GEAR of the YEAR

IT FEELS LIKE only yesterday we were gearing up for last year’s Gear of the Year awards. That prestigious moment where we gather our thoughts on the very best hardware that has been launched in the last year (or at least the gear we’ve had the opportunity to test) and give you our picks for where you should invest your money. It has certainly been an interesting year, that’s for sure, and jam-packed with a ton of new releases. Last time around, we were still reeling from the first year of the pandemic, the world of computing had just arrived at a rather abrupt silicon shortage, and Nvidia had just launched its latest and greatest 3000-series GPUs as well. Life was, fair to say, a little odd. And, arguably, it still is.

- THE MAXIMUM PC TEAM

OCULUS QUEST 2 SPECIAL MENTION

VR has had a bit of a bumpy ride since its conception, but Oculus seems to be starting to get all the pieces just right, especially with its latest headset, the Quest 2.

This $300 budget VR headset packs in a ton of tech, including refresh rates up to 120Hz, a resolution of 1832x1920 per eye, WiFi 6 connectivity (including complete wireless connectivity with your PC), some impressive controllers, 64GB of storage, 6GB of memory, a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 CPU, and it also manages an incredible three-hour battery life.

Easy to set up and easy to configure, if you’re thinking about trying out VR for the first time, there’s no better place to start than with the Quest 2. The only downside? Well, you need a Facebook account to use it.

• Reviewed: Maximum PC, July 2021

However, a lot has changed since then. Most notably, we’ve had to rework our list this time around. Over the past 11 issues, not a single graphics card has scored higher than an 8. With the prices sky-high and supply still at an all-time low, we couldn’t justify including any from either Nvidia or AMD this time.

As always, there’s a lot of kit out there and companies that we haven’t included this time around. That’s not to say that they haven’t produced some exceptional products, just that, well, we only have limited space in this old magazine of ours and, sadly, some parts just didn’t make the cut.

So, with that out of the way, let’s get stuck into our favorite gear of the year, shall we? –THE MAXIMUM PC TEAM