The biggest names in laptops showed up at CES this week with new designs, new chips, and mostly a chance to sneak in the term “AI.” But most of them also quietly came with one of the most important upgrades of all for competitive gamers: better Wi-Fi with support for Wi-Fi 7. It's about time, because router manufacturers have pushed out Wi-Fi 7 routers The door will be open all of 2023, and we've been waiting for machines that can put the standard's ridiculous promises of speed to the test.
Wi-Fi 7 came primarily to gaming laptops, and the focus on gaming makes sense. One of the biggest advantages of Wi-Fi 7 is that it allows a device to connect to your router over multiple bands – a feature called multi-link operation – which gives your laptop options when it comes to where its packets go should be forwarded. This means that if your 5GHz band is busy, it will simply send the data over the 6GHz line and vice versa. The result should be lower latency when you're on a busy network, which is crucial when you don't have a connection to Ethernet.
Most of the new laptops with Wi-Fi 7 will be on the market soon. But some of the earliest models are, at least for now, very expensive: the 16-inch Razer Blade 16 starts at $3,000, and the 18-inch MSI Titan 18 HX A14V costs at least $5,000. (The only option currently available for pre-order costs $9,099.) Both are expected to be available in mid-January.
If you don't feel like sinking your savings into a laptop, some cheaper gaming models with Wi-Fi 7 have also been announced. There's the $2,099 Lenovo Legion 7i, coming in March, or the much cheaper HP Omen Transcend, available for $1,499.99. Dell also saw two Alienware gaming laptops get the Wi-Fi 7 treatment, while the company's popular XPS lineup got the nod on two of its three laptops: the XPS 13 and the XPS 16.
The only major exception at the show to the unspoken Wi-Fi 7 gaming laptop rule seemed to be Asus. None of the laptops the company has announced in its ROG lineup, including the Zephyrus lineup, have Wi-Fi 7 listed in their specifications. That's surprising considering the company was one of the first to release a Wi-Fi 7 router.
If you're looking to upgrade your gaming laptop and aren't the type to insist on a wired connection, now is a good time to look into Wi-Fi 7 routers. Not much was announced at the show – Acer is launching a gaming router and MSI announced a mesh system – but there are a few coming in 2023, including gamer routers from Netgear and ROG. However, you will probably want to be careful when pulling the trigger. The selection is still a bit sparse and mostly still expensive.
Artificial intelligence (or is that “affectionate intelligence”?) may have been the headliner of everything at CES 2024, but gadgets still managed to show up and get faster like always. With Wi-Fi 7, there were already routers that gave us the roads – now that the Wi-Fi Alliance certifies the standard, here come laptops that give us the cars.