THE PC & HOME TECH THAT BLEW US AWAY

FROM HARDCORE HARDWARE TO WELCOME MAINSTREAM ADVANCES TO COOL TECH INNOVATIONS FOR THE HOME, CES 2025 DELIVERED THE GOOD STUFF.

- KATHERINE STEVENSON

You never know what you're going to get with CES. Of course, we knew we'd hear a lot about Al-check-and there'd be announcements of new CPUs and GPUsalso check. But you just never know how the all the pomp and hoo-ha of this annual mega tech event is going to pay off in the real world, for regular consumers. Does the average PC user have something to be excited about now that the veil has come off this year's product launches? If the PCWorld staff is any indication, the answer is yes! We found plenty of cool products, innovations, and advances at this year's show that are currently available or promise exciting things ahead. Our picks don't stop at PC hardware, either. What's CES without an array of goods for the techloving lifestyle? We note a few of our favorite home-tech products, too.

1. NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 5090

I've never witnessed a PC product as hotly anticipated as the GeForce RTX 5090 (fave. co/3WIcVja), unveiled by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during this year's CES flagship keynote. And this monstrous graphics card lived up to the hype, at least on paper.

The RTX 4090 is still the fastest GPU on the planet, and the RTX 5090 blows it out of the water in all key areas. It has an astounding 21,760 CUDA cores-33 percent more than the 4090, and more than three times as many as the new RTX 5070. Nvidia graced the card with an ample 32GB of memory (the most ever for a GeForce GPU) and a humongous 512-bit memory bus, a high-octane combo for no-compromises 4K gaming and AI workloads alike. And Nvidia's overhauled DLSS 4 will tap dedicated AI cores to send performance soaring even higher in supported games.

If gamers get a chance to buy it at all-even at $1,999, the RTX 5090 will be a screaming deal for AI researchers with all that memory. Everyone is going to want one.-Brad Chacos