NorthPoint Development wants to build a data center on 1,300 acres in the Pocono foothills, near Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. As well as seeking to charm the local government with various funding packages, it has proposed paying checks of $10,000 per household. Despite the Pennsylvania town’s median income of $60,000, the offer isn’t being warmly welcomed by locals, reports the Wall Street Journal. Those interviewed were widely against the data center development plans and cited several reasons for being averse to accepting the payout. The major concerns regarded potential impacts on property values, the specter of noise pollution, and a distrust of both the AI moguls and local government representatives.

Offer letters began to be received by Hazle Township back in June. The WSJ recently talked to several residents about NorthPoint’s $10,000 offer. While some say the $10,000 would be handy, it couldn’t find many residents who were “eager to welcome the data center for the payout,” in the journal’s words. We’d point out that opinion polling can often be inaccurate, as what people say and what they do, voting-wise, doesn’t always line up.

Interviewees cited a number of key reasons for their data center development aversion. We distilled the following points from the source:

• Noise pollution concerns
• Water and energy cost worries
• Dislike of AI
• Distrust of AI moguls and local authorities
• Potential negative impact on property prices

Traditionally, developers have offered towns and cities packages worth tens of millions, including funding for local services. But direct cash payments to residents represent a new phase of their charm offensive, the WSJ indicates. Perhaps the idea for the direct payments to residents came after “a raucous public meeting last year, where angry locals asked what they had to gain by supporting the data center,” ponders the source.

The locals won’t just get the direct payout, though. Other funds up to $120 million over the next 15 years have been dangled like a carrot for community and local services investments — improved schools, emergency services, and so on.

Meanwhile, Hazle Township’s government already rejected the data center project on zoning grounds last year, and it has enacted a temporary moratorium on data center construction. Finally, the $10,000 offer to households is simply not enough in many interviewed folks’ opinions. Residents could feel insulted by it, regarding the offer as a bribe, concludes the WSJ report.

Irdeto, the company behind the much-maligned and performance-sapping DRM software Denuvo, has just scored itself an apparent win. According to reports circulating online, DenuvOwO, the group that came up with the hypervisor-based bypass (HV) of Denuvo, has disbanded. Although it wasn't spelled out, a piracy scene source close to the matter stated that the action was probably due to Irdeto's lawsuit against known cracker Voices38. The HV bypass itself, rather than the games, is a DRM-breaking tool, and one that disables system-level protections to run, to boot.

The well-known CS.Rin forum was oftentimes the first place where links to DenuvOwO HV-bypassed games first appeared, and it has removed all links to said titles and banned some of the group's members. Despite the fact that the site is hosted in Russia, the likely explanation is that since Irdeto is now reaching out to multiple third-party services searching for Voices38's identity, CS.Rin wishes to reduce its exposure to far-reaching laws like the DMCA.

Although the loss is causing some consternation and concern among the piracy scene, this latest development isn't expected to freeze Denuvo cracking entirely. DenuvOwO's work was based around the usage of common open-source computing tools, and it's expected it'll be relatively easy for others to replicate.

Meanwhile, Voices38 has previously said "all is fine [...] Everything will continue as normal" regarding the lawsuit and keeps releasing games. Most recently, long-running cracking group RUNE has taken to using Denuvo DRM as cannonball target practice, and a couple days ago released a proof-of-concept crack for Assassin's Creed: Mirage, fully removing Denuvo Anti-Tamper and VMProtect from the executable in one fell swoop.

Surprising nobody by now, the stripped version appears to run way better than the original, with a 15% boost to average FPS and a 76% uptick in minimum frame rates. This was measured on a beefy rig, too, with an Intel Core i7-13700K and an RTX 5080.

As an added bonus, the main executable size dropped from 496 MB to 102 MB. That's hardly surprising considering how much the binary resembled a barnacle-encrusted ship — the crack strips out 34 VMProtect-virtualized functions, 200 Denuvo VM cores, 261 function obfuscations, and 25,000 function relocations.

What do you get when you cross a bored teenager with free time and excellent computer skills? A hack of a Microsoft database with trillions of records on hand and 25,000 records of employee data, of course. Future legend hacker Faav poked around Microsoft's supposedly internal Titan analytics platform, eventually finding that its user validation was... sub-optimal.

According to Faav, he's "spent the year hacking Microsoft off and on around school," digging up bugs on the Redmond firm's wares as well as Amazon, Google, Adobe, and others. Much like other hackers, he has his own set of tools, and predictably in this day and age, his sonic screwdriver is Antares, an AI orchestrator bot he concocted for the purpose of scanning and automating boring security legwork.

Antares found an endpoint URL in Titan that brought up an error message saying that a VPN was required. Just like a virtual pspspsps, this was enough to get Faav's attention. He got Antares to look for subdomains around this endpoint, coming up with one belonging to an Azure Cloud host, along with a corresponding Swagger/OpenAPI file listing four routes (Swagger is an industry-standard machine-readable instruction on how an API works, for easier third-party integration).

While three of those routes needed Azure Active Directory authentication, one did not, and its name was inspiring: /v2/Query. It also accepted raw SQL queries, prompting a collective facepalm from the audience. Faav still needed to know what to query for, and after clever usage of the Wayback Machine, he found a 2023 version of this login page, complete with a helpful Apache Superset configuration file describing the database schema, showing 56 table definitions.

He also found that this endpoint refused his queries due to the lack of a JWT (JSON Web Token) authentication, so he sicced Antares on it again for 10 days, with no success. Eventually, Faav had a flash of inspiration and realized that the way the server was responding implied that the token's digital signature wasn't being checked. So he just pretended his access token was for an administrator and was promptly let in. One handy "SHOW DATABASES" later, he was staring at 25,000 records of employee data, along with organization records, dashboards, and charts.

After exploring the database a little more, he found a particular data source for Bing analytics. Digging there and tallying up rows across tables, Faav saw he had access to a total of 17 trillion records total, and had to double-check this number and stop himself from yelling out and waking his parents at 2 am.

After reporting the problem to Microsoft's bug bounty program, he was awarded with $5,000 for his findings. In his blog post, he also points out that "AI and human intuition compounded here. Antares did ten days of work I didn’t have to [...] Its persistence, plus one human hunch, is what made this find possible."

A PC RAM maker has honored its guarantee promises despite the memory kit in question’s price rising eightfold since it was bought. This is news in 2026, as we’ve heard of so many companies dealing with AI-inflated component pricing refusing to replace items, instead refunding the original purchasing price despite the products now being worth many multiples of the original price. These glad tidings come via Redditor Double-South8863, who says their $150 G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM kit, now priced at $1,200 on Amazon, was back at full capacity after the company replaced the stick. They received the replacement within two weeks.

“I will never buy any RAM other than G.Skill for as long as I live,” pledged Double-South8863 on Reddit. They informed their fellow social media posters that one of the 64GB RAM kit’s sticks died at the beginning of September. After some A/B testing, they were sure one of the 32GB sticks was dead.

On September 8, about a week after the issue first reared its head, Double-South8863 decided to start an RMA process and get the dud G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 32GB DDR5-6000 stick replaced. They remember buying this highly desirable RAM kit online in May 2025 for the princely sum of $150. Now it is worth a king’s ransom at $1,200 on Amazon, and price tracker sites show it's even been as high as $1,300.

Perhaps the Redditor was aware of the reports of companies and their dastardly deeds regarding RMAs, as they are active on the PCMR subreddit. However, they optimistically went ahead and completed the RMA paperwork, then received instructions, including a shipping address to initiate the warranty exchange. Double-South8863 says they mailed the misbehaving memory module back to G.Skill on September 15. The Redditor’s post celebrating G.Skill’s customer service, proclaiming that they were now a “customer for life,” was published on September 26.

If you check the G.Skill site, you will note that this RAM-first firm still offers a limited lifetime warranty on all its popular RAM kits. Please note that, according to the official terms, this lifetime warranty “automatically terminates upon discontinuation or end-of-life ("EOL") designation of that specific model by G.Skill.” That means you shouldn't expect to swap out a faulty DDR5 module for a replacement for the whole of your natural life.

PC enthusiasts and DIYers are having a hard time right now as several key components required for performance builds are at all-time-high pricing. Meanwhile, those with a working setup pray that nothing will go wrong with the precious equipment they already have. Sadly, things do break, some components more than others. However, warranty obligations seem to have come under increased strain in recent months as consumer product scarcity means component makers can’t or won’t follow RMA norms that had been established for decades. Some of the worst cases we’ve seen involve PCs and component makers trying to refund the original (low) prices paid, substituting failed parts with non-equivalent parts, or even worse.

Sony’s announcement that it will cease physical disc production by 2028 has got many fans and users outraged and concerned about what will happen to digital-only games once their servers go offline. Because of this, one Pennsylvania state senator filed a bill that would compel publishers to find a way to ensure that gamers would always have access to their games, even if their online support has already ended. According to Local 21 News, Sen. John Kane (D), the Protect Our Games Act will require video game manufacturers to give their customers at least 60-day notice before ending access to the title.

More importantly, it says that these companies must provide at least one of these options to affected gamers: allow for offline gaming, patch the title so that it could still be used online independently of the game’s online servers, or to refund the title’s cost at an amount equal to its highest price in the past 12 months, which should also not be lower than 25% of its initial sale price. If this law passes, this will offer some protection to gamers who often have no choice but to accept a game company’s decision to end a title.

The bill is only at its early stages, and there’s no telling how far it will go or if it will even be signed by the governor. Nevertheless, if it passes, it will force companies to ensure that their games remain playable even if they remove them from online stores, at least in Pennsylvania. Hopefully, this could set a precedent, and other states would soon follow suit. While this doesn’t solve the ownership problem, as you’re still getting a license to use the game instead of owning it on a physical disc, you at least are ensured that you do not lose access to the game even if the company folds or loses interest in maintaining the title.

This is exactly what the Stop Killing Games movement is fighting for, with the movement gaining support in both the EU and California. Unfortunately, none of its efforts have resulted in a law yet, with the EU declining to pursue new legislation in support of it. On the other hand, the California version of this bill has already passed a State Assembly vote, although it still has a long way to go before becoming law.

There's a real advantage right now to buying a pre-built gaming PC. The RAMpocalypse has made it difficult, from a budget point of view, to build new gaming PCs. Instead, the real value is to buy a rig with the specs that'll allow you to game for the next few years. This ABS Cyclone Aqua machine with an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPU is the perfect example, giving you 1440-capable performance for just $1,399.99.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

You're getting a spec sheet that would be tricky to put together if you were building a rig yourself. The RTX 5060 Ti is the star of this particular show, but the rest of the build includes 16GB of DDR5 RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 20-core Intel Core i7-14700F processor. We're still seeing the 14700F in pre-builts as an affordable option that can still deliver great gaming performance.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti means you're getting one of Nvidia’s latest-generation cards, with this GPU sitting in the mid-tier. You're getting 4,608 CUDA cores and a boost clock speed of 2,527MHz here. You only need a single eight-pin PCIe connector to deliver power, unlike the RTX 5090, so you don't need to worry about this PC requiring huge amounts of power to run.

As our RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB review explains, you're getting an impressive set of performance with this Blackwell GPU for 1080p and 1440p gaming. The charts below show how great it is for ray tracing for its price, especially compared to rival cards. You're also getting full Nvidia DLSS support here, giving you the full set of Nvidia's software capabilities for improving performance in-game, including multi-frame generation. MFG will give your games a frame rate boost, inserting AI-generated frames to help deliver performance in the most resource-heavy games at higher resolutions.

16GB of GDDR7 VRAM, meanwhile, makes this GPU a far better option than the 8GB variants you could pick up at this price. That gives you far more headroom, performance-wise, in games that are resource-heavy, especially for 1440p gaming.

Meanwhile, the Intel Core i7-14700F is still a good, if older, CPU option for gaming. This Raptor Lake Refresh CPU comes with 20 cores, split across eight performance cores, which are the good ones for gaming, along with 12 efficient cores for multi-threaded work. You also get a max turbo clock speed of 5.4 GHz and a 65W TDP. At 1080p or 1440p, you aren't going to see the 14700F as a bottleneck in modern gaming.

Some builds at this price are sticking with older specs, including DDR4 RAM, but luckily, you're getting faster DDR5 here. 16GB of G.Skill Flare X5 DDR5 RAM is included, rated for speeds of 6,000 MT/s. Given how pricey RAM is becoming, it's a compromise that it isn't a higher capacity like 32GB, but it could be worse. DDR5 does add to the longevity of this build, however, and you do have scope to upgrade at a later date.

You also get a 1TB Patriot P410 SSD here. It offers Gen 4 speeds, along with space for a couple of the biggest AAA games alongside Windows. There's also Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless connectivity included here, along with gigabit Ethernet for a wired connection to your local network.

The $1,399.99 sale price for this ABS Cyclone Aqua gaming PC is a good option in the current market. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB ensures you've got a rig for 1080p and 1440p gaming, but given how fast prices are rising across the PC hardware market, there's no guarantee that it'll be around for long.

As the memory crisis continues to push up component prices, laptop prices are also rising, making even mainstream models increasingly expensive. However, if you are looking for the right combination of portability and performance, the HP Omen Transcend 14 is currently on sale. The 14-inch powerhouse is available at $1999.99 for a limited period, down from its listed price of $2999.99 at Best Buy, which is a massive saving of $1000.

• Check out the HP Omen Transcend 14 on Best Buy

The HP Omen Transcend 14 is one of the rare compact gaming laptops packing a powerful set of hardware. This particular configuration comes with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285H processor, paired with 32GB of LPDDR5x memory and an Nvidia RTX 5070 Laptop GPU with 8GB of GDDR7 VRAM. For storage, there is a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD, while the laptop ships with Windows 11 Home. The combination should make it capable of handling modern games as well as demanding workloads such as video editing and other content-creation tasks.

A highlight feature of the laptop is the 14-inch 3K OLED display, which has a 2880 x 1800 resolution and a 120 Hz refresh rate. The panel supports a 48-120Hz variable refresh rate, covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, and offers up to 500 nits of HDR brightness, making it suitable for both gaming and content creation.

Despite packing high-end hardware, the Transcend 14 remains relatively portable, measuring around 0.7 inches thick and weighing about 3.6 pounds. In terms of ports, it comes with Thunderbolt 4, USB-C with DisplayPort and power delivery, HDMI 2.1, and a USB-A port. The laptop also comes with a four-zone RGB backlit keyboard, while the 71 Wh battery is claimed to last up to 14 hours on a full charge.

Considering the premium hardware and compact footprint, the HP Omen Transcend 14 at $1,999.99 is a deal worth considering. The $1,000 discount from its $2,999.99 listed price makes it a considerably more affordable proposition. However, you’ll need to move fast, as the deal price is only available for a few hours.

A chrysophile has ordered a special edition mini PC with a pure 24-carat gold passive chassis reports Fanless Tech. It’s a premium custom version of the ~5-inch (120 x 120 x 120mm) Kubb Fanless PC, but costing around $1.7 million with its opulent gold chassis. As well as its choice of materials pumping up price, this mini PC’s weight has increased from its default 4.6 to 28.7 pounds (2.1kg to 13kg). But as a bonus, which probably still doesn’t make it worth it for most folks, gold has significantly better thermal conductivity than aluminum.

In its social media post, Fanless Tech calls the Kubb Fanless in gold a “cooling marvel.” Its news post on the topic elaborates on this claim, explaining that the thermal conductivity of gold is “about 30% to 50% faster than aluminum.” That might help its Core Ultra chip perform a bit better, all else being equal. However the sacrifice to portability, as this compact gold PC is over 6x heavier, could be a major drawback. As well as the price.

We looked up the thermal conductivity of aluminum and gold, as well as some other common materials. The chart below could be useful for your own passive computing projects.

In contrast to its gilded construction, this mini PC's specs are very modest. Standard configurations of the Kubb Fanless are as follows:

• Intel Core Ultra 5 225H, or Intel Core Ultra X7 358H, or AMD Ryzen AI 5 340
• 16GB DDR5, up to 128GB
• 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, optional second M.2 SSD
• Intel: 1x USB 3.2 (Type A), 1x USB 3.2 (Type-C, DP1.4a), 1x USB4/Thunderbolt 4 (Type-C, DP 2.1), Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• AMD: 1x USB 3.2 Gen2 (Type A), 2x USB4 (Type-C, DP 1.4a), Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3
• Side ports: 2x Port RJ45, 2x HDMI 2.1 TMDS, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 (Type A)
• 19V DC, 6.32A, 120W power adapter (100–240V AC)
• Windows 11 Pro
• 3 years guarantee

Kubb Fanless mini PCs are usually made from aluminum, and finished in graphite, blue, or bronze. With an Intel Core Ultra 5 225H at their heart, all those colors are all listed at €1,595 ($1,822) at Kubb.eu, but there is no stock. At that kind of price, the Arctic Senza AI 370 we tested earlier in the year looks like it would be a knockout passive computing competitor. We aren’t sure if Arctic would accept the 24 carat gold chassis special order, and the Senza is designed for discrete under-desk-mounted silence.

We previously reported on the fanless Kubb Mini range of 3 x 3 x 3-inch mini PCs which packed Intel Twin Lake chips, came in cute/bright color finishes, and were priced around $500 (€430).

PlusAI, an autonomous trucking startup, is working with Nvidia to develop its systems and has several trucks and trailers marked with the logos of both companies. This likely caught the attention of thieves who were looking to score big on AI GPUs, with Wired reporting that two of the startup’s trailers got stolen and were found at another location. However, the joke’s on the criminals, as they discovered that the two stolen units contained 20,000 pounds of sand each.

The AI data center construction boom has made PC components like RAM and GPUs insanely expensive, which has led to a rise in petty theft involving these components. Enterprises and startups are being targeted, too, especially as they build data centers and local AI servers with millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and hardware. We’ve already seen cargo heists of copper cable and other hardware worth $1.3 million, while other criminals have become more brazen, pushing or spinning security escorts off the road so they can get away with a truck’s worth of AI GPUs.

While PlusAI is partnered with Nvidia, it also uses simulated cargo loads for real-world tests, allowing the company to model how a fully loaded semi-trailer would react to various road conditions. The startup’s truck cabs, which likely had advanced AI hardware installed, were parked securely inside its warehouse, while the trailers were apparently left outside and secured with hand locks. “PlusAI uses simulated loads in its trailers to assist with research and development testing,” company spokesperson Lauren Kwan told Wired, adding that they were recovered with “40,000 pounds of sand intact.”

Interestingly, the discovery of the theft was accidentally made by one of the startup’s top executives, who received a message from an acquaintance saying that they saw the trailers, which they described as “trucks,” near their workplace. This likely got the executive concerned, as that location was half a mile away from PlusAI’s warehouse, which led to the cops getting called. As for the prospective criminals, they probably left the crime scene disappointed — they thought they were getting a huge payday from two truckloads’ worth of smart silicon, but they ended up with 20 tons of dumb sand instead.

Gigabyte Technology hardly needs an introduction to anyone who has built a PC in the last three decades. Founded in Taipei in 1986, the company grew into one of the largest motherboard and graphics card manufacturers in the world, and its AORUS brand has become a fixture of the enthusiast market. Power supplies are a comparatively recent and more modest part of its business. Like nearly every PC brand, Gigabyte does not manufacture its own PSUs. Instead, it sources platforms from established OEMs and sells them under its UD, P-series and AORUS lines. The results have been uneven over the years, with some very good units and a few that left a lot to be desired, so the OEM and the target audience behind each model matters more than the badge on the box.

The Gaming GM PG5 series is Gigabyte's newest attempt to cover the upper mainstream, and the 1000W model in review today is something of a spiritual successor to the popular UD1000GM PG5. We look closer to determine how it ranks among our best power supplies list. It is built by HEC, a long-established Taiwanese OEM. It is fully compliant with the ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 design guides and comes with a native 12V-2x6 connector, a 135 mm fluid dynamic bearing fan, and (according to Gigabyte) 100% Japanese capacitors.

The headline feature, though, is T-Guard, a thermal monitoring system for the 12V-2x6 connector that can cut power to the graphics card if the connector starts overheating. The T-Guard signifies Gigabyte’s proposed solution to the known PCIe 5.1 connector overheating problem that almost every manufacturer has been trying to implement a defense against. Curiously, Gigabyte markets the unit with 80 PLUS Gold logos, even though it has received Platinum certifications from both CLEAResult (80 PLUS) and Cybenetics. It is also available in white as the 1000GM PG5 ICE, comes with a ten-year warranty, and retails for $170 at the time of this review.

Specifications and Design

In the Box

The Gaming 1000GM PG5 arrives in a black and orange cardboard box with a large render of the unit on the front, next to the model name and a bold orange "1000W" print. A row of small icons along the bottom highlights the ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 compatibility, the fully modular design, the Japanese capacitors, the smart fan, and T-Guard, while an 80 PLUS Gold badge sits at the top right corner. It is a flashy, gaming-oriented design, which is fitting given the name of the series.

The bundle is very basic. Other than the unit itself, we only found the AC power cord, four black cable ties, and a multilingual user manual. There are no Velcro straps and no cable combs. Strangely, there were not even mounting screws in our sample's box. For a $170 1000W unit, that is on the stingy side of things, although it hardly matters for the actual quality of the product, and most builders probably already have a drawer full of these things.

All of the cables are modular, including the 24-pin ATX cable. Gigabyte went with black, flat "embossed" cables, where every wire is individually insulated, but the wires are bound together into a ribbon. They are flexible and easy to route, and they look considerably better than plain flat cables. The single native 12V-2x6 cable has a dual-color connector, with a light grey front section that makes a partially seated plug easy to spot, and it is rated for 600W.

External Appearance

The chassis of the Gaming 1000GM PG5 measures 150 x 150 x 86 mm (L x W x H), which are slightly larger than the typical dimensions of a standard ATX unit. Still, at 150 mm long, it will fit in virtually every ATX case, although the length means that very compact builds may be a little tight once the modular cables are installed. The design is more elaborate than most PSUs in this price range. The upper part of the chassis is finished in a dark metallic gunmetal grey, while the lower part and the front and rear faces are matte black.

The sides carry a large embossed "GAMING" logo along with the Gigabyte name and the wattage, and the fan grille is a perforated octagonal area with the Gaming series logo at its center, with four exposed screws at the corners. The specifications sticker is placed on the side opposite the fan.

The rear face of the unit is almost entirely perforated with a honeycomb pattern, and there are only the on/off switch and the AC receptacle. There is no switch to control the semi-passive fan mode. It is always active. The modular panel on the front is clean and clearly labelled, with four sockets for the CPU and PCIe cables, three sockets for the peripheral and SATA cables, the 24-pin motherboard sockets and the non-standard 12V-2x6 cable socket, which is placed separately at the bottom left corner.

T-Guard is the major update over the UD1000GM PG5, and a feature Gigabyte clearly is relying on to market the unit. According to Gigabyte, precision thermistors monitor the temperature of the 12V-2x6 connector in real time, and if an abnormal temperature rise is detected, the system cuts power to the graphics card while keeping the rest of the system running. If the CPU has integrated graphics and the monitor is connected to the motherboard, the user can continue working and save any progress before shutting down, and a reboot is required to restore power to the GPU.

The UD1000GM PG5 had nothing similar. It relied solely on the typical protection features of every PSU, which do nothing against a single overheating connector, as current is spread across many pins and the total draw never approaches the OCP limit. Monitoring the temperature directly addresses the actual failure mode behind the melting connectors that have plagued high-end graphics cards over the past few years, and it is a lot more meaningful than yet another marketing badge. The concept is sound and, as a concept, it should work, unless the temperature increase on the connector is very abrupt and the position of the sensor does not allow it to react in time.

Internal Design

The cooling fan is a Hong Hua HA13525H12SF-Z, a 135 mm fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) fan rated at 0.50A. Hong Hua fans are very common inside mainstream PSUs, are reliable, and should easily last through the ten-year warranty. The larger 135 mm diameter allows the fan to move the same amount of air at lower speeds than a 120 mm fan, which pays off in the acoustics department and probably the main reason why the designer chose to push the chassis to 150 mm, as the 135 mm fan does not fit in a 140 mm chassis. A clear plastic sheet under the fan guides the airflow across the heatsinks.

The OEM behind the Gaming 1000GM PG5 is HEC, a manufacturer that has been producing power supplies for decades and has built units for many renowned brands. The platform is modern, with good-sized two-prong heatsinks for the active components, and a clean, well-spaced layout that helps with airflow. The transient filtering stage starts on a small PCB right behind the AC receptacle and continues on the main board, with four Y capacitors, three X capacitors, two filtering inductors, and a MOV, which is more than a complete filter for a unit of this class. An NTC thermistor and a bypass relay provide inrush current protection. There are two bridge rectifiers, mounted on their own relatively large dedicated heatsink.

The APFC stage uses three CRJW125N60G2F MOSFETs and a boost diode. The coil is fully enclosed and the bulk capacitor is a single 680 μF / 400 V unit from Toshin Kogyo (TK), a respected Japanese manufacturer, rated for 105 °C. The primary inversion stage consists of two NCE 65TF099F MOSFETs on a dedicated heatsink, forming a half-bridge LLC resonant topology. It is a simple, mature, and efficient arrangement that is found in the majority of high performance units today.

On the secondary side, the 12V rail is generated by six unidentifiable MOSFETs in a synchronous rectification arrangement. The 3.3V and 5V rails are generated by DC-to-DC converters on a vertical daughterboard. Gigabyte's claim of 100% Japanese capacitors is accurate. All of the electrolytic and polymer capacitors on the secondary side are supplied by TK as well, which is a welcome sight in a $170 unit, and it is excellent news for its long-term reliability.

Cold Test Results (25°C Ambient)

Cold Test Results (25°C Ambient)

For the testing of PSUs, we are using high-precision electronic loads with a maximum power draw of 2700 Watts, a Rigol DS5042M 40 MHz oscilloscope, an Extech 380803 power analyzer, two high-precision UNI-T UT-325 digital thermometers, an Extech HD600 SPL meter, a self-designed hotbox, and various other bits and parts.

At 25 °C ambient, the Gaming 1000GM PG5 performs much better than the Gold logo on its box suggests. It averaged 92.6% at 230 VAC and 90.6% at 115 VAC across the nominal load range, peaking at 93.8% (230 VAC) at about 50% load and 92% (115 VAC) at about 30% load. Even at a sustained 1000W, efficiency was 91.0% and 88.5%, respectively. This is Platinum-level performance, and it is consistent with both certifications the unit actually holds: 80 PLUS Platinum from CLEAResult and ETA Platinum from Cybenetics. Why Gigabyte chose to market it as a Gold unit is anyone's guess.

The thermal and acoustic performance balance is impressive. The fan remains completely stopped up to about 30% load (roughly 300W), which covers most desktop work. Once it starts spinning, it barely gets audible up to 500W, where it reaches about 33 dB(A). From there it ramps up gradually, reaching 36.4 dB(A) at 600W and about 41 dB(A) at 800W, before climbing to 48.2 dB(A) at a sustained 1000W. That last figure is loud, but it is hardly a load most systems will continuously sustain. Thermally, the unit maintains very low and safe operating temperatures.

Hot Test Results (~45°C Ambient)

Hot Test Results (~45°C Ambient)

Inside our hotbox, at roughly 45 °C ambient, efficiency drops by just 0.8%, averaging 91.8% at 230 VAC and 89.8% at 115 VAC, with full load figures of 89.9% and 87.4% respectively. That is a very small degradation for a 20 °C increase in ambient temperature, which is a testament to the quality of the components and their resilience to adverse operating conditions.

The fan is a slightly different story. It still stays off up to about 300W, but it starts at a higher speed and ramps up much faster, reaching 38.3 dB(A) at 500W and 47.2 dB(A) at 800W. At a sustained 1000W, the fan climbs to 54.5 dB(A), practically the maximum, as the fan reaches its top speed, which is very loud and very noticeable in any system. In return, the internal temperatures stay very low, with the primary and secondary heatsinks reaching just 88°C and 82°C respectively at full load. These are high figures, but they are reasonable for a unit operating at its maximum output in a 45°C environment, and the unit’s components are very capable of handling them. Gigabyte clearly favored longevity over everything else.

PSU Quality and Bottom Line

Power Supply Quality

Voltage regulation is good on the minor rails and average on the 12V rail. Across the 20% to 100% load span, the 3.3V and 5V rails moved by just 0.5%, which is exceptional. The 12V rail regulation is 1.3% - not a class leading figure, but not a bad result either. The ripple suppression is very good. The 12V rail peaked at 48 mV at full load, while the 3.3V and 5V rails did not exceed 26 mV under any condition. Against the 120 mV and 50 mV ATX design limits, that is 60% headroom on the 12V rail and 48% on the minor rails. Several premium platforms can do better, but these figures are far from unacceptable on a mainstream PSU.

During our thorough assessment, we evaluate the essential protection features of every power supply unit we review, including Over Current Protection (OCP), Over Voltage Protection (OVP), Over Power Protection (OPP), and Short Circuit Protection (SCP).

All protection mechanisms were verified and triggered correctly during testing. With the unit hot, OCP tripped at 136% (27.2A) on both the 3.3V and 5V rails, and at 120% (100A) on the 12V rail, while OPP shut the unit down at 116% of its rated output, or about 1160W. These are tight thresholds for a 1000W unit, yet not too tight, as expected from an ATX 3.1 compliant unit.

Bottom Line

The Gigabyte Gaming 1000GM PG5 is a well-rounded power supply, and one that Gigabyte seems to undersell. The HEC platform is modern and well designed, the component selection includes Japanese capacitors all around, which is a welcome sight at this price point, and the unit is fully compliant with the latest ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 design guides. It is evident that Gigabyte favored longevity and reliability over squeezing out every last bit of electrical performance, and for a mainstream 1000W unit, that is a very reasonable priority.

T-Guard deserves a special mention, as it is the major update over the UD1000GM PG5 and the reason most people will notice this unit. It is Gigabyte's answer to the known 12V-2x6 connector overheating problem, which almost every manufacturer is currently trying to find a defense against. By monitoring the connector temperature and cutting power to the GPU if something goes wrong, while keeping the rest of the system alive, it targets the actual failure mode instead of relying on protections that were never designed for it. As a concept, it should work, unless the temperature rise is very abrupt and the position of the sensor does not allow it to react in time. Even so, for anyone planning to run a power hungry graphics card, it is a reassuring addition.

Efficiency is where the unit shines. It is Platinum-level efficient, as confirmed by our testing and both the 80 PLUS and Cybenetics certifications, which makes Gigabyte's decision to market it with Gold logos rather strange. The rest of the electrical performance is average for its class, with good minor rail regulation, a decent 1.3% on the 12V rail, and ripple that is comfortably within the ATX limits, if not remarkable. The balance between temperatures and noise is very good. At room temperature, the fan is barely audible up to 500W, and the internal temperatures remain low and safe, even inside our hotbox, where efficiency barely degraded.

The compromises are few. The fan gets very loud under sustained heavy loads in hot environments, practically reaching its top speed at full load, and the bundle is bare, lacking even mounting screws. The 150 mm long chassis, a consequence of the 135 mm fan, may also be a little tight in very compact cases. None of these are serious issues, as the vast majority of gaming systems will rarely push the unit hard enough for the fan to become a nuisance.

With a price tag of $170 at the time of this review and a ten-year warranty, the Gaming 1000GM PG5 represents good value, but it does not stand out across the board. Against other 1000W units in the same price range, such as the Corsair RM1000x, the MSI MAG A1000GL PCIE5 and the Montech Century II 1050W, it provides average all-around electrical performance, so buyers should not expect a noticeable difference in regulation or ripple. Where it pulls ahead is efficiency, as its Platinum-level figures are great for the class, and it also offers a good balance between temperatures and noise, with all-Japanese capacitors and T-Guard as extra reasons to pick it. For a gaming system built around a demanding graphics card, especially one with a 12V-2x6 connector, that combination makes the Gaming 1000GM PG5 a very sensible 1000W choice, even if it is not a clear winner in every category.

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Developers of SharpEmu — an experimental, open-source PS5 emulator — have successfully run PS5 games at a playable 60 FPS on the emulator. According to an X post on September 25, the developers reached this milestone for six of 55 titles tested, with 12 — including the six playable — reaching gameplay. According to the developer, the six games are yet to be tested from start to finish; the “playable” designation means the games currently run without issues, although minor graphical or audio issues may persist in some.

The six 60 FPS titles are Dreaming Sarah, Void Terrarium, New Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja, Tetris Forever, Hoa, and Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered. The breakthrough was achieved with SharpEmu v0.0.4-release.2, the emulator’s latest public build released on September 25. According to developers, the build includes upgrades such as improved SPIR-V shader translation and updated Vulkan API support.

Developed in C#, the SharpEmu PS5 emulator supports Windows, Linux, and macOS and uses Vulkan and MoltenVK for graphics API calls. PlayStation 5 relies on an AMD Zen 2 x86-64 CPU architecture; therefore, SharpEmu can execute the console's CPU instructions natively on a standard PC rather than translating them from an unfamiliar instruction set. The emulator focuses on loading a game's eboot.bin executable and required system modules, partially handling kernel functions, and processing the game's shader, resource, and AGC graphics submissions.

For now, SharpEmu is still far from handling demanding 3D titles, with only 12 of 55 tested titles reaching a game ready state. Of those 12, only six performed cleanly enough to be designated as “playable” at a full 60 FPS. The developers stress that SharpEmu is still in its early stages, noting that “SharpEmu is an experimental emulator intended for research and educational purposes. This project does not contain any copyrighted system firmware, game data, or proprietary PlayStation assets.” Meanwhile, another emulator, KytyPS5, recently ran the PS5 version of GTA V at roughly 40 to 60 FPS on a high-end Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Radeon RX 7900 XT system, crashing after the game's opening mission.

It won’t be long until Linux enthusiasts will be able to complete a clean kernel build in under 10 seconds. Linux expert and Phoronix head honcho Michael Larabel said that “the coffee window is closing” in recent commentary that weighs computer processor advances and human / AI optimizations of the Kbuild code. What once used to be a computer processing task that provided a decent excuse for a coffee break now only allows enough time for a measured sip.

The source site’s determined Linux focus has meant that OS kernel compilation times have become a signature benchmark over the last two decades. Larabel notes that this once time-consuming process “can be done in now roughly 15 seconds.” It isn’t just advances in hardware and core counts pushing the envelope; compiling a defconfig x86-64 Linux kernel build has had many bottlenecks removed thanks to the work of Linux MM developer Lorenzo Stoakes and the assistance of AI/LLMs recently. Even modest processors have seen their compile times cut dramatically thanks to this work.

Larabel went hands-on with the latest v4 kernel patches from Lorenzo, and armed with his very powerful EPYC workstation, achieved “a 15-second kernel build!” Before the latest patches, the same system took over 22 seconds for the same compilation task.

The test system is extremely potent, though. Your home PC or laptop might still let you have enough time to go brew some coffee, as Larabel’s test rig features the following components:

• 2x AMD EPYC 9575F 64-core processors (so, 128 cores / 256 threads)
• 24 x 64GB DDR5-6400 memory modules
• Samsung PM1743 3.84TB PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD storage
• Stock Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

It is noted that the code compilation benchmarking didn’t employ a RAMdisk to aggressively tune the compile times

All the above timings mentioned are for the minimal default kernel compilation for x86-64 systems. The Phoronix chief also timed the compilation of a Linux kernel with ‘allmodconfig’ with thousands of drivers and subsystems enabled. This precipitates far longer compile times. On the above beefy system, though, the latest Lorenzo patches drove the time down from 169 seconds to 134 seconds. So, this other milestone is approaching the two-minute mark.

Phoronix is now taking bets on AMD (Zen 6) EPYC 9686F systems, with MRDIMMs and PCIe Gen6 storage pushing defconfig x86-64 Linux kernel compilation times under the 10-second mark.

A security researcher discovered a vulnerability in Flock’s website that gave him an access token without needing login credentials. The researcher used the information gleaned to build a map of Flock cameras and share it on a website he named the Flock Surveillance Map, which now lists the location of 335,701 cameras. Flock has now issued a trademark infringement complaint with the goal of having the researcher close the website.

According to The Intercept, Joshua Michael used this to query ArcGIS, a third-party mapping and geospatial layer that Flock uses, to retrieve a database of Flock devices in November 2025.

Michael said that he immediately informed the company about the security flaw. He said in his email, dated Nov. 13, 2025, that “all testing was strictly non-intrusive, limited to open unauthenticated endpoints, and did not involve bypassing authentication, modifying data, or invoking any billable ArcGIS or Google operations.” However, the company did not reply to his message, and it took him two more attempts before a representative responded. Flock said in its response, “Thank you for the findings. We are internally triaging them and will reach back out with next steps soon,” but the researcher said that the company still hasn’t replied to this day.

Flock apparently fixed the vulnerability in January of this year after Michael published his findings, but the researcher was able to exfiltrate a Flock device location database before that. This information has allowed him to build the Flock Surveillance Map website, which lists 335,701 cameras, presumably updated in December 2025.

The surveillance company said that it has never been hacked, that Flock information has never been leaked, and that the Flock Safety cloud platform “has never experienced a data breach,” but Michael says that this does not reflect reality. He told The Intercept that it made this announcement “after I pulled their database of devices.” “That leaves two possibilities,” said the researcher. “Either they knew and chose not to disclose it for fear of bad press, or they didn’t know I exfiltrated the data at all. The first is a transparency failure. The second is a detection failure with national security implications.”

This issue once again raises questions about the company’s cybersecurity and privacy measures. Hackers have recently discovered that the Flock cameras stored encryption keys directly on the device, which allowed them to extract more than 27,000 clips stored and find that it has taken more than 1.6 million images in a span of 21 days. There were also multiple instances of misuse, in which police officers used the system to stalk romantic partners, while a car reviewer was “ambushed” in a store parking lot and detained for an hour for a mistyped police report.

What’s more alarming was that Michael pointed out that the ubiquity of the system and the vulnerabilities he uncovered so far show that it could be used to track personnel. Soldiers and civilians working in the defense industry could potentially be observed going to and from 22 sensitive sites, including Eglin AFB, CIA Headquarters, FBI Headquarters, Joint Base Andrews, and even the Pentagon, with people living within a 20-mile radius of these sites having a 57.22% to 93.94% chance of passing a Flock camera and getting recorded in the system.

While Flock did not comment on The Intercept’s reporting before publication, Michael noted that he received a trademark infringement complaint on his site. Doppel, a cybersecurity company focusing on social engineering defense, reached out on behalf of the surveillance company and said that he’s using the trademark “FLOCK SAFETY” without authorization and that it may confuse its customers. Because of this, the firm requested that the Flock Surveillance Map website be taken down, despite a pop-up that appears on the website when accessed for the first time saying otherwise.

TypeSafe AI's Jev "beat the Elite Four and the Champion and entered the Hall of Fame on September 23, 2026" in Pokémon Red, according to the developer's project page. Unlike the chatbots that have taken weeks to months to beat the Blue version of the game, Jev can only pick from a list of choices. It didn't achieve this without help, though. Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 monitored the game log and adjusted options and their wording as Jev played, effectively acting like a coach.

The developer, Andrew Boyd, is the founder of Standard Agents Inc., which sells a platform for building AI agents. Boyd initially announced the project on X with victory coming in a week. The gameplay was livestreamed, available in a browser or a terminal, with a chat that Jev moderated.

Jev is a recently released decision model that returns solutions with a confidence figure. It is not a chatbot, and it is not an LLM. For the game, Jev refers to a list of options with facts, and it selects the best option based on probability. It doesn't read the screen and does not produce text or images. A traditional LLM, Claude Opus 5, monitored the game log to help Jev when it got stuck. This happened indirectly by modifying the options and data available to Jev.

The page's harness changelog had 474 entries, most of them a failure from the game log paired with the change made in response. Examples of mistakes include walking "into Lorelei's shut entrance 53 times," crossing one Rock Tunnel ladder "124 times in ten minutes," and losing to the Champion's Alakazam after beating all four Elite Four trainers, which forced Jev to beat all four again before it took down the Champion later that day.

Opus made adjustments for both accuracy and cost. Using notes on the model from TypeSafe, it reduced the text sent to Jev by about two-thirds and used words instead of numbers. When Jev got stuck in a loop, the harness was changed to request a decision only every six seconds instead of about once a second. Human input also existed: viewers sent tips in chat, and the helpful ones were used to improve Jev's list of options. The reliance on Opus, the developer, and the audience shows the strengths and limitations of the decision model.

A second Jev-based run, made by Christian Mathiesen at Frigade, detailed a separate approach. The harness in that case, according to its README, "reads the game's memory, lists the legal options ... and Jev picks one," but it never writes to game memory. Mathiesen said that his first version, where Jev could choose the buttons directly, "never left Pallet Town." The cost, by his own estimate, is "about $1–1.70 per 24 hours."

A separate Pokémon Red experiment took a different route. A developer who goes by stmonty trained a small world model on an RTX 3080 Ti with more than 42,000 frames of gameplay. Starting from a save in Professor Oak's lab, it picked a starter in 52 of 100 tries, according to stmonty's blog post. Both the goal and assistance were far smaller than Jev's: stmonty's model had to learn what each input does from screenshots alone.

The viral nature of Jev, with LangChain describing it as having "had a pretty outsized response" since its launch on Sept. 15, had multiple developers playing the game within 10 days. The success of the run demonstrates that collaboration with specialized models can improve problem-solving in a meaningful way. TypeSafe itself says open-ended tasks are better suited to an LLM, as we reported when Jev launched. For comparison, Anthropic's Claude Plays Pokémon stream, running Opus 4.5 at the time, still hadn't finished Red as of January. This time, with Jev doing the playing and Claude writing the rules, the developer achieved victory.

The U.S. Navy and the British Royal Navy have jointly launched an exercise U.S. Mk 48 heavyweight torpedo from the Royal Navy’s uncrewed drone submarine, XV Excalibur, marking a historic milestone in autonomous warfare. According to an official press release, the proof-of-concept launch took place on September 13 at the British Underwater Test & Evaluation Center (BUTEC) in Scotland.

“This successful test marks a historic first for allied undersea warfare,” said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle. “Proving that we can seamlessly launch a U.S. heavyweight torpedo from a Royal Navy autonomous underwater vehicle validates our shared vision for true interchangeability. By integrating weapons, payloads, and mission architectures across allied platforms, we are increasing the flexibility, scale, and combat power of our combined forces and ensuring they are ready to meet the strategic demands of tomorrow.”

The launch was conducted under AUKUS Pillar 2, a military partnership between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia aimed at developing and accelerating the deployment of cutting-edge, advanced defense technologies, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and autonomous underwater systems, to maintain a strategic technological edge in the Indo-Pacific region. According to the U.S. Navy, the trial validated the mechanical, electrical, and software integration of an American kinetic payload onto a British autonomous platform, proving weapon interchangeability between allied forces.

The project — designated Project Broadsword — received approval in February 2026 from the Department of the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office (DONRCO) and was executed in collaboration with OPNAV N97, the Royal Navy, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Keyport, and several industry partners. From approval to trials took just seven months. In a similar project, the U.S. Navy launched missiles from its first drone sailboat in August.

The Mk 48 is a heavyweight anti-submarine and anti-surface torpedo used by the U.S. Navy and several allied submarine forces. Typically launched from fully manned submarines with crews of 100 to 140 actively involved sailors, the 3,700-pound (1,680 kg) weapon is designed to sink deep-diving submarines and high-performance surface ships. Project Broadsword marks the first time the torpedo has been successfully launched from an uncrewed, autonomous robotic submarine.

The launch machine, XV Excalibur, is the British Royal Navy’s Extra-Large Uncrewed Underwater Vessel (XLUUV), designed to operate autonomously or via remote control without any crew on board. The Royal Navy successfully demonstrated the drone's capability in 2025 by controlling Excalibur in UK waters from a command center 10,000 miles away in Australia. Before the torpedo test, the vessel served as a mobile underwater laboratory for testing cutting-edge technology and future payloads. Because Excalibur lacks traditional internal torpedo tubes, engineers attached the 2-ton torpedo externally using a specialized cradle beneath its hull.

The U.S. Navy confirmed that following the success of Project Broadsword, it will “continue aggressive follow-on acceleration with Project CUTLASS,” in collaboration with its partners. “Utilizing the Anduril Dive-XL platform, the next phase will tackle advanced payload integration data, command and control architectures, and tactical employment scenarios to further mature uncrewed undersea capabilities,” the press release read.

The launch is the latest development in fast-rising autonomous warfare, where militaries deploy systems that can capture and process data and execute tasks — including the use of lethal force — with little to no human intervention. These systems include unmanned aerial, ground, and sea vehicles; weapons; robots; and AI-driven command-and-control systems. Earlier this month, an autonomous NATO strike drone used Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano to independently pick and bomb targets.

With physical media making a comeback, a man in the UK has been sentenced to three years and six months in prison for manufacturing and selling counterfeit vinyl records. Rehan Ahmed, from Southall in west London, was reportedly running a “highly organised, unlicensed operation” since 2017 that produced thousands of fake records featuring music from popular artists including The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Coldplay, and Kendrick Lamar. The operation is estimated to have generated nearly £2.7 million ($3.5 million) in revenue.

Ahmed’s counterfeit business, ‘Phoenix of Vinyl ’, came on the radar in 2024 after a representative from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) made a test purchase and found evidence of counterfeiting. The City of London Police raided the premises soon after and uncovered the largest stock of fake vinyl ever found in the UK, with 2,791 records by 108 different artists. In addition to the records, police officers also found four vinyl presses roughly 70 years old, along with 3,000 metal stampers, and thousands of sleeves and center labels.

A separate report by The Guardian suggests that the BPI has been involved in 43 search warrants over the past two years targeting counterfeit vinyl and CDs. They have seized around 600,000 items with an estimated value of up to £8 million ($10.7 million).

"With music on physical formats enjoying a resurgence, the market in counterfeit records has unfortunately also been growing as criminals cash in at the expense of creators and fans. This doesn't just impact the legal music economy and everyone that works and invests in it - it also affects every one of us as citizens who fall victim to other forms of criminality that it funds," said Peter Ratcliffe, director of content protection at BPI.

According to a report published by the BPI, vinyl sales in the UK have grown substantially, with 7.6 million records sold in 2025. That’s a 13.3% year-over-year increase, marking the format’s 18th consecutive year of growth. Vinyl revenue also rose 19.9% year-over-year to £174.7 million ($234 million), with the BPI reporting in March that it was the format’s highest annual revenue in more than three decades.

Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is driven by the ruthless application of science, economics, and the dedication of its employees. But superstitious engineers think there’s another key ingredient – strategically placed bags of creamy coconut flavored Guai Guai snacks in their traditional green livery. These bags of snacks are found with surprising regularity around Taiwan, placed on machinery used to make semiconductors and other computing products, as the prevailing superstition is that the snacks bring good luck. Alarmingly, the Taipei Times recently reported that production of these tech talisman snacks could be halted, as the company that makes Guai Guai is facing a severe threat of strike action.

The Guai Guai Company factory in Zhongli, Taiwan, has operated since 1968, and more than a third of its workforce have been with the company for 30 years or more. On September 1 this year, the company revealed that it would relocate to Hsinchu, about 45 minutes south by car. Kind of ironically, Guai Guai is relocating to Taiwan's Silicon Valley, yet this action could grind production to a halt.

Workers can retain their positions if they relocate or commute to the new factory. Also they have been offered a 5% increase in pay. It is noted by the worker’s union that 5% is merely in line with the newly announced changes to Taiwan’s minimum wage.

Another grievance felt by the workers concerns the massive windfall that the company is getting for the sale of its Zhongli site. Taiwan’s Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc. (ASE) has bought it for redevelopment. This has netted the company NT$5.6 billion (US$176.1 million). No bonus, dividend, or any other kind of benefit will be shared with the workers.

Thus the union is looking for the company to make written guarantees on severance packages and pay raises, writes the Taipei Times. Specifically, the disgruntled factory workers are looking for a share of the ‘AI windfall’ with weight given to longer-serving staff. Moreover it is seeking severance packages for those who don’t want to work so far away, and asking that workers who stay on get a NT$10,000 (US$315) monthly salary increase.

A massive 94% of the Guai Guai workers voted in favor of strike action. They are now just waiting for the company response, the results of the negotiations between the snack-making company and the union.

Negotiations between management and the union are expected to continue this week, but we haven’t seen any further news from Taiwan on this matter yet. Taiwan’s government doesn’t take an entirely neutral stance, according to the source. The company’s offer should respect the years of service of the workers and secure the livelihoods their labor had earned, reckons the local Taoyuan Department of Labor, which is monitoring the situation and could decide to step in.

While gamers wait for the release of Grand Theft Auto VI, whether on their consoles or gaming PCs with one of the best graphics cards, they can relive one of the franchise's most memorable titles. Modder gebdag has unveiled GTA2 RTX Remix, a mod that harnesses Nvidia’s RTX Remix technology to add full path tracing and dynamic time-of-day cycles to the 27-year-old classic, Grand Theft Auto 2.

Grand Theft Auto 2, released in 1999, used older graphics APIs such as DirectDraw and an earlier version of Direct3D. The problem is that these legacy APIs create a technical barrier to modern technologies like RTX Remix. Nvidia's platform lacks native support for DirectDraw and only plays well with Direct3D 9. It requires a wrapper to interface with previous versions of Direct3D, which is where the GTA2 RTX Remix comes in.

Modder gebdag ingeniously developed a custom Direct3D 9 renderer for Grand Theft Auto 2. It acts as a generational bridge between the original game and Nvidia’s RTX Remix. To do so, the mod relies on two DLLs (gta2dx9.dll and gta2dx9_vid.dll) that serve as translators, converting the game's legacy graphics pipeline into a modern Direct3D 9 renderer that RTX Remix can understand. As a result, RTX Remix can interpret Grand Theft Auto 2's visuals in real time and do its magic.

As you can see in the embedded video below, the mod preserves the core gameplay fans will appreciate while adding a dramatic graphic overhaul to the classic top-down action title. Anywhere City now looks like a living metropolis, with realistic lighting and shadow effects throughout. The dynamic day-night cycle is a great addition that lets you see the sun set and the moon rise. Things like explosions, vehicle fires, or neon signs now have their own light sources with glows and reflections. Press F4 to open the menu and tweak the lighting to your taste.

The graphics revamp is just one of the mod’s improvements. Beyond the eye-candy upgrade, it also adds other features to bring Grand Theft Auto 2 up to modern standards. While the original was limited to a 4:3 native aspect ratio, the mod supports widescreen 16:9 displays, giving gamers a more immersive view of Anywhere City. The mod also improves gameplay by adding support for frame rates up to 60 FPS through Frame Generation technology. It also fixes the nuisance of cars and pedestrians popping in at the screen edges.

GTA2 RTX Remix is an open-source project available on GitHub. To use the mod, you will need a copy of Grand Theft Auto 2. The modder tested it specifically with version 9.6, which Rockstar Games distributed for free in 2004. You will also need a 64-bit version of Windows 10 or Windows 11, along with the required RTX Remix runtime files.

RTX Remix has opened the floodgates to a plethora of mods from studios and the modding community that transform some of the most beloved games from our childhood. Now, Grand Theft Auto 2 has joined this notable list, which also includes Need For Speed Carbon, Tomb Raider, Max Payne, and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, to name just a few.

The Russian military has started striking data centers within Ukraine in its latest escalation against the country. According to the BBC, a Russian drone hit the data center, which was situated in a central business district in Kyiv, damaging it and killing four people in the area. Multiple reports also suggest that other data centers and network infrastructure have been hit across the country as well, with President Volodymyr Zelensky saying that Moscow wants to maximize disruption for the common people.

“All this affects people’s ability to stay connected, study, work,” Zelensky said. He also wrote in a social media post, “The Russians are constantly expanding their escalation operation: American and other businesses, data centers, internet providers — for Russia, all ordinary life is simply a target. It is important that the world responds to all of this and that Russia feels the response to its terror.” Russia, on the other hand, confirmed that it attacked the Datagroup site, claiming that Ukrainian military intelligence used it, and that it’s also targeting other data and telecommunications centers owned by New-Telco, United DC, Kyivstar, and Parkovyi.

These attacks have left about 100,000 households in Ukraine without internet connectivity, and some companies have begun migrating their data across the border to avoid disruption. Nevertheless, one government official said that Ukraine’s internet network is highly decentralized, but people should still expect some local disruptions. However, Ukraine Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said that Russia’s targeting of data centers would affect the flow of “life-saving information.” “Rapid alerts about missile and drone threats are essential — they save lives. This is crucial civilian infrastructure… It is not a military target,” Sybiha said. “It is essential to keeping everyday life functioning.”

Data centers are considered critical infrastructure as modern society increasingly relies on online services. Because of this, they’re now considered strategic targets in a conflict. While government-owned data processing sites have historically been one of the first targets in military operations, Iran’s response to the U.S.’s bombing campaign in March marked one of the first instances where commercial civilian data center infrastructure was deliberately targeted. This included drone and missile attacks on AWS Middle East regional data centers in Dubai and Bahrain. It also directly threatened the offices of Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and 14 other American tech companies in the region, as well as OpenAI’s Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi.+

Microsoft launched the Copilot+ brand in 2024 to differentiate its offerings with local AI capabilities from other devices that do not have NPUs or fail to meet the minimum 40+ TOPS requirement. But a little over two years after the disastrous launch and poor sales, the company has quietly moved away from the brand. Microsoft Surface CVP Brett Ostrum confirmed this to Windows Central in an interview on the sidelines of Snapdragon Summit 2026.

“These are not called Copilot+ PCs,” Ostrum said. “They do meet all the requirements of our previous bar for what Copilot+ devices are. We still lean into the narrative around AI on the edge and being able to have a hybrid out there.” Even other devices that would’ve been eligible under the branding, including the upcoming Nvidia RTX Spark N1X and Microsoft’s own Project Zenith, are missing the Copilot+ badges. The company also said that it’s scaling back Copilot’s presence in Windows 11, promising to improve the operating system’s performance, reliability, and updates. Microsoft also vowed to optimize it to run smoothly on just 8GB of RAM amid the AI-driven memory shortage.

However, that doesn’t mean Microsoft is backing away completely from Copilot. Despite dropping the hardware branding, it’s still working on numerous AI features for its product lineup. The company recently revamped Copilot and added new features like Home, Code, and Autopilot. It has also tested Copilot+ AI features that run on discrete GPUs, possibly expanding the feature set to PCs that use processors without a built-in NPU. In fact, one AI consultant mapped out Microsoft Copilot products and discovered more than 80 unique offerings, with many more possibly unaccounted for.

Microsoft did not give a specific reason for dropping the branding, but as many modern mainstream and high-end processors now come with NPUs that can hit 40 TOPS or more, it seems that it no longer makes sense to offer that differentiation. Aside from that, the current memory chip shortage has made the minimum 16GB requirement rather expensive, with Microsoft even purging its 32GB RAM recommendation from its website and releasing brand-new Surface for Business laptops with as little as 8GB of RAM.

It’s still unclear if the quiet sunset of the Copilot+ brand means that every Windows 11 PC will now get all the AI features that were once locked behind the name. But even if it will no longer exist on the hardware side, we still expect the Copilot branding to stay inside Windows and other Microsoft products for better or for worse.

PlayStation 5 emulation has witnessed massive growth ever since Sony confirmed its plans to end PC ports for its first-party, narrative-driven single-player games. The latest name joining the list is the open source project AnyPS5, which is claimed to run PS5 games natively on PC without requiring any emulation. The official GitHub page describes it as a tool for automatically porting executables to Linux and Windows.

Since the PS5 is powered by AMD’s Zen 2 hardware, it uses the x86-64 architecture, thus allowing AnyPS5 to work as a compatibility translation layer somewhat similar to Proton or Wine. It takes the original PS5 executable files and converts them into Windows and Linux formats, while the shaders are recompiled into SPIR-V for Vulkan. By avoiding emulation altogether, AnyPS5 can potentially eliminate some of the computational overhead, resulting in a smoother experience.

That said, development is still in the early stages, with test builds reportedly managing to boot select games as far as the main menu, with some even reaching gameplay with audio. However, the tool still requires a lot of work, particularly when it comes to system libraries and proprietary APIs unique to the PlayStation 5’s operating system. While the project is currently active on GitHub, a working public build is yet to be released.

PS5 emulation is still far from being practical, but if you are interested or have been following the topic, make sure to check out KytyPS5, one of the most prominent and popular PlayStation 5 emulators in active development. It recently managed to run the PS5 version of Grand Theft Auto V as high as 40 to 60 FPS using high-end PC hardware. Unfortunately, this one is also in an early experimental phase and is not stable enough to maintain playable frame rates.

There is also SharpEmu, which focuses on accuracy and the underlying infrastructure needed to improve compatibility with PS5 games. The project has managed to successfully run Astro’s Playroom on a Steam Deck and was shown booting on the handheld at around 0.5 to 1 FPS. The game remains unplayable at those frame rates and does not progress beyond the introductory sequence, but getting PS5 emulation to run on the Steam Deck represents a major step forward for the project.

A newly published patent shows that Nvidia has been working on an AI chatbot that could make it quicker and easier for developers to optimize their PC games. The chatbot would be capable of receiving a plain English request for help before running diagnostics based on the specific issue at hand.

PC gamers are well aware of the impact of poor optimization on games. And while there are tools available to developers that help them identify issues and then address them, they require specialist knowledge to use. They also take time, something that developers rarely have — especially as they get closer to a release date.

The patent, first spotted by Patentlyze, could help. It depicts a chatbot-like interface in which developers would be able to outline the issue that they are seeing. They would be able to do so using normal language, allowing even relatively inexperienced developers to use the tool.

Example questions provided by the patent include "What is causing the micro-stutter during camera cuts?" and "Why is frame time spiking when ray-traced reflections enter the viewport?".

Once the question has been posed, the AI would then write a diagnostic specific to the issue before automatically running it on the GPU and then providing the results for interpretation. The developer would then be able to implement any fixes and re-run any testing that is still required.

The patent doesn't make it clear whether there will be any validation or testing of the diagnostic code this tool would create, something that may give some pause. Test results are only as strong as the test that was used to get them, and developers will need to trust that Nvidia's chatbot is up to the job before relying on it.

However, it's important to remember that companies like Nvidia apply for countless patents every year. Not all of those patents turn into shipping products or features, and there is no guarantee that this one will ever see the light of day. That being said, it does seem similar to G-Assist, a chatbot-like tool that allows gamers to get AI-powered assistance for their GeForce RTX PC. Nvidia has also sought to bring its AI chops to bear on other aspects of gaming, not least DLSS 5 and its multiple AI modes for different levels of detail — whether gamers want it or not.

For gamers, the hope will be that this patent will result in a tool that makes it easier for game developers to optimize their wares ahead of release.

The good news is that Sandisk is still putting out SSDs for consumers, and these are not just cheap replacements. The Optimus GX Pro 850P is a bona fide high-end Gen 4 SSD that puts Sandisk’s name on the WD Black SN850X’s legendary design. This means DRAM, TLC flash, and good performance for any role.

Like the Black SN850P, which is a Black SN850X made with a heatsink and for the PS5, the 850P is made for the console. Its heatsink is excellent, and it would fit right into your desktop PC, too. We wouldn’t recommend shucking it for use in a laptop, but theoretically it could work there as well. Our main concern would be the pricing, which is a bit steep – this is a nice drive, but you’ll pay a premium for it.

Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P Specifications

The Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P is available at the same capacities as its WD Black SN850P forebear: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. This also matches the original WD Black SN850X and its later 8TB SKU. Prices at the time of review for the Optimus GX Pro 850P are $309.99, $609.99, $1,139.99, and $2,249.99. These prices are well above the $234.99, $494.99, and $1,019.00 that the Black SN850P is currently demanding. We think the prices will come down on the Sandisk drive, but be aware of the comparable alternatives when making a purchase.

The drive can reach up to 7,300 / 6,600 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1.2 million random read/write IOPS. This performance is at the top for a Gen 4 drive and, frankly, is capable of delivering an excellent experience even for heavier workloads. The drive’s warranty is standard at five years with 600TB of writes for every TB of capacity. The Optimus GX Pro 850P supports data-at-rest encryption through TCG Opal v2.01, but this is not explicitly listed for the SN850P, likely as this model is designed for use in the PS5.

Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P Software and Accessories

Sandisk fully supports its drives with downloadable software. For the Optimus GX Pro 850P this includes the Sandisk Dashboard, which is Sandisk’s version of WD’s Dashboard, and Acronis True Image for Sandisk. The former is an SSD toolbox with all of the expected features: drive health and SMART monitoring, firmware updating, performance testing, etc. Acronis True Image is OEM-licensed software used for backing up files and imaging drives.

Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P: A Closer Look

The Optimus GX Pro 850P is designed to specifically fit into the PS5 with an effective heatsink. The bare drive underneath is single-sided at 1TB and 2TB but double-sided at 4TB and 8TB. For that reason, the rated height is larger for the latter two SKUs. In general, this should not be an issue for fit in desktop PCs. The heatsink itself is finned for extra surface area for better heat dissipation and should keep the drive cool even under harsh conditions. It does not have RGB, unlike the WD Black SN850’s heatsinked SKU.

The drive label gives some additional information, such as a rating for 3.3V / 2.8A. This is ~9W, which matches the drive’s highest reported power state. This is certainly higher than the ~5W we see for many DRAM-less drives, which have half the flash channels on top of not having DRAM to worry about, but it is not enough to be a problem with this heatsink.

The Optimus GX Pro 850P has a relatively standard SSD layout with an SSD controller, a DRAM module, power management circuitry, and two NAND flash packages. The larger, double-sided versions of the drive will have more NAND flash packages, with two additional packages on the back. We’ve covered the controller and its iterations in the past. The DRAM, for what it’s worth, is DDR4, which is serviceable for the role volatile memory plays on an SSD: mostly as a metadata cache. The one caveat here is that our 2TB drive only has 1GB of DRAM, which is one-half the usual and likewise one-half of what we had on our 2TB WD Black SN850X sample. In practice, this should have no impact on intended workload performance and could potentially reduce cost a small amount.

The flash is potentially more interesting, as it could be the expected BiCS5, or it could have been updated. The 8TB WD Black SN850X uses BiCS6, and it can make sense to cycle in newer flash later on in a product’s lifetime. The Optimus GX Pro 850P is essentially in that line. What we can say for sure is that the flash on here was manufactured more recently than the flash on the Black SN850X samples we’ve reviewed at both capacities – newer in production date, not necessarily in generation – but the performance is close enough that there would be little perceptible difference even if it were generationally different. This drive is at the edge of what you can get out of this controller technology and Sandisk could also choose to tune it specifically for this performance range, so at the end of the day one could say this is, effectively, equivalent to the WD Black SN850X with BiCS5 TLC flash.

We believe our sample is still using BiCS5 anyway – the coding’s sixth character “C” implies that – but that statement applies to any potential BiCS6 swap. In this case, moving to newer BiCS5 means a higher I/O rate, 1,200 MT/s to 1,600 MT/s. The former is plenty to saturate a PCIe 4.0 link with an eight-channel controller like the 850P’s, but putting in newer flash makes sense from a supply perspective. Higher MT/s flash can have lower latency and potentially better power efficiency when run at a lower MT/s, but we don’t believe either is a motivation here. Real-world impacts are, again, minimal, with minor exceptions that might not exist if we were comparing to a current Black SN850X.

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Comparison Products

The Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P is Sandisk’s take on the WD Black SN850P, which in turn is a PS5 version of the Black SN850X, so we have to compare it to that latter drive. The stiffest proprietary competition is from Samsung with the 990 Pro. Alternatives with DRAM but different hardware include the Crucial T500, the Adata Legend 960 Max, the TeamGroup G70 Pro, and the Inland Gaming Performance Plus. To keep things honest, we also want to compare faster DRAM-less drives that have historically been great for the PS5. These include the Addlink A93 (4TB) and the WD Black SN7100.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

Is the 850P a good game drive? In our estimation, yes. It beats the original Black SN850X, due in part to firmware maturity and/or the newer BiCS5 – we would expect these two to be comparable if the Black is or has been updated – and it is also faster than popular DRAM-less options like the A93. In general, we think going with something DRAM-less, like the A93, is a good way to save some money if you’re buying an SSD just to host games. This approach extends even to the Black SN7100, which struggles on this list against the largely DRAM-equipped competition, as it still scores pretty well. We consider 45µs or better to be excellent for load times.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

For general application use, we are a little more disappointed. The 850P ends up in the middle of the pack, although its results are still quite good. This will beat most DRAM-less drives, although it falls behind the Black SN7100, as that drive uses very responsive BiCS8 flash. This makes it clear that the 850P is using older BiCS flash, which doesn’t have the same latency edge. This isn’t the worst trade-off if you’re looking for a full-fledged SSD with eight flash channels and DRAM – this drive will sustain better over time and through heavier workloads. Again, anything at or below 45µs for latency is good in our book, so this would be perfectly suitable as an OS drive.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

The 850P should be, by most accounts, the definitive PS5 SSD. We’ve had the Black SN850X as our best SSD for the PS5 for quite a long time, although the SN850P is the PS5-specific model. The Black SN850X simply delivers a similar experience to the SN850P at a lower price point. Why is this the best SSD for the platform? Well, you get top-tier Gen 4 performance with reliability and an excellent heatsink. All of this still applies to Sandisk’s 850P.

Now, a DRAM-less alternative with half the flash channels – which means it runs cooler – like the A93 seems to be more sensible. It’s less expensive, and the PS5 doesn’t benefit from more performance than it provides. The argument here is therefore more on reliability and, possibly, consistency. The 850P can manage more flash at once – which actually is ideal for larger capacities, including 2TB for this generation – and it also has DRAM.

Many enthusiasts still want DRAM as it can improve performance and endurance. Keep in mind that our A93 sample is the 4TB model, which its controller can address thanks to a revision made for that purpose. A four-channel drive is still at its best with up to four dies per channel, or 16 in total, which works out to 2TB with 1Tb dies. Going past that doesn’t really deliver more performance, and having an eight-channel controller is preferable at higher capacities. A stronger argument would be this: the 850P is a quality, mature product that could act as an investment. Considering that a 2TB Black SN850X bought at its lowest price beats the stock market right now, that’s not as crazy as it once sounded.

Our take is that, for a PS5, you really can get anything. If you’re set on a quality drive, though, this one is basically as good as it gets. You’re here for the numbers, though, and it only wins in transfers to the drive, and not by much. That’s valid, but with more wear and a fuller drive, it is more likely to maintain peak performance for longer. So, don’t buy this drive for faster game load times or FPS, because you won’t get that here.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

Our DiskBench test gives a good measure of real-world performance with a mixed file load, with Gen 4 expectations around 2 GB/s for copies and writes and 4 GB/s for reads. Writes are going to be slower than reads and can help cap copy performance. The 850P does nothing unusual here, coming in at numbers close to these. We tend to put the most weight on copy performance and, here, the 850P manages to come in second behind only the T500. This makes sense as the T500 has newer flash with more planes, which helps it eke out more bandwidth. The Black SN7100 also has newer flash, specifically a newer form of BiCS, which keeps it competitive. Still, the 850P impressively beats the Black SN850X by a significant amount – perhaps due to firmware maturity and/or newer BiCS5 – and the 990 Pro as well.

This is an important result because most of what people use storage for ultimately comes down to transfers like these. Files between drives. Backups. Updating software. You’re not going to have a lot of transfers going on at once with a high queue depth, and if you’re working with smaller files, you are not going to get near the theoretical throughput. So, the 850P certainly earns the mantle of being a high-end Gen 4 drive. On the other hand, even the DRAM-less A93 is not that much slower. If you’re someone who does a lot of transfers, the added time could add up, though.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

The 850P performs very closely to the Black SN850X in ATTO, as expected. We see no real anomalies here. The drive is very consistent, which makes for a reliable user experience regardless of workload type. It is easy to notice, however, that the 850P and Black SN850X have weaker performance between the 512B and 2KiB block sizes, closer to the Legend 960 Max and WD Black SN7100. We would chalk this up to the controller technology for the WD and Sandisk drives – they all use proprietary ones with the same foundation – with the Legend 960 Max being the singular SMI-based drive.

We’ve found historically that drives may show up weaker here in ATTO as indicative of a trade-off. This is because, generally, we think in terms of 4KiB – a typical cluster and sector size that is used for performance metrics everywhere – which is a logical page downstream from the 16KiB physical pages that modern flash uses. Handling smaller reads/writes could increase memory load and can increase latency. However, focusing on 4KiB and larger block sizes makes more sense for a variety of workloads, and performance is not the only factor. A manufacturer also has to consider power consumption and wear, for example. So there may be good design reasons for this behavior.

If we move on to CDM to see performance at 4KiB, at a typical queue depth of 1, the 850P is average with reads and on top with writes. Anything at or below 45µs for reads is pretty good, and the drive competes well. The SN7100 is in a class of its own with its BiCS8 flash. For writes, which are often less important, we see strong numbers from most drives. The DRAM-less A93, the SMI-based Legend 960 Max, and the proprietary 990 Pro are on the weaker end. Generally speaking, this does not indicate a problem with the drive at this level and could be a facet of the controller, the flash, or both, often also as a trade-off. What we can say is that the 850P is stellar here, which certainly makes it more attractive for use in a NAS, for caching, and for workloads that are not found in the PS5. That’s not a knock – it simply illustrates the drive’s heritage and underlines that this drive could be good anywhere.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states including the steady state write performance.

We’ll start with the 850P’s fastest mode in the cache: over 6.46 GB/s for just over 92 seconds. This is a 595GB cache, more or less exactly matching the Black SN850X. A drive with 3-bit TLC cache can handle up to one-third its actual size, so this is smaller than what’s possible but still large in the grand scheme of things. It’s more than suitably large to cache even large file writes, which means it can be used for things outside of gaming. This is reinforced by the post-cache speed, where it’s writing to the native TLC flash at a respectable 1.6 GB/s. This doesn’t sound like much given the speed of drives today, but it would be at or above the best Gen 3 drives in this mode while generally having a larger and faster cache.

Samsung’s 990 Pro is in the same boat, providing consistent performance outside the cache but looking slow compared to the steady state speeds we see with other drives. In part, this is due to the flash being used on it, as well as the WD/Sandisk drives. Newer flash has more planes and lower latency, both of which can boost throughput. Some drives, like the Inland Gaming Performance Plus, alternatively have smaller caches, which allow the drive to maintain higher sustained speeds. The same goes for the Legend 960 Max. Speed is also not everything, as not all drives write as smoothly in their post-cache modes. Maintaining responsiveness can help a drive feel spunkier when it hits this slower state.

If we take all of this into consideration, the 850P actually has some interesting applications. You could use this as a NAS drive, for example. Generally, we think the Inland Gaming Performance Plus – or the updated Performance Plus – would be better, as a super large cache leans more towards everyday consumer workloads. However, the 850P is steady enough with still sufficient speed. It would probably provide a better experience than the T500, especially as it has twice the flash channels, so it can manage better at high capacity. So, yes, this is a PS5 drive, but its heatsink and performance profile are such that you could use it as a workhorse drive as well.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case for idle.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording, we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature, but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

The 850P has a heatsink, so it’s not going into a laptop, and concerns about power consumption are a little less important. The presence of the heatsink also helps keep the drive cool, so throttling is also not a big concern. Still, you could choose to remove the heatsink, and maybe you want to toss this into a small form factor media machine. In those cases, the 850P’s efficiency – which lands in the lower half of the pack – is sufficient but not great. It’s better than the SM2264-based Legend 960 Max and E18-based Gaming Performance Plus, which are good baselines, but falls behind newer drives and technology.

Our feeling here is that a high-end Gen 4 drive should get at least 400 MB/s per watt, which is generally the case. DRAM-less options can target much higher and are often a better choice if you’re worried about heat or power consumption. If you are going for a high-end drive, ideally you have a heatsink. The one the 850P comes with is very effective, with us measuring a maximum temperature of 54 degrees Celsius. This is very far off from throttling and, frankly, it is a fantastic result.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and antivirus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P Bottom Line

The Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P brings no real surprises. If you were expecting it to be a WD Black SN850P – which itself is just a Black SN850X with a PS5-compliant heatsink – with a Sandisk badge, then you won’t be disappointed. Technically, there are some firmware optimizations possible for a drive destined to be used in PS5s, but we’ve found that any such changes have little impact on overall performance. The 850P is a drive with mature hardware and firmware, and that’s the main story here. It’s a reliable, consistent, well-performing drive that will rock the PS5 but is also good in regular computers.

Our biggest complaint is probably that the 850P can be bested by other drives in any given category. There are less expensive drives with similar performance in the PS5. There are drives that will be better in a laptop, even assuming the 850P’s heatsink is removed. There are even drives that beat it on the desktop in some areas, or are less expensive. Frankly, it feels like a premium drive, and that’s long been the case for the Black SN850X and its progeny. This is also true of the Samsung 990 Pro, its direct competitor, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you want a rock-solid drive that can do anything, look no further. If you have a specific application in mind or want to save some money, there are other options.

Considering how much people value their data and worry about storage stability, we think the Optimus GX Pro 850P does have a place. It’s a no-nonsense drive that gets the job done with a proven track record. The heatsink is very effective, and the drive itself doesn’t really struggle with any one workload. While it is designed for the PS5, it would be plenty happy in an enthusiast’s desktop. Not everybody needs a Gen 5 powerhouse. We recommend it for the discerning buyer who wants something fast and reliable without having to guess what hardware is inside some generic brand’s drive.

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Nvidia has updated its RTX Mega Geometry SDK to 2.0, adding streaming support for “continuous level-of-detail clusters” to handle high-density meshes, according to the developer blog post. Nvidia says it works even for scenes too big for the VRAM budget. The technology is in addition to its RTX Kit, arriving alongside RTX Kit 2026.3. The announcement comes close to the release of Gears of War: E-Day, which makes use of RTX Mega Geometry technology. Nvidia has not explicitly said what version of Mega Geometry the game uses.

Mega Geometry “organizes detailed meshes into clusters so ray-traced scenes can adapt geometric detail efficiently,” according to Nvidia. The SDK appeared at version 0.9.0 beta in 2025 and found its way into Alan Wake 2’s title update 1.2.8 early that same year. Our test on an RTX 4090 found about 1GB of VRAM saved with a performance boost of 13%, at native 4K and with DLSS Quality. On an 8GB graphics card, that 1GB is an eighth of the memory.

The SDK is at version 2.0.0 on GitHub as of this week. The technology makes dense scenes less expensive to ray trace, with 2.0 specifically targeting geometry that doesn’t fit in VRAM. This means that “a scene’s source geometry no longer has to fit in VRAM [with detail] bounded by a memory budget rather than by mesh count,” according to Nvidia’s changelog.

When a scene goes over budget, it settles at lower detail instead of constantly swapping geometry in and out of VRAM. By default, this is based on 2GB of VRAM for streamed geometry, another 2GB for ray-tracing acceleration structures, and 4GB of material textures, but these are adjustable. The existing tessellation path remains.

In the case of Nvidia’s sample Zorah, there are 1.6 billion unique triangles in a 70GB download, with a first load that can require up to 64GB of RAM at peak. Zorah uses 31GB of mesh data, but the courtyard sample view only has 1.5GB of mesh data in VRAM, using an RTX 5090 at 4K with DLSS Quality.

The sample requires an RTX GPU with 10GB of VRAM or more, a Game Ready driver 570 or later, Microsoft’s DXR 1.1 or later, and Windows 10 at a minimum. For now, this looks more like a tool for developers than players. It’s an SDK with a reference sample, and currently no game has been confirmed to use it.

The rest of RTX Kit 2026.3 includes RTX Character Rendering 1.4, RTX Dynamic Illumination 3.1, RTX Neural Texture Compression (NTC) 0.10 beta, RTX Neural Shading 1.4, and RTX Texture Filtering 1.3. NTC has been at v0.10.0 beta on GitHub since Aug. 4, with the DX12 LinAlg path only for testing purposes. The DX12 LinAlg path requires preview driver 620.12, the preview Agility SDK, and Windows Developer Mode. That leaves Vulkan as the only way for released games to use NTC with Tensor Core acceleration today.

An existing problem, Nvidia said in August, is that under ray tracing, Nanite elements “switch to a single, static low-detail mesh” because it’s “prohibitively expensive” to build acceleration structures for them with “existing DXR 1.2 and Vulkan APIs.” It has taken six years of research and development to pioneer the new technology, with the innovations debuting with Gears of War: E-Day on Oct. 6. These will later be part of Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing 2.0 standard, according to Nvidia.

On Sept. 22, in a Game Ready driver post, Nvidia stated that Mega Geometry enables “accurate ray tracing of Nanite geometry for the very first time.” Nvidia’s Game Ready driver 617.14 for the game is already out. Early access on Oct. 1 is the first chance for players to see Nvidia’s Nanite ray tracing technology in action.

Factoring attacks against the RSA algorithm were generally considered infeasible, but that may change dramatically if the findings in a paper from UC San Diego (California) and Inria Nancy (France) prove correct after peer review. The paper outlines a new attack that breaks RSA in record time. That's concerning because RSA-based encryption was in use for quite some time, and although it's been generally deprecated in favor of ECC and post-quantum algorithms, it's still employed today in a substantial portion of services.

Assuming the research holds up and the attack conditions are met, the number of necessary operations for cracking an RSA-encrypted key (and thus, inspecting network traffic encrypted with it) drops dramatically. (From 2⁸⁰, 2¹¹², 2¹²⁸, and 2¹⁴⁴ down to 2⁶⁵, 2⁹⁰, 2¹⁰⁵, and 2¹¹⁹ — for 1024, 2048, 3072-, and 4096-bit key lengths, respectively.)

Even for the 1024-bit keys, performing 2⁶⁵ calculations is still a lot, but it starts getting into the range where it's feasible for an entity with large resources at their disposal, like a number of state actors. Crucially, the paper indicates that the algorithms the team used are far from optimized and could hypothetically be significantly sped up after optimization passes, potentially with the help of AI tools and by leveraging GPUs for the task.

The attack only works against the textbook (or "raw") variant of RSA, which isn't widely used for commonplace computing like website certificates and remote access, but is nevertheless present in services like Cloudflare Privacy Pass, iCloud Private Relay, and Private Cloud Compute. Equipment and services using PKCS #11, like many smart cards, USB security tokens, code-signing pipelines, hardware security (HSM) and trusted platform (TPM) modules also use this variation. But fulfilling the attack conditions is much easier said than done.

In order to reach a point where an attacker can decipher data, they first must perform an exceedingly high number of queries against the key they're attacking, collecting enough data points from the key's oracle. In practical terms, this often means repeatedly poking a live server that's using that key to encrypt traffic, billions of times over, though it can also be done against a standalone hardware device.

In the practical context of an encryption algorithm, an oracle takes a number in, runs it through a computation involving a private key, and spits it back out, without revealing its key. The textbook variant of RSA under attack here lets the oracle be queried with any number, thus allowing the attacker to collect enough data points to perform the mathematical wizardry described in the paper. They can then proceed to throw a lot of computing power to ultimately inspect whichever traffic they captured that was using that same encryption key.

As network administrators have certainly figured out by now, running billions of queries against a live service is almost guaranteed to earn them an IP ban, among other measures. It's a reasonable assumption that entities like Cloudflare and Apple have those kinds of controls in place. Still, not everyone does, especially in the case of key management services that aren't closely monitored, including hardware-based ones. The scientists worked their magic on Thales Luna HSMs, in both hardware and online service form.

Although the bar for a practical application of this attack remains quite high, the key finding is that it may be significantly lowered. This opens the possibility that oracle data collected today may be used to decrypt saved traffic in a matter of weeks or months, especially in the near future as hardware advances. It's also possible that other scientists can take this idea and expand on it, finding additional flaws.

When you buy a product, there is a reasonable expectation of warranty service. When you spend multiple thousands of dollars on a computer graphics card (a product category that has only recently entered the multi-thousand-dollar range), there is a reasonable expectation of exceptional service. What if, instead, you got absolutely no service? According to Redditor /u/Melodic_Initial_1767, that's what he got when he tried to RMA his burned GeForce RTX 5090.

Like so many others, "Melodic" found his graphics card non-functional after melting the 12V-2x6 connectors on both ends of the modular cable that came with his 1600-watt ASRock power supply (the PG-1600G, which we reviewed last year). This happened despite the fact that he says he was using the stock BIOS, no overclocking, and, in fact, a manually reduced power limit. Moreover, the card was supposedly sitting idle when it died, although that doesn't really mean anything. He opened a ticket with PNY and says he was denied the next day with this response:

Well, he wasn't using the included cable or an approved one, but he was using the native cable from his power supply; surely that should be good enough, right? After all, the warranty terms actually don't appear to say a single thing about 12VHPWR or 12V-2x6 cables. According to the Redditor, the only thing the warranty says about power is that the card has to be "installed in accordance with the installation guide provided herewith." Guess what the installation guide says?

If you guessed "locate an unused power connector within your system and plug it into the corresponding connector on your graphics card," congratulations, you will also be denied warranty service from PNY, because apparently you have to intuit which cables are approved by PNY, since, as far as we can see, there's no list of approved cables anywhere on PNY's website, nor in the product documentation for its graphics cards. Besides, the card didn't come with a 16-pin cable, so it's not like he could have used PNY's own cable, and the idea that the firm would prefer him to use an "octopus" adapter over a native cable is shaky at best.

I personally have never had the pleasure of dealing with PNY support, but multiple other Redditors in the thread, which is nearing 1,200 replies at this point, have mentioned a history of difficulty getting support from PNY. When asking the company which clause of their warranty policy they are using to deny his warranty request, /u/Melodic_Initial_1767 was apparently told by a "Senior Technician" that the decision is final and that his ticket had been closed.

A notable point brought up by /u/dusto_man in the thread is that the ASRock power supply used by "Melodic" advertises a "TempGuard" feature that supposedly monitors the temperature at the 12V-2x6 connector on the PSU side for safety, but clearly that either wasn't configured or also failed. ASRock offers a ten-year warranty on that unit; /u/dusto_man mentioned this in a thread where users were advising the original poster to contact ASRock and let that firm go after PNY to avoid covering the failed GPU, which is worth multiple thousands of dollars now.

Indeed, that could be why PNY is attempting to shut down the RMA attempt. The firm may not have any GeForce RTX 5090 cards to send him, and even if it does, the cheapest GeForce RTX 5090 card available to buy new on the market today is $4400 USD, and PNY would likely prefer to sell it at that price instead. While the board vendor is most likely only on the hook (legally) for /u/Melodic_Initial_1767's original purchase price, that could still easily be $2,000 or more. We have now seen these same RMA denial patterns with storage and memory devices from multiple vendors during the shortage, so it wouldn't be an exception. We'll have to wait and see if PNY will stand on unwritten technicalities rather than take a hit to its bottom line.

Tech enthusiast and developer Matt Birchler has tested an Apple iPhone 18 Pro with a can of La Croix used as a cooling device to address persistent thermal throttling that he noticed during his other tests with the phone. Surprisingly, this yielded much stronger results than one would assume, given that he simply placed the can of sparkling water on top of the phone, providing a 25% improvement in sustained performance.

Birchier has been benchmarking the A20 Pro processor inside the iPhone 18 Pro, and it has so far offered excellent transcription results in its normal non-sparkling-water-cooled configuration. In one test run, the latest Apple smartphone hit a maximum speed of 447.9 words per second, before settling down to a little over 320 for the 7th to the 20th runs. The reduced performance during the latter stages of a prolonged benchmark run is normal for nearly every portable device, as they reduce performance to avoid thermally damaging their chips and other components.

It’s exactly for this reason that high-performance computers often come with the best CPU coolers, with some enthusiasts preferring the best AIO coolers or custom water-cooling loops to get the most out of their high-end processors. However, this usually isn’t possible with most mainstream phones, unless you’re running a specialized gaming handset like the liquid-cooled Redmagic 11 Pro — but it seems that Birchler found a solution for the iPhone 18 Pro. “I did some benchmarking today and saw how the newest iPhone thermal throttles, which isn’t severe, but does happen,” the developer said. “I know from experience that if you put a cold beverage on the back of your phone, it will cool down really quick, so I thought…the test is obvious.”

So, Birchler pulled out an ice-cold can of La Croix from the fridge, started a benchmarking session consisting of 20 runs, and placed the drink on the back of the phone. After the tests were completed, the results were as expected: even though its initial run had a slightly lower result of 429.5 words per second, the “liquid-cooled” iPhone 18 Pro had a higher average of 400.4. This meant that giving the iPhone a cold drink helped it sustain around 25% higher performance, but at the cost of keeping the phone facing down while running heavy loads.

The average user wouldn’t need cooling solutions like these for most mobile devices. But if you use your device for extensive loads, like gaming or shooting and editing photos and videos, you might notice slower performance and a dimmer screen after a few minutes. You could follow Birchler’s lead and strap a cold drink to the back of your phone to reduce thermal throttling, but it’s going to be inconvenient and impractical. After all, it’s quite awkward to hold your phone while a can is sticking out of its back. This is why some smartphone accessory manufacturers make devices like the Black Shark Magnetic Phone Cooler 6 Pro for gamers or the SmallRig Universal Hyper Chill Cooling Phone Cage and the Tilta Khronos Advanced Kit for filmmakers.

Other enthusiasts have also experimented with their own designs, like this monstrous SSD cooling solution strapped to the back of an iPhone 17 Pro Max. These will allow you to squeeze more performance from your phone, but at the expense of an impractical design, additional weight, and shorter battery life.

A week and change ago, the U.S. Congress saw yet another anti-piracy bill introduced, H.R. 10364, or by its full name, the American Copyright Protection Act of 2026 (ACPA). It would require internet service providers, DNS resolving services, and virtual private networks, or VPNs, to block foreign websites or services hosting pirated content. The full text for the bill is now public, and it stands out due to its targeting of foreign services and affecting connections "from the United States." That gets complicated pretty quick when VPNs and content delivery networks (CDNs) are in play.

In ACPA, a standard blocking order needs to be court-issued, but would apply in 14 to 30 days. There's a special case seemingly targeted at live-streaming of sports events and shows, or "time-sensitive events" in legal parlance, which can shorten the blocking deadline as a judge sees fit, so long as the first leak of copyrighted material appears within 24 hours after going live.

Blocking at the ISP and DNS level is relatively straightforward. The vast majority of users utilize their ISP's DNS, so not resolving a given domain if it's in the blocklist for its customers is simple enough. Some people, like yours truly, rely on external DNS servers like Google DNS, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, OpenDNS, or NextDNS. These too could ignore specific DNS resolution requests from incoming users in the States, the accuracy of geolocation notwithstanding.

Small ISPs and services with less than 100,000 monthly users and public networks are exempted, as are root DNS and top-level domain (TLD) providers. However, the bill does not specify an exact means of blockage, and it's possible that service providers, out of fear of liability, may well take a heavy-handed approach. It also makes no mention of protecting or nullifying encryption.

When it comes to people using VPNs to bounce their connection through another location, things get tricky, as the bill does not clearly state what "from the United States" means, and even the definition of "foreign" can get fuzzy. Determining those might well be an exercise in quantum superposition, since any of the below scenarios can be argued to technically fulfill a criteria. We conjured up a handful of possibilities, though we're sure creative techies can come up with many more:

1. A connection to a VPN originates from the U.S.
2. A VPN's endpoint resides in the U.S.
3. A VPN's registered subscriber is a U.S. person, but they are currently outside the U.S.
4. The user uses a VPN to a foreign country, but connects to a website that's behind a CDN — does the CDN endpoint count as a destination?
5. Same, but the actual website is on U.S. soil despite being accessed from outside; is it "foreign" if the endpoint is?
6. For multi-hop VPNs, which hop or hops count towards determining a destination, especially if the traffic passes through the U.S. at some point?
7. A U.S. citizen in a boat in international waters using Starlink (a U.S. satellite ISP) counts as foreign?
8. A U.S. citizen goes abroad and uses roaming; are they considered foreign due to their physical location, or within the U.S. because they are using stateside infrastructure?

Additional legal questions can be raised with other technological factors. The use of shared IPs in hosting services, or CGNAT implementations, can create obfuscation of the concepts of "destination" and "origin." Is a DNS provider using Oblivious DoH, where the server responds to a request but doesn't know who made it and vice versa, liable? How does Apple's iCloud Private Relay feature, which hides a connection's source and destination from each other, sit within the legal framework? And with encrypted DNS, how much is the ISP liable, since they can't see which domain the user requested?

The neutrality of third-party service providers has come under fire in jurisdictions like France and Spain, where rulings mostly went against claims of neutrality. Some were forced to often enable large-scale blocking, an action likely to trigger more than a few false positives. A Spanish court ruled against Cloudflare and RootedCON for their part in providing CDNs, resulting in mass IP blockings. Over in France, a court found that VPNs do have to comply with blocking orders despite their job as "technical intermediaries."

For what it's worth, ACPA is only one of multiple bills sitting in Congress in the "introduced" state, and currently appears to have no sponsors, scheduled hearings, or even markup. If foreign activities are any indication, though, broad legislation like this may have substantial unintended consequences.

A German Army Enigma transmission from 85 years ago, known as the MVUEH message, has been cracked by GTP-Astra in two days, reports the Crypto Cella. MVUEH was sent by the German Army to the SS-Totenkopf (Death’s Head) Division on July 10, 1941, at the height of the Nazi military power in WWII. This uncracked Enigma message was shared with enthusiasts online in 2005, but its secrets had remained concealed until now.

Crypto Cellar researchers highlight that what Astra managed to do in just two days “would take a human researcher weeks or even months.” Currently, the awestruck researchers are still picking through logs to determine how Astra managed this feat and how it did it so quickly.

One of the most impressive things about Astra’s tackling of MVUEH was that it “did it entirely on its own,” says the source. It was merely asked whether it could break any of the unbroken Enigma machine messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page. In response, Astra picked Nr. 172, MVUEH as a promising target and thought it might be related to the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX.

With its target decided and expecting the repeated place name "ROSENOW ROSENOW" as a probable plaintext clue, Astra developed Python and C++ software for an Enigma simulator and an Enigma Bombe. Its hunch appears to have been correct. You can see a demo of the radio message being decrypted online at the MVUEHA Cryptanalysis Case Study site (screenshot below).

In brief, the encrypted 82-letter MVUEH cipher looked like this:
ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC

Decrypted, with spaces added as appropriate, it looks like this:
BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES X BEFINDE MIQ IN X ROSENOW ROSENOW X SOFORT FUNKANTWORT X WASCHBBSCH

An approximate English translation is:
Please specify the route of march. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. Immediate reply by radio

Note that there was a spelling mistake at the front of the original message, which wouldn’t help decoding efforts.

We’ve looked at Enigma machines before, as efforts to crack wartime ciphers from them, as well as from Lorenz machines, would lead to some of the first general-purpose digital computer designs.

The Enigma featured a 26-key keyboard, with 26 light-up letters on the ‘lampboard’ positioned above it. Behind the lampboard, three rotors were installed from a set of five. The signal from a keyboard press traveled through an input wheel, then the three manually turnable rotors with 26 pins each, then a reflector to return the signal, which lit up the lampboard. Making it even more tricky to crack, the rotors would advance every keypress. Thus, if you keep pressing the same letter, a different letter on the lampboard would be shown each time. Yet another layer of obfuscation was added via the plugboard at the front of the machine, where users swapped more letters around. Operators used up to 10 plugboard rerouting wires.

Before using the Enigma machine, four settings must be dialed in by the operator: rotor order, ring setting, rotor starting positions, and plugboard connection(s). These settings were distributed separately, and they changed following a calendar. Even if the enemy had an Enigma machine, they’d also need to know the settings on the day to decode the message(s).

We reported on GPT6-Astra's deciphering skills just last week. The LLM was behind the cracking of a 108-year-old unsolved WWI German code that had been encrypted using the ADFGVX method.

The end goal is finally in sight for Elon Musk, nearly two years after he announced plans to expand the Colossus supercomputer to over a million GPUs. The billionaire said on X that 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs will be operational by next week, with another 220,000 coming online in November. He also added that another 220,000 units will come online by late December “if we get lucky.”

These numbers would add to the 110,000 GB200 and 440,000 GB300 GPUs already operating at Colossus 2, plus the 150,000 H100, 50,000 H200, and 30,000 GB200 GPUs at Colossus 1. This would bring SpaceXAI’s GB300 GPUs to 1.1 million units, with its total GPUs in operation to 1,440,000 units. This is quite an achievement, especially given that the company is behind its rivals by several years — SpaceXAI is only three years old, while Anthropic and OpenAI are six and ten years old, respectively. Interestingly, the Colossus 1 site, which features a combination of Hopper and Blackwell GPUs, is inefficient for training Grok, so Musk rented it out to Anthropic for inference instead. On the other hand, Colossus 2 solely uses Blackwell GPUs, ensuring that there won’t be any bottlenecks.

While Elon Musk essentially begged for Jensen Huang to give him these GPUs, getting his hands on them isn’t currently the hardest part. One of the biggest issues facing data center build-outs right now is power, and SpaceXAI solved this by bringing its own. This has resulted in some controversies with the surrounding neighborhood, ending in a lawsuit against the company for running unpermitted gas turbines. It has since promised to remove them, but only over a span of one year as its own 1.2-GW power plant comes online.

Running a million GPUs or more on a single site is an impressive achievement, but SpaceXAI isn’t the only one trying to reach this goal. Broadcom said in 2024 that it has three hyperscale customers gunning for this target by 2027 but didn’t mention who these customers were. As for Elon Musk, the 1-million-GPU target is just the beginning. He said that SpaceXAI will grow its data center capacity sevenfold by 2027, and he’s even aiming for 50 million H100-equivalent GPUs by 2030. These data centers won’t be limited to the ground as well, with SpaceX planning to launch an Orbital Data Center System with a million satellites, despite Jensen Huang saying that it’s a “dream” for now.

Tower Semiconductor and the government of Japan plan to co-invest a total of $4 billion in the company's Japanese operations to turn regional fabs into a massive manufacturing base for optical-connectivity semiconductors, reports Nikkei. The dual-track expansion will repurpose an idled fab, maximize output of an existing 300mm facility, and eventually add another 300mm fab, thus boosting Tower's Japanese capacity to the equivalent of 45,000 300mm wafers per month by 2029.

Track One: Convert and expand

The first stage, called Track One, involves converting Tower's idle 200-mm Fab 6 in Arai, Niigata Prefecture, into a 300mm manufacturing facility for silicon photonics (SiPho) and advanced optical packaging (i.e., bonding electronic integrated circuits with photonic integrated circuits), as well as expanding the output of SiGe EICs (Silicon-Germanium Electronic Integrated Circuits) and SiPho PICs (Photonic Integrated Circuits) at 300-mm Fab 7 near Uozu, Toyama Prefecture.

Fab 7 is already fully qualified and is in mass production of various SiGe EICs and SiPho PICs using various process technologies, including the latest TPS65SG and several other TPS65-series 65nm-class SiGe fabrication nodes, as well as TPS45PHD 45nm-class SiPho manufacturing technology. The plan is to expand Fab 7's output as significantly as possible to meet growing demand for optical engines by the AI industry. Such an approach enables the company to add output progressively as additional equipment is installed, rather than waiting for an entirely new fab and process flows to qualify.

Track One is scheduled to reach full production readiness in the fourth quarter of 2027. Tower expects Track One to enable it to earn approximately $3.6 billion in revenue and $1.2 billion in net profit in FY2028.

Track Two: Build new fab

The second stage, called Track Two, commences in parallel and is considerably more ambitious. Tower intends to construct another 300mm manufacturing facility next to Fab 7 in Uozu that will increase the company's output of SiGe EICs and SiPho PICs by several times. As a result, Tower will have two sites in Japan producing EICs and PICs and one — the converted Fab 6 — assembling optical engines using these components.

The second stage is expected to start contributing materially to Tower's financial results in 2029.

Tower expects its Japanese production capacity to ultimately reach the equivalent of 45,000 300mm wafers per month in 2029, around 40 times higher than 2025 levels, and plans to hire approximately 200 people. The scale of the project reflects rapidly growing demand for optical connectivity in AI infrastructure. According to Nikkei, Tower controls more than 80% of the contract production market for optical communications semiconductors used in servers and serves some of the industry leaders, including Marvell, so it needs massive scale.

Tower plans to invest $3 billion of its own money in its two expansion tracks, while Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) will provide another $1 billion, bringing the overall project to roughly $4 billion.

Tower admits that companies like Intel, TSMC, and GlobalFoundries are currently ahead in co-packaged optics (CPO), so the Japanese investment is not merely about adding capacity, but also about setting the stage for its CPO plans. For now, Tower intends to bring CPO and preceding manufacturing technologies to its Uozu, Toyama Prefecture, site. While the company has not disclosed any details about its CPO roadmap, even its latest process technologies for EICs and PICs should be more or less good enough to bring optics closer to compute silicon.

Tower's Japan restructuring

Tower Semiconductor's plans for major expansion in Japan also coincide with a restructuring of the company's local manufacturing operations. But understanding what is changing requires a short history lesson.

Tower established its Japanese manufacturing presence in 2014 by forming TowerJazz Panasonic Semiconductor Co. (TPSCo) with Panasonic, owning a 51% controlling stake while Panasonic retained 49% and contributed its fabs in Uozu, Tonami, and Arai. Following Panasonic's exit from the semiconductor business in 2020, Panasonic's stake passed to Nuvoton Technology Corporation Japan (NTCJ).

The most important asset is Fab 7 in Uozu, a 300mm facility that Tower has gradually transformed from a former Panasonic fab into one of its key specialty manufacturing sites that now supports 65nm-class SiGe and 45nm-class SiPho technologies.

Tower and Nuvoton are now effectively dismantling the original TPSCo structure. Under an agreement announced in March 2026 and expected to close in April 2027, Tower will take full ownership and operational control of Fab 7 and its 300mm foundry business, while Nuvoton will take full ownership of TPSCo and Fab 5 in Tonami. At the same time, Tower is resurrecting the former Arai facility, Fab 6, as a 300mm SiPho and advanced optical packaging site and plans to build another 300mm fab adjacent to Fab 7.

In short, what started as a relatively inexpensive way for Tower to obtain Japanese manufacturing capacity from Panasonic more than a decade ago is now evolving into a major Tower-owned 300mm SiPho and SiGe production hub, which is set to increase the company's output and revenue by multiple times.

Meta's new AI agent Muse is powered by AMD EPYC Turin host systems, with each sandbox sporting two dedicated cores and 8GB of memory. Blogger Evan Hoffman and analyst Tae Kim both discovered that Muse will run some rudimentary Ubuntu commands if prompted, passing along the output to help identify things like the specs of the host system. More concerning is that Muse seems able to execute commands that might be unsafe, with Hoffman claiming that Muse offered to set up SSH to Muse's private VM.

Both Kim and Hoffman asked Muse about the VM's specs, and in both instances, Muse revealed that it's running on AMD EPYC 9D25 CPUs, a high-density Turin chip with up to 128 cores (two of which are generally fused off or reserved). The VMs are running on Ubuntu 24.04 and using Linux kernel 7.0. The systems hosting Muse don't include GPUs. The AI agent revealed that Meta uses separate GPU servers for inference, isolating the agent to CPU-only sandboxes.

The agent suggests that each user gets their own private sandbox that's persistent, which allows us to do some math on how many people an individual tray can host. Assuming a 2P system that offers up to 510 vCPUs with 2TB of memory, hosting up to 254 Muse users. Muse has reportedly passed over 500,000 daily active users as of a few days ago, which would come out to somewhere around 2,000 server trays with dual EPYC 9D25 CPUs and 2TB of memory.

This is just some rough napkin math; don't take it as law. It's possible Meta has CPU-only servers deployed with multiple different chips to host Muse, and it's also possible there's overhead in the configuration. Turin chips support up to 6TB of memory with high-density DIMMs, for instance. Still, EPYC hosts seem popular for this use case, mainly because of their core density, as even a dual-core sandbox can add up quickly when multiplied across hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of users.

Muse isn't completely open. Hoffman shared an example where an attempted command failed due to improper permissions when Muse tried to query the kernel buffer. Presumably, sudo (admin) commands would be blocked as well.

However, there might still be some security loopholes. Hoffman says that Muse offered to set up SSH into the private Muse VM. With a reverse SSH tunnel — where the destination machine initiates the connection, bypassing the firewall — an attacker may be able to execute more damaging commands.

Meta's David Singleton says this is intended behavior, however, describing Muse as "a free computer in the cloud." Meta has an extensive white paper on the security architecture of Muse published on its research website.

Noctua is teaming up with Forced Physics DCT to explore whether the company’s JouleForce micro-channel array-based cooling can be adapted for desktop PCs and workstations. The long–term partnership will focus on developing a quieter way to use the tech, although Noctua said in its announcement that the partnership is not tied to any specific product or release date.

Claimed to be a new third path to cooling, JouleForce goes beyond traditional air and liquid cooling methods. While it is still based on air-cooling, its capabilities far exceed today’s modern CPU coolers, with the ability to cool over 2000W of thermal energy. The technology uses densely packed micro-channels designed to improve heat transfer. According to Forced Physics, its geometry prevents the boundary layer that normally forms along cooling surfaces, allowing heat to be extracted along the entire length of each channel. This essentially enables large amounts of heat to be removed using air alone, without requiring a liquid-cooling loop.

While that sounds impressive, bringing the technology to desktop PCs comes with a major challenge. The micro-channel arrays currently have a pressure drop that is “an order of magnitude and more” above the range of conventional PC fans. Thus, in its current state, JouleForce relies on industrial blowers, high-speed centrifugal fans, or even vacuum pumps to push air through the arrays.

Noctua’s expertise could prove useful as the company is known for developing some of the best performing PC fans. The partnership will investigate ways to reduce the pressure required by the micro-channel arrays or generate the necessary static pressure without making desktop systems excessively loud. “The pressure levels this technology requires in today’s implementations are currently supplied by equipment nobody would want on or under their desk, so this is a demanding, long-term engineering task – and one that we are eager to tackle,” said Roland Mossig, CEO at Noctua.

For now, Noctua and Forced Physics are still in the early research stage, with both companies planning to share updates as the project reaches significant milestones. If the two companies can crack the airflow and acoustic challenges, JouleForce could eventually make its way to desktop PCs. At the same time, Noctua would have a serious advantage in the market compared to other heatsink manufacturers.

There's a stunning discount on a featured-packed resin 3D printer that'll save you 39% on its usual price, but only if you're quick. Thanks to the Elegoo Day makers sale, you can pick up the Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 16K resin 3D printer for just $399, down from $649.99. You'll have to be quick, though, as Elegoo's sale ends in just a few days.

● Check out this deal on Elegoo's website

The Saturn 4 Ultra 16K is a slightly upgraded version of the model that we tested in our Saturn 4 Ultra review, which saw it score highly and gain an Editor's Choice award based on its brilliant performance. This deal brings an already featured-packed and good-value resin 3D printer down to an even more enticing price, with the upgrades including an integrated vat heater and upgraded Wi-Fi connectivity.

With the Saturn 4 Ultra 16K, you're getting a resin printer that includes a 4-inch capacitive touchscreen on the front, giving you full access to several of the built-in smart features to help you start printing. The build volume is 211.68 x 118.37 x 220mm, slightly smaller than the original 4 Ultra, but only just.

You also get a 10-inch, 16K LCD screen with this printer. For resin printer newcomers, this isn't a display, but a mask that helps to block or let UV light pass through to cure each individual layer of liquid resin that prints. You're getting a 11,520 x 5,120 resolution with this printer, giving you an accuracy of 14 microns. Compare and contrast to the humble human hair, which is around 70 microns in thickness. This improved over the original Saturn 4 Ultra's 12K screen.

The Saturn 4 Ultra 16K's integrated vat heater is a real improvement on this model, which means you can maintain optimal resin temperatures for reliable prints, even in a really cold environment, giving you a solid 86°F or 30°C. You've also got mechanical sensors that help stop the plate from crushing the screen if a print fails, as well as a tilt-release feature that moves the entire tank away to peel resin layers one by one, giving you a 150mm/hr print speed. There's also power loss recovery to protect your print progress in an outage, as well as a built-in camera to help you monitor your print and create time-lapse videos.

The $399 sale price for the Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 12K is a brilliant one for the upgraded version of one of our favorite resin 3D printers. With the Elegoo Day sale set to finish on September 29, you've only got a few days to dive into a new hobby or expand your existing collection with this very affordable resin printer.

The maker of XMG gaming laptops and Schenker workstations said the prices for DDR5 SO-DIMMs have increased sixfold since July 2025, and it believes RAM will be in short supply through 2027 and beyond. The company said this in the r/XMG_gg subreddit, where the company also announced a price increase of $113 (€100) and $228 (€200) for most of its gaming laptop models, plus a massive $342 (€300) hike for one professional laptop.

This dramatic DDR5 SO-DIMM price jump tracks closely with desktop RAM, which experienced a similar 500% climb in the past 12 months. But what’s also concerning is that other components have increased in cost, too. Aside from RAM and SSDs, XMG noted that PCBs, electronic components, CPUs, graphics cards, and video memory are also facing similar cost pressures, resulting in higher costs. The war in the Middle East has compounded the situation, especially as increased oil and fuel prices are making air freight costs higher, while also increasing insurance premiums for sea cargo traveling from Asia to Europe via the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

Because of this, the company says it was forced to increase the prices of several of its models. It also reminded customers that its margins are fixed and that the resulting hikes are solely driven by higher upstream costs. A company representative also said, “If relevant input prices fall again, we will reflect this in our retail prices as well — just as we have done in the past.” This is similar to Framework’s pricing strategy, where it recently cut the memory prices for the Laptop 13 Pro after it was able to find another source for cheaper LPCAMM2

The post also gave a bearish outlook on the memory situation, echoing Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra’s words that the DRAM shortages will go well into 2027. This contrasts with Asus CEO Jason Chen’s prediction that component prices will start reversing in the latter half of 2027, and that the long-term predictions of high memory costs are just chip makers wanting to retain high gross margins for as long as possible. Chen said that Chinese memory makers increasing their production would help ease the shortage and that price increases are reportedly cooling as consumers refuse to pay more. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing which of these two perspectives is correct, and we can only wait and see what happens with memory prices over the next 12 months.

Gamemax is a brand behind an OEM (Sohoo), founded to retail its own products. Founded in 2013, the company sells cases, coolers, monitors, peripherals, and power supplies under a positioning it calls affordable luxury, which in practice means visually loud products at prices that undercut the established names. Its power supply catalog has always been the most uneven part of the range. There are units at the bottom of the stack that exist purely to hit a price, and there are recent models such as the Lion Core series that carry genuine certification and measure respectably. Knowing which of the two a given Gamemax supply belongs to has historically required someone to open it up and put it on a load tester, because the badge on the box does not settle the question.

We examine the Gamemax RGB PRO 750G to see how it fares among the best power supplies on the market. The RGB PRO series sits in the middle of that catalog and leads with its lighting. The 750G reviewed here is the 750W model, a fully modular ATX unit built around a 140 mm ARGB fan, compliant with ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1, and fitted with a native 12V-2x6 connector for current graphics cards. Gamemax rates it at 40°C ambient and lists an operating range up to 50°C, with the important caveat that output is derated by twenty percent above 40°C, so anyone running it in a genuinely hot environment is buying a 600W supply.

The company claims 80 PLUS Gold efficiency, Japanese 105°C main capacitors, and 25 addressable lighting modes with motherboard sync. The Gold claim is the one worth pausing on, because no entry for this model exists in the CLEAResult 80 PLUS database, nor in the Cybenetics or PPLP databases, so the badge printed on the sticker is at present a manufacturer assertion and nothing more. At an MSRP of $105, the RGB PRO 750G is asking more than several other 750W Gold units currently sell for, which places a great deal of weight on the lighting to justify the difference.

Specifications and Design

In the Box

The RGB PRO 750G arrives in a black cardboard box with a render of the unit on the front, the model name and wattage set large across the top, and three badges in the top right corner: PCIe 5.1 ready, ATX 3.1 ready, and a warranty shield. Green pinstripes run vertically across the artwork, the word Gamemax is spelled out letter by letter along the bottom edge, and an RGB color wheel with the words RGB LIGHT VERSION occupies the corner. It is busy but legible, and the front of the box tells a buyer most of what they need to know.

Protection inside is adequate rather than generous, with the supply held between two molded pieces and the cables bagged separately. The bundle is thin. There is the AC power cord, four mounting screws, two zip ties, a multilingual user manual, and a 5V three-pin ARGB cable for motherboard synchronization. The ARGB cable is the one item a competitor would not usually include, and given the feature set, it is a necessity rather than a bonus.

All of the unit’s cables are individually sleeved in black braid. Gamemax's marketing describes the whole set as “embossed flat cables”. Wire gauges look appropriate throughout. These sleeved cables are slightly stiffer than flat ones and take more effort to route behind a motherboard tray, which is the usual trade for looks and ruggedness.

External Appearance

At 165 x 150 x 86 mm, the RGB PRO 750G is a slightly long power supply. The 165 mm depth is 25 mm more than the ATX design guide recommendation, which is commonly met by 750W units. While every full-size ATX case will likely take it, cable clearance behind the unit in a mid-tower with a shroud will be tighter than it should be. The chassis is all black with a slightly textured matte finish that, for some reason, is very sensitive to fingerprint marks. It is a decent paint job, evenly applied. Four exposed screws hold the fan in place.

The top face is dominated by a hexagonal honeycomb grille stamped directly into the panel rather than a separate wire guard, with a Gamemax lion badge at the hub of the fan. The specification sticker occupies the opposite face, printed clearly, and includes the full rail table, the safety marks, and an 80 PLUS Gold logo. The side panels carry a large 750W in outline type with RGB LIGHT VERSION beneath it and the lion logo rendered in a rainbow gradient, alongside a further honeycomb perforated section.

The rear face holds the C14 receptacle, a recessed main rocker switch, and a small square button labelled RGB LIGHT, all set into a perforated exhaust panel that covers most of the available area. The front face is the fully modular connector bay, arranged in two rows and silkscreened above and below each socket. A three pin 5V ARGB header sits at the left edge of the bay for the sync cable.

The lighting is the reason this model exists, and it is better executed than the price suggests. A ring of addressable LEDs sits under the perimeter of the fan opening and lights the honeycomb cells from beneath, so the effect is a glowing hexagonal halo rather than the illuminated fan blades most RGB supplies use. It is diffused, even, and free of the visible hot spots that give away cheap LED strips, and it looks considerably more expensive than it is. Gamemax claims 25 modes, cycled with the rear RGB LIGHT button.

A short press steps to the next mode, holding the button for three seconds switches the lighting off, pressing again restores the previous mode after a single white flash, and a longer hold enters a self-test that lights every LED white. The last mode is retained through a power cycle. Connecting the bundled cable to a 5V three-pin header on the motherboard hands control to the board's own software instead. However, the lighting is on the fan face, and in any case, with a bottom-mounted shroud, the conventional fan-down orientation buries the whole effect. Seeing it requires mounting the unit fan up, which most cases allow but which compromises intake air for the supply itself.

Internal Design

Cooling comes from a 140 mm fan is made by PowerYear, model PY-14025H12S, rated at 12V and 0.40A. We could not find a datasheet for it. Gamemax claims a fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) engine fan and has a 50,000-hour life expectancy. The “S” designation suggests a sleeve bearing, but fan OEMs are infamous for mixing SKUs, so we cannot say be certain of the engine inside it. In a unit with a 10-year warranty, we would certainly hope that Gamemax’s claims are accurate.

The platform is a Sohoo design. Guangdong Sohoo Technology is behind Gamemax, which is a Chinese manufacturer better known for cases and entry-level supplies than for anything with grand ambitions, but they have begun looking up lately. The layout is tidy for the class. Component placement is orderly, the soldering on the underside is clean, and the heatsinks are properly sized rather than the token strips of aluminum that usually accompany a budget platform. The extra 25 mm of chassis depth is put to use, as the board is not crowded and airflow is virtually unrestricted. None of this is bad work.

The transient filtering stage begins on a small vertical PCB mounted behind the AC receptacle and continues on the main board, comprising two Y capacitors, two X capacitors, two common-mode chokes, and a MOV. That is a basic but complete filter with nothing omitted. Inrush current is handled by an NTC thermistor with a relay for bypass duty. A single bridge rectifier is mounted on the main heatsink alongside the APFC components. The active PFC stage uses two Oriental Semiconductor OSG55R140F MOSFETs and stores energy in a Nichicon 390 μF, 420V capacitor rated to 105°C, from the CE GG series. That capacitor is the one Gamemax's marketing points to when it advertises Japanese capacitors, and on the primary side, the claim is accurate. The boost coil is unshielded.

The primary inversion stage is built from two Si-Trend SI23N50F MOSFETs in a half-bridge arrangement, also sharing the long heatsink with the APFC components and feeding the main transformer. The resonant components alongside it indicate an LLC resonant converter, the standard and sensible choice for a Gold-class unit of this size.

On the secondary side, the 12V rail is produced by four SPTJ4R1D6LA MOSFETs in synchronous rectification, a part we could not attribute to a known vendor. The 3.3V and 5V rails are generated by DC-to-DC converters on a vertical daughterboard adjacent to the modular PCB. Secondary filtering is where the cost comes out. Every secondary capacitor in this unit is supplied by Teapo. Teapo parts are not bad, and the ones fitted here are 105°C rated, but they are the middle-budget choice, which explains why the marketing claim about Japanese “main capacitors” looks carefully worded. With 10 years of warranty behind them, the secondary capacitors are the wrong place to have economized.

Cold Test Results (25°C Ambient)

Cold Test Results (25°C Ambient)

For the testing of PSUs, we are using high-precision electronic loads with a maximum power draw of 2700 Watts, a Rigol DS5042M 40 MHz oscilloscope, an Extech 380803 power analyzer, two high-precision UNI-T UT-325 digital thermometers, an Extech HD600 SPL meter, a self-designed hotbox, and various other bits and parts.

At 25°C ambient, the RGB PRO 750G measures considerably better than its provenance would suggest. Efficiency averaged 90.8% across the nominal load range at 230 VAC and 88.6% at 115 VAC, peaking at 92.1% near 40% load on the higher input and 90.3% at roughly the same point on the lower one. Full load returns 90.7% and 87.2%, respectively, and the curve falls away gently rather than collapsing. Those are real Gold numbers. At 115 VAC the unit returns 88.3% at 20% load, 90.0% at 50% and 87.2% at 100%, which clears the 80 PLUS Gold thresholds of 87%, 90% and 87%, though two of the three points clear them by a thin margin. The performance is there. What is not there is any independent confirmation of it, since no entry for this model appears in the CLEAResult, Cybenetics, or PPLP databases, and an 80 PLUS Gold logo on a sticker with nothing behind it is a claim, not a real certification.

Thermally, the unit is excellent, and acoustically it pays for that. The primary heatsink reached 51.0°C and the secondary 47.8°C at full load, with exhaust air leaving at 39.7°C against a 25.2°C intake, a delta of 14.5°C. Those are figures we would expect from a considerably more expensive supply, and they are achieved the obvious way. There is no semi-passive mode, and the cooling profile is a little aggressive. The fan turns on from the moment the unit is powered, and it stays close to the base through the first 300W, drifting only to 33 dB(A). Past 400W, the curve turns sharply upward, reaching 43.0 dB(A) at 525W, 45.2 dB(A) at 600W, and close to 50 dB(A) at a sustained 750W. Below 300W, this is a quiet supply, and the absence of a fanless window costs it very little, as it is practically inaudible. Above 500W, it is one of the louder 750W units we have measured, and in a quiet build it will be the component you hear.

Hot Test Results (~45°C Ambient)

Hot Test Results (~45°C Ambient)

Inside the hotbox at approximately 45°C ambient, into the range where Gamemax derates it, efficiency moves, but not dramatically so. The average fell to 89.8% at 230 VAC and 87.7% at 115 VAC, with full load figures of 89.3% and 85.9%. A single point of degradation at 230 VAC across a 20-degree ambient rise is a genuinely good result for the class of this unit. The 115 VAC curve suffers more than the 230 VAC one, falling below 86% at maximum output, which is where the manufacturer's derating starts to look like sound engineering rather than marketing caution, as the signs of thermal stress become obvious.

Internal temperatures stayed under control. The primary heatsink reached 80.8°C and the secondary 76.3°C at full load, well within the ratings of the components fitted, and the exhaust delta is essentially unchanged from the cold run. Once again, the fan is doing the work. It starts at 37.7 dB(A) even at 37.5W, passes 45 dB(A) before 300W, reaches 50 dB(A) at half load, and finishes at 54.4 dB(A) at a sustained 750W. That is loud in the plain sense of the word, and it makes sustained heavy load in a warm case an unpleasant proposition. It is a unit that will stay cool and reliable, but acoustics are being sacrificed for it.

PSU Quality and Bottom Line

Power Supply Quality

Voltage regulation is good rather than exceptional. Across the 20% to 100% load span, the 3.3V rail moved by 1.1%, the 12V rail by 1.4%, and the 5V rail by 1.5%. The 12V line ran from 12.12V at 20% load down to 11.95V at maximum output, which is 0.4% below nominal and entirely comfortable. The 5V rail sags to 4.97V at full load and the 3.3V rail to 3.31V. Neither minor rail is generously specified in the first place, at 15A each and 80W combined, but modern systems ask almost nothing of them and the figures are of academic interest for most builders. Ripple suppression is the strongest single result in this review. The 12V rail peaked at 48 mV under full load against the 120 mV ATX design limit, leaving 60% headroom on the rail that matters. The 5V rail topped out at 28 mV and the 3.3V rail at 26 mV against their 50 mV limits, with roughly 44% and 48% headroom respectively. However, all three rails stayed almost perfectly flat across the load range rather than degrading as output climbed, which behavior is rather odd for a PC PSU, as they tend to perform better when lightly loaded.

During our thorough assessment, we evaluate the essential protection features of every power supply unit we review, including Over Current Protection (OCP), Over Voltage Protection (OVP), Over Power Protection (OPP), and Short Circuit Protection (SCP).

All protection mechanisms triggered correctly with the unit hot. OCP tripped at 136% on the 3.3V rail, or 20.4A, and at 132% on the 5V rail, or 19.8A. The 12V rail is the outlier. OCP intervened at 108%, equivalent to 67A against a 62A rating, which is a far tighter margin than we normally see and tighter than we are comfortable with on an ATX 3.1 supply. Modern graphics cards produce short excursions well above their rated draw, and a 12V protection point set 8% above the rail rating leaves very little room for them. OPP shut the unit down at approximately 110% of rated output, or 825W, which is similarly conservative. Nothing here is unsafe. The unit is simply less tolerant of transient behavior than its ATX 3.1 badge implies, and a system pairing an ATX 3.1 class graphics card with a supply already running near its rated output is the scenario we would be cautious about.

Bottom Line

The RGB PRO 750G is two products fighting each other. Underneath there is a Sohoo platform that is competently engineered, properly filtered, generously heatsinked for the class, and that holds its efficiency in heat better than many mainstream Gold units. The Nichicon primary capacitor is a real one, and the ripple figures, although not record-breaking, are the best part of the review. On top of it sits a lighting ring, a set of marketing claims that do not survive checking, and a price that assumes you want the first of those enough to stop asking questions about the second.

The measurements support the 80 PLUS badge even though there is no published certification for this particular model. An average of 90.8% at 230 VAC and 88.6% at 115 VAC are honest Gold numbers, and the 115 VAC curve clears the 80 PLUS Gold thresholds at all three checkpoints, if narrowly at two of them. Regulation is comfortable on every rail, and ripple has more than half its allowance spare on the 12V line. Internal temperatures are excellent in both ambients. Nothing in the electrical results embarrasses the unit.

The compromises are concentrated in three places. The secondary capacitors are all Teapo, which is the middle-budget choice and sits awkwardly against marketing that advertises Japanese capacitors without mentioning that only one of them is. The fan is a PowerYear part whose engine we cannot confirm, and it never stops; while that buys the excellent thermals, it also produces noise, which places this among the louder 750W supplies at high load. And the 12V OCP point of 67A, only eight percent above the rail rating, is tighter than a supply carrying an ATX 3.1 badge should be, given what current graphics cards do to a 12V rail on a millisecond scale. The warranty is the part of the package doing the most work. Ten years is serious coverage, level with MSI and three years beyond Corsair, and on a unit whose secondary capacitors are the obvious economy, it is the reassurance that makes them tolerable. It is also the clearest signal that Gamemax expects this platform to last, which the thermal results support.

The pricing is where the argument gets difficult. At $105, the RGB PRO 750G is not the cheap option, which is the position a Gamemax supply usually occupies and the one this feature sheet is built for. The MSI MAG A750GL PCIE5 and the Corsair RM750e both sell below it routinely, frequently closer to eighty dollars, and both carry certification that exists in a public database along with quieter behavior at high load. Against that pair, the Gamemax is behind on certification, behind on acoustics, level with MSI and ahead of Corsair on warranty, competitive on efficiency, ahead on ripple, and 25 mm longer in the chassis. Against the Cooler Master MWE Gold 750 V4 at $119, it saves fourteen dollars and matches the coverage, giving up the conformal coating and the better-documented parts sheet to do it. It wins outright on exactly one axis, and that axis is decorative.

The engineering does not deserve dismissal, and anyone who assumes an RGB badge guarantees a bad power supply will be wrong about this one. It measures well, it runs cool, it is covered for a decade, and none of that is an accident. But competence is the floor in this segment rather than the selling point, and $105 asks a buyer to pay above the going rate for a unit that leads on decoration and merely keeps pace on everything else. If the ARGB halo is what you want, and your case mounts the supply fan up where you will actually see it, this is a defensible purchase that will not let you down. If it is not, the same money buys a certified, quieter, equally well-covered supply from a brand with a longer record, and that is the comparison Gamemax still has to answer.

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Nintendo of America just won a lawsuit against James Williams, who allegedly moderated the r/SwitchPirates subreddit and sold pirated Switch games online. According to Aftermath, the company sued Williams in June 2024 for copyright violations. However, they failed to respond even after several months, so the company asked for and received a default judgement in their favor.

The court is now directing Williams to pay $4.5 million to Nintendo of America for damages and shut down the pirated shops they control. “To effectuate this injunction, Williams shall immediately disable access to all online ‘shops’ that he operates or otherwise controls which have offered to the public extensive libraries of pirated Nintendo Switch games for download,” Washington court clerk Joshua C. Lewis and deputy clerk Natalie Wood said in the default judgement filing.

Williams was reportedly uncovered through an in-depth investigation by the company and its lawyers, which tracked them through their Archbox persona on Reddit. Nintendo then matched the details it found on the social media platform to its internal database and discovered that it was linked to a Nintendo account that had a handheld sent in for repairs. A few days after the unit was returned to Williams’ address, the company sent a cease-and-desist, to which the defendant allegedly replied via email.

Nintendo said in its filing that Williams agreed to comply and cooperate with the company’s demands and requests that are within their control but has since cut-off communications. Because of this, it asked the court for a default judgement in October 2025, which the court finally granted.

Nintendo is known for being litigious when it comes to its intellectual property. The developers of Switch emulator Yuzu settled with Nintendo for $2.4 million in 2024, while the company won a $2 million settlement against a Switch modder making backup devices like the MIG Switch and MIG Dumper last year. It has also successfully applied DMCA strikes on over 400 GitHub repositories hosting Switch emulators earlier this year.

But despite many public wins, Nintendo does not always prevail in its lawsuits. Palworld, which is often described as “Pokémon with guns,” has sold over 5 million copies on Steam, and Nintendo hasn’t filed a copyright lawsuit against the company. Instead, it sued the developers of the game for patent infringement several months after it went viral. The case is still ongoing, but sources say that Nintendo could only expect a maximum payout of $30,000 if it were to win its case.

Microsoft is taking another swing at Copilot, adding new features as it specifically turns the AI feature set into a series of tools designed for work. Branded "new Copilot", it will serve as a mix between a chat, a harness, and a business assistant.

Copilot will now be divided into three sections: Home, Code, and Autopilot. Microsoft pitches Home as a "new starting point," where you organize and connect your meetings, documents, emails, apps, and yes, agents. Effectively, it keeps everyone aligned on projects. The company describes the Home area as mixing Chat and Cowork, its existing agent. The new Copilot is rolling out with Microsoft's Frontier Program for businesses and individual subscribers, allowing early access to features now.

Office will live in the Home section, including Teams threads, calendars, Outlook, and more. You can ask Copilot to build slides, create spreadsheets, or put together documents.

Code is an answer to ChatGPT's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code. Microsoft is describing the act of vibe coding and building small apps "as basic a skill as writing a memo or modeling a budget." Code is built on the same technology as GitHub Copilot, and is run in a sandboxed environment that can be hosted on your system. With Microsoft's new Copilot Managed Runtime, enterprises will be able to host code in their own Microsoft 365 environment, with Microsoft managing the code.

Autopilot is a rebranding of Scout, a "digital teammate." This is a semi-autonomous agent that you can name and tell what to do, and it will go off on its own to do it. This is designed for recurring work, though Microsoft describes it as being able to do more advanced work, including building schedules, handling meetings, and reaching out to others in an organization.

All of Copilot uses Microsoft IQ, designed to set a business context for agents to follow by giving them a framework about how AI should work in your organization. By the end of the month, Microsoft expects to launch a plugin registry to add functionality, in a catalog managed by IT administrators.

For managing spending, Microsoft's subscription license will give you Copilot in chat across Office, while an "Auto" mode will consider accuracy, speed, and cost to pick a model for other jobs. Organizations can use usage-based billing to pick which models they want to use based on cost. "Cowork, Code, and Autopilot; new long-running agentic capabilities; and frontier models like Astra and Fable all run on UBB," Microsoft chief marketing officer for AI at Work, Jared Spataro, wrote in a blog post.

Copilot may not be as exciting to individual developers and at-home enthusiasts as some other AI platforms, but it's clear Microsoft is revamping to take another shot at making its AI tools the most popular for businesses.

Intel's 14A (1.4nm-class) process technology is expected to deliver performance 'within 5%' of TSMC's A14 (1.4nm-class) production node, Naga Chandrasekaran, the chief technology and operations officer as well as general manager of Intel Foundry, told investment banking firm KeyBanc (via @Alex_Intel_). Given TSMC's track record of delivering steady performance, power, and area (PPA) gains with every new node, this might sound like entirely good news. However, the statement deserves a closer examination.

Delivering 'within 5%' performance is an ambiguous statement that may mean that 14A will be 5% faster than A14, or that 14A will be 5% slower than A14. While 'within 5%' performance compared to the direct rival of the same class may sound like a good competitive position, in recent years Intel's process technologies trailed TSMC's nodes in transistor density and remained competitive in performance or power. This was, to a large degree, attributed to Intel's historic focus on CPU performance, but not necessarily transistor density, as its own fabs have offset additional costs associated with larger dies.

In fact, actual shipping processors suggest Intel's 18A is at least competitive with TSMC's N2 in maximum achievable CPU frequency as Intel's Core Ultra X9 388H 'Panther Lake' can hit 5.10 GHz (at an 80W max turbo power), AMD's EPYC 9586F has the highest single-core clock of 5.0 GHz (at a default 500W CPU power), Apple's A20 Pro can achieve 4.93 GHz, whereas Apple's M6 can hit 4.78 GHz. These numbers should not be converted directly into a statement such as '18A is X% faster than N2,' because the processors use different architectures, voltages, standard-cell libraries, thermal envelopes, and physical implementations. However, they do provide a useful real-world reference point: the available N2 processors do not show a substantial frequency advantage over 18A. If anything, the highest observed CPU frequencies favor Intel's process.

Based on internal estimates, Intel officially states that compared to its already fast 18A, its 14A is expected to provide 15% – 20% higher performance at the same power, or 25% – 35% lower power at the same frequency and transistor count. By contrast, TSMC expects its A14 to be 10% - 15% faster than N2 at the same power, or 25% - 30% lower power at the same clocks and transistor count.

Combining the observed 18A and N2 CPU frequencies of Intel's 18A and TSMC's N2 with Intel's stated 15% – 20% 14A gain and TSMC's assumed 10% – 15% A14 gain would ordinarily suggest a modest 14A performance advantage of A14 even in most conservative scenarios for Intel. Therefore, Intel's new expectation that 14A will be 'within 5%' of A14 is notably less ambitious than one might infer from the company's published process specifications, even though the 'within 5%' statement does not tell us which process Intel expects to lead.

In fact, advantages of Intel's 14A over TSMC's A14 can be calculated using the highest observed 18A and N2 CPU clocks combined with Intel's and TSMC's official iso power performance projections.

Starting points: Intel 18A = 5.10 GHz (Core Ultra 9 388H); TSMC N2 = 5.00 GHz (EPYC 9586F).

With Intel’s Core Ultra X9 388H and AMD’s EPYC 9586F as the starting points, the official iso-power performance projections imply a 2% – 11.3% potential performance advantage for 14A over A14, depending on the combination of process-performance assumptions.

Starting points: Intel 18A = 5.10 GHz (Core Ultra 9 388H); TSMC N2 = 4.78 GHz (Apple M6).

Using Apple's M6 as the real-world N2 reference, a similar calculation gives Intel 14A a 6.5% – 16.2% implied advantage over TSMC A14. Even the worst possible combination for Intel — 14A achieves only +15% while A14 achieves the full +15% — puts Intel's node well beyond the 'within 5%' estimate given by Naga Chandrasekaran.

It should be clearly noted that our calculations do not predict 14A or A14 CPU frequencies, as we use clocks from current CPU architectures with improvement claims for upcoming process technologies. The calculation is useful primarily for illustrating what the companies' published numbers imply relative to today's products.

Intel's 'within 5%' assessment raises an interesting question: why does Intel expect 14A and A14 to be so close when the companies' published process gains appear to suggest a larger gap? Perhaps Intel's assessment incorporates factors that these simple calculations do not capture. Or perhaps the head of Intel Foundry took a page from his boss Lip-Bu Tan's book and now prefers to underpromise.

If you bought anything on Asus' web store, you should check your inbox. The company has reported that its online shop suffered a data breach, and that contact details and order records "may have been accessed."

Asus says that no payment or financial information was revealed. However, Asus is not saying how large the breach was, or which regions had records leaked. The firm only indicates "part of the Asus eShop environment," a statement that is quite vague. Since the eShop is segregated by region and country, there's also no word on which locations were affected.

No information was offered on the duration of the breach or who may be behind the attack. There is no publicly posted statement, except for what people who have received the email have shown.

Asus says it "promptly took steps" to contain the breach, and that it has not identified any ongoing access. The firm also states that an investigation is in progress, and is advising customers to be extra careful, as the leaked information could be used to convincingly impersonate Asus and used for phishing attacks. For example, someone claiming to be from Asus may reach out about a recent order and offer your name, address, and order information as proof they're legitimate.

Anyone with compromised credentials should keep an eye out for unexpected emails, phone calls, SMS, or online messages claiming to be from Asus. Don't click any links or scan any QR codes contained in those messages — be sure to manually visit the websites in question in your browser.

Likewise, don't hand out any personal info or passwords during any phone calls, much less accept any requests for remote access software unless you are fully aware you're speaking to actual support. As always, be sure to enable two-factor authentication (aka 2FA or MFA) so that thieves can't access your accounts even if they hold your password.

The DataOne data center in Vineland, New Jersey, has just been hit with a record $1.07 million fine for operating unpermitted portable generators on the construction site. According to the New York Times, state inspectors spotted 62 of these units powering the facility back in late July.

Residents had already complained about it at a February town hall meeting. Inspectors said that there were no generators on site when they first visited in December last year. However, some residents said that “some type of unit” was spotted by satellite imagery back in February, leading to their complaint at the community assembly.

Residents of Vineland have already made multiple complaints about the development. Some of the issues t include the unpermitted construction of a 1.5-million-gallon LNG tank and unacceptable noise levels, especially at night, that affected homes within a half-mile radius of the construction site. They also said that there was little to no public consultation on the project before it went into full swing, with the people only finding out that a data center was being constructed in their neighborhood after Microsoft announced a $33 billion deal with Nebius, which in turn contracted DataOne to supply the compute they need.

Despite a record fine, some residents feel that the punishment isn’t enough. “It’s a ‘don’t ask for permission, just ask for forgiveness later’ kind of deal,” longtime Vineland resident Steve Brown told the Times. He also added, “It’s still kind of a drop in the bucket for a company that has several billion dollars of capital.” Long-time community member Tiffany Leone-Vespa also added, “What’s $1.07 million? They should have done it for each generator they were running illegally. They’re billionaires. It’s like pocket change.”

On the other hand, DataOne disagreed with the fine. A company spokesperson said that “We will apply for the air permits for the temporary generators,” and also added that it’s transitioning from the polluting and noisy portable turbines to more modern fuel cells. New Jersey ordered it to comply with the permitting requirements and to stop using the generators if they’re not granted within 45 days.

This is a similar situation that the citizens of Memphis and Southaven faced when SpaceXAI deployed 69 unpermitted generators to provide power to its Colossus 2 data center. It has become the subject of a lawsuit, especially as the community raised concerns that they were spewing thousands of tons of pollutants in the primarily black neighborhood. However, the Department of Justice stepped in and asked the court to dismiss the case because the site “supports mission-critical operations.” Elon Musk’s company eventually agreed to remove all unpermitted turbines, but said that the process will take over a year as replacement 1.2-gigawatt plants gradually come online.

There's a brilliant price right now on a top-end gaming PC, thanks to Walmart. You can pick up this HP Omen 35L rig with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, Intel Core i7-14700F CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB SSD for $1,899.99. That's an unbelievable price for a rig with this spec in the current market, one that makes it hundreds of dollars cheaper than many of its rivals. If you bought the same machine on HP's website with the same configuration, it would set you back $3,639.99, over $1,700 more than you'd pay here.

● Check out this deal at Walmart

This version of the HP Omen 35L is a recent refresh, with a modern set of specs that'll keep you gaming for years into the future. It ships with a 35-liter case, so it's a more manageable option for your desk compared to the HP Omen Max 45L. It's a fairly understated design, though, with a minimal black colorway, although some RGB lighting is available through the cooling fans.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is the focal point in this PC. You're getting one of Nvidia's current-gen mid- to high-tier powerhouses here, featuring the best of Nvidia's latest tech, including DLSS with multi-frame generation at your disposal.

Specs-wise, it has 8,960 CUDA cores, along with 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM on a 256-bit memory bus, as our RTX 5070 Ti review explains. The boost in VRAM compared to the cheaper 8GB GPUs on sale is important here if you want to hit the highest frame rates at 1440p and 4K. For 4K, you'll probably need to tweak your graphics settings a little, especially in the most graphically-intensive games. Luckily, multi-frame generation will give you an AI-generated frame rate boost if you run into any difficulties.

1440p will be much more solid, though. As the GPU benchmarks from our review show, you'll manage 1440p above 60fps on average pretty consistently with the highest ultra graphics settings.

You're also getting the Intel Core i7-14700F in this HP build. This Raptor Lake Refresh CPU is a little old now, but it's still a popular choice in pre-built systems, and it still delivers good performance for gaming. You're getting 20 cores with the 14700F, eight of which are performance cores for gaming, along with 12 efficient cores which will prove useful for multi-threaded work.

Other specs include support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity. You're also getting a 1TB NVMe SSD with Gen 4 speeds here, so you'll manage to install at least a few of the newest and biggest games. 32GB of DDR5 RAM means you're not forced to compromise on memory, even at this price, insulating you from the RAMpocalypse affecting industry pricing at the moment.

The $1,899.99 price for this HP Omen 35L gaming PC isn't being listed as a deal on Walmart's website, but don't be fooled. This kind of spec is usually priced well above $2,000 in the current market, so we'd expect the price to jump up soon or stock to run out. If you want a 4K-capable RTX 5070 Ti gaming PC for less than $1,900 from a trusted brand, you'll want to grab this one while you can.

There is no doubt the GeForce RTX 5090 is one of the best graphics cards and has the full potential to leverage DLSS 5. However, if you plan to hop on the DLSS 5 bandwagon, you may want to keep an eye on your graphics card's temperatures and power consumption. According to tests by Korean outlet QuasarZone, the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition peaked at nearly 650W in power draw, with the highest recorded temperature on the 16-pin (12VHPWR) power connector exceeding 90 degrees Celsius. Notably, that is higher than the standard temperatures measured for the GPU die.

While less frequent, user reports of the 16-pin power connector melting are still popping up if you look around the Internet, particularly on Reddit. Even a couple of media outlets have also encountered power connector meltdowns during their use. So, it is not an issue that affects only new users; 16-pin power connector failures extend to seasoned industry veterans, too. There is no prejudice toward Nvidia's Blackwell-powered graphics cards, either. Similar meltdowns have appeared on AMD Radeon graphics cards. Running DLSS 5 may just be adding fuel to the fire, figuratively.

QuasarZone ran Cyberpunk 2077 in a controlled environment at 27.5 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes. The publication used a 4K (3840x2160) resolution with DLSS Quality and Ultra image settings and monitored the temperature of the 16-pin power connector. The media outlet tested the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition, Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090, and GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition.

Nvidia DLSS 5 Impact On 16-pin Power Connector Temperatures

In the first round of testing using a GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition with DLSS 5 disabled, QuasarZone measured 77.1 degrees Celsius on the latch side of the 16-pin power connector and 80.9 degrees Celsius on the opposite side. With DLSS 5 enabled, the temperatures quickly jumped to 83.4 and 91.7 degrees Celsius, respectively.

Before DLSS 5, the average core and peak temperatures for the GeForce RTX 5090 were 79.4 and 82.3 degrees Celsius, respectively. Afterward, they increased to 83 and 86.3 degrees Celsius. As a result, the 16-pin power connector was the hottest spot on the GeForce RTX 5090.

In contrast, the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition ran at significantly lower, more manageable temperatures. Before activating DLSS 5, the temperature on the latch side and opposite the 16-pin power connector registered 45.8 and 47.6 degrees Celsius, respectively. With DLSS 5, the temperatures rose to 52.2 degrees Celsius on the latch side and 48.6 degrees Celsius on the opposite side. The results were not a surprise, since the GeForce RTX 5080 consumes less power than the GeForce RTX 5090.

Nvidia DLSS 5 Impact On Graphics Card Power Consumption

Using HWiNFO to measure average power consumption, the GeForce RTX 5090 showed a 13% increase in power draw with DLSS5 enabled. By contrast, the GeForce RTX 5080 showed a 17% increase in average power consumption under the same conditions. Despite these notable increases, both cards seemingly stayed within their official TDP specifications, with the RTX 5090 rated at 575W and the RTX 5080 at 360W.

HWiNFO uses a software-level API to poll power metrics from the graphics card's telemetry sensors. While it is sufficient for everyday monitoring, nothing is more accurate than measuring power directly from the circuit board. The Nvidia Power Capture Analysis Tool (PCAT) is perfect for that.

QuasarZone found that the GeForce RTX 5090's average and peak power draw increased by 13%, effectively exceeding the graphics card's power limit. The average power consumption readings differed by 3% between HWiNFO and PCAT.

Focusing primarily on the 16-pin power connector, QuasarZone's PCAT measurements showed a 582.7W power draw without DLSS 5 and 646.7W with it on, representing an 11% increase.

While 658W sounds scary, it does not compare to what we have seen on custom GeForce RTX 5090 models. On the GeForce RTX 5090 32G Lightning Z with DLSS 5, we observed the graphics card's power consumption spike to 592W at 1080p, 695W at 1440p, and 848W at 4K.

Using the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 as a test subject, QuasarZone recorded the current flowing through each of the six power pins from the 16-pin power connector. Before enabling DLSS 5, the power readings ranged from 6.94A to 7.47A. When activated, the power readings spiked to between 7.83A and 8.51A. While the values remained within PCI-SIG’s requirement of 9.2A per pin, headroom is extremely thin, with just 0.69A between the highest recorded current and the official threshold.

In another simulation, the Korean media outlet explored the consequences of a loose pin or improper connection in the 16-pin power connector. This is the most common scenario that leads to 16-pin power connector meltdowns, due to unbalanced power loading across the connector. With one nonfunctional power pin, the electrical load is redistributed to the remaining pins.

With DLSS 5 off, the highest current registered on a single pin reached 8.9A. This value remains uncomfortably close to PCI-SIG's standard. However, turning on DLSS 5 pushed the power pins to 10.1A, 10% above the specification. The simple test highlights just how easily and quickly things can go wrong.

QuasarZone's alarming test results may look like fuel for fearmongering. However, the publication's tests align closely with our findings that DLSS 5 substantially increases power consumption. At least one user has allegedly reported a 16-pin power connector meltdown while experimenting with DLSS 5.

Google is set to launch an experimental satellite, named MVP, into orbit next week to test running an AI data center in space. As part of a wider initiative called Project Suncatcher, the satellite will be aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket when it launches from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Once in space, and assuming everything goes well, the tech on board the satellite will be capable of handling simple AI requests from space.

The New York Times points out that while the move is an important one, the satellite will be limited in terms of its processing power. It will feature just four Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and be similar to a single Earth-bound server in terms of capabilities. It will be powered by solar panels capable of providing a single kilowatt of power to the tensor chips.

While clearly limited, the orbiting server is set to handle AI requests for up to a year, although it will remain in orbit for up to six years. After that, gravity will take hold, and the satellite will burn up during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.

Before that happens, James Manyika, Google's senior vice president of research, expects to learn more about how space may become a home for future data centers, though probably not for a long time.

“We don’t expect, to be perfectly frank, that we’ll have anything usefully operational in the next few years,” the SVP told the Times. He went on to compare the venture to Google's driverless cars, saying that Google was testing those "like 15 years before anything showed up." The idea of users accessing a version of Gemini running in space is some way from coming to fruition.

But it's also something that Google and other companies are set to investigate further. Alongside Google, Elon Musk (xAI, Tesla, SpaceX), as well as Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Sam Altman (OpenAI), have been making noises about the prospect of orbital data centers for some time now. China has already put its own AI compute into orbit. Even Intel has a patent for orbital data centers of its own.

Putting servers into space does have its issues, not least the problem of getting them there. Radiation and computers don't get along, and the radiation found in space can cause "bit flips" that change the way chips process data. Google's answer, for now, is to restart the chips every so often to reset them. The company has also devised a cooling system that will vent heat directly into space — since the usual fan-based solution simply won't work without any air.

Despite these accommodations, the four chips in Google's test satellite will still get too hot, too quickly. They'll only be able to run for around 15 minutes before they need to be shut down to allow them to cool off.

Regardless, it's still early days for the concept of running servers in space. Google plans to launch a pair of satellites next, with long-term plans for networked fleets of more than 80 satellites also already floated.

By Manyika's estimation, Google has 15 years to go from a four-chip server to a full-on data center. The clock is ticking.

Australia has ordered an “urgent and immediate review” after saying an OpenAI agent discovered a way around blocks on its Medicare statistics portal, BBC News reported. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made the announcement at the UN General Assembly in New York, referring to a hack that happened in June. OpenAI became aware of the hack in August but did not report it to the government agency’s public inbox until September.

The report says it is “believed to be the first known breach of a government system by rogue AI agents.” Albanese stated it took OpenAI “way too long to inform the government,” and OpenAI said “our models took actions we did not intend.”

The breached portal, Australia’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, run by Services Australia, is a public-facing site that contains “non-sensitive Medicare information,” Albanese said. He said OpenAI’s research team used an internal model to research public medicine spending and that the agent hit and sidestepped repeated blocks, eventually reaching “both public and non-public files.” Services Australia has also stated that the agent wrote files to an internal server, according to the PM, but that claim remains under investigation.

OpenAI described the work as an “internal evaluation” with accessed material including “aggregate health statistics and internal file names” but said it found no evidence of patient records being accessed. It is also “providing technical information” to support the investigations.

OpenAI’s agent reportedly first accessed the portal on June 18. The company became aware of this during a review in August. On Sept. 10, 84 days after first access, it emailed Services Australia via its public mailbox. Five days later, the government department reported it to the Australian Cyber Security Centre, part of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD).

Albanese said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that the company’s protocols “were not up to scratch here.” Katy Gallagher, the minister for the public service, also admitted that inbox handling could be managed better, with it only being “looked at once a day” and being prone to receiving hoaxes.

On Sept. 16, OpenAI published “Our framework for reporting model misalignment” with six reports, just six days after the email. The outlet observes that the blog post didn’t appear “to mention this incident,” despite OpenAI being aware by August. OpenAI’s framework appears to allow for such a delay by design, for security reasons. Cases that affect a third party go on what OpenAI calls its “Slow Track,” where the company intends to publish “an initial notice as soon as possible.” The six existing reports came from faster tracks, which would explain the Australian case’s absence.

A taskforce led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with assistance from the National Cybersecurity Coordinator, the Office of AI, ASD, the Australian AI Safety Institute, and Services Australia, will review whether existing processes are appropriate to respond to AI-related cyber incidents. A separate ASD-aided forensic investigation is underway as the government seeks urgent advice on whether any offenses occurred. The taskforce’s findings will also inform the development of Australia’s AI standards legislation.

This event follows increasing questions about AI safety, including British Columbia recently suing OpenAI and Altman over the technology’s use related to the Tumbler Ridge shooting. Rogue agents, particularly ones that stray into government systems, act to fuel uncertainty about current safeguards. The widely reported Hugging Face breach in July is part of a worrying timeline as agent autonomy continues to grow into a real-world AI safety issue. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s recent stark warning that “we have to shut the labs down” if AI experiments are unsafe reinforces the contined need for vigilance.

Paying for your new games or in-game content like new levels and skins might be about to get even easier if a newly published PlayStation patent is anything to go by. The patent, titled “Video Game Controller-Driven Information Transfer,” details a system that would allow a PlayStation controller to accept payments whenever a gamer taps it with their credit card or smartphone. It would work with gift cards, too.

The patent was first filed way back in March 2025, but it was only made public on September 17 this year before being spotted by Dexerto.

The patent includes artwork that shows how the payment system would potentially work. One example shows a TV displaying the question "Do you wish to purchase this game?" with a PS5 DualSense controller beside a smartphone. Another shows a "Gift card received!" message, confirming that we may be about to see the end of entering long strings of text just to top up a PlayStation Store balance.

PlayStation's patent also suggests that gamers could be prompted to buy a game after playing a demo at a retailer or event. The console would handle payment once a card or phone has been presented to a controller, although it's unclear if gamers would need to sign in to their PlayStation account for the purchase to be completed. The patent does allow for both NFC and Bluetooth to be used, so it's possible the PlayStation smartphone app may play a part here.

However, those hoping the patent would hint at a future PlayStation console or controller will be disappointed to learn that is very much not the case. Imagery used in the patent shows a recognizable PS5 console and DualSense controller.

There have been rumors of a PS6 launch as soon as 2027, but given the current state of play with regard to component shortages and price hikes, that's far from confirmed at this point. A delay until 2029 has also been rumored.

Just because Sony has a patent doesn't mean this idea will hit real PlayStations. Companies apply for (and are granted) patents all the time. Not everything depicted in those patents turn into shipping products or features. There are no guarantees this new payment system will ever see the light of day.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a simple solution for frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic that have recently called for increased regulation for their models — "we have to shut the labs down," Huang said in an interview with The New York Times' Ezra Klein. Huang's comments are pragmatic ones, stating that if frontier labs can't contain their experiments, those experiments must end.

"Now, if they say the alternative, which is: There is no way to contain our experiments, there’s just no way; when we test our A.I. models, it will get out, and it will damage the world — then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down," Huang said. "Because the cost to humanity, the damage is too great. The shareholder, the liabilities — it could be civil liabilities, it could be criminal liabilities. I mean, the liability’s incredible."

The conversation around increased AI regulation comes on the back of a highly publicized incident where an OpenAI agent hacked popular model hosting platform Hugging Face — a platform that Nvidia now owns, and one that likely would've sought damages from OpenAI had it been under Nvidia's purview at the time. Following that incident, various frontier labs, including those at Anthropic and Alphabet (Google), have used the idea of rogue agents as equal parts marketing tool and call to regulatory action, likely in an attempt to be the first at the table to shape those regulations.

Huang has not been keen on those regulatory calls. Just days ago, the executive countered extreme claims that AI would destroy the world by 2030, and said that frontier labs "never should ship products before they're ready and deliver products that are unsafe."

Although the labs and their chief hardware vendor, Nvidia, have mostly been aligned when it comes to AI policy, the push for regulatory capture has created a rift. Multiple labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceXAI, agreed mutually to slow the pace of model development. Now, they're facing an antitrust lawsuit, with claims these plans are "self-serving."

Huang's comments to Klein shift the responsibility away from collective development and toward individual leaders. "These are companies with agency," Huang said. "If I believe that I'm about to launch a product that is unsafe, it is completely in my ability... to not launch that product. And so I can't buy into the idea that somehow, all of Americans, around 400 million of us, are pushing them to launch untested products that are unreliable."

Although one side of the argument (from the frontier labs) is seemingly pushing for more regulation, that doesn't mean Huang is against regulation. In his own words: "I’m saying that we have lots of laws and regulations. Apply it." The executive argued that labs, particularly those at OpenAI and Anthropic, have rapidly gone from research institutions to companies likely worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and that they should carry themselves as such. "I’m not against laws and regulations. I’m against, currently, the distraction," Huang said.

Reports of rogue AI agents continue to mount. Earlier this month, Anthropic disclosed a fourth instance where one of its models hacked an external system, and just days ago, Google confirmed a report that its Gemini models hacked three companies earlier this year.

Bookstores in Japan are enjoying a boom in sales right now. However, this welcome spurt in business, where used books are bought in the 100s or even by the ton, is causing mixed feelings among owners of these businesses, reports NTV Japan (machine translation). It is suspected that many of the well-read hardbacks and paperbacks, often directed to “a logistics center in Okayama Prefecture,” will be scanned and then pulped by one of the foreign AI tech giants.

We’ve previously reported on AI companies scanning and then destroying millions of books in the U.S. and Europe. Now reports indicate that the AI vandals are running similar schemes in Japan.

According to NTV, there has been a large swell of orders being placed with bookstores that sell via online marketplaces. In interviews, some stores have reported selling 100s of books per day via these channels, or even days when sales have multiplied fivefold.

The Japanese news site notes there are records of a 50-ton consignment of Japanese books being shipped to the U.S. to be churned through Anthropic’s destructive scanning process. It has also heard that a used bookstore in Western Japan has received an email from a foreign company inquiring about an order of tens of thousands of books.

There are several other AI-is-vacuuming-up-my-culture tells in the new NTV story. The Japanese news site says that while the multiple accounts are responsible for the surge in bulk orders, they all request shipment to a logistics center in Okayama Prefecture. Unfortunately, the logistics center operator wouldn’t comment or answer questions from NTV.

The genre purchasing pattern of the bulk buyers also hints at an AI scan and shred operation. A Tokyo bookstore owner told NTV that it used to be novels and comics that sold the most. However, the increased orders have recently been in genres like philosophy, history, political history, medicine, law, and topics such as “life and culture in the Edo period.”

There are mixed feelings among the used bookstore owners who were interviewed. There’s something of a boom to be enjoyed now, with sales rocketing. Clearly, though, if used books are fully removed from circulation, there will be impacts on the prospects of businesses – like stock availability and pricing.

There’s also the question of the removal of important cultural works from circulation if this trend continues. Another moral question concerns the use of copyrighted works for AI learning. This is still legal in Japan, unless it can be demonstrated that the scanning unfairly harms the interests of the copyright holder. With underhand bulk operations like these, it isn’t likely anyone will be asked for permission about their book being scanned.

The Blue Yeti launched back in 2009 and went on to become one of the most popular USB microphones for creators, podcasters, and streamers. Now, eight years after acquiring Blue Microphones, Logitech is finally launching its successor. The new Yeti 2 arrives as a more modern version with a cleaner design and features a 3D proximity sensor, AI-based noise reduction, and even a built-in display. Unlike the original Yeti, however, it will be available in only two colors — Black and White — at a starting price of $159.99.

• Grab the Logitech Yeti 2 microphone from Amazon

Logitech says the proximity sensor on the Yeti 2 is capable of tracking audio in 3D and can automatically adjust various settings in real time, including gain, equalizer, and pickup patterns. As for the AI denoiser, it can actively filter out unwanted background noise such as keyboard clacks, mouse clicks, and fan noise to ensure crystal-clear audio.

The Yeti 2 also retains the USB connectivity that helped make the original microphone popular, while adding several features aimed at making it easier to adjust settings on the fly. The integrated 1.3-inch colored LED display features an easy-to-use interface with an 8-bit Yeti mascot that provides quick information and helpful tips. It also allows you to tweak settings or switch between presets using the dial, without having to rely on dedicated software. Alternatively, the mic offers direct integration with Logitech’s G Hub software for deeper settings control, community-powered Blue VO!CE profiles, and custom avatar uploads.

In addition to its latest microphone, Logitech also announced some gaming-focused products under its G Pro series. The new gaming lineup includes the Pro X3 Superstrike mouse, Pro X Control mousepad, Pro X2 Rapid keyboard, and Pro X3 Lightspeed headset, all designed with input from professional esports athletes.

The Pro X3 Superstrike uses Logitech’s proprietary HITS technology and is claimed to deliver 50% improved power efficiency in a lightweight design. The Pro X Control mousepad measures 400 x 460 mm and features a knitted cloth surface, 6 mm foam cushioning, stitched edges, and a high-friction base for stability. The Pro X2 Rapid keyboard comes with magnetic switches, Rapid Trigger, Key Priority, and an OLED display that allows users to make quick adjustments. Finally, the Pro X3 Lightspeed headset features a 48 kHz microphone, customizable EQ, and extended battery life aimed at long competitive gaming sessions.

With RAMageddon, the storage apocalypse, GPU stagnation, and GPU price increases all happening more or less simultaneously, this is the worst time to build a PC that I can remember — and I built my first PC in the previous century (powered by an AMD K6-2). If you have a rig that meets your needs at the moment (even if just barely), current prices probably make you more interested in keeping it running than in considering major upgrades or, even more daunting, starting over from scratch with a new build.

But fret as we might about the future of our much-beloved component-swapping hobby, a few articles and experiences in recent weeks have given me glimpses of the PC-building future, and I don’t think it’s all bad — at least so long as you have time to research and tinker, you can live without the highest-end components, or you have enough of a build budget that price doesn’t matter much.

Old parts get a new life, with some patient tweaking

First off, we recently tested AMD’s BC-250, a 2021-era APU that started off as defective or cut-down PS5 silicon, repurposed as a cryptomining card. But more recently, a community-developed BIOS and drivers have turned this custom hardware into a Linux-based competitor to Valve’s much-hyped Steam Machine, while costing roughly half the price of a similarly configured system, once you source the power supply and other necessary parts. It even comes with 16GB of shared GDDR6, sidestepping the current RAM pricing issue altogether.

Now, this is more of a project than a PC. You have to source the card (from places like AliExpress, eBay, or Etsy), then research and figure out how to flash the board so that it will even boot, followed by getting Linux and the requisite drivers installed, before you can even think about playing games. But depending on your sample, you might also be able to unlock extra CPU cores and compute units for even better performance.

It’s far from a simple setup. But this kind of community-led hardware repurposing and enhancement reminds me of two distinct hardware eras: The very early days of PC kits (which I wasn’t really around for), and the early 2000s, when you could unlock AMD Athlon and Duron multipliers with a pencil (or later, conductive silver lacquer). Unlocking higher clocks and extra performance without paying for a much pricier chip is exactly the kind of achievable dream that the PC enthusiast hobby was founded on, and it’s good to see it making a comeback – even if it’s with this one very specific piece of hardware.

But as AI hardware development continues — and especially if (or when) specific areas of the hardware bubble pop or deflate – I expect to see more situations where communities of tinkerers figure out how to get discarded hardware to run games and other compute tasks, giving budget buyers hope for acceptable performance at reasonable prices. Ironically, AI tools like Claude Code will almost certainly make breakthroughs in hardware repurposing much easier.

To boldly go (to price brackets) where no PC has gone before

On the other end of the PC price spectrum, I recently assembled a PC using parts from Asus’ ROG Edition 20 line. The anniversary hardware, which debuted earlier this year at Computex, ignores affordability concerns entirely. Asus instead opted to celebrate two decades of its Republic of Gamers sub-brand by taking several of its already expensive parts and peripherals, adding a few (mostly aesthetic) features and some gold accents, and charging even more for them.

How much more? The finished PC, with about $2,000 worth of peripherals, a $3,300 motherboard and cooler combo, and a $6,000 RTX 5090, costs roughly $15,000 – and that’s with a modest 2TB SSD and 32GB of RAM. If you opt for a more fitting 128GB kit with tight timings and 8TB of solid-state storage, you could easily spend $20,000 on a build like this.

As tough as it is for many of us to swallow, there’s likely a large enough customer base of gamers and PC enthusiasts who can and will pay whatever it takes to own high-end, high-performance PCs to keep options like this afloat. Because while the cost of individual parts has certainly increased, the luxury PC market has existed for decades. I know because in the years before I joined Tom’s Hardware, I reviewed several PCs with custom cooling loops and multiple graphics cards (up to quad-SLI) from the likes of Digital Storm and Maingear. That market isn’t going away; it’s just getting more expensive.

The murky future of mainstream desktop gaming PCs

So what about the mainstream PC gaming market? Things are tougher there, and I suspect that space will continue to shrink due to, well, everything I linked to up top. Those looking for gaming options in the sub-$2,000 range that “just work” without much tinkering are more likely to make do with consoles (which are, of course, also getting more expensive), gaming laptops or handhelds, or console-like PCs like Valve’s Steam Machine.

Intel and AMD are reviving or extending the lifespan of chips and platforms that support last-gen DDR4, but older memory isn’t getting any cheaper either. And our own testing has shown that DDR4 is increasingly holding back gaming performance.

There was a brief hope that Chinese memory makers like CXMT might help bring down DDR5 prices. But U.S. approval for that seems unlikely, especially as the FCC is busy banning humanoid robots and robot vacuum cleaners built overseas. And, of course, companies like CXMT aren’t looking to be PC saviors. They want to sell their RAM to AI hyperscalers for the same high prices as SK hynix, Micron, and Samsung. And even if DDR5 somehow suddenly became more affordable, GPU prices are also continuing to climb, and storage (SSDs and hard drives) faces similar pricing issues.

Can software save the day?

Like it or not, we’ll certainly see further advancements in AI upscaling and other VRAM tweaks and tricks that make modern gaming possible on older and current-gen cards with 8GB or even 4GB of VRAM before the price of RAM, storage, and GPUs drop significantly.

Will it be enough to keep PC gaming enticing and affordable enough to prop up the mainstream PC gaming market? That’s tough to say with any certainty at this point, but if being a PC enthusiast since the 1990s (and a PC gamer since the late 1980s) has taught me one thing, it’s that this hobby is resilient. Some will pay what they need to pay for high-end hardware. Some will find suitable solutions by tinkering with repurposed silicon. And others will forge a middle ground that works for them.

I transitioned from a PC enthusiast to a full-time professional covering the PC and related hardware space in 2008. Even back then, people were telling me that the desktop was dead or dying. Instead, it has evolved and survived for nearly 20 years, through the smartphone revolution, past soldered-on laptop components, through two cycles of Steam Machines, and the death of physical game media. Meanwhile, game stores like Steam rake in record profits, indicating that the demand for PC gaming remains high. All this tells me that PC building and PC gaming will need to continue to evolve, but it’s not quite on the endangered hardware list yet.