Nvidia launched the GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB) in early 2021 as an affordable mainstream gaming GPU with a 170W TDP, before re-releasing two months ago to offer relief during the ongoing component crisis. Throughout this time, not one person thought that the 3060 consumed too much power... except someone in China who decided to make a 75W version of the card. This blower-style variant has no 6- or 8-pin power connectors and runs entirely off the PCIe slot it'll be connected to, resulting in some expectedly underwhelming performance.

The RTX 3060 takes very well to undervolting and, therefore, can already be taken all the way down to just 100W at the cost of modestly reduced performance. A single PCIe x16 slot can provide up to 75W of power, so forcing a 3060 down to that number requires a shunt mod. This practice is usually associated with unlocking power limits on a GPU to chase overclocking feats where you decrease resistance, but in this case, you'd be increasing it.

This is a single-slot, low-profile card with a blower-style cooler about the size of a modern smartphone. You get just 1x HDMI and 1x DisplayPort in terms of connectivity. There is no fin stack present either, the PCB lacks a backplate, and the shroud is a thin metal sheet responsible for all the heat dissipation with a rudimentary heatsink in the middle.

A teardown of the GPU on BiliBili shows it's under-equipped from the inside, too. The memory chips have no thermal pads or paste on them. Instead, the metal shroud just touches the core directly to keep the entire thing cool. Remember that there's just one fan at the far end to blow hot air; there is no intake or proper airflow with positive pressure. So far, everything about this card, except its compact size, is looking subpar.

Once we get to testing, any skepticism is validated as the 75W RTX 3060 GPU is barely able to edge past 900 MHz, despite being rated for 1,770 MHz boost clocks. This results in a Time Spy score of just 4,821 points whereas a regular RTX 3060 easily scores upwards of 9,000 points in the same benchmark. Even older budget GPUs like AMD's iconic RX 580 and Nvidia's equally-popular GTX 1060 score more.

During the Time Spy run, the GPU hotspot also went past 90 degrees Celsius, proving that the cooler is barely performing if it's struggling to tame even a 75W card. Clearly, this GPU was suffering from severe thermal throttling on top of already having its power budget more than halved. One could make an argument that it's still an Ampere GPU, so it could make sense in low-power, compact systems. But there are now mini PCs with similarly performing or far more potent integrated graphics in 2026.

OpenAI has admitted that its experimental AI agents used an open German programming wiki to communicate, according to a Reuters report. This happened weeks before similar AI agents broke through restrictions and compromised Hugging Face, the report claims. Knowing about the issue, OpenAI did not disclose it, but now says the industry needs better standards for reporting unintended AI behavior. OpenAI admitted the misconduct. But this wrongdoing raises more questions than it provides answers.

Starting around May 2026, thousands of OpenAI agents — which are essentially well tooled advanced crawlers — discovered that they could write to DseWiki, an old German-language programming collaborative website. So, between May and June, the agents used more than 3,700 names to generate some 18,000 posts exchanging information useful for completing evaluations and circumventing restrictions. Some created backup pages in case moderators deleted their posts, something that essentially turned a wiki into a persistent storage service for the said agents to share information. OpenAI calls this the 'wiki incident' and admits the wrongdoing.

"Our misalignment disclosure practices need to expand for this new phase of model capabilities," the company wrote in an X post. "We and the larger AI community do not yet have a clear standard for how to report misalignment that shows up during training, evaluation, and deployment, including examples that do not look like traditional security incidents but could provide insight into AI behavior and future risks. We are working on a framework and will share it in upcoming weeks, and in parallel we're working with dozens of government regulatory agencies worldwide on these issues."

OpenAI subsequently quarantined the trained weights of the experimental model involved, postponed frontier reinforcement-learning runs, and added security measures. The company further clarified that the agents had not developed their own objectives, but were aggressively pursuing assigned ExploitGym cybersecurity challenges and treated restrictions as obstacles to complete them.

To do so, agents found unintended communication channels that enabled separate runs to exchange vulnerabilities, techniques for obtain Internet access, something that eventually exposed Hugging Face credentials.

According to researchers, the advanced crawlers — which Open AI calls AI agents — exploited an unknown vulnerability in the company's internal Artifactory package-registry proxy, escalated privileges, moved across systems, and reached the Internet. They then compromised dozens of Hugging Face servers, obtained root access to one machine, accessed some private information and messaging credentials, and copied private evaluation data into a public Hugging Face dataset. And the rest is history.

Breaking Asimov's law?

OpenAI's agents may sound like something that would violate Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics, but the comparison only goes so far.

The First Law says a robot may not injure a human or allow a human to come to harm. There is no indication that the OpenAI agents physically harmed anyone.

The Second Law requires robots to obey humans unless doing so conflicts with the First Law. Here the comparison gets more interesting: the agents certainly circumvented restrictions imposed by their owners/operators, obtained unauthorized Internet access, and exploited external systems while pursuing their assigned tasks. In Asimov's framework, this certainly means disobedience. Meanwhile, the AI agents were simultaneously following the human instruction to solve their own tasks. This may not be considered disobedience, as these agents did not introduce any physical harm to people. Meanwhile, we are walking on very thin ice here. Unauthorized internet access while exploiting systems to pursue their own benefit is not exactly welcome in the U.S. and Europe.

The Third Law requires a robot to protect its own existence as long as doing so does not conflict with the first two laws. There is clear evidence that OpenAI's AI agents were trying to preserve themselves: creating persistent communication channels and backup wiki pages helped them complete their tasks rather than ensured their survival.

Dis-Summary

Today's AI models are not programmed around Asimov's laws. The incidents instead demonstrate the real engineering problem Asimov's laws remarkably well: a sufficiently capable machine can follow the literal objective given by humans and yet its behavior is far from what its creators neither expected nor wanted. Yet here we are.

FSP is not a brand that needs an introduction so much as a reminder of scale. Founded in Taiwan in April 1993 as a joint venture between Fortron/Source of the United States, Sparkle Power International, and Powertech Systems — the three names that give the company its initials — FSP grew into one of the largest power-supply manufacturers in the world. It became one of Intel’s early seed partners during the formative years of the ATX standard, was listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 2002, and has spent three decades quietly building units for a long list of system integrators and consumer brands. When most companies want a power supply, they call an OEM. FSP is the company that frequently gets the call.

That distinction matters here. The Mega GM is not a contracted design wearing someone else’s sticker but FSP’s own platform, engineered and assembled under its roof. We evaluate the Mega GM 1200W to see whether it belongs on our best power supplies list. The series spans 850W, 1000W, and the 1200W flagship reviewed here, all built around the same ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 brief: native 12V-2x6 delivery, support for the 200% transient power excursions modern GPUs demand, and FSP’s proprietary MTLC (Micro Tolerance Load Control) regulation scheme. On paper, it is positioned as a Gold-class product. In practice, as the testing will show, it behaves like something a tier above.

Specifications and Design

In the Box

The Mega GM 1200W arrives in a cleanly designed box, black with a high-resolution render of the unit and the certifications laid out plainly on the front: 80 PLUS Gold, Cybenetics Gold, and the Cybenetics A++ acoustic award, alongside the PCIe 5.1 and ATX 3.1 badges – which is kind of weird considering the unit’s actual certifications are not aligned with those on the box!

Inside, the supply is well protected within a molded cardboard housing, with the accessories boxed separately. The bundle is sensible, if not lavish: mounting screws, the AC power cable, cable ties, a set of cable combs, an ATX jump-start tester, the usual paperwork, and a storage pouch for whatever cables a given build leaves unused.

The cables themselves are individually sleeved with FSP’s embossed weave and shipped in two tidy bundles held together by another two reusable cable straps. Gauges are appropriate to the tier. That native 12V-2x6 lead is the headline inclusion - a full 600W with no adapters, which is exactly what an RTX 50-series build wants to see. Sadly, there is only one, which is a shame for a 1200W unit.

External Appearance

At 150 x 150 x 86 mm, the Mega GM 1200W is genuinely compact for its output. A great many 1200W units stretch to 160 mm or beyond, so the standard 150 mm depth here is a real practical advantage — it drops into mid-tower cases without the clearance anxiety that so often accompanies this wattage. The chassis is finished in a matte, lightly textured black that hides fingerprints well, and build quality is reassuring.

The top panel is given over to the intake fan, sitting behind a diagonally slatted finger guard finished in champagne-silver that lifts the otherwise monochrome look. At the sides of the unit, the “Mega” wordmark is picked out in one corner and the FSP logo resting above it. The full-length specification and certification label occupies the top side of the unit, the face that points upward in most installations. For the record, this sample is assembled in China, which is normal for FSP’s consumer lines despite the company’s Taiwanese roots.

The mains side carries the AC receptacle and the primary rocker switch, joined by a separate ECO switch that enables or disables the semi-fanless mode — a welcome piece of user control rather than a fixed, non-negotiable profile for users that prefer the fan running at all times even if at a minimum speed. That same face is a large honeycomb exhaust grille, perforated edge to edge so the fan can push warm air straight out of the chassis. The opposite end houses the fully modular connector bay, with the sockets keyed so that plugging a cable into the wrong port during installation is effectively impossible.

Internal Design

Cooling is handled by a 135 mm Power Logic PLA13525S12M, a fluid (hydro) dynamic bearing (FBD) fan drawing 0.40A at 12V. It is a known, well-regarded part. Τhe same model has turned up inside several other premium PSUs. An FBD is the right call at this tier, trading a little extra cost for low noise and a long service life.

FSP both designs and builds the platform, so there is no hidden OEM behind it. The internals are tidy and logically laid out on a double-sided PCB. The transient filtering stage is good, with two Y capacitors, three X capacitors, two common-mode filtering inductors, and a single MOV. Mains rectification is handled by a pair of 600V bridges mounted on their own heatsink immediately after the filter.

The active PFC stage pairs two Infineon 60R080P7 MOSFETs with two STMicroelectronics diodes found on their dedicated heatsink. Bulk energy storage is, pleasingly, entirely Japanese: two Nippon Chemi-Con 680 µF and 330 µF capacitors, both rated to 420V and 105 °C. The primary inversion stage uses two Greatpower GP47S60 MOSFETs arranged in a half-bridge LLC resonant topology, also found on their dedicated heatsink. This is a mature, reliability/cost-focused topology rather than the full-bridge arrangement reserved for top tier units. On the secondary side, the +12V rail is produced by synchronous rectification, with six Infineon 07N04LS6 MOSFETs doing the work. The minor 3.3V and 5V rails are derived from DC-to-DC converters.

FSP has stayed disciplined with the secondary capacitors, which is the clearest single signal that the company is being serious regarding the marketing claims of this unit. The electrolytics are entirely Japanese, with all of the electrolytics supplied by Nippon Chemi-Con and Rubycon. The same goes for the solid-state capacitors, with Nippon Chemi-Con and Nichicon products handling high-frequency filtering. The one notable omission is dedicated fan-failure protection, which the unit does without.

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 Mega GM 1200W posts strong efficiency through the low and middle of its range. It averaged 93.0% at 230 VAC and 90.7% at 115 VAC across the nominal load band, peaking at roughly 94.6% near 30% load and holding above 92% across most of the curve. The weakness is at the top: efficiency sags as the unit approaches full output, dropping to 91.0% at 230 VAC and just 87.3% at 115 VAC at a sustained 1200W. That full-load dip has consequences for how the unit is rated. Despite the 80 PLUS Gold logo printed on the box, the Mega GM’s only independently verified efficiency credential is its Cybenetics certification — there is no corresponding entry in CLEAResult’s 80 PLUS database. The distinction is not academic: Cybenetics averages efficiency across the whole operating range, which is generous enough here to reach Platinum, whereas 80 PLUS tests fixed 20/50/100% load points with a strict full-load threshold. Under that methodology, the efficiency drop at maximum load is exactly what would cap the unit at Gold rather than Platinum. The headline efficiency is real, but it is flattered by the rating system it was measured under.

Acoustically, the cold run is where the rating earns its keep. With the ECO mode engaged, the fan simply stays off below roughly 50% load. Once it does spin up, it registers a barely-there 31.6 dB(A) at 600W, climbing gently to about 41 dB(A) only at the very top of the load range. For most real-world workloads, this supply is effectively inaudible. Internal temperatures stay well in hand throughout: the primary heatsink tops out near 65 °C and the secondary near 69 °C at full load.

Hot Test Results (~45°C Ambient)

Hot Test Results (~45°C Ambient)

Raising the ambient to roughly 45 °C predictably trims efficiency, but not alarmingly. Average efficiency settles to 91.4% at 230 VAC and 89.2% at 115 VAC, with full-load figures of 88.9% and 85.3%, respectively. The drop of around 1.6 points at 230 VAC is measurable but normal for the temperature delta, and at no load point did the unit show any hint of thermal instability or output stress during sustained running.

Noise is the one area where the heat clearly changes the character of the unit. The fan engages earlier and ramps harder, rising from the low-30s dB(A) through the mid-load range to about 55.0 dB(A) at a sustained 1200W. That is a substantial step up from the cold run and the loudest this supply gets — though it is worth keeping in perspective that it only happens at the intersection of maximum load and elevated ambient, a corner most systems should never visit. Internal temperatures rise accordingly, with the secondary heatsink reaching roughly 109 °C and exhaust air near 70 °C at full load, figures that are flirting with the OTP protection, but the platform held composure for the duration of testing.

PSU Quality and Bottom Line

Power Supply Quality

Voltage regulation is solid without being a strong point. Across the 20% to 100% load span, the 12V rail moved by 1.2%, the 5V rail by 1.5%, and the 3.3V rail by 1.3%. FSP markets its MTLC scheme as delivering ±1% regulation, but only the 12V rail comes close to that figure. The minor rails clearly miss it, with the 5V line in particular drifting half a point beyond the claim. It is a perfectly acceptable result for a 1200W unit, just not the precision the marketing implies.

Ripple suppression is another weak point. The unit stays very well inside the ATX limits, but it is some way off class-leading. The 12V rail peaked at 44 mV under full load and 46 mV under the harsher cross-load condition, with the 5V rail at 28 mV and the 3.3V rail at 26 mV. Against the 120 mV (12V) and 50 mV (3.3V/5V) ATX ceilings, that is a comfortable pass, yet the best units in this price bracket hold the filtering tighter. For a supply that does so well on efficiency and noise, the ripple figures are a conspicuous step down.

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, including OCP, OVP, OPP, and SCP, were verified and triggered correctly during testing. The OCP tripped at 126% on the 3.3V rail, 128% on the 5V rail, and 120% on the 12V rail, with OPP engaging only at roughly 120% of rated output before shutdown. The protection circuitry is on the conservative side, favoring equipment reliability.

Bottom Line

Specifications aside, the Mega GM 1200W is a very capable power supply that falls just short of the top tier on a handful of specific, identifiable points. FSP designs and builds the platform itself, which is worth more than it sounds, as this is not a rebadged contract design but an in-house effort from one of the largest and oldest power-supply manufacturers in the world, and the engineering discipline shows in the layout, the soldering quality, and the parts selection. The bones of this unit are excellent.

The build is where it is least open to criticism. The capacitor complement is 100% Japanese on both the primary and secondary sides, while the active components also are top-tier, a choice that speaks to longevity rather than to a cost target. The 150 mm chassis is genuinely compact for 1200W and drops into mid-tower cases that many rivals of this output simply will not fit. The ten-year warranty is the kind of commitment that, in this segment, tracks platform quality more reliably than almost any single number on the box.

Efficiency is where the marketing and the measurements part ways, and it deserves to be spelled out for prospective buyers, even if the marketing actually undersells the unit. The low and middle of the load range the unit is excellent but it sags at full load, and that has a concrete consequence. The Mega GM officially carries only a Cybenetics certification — there is no 80 PLUS listing from CLEAResult behind the Gold logo on the box. Cybenetics’ whole-range averaging is forgiving enough to award Platinum, but under 80 PLUS’s fixed-load-point testing that full-load dip would probably pull the unit down to Gold. Anyone shopping on the strength of a Platinum efficiency figure should understand that the number depends entirely on which methodology you trust, or the kind of use you are going to put the Mega GM to.

The electrical results reinforce the impression of a unit that is good rather than outstanding. Ripple suppression is always within spec, but the figures are noticeably higher than what the best units in this bracket achieve. Load regulation is acceptable yet misses FSP’s own ±1% MTLC claim on the minor rails, with the 5V line the clear laggard. The protections all work, though their thresholds prioritize conservative shutdown. None of these is a deal-breaker on its own; collectively, they are the difference between a strong unit and a class-leading one, and they are why this review stops short of a higher score.

Availability is the last thing to weigh, and it is sharply regional. Across Europe and Asia, the Mega GM 1200W is available but, even then, not readily. At an MSRP of $229 and significantly lower retail pricing, the unit is sensibly priced for what it delivers, which makes it an easy unit to recommend to readers in those markets. In the United States, by contrast, stock is currently very hard to come by, even though the manufacturer assures us that the unit will eventually become available. Taken as a whole, this is an FSP-built, all-Japanese, compact 1200W supply with excellent acoustics and strong everyday efficiency. It earns a solid recommendation in the regions where you can actually buy it - just not an unqualified one.

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A Bitcoin mining data center in El Reno, Oklahoma, has been condemned after it leaked 3 million gallons of water, reports Koco TV News. Schools, businesses, and city and county offices were all closed last week due to the leak.

According to the source report, the Athlon Blockchain LLC-owned data center shouldn’t even have been operating, as the city issued it a Stop Work Order in 2023 due to “multiple fire and life safety code violations as well as the expiration of the building and electrical permits that had previously been issued.” The city asserts that none of the costs related to the water leak at the property will be passed on to citizens, according to the source.

We don’t know whether the Bitcoin mining data center development went ahead despite the Stop Work Order in 2023 due to ignorance or a devil-may-care attitude toward regulation. Koco reports that the owner of the property was given until the end of 2023 to comply with safety codes and obtain new permits, while construction should have been put on hold. Now it is believed that the firm building the facility set up the data center and began operations without any further consultation with the city. Perhaps the owners thought they could sidestep the Stop Work Order by housing the data center in an array of shipping containers.

Clearly, regulators should check that codes, directives, and ordinances are obeyed. This incident shows a disastrous leak from an insufficiently policed operator with serious repercussions for local citizens. Thus, the city has now committed to routinely reviewing compliance. As for the waste and costs involved in this case, a statement on behalf of the city says it is “preparing to take the necessary legal actions to recoup all costs and expenses related to the water leak from the property owner, including city resources expended in locating and addressing the leak.”

There has been a lot of controversy recently regarding data center usage of water. Concerns have been heightened due to widespread drought conditions in the Northern Hemisphere this summer.

When it comes to high-speed storage, SSD prices have been at an all-time high due to the ongoing turbulence in the memory market. However, if you are looking for a speedy drive with plenty of capacity, Samsung’s freshly launched 990 PCIe Gen 4 SSD with 2TB capacity is already selling at a discount. You can grab the drive at $339.99 at Amazon, down from its usual price of $529.99.

• Check out the deal on Amazon

The Samsung 990 series was launched earlier this year, right in the midst of the RAMpocalypse. The SSD is essentially a QLC-based version of the 990 EVO Plus. QLC SSDs can be a good choice for gaming, as it mostly involves reading data rather than writing it. QLC drives are slower than TLC, but frequently used data can stay in the faster pSLC cache if the drive has enough free space. The Samsung 990 also features the company’s PiccoloQ controller with V9 QLC Flash memory and is capable of full PCIe Gen 4 throughput.

In our testing, we found the drive to offer similar results to Samsung’s 990 Evo Plus and the 990 Evo in latency testing, while beating the 990 Evo drive in bandwidth and 3DMark overall score. It also managed to stay competitive with the Crucial P310, which is one of the best QLC-based drives on the market. The Samsung 990 is also a solid option for consoles, delivering bandwidth that puts it ahead of the 990 Evo and on par with or better than most budget PCIe 4.0 drives.

The Samsung 990 at $339.99 is a compelling option for those who are looking for plenty of fast storage without paying more during the current SSD price surge. The 1TB model is also selling at a discount if you do not require this much storage. Do keep in mind that this sale price is available for a very limited time. If you need a high-capacity PCIe 4.0 SSD, it may be worth grabbing before the discount disappears.

Today we’re testing MSI’s latest flagship AIO, the MEG Coreliquid E15 360, a luxury AIO with a premium black-and-gold aesthetic symbolizing authority and elegance. So we’re expecting market-leading thermal performance. Of course, the feature that stands out the most is the stunning 6.67-inch curved 2240x1080 AMOLED screen. The whole design looks and feels premium, with a price tag to match.

Let's take a look at the specifications and features of this CPU cooler, then we’ll go over thermal and noise benchmarks to decide if the MEG CoreLiquid E15 360 is good enough to make our list of the best CPU coolers on the market.

Cooler specifications

Features of MSI’s MEG CoreLiquid E15 360 AIO

▶️ Premium black-and-gold aesthetic

MSI’s MEG CoreLiquid E15 features a design that just oozes a feeling of premium quality – each component is precision-made using high-quality components, with gold colored plating flanking black metal. The highlight of this cooler, of course, is the premium curved screen, but if, for some reason, you’d prefer not to use the screen, a stylish black-and-gold pump cover is also included.

▶️ RAM Clearance

As with most AIOs on the market, MSI’s E15 doesn’t overhang or interfere with RAM DIMMs at all, allowing for compatibility with all sizes of DDR4 or DDR5 DIMMs, no matter how tall.

▶️ Magnetic Penrose Triangle

A pretty nifty piece of swag included with this AIO is a magnetic Penrose triangle and, boy, let me tell you, this magnet is strong! How strong? I threw it across the living room to a metal door and it instantly secured itself to the door!

▶️ 28mm thick single-frame fans

There’s more to a cooler than just the heatsink. The included fans have a direct impact on aesthetics, noise levels, and overall thermal performance. The E15 features a 360mm single-frame fan unit, and it is pre-installed for user convenience, saving a few moments during cooler installation.

▶️ MSI EZ Display software – Pros and Cons

Strictly speaking, you don’t actually need to install MSI’s EZ Display software to enjoy the functionality of the included screen. The E15’s default animation shows a Penrose triangle against a background strongly reminiscent of the brutalist Isu ruins from The Fate of Atlantis DLC in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.

If you’re happy with this default animation, no software installation is necessary. It’s only if you want to customize the screen that software installation is necessary.

Once the MSI EZ Display software has been installed, there are three primary configuration styles. The first is a “full screen” mode that has several stunning animations, each unique but in the same style as the others.

In addition to the visual theme, you can choose to enable several metrics on the screen. In the image above, I’ve enabled the date and time, but you can opt for other things, like CPU and GPU temperatures, processor frequencies, etc.

These are nice features and certainly look good, but that’s where the customization ends for metrics. The EZ Display doesn’t currently let you change the position or size of the metrics displayed. If MSI wants this AIO to appeal to tech enthusiasts, that’s a feature they’ll need to implement – especially when you consider the E15’s luxury price tag. This lack of proper customization is especially annoying when trying to display metrics with a custom image, as shown below.

Another aspect I would like to see improved is the ability to deselect themes in the “playlist.” Currently, if you let the animations shuffle or loop, every single animation (preset and custom) that you have included in your library is played.

The second configuration mode available for this screen is a “split-screen” option, which currently has only two presets. As the mode’s name implies, this splits the display into two parts, allowing for one animation or image on each side of the display.

The last mode available for this screen is extended mode, which allows you to use the display as a secondary monitor with Windows.

This allows you to use your own software and show off themes and images entirely of your own creation, play movies of any length, etc. There is one downside though: when I tested this mode, HDCP would not work on either the MSI display or my primary LG ultrawide monitor when streaming video from Amazon Prime on my primary monitor, resulting in degraded video quality.

▶️ Packaging

The outer packaging loudly advertises the product, with a stunning black-and-gold theme and the AIO’s image on the front. The individual parts in the package are protected with cardboard, with mini boxes for the radiator, pump, accessories, and etc.

Included with the package are:

• Mounting hardware for AMD and Intel platforms
• 120mm fans
• Thermal paste
• Magnetic Penrose triangle
• Bending tube clips

▶️ MSI MEG CORELIQUID E15 360 AM5 Installation

To begin putting things together, you’ll first need to remove the default AM4/5 retention brackets and replace them with the included mounting bars for the AIO.

Next, take the mounting bars and secure them with the included screws.

Now it’s time to apply the thermal compound. If you’re not sure how to do that, we have a handy thermal paste application guide that covers the different methods you can use.

After thermal paste is applied, take the CPU block and press it against the mounting bars, using the built-in screws to secure it in place.

At this point, you’re mostly good to go. You can leave the AIO set up as above if you want, but most users will want to take off the cover from the CPU block and place the screen on top of it instead.

The final step, of course, is to connect the AIO’s cables – ARGB, USB, and PWM.

Real-world testing configuration – AMD AM5 platform

We’ve tested coolers with both the Ryzen 9950X3D and its non-V-Cache sibling, the 9950X. There are some differences in how the 9950X and 9950X3D CPUs are impacted by thermal events. While the heat output of the CCDs of AMD’s 9950X3D is relatively balanced, the 9950X I used has one CCD that runs much hotter than the other, with a difference of over 10 degrees Celsius in some scenarios, shown below.

We’ve since returned to using a 9950X3D for cooler testing, as it has a more balanced heat profile, and is almost certainly a more widely adopted CPU. The benchmark results shared in these reviews may differ from others because I emphasize results that are comparable to real-world use. This means I generally test CPU coolers inside of a closed desktop case, which increases cooling difficulty compared to other testing methods.

Many reviewers test coolers on open test benches, which have a combination of lower airflow needs and lowered ambient temperatures. This can make weak coolers appear stronger than they really are. Some publications have also used generic thermal plates to test cooling solutions. I reject both of these methods because they don’t accurately reflect real-world cooler conditions.

Our latest testing setup uses the FLOVA F50 computer case from Tryx.

This case features a unique “crossflow” fan that pulls air from the side, which the company claims is more effective than traditional intake fans. For air cooling tests, we’ve added a single Noctua NF-A12 G2 intake fan.

PBO Performance and maximum noise levels

We’re going to start this review’s benchmark section by focusing on a traditional maximum performance test, with the CPU cooler’s fans allowed to reach their fastest speeds, for the best cooling possible.

Turning on PBO allows AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D to stretch its legs and consume over 260W. Enabling PBO allows for high power consumption and heat output. When using MSI’s X870E Carbon Wifi motherboard, the CPU will reach its TJ Max (peak temperature) of 95 degrees C (203 F) and thermally throttle, to some extent, with most coolers. When this throttling occurs, I’ve measured the average power consumption to determine performance.

I’ve highlighted the performance of the MEG CoreLiquid E15, the P22, and the prototype P22 to demonstrate how MSI has been continuously improving the thermal performance of its AIOs. The MEG E15 has the second-best results in our current test bench, averaging 62 degrees Celsius over ambient (84 C). Out of curiosity, I also tested the thermal performance to see how better temperatures might perform with an open case – and surprisingly, there was only a single degree’s difference.

The maximum noise levels of this cooler are on the louder end, measuring 48 dBA. But to my ears at least, the the pitch of the cooler’s fans is soft, which makes the cooler feel quieter than how it measures.

200W thermal benchmarks

For the next thermal test, I leave the motherboard settings at their defaults, which results in a power limit of 200W when running Cinebench R23.

Thermal results in this scenario were similar to our first test, with MSI’s E15 being a top performer, holding the third-best results, averaging 47.1 C over ambient (69.1 C).

150W + GPU thermal results

Our next test runs Cinebench on the CPU with a 150W power limit, while also running Furmark on MSI’s RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3x OC. This causes the GPU to consume ~295W of power. This test is designed to emulate the thermals of games, which stress both the CPU and GPU.

MSI’s E15 AIO once again performs well here, with our second-place result when testing in our Tryx FLOVA F50 test bench. Out of curiosity, I also tested this AIO in an open case, which resulted in an additional thermal improvement of 1.8 C.

Noise levels in this scenario were moderate, registering at 40.9 dBA with our Pyle PSP25 sound meter.

Noise-normalized testing

Most testing is performed with the cooler tied to the default fan curve of our MSI X870E Carbon motherboard, but some of y’all prefer to see tests when the noise levels of coolers are equalized. This is especially important to those of you who prefer silent computers. This next test has the CPU cooler noise-normalized to 38.9 dBA, with PBO enabled for the Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU.

This test is especially difficult, because in addition to the reduced noise from the CPU cooler, our current test bench’s system fans are configured to run extremely silently, below the floor of the noise meter I use to measure dBA.

The results here are simply excellent. MSI’s E15 is one of the few AIOs on the market capable of keeping the CPU under TJ Max with PBO enabled in our current test bench, even when the noise levels of the fans are limited.

Karhu DDR5 RAM thermals testing

Your CPU cooler does not operate in isolation. It has an impact on not just your CPU’s temperatures, but also the other components in your build, like your RAM and GPU. To that end, I’ve run the Karhu RAM stress test. This places a load of ~153W on the CPU and ensures system RAM (DDR5 in my case) is fully stable. In this type of scenario, most AIOs tend to produce worse results than air coolers.

DDR5 temperatures in this test were good, the best of any AIO, save those incorporating VRM or RAM fans.

Conclusion

With a hefty $399 price, this AIO is strictly for users who don’t care much about build budgets. The stunning black-and-gold aesthetic reflects that luxury status, and the included 6.7-inch screen and preset animations are stunning. Thermal performance is also among the best AIOs on the market, so the cooler isn’t all about style over substance.

But of course, with the ongoing inflated prices of RAM, storage, and GPUs, most of us aren’t likely to seriously consider spending nearly $400 on a cooler. If you’re looking for a more budget-minded alternative, I’d encourage you to check out Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III Pro instead.

There was good news for the U.S. recorded music industry this week, as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced revenues outpaced inflation in H1 2026. “U.S. recorded music revenue reached $6B in the first half of 2026, up 6.9%,” noted the association. Probably more interesting, though, is that consumers have been seriously splashing cash on retro or legacy physical audio formats. A strong resurgence in CD and vinyl music sales saw both up double figures in the latest figures. “Physical revenues jumped 25.9%, powered by 17.7% vinyl growth and a 58.6% increase in CDs,” reported the RIAA.

With the extremely strong headline growth in ‘retro’ formats, one could be excused for thinking consumers are pulling back from digital music distributors like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and so on. However, the RIAA underlines that “every major revenue category grew, reflecting a healthy and increasingly diversified marketplace.” While we focus on streaming, this digital segment generated $4.9B in H1 2026, up 4.7% and remaining the largest source of recorded music industry revenue. Other digital stats worth highlighting are the 6.4% growth in paid subscriptions, reaching $3.4B, and the 3.7% growth in free streaming, reaching $900M.

Returning to physical music media, the RIAA characterizes this resurgence as “continued fan excitement with different ways to experience music across an increasingly varied marketplace.” Indeed, I have seen more and more tempting special edition re-releases and remasters on CD and vinyl, for bands I enjoy listening to.

Overall, the numbers do seem to suggest that the boom in physical music distribution isn’t conclusive evidence that consumers are rejecting how the music streaming industry is changing its offerings (pricing, catalogs, etc). However, there may indeed be some backlash here, as we have seen in the TV/movie streaming business. Some consumers are increasingly frustrated with video streaming offerings and are building up home media catalogs by purchasing DVDs, Blu-rays, etc. We’ve started to see a bit of this in video gaming, too, as the high-profile case regarding Sony PlayStation digital game ownership has stirred some gamers into action.

The PS5 emulation scene is growing at a rapid pace, perhaps the most rapidly we've ever seen, because the PS5 version of GTA V is now at least playable at up to 60 FPS on PC for a few minutes as modders work to fine-tune their approach. The last time we checked in over a month ago, GTA V was still stuck at the initial splash screen while 2D games were running smoothly, and other 3D games were just beginning to perform. Evidently, a lot of progress has been made since then — all in an effort to potentially get GTA VI playable on PC before an official port drops.

The video above shows GTA V's starting mission running at roughly 40 to 60 FPS, fluctuating based on how much action is going on. It's the starting mission of the game, so the true test of the open world is still a bit far out. The game is being emulated via KytyPS5, the most prominent PS5 emulator at the moment, alongside ShadEmu. The PC running it has a Ryzen 7 9950X3D CPU and an RX 7900 XT GPU, so admittedly very high-end specs.

Unfortunately, as soon as the player gets to the shutter that opens up to police waiting outside, the game crashes. It would've been almost euphoric to see actual gunplay between the character you're controlling and the NPCs shooting at you, but what we already witnessed was highly impressive, nonetheless. This is by far the biggest milestone in the PS5 emulation scene and the closest we've gotten to the actual goal of all this sudden development.

Case in point, a user was able to get past the starting mission and actually into the open world of GTA V. The game was running below 15 FPS, but as soon as Franklin and Lamar's cutscene occurred, the frame rate rose to the mid-40s. The game crashed as soon as the cutscene ended, but remember that GTA V cutscenes are not pre-rendered videos but are instead rendered in real time using the game engine, so this is a very impressive feat for the KytyPS5 emulator.

GTA V is not a difficult game to run; Android flagships from the past three years can emulate it at up to 60 FPS as well these days. But getting the PS5 version of the game to even be playable on PC in such a short amount of time is a testament to the community's dedication. It's easy to imagine that after seeing the GTA VI gameplay reveal, the urge to play it on PC right away instead of waiting for an official release has spiked to an all-time high.

GTA V actually first booted inside KytyPS5 a week ago before getting to this point, but it's not the only game running well right now. There are at least four other PS5 titles capable of being played at 60 FPS through emulation. The tweet above shows them all running on an RTX 5080 system with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D. We tried one game ourselves — PAC-MAN WORLD Re-PAC — and it ran shockingly well, locked at 60 FPS, even on an RX 6700 XT rig paired with a Ryzen 7 7700X processor.

On the other hand, SharpEmu is also making progress, but that team has a different approach to the same hurdle. They're busy tackling accuracy and infrastructure setup rather than game-specific compatibility, per its GitHub repo. In other words, it means fixing low-level issues that are preventing games like Astro Bot from currently reaching the gameplay state. Astro's Playroom has just barely reached the point where it boots.

SharpEmu is delivering a lot of achievements on the handheld side, though, with massive improvements made for the Steam Deck. The post below shows a similar level of performance for Astro’s Playroom compared to a much more powerful RX 7900 XT system with a Ryzen 9 7900X CPU. It's still barely 1 frame per second, and the game doesn't get past the boot screen, but the fact that it's even possible is enough cause for celebration. Remember, this is the worst that PS5 emulation will ever be.

A former Jagex employee who used to work on Old School RuneScape (OSRS) was sentenced to a three-year prison term and suspended for two years after he was found guilty of stealing over $400,000 worth of virtual gold and selling it on the black market. According to Dexerto, 32-year-old Andrew Lakeman, also known as Jed Sanderson, worked on the game starting in 2015 and is known to the community as “Mod Jed.” By 2018, Jagex noticed a pattern: accounts would get recovered under suspicious circumstances, and then valuable in-game items and gold would disappear from them.

OSRS’s in-game economy is similar to that of the real world, where players can trade items with each other or sell them directly on the Grand Exchange, which functions much like a stock exchange. While we don’t know if OSRS players have built collections worth $100,000 or more like in other titles such as Team Fortress 2, these missing virtual items still hold real monetary value and could have a direct financial impact on its players.

Jagex initially thought it was a glitch, but a deeper investigation led the company to suspect that it was an inside job. The event wasn’t that catastrophic for Jagex, unlike the Rainbow Six Siege X hack that shut down the game and forced Ubisoft to take all its servers offline. However, it’s still a major breach for the developer, especially given that the hack was done by its own employee. Failing to act on the issue would break player trust — a crucial metric for a game that averages more than 100,000 players at any given time.

So, it changed how account recoveries work and also modified its firewall without telling its people, allowing its IT team to track the illegal activity back to Mod Jed. Lakeman denied the accusations and claimed that somebody hacked his account to conduct the thefts, but Jagex fired him anyway and reported the incident to the police. Investigators later discovered that the virtual gold and other in-game items Lakeman stole were eventually sold on the black market for over $400,000. He even held $493,000 in cash in various bank accounts, allegedly as proceeds of cryptocurrency sales, although it’s unclear whether this amount came from his illicit sales.

He was finally arrested in July 2019 but was only given a three-year sentence, suspended for two years, on September 3. The Cambridge Crown Court also gave him a 150-hour unpaid work sentence, plus 25 days of rehabilitation. “Lakeman was well aware that what he was doing was wrong, and the hundreds of thousands of pounds he gained from selling the in-game items is no different from any other theft,” Detective Constable Andrew McKeane said in a statement by the Cambridgeshire Constabulary. “Just because it’s virtual, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t face the full force of the law.”

Kaleidescape, a maker of luxury home theater equipment, has revealed its latest media server, the "Compact Terra Prime 246TB SSD." As the descriptive name suggests, it's a compact movie server with 246TB of storage for opulent home theater setups. We didn't get a price, but it's likely to be $150,000+ given what the company's other servers cost. It can be combined with Kaleidescape's $4,000 Strato V media player to form the highest-end movie-watching experience possible outside of actual theaters.

The Compact Terra Prime uses the same chassis as the aforementioned Strato V player and holds 2x enterprise-grade 123TB SSDs inside. We didn't get confirmation on what kind of SSDs these are, but we can infer from the specs that it's a pair of Solidigm D5-P5336 drives. It's the only SKU that makes sense; each of those is a PCIe 4.0 ultra-high-density NVMe SSD using 3D QLC NAND, likely in the U.2 form factor. Anyhow, the combined 246TB capacity can hold up to 4,000 standard 4K movies, or 2,300 "4K Cinematic" / 8K movies, or 6,800 HD movies.

To understand what 4K Cinematic means, you have to know that Kaleidescape is not just a manufacturer. The company also runs an online movie store that directly licenses master copies of films from major studios. The platform hosts extremely high bitrate content for purchase that exceeds most 4K Blu-rays. As such, the 4K Cinematic tier promises 110 Mbps video with 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, with no compression. You also get support for HDR formats such as Dolby Vision and lossless audio formats like Dolby Atmos.

Watching these movies requires a proprietary Kaleidescape media player. The server isn't necessary, since the company's latest Strato V comes with 960 GB of onboard storage to hold up to eight 4K Cinematic movies at a time. When you combine a player, a server, and a movie store, you get the absolute pinnacle of home video: Blu-ray's high fidelity and online streaming's convenience in one place. The Compact Terra Prime 246TB simply represents one enormous piece of the puzzle.

The server weighs just 4 pounds, or less than 2 kilograms, and measures out to 7.87 x 1.52 x 10 inches. It has two fans that cool the NAND at a maximum noise level of 20 dB. The back of the device has a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port that Kaleidescape promises can download a 4K movie in just 4 minutes if you saturate its throughput. This matters because you cannot stream movies from the company's online store; they must be downloaded locally first as part of the uncompromising experience.

Once available, though, the server supports up to 25 instances of 4K playback simultaneously. That's more than even most full-fledged movie theaters ever do. The Compact Terra Prime 246TB is also constructed entirely out of aluminum. You'd expect that kind of build quality given what it costs. Kaleidescape didn't reveal an MSRP, but its 120TB SSD server currently costs $34,995. Doing simple math, the 246TB version should cost double, if not more. It's available now, but you can only purchase it through select Kaleidescape partners on a made-to-order basis.

With the entire PC hardware industry in shambles right now, laptops represent some of the best deals to be had. The integrated nature of these devices often results in unexpected savings compared to their desktop counterparts. As such, we've found a great offer on an HP OmniBook Flip X 2-in-1 for just $699, down 47% from its list price of $1,329 on Best Buy. It's a 16-inch OLED laptop with solid performance for everyday tasks, and then some.

• Check out this deal on Best Buy

This specific variant of the OmniBook X Flip 2-in-1 being at $699 puts it directly in MacBook Neo territory, which also starts at $699 now. But for that money, you're getting a whole lot more computer. The main selling point here is the gorgeous 16-inch OLED display carrying a 1920x1200 resolution. It's touchscreen and, owing to its name, flips around 180 degrees to form a tablet. The laptop is built well so turning it around doesn't feel flimsy, either.

Inside the heart of the laptop sits a Ryzen AI 5 340 processor. It's a Gorgon Point chip, so basically a Strix Point refresh, but it's capable of churning through daily tasks like butter. It has four Zen 5 cores (two of which are Zen 5c) and four RDNA 3.5 Compute Units, which are enough for very lightweight 1080p gaming. This laptop doesn't have a dedicated GPU so the integrated Radeon 840M serves as your main GPU, but that just makes the 76Wh battery last even longer.

The rest of the laptop features strong specs for its class as well, staring with 16GB of LPDDRX5 memory, which is double what you get on the MacBook Neo. There's also a 512GB SSD inside and you get a 65W GaN charger in the box. In terms of I/O, there are 2x Thunderbolt (USB-C 40 Gbps) ports, 2x USB-A 10 Gbps ports, 1x HDMI 2.1 and a 3.5mm audio jack onboard. You even get Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0 for wireless connectivity.

All in all, this is one impressive budget laptop that's not trying to deceive you into thinking it can do more than what it can. It's meant for regular, everyday work like browsing the web and media consumption, especially with that beautiful OLED display, and it excels at that. It only weighs 4 lbs. and for just $699 on Best Buy, you genuinely cannot find a better laptop without significant compromises elsewhere.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

Microsoft just released another version of Windows 11 designed for developers, dubbed Project Zenith. According to the Windows Blogs, this operating system is optimized for developer workflows and will first become available on the AMD Ryzen AI Halo, Team Red’s direct answer to the Nvidia DGX Spark, although it will also arrive on more devices from Microsoft’s OEM and other silicon partners soon. Redmond calls Project Zenith “a ready-to-code distraction-free Windows experience on developer-class devices with 64 GB+ unified memory and 250+ GB/s memory bandwidth,” claiming that “developers can jump right in.”

It comes with pre-installed tools like Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, PowerToys, WinAppCLI, Windows Dev Skills, Intelligent Terminal, PowerShell 7, Git, GitHub CLI, AzureCLI, Core Utils, Oh My Posh, Python 3.14+, uv, NVM, Node 24+, WSL 2+ Ubuntu, and .NET 10. Aside from that, Microsoft said it pre-configures Windows 11 so developers don’t have to dig through the settings menus of various apps to configure them for their needs.

It’s primarily designed for AI developers, especially since the devices it’s installed on are designed to run 30B+ parameter models locally and without meters. The company also made it more secure for developing and running agents, deploying features such as OS-enforced identity, containment through Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), and enterprise-grade manageability for agents.

Project Zenith is Microsoft’s response to the AI token crisis, which has caused costs to spiral out of control, especially as agents use 1000x more tokens compared to standard AI. While frontier models would still be available on the cloud, AI developers could run everything else locally through devices like this, powered by this version of Windows 11. This should help AI developers keep using their agents without feeling the bite of tokenized billing, which is especially crucial for those working in smaller organizations or experimenting at home.

One big tradeoff with Project Zenith, though, is that it’s only available on expensive devices, at least for the moment. The AMD Ryzen AI Halo, with its AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, 128GB LPDDR5x-8000 RAM, 2TB SSD, and integrated Radeon 8060S graphics, costs $3,999.99 on Micro Center. Even if Microsoft eventually makes Project Zenith available for separate purchase and installable on other mini-PCs, the 64 GB+ unified memory requirement will be a major roadblock, especially with skyrocketing RAM prices driven by the AI boom.

Gamescom organizers issued an apology after facing backlash over their initial response to a report that some indie exhibitors had their equipment stolen from their booths. The company said in an X post that it accepts the criticism it received and recognizes the gravity of the developers’ losses.

“Over the past few days, we have received a great deal of criticism for the way we communicated about the theft of hardware belonging to several indie developers. That criticism is justified. Our first response did not strike the right tone, and it did not show the people affected the empathy they deserved. We are sorry,” Gamescom wrote in its statement.

“A theft like this is far more than a material loss. It can ruin an entire gamescom for the people it happens to, and it can destroy work that took months or years to build — work that, for a small studio, can be almost everything. To everyone affected: we understand what this has cost you, and we should have so from the very first moment.”

Aside from apologizing for its initial remarks, the company also laid out the steps it has been taking to address the issue. It said that it has already been in contact with the affected parties to learn about the consequences of the incident. Alongside that, it’s also conducting its regular post-event review and exhibitor feedback evaluation, plus an additional security review for indie exhibitors. As part of the latter, it’s inviting shared indie booth organizers to a roundtable “so that we can develop concrete measures together.”

So far, only three exhibitors have reported having their laptops and consoles stolen — Mimic developer Ryan Laley, iam8bit, and Tessera Studios. The latter two were situated close together in Hall 4.1, next to the west entrance gate, making them easy targets, but Tessera Studios was in Hall 10.2, on the second floor and quite distant from the other two victims. Laley lost a brand-new Alienware gaming laptop, while iam8bit reported two missing laptops. Tessera Studios also lost two laptops, plus a Steam Deck.

This is a considerable sum, especially since these devices are likely gaming laptops that cost far more than your average entry-level model. But beyond the monetary cost, the bigger blow to these developers is the missing intellectual property. While they may have backed up their projects on some of the best external SSDs, the fact that their unfinished work is now out in the wild will be “heartbreaking” for any game developer.

The gaming industry has since stepped up and offered to help the affected studios and developers. “We have also been moved by how this industry responded. Within hours, people offered help — unconditionally, and without being asked. That says a great deal about this community, and we are grateful for it,” the organizers said. “What it does not do is relieve us, as the organizers, of our own responsibility to work together with our exhibitors and partners to create the best possible environment for everyone.”

PAX West is underway at the Seattle Convention Center in Seattle, Washington, and Nvidia is offering a selection of its Founder's Edition GPUs at MSRP. Nvidia has RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 models available while supplies last, along with packs of GeForce Trading Cards Series 1. Jacob Freeman, GeForce Evangelist at Nvidia, shared the announcement on X, telling interested gamers to "come find me" if they want a GPU.

Nvidia's Verified Priority Access (VPA) is a lottery program for Founder's Edition cards that the company launched in 2022 for RTX 40-series GPUs. It returned in 2025 for RTX 50-series GPUs, and although you can still sign up for the program online, Nvidia has seemingly shifted to offering MSRP GPUs during live events. Last month, the company did something similar at QuakeCon in Austin, Texas.

Over the past month, we've seen a sharp rise in the price of Nvidia's highest-end graphics cards in our GPU price tracker, with the $1,999 RTX 5090 now regularly listed for above $5,000. The RTX 5090 has been a particular flashpoint due to its plentiful 32GB of GDDR7 memory, making it ideal not only for flagship gaming performance but also (relatively) low-cost local AI inference.

Earlier this month, however, we saw increases as large as 39% in median list price for RTX 50-series GPUs, following a series of reports about regional price increases outside of the U.S. The increases hit the middle of Nvidia's Blackwell stack the hardest, with the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB jumping by 29% and RTX 5070 jumping by 36%.

The RTX 5090 has continued to rise in price, even after the hike we saw early last month. At the time, the median price was $4,699.99, but now, you'll spend at least $5,000 on a GPU online. Deals, if you can call them that, are available on the RTX 5090 if you have a Micro Center nearby, with models going down as low as $4,200.

This week, Nvidia launched DLSS 5 for RTX 50-series GPUs in NBA 2K27, following a leaked DLL that allowed modders to get Neural Rendering operational in just about any game. Within days, the community got DLSS 5 operational on RTX 40-series GPUs, as well as older RTX 30-series GPUs, though performance was unplayable on the latter. Nvidia says it plans to bring DLSS 5 support to RTX 40-series GPUs at a later date.

Although Nvidia doesn't have a booth at PAX West 2026, many of its partners do, including Starforge Systems, Razer, and Lenovo. Freeman says he'll be posting updates on X on where and when attendees can find him.

AMD is no stranger to refreshing its older CPU families with new SKUs, especially since the consumer hardware market for new products is currently in a slump. Ryzen 7000 is a relatively new lineup for the company, but it seems like it might be the latest recipient of this strategy. Leaker Roland Quandt is reporting that a Ryzen 5 7500 non-F is coming soon with specs identical to the 7500F, but at double the price for some reason.

AMD Ryzen 5 7500 (no F, no X3D, no nothing) incoming.AM5 socket3,7 GHz, up to 5,0 GHz boost6C/12T38MB cache in total65W TDP~230 Euro

— @rquandt.bsky.social (@rquandt.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-09-05T13:08:32.503Z

As the post above clarifies, this is a bog-standard chip with no 3D V-Cache or anything extra. Actually, that's not entirely factual, as ditching the "F" moniker means the processor is gaining integrated graphics. However, given what we see on the Ryzen 5 7600, this iGPU will comprise only two small RDNA 2 CUs. That's enough for a display output and everyday tasks, but don't expect to be gaming on this thing.

The rest of the specs remain unchanged from the Ryzen 5 7500F. Its rumored non-F counterpart is also a six-core, twelve-thread CPU with a 3.7 GHz base clock and 5.0 GHz boost clock. You'll get 38MB of combined cache, likely a 32MB L3 + 6MB L2 split, along with a 65W TDP. All those match the 7500F, with the only glaring difference being the price — the Ryzen 5 7500 is supposed to somehow retail for 230 Euros, or $267 freedom units.

For context, the Ryzen 5 7500F launched at $179 three years ago but quickly came down in price and can be had for just $116 right now. Even in Germany, it costs 105 Euros at the moment, which translates to $122. Moreover, for the $250+ price rumored for the 7500 non-F, you can instead get the much more powerful Ryzen 5 9600X along with a whole B850 motherboard on Newegg as we speak. You can even find the 7600X3D for less than $250 on Amazon right now.

The only way one could try to justify this pricing is by arguing that the 7500 non-F comes with a box and cooler, unlike the 7500F, which is a tray-only package. Then again, these comparisons are based on current pricing, and we know how much of a mirage that can be during the component crisis. Price hikes for CPUs are not a rarity anymore, and since we don't have a rumored launch window for the 7500 non-F, it could coincide with one.

That's just speculation, though; take everything you just read with a grain of salt. The reason the rumored price is in Euros to begin with is that the leaker is based in Germany. We don't even know if this chip will receive a global launch.

IFA isn't typically a PC-focused show. But this year, Europe’s biggest tech show had plenty of computing hardware, in between robots and AI washing machines.

Laptop OEMs are continuing to adapt to a market riled by RAM shortages and the debut of the MacBook Neo earlier this year. Dell, Acer, and Lenovo all dropped more affordable, mid-range machines with plenty of color options – and let’s not forget Packard Bell.

Nvidia and AMD, on the other hand, are both trying to bring AI computing home – shortages and high prices or not. Nvidia continued to tease its RTX Spark platform (including an October release date), while AMD finally has device partners for its AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495, with up to 192GB of unified memory. While Nvidia’s RTX Spark loomed large over the PC side of the show, there wasn't much newly announced hardware, aside from Lenovo’s 2-in-1 and a mini PC from Acer. Pricing is still unknown, and demos were largely locked down behind company representatives. We're still waiting to see the true impact of these systems on the PC market.

In between, some unique monitors and peripherals dotted the show floor, challenging size and speed constraints to innovate where they can amid a challenging component and pricing landscape. — Andrew E. Freedman

Lenovo IdeaPad Vibe

IFA 2026 proved the Windows world is not slowing down when it comes to producing rivals to the MacBook Neo. But Lenovo has taken the fight to its logical extremes, adding more color and personalization options. The IdeaPad Vibe sports seven colors, ranging from chill blue to spicy gold and, of course, lowkey gray.

You can also choose the colors for the keys on the keyboard. In theory, you buy a set to match or contrast when you purchase the laptop, though you may be able to buy additional sets down the line to mix it up. You don't see replaceable keycaps on laptops too often.The internal specs include AMD Ryzen AI 4000 series or Snapdragon X processors. There are 14- and 15-inch screens, and all-aluminum builds or a plastic bottom. The base model will start at $699, matching perfectly with the MacBook Neo and Dell XPS 13, and bringing a ton of style to the mid-level budget PC space. — Andrew E. Freedman

Read more: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Vibe laptops stand out with seven colors and swappable keycaps – 14,15-inch models with Snapdragon X and AMD AI 400 CPUs to start at $699

Acer Nitro XV275U Z2

While we’ve seen a lot of activity in the mid- to high-end of the gaming monitor sector, especially with OLED panels, there’s still a lot to be excited about in the entry-level / budget segment. And Acer aims to make cash-strapped gamers happy with its Nitro XV275U Z2.

This is a tri-mode monitor, offering three distinct resolution/refresh rate presets thanks to Dynamic Frequency and Resolution (DFR). Featuring a 27-inch IPS panel, the Nitro XV275U Z2 has a native QHD (2560 x 1440) resolution and 275 Hz refresh rate. However, you can step down to 1080p resolution and boost the maximum refresh rate to 360 Hz. And if you’re willing to sacrifice even more resolution by dropping to 720p, you’ll be blessed with a 500 Hz maximum refresh rate.

That’s a lot of flexibility for gamers, and Acer further ups the value factor by including 1,152-zone Mini LED backlighting, typical brightness of 500 nits, and 1,000 nits in HDR mode. Best of all, the Nitro XV275U Z2 will be available at an enticing price of $329 when it debuts in Q4 2026. — Brandon Hill

Read more: Acer launches seven new gaming monitors across Nitro and Predator families — tri-mode panels, QD-OLEDs, Mini LEDs, 1,000 Hz, and more

Lexar Muse

With so much of the world’s flash memory capacity being gobbled up by AI hardware, most storage makers don’t seem to be focused on consumer innovation. But Lexar hasn’t taken its eye off the portable SSD space, showing off its Muse, a drive about the size of a credit card – and a few cards thick at 3.15 x 1.89 x 0.15 inches. And bulk matters when your drive is designed primarily to attach magnetically to the back of your phone for recording video. The Muse does this with a magnetic sleeve that you slide the drive into, much like a card holder.Lexar says the svelte design was achieved through a combination of a custom thin PCB, high-density NAND stacking, and an internal design that’s more integrated than most external SSDs. There are, of course, some downsides to the ultra-thin design, like the lack of space for a USB-C port, which Lexar has replaced with pogo pins on the back and a proprietary magnetic SnapLink cable. Capacity is also limited to just 512GB and 1TB. The 10 Gbps drive is expected to arrive later this year. — Matt Safford

Read more: Lexar announces ‘world’s thinnest portable SSD’ in celebration of the brand’s 30th anniversary – Lexar Muse drive achieves 0.15-inch thickness with proprietary pogo-pin cable, magnetic sleeve for phone mounting

Minisforum N5 Max

With AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 finally launching in systems, it wasn't surprising to see it in a handful of mini PCs and workstations. But it was surprising to find it in a NAS.

The Minisforum N5 Max takes the Gorgon Halo part (it's also available with last-gen Strix Halo) and puts it in a five-bay network-attached storage device. Beyond those five HDD bays (up to 32TB each, or 160TB total), five M.2 SSD slots allow up to another 40TB, giving this device up to 200TB of space for your files. Do you want Qwen 3.8 and 200TB of files? Because on the show floor, the company showed Qwen 3.8 navigating 200TB of files.

The idea, according to Minisforum, is that your agents are running on the same device as all of your files, making for one convenient local device. The system comes with the 16-core, 32-thread processor, AMD Radeon 8065S graphics, and up to 192GB of LPDDR5x unified memory. It's likely to come at the end of September, and while reps for Minisforum didn't have a price, they suggested it could be over $7,000, just like the company’s upcoming Gorgon Halo workstation.The system supports the company's MinisCloud OS, Linux, Proxmox, and Windows 11. So in theory, you could use this as your primary computer. But this is one of the only pieces of AI computing furniture we saw here at IFA. — Andrew E. Freedman

Read more: Minisforum launches local AI solutions at IFA 2026 — AI Agent NAS N5 and AI Mini Workstation MS-S1 use AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 processors designed to run models locally

Acer Project DualPlay Mini

Acer’s Project DualPlay Mini is the platonic ideal of a concept device, in that it’s equal parts interesting, impractical, and unlikely to be a product you can actually buy. It’s a handheld clamshell that transitions into a netbook-style device, giving you access to a keyboard so you can get work done on the go.

The device is unsurprisingly chunky, and the keyboard is decisively impractical, but concepts are for trying out new ideas. The device folds in half, but it doesn’t feature two displays. Rather, the display is set on a separate hinge that can rotate to the front in handheld mode, or to the back in laptop mode. Acer told us at IFA that the device comes with a Panther Lake chip, though it’s unclear if that’s Panther Lake proper or one of Intel’s cut-down G3 SoCs for handhelds.

The device features a fingerprint reader, along with two USB-C ports (likely Thunderbolt 4) and two back buttons, typical of most handhelds. It adopts the same cooling system as the Predator Atlas 8, Acer’s traditional G3 handheld. Although it’s not clear if we’ll eventually see the DualPlay Mini on store shelves, we were able to see the device in-person at IFA, showcasing that it’s much further along than a few renders — Jake Roach

Read more: Acer’s wild Project DualPlay Mini is a foldable handheld that doubles as a netbook

DLSS 5 officially debuted inside NBA 2K27 yesterday with more games to follow down the line, along with RTX 40-series support planned for the future. However, if you don't own a GPU from either of those families, the modding community has once again stepped up to offer a workaround. Developer danielblnc has figured out a way to make DLSS 5 work on AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs (RX 9000 series). As long as you're playing a DirectX 12 game with FSR support, "DLSS-NR-on-AMD" can inject DLSS 5 inside it.

The project is closed-source, so we don't know exactly how it works but we can make a few educated guesses. The mod is likely using a dynamic wrapper to intercept NGX API calls and fool the DLSS 5 DLL into loading on an AMD GPU. Once loaded, it extracts the AI model and Tensor data inside that DLL and converts those calculations into math AMD's matrix accelerators can understand via the HIP RT backend (rather than translating CUDA).

It then hooks into the game's FSR pipeline to run that frame data through the neural model and produce the same quality results you would get on an actual RTX 50-series GPU, just without any of the Tensor cores. DLSS-NR-on-AMD doesn't work on any game requiring anti-cheat. Even in single-player titles the performance is not great, especially since the RX 9070 XT is the top-end RDNA 4 GPU available.

Initially, Cyberpunk 2077 was running at 28 FPS at 1080p on the 9070 XT with DLSS 5 on, but a patch has been released that improves the frame rate by 12% to a stable 30 FPS. Another update has added a 2% boost but that's likely negligible. Performance reports from users online are a bit less optimistic. The ultimate goal is to get performance similar to an RTX 5070 Ti, which is not far-fetched since both GPUs are matched in raster and very close in ray tracing.

If you want to try it yourself, just head on over to the GitHub page and grab the latest release (it's an executable). Inside, you won't find the DLSS 5 DLL; you have to provide a "legally-obtained" copy yourself, as the repo points out. Currently, only NBA 2K27 natively supports DLSS 5 and that's where the DLL was originally leaked from. Anyways, once you have it, move the DLL and the executable inside the game's bin folder. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish installation.

Open the game, select FSR 3 or 4 from the in-game graphics settings, and press the End key to bring up the custom menu. This menu allows you to adjust individual parameters like structure and tone, similar to how the ReShade mod works in other games. You see the changes in real-time and it looks just as "good" as the non-intercepted DLSS 5. Don't expect any miracles because DLSS 5 is already very compute heavy and you're adding extra overhead by running it on non-compatible hardware.

Sure, both the RTX 50-series and the RX 9000 series support FP8 formats but DLSS 5 is meant to run on Tensor cores; not AMD's dual-issue AI accelerators. However, since the RTX 40-series also has Tensor cores and native FP8 support, Nvidia has confirmed that DLSS 5 will eventually make its way onto last-gen silicon as well. As for DLSS-NR-on-AMD, users have been able to get it running on RX 7000 series, but performance is once again abysmal because of the lack of FP8 support.

The GitHub repo does mention RDNA 3 support being explored but there are no plans for it at the moment. There is a lot of work to be done just to get the RX 9070 XT performance on the level of the 5070 Ti first. Ultimately, the ambition of the modding community never fails to impress because this is the slowest DLSS 5 on RDNA 4 will ever be. Nvidia's efforts to optimize DLSS 5 on its own hardware will, inadvertently, improve this mod as well as time goes on.

Xbox Game Pass has been an alternative option for gamers who cannot afford the best graphics cards. However, Microsoft has changed the business model for its cloud gaming service. The company has decided to monetize actual gaming time. Beginning in November, Game Pass subscribers will have new monthly limits on their total cloud gaming playtime. Once they reach these limits, players will be prompted to purchase additional gaming hours from the Xbox Store to keep playing.

Game Pass Essential, Premium, and Ultimate subscribers will face monthly cloud playtime limits of five, 10, and 15 hours, respectively. The changes affect only Xbox Cloud Gaming, a feature included with Xbox Game Pass that lets subscribers stream and play games directly from Microsoft's servers over the Internet. Subscribers can still download and install as many Xbox Game Pass titles as they want on their consoles or gaming systems, with no monthly limits on playtime.

Needless to say, Microsoft's decision marks a drastic shift for Xbox Cloud Gaming, moving from an unlimited model to a capped-hour system. Under the current packages, Game Pass Essential, Premium, and Ultimate users pay $2, $1.50, and $1.53 per hour for Xbox Cloud Gaming, respectively. Despite announcing these changes, Microsoft has yet to disclose details regarding the pricing structure for additional playtime.

A hardcore gamer who subscribes to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate could easily average around 50 hours of cloud gameplay per month. For example, if they pay the highest rate ($1.53) for 35 overage hours, an Xbox Series S 512GB ($499.99) would pay for itself in under 10 months. Alternatively, the user could break even on an Xbox Series X 1TB ($749.99) in about 14 months.

These changes will significantly affect heavy cloud gamers who stream games regularly. Even the highest subscription tier, Game Pass Ultimate, now imposes a 15-hour monthly playtime cap. The limit is not even enough to complete one game per month. For instance, AAA titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 can take almost 30 hours to complete, even if you just stick to the main storyline.

Xbox Game Pass Pricing

The new policy introduces limits for frequent cloud gamers, but it also opens a new market for Microsoft: casual players who don't own a console or may not want to commit to a subscription but are willing to buy gaming hours to play select titles in the Xbox Game Pass library. Microsoft's decision ultimately transforms Xbox Cloud Gaming into an "à la carte" type of service where gamers buy cloud playtime hours as needed.

Microsoft attributes its recent policy changes to the rising infrastructure costs associated with maintaining the cloud server network. The company estimated only about 4% of its subscribers will be directly impacted by the new playtime limits. Therefore, it is reasonable to think that the other 96% of the user base do not use Xbox Cloud Gaming or stay under the monthly hour thresholds.

Over the past two years, Microsoft has implemented two price increases for Xbox Game Pass, with the most recent hike occurring in October of last year. Interestingly, despite the upward trend in pricing, the company made a surprising move by reducing the cost of Xbox Game Pass earlier this year. By shifting Xbox Cloud Gaming to a metered system, Microsoft may be trying to maintain profitability and subscriber retention.

But nothing about the timing appears coincidental. Grand Theft Auto VI, arguably the most anticipated title of the decade, will launch on November 19. Microsoft’s new Xbox Cloud Gaming policy is set to take effect in the very same month. Microsoft is strategically positioning the subscription service to capitalize on the massive surge of interest. The company likely wants to attract users who do not own a console or gaming system because of the ridiculous pricing but still want to play Grand Theft Auto VI.

Memory prices have reached unprecedented highs, so every bit of savings can make a real difference. Corsair has stepped up to offer discounts up to 23% on select Vengeance RGB DDR5-6400 memory kits in both 32GB and 64GB configurations. The former capacity is available in a variety of colors, including white, black, and RGB variants.

• Check out the Vengeance RGB DDR5-6400 64GB deal on Corsair
• Check out the Vengeance DDR5-6400 32GB deal on Corsair
• Check out the Vengeance DDR5-6400 32GB deal on Corsair
• Check out the Vengeance RGB DDR5-6400 32GB deal on Corsair

The 64GB memory kit is a great upgrade for consumers who need lots of memory for productivity. It features four 16GB memory modules, so it requires a motherboard with four memory slots. The memory kit operates at DDR5-6400 with memory timings tightened to 32-40-40-84. It requires 1.4V to reach its rated performance. Optimized for Intel’s latest 700- and 800-series platforms, the memory kit includes full Intel XMP support for easy setup.

For consumers who prefer a mainstream memory capacity without compromising on performance, the 32GB memory kit is an exceptional choice. It retains the same specifications as the 64GB variant. However, this variant specifically targets white builds and buyers do not value RGB lighting.

While white memory modules help hightlight a PC build, sometimes an all-black theme is what many enthusiasts appreciate. The black version of the Vengeance DDR5-6400 32GB memory kit blends effortlessly into any setup, especially minimalist systems that want to keep RGB illumination in check.

For users who want some flashiness in their lives and want their systems to stand out, Corsair has also put the RGB variant of the Vengeance DDR5-6400 32GB memory kit on sale. While it costs just $10 more than the non-RGB counterparts, the added value comes in the shape of Corsair's ten-zone RGB lighting system. You can synchronize the illumination with other Corsair components and peripherals.

The Vengeance RGB DDR5-6400 64GB memory kit and the 32GB SKUs, including the white, black, and RGB flavors, come with Corsair's limited lifetime warranty. Given how absurd prices have become on DDR5 memory kits, you can sleep at night knowing that your substantial investment is protected against factory defects.

Corsair's 20% sale on the selected Vengeance DDR5-6400 memory kits is limited to the U.S. market. Users have until September 20 to take advantage of the nice savings.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

The first units of the ‘world’s first fully transparent video game console’ are shipping to founders, and now the project is on its way to Kickstarter. Above and below you can see images of the new Arduview. As you can see, it isn’t just another clear-shell console or handheld; the makers of this device have fully embraced the latest in transparent electronics. Thus, here we have a crystal shell handheld with a see-through motherboard, using a transparent display.

There have been quite a few transparent shell consoles over the years, with some of the best-known probably being the Game Boy Color in Atomic Purple and the N64 Funtastic series. Earlier this year we saw the new Commodore release a dazzling Starlight edition of the C64U. Most recently, Microsoft has revealed its translucent green Xbox Series X25.

Adruview founder Louis Huang told Tom’s Hardware that while he has always loved transparent consoles and clear-shell mods, he was disappointed that the transparency always just stopped at the frame. “So we pushed it further with a transparent OLED screen, board, and case. You can see straight through the whole device,” wrote the Babson College student.

That's enough about the console’s appearance, what about the guts of this handheld? Well, the Arduview project is based on the open-source Arduboy. You guessed it, this console is based on the Arduino platform, designed for DIY electronics tinkering and coding, and here it is purposed for playing hundreds of community-made 8-bit games on the ATmega32u4 microcontroller with its meager resources (2.5KB RAM, 32KB storage).

Huang highlights that the Arduview weighs just 50g (<1.8 ounces), connects to your computer and charges via USB-C, and there is no app store, no Wi-Fi. Users just power on and play.

If you are interested in this kind of handheld, the Arduview early access program still appears to be open, despite the site mentioning it runs “in August 2026.” I guess we are only just into September… I clicked the button and could still reserve a unit for $5 and benefit from the $49 'founder price.' Apparently it will be $100 at retail.

We don’t have a date for the Kickstarter launch yet, and perhaps there will be similar cheaper-than-$100 offers for early birds, and so on. However, the Kickstarter backers won’t get their hardware until 2027.

As an open-source platform, there are other makers and suppliers of Arduboy hardware, such as Seeed Studio. If the Arduview’s clear charms aren’t reeling you in but the portable platform appeals, you can grab the not-very-transparent Arduboy FX-C available on Amazon at $79.99, for example.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 has arrived in NBA 2K27, and we've been up since midnight testing it across every RTX 50-series graphics card to see what the first official implementation of this tech can do and how it compares to the community-implemented mods that have been circulating over the past couple weeks.

Before we discuss the performance cost of DLSS 5, many will ask whether this tech is even worth getting excited about, given the intense controversy that it's sparked ever since Nvidia revealed it earlier this year.

In short: yes, absolutely.

This first-party implementation of DLSS 5, tuned under the full control of 2K Games' art directors and artists, looks incredible, full stop. If you see it running, you will want to leave it on. It doesn't look like "slop" or a cheap filter. It just looks correct, or at least more correct.

For just a couple of examples, without DLSS 5, even at ultra settings and with RT, the game has a slightly "plastic" or "flat" look. Faces can have a waxy uniformity that immediately indicates that you're looking at a video game, not a live broadcast. Hair looks totally and unnaturally flat. The whites of eyes can be unnaturally bright, giving a sort of googly-eye or doll-like effect that immediately broke my sense of immersion. I didn't think any of this would be a big deal for a sports game, but it all stands out.

DLSS 5 breathes incredible life into NBA 2K27. Skin looks like real flesh and blood. Eyes are rendered with the proper tones, depth, and sparkle. Hair looks a billion times more realistic. Every human on screen just looks more alive. You won't entirely forget that you're looking at a game, but it becomes much easier to suspend disbelief and get lost in the action.

My experience slapping DLSS 5 mods into games has produced promising but sometimes mixed results. If the polished experience that NBA 2K25 delivers is any indication, I can't wait for more studios to get their hands on it and integrate it into their games under the care of the same artists that created them.

Our testing methods

We did our best to deliver clean test numbers in the short time we've had with NBA 2K27. Performance in this can be tricky to measure. Benchmarking in the hub worlds or cutscenes will deliver lower performance than on the court, and even then, in-game events like fouls and time-outs will also result in skewed numbers if you're not careful. We picked a repeatable match-up from the game's career mode and sampled 60 seconds of continuous gameplay with DLSS 5 on and off, making sure to restart if we ran into any of the scripted events above.

We used NBA 2K27's maximum graphics settings as our baseline, including RT. We tested at native resolutions without upscaling, and we didn't test with Multi Frame Generation enabled. We view MFG as a cherry on top of an already solid baseline experience, not a baseline in itself.

Our test system is built with the following components:

All of our performance results are captured using Nvidia's FrameView 2.0 utility. We measure graphics card power consumption directly with Nvidia's PCAT hardware power logging tool.

If you have any questions about our testing methods, let us know in the comments and we'll do our best to answer them. On to the numbers.

NBA 2K27 1080p performance

At 1080p, everything from the RTX 5070 on up is CPU-bound without DLSS 5 enabled, even with maxed-out settings and RT on. Turn on DLSS 5, though, and the differences in Tensor Core compute across the cards quickly becomes obvious. But even the RTX 5060 can manage nearly 60 FPS on average with DLSS 5 enabled at 1080p, so almost anybody with a Blackwell card can at least try out the feature.

Given these results, you might think to enable DLSS Super Resolution (aka upscaling). But because the amount of time needed to run the DLSS 5 model has a fixed cost per output frame that scales with your target resolution and largely dominates the total frame time, especially on lower-end hardware, you may find that enabling DLSS SR doesn't have as much of an effect on performance as we've come to expect. The game still has to wait for that final generative step to occur, even if DLSS SR cuts down some of the total frame time.

As noted, we didn't use MFG for these tests, simply because there's no need for us to make the numbers on these charts artifically large. If you do want to enable it, the multiplier you want will be determined by your monitor's refresh rate and your own personal tastes.

We did chart PC latency as estimated by FrameView, so you can get a sense of whether there's enough of a latency budget to enable MFG at all. At 1080p, every card is a solid candidate for enabling MFG without adding unreasonable amounts of input latency, although the RTX 5050 is in a borderline position. And all three of the 8GB cards might have trouble fitting the MFG model into their VRAM with these maxed-out settings and DLSS 5 enabled, so you might need to turn off RT at a minimum to use MFG on these lower-end GPUs.

As we already saw in early testing of the leaked DLSS 5 builds circulating in the community, enabling the model has a large impact on power consumption, likely due to the intense Tensor Core load required to run the DLSS 5 model.

NBA 2K27 1440p performance

Moving up to 1440p separates our cards some more. The RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 are still CPU-limited without DLSS 5. The RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, RTX 5060, and RTX 5050 all get a "Low VRAM" warning with these settings, so if you're trying to push this higher resolution with those cards, you might want to start tuning your DLSS upscaling settings to relieve VRAM pressure, even if it doesn't result in additional performance with DLSS 5.

But you really want an RTX 5060 Ti at a minimum here to get acceptable input latency with DLSS 5 enabled, and the RTX 5070 is the true baseline for a good experience. At the higher end, the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080 both provide fluid frame rates even without MFG, and you have the latency budget to enable framegen without worry on anything from the RTX 5070 on up.

DLSS 5's power consumption on all these cards (except the chugging RTX 5050) rises as expected with the higher-resolution output frame we're asking it to generate. Everything from the RTX 5060 up to the RTX 5070 Ti ends up running at its power limit, while the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 still have room to stretch out. The unconstrained MSI RTX 5090 Lighting Z sucks down a ton of power to deliver its scorching performance.

NBA 2K27 4K performance

Running NBA 2K27 at 4K with DLSS 5 is extremely demanding, since the model has to generate an output frame with more than twice as many pixels than at 1440p. Even the RTX 5070 Ti is straining here, as its input latency with DLSS 5 is potentially too high to enable MFG while still delivering a responsive gameplay experience.

You can see why Nvidia only recommends the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 for a 4K DLSS 5 experience in this title, as they're the only two cards that deliver high enough baseline performance with low enough input latencies to make MFG practical. And even then, the RTX 5080 is on the edge of what we'd consider an acceptable input latency before enabling MFG.

Our power consumption chart at 4K is a bit of a mess at the low end since the RTX 5050 and RTX 5060 are crushed by the demands of DLSS 5 and end up chugging. Really, though, we're here to see how the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090s handle this incredibly Tensor Core-intensive work. Both cards end up running at their power limits.

The MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z shows how much power scaling the GB202 GPU has left in it once you remove the constraint of a single 12V-2x6 connector. We were wondering whether the power numbers we saw from a modded version of Control were a fluke, but DLSS 5 in NBA 2K27 goes even harder and pushes the RTX 5090 Lightning Z to nearly 850W on average in this test. For 48% more power than the RTX 5090 Founders Edition, you get 22% higher performance.

On a big 4K screen like an OLED TV, a fluid 90 FPS at a native 4K resolution with the level of detail and realism that DLSS 5 adds is an astounding gaming experience. You really haven't seen anything like it. But mere mortals with single-plug 5090s will probably want to enable MFG 2X at a minimum.

Bottom line

It's early days for DLSS 5 performance, and in its first official showing in NBA 2K27, it certainly has a large performance cost—sometimes well over 50% on lower-end hardware. But the generational leap in realism it provides for every human on screen is well worth it to my eye, at least. Now that I've seen a first-party, developer-driven implementation of DLSS 5, I want it in every game where its photorealistic enhancements would make sense, without question.

And as it's implemented in NBA 2K27, our performance results show that the tech is accessible enough that almost anybody with an RTX 50-series graphics card can try it out and still enjoy a fluid and responsive experience, even without Multi Frame Generation. Most of us aren't playing on 4K monitors, and at 1080p and 1440p, the Blackwell card you may already have is probably up to the task of running DLSS 5 with acceptable baseline performance.

DLSS 5 does upend some intuitions we've developed around the interactions of upscaling and frame rate. The large fixed frame-time cost that's required to generate the DLSS 5 output frame is entirely dependent on your target output resolution, making the lowered input resolution of DLSS 4.5 upscaling far less of a performance multiplier than it might otherwise be.

Given those realities, DLSS MFG can still make for a more fluid experience alongside DLSS 5 with a couple of clicks in a menu—at least assuming you have enough VRAM to hold the game assets, the DLSS 5 model, and the MFG model all at once. On 8GB graphics cards, this may require some tweaking to get working.

Nvidia has promised to continue improving the fundamental performance of the DLSS 5 model with time, and the fact that it's moved from requiring a dedicated RTX 5090 to run in the demos we saw at GTC to running on an RTX 5060 today is a sign that such promises do bear fruit.

Boosting the fundamental performance of the DLSS 5 model is vital, because as we all well know, prices for most Blackwell cards have spiked across the board to the point that former midrange options like the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and RTX 5070 are many hundreds of dollars more expensive than their MSRPs and well out of whack with their former performance-per-dollar propositions. A hardware upgrade to get better performance is no longer a no-brainer for many PC builders, and that problem is going to get even worse as the AI boom continues unabated.

Those elevated prices are also why Nvidia's post-launch pledge to bring the DLSS 5 model to RTX 40-series cards later this year is a welcome development. In our limited experience with community mods, Ada GPUs run the current DLSS 5 model about as well as Blackwell cards do, and gamers who haven't already upgraded from their 40-series cards certainly won't be raring to move off that hardware any time soon. Locking DLSS 5 to new GPUs that are prohibitively expensive to buy for non-technical reasons isn't a winning strategy for goodwill or broad adoption, and it's good to see Nvidia acknowledge that reality.

For all that, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that DLSS 5 is a huge, exciting leap forward in the never-ending pursuit of photorealism in real-time graphics. When you toggle it on and off in NBA 2K27, it feels like a generational improvement in rendering technology at the press of a button. Now that I've seen it in action, I don't want to play NBA 2K27 without it, and I hope to see more first-party integrations of it soon.

Taiwan is cracking down on Chinese businesses illegally operating on the island, often by concealing their ownership through shell companies registered in other nations or by hiring non-Chinese nationals to put up the company for them. According to the Rest of World, Taiwan’s Cross-Strait Act and other related investment rules and regulations require Chinese businesses to apply for a permit from the government before they can began operating. However, not all can get this coveted approval, especially as political tensions between the island nation and its bigger neighbor has flared up in recent years.

China has been trying to build self-sufficiency when it comes to semiconductors and advanced chips — an endeavor that began in 2015 and was supercharged in recent years by the White House’s efforts to keep Western technologies away from Beijing through trade bans and export controls. Many Chinese companies are trying to stay competitive and build their own technologies by hiring experts and engineers from across the Taiwan Strait, especially those who have experience working in Taiwan’s vibrant semiconductor industry. They’re even trying to attract talent by offering lucrative salaries that are five to ten times higher than average.

However, Taipei considers this a threat to its national security, especially as its “silicon shield” strategy relies on its technological advantage over China to ensure that its allies help defend it in case of an invasion. Taiwan accounts for more than 60% of global semiconductor production and produces about 90% of the most advanced processors — so any disruption would plunge the modern world into chaos. And by building a semiconductor industry that can rival Taiwan's, China hopes to erode Taiwan’s advantage while also ensuring that it can have all the chips it needs without relying on external sources.

The Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau (MJIB), the Taiwanese equivalent to the FBI, has investigated 166 cases involving illegal Chinese ownership since 2020. Court records reveal that at least 36 of these have resulted in convictions, in which punishment can include prison time of up to three years and fines ranging from NTD 120,000 (USD $3,800) to nearly NTD 25,000,000 (USD $800,000).

Of the 36 companies that been found guilty of violating the Cross-Strait Act, 33 of them were focused on semiconductor research, development, and design. Aside from this, the agency also investigated 67 cases of Chinese companies allegedly stealing trade secrets from Taiwanese companies.

The Chinese companies accused of breaking Taiwan’s ownership law aren’t small entities, either. Some of the businesses that were investigated and raided were said to have connections with tech giant Xiaomi, smartphone brand OnePlus and mother company Oppo, and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), which is China’s most advanced foundry and a direct competitor to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC).

Despite the fear that Beijing is using this technique for economic espionage, Omdia research director Hui He said that “These moves were largely driven by business needs.” Still, former U.S. Department of Defense official Nichol Eftimiades warned, “Is it espionage if I sit there poaching talents? Well, in some places it is. We are dealing with different definitions depending on the country, and it’s a problem.”

The Trump administration has imposed tariffs of up to 100% on imported drones and their components. This is its latest move in a long-running campaign to reduce reliance on foreign drones and other electronics — especially Chinese — citing national security while bolstering the domestic supply chain. The tariffs came into effect on Thursday, September 3, 21 days after President Donald Trump signed the measure on August 13. Consequently, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) published guidance detailing exact filing procedures and tariff rates for the affected drones.

The proclamation categorizes drones by capability, with the 100% rate applying to unmanned aircraft with a maximum takeoff weight above 55 pounds (25kg); any drone with thermal imaging and docking stations; and a defined list of critical components, including static converters, airframe components, and electronic control boards. The White House calls this category “particularly sensitive for natural security purposes.”

A 25% rate applies to smaller drones that lack those capabilities, as well as other components. This system of classification splits many brands into both categories. DJI’s thermal-equipped, public-safety Matrice series, for example, falls into the 100% bracket regardless of its weight, while consumer models such as the Mini and Air series are at 25%. Both rates apply to imports regardless of country of origin, except for specific allied countries. However, they overwhelmingly land squarely on China — home to DJI, which holds more than two-thirds of the global market and supplies the bulk of the drones on US shelves.

Drones and components from the European Union, Japan, Liechtenstein, South Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan are set at 15%, while those from the United Kingdom are set at 10%, provided that substantially all of the hardware, software, and technology originates in those countries or the United States. The proclamation also phases in the tariff across two component groups. A 25% to 100% rate on finished aircraft, docking stations, and the most sensitive components — power converters, flight-control boards, and the airframe parts used in drones over 25 kilograms — took effect on Sept. 3. For a second, lower-priority group of components — largely the same categories of parts, but produced for smaller consumer and commercial drones — the rate, which is set at 25%, does not take effect until Feb. 9, 2027. The administration framed the 180-day runway as time for importers to shift sourcing.

The tariffs are the latest development in a widening federal effort to push Chinese drones out of the US market on grounds of national security. In December 2025, the Federal Communications Commission added all foreign-made drones and their critical components to its Covered List, blocking new models from the authorization they need to be sold domestically. Last month, the agency moved to retroactively ban previously cleared models it deems "military-grade," including those with LiDAR. That proposal's public-comment window closed September 2, one day before the tariffs took effect. If passed, many of the items affected by the tariffs would be automatically banned. Conversely, if the proposal fails, the tariffs would still apply significant pressure.

The proclamation pairs the duties with incentives meant to rebuild a domestic supply chain, with U.S. makers such as Skydio attracting major investment since the original ban. The onshoring push has also drawn scrutiny for its proximity to the president's family. Donald Trump Jr. has sat on the advisory board of Florida drone-parts maker Unusual Machines since November 2024 and holds a sizable stake. The company's shares climbed sharply after the tariff announcement. Government-ethics groups have flagged the arrangement as at least the appearance of a conflict.

Japan’s military has decided to mass-procure Terra B1 interceptor drones. These drones are fabricated using 3D printers and are based on the tried and tested A1 model from Terra Drone, which began to be deployed by Ukraine earlier this year. A demo of the Terra B1 impressed Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Forces enough to swing the mass-procurement agreement. These interceptors are expected to capably counter notorious drone threats like the Shahed designs and anti-radar loitering munitions such as the IAI Harpy, notes 3D Printing Industry news.

The Japanese Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency (ATLA) is the body that rubberstamped the deal with Terra Drone. According to a press release from the latter, the Terra B1 is being mass-produced in Japan after successfully passing trials. It was just one of a range of designs put forward by 38 separate companies. To be chosen by ALTA, the B1 had to satisfy a number of criteria such as “effective range, flight duration, flight distance, maximum and cruising speed, guidance method, number of aircraft that can be controlled simultaneously, launch and recovery methods, integration with other systems, safety measures, [and] operational track record,” says Terra Drone. The first Terra B1 interceptors are expected off the domestic production lines sometime this month.

We witnessed the clamor for cheap and effective anti-drone solutions when the conflict between the U.S. and Iran erupted earlier this year. Gulf states seen as U.S. allies or sympathizers were repeatedly targeted by airborne Iranian threats, but their anti-air missiles weren’t designed to counter such attacks. Patriot missiles, for example, are too expensive and in too short supply to match drone threats 1-to-1. It wasn’t sustainable. It didn’t take long, therefore, for battle-proven Ukrainian anti-drone tech to be bought in.

Now we see Japan proactively following the cheap-yet-effective drone interceptor route. 3D printing is another emerging tech that will be applied here to enable Japan’s Self-Defense Forces “to acquire more effective drone countermeasure equipment with greater speed.” After a successful initial deployment by the Maritime Self-Defense Force, Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force and Ground Self-Defense Force may also look at customizing Terra B1 interceptors for their needs.

This isn't the first example of important synergies between drone and 3D printing technologies. We also recently reported on drones, drone parts, and other maintenance and repair essentials being 3D printed aboard the USS Essex. This was all done inside a compact containerized factory as the ship sailed to take part in RIMPAC 2026 around Hawaii.

After a heavily scrutinized announcement earlier this year and a very revealing past few days, DLSS 5 has finally, officially launched inside NBA 2K27. A sports game is a bit of an unusual choice to showcase what is seemingly the next big leap in real-time rendering, but it's the only game DLSS 5 works with for now. Fortunately, you don't need an RTX 50-series GPU to enjoy it, as Nvidia has confirmed that the tech is coming to previous-gen RTX 40-series hardware as well, though we don't know exactly when.

Nvidia has worked closely with developer Visual Concepts to leverage DLSS 5 as an aid rather than the foundation of NBA 2K27. The game still uses scanned 3D models of all the players to form the base geometry. Then, DLSS 5 combines training data and engine data to infer things like lighting and shadows, upgrading the scene to look more photorealistic. Such engine-level implementation allows devs to fine-tune the end result as per their creative intent instead of just applying a global AI filter over everything.

DLSS 5 will come to other titles soon, but for now it's limited to NBA 2K27, and even then, it's extremely taxing. Nvidia's own marketing shows DLSS 5 netting 370 FPS at 4K with an RTX 5090, compared to 240 FPS with DLSS turned off. What it doesn't highlight as clearly is that the 370 FPS number comes from 6x MFG — five fake frames being interpolated for every real frame. That means the game is actually running at ~61 FPS; turning on DLSS 5 tanked performance by four times compared to native. Not to mention, it's being upscaled from 1080p to 4K, too.

If you don't happen to own the latest-and-greatest in Blackwell silicon, and you also don't want to pay for the Ultimate tier of GeForce Now (RTX 5080), there's still some good news for you. After initially locking DLSS 5 to only the RTX 50-series, Nvidia has confirmed it'll bring the 3D-guided neural rendering tech to RTX 40-series GPUs soon. "Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series," said Ben Berraondo, head of PR at the company.

It's likely that modders opening the floodgates for patched DLLs convinced, or perhaps forced, Nvidia to reconsider its initial stance. It's no secret that DLSS 5 has a merciless compute cost, so making it work on older Ada GPUs would only result in negative PR for an already divisive product. But once modders showed it's possible — not just on the 40-series, but also on the 30- and even 20-series — the ball was in Nvidia's court and, to its credit, the game hasn't stopped. It'll be interesting to see the performance, considering the RTX 40-series only has up to 2x MFG.

For now, the focus is entirely on optimizing DLSS 5 for RTX 50-series, and that improvement will, in turn, help the future release on RTX 40-series, too. As more and more games implement the tech, the dataset behind it will mature, and DLSS 5 might one day grow to distinguish itself from AI slop for its critics. At the moment, don't expect granular control like we've seen through ReShade, as that's entirely a community effort. DLSS 5 will simply be an on/off toggle in most titles since the devs would've already tweaked the individual parameters themselves.

It's the Labor Day weekend, and now's a great time for you to get started with a brand new hobby: 3D printing. Creality's flash sale for Labor Day has slashed the prices of its flagship range of 3D printers, with up to 50% off right now. If you've been waiting for the chance to jump into the 3D printing world, this is the perfect opportunity.

You've got some of Creality's best printers on sale right now, along with resin and filament discounts for those who need to top up their materials. One of the biggest discounts you'll want to take advantage of is the Creality K1, which is down to just $299 right now, saving you half compared to its usual list price.

● Check out Creality's 3D printer deals

Other sales you'll want to look at include the beginner-friendly Creality Ender 3 V3 Plus, now priced at just $339, along with the Creality SparkX i7, which features in our best 3D printers guide and has dropped to just $229.

That said, these Labor Day 3D printer sales won't last forever. These discounts are running until September 15, 2026, at 23:59 ET, although Creality might pull the sale early if it proves too popular, so you'll want to get your order in quickly. You can check out our roundup of Creality's best discounts on 3D printers below.

Creality 3D Printer Deals

Creality 3D Printer Filament and Resin Deals

Creality 3D Printer Accessories

More Tech Deals

Check out our Amazon Labor Day and Best Buy Labor Day tech deals pages for more limited-time discounts this weekend.

If you're looking for further savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

Mini-PC maker Minisforum just launched the latest upgrades to its flagship products at IFA 2026 in Berlin, Germany. The first is the AI Agent NAS N5 Max-P495, an upgrade to the brand’s flagship NAS with pre-installed OpenClaw that was launched earlier this year, and it’s followed by the MS-S1 Max-P495, a mini-PC designed for AI computing. Both devices feature AMD’s latest Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 processor with an integrated Radeon 8065S GPU, delivering up to 131 TOPS of AI performance, and can be configured with up to 192GB of unified memory, of which 160GB could be allocated as graphics memory.

The AI Agent NAS N5 Max-P495 can accommodate up to 200TB of local storage, making it useful for storing large amounts of data locally. When paired with the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495, you can use this to run your AI agents like OpenClaw or Hermes Agent directly on your storage solution. This gives you privacy, ensuring that all your data stays on your machines, while the local storage cuts latency and helps you (and your AI) get things done speedily. Minisforum says that the N5 MAX-P495 is designed “as a centralized backed for data, models, knowledge, and long-running AI workloads.” It would also help cut or keep your AI inference costs in control, especially as agentic AI is known to use up 1000x more tokens compared to standard AI.

Now, if you need something powerful for your professional or creative workflow, Minisforum has the MS-S1 Max-P495 for you. Just like the NAS, this is an update of the company’s top-of-the-line MS-S1 mini-PC, which previously featured an AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+ APU. This device, which now uses the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495, is optimized for AI compute, with its processor delivering 55 TOPS from a dedicated NPU for a total AI performance of 131 TOPS, and support for various models from labs like Gemma, OpenAI, and Qwen. More importantly, it’s easily scalable, with four units easily deployable in a 2U rack.

This makes it an excellent alternative to the Mac mini and Mac Studio, which are in short supply because of the local AI boom. But even if you’re not into AI but just need something small that doesn’t compromise on performance, the MS-S1 Max-P495 can still deliver. You can order it with as much as 192GB of unified memory to ensure that you do not run out of RAM for 3D rendering, video editing, and even computational fluid dynamics. The 8060S on the older Ryzen AI Max 395+ is also quite capable for 1080p gaming, so we wouldn’t be surprised if you can comfortably play on this new mini-PC, too.

If you’re experimenting with AI and want something powerful to help run your models, the N5 Max-P495 and the MS-S1 Max-P495 are great devices to consider for your upgrade. Just make sure that your agents have proper safeguards so that it doesn’t end up accidentally deleting your entire home directory. Unfortunately, we don’t have pricing and availability for these two AI devices at the moment, but if you want to see them for yourself and you happen to be in Berlin, drop by IFA from September 4 to 8, 2026.

Best Buy is throwing a huge sale for Labor Day, meaning you can grab a big discount on tech right now. In fact, you can save up to $900 on select gaming laptops, along with $500 off a new MacBook. Gaming PCs are on sale, too, with up to $600 knocked off big-brand tech, along with monitor savings of up to $500 also available.

● Check out Best Buy's tech sales

It's the end of the summer break, and with back-to-school deals all around us, now could be the best opportunity to pick up a bargain before the prices go up again. The PC hardware market is running super hot right now, with RAM and SSD costs pushing prices up, and a deal from a big retailer like Best Buy is a great way to treat yourself without breaking the bank.

We've put together some of the biggest and best discounts on offer from Best Buy below.

Best Buy Labor Day Gaming Laptop and Handheld Deals

Best Buy Labor Day Gaming PC Deals

Best Buy Labor Day Monitor Deals

AI development might not be the wild west it was when ChatGPT burst onto the scene a few years ago, but it's still very much a frontier, with no clear boundaries and few yardsticks. But for AI developers on the frontier, they're pulling hard towards dual goals of ever greater intelligence and ever cheaper per-token pricing, and it's leading to a real back-and-forth of who's truly ahead, with some winners only holding the top spot for a few hours.

Although Anthropic's Claude Fable and Opus models have been consistently competitive at the very top of the intelligence charts, they're also some of the most costly to use. For more general use, some are paying closer attention to the "Pareto Frontier," where peak intelligence and minimal cost reach the pinnacle, and there the competition is fierce and ever-changing.

Hot off the screeching reversal of companies' tokenmaxing plans earlier this year, this increased focus on getting the cost of AI down has left us running headfirst into Jevons paradox again, too. As token costs for high-intelligence models have come down, token usage has exploded over 25 times in the past year, and doubled in the past month alone.

People may not want to spend more on AI, but they appear to be using a lot more of it when they can afford to.

Long live the King(s)

Despite its radical and rapid ascension, the big winners in the AI industry haven't changed much since its inception. It may have had a few penny drop, "Deepseek moments," where there's been a frenzied scramble by everyone to get ahead of some new threat, but by and large OpenAI and Anthropic have been scuffling at the top of the intelligence pile, Google and Meta have been bouncing around the more efficient and cost-effective middle, and xAI's Grok has been there in the background, grabbing headlines for all the wrong reasons.

That's largely still the state of play in September 2026. Although benchmarks are gamed during model design and real-world use is more representative of actual real-world use, Anthropic's best are still considered by most to be the smartest. Fable 5.1, Fable 5, and Claude Opus all rank in the top four of ArtificialAnalysis' Intelligence Index test, as does OpenRouters and BenchLM even have them take all the podium spots.

While ahead, though, Anthropic's models don't hold an enormous lead. Fable 5.1 might score a 66 on ArtificialAnalysis' benchmark, but OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol (max) manages a 61. Grok 4.6 (high) and Kimi K3 (max) are capable of scores above 60, and the new Meta Muse Spark 1.3 (max) can hit 62 - though we don't have cost comparison pricing for it yet.

The same is true across other benchmarks from other companies.

But where the top models nudge each other back and forth with light tweaks and slight bumps in capability, there's much greater distinction in the mid-range. And not on intelligence, but on price.

Even With Cost Cuts, Frontier Models are Very Expensive

Major AI developers know they have a pricing problem. Following the jump to per-token pricing earlier this year, budgets were blown, and even the AI CEOs started talking publicly about making AI more affordable. How that will help them ever reach profitability remains to be seen, but the writing is absolutely on the wall.

And even then, the top AI models are absurdly expensive compared to the models on the Pareto frontier.

Claude Fable 5.1 comes with a 75% cut in the cost of its cache write pricing, and Artificial Analysis still clocked it at $3.69 per task on its Intelligence Index test. That comes from much more expensive answers and reasoning, because while Fable 5.0 has more expensive cache write costs, it's $3.14 per benchmark task. But that's 50% more expensive than Claude Opus 5 on the same task, which is double again the cost of GPT 5.6 Sol.

Then costs really start to crater, especially when you consider the intelligence of the more affordable models.

Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash (high) is a powerful model, able to score a 59 on the Intelligence Index test. But it costs a mere $0.58 per task on the Index test - less than 1/6th the price of Claude Fable 5.1, with just a 10% drop in intelligence scoring. OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol (high) costs $0.43, with an intelligence score of 57.

Chinese competition is right there in the mix, too. The daunting Kimi K3 (max) can manage a 60 on the intelligence benchmark, with a per-task cost of $0.84, while its Kimi K3 (low) variant offers a 48 score on intelligence at just $0.24 per task. Deepseek V4 Pro is arguably one of the most impressive, with a 53 and $0.27, respectively.

At the time of writing, Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 (xhigh) holds the Pareto frontier title, with a score of 61 and a per-task cost of just $0.55. It stole that top spot from Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash, which wore the crown for just 3.5 hours.

Get in, we're going token shopping

The perspective and approach of the business community to AI use has been equally terrifying and fascinating. While we've all felt the fear of AI invalidating skills we've spent years acquiring, business leaders have swung massively between demanding AI use at a grand scale and then quickly following it up with, "oh god, no, not that much."

Uber famously blew through its annual AI budget in just a few months, and tokenmaxxing leaderboards saw one unnamed company eat through half a billion dollars worth of tokens in just a few weeks. But while everyone is certainly taking costs a lot more seriously than they once were, that's not slowing AI usage. Indeed, as more effective intelligence has become more affordable, token usage is exploding.

One of OpenRouter's engineers published a chart showing that overall paid token use had increased 25 times in the past year, and doubled over the past month alone.

This increase appears to be coming from some of those middle-of-the-pack, affordable intelligence models. According to OpenRouter's LLM rankings, the most used model for the past month was OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Luna, with close to 12 trillion tokens. With its intelligence score of 52 and a per-task cost of just $0.05, it's right on the Pareto line at the cheapest end of the spectrum.

Right behind it, though, is Chinese developer Z-Ai with its GLM 5.3 Flash. It's at 11.4 trillion tokens in the past month, a more than 1,000% increase month to month. Its intelligence-to-price ratio is 57 to $0.09. Deepseek v4 Flash is right there with it, and other Chinese, intelligent-enough but very-affordable models round out the pack.

In comparison, the major, expensive models are barely being used at all. Fable 5's monthly use is in the low billions of output tokens, and even OpenAI, with its massive user base, is only cracking 1.8T monthly tokens with its 5.6 Sol.

Jevons strikes again

Besides the bonkers business model for many of those involved, there are intriguing patterns emerging in AI usage. People can find ways to use lots of tokens, but they are only willing to pay so much for them. They want intelligence at as low a price as possible, and there is a crossover point where one becomes more important than the other.

While cynics argue that benchmarks are gamed, and boosters are still heralding the coming of their AI savior, the actual economics of the industry paint a much clearer picture. Intelligence has a price, but it's much lower than some of the frontier model developers are able to build it for. As models become ever more efficient and the hardware for inference grows ever more powerful, we may reach a point where what large language models can do effectively is affordable enough that anyone can use it as much as they want.

What that means for the major companies who spent hundreds of billions of dollars to get us to that point, very much remains to be seen.

When NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 50 series, a major part of the hype surrounding the new GPU family was its support for DLSS Multi-Frame Generation. This feature was officially locked to the new RTX 50 "Blackwell" GPUs, but modders have been working on unlocking it for RTX 40-series cards for a while now. NVIDIA is clearly aware of these efforts, as it recently pushed an over-the-air update via the NVIDIA App that seemed targeted at blocking them due to its odd changes. Yet, as pointed out by Sebastian Castellanos on X, enterprising hackers had already found a workaround just hours later.

At the launch of Blackwell, NVIDIA explained that bringing Multi-Frame Generation to previous-generation RTX 40-series cards wasn't possible because those GPUs relied on a hardware optical flow generator incapable of producing multiple interpolated frames per rendered frame. Instead, Blackwell introduced a software-based optical flow method executed directly on the GPU shader cores without requiring the hardware unit. To tech-savvy gamers, the obvious question arose: why not use that same software method on Ada Lovelace GPUs and bypass their hardware optical flow units? NVIDIA showed no interest in enabling this, leading many to assume it was technically impossible.

Put simply, it's possible. There are apparently various roadblocks within NVIDIA's software, but the strength of the PC platform lies in its openness; users can freely modify software running on their own hardware. And so, at least three distinct mods have emerged to unlock DLSS Multi-Frame Generation across multiple titles. It began with a Cyberpunk 2077 mod by creator "dashdogy" that relied on game-specific modding frameworks, but the technique has since been adapted into a broader ReShade plugin applicable to almost any game, and that's just one of at least three different multi-game unlock mods I found.

It's obviously in the company's best interest to protect its marketing narrative, and the narrative is that Multi-Frame Generation doesn't work on GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards. However, user reports across X and Reddit tell a different story. Users report that the mods not only work, but also deliver surprisingly smooth frame pacing. NVIDIA had previously warned that Blackwell's specialized hardware flip metering was mandatory for proper frame pacing with multi-frame generation, but dashdogy noted that his mod backports "Blackwell-specific frame timing instructions to allow Ada to place the frames in the correct positions," suggesting that MFG's purported hardware dependency was greatly exaggerated.

Earlier attempts to enable multi-frame generation on Ada Lovelace relied on GPU spoofing or hybrid solutions, like combining standard 2x DLSS Frame Generation with AMD's FSR 3 or Lossless Scaling's software frame generation. Those workarounds were significantly clunkier than native game mods that utilize NVIDIA's own DLSS-G framework. While I couldn't get this latest mod working in the limited time before publication, community developers have not only bypassed the latest roadblocks thrown up by Mean Green, but in fact, they've released at least two more updates for the mod in the last ten hours since Castellanos' X post.

All of this coincides rather neatly with the contentious rollout of DLSS 5 "Neural Rendering," which is another technology originally pitched as an RTX 50-series exclusive before NVIDIA made a last-minute reversal to promise it for RTX 40-series cards as well. That shift may well have been driven by hackers porting DLSS 5 Neural Rendering not just to older NVIDIA architectures, but even to AMD Radeon GPUs. Once it became common knowledge that DLSS 5 runs on non-Blackwell hardware, continuing to claim hardware exclusivity risked a major loss of consumer trust. It'll be fascinating to see if NVIDIA will pivot on DLSS Multi-Frame Generation in the same way. While it would be a nice bone to throw the company's loyal previous-generation customers, we wouldn't bet on it.

It’s not often we find deals on video cards, but Walmart has a whopper for any gamer who needs a boost. Get your hands on the MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G Shadow 2X OC Plus for only $569.99. While this card certainly isn’t at its lowest price ever, it is the lowest-priced RTX 5060 Ti 16GB we could find on Amazon ($759.99), Newegg ($799.99 - also an MSI Shadow), or Best Buy (also a $779.99 MSI Shadow), and by an incredible $200. As you may have noticed, the median price for an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB in early August was just over $800, a 39% jump from June, when you could find it for $570 at Walmart right now.

• Check out this deal at Walmart

The Shadow 2X OC Plus version sports an all-black, performance-focused design with two large fans to keep the card running cool during long gaming sessions. The shadowy appearance is sure to blend in with a black-themed build (sorry, no integrated RGBs). It’s one of the smaller 5060 Ti’s out there (8.8 x 4.9 x 1.6-inches - a 1.5-slot card) compared to the triple-fan options, which means it can fit inside many small form-factor chassis for a small but still powerful system.

The card uses a full-length PCIe slot (runs at x8 speeds) and is powered by a single 6+2 PCIe connector—plenty for its 180W power envelope. Video outputs consist of three DisplayPort (v2.1b) and one HDMI (v.2.1b) ports - standard fare. Base core clocks start at 2,407 MHz and boost to at least 2,646 MHz, while the ample 16GB of GDDR7 RAM runs at 28 Gbps across a 128-bit bus. The 5060 Ti 16GB is a decidedly mid-range part that plays well at 1080p and 1440p resolutions, offering an average of over 105 frames per second across 11 rasterized games at 1080p and 73 frames per second at the more intensive 1440p, which is plenty for today’s games (don’t forget about DLSS and MFG!). That said, we are aware that the AMD Radeon 9070 GRE exists, and if you can find it for less, it's faster all around, even with ray tracing. Choose your poison, as each has its positives and negatives.

You know we’re not in a good market when $570 for an MSI RTX 5060 Ti 16G Shadow 2x OC Plus is a great deal, but here we are, and this is a great deal considering it’s the lowest-priced RTX 5060 Ti and by an incredible $200 (~25% off).

In today’s AI-dominated tech space, gamers have been bombarded with rising prices for storage, memory, and even GPUs. So gamers are increasingly looking for value when purchasing a new system. To that end, HP is attempting to deliver solid gaming performance at an accessible price with the HyperX Omen 15. It’s worth noting that the Omen now takes the place of the Victus 15 in HP’s mainstream gaming laptop range, with the Omen Max occupying the top spot.

The Omen 15 has a strong foundation with a Core Ultra 9 processor, 32GB of RAM, a 15.3-inch 1800p OLED display, and a sleek design. HP delivers all this for just over $2,000, and it has strong gaming performance, but there are compromises in chassis construction and features you’d expect at this price point.

Design of the HyperX Omen 15

The Omen 15 shares its design language with the slightly larger Omen Max 16 that I previously reviewed. It’s an unassuming design, finished in Shadow Black, with just a hint of shimmering flakes if you look closely under light. There aren’t any garish design flourishes or additional RGB effects (other than the keyboard).

Like the Omen Max 16, the Omen 15 identifies itself with an “O15” script on the right side of the deck. Given that the Omen 15 is less than half the price of its larger sibling, you only get an aluminum lid. Everything else, including the upper and lower chassis, is constructed of a much cheaper (and more pliable) plastic.

The desk easily deforms when pressing on it, and the whole laptop flexes with minimal effort, twisting it from corner to corner. The overall feel of the laptop doesn’t quite seem up to par with what I’d expect from a gaming laptop priced over $2,000.

There’s also another interesting omission when looking around the chassis. Despite its price tag, there are no Thunderbolt ports. And you only get one USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port on the back, beside an HDMI 2.1 port. There’s a GbE Ethernet port and a USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port on the right side of the chassis, while a proprietary barrel-style power port, another USB-A port, and a 3.5 mm combo audio jack are on the left.

Our Omen 15 review unit measures 13.5 x 9.96 x 0.93 inches and weighs 4.89 pounds. For comparison, the Gigabyte Aero X16 is 14 x 9.9 x 0.78 inches and 4.2 pounds, while the Framework Laptop 16 measures 14.03 x 11.43 x 0.82 inches and 5.29 pounds. Finally, the Predator Triton 14 AI is 12.68 x 8.84 x 0.71 inches and 3.5 pounds (due to its smaller 14.5-inch display).

HyperX Omen 15 Specifications

Gaming and Graphics on the HyperX Omen 15

Our Omen 15 review unit came configured with an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor, 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory, and a GeForce RTX 5070 GPU (85W TGP).

As for the assembled competitors, we have the Aero X16 (Ryzen AI 7 350, 32GB, RTX 5070 85W), Predator Triton 14 AI (Core Ultra 9 288V, RTX 5070 110W), and Framework Laptop 16 (Ryzen AI 7 350, RTX 5070 100W).

I’ve been playing a lot of Battlefield 6 recently, and I tend to run at native resolution in Overkill detail mode, with DLSS Quality and frame generation enabled. However, I dialed it back to High detail mode instead of Overkill to accommodate just 8GB of memory on the RTX 5070. Using these settings, I was able to average between 70 and 85 frames per second.

We start off our gaming benchmarks with Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Highest settings), where the Omen 15 started off on the right foot with 126 FPS at 1080p resolution and 60 FPS at 1800p. The Framework Laptop 16 eked out 6 additional FPS at 1080p and another 17 at its native resolution. However, we still consider it a good showing, given that the RTX 5070 in the Omen 15 operates at a 85W TGP (versus 100W for the Framework) and at a higher native resolution (1800p versus 1600p).

Cyberpunk 2077 (Ray Tracing Ultra settings) again saw the Omen 15 in second place to the Laptop 16. This time, it hit 35 FPS at 1080p resolution compared to 38 FPS for the Laptop 16. Performance at 1800p was in the single digits for the Omen 15, while the Laptop 16 managed 18 FPS. Both are slideshow-worthy numbers that are nothing to brag about.

Far Cry 6 (Ultra settings) was a high point for the Omen 15, which bested all competitors with 107 FPS at 1080p resolution. Cranking the dial to 1800p, that figure dropped to 69 FPS, compared to 70 FPS for the Aero X16 running at 1600p. The Laptop 16 forged ahead with 83 FPS at 1600p.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Medium settings) was something of a sore spot for the Omen 15 (59 FPS at 1080p), which fell well below the Aero X16 (78 FPS) and the Laptop 16 (91 FPS). Boosting the resolution to 1800p also saw the Omen 15 in third place, with 35 FPS, well off the pace set by the Laptop 16 (57 FPS).

Forza Horizon 6 (Ultra settings) is a more recent benchmark in our testing suite, and so far, the Omen 15 is the only entry in this class of gaming laptops. With that said, the Omen 15 achieved 80 FPS at 1080p and 51 FPS at 1800p.

On our Metro Exodus stress test, the Omen 15 review unit averaged 141.62 FPS at 1080p across 15 loops using the RTX preset. The CPU performance cores averaged 3.52 GHz, the efficiency cores averaged 2.82 GHz, and the low-power efficiency cores ran at 1.9 GHz. The RTX 5070 GPU averaged 2.0 GHz.

Productivity Performance on the HyperX Omen 15

With a Core Ultra 9 386H processor, 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD onboard, we expected solid performance from the Omen 15. Those expectations were met in terms of CPU performance, while storage performance lagged a bit behind the competition.

The Omen 15 performed well in Geekbench 6, hitting 2,857 in the single-core benchmark, keeping it right in the mix with the other competitors. However, it sprinted out ahead of the pack in multi-core, delivering 15,916 compared to 14,074 on the second-place Aero X16.

The Omen 15 was at the back of the pack on our file transfer test, coming in at 999 MBps from the Samsung MZVMX1T0HCLD-00BH1 SSD versus an average of around just under 1,500 MBps for the other three competitors.

Moving on to our HandBrake test, where we transcode a 4K video file to 1080p, the Omen 15 took the top spot, finishing the task in 3 minutes and 39 seconds. That was about 15 seconds faster than the second-place Aero X16.

Display on the HyperX Omen 15

Our review unit came equipped with a 15.3-inch 2880 x 1800 OLED display. Interestingly, the refresh rate is limited to just 120 Hz, compared to the faster 144 Hz to 165 Hz that we see in competitors like the Aero X16 and Laptop 16.

The Omen 15’s OLED panel performed roughly on par with the rest of the laptops in this segment, as it covered 132.3 percent of the DCI-P3 color space and 186.8 percent of sRGB. It even managed to take the top spot in the brightness category, hitting 460.2 nits compared to 444 nits for the Laptop 16.

I love OLED panels, and the 1800p unit on the Omen 15 just proves that that love shows no sign of abating. Colors looked rich, blacks were jet black, and brightness levels in my home office setting (with an abundance of overhead lighting) were more than adequate.

I played quite a bit of Forza Horizon 6 using the Omen 15, and marveled at the bright, colorful, and reflective car bodies as I competed in various events.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the HyperX Omen 15

There have been noticeable improvements made to the Omen 15’s keyboard, at least compared to the previous Victus 15. The biggest change is the move from half-height arrow keys to full-size. The tiny, half-height function keys have also been enlarged.

HP also boasts of an 8K polling rate for the Omen 15’s keyboard (equating to a response time of 0.125 ms). I wouldn’t consider myself to be a highly competitive gamer, so any upgrades in this area are lost on me. The keyboard also features 4-zone RGB backlighting.

Using the Keyhero.com typing test, I averaged around 87 words per minute with 95% accuracy, which is on par with my typical typing speed. I found the keyboard comfortable for typing and gaming.

There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the touchpad, which features a top-hinged design. Its surface allowed my finger to glide smoothly, although it is a bit loud and clanky when clicked.

Audio on the HyperX Omen 15

The Omen 15 features stereo speakers supporting DTS:X Ultra and HyperX Audio Control. I was pleasantly surprised by the sound emanating from the speaker, which was rich in volume and clarity. While lacking any real semblance of bass, the underlying output was clean.

I took the opportunity to fire up “Mujahadin and Opium,” which is a horn- and string-filled track by John Barry from The Living Daylights soundtrack. There is just something very chilling about the interplay of the strings and horns; the former of which starts the track, while the latter beautifully fills in classic James Bond tradition.

The speakers also did well to mimic engine sounds as I went corner carving in Forza Horizon 6, be it a high-strung flat-6 or a burbling V8.

Upgradeability of the HyperX Omen 15

Flipping the Omen 15 over to reveal its bottom panel, you’ll find five screws holding it in place. Three of the screws are exposed, while the two corner screws at the back are hidden beneath tiny rubber plugs. I needed to use a safety pin to pry them out, which was annoying.

With the panel removed, you’ll find easy access to the battery, both M.2 SSD bays, the Wi-Fi card, and the two SO-DIMM slots (which are covered by a flexible I/O shield).

Battery Life on the HyperX Omen 15

The Omen 15 is powered by a 70 WHr battery, and it performed well against its peers. Our battery test leverages web browsing, video streaming over Wi-Fi, and OpenGL testing with the screen brightness set at 150 nits.

The HyperX laptop endured for 8 hours and 30 minutes, which was 10 minutes longer than the Laptop 16 and 14 minutes longer than the Predator Triton 14 AI. However, it was no match for the Aero X16, which lasted 9 hours and 13 minutes.

Heat on the HyperX Omen 15

During the Metro Exodus stress test, we measured the Omen 15's keyboard at 95.4 degrees Fahrenheit (F) between the G and H keys, while the touchpad was 85.1 F.

The hottest part of the laptop was near the bottom-rear of the chassis, measuring 110 F.

While running the Metro Exodus stress test, the CPU measured 63.4 degrees Celsius (C). Meanwhile, the RTX 5070 came in at 63.2 C.

Webcam on the HyperX Omen 15

The Omen 15 uses a standard 1080p webcam with IR capabilities, meaning it can be used with Windows Hello biometric authentication in Windows 11.

The camera is fine, and by no means a standout in any particular area. It covers the basics, offering decent color reproduction, and did a passable job of picking out my facial hair. However, I did notice a fair amount of noise in the image. However, if you mainly use the camera to hop on a few Zoom calls here and there, it’s more than adequate.

HyperX Omen 15 Software and Warranty

HP has no qualms about loading up its systems with a copious amount of apps, as you'll find a variety of software including HP, HP Documentation, HP PC Hardware Diagnostics, HP Smart, HP Privacy Settings, and HP TV+ (and that's not even all of them).

However, the HP utility that you'll probably interact with the most is the Omen Gaming Hub. Here you'll find controls for tweaking nearly every aspect of the system, from power modes to RGB lighting for the keyboard.

The Omen 15 comes with a one-year manufacturer warranty.

HyperX Omen 15 Configurations

Our Omen 15 review unit came configured with an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor, 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory, a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, GeForce RTX 5070 GPU, and a 2880 x 1800 OLED 120 Hz display. It’s listed on HP’s website with an MSRP of $2,799, but is currently available for $2,099 with a 25% off coupon.

There are various configurations available with slightly different specs, but the 15-ga0762nr SKU features a Core i7-14650HX processor, 16GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, an RTX 5060 GPU, and a 2560 x 1600 OLED with a 180 Hz refresh rate. This system is priced at $1,999, or just a $100 discount compared to our review unit’s sale price. However, the price disparity makes more sense when you consider our review unit’s MSRP.

Bottom Line

On the one hand, the HyperX Omen 15 has solid gaming performance across the board, and its CPU performance in productivity tasks is top-of-the-class. In addition, the 15.3-inch OLED display looks great and offers an expansive 2880 x 1800 resolution.

On the other hand, the chassis is constructed of cheap and flexy plastic, while SSD performance lags behind its competitors. In addition, the display is limited to a 120 Hz refresh rate, and you don’t get any Thunderbolt ports (if that’s something that’s important to you at this price point).

Where things get even more complicated is with pricing. Our review unit carries an MSRP of $2,799, but HP is currently selling it for $2,099 after discounts. At MSRP, our review unit is an absolute non-starter, while the sale price makes it a much more palatable option. But even at its sale price, we feel that the Gigabyte Aero X16 makes a far more compelling buy at just $1,799.

Denver Water, which supplies the city and its surrounding areas, has imposed Stage 1 drought restrictions in its service area starting August 2026 as water supplies continue to drop. According to Gadget Review, commercial properties like data centers can only water grass twice a week — on Tuesdays and Fridays — until September 30. Starting October 1, lawn sprinklers will be banned for use until the Board of Water Commissioners declares otherwise. However, one resident who was out walking their dog saw that the new AI data center built close to their home was watering its lawn and using so much water that some areas have started to puddle.

“We can’t water our lawns until next summer, at the earliest, but you better believe that they are watering their entire green with so many sprinklers that it’s already making a giant pond, but I can’t water my f****ng tomatoes. I hate it here,” one resident claimed in the video.

This has understandably raised a lot of outrage, especially with all the widespread, bipartisan resistance that these data centers have been facing. However, there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to the video. Firstly, we do not know when the video was shot; there’s a possibility that it was recorded on either a Tuesday or a Friday, meaning the site was well within its rights to water its lawns, at least until September 30.

The publication also noted several other possibilities: it could be using recycled, non-potable water, which Denver Water explicitly states, “are approved to irrigate any day of the week”; it could hold a variance from the utility provider, granting them permission to water their grass under “special circumstances,” or it was just plainly violating the law. Without further information, there’s just no way we can determine what is going on based on a single video. Nevertheless, this compounds the negative perception that data centers are already facing. Although closed-loop cooling technologies like those from Microsoft and Nvidia have essentially cut data center water consumption for cooling to zero, we still cannot get around the fact that several sites have already caused water issues for their neighbors.

Many people are raising issues about data centers’ massive resource consumption and the other negative effects like noise and air pollution that they could potentially bring to their surroundings. It’s for these reasons that Denver, and hundreds of other jurisdictions, have passed temporary bans and moratoriums on data center development.

AMD announced what it calls "the most powerful workstation in the world" at IFA 2026, dubbed the Threadripper Halo Station. The machine includes a Threadripper Pro 9995WX with 96 Zen 5 cores, dual liquid-cooled Instinct MI350P accelerators "with a path to four," 2TB of DDR5, and 288GB of HBM3E with up to 576GB supported. AMD claims the workstation is capable of running trillion-parameter models.

Taking all of the components together, the street price should come out to over $100,000 with just the core components: memory, CPU, and dual GPUs. Configured higher, and with supporting storage, power, and cooling, the workstation could very easily climb over $150,000.

It's essentially a server tray reconfigured into a tower, with an EPYC host replaced with a 96-core Threadripper. AMD didn't share many details about the machine outside of the specs, though it appears to be a system design that AMD's OEM partners will ultimately build and ship. AMD has yet to announce any partners supporting the machine.

The Threadripper Pro 9995WX at the heart of the machine is a 96-core, 192-thread Zen 5 chip that can boost up to 5.4 GHz. It ships with 384 MB of L3 cache and has a TDP of 350W. It's hard to find Threadripper Pro standalone chips in general, but the 9995WX clocks in at around $11,000 to $12,000.

The MI350P accelerators come with 128 CDNA 4 compute units built on TSMC N3. Each accelerator packs 144GB of HBM3E memory, giving the system 288GB of HBM3E. AMD says there's a "path to four," opening up the possibility of two more accelerators bringing 576GB of HBM3E to the system. You'll need plenty of power to feed the GPUs, as each accelerator is rated for up to 600W.

Although AMD says it can support up to four accelerators, the workstation shown off at IFA only has room for two, both of which are liquid-cooled, alongside the Threadripper host. AMD doesn't sell MI350P accelerators on their own in traditional consumer channels, but the estimated price is somewhere around $20,000 per accelerator.

At a system level, the Threadripper Halo Station includes 2TB of DDR5 memory, which is the maximum capacity supported across the eight-channel memory configuration of the Threadripper Pro 9995WX. AMD supports up to DDR5-6400 on the Threadripper, though it made no mention of speed during its IFA presentation. Regardless of speed, 2TB of DDR5 costs about $50,000 right now.

AMD has yet to set a price or release date for the Threadripper Halo Station, though we'll likely hear more about the design from AMD's partners in the near future. An extremely expensive workstation isn't out of the question. The Lenovo ThinkStation P8, for instance, which uses Threadripper Pro CPUs as a host, clocks in at $334,463 right now, maxed out with 2TB of DDR5 and dual Blackwell accelerators.

Sales of discrete graphics processors for consumer PCs were up both sequentially and year-over-year in the second quarter despite soaring prices caused by component shortages, according to a newly released report by Jon Peddie Research. Although PC CPU shipments dropped in Q2 2026 year-over-year amid seasonality and shortages, sales of standalone graphics processors for consumer computers were up 12.2% sequentially and 14.1% YoY, the best market dynamics in some time.

Sales of graphics processing units for consumer PCs — which include integrated and standalone GPUs for desktops and laptops — totaled 75.5 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 10.4% quarter-over-quarter and 1.1% year-over-year, primarily driven by notebooks. This happened as the consumer CPU market contracted by 1.1% YoY amid a massive sequential drop in desktop CPU shipments and a significant rise in mobile CPUs shipments. Desktop GPU shipments declined by 4% quarter-over-quarter, while notebook GPU shipments surged by 16.8%, JPR claims.

But despite declining desktop PC unit shipments and modest growth in notebooks, unit shipments of discrete GPUs increased by 12.2% sequentially and 14.1% year-over-year in Q2 2026, according to JPR data. Jon Peddie Research does not publish absolute numbers of standalone graphics processors shipped in the second quarter, but our estimate is that around 20 million discrete GPUs were sold by AMD, Intel, and Nvidia in Q2, based on attach rates and Nvidia's market share and dynamics.

The results indicate that demand for PCs with discrete graphics remained remarkably resilient despite soaring component prices and slowing demand for desktop PCs. However, JPR's shipment data does not reveal whether the increase was primarily driven by gamers buying graphics cards, stronger demand for gaming notebooks, or other factors.

"The second quarter is typically down compared to the previous quarter," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "This quarter, discrete GPUs increased by 12.2%, even while a global memory crisis sent component prices soaring, driven by a mix of supply-side positioning, artificial demand shocks, and localized market dynamics."

Jon Peddie Research has yet to publish its complete desktop AIB report, which is expected later this month and will include market shares for AMD, Intel, and Nvidia; yet it is safe to say that the latter has maintained its undisputed leadership.

As for the overall consumer PC GPU market, Intel retained its leadership with a 56% market share as it increased shipments of consumer CPUs in Q2 2026. Nvidia came second with 23%, which is not bad at all considering that it only ships discrete GPUs. AMD came third with 21% share, up significantly from 14% in the same quarter a year ago, as it managed to gain seven percentage points of the consumer GPU market YoY amid growing sales of its consumer CPUs.

Fractal Design is determined to be on, under, and in front of your desk — the PC peripherals company best known for its designer PC cases has just released the Fractal Refine 2 — the second generation of its minimalist, "refined" take on the typical racing-inspired gaming chair.

The Fractal Refine 2 is very similar to the original Fractal Refine, but it's been... refined... just a bit further. It still features a subdued but unmistakable "gaming chair" silhouette, as well as a fairly high level of adjustability and a large, hefty frame. Fractal has definitely made some changes — the 4D arm rests now lock in place, and the tilt limiter, which I found to be way too strong in the original, has been pulled back a little (but not quite enough). The price has also been adjusted — all variations retail for $640, which is on the higher side for a typical racing-style gaming chair. We did like the original Refine, but its scratchy mesh fabric kept it off our list of best gaming chairs — but this time we're taking a look at the fabric version.

Assembly

The Fractal Refine 2 comes in a heavy box that's so large you might think the chair is already assembled — but it isn't. It's well-packed: all the pieces are individually wrapped and/or boxed, and there's plenty of eco-friendly packing material keeping everything in its place.

The chair comes with all the tools you'll need to assemble it, though there's admittedly not too much assembly. It comes with an allen wrench and several screws — six longer screws for attaching the armrests, two shorter screws for attaching the backrest, and a handful of extra screws, just in case.

Assembly is pretty straightforward and is pretty easy to accomplish alone — unlike most of the traditional racing-style gaming chairs, the backrest of the Refine 2 is quite a bit lighter than the base, and is easy to put into place alone. It also has two pre-placed screws that slot into two holes and slide to "lock" in place, so you don't need to somehow hold the two pieces together and screw them into place simultaneously. (This might not sound that noteworthy, but trust me — many chairs are virtually impossible to put together without a partner because of this.)

I was able to assemble the Refine 2 by myself in about 15 minutes, and the most difficult part was unpacking everything (because the box really is huge). The Refine 2 comes with a large illustrated instruction panel, as well as an information booklet with more detailed instructions.

Specs

Design

The Refine 2 comes in three upholstery options — fabric, mesh, and hybrid (fabric seat, mesh back) — and two colorways — light and dark. Our review unit came in the dark colorway, a dark slate heathered gray with a black frame, with full fabric upholstery. The fabric feels like soft brushed cotton and is much more comfortable than both the mesh and the fabric of the mesh version of the original Fractal Refine that we reviewed two years ago.

Fabric aside, the Refine 2 looks very similar to its predecessor, with the same "refined" racing-inspired silhouette. It sits on a sturdy, five-spoke metal base with large, hollow plastic casters and a class 4 pneumatic gas lift. It features a glass-fiber reinforced frame with a thick, padded seat that has slightly raised sides — not quite a bucket seat, though it does have the traditional forward hump that bucket seats have. The seat width is approximately 17 inches (431.8mm) between the sides; with the sides included it's closer to 20.5 inches (520.7mm).

The chair has a tall, racing-style backrest with slightly winged shoulder support and a headrest. The chair measures 18.75 inches (476.25mm) wide at the shoulders, and is approximately 53.7 - 58.5 inches (1365 - 1485mm) tall overall. The backrest consists of fabric stretched over a plastic frame for firm, suspension-style support. The chair also features manually-adjustable lumbar support, which presses through the backrest and can be moved vertically and adjusted for strength.

The Refine 2 is not a bad-looking chair, but it is big, heavy, and difficult to maneuver once it's been assembled. It weighs almost 80 pounds (36kg), and is fairly bottom-heavy, which I suppose is good for those who want to spend a lot of time tilting in this chair.

Comfort and Adjustments

The Refine 2 is highly adjustable, though it doesn't offer some of the traditional gaming chair adjustments, such as the ability to lie almost completely flat. There are two levers on the right side of the chair, just under the seat, that control seat depth and height. The front lever controls height, and works as expected — pulling it raises and lowers the chair's height via its gas lift. The floor-to-seat height ranges from 19.3 - 24 inches (490 - 610mm).

The back lever controls seat depth, which starts at around 16.7 inches (425mm) and can be adjusted to approximately 19.69 inches (500mm), which is pretty deep. Under the two levers there's a knob for adjusting the strength of the chair's tilt limiter — twisting forward (clockwise) makes it stronger, while twisting backward (counter-clockwise) makes it weaker. One of my main issues with the original Refine was that the tilt limiter was far too strong, even at its weakest setting. I'm pleased to see that the Refine 2 has toned down the absolute strength of the tilt limiter, but unfortunately it's still just a little too strong for me to be able to easily lean back. While I did manage to find a comfortable position with the Refine 2 by tilting back and locking the chair into a slightly reclined position, I would still prefer more flexibility in the seatback while I'm working.

The Refine 2 has adjustable lumbar support in the form of a moving lumbar pad that presses through the seat's suspension back. The lumbar pad can be moved up and down (you'll need to move it manually), and support can be dialed up by twisting the knob clockwise, or dialed down by twisting the knob counter-clockwise. The lumbar support now features dual pads on either side of your spine (instead of just one pad, like the original Refine had), which flex and adapt as you move to better support your lower back. The dynamic support was nice, though I think I still prefer vertically-adaptable support (like what's on the Herman Miller x Logitech G Vantum).

Like its predecessor, the Refine 2 has 4D adjustable armrests — you can adjust the height, width, depth, and angle. Unlike its predecessor, these arm rests do fully lock in place, as the depth (back/forward) movement is now locked to the small button (on the inside of the armrest, near the front) that also locks angle. There's a lever on the outside of each armrest for adjusting height, and a button on the inside (in the middle) for adjusting width. You can also adjust overall armrest width at the base, though you'll need to break out the hex wrench to do this.

The armrests have wide, padded polyurethane-covered tops and are fairly comfortable. I did find the depth/angle lock to be a little difficult to easily maneuver — especially when I wanted to adjust angle (there are only three angles — neutral/straight, and about 20 degrees inward and outward), but I suppose that's the price we pay for locking arm rests.

The chair has a built-in, detachable neck pillow implemented the same way it is on the original Refine — attached to the chair via two sturdy metal attachments that click into place. The neck pillow can be manually raised or lowered, or it can be removed completely by pressing the button at the top of the backrest. The neck pillow is very similar to the one in the original Refine — moderately dense fabric-covered memory foam with a bottom-heavy sloped shape designed to sit at the base of your neck.

The maximum recommended weight for the Refine 2 is approximately 300 pounds (135kg). However, the recommended weight range is 132 - 300 pounds (60 - 135kg) and the recommended height range is 5'5" - 6'7" (160 - 200cm). I'm right at the lower end of this range (I'm around 5'7" / 171cm and I weigh around 135 pounds / 61kg), and the chair still seemed too heavy for me. While the tilt limiter was weaker than the tilt limiter on the original Refine, I still found it hard to easily tilt back and ended up having to lock the chair into position for comfort. My husband, who's 5'11" (180cm) and weighs around 190 pounds (86kg) had a much easier time tilting and maneuvering the chair.

Bottom Line

The Fractal Refine 2 is actually a pretty nicely refined version of the original Refine. The company definitely took some feedback into account and made some adjustments — but are they enough? This chair is practically identical to its predecessor, and the relatively minor changes aren't really enough to warrant an upgrade if you already have the original. If you don't already have the Fractal Refine, the Refine 2 is a pretty nice halfway point between racing-style gaming chairs and pricier task/office chairs — and the price is about halfway, too. At $640, this is a little more than you'll spend on a typical racing-style chair, such as SecretLab's Titan Evo NanoGen, but it's significantly less than you'll spend on most office-style chairs, such as SteelCase's Karman.

Earlier this year, V-Color announced its 1+1 DDR5 filler memory kits to help suspend disbelief and offer psychological salvation against rising memory prices. These kits mix real DDR5 sticks with dummy modules that don't actually have any RAM inside — just working RGB — to give you the illusion of a fully-slotted motherboard. Today, the kit is finally available to buy in the UK and Europe, with just the filler sticks on their own also listed for sale in North America.

V-Color has two different DDR5 products: Manta XSky and Manta XFinity, the latter being the higher-end model. The 1+1 kit is only available for the Manta XSky variant and only in the UK and Germany; not yet in the US. The 0GB kits (where both sticks are dummies) are available in both the Manta XSky and XFinity models across multiple regions. Pricing starts from $43 and goes up to almost $300, so let's break it all down.

In the UK, Overclockers currently has the 16GB 6,000 MT/s CL30 kit listed for 210 GBP, or $285, in black and white colorways. You get a single 16GB stick with those specs and a filler module to occupy two slots on your motherboard. There's a slightly more expensive 16GB 6,000 MT/s CL28 kit as well, selling for 219 GBP, or $297. Once again, you can choose either the black or white color, and you get 1 real stick of RAM and one filler.

• V-Color (1+1) Manta XSky RGB 16GB C30 6,000MHz - Black
• V-Color (1+1) Manta XSky RGB 16GB C30 6,000MHz - White
• V-Color (1+1) Manta XSky RGB 16GB C28 6,000MHz - Black
• V-Color (1+1) Manta XSky RGB 16GB C28 6,000MHz - White

In Europe, using Geizhals, we were only able to find one in-stock listing of the 16GB 6,000 MT/s CL28 kit for 330 Euros, or $384, in the black colorway. The same kit with CL30 speeds can be had for 220 Euros, or $256, but it's out of stock on CaseKing, the one Germany-based store in the entire EU with these products. We'll remind readers that there are no North America listings for V-Color's 1+1 DDR5 kits as of now.

But we did spot plenty of 0GB kits on Newegg and Amazon. These kits don't offer any real RAM whatsoever and are purely meant for decorative purposes. You can only use these if you already have working RAM in your system and two extra slots left to populate on your motherboard. Amazon has the Manta XFinity variant listed for $57 in either black or white, while Newegg is selling the Manta XSky model for $44 in white.

• V-Color Manta XFinity DDR5 RGB Filler Solution - Black (Amazon)
• V-Color Manta XFinity DDR5 RGB Filler Solution - White (Amazon)
• V-Color Manta XSky DDR5 RGB Filler Solution - White (Newegg)

CaseKing in Germany is selling the Manta XSky filler kit for 50 Euros, or $58, but we weren't able to find any other listing across Europe. The prices for these kits across the world are not much higher than their regular, non-filler counterparts, so you might as well spring for these until the RAMpocalypse settles down. Just don't forget that you'd still be limited to single-channel memory with the 1+1 kits, which isn't that big of a deal when it comes to DDR5, especially if you have an X3D CPU.

Hoto screwdrivers have become a key component in the Tom's Hardware staff toolkit in recent years, and this particular model has been one of my favorites. I've used it for DIY projects during my house reno, but it's also been useful for PC repairs and other odd jobs. The battery life means I've only had to charge it a couple of times in nearly a year of heavy usage. If that sounds good to you, you'll want to grab the 40% discount on this 25-bit Hoto electric screwdriver kit, now priced at just $29.98 for a limited time only.

● Check out this deal at Amazon

This kit is an upgraded version of the model I own; it's the same driver, but with extra bits and a better case, so it's a little bit more robust for users. The 40% discount brings it back to a price that we've seen a few times in recent months, but the kit does spike up and down, so you'll want to grab it while it's on offer.

You're getting the familiar 3.6V electric driver here, with a 1,500 mAh battery that Hoto claims allows you to drive over 1,000 screws without the need to charge it. That does match my own experience, as I've only needed to charge it a couple of times since I picked it up late last year. I use it extensively, pretty much every weekend, too. To charge it, you'll need to use the supplied USB-C cable, and it takes about two and a half hours to fully charge.

This is a fully adjustable driver, so it can handle a few different scenarios, with three different torque settings to choose from. It has an LED light at the top to help you see when you're driving in dark spaces like PC cases, and it'll stop immediately as soon as you release the button. It's magnetic, so keeping hold of tiny screws won't be a problem here.

You get an upgraded storage case with this Hoto model, which helps to both protect the driver and keep your bits organized, and it's a nice upgrade over the circular casing I received with the earlier NEX O1 Pro kit. You're getting 24 different screw bits here, along with an extended PH2 bit, giving you access to Phillips, Torx, flat, hexagon, and Pozidriv head bits, which are all rated for 60HRC on the Rockwell scale.

The $29.98 sale price on this 25-piece Hoto electric screwdriver set makes this a must-buy for hobbyists. If you need a starter set for a PC building kit, or just want a few handy tools for DIY-ing around the home, then this Hoto kit is a good place to start. It's versatile, lightweight, and a good option for when you just need a bit of extra power compared to manual driving.

Amid growing community backlash, SpaceXAI offered a 50% discount to anyone living near its two data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, and claimed that thousands have already taken advantage of the promotion. Aside from the discounts offered to residents of the city and neighboring Southaven, Mississippi, SpaceXAI Memphis said in its X post that it’s also waiving the upfront hardware cost for the recently launched Starlink V5 rental kit across all plans, saving users up to $349 in one-time costs.

Critics say that Elon Musk is simply making this move to buy goodwill with his neighbors, especially as his data centers have been in hot water over the deployment of unpermitted turbines to deliver much-needed power. "Communities in Memphis and North Mississippi aren’t asking for discounted internet service,” SELC Senior Attorney Amanda Garcia told PCMag. “They're asking xAI to shut down its illegal, unpermitted power plant that continues to pump out staggering amounts of harmful (sic) pollution, including smog-forming nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter, and hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde.” While SpaceXAI has since promised to remove all 69 of its unpermitted generators, it says it will do so only over a span of one year as its 1.2 GW power plant comes online to replace them.

Starlink residential plans are available in three tiers: 100 Mbps for $55 a month, 200 Mbps for $85 a month, and Max for $130 a month. Residents who subscribe to any of these plans could get them for just $27.50, $42.50, or $65, respectively, resulting in massive savings. This makes the cheapest Starlink plan more affordable than other internet service providers like AT&T and Xfinity, whose plans often start at $35 to $40 per month.

However, those competitors offer fiber-based connections with speeds up to 300 Mbps, meaning users would be getting a downgrade if they switch over. However, some users in the r/memphis subreddit commented that this is a great option for areas of Memphis and Southaven that still lack fiber access, and it could also be a useful backup for those who need reliable internet service. There were also several complaints about outrageous fees from other options, which drive their internet costs well above $40, making the $27.50 monthly fee for the 100 Mbps Starlink plan a tempting option. Interestingly, the company is also offering the same discount in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, where SpaceX plans to build its new spaceport.

While the company’s social media post makes it seem like 2,000 is an achievement, it’s still a small number relative to the city's total population. The latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates that Memphis alone has a population of over 600,000 people and more than 250,000 households. That means the new subscribers account for less than 1% of the total homes in the city. Aside from that, SpaceXAI’s latest earnings report says that it has more than 12 million subscribers, so the 2,000 new subscribers from the city are just a drop in the company’s massive bucket of Starlink users.

Over the past several months, combo deals, especially those at Newegg, have been one of the only ways to upgrade your system during the RAMpocalypse. The number of combo deals seems to be declining recently, making it a little harder to get a ‘deal’ on the latest hardware. That doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. If you’re in the market to upgrade your RAM or start building a new system, Newegg has a 32GB TeamGroup T-Force Vulcan Eco DDR5-6400 CL38 kit for only $405 with promo code LDSF243. The price tag makes this kit the least expensive DDR5-6400 kit available, even cheaper than most DDR-6000 kits at the ‘egg, too.

• Check out this deal at Newegg

The T-Force Vulcan Eco kit uses a cool-looking silver heatspreader that blends in seamlessly with white/light colorways and offers a nice point of contrast for anyone building in the familiar black. For those looking for some RGB bling, you’ll have to rely on your chassis or case fans, as the Vulcan Eco kit is plain jane. The Eco in the name comes from the recycled materials used to fabricate around 80% of the aluminum heat spreader, promoting environmental sustainability and responsibility while curbing carbon emissions.

We reviewed the DDR5-6000 CL30 kit and loved its tight timings, excellent performance on Intel platforms, and, of course, the recycled aluminum heat spreader. We didn’t review this exact kit, but the charts below give you a general idea of performance. No matter if you plan to use these in an Intel build or in an AMD system, it’s not going to hold you back. If you’re into overclocking, there’s a bit of headroom left in the SK Hynix A-die IC’s they use to improve performance even more if you choose.

While $405 using promo code LDSF243 for a 32GB RAM kit still makes the world cringe, considering we could all get 64GB just over half that price in mid-2025, it’s one of the best deals out there. In fact, it’s one of the least expensive options with reasonable timings and speeds, so you won’t have to choose between a good price and good performance. If you’re in the market to upgrade your RAM or start a DDR5-based PC build, you don’t want to pass this Newegg deal up.

The saga involving Chinese DRAM maker CXMT's alleged theft of Samsung's trade secrets is going strong. The South Korean court case already includes multiple convictions, two of which carry prison sentences for ex-Samsung engineers. The latest chapter is a doozy, though. Korean publication NoCut News spilled the chips on Project Hefei, a purported CXMT roadmap outlining long-term planning about said technology "acquisitions," personnel poaching, and production tape-out — all key pieces that may have directly led to CXMT's ascension to 10% of the global DRAM market.

According to leaked court documents, the prosecution says that Project Hefei was CXMT's entire DRAM development plan and was spearheaded by the firm's head of development (formerly Samsung's DRAM development lead), around August 2016 — not much longer after CXMT itself was created in June 2016.

In brief, the purported plan was to nab Samsung's Process Recipe Plan (PRP) by September 2016, poach key Samsung engineers by October 2016, have R&D complete in July 2017, and start making DRAM wafers by August 2018 at a rate of 10,000 a month. NoCut says the PRP dataset comprises 620 steps in DRAM manufacturing and includes data on equipment, consumables, and production methods.

The report states that in August 2016, CXMT first attempted to make wafers of 18nm chips by relying on the collective memories of the Samsung engineers it had hired away. Those recollections apparently proved insufficient, so after allegedly gaining illicit access to Samsung's PRP, CXMT prepared its own document in September 2016. The leaked data even included specific equipment suppliers and model numbers.

CXMT's "new" PRP was then handed out to key specialists, many of them ex-Samsung engineers, whom the prosecution says ought to have immediately recognized the data as originating from the Korean firm. The document apparently included notation and notes on process developments that were all unique to Samsung. A convicted ex-Samsung researcher with the surname Jeon, previously sentenced to 7 years in prison for manually copying parts of the PRP before leaving for CXMT, testified in this case as a witness.

The whole CXMT debacle has been playing out in South Korean courtrooms since January 2024 and is arguably far bigger than just "a company stole some tech from another." A decade ago, most of the DRAM market was taken by the Big Three: Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix. CXMT was created in June 2016 in Hefei (hence the project name), with a modest government investment of around $1.9 billion USD, allegedly with no R&D facilities whatsoever or any plan for research.

Going from zero facilities and institutional expertise to DRAM wafer production in little over two years would be an unprecedented feat, and presumably nigh impossible without the alleged IP theft; getting just the memory fab up and running usually takes two to four years, let alone any time for research. The firm claimed in 2019 that it designed its then-new 8 Gb DDR4 chips entirely in-house as a "leapfrog, independent" technology and began selling DRAM chips locally.

Then the AI locusts charged in and ate every chip on the planet. This demand resulted in explosive growth for CXMT, from an estimated 4% of the global DRAM market in Q2 2025 to around 10% in Q2 2016, marking the first time in over a decade that the Big Three held less than 90% of the pie.

Production capacity expanded to three 12" wafer fabrication facilities, expected to churn out a collective 350,000 wafers until the year is done — close to the same figure that Micron produces, of 375,000 to 385,000. CXMT is also planning to open a second fab in Beijing, aiming to produce over 600,000 wafers per month once it's online.

Furthermore, CXMT's gains aren't coming just from its DRAM market share. Revenue grew 716% in Q2 2026 alone, and its IPO on the Shanghai STAR Market in July 2026 saw its stock climb 466%, netting the firm a cool $8.6 billion USD and making it the most valuable chipmaker in the Chinese stock market.

About 70% of that money is reportedly going towards further expansion of DRAM production, rather than pricier, more complicated HBM. However, the firm has supplied HBM3E samples to Alibaba's T-Head and Cambricon, even as Samsung and SK hynix enter HBM4 production.

As of the South Korean prosecution's last tally in December 2025, Samsung's damages due to CXMT's alleged machinations ascended to "at least tens of trillions of won." A back-of-the-envelope extrapolation, considering quite a while has passed, might suggest a figure in the range of ₩40 trillion, or $29.5 billion, and rising exponentially.

The lasting impact on the memory market and technology in general is going well beyond plain number descriptors, though. All things considered, if the allegations are true, then CXMT's machinations resulted in a geopolitical-scale economic event. Dr. Evil would be proud.

If you’ve ever snapped a 10,000 mAh magnetic battery or other bulky accessory to the back of your compatible Android or iPhone, you know how cumbersome it can be, especially while you’re trying to use your phone rather than just letting it charge. For those who are shooting video or backing up their files on the go, Lexar wants to make that problem go away with its latest external SSD, the Muse.

At just 80×48×3.8 mm (3.15x1.89x0.15 inches), with tapered edges that make it feel even slimmer, the company calls it the world’s thinnest portable SSD. And compared to the best external SSDs we’ve tested, it certainly stands out for its tiny size.

But to get that slim and small, the company is using a proprietary snap-on cable (Lexar calls it SnapLink) that connects to the back of the drive magnetically, via pogo pins. And the pogo pin side looks kind of bulky compared to the drive itself. If you want the drive to magnetically attach to your phone, you’ll need to slide the drive into its sleeve first, which also looks like it could do double duty as a card wallet.

In other words, Lexar made serious functional design sacrifices to achieve its slim storage superlative. Still, there’s no denying that the Muse will take up a lot less space on the back of your phone than alternatives like Orico’s BookDrive P10Plus.

Aside from its unique slimness and requisite accessories, the Muse looks to be a fairly typical 10 Gbps drive, with Lexar promising read speeds up to 1,050 MB/s, and write speeds up to 1,000 MB/s. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of sustained write performance is possible in such a thin shell.

As a USB-C storage device, the drive will of course also work with Macs, Android devices, and PCs (although you may need to format the drive first to support other operating systems). Lexar also notes there is app support for automatically backing up footage from iPhones, specifically.

Lexar says the Muse portable SSD will be available in 512 and 1TB capacities, sometime in the last quarter of 2026. Official pricing is up in the air, but representatives at IFA told us the company was aiming for roughly $230 for the 512GB model and $380 for 1TB. As always, devices that claim things like “world’s thinnest” tend to carry a price premium.

Nvidia started its AI business with humble AI accelerators, then moved to AI servers, and later to rack-scale and data center-scale platforms. With its multi-faceted AI strategy in place, the company is now looking beyond hardware. On Thursday, Nvidia said it had agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the world's largest platforms for distributing and developing open AI models, for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face will retain its brand and remain open to models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers, and computing platforms.

Nvidia positions the deal as an expansion of its commitment to open-weight AI models and as a way to popularize the use of artificial intelligence in general by enabling different types of developers to use appropriate open models for their products. The move is strategically important for Nvidia as it commands the lion's share of the AI hardware market and wants demand for its hardware to grow. Yet, Nvidia promises not to force participants of the platform into its hardware ecosystem.

Hugging Face currently serves more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, who have uploaded over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, according to Nvidia. Furthermore, more than 200,000 companies use the service to find, assess, modify, and deploy AI models. Nvidia claims this business model will remain intact after the acquisition: Hugging Face will continue to host open-source and open-weight models from different developers and support multiple clouds and accelerator architectures.

Meanwhile, Nvidia says that its infrastructure, engineering resources, and global presence can improve Hugging Face's platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference, and deployment capabilities, which means that it will increase the portion of Hugging Face that relies not only on its hardware but also on its resources and global presence.

It is noteworthy that Nvidia itself already has a considerable footprint on Hugging Face. The company claims to have published more than 500 models and 250 open datasets, making it one of the platform's largest contributors. Nvidia also develops some of its models, software libraries, and tools openly so that third-party developers can modify and build upon them.

Interestingly, the deal appears to have originated with Hugging Face's founder. Nvidia's Jensen Huang says Clément Delangue approached him while evaluating the company's next stage and concluded that Nvidia could provide an appropriate home for Hugging Face, its community, and its open-model ambitions. As it turns out, Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face and keep developing it. The Hugging Face team will join the Nvidia organization and continue working on the project.

Lenovo has a history of bringing concept laptops to the IFA trade show in Berlin, and this year’s pair are all about improving productivity and portability. They also feel closer to something you might actually buy than some concepts we’ve seen in the past.

First up, Project AeroBlade is a 14-inch laptop where, as the company’s press release puts it, “every component is re-engineered around mobility.” For starters, the laptop foregoes fans in favor of Frore Systems’ AirJet solid-state cooling tech, which uses piezoelectric membranes that vibrate ultrasonically, beyond the range of human hearing. There are four AirJet Mini modules here, which is three more than the single AirJet Mini we saw in Intel’s Wildcat Lake reference design back at Computex earlier this year. That should mean much better sustained performance than we’ve seen from passively cooled PCs in the past.

Frore System’s latest AirJet Mini modules are rated to dissipate 7.5 watts of heat, giving the AeroBlade laptop 30 watts of active heat dissipation. This pairs well with the 17-30W-TDP Intel Lunar Lake silicon Lenovo is using in this concept. The more recent Wildcat Lake chips are rated from 15-35W, so should also fare reasonably well with a similar solid-state cooling setup.

Project AeroBlade also uses a tiny motherboard, which, along with a magnesium-aluminum frame, results in a laptop that is just 0.39 inches (10 mm) thick and weighs less than 1.83 pounds (830 grams). The slimness means you’ll have to live on USB-C /Thunderbolt 4 ports alone, but the laptop includes three of them, along with an OLED screen and Wi-Fi 7.

The company is using Intel’s Lunar Lake here, but of course, if the concepts behind this design eventually become a laptop you can buy, it will ship with a more modern CPU. I’d love to see what kind of performance and battery life Wildcat or Panther Lake could deliver in this svelte laptop form factor.

The company is using Intel’s Lunar Lake here, but of course, if the concepts behind this design eventually become a laptop you can buy, it will ship with a more modern CPU. I’d love to see what kind of performance and battery life Wildcat or Panther Lake could deliver in this svelte laptop form factor.

A 17-inch screen in a 14-inch laptop

Project Swan sees Lenovo return to its rollable-screen ambitions, this time with a concept that at once feels more modest, mainstream, and achievable than previous attempts. Housed in a mostly standard-looking 14-inch ThinkBook chassis, the screen expands at the press of a button into a 17-inch, 16:9 display with a 2850 x 1672 resolution. That’s not quite 16:9, but there’s likely some small amount of the rollable OLED display that remains off the visible screen in this concept design.

As you would expect, this isn’t the thinnest or lightest 14-inch laptop, weighing in at 3.53 pounds (1.6kg) and measuring 0.7 inches (17.9 mm) thick. The extra bulk lives in the lid, which needs to house the rollable display mechanism, as well as bezels that expand out the sides. As is usually the case with these devices, the motor mechanism is louder than would likely be acceptable in a finished product, but at least it worked flawlessly during several open and close cycles – which is not always the case with concepts like this.

Hopefully Lenovo can shrink the required screen hardware slightly if a version of this design gets incorporated into a laptop you can actually buy. Because while I don’t love the extra bulk, the idea of a compact 14-inch laptop that can give me a 17-inch screen on the go is very appealing.

If you're a token-hungry AI enthusiast, and if you or your family happen to have PCs with idle GPU cycles to spare in this economy, Nvidia wants to make it possible to harness those cycles so you can save cash on cloud tokens and keep your work private. At IFA 2026, the company is introducing a local distributed AI clustering tool called the Personal AI Router (PAIR) that dispatches agentic AI sub-tasks from your main PC to systems on your home network that have suitable GPU cycles to spare.

As Nvidia tells it, when a user runs a local AI agent and gives it a goal to complete, that central agent might then spawn several sub-tasks carved out of that larger goal. If those sub-tasks or sub-agents are all running on the same GPU, the contention they create might cause the task to finish more slowly than it could if each sub-agent had a dedicated compute node to work with.

PAIR is a tool that can make that distributed AI work happen on a home network. Assuming that a family or shared household is sufficiently flush with idle GPU resources, PAIR canYEa assign each participating system one of those sub-tasks to perform and return the results to the main node, potentially resulting in faster completion of the larger agentic task.

Of course, systems on your local network won't always be idle. Their owners will frequently use the GPUs in their systems for gaming, creative work, or AI tasks of their own. If a user needs their GPU back, PAIR purports to gracefully deal with those changing conditions. It doesn't reserve dedicated capacity from other PCs; it's elastic by design and will make the best of the resources available to it at any given moment.

This unpredictable availability of spare cycles does, of course, mean that quality of service is not assured from a PAIR cluster. But for long-running tasks that don't need to be done on a strict deadline, being able to put spare compute to work could still be more effective than running an agent swarm on a single node.

PAIR sounds relatively simple to set up. It creates a proxy for popular AI front-ends like LM Studio and Ollama to connect to. PAIR then orchestrates work across available nodes on the network and returns the results of that work to the originating application on the head node.

In turn, participating PAIR nodes also need to be running Ollama or LM Studio and have a PAIR installation of their own. Nvidia says that enrolling systems in a PAIR cluster is straightforward and relies on mDNS or an IP address fallback for discovery. PAIR will also help initiate model downloads on participating systems, but Nvidia says that nodes don’t need to have identical models or sets of models downloaded to participate.

If more systems do have a given model available, though, it broadens the pool of potential nodes that can handle a request if the orchestrator agent needs a particular model’s capabilities.

PAIR will run on any DGX Spark (or other GB10) box, as well as GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards or newer. It also supports Macs with M4-series processors or newer for inference. Accordingly, the PAIR client will be available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Nvidia is finally getting more specific about the launch of the RTX Spark. The chip, which it is now officially calling the "N1X," will launch in laptops in October and come in two configurations.

The more powerful option will mix a 20-core Grace CPU with a 6,144-core Blackwell GPU, and come with between 24 and 128GB of unified memory. The other variation uses an 18-core CPU and a cut-down 5,120-core Blackwell GPU with between 24 and 32GB of unified memory. That version will only be in laptops.