OVER THE NEXT 10 PAGES, you’ll find the

best gear to have been released this year.

The hardware, systems, and components

that stand out as the best options around.

If you’re looking to treat yourself, this

makes for a great wishlist of where to

drop your cash. Or, if you’ve already

bought something that we’ve covered,

congratulations—you have great taste.

The big news of 2019 was the release

of AMD’s Zen 2 architecture, as found

in the Ryzen 3000 series of CPUs, and

with it came support for PCIe 4.0, which

saw impressive bandwidths in SSDs in

particular. There’s been plenty of great

motherboards for these new chips, too,

making it a great time for anyone looking

to upgrade their system with a whole new

power ful base with lot s of cores and threads.

A quick look through the list will reveal that

Intel’s desktop CPUs haven’t made the cut, and

the same goes for Nvidia’s high-end GPUs, which

failed to make the list due to their high price and

lack of a killer app for real-time ray tracing. Still,

there have been some great GPUs at the lower end

of the stack, and you’ll find our favorites here.

BY THE MAXIMUM PC TEAM

YEAR

OF THE

GEAR

› HP Envy 13

We love the idea of thin and light notebooks, but

the performance hit has put us off. Until now. The

Envy 13 is a brilliant example of how far the genre

has advanced, and while once you were sacrificing

too much power at the altar of portability, these

days you can have it all: great battery life, strong

performance, and at just 2.6lb, it’s seriously

portable, too. The GeForce MX250 isn’t what you’d

call a gaming powerhouse, but then this isn’t

really a gaming machine, so no harm done.

$1,250 http://store.hp.com

Reviewed: Vol. 24, No. 11, Page 78

24 MAXIMUMPC JAN 2020 maximumpc.com

gear of the year