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CES is filled with wild and wacky curios, to be sure, but there are also plenty of good old-fashioned laptops. Every year the big chipmakers announce new products and the big computer manufacturers unveil new laptops that take advantage of updated CPUs and GPUs. All told, companies announced nearly two dozen upcoming laptops at this year's conference. Some are bulky beasts made for gaming, while others are thin beauties intended for portability. The vast majority of them are filled to the brim with the AI tools that everyone loves so very much.
Here are all of the laptops that piqued our interest at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, just in case you need to start saving some money for a purchase later this year.
ASUS Zenbook A14
The ASUS Zenbook A14 is the MacBook Air competitor of our dreams. It weighs less than 2.2 pounds, which is actually a half a pound lighter than the Air. When it comes to specs, it actually outclasses Apple in nearly every category. There's a 14-inch OLED screen, up to 32 hours (!) of battery life and up to 32GB of RAM. It's also covered in a nifty ceramic coating that feels great to hold.
It comes in two versions. There's one that includes a Snapdragon X Plus CPU and 16GB of RAM, which starts at $900. The higher-end model features a Snapdragon X Elite chip and 32GB of RAM, starting at $1,100. The lap
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From a laptop with a screen that grows to a 1-kilogram ultraportable with more than 30 hours of battery life, these are the laptops that grabbed our attention at CES.
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But choosing an external SSD means sorting through a dizzying array of options, and making a poor choice can leave you feeling hard done by. Lucky for you, we've done the testing and can offer some sure-fire recommendations that are guaranteed to help, and not hinder, your gaming setup.
Why you should trust us: We are PCWorld. Our reviewers have been putting computer hardware through its paces for decades. Our external drive evaluations are thorough and rigorous, testing the limits of every product — from performance benchmarks to the practicalities of regular use. As consumers ourselves, we know what makes a product exceptional. For more about our testing process, scroll to the bottom of this article.
Scroll below our recommendations to learn about other external SSDs for gaming that did not make our list.
Lexar SL600 Blaze - Best 20Gbps external SSD for gaming
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That's incredibly fast, but it isn't quite speedy enough to beat the fastest PCIE 5 drive we've tested. That would be Crucial's own T705 drive, unbeaten after almost a year.
But the interesting twist here is that Crucial claims the P510 drive can do this using 25 percent less power than its previous fifth-gen designs. And that is indeed a big deal if you're putting this thing in a laptop, where every watt counts in terms of battery life.
The company also announced a new version of its P310 fouth-gen drive with a heatsink in the box, all the better to work with the PS5 (though it'll fit fine into any M.2 2280 slot). That drive is rated for 7100MB/s read speeds, which is on the zippy side for an older design.
Various new options for existing DDR5 memory lines, including Pro Overclocking modules as dense as 32GB on a stick, round out the CES announcements.
The P510 SSD should be available starting in the spring (that's northern hemisphere talk for "probably before July") in 1TB and 2TB flavors, while the new heatsink-equipped P310 will go on sale later this month. Prices were not shared, womp womp.
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The Galaxy Book 5 Pro and Galaxy Book 5 360 arrive next month.
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