From 360 Hz monitors to 8,000 Hz keyboards, 2021 was the year of the hertz

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | MSI)

When tech gets stale, one thing the industry does to try to get shoppers excited about new products is offer bigger and better specs. In 2021, a lot of focus went into beefing up the speed specs, measured in hertz, of PC peripherals (a hertz, or Hz, is a unit of frequency representing one cycle per second). We saw vendors increase the polling and refresh rates of everyday devices, turning them into advanced pieces of equipment to pique enthusiast interest.

Here’s how it all went down.

First, the monitors

2021 was the year of the hertz, but in order to get there, we have to go back to 2020, when the world was introduced to 360 Hz monitors.