Economists Christoph Siemroth of the University of Essex and Yeomyung Park of Sungkyunkwan University have published a peer-reviewed IEEE study that re-crunches 12 years of Backblaze's public drive data, covering 443,156 hard drives and more than 1.66 million drive-years from 2013 through Q2 2025, and finds that HGST drives fail at roughly 41% of Seagate's rate when drives of matched age, capacity, form factor, and operating temperature are compared. WD comes in at about 52% of Seagate's failure rate, while Toshiba sits in last at 107%. As for the most reliable brand in the ranking? HGST, one you can't buy new after WD acquired it in 2012 and wound it down.

Backblaze's quarterly reports compare whichever drives are available at the time, and the authors argue that approach stacks old drives against young ones because each manufacturer's fleet skews to a different era. HGST led new installations in 2014, Seagate dominated from 2015 to 2020, Toshiba topped 2023, and WD topped 2024, so raw annualized figures pit aging Seagate and HGST stock against much fresher Toshiba and WD units. A further 146,943 drives, about 31% of the sample, exited the dataset without ever failing, mostly pulled during capacity upgrades.

Toshiba's monthly failure rate more than quadruples once its drives pass 60 months in service, a monolithic jump that no other manufacturer in the dataset shows at any age. Between 50 and 100 months, Toshiba units failed at five to six per 1,000 drives per month, while the other three brands generally stayed at or below 2.5. Seagate's failure rate started highest among young drives but held steady with age. Backblaze's own analysis of its dead drives previously found most failures happened before three years of service.

Each additional one-degree Celsius of average drive temperature raised failure rates by 2.1% in the models, compounding to roughly 23% across a 10 degrees Celsius increase. Each extra terabyte of capacity cut failure rates by about 3.4%, which the authors attribute partly to helium-filled enclosures and newer head-fabrication processes in higher-capacity designs.

The dataset consists of enterprise drives run in Backblaze's data centers, so the ranking may not carry over to consumer models. Backblaze doesn't record comparable workload data across manufacturers, and only 0.52% of sampled drives ran longer than a decade, so the estimates reflect short- to medium-term reliability.

The authors also suggest WD's ownership of HGST plausibly explains why the two brands sit closest together, given the potential for shared technology. Backblaze's most recent annual report, published in February, put its fleet-wide annualized failure rate for 2025 at 1.36%.

AMD recently expanded its X3D lineup with the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, a new entry that slots in below the Ryzen 7 7800X3D as a more affordable way to get 3D V-Cache on the AM5 platform. Launched on July 16 at $329, the 7700X3D is essentially built from the same silicon as the 7800X3D, just with lower clocks and a price tag that undercuts it by $120 at launch.

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D, on the other hand, needs no introduction at this point. Launched back in April 2023 at $449 (now $360), it quickly became one of the most recommended gaming CPUs on the market and has held that reputation for over three years. AMD has kept it in the lineup even as newer X3D chips took the place at the top of the best CPU for gaming charts, which says a lot about how well it has aged.

With the 7700X3D now available, AM5 builders finally have a cheaper way into the X3D club without stepping down to the six-core Ryzen 5 7600X3D. The obvious question is how much performance actually gets left on the table by going with the cheaper option, and whether the 7800X3D's higher clocks are worth the extra money in 2026.

Using data from our CPU benchmark hierarchy and individual reviews of both chips, we’re going to compare them point-for-point across gaming, application performance, power consumption, and more.

Features and Specifications: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

The Ryzen 7 7700X3D is the newer of the two chips here, launching on July 16, 2026, priced at $329. For the time being, it's a Newegg exclusive in North America, at least for this quarter, before wider retail availability presumably follows. It's built on the same Zen 4 architecture as the rest of the Zen 4 X3D family and manufactured on TSMC's N5 process.

The chip features 8 cores and 16 threads, with a base clock of 4.0 GHz and a boost clock of 4.5 GHz. That boost clock is notably 500 MHz lower than the 7800X3D, which is really the main differentiator between the two chips on paper. AMD has essentially taken 7800X3D silicon that couldn't hit the higher clocks and repackaged it as a cheaper SKU.

For the cache, the Ryzen 7 7700X3D carries the full 96MB of 3D V-Cache-enabled L3, for a total cache pool of 104MB once you factor in L2. This matches the 7800X3D exactly, and it's the reason the 7700X3D isn't just a watered-down budget chip.

The Ryzen 7 7700X3D uses the AM5 socket and supports DDR5 memory exclusively, with capacities of up to 128 GB. It also supports PCIe 5.0 connectivity for both storage and GPU lanes. The chip has a 120W TDP, identical to the 7800X3D, and integrated graphics are included in the form of AMD Radeon Graphics with 2 CUs running at 2,200 MHz (same as the 7800X3D).

Now onto the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which launched in April 2023. It's also an 8-core, 16-thread Zen 4 chip built on TSMC's N5 node, so the core architecture and process node are shared between both CPUs. Where it separates itself is clock speed, with a 4.2 GHz base clock and a considerably higher 5.0 GHz boost clock.

The 7800X3D carries the same 96MB of L3 cache as the 7700X3D, along with the same 104MB total cache figure. It also uses the AM5 socket with DDR5-5200 support up to 128GB, the same 120W TDP, and the same PCIe 5.0 lane configuration.

Neither CPU officially supports a traditional multiplier overclock in the way non-X3D Ryzen chips do. However, AMD has gradually opened up more headroom for Curve Optimizer and PBO tuning on its X3D lineup since the 7800X3D's launch. We'll get into that in more detail in the overclocking round.

Zooming out, it's clear these two CPUs are much closer than a typical faceoff matchup. The Ryzen 7 7700X3D and Ryzen 7 7800X3D share the same core count, the same cache pool, the same socket, the same memory support, and the same TDP. The only meaningful difference on paper is the 500 MHz deficit on the 7700X3D's boost clock, and any price gap that comes with ti (though that gap is small).

That makes this round more or less straightforward, with only one factor tipping the scales in the favor of the 7800X3D.

⭐ Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

The 7800X3D still wins on paper thanks to its higher boost clock, but barely. With identical cache, cores, and platform support, this is about as close as a spec sheet comparison gets.

Gaming Benchmarks and Performance: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

For gaming, we're looking at a 16-game test suite at 1080p, with settings varying between High and Ultra depending on the title. That should give us a clear picture of how the new Ryzen 7 7700X3D stacks up against its more expensive sibling in the games people are actually going to play. We tested the two CPUs with a GeForce RTX 5090 to remove any potential GPU bottlenecks.

We used identical systems for testing. For a full breakdown of the platforms we used, see our Ryzen 7 7700X3D review and Ryzen 7 7800X3D review.

Starting off with our 16-game FPS geomean, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D leads the Ryzen 7 7700X3D with an average of 181.8 FPS, compared to 174.3 FPS for the newer chip. That works out to a 4.3% advantage for the 7800X3D. The gap widens slightly in 1% lows, where the 7800X3D puts out 124 FPS against 118 FPS for the 7700X3D, a difference of about 5%.

It's a modest lead across the board, but a lead nonetheless. Both CPUs comfortably outpace the rest of the field here, including the pricier Core i7-14700K and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, so this really comes down to a battle within AMD's own X3D lineup.

Looking at individual titles, the story stays fairly consistent. In Baldur's Gate 3, the 7800X3D leads the 7700X3D by 6.4%, and the gap is similar in The Last of Us Part One at 5.6% and Marvel Rivals at 5.5%. Hogwarts Legacy sees the 7800X3D ahead by 4%, and 007: First Light comes in at a 3.2% lead.

However, the margin shrinks considerably in a few titles. Flight Simulator 24 and Minecraft RT both land in the 2% range, and Crimson Desert is even closer at just 1.4%. Interestingly, DOOM: The Dark Ages is essentially a dead heat, with the 7800X3D ahead by less than 1%, at 201.9 FPS to the 7700X3D's 200 FPS.

So yes, the 7800X3D wins every title we tested, but in a good chunk of them, you'd be hard-pressed to notice the difference without a frame counter on screen. However, that is what you would expect from a CPU that is essentially the same, with a cut-down boost clock.

Speaking of the clocks, the 7800X3D averaged 4,726 MHz across our test suite, compared to 4,505 MHz on the 7700X3D. That's a 4.9% higher average clock speed for the 7800X3D, and it lines up almost exactly with its FPS advantage, so the extra frequency headroom appears to be the deciding factor here.

Where the 7700X3D claws back some ground is in power, temperatures, and value. The newer chip drew just 60.9 watts on average during our gaming tests, compared to 67.3 watts for the 7800X3D, a 9.5% reduction in power draw. That also translates to lower temperatures, with the 7700X3D running at an average of 55°C versus 62°C for the 7800X3D, a full 7°C cooler than its sibling.

Safe to say, the 7700X3D is also the more efficient chip of the two. It managed 2.86 FPS-per-watt in our testing, compared to 2.70 for the 7800X3D, making it about 6% more efficient. The value picture tells a similar story, with the 7700X3D delivering 0.53 FPS-per-dollar against 0.50 for the 7800X3D — though that assumes a $360 price for the 7800X3D, and we’ve seen it sell for the same price as the 7700X3D multiple times previously. Obviously with both CPUs at $330, the 7800X3D comes out ahead on value.

⭐ Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

The 7800X3D wins every game we tested, and while several of those wins are razor thin, a win is still a win. The 7700X3D answers back with better efficiency, cooler temperatures, and a stronger price-to-performance ratio, at least at MSRP, but this round is about raw gaming performance, and the 7800X3D still has the edge there.

Productivity Performance: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

AMD’s X3D chips aren’t top productivity performers, unless you spring for something like the Ryzen 9950X3D. Still, application performance is important even if you primarily use your PC for gaming. We have a range of tests in rendering, encoding, web performance, and more that compromise or multithreaded and single-threaded geomeans, which you can see in the gallery below.

In these workloads that are concerned with raw CPU performance, clock speed alone can make a significant difference. That tracks with our results, with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D consistently providing a larger advantage over the 7700X3D in application performance than it does in games.

Starting with our multi-threaded performance ranking geomean, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D scores 291 points, compared to 272 points for the Ryzen 7 7700X3D. That puts the 7800X3D ahead by 7% on average. It is not a massive gap, but it is a consistent one, as it shows up across every multi-core test we ran.

In Cinebench 2024's multi-core test, the 7800X3D leads the 7700X3D by 4.7%, with the same pattern showing up in Cinebench 2026 at a 5.3% lead. POV-Ray tells a similar story, with the 7800X3D ahead by 7.7%, and Blender's Junkshop scene puts the 7800X3D 6.25% faster than the newer chip.

The encoding tests follow the same trend. In HandBrake's x265 10-bit encode, the 7800X3D is 7.7% faster than the 7700X3D, and that lead holds nearly identical at 7.6% in SVT_AV1 encoding. JPEG-XL multi-threaded decode shows the 7800X3D ahead by 7.2%.

Interestingly, the gap in every single multi-threaded benchmark sits somewhere between 4% and 8%, so there is no real outlier here in either direction. Since core and thread counts are identical, this is really just a straightforward reflection of the 7800X3D's higher boost clocks doing their job across sustained, all-core loads.

Moving on to single-threaded performance, the gap actually widens a bit. Our single-threaded performance ranking geomean has the 7800X3D at 215 points against 195 points for the 7700X3D, which is a 10.3% lead for the pricier chip.

This makes sense when you consider how single-core workloads work. With fewer cores active, the CPU can push individual cores harder within its power budget, so the chip with the higher clock ceiling pulls further ahead than it does in multi-core tests where thermal and power limits are shared across all cores at once.

The same pattern shows up across the individual single-threaded tests. Cinebench 2024's single-core result favors the 7800X3D by 9.8%, and Cinebench 2026 comes in nearly identical at 9.8% as well. POV-Ray's single-core test shows the widest gap of the round, with the 7800X3D ahead by a noticeable 11.1%.

In the Lame audio encoding tests, the 7800X3D finishes 8.8% faster in the standard test and 9.5% faster in the extended version. WebXPRT4, which measures browser and JavaScript performance, has the 7800X3D ahead by 9.7%.

It is worth remembering that neither of these CPUs was really built with productivity as the main focus. The extra 3D V-Cache that makes them so good at gaming doesn’t help much in these tests, and if anything, the lower clock speeds that come with fitting that cache onto the die work against them in these tests.

⭐Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

The 7800X3D wins every single productivity test we ran, with leads ranging from roughly 5% in multi-threaded work up to 11% in single-threaded tasks. It is a clean sweep, though the margins stay consistent enough that the 7700X3D never looks completely outmatched.

Overclocking: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

AMD introduced traditional multiplier-based overclocking with Zen 5 X3D CPUs. However, the Ryzen 7 77003D and 7800X3D don’t have access to that. These CPUs stack the cache on top of the compute die, acting as an insulating layer. New Zen 5 X3D CPUs instead keep the cache below the compute die.

That said, AMD loosened things up compared to the first-gen X3D chips. Both the 7700X3D and 7800X3D support Precision Boost Overdrive and Curve Optimizer, which let you push sustained boost clocks a bit further and shave voltage where the silicon allows it, without touching the core multiplier directly. Memory and Infinity Fabric overclocking remain fully open on both chips too, and EXPO makes hitting rated DDR5 speeds simple enough.

Given that the 7800X3D already ships with higher stock clocks and a bit more thermal headroom than the 7700X3D, it also tends to respond slightly better to PBO tuning, since it has more room to stretch before hitting the same limits. The 7700X3D isn't far behind, and its lower stock power draw means it has some slack of its own to work with when pushed.

Realistically, this round is a wash in terms of actual tools available. Both chips are locked in the same way, and both get the same PBO and Curve Optimizer toolkit. The only real difference comes down to how much headroom each chip has to give up before hitting a wall, which slightly favors the 7800X3D, but it is still a tie overall.

⭐Winner: Tie

Both CPUs are limited to the same PBO and Curve Optimizer tuning since neither got AMD's reworked cache layout, so this round is essentially a tie between the two.

Power Consumption, Efficiency, and Cooling: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

For power consumption, we measured power draw across idle, active idle, and full load scenarios, then broke things down further into efficiency metrics to see which chip gets more work done per watt.

At idle, the Ryzen 7 7700X3D consumed just 19 watts, compared to 25 watts for the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, making the 7700X3D 31.6% more efficient at rest. That gap narrows slightly in an active-idle scenario like YouTube playback, where the 7700X3D drew 22W against 28W for the 7800X3D, a 27.3% difference. Even while doing nothing demanding, the newer chip is sipping noticeably less power.

Moving on to all-core workloads, in our y-cruncher multi-threaded AVX power test, the Ryzen 7 7700X3D consumed 78W, while the Ryzen 7 7800X3D drew 89W, which is a 14.1% increase. The same pattern shows up in Linpack, where the 7800X3D consumed 10.8% more power than the 7700X3D.

We see the gap growing wider in our rendering tests. Cinebench 2024's multi-core render has the 7800X3D pulling 88W compared to 74W for the 7700X3D, an 18.9% increase, and Blender's Junkshop scene shows an even wider 23% gap. The encoding tests land somewhere in between, with the 7800X3D drawing 11.1% more power in HandBrake x265 and 15.3% more in SVT_AV1 encoding.

We even looked at single-threaded power draw, and the same pattern can be seen here as well. In y-cruncher's single-threaded AVX test, the 7700X3D consumed 32W, while the 7800X3D needed 39W, which is a 21.9% increase. This lines up with the more conservative power budget AMD appears to have given the 7700X3D, as it prioritizes efficiency over the extra clock speed the 7800X3D gets to use.

To determine said efficiency, we looked at the performance delivered per watt. In Cinebench 2024, the 7700X3D managed 14.4 points per watt compared to 12.6 for the 7800X3D, making it 14.3% more efficient in this test. Linpack's GFLOPs-per-watt-hour metric shows a similar story, with the 7700X3D being 12.2% more efficient in this test. In HandBrake x265, the watts-per-FPS numbers are close, but the 7700X3D still edges ahead by 4.6%.

We can also visualize this using our scatterplots. In the Linpack power efficiency chart, the Ryzen 7 7700X3D and Ryzen 7 7800X3D sit almost on top of each other toward the bottom-left of the graph, both well ahead of the Core i7-14700K and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus in efficiency. The HandBrake x265 scatter plot tells a slightly different story. The 7700X3D sits marginally lower in energy use, while the 7800X3D pushes a bit further right thanks to its higher FPS, landing both chips close together towards the middle of the plot.

Curiously, the 7800X3D never falls behind by a wide margin in these efficiency charts, but the 7700X3D is consistently the more frugal chip whenever raw wattage is being measured directly. The long and short of it is that AMD seems to have dialed back the power ceiling on the 7700X3D without giving up much in the way of real-world efficiency, which makes sense given it is the newer, more refined part in this matchup.

⭐Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

The Ryzen 7 7700X3D draws less power across idle, active idle, and full-load scenarios, and it backs that up with better efficiency numbers in nearly every test we ran. The 7800X3D still performs faster, but not by enough to justify its higher power draw in this round.

Pricing: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Pricing is interesting as this is where the two chips get quite close, since they share the same platform, the same socket, and largely the same feature set. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D currently sits at $340, though it’s previously sold closer to $340, while the newer Ryzen 7 7700X3D comes in at $330, making it $10 cheaper out of the gate.

That $10 difference on the CPU itself is straightforward enough, and the platform costs line up, as well. Both CPUs support the same AM5 platform. A decent B650 board runs about $150-$200, while X670E boards with better VRMs and connectivity climb into the $250-$350 range.

Memory requirements are also identical, since both CPUs support DDR5 exclusively. A 32GB DDR5-6000 kit, which is the sweet spot for AM5 platforms, currently runs between $300 and $400 depending on the brand and timings. Given the ongoing RAMpocalypse, that price could shift, but it applies equally to both chips, so it does not tilt the comparison one way or the other.

Both CPUs are remarkably efficient, but they run hotter than what their power draw suggests; that's the insulation effect of the cache at work. A competent air cooler between $30 and $80 is enough to keep the chip cool, though you might want to step up to a midrange AIO liquid cooler between $80 and $120.

Platform longevity is identical between the two as well, since both are on the AM5 platform that AMD has committed to supporting for years to come. Neither chip has an advantage in future upgrade paths, so this round really does come down to dollars and cents.

And that makes picking a winner here tricky. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D has seen consistent price drops, with it dropping from $360 to $340 just in the time between writing and publishing this article. The Ryzen 7 7700X3D briefly dropped down to $290, though it climbed back up to $330 and has remained there since.

⭐ Winner: Tie

This round is a tie because, depending on the day, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D might be the exact same price (we've actually seen it cheaper on sale) than the 7700X3D. If you want a shorthand, if you can buy the Ryzen 7 7800X3D for less than $350, it makes up the extra cost in performance. Otherwise, the 7700X3D comes out ahead on value.

Bottom Line: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

After a six-round matchup, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D comes out on top with a 5-3 scoreline, coming ahead in features, gaming performance, and productivity, while coming in a tie with the 7700X3D in pricing and power consumption.

The 7800X3D's wins all trace back to the same factor: higher clock speeds. It has more headroom baked in from the factory, and that advantage carries through gaming performance and productivity workloads. Its victory in both of these categories was slim, but consistent.

The Ryzen 7 7700X3D answers back where it counts the most for a lot of buyers. It draws noticeably less power at idle and under load, runs slightly cooler, and is more efficient across nearly every metric we tested. That efficiency doesn’t translate into direct savings, however. Both chips have a very similar thermal profile.

If you want the fastest possible gaming and productivity performance on this platform and don't mind paying a bit more upfront, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the CPU to get. The performance gap isn't enormous, but it is still noticeable enough across every round we tested.

Given how close these two chips actually are once you factor in price and efficiency, this is one of the tighter faceoffs we've done. Still, the numbers don't lie, and the 7800X3D is the overall victor in this battle.

⭐ Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

More CPU Faceoffs

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 vs Ryzen 9 9950X3D
• Intel Core i5-14400 vs AMD Ryzen 5 7600X
• AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D vs Intel Core i9-14900K
• AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D vs Ryzen 7 9800X3D

The latest cooler on our test bench is the Sigma L36 Pro, a high-end AIO with a 3.5-inch display from relative cooling newcomer Ocypus. This manufacturer is known for quirky design choices that help set it apart from its many competitors. I found the company’s Iota C70 computer case and A62 digital air cooler especially interesting products when I tested them last year.

Like many other AIOs we’ve reviewed lately, the Sigma L36 Pro features a display – a large 3.5-inch detachable screen in this case, capable of displaying performance metrics and animated images and video.

Screen aside, the technical specifications of the product are impressive. The static pressure exerted by the fans is nearly twice as strong as many competitors – rated for up to 5.8 mmH20. But even more impressive than this is the price of the liquid cooler: Despite having a relatively large display and extremely powerful fans, you can find this cooler selling for $135 or less.

Let's take a look at the specifications and features of this eye-catching AIO, then we’ll go over thermal and noise benchmarks so you can decide if the Ocypus Sigma L36 Pro deserves to make our list of the best CPU coolers.

Cooler specifications

Features of Ocypus Sigma L36 Pro

▶️ Detachable 3.5-inch 640x480 resolution IPS display

It seems like the biggest trend in liquid cooling recently is AIOs with fancy displays on top of the CPU block, and Ocypus rides this trend, including a 3.5-inch IPS screen here that some users might find reminiscent of older PCs due to it’s VGA (640x480) resolution and 4:3 aspect ratio.

Many AIOs have the screen built into the CPU block, like Hyte’s THICC Q60. Other manufacturers offer the display and CPU block as separate components, and that’s how the Ocypus Sigma L36 Pro is designed.

When a display connects to the PC, but isn’t actually built into the CPU block, this opens up customization options that you might not think of normally. As you can see in the photograph above, I’ve got the display set up on a stool next to my computer desk, instead of inside my case. You’ll have to obtain a 9-pin header to USB-A (or C) adapter to use the device externally, but these can usually be found for less than $10.

To control and customize the display, you’ll need to download the simply named Ocypus Display software. It’s a surprisingly small download size of only 184 megabytes, and uses 493 MB when installed – and about the same amount of RAM when active.

Multiple preset themes are available, but only three are installed by default.

If you click the cloud icon shown in the picture above, a link to Ocypus' “Download Center” is opened in your default browser, which offers more options.

The software is extremely simple to use and easy to create your own customized theme with. In the example above, I uploaded an animated GIF file of a happy puppy and set the display to monitor CPU temperature, power consumption, and fan speeds metrics through text labels. I’ve also set up monitoring of CPU utilization, both with a text label showing the current status and a line graph showing the changes in CPU utilization over time.

▶️ RAM Clearance

As with most liquid coolers, the design of this AIO is such that the CPU block as such that it doesn’t overhang or interfere with the DIMM slots in any manner, ensuring that all sticks of compatible RAM, no matter how tall, will fit with this cooler.

▶️ Thick CPU cold plate

This AIO is designed for normal PC platforms like Intel’s Arrow Lake and LGA1851 socket or AMD’s Ryzen X3D CPUs and the AM5 socket, but you might wonder if it supports server products when you see the size of the coldplate – it has a larger surface area and greater thickness than most liquid coolers designed for consumer PCs.

▶️ 120mm fans

There’s more to a cooler than just the radiator and liquid pump. The included fans have a direct impact on aesthetics, noise levels, and overall thermal performance. Conveniently, the fans here arrive pre-installed, saving a few moments of time when you put things together. The fans included in this model are white, but this cooler is also available with black fans.

These fans seem to be overbuilt, more powerful than the rest of the AIO can properly take advantage of. They are rated for an unusually high 5.8 MMH20 of static pressure and 90 CFM at full speed.

▶️ Packaging

The outer packaging is a bit flashy, at least in comparison to your normal AIO box. It features a rendering of the cooler against a black background with streaks of purple hues – logos on all sides of the box for full marketing impact.

The inner packaging is just as fresh as the outside, with each component of the cooling system well protected from the chaos that shipping can bring by using a combination of soft covers and individual cardboard walls for each component.

Included with the package are:

• Mounting hardware for AMD and Intel platforms
• Tubing clips
• A small tube of thermal paste
• 360mm radiator and 120mm fans
• 3.5-inch LCD display

AM5 Installation

This section assumes you’ve already mounted the 360mm radiator. Installation of AIOs is typically much easier when you have already secured the radiator to your computer case. To begin putting things together, you’ll first need to remove the default AM4/5 retention hardware.

The next step is to screw in the mounting studs, as shown below.

Now you’ll want to apply the included thermal paste. 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 studs, using the included screws and a screwdriver to secure it in place.

I chose to attach the included 3.5-inch screen externally, but if you want to place it in your case, this is the time to put it on top of your CPU block. The final step, of course, is to connect the cables and turn on your computer when finished.

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 lesser airflow needs and lowered ambient temperatures. This results in making 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 to an extent and consume over 260W. Enabling PBO enables 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.

High-end AIO liquid coolers have higher expectations in this benchmark, and are expected to be able to keep AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D under TJ Max during the duration of the benchmark – in these cases, we compare the CPU’s actual temperature.

Ocypus’ Sigma L36 Pro performs well and is capable of keeping the CPU cool in this test, with an average temperature of 85.7C/186.3F.

Some coolers perform well in maximum strength tests, but run loudly at full speeds. Noisy fans in this scenario aren’t necessarily a bad thing; some folks prefer to hear them as a way to be aware when the CPU is getting hot.

The fans included with Ocypus’ Sigma L36 Pro reach 49.8 dBA at 100% RPM, which is loud, but to be expected of fans with 5.8mm H20 of air pressure. Those who prefer to implement speed restrictions for silent operation need not worry; our noise-normalized benchmarks show good performance even when the fans are set to run quietly.

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.

When compared to the other seven AIOs we’ve tested Ocypus Sigma L36 Pro against, its performance is behind most of its peers. That said, the gap between Ocypus’ AIO and the top performer is rather small – the average temperature of 70.5C (48.5C above ambient) achieved by the Sigma L36 Pro is only 2.1C behind our best result.

150W + GPU thermal results, noise levels

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 primarily stress the CPU and GPU.

Ocypus’ position in this thermal test remains the same as in our previous chart. When tied to the default fan curve of MSI’s X870E Carbon motherboard, it reaches a mild volume level of 41.9 dBA.

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.Most coolers will not be able to keep the CPU from reaching its peak temperature (TJ Max) in this stress test. So we’ll look at this in terms of average CPU power consumption, which averaged 255.4 watts.

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.

Conclusion

Ocypus’ Sigma L36 Pro features an attractive combination of features, including a fancy 3.5-inch LCD display. Those things alone make this AIO interesting and worth considering, but it’s also affordable, with a regular price of only $135, and often on sale for less. In fact, as this review was wrapping up, the black version of the Sigma L36 Pro was on sale at Amazon for just $105. At that price, it’s inarguably a CPU-cooling steal.

Although SK hynix is primarily known as a memory maker, the South Korean company also produces high-quality consumer SSDs, many of which previously earned spots on our list of the best SSDs. Recently, a Reddit user said they reached out to SK hynix for a warranty replacement on a malfunctioning SSD, but the chipmaker reportedly told the owner no replacement units were available and instead offered a refund at the original purchase price. However, with SSD prices soaring due to a global storage shortage, a refund like this would be insufficient to buy a comparable drive in today’s market.

When you send in an SSD for warranty work, there are generally two possible outcomes. Either the company repairs it or replaces it with a similar or equivalent drive, or, in some cases, provides a refund. The former is often straightforward; the latter, however, tends to be more complex. The manufacturer's warranty strictly defines the refund amount.

If you examine SK hynix’s warranty policy on SSDs, the documentation explicitly states: “In lieu of a Product repair or replacement, the original purchaser may receive a refund of either the original purchase price or the fair market value, whichever is lower.”

In other words, SK hynix will determine the refund amount by comparing what the Redditor paid for the SSD at the time of purchase with its current fair market value, then issuing the lower figure. Under normal market conditions, it would be a fair and reasonable solution. However, the storage shortage has caused SSD prices to increase substantially, so this clause will definitely leave customers at a disadvantage. The Redditor did not provide details on which drive they bought or when. Nonetheless, as examples, SSDs like the SK hynix Platinum P51 and its predecessor, the Platinum P41, have doubled in price since the storage shortage.

An increasing number of warranty claims have gone public over the last couple of months. For example, a recent incident involving Micron saw the company initially offering only a standard refund at the original purchase price for a Crucial memory kit, the company's axed consumer brand. After some pushback, Micron ultimately offered to match the memory kit's capacity with alternative memory modules.

In another high-profile spat, Louis Rossmann had a lengthy back-and-forth with Samsung customer service over an SSD warranty and eventually threatened legal action. Samsung ultimately refunded the owner at the SSD's current market price. It was weird to see the situation escalate the way it did since Samsung’s warranty policy confirms that if the company is unable to repair or replace a product, it will “refund the then current market value of the Product at the time the warranty claim is made to Samsung.”

Recent cases show that it is important for consumers to read the fine print in manufacturers' warranty policies, especially in these turbulent times. Many companies are profiting immensely from the memory and storage shortage. Nevertheless, they should not forget the customers who supported them before the shortage. Consumers are already frustrated by rising hardware prices, so manufacturers should at least show empathy and flexibility when handling warranty claims to better serve their customers.

Intel’s Robert Hallock, vice president and general manager of the enthusiast channel business, believes that the consumer market will see a split in sockets for mainstream and enthusiast platforms to address the rising costs of PCs for cash-strapped buyers. Tom’s Hardware Premium recently spoke with the technical marketing leader about the state of the PC market, which Hallock described as a “tale of two kingdoms.”

“I think the market's experiencing a tale of two kingdoms. For the folks who have a significant amount of discretionary budget, they can absorb the cost impacts of what's going on in the industry, and most other people cannot,” Hallock said. “And that's having a very different impact, as you can imagine, on different parts of the market. Low-end, mainstream is really taking a beating. Enthusiast and premium, not so bad. You could, depending on the device class, maybe even [say] growing positive. So it's a very starkly divided market at the moment.”

Hallock’s take on the market is interesting. The doom and gloom of the RAM and NAND shortages is omnipresent, but we’ve also seen very expensive launches despite that. Gigabyte launched the $5,300 RTX 5090 Infinity OC in June. Asus demoed its 20th anniversary ROG lineup at the same time, which includes a $3,300 motherboard and CPU cooler bundle, as well as a $6,000 RTX 5090. Saying the enthusiast market is growing given the current market conditions may be a stretch, but RAM prices haven’t killed it — an extra $300 or $400 in RAM in the context of a $5,000 PC doesn’t really move the needle.

That’s not the majority of the market, however, and presumably, those few high spenders aren’t enough to sustain a business at the scale of Intel. We’ve already seen concessions in hardware to reach buyers during the memory shortage, particularly in laptops, with the MacBook Neo, Intel’s own Wildcat Lake, and the newly-detailed Snapdragon C. On the desktop, we’ve seen AMD re-release the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and introduce the Ryzen 7 7700X3D. Intel has sold off its new Arrow Lake Refresh chips at much lower prices than expected, with the new Core Ultra 5 250K Plus recently dropping to just $155 in a limited-time sale.

On desktop, at least, these seem like short-term measures. Hallock suggests that, going forward, there will be a more clear divide between mainstream and enthusiast platforms, not just at Intel, but across the industry if prices don’t let up.

“I truly believe that what the market is going to see going forward, and this is just like an industry-level comment… and I want to stress this is not just Intel. You're probably going to see a split. You'll have a premium socket and a mainstream socket from everybody,” Hallock said. “If you’re playing in desktop space, that is probably what you'll do because the supply chain costs, the upstream costs, the same costs that are currently harming the entry-level and mainstream market, I don't see those abating anytime soon.”

AMD has stressed in its previous two earnings calls that gaming revenue, in particular, is declining due to higher component costs. In Intel’s most recent earnings, it reported revenue in its client business up 13% year-over-year, though clarified that was due to higher average selling price, not increased unit sales, because of “some inflation on our cost and [needing] to pass that on to the end customer,” said Intel’s chief financial officer David Zinsner during the earnings call at the time.

Hallock buttoned up the point clearly: “You're going to have to make some concessions in your product stack, and that's purely to control costs and give people an option that they can actually afford. Otherwise, if you don't do it, the other alternative is it just disappears because it's unaffordable.”

It seems for Intel that the socket split looks like LGA 1700 for mainstream and LGA 1954 for enthusiasts, though Hallock didn’t say that explicitly. In June, Tom’s Hardware first reported on “Raptor Lake Next,” which is supposedly a third refresh to Intel’s Raptor Lake lineup set for early 2027. Hallock didn’t confirm the range to us, though he said that Raptor Lake remains a “core part of the portfolio” that he wants to offer “for years to come.”

LGA 1954 is the socket that Intel’s upcoming Nova Lake CPUs will use. There’s a lot of anticipation surrounding Nova Lake, not only due to the lackluster reception of Arrow Lake, but also the various rumors that have swirled around the range, including the introduction of bLCC as a 3D V-Cache competitor and a 52-core flagship, neither of which have been confirmed by Intel.

Although a lot is riding on Nova Lake, Hallock was clear that, given the current market, it won’t appeal to everyone. “A product like Nova Lake cannot address every single slice of the market. It just can't, given the current market that we're in,” Hallock said. “But I do hope and do believe that people will look back and go, ‘Damn, you know, that was pretty freaking good.’ That's what we’re hoping for.”

You can read the transcript of the full interview at our Tom's Hardware Premium site.

What could possibly go wrong when you try to steal trade secrets from a restricted facility using a 360-degree action camera hidden in snacks? Forgetting to turn off the device’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi transmitters, as it turns out.

A senior engineer at Nanya Technology has been indicted in Taiwan for allegedly copying 32 files containing information about the company's DRAM manufacturing process, reports Freedom Times. The engineer was reportedly in talks with Chinese recruitment agencies and allegedly planned to pass Nanya's trade secrets to its next employer in the People's Republic in exchange for higher compensation.

Yeh Yen-wei, a senior engineer in the Advanced Process Development Division at Nanya, joined the company in 2022 and began to communicate with Chinese recruiters in 2025 to explore employment opportunities in the People's Republic. Sometime in mid-February 2026, he submitted his resignation. However, before leaving the company in mid-April, on March 28, April 4, and April 5 — during weekends and either late at night or early in the morning — he visited the company's restricted office areas with his Insta360 X4 Air action camera hidden among snacks to get it past security checks.

Once inside, Yeh used his legitimate account credentials to access Nanya's virtual machines and opened various internal research and development documents. He then used the camera to capture photographs and video of information associated with Nanya's DRAM process technologies and production methods. It goes without saying that he retained the information when he officially resigned from Nanya in mid-April.

However, his actions did not go unnoticed. Nanya's IT security team detected 'abnormal' wireless signals inside the company's restricted facilities (i.e., identified the device using its Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi signals) and tied them to the employee's access records and activity logs. Eventually, Nanya reported the suspected theft to Taiwanese authorities, which led to an indictment.

The New Taipei District Prosecutors Office charged Yeh under Taiwan's Trade Secrets Act with unauthorized reproduction of trade secrets intended for use in China, an offense for which he faces up to 10 years in prison, as well as with breach of trust under the Criminal Code. Meanwhile, forensic examination of the seized equipment uncovered no evidence that Yeh had successfully transmitted Nanya's confidential information to a Chinese company or anyone outside the company, so he could potentially get off easy.

Discussions about the thorny topic of computer data preservation are swirling again. This time, optical disc collectors are highlighting the danger of catastrophic failures of compact disc (CD) formats. Specifically, a handful of Twitter/X users have seen their treasured CDs split or shatter without any glaringly obvious cause. The root cause seems to be the degradation of the polycarbonate substrates of the CDs from either cleaning substances or some types of foam padding in storage cases off-gassing.

The two examples of shattered CDs embedded above might look pretty similar, but the failures may have been precipitated through different vectors. @japanretrogame’s split-down-the-middle CD was perhaps doomed due to too much care and maintenance. Reader notes suggest the user cleaned and polished this CD to keep it clean and shiny. This eventually caused chemical cracking of the polycarbonate substrate, it is thought [machine translations used].

Moving along to consider @CZ662C’s even worse-looking CD fragments, and the tech detectives on X reckon this dramatic damage was caused by storage in a foam-padded case. Some foam padding materials, the story goes, will off-gas ammonia compounds. Apparently sealed protective cases with (particularly polyurethane type) foam padding will off-gas, and if left sealed with CDs inside, the vapor can weaken, craze, or lead to cracking of the polycarbonate structure.

Polycarbonate substrate damage is a greater danger for CD users as compact discs rely on a single layer of this plastic. DVDs employ two polycarbonate halves bonded together with adhesive, which makes them less susceptible to the above-outlined issues.

There’s also bit rot and/or laser rot to worry about

The dangers of bit rot and laser rot have caused far more significant blips on the optical disc user threat radar to date. Wikipedia classifies this kind of damage as being caused largely by oxidation of the reflective layer, reactions with contaminants, and ultraviolet light damage. DVDs can also suffer from de-bonding of the adhesive between the two slivers of polycarbonate in the disc.

Over the years, some brands of optical media have earned a poor reputation for longevity due to bit rot susceptibility. I’ve had numerous discs suffer this kind of damage. It is therefore important to back up optical discs, which may themselves have been backups at some point, to keep all your old digital treasures alive.

Unfazed by the ongoing memory shortage, G.Skill has launched the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C30 memory kit, equipped with AMD's EXPO Ultra Low Latency (ULL) feature, to position it as a serious contender among the best RAM options.

EXPO 1.2 may seem like a minor specification update, but ULL is nothing to sneeze at. Among all the features, it brings a new level of optimization of memory sub-timings that were previously neglected. These memory sub-timings are key to increasing the performance on Ryzen processors. Standard AMD EXPO memory kits typically leave these memory sub-timings alone for the sake of broader compatibility. However, new EXPO ULL-certified memory kits, like the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C30, leverage these secondary and tertiary memory sub-timings to unlock additional performance from AMD's Ryzen chips.

If you have seen one Trident Z5 memory module, you have seen them all because every new Trident series that comes out follows a similar design recipe as the very first Trident DDR5 memory modules. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though. The design has been a winning formula for G.Skill's Trident Z5 memory modules, and it has resonated well among enthusiasts.

In the case of the Trident Z5 NeoX, G.Skill went with a single-color exterior. Depending on the SKU, the memory modules are available in matte black, matte white, or a sleek glossy black finish. Regardless of which colorway you choose, the overall design language remains largely identical. The only subtle difference lies in the logo placement. On the glossy black variant, the logo is on the right side, while on the matte versions, it resides in the center of the memory module.

Since it essentially utilizes the standard blueprint for every Trident Z5 memory module, the NeoX maintains a height of 1.65 inches (42mm). You are unlikely to run into clearance issues with large CPU air coolers. When it comes to aesthetics, the only RGB lighting present is the diffused light bar running along the top edge of the memory module. G.Skill provides its proprietary Trident Z Lighting Control software for customization, but you can use the motherboard software suites from all major brands, including Asus Aura Sync, Gigabyte RGB Fusion 2.0, MSI Mystic Light Sync, or ASRock Polychrome Sync.

It is a dual-channel memory kit, so each memory module is 16GB in capacity. The memory modules employ a black PCB with a single-sided design and a single-rank layout. There are eight integrated circuits (ICs), each with a capacity of 2GB, on one side of the PCB. The ICs themselves are H5CG48MEBD-X014 (M-die) from SK hynix and are well-regarded in the overclocking community. The power management integrated circuit (PMIC), which handles the power delivery, is from ANPEC, specifically the APW8502C-VBA50.

Like most enthusiast-grade memory kits, the Trident Z5 NeoX modules default to the JEDEC DDR5-4800 specification, with relaxed timings of 40-40-70 to ensure maximum compatibility. Since it is a memory kit for AMD systems, there are only EXPO profiles onboard. The primary EXPO profile corresponds to ULL, and it is clearly labeled as such within the BIOS for easy identification. It will set memory to DDR5-6000 speeds with 30-38-38-23 timings at 1.35V. The secondary EXPO profile keeps the data rate and operating voltage the same but dials back the tRAS to 96 clock cycles, probably to enhance stability for users who cannot get the ULL profile to work. See our PC Memory 101 feature and How to Shop for RAM story for more timings and frequency considerations.

Comparison Hardware

The Intel system features the Core Ultra 9 285K processor and the MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X motherboard with firmware version 7E20v1AA0. Conversely, the AMD system utilizes the Ryzen 9 9900X processor and the MSI MPG X870E Carbon WiFi motherboard with firmware version 7E49v1AA3. The Corsair iCUE Link Titan 360 RX LCD CPU liquid-cooling solution efficiently maintains optimal temperatures for both the Arrow Lake and Zen 5 processors, ensuring efficient thermal management across platforms.

The MSI GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Gaming X Trio efficiently handles demanding graphics workloads, preventing any bottlenecks during our gaming RAM benchmarks. The TeamGroup A440 Lite PCIe 4.0 SSD balances performance and capacity, delivering 2TB of ultra-fast storage with speeds up to 7,400 MB/s—perfect for Windows 11 24H2 installations, benchmarking software, and gaming applications.

The Corsair RM1000x Shift ATX 3.0 power supply delivers reliable and ample power to our test systems, directly supporting the GeForce RTX 4080 via its native 16-pin (12VHPWR) cable. The Streacom BC1 open-air test bench offers flexible, tool-free accommodation for all hardware components, streamlining assembly and component swaps.

Intel Performance

The results from our testing clearly demonstrated that the NeoX does not perform to its full potential when paired with an Intel-based system. The NeoX specifically targets AMD platforms, so the ULL optimizations are not available on an Intel system. That is not to say that the NeoX was slow.

On the contrary, even without access to ULL, the NeoX proved to be a strong competitor. It performed well in the 7-Zip compression workload, where it was up to 7% faster than the slowest memory kit. However, there are better and more affordable options for Intel users, such as the Vengeance RGB DDR5-6000 C30, the Ripjaws S5 DDR5-6000 C32, or the Deltaα RGB DDR5-6000 C38.

AMD Performance

It was a different story entirely when on an AMD platform, an environment where the NeoX thrived. On average, the NeoX posted results that were 3% faster than the Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000 C30, its non-ULL counterpart, and 9% faster than the Lancer RGB DDR5-6000 C40, one of the first DDR5 memory kits when the standard debuted. While a 3% to 9% performance lead appears modest, it is important to highlight that some workloads benefited more than others, which balances out the average.

The advantages of ULL memory like the NeoX extend into gaming, but the degree of improvement heavily depends on the game. For example, in games such as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the NeoX was right in the alley of the non-ULL competitors. In Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the NeoX showed an 8% uplift in average frame rates and a 10% improvement in 1% lows compared to the Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000 C30. Watch Dogs: Legion exhibited a similar pattern, with the NeoX delivering 8% higher average frame rates and 10% better 1% lows than its non-ULL equivalent.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

One of the upsides of the NeoX memory kit is that it operates at the standard 1.35V commonly used by enthusiast-grade DDR5. It provides substantial headroom for those willing to experiment with overclocking. During our testing, we found that a modest bump of just 0.05V, from 1.35V to 1.40V, enabled us to stabilize the memory kit at DDR5-6200 while maintaining the same tight timings as DDR5-6000 (32-38-38-32).

The NeoX memory kit already ships with very tight timings. Nonetheless, we were curious to see how much further these timings could operate without compromising system stability. Using the same 1.4V DRAM voltage as our previous overclocking endeavor, we methodically decrementally lower the memory timings. The only stable reduction we could achieve was with tRCD and tRP, which we were able to lower by two clock cycles.

Bottom Line

There is no denying that the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C30 is at the top echelon of DDR5 memory kits for the AMD platform. The memory kit targets the very hardcore hardware enthusiast who wants to maximize performance from their AMD processor and does not want to tinker with a standard memory kit, but more importantly, is not afraid to pay for it. While the ULL memory kit will not post double-digit uplifts, it is still important to keep expectations in check as the level of improvement over a standard memory kit varies significantly based on your combination of hardware, and remember that ULL is more for the vanilla Ryzen chip as X3D parts are unlikely to experience any perceptible gains.

Like countless other DDR5 memory kits released during this historic memory shortage, the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C30 also falls victim to the circumstances. The memory kit launches at $629.99, so it would be wise to wait for prices to stabilize before picking one up. However, for users putting a new AMD system together from scratch or looking to upgrade their memory and want unbeatable performance at this very moment, the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C30 is in a league of its own.

Unlike some of its cooler competitors, Chiba Japan-based Scythe is a fabless company that partners with factories in China and Taiwan for manufacturing of its air coolers, fans, and other PC hardware. The company has been delivering cooling products aimed largely at quiet performance for more than 20 years. We’ve enjoyed testing its previous products, like the fan-favorite FUMA 3 air cooler. Today we’re looking at Scythe’s latest offering, the Magoroku – a dual tower heatsink paired with two of Scythe’s Wonder Tornado 120 fans.

Let's take a look at the specifications and features of this CPU cooler. Then we’ll go over thermal and noise benchmarks to see if the Magoroku deserves to make our list of the best CPU coolers.

Cooler specifications

Features of the Scythe Magoroku air cooler

▶️ Dual tower heatsinks, six copper heatpipes

This air cooler features a dual-tower design, with six copper heatpipes to move heat from the CPU block into the metal fins above.

▶️ RAM Clearance

RAM compatibility with this cooler depends on how you look at it. Officially, Scythe mentions support for RAM up to 57mm tall. However, using the fan with tall RAM in this configuration does result in some performance loss.

We instead recommend moving the front fan to the back of the unit, above your motherboard’s VRM heatsinks, for best thermal performance. This configuration also has the side effect of complete RAM compatibility, as nothing interferes with or overhangs the DIMM slots.

▶️ 120mm Wonder Tornado 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. Scythe includes two of its Wonder Tornado 120 fans with the Magoroku air cooler.

▶️ Packaging

The outer packaging highlights the design of the product in a flashy but subtle way, incorporating a black background with grey and white highlights.

The CPU cooler and fans are protected by molded foam and cardboard inserts.

Included with the package are:

● Mounting hardware for AMD and Intel platforms

● Three sets of fan clips

● A small tube of thermal paste

● Two 120mm Wonder Tornado fans

● Screwdriver

AM5 Installation

To begin putting things together, you’ll need to first remove the default AM4/5 retention mechanism. Next, place the studs over the exposed holes.

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

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 best 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 and screwdriver to secure it in place.

Finally, you’ll want to attach both fans using the clips included with the cooler and connect them to the motherboard’s PWM header. If you have tall system RAM, I advise moving the front fan and placing it in the rear for best thermal performance.

Real-world testing configuration on AMD’s 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 lesser airflow needs and lowered ambient temperatures. This results in making 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.

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 to an extent and consume over 260W. Enabling PBO enables 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.

You’ll notice there are two results for Scythe’s Magoroku here. The first result is with an intake fan above our test rig’s TeamGroup DDR5 (as Scythe suggests); the second result is with that fan placed on the back above the motherboard’s VRM modules. As you can see, it’s better to move the front fan to the back if your system incorporates tall RAM modules. That said, neither result is particularly impressive. These are the worst results we’ve seen on our latest test bench.

Some coolers perform well in maximum strength tests, but run loudly at full speeds. Noisy fans in this scenario aren’t necessarily a bad thing; some prefer to hear them as a way to be aware when the CPU is getting hot. Scythe’s Magoroku has a maximum volume level of 43.4 dBA, which is on the quieter end of the fan noise spectrum.

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. The results here are slightly better than the last test, but not by much. The Scythe was the second-warmest cooler we’ve seen on this test bench.

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 primarily stress the CPU and GPU.

We’ve got another fairly disappointing result here, with a CPU temperature of 69.9C (47.9C over ambient) – the thermal performance is again in last place. Noise levels in our 150W CPU thermal test were acceptable, though, reaching 39.6 dBA.

It’s worth pointing out that some games are more intensive than this test above. While playing Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, I regularly noticed temperatures reaching near TJ Max. This is a bit concerning.

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.

Most coolers, particularly air coolers, can’t keep the CPU from reaching its peak temperature (TJ Max) in this stress test. We’ll look at this in terms of power consumption, which averaged 228.7 watts. I wish I could say more positive things about this cooler’s thermal performance, but it just doesn’t seem to perform very well with an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D CPU.

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.

While the rest of our test results weren’t very impressive, Scythe’s Magoroku performed well when it came to keeping system DDR5 temperatures under control, measuring at an average of 43C (21C over ambient), tied for our second-place result in this benchmark if you don’t count Silverstone’s AIO with extra VRM fans.

Conclusion

Scythe’s Magoroku is a nice-looking cooler with moderately low noise levels. But most of our thermal results were underwhelming with our AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D test bench. The exception to this was DDR5 RAM temperatures, which were impressive. If you’re looking for a low-noise air cooler that effectively cools your system memory, you might be happy with this product.

Perhaps this cooler performs better on Intel systems, but for AMD users, I’d instead recommend Thermalright’s Royal Pretor 130 at this price point.

Intel’s Robert Hallock, vice president and general manager of Intel’s enthusiast channel business, told Tom’s Hardware Premium in an interview that the Raptor Lake architecture will be part of Intel’s offerings “for years to come.” Intel has no plans to abandon Raptor Lake, and if anything, the company says it’s working to “smooth out” some of the supply and pricing inconsistencies among the range. Raptor Lake CPUs still rank among the best CPUs for gaming, not only due to the underperforming Arrow Lake (not Refresh), but also due to high DDR5 prices.

“Going forward, 10nm products like Raptor Lake; that is a core part of the portfolio that I want to offer to people for years to come,” said Hallock. “LGA 1700 is still a good socket. Lots of people [are] still interested in DDR4, so [we’ll] keep offering, and you'll see [pricing] smooth out over time. It'll come back to normal. That's the plan.”

Raptor Lake has become a key part of Intel’s roadmap as the RAM shortage strangles budget builders from upgrading to a DDR5 platform. In June, Tom’s Hardware first reported on motherboard manufacturers increasing production of DDR4-based boards with the LGA 1700 socket (the socket Raptor Lake CPUs use), and we’re seeing those products roll out now. Just days ago, in fact, Gigabyte introduced a new LGA 1700 board with DDR4 support.

Motherboards were one issue with Raptor Lake on DDR4 platforms; there were never a ton of LGA 1700 motherboards with DDR4 support to begin with. They were something of a stopgap with 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs as Intel transitioned to DDR5, largely falling out of favor (and inventory) as Raptor Lake rolled out and DDR5 prices started coming down. Obviously we’re living in a much different world now.

But as the DDR5 pricing crisis started hitting, Raptor Lake inventory started faltering, in part due to increased demand (at least according to Hallock), and likely also in part due to the gradual phasing out of older products. Today, the pricing situation with Raptor Lake is problematic. The Core i5-14600K, for example, sold for $200 or less for the better part of last year. It’s since jumped to around $250, if you can find it in stock at all. At the time of writing, it’s on backorder at Newegg and $262 at Amazon. Similarly, the Core i7-14700K should be selling for around $330, but it’s $380 at Newegg at the time of writing and sold out at Amazon. Again, for the majority of last year, the 14700K often sold for less than $350.

This wobbly inventory and pricing situation is due to the “sudden inrush of demand” for Raptor Lake CPUs as the RAM pricing crisis started to take hold, and Intel didn’t see it coming. “If people are going to go to more affordable hardware, they still want the fastest available for their money, and that happened to be Alder Lake and Raptor Lake. So there was a sudden inrush of demand into these parts — certainly not anticipated when you start your wafers, and your builds, long before that moment ever happens. So it's very hard to predict,” Hallock said.

And Raptor Lake CPUs do remain top DDR4 performers. In our recent re-review of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the Core i7-14700K and 13700K matched the 5800X3D in games, all three of which were using DDR4, and offered much better application performance. In our recent comparison of DDR4 against DDR5 across Intel’s LGA 1700 stack, we found that DDR4 is the major bottleneck in games, which is something even the 5800X3D can’t overcome.

Hallock indicates that we’ll see an increase in Raptor Lake inventory, though he didn’t specify what that inventory will look like. As Tom’s Hardware first reported in June, motherboard vendors are gearing up for “Raptor Lake Next,” which is supposedly another slate of refreshes set to launch at the beginning of next year. There are also Bartlett Lake processors that use strictly P-cores, exclusively for embedded applications. Although they haven’t made their way to DIY desktops, the range shows that Intel continues to produce 10nm products and likely will for several years in the future.

Although Intel is making efforts to improve Raptor Lake supply — be that through more stock or Raptor Lake Next — that isn’t coming at the cost of next-gen Nova Lake parts. Hallock indicated that Intel, as well as the industry more broadly, is looking at splitting mainstream and enthusiast offerings due to pricing pressure elsewhere in the market. You can read the transcript of the full interview at our Tom's Hardware Premium site.

This week, we managed to sit down with Robert Hallock, Intel VP and General Manager of Enthusiast Channel Business, in a rare interview that catches the company during a curious time, between product cycles and several months after the launch of the Core Ultra 200S Plus lineup of CPUs. With the company’s data center business booming, have consumer products been left behind, or will Intel continue to step in the right direction in regaining trust with a core audience that it’s appealed to for decades: the humble enthusiast?

The following is a transcript of our interview with Hallock, which has been lightly edited for flow and clarity. We hope you enjoy this unredacted look, exclusively available to Tom’s Hardware Premium subscribers. You can also catch session transcripts from earlier in the year, featuring Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Valve, and more.

Jake Roach (Senior CPU Analyst, Tom’s Hardware): I appreciate you doing this outside of a typical product cycle.

Robert Hallock (VP & GM Enthusiast Channel Business, Intel): Of course.

Roach: I really just wanted to get your read on a lot of things because things are crazy in the enthusiast desktop space right now.

Hallock: They are.

Roach: So, how are things going in enthusiast desktop land given memory shortages, NAND shortages, everything going on right now?

Hallock: I think the market's experiencing a tale of two kingdoms. Yeah. For the folks who have a significant amount of discretionary budget, they can absorb the cost impacts of what's going on in the industry, and most other people cannot. Right? And that's having a very different impact, as you can imagine, on different parts of the market. Low-end mainstreams really taking a beating. Enthusiast and premium, not so bad. You could, depending on the device class, maybe even be growing positive. So it's a very starkly divided market at the moment.

Roach: I guess I hadn't heard that kind of take on it before. I guess it makes sense that you have more discretionary spending, or if you already were kind of invested in a certain ecosystem. I haven't heard that before.

Intel’s flexibility in the consumer market

Roach: I'm curious about the position of Intel right now. There's AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, right? And you've seen a kind of big shift for AMD and NVIDIA. Nvidia doesn't even break out gaming as a business category anymore; it's embedded now, and I think AMD is now coming up on close to double the data center revenue that they have from their client business. But for Intel, the majority of your revenue still comes from the client business. Does that put you in kind of a unique position right now with so much focus on the data center?

Hallock: I think that it does. I like to believe that it does, and I'm hoping, selfishly for myself, that it does. One of the things that I believe that Intel, that people truly sleep on about Intel when talking about the big fight of this company versus that company, just how big Intel is, how many resources Intel has. As I look at, for example, you know our desktop enthusiast roadmap, I don't have to trade supply with a data center part; I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to think about it.

I can build a roadmap and a plan for the market that is sized against purely what is going on in the client market. And that kind of freedom is very empowering when you're trying to run an enthusiast desktop business for enthusiasts, and it doesn't mean that we're immune to what's going on in the market. It doesn't mean we're immune to supply fluctuations upstream of us. That happens too, right? But at a fundamental level, I can sit down with my team and my partners and build a plan for a product for the year, and not have to worry about what's going on with Xeon, as an example, and vice versa, right? That's their luxury too, right? I can do my thing in client land, and they can do theirs in data center land, and it's okay. And so the size of Intel is what allows that to happen. And at it is at its best, it allows us to maximize the investment and the return on multiple product categories. It's a nice one that works out that way.

Roach: I think it's been maybe a few earnings calls back. There were some mentions in a couple of earnings calls about wafer allocation moving toward the data center to meet demand for Xeon. But you're saying that's not really a concern when it comes to future launches.

Hallock: No, and so, just to give a little inside baseball. It depends on what era you're talking about. If we're just coming into the sudden AI boom, where prices are multiplying very, very rapidly. That was a surprising moment for everyone in the industry. Like we kind of felt it coming.

We heard the rumors, but the size and scale were very abrupt. It was immediate. That is still surprising. It was immediate, and in those cases, yeah, you’re probably going to have to trade some supply around. But once you’re in, like once you’re in it, now you know the plan for it.

Roach: Okay, so that was a temporary measure, gotcha.

On Intel’s enthusiast roadamps

Roach: So, shifting back to the desktop, I know you've mentioned several times about this ambitious enthusiast roadmap, presumably that centers around 18A and Nova Lake. So far, what we've seen out of 18A has been more premium offerings. Obviously, we have Panther Lake; we have Wildcat Lake. Wildcat Lake [is] not a premium offering, but it makes some pretty big concessions to reach that budget price point of single-channel memory and all of that. So I'm curious, given that there is such a large divide between this enthusiast premium category, this budget category, do you think that the DIY PC market can be served by a single product stack, especially on this kind of cutting-edge node?

Hallock: I truly believe that what the market is going to see going forward, and this is just an industry-level comment, is, and I want to stress this is not just Intel...You're probably going to see a split. You'll have a premium socket and a mainstream socket from everybody. If you're playing in desktop space, that is probably what you'll do because the supply chain costs, the upstream costs, have the same costs that are currently harming the entry-level and mainstream market; I don't see those abating anytime soon, right? And so it means that in order to continue providing affordable computer hardware, you're going to have to make some design concessions.

You're going to have to make some concessions in your product stack, and that's purely to control costs and give people an option that they can actually afford. Otherwise, if you don't do it, the other alternative is it just disappears because it's unaffordable. So, seeing a split is likely the outcome for everybody.

Roach: I was telling Thomas yesterday when Gamer Days first came out, I think there was a day when the Core Ultra 250K Plus was $150. I’m like, ‘Man, at that price, that is one hell of a deal.’

Hallock: Hell of a CPU? Yes, it is.

Roach: So obviously we have Arrow Lake Refresh. Arrow Lake Refresh is great, very positive reception. But we've also seen this… One of the stories we really heard a lot from the motherboard guys at Computex was spinning up older DDR4 boards with LGA 1700. I think Gigabyte just reintroduced one a few days ago, and that's great to see because there weren't a ton of those boards even when Alder Lake launched.

But, one of the things that has been concerning for me – covering CPUs – is a lot of volatility in pricing on 13th- and 14th-gen processors, oftentimes selling for much more than comparables from AMD or even for certainly from from Arrow Lake. I'm wondering: are there any plans to maybe improve supply, or some sort of effort to stabilize the pricing of those so it's a bit more consistent?

Hallock: Well, I think what you're seeing is the fact that those 10nm parts are still phenomenally good. We don't spend a lot of time talking about them in the media or at Intel. It's old stuff, and we've all moved on. But they're still phenomenally good CPUs. And if you look at the sort of bucket of options that you can buy for these older DDR4 platforms, it is very likely that Alder Lake or Raptor Lake are the fastest of the bunch in that mix.

Roach: They are. I just recently did a whole DDR4 vs DDR5 article.

Hallock: And so what you're seeing is just like if people are going to go to more affordable hardware, they still want the fastest available for their money, and that happened to be Alder Lake and Raptor Lake. So there was a sudden inrush of demand into these parts that was certainly not anticipated when you start your wafers and your builds long before that moment ever happens. So it's very hard to predict. But going forward, 10-nanometer products like Raptor Lake – that is a core part of the portfolio that I want to offer to people for years to come. LGA 1700 is still a good socket. Lots of people are still interested in DDR4, so keep offering. And you'll see it smooth out over time. It'll come back to normal. That's the plan.

Roach: Yeah, it was really interesting going back because obviously with Alder Lake’s launch, there was a bunch of discussion about DDR4 versus DDR5, but seeing how it scaled all the way up to 14th-gen. You have the 14700K with DDR4 at parity with a 5800X3D in gaming, and obviously much faster in applications. So yeah, I’ve been hoping for a $300 14700K that I can recommend to people.

On Intel's approach to AI in the enthusiast segment

Roach: I wanted to shift a little bit away from desktop. I know that is your, well. I guess maybe not desktop, but the kind of traditional view of just a single-socketed processor. Intel has this kind of breadth of IP, great graphics IP, lots of experience with memory and advanced packaging. And honestly, it's been surprising to me that we haven't seen what I like to call the 'big chip’ out of Intel yet, a consumer 'big chip' out of Intel. Between Strix Halo, I guess Gorgon Halo now, the M-series from Apple, and of course RTX Spark. I appreciate that that's not directly under your purview, but do you think that's an important area of the market, or is this a way to kind of capitalize on this sudden rush in demand for kind of these AI developer workstations?

Hallock: Tricky to say. I'm not sure about that part of the roadmap, but it's an interesting place because in a before time, a big integrated graphics device would have been pitched for gaming, right? It would have been pitched for gaming.

And the market has not always responded positively to that sort of setup, like whether or not the performance is right or the power is right, and oftentimes it's better than the CPU plus discrete option you can get for the same price and the same power. It's better.

Just, there's something about it people just don't take it, and then this whole AI thing came along in a real way – the agentic AI component of it – and certainly renewed demand for that kind of hardware. Now, does that sustain? I don't know. Do people come out of this seeing the value for gaming again – that I also don't know. But you know, we are looking at it, we are exploring it. It's certainly an interesting part of the market. A lot of excitement. People love to talk about it. But interestingly, I don’t think the actual run rate is all that high. So, it’s something we’re cautious about.

Roach: I will tell you every single event I have been to where they've had one of these agentic 'buy your box and run an agent forever’ demos, I don't think I've ever seen a single person actually sitting and watching one of those demos. I don't know what that says, but interesting to note.

Hallock: Just on AI software in general… It's an evolutionary process. Businesses can absolutely benefit now, like Intel has. I personally have agents running for me at work to do processes that honestly took a lot of my time. Sure. And now they're completely automated, and I just have to fact-check them, and that's great. I've saved a lot of time doing this, but you know, the transition to an average consumer – I don't know if we're there yet, right? We're not there yet, and I suspect that's probably informing the demo interest. But it is also a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing.

If you are not AI-aware or AI-ingrained, if you haven't just been dunked in the AI bucket because of your job or your profession or whatever, it is difficult to imagine what you could use it for, right? So now you're caught in this trap, 'well, I've heard about it, I don't know what I could use it for, but then I can get my hands on it, and now I don't know what to do with it.' It's like learning a search engine when we all had to do that, right? But on steroids.

Roach: It’s funny having conversations with friends and people who aren’t in this world because… recording and transcription, right? Like, that’s a super great use case of just, I mean, it’s not even an agentic or an advanced thing. I’ll explain that to them. They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a great use case.’ I mean, for most people, AI is the sloppy AI images and things like that. That’s AI. They see no other use case for it.

Hallock: That's the great injustice in this industry, right? There are so many things that we all call AI. They all have the same name. And some of them are just like a sticker on a toaster, and some of them are legitimately useful, and they run on your computer, and you have custody over your information and your privacy. That's not bad, but that's quite a spectrum. Yeah, one word, and it's such a shame.

Roach: It is a shame too. With the hardware advancements, it's a bummer being at Tom's Hardware, being mostly a consumer-facing brand, and talking about things like Vera, things like Venice. I'm sure later this month, things like Diamond Rapids. You know, and all that stuff is very interesting from a hardware perspective.

Challenging AMD with new consumer hardware

Roach: I was interested to hear your perspective on this. I was at Advancing AI last month for the Venice launch, and I don't know how long it's been, but it's certainly been since Ryzen, since the original Zen, that AMD's leading with Zen 6 in the data center instead of on client. I just wanted to get your reaction to that.

Hallock: I think it's a natural reaction for them. Makes a lot of sense. What I would say is, as we think about our own roadmap, I have a new core. *chuckles* It's coming to desktop first. I hope enthusiasts do the math about that one, and… That's all I'm going to say.

Roach: Okay, perfect. I would expect no less of a diplomatic response, but I appreciate the response nonetheless. That is, it is exciting to hear that there's still a focus on consumers, because I know for GPUs especially, but even some questions with CPUs about, are we even going to get new hardware? Like, is that a thing?

And I think this goes to a bit of an extreme that all of our local compute's going to wither away, and then it's all going to be cloud instances or whatever that we rent from some data center somewhere. I don't think that's the case, but it is encouraging to hear that there is at least some focus on launching new enthusiast products. I'm wonderi–

Hallock: Not just some focus; I have new CPUs all the way out to 2030. I have a back-to-back-to-back-to-back cadence for gamers, for desktop built for that purpose. Obviously I can’t go into what any of that is, but I’m accelerating for the gaming market. We are moving faster than we ever have in product and release cadence. We’re very serious about this.

Yeah, I understand people are skeptical after the last couple of years. I truly get that. But the signal Intel is trying to send is like… We’re gearing up for one of the most significant desktop CPU launches we have ever had.

We took a team that was time-shared with other businesses. And now this slice of the market has a full org structure inside Intel, and if you're not in corporate America, what that means is the company is so serious about it. They're putting real people, with a lot of budget behind it, right? And having an owner, a sponsor, people that care about it, looking after it – custodians of that work – it makes a real difference.

Just... The difference between Arrow Lake and Arrow Lake Refresh. That’s the difference.

Roach: Oh man, that was a big difference. Oh. Different teams on those? Okay, I hadn’t realized because when we talked about Arrow Lake Refresh, it was… You had made mention of like ‘Hey, we’ve updated our roadmap, and this is our first, maybe peace offering after Arrow Lake.’

But I didn’t realize it was a completely different, or not completely different, but a different team.

Hallock: Yeah, well. Pretty much completely different. Marketing people, different product managers, different business people, and simply, we have a different philosophy on how this market should run, and what people should get for their dollar. And I’m glad that people appreciate it.

A post-Arrow Lake shakeup

Roach: Okay, so there was a big shakeup after. That was one of the questions I had. What were the key takeaways from Arrow Lake? But it sounds like those takeaways were addressed immediately.

Hallock: A couple takeaways that you saw manifest in the [Arrow Lake] refresh launch: The software experience for DIYers, which nobody likes to admit that we all need software for our CPUs because they all have a lot more cores than any game typically expects these days. And so the resilience of that software experience. How do people obtain it? How do they install it? How can they validate your performance? How can they verify that they're getting what you are promising? All of that was kind of open-loop in the Arrow Lake original timeframe.

We had some aspects coming from motherboard vendor websites, some from Windows updates, some from Intel.com. It's too complicated for people, so that directly led into the Intel platform performance package- like, kind of crazy- but put all your useful bits in one spot and tell people to download it.

Well, when you lose sight of this enthusiast DIY space and how people consume software and hardware in this part of the market, it's easy to get turned around. OEMs have a very different strategy. They go through these massive validation efforts and have huge QA labs and can set up a system image with point releases, and… Normal people don't have those resources.

You have to make it very easy for them. So, software resilience was a big one. And then when you look at a pile of IP, some engineer says, ‘Hey, your CPU can do this to this.’ That's your range of capability, and inside you open the box. You've got some stuff you can smudge around, like frequencies or voltage or core counts or specs on and off. You can decide to remix those very differently too. You decide to price it differently.

So what you're seeing is Intel got healthy on its software foundations for DIYers. Intel got healthy on its respect for performance per dollar for customers. We set up some really healthy internal processes for future platforms. Arrow Lake was a tough, tough lesson to learn, but a good one, because it drove some really, really useful changes inside Intel.

The importance of CPU software optimization

Roach: You've really beaten the drum on the importance of software; software is just as important as hardware. Just this past week I was testing out the BC-250. If you're familiar.

Hallock: Yeah.

Roach: The PS5 APU that was repurposed. And if you need a crash course in the importance of software to a gaming experience, just boot up one of those things. But can you explain, from your view, what the importance of software is, especially given Intel's… This is pretty ancient history at this point, but you know, use of specific compilers and things like that. What is your view about the importance of software to an overall performance package?

Hallock: I am scared to open this box, lest I get misinterpreted. So, here’s the deal. From the perspective of a software developer, it's actually really tough to be a professional software developer, especially if you are not self-publishing, especially if you have a publisher breathing down your neck. Because it means that your publisher is picking the release time, not you.

That's time crunch number one. Time crunch number two is… What hardware are we targeting? What CPU do I have at my desk as a developer? What does our QA lab have? What has the publisher allowed us to buy with our budget for QA? What does my historical install base look like for other games? And every time you open the box on any of those, you find more subdivision of compatibility that you need to worry about. That's time crunch number two.

Time crunch number three is, did you start on a console, or did you start on PC? Which were you targeting first? Probably console. So now you have to do a port, which is a time crunch. Some publishers outsource this. There are companies that all they do is console ports to PC.

Roach: A lot of Sony games.

Hallock: You know, I’m thinking of Nixxes. What a great developer! They've been amazing over the years at doing these kinds of ports. So all you're really doing is budgeting a decreasing amount of time as a dev, and then you're like, okay, well, my game has to run on a CPU anywhere from four cores to, gosh, like 32 threads, 24 threads, depending on the vendor. It's a lot.

And so what ends up happening is they just draw a line in the sand. This is the hardware we have in QA. This is what's on my desk. This is what's in the console, and that's what we have time to look at. And maybe we'll look at other stuff later. And a lot of the time, one thing that many gamers still don't quite understand is, like, it's not even really the Windows scheduler or the OS scheduler that's determining how these CPUs get used when you're running a game-they have their own layer.

It's called an affinity mask, and they tell the OS how to use the CPU. So the game is in control of how to do the scheduling, sending all these hints to the operating system. What if those hints are wrong? What if those aren't the right hints for the CPU you have in the socket? What if the game is newer than your hardware, or substantially older than your hardware? Or the developer never looked at your combination?

These are all moments where the game can easily give up huge chunks of performance, or just not run. And everybody has to deal with this, right? Every CPU vendor has to address these challenges somehow. We call it the Intel Platform Performance package; AMD calls it the chipset driver.

Right, we've all got this, and it's so important because it can reach into the operating system, or reach into the application, or reach into the firmware of the CPU itself, and make those real-time adjustments to get the performance back. Gamers would not like how this industry looks without this software from the CPU vendors. It would be a much, much less performant, much slower, higher frame time, more stuttering, sort of environment.

Roach: Yeah, it’s already quite surprising to deal with.

Hallock: Yeah, software cannot replace the CPU, and that is not what we're proposing, right? We're not saying, 'hey, I'm going to give up 10% on the hardware and give you 10% back on the software because it's cheaper.' No, I want 10% of both.

That it’s not trade; it’s both. And that is why we’re interested in pursuing it, and why I think it’s so important, because I’ve now spent serious time at two processor companies and have seen the performance gains that come from this kind of software, and what they contribute to the experience, including my own gaming system that I’m talking to you on right now.

And so, that’s why I’m big on software, because the performance would be much, much worse without it – not insurmountably, but it would functionally limit the kind of hardware that you can produce if everything has to fit in this lowest common denominator of software. That’s the other outcome, and that would be even worse. We cannot have the hardware be stagnant because of the software.

Roach: Gotcha. Yeah. That’s certainly giving up. It’s not the 10% hardware for 10% software. Leaving stagnant software gives up a lot more.

Hallock: That’s right.

Roach: Yeah. You know, we did a story probably a couple of days ago. This guy who, we call him a hardware researcher, but he really just does memes. He made a C compiler that would compile completely with Move and Assembly, and then he made a leaderboard of… it was the x86 Hall of Shame, where he tried to find a single assembly instruction, how to make it run as slow as possible, and he got one up to 189 billion cycles.

Yeah, it was ridiculous. He basically found the two slowest areas in the fabric, the two highest-latency areas in the fabric. Ran the instruction on one of them, and then had the other one make a bunch of frivolous four-byte reads, and like lock it up. Yeah. Anyway, just a great example of how you can make hardware–

Hallock: What people don't understand, every CPU architecture is like the fine art of intelligent compromise, and it's like, okay, well, just as like a random example, could you make the read and write link the same size? Sure.

But what if the reads are like 10 times more common than the writes? Do you really need them to be bidirectionally the same size? Like it's going to show up on a micro benchmark. Someone's going to complain about it, but in real performance, day-to-day, do you actually need it? Yeah, probably not. And there's stuff like that all over a modern CPU based on decades of just, like, learning how people are likely to use this thing; it actually does shape the microarchitecture itself somewhat, like a reflexive principle, right? We speak it into existence by using our processors in a certain way. It's fun.

Checking in on IBOT

Roach: On software, I think I'm probably much higher on IBOT personally than you know. We've seen some interest in it. We did some testing for it. I think it's this thing that probably becomes more important as time goes on. I'm just wondering how it's going. We've had one update, I believe, one game update. I just wanted to check in on how IBOT’s coming along.

Hallock: Going well. You know, we continue to work on multiplayer support, which was kind of in the initial scope. It's taking, I think, longer than the public may have expected, because we certainly do not want people to get in trouble using this technology. And that means you have to talk to a lot of people to do it. We're actively working on non-gaming workloads.

We are working on another upcoming release. I don't have the exact date for this, but we're working on the bits for the next update. And then we're also thinking about, for Nova Lake, you know, what is version 2.0, for lack of a better phrase? What do we want to build into that release based on the new hardware capabilities? Which I know is both some details and not a lot of details, but it's very important to us; it is a long-term, permanent aspect of our roadmap.

Roach: Yeah, I think the game selection has been interesting to see. Obviously, when we spoke around Arrow Lake refresh, you had mentioned, ‘Hey, there's going to be a lot of games where there's no benefit whatsoever, or a lot of workloads in general where there's no benefit whatsoever. We just want to improve where we can.’

I'm curious how you go about finding those improvements, because surely it can't be just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Hallock: No, well, sometimes it is. Okay. Sometimes it is. It’s a multi-part process. We do have a team that proactively goes out and evaluates things that are very popular, high profile in the community. Just because it's so obvious to go grab those and take a look. We also have automated systems that go through workloads and try to find opportunities. That does a lot of heavy lifting. Dirty word, but we have AI tools that can also help us analyze and find opportunities. So it's one part manual and a lot of automation to find these, and we go from there.

Adressing Nova Lake rumors

Roach: I wanted to ask something a little bit more direct about Nova Lake because speculation around Nova Lake has been going on for a while. I wanted to focus on the high-end, there's been kind of these endless rumors about a 52-core part. You have teased previously scaling up Thread Director to deal with these higher core-count CPUs. I'm wondering right now: What does something like this ultra-high core count, or like a high-end desktop processor, what is that offering right now to the market, in your view?

Hallock: My view has always been that the market will initially go. ‘Ah, what am I going to do with this kind of hardware?’ And then they figure it out. And my most recent example of this comes from my time at AMD. I was sitting at Computex, and at the time we were unveiling our first 12-core CPU. So that would have been the 5900X, I think, maybe the 3900x. It's been a while, and I was sitting in the room with a bunch of journalists who – 18 months ago – had been like, "Why eight-core in consumer? What are you even talking about? Why? Why does this exist?” Same people sitting in front of me. I'm talking about a 12-core CPU, and they're like, "Where's your 16-core?" Like a poorly, poorly kept secret at that point, right? Like it was only like a week away from getting announced, and everybody knew it existed.

How quickly perspectives change. Suddenly, we went from four-core to eight-core, to 12, to 16 in three years. And man, how quickly people’s opinions changed about the value of [higher] core counts. I don’t think, in the history of the PC industry, [that] bigger bar better, more performance better. Never a bad answer. And that does inform my thinking about the roadmap, and Intel’s thinking about the roadmap going forward. It’s never a bad idea to offer more hardware to people.

Roach: The irony. About that, I think it was Zen...It must have been Zen 2. The irony about that is that the 12-core SKUs are always significantly worse than the eight-core and the 16-core. I guess there are some workloads where it makes sense, but yeah, it's interesting to hear.

I think, you know, one of the big hopes for Nova is a competitor to V-Cache. I know this is something you're well aware of, and you know has been brought up numerous times. I watched some previous interviews that you did, I believe, with a recent one with PC Games Hardware, and you had mentioned ways to improve cache locality as something like, ‘Hey, we don't just need to stack a bunch more cache on the chip. We have other levers we can pull to find this performance or to offer something that the X3D chips offer.’

I'm curious what those levers are, because you've made reference to them before, and I just wanted to get a little bit more of a technical explanation.

Hallock: We will have to wait for the fullness of time, won’t we?

Roach: Yes, we will. Hey. You can’t knock me for trying.

Hallock: No, you have to try, and I appreciate and respect that. You know, my bottom line is this is going to be both an answer and a non-answer. Sorry. But I want to try to answer the question for the public more generally. We understand and appreciate there is a like a lot of hope, a lot of expectation, and a lot of desire surrounding Nova Lake. We get it.

And in some ways... selfishly. We’ve lived through it. Every negative comment, every bad tweet, every crappy article. It wears on you. It really does. And we want to deliver a product with Nova Lake that meaningfully addresses these criticisms.

Yeah, just pick one [CPU from Intel or AMD]. I’m not going to confirm anything else, but pick one. I think the Nova Lake product will do the job.

Roach: Okay. Well, that's good to hear. I have to imagine, especially with Nova Lake in particular, given how much they're, you know… There's probably a story on Videocardz or WCCFTech, probably a lot on Tom's Hardware every two or three days. So, yeah, it's a lot.

Hallock: Well, I think it’s reflective of how excited people are, how much anticipation, how much demand is pent up for this moment.

Roach: I know we're almost out of time, but I did want to share with you real quick. It was a big thing that we talked about this year at CES. Actually, I was talking to AMD PR, and they were getting reactions [to AMD’s new announcements]. And I told them, I was like, man, there is a Dark Knight sentiment. You live long enough to see yourself become the villain…happening right now in the industry. I think there's certainly a lot of that reaction that we've seen at least. So, for what that's worth…

Hallock: I have read those comments. Yeah. You know, a product like Nova Lake cannot address every single slice of the market. It just can't, given the current market that we're in. But I, I do hope and do believe that people will look back and go, ‘damn, you know, that was pretty, pretty freaking good.’ Yeah, that's what we were hoping for. And if Intel just keeps going, we're gonna be okay. And that's the trajectory we're on. That's who I want to be, as a business for gamers.

Roach: Yeah, I've heard you say that numerous times, which is encouraging to hear. So I appreciate it, and yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. You know, I always enjoy talking with you, and I'm excited to see what comes next.

[Session ends]

It's a sorry state of affairs in the storage component sector at the moment, with prices having doubled or more since the AI boom moved in to destroy the PC component ecosystem. Prices and deals are now relative to the current climate, not to what was available a year ago, unfortunately. Today we have a decent $50 discount off of a large 24TB HDD, which turns it into one of the best value drives of this size currently available. Seagate's Barracuda Compute 24TB HDD is reduced to $699.99 when you use code BTSF2883 at checkout. That works out to $29.16 per Terabyte, or $0.02 per Gigabyte. In years gone by, we have seen this drive a lot cheaper in sales such as Black Friday, before the extreme compute price inflation took effect. But if you're hunting for a large HDD, then this is one of the best deals you're currently going to find.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The Seagate BarraCuda comes in a standard 3.5-inch metal chassis and is a CMR drive with a 512MB cache and 7,200 RPM disk spin speed. A SATA 6Gb/s interface delivers up to 190 MB/s transfer speeds, some of the fastest available speeds for this kind of storage, and is the standard for most PC and NAS setups. Its large capacity means you can store reams of data, including pictures and video files.

The massive 24TB capacity of this drive is perfect for someone looking for a large storage drive for a media center or for a big backup drive in a PC. Although the Seagate Barracuda Compute is fast for an HDD, it's not fast enough for modern gaming; you definitely want an SSD for that. But for storing movies, videos, and other media, this drive is perfect.

Modern smartphones pack enough computing power to rival budget PCs. However, one of the biggest limitations preventing mobile chips from sustaining peak performance is thermal throttling. To tackle the problem, a hardware enthusiast on Reddit carried out an experiment in the most absurd way possible, sandwiching a smartphone between two desktop CPU air coolers. The result is a miniature desktop PC built around a phone's motherboard that actually works and performs well.

The smartphone chosen for this project is the ZTE Nubia Z70 Ultra, which is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC paired with 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 1TB of UFS 4.0 storage. It is worth noting that this particular chipset made its debut in 2024, with its prime CPU cores rated to reach up to 4.32 GHz. The latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is a more powerful chip and can go as high as 4.6 GHz. Rather than using a newer, higher-clocked chip, the project is essentially testing how much sustained performance can be extracted from an older Snapdragon flagship.

“It actually started from a pretty simple idea," the creator told Tom's Hardware. "I wanted to see how far I could push the concept of using a single smartphone as my main machine, instead of having a phone, a gaming console and a separate PC.”

To carry out the project, the smartphone was completely stripped down to its core by removing the camera hardware, mobile network hardware, as well as the display, which is cleverly mounted within the custom acrylic enclosure for the system. The creator then mounted two full-size desktop CPU heatsinks on each side of the phone hardware. The contact plates on the heatsinks, being large enough, could fully cover the main components, thus allowing improved heat dissipation compared to the original phone chassis.

The results are particularly impressive when it comes to sustained workloads. In the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test, the setup achieved a 99% stability score over 20 loops. Its best loop produced a score of 6,980, while the lowest-scoring loop came in at 6,910, which is a mere 70-point difference. A screenshot also shows a 3DMark score of 10,533 in the ranking, putting the modified Z70 Ultra slightly ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S25+ powered by the same Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset.

The sustained performance is arguably more interesting compared to the peak benchmark numbers. Smartphones are designed around a difficult compromise where their processors can briefly operate at high performance levels. But due to the limited physical space for heat dissipation means sustained workloads eventually force the system to reduce clocks and power consumption.

“The long-term goal is basically one device that can cover Android, desktop Linux, Windows applications and PC gaming,” added the creator. Essentially, they wanted to keep Android at the core while having a desktop environment when connecting the setup to an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. To achieve that, a custom Linux XFCE4 desktop environment was created using Termux, running directly on top of Android. The setup also supports hardware-accelerated Vulkan via Turnip on the Adreno GPU. Since the creator wanted to run Windows games locally on the Snapdragon hardware, they tinkered with Wine, Box64, and Hangover builds adapted and recompiled for the Linux environment, alongside GameNative.

The creator claims to have successfully run Windows applications and games, including The Witcher 3. The system was able to run the game at 1080p resolution with the Ultra graphics preset, delivering around 20–30 FPS. Notably, the GPU was sitting at approximately 99% utilization during gameplay, while certain scenes managed to exceed 30 FPS. That obviously isn't enough performance to turn the smartphone into a replacement for a modern gaming PC. However, it is impressive that a smartphone SoC can render a demanding PC game at 1080p using a compatibility stack designed to translate software between different CPU architectures and operating environments.

The project is anything but practical, as the two desktop CPU coolers make the original smartphone form factor essentially irrelevant. However, by giving the Snapdragon 8 Elite substantially more thermal headroom, the creator has turned a flagship smartphone into something that sits somewhere between a phone and a desktop PC. More importantly, it raises an interesting question about how much performance modern mobile chips are leaving on the table simply because they have to fit inside our pockets.

Coming on the heels of Intel's $19.7 billion common stock offering from earlier this week, AMD on Thursday announced plans to borrow $4.75 billion through a new senior unsecured debt offering. AMD does not tie the proceeds to a particular project, saying they will be available for general corporate purposes, including potentially paying down existing debt. Meanwhile, the increasing capital intensity of the industry gives AMD numerous options to use the money.

"We intend to use the net proceeds from this offering for general corporate purposes, which may include the repayment of debt," an AMD statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission reads.

The offering comprises four tranches: $1.25 billion of 4.6% notes due in 2029; $1.50 billion of 5% notes due in 2031; $1 billion of 5.25% notes due in 2033; and $1 billion of 5.5% notes due in 2036. Their yields to maturity are 4.64%, 5.018%, 5.264%, and 5.532%, respectively, while spreads over comparable U.S. Treasuries range from 43 to 90 basis points, which indicates that the market is generally confident in AMD and is willing to lend it money at rates that barely exceed those of the U.S. Treasury. Moody's and S&P are expected to rate the securities A1 and A, respectively.

AMD did not disclose how it plans to spend $4.75 billion, but the additional money obtained at attractive rates gives it room to finance its increasingly capital-intensive business as well as cash for debt repayment and other corporate requirements.

AMD hardly appears desperate for additional money. At the end of Q2 2026, the company had approximately $13.1 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments. AMD's debt totaled $3.2 billion, and only $875 million is classified as current, which means that the proceeds from the offering by far exceed AMD's current obligations. Meanwhile, AMD's business is becoming very capital intensive.

At the end of 2025, the company had around $12.2 billion in unconditional commitments, which include purchases of wafers and substrates, multi-year cloud-service agreements, software and technology licenses, and guaranteed obligations to third parties. Approximately $8.5 billion was due in 2026.

Also, AMD's working capital requirements are growing. Inventories reached approximately $8.47 billion by the end of Q2, while accounts payable climbed to $5.36 billion. AMD also spent $1.20 billion on property and equipment during the first half of 2026, compared with $494 million a year earlier.

If we were to speculate where AMD can put $4.75 billion, then long-term supply agreements for commodities like memory, logic production, or advanced packaging immediately come to mind. However, given the current market realities, $4.75 billion is 1.8x smaller than AMD's inventories as of late Q2 2026. Furthermore, an average long-term supply deal with a major memory maker now amounts to $7.14 billion (according to Micron's comments made in its recent earnings release).

That said, $4.75 billion may not be enough for AMD to make strategically important purchase commitments. Nonetheless, getting nearly $5 billion at attractive rates amid global undersupply of pretty much everything certainly gives AMD some additional flexibility to run its business.

The ongoing memory crunch has turned the best RAM, specifically DDR5, into halo-tier hardware. In response to the crisis, chipmakers and motherboard vendors have restarted production of hardware compatible with more budget-friendly DDR4. Recently, as reported by VideoCardz, Gigabyte has quietly launched the B450M D3HP and B450M D3HP WIFI6E motherboards, built around AMD's immortal B450 chipset, which launched eight years ago.

Revitalizing older platforms that support more affordable memory options is one way manufacturers are helping consumers cope with the memory shortage. Going as far back as the AMD 400-series chipset may come as a shock to some, but if you look at it, the B450 chipset has been the de facto budget king for the AM4 platform for as long as we can remember.

The B450M D3HP and B450M D3HP WIFI6E have a humble 4+2-phase power delivery subsystem. Although the design is limited compared to more premium offerings, these motherboards support multiple generations of AMD Ryzen processors (Ryzen 3000 to Ryzen 5000) and APUs (Ryzen 3000G to Ryzen 5000G). Similarly, these microATX motherboards accommodate SKUs ranging from energy-efficient 35W processors to the flagship 105W parts. The versatility means you can pair the B450M D3HP or B450M D3HP WIFI6E with anything from an entry-level Athlon 200GE to the premium Ryzen 9 5950X.

The B450M D3HP and B450M D3HP WIFI6E are cut from the same cloth. As its name suggests, the B450M D3HP WIFI6E stands out for including Wi-Fi 6E connectivity. The Realtek RTL8852CE controller provides wireless connectivity and supports the latest Bluetooth 5.4 standard.

Equipped with four DDR4 memory slots, these motherboards support up to 128GB of memory at DDR4-2667 data rates. Storage flexibility is another highlight of these Gigabyte motherboards, with two M.2 2280 slots. One slot operates at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds, and the other at PCIe 2.0 x2 speeds. For users with legacy storage devices, the motherboards also feature four SATA III connectors.

Expansion options are somewhat limited, though. You receive only one PCIe 3.0 x16 expansion slot, ideal for installing a dedicated graphics card, and one PCIe 2.0 x1 expansion slot for other add-in cards. For those who prefer integrated graphics, the motherboards are equipped with a range of display outputs, including one DisplayPort 1.2 and two HDMI 2.0b ports.

When it comes to connectivity, the motherboards offer seven USB ports: four USB 3.2 Gen 1 and three USB 2.0. A single Gigabit Ethernet port is available and leverages an unspecified Realtek controller. The inclusion of a Q-Flash Plus button is a plus, as it enables seamless BIOS updates, even without a processor, memory, or graphics card installed.

At this stage, Gigabyte has yet to announce official pricing for the B450M D3HP and B450M D3HP WIFI6E. We have not seen either model at major U.S. retailers, either. Gigabyte’s B450 motherboards have disappeared from the market ages ago. When these motherboards were available, entry-level and mid-range models typically started at around $50 and $80, respectively. The high-end models, on the other hand, had a starting price of $100.

The B450M D3HP and B450M D3HP WIFI6E should fall under the entry-level category. However, given the current market conditions, it remains to be seen whether Gigabyte will stick to similar price points.

Maxsun isn't that well-known in the U.S, but the China-based company has been around since 2002, and a player in the motherboard game (as well as things like graphics cards and storage) overseas for decades. In that time, it has released some unique motherboard designs, such as the Intel-based iCraft B760M Cross, which features its anime-based brand mascot, Aijia, on the box, with pink and light blue highlights on the white PCB. It was a cool board, but like many of the company's previous samples, it was not without shortcomings.

Today we're testing Maxsun's Terminator B850M Pro II, a budget Micro ATX AM5 board that sports a black aesthetic and is generally well-equipped for a small-form-factor motherboard. You get support for the latest flagship-class processors like the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 (as well as future AM5 processors), Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5 GbE networking, three M.2 sockets (two PCIe 5.0 x4) and two SATA ports for storage, and room for expansion with two full-length PCIe slots. I would like to see faster USB ports (the fastest is only 10 Gbps) and perhaps a better audio codec, but this board is otherwise comparable to similarly priced B850M options.

The performance portion of our testing went smoothly, but results were average to below average, depending on the test. The Terminator B850M Pro II was competent at gaming and some of the single/lightly threaded tests, mixing in with most other boards, but was slower in heavily multi-threaded tests with our Ryzen 9 9900X.

Below, we’ll examine the B850M Pro II’s performance and other features, although as you have probably guessed from the score above, it won't make it to our list of the best motherboards. But before we share test results and discuss details, here are the specifications from the Maxsun website:

Specifications of the B850M Pro II

Inside the Box

Inside the box along with the motherboard, the only accessories included are the Wi-Fi antennas, two SATA cables, and a warranty card. That’s it. No stickers, extra thermal pads, nada. It’s paltry by any standard, but it’s still enough to get your SATA-based drives connected and your new PC online.

Design and Features of the B850M Pro II

The B850M Pro II uses an 8-layer matte-black PCB, with large heatsinks covering the VRMs, M.2 sockets, and chipset. The black motif is broken up by two crimson lines running diagonally across the heatsinks. You will not find integrated RGB lighting, but can add it using the existing ARGB headers. It’s not an exciting Micro ATX board vying for attention, but does blend in with any black or dark build theme.

Starting our tour in the top-left corner, we see the two 8-pin EPS connectors (one required between the two separate VRM heatsinks. On the left, we get a better look at the Terminator branding on top of the large heatsink. Nothing extraordinary here.

Moving past the socket area to the right, the next feature we encounter is the four DRAM slots, with the locking mechanism located on top. Maxsun lists support up to DDR5-8000, which is a bit lower than most B850 (and X870) boards, but still well past AMD’s sweet spot (6000-6400 MT/s). We couldn’t get our DDR5-8000 kit to boot, even with the APU, but it’s to be expected as those speeds are right at the limit and our sticks weren’t on the memory QVL. No worries, as our DDR5-6000 and DDR5-7200 kits worked just fine without the help of an APU and its generally superior memory controller.

In the upper-right corner, next we see the first of two 3-pin ARGB headers (the other is along the bottom edge). The Maxsun Sync 2 software controls any attached RGB lighting and gives users your typical fare of pre-programmed lighting and customization (speed, color, etc.). But that’s the only piece of software the company offers for this board.

Moving down the right edge, we run into the first two (of five) 4-pin fan headers. Since we don’t have access to the manual (one wasn't included in the box and we can't find one online), and the specifications on the web page don’t mention it, we’re not sure how much each header supports. We’ve reached out to Maxsun for clarity, but until they respond, assume they support 1A/12W each, which should be enough for multiple fans and an AIO without worry. The BIOS is the only way to control the fan headers. Sadly, Maxsun still doesn’t have a dedicated desktop application for monitoring, overclocking, or fan control. And while there are ways around it, if you want to be in the conversation with ‘the big four’ motherboard brands in the US, having Windows-based software helps.

Continuing along the edge, we run into the 24-pin ATX connector for the board power, and the front-panel USB ports. The first is a USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) header, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type-C connector, and a 19-pin USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) header. What’s worth noting here is the lack of a 20 Gbps header. And the rear IO’s fastest port is also 10 Gbps. While 20 Gbps ports aren’t common on B850 boards, it would be nice to see at least one.

Power delivery on the B850M Pro II is on the light side, sporting a total of 15 phases, with 12 dedicated to Vcore. Power heads from the 8-pin EPS connector(s) and onto the Realtek RT3678BE PWM controller. From there, it moves to the paltry Vishay Sic654 50A DrMOS MOSFETs. The 600 Amps available is relatively low, but Maxsun lists support for up to 300W TDP, which means, in theory, you can toss in a Ryzen 9 9950X or the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, and still be OK.

If that’s your plan for this board, make sure you have adequate case cooling, especially if you’re pushing the CPU hard for extended periods, as these VRMs will get toasty with a high-wattage processor. If you’d like to know more about VRMs and what you actually need from a motherboard, check out the Motherboard VRM thermal testing article we recently published.

On the bottom half of the board, starting on the left, is the exposed audio section, consisting of the Realtek ALC897 codec and four dedicated audio capacitors above it. The ALC897 is the most basic audio codec on consumer-class motherboards. In fairness, it is commonly used, especially in the Micro ATX form factor. That said, its direct competitors (by price point) use the improved ALC1220 or the latest-gen ALC4080 codecs. And while you’ll be hard-pressed to notice a difference without plugging in some of the best PC speakers, it’s still a difference among the comparables.

In the middle are two full-length PCIe slots, and under the plate-style heatsink are all three M.2 sockets. Starting with the two PCIe slots, the top slot with the reinforcement is your PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and is primary for graphics. It also uses a quick-release GPU latch for easy removal. Press the button to unlock and remove. Easy. The bottom slot connects via the chipset, supports PCIe 4.0 x4, and is good for expansion cards. You could use it to add faster USB Type-C ports, if needed.

In between the PCIe slots are the three M.2 sockets. The B850M Pro II gives you two PCIe 5.0 x4 (128 Gbps) M.2 sockets (up to 80mm) that source their bandwidth through the CPU, and a single PCIe 4.0 x4 (64 Gbps) socket that also supports up to 80mm devices. Note that when using both PCIe 5.0 M.2 sockets, the primary graphics slot drops to PCIe 5.0 x8. Having all three M.2 sockets under the graphics card with a plate heatsink isn’t ideal, especially if you have one of those PCIe 5.0 drives.

We've also included a few images of the active ICs for the board. This Maxsun uses a mix of Realtek (PWM controller, audio) and Vishay (MOSFETs) branded ICs.

At the bottom are several headers, including front-panel audio and USB ports. A complete list of connectivity is listed below (from L to R):

• Front panel audio
• 3-pin ARGB
• 4-pin fan header
• COM port
• Debug header
• USB 2.0 header
• (2) SATA ports
• 4-pin fan header
• Front panel

The rear IO on the B850M Pro II generally has what most users need, just perhaps not the fastest or the largest number of ports. Starting on the left, we see the DisplayPort and HDMI (v1.4) video outputs. Next to that are the first two (of four, in blue) USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps ports, your 10 Gbps Type-C port, and a convenient clear CMOS button. The tall stack of black USB ports is USB 2.0. Above the second set of Gen 2 ports is the Realtek 2.5 GbE port. Next to that is the Mediatek Wi-Fi 7, but note it only uses the 160 Hz frequency and can be slower than the fastest Wi-Fi 7 devices. Last but not least, on the right is a full 5-plug plus SPDIF audio stack.

There’s nothing out of the ordinary here, but I would like to see at least one 20 Gbps port, even on a B850-class Micro ATX motherboard.

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Firmware

Maxsun has updated its BIOS from the ground up, introducing a mobile-inspired interface with larger icons, more buttons, and “card-style modules” for easier navigation. Like most modern BIOSes, it has an informative, functional, easy mode with different sections (modules) on the left, information and buttons (for enabling EXPO, ReSize Bar, EUP, and RGBs), along with other system details like fan speeds and settings, as well as boot priorities. You can also adjust the background with three included images (Sweet Aiga, Sci-Fi Mecha, and Textured Glass), which is unique.

The advanced portion of the BIOS offers plenty of options to tweak your system, but doesn’t appear to have quite as many options as other motherboards. Still, there are lots of options, including PBO, to tweak your CPU. You can also tweak your memory.

In all, the BIOS worked well and will be fine for most users, but the mobile-inspired interface isn’t quite as refined and doesn’t give you the premium vibes we see from Gigabyte, MSI, or Asus BIOSes.

Software

Maxsun Sync 2 is an application that controls RGB lighting, picking up not only the board but also our RAM and GPOU (as expected). There are 10 different lighting effects, most of which you can change (speed, color flow, etc.) to your liking. It worked well in our limited testing, controlling each item it picked up without issue.

For those looking for an application that controls fans, overclocking, and the like, you’ll need to stick with the BIOS, as Maxsun does not offer one at this time. If the company wants to compete with the ‘big four’ (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, ASRock), it needs to offer software, since the competition pretty much all has well-established monitoring and control applications.

Test System / Comparison Products

We’ve updated our test system to Windows 11 (23H2) 64-bit OS with all updates applied as of late September 2024 (this includes the Branch Prediction Optimizations for AMD). Hardware-wise, we’ve updated the RAM kits (matching our Intel test system), cooling, storage, and video card. Unless otherwise noted, we use the latest publicly available non-beta motherboard BIOS. The hardware we used is as follows:

TEST SYSTEM COMPONENTS:

• CPU - AMD Ryzen 9 9900X
• Cooling - Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420
• Storage - Crucial 2TB T705 M.2 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD
• RAM - Kingston Fury Beast DDR5-6000 CL36 (KF560C36BBEAK2-32)RAM - Teamgroup T-Force Delta DDR5-7200 CL34 (FF3D518G7200HC34ABK)RAM - Klevv Cras XR5 RGB DDR5-8000 (KD5AGUA80-80R380S)
• GPU - Asus TUF RTX 4080 16G
• PSU - EVGA Supernova 850W P6
• Windows 11 64-bit (23H2 - 22631.4169)NVIDIA Driver 561.09

Benchmark Settings

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Benchmark Results

Our standard benchmarks and power tests are performed using the CPU’s stock frequencies (including any default boost/turbo) with all power-saving features enabled. We set optimized defaults in the BIOS and the memory by enabling the XMP profile. The Windows power scheme is set to Balanced (default) for this baseline testing, so the PC idles appropriately.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Synthetics offer a valuable method for evaluating a board's performance, as identical settings are expected to yield similar results. Turbo boost wattage and advanced memory timings are areas where motherboard manufacturers can still optimize for stability or performance, though, and these settings can impact specific testing scenarios.

Starting with the synthetic benchmarks, the Terminator B850M Pro II performed average to below average in most tests. In fact, Cinebench R24 and POV multi-core scores were the lowest we’ve seen (mind you, it’s only a couple of percent slower from worst to first), which was surprising considering power use was similar to other B850 boards. Outside of that, results were average for the rest.

Timed Applications

3D Games and 3DMark

Starting with the launch of Zen 5, we’ve updated our game tests. We’re keeping the F1 racing game but have upgraded to F1 24. We also dropped Far Cry 6 in favor of an even more popular and good-looking game in Cyberpunk 2077. We run both games at 1920x1080 resolution using the Ultra preset (details listed above). Cyberpunk 2077 uses DLSS, while we left F1 24 to native resolution scaling.

The goal with these settings is to determine if there are differences in performance at the most commonly used (and CPU/system-bound) resolution with settings most people use or strive for (Ultra). We expect the difference between boards in these tests to be minor, with most falling within the margin of error. We’ve also added a minimum FPS setting, which can affect your gameplay and immersion.

In our 3DMark and game tests, the B850M Pro II was dead-on average in the synthetics and slightly above average in both games. While the Maxsun didn’t have a great showing in the rendering, encoding, and other tests, it proved to be a competent gamer.

Overclocking

Over the past few CPU generations, overclocking headroom has been shrinking on both sides of the fence, while the out-of-the-box potential has increased. For overclockers, this means there’s less fun to have. For the average consumer, you’re getting the most out of the processor without manual tweaking. Today’s motherboards are more robust than ever, and they easily support power-hungry flagship-class processors, so we know the hardware can handle them. There are multiple ways to extract even more performance from these processors: enabling a canned PBO setting, manually tweaking the PBO settings, or just going for an all-core overclock. Results will vary and depend on the cooling as well. In other words, your mileage may vary. Considering all the above, we will not be overclocking the CPU. However, we will try out our different memory kits to ensure they meet the specifications.

For memory testing, we start with our fastest non-clock driver kit: Klevv 32GB (2x16) DDR5-8000. Per usual on this platform, it booted to Windows but wouldn’t pass a stress test with our 9900X. The Team Group DDR5-7200 kit worked without issue. Those speeds are well past the ‘sweet spot’ for the AMD platform, and with today’s RAM prices, we doubt many people are looking at these higher speeds anyway.

Dropping in the Ryzen 5 8600G APU, which typically unlocks the ability to run our DDR5-8000 kit, didn’t this time around. We couldn’t get the system to boot with this RAM kit, no matter what we tried. But, between the 8000 MT/s listed spec and our kit not being on Maxsun's QVL, it was an expected result, and nothing to hold against it as it’s well past the sweet spot.

Power Consumption / VRM Temperatures

We used AIDA64’s System Stability Test with Stress CPU, FPU, cache, and Memory enabled for power testing, using the processor's peak power consumption value. The wattage reading is obtained from the wall using a Kill-A-Watt meter, which captures the entire PC (excluding the monitor). The only variable that changes is the motherboard; all other parts remain the same. Please note that we have moved to using only the stock power-use/VRM temperature charts, as this section aims to ensure that the power delivery can handle flagship-class processors.

Stress testing this board with our DDR5-7200 kit showed it to be less power-hungry than most competitors. At idle, it sat around 89W and slightly higher than average, peaking at 245W, one of the lower results under load. This averages out to 167W, slightly better than the average B850/X870/X870E-based boards.

VRM temperatures were good during our testing, peaking at 50 degrees Celsius on our sensor and 55 degrees on the hottest internal sensor. For 50A MOSFETs pushing 160W loads for this test, that’s a solid result. You can use a higher-wattage processor and possibly overclock, but make sure you have good airflow to keep the budget VRMs running cool.

Bottom Line

The Maxsun Terminator B850M Pro II proved to be a competent budget-class AM5 motherboard, but it doesn’t do enough to stand out. Gaming performance was as expected, but other performance was a bit lackluster with default settings. It offers a solid set of features, including Wi-Fi 7 (though limited to 160Hz), three M.2 sockets (two PCIe 5.0), and support for the latest Ryzen 9 processors. The BIOS is functional and easy to navigate. Still, the lack of Windows-based software for monitoring, fan control, and overclocking is a notable omission, since competing motherboards already have well-established software ecosystems.

For me, the biggest question about this board's market viability is price. Maxsun stated the MSRP is $199.99, but is found on Alibaba for $243.76 and Amazon for $229.00. At those prices, it’s not worth it when the competition is all currently (at the time of this writing) priced below $199. Hardware-wise, MSI’s MAG B850M Mortar Wifi ($199.99) is probably the best-equipped option and arguably one of the better-looking B850 boards. ASRock’s B850M Steel Legend ($149.99) in white is also attractive (the only one of this group with RGB lighting) and the least expensive option. Asus’ Prime B850M-A WiFi-CSM ($191.99) is also a consideration, with similar specs and still less expensive than the Maxsun. With all of these other boards available, the Maxsun is a tough sell anywhere above $200.

Terminator B850M Pro II is an option in the MicroATX B850 space, but not the best. At the currently inflated price, it won't make our best motherboards list. If you can find it for $199, it’s definitely in the conversation, especially for anyone who needs two PCIe 5.0-based M.2 sockets in a budget, small-form-factor board. Until the price comes down for us in the U.S., competing boards are the better option.

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Since late 2025, RAM, storage, and graphics card prices have shot through the roof, making items that were once affordable out of reach for many people. Anyone still in the market for those parts has to rely on combo deals for any reasonable pricing. Newegg has an excellent 3-item combo running where you essentially get the 16GB of DDR5 RAM for FREE with a huge $274 discount. For only $658.99, you get the powerful Ryzen 9 9900X processor, a quality Asus X870E-Plus Wi-Fi 7 motherboard, and 2x8GB Team Group DDR5-5200 RAM, along with a free Cooler Master 240mm AIO.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The star of the combo has to be the ‘free’ RAM. The combo offers 16GB (2x8GB) of TeamGroup’s T-Force Vulkan DDR5-5200. And while the RAM speed is outside of AMD’s sweet spot, you’d be hard-pressed to notice a performance difference without looking at a frame counter. These black, non-RGB sticks will also look great with the included motherboard. If you apply the ~$274 discount to the RAM, you’re getting it for free. And if 16GB isn’t enough, buy the same kit again net 32GB for only $240.

Although we didn’t review AMD’s Ryzen 9 9900X, we know the non-X3D chips, like its big brother, the Ryzen 9 9950X, were generally well received by our reviewer and the public alike. Its strong multicore and single-threaded performance, native AVX-512 support, and backward compatibility with AM5 motherboards make this CPU an excellent choice for someone who uses their PC for more than just gaming and can make use of the additional cores and threads, as you can see from our benchmark data:

The Ryzen 9 9900X is a 12-core, 24-thread processor built on TSMC’s 4nm FinFET process (6nm for the I/O die) with a base clock of 4.4 GHz and boost up to 5.6 GHz. It has a TDP of 120W and is relatively easy to manage the thermals, even when overclocking the fully unlocked processor. While overclocking isn’t what it used to be, you can still squeeze out a couple of hundred more GHz, and sometimes you can get there, even when lowering the voltage. In short, there’s a lot of performance out of the box, and even a bit more headroom left if you want to overclock.

Last, the Asus TUF Gaming X870E-Plus Wifi 7 is a solid all-around motherboard for the AM5 platform. It delivers sufficient power to support flagship-class processors and easily handles the 9850X3D in the combo, even with some overclocking. It comes with four M.2 sockets (one PCIe 5.0) and two SATA ports for storage, fast networking with integrated Wi-Fi 7 and 2,5 GbE, ample USB ports on the rear IO (13, including two USB4 40 Gbps Type-C), and a quality audio solution based on the last-gen Realtek flagship (ALC1220P). Asus’ AI solutions (AI Cache Boost, Overclocking, Cooling II, and Networking II) and the DIY-friendly design make it easy to build and get the most out of your system.

If you’re in the market for an AM5-based system that isn’t based on an X3D chip, this $658.99 combo (an incredible $274 savings) is one of the better deals available at Newegg right now. And you even get a free 240mm Cooler Master AIO. Getting RAM for what essentially amounts to ‘free’ is not something we see frequently. You can even upgrade to 32GB and still find yourself well ahead versus buying alone. Get this deal while it lasts.

Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan has invested $12 million of his own money in Intel this week as part of the company's $19.7 billion stock offering, indicating his confidence in the company. Meanwhile, Bank of America analysts view the capital raise as an indicator of management's 'increasing foundry conviction,' suggesting growing confidence in Intel's foundry prospects.

"The capital raise […] is still a good leading indicator of management's increasing Foundry conviction (vs. defensive balance-sheet action)," reads an excerpt from BofA's note to clients published by John Intel. "We flag the capital raise also aligns with the recent step-up in capex (for internal customer) and ongoing 14A progress, with further capex increase expected on potential incremental external customer wins (18A-P, 14A, advanced packaging EMIB-T)."

Indeed, it is hard to believe that Intel's management would raise almost $20 billion without a more or less clear plan on how to spend it. In fact, Lip-Bu Tan has said repeatedly that he would not authorize building capacity for external customers unless there was a customer commitment. Of course, at some point, Intel will need additional 18A capacity for its own products as well, but $20 billion is a lot of money, which may indicate that the additional capacity will be aimed both at internal and external clients. This is by no means a confirmation that a formal deal has been reached with a big customer like Apple, AMD, Nvidia, or Qualcomm, but it is at least an indicator of management's confidence in Intel's performance going forward.

In fact, Intel's $19.7 billion stock offering was several times oversubscribed and about 33% of investors who submitted orders received no shares at all, reports @FirstSquawk, which indicates great confidence in the company by regular investors. Apparently, Intel's chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, was among the investors who managed to get $12 million worth of stock using his own money.

In March 2025, shortly after becoming the head of Intel, Lip-Bu Tan bought $25 million of Intel shares (approximately 1.04 million shares) through a family trust to hold them for five years as a required part of his employment contract. Since then, he neither bought nor sold his Intel stock, so the acquisition of $12 million worth of Intel shares is a significant deal.

"Overall, we view the raise as net positive given foundry scale and customer conviction driving longer term top-line and operational efficiency, more than offsetting modest near-term EPS dilution," the note by BofA reads. "We also flag positive read-through for both front-end and back-end packaging semicap vendors."

Qualcomm is getting into some of the nitty-gritty details of the Snapdragon C system-on-a-chip, the ARM-based platform it announced in June for laptops priced around $300.

The Snapdragon C is an 8-core Qualcomm Kryo CPU, with a single-core max frequency of 3 GHz and a multi-core max of 2 GHz. A Qualcomm spokesperson clarified that "Snapdragon C's 8 cores operate at different max frequencies to optimize for power [and] performance with 1 core at up to 3GHz, 3 at up to 2.6GHz, and the remaining 4 at up to 2GHz. The maximum sustained frequency across all cores is 2 GHz.."

It also has an integrated Adreno GPU with a max frequency of 900 MHz, and a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, though Qualcomm hasn't listed how many TOPS it supports.

Intel's Core 3 304, the weakest of its "Wildcat Lake" processors for budget systems, has a max performance core turbo frequency of 4.3 GHz and max low-power efficient core frequency of 3.3 GHz..

In updated slides, Qualcomm pits the Snapdragon C (in a reference design with 8GB of memory) against an Acer TravelMate with Intel's N250 and 8GB of RAM. The company claims you get 67% better battery performance than the Intel N250 and up to 2.1 times better battery efficiency, though that's measured with multi-threaded Cinebench. The company did not publish any benchmarks when the systems are plugged in.

Qualcomm claims that, on battery, the Snapdragon C is up to 44% faster in single-threaded Geekbench and 24% higher in multi-core. But its top victories were in Cinebench, running 50% faster single-threaded and 67% faster multi-threaded. But Geekbench and Speedometer 3.1 (+39%) are the real numbers to look at here, as they better showcase the type of work someone might typically do with a cheap notebook.

While Qualcomm is promising "all-day" battery life, it's leaving the number of hours up to its OEM partners. That's likely to vary depending on the display panels and other factors, but in Qualcomm's test reference device, it used a 16-inch screen. Qualcomm notes in its footnotes that the TravelMate has an 11.6-inch display, with "total power configured to match 16" screen."

Qualcomm instead is claiming battery power efficiency over the Intel N250 across all of its tests, from Netflix running in Microsoft Edge (106% better), web browsing (68% better), and a Teams video call (74% better).

Qualcomm is promising designs from HP, Acer, Asus, and Lenovo. At Computex, Acer showed a first look at the Aspire Go 15, its first notebook with Snapdragon C. We know that system has 8GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and plenty of ports, but the company still has not unveiled a release date or pricing information.

It is possible that the timing of this launch will enable Qualcomm's OEM partners to unveil new systems at the IFA technology trade show in Berlin, unless they decide to wait until CES.

It's also unclear if the $300 guidance will hold, given the increase in cost of components — especially memory. But it's possible Snapdragon C laptops will significantly undercut the MacBook Neo and Windows laptops with Intel's Wildcat Lake. We'll have to test Snapdragon C to see how it performs.

You can see Qualcomm's full slide deck below:

Nvidia has once again silently raised the price of its RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell on its US Marketplace website to $16,000. The card was previously listed for $13,250, which itself was a price hike earlier this year since it actually launched at $8,565. Workstation GPUs of this caliber don't really have an MSRP since no one's buying them at retail, but we saw pre-orders for this GPU as low as $7,673 back in March 2025.

• RTX Pro 6000 at Newegg: $13,998 (Old Price)

That's when the card was first announced, and it went on sale a month later, in April 2025, where initial listings had it up for $8,435 for bulk orders and $8,565 for single-unit purchases. This means the June 2026 change from $8,435 to $13,250 was already a 57% price increase, and now, from $13,250 to $16,000, we're seeing a roughly 20% hike. In total, from March 2025 to August 2026, the RTX Pro 6000 became almost 90% more expensive.

If you count the pre-order prices that were momentarily below $8,000 — we're seeing this card sell for more than twice what it debuted at. Keep in mind that we're talking about the boxed Workstation Edition, which is basically like the Founder's Edition for these professional cards, because otherwise it's also available in a 300W Max-Q variant with a blower-style cooler, and a server edition with passive cooling for rack mounts.

These price hikes were not officially confirmed by Nvidia at any point during 2025 and 2026. With the ongoing component crisis continuing to worsen memory prices, these changes are not a surprise, especially when you consider the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell has 96GB of GDDR7 VRAM.

Still, a nearly $7,500 increase from March 2025 listings to now is a sizeable jump. For what it's worth, we found the same SKU listed on Newegg for $13,998, so $2,000 less than Nvidia's official store and basically the same price as before. Perhaps this listing will rise to $16,000 the moment current inventory runs out, and prices always vary between retailers. Case in point, B&H has the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell up for $15,499 right now.

CoreWeave signed a contract for Nvidia A100 GPUs that runs into 2029, nine years after the Ampere-based SKU debuted, CEO Mike Intrator disclosed on the company's second-quarter earnings call on Monday. The company reported $2.58 billion in quarterly revenue, up 112% year over year, and a $104 billion revenue backlog that excludes more than $25 billion in new commitments booked since July. In remarks made during the earnings call, Intrator said, “pricing for prior generation SKUs is at or above where it was years ago.”

Michael Burry accused hyperscalers in November of understating depreciation by $176 billion between 2026 and 2028 by stretching GPU useful-life assumptions to five or six years against a chip cadence that now delivers a new Nvidia architecture roughly every year. Concerns that accelerating GPU obsolescence could unravel AI financing predate his estimate, and an unnamed Google architect put datacenter GPU service life at one to three years back in 2024.

Intrator told CNBC at the time that a batch of H100s coming off an expired contract was immediately rebooked at 95% of the original price, and Nvidia CFO Colette Kress countered Burry directly, saying A100s sold six years ago still run at full utilization. The 2029 deal stretches that record further, putting contracted revenue on 2020 silicon beyond even the six-year depreciation schedules defended by hyperscalers.

An air-cooled Nvidia DGX A100 system draws 6.5kW at maximum load and fits comfortably in legacy data center halls designed for roughly 20kW per rack. Nvidia's current GB200 and GB300 NVL72 racks draw 120kW to 140kW and require direct-to-chip liquid cooling, roughly six times what those older facilities can feed and cool. Blackwell therefore can't move into the halls where Ampere is currently deployed without a rebuild of power delivery and cooling infrastructure.

That mismatch is helping to keep A100 fleets in service regardless of how gracefully or not silicon itself ages. The energized, air-cooled capacity holding them has no higher-value use, and renting nine-year-old GPUs is a better alternative to leaving it in the dark.

CoreWeave's contracted power grew to 3.7 GW in Q2 and stood at 4.2 GW as of Monday, against just 1.5 GW online, so customer commitments already cover nearly triple the capacity the company can deliver. CFO Nitin Agrawal added on the call that capacity coming up for renewal represents a very limited share of CoreWeave's fleet, with older-generation ASPs at or above levels from a year ago.

Intel's upcoming Nova Lake CPUs have been a part of the rumor mill for months as excitement builds up for a potential CES 2027 announcement. The latest leak comes from reliable tipster Jaykihn, who's actually updating an older report that said SKUs with cut-down E-cores would also have reduced cache. Now, his new leak claims Intel will keep the L3 cache unaltered, even on chips with partially disabled E-core clusters.

Previously, it was rumored that some Nova Lake configs, such as the 8+12+4 silicon, would only have 33MB of L3 cache since the 12 E-cores are cut down from the 16 we expect on the full-fat variant of this SKU. Now, Jaykihn reports that this config will now have 36MB of L3 cache instead, just like the uncut 8+16+4 config. Similarly, the 4+4+4 config is said to retain 18MB of L3 cache instead of 15MB, same as the fully enabled 4+8+4 SKUs.

This does not apply to every SKU of Nova Lake, however. For instance, the leaker claims that the 6+12+4 config is still limited to 27MB and not 30MB, had the disabled E-core cluster retained its cache. If true, it seems there's no linear scaling at play here; rather, Intel just decides on its own which SKUs get to keep all of the L3 cache regardless of their disabled E-cores, and which ones are still relegated to lower amounts.

Nova Lake desktop CPUs are not the only ones reportedly affected by this change; Nova Lake-HX, the mobile lineup, is also said to follow the same methodology at this point. Therefore, we can expect some of the midrange SKUs to have more cache than previously expected. Keep in mind that all of this is preliminary, unofficial information and subject to change between now and the actual launch, as this very development proves.

Intel's big trick for Nova Lake is expected to be the introduction of bLLC in consumer CPUs, directly meant to challenge AMD's 3D V-Cache. Only mid- to high-end SKUs are expected to get it, including the 8+12+4 and 6+12+4 configs we mentioned earlier. They're said to feature 132MB and 108MB of bLLC, respectively, which is separate from the native L3 cache we've been talking about in this story, so those numbers won't change.

*non-bLLC variants of all the single-tile SKUs are also rumored. All specifications rumored, not confirmed by Intel.

As usual, there might be some level of internal segmentation that we aren't seeing here. Although leaked specs give us a glimpse at what Nova Lake could offer, it's always possible that Intel is testing various configurations, even if those chips won't end up in the main lineup.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has revealed that new memory architectures — once thought a commodity business — are now strategically interesting and one of his pet projects, while speaking about the comeback of the American chip industry. He further noted that the memory industry is ripe for innovation, and also hinted at exploring ways to stack memory on top of a CPU.

After years of being a commodity, memory became a strategic asset in recent quarters and will likely remain one for a while, so suddenly, leading makers of 3D NAND and DRAM became highly profitable companies, something the Intel CEO is keenly aware of:  "I used to be, 'do not invest in memory because it is a kind of commodity business,' but now it has become different," Tan said. […] "There is a lot of new technology coming out. So, we are kind of looking at one of my pet projects, some of the new memory architecture. I think you just saw the news: I hired my good friend, Seok-Hee Lee, who used to run SK Hynix. So, you kind of know something that I am thinking about. We are not ready to unfold it."

Tan did not reveal anything about the pet project and did not even specify whether the project is one of his personally favored strategic initiatives at Intel, or an initiative in one of the companies that he has invested in. He did mention that stacking memory on top of a CPU could make a lot of sense, though did not elaborate. Tan's remarks also follow the revelation of an Intel XBM patent that does away with the silicon interposer of HBM.

" I think CPU and memory, I think there are a lot of ways we can really do stacking together," Tan said. "And also try to find some new architecture for memory. I think in some way the memory, a lot of innovation are not there. So, there is some really good area."

Not everyone in the industry remembers, but Intel started as a memory company in 1968 and was quite a successful memory maker until the eighties, when Japanese companies took the lead, and Intel had to exit the market completely after suffering severe losses. Since then, the company has attempted either to return to the memory market with NAND and Optane, or at least to capitalize on a new type of memory with RDRAM. In all three cases, the company abandoned its memory initiatives without incurring significant losses.

Given the current profitability of 3D NAND and DRAM makers, producing memory is certainly a good business again and will remain profitable for some time. However, to re-enter it, companies like Intel would need capital to build at least one fab, R&D to develop competitive process technologies, and time. While licensing a technology — assuming that a company has capital — is an option, we strongly doubt that at this point Intel may be inclined to invest capital in memory and not in its core products and foundry businesses. Furthermore, it is unclear how investors react to such investments given the fact that the company struggles to become a strong competitor in the foundry market and has exited 3D NAND and 3DXPoint/Optane businesses after failing to achieve strategic targets.

Unfortunately, storage costs for PC builders have shot up into the stratosphere this year. AI has sucked up our RAM and SSDs and left us with inflated prices as a result, making it essential to find good deals in the current market when they appear. This 4TB Team Group T-Force G50 SSD for $389.99, thanks to a $106 discount code at Newegg, isn't a record breaker, but it's basically the lowest price you'll pay for this amount of storage for an SSD offering Gen 4 speeds, and $10 cheaper than we saw during Prime Day.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The only drive you'll find cheaper with similar specs is the Silicon Power UD90, but only by a few cents, with the next drive costing you over $50 more for slower speeds. If you want it, you'll need to make sure you use the coupon code BTSF2997 at checkout to get the full discount applied.

The T-Force G50 is a PCIe 4.0 SSD, running over all four lanes, and offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 5,000 and 4,500 MB/s apiece. It won't be winning any speed awards, but if that was your aim, then the Samsung 990 Pro, which sits on our best SSD, is the better option. You'll need to pay almost twice the price, however, with the 990 Pro costing $789.99 right now, just $10 less than double what you're paying here for the same storage capacity.

The T-Force G50 comes with a graphene heatsink to keep things cool, ships with TLC memory, and features a memory controller from InnoGrit.

The $389.99 sale price for this Team Group T-Force G50 4TB SSD is a bargain under current conditions. We're in a troubled market for PC builders, and the $106 saving brings this SSD down to around 10.2 cents per GB, as low as you'll find right now for this capacity from a Gen 4 SSD. Don't forget to use coupon code BTSF2997 for the discount, however.

SK hynix has resumed investments in its fab in Dalian, China, which is operated by its Solidigm subsidiary, and plans to boost its output by 50% already in 2027, reports Sedaily. Coincidentally, the company is mulling listing some of Solidigm's shares on NASDAQ to raise capital, but to retain control over its North America-based subsidiary, according to The Korea Herald.

After SK hynix acquired Intel's 3D NAND and SSD business in 2021 and formed its Solidigm subsidiary shortly after, it suspended any expansions of Solidigm's capacity in China partly due to the memory market downturn in 2022 – 2023 and partly due to U.S. export controls that curb exports of advanced fab tools to China. However, as demand for solid-state storage is setting records in general and demand for Solidigm's high-capacity SSDs is exceptionally strong, SK hynix is reconsidering its capacity plans for the Dalian fab just in time for Solidigm's initial public offering.

Following a four-year pause, Solidigm has reportedly resumed investment in its Dalian facility in China this year. The company has completed construction of the second phase of the fab and is preparing to start installing production equipment as early as November, the report claims. The facility is expected to begin mass production of floating gate 3D NAND flash in the first half of 2027, if the report is accurate.

The second phase of Solidigm's fab in Dalian is reportedly designed for a wafer output capacity of around 50,000 wafer starts per month (WSPM). Combined with approximately 100,000 WSPM at the existing first phase of the facility, the new phase would boost Solidigm's NAND production capacity in Dalian by roughly 50%, to around 150,000 WSPM.

Late last year, the U.S. government granted SK hynix and Samsung annual licenses to ship semiconductor production equipment that contains technologies developed in America to their Chinese fabs through 2026, which replaced their previous open-ended Validated End User (VEU) exemptions. As a result, both companies can now upgrade their fabs in the People's Republic and even use new process technologies there.

Solidigm, for example, intends to start making floating gate 3D QLC NAND memory with over 200 active layers at its Dalian facility in the second half of 2026, which was made possible by the timely tool upgrades. The additional capacity will further increase bit output of the Dalian campus, which in turn will enable Solidigm to produce its 245TB-class SSDs due to be introduced in the coming months in decent quantities, sometimes in 2027.

Solidigm, which controls roughly a quarter of the data center-grade SSD market, is a crown jewel in SK hynix's portfolio as it makes unique products that are sold at a premium and are in high demand. Listing Solidigm on NASDAQ would enable SK hynix to gain capital (up to $7 billion, if unofficial reports are correct), but retain control over the precious asset. The money that SK hynix will raise should be roughly enough to expand Solidigm's capacity and increase output of premium data center-grade solid-state drives.

It should be noted that SK hynix did not officially confirm the Solidigm IPO plan last week, as its regulatory filing on August 5 said that Solidigm was considering various ways to improve its competitiveness, but the final decision is yet to be made.

If you've ever stumbled upon the Amazon CPU best sellers list over the past few years, you've been greeted by a wall of red boxes. This list isn't a good source of data, without hard sales figures and heavily skewed toward what's available on Amazon at any given time. But AMD senior marketing director Saša Marinković recently shared a screenshot of the Amazon CPU best-sellers list, bragging on AMD's representation. The interesting bit is that the screenshot Marinković shared shows the $80, DDR4-based Ryzen 5 5500 at the top of the charts.

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D has since reclaimed the top slot — it is the best CPU for gaming, after all — but the screenshot touches on the prevalence of DDR4 platforms, nearly four years after the launch of Zen 4 and introduction of DDR5 to AMD's platform. It's not just the Ryzen 5 5500, either.

Of the 25 best sellers on Amazon, three slots are occupied by Intel, and one slot is claimed by the Thermal Grizzly AM5 contact frame. AMD holds every other slot, though it's nearly an even split between DDR4 and DDR5. There are nine Zen 3 CPUs on DDR4 platforms to 12 Zen 4/5 CPUs on DDR5 platforms.

It seems Marinković's screenshot is a bit out of date — currently, the split is even closer, with Intel picking up two extra spots and the split between DDR4 and DDR5 AMD CPUs moving to nine and 10 slots, respectively.

The irony here is that Marinković is highlighting AMD's representation on the best-sellers list while a four-year-old CPU is at the top of the charts, not one of the many performant DDR5 processors AMD has released since. It's not hard to draw a straight line between DDR4 popularity and current RAM pricing on your own. However, several motherboard vendors have previously confirmed to Tom's Hardware that they're increasing DDR4 motherboard production due to demand for older platforms.

The Ryzen 5 5500 is one of the cheapest CPUs you can buy at only $80, and it comes with a Wraith Stealth cooler in the box, saving you some money on an aftermarket CPU cooler. It's based on the Zen 3 architecture with six cores and 12 threads and boosts up to 4.2 GHz. It has a cut-down L3 cache compared to other Zen 3 CPUs at 16 MB, however, and it tops out at PCIe 3.0.

We recently published a $100 CPU shootout comparing the Ryzen 5 5500 to some other options around the same price and found its performance lacking, particularly in games; the Intel Core i3-14100F consistently offered better performance with DDR4. That conclusion only holds up if you don't already have an AM4 motherboard, however. If you're in the market for the Ryzen 5 5500, you're already on a tight budget, so a new motherboard probably isn't in the cards.

The AMD BC-250 has taken on a new life. It’s a PS5 APU that was repurposed for mining during the crypto boom, and now it’s being repurposed once again as a Linux gaming board. The BC-250 has seen some coverage in years past. It was originally a board you could pick up for less than $100, but now you’ll likely spend over $200 on one. We’re taking a closer look at the board and the performance it offers now for a few key reasons.

First, we have the Steam Machine. Valve’s long-awaited console-like PC is here and much more expensive than anyone expected at over $1,000. You can easily put together a BC-250 build for around $400 or $500, and even less if you have a power supply and SSD lying around. If you can get in the realm of Steam Machine performance for half the price (and the BC-250 can, based on our testing), that’s pretty compelling.

There have also been some significant developments among the BC-250 community. The board only works in the first place due to a community-developed BIOS and GPU driver, and developers have continued to experiment with what’s possible with the hardware. Now, there are tools that enable all 40 Compute Units (CUs) on the board (it defaults to 24 CUs), as well as tools to enable the two disabled Zen 2 cores, taking the six-core CPU to an eight-core CPU.

Now, the BC-250 isn’t a cut-down PS5 APU, at least from a hardware perspective. It actually patches two more graphics CUs compared to the PS5. Though, as should become clear throughout this story, relating the BC-250 to the PS5 on anything but the silicon on the board isn’t the best idea.

All in, we spent about $350 on the BC-250, with around $200 of that going toward the board (it’s currently listed for around $175 on eBay) and the additional budget going toward a 3D-printed case, fans, and a power supply. You could spend as little as the cost of the board if you can 3D print a case, bring your own fans, and repurpose an old PSU and NVMe SSD. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll spend between $400 and $500.

Even for “full” price, the BC-250 is significantly cheaper than what you can get elsewhere. The PS5 digital edition is now $600, while the Pro will run you $900. The newly-released Steam Machine starts at $1,050, and that’s with just 512 GB of storage. The BC-250 is significantly cheaper and offers performance that can rival these platforms. What you save in money, however, you spend in time.

The BC-250 is a great project if you like tinkering, but it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it gaming device, even after the initial setup. After a few weeks of using the board, that much became clear.

A PS5 APU, not a PS5: BC-250 specifications

The BC-250 is described as a cut-down PS5 APU, and that’s exactly what it is, but the “cut-down” portion of the description carries a lot of weight. It comes with eight Zen 2 cores, but two of them are disabled, and a 40-CU RDNA 2 GPU, though only 24 of those CUs work out of the box.

The community has been able to unlock all 40 CUs with good success. Ultimately, your mileage with unlocking all 40 CUs will vary; some boards will work just fine with all 40, others with 32 or 36, and some with the base 24. As I’ll dig into more later, I was able to unlock all 40 CUs and run them stably up to 1,850 MHz, much higher than the recommended 1,500 MHz max frequency.

Out of the box, both the CPU and GPU run at locked frequencies of around 3.5 GHz and 1,500 MHz, respectively. You’ll need to separately install a GPU and CPU governor for dynamic frequency scaling (a necessity in the case of the GPU, though optional for the CPU). Achievable frequency on the CPU and GPU is entirely determined by your thermals. Both governors allow for overclocking, but the BC-250 is thermally constrained, even with active airflow, so don’t expect to push far beyond the stock frequency, particularly on the CPU.

Unfortunately, storage is a big bottleneck for the BC-250, and one of the biggest points of divergence compared to a PS5. The M.2 runs at just PCIe 2.0 x2 speeds, delivering about 1 GB/s of maximum performance with an NVMe SSD. The good news is that, due to how slow the interface is, you can save some money and get a less-performant but larger drive for storage.

As of a few days ago, at the time of writing, some initial fixes to unlock the extra two CPU cores have rolled out, which I was able to get working after a bit of trial and error. Outside of the GPU and CPU, the BC-250 has a bit less L3 cache. The APU, from a hardware perspective, is very similar to the PS5. Though that ignores the complex I/O system present in the PS5, not to mention the various layers of software that Sony runs on the APU.

Given that the BC-250 wasn’t designed for gaming, it’s important to keep that context in mind. You could just as easily describe it as a crypto mining board that’s been repurposed for gaming as you could a PS5 APU that’s been repurposed for mining. The BC-250 is a mining board, and the only reason it works is due to a large number of enthusiasts trying to get the damn thing to work and sharing their advancements along the way.

Although Linux gaming broadly has made a ton of advancements over the past few years, the BC-250 has unique hurdles you need to overcome. It needs fixes to scale the frequency on both the CPU and GPU; otherwise, it’s locked at a fixed frequency. It needs a custom BIOS image to even boot, and a specific configuration in the BIOS to avoid immediately crashing. Those are all steps you need to take to get the BC-250 to work in the first place, let alone start optimizing it to squeeze out the best performance.

There is extensive community documentation for the BC-250, which I referenced ad nauseam throughout this process. It’s an excellent resource, but even still, I had to search out solutions outside of the documentation. This is cobbled together from community fixes, and the documentation seeks to cover as many distros as possible. But it’s nigh impossible to have complete documentation on the BC-250, as valiant as the effort linked above is.

Expect a bumpy (but rewarding) road. It’s better to think of the BC-250 as a project, rather than a commodity like the PS5. Yes, you can play games on it and get surprisingly good performance, but you’ll spend a good amount of time simply tinkering with the machine, at first to get it to work, and later to optimize it. And you will inevitably run up against games that either don’t work or have poor performance, prompting another investigation and optimization cycle. I find the process rewarding; others will find it frustrating.

Setting up and configuring the BC-250

Getting the BC-250 is only one part of the process here. At the least, you need a power supply that can deliver at least 20A on the 12V rail. A standard PSU will work, but FlexATX power supplies are a better fit. I ended up purchasing a 3D-printed case, along with a power supply, from eBay. The BC-250 documentation includes several PSU recommendations, along with case designs, if you want to go about choosing your parts piecemeal.

Here’s what I’d recommend at minimum:

• BC-250
• 300W+ PSU (at least 20A on 12V rail)
• 2x Arctic P12 high-pressure fans (if using CU unlock)

Regardless of the route you choose, double-check fan mounting points (there aren’t any mounts on the BC-250 itself) and case/PSU compatibility. Many small form factor BC-250 designs you can 3D print are designed around a FlexATX PSU. Before booting, verify your 8-pin pinout against the community documentation. If the 12V pins are in the wrong position, you can fry your board.

With the board ready, the first step is to flash a new BIOS from the shell. It’s straightforward enough, though without the modern conveniences of firmware flashback in the event of a failure. If you lose power, you’ll brick your board and need a hardware controller to reset it, so I recommend connecting to a UPS during the flashing process. You can grab the correct files from the documentation.

From there, you need to clear your CMOS by removing the battery and configure a few BIOS options to force the integrated graphics, set the UMA frame buffer size, and disable IOMMU. From there, you need to choose which Linux distro you’re going to use, which is very important. I’d recommend experimenting with a few different distros, especially if you’re new to Linux.

For gaming, the go-to options are Bazzite and CachyOS, the former of which I originally went with. There are some “optimized” images floating around for the BC-250 that supposedly rope in all of the configuration and fixes you need into a fresh OS image. I wouldn’t recommend using those. Setting up the BC-250 is getting easier by the day (I have found new fixes and scripts that automate installing several fixes just in the time I’ve been testing the board), so these optimized images are, at best, out of date, and at worst, not actually optimized at all. Tread carefully.

You don’t need an optimized image because, at least for Bazzite and CachyOS, scripts exist that can automate the entire setup process. Strictly speaking, the only thing you need is the GPU governor. Previously, you would need a kernel patch, but a GPU governor via an SMU now exists and is what I used. The governor is what allows dynamic frequency scaling on the GPU, as well as overclocking.

You’ll also need a compatible kernel, which is easier to manage on rolling distros like CachyOS. 6.18.18 LTS is the recommended kernel at the time of writing, but 6.17.11+ works, along with 6.12.x to 6.14.x LTS. Other kernels may work, though some (such as 6.15.0) are broken and will trigger a kernel panic.

With your distro chosen and a correct kernel working, here are the optimization steps I took:

• Install GPU and CPU governor
• Unlock 40 CUs
• Setup Zswap with 32GB swap page
• Install ACPI fix
• Configure PWM sensors

Again, scripts exist for these patches, the most critical of which don’t even require kernel patching any longer. The exact fixes you need and the method to install them will depend on the distro you choose, however, so make sure to keep the setup documentation handy.

The list above is in order of importance. Once you have the GPU governor, the next step is to try to enable the full GPU. Previously, you would need a kernel patch, but the bc250-cu-live-manager utility can enable the CUs via a User Mode Register (UMR) without the need for a kernel patch. Not only is this easier to do, but it also persists across updates, unlike a kernel patch, where new kernels will force you to go through the unlock process again. The end result is identical regardless of the path you choose.

I spent a good deal of time testing the 40 CUs before doing any other optimizations, and I’d recommend you do the same. Just because the board has 40 CUs doesn’t mean you can use all of them. I was able to unlock all 40, though not at the frequencies some others have reported. And some users aren’t able to use all 40, rooting out bad clusters for a 32-CU or 36-CU configuration. Overclocking-like trial and error is necessary here, though, as we’ll get to in the performance section later, experimenting is worth the hassle. Using all 40 CUs, even at suboptimal clock speeds, offers much better performance.

Although setting everything up on Bazzite should be easy, I ran into issues numerous times. It’s an immutable OS image, which can cause problems depending on the fixes you’re trying to apply. It’s a great choice if you want to quickly set up the BC-250, but it became clear that an immutable image isn’t optimal if you want to get the best performance. Further, some newer fixes simply wouldn’t work, such as unlocking the extra two CPU cores.

The CachyOS pivot

After a few days of optimizing, testing, and troubleshooting Bazzite, I made the hard decision to wipe the machine and start fresh with CachyOS. In hindsight, I should have started with CachyOS from the beginning for numerous reasons, but mainly because it’s a rolling Arch-based distro. Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic-based distro. It’s immutable, adding guardrails to make it difficult to break anything, but in the process, making it much more difficult to apply low-level changes like kernel patches.

If you’re not familiar with Linux and don’t care to become familiar, Bazzite is your best bet. It’s convenient, and it includes a ton of small community fixes right in the startup menu, such as the LSFG-VK project for Lossless Scaling. It became clear, however, that you’re trading performance for convenience with Bazzite. CachyOS is more hands-on, but it’s much easier to actually accomplish what you need to with the BC-250.

Most notably, CachyOS (and other rolling release distros) allow you to easily manage your kernel. There are alternative methods for critical setup items like the GPU governor and CU unlock that don’t require a kernel patch. However, having the ability to easily patch your kernel helps when you run up against compatibility or performance issues, allowing you to try alternative installation methods or community fixes.

Further, CachyOS has access to yay, or Yet Another Yogurt, the simple command-line call to search and install packages from the Arch User Repository (AUR). It takes some time getting used to living in the command line as often as you do on any Arch-based distro. But even knowing just a few basic commands allows you to accomplish what you want much faster than fumbling around with flatpaks, at least in my experience.

Getting set back up was simple thanks to a community script that automates nearly all of the configuration and optimization for the BC-250. The BC250-Toolkit script brings together all of the various community patches, including optional optimizations, and it just worked. Coming off of Bazzite, it was a treat not to run up against the immutable walls of the distro. I was able to accomplish in a few hours what took me more than a day with Bazzite.

CachyOS specifically has a few optimizations for gaming, as well. First, there’s the BORE, or Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer, scheduler that, as the name implies, is optimized for bursty workloads (Michael Larabel over at Phoronix has a great writeup on that). CachyOS also includes packages for x86-64 v3 and v4, the former of which is relevant to the BC-250.

These optimizations represent a substantial performance improvement. In Forza Horizon 6, for example, I went from 61 FPS at 4K with the Low preset to 72 FPS on CachyOS after it was configured properly (with 40 CUs in both cases). In Cyberpunk 2077, I went from 74.7 FPS on Bazzite to 82.2 FPS at 1080p with the Steam Deck preset, and perhaps more impressively, from 47.8 FPS to 56.5 FPS at 1440p.

I saw higher peak performance on Bazzite in Unigine Superposition, though that’s likely due to more thermal headroom for the GPU, as I wasn’t able to enable the extra CPU cores on Bazzite. I mainly wanted to show this chart to bring the “optimized” Bazzite image into the fold, which was supposedly an image that was already configured for the BC-250. Using a script to automate the installation of several tools (like the one available for CachyOS) is one thing. Using an entirely custom image is another. I’d suggest starting with a clean, official image regardless of the distro you choose.

Testing performance on the BC-250

The best touchstone for comparisons with the BC-250 is the Steam Machine. The Steam Machine is more powerful simply based on the spec sheet. I ran a truncated list of benchmarks to see how the BC-250 stacks up, as well as several additional benchmarks on the BC-250 alone. Performance here is tough to compare fairly. Even just with CachyOS and Bazzite above, we see large performance differences. And, as will become clear in this section, there were numerous tests that either showed performance issues inconsistently or simply failed to run at all.

Our best point of comparison between the Steam Machine and BC-250 comes in Cyberpunk 2077. Neither machine is capable of achieving a playable frame rate at 4K, but the fully-optimized BC-250 is just 6.7% behind at 1440p. At 1080p, however, the performance drop is 16.1%, exposing perhaps the biggest performance issue with the BC-250.

Forza Horizon 6 also highlights this issue; the CPU in the BC-250 is very weak. It’s not only weak because it’s using the aging Zen 2 architecture, but it also has only six cores (or eight, if you can enable them). It’s such a hurdle because the clock speed is severely limited to just 3.5 GHz, the same as the PS5. We are completely CPU-bound at 1080p and even 1440p in Forza Horizon 6, and then miraculously, at 4K, the larger GPU of the BC-250 is able to take over and actually beat the Steam Machine.

A system so hamstrung by the CPU makes sense in the context of a console. Sony has a performance target, and it makes sense to opt for a weaker CPU and a more powerful GPU. The CPU can reach that performance target. But in the context of a PC where you’re given more options, resolutions, and performance-enhancing features, the limitation of the CPU becomes clear. There’s an obvious performance wall you’ll run into with the BC-250 that no amount of tweaking can solve.

For a clear view of the CPU limitation here, look at the Forza Horizon 6 benchmark above. Running at 1080p with Low graphics is going to induce a CPU bottleneck in most systems, but the gap between GPU render performance and CPU render performance here is massive. According to the game’s benchmark, we were bottlenecked by the CPU entirely throughout the run.

Even at 4K, you can see that the CPU is still a significant influence on performance in this game, showcasing just how unbalanced this system is. Again, that imbalance makes sense for the PS5, but it’s a critical caveat with the BC-250.

In the gallery above, you can browse our other comparative results to get an idea where the BC-250 lands. I’m going to move past comparisons and look at the BC-250 in isolation. An apples-to-apples comparison really isn’t possible (nor fair) with the BC-250. That’s not only due to the wide performance window depending on your specific board and software stack, but also the clear performance limitations of the BC-250 that require certain workloads that wouldn’t make sense with other machines.

Chief among those limitations is VRAM, and memory in general. You have just 16 GB of GDDR6 for the whole system, which is much less of an issue on the PS5 where there’s careful memory management. As you can see in the chart above, I don’t have 4K results for Spider-Man 2 or Doom: The Dark Ages, and that’s due to a lack of VRAM.

In both cases, the games crashed at 4K, but worse, they wouldn’t start back up. I made the mistake of flipping to 4K before turning FSR on, which locked me out of starting the game until I manually edited the settings file prior to launch. 4K is possible on the BC-250, though it has a very narrow performance window considering the VRAM limitations and CPU performance.

Although FSR Performance mode is ideal for 4K (50% scaling, 1080p input resolution), I opted for Balanced to avoid the CPU bottleneck we can see present in other games (you can even see it here in some games, such as Spider-Man 2). However, turning up the input resolution also puts a greater strain on VRAM. You’ll need time and patience to experiment with these more demanding titles to find the ideal balance of settings on the BC-250; of course, if you’re just playing Silksong, none of this matters much.

The VRAM limitation is also relevant for frame generation. With such a narrow memory footprint, you’ll struggle to use frame generation at 4K if you’re already pushing the VRAM to its limits (those buffered frames need to live somewhere). Thankfully, Lossless Scaling is an option on Linux with LSFG-VK, which doesn’t strain your VRAM like in-engine tools.

An important aspect of performance with the BC-250 is cooling. Most governor profiles cap temperature at 80 degrees for multiple reasons. First, the heatsink of the BC-250 is closed on top. You can sit and rip apart the top of the heatsink for direct airflow with a pair of tweezers, but I left the heatsink on my board intact for now, using two Arctic P12 fans to assist with cooling.

Cooling is all the more important with the 40CU unlock and enabling the extra two Zen 2 cores. Stress-testing in Furmark over a 20-minute run, you can see how quickly the GPU throttles from 1,850 MHz back down to 1,500 MHz as it reaches the temperature cap of 80 degrees.

Remember, however, that Furmark is a stress test. I wasn’t thermal throttling in games, with the CPU and GPU settling around 70 degrees in Doom: The Dark Ages. I’ve included CPU and GPU power in the chart above, as well, and you can see that, combined, they rarely poked over 100W. Keep in mind that we’re exclusively looking at GPU and CPU power here, not whole system power. Whole system power can peak above 225W.

The stock heatsink and dual Arctic P12S do a good job keeping the BC-250 chugging along, even with all of the silicon unlocked and a moderate overclock on the GPU. However, Furmark makes it clear that this current iteration of the system can’t sustain its performance over long periods of time. It would take longer for that drop to show up in the most demanding games, unlike in Furmark, where we can see the drop in just 20 minutes. But I plan on revisiting the cooling solution in this BC-250 build. Maybe I can even raise the temperature limit closer to the 100-degree TJmax.

The bad and the ugly of BC-250 gaming

Although the BC-250 offers compelling performance for the price, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the numerous quirks I ran into while testing. There are performance issues and limitations with the board that you can explain with hardware, and further compatibility issues that you can explain away with Linux. Then, there’s everything else: the weird bugs, quirks, and oddities that pop up when running a largely community-developed software stack on unofficial hardware that wasn’t built for this purpose.

The above image of Resident Evil 9 is a microcosm of what I’m talking about. The RE Engine is remarkably scalable, and that was on full display with my BC-250 testing. Requiem offered excellent performance, even all the way up to 4K. It didn’t feel like I was compromising much of anything with the BC-250. But then I turned on the “hair strands” setting, and the result is what you can see above.

No, it’s not due to the CU unlock, any overclock, or even the overlay you can see. It’s just something with this set of hardware, this software stack, and the hair strands setting in Resident Evil Requiem.

Similarly, in Doom: The Dark Ages, any resolution change I would apply necessitated a restart of the game. Otherwise, I’d get the ghostly streaking you can see in the image above. On one of these reboots, the game suddenly stopped rendering reflective surfaces, resulting in the strange black voids you can see below.

This isn’t a criticism of the BC-250, and certainly not of the remarkable work of the passionate developers and enthusiasts who’ve created fixes and workarounds for the hardware. The fact that this board boots at all and runs games is a minor miracle. The context of what the board is, however, is important.

You will, inevitably, run into strange issues that aren’t documented anywhere. These are two examples, but I also ran into strange problems elsewhere. The widely used MangoHUD overlay, for example, didn’t pull in my GPU’s clock speed correctly after an update, even after ensuring I applied the community fix through the GPU governor to map the reporting correctly. And once you add external devices, compatibility gets even more complex. The board doesn’t have Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, for example, and an external adapter should work (this UGreen Wi-Fi 6 adapter I purchased does), but it’s just as likely that a driver for another adapter doesn’t work or isn’t available.

I don’t have an issue with these quirks, but the BC-250 also isn’t my primary gaming machine. You should just be aware of them. And, if you’re going to invest in a BC-250 build of your own, be ready to encounter some strange issues that you might not be able to easily troubleshoot.

What’s next?

The BC-250 is a project, and like any good project, it isn’t done here. Now that I’ve messed around with the configuration, tried out different distros, got the critical mods working, and measured performance, I want to actually use the BC-250 long-term. Maybe I can find some additional optimization steps I can take, or workarounds for some of the strange issues that I noticed during testing. Regardless of what it is, I’m confident that I’ll mess around with the BC-250 more outside of just playing games on it.

My clear next step is to work on cooling. I kept things conservative here in order to get valid data in a timely manner, but I want to dig deeper into what I can do on the thermal front, not only to raise the temperature limit, but also to push the GPU overclock further. That may involve some CU tinkering, as well; if I can get similar performance at 36 CUs and better thermal headroom, I may be able to push higher overall performance.

DeepCool has been delivering innovative, interesting, and often budget-conscious PC cases and cooling products for more than a decade. Its current lineup includes air and AIO coolers, computer cases, keyboards, power supplies, and other accessories.

We were impressed by the company’s AK620 and Assassin VC Elite air coolers in the past. In 2024, the Beijing-based company was banned from selling products in the U.S., but has continued to produce and improve its cooling products for markets elsewhere. US consumers also have the option of importing the cooler, if you don’t mind paying for extra shipping costs.

Here, we’re looking at DeepCool’s second-generation AK series coolers, the AK400 G2 and AK620 G2. These are available in two styles: one with woodgrain top covers, the other featuring a digital display.

Let's take a look at the specifications and features of the coolers, then we’ll go over thermal and noise benchmarks and decide if DeepCool’s AK G2 series coolers deserve to make our list of the best CPU coolers.

DeepCool AK620 G2/AK400 G2 specifications

Features of DeepCool’s AK G2 Air coolers

▶️ Heatpipes and heatsink

With the single-tower AK400 G2, four slightly staggered direct-touch copper heatpipes are embedded in the base to transfer heat from the CPU into the heatsink and its fins.

The larger, dual-tower AK620 G2 features six evenly spaced copper heatpipes.

The heatsink fin designs are similar in both models. The front ends feature a jigsaw-type design, shown below.

The exhaust side features the checkerboard matrix style DeepCool’s air coolers are known for, a design choice which the company says improves static pressure.

▶️ High-performance 120 mm fans

There’s more to a cooler than just the heatsink. The included fans directly impact noise levels and cooling performance. The fans included on both AK400 and AK620 G2 models are essentially the same – but the AK400’s single fan runs up to 10% faster than the two fans included with the AK620 G2.

▶️ Woodgrain and digital display styles available

Both the AK400 and AK620 are available in black or white, but there are two sub-choices for the aesthetic. The versions we’ve tested for this review feature woodgrain, a motif that’s been increasing in popularity in DIY PCs since the release of Fractal’s North computer case.

If you don’t like woodgrain, DeepCool also includes a checkerboard black cover that you can use in place of the woodgrain covers.

There’s also the Nyx version of the AK620 G2 available, which features a digital display showing CPU performance metrics – temperature, frequency, power consumption, and overall CPU usage.

▶️ RAM Clearance

The AK400 G2's design is such that it doesn’t overhang or interfere with the DIMM slots, ensuring that all sizes of RAM, no matter how tall, are compatible.

Standard-height DDR5 sticks 40mm tall fit well under the larger AK620 G2, but taller sticks won’t fit perfectly underneath. Our current CPU cooler test bench incorporates TeamGroup’s Sakura Rose T-Force Xtreem DDR5-7200 sticks, which are 48.8mm (1.92 inches) tall.

If you also use taller RAM DIMMs, you’ll have to raise the intake fan’s placement by a few millimeters for things to fit properly, as we did (see image, above). This might result in slightly lower cooling performance in certain scenarios. But even so, the AK620 G2 performed excellently, as you’ll see in the benchmarks section.

▶️ Packaging

The outer packaging is typical of DeepCool products: a basic brown box with a blue line and DeepCool’s logo, covered by a wraparound showing a picture of the cooler.

The heatsink and fans are protected by molded foam, and the accessories are contained in a small cardboard box. Included with the package are:

• Mounting hardware for AMD and Intel platforms
• Alternative top covers
• Screwdriver (AK620 G2 only)
• The AK620 G2 includes a tube of thermal paste; the AK400 G2 includes pre-installed thermal paste
• Single-tower (AK400 G2) or dual-tower (AK620 G2) heatsink
• 120 mm fans and fan clips
• Installation manual

▶️ AK620 G2 AM5 Installation

You’ll need to first remove the default AM4/5 retention mechanism and then place the mounting studs around the exposed screw holes.

The next step is to place the mounting bars on top of the studs, securing them with the included screws, and then apply the included thermal paste. 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. Afterwards, place the heatsink tower against the CPU and mounting bars, and use a screwdriver to secure it.

Once the heatsink is secured, attach the 120 mm fans to the heatsinks. Lastly, connect the PWM cables of the fans to the corresponding headers of your motherboard.

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 has one CCD that runs much hotter than the other, with a difference of over 10 degrees Celsius in some scenarios, shown below.

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 an open test bench, which has lesser airflow needs and lowered ambient temperatures. This results in weak coolers appearing stronger than they really are. Some have also used generic thermal plates to test cooling solutions. I feel that these methods don’t accurately reflect real-world cooler conditions.