Your gaming PC is a work-in-progress. Just when you're happy with a quad-core, SLIed-up beast, Intel redo their entire CPU structure and enter the graphics card market.

This year we're going to see monitor prices plummet, a new version of Windows supporting a touch screen interface, and hard drive tech repurposed from USB drives. There's a whole new world of hardware on its way. Here's what you can expect from 2009.

Giganto-monitors
The cost of monitors continues to fall off a cliff. Given that you can buy a 32-inch telly for around £200, a 20-30 inch monitor is more affordable than you might think. Already, 20-inch widescreen models go for barely more than £100. Low-end 24-inchers can be had for around the £180 mark.



Two things to bear in mind. Firstly, the big screens generally run at a resolution of 1920x1200, and running games at a lower res will mean a blurry picture. So, make sure your graphics card has the grunt for it.

Secondly, there's a silent screen panel format war being waged, with each monitor falling into one of three general categories: TN, PVA or IPS. Each has a fatal enough flaw that the dream, all-purpose monitor doesn't quite exist yet. TN is best for gaming due to faster response times, PVA for movies with its better contrast ratios and viewing angles, and IPS for desktop work because of its excellent colour reproduction.

Touchscreen PCs and Windows 7
One goal of Windows 7 is touchscreen-friendliness (yes, comparisons to the iPhone's swipey gestures and virtual buttons have been made). MS aren't always reliable trendsetters - tablet PCs, anyone? - but this one really is looking likely, more so for laptops than for desktops. It won't hit big until 2010, but it looks certain to be part of the long-term future of PCs.


If you're looking for big, sweeping changes in Windows 7 (that's the official name) you won't find them - this is still Windows, but as a happy side-effect of that MS are promising we won't suffer a new round of software and hardware compatibility problems. Anything that works on Vista should work on 7. Perhaps more importantly, they're aiming to improve performance, one of Vista's major failings. In the words of one William Gates, Esq, Windows 7 will: "...be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone, so those scenarios connect up well to make it a great platform for the best gaming that can be done." Hmm. A beta is due in the next few months, the full release mid-year.

Core i7 CPUs
Intel's follow-up to the Core 2 range has arrived - and every Core i7 chip (as they're known) will be quad core. Also, hyper-threading is back, so Windows will think you've got eight cores. Don't expect eight-core performance, but do expect a boost in games that support it. Unlike most current quadders (essentially two dual-cores stuck together) all the cores are on a single die, which will notch the performance up.



Also, Intel have finally adopted the integrated memory controller that gave the Athlon 64 an edge for so long. This means your CPU can talk directly to your RAM, rather than being slowed down by feeding everything through the motherboard - thus, better performance, theoretically. Later this year, expect an improved version of the chip, currently codenamed Westmere - which will have as many as six cores.

Meantime, ATI-AMD are working on Fusion, which is a merger of a CPU and a GPU and will, they hope, make processors a two-horse race again.

Solid state drives
So you know the way that USB stick on your keyring has no moving parts and can survive being jumped on by a rhino? That's what PC hard drives are moving rapidly towards. Noisy, slow, ever-twitching drives and a predilection for sudden mechanical failure are on the way out. While solid state drives are slower to write data than most traditional HDs, the higher-end models are dramatically faster reading - which means load times are far quicker. A standard 2008 desktop hard drive takes around 50 agonising seconds to load a Team Fortress 2 map. On Intel's X-25M, currently the darling of the solid state set, it's around 25.



Downsides are the price - the X-25M is nearly £500 for 128Gb - and that cheaper models suffer from huge performance spikes. The average read speed might be awesome, but if you pick up one of the earlier-gen drives you'll find sporadic slowdowns. 2009 should see the X-25M's price drop and its improvements spread to cheaper rivals.

Intel Larrabee
With Intel stronger than ever since Core 2 Duo, they can afford to turn their attention to additional fronts. Specifically: graphics cards, something they've hitherto only dabbled with in low-power, oft-reviled integrated chips.

With Larrabee, they're going full-pelt for an add-in card designed to kick sand in the face of the GeForces and Radeons. It's built on significantly different principles: as much on CPUs as on GPUs. As well as playing to Intel's strengths, this is also part of the nVidia/Intel war for the future of all processing. In theory, a Larrabee card is enough to run Windows itself; there's even talk of a modified version that'll drop into a CPU socket. Initially though, it'll be a graphics card, with 24, 32 or 48 cores - touted as more than enough to run games such as Gears of War and HL2: Episode Two at 60fps at 1600x1200. Larrabee should strut its stuff early this year. Just what we need: 3D card buying options getting even more complicated.

(computerandvideogame)