GEAR OF THE YEAR

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 powerful base with lots 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.

› 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