What to expect from CES 2017

CES officially begins on Thursday, but don't let that fool you: there's already plenty of news coming out of the year's biggest technology show on day zero. Press conference day mostly focuses on smartphones and smart refrigerators and other questionable gadgets, but we've already had a good haul of new PC tech, like Intel's Kaby Lake processors and an HDR G-Sync 4K monitor from Asus.

But what do we expect to see for the rest of the week? With VR finally available to consumers, what will be the big trends in PC hardware at this year's show? Here are the things we think we'll be seeing a lot of.

HDR monitors - As mentioned above, we've already seen one HDR monitor at this year's show thanks to a leaked press release. With HDR TVs now becoming more common, we expect to see the standard start to appear in monitors. They'll all be high-end models, though, so affordability may take another year or two.

4K 144 Hz monitors - While the Asus monitor seems to combine the best of all worlds, we'll start seeing more 4K monitors that support 120Hz or even 144Hz, at much more affordable prices than the top-of-the-line HDR models. But they'll still be pricey, high-end screens.

RGB lighting - The trend will continue from the past few years. Most PC components have RGB lights in them, at this point, but until every single component is glowing in the exact flavor of fuchsia you want, it'll continue.

Thinner and lighter gaming notebooks - With Nvidia launching notebook models of the 1050 and the 1050 Ti, and Intel's Kaby Lake CPUs even more power efficient than last year's Skylake, expect to see more notebooks taking advantage of these components and slimming down. Lower power draw and less heat should mean less space is dedicated to cooling. Battery life should improve, too.

Tempered glass PC cases - Several casemakers released new models last year with tempered glass panels, and we dig the look. It's classy. Unless those models were a total sales dud, expect to see more of them in 2017.

VR accessories and competitors - VR still has a lot of money swirling around it, so expect to see plenty of accessories, most of which will go nowhere. There will be plenty of competitors, too, but mostly focused around the more affordable arena of mobile VR, rather than the high-end Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

What do you expect to see from this year's show? Stay glued to our hardware channel for all the PC hardware news out of CES 2017.

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