Five CES 2025 Announcements We’re Excited For

CES 2025 has come and gone, and there were about a million new things all clamouring for attention from the press and the public. We've gone and picked five of them that we think will have the biggest impact in the coming year.

TCL’s Under-Display Camera

While a number of laptop manufacturers are still trying every configuration under the sun to cram their webcams into the bezels of their laptop’s lids, Lenovo is experimenting with a new panel from TCL, called the CSOT 4K PureSight Pro OLED display. The display is OLED, and therefore quite impressive on its own, but TCL has shoved a camera into the fourth dimension for an uninterrupted view of the panel.

Debuting in the Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i later this year, the under-display camera will need to be slim enough to be sandwiched between everything, and still offer 1080P video capture and potentially Windows Hello facial recognition.

Under-display cameras aren’t new (ZTE managed the first one in 2021), and this certainly won't be the last from TCL either. The technology has offered grainy video in the past that is much softer than you’d expect, limiting consumer enthusiasm for them. This latest attempt should be much better, and grant high-end laptops and ultrabooks a sleek and uninterrupted design.

Ventiva ICE9 Fanless Cooling For Ultrabooks

The Ventiva ICE9 uses a concept that’s been tried before, but this time they are partnering with Dell and Intel to possibly make it into production. The ICE9 uses the magic of electrohydrodynamic (EHD) flow to ionise air particles passing through two electrodes, passively moving them through a series of magnetic fields and out of the laptop without having any moving parts.

The result is an incredibly slim unit that can be as little as 2mm thick, but push out the same amount of air as a typical fan in an ultrabook.

While EHD systems have been demonstrated by other manufacturers in the past, it has always been put on the back-burner because it doesn’t scale well past thin-and-light laptops or very small form-factor systems. You can’t build a bigger one to cool an RTX 5080, for example - making the housing vertically larger exponentially increases the amount of power needed to ionise the air passing through it.

While you won’t see this tech in an Alienware laptop in the future, Dell’s new Pro Max lineup should have them in a future XPS 13 successor that will be as quiet as a mouse.

NVIDIA RTX 50 Series Graphics Cards

This is an easy one, and you could argue a bias here. NVIDIA’s new RTX 50 series cards bring with them updates to technologies that we’ve all come to use and rely on, like Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS), frame generation, real-time ray tracing, and running local AI models for mahala.

While NVIDIA has an entire lineup of cards from the RTX 5070 to the flagship RTX 5090, we’re particularly interested in what the RTX 5070 Ti brings to the table.

As the mid-range card in the new lineup, it offers 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM, an upgraded core compared to the RTX 4070 Ti Super, and all the new features including Multi Frame Generation. This should, for the first time, make gaming at 4K for NVIDIA’s midrange cards viable, something that hasn’t been possible for a very long time as games have continued to hike their system requirements.

Reviews for the RTX 5090 Founders Edition are already out, showing a roughly 25% increase in performance and power draw with a similar 25% increase in price. Blackwell is NVIDIA’s chance to show what they’re able to do when their engineers are allowed to forget about power budgets and run everything to its maximum potential.

SteamOS is Coming to More Handhelds

We’re fans of the Steam Deck and ROG Ally here at the office, but we’re also fans of what Valve is trying to do for gamers by open-sourcing their work to make Steam on Linux a good experience on handhelds and large TVs. Big Picture has been around for a while and it almost gets you into a console-like experience, but SteamOS is the real deal.

For 2025, Valve is partnering with Lenovo to officially support SteamOS on the new Legion Go S. Variants of the console that ship with SteamOS instead of Windows 11 will be $100 cheaper in the United States, with similar discounts expected in supported regions where the Go S will be available.

It’s only a short trip from handhelds to the wider PC ecosystem. Valve did try introducing SteamOS on Steam Machines as a way to get into living rooms and compete with consoles like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but that did not make the splash they intended back then.

A second attempt might be more successful. We all know a third won’t happen.

Phison Introduces Cheaper, Cooler PCIe 5 SSD Controllers

Solid state drives are passively cooled most of the time, but for the PCIe 5 generation every single drive needed either a massive heatsink or active cooling to achieve stability.

The heatsinks grew comically large, some of them almost measuring 15cm tall, and the actively cooled designs had tiny fans that forced you to run a wire across the motherboard because they could not be slot-powered.

Most of the heat comes from the SSD controller, which handles all the Input/Output operations on the SSD and manages wear leveling of the individual NAND cells. With the move to more advanced production processes, such as TSMC’s N6 node, Phison is able to produce new controllers that run cooler and require no giant heatsinks or active cooling.

The Phison E28 will be suited for high-end SSDs that push the limits of the PCIe 5 standard, driving TLC NAND to over 14GB/s for read and write throughput. The Phison E31T will be a new, affordable controller for new mid-range Gen 5 SSDs, offering up to 10GB/s read speeds and over 8GB/s for writes.

Both controllers will run cool enough that they only need basic heatsinks or contact with a large heatspreader inside a laptop, so we should see their inclusion in high-performance gaming laptops and workstations in the not too distant future.