Getting your hands on fast NVMe storage for your PC or laptop has become extremely challenging. That said, the Samsung 990 SSD is currently available at a discounted price of $189.99, against its original list price of $229.99 on Amazon. Although the $40 saving might not seem that impressive, deals on high-performance internal SSDs are becoming harder to come by amid the ongoing NAND and DRAM crisis. If you've been holding off on a storage upgrade, this could be a good opportunity to pick up a reliable, high-speed SSD.

• Check out this deal on Amazon

The Samsung 990 is a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD that uses Samsung's latest V9 QLC NAND flash memory and a DRAM-less controller. It was introduced earlier this year with MSRPs of $269.99 for the 1TB model and $529.99 for the 2TB model. The 1TB model offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,150 MB/s and 6,450 MB/s, making it an excellent option for everyday computing, gaming, and handling large files. Samsung rates the drive for up to 400TB of written data, although it offers just three years of warranty. It features a single-sided M.2 2280 design, which should make it compatible with a wide range of desktop motherboards, laptops, and even mini-PCs.

In our testing of the 2TB variant, we found that the Samsung 990 delivers reasonably good all-around performance, particularly for gaming and everyday applications. It offered similar performance to the Samsung 990 EVO Plus in some tests. However, it fell behind competing drives such as the Crucial P310 and WD Blue SN5100 in others, particularly during file transfers. One of its biggest advantages is its large write cache, which allows it to maintain speeds of nearly 6,100 MB/s for more than 57 seconds before performance drops once the cache is exhausted. Its power efficiency may not be the best, but overall it is a competent budget PCIe 4.0 SSD.

For anyone upgrading from an older SATA SSD or a traditional hard drive, the Samsung 990 should offer a noticeable improvement in boot times, application loading, and overall system responsiveness. At its current price of $189.99, it is also a suitable option for expanding game storage without spending a fortune.

Gears of War: E-Day delivers an impressive visual and technical showcase. The game brings together several advanced graphics technologies, including Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite and Lumen, MegaLights, and RTX Mega Geometry for more accurate ray-traced shadows and reflections, alongside a range of upscaling and frame generation technologies.

However, today we’re focusing on a less-discussed technology that plays an equally important role in bringing this visually rich, densely detailed world to systems with more limited hardware resources: storage technology designed to reduce RAM usage.

We’ll begin by examining its behavior on a high-end system with plenty of resources to spare, before moving to a more modest configuration that better represents the hardware available to the average PC gamer. This will allow us to see how much of a difference the technology makes, particularly on lower-end systems.

The Storage Tech Explained

The Storage Tech Explained

In an interview with Digital Foundry, The Coalition explained how they leveraged the Xbox Series S’s fast SSD to bring the dense world of Gears of War: E-Day to a memory-limited system. By effectively using the NVMe SSD as an extension of system memory, they can dynamically load and offload complex city data in real time. This approach allows the game to stream the necessary assets for each scene just in time, overcoming the console’s limited RAM.

Digital Foundry notes that the true “special sauce” lies in The Coalition’s smart data management. The team employs advanced heuristics to determine which assets are fetched from the SSD and when, carefully balancing performance. Overusing this technique could harm frame rates, so the system is tuned to swap data only when it benefits the experience.

Gears of War: E-Day also supports DirectStorage, although based on our previous testing, this alone does not always result in high SSD activity or read rates.

Is this storage tech also used on PC?

Is this storage tech also used on PC?

YouTuber Mostly Positive Reviews shared his findings in a recent post on X, where he found higher-than-usual SSD activity in Task Manager when playing the game.

Based on his findings, we decided to investigate further.

Test System

Desktop:

• MSI GeForce RTX 5090 VANGUARD SOC Launch Edition
• Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• 64GB (2x32GB) G.SKILL Flare X5 DDR5 @6200 MHz CL30
• Crucial T700 Gen5 SSD
• Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G SSD Gen4
• ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro SSD Gen3
• Samsung 870 EVO SATA III SSD
• ASUS ROG STRIX B850-F Gaming WiFi
• Corsair Nautilus 360 RS AIO Cooler
• HAGS enabled
• Windows 11 26H2 (Build 26300.9711)
• NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 617.42

Laptop:

• RTX 4060 Laptop GPU
• Intel Core i7-13620H
• 16GB DDR5
• PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD
• Samsung 870 EVO SATA III SSD
• HAGS enabled
• Windows 11 26H2 (Build 26300.9711)
• Nvidia GeForce Game Ready Driver 617.42

SSD Activity and Read Rate

SSD Activity and Read Rate

Task Manager does not use a low enough polling period to measure SSD activity accurately, so we used HWInfo with the polling period set to 20 milliseconds. We tested SSD activity across all of the game’s graphics presets at 4K using DLSS Quality.

In our previous tests of games that relied heavily on the SSD, none came close to sustaining 1 GB/s of average bandwidth. The highest we recorded was 366 MB/s in Forspoken at 4K with maximum settings, while many titles stayed well under 100 MB/s. Some games did show higher peak bandwidths, but these spikes lasted only a few milliseconds. For our purposes, it’s the sustained throughput – reflected in the average bandwidth – that truly matters.

In Gears of War: E-Day at higher settings, we essentially have a steady stream of a little over 1 GB/s at all times, indicating that the disk is indeed being utilized as an extension of system memory. As you can see, peaks hit up to 3.7 GB/s of throughput.

System Memory Usage

System Memory Usage

We measured RAM usage on our high-end system to see how much the game will use across each generation of SSD tested.

The game uses a significant amount of system memory, but having the game installed on an NVMe SSD – regardless of generation – saves about 2GB of RAM. The storage technology seems to be working as expected.

Visual Impact

Visual Impact

Since the game’s average read bandwidth far exceeds the limits of a SATA SSD, we expect that installing the game on one would lead to visual issues – and that is exactly what we observe.

In the first comparison, textures are slow to load, which noticeably reduces image quality. In the second comparison, lighting and shadows take some time to appear. While everything eventually loads correctly, running the game on a SATA SSD does hurt immersion.

Performance Comparison Across Four Generations of SSDs

Performance Comparison Across Four Generations of SSDs

We tested the game across four generations of SSDs to evaluate any impact on performance. Using a high-end system with ample memory, we aim to determine the behavior of the storage technology on a system that is not resource-constrained. We will then compare the performance of our laptop’s internal PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD with that of a SATA SSD.

On a system with sufficient memory, installing the game on a SATA SSD has no measurable performance impact. The only drawback is the aforementioned visual degradation.

Now, we focused on our lower-end system with only 16GB of DDR5.

Now we start to see the benefit of installing the game on an NVMe SSD, especially on higher settings.

Although the average frame rate remains virtually identical on both the NVMe and SATA SSDs, increasing the graphics preset impacts the 1% lows. The NVMe SSD delivers smoother frametimes, resulting in a more responsive and fluid gaming experience.

Final Thoughts

Final Thoughts

While the concept isn’t entirely new – Windows already uses virtual memory to page data to disk when physical memory is exhausted – The Coalition has fine-tuned this technology specifically for their game. Their approach ensures that the data being paged out won’t noticeably slow down gameplay as it’s read from disk. In our testing, this technology successfully reduces RAM usage when the game is installed on an NVMe SSD.

Placing the game on an NVMe SSD also enables near-instant asset loading. For systems with 16GB of RAM or less, an NVMe SSD can deliver higher 1% lows, resulting in smoother performance. With RAM prices climbing and many players using machines with 16GB – or even 8GB – of memory, it’s reasonable to wonder if other developers will adopt similar techniques. For titles striving to create visually dense, richly detailed worlds, leveraging fast storage could be a practical way to preserve their vision on lower-end systems.

Nvidia's board of directors has approached Arm chief executive Rene Haas as a potential successor to Jensen Huang, according to a report from the Financial Times that cites people familiar with the matter. Haas is among several candidates under consideration, although it remains unclear whether he will get a formal offer and/or agree to take the position.

The search for Nvidia's next chief executive comes as the company undergoes a leadership transition following Jensen Huang's swift departure from the CEO position earlier this week. For now, Nvidia's chief financial officer Colette Kress serves as interim CEO. The company's board is currently searching for a permanent replacement and is reportedly evaluating both internal and external candidates. Neither Arm nor Nvidia commented on the matter to FT.

Rene Haas is no stranger to Nvidia, as he spent approximately seven years at the company before leaving in 2013. During his tenure as vice president at Nvidia, he was responsible for multiple projects, including notebook GPUs, Windows-on-Arm, and Tegra system-on-chips. Given that he held senior management positions, he certainly gained experience with Nvidia's operations, corporate culture, and relationships with customers and partners.

Furthermore, Haas has experience with the development of consumer and data center CPUs as well as GPUs and GPU IP, a combination that is hard to find in the industry. Haas reportedly maintains close ties with Jensen Huang and several members of Nvidia's board, which could make him a particularly attractive candidate for a company whose strategy and management structure have orbited around its founder for more than three decades.

While at Arm, Haas has demonstrated a willingness to make substantial strategic changes at the company. Since Haas took the reins in 2022, Arm has introduced its Compute Subsystems (CSS) initiative, providing customers with complete and validated processor platform design, making it easier for newcomers to enter the market. Arm also introduced its first own-brand AGI CPU, putting the company in direct competition with some of its traditional customers. Both initiatives represent significant departures from Arm's traditional business model; however, they demonstrate Haas' readiness to pursue new revenue opportunities despite risks and the possibility of damaging relationships with long-term partners.

Another advantage is Haas' extensive experience with the semiconductor industry in general. Arm's CPU and GPU technologies are used in system-on-chips developed by hundreds of companies that have very distinctive requirements, including Nvidia itself, Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek, just to name a few.

In addition, Haas led Arm through its initial public offering in 2023 and therefore has experience with investors and regulators. Also, Haas happens to be the CEO of SoftBank, the parent of Arm.

Nevertheless, Haas' potential appointment would not be without challenges, primarily because he has never managed a company the scale of Nvidia. Arm has around 10,000 employees worldwide; it develops and licenses various semiconductor IP, primarily CPU and GPU technologies, to a wide range of customers with distinct needs. By contrast, Nvidia designs CPUs, GPUs, networking equipment, complete AI systems, and software platforms and has a headcount of about 42,000. As a result, if Haas becomes the boss of Nvidia, he will have to manage a considerably bigger organization with a dramatically more complicated product portfolio and supply chain. Furthermore, replacing Huang, who has led Nvidia since its establishment in 1993 and personally shaped its technology strategy and business tactics, would be a formidable task for virtually any executive.

Ironically, Haas' appointment (if it happens) would create an unusual situation in which Nvidia will be led by the chief executive of a company it attempted to acquire in 2020 and abandoned the transaction in 2022 amid regulatory opposition.

A new Intel Arrow Lake SKU is listed for sale in multiple prebuilt PCs on Newegg, despite no official acknowledgement of the model from Intel. The Core Ultra 7 260K is a downclocked version of the Core Ultra 7 265K from Intel's main Arrow Lake stack, not the Arrow Lake Refresh stack that's infiltrated our list of the best CPUs for gaming. Outside of a few areas on Newegg's website, you'll find no mention of the CPU elsewhere online (including Intel's official Core Ultra Series 2 specs page).

Although retailer-exclusive and late-generation variants are common from AMD and Intel — we recently reviewed the Ryzen 5 5500F, for instance — they almost never fly completely under the radar, as is the case with the Core Ultra 7 260K. The chip itself is identical to the Core Ultra 7 265K based on the specs we know, fitted with 20 cores, eight of which are P-cores. The 260K tops out at 5.4 GHz, however, while the 265K reaches 5.5 GHz.

Otherwise, the specs are all the same. It comes with the same 125W TDP, same 30 MB of L3 cache, and same support for up to 256 GB of memory running at DDR5-6400. We only know of these specs from an image shown on the two ABS prebuilt listings available with the 260K. It's available in the ABS Kaze II paired with an RTX 5060, as well as the Flux II Aqua with an RTX 5070.

The image is below, captured hastily, as you can see, from a Microsoft Teams call. Again, we weren't able to find any information from Intel about the chip outside of this slide.

One critical detail this slide confirms is that the Core Ultra 7 260K belongs to the Arrow Lake family, not the range of Arrow Lake Refresh processors like the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus. It tops out at DDR5-6400, while Arrow Lake Refresh climbs up to DDR5-7200. That means the chip doesn't have access to the hardware-level enhancements available in Arrow Lake Refresh, nor the software-based Intel Binary Optimization Tool that boosts performance in select games.

Although that's enough to categorize the 260K, there are some details that are unclear. In the two PCs it's available in, the chip is referred to as the 260K across the full product page except in Newegg's option selector (pictured below), where it's referred to as the U7-260KF. Intel's KF models are unlocked for overclocking but lack integrated graphics.

Additionally, the slide from Intel referenced above shows the chip boosting up to 5.4 GHz, but the product page lists the chip at 5.2 GHz for maximum boost clock.

Newegg has told us that the chip is exclusive to the retailer and will only be sold through its in-house ABS prebuilts. ABS machines are normally sold with components Newegg already sells piecemeal, offering a convenient way to get a full rig with parts you can identify. The ABS Flux II Aqua, which is available with the chip, is on sale at Newegg now for $300 off.

We've reached out to Intel to get more details about the Core Ultra 7 260K, and we'll update this story when we hear back (see update log above). Although the specs suggest the 260K should perform almost identically to the 265K, we haven't had a chance to test the CPU ourselves. And, as you can see from the rankings in our CPU benchmark hierarchy, we recommend most Intel shoppers move toward an Arrow Lake Refresh SKU.

Newegg has refreshed its bundle deals and have recently come out with a couple of solid deals that help take some of the sting out of building a PC in these trying times. The latest combo pairs one of the fastest gaming CPUs in the Ryzen 5 9800X3D, 32GB of Corsair DDR5-6000 RAM, and a premium motherboard with MSI’s X870E Carbon Wifi for only $1,250.98, saving $119 compared to buying the parts individually. In fact, buying this RAM kit alone would cost $509.99, so if you apply the discount to the RAM, it’s just $390 and cheaper than any comparable standalone kit, which looks to be around $460 at the time of this writing. Newegg also throws in a free Rosewill 360mm AIO ($90 value) to sweeten the pot.

• Check out all the RAM Combo deals at Newegg

The RAM portion of the bundle, Corsair’s Vengeance RGB 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 RAM kit, is currently available on Newegg for an eye-watering $509.99 when bought separately. The good news is that the discount brings this RAM down to something reasonable for the times. This black kit matches the MSI X870E Carbon board in the combo and features a frosted RGB light bar that runs the length of the sticks. If RGB lighting isn’t your thing and you prefer a stealthy, unassuming look, you can turn it off. The DDR5-6000 speed lands in the sweet spot for the AM5 platform and is a worthwhile, good-looking option. The SK Hynix ICs under the heatsink pair nicely with the MSI board and offer plenty of overclocking headroom.

Next is one of the most popular and fastest current-generation gaming CPUs: the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. This 8-core/16-thread Zen5-based processor has a 4.6 GHz base clock and a 5.2 GHz max boost, plenty fast for any task. The X3D variant's 96MB of L3 cache helps with gaming (among other things), making it one of the fastest gaming CPUs available. It is also a well-rounded performer that excels in games and suits most applications.

Last but certainly not least is the premium MSI X870E Carbon Wifi motherboard (one we reviewed in the past. We loved the robust power delivery (perfect for the 9800X3D or greater), the dual Ethernet ports, EZ features, storage options (4x SATA, 4x M.2 sockets - one PCie 5.0) and ample connectivity on the rear I/O, including four USB Type-C ports (2x 40 Gbps). The all-black motherboard sports a cool RGB design element of the MSI dragon on the VRM heatsink to break up the monotony and lend some bling to the inside of your chassis. It’s a great motherboard to build your AM5 rig around.

In the end, we like this combo as this, and others like it, help take some of the pain out of buying a PC today. Priced at $1,250.98 with a savings of $118.99 and a free 360mm Rosewill Frostmax Digital ARGB AIO ($90 value), it’s one of the better bundles available on Newegg right now. Get it while supplies last.

Corsair needs very little introduction to anyone who has built a PC over the past two decades. Founded in California in 1994 as a manufacturer of memory modules, the company has since grown into one of the largest brands in the PC component and peripheral market, with a catalog that covers cases, cooling, keyboards, mice, streaming gear, and of course, power supplies. Corsair entered the PSU market in the second half of the 2000s and built its reputation there by choosing its OEM partners carefully rather than manufacturing in-house. Channel Well Technology (CWT) has been one of the most important of these partners, producing a large portion of the RMx and HXi units over the years. The HXi series in particular has long been Corsair's high-end, digitally monitored family, positioned just below the flagship AX models.

We take a closer look at the HX1000i Shift Crystal to see if it deserves a spot in our best power supplies list. The HX1000i Shift Crystal is a bit of an odd bird, and Corsair is clearly fine with that. First shown at Computex 2026 and launching on November 12th, it combines the side-mounted connector layout of the SHIFT models with the digital HXi platform, and then wraps everything in a chassis with clear polycarbonate panels on three sides, turning the internals of the PSU into a part of the build's aesthetics. Beneath the show, the platform is built by CWT. It holds a Cybenetics Platinum certification at both 115 VAC and 230 VAC, and it is fully compliant with the ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 design guides. It also integrates an iCUE LINK System Hub and Corsair's PinProtect+ per-pin current monitoring for the native 12V-2x6 connector. The 1000W model that we are reviewing today is rated to deliver its full power output continuously at ambient temperatures up to 50°C and comes with a ten-year warranty.

Specifications and Design

In the Box

The HX1000i Shift Crystal ships in a very large and sturdy black cardboard box, with a large render of the unit on the front that does a good job of showing off the transparent panels and the lit fan. The model name is printed in big yellow and white letters across the bottom half, while the badges in the top right corner - ATX 3.1 with PCIe 5.1 and 12V-2x6 support, the Cybenetics certifications, and the iCUE LINK logo- tell you most of what you need to know before even opening the package.

The bundle is rather spartan for a product of this class. Inside the box, we found the AC power cord, four mounting screws, a handful of black cable ties, and a leaflet with safety and compliance information. There are no Velcro straps, no cable combs beyond those already on the cables, and no other accessories of any kind. It is not a deal breaker by any means, but a premium unit like this that is focused on aesthetics could have been a little more generous in this department.

All of the cables are fully modular and black, with individually sleeved wires and low-profile cable combs. There is a 24-pin ATX cable, two 4+4-pin EPS cables, three PCIe cables carrying four 6+2-pin connectors in total, and a native 12V-2x6 cable rated for 600W, alongside two SATA and two Molex cables with four connectors each. Eight Molex connectors on a modern 1000W unit is extremely generous, frankly more than any reasonable build will ever need. Corsair also supplies two iCUE LINK cables of different lengths and a USB cable that connects the PSU's monitoring interface to the motherboard.

External Appearance

With dimensions of 150 x 86 x 200 mm, the HX1000i Shift Crystal is a long ATX unit, which is a non-issue if you are getting the matching Corsair 4500X case anyway. In any other case, you will need to check your case's specifications before buying one. The side-mounted SHIFT connectors also require some free space next to the PSU, as the cables plug into the side of the unit instead of its face, which is great for cases with a hidden PSU compartment but not suitable for every chassis. The design is unlike anything else on the market. The steel frame is black, with Y-shaped cutouts forming the fan grille and a debossed pattern of the same shape on the opposite panel, while three of the sides are clear polycarbonate panels that reveal the white fan frame, the bulk capacitors, the coils, and the white PCBs. With the RGB fan lit, the unit very much looks like a piece of display hardware rather than a power supply.

The rear of the unit is a little more conventional, with the AC receptacle, a rocker on/off switch marked with the "HX1000i SHIFT" logo, and a large perforated area with the same Y-shaped cutouts for the exhaust. The modular connector bay is on the side, behind the clear panel. The face opposite the AC receptacle hosts the white control PCB, also visible through its clear panel, with two iCUE LINK ports, a USB Type-C port, and a small port marked "TACH". The hexagonal specifications sticker is on the solid steel top side of the unit and is an envelope-type that can be closed to hide the text.

The CRYSTAL is fully compatible with Corsair's iCUE software, which can be used to monitor the PSU, adjust its fan speed, and switch the 12V overcurrent protection between single- and multi-rail modes. Corsair also integrated an iCUE LINK System Hub that, according to the company, supports up to 24 iCUE LINK devices without the need for a separate hub. The most interesting addition, however, is PinProtect+, Corsair's per-pin current monitoring for the 12V-2x6 connector. If the current on a pin exceeds a user-customizable threshold, the PSU cuts power to the connector, and the RGB fan lighting turns red to signal the fault. Given the history of melting connectors, this is a genuinely useful feature rather than marketing fluff. We can confirm that it is working as intended, as we tried pulling 20A from a single wire of the 12V-2x6 connector and the PSU shut down instantly.

Internal Design

Cooling is handled by a 140 mm Corsair NR140HL-RGB fan. Corsair calls it a magnetic dome bearing design, and in practice it is a rifle-bearing fan with a half-domed shaft magnet, rated at 0.55A on 12V. The fan is white with addressable lighting, which also doubles as the visual alarm for PinProtect+. It is a decent fan, and the magnetic shaft should help with longevity, but it is worth mentioning that the regular HX1000i SHIFT uses a fluid dynamic bearing fan, which we would normally consider the better choice for a premium unit.

The OEM behind the HX1000i Shift Crystal is Channel Well Technology (CWT), Corsair's long-time partner for its HXi units. Almost every part inside the unit has been relabeled as "Corsair", including the capacitors and the magnetic components, so the OEM is not obvious at a glance, but the Cybenetics report confirms it. The layout is extremely clean and obviously optimized for aesthetics, which also explains the excessive length of the chassis. The bridge rectifiers have their own heatsink, the APFC components sit on another large heatsink, and the primary switchers have their own heatsink as well, while the secondary side components are on a vertical PCB right after the main transformer. All heatsinks are of good size and quality.

The transient filtering stage has four Y capacitors, three X capacitors, and two filtering inductors. Two bridge rectifiers sharing a large heatsink feed the APFC stage, which relies on two Infineon 60R099P6 MOSFETs and two fully encased filtering coils. The APFC stage also includes two bulk capacitors, one Corsair 560 μF / 420 V capacitor and one Corsair 470 μF / 420 V capacitor, for a combined capacity of 1030 μF. According to the Cybenetics report, these capacitors are supplied by Elite, a relatively reputable Taiwanese manufacturer, and they are rated for 105°C. They are not capacitors that we frequently encounter in anything above mid-tier, though, and we feel they are not a great match for a premium unit.

The primary inversion stage uses two more Infineon 60R099P6 MOSFETs in a half-bridge LLC resonant topology. On the secondary side, ten Infineon 014N04LS MOSFETs handle the synchronous rectification of the 12V rail, and the minor rails are derived from DC-to-DC converters. All of the capacitors on the secondary side are rebranded as Corsair, with black and white sleeves that match the color scheme of the unit, and are also made by Elite. These are mostly good parts, but it is a bit ironic that Corsair advertises 105°C Japanese electrolytic capacitors for the regular HX1000i SHIFT, while the version built to show its capacitors off uses Taiwanese ones.

Cold Test Results (25°C Ambient)

Cold Test Results (25°C Ambient)

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

At 25°C ambient, the HX1000i Shift Crystal is a very efficient power supply. It averaged 92.1% at 230 VAC and 90.5% at 115 VAC across the nominal load range, with the efficiency peaking at 93.6% (230 VAC) and 92.2% (115 VAC) at around 40% load. The curve is relatively flat after that, with the unit still achieving 91% at 230 VAC and 88.5% at 115 VAC while delivering its full 1000W. The efficiency at very low loads is good as well, at just over 88% with a 50W load on 230 VAC. These figures are in line with the unit's Cybenetics Platinum certification at both input voltages. There is no 80 PLUS certification for this unit.

The acoustics at room temperature are very good. The fan stays completely off up to 50% load, so a typical gaming system with a powerful graphics card will rarely ever wake it up. Once it starts, the unit registers 31.6 dB(A) at 500W, and the fan ramps up very gently, staying around 33 dB(A) at 700W and below 37 dB(A) at 900W. Only at full load does the noise climb to about 39 dB(A), which is still a low figure for a 1000W unit. Thermal performance gives no reason for concern at all, with the primary and secondary heatsinks reaching just 55°C and 58°C respectively at full load.

Hot Test Results (~45°C Ambient)

Hot Test Results (~45°C Ambient)

Inside our hotbox, at roughly 45°C ambient and still within the unit's 50°C rating, the HX1000i Shift Crystal hardly lost any efficiency at all. It averaged 91.7% at 230 VAC and 90.1% at 115 VAC, a drop of just 0.4 percentage points compared to the cold test. The peak efficiency dropped to 93.3% and 91.9%, respectively, and the full-load efficiency to 90.6% and 88.1%. That is a very strong result that shows how well the platform tolerates high ambient temperatures.

The fan is the part that changes its behavior the most in the heat. It starts spinning a bit earlier, at about 400W, registering 32.2 dB(A), and the noise climbs relatively fast to about 36 dB(A) at 600W and 39.5 dB(A) at 700W. Beyond 800W, the fan profile becomes much more aggressive, with the unit reaching 45.7 dB(A) at 900W and 46.8 dB(A) at its maximum output. That is definitely loud, though it takes very adverse conditions to get there. Internal temperatures rose considerably, with the primary heatsink reaching 84°C and the secondary heatsink 89°C at full load, figures that are high but comfortably within what the platform can handle.

PSU Quality and Bottom Line

Power Supply Quality

Voltage regulation is very good. Across the 20% to 100% load range, the 12V rail deviated by 1%, from 12.10V down to 11.98V; the 5V rail by 1% as well; and the 3.3V rail by just 0.7%. These are not the sub-0.5% figures of the very best digital platforms on the market, but all of the rails are well controlled, and the 12V rail stays very close to its nominal voltage across the whole load range. The ripple suppression is excellent. The 12V rail peaked at 48 mV under maximum load and 44 mV during the 12V cross-load test, while the 5V and 3.3V rails both topped out at 26 mV. Compared to the ATX design limits of 120 mV and 50 mV, that leaves a margin of 60% on the 12V rail and about 48% on the minor rails, which is very comfortable headroom for a 1000W unit.

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

All protection mechanisms were verified and triggered correctly during testing. With the unit hot, OCP tripped at 148% (37A) on the 3.3V rail, 144% (36A) on the 5V rail, and 132% (110A) on the 12V rail, with OPP shutting the unit down at 130% of its rated output, or 1300W. These thresholds are on the high side, especially for the minor rails, but they are not unusual for an ATX 3.1 unit.

Bottom Line

The HX1000i Shift Crystal is a power supply designed to be looked at, and that is not something we often get to say. Corsair took a CWT-built HXi platform, cleaned up its layout to the point that it can be shown off, and placed it behind three polycarbonate panels with an RGB fan on top. The result is unique, and it is backed by a genuinely modern feature set, with ATX 3.1 compliance, full iCUE support, an integrated iCUE LINK System Hub, and a native 12V-2x6 connector with PinProtect+ per-pin current monitoring. The latter is more than a bullet point on the box, as the unit shut down instantly when we pulled 20A from a single wire of the 12V-2x6 connector.

Most importantly, the looks did not come at the expense of performance. The efficiency is excellent, with averages of 92.1% at 230 VAC and 90.5% at 115 VAC, and it barely moved when we raised the ambient temperature to 45°C. Voltage regulation is tight on every rail, and the ripple suppression is excellent, leaving a large margin against the ATX limits. At room temperature, the fan does not even spin up before the load reaches 500W and it stays quiet all the way up to the maximum output.

The compromises are few, but some of them are hard to ignore on a unit like this. The capacitors are all made by Elite and rebranded as Corsair. Elite is a relatively reputable Taiwanese manufacturer, but its capacitors are not something we frequently encounter above the mid-tier, and they are not a great match for a premium unit when the regular HX1000i SHIFT advertises Japanese capacitors. The fan uses a rifle bearing with a magnetic shaft instead of a fluid dynamic bearing, and it becomes loud under heavy load in a hot environment. The bundle is also spartan for an aesthetics-focused premium product. Finally, the 200 mm long chassis and the side-mounted connectors mean that not every case will accommodate the unit, although most buyers are likely to pair it with Corsair's matching 4500X case anyway. On the bright side, the ten-year warranty covers the unit for a period that very few users will ever need, and it makes the component choices easier to accept.

At the time of this review, Corsair had not made the price of the HX1000i Shift Crystal public, which makes a definitive value judgment impossible. The regular HX1000i SHIFT is the obvious comparison, as it offers the same side connector layout, iCUE integration, and iCUE LINK hub for $339.99 at Corsair's own store, along with a fluid dynamic bearing fan and Japanese capacitors. Compared to other showy high-end units, such as the Asus ROG Thor 1000W Platinum II or the Lian Li Edge 1000, the CRYSTAL is the only one that actually puts its internals on display, and its Cybenetics Platinum efficiency and tight electrical performance mean that it does not need its looks to justify itself. If it arrives at a reasonable premium over the regular HX1000i SHIFT, it is an easy recommendation for anyone building a showcase system, and a well-performing 1000W unit for everyone else who simply likes how it looks, as long as they can live with its parts selection.

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Austrian cooling outfit Noctua is officially rolling its new NT-CP1 AM5/4 Carbice carbon nanotube thermal pad for AMD AM4 and AM5 processors into the retail market. After announcing its partnership with advanced nanotechnology company Carbice back in June 2026, the premium thermal pad can now be purchased for $24.95 in the US and €24.95 in the European region.

• Grab the Noctua NT-CP1 AM5/4 Carbice carbon nanotube thermal pad on Amazon

Conventional thermal pastes and most thermal pads gradually lose performance over time due to pump-out, delamination, cracking, and other forms of degradation. However, Noctua says that its new NT-CP1 thermal pad takes a different approach. It makes use of Carbice's vertically-aligned carbon nanotube technology, originally developed for high thermal reliability in aerospace systems. The carbon nanotubes gradually conform to microscopic imperfections of a CPU’s IHS over hundreds to thousands of thermal cycles.

This allows heat transfer performance to improve during the initial activation period rather than gradually deteriorating. The thermal pad can also maintain stable, maintenance-free performance for years once the initial activation phase is complete. Thus, making it a suitable option for users who want consistent thermal performance without having to periodically replace degraded thermal paste.

"Carbice pads offer a unique combination of ultimate performance stability and convenient installation. This makes the NT-CP1 the perfect choice for everyone who’s looking for a thermal pad that’s super easy to apply and never needs to be replaced," said Noctua CEO Roland Mossig in a press note.

Unlike conventional carbon or graphite-based thermal pads, which can be brittle, slippery, and electrically conductive, the NT-CP1 features an aluminum backbone sandwiched between layers of carbon nanotubes. The surface is also protected by a nanoscale polymer coating, which Noctua says makes the pad more robust, easier to handle, and less likely to move during installation. The company recommends a simple peel, press, and peel installation process, while the slightly tacky coating helps keep the pad in place and offers electrical insulation as long as the polymer layer remains intact.

With an ultra-thin 90µm profile and precut 33x33mm size, the thermal pad fits both AM5 and AM4 socket processors. Noctua also highlights its manufacturing process, noting that the pad is produced in the US using recycled aluminum and waste carbon gas to grow the carbon nanotubes. The company claims that its manufacturing process is more energy-efficient compared to conventional graphite and graphene-based pads, while the aluminum structure allows the product to be recycled through standard aluminum recycling channels.

Enterprising techies looking to build their own local AI cluster have far more interesting options than buying DGX Sparks or Apple Mac Studios. Used data center GPUs are everywhere, and a server rack's garbage is an enthusiast's treasure. This option has become even more popular with CMPunlocker, a soft-mod for Nvidia CMP-170HX cards that unlocks abilities well beyond stock. Now, a techie has taken it a step further, blasting through the remaining limitations with voltage glitching and creating a card faster than the actual $20,000 Nvidia A100 GPU with 80GB of VRAM... but from an $2,500 8GB CMP-170HX mining card.

The volt-mod was done by Kate (GitHub link here), who got her starting point from a paper that described how one could exploit GA100 cards' microcode. She turned her attention to the normally protected onboard fuse controller. Although it's rarely discussed, a "fuse box" has been integral in most any CPU and GPU for a while — though it's normally used once at the factory to break physical connections in chips to parts that have tested poorly, thus disabling them so they can be sold as a lower-end model.

If you're wondering how people are getting 80-40GB of VRAM out of 8-10GB, the explanation is simple: the GA100 silicon actually includes all the corresponding HBM2e VRAM dies within; but they get disabled at the factory like the shader modules. The smaller version is more desirable, as it's based on the variant of GA100 with 80GB of HBM2e within, while the 10GB cards spawn from the 40GB GA100.

The Nvidia cards in question have quite an elaborate eFuse controller (16,384 in a 512 x 32 array) — which can be read to obtain the card's current configuration. Most every part of the card has related fuses: VRAM sections, individual shader modules, PCIe 4.0 and NVLink, and even video codec hardware. However, as Kate succinctly put it: Nvidia's design is insecure, as popping fuses can grant access to more features, not fewer.

Under normal conditions, these fuses can't be popped, or "written to," by the user — but a geek armed with a soldering iron isn't a normal user. Kate had GPT-6 Astra design a simple circuit board based on an $8 STM32G4 microcontroller to tap into the power signals on the card's PCB.

The voltage regulators (VRMs) on the card "speak" PWMVID, an Nvidia standard, and Kate's board intercepted the PWM signals sent into the VRM controller, forcing it to produce voltage glitches on the line feeding the GPU, where the fuse controller lies.

Remember when we said the fuse controller was read-only? With the voltage glitches, many fuse-status reads in a tight loop, and she managed to set the controller to a state in which its security bit flags allowed writes through. From that point, it was "easy" to reconfigure her card. She was careful to force-disable any shader modules previously marked as defective, because these are physical fuses — there's no "undo" button.

She applied the mod to her cards and, after testing with multiple workloads, found that nine had the full 80 GB of VRAM working, and one card "only" had 64 GB usable. Most interestingly, unlocking all the shader modules (SM) nets her FP16 FMA performance 20% beyond a regular A100 card. She thinks this is due to the chips often having 120 or more usable SMs — over the 108 on the spec sheet. The GA100 die starts with 128 SMs to account for defects, which is normal in chip manufacturing.

The CMPUnlocker soft mod is required for enabling the "new" features on the drivers, but it doesn't unlock the card's full potential: the VRAM upper limit is 40-64GB (depending on the variant), many shader modules remain locked, and PCIe bandwidth only goes to 2.0. Additionally, there's no ECC, NVLink, or multi-instance GPU support, all of which are critical in a server setup and are also used for product segmentation.

Kate's volt-mod does away with all of these limits, and her best test card is happily working at PCIe 4.0 speed with the full feature set. She didn't test the video encoder bits, but it's unlikely anybody using these cards cares much for that.

As for the cost, a CMP-170HX 8GB is currently hovering around $3,000, and the 10GB variant costs around $2,500. A full-fat Nvidia A100 80GB in a PCIe configuration can reach $20,000 or more. The SXM server-module versions are cheaper, but they require infrastructure around them. Note that these prices will likely vary significantly, especially as people become increasingly aware of the mods.

Kate says she's publishing her research now because another person independently found the same issue. She has informed Nvidia of the vulnerability, though there's not much the company can do for existing cards already on the market.

Nvidia's Board of Directors is preparing to oust co-founder and chief executive Jensen Huang following revelations of two extramarital affairs, including one with a woman suspected of working for Chinese intelligence and another with an Nvidia executive, reports The Wall Street Journal. Although no final decision has been made yet, the company's directors could meet as early as November 11 to discuss Huang's future. Whoever succeeds Huang will be the company's second CEO in 33 years. Nvidia's stock dropped 8% in after-hours trading following the reports. Nvidia's board of directors launched an independent investigation into the matter on November 8.

The report from the WSJ comes hours after the New York Times revealed that Huang allegedly had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, who reports directly to him. According to five people who worked at Nvidia, the relationship was known internally, while Huang and Powell were reportedly seen together at a San Jose hotel during Nvidia's GTC conference in March. The allegations follow an earlier report that Huang had a relationship with Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence believes to be a Chinese intelligence asset.

A similar controversy cost Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich his position in June 2018, when an internal investigation confirmed that he had maintained a consensual relationship with an employee, which violated the company's non-fraternization policy applicable to all managers. It is noteworthy that Nvidia's code of conduct explicitly identifies personal relationships as potential conflicts of interest and instructs employees to consult the company's legal department when such conflicts arise. Whether Huang violated Nvidia's internal policies remains unclear, as the code of conduct does not explicitly prohibit all relationships between managers and subordinates.

Huang's potential departure would mark the first CEO transition in Nvidia's 33-year history, and therefore his succession has become an immediate concern for Nvidia, which does not have anyone of Huang's caliber in the leadership team. Although chief financial officer Colette Kress could potentially serve as interim chief executive if Huang is ousted while the BoD searches for a permanent replacement, it remains to be seen how Wall Street would react to this assignment.

Nvidia co-founder Chris Malachowsky, who used to be the company's senior vice president of engineering and operations and remains a member of the company's board and an Nvidia Fellow, could also play a role in the succession process, given his extensive knowledge of Nvidia's technology, corporate culture, and history. However, has not served in an executive role at Nvidia for at least a decade, so the chances that he will succeed Huang are low.

Back on Sunday, directors expressed confidence in Jensen Huang and his leadership team, a choice of words that did not exactly guarantee his continued tenure.

AMD missed out on deploying Turin-X CPUs in the previous generation, giving its 3D V-Cache tech a four-year hiatus from the data center following the launch of Genoa-X in 2023. In the second half of next year, 3D V-Cache is coming back for HPC with Venice-X, matching the 96 cores and 1,152 MB of L3 cache available on the EPYC 9684X (Genoa-X), but with vastly higher clock speeds, PCIe 6.0, and nearly four times the per-socket memory bandwidth.

After first bringing hybrid bonding to EPYC processors with Milan-X in 2022, AMD followed up a little over a year later with Genoa-X. Turin came and went without a chip sporting stacked SRAM, but now, it’s back with Venice-X. The critical change this time around doesn’t come from big jumps in core count — and consequently cache — as is the case with the standard SP7 lineup. Rather, it’s the 5.3 GHz boost clock speed, another pillar of Venice broadly, that’s particularly beneficial in the HPC workloads Venice-X targets.

As you can see from the top EPYC -X chips from previous generations, boost clocks were significantly lower for the X chips, and higher frequencies were available within the standard chips from each family. Milan scaled up to 4.1 GHz, while Genoa could climb to 4.4 GHz, just not on the EPYC -X chips. Venice-X brings up to the maximum 5.3 GHz boost clock available across the range, unifying a high frequency with a large pool of bonded L3 for HPC workloads.

There are still details missing about Venice-X, including the base frequency, how many SKUs are in the lineup and what their specs are, and the TDP (though the 400 to 600 W range available to other Venice CPUs is likely). The chips appear to use the SP7 socket, however, keeping with previous EPYC -X chips.

The platform comes with 96 PCIe 6.0 lanes, while the smaller SP8 platform targeting enterprises trades memory channels for PCIe lanes. Venice-X comes with the full 16-channel memory setup available on SP7, including support for MRDIMMs at 12,800 MT/s that can drive the quoted 1.6 TB/s of per-socket memory bandwidth.

The critical marriage with Venice-X for HPC workloads, according to AMD, is high frequency with a large pool of stacked cache. AMD currently maintains both 3D V-Cache and high-frequency EPYC chips in its HPC fleet to run its internal EDA workloads. AMD Fellow Phil Steinke says the company runs performance analysis on these workloads to characterize performance, optimize EPYC designs, and push partners to optimize their software.

The biggest consumer on the HPC fleet by far are function verification workloads at over half of AMD's used compute, according to Steinke. These are logic simulations that show up in tools like Cadence Xcelium, and Steinke says the EPYC team is running these workloads “24 x 7 x 365.”

An example of one such workload is above, measuring IPC with AMD's uProf monitoring utility. With 3D V-Cache, AMD says this workload completes 40% faster at around double the instructions per clock. AMD didn't clarify which chips it was comparing or what application it was using. However, the comparison is between an EPYC fleet with and without 3D V-Cache.

Steinke says AMD is able to now move toward a single chip with Venice-X, maintaining the cache advantages in workloads like functional verification while driving the EDA workloads more sensitive to frequency. "I mentioned we have a mix of high frequency and 3D V-Cache CPUs in our data center, and that's because through Milan and Genoa, the high frequency parts were always a little higher on the frequency side," Steinke said. "You don't have that dichotomy [with Venice-X]. You can get the best of both worlds in a single CPU, and this is what we're really excited to be picking up for our own use."

AMD hasn't shared any benchmarks for Venice-X yet, but it provided some more specific HPC benchmarks comparing its high-frequency EPYC 9686F to Intel's Xeon 6980P in several HPC workloads, such as computational fluid dynamics. In AMD's testing, the 9686F was 1.6x faster in these benchmarks while running 32 fewer cores.

We had a chance to test the EPYC 9686F along with the dense EPYC 9996, which you can read more about in our Zen 6 EPYC Venice deep dive and benchmarking article. And indeed, the EPYC 9686F looks very impressive in some of the HPC workloads we ran.

We were only able to test a 2P configuration, and as evidenced by the sole Xeon 6980P, CloverLeaf is sensitive to latency. Even then, the 2P EPYC 9686F completed the complex hydrodynamics simulation in about a third of the time as a single Xeon 6980P.

AMD says it's currently using MEXT, its AI-driven flash-as-DRAM technology, to bolster the amount of memory available for its EDA workloads. When it deploys Venice-X, Steinke says the company will continue using MEXT, which you can read more about in our recent MEXT breakdown on Tom's Hardware Premium.

Venice-X CPUs are launching in the second half of 2027, while SP7 and SP8 Venice CPUs are rolling out now. Also coming in the second half of next year is AMD's Verano, which it's pitching as an AI host node that leverages SOCAMM2 LPDDR5X memory.

ASRock has rolled out a new firmware update for its Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards. The latest VBIOS version 1.0.6 appears to be a follow-up to the previous 1.0.5 release. According to community reports, that older version was bricking some of the company's Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. The new update has now quietly made its way to the ASRock official website, although the company has not published a changelog or provided any details on what the new update addresses.

Last month, AMD released a VBIOS patch for Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards to address potential security vulnerabilities. While the company did not disclose any technical details about the vulnerabilities, it assured gamers that there had been no reports of them being exploited. According to a statement shared with ComputerBase, the company provided the following rationale for the update:

"AMD is releasing a firmware update as part of our usual approach to address potential security vulnerabilities. These corrections are already made available before the public announcement to give customers time to update their firmware. As a best practice, we recommend that users update the firmware of their graphics cards as soon as they are provided by the respective GPU manufacturer. There are no reports of exploiting these security vulnerabilities in practice."

ASRock subsequently listed the 1.0.5 VBIOS update for 10 graphics card models, spanning its Radeon RX 7600 XT, RX 7700 XT, RX 7800 XT, RX 7900 XT, and RX 7900 XTX families. However, several Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX owners reported that their systems failed to boot after installing the firmware. Some lucky users were able to use external EEPROM programmers to recover their cards. Although ASRock has since removed the 1.0.5 update from its website, it has yet to provide clarity on what caused the failures or confirm whether the newly released VBIOS addresses the issue.

There are also unanswered questions around how ASRock plans to help customers who have already been affected. According to reports shared with VideoCardz, a user in Japan received a confirmation from ASRock that the failed update would be covered under warranty. However, another owner in Europe was reportedly directed to seek warranty service despite having an out-of-warranty graphics card. This essentially leaves affected owners uncertain of whether they will receive free repairs or replacements.

Additionally, the lack of a changelog or an official statement, along with the new firmware version, makes it difficult for users to determine whether installing the replacement firmware is safe. We can only hope that ASRock provides some clarity around what version 1.06

PC case, cooling, and PSU maker Montech is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year and has released a new flagship ATX chassis, the King 95 3D and 3D Pro. Like the previous King 95, the 3D version keeps the signature 15-degree curved-glass panoramic front panel and adds a top glass panel, giving you a third window and a unique aesthetic for viewing your build. An integrated, contoured ARGB strip follows the chassis's smooth lines, making it look every bit the king of the castle.

Inside, the large mid-tower chassis supports multiple radiators (though only one 360mm), large graphics cards (plus integrated adjustable GPU support), CPU air coolers, and spots for 2.5- and 3.5-inch drives. However, it doesn't support E-ATX motherboards. The King 95 3D supports rear-connect motherboards and has ample room for cable routing and management. The front aluminum panel IO runs vertically, as with previous King cases, and includes a fast USB 3.2 Gen2x2 (20 Gbps) Type-C port. Overall, it has everything you want in a premium chassis. The uncommon three-panel view into your PC is a great way to show off your rig.

The King 95 3D is available for an inexpensive (at least for curved glass) $119.90 if you want to select your own fans. The 3D Pro includes seven pre-installed LINK Fan INF 120 fans for builders who want a more coordinated look out of the box, plus it includes the Lumi hub (a dedicated fan controller), for $199.90. We have the 3D Pro version in our lab and ran the case through thermal and noise testing in its out-of-the-box configuration to show how it performs compared to others. Will it make our best PC cases list? It has a chance. But before we get into the details, here are the case's specifications from Montech.

Montech King 95 3D Product Specifications

Features of the King 95 3D

▶️ External Features

From the outside, the King 95 3D Pro looks the part of its royal name. That signature curve and three panes of glass offer a panoramic view inside your case like few others, letting you show off your PC from even more angles. It also features a frosted, continuous LED strip running along the tiered top, right side, and bottom, adding some tasteful bling to the chassis. If you get the Pro version with the seven fans, it’s an RGB light show inside which could be polarizing. I do wish there were an option for preinstalled non-RGB fans, since the seven included ones and the infinity mirror styling may not be for everyone. Still, the curved front corner and clean lines really cement the King 95 3D as one of the better-looking panoramic cases on the market.

Up front, the removable curved glass corner with a smoked tint sets it apart from most others. On the right, the front IO panel runs vertically, with the power button on top and the LED on/off button below. It has three USB ports: one 3.2 Gen2x2 (20 Gbps) Type-C and two USB 3.2 Gen1 (5 Gbps) Type-A ports. Finally, it has a 3.5mm audio jack. That continuous 118-LED strip is visible from the front, running along the top, down the right edge, and along the bottom edge. I’m not a fan of a lot of RGB, but this implementation is tasteful. You can control this lighting through the motherboard software or Montech's Lumi software, which lets you fully customize the fans and RGB strip.

The main window panel also uses a smoke-colored tint, with Montech branding in the upper-right corner, and it's secured to the frame by two captive thumbscrews on the back. To remove it, loosen the thumbscrews, slide the panel back, pull from the top, then lift it out of the slots. Easy. I have to say, the biggest problem with all this glass is keeping it pristine and fingerprint-free.

The other (metal) side panel, behind the motherboard, slots into the frame and is secured the same way. It has filtered venting along the top and side for the fans/radiator locations, plus another area for airflow near the power supply and drive mounting locations. In the middle is a gold placard with Montech King 95 3D 10th anniversary badging. Note: The dust filters on this panel aren't removable, so you’ll need to remove the whole panel to clean things up.

At the top, we get a better look at the third windowed panel, letting observers peer into the case from a different angle rather than straight on or from the front. We can also see the tiered top and part of the long RGB strip. Taking this panel off isn’t as simple as the rest. Yes, it’s also secured by two captive thumbscrews on the back, but to remove it, you’ll need to open the main window panel to expose a retaining screw, remove it, then loosen the back thumbscrews and slide it to the rear. After you remove the top glass, you can remove the upper and side retaining screws to take it out. When building, I didn’t find this necessary, but it’s good to know you can take it apart if needed.

Looking at the case from behind, one of the first things I noticed was the vertical PSU mounting location on the left. This space supports up to 220mm power supplies, which is all but the largest on the market. On the right, we see space for two 120mm fans, the motherboard I/O, and seven horizontal expansion slots. Unfortunately, Montech says the King 95 3D does not support vertical GPUs.

Underneath the case, there isn’t a lot going on. We get a better look at the four short rubber-bottom ‘feet’ and the removable dust filter. Montech put on its thinking cap and designed the dust filter to slide out from the front, so chances are you won’t have to move your heavy case to clean it.

▶️ Internal Features

Inside, the case uses a dual-chamber design, with the power supply and all wires hidden behind the motherboard tray. At the bottom, we see three Link Fan INF 120s (reverse blade) along with the mirror finish. The magnetically linked, daisy-chainable fans run up to 2,300 RPM (2,200 RPM on the reverse blade), pushing between 65-67 CFM with a maximum rating of 32dBA (29 dBA on the standard blade). A single Link Fan INF 120 costs $19.90, while a 3-pack (with Lumi Hub) is $64.90. If you do the math for seven fans and the Lumi Hub, it’s cheaper to buy them with the case rather than separately.

When powered on, the mirrored sides become an infinity panel, and with all seven matching, it creates a consistent view across the build. The bottom fan bracket is adjustable, with three positions (8 degrees). We left it down during testing, but with it up, you can focus more air towards the GPU and show off whatever fans you put in the space.

The motherboard tray has plenty of cutouts to access the back of the motherboard for easy installation/removal of air coolers or AIO/custom water-cooling blocks. The case also supports rear-connect ecosystems, including Asus BTF, Gigabyte Stealth, and MSI Project Zero boards. Grommets surround the motherboard tray and are in ideal locations, but like most, they pull out easily when you try to route cables, especially those with larger connectors. I wish all case vendors would secure these better, since they're a pain to reinstall, especially when the case is full of cables.

Up top, we can see the huge gap above the motherboard tray for more fans and radiators. The case cooled just fine with the seven included fans and our air cooler, though GPU temps ran a bit warmer in our noise-normalized testing. That top gap is begging to be filled with fans, even if only for aesthetics. If you plan to use an AIO cooler, this isn’t a problem, since the radiator/fans will fill the space.

From the front, you can see the two Link INF 120mm fans and, at the bottom, the tool-less, adjustable GPU support strut. The back has space to mount two 120mm fans or one 120mm radiator. You can also see the seven horizontal expansion slots held in by thumbnail screws.

Inside, the top of the case above the motherboard space fits up to three 120mm fans or a 360mm radiator. The space is offset back from the motherboard tray, which is a boon for cable management. Normally, there’s barely any room to route the EPS cables, but here there's plenty. Just note that if your build uses air cooling, you will need to fill that area with fans to make it look good. Otherwise, it’s just a blank open space above the motherboard.

On the rear side of the chassis, we get a good look at the space behind the motherboard tray and the fan baffles. There’s plenty of room to route cables, and Montech has multiple pre-installed Velcro straps for cable routing. Even with the power supply installed, there’s plenty of room underneath it to stash excess cables.

At the bottom, we see a simple ARGB hub that consolidates the three different ARGB cables from the fans into one header to control all of them. Montech also includes a magnetic Lumi fan/RGB hub (which supports up to 13 Link Fans total) with both the Pro and non-Pro variants. Oddly, it comes loose/uninstalled on the Pro, but installed on the non-Pro. The box in the lower-right holds one 3.5-inch HDD and a single 2.5-inch drive. The second 2.5-inch drive mounts in the other location at the bottom left, next to the side fans.

We do like the look of the King 95 3D Pro case in black, and I bet it looks great in white with an all-white build too. The curved glass and 3-panel panoramic interior views are great for anyone who’d like to show off their now-ridiculously expensive parts. The included Link Fan INF 120 fans work well and run relatively quietly. If there’s an aesthetic drawback, it's that I’m not a huge fan of all the RGB and infinity mirrors on the pre-installed fans. It’s a lot, and it makes me yearn for an option with preinstalled fans and no RGB. Of course, you can turn them off in the software, or buy the non-Pro and choose whichever fans fit your build.

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Test equipment, method, and results

Thermal tests showing how a case performs are just one part of deciding whether you should buy it. Other considerations include aesthetics (subjective), noise and how loud it is while keeping your components cool, additional features, and, of course, price. Everyone has different priorities for their PC case, be it RGB lighting, quiet cooling, ample space for your components, or the best cooling possible, noise be damned. Our goal is to give you the information you need to make an informed buying decision.

To get heat into the system, we stress the CPU with Cinebench R26 (multi-threaded test) and the video card with FurMark 2 (1080p). We run the CPU and GPU tests concurrently for 30 minutes, allowing the air-cooled system to reach saturation and stabilize. We then let the system idle for 15 minutes, adjust the fans to 100%, and test again.

Noise-normalized (42dBA) Maximum thermal Performance

This set of tests is designed for those who love quiet PCs, with both system fans and the CPU fan noise normalized to 42 dBA. Consider this a measure of the case’s thermal efficiency when noise levels are set to run quietly. It is audible, but just (at least for my old ears).

Noise-normalized results were among the best for the CPU and warmer than average for the GPU. The CPU averaged 87 degrees Celsius throughout testing, which is a couple of degrees better than most. The video card averaged 81 degrees, which was surprising given the three fans blowing directly at it. These temps will drop a bit if you add more exhaust fans at the top, but these are good results, especially for the CPU, and the case with these fans will keep whatever you put inside running cool, without making much noise at these fan speeds.

Maximum thermal performance - fans at full speed

Our noise-normalized results are for those who prefer silence, but what if you don’t mind extra noise and just want maximum performance, or you have to run things at high settings to keep high-powered devices cool? This testing is for you. Obviously, when you add fans or an AIO up top, things will change a bit, but this gives you a great idea of ‘out-of-the-box’ performance, noise be damned.

After raising the fan speed to 100%, the CPU only dropped two degrees Celsius, mostly because we could turn the fans up a bit higher than others in the noise-normalized testing. The video card dropped a respectable nine degrees, but was still one of the warmest but in a tightly packed datasets. Again, we expect even lower temperatures with the full complement of fans installed and have no worries it will handle flagship-class hardware.

Maximum Noise Levels

We measure noise levels with a sound meter one meter away from the computer case, with the pre-installed fans running at maximum RPM. If a case does not have enough included fans for airflow (intake and exhaust) as configured, we add a Cooler Master M120 ARGB, since we expect most users will add at least one more fan in situations like these.

The loudest this case gets in our configuration was 53 dBA, 11 dBA above our baseline threshold. This is the second-highest among the tested chassis. I was surprised by this result too, since the entire front and top of the case are covered, while others with an open front were a couple of dBA lower. That said, this case as tested has seven fans, and these tested cases often include four (or fewer), so it’s not bad considering it’s close to double the number of fans as others. Even at full power, they didn’t sound harsh, just like fans moving a lot of air in and out.

Conclusion

Montech’s new King 95 3D 10th anniversary case is a notable update from the King 95. I personally own the King 95 Ultra (Limited edition) and love what it offers. And that curved glass corner was a unique feature for cases when it launched. Fast forward to today, the 3D version for its 10th anniversary takes what worked there and builds on it. It’s larger, includes a cool 118-LED contour strip for continuous lighting, and has plenty of room for large internals. At $119.90 without fans, you supply your own, or for $199.90, you can get seven pre-installed Link Fan INF120s and a hub.

Performance was good all around, with the King 95 3D Pro and its seven fans doing a good job keeping the CPU cool in our noise-normalized testing. The video card did run warmer than most, but not enough to be alarming. Cranking the fans to 100% yields slightly better CPU temps, and the GPU dropped considerably, much closer to other chassis’ results. With all the fans running at full tilt, the noise was on the louder side, but it was just air turbulence. In short, feel free to pack this chassis with any hardware that fits, as it will cool without issue. It’s just a bit loud with Link fans turned up. I would like to see E-ATX motherboard support in the larger case, but that certainly isn’t a dealbreaker for most.

The Montech King 95 3D is a solid premium mid-tower chassis. The top glass is a unique addition for a PC case and lets you see inside from almost any angle. It also offers ample room for large graphics cards, CPU air coolers, and a 360mm AIO at the top. The included fans add a lot of bling, but you can buy the non-Pro version of the King 95 3D and choose your own fans for a more subtle, potentially quieter, and less RGB-infused build. If you’re in the market for a larger premium mid-tower chassis and would like to show off your build through three windowed panels, the new King 95 3D (and 3D Pro) should be on your shortlist for a sub-$120 (w/o fans) or sub-$200 (w/seven fans) chassis.

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In June, AMD overtook the predictive memory engine known as MEXT, which claims to offer upwards of 99% of the performance of a system with full DRAM capacity while running with as little as 25% of the physical DIMMs. The technology offloads cold memory pages to flash storage and uses an AI model to serve pages before they’re needed, and AMD says it plans to extend the tech across a wide swath of its IT infrastructure next year.

The pitch behind MEXT seems too good to be true. According to AMD and MEXT founder Gary Smerdon, the technology can cut the physical DRAM required in a server by 20% to 75% depending on the application and performance target. That missing memory still registers as installed DRAM to the OS. Instead of DRAM, however, MEXT uses relatively inexpensive flash storage to offload cold pages, flying them back in as they’re needed with an AI model. In some of AMD’s internal workloads, such as Synopsys PrimeTime, the company says it’s able to achieve 95% of the performance of a full server while running at 50% DRAM capacity with MEXT.

AMD has deployed MEXT internally on 145 servers, which it says will expand to 2,000 servers next year. In addition, the company has announced a partnership with HPE to bring MEXT to customers. Currently, we’re in phase 1 of the rollout, with some EPYC Venice servers carrying a “MEXT Ready” badge and a dedicated NVMe drive or bay for the offload. Phase 2 brings MEXT licenses out to these servers, as well as the RAM View application. AMD hasn’t said when Phase 2 will begin.

The AI-driven DRAM pricing surge impacts more than just gaming PCs, with enterprises also feeling the brunt of price increases, even if they aren’t running AI workloads. If MEXT is able to achieve what AMD claims, it could be transformative given the current market. Because of that, it’s worth understanding what exactly MEXT is, as well as what AMD claims it can do.

Although MEXT is exciting in concept, it’s obvious that AMD is taking a conservative approach to the rollout. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, after all. The applications of MEXT are currently narrow, though AMD says it’s expanding the workloads it’s using MEXT on with promising early results.

DRAM, Flash and an LLM

The basic setup of MEXT is simple in concept: cold pages go to flash, AI brings those pages back as needed, and it’s as if the memory was never missing in the first place. The main problem should be obvious. Flash is orders of magnitude slower than DRAM, so streaming pages back into memory from flash as they’re needed isn’t feasible. MEXT’s trick is using an AI model to predict the pages you’ll need. And, as long as the model is able to stay ahead by at least the transfer latency from the SSD, it’s as if the physical DRAM was installed the whole time.

This isn’t a crazy concept considering how a transformer-based LLM, which MEXT uses, operates. If you’re unfamiliar with the inner workings, this open-source visualization breaks down the concept of a transformer AI model cleanly. The foundational concept is next token prediction, which underpins the design of modern LLMs. Given a set of tokens, the LLM determines which token (word, portion of a word, etc.) is most likely to come next. It makes a prediction. In the case of MEXT, it’s predicting what page is needed next, not what word comes next.

Memory offloading to flash isn’t a new concept, but MEXT founder Gary Smerdon says that AI is the critical difference in this technology. MEXT itself is deployed as a Linux kernel module that works with any Linux distro. It uses an “ensemble of AI models,” with the primary transformer-based LLM driving the technology. And critically, it doesn’t come pre-trained.

Instead, AMD says that MEXT trains in under a second when first deployed, operates on one EPYC core without a GPU, and continually trains as the workload progresses. This approach makes sense given the varied workloads that MEXT may apply to. The idea is that it would learn the access patterns of the application in order to drive that prediction engine.

MEXT isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t need to be perfect in every situation. For instance, the order of stored pages isn’t important. With text, an LLM needs to predict the correct text in the correct order, but with MEXT, the order doesn’t matter. As long as the page is in DRAM when it’s needed, that’s fine.

In order to understand the application of MEXT to different workloads, AMD has developed RAM View to go alongside the tech. It’s a memory utilization tool that shows which pages are hot and which have gone cold. As you can see from the example above, a system with 1.5 TB of memory shows near-full utilization across the full workload, but around half of the pages stored in memory haven’t been touched in five minutes or more at any given time.

AMD provided this generalized example and didn’t clarify what workload it was testing. That’s very important, as the utilization breakdown will look vastly different depending on the application(s) running on the server. Initially, AMD is applying MEXT to critical EDA applications it uses internally, such as Synopsys PrimeTime, but the company says it has focused on optimizing agentic AI, database, and media and entertainment workloads as well.

This is important not only because memory access patterns change between applications, but also because performance in those applications reacts differently when a system doesn’t have enough memory. The “memory wall,” as AMD calls it, should be a familiar concept regardless of whether you’ve ever touched a server. With MEXT, AMD says it’s trying to extend this memory wall, which may look different for different applications.

For instance, the company is confident that many workloads can reduce capacity by around 20% to 25%. As the reduction increases, however, the applications become more specialized, and the performance delta becomes greater.

AMD’s internal MEXT results

AMD has shared some internal MEXT results, which look impressive, though as usual, it’s always smart to handle first-party benchmarks like this with skepticism. Starting with PrimeTime, where AMD has focused much of its attention on MEXT up to this point, it says servers running at 50% capacity retain 95% of the performance of a full server, and going down to as little as 25% capacity still maintains 80% of the application’s performance.

PrimeTime demands a lot of memory for large designs. There are some applications where performance is nearly identical, according to AMD. In a 3-node cluster running in Azure with 5th-gen EPYC CPUs, AMD says MEXT offers 99% of the performance of the full cluster while running at 50% DRAM capacity with the Spark SQL workload from the TPC-DS benchmark. SQL databases try to cache as much data as possible in memory to prevent I/O bottlenecks, creating a golden opportunity for tech like MEXT that wants to free cold pages.

Perhaps the most applicable workload at the current moment, however, is agentic AI, and AMD says MEXT has similar applications there. Across a five-agent concurrent geomean, AMD claims 99% of the performance of a full server with 50% memory capacity, and 85% of the performance with 25% capacity. With a “memory-hungry” agent, AMD claims 90% and 88% performance for 50% and 25% capacity, respectively.

The slide you can see above has footnote tags. However, AMD has not shared the footnotes with us yet, so we don’t have a view into how these tests were run. Naturally, we assume AMD has, at minimum, represented the performance of MEXT in the best light possible. We can’t do a full analysis without knowing how the tests were run, however.

What is interesting is AMD’s cautious approach to rolling out MEXT. It’s an EPYC-exclusive feature right now, though AMD left the door open for support on future products (consumer devices, such as Strix Halo) far down the road. It will be sold as a license, bundled with the RAM View software, but we don’t have a timeline on when that will happen. And, despite a partnership with HPE to push out “MEXT Ready” servers, we still don’t know when MEXT itself will be ready for deployment beyond AMD’s walls.

Given that conservative approach, there are likely pitfalls to MEXT that we’re not seeing yet, and it’s hard to imagine it will be broadly applicable to every server, at least at the 50% and 25% DRAM capacity levels that AMD showed off with its benchmarks.

However, even being able to trim 25% of a server’s DRAM capacity represents a massive cost savings in the current supply-constrained environment. If some workloads can push that to 50% capacity, that’s even better. Of course, we’ll need to see how MEXT holds up once it’s available broadly, but if AMD’s claims hold water, it could become a defining technology in data centers that can’t seem to get enough memory.

Newegg is one of the best places at the moment for deal bundles on otherwise expensive PC parts for a new gaming PC. With that in mind, you can pick up a brand-new AMD Ryzen 7 9950X3D with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and an Asus TUF Gaming X870E motherboard for $1,059.98.

● Check out this combo deal at Newegg

This deal saves you $128.99 compared to buying the parts separately. You're also getting a free Rosewill 360mm AIO liquid cooler thrown in for free, worth $89.99. More importantly, however, is the RAM. With this deal, you're bringing down the effective cost of the memory to just $351, or less if you count the free cooler.

Buying this RAM separately would cost you $479.99, while the cheapest 32GB DDR5 kit on sale anywhere right now is $438, so you're paying $87 less for RAM compared to what you'd have to pay elsewhere. That's a great deal considering how expensive RAM has become over the last year, especially if you need to build or upgrade your rig today.

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is no longer the fastest gaming CPU on the market, but it's still our favorite, with performance that's almost impossible to beat. It ships with eight cores, 16 threads, and a boost clock speed up to 5.2 GHz. The important stat, though, is 96MB of L3 cache. This is AMD's all-important 3D V-Cache technology in action. The extra cache provides a huge frame rate boost by giving the CPU more memory directly.

There's less need for it to drop down to slower system RAM while you're gaming, making frame rates higher and more stable. As the Bench charts below show, this is a CPU that, despite being marginally pipped to the post by newer CPUs like the 9850X3D, is still an absolute powerhouse for gamers.

Along with this world-class processor is a solid set of RAM for your rig. The V-Color Manta XSky RAM included here is a popular one among these Newegg bundles. You're getting two 16GB memory modules to run dual-channel, and it's fast DDR5 CL30 RAM, rated at 6,000 MT/s, with RGB lighting that you can configure. RAM prices are showing no signs of cooling, so getting RAM for nearly $90 less than you'd be paying elsewhere is a worthy option if you're building or upgrading a new PC.

Along with the RAM is an Asus TUF Gaming X870E-Plus WiFi 7 motherboard. This is an enthusiast-friendly board that's packed with a whole host of gaming features. Ready for an AM5 build, this motherboard has 13 USBs at the rear, including two USB-C ports that are rated at speeds of 40 Gbps. You're also getting four M.2 sockets for plenty of SSDs, and with the 9800X3D installed, two of them are rated for PCIe 5.0 speeds over four lanes. There's fast networking, with 2.5 Gb Ethernet and Wi-Fi 7 support included.

A nice extra, too, is that Rosewill AIO cooler. Worth $89.99 if you had to buy it, this 360mm cooler will help to keep your CPU cool, with three RGB fans and a built-in display that can show you your CPU's temperature, fan and pump speeds. No cost here: this one comes with the bundle for free.

Overall, the $1,059.99 sale price for this Newegg parts bundle means you're scoring a top-spec CPU with better-priced RAM than buying it separately before we even consider the motherboard and free CPU cooler. The $128.99 discount here isn't one you should ignore given current market prices, but with these bundles selling out fast, you'll need to be quick to secure it for yourself.

u/Motor_Attention1865 on Reddit didn't like how his PC added extra heat to his room in the winter, so he went the extra mile to dump the heat outside in a fashion similar to mini-split air conditioners. The external cooling system is controlled by an Arduino Mega that the PC communicates with when it needs extra cooling. The system opens a three-way valve to route coolant outside and prevents condensation by keeping the coolant temperature above the dew point.

Our intrepid modder's room has heated floors, and the PC was dumping too much heat under the table where his PC sits, even in 25 °F (-4 °C) weather. He grew tired of manually opening a window to regulate the temperature in his space, so he put in much more effort to create a split cooling system that puts another radiator outside in the below-freezing temperatures, cooling down the PC significantly.

Motor_Attention1865's build itself is impressive enough, with a delidded Core Ultra 7 270K Plus cooled by a Thermal Grizzly 1851 Mycro Pro direct-die water block with Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut Extreme liquid compound. Not only is his RTX 4070 Ti Super also watercooled with a Bykski water block, but the 2x24GB DDR5-8400 G.Skill RAM is also watercooled using Bykski heat spreaders with an IceManCooler two-channel water block. The cooling system within the PC has two radiators: a 120mm in the back and a 360mm in the front, all fed by an EK Kinetic D5 pump-reservoir.

The external cooling system, however, is even more impressive. The 240mm outdoor radiator with two Noctua iPPC-3000 fans isn’t outrageous, but the automated system that makes it useful is what’s interesting. Next to the PC is a box with a Bykski D5 pump and reservoir that pushes water outside, but it doesn’t use the external radiator until the PC needs the extra cooling.

Upon startup, the PC runs a Python script that communicates with an Arduino Mega connected to three temperature probes checking the coolant temperature and three more temperature and humidity sensors that monitor the PC case and the ambient air. The sensors give the Arduino Mega information on where to switch the motorized three-way valve depending on the temperature and humidity.

The problem with extreme cold in any PC is condensation. If coolant gets below the dew point of the environment, condensation forms, potentially shorting out PC components. To prevent this disaster, the Arduino determines the dew point based on the humidity and temperature of the room and in the PC. Motor_Attention1865 set the Arduino to close off the outside radiator at +10 °C above the dew point, or +5 °C during benchmarking, allowing for low temperatures without risking droplets forming in the PC.

Because of the freezing or below-freezing temperatures at which this external loop is meant to operate, Motor_Attention1865 also added pure ethylene glycol to the Aquacomputer Double Protect Ultra Clear coolant in the loop, lowering its freezing point from -18 °C to -28 °C.

Thanks to the supplemental cooling system and delidding, the system achieves temperatures below 50 °C under heavy use. According to Motor_Attention1865, the RTX 4070 Ti sits at 37 °C and the CPU hovers around 45-50 °C while gaming. Temperatures were higher in benchmarks, however — in Cinebench R23, the CPU sat at 52 °C, while in 3DMark Steel Nomad, the GPU was at 48 °C.

Above all, however, Motor_Attention1865 no longer needs to bother himself with opening a window if their room gets too hot with the PC under load. It's the small things.

Two prominent voices within AMD agree that the company didn’t design its new Zen 6 family, codenamed Venice, explicitly for agentic AI in a clear shot at Nvidia and Arm, who’ve both described their latest data center CPUs as “agentic” in nature. In separate talks, AMD’s chief Zen architect Mike Clark and corporate VP Madhu Rangarajan said that the company didn’t predict the agentic wave when Zen 6 development started.

We just wrapped up testing AMD's Venice CPUs, which you can read more about in our Zen 6 benchmarking article.

CPU development cycles are measured in years, and given that the agentic frenzy around CPUs hit around March of this year, it’s unreasonable to expect that anyone has developed silicon specifically for agentic AI, much less a general-purpose data center CPU. And still, Nvidia claims its Vera CPU was “purpose-built” for agentic AI, while Arm says its AGI CPU was “designed for the demands of agentic AI.”

“We think that the EPYC 9006 CPU is the best CPU for the agentic era, and spoiler alert, we didn’t magically know four years ago that agentic was going to be a thing and purpose-built something for agentic,” said Rangarajan in a session with media. “The reality is an agentic workflow is a diverse set of tasks… and in order to execute those tasks well, you need compute that is able to handle a diverse set of workloads with a full portfolio.”

Introducing the Zen 6 microarchitecture, Mike Clark agreed with the sentiment: “I’m not going to mislead and act like I knew agentic computing was coming, or we knew it, but we did strongly believe that the CPU would always have a place in the software ecosystem of AI… And as agentic [has] blown up, we [are] able to now deploy that for agentic compute workloads.”

As AMD rolls out its next-generation microarchitecture with Venice CPUs, it’s targeting the messaging from Arm and Nvidia, which have posed the most direct threat to AMD’s continued rise in the data center on the back of agentic workloads. And indeed, there are performance vectors where Nvidia’s Vera looks strong for agentic workloads, as you can see in our Nvidia Vera testing. AMD’s argument, however, is that agentic AI calls for a broad range of CPUs just as general-purpose workloads do, pushing back on the single-SKU approach of Nvidia and Arm.

Our testing of two AMD Venice chips supports that argument, as well, with the dense EPYC 9996 with its 256 cores and 512 threads offering peak throughput performance, while the frequency-optimized EPYC 9686F goes toe-to-toe with Vera in the role of an AI host node. AMD is launching two additional ranges next year, with Venice-X targeting HPC with its 3D-stack cache, and Verano going directly after Vera as an AI host node with an LPDDR5X memory system.

Although the workload characteristics of agentic AI are still in the process of being defined, we have a better understanding of how those loops work now than we did at the beginning of the year. And like all complex topics, the answer to what is important in a CPU for agentic AI is the always-disappointing “it depends.”

As we break down in our early testing procedure for agentic AI, the workload characteristics and demand on the CPU/memory are defined by what the agent is doing, and in the data center, what several agents are doing at high concurrency when sandboxed. A coding agent will generally call more tools that are taxing on the CPU than a web browsing agent, for example, while an agent that queries a database may call for strong memory performance.

Of course, there are some vectors of performance that can’t be addressed with different SKUs (such as that strong memory performance). However, the potential diversity of agentic workloads certainly makes an argument for CPU variety. At a most basic level, an agentic loop allows the LLM to understand functions you’ve defined, and then pass arguments to those functions to execute them. We’re talking about a workload as broad as what you can define in a function in languages like Python and Rust.

AMD’s EPYC ‘Venice’ CPUs are the first to debut the new Zen 6 architecture, and we’ve been testing two chips from the range over the past several weeks to see how they compare to Nvidia’s Vera, and more broadly, how the Zen 6 architecture departs from Zen 5 ahead of the expected consumer-focused Olympic Ridge launch next year. Zen 5 was a ground-up redesign of AMD’s storied Zen core, and Zen 6 takes that foundation and expands it in just about every regard.

Zen 6 uses TSMC’s N2P node, but it also comes with significant architectural changes under the hood. Within the core, a redesigned vector engine pushes AMD’s SIMD performance even higher, and it now natively supports half-precision FP16 instructions alongside full, 32-bit precision. It also splits integer schedulers within the execution engine, allowing for more instructions in flight through the core.

Across the die, AMD made other significant changes. The single IOD of previous generations is now split across two IODs, giving the SP7 platform access to 16 memory channels (though at the cost of PCIe 6.0 lanes compared to the previous generation and SP8 platform).

The CCDs have been upgraded, too, for the first time since Zen 3. A standard Zen 6 CCD can now scale up to 12 cores, while a Zen 6c packs 32 cores. With Zen 5 and 5c, CCDs topped out at eight cores and 16 cores, respectively. For the Zen 6c CCD, AMD also doubled the amount of shared L3 per core, which effectively quadruples the L3 compared to Zen 5c, since the CCD packs twice the number of cores.

Interestingly, Zen 6 is neither a marginal optimization to Zen 5, nor a complete architecture redesign. Stepping back, it looks like AMD pushes as many dials as it has access to to their highest level, and that holds up looking at performance.

The 256-core EPYC 9996 delivers 1,024 threads in a 2P configuration, which came out 93% ahead of the 768-thread 2P EPYC 9965 server we tested in SPEC CPU 2026’s intrate throughput test. The frequency-optimized EPYC 9686F excels elsewhere, notably in scientific computing and HPC workloads, and it serves as AMD’s competitor to Vera, at least before the LPDDR-based Verano platform arrives from AMD next year.

AMD says it believes Venice is fundamentally a generation ahead of the competition, which would be a worthless line if it wasn’t backed up by data. Intel’s Granite Rapids-AP is rarely in the conversation, and although Vera maintains some competitive positions, Venice is often ahead — sometimes orders of magnitude ahead.

Intel’s Diamond Rapids is set to launch next year, which should help balance the scales. But AMD has set an incredibly high bar with Venice, one that it will likely extend even higher for some workloads with the arrival of Venice-X and Verano next year.

There’s a lot to get to here. We have a full deep dive into the Zen 6 microarchitecture, a broader look at the chip itself, the platform(s) AMD is pushing out this generation, and of course, more than 100 benchmarks covering everything from Python performance to HPC.

AMD Zen 6 microarchitecture breakdown

AMD Zen 6 microarchitecture breakdown

The headline for Zen 6 is a 27% average IPC uplift over Zen 5 in enterprise, cloud, and AI workloads. The debut of this new microarchitecture is focused on the data center, so you shouldn’t take that 27% IPC improvement as broadly applicable to all workloads. Additionally, AMD arrived at that number by comparing fixed-frequency Zen 5 to Zen 6c with 16 cores. As we’ll get into in the next section, a Zen 6c CCD can comfortably fit 16 Zen 6c cores with room to spare, while 16 Zen 5 cores are split across two CCDs.

The compute die is built on TSMC’s N2P node, which is an already optimized version of N2 that comes with a 5% performance improvement. Compared to N3E (Zen 5 used N4P), N2P offers an 18% speed improvement at iso-power, or a 36% reduction in power at the same speed.

AMD described Zen 5 as a ground-up redesign when the microarchitecture first broke cover in mid-2024, characterized by a wider execution engine capable of dispatching and returning eight instructions per cycle, a wider frontend to feed it, full AVX-512 support, and doubled bandwidth between the L2 and L1 cache. Zen 6 is a continuation of the redesign we saw on Zen 5. It carries many of the same characteristics, as well as the same general topology, just enhanced in a number of ways.

As we go through the breakdown, keep in mind that Zen 6 and Zen 6c use the same microarchitecture. Zen 6c is just a space-optimized design that consumes less power, clocks lower, and, obviously, takes up less die space than a full Zen 6 core. But, the company uses the same microarchitecture inside the core, unlike Intel’s E-cores, which use a different microarchitecture than the P-cores.

Starting with the frontend, it’s largely unchanged from Zen 5, short of a few notable improvements. You get the same dual 4-wide decode pipes and 8-dispatch, but AMD has improved the BPU and op cache. For the BPU, it has a 64-entry Return Address Stack, up from 52 on Zen 5. AMD also increased the op cache size back up to 6.75K entries from 6K on Zen 5 (Zen 4 also had a 6.75K-entry op cache). This larger cache can serve up to 18 micro-ops per cycle, up from 12 on Zen 5.

AMD split the integer schedulers for Zen 6 (Zen 5 had a unified scheduler), now offering higher capacity, with 96 shared ALU/AGU and 48 dedicated ALU entries, compared to an 88 / 56 split for ALU/AGU on Zen 5. AMD also expanded the general-purpose registers to a 352-entry physical register file, up from 240 on Zen 5.

The vector execution engine is also improved, following on the heels of a true 512-bit register in Zen 5. Zen 6 carries forward that 512-bit data path and adds some additional improvements. Notably, the engine now supports half-precision AVX-512 FP16 instructions, which needed to be converted in Zen 5’s vector execution engine. Also notable is the FP load/store bandwidth. Zen 5 supports two loads of any size, but Zen 6 supports either two 512-bit loads or four 256-bit loads. Store bandwidth is unchanged, at one 512-bit store or two 256-bit stores.

Zen 6 carries forward the 48 KB 12-way L1 data cache from Zen 5, along with 1 MB 16-way private L2. The shared L3 is treated as victim cache for the L2, as is the case in Zen 5. However, AMD increased the in-flight window compared to Zen 5, with an 80-entry load queue and 128-entry store queue.

AMD Zen 6 and Zen 6c CCD and platform breakdown

AMD Zen 6 and Zen 6c CCD and platform breakdown

Perhaps the biggest change going from Zen 5 to Zen 6 comes in the density of the CCD. Zen 6 offers up to 12 cores per CCD, up from 8 on Zen 5, while Zen 6c scales up to 32, double that of Zen 5c. Elsewhere, the updated CCDs either match or improve on Zen 5/5c CCDs.

For Zen 6, AMD retained the 4 MB of L3 cache per core, increasing the total cache to 48 MB to accommodate the new 12-core limit. The maximum frequency of a standard Zen 6 CCD has increased from 5 GHz on Zen 5 to 5.3 GHz on Zen 6. Keep in mind these clocks are in the context of Venice; we expect higher maximum boost clocks on consumer Olympic Ridge.

Zen 6c has more enhancements. AMD doubled the amount of L3 per core from 2 MB to 4 MB, matching the normal Zen 6 CCD. And, with double the L3 per core and double the number of cores, the Zen 6c CCD has a total of 128 MB of L3, quadruple that of a Zen 5c CCD. For Zen 6c, the maximum frequency is also up, going from 3.7 GHz on Zen 5c to 4.1 GHz on Zen 6c.

Across both, AMD claims a “large core IPC uplift,” as well as improved power and SMT efficiency. We haven’t seen an overall IPC claim yet, though the numbers referenced above put Venice at about a 27% advantage over Turin in enterprise, cloud, and AI workloads.

In the context of Venice, AMD can fit up to eight CCDs on a chip, coming out to 256 cores in total for Zen 6c, and 96 cores total for regular Zen 6 for SP7 platforms (the initial lineup for Venice). AMD is moving past the SP5 socket available to Genoa and Turin CPUs for SP7, which is a slightly larger socket at 76 x 80 mm (SP5 is ~72 x 75 mm).

The topology of the chip is largely intact from Turin, short of the dual IO dies that characterize Venice. The two IODs live in the middle of the chip, flanked by Zen 6 CCDs. The second IOD is what gives SP7 chips access to 16 channels of memory per socket (8 channels per IOD), supporting up to 12,800 MT/s speeds using MRDIMMs in a 1DPC configuration. With RDIMMs, AMD supports up to 8,000 MT/s. The platform supports up to 8 TB of memory per socket, and AMD claims bandwidth of up to 1.6 TB/s per socket (1 TB/s per socket with RDIMMs).

Also on the IOD, there’s the hardware root-of-trust, as well as AMD’s confidential computing extensions, including execution encryption, memory integrity, and trusted I/O. New to the platform is PCIe 6.0 at speeds up to 64 Gbps per lane. A 1P SP7 configuration has access to 96 PCIe 6.0 lanes, while a 2P platform has up to 128. Each configuration also comes with “bonus” PCIe 4.0 lanes, either 8 for 1P configs or 16 for 2P.

Two 64G SerDes interfaces bring the PCIe lanes into the IOD, one of which is used to link the chips in a 2P configuration. That second interface can still optionally handle an additional 12 PCIe 6.0 lanes, giving the “up to” 128 2P lanes number. The bonus lanes run through a smaller 16G SerDes interface.

Platforms with the SP8 socket trade memory channels for PCIe lanes. The SP8 socket is smaller at 62.5 x 80 mm, and the platform supports eight memory channels instead of 16, though with the same support for up to 12,800 MT/s MRDIMMs. Memory bandwidth drops to 819 GB/s for MRDIMMs and 512 GB/s for RDIMMs at the maximum supported transfer rate.

However, SP8 chips have access to 64 PCIe 6.0 lanes per IOD, for a total of 128 lanes in a socket (plus the additional eight PCIe 4.0 bonus lanes). Just like SP7, some of those lanes are shared in a 2P configuration, dropping the total to 192 PCIe 6.0 lanes in 2P SP8 servers, with 16 additional PCIe 4.0 lanes. Both platforms support CXL 3.1.

AMD also provided a platform breakdown for its upcoming Verano range, which uses the Zen 6 microarchitecture on an LPDDR5X-based platform, leveraging replaceable SOCAMM2 DIMMs.

UPP, UBPS, and FAST in Zen 6 ‘Venice’ CPUs

UPP, UBPS, and FAST in Zen 6 ‘Venice’ CPUs

AMD has added a few quality-of-life features to Venice CPUs that should make them easier to manage when actually deployed. First is UPP, or Unified Power Provisioning, which is a power management feature that takes into account total platform power, allocating it as needed to different components, depending on the workload. With it, AMD says it’s able to deliver a power consumption of 830W on 16 servers to 706W on 18 servers, or a decrease in provisioned power by 15%, while increasing the number of servers per rack.

Also dealing with power is UBPS, or Utilization Based Power Scaling. It’s a dynamic power scaling feature that aligns with whatever workload is running on the server, which AMD says “helps close the gap between provisioned and consumed power.” Like UPP, UBPS is concerned with platform power, not just the power consumption of the CPU.

The most interesting addition is FAST, or Frequency Adaptive Spectrum Technology. The feature takes in telemetry from the platform and policies set in firmware to adjust the frequency within set power and thermal limits. It sounds a little more involved than a simple Precision Boost Overdrive for the data center, however.

AMD described FAST to us as allowing for two performance tiers within one socket. As an example, AMD pointed to a 96-core Venice CPU, saying FAST allows 32 of those cores to run in a “premium” category, with a base clock of 3.65 GHz and a max clock of 5 GHz, while a “batch” category with 64 cores runs at 2 GHz with a 2.4 GHz max. AMD described it as multiple commercial SKUs within a single socket.

Preliminary MEXT support, claims of 95% performance at 50% DRAM capacity

Preliminary MEXT support, claims of 95% performance at 50% DRAM capacity

Venice marks the point when AMD will start offering MEXT on its EPYC platforms. AMD aquired MEXT earlier this year, and it has used the feature internally. With HPE, AMD is rolling out “MEXT ready” platforms, which will, eventually, have access to MEXT licenses. The technology is interesting, especially given how constrained memory is right now.

The general concept of MEXT is using flash as DRAM. Even the fastest flash is orders of magnitude slower than DRAM, but MEXT attempts to take advantage of DRAM access patterns to expose more memory to the system without it actually being there. Pages that haven’t been accessed in several minutes are offloaded to flash storage, and an AI model predicts pages that are needed. Then, those pages are loaded back into memory as you need them.

Conceptually, it sounds too good to be true. AMD pointed out that MEXT is using a transformer-based LLM, and effectively, LLMs are predicting what words go next when generating text. Here, AMD says the bar isn’t even that high. As long as the model can stream the correct pages in, and do so fast enough to cover the flash latency, the order of them doesn’t matter.

MEXT is delivered through a Linux kernel module, and AMD has bold claims about its capabilities. The company has deployed the software internally on 145 servers, which it expects to expand to over 2,000 servers next year. Currently, AMD is using it for critical EDA workflows, such as Synopsis PrimeTime. The company says that it’s able to maintain 95% of the application’s performance on Venice with just 50% of the system DRAM. Going down as low as 25%, the company claims the app maintains 80% of its performance.

We’ll have more on MEXT shortly. The feature is exclusive to EPYC CPUs, and AMD was clear that it only applies to certain workloads right now. There are likely applications where you won’t be able to cut the DRAM capacity of a server, or where you’ll need to use a more conservative cut of 25% or less.

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ test configurations

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ test configurations

AMD gave us access to two Zen 6 Venice systems for the purpose of testing, both of which were dual-socket servers. For the first system, we tested the dense EPYC 9996, which is AMD’s high-core-count design, packing 256 cores and 512 threads per socket, for a total of 512 cores and 1024 threads across a 2P system. It’s a peak throughput SKU, designed to handle heavily concurrent workloads.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the EPYC 9686F, which is still a high core count CPU in its own right, with 96 cores and 192 threads, giving a 2P system 192 cores and 384 threads. The “F” suffix for AMD’s data center CPUs notes a high-frequency SKU, designed to push performance up in more demanding applications, as opposed to the dense, frontend-focused EPYC 9996.

Both chips use AMD’s SP7 socket, which is geared toward data centers, with higher core count SKUs. The upcoming SP8 socket is focused on enterprise customers, with smaller core counts and support for fewer memory channels.

Although the EPYC 9996 is a dense design with the Zen 6c core, it comes with a fairly high boost clock of 4.1 GHz, though a much lower 2.55 GHz base clock, which it will likely be running closer to in real deployments. It comes with a massive 1,024 MB pool of L3 for the chip, as well as a 600W rated TDP, though it can be manually adjusted between 400W and 600W.

The EPYC 9686F proves out AMD’s claims about Venice, serving as one of two chips in the SP7 lineup to boost up to 5 GHz. It has a lower 500W TDP, though it can again run between 400W and 600W. This is the SKU AMD has heavily referenced in its published Venice benchmarks as a “96-core HF” model.

It’s an interesting model, perhaps more so than the EPYC 9996. It’s in direct competition with Nvidia’s Vera CPU, not only based on core count, but also on performance. These two chips trade blows in several benchmarks, and it’s clear that AMD is pushing this SKU as its “agentic CPU” of the Venice lineup, similar to how Nvidia has positioned Vera.

You can see the platforms we tested above. The Nigeria reference platform we tested these Zen 6 chips on came with top-end DDR5-12800 MRDIMMs, arranged to fully saturate the 16-channel memory with 32 sticks. This massive jump in memory support is a critical aspect of Venice, particularly for the hotly contested EPYC 9686F and its all-important matchup against Vera.

Vera’s use of LPDDR5 SOCAMM2 memory allows for higher transfer rates than standard RDIMMs in a field-replaceable package, though through a relatively tame eight-channel setup. Vera can get away with 8-channel memory, however, with its topology allowing for massive data movement across the chip. AMD’s distributed design necessitates a bigger memory configuration, with double the channels and access to even higher transfer rates through the use of MRDIMMs.

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ 9996 and 9686F SPEC estimates

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ 9996 and 9686F SPEC estimates

Starting off our benchmarks is SPEC CPU 2026, the de facto industry benchmark for server CPU performance. As usual with SPEC runs, the numbers below are “estimates.” We gathered the numbers from real SPEC runs, but we haven’t reported them to the SPEC committee, so they remain “estimates.”

For the throughput benchmark suites, intrate and fprate, we ran a number of copies for each application equal to the thread count of the chip. All of our tests were run on Ubuntu Server 26.04 with Linux Kernel 7.0, and we used GCC 15.2 for all but the Venice chips. GCC 16 brings official support for Zen 6, which we used here. However, we did regression testing against GCC 15 and found only minor differences, and nothing that would change our standings.

Using GCC 16 was important to keep our optimization flags equal. We used common GCC flags, including fast link-time optimization and march/mcpu flags to expose the correct processor instruction support. We also used the open-source jemalloc memory allocator across all tested systems.

The overall intrate scores set the tone, particularly for the EPYC 9996. It has access to 1,024 threads in a 2P configuration, multiplying the clear speed improvements in Zen 6 broadly across more threads compared to last-gen’s top-end EPYC 9965. The 9996 scored a massive 93% higher in this test, though that number requires some context.

Both throughput benchmarks in SPEC reward not only how much work is done, but also how quickly it’s done. With access to a much larger thread pool and improvements in Zen 6 broadly, there’s that multiplicative effect when looking at pure throughput. A 2P EPYC 9996 system is 93% faster than a 2P EPYC 9965 system in this benchmark, but not broadly across the board.

The EPYC 9686F provides some context, which is still good news for AMD, just not on the level of doubling the performance of the previous generation. We unfortunately didn’t have access to a 9575F for a closer gen-on-gen comparison, but the EPYC 9755 is a decent proxy, with its 128 cores and relatively high 4.1 GHz boost clock. Compared with that CPU, the EPYC 9686F in a 2P configuration is 19% ahead — not too shabby considering the thread disadvantage.

Critically for AMD, the EPYC 9686F is also 17% ahead of Nvidia’s Vera CPU. Vera punches far above its weight class compared to the x86 competition, as evidenced by its matchup against the 9755 and Intel’s flagship Granite Rapids-AP 6980P.

fprate

Flipping over to float performance, AMD did a lot of work on the vector engine in Zen 6, and it shows up in fprate. The differences between the EPYC 9996 and 9686F are smaller, though not in a way where both chips are hamstrung. Rather, the EPYC 9696F is able to push up closer to the 9996, leaving both Zen 6 chips running circles around the field.

AMD more than doubled the score with its Zen 6 chips compared to our Zen 5 touchpoints, which is a massive achievement. The EPYC 9686F excels even more over Vera in fprate with a 40% lead, despite only a minor bump in core count (88 on Vera to 96 on the 9686F). Intel’s Granite Rapids-AP isn’t in the conversation here for raw performance; though, apparently the range is still in high-enough demand that Intel has increased production in the tight CPU environment we’re currently experiencing.

These throughput benchmarks are most representative of how these CPUs will actually be deployed, running multiple copies of applications under high concurrency. However, SPEC CPU also includes its speed suite, which looks at application performance when you can dedicate the whole chip to running just that one application, more along the lines of a client CPU benchmark.

The EPYC 9686F naturally looks better here with its blistering 5 GHz boost clock. In the integer suite, the frequency-optimized chip is 21% ahead of Vera, both in a 2P configuration. The 9996 still holds up, only falling short of the 9686F, despite much more inter-CCD communication.

SPEC shows the various improvements in Zen 6 showing up in a compounding fashion. There’s the new microarchitecture with an optimized vector path, but also more cores per CCD. And also support for higher memory speeds, as well as more memory channels. In isolation, any of these improvements are solid (if rote) for typical gen-on-gen improvements. Add them up in a workload that can take advantage of all of those improvements, however, and Zen 6 is blistering.

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ 9996 and 9686F Python and memory benchmarks

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ 9996 and 9686F Python and memory benchmarks

Two of the biggest performance vectors in the agentic era are memory performance and Python performance, at least at the moment. Agentic frameworks are largely defined by Python between LangGraph and CrewAI, though alternative frameworks written in TypeScript and Rust have started to appear as well. Regardless, Python remains important for agentic CPUs right now.

Similarly, memory bandwidth is important for certain types of agents, particularly those that need to query large databases, regardless of if they’re a traditional relational database written in SQL or a non-relational database.

Starting with the industry-standard STREAM benchmark, AMD is ahead of Nvidia’s Vera by between 11% and 19%, depending on the test. However, this was with the OpenMP “true” policy for process binding, which binds processes to the thread they’re placed on to avoid them jumping around and skewing the results. Vera performs well, even with this policy, but its mesh cache and monolithic design allow it to realize big performance gains with the “spread” policy.

This policy also binds processes, but it distributes them across the chip as far away from each other as possible. AMD chips don’t see an improvement with the spread policy, and Intel’s Granite Rapids-AP sees a slight regression. Vera, however, remains on top of the pile, with a clear victory margin with the policy applied.

In the tried-and-true MBW benchmark, the pair of 9996s claim a small lead over Vera, with a small array size of just 128 MB, but Vera jumps into first place when the array size increases. AMD has certainly tightened up the memory matchup against Vera with 16 channels and support for 12,800 MT/s MRDIMMs, but Vera’s topology and already competitive memory subsystem still wins the day.

The clear differences in memory performance flatten off as we flip to Python, which is a much more hotly-contested area of performance. Starting with a broad overview, we have PyBench. Across the suite, the EPYC 9686F was 32% faster than Vera, while the EPYC 9996 naturally claims a smaller 14% lead with its relatively limited boost clocks. For gen-on-gen comparisons, the EPYC 9996 is an impressive 24% ahead of the EPYC, while the 9686F claims a lead of 35% over the 9755 – though, no small part of that advantage is the 900 MHz higher boost clock that the 9686F has access to.

PyPerformance allows us to go more granular into specific Python applications and functions, but a similar pattern appears. The rankings of other CPUs change, but across the vast majority of tests, the EPYC 9686F leads by a clear margin. It makes sense, too, given that Python heavily leans on a single thread at stock.

There are some exceptions, notably the networkx benchmark, where the throughput-optimized 9996 tops the charts, matching Nvidia’s Vera. Despite how impressive Nvidia’s chip is, considering the company’s infancy in data center CPUs and the chip’s tame spec sheet, Venice shows that the CPU game is AMD’s to win (or lose).

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ 9996 and 9686F compression and rendering benchmarks

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ 9996 and 9686F compression and rendering benchmarks

Breaking out of the agentic bubble, AMD has continually proven itself as the leading force in general-purpose data center applications, and that trend continues with Venice. As with all of the workloads here, they can touch on agentic AI depending on what the agent is set up to do; database performance, for example, is important if an agent is often querying a database. However, we’re going to keep our analysis at a high level here, as EPYC CPUs will be deployed for a broad range of workloads, some portion of which won’t come remotely close to agentic AI.

Starting with compression performance, AMD generally sits at the top of the charts for compression and decompression speeds, which is the case here with zstd and 7-Zip. In zstd, Vera claims an early lead at the lowest compression level. However, its poor decompression performance shows up even at level 3, and AMD takes over with a clear victory at the compression level 19, with Vera falling even further behind in decompression performance.

The long mode results are especially interesting. Although the rankings don’t change, Vera’s performance in these sustained compression workloads gets worse, while AMD is able to hang onto much more of its performance. Vera and the EPCY 9686F are within noise of each other in the level 3 compression test, and Vera falls to the bottom of the rankings when looking at decompression.

7-Zip has been, for years now, AMD’s game. The charts really speak for themselves here; we’re dealing in multiplicative factors compared to Vera, not to mention the weak competition from Intel’s Granite Rapids-AP. AMD is always strong in 7-Zip, which is compounding here considering the already high base level of performance we see out of Zen 6 across a wide range of workloads.

Onto rendering, Blender shows big gen-on-gen gains for Venice, with the EPYC 9996 offering somewhere between a 30% and 40% improvement over the EPYC 9965 depending on the scene. This is true even in demanding scenes like Barbershop, where render time can be expressed as minutes instead of seconds for many chips. The EPYC 9996 completed the render 35% faster than the EPYC 9965. The EPYC 9686F was able to match the dense EPYC 9965, despite packing half of the cores. Vera isn’t included in our Blender results because a native Arm version isn’t available.

Vera retains a top position in C-Ray, both at 4K and 1080p, though a dual EPYC 9996 configuration is within spitting distance. The script flips in OSPRay, with AMD pulling off clear leads in real-time ambient occlusion, scientific visualization, and path tracing. There are some massive jumps, with the EPYC 9996 nearly tripling the performance of the Xeon 6980P and Vera in the ambient occlusion and scientific visualization tests.

The reworked vector engine in Venice shows up even more clearly in the dim_512 tests, which further stress both the vector engine and memory bandwidth of the platform.

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ 9996 and 9686F Java and database benchmarks

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ 9996 and 9686F Java and database benchmarks

We run three Java suites to measure the ever-important programming language that shows up everywhere from scientific computing to database workloads. Starting on the former end, Java SciMark shows the EPYC 9686F in a clear lead over the competition, with a massive 92% lead over Vera in the composite score. For an apples-to-apples gen-on-gen increase, the EPYC 9996 managed a respectable 24% jump over the EPYC 9965.

Java SciMark provides a nice overview of some critical functions, such as Monte Carlo risk analysis that’s applicable to financial institutions. DaCapo and Renaissance are much wider suites measuring a range of Java-based applications. Many of these tests are highly specific, so the rankings jump around, depending on what the workload stresses. We can see a bit of that with Java SciMark, as well, with Vera claiming the top slot in FFTs. Venice, however, remains ahead.

In large column-based database workloads like Clickhouse, Venice also looks impressive, though not from the jump. Vera maintains its performance from a cold cache, while none of the x86 competition reach steady performance until the cache is warm. The reason should be obvious given Vera’s topology and its distributed mesh, which allows it to jump straight to its peak performance, even when the cache is cold.

Once it’s warm, the 9686F jumps into the lead. There’s a regression in performance going from the 9965 to the 9996, which makes sense for Clickhouse, as larger core counts can create issues in cache coherency.

To look at NoSQL performance, we have simdjson, which leverages SIMD instructions for JSON parsing, as the name implies. Once again, the vector engine in Venice shines, regardless of the workload you look at.

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ 9996 and 9686F HPC and compilation benchmarks

AMD Zen 6 EPYC ‘Venice’ 9996 and 9686F HPC and compilation benchmarks

Vera showed strong compilation performance against AMD’s Turin chips, but Team Red leapfrogs that performance with Venice. Starting with LLVM, the frequency-optimized 9686F earns a top slot with makefiles, while the EPYC 9996 tops with Ninja. The drop is around 19% gen-on-gen, aligning with the performance we’ve seen with other workloads.

In PHP, where Vera is more competitive, the EPYC 9686F squeezes out the most marginal of victories, but perhaps most telling is the 9996, which is in the upper tier of chips, despite how dense it is. Building applications, the Godot game engine and ImageMagick once again show both Venice chips on the top of the stack, outclassing the performance of Vera, which previously held a top slot in ImageMagick, and only fell slightly behind the 9755 in Godot.

The 9686F shows large performance jumps in HPC workloads, which AMD says is the target of these lower-core, frequency-optimized SKUs. In CloverLeaf, the EPYC 9686F is more than twice as fast as Vera, and it’s nearly twice as fast with FFTE. In Octave, Vera retains its top position, but both Venice chips are only slightly behind.

Although not traditional HPC, the heavily threaded number crunching behind the scenes in the Stockfish chess engine allows the 1,024 threads in a 2P EPYC 9996 server to outclass the 9965 by nearly 50%. Primesieve shows similarly large leaps, with the EPYC 9996 calculating some 37 billion prime numbers in less than half a second.

More to come

More to come

AMD already had a strong position in the newly reinvigorated CPU market with Turin. The unique topology and strong focus of Vera has allowed Nvidia to make inroads in certain workloads, but even looking at two SKUs from AMD’s broad Venice lineup, it’s clear that AMD is able to push performance much higher across the board. In some cases, that’s by orders of magnitude gen-on-gen.

There isn’t one area of Zen 6, or the SoCs available with Venice broadly, that totally accounts for the performance increase. It’s small advantages throughout the design, pushing an already strong vector engine further, vastly increasing CCD density, and giving memory bandwidth a boon between support for 12,800 MT/s MRDIMMs and 16-channel memory courtesy of the dual IODs.

But the story AMD has been trying to tell, and the one that’s difficult to ignore in the current market of a one-size-fits-all approach we’ve seen from Nvidia and Arm, is that Venice is available in a broad range of different configurations. We tested two chips on SP7, but the enterprise-focused SP8 socket is arriving within the next few months. And next year, AMD is pushing out Venice-X with 3D V-Cache for HPC workloads, as well as Verano, which looks like AMD’s take on Vera with its field-replaceable SOCAMM2 LPDDR5X memory.

Even without those chips, the two SP7 chips we tested already give AMD a leading position among current data center CPUs. Intel’s Diamond Rapids could change that story come next year, but the EPYC 9686F provides top-tier performance with HPC and AI host node performance, while the EPYC 9996 provides unmatched throughput.

MORE: Best CPUs

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There's a great Newegg combo deal right now that'll net you half the parts you'll need for a new 4K gaming PC. For $1,090.98, you can pick up the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, one of the best CPUs you'll find for gaming, along with 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR5-6000 RAM and a mid-tier Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 motherboard.

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Starting out in this combo is one of the fastest and best of the current-gen gaming CPUs on the market, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. This eight-core, 16-thread Zen 5 processor has a base clock speed of 4.6 GHz and a max boost speed of 5.2 GHz and a 120W TDP. More importantly for gamers, though, is the L3 cache. This boosted 96MB L3 cache capacity is the reason AMD CPUs have become the dominant force in gaming right now. They're able to deliver faster, more stable frame rates as the CPU doesn't need to rely on the slower system RAM as often while you're gaming.

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What's old is new again. Seagate started adding faster flash-based storage to its hard drives in 2010, when solid-state storage was prohibitively expensive. And now that SSDs are stupid-expensive again (thanks, AI hyperscaler demand) the hard drive maker is offering up another hybrid drive, of sorts, with the Firecuda Forge.

Available in 8TB and 20TB capacities, the Forge is an external hard drive that requires that you bring and install your own SSD. That's right, the drive won't work unless you partially disassemble and install your own M.2 2280 SSD, which mounts in the side of the enclosure. 1TB drives with DRAM are recommended. Performance maxes out at PCIe Gen3 drives; newer, faster, and roomier SSDs are supported, but won't improve performance. The Firecuda Forge only has a mounting point for 2280-length drives, and while drives that are less than 1TB are supported, that means less room for frequently used files, so "performance may be reduced."

Interestingly, Seagate sent us a 2TB FireCuda 530R SSD to test with the Forge hard drive, which is both faster (PCIe 4.0) and more spacious than what the company says you should pair with its hard drive. The list of SSD that Seagate has officially qualified to work with the Firecuda Forge is also pretty sparse, including just three other drives: Samsung's 990 Pro, WD/Sandisk SN850X/GX Pro 850X, and the WD/SanDisk SN710/GX7100.

We only received a review sample a few days before launch, and haven't yet had a chance to put the FireCuda Forge through its paces for a full review. But I was impressed that, after I installed the SSD and plugged the drive in, it just showed up in Windows 11 as an 8TB drive. (The company says it also works with macOS 26 and later). There was no software setup involved, and Seagate says you can even remove and upgrade the hard drive to something roomier down the line. Seagate calls the "product architecture" that handles unifying and data handling between the spinning platter drive and the SSD "Alkemi," and says it combines "onboard processing" with the hard drive and the user-supplied SSD to "prioritize active data without requiring users to manually manage separate drives."

Seagate says Alkemi observes workloads and gives priority to currently relevant or often-used data, that it adapts over time to user behavior, and describes it as an "on-device device dynamic caching and workload-aware data-prioritization technology." That sounds pretty similar to the SSD caching used on hybrid drives of the early 2010s, although with up to 1TB of fast SSD storage, you're getting a much bigger fast data pool than those drives of the past, which often made do with 4-16GB.

Interestingly, Seagate says that machine learning is a part of what Alkemi does, but repeatedly points out in its review materials that it is not using generative AI. It's likely the company is worried about customers connecting the many reported instances of LLMs and agents deleting data with this new product. I can understand why Seagate would want to distance its hybrid storage tech from reports of catastrophic data deletion.

What's the FireCuda Forge like to use?

Getting past the somewhat odd-feeling aspect of having to crack open an external drive right out of the box and install another drive into it in order for it to work, the process was pretty painless. You have to remove four screws from the bottom (with a tiny included hex-bit driver) to get the outer shell off the FireCuda Forge. From there, the M.2 drive bay is clearly visible on the side. If you want to remove six more hex screws, you can also pop out the hard drive for future upgrades. But for now, we're just going to install an M.2 SSD.

SSD installation is pretty much the same as putting one of these drives in any laptop or motherboard. Though you'll need a tool; the drive requires a a tiny screw and Seagate does not include a suitable Phillips head screwdriver. The drive bay is somewhat recessed, and there are two thick thermal pads included in the box that should ensure the drive makes contact with both the inner edge of the bay and the external shroud.

This should provide some heat dissipation, but these surfaces are all's plastic, with only a foil layer on the outer shroud to draw some of the drive's heat away from the SSD itself. This is probably fine for most bursty game and creative workloads. But this design does not feel ideal for workloads that hit the drive consistently for hours on end. During our testing, the edge of the drive where the SSD is installed got noticeably warmer than the rest of the enclosure, but it didn't get hot.

In terms of design, the FireCuda Forge looks very similar to the FireCuda X Vault HDD we looked at earlier this year, complete with some gamer-friendly RGB lighting. The primary physical difference is that you'll need the supplied USB-C cable and external power adapter to use the Forge, while the X Vault only has a USB-C port. Presumably, powering both a 3.5-inch hard drive and an M.2 SSD draws too much power for most (or at least some) USB-C ports. I still would love for drives like this to be able to run off of one single cable, though, which was my favorite feature of the X Vault hard drive.

Preliminary testing

We only received the FireCuda Forge a couple of working days before its announcement. But we were able to run some benchmarks with the Forge drive and a 530R SSD that Seagate provided, and saw some interesting results. The Forge's USB-C connection is USB4, and Seagate's performance claims are up to 2,500 MB/s read and 2,000 MB/s write. That's obviously much faster than a hard drive, but you're also going to be sacrificing the speed of the SSD you're dropping into this drive — especially if it's a PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

On this synthetic test, Seagate's Forge beats recent traditional hard drives (and the slowest external SSD we've tested, Samsung's T5). But Kingston's fast flash drive does better, as does Sandisk's Desk Drive, which nearly doubles the score of the Forge, which isn't surprising given it's a full-fledged external SSD.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Here , we see the Forge drive easily beating the spinning-platter-only drives and Samsung's T5 Evo on writes, only falling to the SanDisk Desk Drive desktop SSD. But on reads, the Forge leads by the pack.

Synthetic Testing: CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Last up (for now), CrystalDiskMark proves the Forge does benefit significantly from its USB4 interface, with its performance on sequential reads and writes jumping well ahead of everything else on our chart — because all other drives here top out at 10 Gbps. There are, of course, faster external SSDs (like Samsung's recent P9). But at 8TB, solid-state options are generally more expensive, and faster external SSDs at 8TB are much more expensive. And of course, 20TB external SSDs aren't really an option, at least in the consumer drive space.

Pricing and final thoughts

The whole reason a product like the Seagate Forge exists is because SSDs are expensive. The problem is, hard drives have faced similar price jumps due to demand. And Seagate says the 8TB Forge will launch at $699 for the 8TB drive, and $899 for the 20TB option. That's a lot of money for a drive you need to also put your own M.2 SSD into for it to function.

We'll also need to do more testing with things like game load times before passing judgment on the FireCuda Forge. But it likely makes much more sense in the 20TB capacity, where no single-drive consumer SSD-based option exists. At 8TB, there are options like SanDisk's Desk drive, which has a slower 10GBps interface, but is a full-fledged SSD, rather than a hard drive with some fast SSD cache. Surprisingly, that Sandisk drive is still on sale for $999. And unless you happen to have an old M.2 SSD lying around to install into the Forge, its price, including the SSD it needs to function, isn't going to be far off traditional solid-state options.

Reddit user u/Doomslayer606 posted about frayed braided sleeving on both 12V-2x6 cables for their two RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation GPUs the other day, asking whether it’s normal cable degradation or a sign of overheating. The GPUs were running at 500W, below the maximum 600W power draw, but commenters are confident it’s overheated cables, as the poster reports stiff, cracked, and easily peeling sleeves on only some of the wires.

u/Doomslayer606 posted on r/PcBuild with the title “Did I just save my RTX PRO 6000 GPUs from melting?” with photos of the 12V-2x6 cable’s braided sleeving frayed. The poster asked in the description whether this was normal degradation, a manufacturing issue, or overheating. The poster reported that the damaged braided sleeving felt stiff and peeled off easily, which is a strong indication of heat damage, and the comments were sure that it was.

Luckily, the poster’s GPUs were safe, but the 12-2x6 connectors are notorious for melting due to high power draw. One comment asked if they kept the stock power limit, to which the poster responded that they lowered both GPUs to 500W — another user responded asking why the poster wouldn’t use 300W, but the poster said it would reduce performance by up to 50% and they need to keep up with their deadlines.

Theoretically, the cable should be able to handle 500W, as each positive pin would only handle 6.94 A, which isn’t enough current to significantly heat up 16 AWG wire, but one of the main causes of cable overheating is uneven current distribution across the pins. Since only two of the pins melted on both cables, it’s likely those received high-current spikes often, leading to heat buildup.

Users have suggested aftermarket cables like the Corsair ThermalProtect 12V-2x6 cable that detects overheating cables, and the Thermal Grizzly WireView Pro II or Aqua Computing AMPINEL, which have active current balancing to prevent any wire from taking too much current alone. In a recent story, someone even created a power distributor, distributing the 12 pins into two 8-pin cables with a custom-designed PCB, which lowered the cable temperatures significantly — while another modder had a cursed solution, soldering thick cables directly to the RTX 5090’s power pins.

In an ideal world, consumers shouldn’t need another product or mod their GPUs to stop them destroying themselves. GPUs have only gotten more powerful, but instead of using more or thicker wires, we’re getting fewer wires of the same thickness. Understandably, having multiple 8-pin connectors gets messy, but surely there has to be a better solution. Maybe GPUs have outgrown the Mini-Fit Jr. connectors and need to have their own special connector with thicker pins and thicker wires.

The smartphone industry is expected to see a spike in reballed memory adoption. According to a report by global market intelligence and research firm TrendForce, the current penetration rate is estimated at around 3–4%, with reballed memory primarily used in entry-level and budget smartphone models. However, this figure is expected to rise to 7–9% in 2027.

Reballed memory is recycled memory salvaged from older or discarded devices. The term reball comes from the process itself, in which the solder balls on a used memory chip are first melted so the chip can be removed from the old device, then re-soldered to a new device, thus allowing the component to be reused rather than discarded. You can see the process in action in the video below.

This offers manufacturers a cheaper alternative to sourcing new memory chips, potentially helping them keep production costs under control. Currently, reballed 4GB LPDDR4X memory modules make up the majority of such components on the market, and they are used in 4G smartphones priced below CNY 1,299 (approximately $200).

This tactic is becoming increasingly important for smartphone makers, as customers are particularly sensitive to price increases in the budget segment. This leaves limited room to raise retail prices without affecting demand. Using reballed memory can help offset rising bill of materials (BOM) costs while allowing brands to keep entry-level devices affordable.

TrendForce expects DRAM prices to rise even further in the first quarter of 2027, which may put additional pressure on smartphone manufacturers. As a result, the use of recycled memory and other lower-specification components could gradually expand beyond the entry-level segment and into more premium smartphones. What is currently a cost-saving measure for budget devices could eventually become a broader strategy for manufacturers looking to manage expenses amid a prolonged period of high memory prices.

The rising cost of memory is also pushing PC enthusiasts and hardware hobbyists to explore unconventional ways to reuse existing DRAM chips. Recently, an electronics hobbyist converted a relatively inexpensive $120 DDR5 SO-DIMM kit into a desktop memory kit valued at around $1,000. The project involved salvaging an SK hynix 2x 16GB DDR5-5600 SODIMM kit purchased from Facebook Marketplace and reballing the chips onto custom desktop DIMM PCBs, with the resulting modules reportedly capable of reaching DDR5-7800 speeds.

Converting laptop memory into desktop DIMMs is technically demanding and requires considerable expertise and specialized equipment. Similarly, reballing memory for use in smartphones is far from straightforward, particularly given the tiny solder connections in modern BGA (Ball Grid Array) packages. Nevertheless, both developments highlight how manufacturers, repair specialists, and hardware enthusiasts are exploring alternatives to reuse existing memory to offset rising costs and limited availability.

A new GitHub repository dubbed ram-altman features a script to monitor your PC’s RAM usage and report back to the eponymous OpenAI boss. Sam Altman infamously described people having spare, underutilized DRAM in computers at home as “quite terrible” in a recent podcast. Thus, developer Iain Kay was inspired to write a bash script that emails the OpenAI boss once a day to report on any RAM that is underutilized. Clearly this is not a serious tool, or rather “The memory accounting is. The correspondence isn't,” says Kay.

ram-altman leans on the MemAvailable query, which returns the kernel's own estimate of how much memory programs can claim without swapping, explains the developer of this script. When installed, it checks every five minutes and emails Altman once a day if you are found to be wasting this precious resource.

The emails take the .CSV file logs of your RAM use throughout the day as the data source to compose a summary email. These script-generated messages rotate through eight subject lines, 10 humorous message boilerplates, and six signoffs. Sample emails can be seen on the ram-altman.lol website. Altman’s email address isn’t supplied as part of the script.

If your machine is using 90% or more of its RAM, then you won’t be reported to the OpenAI boss for wasting memory. Also, if you don’t want to disturb Altman, you can run the tests without emailing anyone with the terminal command: bash ram-altman.sh --dry-run

The developer isn’t too scathing of the OpenAI boss. Kay quotes Altman’s explanations that his remarks were taken out of context. Moreover, the dev doffs his cap to the artificial intelligence leader’s humorous display name change to ‘Ram Altman’ on X last week. That’s where the name for this script came from.

ram-altman is a free bash script available on GitHub. It runs natively on Linux. On Windows, you can use WSL to run it, but someone has ported it for PowerShell too. It won’t run on Mac, but Altman and his minions would find it inconvenient, at best, to remove your soldered-down Apple RAM.

Put simply, AMD dominates the gaming CPU world right now. While the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D isn't the most powerful, it's still the best option for gamers, offering a good performance-to-power ratio. It's simply a powerhouse, and right now, it's down to a new record low price of $399.99 at multiple retailers. Considering the performance you can get with a 9800X3D, you'll want to grab it if you've got an AM5 build.

● Check out this deal on Amazon

● Check out this deal on Newegg

Both Newegg and Amazon have it at this record price, but you'll need to apply some coupons to get the price. At Newegg, that means using the coupon code BFF36 at checkout to knock $70 off its current list price, while at Amazon, you'll need to click or tap to apply the $49.01 coupon, shown below the price.

There aren't many options for gaming that beat the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. It's a powerhouse that was, until recently, the best CPU for gaming in the world, beating every other chip due to its boosted L3 cache capacity. You're getting an eight-core, 16-thread processor, made using AMD's current-gen Zen 5 architecture, with a boost clock speed of 5.2 GHz, and a 120W TDP.

The 9800X3D is fully unlocked, so it's possible to overclock it, which was a limitation in older 3D V-cache chips from AMD. It's that extra L3 cache that makes this such a special chip, too, stacked beneath the CPU cores closer to the heat spreader on a reconfigured die.

Faster chips do technically exist, like the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which our CPU benchmark data shows is 3% faster at 1080p than the 9800X3D, although with much higher power demands. The 9800X3D offers the best performance per watt of any other gaming CPU, so you can really maximise performance without a huge increase in electrical power. You can see, too, from the Bench charts below that the 9800X3D sits very close to the top as far as CPU performance goes.

Put simply, if you pair this processor with a recent GPU, you won't see many bottlenecks. Pair it with a top-class option like the RTX 5080 or RTX 5090, and you'll be hitting high frame rates in any game you can throw at it. CPU-intensive games like Cyberpunk 2077 won't be let down by that 96MB of L3 cache included in this X3D chip.

Given how good a processor this is, and how little Intel has been able to rival it, we can't see it falling out of date for a long while yet. It's sitting at the top of the food chain and will continue to dominate games for years into the future. AMD's AM5 platform, meanwhile, remains in use, and AMD has promised to support it for at least one more generation.

If you want even better performance, though, then the 9850X3D (which, as we mentioned earlier, does manage to beat the 9800X3D by 3%) is also on sale. You can pick up the 9850X3D for $419 at Newegg right now, thanks to a $65 promo code, a significant discount on its launch price. You'll need to apply the BFF39 code at checkout at Newegg to get the discount, or apply the on-screen code if you buy it at Amazon.

The 9800X3D and 9850X3D are formidable options for gaming, the 1-2 winners that sit above all others. The record-low $399 sale price for the 9800X3D is simply exceptional, while $419 for the 9850X3D is an $80 drop compared to its launch price. Either option would be a serious upgrade for an AM5 gaming PC, or as the center point of a new build.

An SSD can spend most of its day doing very little, particularly when a PC is sitting idle. That may not be the case for some AMD Radeon systems, however, with reports suggesting that AMD’s External Events Utility (EEU), which is installed alongside Radeon drivers, may be writing data to the system driver continuously, even when the computer is barely being used. The issue drew attention again on November 8, when Reddit user ‘darklinkpower’ highlighted reports of the unusual drive activity.

One Radeon owner claimed the problem had been quietly eating into their drive's reported health for more than a year, writing: "I just found out that the driver eats up 1% of my SSD health every month for 16 months." Another user reported sustained writes of approximately 5MB/s while their PC was idle. Another one claimed their SSD health had dropped by about 1% every month for 16 months. AMD has acknowledged the problem. In an October 21 response on its community forum, a company representative confirmed that they were investigating. “Yes. We're looking into it with the aim to resolve it in a future driver release." He said. Another representative, AMAD Vik, subsequently offered a more encouraging update on Reddit, apologizing and saying, “This is hopefully fixed in the next one."

Notably, the EEU is not an entirely unfamiliar culprit. Last November, a similar issue involving AMD chipset drivers arose, with a Redditor claiming he had discovered that the software repeatedly updated a log file whenever on-screen elements were moved or resized. That incident also prompted questions about whether stopping the service would affect FreeSync. The latest reports are a different proposition, though, with some users now seeing writes that barely let up, even when their PCs are doing nothing.

The numbers are worth looking at. At 5 MB/s, an SSD would receive about 18GB of host writes per hour. Over a full day, that's 432GB, and a month of uninterrupted activity could push the figures close to 13TB. That, however, does not necessarily mean being written to the NAND flash itself. SSD controllers use caching and wear-leveling, and other techniques, to manage incoming data. How much of that reported activity thus translates into actual flash wear is still unknown. The user's claim of losing 1% of drive health each month also hasn't been independently confirmed.

Moreover, there doesn't appear to be clear patterns across Radeon driver versions. Reports include systems running Adrenalin 26.19.2, as well as older releases, suggesting the problem may not be limited to the latest update. AMD's October 30 release notes for Adrenalin 26.20.2 don't mention the issue either. For now, it's difficult to say which driver versions, hardware combinations, or system configurations are responsible.

That said, there are two reported workarounds. The first involves opening the Windows Services application by pressing Win + R, entering services.msc, and locating AMD EEU. Users can then stop the service or change its startup type to Disabled. That appears to stop excessive writeups, but isn’t necessarily a clean solution. The second workaround involves disabling Resizable Bar (ReBAR), which another user reported had stopped the disk activity without disabling the EEU. This, however, isn’t ideal either, as ReBAR can improve gaming performance by allowing the PC to access the GPU’S memory more efficiently.

For now, checking whether the problem actually exists on your PC is probably the most sensible first step. Open Windows Resource Monitor by pressing Win + R, typing resmon, and selecting the Disk tab. Sort by write activity and look for sustained writes from atieclxx.exe or atiesrxx.exe. AMD has indicated that a fix is in the works, but hasn’t published a confirmed release date. Until then, Radeon owners may want to monitor their storage activity rather than immediately disabling driver services or changing BIOS settings.

Current-gen desktop builds are becoming rare due to memory and graphics card pricing, so many enthusiasts have taken to upgrading older machines, using previous-gen platforms, or buying used hardware. For any and all of those scenarios, the G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3200 32 GB kit is just perfect, and it can be yours for $209.99 at Newegg with promo code BNWF83.

• Check out the G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB DDR4-3200 kit at Newegg with promo code BNWF83

This dual-channel kit does exactly what it says on the tin, offering a roomy 32 GB that ought to be fine for many years to come, or until Altman finds your location. The rated speed is pretty good at 3200 MT/s, and latency is pretty good at 16 cycles. There's no onboard RGB, but that's a blessing in disguise, proven by the low asking price. The exact model is F4-3200C16D-32GVK, if you're curious.

With this kit in hand, you can conjure up a perfectly potent gaming rig using, say, a Ryzen 5800X3D CPU ($319.99 with promo code BFF43), an Asus TUF B550-Plus Wi-Fi motherboard ($119.99), and a Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 graphics card ($729.99) and still come in under $1,500 for the baseline components.

As befits any quality memory kit, there are onboard XMP 2.0 profiles, and the maker offers a limited lifetime warranty. I've personally used the G.Skill memory for decades now, and have nothing but good things to say about the quality of the gear and the effectiveness of the company's RMA and support.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to having an affair with a woman who is allegedly a Chinese spy. His apology came in a letter to Nvidia staff, which you can read in full below. Nvidia's board of directors released a statement late on Sunday to address the bombshell report that U.S. intelligence believes Huang had an affair with a Chinese spy. The board says it has no reason to believe sensitive corporate information or U.S. national security was compromised, but the company intends to examine all available information to determine what happened.

The BoD claims it is fully confident in Jensen Huang and his leadership team. Huang, who has been married to his wife, Lori Huang, for 41 years, says he fully supports the investigation.

"A committee of independent directors, assisted by outside independent counsel, will oversee the investigation," a statement by Nvidia's BoD reads. "The Board prioritizes U.S. national and economic security, which is paramount to the interests of Nvidia and its shareholders. […] Jensen fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it."

On Friday, the first reporting emerged claiming U.S. intelligence agencies believe Huang had a romantic relationship with Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed who was allegedly recruited by China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) to gather information and help Chinese companies obtain restricted AI GPUs. The company has been on the radar for smuggling restricted hardware to China since at least 2025: Megaspeed has been accused of smuggling $2 billion worth of AI chips into China via its subsidiary Speedmatrix.

Nvidia has strenuously rejected suggestions of improper dealings, saying that its CEO regularly meets thousands of customers and that these interactions do not involve sensitive corporate information or national security secrets. Chinese officials have also dismissed the espionage allegations as unfounded.

The suspected Chinese intelligence operation targeting Jensen has not been independently confirmed as a fact. The relationship is alleged to follow the typical "honeypot" strategy, wherein foreign intelligence agencies use operatives to ensnare targets into romantic relationships to steal information and influence their decision-making.

Huang has been an outspoken critic of those opposed to limiting the supply of AI GPUs to China. Huang recently expressed his opinion that the label 'China hawk' is not a badge of honor Americans should wear; it is really 'a badge of shame.' Huang also said it "doesn’t have to be all us or them. It could be us and them," drawing fire from others in the administration and other tech companies, including the CEO of Palantir.

"I owe my family and all of you an apology," Huang wrote. "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry. Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it. To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust."

In June 2018, Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich resigned after an internal investigation, assisted by external legal counsel, confirmed that he had engaged in a consensual romantic relationship with an Intel employee, which violated the company's non-fraternization policy applicable to all managers. Krzanich, who had led Intel since 2013, also stepped down from the company's board, while then-chief financial officer Robert Swan took over as interim CEO. For now, it remains unclear if Jensen will meet a similar fate and lose control of the company he founded.

Jensen's full letter to staff reads as follows:

To my colleagues at NVIDIA, I owe my family and all of you an apology. I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.

Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.

To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.

To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.

Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.

My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.

Jensen

The whole statement from Nvidia's Board of Directors reads as follows:

The Nvidia Board is initiating an independent investigation in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.

A committee of independent directors, assisted by outside independent counsel, will oversee the investigation.

The Board prioritizes U.S. national and economic security, which is paramount to the interests of NVIDIA and its shareholders.

While the Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised, the Board's inquiry will examine all available information.

Jensen fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it.

The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team and will provide further updates as appropriate.

Diamonds have exceptional cooling capabilities due to their excellent thermal conductivity, with the material estimated to be at least five times more conductive than copper. Because of this, Diamond Foundry, a firm focusing on lab-grown diamonds, announced the world’s first 200mm single-crystal diamond (SCD) wafer. The 200mm SCD is about the same wafer size that semiconductor fabs use for older processes, with the company boasting on its website that “Single-crystal diamond has entered the wafer-scale era.” This is part of the effort to manufacture SCD at scale so that it can be used for semiconductor cooling, especially now that increasing power of AI chips has also led to enormous thermal problems.

What makes Diamond Foundry’s 200mm SCD wafer different from other lab-grown diamonds is that it’s created as a high-quality single-crystal piece instead of a polycrystalline gem. Although the former is difficult to manufacture, it is what allows diamond to become an extreme efficient thermal conductor while simultaneously retaining its electrical insulating properties — this efficiency should help cut down on hotspots, making SCDs an excellent solution for AI chip cooling.

The company also showed in a graph that it is now thought possible to create a D300 SCD wafer before 2030, matching the size of the wafers used in leading node processes. However, it should be noted that the sample shown by the company remains unpolished, meaning it still needs to go through some processes to make it suitable for chipmakers.

Although the company was founded in 2012, it also acknowledged the work of scientists who have been chipping away at the scale problem of SCDs since the early 2000s. “This is one of those milestones that once seemed almost impossible. Hundreds of DF engineers, scientists, and technicians contributed to us getting here. It is the accumulated result of countless experiments, failures, inventions, rebuilt machines, and insights over more than a decade,” Diamond Foundry CEO Martin Roscheisen said.

“Stefan and Martin pursued this goal for 25 years. There are very few examples in technology of someone sticking to a really hard scientific challenge with that level of perseverance. They kept going when the prevailing view was that single‑crystal diamond simply could not be made at this scale. Today, the perseverance shows as the first-ever D200mm single‑crystal diamond. And best of all, it makes D300mm predictable as well.”

Diamond Foundry isn’t the only company that has identified the potential of lab-grown diamonds for semiconductor cooling. Akash Systems secured $18.2 million in CHIPS Act funding in 2024 to produce Gallium Nitride fused with synthetic diamond, which it claims will reduce temperatures by 20 degrees C. The De Beers Group, which is known for its diamond mines in Africa, is also building a copper-plated diamond composite material aimed at improving cooling efficiency for AI, high-performance computing, and GaN RF devices. Even Frore Systems, which is known for its solid-state cooler, is diving into diamond-infused watercooling cold plates for Nvidia’s next-generation AI GPUs.

On this day in 2006, Nvidia released the legendary GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS graphics cards. Nvidia has decided to honor the flagship of the pair with its GeForce 8800 GTX - 20 Years of a Legend interactive demo, now free on Steam. However, the recommended specs to ‘play’ with this semi-interactive path-traced unboxing experience include a wallet-worrying RTX 5080. Or you could just watch the video, embedded below for your convenience.

The downloadable demo, which also requires 32GB of RAM and 30GB of free storage, was created by Dylan Browne, a senior special effects artist who frequently works with Unreal Engine, as in this case. This experience is said to deliver era-appropriate graphics, but requires the most advanced graphics tech available two decades after the 8800 GTX first hit the scene to work its graphical magic.

To run GeForce 8800 GTX - 20 Years of a Legend on a 2026 PC, you will need at least an RTX 4070 for acceptable performance, according to the Steam page. This software is stuffed with the latest graphics tech embraced by the green team. “DLSS 4.5 with Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction, path tracing, and Mega Geometry” are all present, says Nvidia.

There’s a bit more to the interactive demo than looking around and poking a box with your mouse and then prodding it to fit the shiny new GPU into your “era-accurate PC tower.” An extra layer of fun is promised by the provision of hidden Easter eggs in this experience.

However, the demo appears to show Windows Vista on the PC in the gaming den, which launched at retail a few months after the 8800 GTX. Admittedly, this legendary GeForce card and Windows Vista OS would roam the Earth at the same time, with many folks buying the GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS to shove into their Vista PCs from 2007 onwards. Crysis launched on PCs in late 2007, a year after the G80 architecture cards debuted.

Nvidia launched the GeForce 8800 GTX (128 shader units) and 8800 GTS (96 shader units) at $599 and $449, respectively. These legendary Nvidia GPUs spearheaded the DirectX 10 era, accelerating existing PC titles and delivering next-gen visuals with new DX10 software. You can read more in our reviews from the time, like the 12-page review of the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS from the launch week. Briefly, our reviewer thought these cards were “amazing” for their current performance and DX10 promise. They were also excited about the G80 architecture for bringing CUDA to consumers and the promise of making the GPU “something much more than a frame rendering device.” Some Luddite gamers may wish that had never happened.

Nvidia driver support for the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS would run out of road about a decade later. By that time, DirectX 11 hardware and games were mainstream, leaving older graphics hardware designs obsolete when it came to playing the latest AAA PC titles.

Microsoft VP Scott Hanselman has revealed a new open-source GitHub project called gputaskman. The name neatly encapsulates the headline role of this tool, a GPU-focused task manager, but its scope might be broader than you expect. This new tool for Windows, Linux, and macOS can show per-process GPU usage, VRAM consumption, active runtimes, and many more stats. It also breaks out AI/LLM task-specific information.

On social media, Hanselman snappily makes clear the technical itch that gputaskman was designed to scratch. “There's a lot going on in my GPU,” wrote the prominent public face of Microsoft's developer ecosystem. “I'm making a GPU Taskman to get insights to where my GPU memory is going.”

There are several example screenshots of GPU Taskman in use by the Microsoft VP. They clearly show the kinds of data that are presented in the terminal-like display that pops up in the tool. Hanselman’s tweet shows that the most VRAM-hungry app on his RTX 4080S system is the desktop windows manager. That is selected in the list, and more details are shown for this task at the bottom of the window. Also, we see AI/LLM apps consuming VRAM, and a few Windows staples.

In a GitHub-embedded image, we see what details are broken out when the llama-server.exe app is selected in the list. The bottom of the window breakdown reveals that Qwen3-0.6B is being used, and there’s a breakdown of its weights, the KV cache, the number of parameters, and more. Very informative.

As the Microsoft developer has made portable Windows downloads of the latest v0.3.0 release of gputaskman, I couldn’t resist giving it a spin. Upon launch, I found that no tasks were using the discrete GPU in my laptop… so I fired up ye olde Unigine Valley GPU benchmark to stir the RTX 4060 from its slumber. I note the live-streaming charts showing GPU load, VRAM use, temperature, and so on are more prominent in my screenshot than in Hanselman’s examples. Perhaps he screen-shotted a previous version of the tool.

There’s a lot more information about gputaskman, its inner workings, and even its source code, on the linked GitHub repository. Hanselman is sharing his “experimental software” tool under the permissive MIT license. Finally, in social media comments, he hints that expanded GPU monitoring capabilities could be coming to Windows as standard.

The latest CPU-Z hardware survey data shows 32GB and 64GB memory configurations down 2.5% and 18% year on year, respectively. The driving factor is no mystery: High-capacity memory has become a luxury in modern PC builds. The AI rush is still gobbling up the global DRAM supply, so prices for the best RAM options across DDR4 and DDR5 have gone through the roof.

If you are not familiar with CPU-Z, it is a free program that gives you a detailed breakdown of the hardware inside your system. It only tracks systems where it is actually installed and running, so it does not report monthly retail sales figures. Do not take the data as sales figures in any sense. They represent CPU-Z's active user base.

32GB and 16GB are common configurations that have grown over the years. According to the gathered data, 32GB configurations lead CPU-Z's user base with a 37.2% share, with 16GB configurations close behind at 33%. Not a surprise, really, since applications and games have grown more memory-intensive. 16GB has been the baseline for a long time now, and 32GB is now the sweet spot for many people, even gamers.

On the flip side, 8GB configurations have been steadily declining. They make up only 11% of the surveyed systems. 8GB systems are rare nowadays. You may still find them in legacy systems, basic office machines, or extremely budget-limited builds where performance takes a backseat. Meanwhile, higher-end configurations, including 64GB and 24GB, are still in the minority at 7.3% and 2.3%, respectively.

For the first time, the CPU-Z developer recorded a noticeable decline in higher-capacity configurations. Specifically, 32GB configurations fell 2.5% year over year, while 64GB options dropped a significant 18%. This is likely due to the steep rise in memory prices, which has forced consumers to reconsider the cost-benefit of larger capacities.

As the price per gigabyte goes up, buyers are opting for more affordable capacities. Lower-capacity memory kits have seen a somewhat revival. The 16GB configuration, often considered the minimum, has rebounded by 12.9%. Similarly, 8GB configurations, which were previously in sharp decline, grew 5.5%.

Interestingly, 24GB configurations also increased by 19.7% and have become a compromise for consumers who need more than 16GB of memory but do not want to spend a lot of money on a premium 32GB memory kit.

How much money are you willing to spend during the Black Friday sales?

The current distribution between DDR4 and DDR5 memory types reveals that DDR4 remains the dominant memory standard at 54.5%. In contrast, DDR5, despite being the latest memory technology, is still in its early adoption phase at 32.9%. DDR4 has been the de facto standard for almost a decade now, so it will take time for DDR5 to overtake it.

Nonetheless, the noticeable 6% growth in DDR4 and 2.9% decline in DDR5 suggests budget-conscious consumers are sticking with platforms that still embrace DDR4, such as AMD's Zen 3-powered Ryzen 5000 (codenamed Vermeer) or Intel's 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors. CPU-Z's processor charts show a significant increase in Zen 3 chips, including the Ryzen 7 5700X, Ryzen 5 5600, and Ryzen 5 5500, with figures up to 42.8%, 36.1%, and 67.3%, respectively.

Although both DDR4 and DDR5 have increased in price, the former remains slightly more affordable. Companies are supporting the effort too, such as AMD rereleasing the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, vendors restarting DDR4 and DDR4 motherboard production, or Intel preparing rewarmed Raptor Lake Next chips for 2027.

It is arguably the worst time to build a gaming PC especially with the ongoing memory crisis inflating the cost of RAM, SSDs, and graphics cards. One way to possibly work around the rising costs is to consider a prebuilt system. For instance, the iBuyPower Slate Gaming Desktop PC, a well-rounded mid-range gaming PC which is selling for a very reasonable price of $899, down from its regular price of $1,399 over at Best Buy.

• Check out the deal on Best Buy

The system is powered by the AMD Ryzen 5 8400F, an entry-level 6-core, 12-thread desktop processor with a relatively low 65W TDP. This makes it fairly power-efficient while still offering decent performance for 1080p gaming. For graphics, the prebuilt comes with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060, a solid GPU for 1080p gaming as well as an entry point to Nvidia's latest Blackwell architecture, with support for multi-frame generation and newly released DLSS 5.

For memory, there's a single 16GB DDR5 stick running at 4,800MT/s. which isn't particularly fast and should ideally be configured in dual-channel, but a 16GB DDR5 memory stick on its own can cost around $300, making the system's $899 asking price a pretty solid deal. It also comes with a 1TB NVMe SSD with additional storage expansion for a secondary M.2 as well as SATA 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives. It is also worth noting that this iBuyPower prebuilt is cheaper yet more powerful than the Steam Machine, which currently goes for $1,049 for the base 512GB storage model. With a little bit of tinkering one could even use this system as a dedicated gaming PC for their living room.

In terms of cooling you get a single tower CPU cooler in addition to four ARGB fans, three at the front and one at the rear. The sturdy mid-tower chassis offers additional cooling fan mounting options, a glass side-panel, and a 600W PSU. iBuyPower also offers an entry-level gaming keyboard and mouse combo with the gaming PC. Remember, the discounted price of $899 is a limited-time offer, so you may want to grab it before the deal expires.

Every once in a while we get a drive that comes across our desk that stands out, for good or for bad. The TeamGroup GA Pro falls into the latter category, enough so that we re-checked our results and contacted the company. We’ve managed to mostly sort out what’s going on and, while this is not the worst drive around, it has enough problems that we would generally not recommend it except if it's on steep sale.

TeamGroup’s array of storage offerings knows no bounds: if there’s a niche to cover, it makes an attempt. The GA Pro feels like such a try, although we’re not completely sure where it fits into the mix. The company is still working to iron out the bugs, if it can, but the technology is old enough that we wouldn’t hold our breath. On paper, it’s a PCIe 5.0 drive with DRAM that should beat any PCIe 4.0 SSD, but we found it struggles to live up to its own class of drive. Bright points are few and far between, but at least we can say it’s not the worst drive we’ve seen. The edges are just rougher than usual.

TeamGroup GA Pro Specifications

The TeamGroup GA Pro is available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB capacities, although we only have the 2TB showing up at $331.99 at retail right now. The 8TB will probably be hard to find at this point. The drive is rated for up to 10,000 / 8,500 MB/s for sequential reads and writes, with no IOPS rating, although a drive like this can achieve 1 million or more. It has the standard five-year warranty with up to 600 TB of writes per TB of capacity.

TeamGroup GA Pro Software and Accessories

TeamGroup has a number of downloads available for this range of drives, which is better than nothing. They do maintain firmware for their drives, and we made sure our test sample had the newest revision, 050g05E7. Also available is the SSD S.M.A.R.T. TOOL, which is their SSD toolbox with basic functions, such as health monitoring. For backup and cloning on Windows, we continue to recommend MultiDrive, which continues to be updated based on user feedback.

TeamGroup GA Pro: A Closer Look

The good news is, the GA Pro has a graphene heat-spreading label. The bad news is, it’s insufficient to cool this drive. In most cases, you will want a heatsink on this. You can use a heatsink with the label in place, but you will have better luck if it’s removed. We are fond of graphene labels as they can be surprisingly effective, but it’s just not enough here.

Then we have the label which, with the 3.3V / 2.5A rating, puts the drive at a very optimistic 8.25W. We measured over 12.5W peak in our testing below. We can’t go by reported power states, as these top off at 3.50 W. Since we can’t rely on that, we can’t say for sure what even the expected enter/exit latencies are, relevant given TeamGroup’s claims about the drive, which we’ll get to later. The drive is otherwise double-sided with a controller, two DRAM packages, and four NAND flash packages.

The SSD controller is InnoGrit’s IG5666, the company’s answer to the Phison E26 high-end PCIe 5.0 champion. We have better controllers in that segment now, like the E28 and SMI’s SM2508, but even at the time of release, the IG5666 was not very popular. Both the E26 and IG5666 run very hot due to using an older process node, and newer flash wasn’t available yet to more easily reach the bus speeds needed. The GA Pro is not running full-out but, to be honest, that doesn’t help much. Phison put a lot of work into getting the E26 up to full speed in steps, and even the base 10 GB/s ones run toasty.

The drive does have the right amount of DDR4, 2GB, for this amount of flash. No problems there. The flash also looks to be YMTC’s 232-layer TLC, which is also perfectly fine. The controller is the weak spot here and, as we’ll find out, its firmware really keeps the GA Pro from reaching its full potential, even with its bandwidth cap.

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Comparison Products

We’re throwing a mix of drives today at the GA Pro, in the interest of finding out why it performs the way it does. Direct competitors include the Crucial T700 and Corsair MP700, two Phison E26-based drives. The MP700 is rated at around the same speeds as the GA Pro, while the T700 is a step up, about halfway from there to the E26’s 14 GB/s effective ceiling. We also have the TeamGroup GE Pro sibling as a drive with similar hardware to the GA Pro but rated for the InnoGrit IG5666 controller’s full speed. The Addlink G55, PNY CS2150, and Crucial P510 also hover around the same specs but are later-arriving, DRAM-less drives. We also have the Lexar NM1090 Pro (4TB) in the mix as it’s a high-end PCIe 5.0 drive, but considered slightly more budget-leaning. Finally, the TeamGroup G70 Pro is our PCIe 4.0 stand-in for a last-gen comparison, from the same company and also with an InnoGrit controller.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

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

There’s no doubt about it; the GA Pro’s response here is quite poor. The drive’s score of 1,428 puts it pretty close to the SATA SSD range of around 1,000 to 1,400, and second to last of the 242 NVMe drives in our database. Now, this is plenty fast for gaming and much better than using an HDD, but it’s also terrible for an NVMe SSD, and we would not recommend it for this.

Right out of the gate, we began to question this drive’s results. We switched up our comparison drives, re-ran the tests, and ultimately contacted TeamGroup. In theory, this score is what we would expect given their explanation, which was that the drive was designed for CDM, ATTO, and sustained writes to get the most out of its bandwidth potential. The firmware being used drops the drive into a lower power state when the host is idle, and this can add unwanted command latency. That matches the 3DMark latency result.

Optimizing for certain workloads makes sense, but we don’t think this result is defensible. The likeliest reason for any such design, beyond the stated one, would be to handle heat. This controller runs hotter than any other PCIe 5.0 one we’ve tested. So, this is almost OEM-drive-like behavior, in the sense that it’s really trying to keep the drive within a certain envelope. We think the firmware is not operating as intended, but we at least accept the theory.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

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

We see the same issue in PCMark. Terrible latency leads to terrible overall results. The drive may not be slow intrinsically, but it might as well be considered as such.

Our hypothesis here, since the problem is consistent, is that the drive is unintentionally throttling. Usually this happens due to heat, but saying “heat” is not fully addressing the problem. That is, it’s not necessarily the heat causing the issue but how the drive and firmware detect and handle it. We remember the days of prototype PCIe 5.0 controllers, mainly from Phison, where flash temperatures were not properly calibrated and caused unintentional throttling. It’s possible something similar is happening here, given how hot the controller runs (see our power and temperature section), but the early takeaway for now is that this is a “solved” problem that InnoGrit is struggling with on this drive for one reason or another.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

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

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

We usually don’t worry about the PS5 with PCIe 5.0 drives, as even the slowest ones are plenty for the console, but we wanted to be sure with this one. The drive works but does not perform that well. Given how brief this testing can be, and because it’s limited to PCIe 4.0 speeds, we don’t believe the drive is throttling. It’s more likely the same latency issue we saw in the trace tests, or a larger firmware issue.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

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

The GA Pro also ends up dead last in DiskBench, which also requires explanation. The drive has a very small cache for its size and generation, something that is also OEM- or NAS-like rather than what we’d expect from a normal retail drive, but it’s large enough to fit this test. Either the cache was not fully emptied in testing, which generally would also be linked to firmware, or we’re having more issues here from the previously mentioned flaw. The drive is also slower with reads because the reads in this test are at a queue depth of 1, where the drive is known to have issues; this was affirmed by TeamGroup when we asked.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

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

The GA Pro isn’t actually all bad here, with reasonable ATTO curves and even some okay marks in CDM. 4KB latency is still higher than expected, and that hurts this drive for everyday use. On the other hand, it can mete out some decent sequential performance, especially at QD8. TeamGroup told us that this is what the drive was designed for, so that lines up. Keep in mind, this drive isn’t going to keep up with PCIe 5.0 drives rated for higher speeds. Instead, to keep it on the positive side, at QD8 it does very well against drives with similar specs.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

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

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

The GA Pro’s fastest mode, pSLC, or what’s called the cache, writes at around 9.2 GB/s. This is respectable for the drive’s speed class and beats any PCIe 4.0 drive, but also doesn’t set records. It only writes at this speed for approximately 7 seconds, which is incredibly short, and means the cache is only about 69 GB in size. This is small in general, small for a 2TB drive, and very small for a modern, PCIe 5.0 drive. It’s not unheard of, as we’ve seen caches around this size on some drives to improve “quality of service,” which basically means keeping the drive performing consistently even when the cache runs out.

We don’t see that, per se, after the cache runs out here. The drive initially acts in an erratic manner, although eventually it does hit a steady speed around 2.5 GB/s. This isn’t too bad, but the drive should be able to muster a little bit more: the G70 Pro, with the same YMTC flash and an even smaller cache, manages about 2.75 GB/s. Still, it’s fast enough to be useful for some applications. TeamGroup suggested this is one area the drive was designed to be good at, and while we can’t agree with that 100%, we do think its current arrangement is, on paper, good for something like write caching. It would be better if things were smoothed out, maybe through firmware, and we would absolutely recommend a good heatsink for that type of workload on this drive.

Power Consumption and Temperature

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

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

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

At this point in the review, you’re probably thinking to yourself: I bet the GA Pro isn’t very power-efficient, either. You’d be correct; it finishes last in our lineup. That comes down to its slow DiskBench copy speed, which our efficiency metric is based on, paired with high power draw: the GA Pro averages 6.32W, fourth-highest in our lineup, and peaks at 12.53W, the highest. Also, its hardware is already known to be inefficient even compared to comparables like a Phison E26 and Micron TLC on the MP700; see the GE Pro. We also don’t really expect great power efficiency out of a drive like this. That said, yeah, don’t get this drive if you care about that. One thing we’ll add is that TeamGroup’s claim about latency fits the results here: the GA Pro’s idle power consumption is significantly better than the GE Pro’s.

Temperature-wise, well, what can we say? The three sensors reported maximum temperatures of 61, 72, and 92 degrees Celsius. The 92-degree reading is most likely the controller, which held at 88 degrees or higher for over 90% of our sustained write test. The drive’s 90-degree warning threshold applies to the composite sensor, which peaked at 72 degrees, and it stayed below that threshold. But the controller holding steady at around 89 degrees in some cases suggests the firmware may be working around that temperature instead. Either way, yes, this drive runs hot. Mind, this is with cooling, so you would definitely want to be prepared to handle this one.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

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

TeamGroup GA Pro Bottom Line

We test many, many drives and only rarely, exceptionally, do we consider giving out a perfect score. That’s because the perfect drive is essentially a unicorn. The same goes the other way, too: to get our very worst rating, a drive would have to be truly awful. Now, the TeamGroup GA Pro is among the worst drives I’ve handled in my tenure, but I’ve heard of many worse. Drives that fail at the drop of a hat, ones plagued with firmware issues, ones with low-grade flash, ones with PCIe 3.0 or worse performance. They exist, and the GA Pro is not one of these. We also reviewed tons of drives from TeamGroup; this is a known brand that also communicated to us the need for a firmware revision, which makes us feel like the InnoGrit controller choice is the biggest issue here.

The GA Pro is an odd drive, anyway, because it’s not fast for a PCIe 5.0 drive. It’s at first-gen speeds for the high-end drives in this class, with the next two steps being 12 and 14 GB/s or so, and it ends up competing with later-arriving 10 GB/s drives that are DRAM-less and far more efficient. If you’re looking at a chart of drive generations like it was showing an evolution, this drive is halfway to being a dinosaur at this point. If we look at the problems Phison had early with the E26, we can see some misstep overlaps here. Our feeling is that TeamGroup had a rough idea of what they wanted this drive to be, and there are many hints at that, like the small cache size, and the vision never panned out. Not surprising given the controller has never done well and the consumer SSD industry at this point is exceptionally bad.

No excuses here, though. Performance is very bad for this class in many areas, especially with low QD reads, presumably due to a latency issue, which hits the drive hard. Power efficiency is also pretty bad, not unexpected, though, and the drive runs hot. That’s also expected from this hardware.

On the other hand, sustained write performance is not terrible once it steadies out, and in some high-QD situations the drive even outperforms its spec. We think TeamGroup could have slotted this into a NAS-like category or even HEDT like other early PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The cache speaks to that, although we’ve seen some Phison-based drives use a smaller cache to smooth out write performance. Which means that TeamGroup may have been targeting a similar milieu, but of course putting the GA Pro up against an E31T drive, like the P510, makes little sense to us.

We cannot recommend the drive in its current form; it needs a firmware update. With that update, and if pricing is respectable, the drive has some niche applications. It could tank some higher QD sequential workloads and let you induce less wear on your better or more important drives. Certainly, most drives in this class have massive caches, and that’s not always a good thing. The problem is we would still probably go with those over a GA Pro even where they may be slower. This drive feels more like one you find $100 off on a sale that seems like a misprice some random Sunday, in which case, well, you could do worse.

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A recent report from The Information suggested that TSMC is exploring 3D DRAM production at Nvidia's request as surging demand for AI hardware strains global DRAM supplies and drives up prices. If the proposal were to come to fruition, it could mean a new, albeit prone to cyclical risks, business for TSMC and could dramatically expand its role in the AI supply chain. For its part, TSMC states that it is a pure-play logic foundry and plans to remain a logic foundry, which essentially means a denial of the report.

"Please note that TSMC focuses on our core business at all times, which is dedicated IC foundry," a TSMC spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "Our mission is to be the trusted technology and capacity provider of the global logic IC industry for years to come."

Despite the denial, according to two people familiar with the initiative cited by The Information, TSMC has begun preparing plans for 3D DRAM manufacturing following a request from Nvidia, its largest customer. The initiative is reportedly overseen by Hsu Kuo-chin, TSMC’s vice president responsible for advanced packaging and former head of Micron’s Taiwanese operations. The effort comes amid widespread memory shortages that turned memory from a commodity into a strategic asset that could determine whether a company can ship its products to customers or not.

Although TSMC works closely with DRAM producers as it packages memory into system-in-packages (SiPs) for its customers, the company lacks the expertise and production capacity to make DRAM, let alone 3D DRAM. Meanwhile, given that 3D DRAM is years away even for major memory makers, pursuing a 3D DRAM strategy cannot solve memory shortages for at least five years.

Unlike conventional DRAM, which arranges memory cells in a single plane, 3D DRAM places multiple levels of memory cells vertically to increase capacity per wafer. All three leading DRAM makers — Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix — are working on their 3D DRAM projects. However, Micron's DRAM strategy includes at least four more planar DRAM process technologies before 3D DRAM becomes a reality.

While TSMC has arguably the industry's best logic process technologies, DRAM production requires entirely different manufacturing processes, which TSMC would have to develop, should it pursue making memory for its customers. Meanwhile, producing 3D DRAM requires completely different fabrication techniques to construct multiple memory-cell layers while controlling defects and maintaining acceptable yields. It is hardly possible to develop a 3D DRAM manufacturing process without having a competitive planar DRAM process technology, and TSMC does not have one.

One of the options for TSMC to enter the DRAM business would be to acquire a small specialty memory producer that has its own fabrication capability. This would give TSMC a credible route into advanced DRAM manufacturing without having to develop the underlying memory technology and IPs from scratch. However, small makers do not have leading-edge commodity DRAM nodes, so TSMC would still need to invest billions of dollars and years of R&D into development of a leading-edge process technology for DRAM.

However, entering DRAM manufacturing would expose TSMC to substantial market risks. Memory shortages frequently encourage capacity expansions that eventually create oversupply, depressing prices and profitability. Such uncertainty could surely make TSMC think twice before going down the DRAM route. Furthermore, entering the DRAM business could also complicate TSMC's relationship with large DRAM makers in general, and SK Hynix, which partnered with the foundry in 2024 to manufacture logic base dies for next-generation HBM products, in particular.

TSMC’s potential entry into DRAM manufacturing could also raise antitrust questions, particularly if the company combines its dominant position in leading-edge logic manufacturing, leading position in advanced chip packaging, and ramping memory production. Regulators could examine whether such vertical integration would enable TSMC to favor its own memory products or disadvantage competitors that lack such a vertical integration. Then again, in-house DRAM development by TSMC could also strengthen competition by introducing another supplier into a market dominated by just three manufacturers.

Yet, TSMC does not necessarily need to manufacture DRAM to capitalize on growing demand for advanced memory. Instead, it could capture a larger share of the value generated by DRAM by producing sophisticated logic base dies for HBM, integrating memory with processors using its SoIC hybrid bonding technology, and developing customized memory solutions with partners such as GUC and established DRAM manufacturers. This approach would allow TSMC to expand its presence in the advanced memory market without investing billions of dollars in developing competitive DRAM process technologies from scratch and/or building additional fabs for tens of billions of dollars.

As high-end PC hardware continues to surge in demand and price, GPU theft has become a highly profitable target for criminals. According to a report by ABC7 News, authorities are investigating a major cargo heist involving the disappearance of an $11.4 million shipment of Nvidia hardware. The shipment reportedly consisted of six pallets of Nvidia hardware that left Oakland for Texas on August 29 and was picked up by a truck posing as a food transport company. Investigators eventually lost track of the vehicle in San Bernardino County, with the Oakland Police Department receiving a report of the theft on September 13.

"These chips command about double the price that they command inside the United States. So, if a chip costs about $550,000, then they go for about 1 million or more abroad," said Olaf Groth, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

While there has been no announcement regarding any arrests, the authorities are said to be investigating the matter. The incident has also raised concerns among experts about the security of high-value technology shipments and the potential national security risks posed by advanced computing hardware making its way into black-market channels.

In a similar incident from Brazil back in September, two pallets containing Nvidia's top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards, valued at approximately $470,000 (R$2.5 million), disappeared at Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo. The shipment, imported from the US, had reportedly arrived at the airport on September 20 and cleared customs on September 24, but the two pallets went missing the following day after being authorized for release.

The investigation eventually uncovered a possible inside job, with Brazilian police identifying three airport employees suspected of helping carry out the heist. According to reports, two outsourced forklift operators allegedly removed the pallets from a warehouse, an incident that was reportedly captured on CCTV, while a third employee responsible for checking and releasing merchandise allegedly helped bypass the airport's electronic controls.

Things took an interesting turn when one of the stolen Zotac RTX 5090 graphics cards appeared for sale on the Brazilian online marketplace OLX for more than $6,000. The listing included clear pictures of the card's serial number, allowing it to be linked to the missing shipment. The listing has since been taken down, while the whereabouts of the remaining graphics cards remain unclear.

Intel’s new Nova Lake-S CPUs are rumored to be on track to start mass production in Q4 2026, with a launch expected in Q1 2027. Unlike previous launches, we’re supposed to see mid-range SKU(s), supposedly an unlocked 28-core product(s), first in Q1, followed later in 2027 by flagship-class models that allegedly use two compute tiles and feature up to 52 cores.

Lip-Bu Tan, Intel CEO, said earlier this year that Nova Lake is “coming at the end of 2026.” Despite the growing number of rumors and statements, we still don’t have a concrete date, but we can expect to see the CPUs soon, and with them, a brand-new socket and motherboard chipsets.

Regardless of how many cores they have or when they arrive, you will need a new motherboard for Nova Lake. The LGA 1851 socket is at the end of its life with the release of Core Ultra Series 2 processors like the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, released earlier in 2026; that means no more new processors and a dead end. A new socket, LGA 1954, is necessary because Nova Lake CPUs have a significant increase in I/O and power needs. It’s also Intel’s first bLLC (big last-level cache) intended to take on AMD’s X3D CPUs.

We haven’t seen many details about the boards themselves, like pricing, official configurations, or product stacks, and we've only caught glimpses of one or two early models at Computex. Still, we have seen a few interesting platform details and rumors. To that end, we’ve put together a table of what we know so far about the specifications. Some things aren’t official yet and are noted by the tilde (~). We’ve also listed last-gen equivalents for reference.

The new lineup consists of five different chipsets. You get Z990 and Z970 for the enthusiast class, B960 for the Mainstream, W980 for workstations, and Q970. You may notice it’s missing the ‘H910’ platform for entry-level PCs, and now we see a second enthusiast-class platform, the Z970, wedged between the B960 and Z990. Z990 is still the flagship, offering more PCIe lanes, a DMI Gen5 x4 link, and 12 Gen5 lanes from the chipset. Z970 is the less expensive enthusiast option and is reportedly built on the same silicon as B960. You get CPU multiplier overclocking, but no BCLK adjustment, and of course fewer ports and lanes than the flagship.

The chipset package itself, internally codenamed “Nova Point,” will also differ slightly and is smaller than Z890 (600 mm² vs 658 mm²). The die-on-package shrinks to 72.5 mm² (11.15 x 6.5mm) compared to 92.9 mm² (11.15 x 8.33 mm), or roughly 22% smaller. Base power increases to 7.9 Watts, up from 6 W on the Z890, with a maximum of 14 W while working.

That power-density increase explains Intel’s rumored active-cooling guidelines for the chipset. When you start connecting components that use the chipset, think some PCIe slots and M.2 drives, the chipset raises its working voltage to maintain signal integrity for all of the bandwidth it now has to provide for the attached devices. Hopefully this is only needed in the high-end Z990/970, where it has a lot more lanes/bandwidth to support, as some of the fans on the chipset (remember early X570?) could get loud.

What to expect from Nova Point motherboards

Beyond the new LGA 1954 socket, not much information has been released about what to expect from motherboard partners. We know the platform's base memory speed is a smoking-fast DDR5-8000, up 800 MT/s over the Arrow Lake refresh chips. And if you don’t have a kit that can run those speeds and want to, it will cost at least $700 from any reputable brand. So the platform's cost of entry will be high unless you’re starting with compatible RAM. That said, you can run slower speeds if you already have DDR5, which would save money, but it could create a performance ceiling.

We’ll also see more abundant PCIe 5.0 connectivity. The upcoming Nova Lake CPUs are said to offer 36 PCIe Gen5 lanes. You get 16 lanes dedicated to graphics, eight lanes to storage, eight lanes to Thunderbolt 5 controllers (4x ea.), and four lanes for the DMI. That said, speeds are the same as the previous generation, since PCIe 4.0 x8 matches PCIe 5.0 x4. The chipset now has 12 dedicated PCIe 5.0 lanes, so motherboard manufacturers can include multiple PCIe 5.0 NVMe slots without sharing bandwidth from the primary PCIe slot or stealing USB4 bandwidth. In theory, you can have five PCIe 5.0 M.2 sockets between the CPU's native lanes and the chipset without sharing bandwidth among PCIe slots or M.2 sockets—a significant upgrade over Z890.