A Reddit user secured a pair of Nvidia GTX Titan X (Maxwell) GPUs at a significant discount, purchasing the two cards for just $86. Syft694 said on PCMR Reddit that it also included a few random EK parts for water cooling, adding that they plan to upgrade from the GTX 1650 in their current system. The GTX Titan X (Maxwell) had an SRP of $999 per unit, meaning this card would have cost around $2,000 when new. This meant they were able to secure a discount of more than 95% on this SLI setup.

u/Syft694 admitted that they were new to the r/pcmasterrace subreddit and they’re asking if the Maxwell GPUs are still viable. While these cards aren’t equipped for ray tracing and are only comparable to an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti in performance based on Tom’s Hardware’s GPU benchmarks hierarchy, it’s still a substantial upgrade over their current graphics card. More importantly, it’s quite an affordable upgrade, especially at a time where GPU prices are skyrocketing because of the memory chip shortage.

I bought 2x EVGA GTX Titan X (Maxwell) with random EK parts all over it for $86. from r/pcmasterrace

One major issue that other Redditors pointed out is that they need to purchase water-cooling hardware required to cool the cards if they don’t have it yet. However, another one pointed out that they could find a Kraken G12 cooling bracket that should work with other AIO coolers on the market — hopefully, including the EK parts attached to the GPUs they bought. There’s also the issue of a lack of Game Ready Drivers for Maxwell cards, but the user argued that they only use it for playing older titles that benefit more from pure rasterization performance and that Turing and newer GPUs are insanely expensive in their region.

While u/Syft694 might not be as lucky as this Goodwill shopper that found a $30 PC with an RTX 3080 Ti GPU and Ryzen 7 CPU, the $86 Nvidia GTX Titan X (Maxwell) dual-SLI setup is still an excellent deal, especially if they do not need modern features. Aside from that, it saves the once formidable graphics card from the scrap heap, helping reduce e-waste and giving it a second life in a system built for running retro or classic games.

There’s never been a better time to buy one of the best 4K gaming monitors. With so many models to choose from and prices at historic lows, it’s almost a no-brainer. But, you say, won’t I have to upgrade my video card to maintain high frame rates? The short answer is yes, but there’s another way. Dual-mode monitors have appeared that, with the push of a button, double their frame rate while switching from 4K to FHD. Though you’re giving up pixel density in the process, it isn’t as dear when the screen is 27 inches.

A 27-inch 4K monitor delivers a tremendous pixel density of 163 ppi, which means the image is incredibly sharp with no visible dot structure. It’s great for close-in viewing, whether you’re gaming or working on your next Photoshop masterpiece.

There’s great value in this genre as well, and Titan Army is one of the leaders there. Its latest offering, the P2712V, delivers a 27-inch IPS screen with 4K at 160 Hz, Full HD at 320 Hz, Adaptive-Sync, HDR10, and wide gamut color. More importantly, it’s just $325, so let’s take a look.

Titan Army P2712V Specs

The P2712V starts with a 27-inch IPS panel sporting an edge backlight. Cost is kept down by leaving out a full-array LED and local dimming; neither is included. But brightness is solid at around 350 nits for HDR and SDR. There is no dynamic contrast in HDR mode, so the ratio remains around 1,000:1 across all content. You also get wide gamut color with a measured 93% coverage of DCI-P3. Accuracy is so good out of the box that I couldn’t improve the image with calibration.

Not too much has been sacrificed on the altar of value. There are aiming points, static and dynamic, sniper modes, night vision, frame counters, timers, alignment marks and solid video processing with a well-implemented overdrive. LED lighting accents the back of the panel with colorful vertical bands. And the stand is fully adjustable with solid ergonomics.

The dual mode switch takes a couple of button presses to execute, but once set up, you can quickly change between 4K at 160 Hz and Full HD at 320 Hz. You lose pixel density, of course, but at 27 inches, the P2712V has a sharper FHD picture than a 32-inch screen.

There are plenty of inputs for all the latest systems, PCs, and consoles. Two HDMI 2.1 and two DisplayPort 1.4 operate at full bandwidth, 3840x2160 at 160 Hz with Adaptive-Sync and HDR. You also get a headphone jack, but there are no USB ports.

Titan Army has always impressed me with its value. The P2712V’s bang-for-the-buck quotient is very high with little left out for $325 at this writing. Let’s check out some test results.

Assembly and Accessories

The P2712V’s plain brown wrapper is so subtle that you have to look at the stick-on label to know which model is inside. Once the crumbly foam is parted, you’ll find the base, upright, and panel securely packed. A small external power supply delivers the AC, and you get a heavy-gauge DisplayPort cable.

Product 360

My apologies for the stock photos above; the P2712V doesn’t actually make characters climb out of the screen. The picture looks awesome, though, thanks to the packing of 8.3 million pixels into a 27-inch IPS panel. The anti-glare layer cuts reflections nicely without spoiling that razor-sharp image. A thin bezel extends past the picture by just a few millimeters, creating a flush and frameless look. Only a Titan Army logo appears at the bottom, which reminds me a bit of a mouth harp. You know, one of those thingies that twangs when you pluck it. At the lower right is a row of OSD control keys and a backlit power button.

The LED lights trim two sides of the P2712V’s backside, making a nice contrast to all the textures going on. The perimeter looks like carbon fiber weave, and the center section has a brushed finish. The base also has a carbon fiber look. The lighting can be controlled in the OSD with multiple color and effect options.

The upright features 5/20 degrees tilt and a 90-degree portrait mode. You also get a solid four-inch height adjustment. There is no swivel. Movements are firm with confident positioning, but there is a little wobble where the panel attaches to the stand.

Up and under, you’ll find four video inputs, two HDMI 2.1 and two DisplayPort 1.4. All operate at full resolution and 160 Hz with HDR and Adaptive-Sync. You also get a 3.5mm headphone jack with volume control in the OSD. There are no USB ports or internal speakers.

OSD Features

The P2712V’s OSD is the same one I’ve seen in all Titan Army monitors. It offers many options for picture adjustment, gaming aids, and video processing, but it is a bit clunky to operate. After a bit of back-and-forth, I figured it out.

The OSD appears when you press any key and has a purposeful look suited for gaming. Resolution and refresh rate are shown at the top of all screens. Starting with the TI menu, it has aiming points, night vision, and two sniper modes. It also has a dual-mode switch that changes between 160 and 320 Hz.

The P2712V has 12 picture modes, though it could be said there are 24, since each has a default and a custom memory. To keep confusion at bay, stick with Standard mode in its default configuration. It doesn’t need calibration, and in fact, tweaking provides no benefit. If you need sRGB, it’s on the second screen of mode choices. It too has default and custom modes and can be calibrated if you wish.

In Picture Settings, you can pick from multiple gamma and color temp presets or adjustable RGB sliders. I found them quite coarse in practice, so for me, they made no improvement. If you get lost in the settings, you can reset just this menu back to factory defaults.

Some of the TI options are repeated in the Game+ menu, and you also get aspect ratios, HDR modes (Auto, Game and Movie) and picture enhancements. That’s where you’ll find the overdrive, which works well on all its levels except Extreme, which caused ghosting on my sample. Here also is the frame counter, more crosshairs, a timer and stopwatch, and sniper mode. This menu too can be reset independent of the others, very handy. Game Illumination refers to the LED in the back, which can be configured for different colors and effects.

Titan Army P2712V Calibration Settings

My initial measurements of the P2712V were excellent. It doesn’t need calibrating in the Standard mode. It also works well in sRGB mode where you get accuracy suitable for color-critical tasks. The native gamut covers 93% of DCI-P3, so it will be oversaturated for SDR content but not in a way that anyone will object to. I tried calibrating the RGB sliders, but found they weren’t fine enough to make any improvement. Below are the brightness settings for commonly used peak levels. HDR signals get three of their own modes, Auto, Movie and Game. Testing showed that Movie was the best choice.

Gaming and Hands-on

To prepare the P2712V for dual-refresh operation, I started in 4K and set the rate in the Nvidia Control Panel to 160 Hz. There were no issues running at full honk for hours of gaming. The P2712V was completely stable. To set up 320 Hz, first activate the dual-mode option in the OSD. On means 320 Hz at FHD resolution. Then return to the Nvidia Control Panel and set the refresh rate to 320 Hz. In both modes, use level 3 for the overdrive. It removes nearly all motion blur and doesn’t cause ghosting. Extreme will add artifacts, so it’s best avoided. There is no backlight strobe feature here, but it isn’t necessary if you run 4K faster than 140 Hz. My setup uses a GeForce RTX 4090, so I ran steadily at 160fps.

Games like Doom Eternal proved to be very responsive; I could not detect any input lag. The picture is super sharp, whether moving or stationary. Fast camera pans don’t cause the smearing that calls out a lesser display. Titan Army’s video processing is very well done.

To switch refresh modes, I had to return to the Windows desktop. Activating dual-mode in a game usually ends in a visit to Task Manager to close the crashed program. This is true of all the dual-refresh monitors I’ve reviewed. At 320 Hz/FHD, the P2712V is very smooth with no visible motion blur. You won’t be wishing for backlight strobing. The overdrive should still be set to level 3. The loss of pixel density is certainly obvious, but not a major negative. It will be attractive to users with less powerful PCs that can’t maintain 160fps at 4K. When it comes to frenetic gameplay, smoothness beats sheer resolution.

The HDR image was colorful and bright, but not more dynamic than SDR. This is solely due to the P2712V’s lack of dynamic contrast. A field dimming option would be welcome here, but in fairness, it is far from the only screen with this deficiency. It supports HDR but doesn’t embrace it.

For everyday tasks, the P2712V is a great choice. Pixel density like this is super nice for photo and graphics work. There’s no visible pixel structure at close viewing distances; I’m talking about 18 to 24 inches away from the screen. Color accuracy is also good enough for critical tasks, especially if you need sRGB. Titan Army nails that mode.

My only complaint about the day-to-day operation of the P2712V is its OSD. The menu has some redundancies that are confusing. And it’s challenging to navigate with just buttons. I’m spoiled by joysticks, but I think they should come on every monitor, regardless of price.

Takeaway: The P2712V punches above its weight class in gaming performance with premium video processing, responsive play and refresh rate flexibility. It can serve equally well with high-end and mid-grade systems. HDR imagery is color accurate and well saturated, but lacks the depth of monitors with dynamic contrast, which is absent here. I’m not a fan of the OSD, but in fairness, you won’t have to use it much since calibration isn’t necessary. Overall, the P2712V gives you a lot to be happy about at a low price.

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To compare the P2712V’s performance, I rounded up speedy 4K screens, mostly 27-inch and one 32-incher, the BenQ PD3226G. Two of them are also dual-refresh: Acer’s XB273K V5 and Alienware’s AW2725QF. Fixed at 160 Hz are Gigabyte’s GS27U and Asus’ XG27UCS.

Pixel Response and Input Lag

Click here to read up on our pixel response and input lag testing procedures.

At 160 Hz, the P2712V is 1ms slower to draw a full white field than its most direct competition. But that is made up for by its overdrive, which is extremely precise. Visually, it’s enough to eliminate the 1ms deficit. The P2712V is very smooth with only the tiniest bit of motion blur at 160 fps. At 320 Hz, there’s no blur to speak of. And that is also true of the Acer and Alienware.

In the lag test, the P2712V is a tad slower than the rest, but it is still within the realm of very fast. Hardcore competitors might prefer the Acer or Alienware for ultimate speed, but most of us won’t be able to perceive a difference between them and the Titan Army. I found it very responsive in all scenarios.

Test Takeaway: If you want the lowest possible input lag and panel response, you’ll have to buy an OLED. But for $325, it’s hard to beat the P2712V. It’s more than quick enough for all but those with very high skill levels. And you can ramp up the fun with the dual-mode switch. The overdrive works very well at 160 and 320 Hz and delivers solid blur reduction without ghosting on its first three levels. The P2712V’s performance compares well with that of more expensive displays.

Viewing Angles

The P2712V’s viewing angles are slightly better than those of the average IPS monitor. At 45 degrees to the sides, there’s a slight red tint which impacts content less than the more common green shift. There is little change in brightness or gamma, so detail and clarity remain high. From the top, you can see a blue tint and a roughly 30% reduction in brightness with light gamma.

Screen Uniformity

To learn how we measure screen uniformity, click here.

My P2712V sample showed excellent screen uniformity with just a 6.01% deviation from the center zone. This exceeds expectations for a $325 4K display. The competition shows solid performance too, but also costs more.

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To read about our monitor tests in-depth, please check out Display Testing Explained: How We Test PC Monitors. We cover brightness and contrast testing on page two.

Uncalibrated – Maximum Backlight Level

Titan Army rates the P2712V at 350 nits, but my sample couldn’t quite get there. It’s close, though, at 334 nits, more than enough output for any indoor space. If you need more than that, the competition promises over 400 nits, which is very bright.

Black levels are solid for an IPS panel, resulting in a decent contrast ratio of 1,026.8:1. That’s an average result and good enough for second place here. The P2712V would certainly benefit from a Mini LED backlight, but then it would cost more.

After Calibration to 200 nits

I didn’t calibrate my P2712V, just lowered brightness to 200 nits. That maintained a consistent contrast of 1,020.7:1, putting it in the top spot. In practice, there are no significant differences among the monitors in the group.

The P2712V also wins the ANSI test with a consistent 936:1 result. It is value-priced but still maintains good QC with well-selected components and solid build quality.

Test Takeaway: The P2712V provides solidly average brightness and contrast when compared to other 4K IPS gaming monitors. It’s average among IPS screens but slightly better than its most direct competitors. It maintains good black levels and a consistent contrast ratio in both static and intra-image tests.

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Grayscale and Gamma Tracking

Our grayscale and gamma tests use Calman calibration software from Portrait Displays. We describe our grayscale and gamma tests in detail here.

The P2712V gets off to a great start with nearly perfect grayscale tracking and gamma that tracks with little deviation from the reference. All gray errors are below 2dE, and the gamma average is 2.16, with the only error being a slight dip at 90%. It doesn’t get much better than this for out-of-the-box performance, especially at this price point. I attempted a calibration but could not improve upon what you see above.

In the sRGB test, grayscale tracking is even better with a 0.78dE average. That’s pro-level performance. Gamma is right on the reference line except for 10% brightness, which renders a bit light. This makes shadow detail clearer but also less dark than it should be. It’s a minor issue at best. I have no complaints.

Comparisons

At default settings, the P2712V beats all comers, except the XG27UCS, which shows exceptional grayscale tracking. 1.21dE is an excellent score. Once the other screens are calibrated, they draw ahead, but visually, there’s no difference between the top and bottom monitors. This is excellent performance.

The P2712V’s gamma test result is very good, but the others are a bit better. The light number I measured at 90% brightness is the main culprit. It contributes to a 0.13 range of values and a 1.82% deviation from the 2.2 reference. The actual value is 2.16. Again, I have no complaint.

Color Gamut Accuracy

Our color gamut and volume testing use Portrait Displays’ Calman software. For details on our color gamut testing and volume calculations, click here.

The P2712V’s gamut results are equally impressive. Magenta and blue show a tiny bit of undersaturation, while the other colors are nearly perfect. Green is a tad under as well, but there is more to that primary than I typically see from other non-Quantum Dot displays. Hue values are also spot-on.

The sRGB gamut chart looks like it came from an expensive professional display. Aside from a tiny undersaturation at 90% red, it is pretty much perfect. A 0.80dE average error is something you rarely find in a $325 monitor.

Comparisons

None of the monitors have significant color errors; they are all exemplary. The P2712V sits in fifth with 1.79dE, but that is still well below the visible threshold of 3dE. Though I didn’t show the sRGB values, the P2712V has a lower error in that gamut than the other screens.

Value displays rarely pass 90% coverage of DCI-P3, but the P2712V manages a solid result of 92.98%. It comes up the tiniest bit short in green, blue and magenta, but I’m definitely picking nits there. It is very colorful, and you won’t see any deficiencies in practice. This is excellent performance.

Test Takeaway: The P2712V is a very colorful monitor, especially when its low price is considered. It’s also more accurate than most value screens and manages to outperform more expensive monitors. You don’t need to calibrate it and in fact, the available adjustments provide no benefit. It also has a very accurate sRGB mode, which is something rarely found in any budget screen. For $325, it’s hard to beat.

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Our HDR benchmarking uses Portrait Displays’ Calman software. To learn about our HDR testing, see our breakdown of how we test PC monitors.

The P2712V supports HDR10 signals with an automatic switch. You get three specific modes, Auto, Movie and Game. There is no dynamic contrast, so you won’t get much drama, but it delivers accuracy on par with most of the other HDR screens I’ve tested.

HDR Brightness and Contrast

Bright highlights help boost HDR quality and the P2712V is a bit below average in that regard. Though it tops out slightly higher than its SDR value, it still falls short of the other screens, which can all exceed 400 nits. It’s obvious in the black level and contrast charts which displays have dynamic contrast. The P2712V doesn’t have it, so its HDR contrast ratio is the same as its SDR, just over 1,000:1. This is often one of the things sacrificed for lower cost, which is not unlike some of its competitors.

Grayscale, EOTF and Color

I measured all three HDR modes and noted subtle differences between them. None had ideal grayscale tracking, but Movie had the least visible errors thanks to a little extra red. Auto and Game are decidedly green in tone. Movie also has the best EOTF tracking with near-perfect adherence to the reference line and a soft transition to tone mapping at 65%. Shadow detail is clear but a little light at levels between zero and 10%.

In the gamut tests, the P2712V is generally oversaturated in the primaries’ inner points. This gives HDR images a little more punch than their SDR counterparts. The only visible hue error is magenta, which is a tad too red in tone. In the BT.2020 test, color runs out at 88% red, 65% green and 90% blue. This is typical HDR coverage for a budget display.

Test Takeaway: The P2712V doesn’t have a precisely accurate HDR mode, but its Movie option has very good luminance tracking, which goes a long way towards maximizing detail and clarity. Color is well saturated and reasonably accurate as well. My only gripe is the lack of dynamic contrast which is a trait shared by other value-oriented monitors. The HDR picture is more colorful than the SDR, but with no additional depth or texture.

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A 4K monitor might be an elusive purchase for some budgets, but more choices appear all the time. Titan Army caters to the value-conscious market with its products and consistently delivers a lot of bang for the buck. It’s also challenging to pair 4K with mid-level gaming systems because to push 8.3 million pixels at 100 fps, you need to spend a bit of money on a good video card. Dual-mode displays provide a nice alternative: you can switch to FHD for gameplay and high frame rates, then back to 4K for productivity and video.

The P2712V isn’t the first dual-mode monitor I’ve seen, but it is one of the least expensive. At $325, it provides everything needed for high-performance gaming and then some. The only things left out here are USB ports and internal speakers. And dynamic contrast for HDR. That’s my only real complaint. It provides the saturated color needed for good HDR but not a backlight dimming option. That would take the P2712V to another level, especially at its current price point.

On the upside, SDR color accuracy is superb. Calibration is completely unnecessary, and I found that I could not improve upon the factory settings. Titan Army has done a superb job there. And SDR contrast is solid with more than enough brightness and decent black levels.

The P2712V’s biggest draw is its flexibility. You can have a high pixel density monitor for productivity and video, and a super-fast screen for gaming that runs at 320 Hz. And you get accurate color too, and it’s all just $325. I can remember when 4K enterprise screens cost 10 times that.

If you are longing for high pixel density and high frame rates but don’t have a high bank balance, the Titan Army P2712V is well worth checking out.

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To address concerns about power consumption of systems used for AI inference, hyperscale cloud service provider (CSP) Cloudflare is testing various AI accelerators that are not AI GPUs from AMD or Nvidia, reports the Wall Street Journal. Recently, the company began to test drive Positron AI's Atlas solution that promises to beat Nvidia's H200 at just 33% of its power consumption.

Positron is a U.S.-based company founded in 2023 that develops AI accelerators focused exclusively on inference. Unlike general-purpose GPUs that are designed for AI training, AI inference, technical computing, and a wide range of other workloads, Positron's hardware is built from scratch to perform inference tasks efficiently and with minimal power consumption. Position AI's first-generation solution for large-scale transformer models is called Atlas. It packs eight Archer accelerators and is designed to beat Nvidia's Hopper-based systems while consuming a fraction of power.

Positron AI's Atlas can reportedly deliver around 280 tokens per second per user in Llama 3.1 8B with BF16 compute at 2000W, whereas an 8-way Nvidia DGX H200 server can only achieve around 180 tokens per second per user in the same scenario, while using a whopping 5900W of power, according to a comparison conducted by Positron AI itself. This would make the Atlas three times more efficient in terms of performance-per-watt and in terms of performance-per-dollar compared to Nvidia's DGX H200 system. This claim, of course, requires verification by a third party.

It is noteworthy that Positron AI makes its ASIC hardware at TSMC's Fab 21 in Arizona (i.e., using an N4 or N5 process technology), and the cards are also assembled in the U.S., which makes them an almost entirely American product. Still, since the ASIC is mated with 32GB of HBM memory, it uses an advanced packaging technology and, therefore, is likely assembled in Taiwan.

Positron AI's Atlas systems and Archer AI accelerators are compatible with widely used AI tools like Hugging Face and serve inference requests through an OpenAI API-compatible endpoint, enabling users to adopt them without major changes to their workflows.

Positron has raised over $75 million in total funding, including a recent $51.6 million round led by investors such as Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, and DFJ Growth. The company is also working on its 2nd Generation AI inference accelerator dubbed Asimov, an 8-way Titan machine that is expected in 2026 to compete against inference systems based on Nvidia's Vera Rubin platforms.

Today we’re looking at Corsair’s latest AIO, the iCUE Link Titan 360 RX RGB. Most users interested in this AIO will be interested in it due to its compatibility with the iCUE ecosystem, which allows for a ton of customization options – including cooler upgrades like optional VRM fan modules or even adding a fancy LCD screen. In common scenarios, this cooler has some of the lowest noise levels I’ve seen thus far – but it isn’t without flaws, as I’ll detail below

Will this AIO make our list of Best CPU Coolers? Let’s take a look at the specifications and features of the Titan RX RGB AIO, then we’ll go over thermal performance and noise levels.

Cooler specifications

Packing and included contents

The packaging for Corsair’s AIO is relatively standard, not much different from the average AIO. The product is secured with plastic wrappings and molded cardboard, and the fans are preinstalled for user convenience.

Included with the box are the following:

• Three pre-installed 120mm fans
• 360mm radiator and CPU block
• Pre-installed Thermal Paste
• iCUE Link Hub
• Mounting accessories for modern AMD & Intel platforms

Features of Corsair’s iCUE Link Titan 360 RX RGB

*️⃣Pre-installed Thermal Paste

Corsair only includes pre-installed thermal paste, sufficient for a single installation. This will be useful for most users, but the downside is that you’ll need to purchase additional thermal paste if you ever want to move the cooler to a new system or swap in a new CPU.

*️⃣27mm Radiator

The iCUE Link Titan 360 RX RGB includes a radiator 27mm in size, which is standard for most liquid coolers.

*️⃣Upgrade Options

One thing that sets the iCUE Link Titan 360 RX RGB apart is the ability to upgrade the AIO with different options that mount on top of the cold plate. These optional upgrades are cheapest if you purchase the AIO directly from Corsair and customize the features during the checkout process.

The module I find most interesting is the VRM fan upgrade, which costs an additional $30 if you purchase it after already owning the AIO – but only $15 if you purchase it with the AIO.

Another upgrade option is a 2.1-inch, 480x480 IPS display which allows you to view real-time CPU temperatures, animated GIFs, movie files, and more. However, I find it hard to recommend as an aftermarket purchase due to its high price of $100 USD.

The last upgrade option available is a simpler “Groove” module, which changes the RGB aesthetic for only $15.

*️⃣iCUE Ecosystem

The Titan RX 360 RX RGB is controlled by an iCUE hub, pictured below. This allows you to take advantage of the iCUE ecosystem.

There’s a lot of options and customization available with Corsair’s iCUE Link system, which is designed to simplify PC building and cable routing, while adding some interesting lighting effects.

One disadvantage of the iCUE Link hub is that it has higher power requirements than a simple USB connection can provide – you’ll need an extra 6-pin PCI-e GPU power connection to power it on.

*️⃣Corsair RX Series 120mm fans

There’s more to a cooler than just the heatsink or radiator. The bundled fans have a significant impact on cooling and noise levels, as well as how the cooler looks in your case. The fans included here aren’t PWM and require using an iCUE Hub to control. However, as the benchmarks will show, they enable strong cooling performance, both at full speed and when restricted to low noise levels!

These fans are pre-installed and feature a quick-connect system, designed to save the user time and offer tidy cable management.

*️⃣Full RAM Compatibility

Like almost every other AIO on the market, Corsair’s AIO doesn’t interfere with or overhang RAM DIMMs in any manner, allowing for use of all sizes of RAM, no matter how tall.

*️⃣Six-year warranty

Most AIOs on the market have a limited warranty of only 1-3 years. Corsair goes the extra mile with a six-year warranty for the Titan 360 RX RGB. This generous warranty almost negates the high price of this AIO – almost.

Things I didn’t like about this AIO

There are two primary things I didn’t like about this AIO, and one minor complaint that is subjective.

❌ First, the iCUe software didn’t always save my custom cooling settings. On multiple occasions when I rebooted my computer, I’d have to manually configure them. Sometimes, my presets wouldn’t save at all. Enabling the “device memory mode” in the iCUE software prevents this problem from occurring entirely, but users shouldn’t have to take this extra step.

❌ The second thing I don’t like about this AIO is that it has higher power consumption compared to competitors. You need an extra 6-pin PCIe GPU power connection to power the hub and cooler. Even if you don’t care about some extra power consumption, this is inconvenient when modern GPUs often require whatever PCIe plugs your PSU has to offer.

❌ The last thing I don’t like about Corsair’s iCUE Link Titan 360 RX RGB is that by default, pump and fan speeds are tied to the temperature of the liquid coolant. But this is a personal preference, you might actually prefer this type of operation. This has the advantage of avoiding fan bursts and delivering lower maximum noise levels.

❌ The primary disadvantage is that this design allows the CPU to reach its peak temperature and throttle during intensive workloads. The other disadvantage is that fans will remain at higher noise levels even after a workload has ended – because it is harder / slower to cool the temperature of the liquid coolant down than it is to cool the temperature of the CPU down.

Testing configuration – Intel LGA1700 and LGA1851 platform

There are many factors other than the CPU cooler that can influence your cooling performance, including the case you use and the fans installed in it. A system's motherboard can also influence this, especially if it suffers from bending, which results in poor cooler contact with the CPU.

In order to prevent bending from impacting our cooling results, we’ve installed Thermalright’s LGA 1700 contact frame into our testing rig. If your motherboard is affected by bending, your thermal results will be worse than those shown below. Not all motherboards are affected equally by this issue. I tested Raptor Lake CPUs in two motherboards. And while one of them showed significant thermal improvements after installing Thermalright’s LGA1700 contact frame, the other motherboard showed no difference in temperatures whatsoever! Check out our review of the contact frame for more information.

I’ve also tested this cooler with Intel’s latest platform, Arrow Lake and LGA 1851.

LGA 1700 and 1851 Installation

The installation of the AIO is simple. The following steps assume that you will mount the radiator to your case first, which is generally a good idea unless your case is very small.

1. You’ll first need to place the backplate against the rear of the motherboard. The backplate included is simple, and only really designed for a single installation. It uses adhesive strips around the rubber standoffs. This has the advantage of making the first installation easy, but it doesn’t adhere very well on additional installations – requiring that the user hold the backplate while attempting to complete the other installation steps.

2. Next, take the CPU block and place it on top of the CPU. Use the screws pre-attached to secure the CPU block.

3. The next step will be to install the iCUE hub, connect it to a 6-pin PCI-e power cable, and then connect cables from the hub to the CPU block and radiator.

4. Now you can power on your computer, as installation is complete.

CPU-only thermal results without power limits

Without power limits enforced on Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K and i7-14700K CPUs, the CPU will hit its peak temperature (TJ Max) and thermally throttle with even the strongest of air coolers and even most liquid coolers on the market. When the CPU reaches its peak temperature, I’ve measured the CPU package power to determine the maximum wattage cooled to best compare their performance. It’s important to note that thermal performance can scale differently depending on the CPU it’s being tested with.

For this test, I manually set the fans to operate tied to the temperature of the CPU and set the pump to the “extreme” profile. Keeping Intel’s Arrow Lake Core Ultra 9 285K cool is no easy task, but the Titan 360 RX RGB was able to keep the CPU at an average of 93 degrees C – which puts it amongst the strongest AIOs on the market, tied for the third-strongest result I’ve seen on this system.

But as I’ve mentioned before – how well a cooler performs can vary depending on what CPU it is paired with. So how’s performance with a CPU that is harder to cool like Intel’s i7-14700K?

Corsair’s AIO performs better with Raptor Lake, keeping the CPU at an average of 90 degrees C, narrowing its gap against the best-performing result to only 2 degrees C (as opposed to a 4C difference with Arrow Lake). The reason for this difference in performance likely comes down to Arrow Lake’s shifted hotspot.

Both of the results above require manually setting the cooler to adjust its performance based on the temperature of the CPU, rather than the temperature of the coolant. Noise levels are lower in the default configuration, but thermal performance suffers as a result, making this cooler comparable to a good 240mm AIO.

To achieve this level of thermal dominance, the fans of the cooler reach up to 49.2 dBA in a custom-configured mode. In the default operating behavior, maximum noise levels are lower – only reaching a moderate 44.2 dBA.

CPU-only thermal results, with noise normalized to 38.9 dBA

Finding the right balance between fan noise levels and cooling performance is important. While running fans at full speed can improve cooling capacity to some extent, the benefits are limited and many users prefer a quieter system.

With this noise-normalized test, I’ve set noise levels to 38.9 dba using the i7-14700K system. This level of noise is a low volume level, but slightly audible to most people. Corsair’s AIO was extremely impressive when configured to a static low noise level, cooling 257W. Technically this is the second-best result I’ve seen, but a 1W difference is within the margin of error – as far as I’m concerned, this is industry-leading performance!

253W results

My recent reviews have focused more on tests with both the CPU and GPU being stressed, but many of y’all have indicated that you would like to see more CPU-only tests – so I’ve started testing Intel’s “Arrow Lake” Core Ultra 9 285K with a 253W limit. My current results for this test are limited, but this will grow as I have time to test more coolers.

Testing with the default power limits of 253W shows good performance, tied for the second-best result I’ve observed yet. But note that I need to test more coolers in this scenario for a complete picture.

135W CPU + 290W GPU results

Testing a CPU Cooler in isolation is great for synthetic benchmarks, but doesn’t tell the whole story of how it will perform. I’ve incorporated two tests with a power limit imposed on the CPU, while also running a full load on MSI’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER 16G VENTUS 3X.

The CPU power limit of 135W was chosen based on the worst CPU power consumption I observed in gaming with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K, which was in Rise of the Tomb Raider.

This scenario isn’t quite as thermally demanding as our previous tests, but that said the Corsair AIO has the second-best results I’ve seen in this test!

These results were obtained with the cooler in its default configuration, in which cooler operation is tied to the temperature of the liquid coolant. This also allows for low noise levels – at only 37.3 dBA, it had the quietest operation of any cooler I’ve tested yet in this scenario.

85W CPU + 290W GPU results

The second round of CPU + GPU testing is also performed with Arrow Lake. The power limit of 85W was chosen based on typical power consumption in gaming scenarios using the Core Ultra 9 285K CPU. This should be fairly easy for most coolers, the main point of this test is to see how quietly (or loudly!) a cooler runs in low-intensity scenarios.

With a CPU temperature of 52 degrees C, Corsair’s AIO ties for the third-coolest result in this test. This test was also performed with the cooler at its default settings, tied to the temperature of the liquid coolant. This also allows for low noise levels – at only 36.4 dBA, this result ties with NZXT’s Kraken Elite for the quietest result I’ve recorded in this test.

Conclusion

Corsair’s iCUE Link Titan 360 RX RGB is one of the strongest coolers on the market. Its noise-normalized performance is industry-leading, and the iCUE ecosystem allows for a number of customization options and even upgrades for the cooler itself! My primary complaints are its high price, the six-pin PCIe power connector requirement, and the fact that the software didn’t always save my custom settings properly.

Montech is a rather new player in the PC power and cooling market. The Taiwanese company first appeared in 2016 and quickly made its presence international. Montech is currently focused on designing and producing PC cases, power supply units (PSUs), and CPU coolers. As the core philosophy of the company was to be competitive in terms of pricing, the vast majority of its products were targeting the high-volume mainstream market.

To entice gamers and enthusiasts, Montech shyly began releasing high-end and top-tier products. Not too long ago, the company released its new Titan Gold PSU series. The Titan Gold consists of high-output units designed for powerful gaming systems, a completely new market segment for the company. We examine the most powerful unit of the series, the Titan Gold 1200W PSU. Besides being a high-quality unit on its own, the Titan Gold was one of the first units that achieved ATX 3.0 compliance, and it was awarded the Cybenetics Platinum certification, but is it good enough to compete among the best power supplies on our list?

Specifications and Design

In the Box

Montech supplies the Titan Gold 1200W unit in a sturdy cardboard box. The artwork on the box is simplistic and focused around a picture of the PSU itself, but there is plenty of information about the specifications and certifications of the power supply on the sides and rear of the box.

Only the absolute basic items for the installation of the PSU can be found inside the packaging of the Montech Titan Gold, with the company supplying just a power cord and four mounting screws. There are no cable ties or straps, or any other accessories to be found.

The Titan Gold 1200W ATX 3.0 PSU is a fully modular design, allowing for the removal of every DC power cable, including the 24-pin ATX connector. Most of the cables have individually sleeved black wires and black connectors, but the ATX 24-pin cable and the 16-pin PCIe 5.0 cable consist of black wires bundled inside nylon sleeving. The strange thing here is the presence of five PCIe connectors, as one of the cables only has a single connector.

External Appearance

Unlike what most would expect from a company that is trying to keep costs down to a minimum, Montech actually invested some resources into making the Titan Gold 1200W PSU visually attractive. The chassis cover is punched to create a natural finger guard shaped after the company’s logo. The entirety of the power supply is sprayed with matte black paint that is highly resistant to fingerprints but also rather easy to chip if mishandled. It measures 160 mm long, which is 20 mm longer than what the ATX standard dictates, but we do not foresee any compatibility problems with any modern case that is meant to house an above-average PC.

The sticker with the unit’s electrical certifications and specifications is found covering most of the power supply’s top side. About a quarter of the sticker is blue and may draw unwanted attention if visible from a windowed side panel. Both sides of the unit have the company logo embossed onto them.

At the rear side of the unit, right next to the AC power connector and the basic on/off switch, there is a latching push button that controls the “smart-zero fan mode”. As the name suggests, this mode allows for passive operation while the PSU’s load is low – a frequently applied technique by many manufacturers nowadays. Disabling it will force the fan to continuously spin as long as the PSU is powered on but its speed will still be controlled thermally.

The front side of the unit is host to the numerous connectors for the modular cables. A legend and the company logo are printed on the chassis. There is also a sticker with the unit’s serial number.

Internal Design

Montech is making use of a 135 mm fan for the cooling needs of the Titan Gold 1200W power supply. The fan is made by Hong Hua, a popular manufacturer among PC PSU OEMs. It has a fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) engine for quiet operation and longevity but also has an extremely high maximum speed of 2300 RPM.

The OEM behind the Titan Gold 1200W power supply is Channel-Well Technologies (CWT), which is not a huge surprise considering that Montech has been in collaboration with them for several of their better products. The surprise here is that, while we didn't know this when soliciting PSUs for review, the Titan Gold 1200W is using the same platform as the MSI MPG A1000G. It is an upgraded version of CWT’s most popular platform, slightly tweaked to add ATX 3.0 support.

Overall, the design of the Titan Gold 1200W is based on proven and relatively simple topologies. The filtering stage is typical, with four Y capacitors, two X capacitors, and two filtering inductors, with two rectifying bridges on a sizable heatsink following right after. The long heatsink that follows holds the active APFC components. Two very large capacitors, one 450V/680μF from Nippon Chemi-Con and one 420V/470μF from Rubycon, as well as a massive filtering inductor. The total capacitance of the circuit is very high and will undoubtedly cause a high inrush current that may cause small or quick circuit breakers to trip.

Moving on to the primary side of the main transformer, we find two transistors on a medium-sized heatsink, forming a typical half-bridge LLC inversion circuitry. The core of the secondary side is on a vertical daughterboard, which is home to eight power transistors that convert the transformer’s output to the main DC output of the power supply. The 3.3V and 5V lines are being generated via DC-to-DC conversion circuitry that can be found on their own vertical daughterboard. The secondary side capacitors are all made by Nippon Chemi-Con and Nichicon.

Cold Test Results

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.

In consideration of the 80Plus Gold certification of the Montech Titan Gold 1200W PSU, the energy conversion efficiency is exceptional. The unit almost reaches 80Plus Platinum standards when powered via a 115 VAC source but cannot meet the 89% limit under maximum load. As Cybenetics ETA program takes into account the average efficiency of the unit, the Titan Gold achieved a Platinum certification there. Powering the Titan Gold from a 230 VAC outlet will increase its overall efficiency by 0.7%, but it will still not meet the 80Plus Platinum certification requirements, as the requirements also depend on the input voltage. The average nominal load efficiency (20% to 100% of the unit's capacity) is 91.1% with the unit powered from a 230 VAC source, and drops down to 90.4% if the unit is powered by a 115 VAC source.

We performed our testing with the “Smart Zero Fan” mode of the unit disabled, forcing the fan to spin regardless of the load. The large heatsinks and good efficiency of the Titan Gold allow it to operate with its fan spinning at very low speeds while the load is relatively low. Still, a 1200W PSU will operate almost inaudibly with a load of up to 500 Watts. After that point, the fan's speed increases quickly, especially when the load is greater than 900 Watts, making the Montech Titan Gold a very loud PSU when heavily loaded.

Hot Test Results

Hot Test Results (~45°C Ambient)

The Montech Titan Gold 1200W power supply displayed good resistance to high ambient temperatures, especially considering its efficiency certification. We calculated an average efficiency degradation of 0.7% across the nominal load range. The degradation is very high while the unit is heavily loaded, peaking at 2% when the unit operates under maximum load, suggesting that the components are getting thermally stressed.

With its massive 1200W power output in mind, the aggressive cooling profile of the fan keeps the internal temperatures of the Titan Gold PSU relatively low while the unit operates at low-to-medium loads. When the unit is heavily loaded, the very high thermal losses (which peak at about 160 Watts at maximum load) are becoming a bit too much for the cooling system to handle and the temperatures rise sharply. The temperatures do not get high enough to force the unit to shut down but they are uncomfortably high and definitely not good for the longevity of the unit. The high component temperatures also cause a significant efficiency drop at very heavy loads due to component stress.

The speedy 135 mm fan does a good job keeping the internal temperatures of the massive 1200W PSU relatively low – however, when the ambient temperature is high, the fan reaches its maximum speed when the load is about 950 Watts. After that point, the temperatures will rise sharply, as the cooling system cannot do anything more to combat the high thermal losses. When the Titan Gold 1200W unit is operating inside a very hot environment, it will stay relatively quiet only while the load is lower than 300 Watts. As the load increases beyond 300 Watts, the fan’s speed will increase linearly and will reach its maximum speed when the load is between 900 and 1000 Watts, at which point it will be generating more than 57 dB(A).

PSU Quality and Bottom Line

Power Supply Quality

The power quality of the Titan Montech Gold 1200W power supply is excellent for a product of this price range and of that efficiency certification. It has exceptional filtering on all voltage lines and a regulation lower than 1% on the primary 12V line. The maximum ripple on the 12V line is just 26 mV, a spectacular figure for a 1200W PSU. Montech also implemented exceptional filtering on the 3.3V/5V lines as well, where we recorded a maximum ripple of just 16 mV.

As part of our standard testing, we test the primary protections of all power supplies we review (Over Current, Over Voltage, Over Power, and Short Circuit). We tested all of the protections of the Montech Titan Gold 1200W power supply, and they all operate as intended. However, as seems to be the trend with ATX 3.0 units that are upgrades/updates of older platforms, both the OCP and OPP protections of the unit are set a bit high. The OCP protection of the 12V rail kicked in instantly, as intended when the current was almost 35% above the unit’s maximum rating. Likewise, we could draw almost 200 Watts above its rated capacity for relatively long time periods before the unit’s OPP protection decided it should shut the unit down. These relatively high figures are the side effect of gaining ATX 3.0 compliance, as the engineers have to ensure that the power supply will not be shutting down due to short-term power excursions.

Bottom Line

The Titan Gold 1200W marks a significant milestone for Montech, as it is their first entry into the ATX 3.0 market and one of the first units to be released under this new standard. With a focus on delivering a good price-to-performance ratio, the Montech Titan Gold 1200W aspires to be a top contender in the crowded power supply market.

The Montech Titan Gold 1200W is a high-performance computer power supply that delivers excellent power quality with very low voltage ripple and good regulation. Ironically for its name, this PSU achieves Platinum-level efficiency and received that level of certification from Cybenetics, but barely missed the 80Plus Platinum certification requirement under maximum load. This power supply is highly efficient, especially at lower loads, but its performance drops slightly at higher loads. The build quality of this power supply is exceptional, featuring Japanese capacitors and construction by a reputable OEM. Additionally, the competitive retail price of the Montech Titan Gold 1200W makes it a great value for those in need of a powerful and reliable power supply.

However, it is important to note that the power supply can get thermally stressed if it is kept running heavily loaded for prolonged periods of time, which must be considered for some applications. Home users and gamers need not worry about this, as regular PCs will not be running at maximum capacity for considerable periods. However, it will also generate very high noise levels if heavily loaded, which can be a potential drawback for some users.

In conclusion, the Montech Titan Gold 1200W power supply is a good, cost-effective option for high-end gaming and workstation builds. Its 1200W output makes it a great choice for all but the most power-hungry of systems, more than easily accommodating a GeForce RTX 4090 and overclocked CPU, and the very good overall efficiency results to passable thermal losses. The build quality is solid and the unit is well designed, and the 12+4 pin connector ensures its compatibility and usefulness going forward. The only downside is the noise level under heavy loads which might be an issue for some users. However, for those who are looking for a top-performing power supply, the Montech Titan Gold 1200W is a great option, and its $165 retail price makes it highly competitive in the market.

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Today's deal features one of the most iconic gaming chair brands, Secretlab, which happens to be running Presidents' Day deals to coincide with the national holiday. So if you're considering upgrading or replacing your PC chair with one of the best gaming chairs, this deal might be a great option for saving some money.

You can buy directly from Secretlab, where their Titan Evo Stealth Gaming Chair is reduced to $519 from the original $549 list price. The Presidents' Day deals also cover other chairs and desks in the Secretlab lineup, so have a little browse if you feel our highlighted deal isn't the right color scheme for you. Also, if you subscribe to Secretlab's mailing list, you can receive a $20 discount on Secretlab accessories on your first purchase.

Secretlab's Titan Evo series of chairs have been out since 2022 and we had the opportunity to review the Secretlab Titan Evo then. We noted then that the Titan Evo was a luxurious spacious seat with highly adjustable lumbar support and armrests, with comfortable armrests and neck pillows included.

Secretlab's Titan Evo gaming chair is designed and built for gamers and PC users who spend a long time sitting at their computer. A sculpted pebble seat base padded with cold-cure foam offers comfort for your rump, and Secretlab's L-ADAPT lumbar support system helps support your lower back and spine.

Other features of the chair include 4D Armrests with magnetic hot-swappable armrest toppers for either heat relief or pillowy support. A magnetic memory foam head pillow that you can simply snap on and adjust for individual comfort. Plus, a reinforced aluminum wheelbase with extra-large polyurethane casters that should hopefully be quieter and cause less wear on your flooring.

Secretlab's Titan Evo chairs also come with a 5-year extended warranty, which offers some peace of mind for an expensive purchase such as this.

Montech, established in 2016, is a Taiwanese manufacturer focused on developing innovative and cost‐effective PC hardware solutions. Although the brand itself is relatively new, it leverages decades of industry expertise through its roots with Telon—a well‐established distributor of PSUs and PC cases in Taiwan. The company designs and produces a broad range of products, including PC cases, CPU cooling systems, and power supply units, targeting both mainstream users and gaming enthusiasts. In the PSU segment, Montech offers several series designed to meet varying system requirements that could rival the best power supplies in the market.

We looked at Montech’s Titan PLA PSU series, which is positioned as a premium line within the company’s expanding portfolio, reflecting a strategic focus on appealing to the modern gaming and enthusiast markets. Developed in collaboration with a highly established OEM, the Titan PLA series emphasizes clean aesthetics, a fully modular design for streamlined cable management, top quality, and adherence to the latest industry standards.

Specifications and Design

In the Box

The Montech Titan PLA 1000W arrives in a large cardboard box with a simple black and platinum artistic theme. The PSU is protected by a nylon pouch and secured with foam inserts to prevent damage during transit.

Montech includes a rich bundle of accessories, featuring mounting screws, an AC power cable, a jump-starting connector for PSU testing, a few white cable ties, quality white cable straps, and white cable combs, providing users with more than just the essential tools for installation and cable management.

The Titan PLA 1000W features cables with individually sleeved white wires and black connectors. The cables are soft and flexible, making them easy to organize with the included cable combs for a structured visual appearance. The PSU is equipped with three 6+2 pin PCI Express connectors, a conservative configuration for a 1000W unit.

External Appearance

Measuring 160 mm in length, the Montech Titan PLA 1000W is slightly longer than a standard ATX PSU but remains compatible with all ATX-compliant tower cases. Only compact or specialized enclosures may have space limitations for a PSU of this size. The unit is available in both black and white, with the reviewed version featuring a satin white chassis. Chrome Montech and Titan PLA logos are placed on both sides of the PSU, while some of the chassis’ corners are chamfered for a refined appearance.

The fan is protected by a parallel wire fan grille, which is not integrated into the chassis, but its mounting screws are concealed to maintain a cleaner look. The top panel of the PSU is covered by a sticker listing the electrical specifications and certifications.

The rear panel includes the standard AC input socket, an on/off power switch, and a button for enabling or disabling the hybrid fan mode. This mode allows semi-passive operation, keeping the fan off under lower loads. The modular cable connectors are located on the front panel, with a clearly marked legend to aid in installation.

Internal Design

The cooling system utilizes a 135mm Hong Hua HA13525H12F-Z fan, which features a fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) for increased longevity and low-noise operation. This fan has a maximum speed of approximately 2300 RPM, which is relatively high for a fan of this size, but the hybrid fan mode ensures that it only activates when necessary, reducing unnecessary noise during low to moderate loads.

Seasonic serves as the OEM for this PSU, a well-established manufacturer known for producing high-performance power supply platforms. Seasonic platforms are often associated with high-end efficiency and reliability, and Montech prominently displays the OEM's name on the product packaging to highlight this collaboration.

The unit’s input filtering stage consists of four Y capacitors, two X capacitors, and two filtering inductors, forming a fairly standard configuration for a 1000W PSU. Two rectifying bridges are mounted on a small heatsink following the filtering stage. The Active Power Factor Correction (APFC) stage employs two Infineon 60R125P6 MOSFETs and a diode, all mounted on a dedicated heatsink, while an encased inductor and two Nippon Chemi-Con capacitors (330 µF and 560 µF) serve as the passive components.

The primary inversion stage is configured in a full-bridge LLC topology, with four transistors mounted on their own heatsink near the primary transformer. On the secondary side, six MOSFETs generate the main 12V rail, cooled indirectly by a nearby heatsink. The 3.3V and 5V rails are generated using DC-to-DC converters placed on a vertical daughterboard, as is typical with all modern PC PSUs.

The capacitors on the secondary side are sourced from reputable Japanese manufacturers, including Nippon Chemi-Con and Rubycon, while Nichicon supplies the polymer capacitors. The heatsinks are quite large for a unit with that kind of efficiency levels and considering the presence of a strong fan.

Cold Test Results

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.

During cold testing, the Montech Titan PLA 1000W exhibited an average nominal load efficiency of 90.4% at 115 VAC and 92.6% at 230 VAC. The PSU is 80 Plus Platinum certified by CLEAResult and Cybenetics Platinum certified. At 115V input, the PSU met 80 Plus Platinum efficiency standards, while at 230V input, it narrowly missed the 92% efficiency requirement at 20% load by a small margin. Peak efficiency was observed at around 50% load, consistent with most high-efficiency designs. The PSU also demonstrated good efficiency at very low loads.

We ran our tests with the hybrid fan mode enabled. The 135mm fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) fan remained off until the load exceeded approximately 400W, ensuring silent operation under light to moderate loads. Once activated, the fan started at a low rotational speed and gradually increased as load levels rose but very slowly. The speed of the fan jumps up when the unit is heavily loaded but remains far from its maximum speed. The unit's internal temperatures are regulated very well and it appears to be very well balanced between reliability and acoustics performance.

Hot Test Results

Hot Test Results (~45°C Ambient)

During hot testing, the Montech Titan PLA 1000W demonstrated an average nominal load efficiency of 89.2% at 115 VAC and 91.3% at 230 VAC. Elevated ambient temperatures resulted in a modest efficiency drop compared to cold testing, where it achieved 90.4% and 92.6%, respectively. The 1.2-1.3% efficiency drop is not unexpected but the most noticeable degradation occurs at higher loads, suggesting a slight thermal stress when the unit is heavily loaded for extended periods.

Under these conditions, the hybrid cooling system reacted as expected - the fan started operating just below 300 watts and increased its speed more rapidly than during cold testing, although it never reached its maximum rotational speed under these conditions either. Internal temperatures were higher, yet the PSU maintained a well-balanced performance between cooling efficiency and noise output, with moderate acoustic levels that remained acceptable even as load increased.

PSU Quality and Bottom Line

Power Supply Quality

The Montech Titan PLA 1000W PSU demonstrated excellent electrical performance in both voltage regulation and ripple suppression. Voltage regulation was particularly tight, with deviations of just 0.5% on the 12V rail, 0.3% on the 5V rail, and 0.4% on the 3.3V rail, ensuring stable power delivery under varying loads. Ripple filtering was equally impressive, with very low fluctuations across all voltage lines - 32 mV on the 12V rail, 18 mV on the 5V rail, and 16 mV on the 3.3V rail. These results indicate outstanding power quality, surpassing typical performance.

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 activated and functioned correctly during testing.

The OCP limits were set at 134% for the 3.3V rail, 140% for the 5V rail, and 122% for the 12V rail, while Over Power Protection (OPP) triggered at 126% under hot conditions. These protection thresholds are well-calibrated for an ATX 3.1 unit.

Bottom Line

The Montech Titan PLA 1000W is a high-quality power supply unit that targets the premium segment of the PSU market. With a fully modular design, high-end internal components, and an elegant aesthetic, it aims to cater to enthusiasts who want everything – quality, performance, and looks. Manufactured by Seasonic, the Titan PLA benefits from one of the most respected OEMs in the industry. The Platinum-level certifications from both CLEAResult and Cybenetics further solidify its positioning as a high-performance PSU.

In terms of electrical performance, the Titan PLA 1000W excels, delivering exceptional voltage regulation and ripple suppression. Voltage regulation is under 0.5% on every rail, ensuring consistent power delivery across different load conditions. Ripple filtering is equally impressive, with just 32 mV on the 12V rail, 18 mV on the 5V rail, and 16 mV on the 3.3V rail, which are among the best figures seen in this wattage class. The unit’s ATX 3.1 compliance ensures that it can handle modern power excursions efficiently, making it well-suited for high-end gaming PCs and workstation builds. Protection mechanisms function correctly, with OCP limits and OPP triggering at reasonable levels for a unit in this category.

The thermal and acoustic performance of the Titan PLA 1000W is well-balanced. The 135mm Hong Hua fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) fan operates in hybrid mode, remaining off until loads exceed 400W in cold conditions and 300W in hot conditions. The fan ramping is smooth and never reaches full speed, even at high loads, helping to maintain a quiet operation. Internal temperatures are kept in check thanks to large heatsinks and an efficient layout. However, efficiency drops by 1.2-1.3% under hot conditions, which is slightly more than ideal for a premium unit.

Overall, the Montech Titan PLA 1000W is an outstanding power supply in terms of quality, performance, and reliability, but it comes at a price. The exceptional electrical performance, top-tier component selection, and solid protection features make it a strong contender in the Platinum-rated PSU category. However, at $200, it faces tough competition from other high-end models that may offer similar efficiency at a slightly lower price point. While the 10-year warranty adds significant value, potential buyers should consider whether they need this level of premium engineering and aesthetics or if a slightly more affordable alternative would suffice.

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Specifications of Nvidia's unreleased RTX Titan Ada GPU have allegedly surfaced on Reddit. A GPU-Z screenshot and photograph shared by FluxRBLX on the Nvidia subreddit reveals the rumored but never shipped RTX Titan Ada GPU specifications featuring a fully enabled AD102 GPU and a whopping 48GB of VRAM.

The GPU-Z screenshot reveals many details on the purported Titan Ada GPU prototype, including core counts, memory configuration, device ID, and more. The GPU would have had 18,432 shaders (CUDA cores), 192 ROPs, 576 TMUs, a pixel fillrate of 478.1 GPixel/s, and a Texture Fillrate of 1,434.2 GTexel/s. The memory subsystem has 48GB of capacity (48GiB if we're being precise), featuring GDDR6 (non-x) ICs on a 384-bit wide memory interface with 864 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Base clock speeds are significantly lower than any outgoing RTX 40 series (Ada Lovelace) GPU, with GPU-Z reporting a clock speed of just 735 MHz. However, boost clocks look far more conventional, rated at 2,490 MHz. The abnormally low base clocks are likely a byproduct of the early nature of the hardware, as this card was purportedly a prototype. That could also explain the use of GDDR6 instead of GDDR6X.

Compared to the RTX 4090, the RTX Titan Ada outclasses it in shader count and memory capacity. The Titan Ada features a fully enabled AD102 die, which would have made it the only RTX-branded GPU in the 40-series family to have a fully unlocked die. The RTX 4090 has access to 89% of the AD102 die.

Memory capacity is also doubled on the Titan Ada GPU, inevitably due to using a "clamshell" configuration with the GDDR6 modules on both sides of the PCB, similar to the RTX 3090 or RTX 6000 Ada. GDDR6 manufacturers don't make GDDR6 memory chips with a capacity greater than 2GB, making this configuration the only option to achieve 48GB on the Titan-class GPU.

One area where the RTX 4090 outperforms the Titan Ada is in memory bandwidth, thanks entirely to its GDDR6X memory. The Titan Ada prototype had slower GDDR6 memory modules, which reduces its bandwidth potential compared to the RTX 4090. Nvidia either didn't plan to use the speedier GDDR6X modules, or perhaps it never got that far. Cooling may have been a concern due to the clamshell layout of the memory chips; the RTX 3090 was shipped in the same configuration as the GDDR6X modules, but the RTX 3090 also suffered from memory temperature issues.

The Reddit poster also shared a PCB shot of the supposed RTX Titan Ada GPU. Assuming the image is legitimate, the PCB looks virtually identical to equivalent RTX 4090 PCBs. The giant AD102 die is in the middle, flanked by 12 of 24 memory ICs. The GPU and memory power delivery components line the right and left sides of the PCB. The PCB pictured is likely a reference design, as Nvidia doesn't normally allow non-reference Titan cards (even if it doesn't have "Founders Edition" branding).

Since this GPU was never released, Nvidia hasn't explained why it never brought the RTX Titan Ada to the market. However, Nvidia likely canceled the product due to internal competition that would have arisen between it and workstation-class GPUs, such as the RTX 6000 Ada that sells for $6,800. Furthermore, AMD didn't have an answer for the RTX 4090, so the RTX Titan Ada might have been overkill, at least for the average gamer.

Clearly, MSI thinks there’s a large market for large gaming laptops, because the company is launching five models at the 18-inch size, plus a barely smaller 17.3-inch Cyborg with a translucent keyboard deck. And while your options will vary between models, these new potent gaming portables will of course be offered with the latest silicon from the likes of AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. 

Starting at the top is the venerable Titan 18 HX, which the company is offering this year in a striking Dragon Edition model inspired by Norse mythology, with a dragon head and runes covering the lid. The design takes me back to my teenage years reading Dragonlance novels, and has a raised texture that the company says is accomplished through metal etching.

Opening the flagship laptop reveals what looks like a large coin with a similar theme embedded in the palm rest area, under a circular piece of glass, with a ring around the outside that the company claims incorporates elements of Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse cosmology. A large, RGB-lit haptic touchpad is embedded below the keyboard, which is also of course RGB-lit and sports pleasing Cherry mechanical switches.

MSI says its latest Titan will offer Intel CPUs up to a Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, top-end Nvidia 50-series graphics (with up to 270W of cooling for the CPU and GPU), 96GB of DDR5-6400 RAM, up to four SSDs (one PCIe 5.0 x4), and a 3840x2400, 120 Hz Mini LED display. The internal vapor chamber cooling has also been designed to chill the CPU, GPU, and speedy boot SSD. And Thunderbolt 5 ports are included on the right edge, for the fastest possible external connectivity. The Titan continues to be MSI’s flagship, “every feature available” laptop.

Obviously, this laptop isn’t going to be light on your wallet or your back. MSI says it weighs 7.94 pounds, and that’s not including the 400W power adapter. Last year’s Titan 18 HX was $5,400 as we tested it, and we’d expect this version with its elaborate design to cost even more. But if you’re really into the Norse theme, the company hopes to sweeten the deal by including a matching ultra-wide mousepad, 3D Dragon Ring pendant, and a backpack. Because you’re absolutely going to need a special backpack for a laptop this big.

Cyborg A15 AI B2HW

On the opposite end of MSI’s big gaming laptop spectrum, the Cyborg A17 “only” sports a 17.3-inch, IPS 1080p display with 144 Hz refresh, with up to an AMD Ryzen 7 260 CPU and an unspecified level of Nvidia’s 50-series graphics. While we don’t know what GPU model this laptop will sport, you can bet it won’t be high-end, as the company says the Cyborg A15 will ship with a 150W power adapter.

Design-wise, the Cyborg A15 is arguably as striking (and potentially polarizing) as the Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition, though its theme is retro-futuristic, with a translucent lid crisscrossed with white and gray splatter patterns.

You won’t get fancy features like Thunderbolt 5 or mechanical keys here, but the keyboard does have four RGB zones. And the Cyborg A15 will cost a lot less than the Titan, while weighing substantially less as well, at 5.29 pounds.

Raiders, Stealths, Vector, and Crosshair

Those looking for laptops with a more traditional design and specs somewhere between the Titan and the Cyborg will be happy to hear that MSI will also offer its Radier, Stealth, Vector, and Crosshair series with different flavors of 2025 CPUs and GPUs. Along with the Titan, the Raider and Vector laptops will also get PCIe 5.0 support with a heatsink integrated into the CPU and GPU cooling hardware. And the company says it’s improved the rubber used in its speaker drivers, to reduce resonance and improve sound.

Like many other companies, MSI is now offering extensive AMD CPU options alongside Intel. The Raider A18 HX will be offered with a Ryzen 9955HX3D CPU (Raider A18 HX A9W) or a Core Ultra 9 275HX (Raider 18 HX A2XW) processor and top-end Nvidia 50-series graphics. The Vector 18 HX will offer the same AMD and Intel CPU options, but lesser Nvidia graphics (likely models that haven’t yet been announced). And the Stealth A18 will come in an HX AI A2XW (Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and top-end Nvidia 50 series), and an AI+ A3HW variant (AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, top-end Nvidia graphics).

A 16-inch Stealth A16 AI+ will solely feature AMD’s HX 370 CPU and top-end Nvidia graphics, while the larger Crosshair 18 HX AI will offer up a Core Ultra 9 275HX and unspecified Nvidia graphics.

Reddit user u/ProjectPhysX shared his PC build on r/pcmasterrace, showcasing two Intel Arc B580s used for running simulations on FluidX3D. The system, which has a Build/Battlestation flair, also has an Nvidia Titan Xp 12GB, giving it a total of 36GB of VRAM. But despite the three GPUs connected, u/ProjectPhysX surprisingly only uses an 800-watt PSU for this build. The rest of his system is composed of an Intel i7-13700K and an Asus Z790 ProArt motherboard, but he didn’t give the amount of RAM his PC has.

This isn’t the first time that an Intel and Nvidia GPU have been used together in a multi-GPU setup, as the same user has previously built a PC with an Intel Arc A770 and the same Nvidia Titan Xp GPU to demo FluidX3D’s multi-GPU prowess. What’s more interesting, though, is that u/ProjectPhysX is Dr. Moritz Lehmann, the developer behind FluidX3D, a computational fluid dynamics software used to simulate how fluids, like water or air, interact with the environment around it.

Also, note that this build isn’t for gaming, as only a few titles support multi-GPU processing. Instead, Dr. Lehmann’s FluidX3D can take advantage of the VRAM of these three graphics cards via PCIe with OpenCL. Furthermore, u/ProjectPhysX says that a dual B580 setup could perform just as well as an RTX 3090, but at a fraction of the price of a secondhand Nvidia Ampere flagship GPU.

Aside from that (and the reason why he was able to get his hands on two B580 GPUs so quickly), Dr. Lehmann’s day job is as a GPU Software Development Engineer at Intel and he “wrote big parts of the GPU kernels for XeSS Frame Generation and Super Resolution.”

Unfortunately, the cheapest B580s are still out of stock in many retailers in the U.S., although a couple of more expensive models are still available. This shows how many consider it a great GPU, and our own review of the Intel Arc B580 showed that it’s the new $249 GPU champion.

To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of legitimate places where you can buy Intel’s newest price champion. That way, you don’t run into scammers, scalpers, and unscrupulous sellers who are taking advantage of the rush to cheat you out of your hard-earned money.

With so many choices available among the best ultrawide gaming monitors, the traditional 32-inch 16:9 screen has become less common. This format has many pluses, with height being the most significant. That extra real estate comes in handy when you want to add document editing and graphics work into your day at the office.

When I received the Titan Army P32A2S2 for review, I thought, “Oh, another 240 Hz QHD monitor.” However, how many of these come in the 32-inch size? The number is relatively small, enough so that this example was a first for me. Lest you think it’s expensive, it is not. The price direct from Titan Army is currently a very reasonable $370. You get an IPS QHD panel with 240 Hz, Adaptive-Sync, HDR and wide gamut color. Let’s take a look.

Titan Army P32A2S2 Specs

The P32A2S2 is billed as a Fast IPS panel, and I found a very well-implemented overdrive and extremely low input lag during testing. If you can run it at the full 240fps, your experience will be incredibly smooth and artifact-free. Adaptive-Sync works for gaming consoles as well as both FreeSync and G-Sync systems. It hasn’t been certified by Nvidia, but I had no issues during my review. The video processing here is top-notch.

The image is also top-notch, with a reasonably bright panel that tops out at a measured 377 nits in SDR mode and 391 nits for HDR content. No dimming or dynamic contrast is available, but contrast is above the IPS average at around 1,300:1. Color gamut volume is also high. I measured over 93% coverage of DCI-P3, which is above average for monitors under $400. Accuracy is fair out of the box and approaches reference level with a small tweak to color temperature.

External features include a solid and adjustable stand and soft LED lighting in the form of two bars across the back. There are no internal speakers or USB ports. But the latest video interfaces grace the input panel. You get two DisplayPort 1.4, two HDMI 2.1 ports, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

For game enhancements, you get the full suite with aiming points, a refresh rate indicator, timers, and a night vision mode. You can set the crosshairs to change color automatically to remain in contrast with the background.

The P32A2S2 offers tremendous speed, low input lag, and a great picture on a big screen for $370. And as you’ll soon see, it performs well above its asking price.

Assembly and Accessories

The P32A2S2’s carton is so plain, I had to look around the side for the sticker that told me the model number. The look is generic, but most users will be buying these online so it’s of little matter. Crumbly foam protects the contents which require a Phillips-head screwdriver (not included) for assembly. The panel snaps on, and if you prefer to use an arm, a 100mm VESA mount with fasteners is included. A small external power supply delivers the volts, and you get a DisplayPort cable.

Product 360

The P32A2S2 is simply styled with just a green Titan Army moniker at the front. Underneath the bottom right corner, you’ll see a glowing power button. Red means standby, and blue means the power is on. More lighting appears in the back in the form of two thin LED strips that emanate from the central attachment point. Shiny red trim sets off the top of the upright, and the cast aluminum base is finished with a pebble-textured powder coat.

The stand is fully adjustable with 5/15 degrees tilt and 15 degrees swivel along with 3.6 inches of height. Movements are firm and sure but somewhat restrictive. There isn’t much range there, but the panel sits nice and high which is a rarity in my experience. You can set it perpendicular to the desktop and have the screen’s center at eye level.

The input panel is low and centered with the ports facing back instead of down, making it easier to plug cables in and out. You get two HDMI 2.1 and two DisplayPort 1.4 inputs. There are no internal speakers or USB ports, but you can plug headphones into the 3.5mm jack.

OSD Features

The P32A2S2 has four control keys for OSD navigation. The menu has the look of a gaming monitor with its angular shape and bright green outlines. You’ll have no trouble reading it from far away thanks to its high contrast.

Pressing any key reveals a quick menu with input selection and brightness options. You can program the functions of the middle two keys in the OSD. Another press of the leftmost button opens the full OSD with its eight sub-menus.

The P32A2S2 has ten picture modes labeled for specific game types or tasks. Standard is the default and best choice. It comes fairly close to standard for color gamut and gamma, but its grayscale runs a little red. This is easily fixed in the Picture Settings menu by using one of the custom color temp memories. There are also fixed presets and gamma options too. You can access a Low Blue Light mode for reading if you prefer its warmer color temp and reduced brightness.

HDR options are found in the Game+ menu. Auto is the best choice because then the P32A2S2 will switch signal modes automatically. Alternatively, you can choose Game or Movie HDR modes, but I saw little change when I tried them.

In the Picture Enhancement section is the Adaptive-Sync toggle along with contrast, color and shadow tweaks. The Night Vision Mode is a shadow enhancer with fixed and dynamic options. Use it to brighten shadow detail if you can’t see in the dark. The overdrive has four levels. Topspeed reduces blur the most but has a slight ghosting effect. Level 3 strikes the perfect balance and at 240fps, I saw no blur or artifacts. The P32A2S2’s overdrive is superb.

Play enhancements are in the Game Aid section and include a refresh rate indicator that appears in the top right corner of the screen. It’s a good thing the P32A2S2 is large because it’s a big graph that shows the frame rate in real-time with an EKG-like trace. You also get a set of crosshairs that can be fixed in color or made dynamic to remain in contrast with the background. Timer and stopwatch functions help manage your gameplay session. The LED light bars in the back are called Game Illumination. They turn and off and glow a steady red. The middle two control keys can be reprogrammed from their default settings to provide convenient access to things like picture mode, overdrive, HDR and more.

Titan Army P32A2S2 Calibration Settings

The P32A2S2’s image looks a little warm and out of the box, and my initial grayscale measurements showed red errors in most of the brightness range. This is an easy fix in one of the user color temp slots where I only had to reduce the red slider by one click to achieve visual perfection. Gamma is very close to the reference so it can be left on its default setting of 2.2. The one and only color gamut choice covers over 93% of DCI-P3 and will be more than colorful enough for both SDR and HDR content. There is no sRGB mode available. My SDR settings are shown below.

For HDR signals, the P32A2S2 automatically switches if HDR is set to Auto. There are two additional modes called Game and Movie. They make little difference to the image, so I recommend leaving it set to Auto. It too is a tad warm in tone but close enough to reference for a satisfying picture. There is no dynamic contrast or dimming to increase contrast, so the HDR image looks much the same as SDR.

Gaming and Hands-on

Gaming on a large monitor is always more fun whether it’s an ultra-wide or a jumbo 16:9 screen like the P32A2S2. The extra height is a real advantage with flight simulators, but it also helps enhance shooters when the map has a lot of altitude changes. Hopping across different platforms, I could always see above or below my position which gave me an advantage.

The low input lag here is simply astounding. While a few milliseconds may not seem like much, it does manifest in melee scenarios when aiming and avoiding are equally important. Making a quick turn to evade an incoming missile was second nature. And putting the crosshair precisely on the target before firing can only be a good thing. The P32A2S2’s gameplay and feel are among the best I’ve experienced.

I played many rounds of Doom Eternal in HDR mode and was pleased with the saturated color and crisp detail. Though QHD resolution in a 32-inch monitor means 92 ppi, I never noticed any softness or smear. That’s primarily due to the 240 Hz refresh rate and the 240 fps frame rates I maintained in games. You won’t need the very most expensive video card to achieve this thanks to the lower pixel count. The P32A2S2 has a very precise overdrive which keeps motion resolution very high without artifacts. Motion blur is nearly non-existent.

The SDR image is equally colorful, mainly because the P32A2S2 lacks an sRGB mode. I don’t expect most users to mind this. Colorful monitors are a thing today, and nearly all of them maintain their full native gamuts for SDR content. By industry standards, they’re over-saturated, but my picky videophile sensibilities are not offended. The P32A2S2 is very colorful, and its accuracy is more than good enough for a pleasing and satisfying image.

For fine graphics work, I would lean more towards an Ultra HD display in the 32-inch size. The P32A2S2 is good for most Photoshop tasks but if you’re working on fine art photography for example, its pixel density is a bit low. It’s fine for text-based productivity though. I had no problem browsing the web, editing in Word or dealing with spreadsheets.

Takeaway: The P32A2S2 is a solid all-around display with excellent color and very good contrast for productivity. Gaming is a real pleasure thanks to very high motion resolution and super low input lag. You can thank Titan Army’s precise overdrive and its selection of internal components for that. As a gaming display, it is extremely well-suited for competition. For the money, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better 32-inch 16:9 monitor.

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When I went looking for displays to compare the P32A2S2’s performance, I only found 27-inch models in the QHD 240 Hz format. The group is HP’s Omen 27qs, RCA’s M27PG135F, BenQ’s EX270QM, and AOC’s AG274QG and CQ27G3Z.

Pixel Response and Input Lag

Click here to read up on our pixel response and input lag testing procedures.

Most 240 Hz displays can draw a full white field in 4ms with a few taking 5ms. This difference is hard to see in test patterns or actual content. As long as the overdrive is good, you won’t see much, if any, motion blur at 240fps. The P32A2S2 is in the quick group at 4ms, and its overdrive is excellent. Quick motion was super smooth with no ghosting whatsoever.

Most impressive is the P32A2S2’s very low input lag. I’ve only seen a handful of 240Hz monitors crack the 20ms barrier, notably Titan Army’s own P2510S and a couple of OLEDs. This screen is operating in 360 and 500Hz territory regarding actual response and feel.

Test Takeaway: The P32A2S2 is one of the fastest monitors you can buy regardless of price or refresh rate. While higher frame rates, or an OLED, will be a tad smoother, they won’t necessarily be more responsive to control inputs. In competition, a monitor like this gives a distinct advantage to the player.

Viewing Angles

The P32A2S2 shows off-axis image quality that’s equal to the best IPS screens I’ve photographed. The side view is slightly cooler in tone but has no apparent reduction in brightness. Gamma stays consistent which means the picture does not lose detail or clarity. The top view is visibly green with a 30% light reduction and some loss of detail.

Screen Uniformity

To learn how we measure screen uniformity, click here.

The P32A2S2 stayed under 10% in my uniformity test which means it has no visible issues when showing a full black field pattern in a darkened room. There were no hotspots, glow or bleed in my review sample. Gray and primary color patterns also looked uniform, and no aberrations were observed.

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To read about our monitor tests in-depth, please check out Display Testing Explained: How We Test PC Monitors. We cover brightness and contrast testing on page two.

Uncalibrated – Maximum Backlight Level

The P32A2S2 delivers plenty of light output for SDR content with a peak white level of 377 nits. This is very bright, especially for a 32-inch panel. Even with a sunny window in your office, you’ll likely want to turn the brightness slider down to a more comfortable level.

The black level is the best of the IPS screens here at 0.2851 nit. This is excellent performance for the technology and is part of a recent trend towards better IPS contrast. I’ve seen several screens of late that can top 1,200 and 1,300:1 contrast like the P32A2S2.

After Calibration to 200 nits

Calibration doesn’t change the finishing order and even adds a few points to the P32A2S2’s score with a final result of 1,385.3 nits peak SDR brightness. It is far enough ahead of the HP that one would see a difference in a side-by-side comparison. Only the VA-equipped CQ27G3Z has a greater advantage in contrast here.

The P32A2S2’s ANSI score is also impressive at 1,298.8:1. This is the consistency I’d expect from a premium monitor. That it is available in a budget screen is a plus.

Test Takeaway: Among IPS monitors, the P32A2S2 has few equals in contrast. It is possible to buy a brighter screen, but you’ll have to look hard to find more dynamic range. At 1,300:1, it is a class leader, and the image shows this by being vibrant and lifelike.

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The P32A2S2 has ten picture modes but you’ll truly only need Standard for everything, be it games or productivity. It’s reasonable out of the box, but calibration is a simple matter that takes the image to near reference-level.

Grayscale and Gamma Tracking

Our grayscale and gamma tests use Calman calibration software from Portrait Displays. We describe our grayscale and gamma tests in detail here.

A grayscale step pattern shows the P32A2S2’s red tint. It’s visible from the 20% brightness step and increases as you go up. This is a forgivable error because it doesn’t greatly impact image quality. Blue and green errors are more detrimental. Gamma tracks close to the 2.2 reference with a slight rise (too dark) at 70-90% brightness.

Calibration removes all visible grayscale errors and returns a pro-level result. Gamma becomes slightly darker at the top of the brightness range, but this does not negatively impact image quality. This is excellent performance.

Comparisons

The P32A2S2’s default grayscale error of 5.86dE is all due to its red tone. While that number is a bit high, the red error isn’t as grievous as a blue or green one would be. After calibration, the P32A2S2 zips to the top with a superb 0.40dE score. It doesn’t get much better than that.

The range of gamma values is reasonably tight at 0.20 from lowest to highest. That’s an average result. The actual value of 2.27 is a 3.18% deviation from the 2.2 standard. Again, this is a better outcome than if gamma were too low. A slightly dark tone can be compensated for by increasing the brightness control. But a light tone will always look washed out.

Color Gamut Accuracy

Our color gamut and volume testing use Portrait Displays’ Calman software. For details on our color gamut testing and volume calculations, click here.

The P32A2S2 starts from a good place in the color gamut test. Red and blue are a touch over-saturated while green is a tad under. These are minor errors that are nearly invisible to the naked eye when viewing actual content. Magenta and yellow are a bit off-hue as well.

Calibration brings everything neatly into line with a visually perfect result. Like the grayscale test, this is a superb gamut chart with every point on target except for a slight over-saturation in the blue primary. My only complaint is that there is no sRGB mode available here.

Comparisons

The P32A2S2’s 1.54dE gamut score is excellent by any measure and good enough for third place in this tight group of displays. It’s a nod to today’s gaming monitor quality when six screens measure so closely. To the naked eye, there is no significant difference.

In the volume test, the P32A2S2 is again mid-pack, but its 93.18% coverage of DCI-P3 is above average. You’ll see a bit less green when looking at the Omen 27qs or the CQ27G3Z. The top three monitors have just a little more red in their palettes. The 138% score for sRGB means the P32A2S2 has no sRGB preset. If you need that gamut, you’ll have to look at a different monitor. However, for critical work in the DCI-P3 space, it is qualified.

Test Takeaway: The P32A2S2 is a 32-inch QHD 240 Hz screen for $370 so it’s already a great value. That it is capable of very accurate and very saturated color is a nice bonus. Calibration is recommended, but all you need to do is lower the red slider one click and you’re there. With decent gamma and satisfying color volume, it delivers an excellent picture well suited for work or play. My only complaint is that there’s no sRGB mode.

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Our HDR benchmarking uses Portrait Displays’ Calman software. To learn about our HDR testing, see our breakdown of how we test PC monitors.

The P32A2S2 supports HDR10 content with an automatic switchover as long as HDR is set to Auto, it is by default. The two additional modes, Movie and Game, offer no advantage or disadvantage. The look much the same, so I stuck with Auto for testing and gameplay.

HDR Brightness and Contrast

The P32A2S2 offers a little extra HDR brightness with over 391 nits peak. But since there’s no dimming or dynamic contrast, there isn’t much more impact for HDR content. This is typical of value-oriented displays which support the standard but don’t embrace it. For $370, I can’t complain too loudly.

Grayscale, EOTF and Color

The P32A2S2 has a red tint in the HDR grayscale test but it’s barely visible in test patterns or content. The errors are mostly below 4dE which is pretty low. The luminance curve stays reasonably close to the reference line. It’s a bit too light in the darkest step which means deep shadow areas won’t quite drop to black. The tone map transition is soft and occurs at the correct level of 65%. Since it’s close to the mark, I didn’t have to make any in-game adjustments to see all available highlight and shadow detail.

In the HDR gamut test, we can see general over-saturation, but the points maintain a linear progression and stay on their hue targets. This gives the HDR image a little more life without affecting detail or clarity. The Rec.2020 chart is much the same until the P32A2S2 runs out of color at 70% green, 85% red and 95% blue. This is typical performance and both the HDR color charts show solid performance.

Test Takeaway: The P32A2S2 is color accurate in HDR mode with good saturation but since there is no dimming or dynamic contrast, the picture only looks slightly more impactful. This isn’t unusual at this price point. The P32A2S2 supports HDR10 with no problems but doesn’t do the standard justice.

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I have always been a fan of 32-inch 16:9 displays, and I use one for my daily work. But as a category, it doesn’t have the vast array of choices found at the 27-inch size. Most 32-inchers are Ultra HD and use more expensive tech like OLED or Mini LED. But for performance gaming, QHD is still the sweet spot for performance and price.

Titan Army is a relative newcomer to the gaming monitor party, but the three displays (so far) I’ve reviewed from them have been excellent performers, especially in overdrive quality and low input lag. The P32A2S2 is one of the quickest monitors I’ve tested at any price. With a near-record 18ms of total lag and artifact-free motion processing, you won’t find much better unless you spend roughly double the money on an OLED.

Image quality gets solid attention as well. The P32A2S2 has better contrast than most IPS panels, around 1,300:1, and a large color gamut too. I measured over 93% coverage of DCI-P3 which is higher than average for budget screens. My only complaint was its lack of an sRGB mode. But I suspect few users will have a problem with that.

If you’ve been pining for a large monitor but want to stick with the 16:9 aspect ratio, the 32-inch Titan Army P32A2S2 is a great choice. It’s one of the few QHD 240 Hz screens in that size and it has gaming performance on par with the very best.

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Titan Army is a relative newcomer to the gaming monitor genre, but it has delivered impressive displays right out of the gate. I recently covered the PA27A2R and found it to be a very capable screen with accurate color and premium video processing at a $200 price point.

Here, I have a new addition to the line, the P2510S. It’s a bit more expensive at $290 to start, but you get a 25-inch IPS QHD panel with 240 Hz, precise overdrive, Adaptive-Sync, HDR, and wide gamut color. And it’s one of the quickest monitors I’ve ever tested. Let’s take a look.

Titan Army P2510S Specs

The P2510S starts with a 25-inch Fast IPS panel running at QHD (2560x1440) resolution. 25-inch QHD monitors are relatively rare. You’ll see later that I could find only 27-inch panels for comparison. Though the screen is a bit smaller, pixel density is higher at 118ppi rather than 109, not a bad thing. I also measured almost 1,200:1 contrast which puts it above the IPS average.

Color is reasonably accurate out of the box, and with a few adjustments, can be made visually perfect. I found some slight gamma errors but nothing that significantly impacted image quality. Color saturation is very high with over 92% coverage of DCI-P3. That’s above average when spending less than $300 on any gaming monitor.

The refresh rate is a native 240 Hz, with no overclock required. And the P2510S has excellent video processing. I found a precise overdrive that operated without visible artifacts, almost completely eliminating motion blur. And input lag is extremely low. You’ll see on page two that this is one of the most responsive gaming monitors you can buy for any price. Adaptive-Sync works flawlessly on G-Sync and FreeSync platforms. It has not been certified by Nvidia.

To keep the price low, Titan Army has left out USB ports, internal speakers, and LED lighting. But there is a complete set of gaming aids that includes aiming points, frame counter, timers, sniper mode, and alignment marks.

If I were to use an automotive metaphor, the P2510S is like a hot hatch. It’s a good basic monitor with performance enhancements in just the right places. It’s a superb gaming display that is something of a sleeper, and it delivers great value in the process.

Assembly and Accessories

Unpacking the P2510S, my first observation was its low weight. I almost thought the carton was empty because it was so light. Removing the panel and minimalist stand doesn’t change that impression. Fear not; once you turn it on, you’ll find very substantial performance. The stand snaps together to create a solid package weighing seven pounds. It could almost be considered a portable monitor. The cable bundle comprises DisplayPort and an IEC cord for the small external power supply.

Product 360

The P2510S features minimal styling with little more than a green Titan Army logo to signal its design intent. The base has lines molded in, and the back of the panel says “25”. And that’s about it. You can see some ventilation slots and the monitor has a generally chiseled look with softened corners. A red clip sits behind the upright to keep cables tidy.

The stand is light and all plastic, but more solid than its light weight suggests. It’s more than capable of keeping the P2510S from wobbling about. It attaches at the panel’s bottom, providing the only adjustment of 5/20 degrees tilt. The fulcrum is low so the screen’s top moves away from the viewer when adjusted. Movement is firm and free of play.

The OSD is controlled by four buttons at the bottom right. The power key is backlit, white for power on and red for standby. If you want to use a monitor arm, a 100mm VESA mount is provided, fasteners not included.

The inputs are up and under and nicely labeled with a color-coded strip. You get two each of HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4 along with a 3.5mm headphone jack. There are no internal speakers, USB ports or LED lights.

OSD Features

The P2510S’s OSD is clearly aimed at gamers with its angular aesthetic and bright green outlines. It’s small but very easy to read thanks to high contrast. Pressing any key brings up a quick menu from which you select the home icon (leftmost button) to summon the full OSD.

There are 12 picture modes, with Standard being the default and best choice. All can be calibrated with either individual or global settings. sRGB is the way to the smaller SDR color gamut if you wish. It and Standard are reasonably accurate out of the box, but I found a better image after calibration.

Picture Settings has a full set of image options including dynamic contrast for SDR content, gamma presets and color temps. You can create up to three custom color temps with the included RGB sliders. Three HDR picture modes are provided in the Game+ menu. They are similar in their color rendering but have different luminance curves. Auto is the best choice there.

Game+ has a large array of video processing options and play aids. The overdrive has four options, of which level 3 is the best. It removes nearly all motion blur and works with no ghosting artifacts. In the Game Aid sub-menu are aiming crosshairs, timer, stopwatch, frame counter and multi-screen alignment marks. In System Settings, you can program two control keys for custom functions like brightness or input selection.

Titan Army P2510S Calibration Settings

The P2510S can be enjoyed without calibration, but the image was a tad warm in tone and gamma proved to be darker than standard. I recommend changing gamma to 2.0 and adjusting the RGB sliders to dial in grayscale tracking. This has a positive effect on color as well. When complete, I observed visually perfect results. My SDR settings are below.

HDR signals enable three additional picture modes. Auto is the best choice, but all three have a slight green tint that cannot be compensated for. Tone mapping is correct though which means the HDR image retains full detail. There is no dynamic contras,t though, so HDR games won’t have any additional visual impact.

Gaming and Hands-on

Jumping right into why one buys a 240 Hz monitor, the P2510S is undeniably quick. It gives a similar feel to the 360 and 500 Hz monitors I’ve reviewed. Input lag is so low that onscreen movement seems to anticipate your control inputs. It isn’t quite as smooth as a 240 Hz OLED or 500 Hz LCD, there is a minuscule amount of motion blur. But the control response is truly on another level. This is a fully qualified competition monitor. And consider that most speedy 25-inch screens are much more expensive and run at FHD rather than QHD resolution. The P2510S’s higher pixel density is an asset. And 240 fps can be achieved with a mid-priced video card.

Image quality inspired only praise. I played both at the default picture settings and with my calibration in place. It’s fine without adjustment, but the real difference happened when I changed gamma from 2.2 to 2.0. This brightens the picture considerably and gives it more life. It also makes detail pop and enhances clarity. I highly recommend using my settings above if you can’t calibrate your P2510S.

As an everyday monitor, it’s a bit smaller than what I’m used to, but for those who are space-challenged, it’s ideal. The base is large enough for stability but presents a small footprint. The whole thing weighs just seven pounds, so it won’t wobble even when you’re fragging away the afternoon. The image works well for productivity with clean whites, deep blacks and excellent sharpness.

Though the P2510S isn’t marketed as portable, it’s very light and breaks down easily. The snap-together stand can easily be stowed with the panel in a backpack. The external power supply is small too. It’s completely feasible to tote it to a LAN party without incurring a back injury.

Takeaway: The P2510S offers tremendous gaming performance and excellent picture quality. I could use the “for the money” qualifier, which would be unfair. It’s a really good monitor by any standard. And its compact size and light weight make it totable which is pretty cool. It has a good out-of-box image and benefits from some adjustments. For less than $300, I can’t imagine much better.

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My test database had no 25-inch QHD screens, so I rounded up the latest 240 and 180 Hz 27s to compare the P2510S’s performance. The group is RCA’s M27PG135F, HP’s Omen 27qs, ASRock’s PG27QFT2A, Asus’ XG27ACS and AOC’s CQ27G3Z.

Pixel Response and Input Lag

Click here to read up on our pixel response and input lag testing procedures.

240 Hz monitors typically refresh in four or five milliseconds. The P2510S is the former group. It has an extremely precise overdrive, so at 240 fps, there’s almost no motion blur. The best part, though, is its extremely low input lag. The P2510S is one of the fastest gaming monitors I’ve ever tested with just 16ms of total lag. It’s quicker than the Asus PG248QP which runs at 540 Hz. Major wow!

Test Takeaway: The P2510S is more than qualified for gameplay at all levels from casual to competitive. Though a higher refresh rate, or an OLED, will render slightly better motion resolution, those displays won’t be as responsive to control inputs. In fairness, this difference will be hard to perceive by all but the best players. But it is significant that there are only two monitors in my database that are quicker, Alienware’s AW2524H at 15ms and Asus’ PG32UCDP, which hits 11ms in its 480 Hz FHD mode.

Viewing Angles

Most IPS screens go a bit green when viewed at 45 degrees to the side but the P2510S has a red tint. This is a good thing because the shift is less visible in actual content. Brightness drops by around 10% and there is some loss of shadow detail. The top view is 50% less bright, looks cool in tone, and has a similar reduction in shadow detail. Overall, this is very good performance in this price segment.

Screen Uniformity

To learn how we measure screen uniformity, click here.

My P2510S had a slight glow on the left side of the screen when I observed a black field pattern. It was subtle enough that content wasn’t affected. This is a sample-specific issue. Others may measure better than this.

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To read about our monitor tests in-depth, please check out Display Testing Explained: How We Test PC Monitors. We cover brightness and contrast testing on page two.

Uncalibrated – Maximum Backlight Level

Though the P2510S isn’t the brightest monitor of the group, it has enough output for use indoors. It exceeds its 300-nit rating and in the contrast test, rises to third place thanks to solid black levels. At 1,157.8:1, it is slightly above the IPS average in this test.

After Calibration to 200 nits

Calibration adds a few points to the P2510S’s contrast score; it’s now a bit shy of 1,200:1, which is excellent performance. The ASRock is a clear over-achiever among IPS screens, but if you want maximum dynamic range in an LCD panel, the VA-based CQ27G3Z is a great choice.

The P2510S maintains consistent contrast in the ANSI test with a score of 1,130.6:1. This shows excellent component selection and quality control on Titan Army’s part. This is a budget screen built to a premium standard.

Test Takeaway: The P2510S has better than average contrast when compared to other IPS monitors. It shows excellent consistency across all the tests which puts it on par with many more expensive displays. It isn’t super bright, but it is more than bright enough for indoor use. With solid black levels, it delivers a satisfying image with good depth and saturation.

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The P2510S ships in its Standard picture mode which is reasonably accurate in the DCI-P3 color space. An sRGB mode is available for those that want it. Any preset can be calibrated to a higher standard.

Grayscale and Gamma Tracking

Our grayscale and gamma tests use Calman calibration software from Portrait Displays. We describe our grayscale and gamma tests in detail here.

The P2510S’s default grayscale run shows a bit of visible warmth. If a monitor can’t be perfect, red errors are always preferable. Too much green is more obvious to the user, and too much blue flattens the image. Extra red won’t detract as much. The errors here are small and concentrated in the brighter pattern steps. Gamma is more obviously off the mark. With an average value of 2.39, it is visibly dark in tone. While the wide gamut color helps compensate somewhat, the image lacks verve.

I switched the gamma preset to 2.0, and the image became livelier. A few tweaks of the RGB sliders removed all visible grayscale errors. They are coarse in operation, so it took more trial and error than usual to achieve an excellent result. It’s well worth the effort though. This is very good performance.

The sRGB mode correctly renders that color gamut, but it has similar red errors in its grayscale test. Gamma is off the mark as well with light values at the bottom of the scale and dark ones in the highlight areas. This serves to reduce picture depth, not a good thing. It is possible to correct the grayscale issues, but there are no gamma options in sRGB mode.

Comparisons

The P2510S starts at a respectable 2.97dE grayscale error, placing it third in this group. Visually, it’s just able to get by without calibration. But I recommend using my settings from page one if you don’t have the means to calibrate. It makes a visible improvement to image quality and fidelity.

If you do nothing else, I recommend setting the gamma preset to 2.0. It isn’t perfectly on the 2.2 reference, but it is very close. And the image has more pop as a result. I would wish that there was an option that was right on 2.2 but 2.14 isn’t a bad thing.

Color Gamut Accuracy

Our color gamut and volume testing use Portrait Displays’ Calman software. For details on our color gamut testing and volume calculations, click here.

The P2510S has an impressively large color gamut and out of the box, it’s fairly close to spec. You can see a bit of oversaturation in red, and there are hue errors in cyan, magenta and yellow. This is due to the grayscale issues I spoke of earlier. Grayscale calibration puts the secondaries on target while the change to gamma dials in the saturation points. Blue is still a tad under, but green is almost fully covered. This is impressive for a $290 monitor.

The sRGB gamut is spot-on except for blue which is under-saturated. The off-hue points in magenta can be fixed with a grayscale calibration if you want to use this mode. The default error of 2.15dE is quite good though.

Comparisons

The P2510S finished fifth in the comparison with a 1.76dE color error when referenced to DCI-P3. All the screens here are solid performers and very close in accuracy. In terms of visual accuracy, there is no difference between them.

Color gamut volume is also close between the six monitors but the P2510S is solidly in second place behind the RCA. It is one of the most colorful monitors you can buy for less than $300. And it has enough volume to qualify for critical applications.

Test Takeaway: The P2510S doesn’t need calibration, but it will benefit from a few adjustments to color temperature and gamma. It has an impressively large color gamut that is only exceeded by more expensive displays. sRGB is there if you want it and allows calibration which is a rarity. You’ll be hard-pressed to find something better for the money.

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Our HDR benchmarking uses Portrait Displays’ Calman software. To learn about our HDR testing, see our breakdown of how we test PC monitors.

The P2510S supports HDR10 signals with an automatic switch as long as you set the HDR option Auto. There are three total HDR picture modes that differ in their tone-mapping and luminance tracking. There is no dynamic dimming available to increase contrast.

HDR Brightness and Contrast

The P2510S manages a tad more brightness in HDR mode with a peak just shy of 378 nits. Black levels are about the same as I saw in SDR mode so contrast is a little higher at 1,323.9:1. You can see the benefit of dynamic dimming in the top two screens which increase their HDR contrast four- and nine-fold. The P2510S has good native performance but is unable to achieve higher potential.

Grayscale, EOTF and Color

The P2510S shows slight green errors in the brighter steps of the HDR grayscale test. They are visible to the naked eye and cannot be adjusted away. I measured all three HDR modes and found Auto provided the best luminance tracking. Game and Movie were darker in tone with some clipped shadow detail.

The P2510S’s wide color gamut is used to best advantage with full coverage of DCI-P3 and a bit of general over-saturation to provide more vivid hues. This effectively provides a little more impact than SDR. I noted slight hue errors in magenta and yellow due to the grayscale issues. The P2510S tracks Rec.2020 color points with a similar level of over-saturation until color runs out at 85% red, 75% green, and 90% blue. This is typical of all wide gamut monitors I’ve reviewed. Only a very few can cover more of Rec.2020.

Test Takeaway: The P2510S delivers adequate HDR performance which could be made better with the addition of dynamic dimming. In fairness, almost no monitors in this price range have that feature. Tone mapping is accurate, but there is a slight green tint due to grayscale errors that can’t be corrected. There is plenty of nicely saturated color with full coverage of DCI-P3. HDR content is very colorful and bright.

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I have reviewed a lot of gaming monitors at all price points, and I can clearly see a trend forming between OLEDs and LCDs. OLEDs remain at the premium end of both pricing and performance. If you are shopping for an LCD though, it’s getting harder to justify the more expensive fast refresh models. 360 or 500 Hz will cost you at least $500, but there are more and more 240 Hz screens that deliver nearly the same feel for less than $350.

The Titan Army P2510S is a perfect example. It immediately sets itself apart from other speedy 25-inch monitors with QHD resolution. Most of the screens in this genre are FHD. Though the 240 Hz refresh rate isn’t unusual, it has a total lag score of 16ms in my test. I’ve only ever reviewed two quicker displays, the Alienware AW2524H at 15ms and the Asus PG32UCDP at 11ms in its 480 Hz FHD mode. The P2510S is a lot less expensive than either one. In terms of gaming performance and price ratio, it has no equal.

Image quality is good out of the box and better with calibration. Gamma runs a bit dark which is an easy fix and the grayscale is slightly warm. This error is hard to spot in actual content so I can say that the P2510S doesn’t need calibration. With a few adjustments though, it looks significantly better.

Physical features like USB ports and speakers are missing but that’s not unusual at this price. There is a full set of gaming aids though, so everything needed for satisfying play is there. Honestly, once you’ve experienced its quick response, the other stuff won’t matter. If you’re looking for a budget gaming monitor that punches way above its weight class, the Titan Army P2510S is well worth considering.

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The first wrongful death lawsuit (PDF) from the Titan submersible implosion in 2023 is underway, and attorneys have pointed out several factors that could have played a role in the tragic accident. Among these contributing factors is the inexpensive Logitech F710 game controller used as the submersible’s only means of navigating the craft.

The estate of Paul-Henri Louis Emile Nargeolet recently filed the lawsuit against OceanGate, Inc., and others. Other defendants include the estate of deceased OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. The lawsuit is requesting damages be paid of at least $50 million.

Nargeolet, known worldwide as “Mr. Titanic” because of his 37 previous dives to the ocean liner wreckage, was working with OceanGate on Titan as a crew member. His responsibilities were to "guide other crewmembers and assist with navigation through the Titanic wreckage.”

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs point out that OceanGate and the other defendants were warned repeatedly by “multiple deep-sea diving experts and engineers, about the potentially fatal consequences of their choices and actions.” These warnings stemmed from serious concerns about the design and construction of the Titan submersible, as well as its operation.

One of the listed design concerns was using the Logitech F710 game controller as the only way to steer the submersible. Rush highlighted this in a 2022 interview with journalist David Pogue, holding up the controller with its 3D-printed thumbstick extensions and boasting, "We run the whole thing with this game controller."

Game controllers are heavily used in military and space flight applications, primarily because newer generations have built up so much muscle memory in using them. However, the decision not to include a secondary, hard-wired means of controlling the Titan was heavily questioned as unsafe before the dive.

Rush, infamously at this point, shrugged off safety concerns. He told Pogue, "At some point, safety just is pure waste." Rush wasn’t just talking about the inclusion of the Logitech F710, but about that and other concerns raised with the Titan’s design. Similarly, the wrongful death suit points out the controller and other factors questioned long before the Titan began its descent to the Titanic wreckage.

These other design and construction choices included building the submersible using carbon fiber instead of titanium, the submersible’s porthole, and the use of materials with differing expansion/compression coefficients. These rounded out the four main areas of criticism Rush and OceanGate ignored.

The lawsuit acknowledges the root cause of the implosion may never be known and does not place sole blame on any one factor. However, the "daisy chain of failures of multiple improperly designed or constructed parts or systems" likely contributed. Now, the plaintiffs seek compensation from OceanGate and the other defendants.

The wrongful death suit claims the defendants "were careless, negligent, grossly negligent, and reckless" because, in part, they failed to provide a safe work environment or "take reasonable precautions during the design, manufacturing, testing, and operation phases" of the Titan.

Nvidia is reportedly prepping a Blackwell-based Titan graphics card that will deliver unbeatable performance, surpassing even the upcoming GeForce RTX 5090, reports Overclock3D.net citing RedGamingTech. The information about Nvidia's intention to develop its next 'big' graphics card has been confirmed by @kopite7kimi, a renowned hardware leaker. But there's a small catch: Just like the rumored RTX 4090 Ti / Titan, the product may never see a retail release.

Nvidia's range-topping "Titan AI" is said to be based on the GB202 graphics processor and deliver 63% higher performance compared to the GeForce RTX 4090 while also offering a 15% higher performance than the future GeForce RTX 5090, according to RGT. However, specifications of the rumored add-in-board are unknown, and considering we're possibly two or three quarters away from the rumored release timeframe for Blackwell-based products for consumers, any information concerning them should be taken with a healthy serving of salt.

For now, the only thing that @kopite7kimi has confirmed is that Nvidia's next-generation product lineup has at least one graphics card based on the 'Big Blackwell' GPU (GB202). This could be the GeForce RTX 5090, seemingly destined to rank among the best graphics cards, or it could be an RTX 5090 Ti or indeed the so-called Titan AI.

"The biggest problem is whether it will actually be used for sale," @kopite7kimi wrote in an X post. "Titan based on Ada Lovelace also exists, but it has never been sold."

Nvidia's Titan graphics cards have always belonged in a class of their own. When Nvidia released its first Titan in early 2013 and then the Titan Z in mid-2014, the company clearly positioned these boards for no-compromise gamers. But starting from the Titan X, Titan Xp, and Titan V — based on the Pascal and Volta microarchitectures — Nvidia repositioned Titan cards as solutions aimed at prosumers. These graphics boards not only offered unbeatable performance, but also came with Nvidia Studio drivers for professional graphics applications. There were also no limitations when it came to AI and HPC performance.

Nvidia decided to skip any Titan with the Ampere generation, opting instead for the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti instead. Then with its Ada Lovelace GPUs, the company stopped at the RTX 4090 — possibly because it couldn't even ship that part to one of its primary markets, China, or perhaps because even the GeForce RTX 4090 didn't have a direct rival from AMD. Or maybe it was because RTX 4090 cards were already experiencing issues with melting 16-pin connectors. There were RTX 6000 Ada Generation professional graphics card for AI, HPC, and ProViz that featured more active CUDA cores than the GeForce RTX 4090 aimed at gamers, but also lower power limits.

With the Blackwell family the situation could repeat itself, and Nvidia may not need or even want to release this rumored Titan AI GPU. Instead, we could see a professional board with a nearly 'full' GPU enabled that will offer great performance, with a price far beyond what gamers or even prosumers are willing to pay. We're still months away from even the earliest potential launch window, and Nvidia could launch a Titan card any time between then and perhaps 2026. For now, we'll take the usual stance of waiting to see what ultimately gets announced.

MSI has launched a new flagship gaming laptop: the Titan 18 Pro Ryzen Edition. The new laptop brings the familiar high-end performance and stylings of the Titan 18 line, powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D. This marks the second-ever appearance of the 7945HX3D in a laptop after its first release in the Asus ROG Scar 17 X3D one year ago. 

Spotted by VideoCardz on Chinese shopping website JD.com, the laptop's specs match the original Titan 18 Pro, with the same RTX 4090 graphics card and the Intel Core i9-14900HX processor replaced with the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D. The storage and RAM see upgrades over both the Pro and HX variants of the Titan 18, with the Ryzen Edition launching at a max spec of 96GB RAM and a 4TB PCIe Gen5 SSD. The original Pro and more expensive HX variants of the laptop have a maximum of 64GB RAM and PCIe Gen4 SSDs, though the Intel variants run two 2TB SSDs paired in RAID-0. Another sacrifice for leaving behind Intel processors is the loss of Thunderbolt 4.

The display remains the same: an endgame-worthy 18-inch 240Hz IPS panel with a 16:10 aspect ratio (2560x1600 resolution) and DisplayHDR 1000 certification. The SteelSeries RGB mechanical keyboard is a slight downgrade from the top-of-the-line Titan 18 HX's Cherry MX Brown Ultra-Thin switches. The laptop is currently only available for purchase through JD.com for sale in China and starts at 21,999 RMB ($3,030); this starting price will get you only 32GB RAM and 1TB storage. 

The Titan 18 Pro Ryzen Edition laptop is releasing at an odd time. While the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D is a powerful chip, and it is exciting to see it released on another computer, it may only be AMD's highest-end laptop chip for a few more weeks. Strix Point will hit shelves with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 mobile APU on July 15th, and early Geekbench results show it beating the 7945HX3D in single-core performance even while not hitting max clock speeds. That said, the 7945HX3D still handily takes the lead in multi-core performance, and Strix Point is not likely to ever see a laptop release alongside an RTX 4090 and nearly 100GB of RAM. 

For an idea of the performance of the MSI Titan 18 Pro Ryzen Edition's older brother, you can read our review of the MSI Titan 18 HX here. We outfitted it with all the fixings for an eye-watering $5,400 and certainly weren't disappointed with its performance.

I’ve been expounding a lot lately about the virtues of OLED gaming monitors and their many advantages over traditional LCD panels. But they aren’t exactly inexpensive. A 27-inch one will cost nearly twice as much as a gaming console. If you want to spend less money, some good deals are available on fast IPS screens.

Moving outside the mainstream, newcomer Titan Army sent me its P27A2R to check out. It is a 27-inch IPS QHD 16:9 flat panel that includes 180 Hz, Adaptive-Sync, and wide-gamut color for just $200. I could almost end the review right there, but let’s take a look anyway.

Titan Army P27A2R Specs

The P27A2R starts with a Fast IPS panel that runs comfortably at 180 Hz without overclock. It has a claimed gray-to-gray response of one millisecond. In my tests, it kept up with other screens of similar speed and showed very low input lag. It also delivers better video processing than its price suggests. The overdrive is precisely tuned and has obviously received some attention. Motion resolution is quite high, and motion is extremely smooth. Adaptive-Sync is supported for AMD and Nvidia platforms. The P27A2R has not been certified by Nvidia, but it ran G-Sync flawlessly in my tests.

Though IPS isn’t known for high contrast, the P27A2R manages to crack 1,200:1 which is a bit better than average for the technology. You’ll get greater dynamic range from VA or OLED of course but this monitor has a crisp and well saturated image with accurate color, something else that belies the low price. It can be enjoyed without calibration and hits all the marks for grayscale, gamma and color. The gamut is extended to cover a measured 91.87% of DCI-P3, another point in its favor.

What’s missing? There are bound to be sacrifices, but the only significant one is that there’s no HDR. The SDR picture is excellent, but there’s no denying that HDR is nice. There’s no sRGB option which is likely to matter to almost no one. The full gamut is in play for all content. There are no USB ports, so you must connect peripherals to your PC. And there are no internal speakers, so you’ll have to derive audio from the 3.5mm headphone jack.

Speaking of connections, the P27A2R has many. There are two HDMI 2.1 and two DisplayPort 1.4 inputs. Since the HDMIs are full bandwidth, you can use consoles and PCs alike for gaming.

You also get a nice LED strip across the back. It’s just red, no light show here, but it emits a nice soft glow against the wall behind. There are aiming points, timer, and a frame rate counter too. The OSD is controlled by a joystick, the stand has full ergonomics and the overall build quality is good. The big draw here is bang for the buck and the P27A2R definitely has a lot of the former for little of the latter.

Assembly and Accessories

The P27A2R comes out of its crumbly foam packing in three parts. It assembles without tools into a reasonably solid package. There’s a bit of wobble at the panel’s attachment point because it rotates both ways without a center detent, but it’s stout enough for gameplay. A tiny brick serves as the external power supply, and the box also contains a DisplayPort cable and four large fasteners for the 75mm VESA mount should you wish to use a monitor arm.

Product 360

The P27A2R is simply styled, almost minimalistic, with nothing but the words “Titan Army” printed in a military shade of green on the front. That is the only graphic found anywhere on the monitor. A thin LED strip in the back brackets the round attachment point in the center. It lights up red, or you can turn it off. It has no options for brightness, color or effect.

Also in the back are inputs that face out rather than down, making hookups a breeze. You can route cables through a hole in the upright. You get two HDMI 2.1, two DisplayPort 1.4 jacks, and a 3.5mm headphone interface. It isn’t the cleanest layout for cable management, but it is far easier to deal with when you tote a monitor to different locations or frequently change connections, as I do.

The side profile is slimmer than most, with a panel depth of just 2.5 inches. The base is deep and wide and will have no problem keeping things upright. The stand has full adjustment capability with 4.8 inches of height, 5/20 degrees tilt, 20 degrees swivel, and 90 degrees rotation. You can set portrait mode in either direction, which makes it a little more challenging to level the screen. Movements are moderately firm with a little play. The P27A2R stays where you set it, but finding a precise position takes a bit of fiddling.

OSD Features

The P27A2R’s OSD was the thing I liked the least. It’s laid out oddly, and the joystick control is not intuitive. The up, down and left directions call up quick menus and can be programmed, that’s the good part. A right click opens the full menu system. Let’s just say it’s good that calibration is not necessary.

Once you open the P27A2R’s OSD, you’re greeted with a graphical screen that shows signal info at the top and is set off in a nice bright green. Game Settings has four picture modes, and instead of simply picking one, you turn the one you want on, thereby turning the others off. It’s odd. Selections are made with a right click rather than a press like just about every other joystick controller out there. This menu is loaded with aiming points, frame rate indicator, timer, overdrive options and a toggle for the LED lighting.

Picture Settings include dynamic contrast (DCR), which should be turned off. There’s plenty of contrast already, and DCR only crushes shadow and highlight detail. What is Contextual Model, you ask? It’s three more picture modes: Movie, Reading, and Night. However, you won’t need them. Just stick with the default Standard mode, and you’ll be fine with very accurate color and no calibration needed. This menu also has gamma presets.

Color Settings has three fixed color temps and three adjustable memories. As I said, you don’t need to tweak it, but if you choose to adjust the RGB sliders, they are frustrating to use. Finding the right combination of joystick clicks was difficult, and it took me a lot of trial and error just to make small changes. But the effort yielded a small improvement, so my ego was satisfied.

I snapped a picture of the OSD Settings menu because it also has options for the three programmable joystick inputs, up, down and left. These can be set to a variety of functions for quick access to things like aiming point, brightness and more. The final menu, Other Settings, has the input selector and volume controls.

Titan Army P27A2R Calibration Settings

The P27A2R is close enough out of the box that calibration is not necessary. Because I couldn’t resist, I calibrated one of the user memories and eked out a tiny improvement in grayscale tracking. Gamma is spot-on either way. The color gamut covers almost 92% of DCI-P3 with no sRGB mode available. My instrument-derived settings are below.

Gaming and Hands-on

What is there to say about a $200 gaming monitor? In the P27A2R’s case, quite a lot. There aren’t USB ports or internal speakers, but that doesn’t impact the gaming experience. I just plugged in a set of headphones. They sound better than monitor speakers anyway. I fired up Doom Eternal and was initially bummed at the lack of HDR. Though the P27A2R has a wide gamut, playing in SDR mode was a bit less vivid than I’m used to. And yes, I’ve been spoiled by a parade of OLEDs coming through my test lab.

But once I got going, gameplay was as good as the best gaming monitors I’ve reviewed. Motion resolution was superb, with no blur whatsoever. The P27A2R has a precisely tuned overdrive. It ran at 180fps with no issue, and G-Sync worked perfectly. Control lag is very low. Perceptually, it’s equal to all the super-fast monitors I’ve experienced. Even a 500 Hz model doesn’t seem any better. More skilled players might feel differently but my casual skills were easily supported by the P27A2R.

QHD resolution at 27 inches means 109ppi, which is plenty of pixel density for games, video and productivity. The image was always crisp and clear, with vivid color and decent contrast. There is no edge enhancement at default settings. Don’t change the sharpness slider if you agree that this is the best way to use a monitor. Contrast is high enough to set text clearly against the background, whether it’s black on white or the reverse. Photo and graphics work was also a breeze. 4K is great, but QHD at this size is more than enough resolution to satisfy. And it doesn’t take as much video card power (or expense) to maintain high frame rates.

The P27A2R’s build quality is good for the money. The stand is a bit fiddly when finding the right position, but everything stays put once you get it right. My only real complaint is the OSD navigation. The combination of joystick inputs is unintuitive. Though calibration is unnecessary, I did one and found the RGB sliders extremely difficult to get right. This is a minor issue since few users will need to tweak the image controls. Just set brightness to taste, and you’ll be happy.

Takeaway: The P27A2R does everything well whether it’s gaming, entertainment or work tasks. It presents a sharp and colorful picture with premium video processing thanks to its precise overdrive and flawless Adaptive-Sync operation. Despite the issues I had using the OSD, it truly punches above its weight class and delivers a lot of performance and quality for the money.

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The sweet spot of price and performance is with 27-inch QHD monitors running between 165 and 180 Hz. The P27A2R is directly comparable to Lenovo’s G27q-30, Cooler Master’s GM2711S, Gigabyte’s GS27QC and MSI’s G272QPF. To fill it out to six, I added HP’s Omen 27qs 240 Hz screen.

Pixel Response and Input Lag

Click here to read up on our pixel response and input lag testing procedures.

Obviously, the HP has a distinct advantage with its 240 Hz refresh rate, but the rest of the panels aren’t far behind. The P27A2R’s excellent video processing makes it nearly as smooth as HP and on par with the others. Motion blur is barely noticeable when running at 180fps and overdrive is set to Fast, the default. There is no ELMB option here, which is unsurprising for a $200 monitor. Input lag is mid-pack with a 26ms score. Most gamers will enjoy a satisfying experience playing on the P27A2R. Only the most skilled will want a faster screen.

Test Takeaway: The P27A2R gives nothing away to more expensive monitors in the speed and feel department. Motion resolution is higher than average for its speed class, and input lag is low enough that all but the very best players will find that it responds instantly to control inputs. For $200, you won’t find a better 27-inch QHD gaming screen.

Viewing Angles

The P27A2R has far less color shift than most IPS monitors I’ve tested, but its reduction in brightness is noticeable at around 30%. Gamma is consistent in the horizontal plane, but if you plan to share it, turn up the brightness to give everyone a better image. The top view is very dark and goes a bit green as well. This is typical IPS performance.

Screen Uniformity

To learn how we measure screen uniformity, click here.

For $200, I can forgive the P27A2R’s uniformity result of 11.77%. In practice, the only visible thing is a touch more brightness down the right side of the screen. This is a sample-specific issue. Brighter gray fields had no problems. There was no bleed or hotspotting in my sample.

MORE: Best Gaming Monitors

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To read about our monitor tests in-depth, please check out Display Testing Explained: How We Test PC Monitors. We cover brightness and contrast testing on page two.

Uncalibrated – Maximum Backlight Level

Titan Army claims 300 nits for the P27A2R, but my sample didn’t quite get there. It’s firmly in the “not too bright but bright enough” category. I adjust monitors down to 200 nits for a level test field, but this is plenty of light output for any indoor space.

In the black level comparison, the P27A2R is the best of the IPS screens with a satisfyingly low 0.2344 nit measurement and 1,230.1:1 contrast.

After Calibration to 200 nits

Calibration costs nothing in terms of dynamic range. Contrast is still over 1,200:1 and the P27A2R is still the best of the IPS monitors in the group. It is better than average for the category which is impressive given its budget status.

It scores well in the ANSI test too with only a small reduction to 1,174.7:1, very consistent. Only the MSI comes close. This is excellent performance.

Test Takeaway: The P27A2R performs well above its price class with higher-than-average contrast and excellent black levels. There are brighter monitors available for more money but unless you need that extra output, or can’t live without HDR, it is hard to beat.

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Given my frustration with the P27A2R’s OSD control, I’m happy to say that you don’t need to calibrate it. It comes out of the box with solid grayscale, gamma and color tracking.

Grayscale and Gamma Tracking

Our grayscale and gamma tests use Calman calibration software from Portrait Displays. We describe our grayscale and gamma tests in detail here.

There’s not much to see here other than a solid effort from Titan Army. Only the 100% brightness step cracks 3dE, and not by much. At peak output, you might see a touch of warmth if you look very hard, but realistically, this is a visually perfect chart. Gamma tracks the reference line almost exactly. With calibration, only a couple of clicks, I got the error down below 1dE average with no change in gamma. This is reference-level performance.

Comparisons

The P27A2R is on par with the other screens in both default and calibrated states. With a 1.57dE out-of-box result, there is no need for adjustment. That is true for the other monitors, too. While Titan Army delivers excellent accuracy for a low price, it isn’t alone. Though its final score puts it in last place, there is no one who will be unhappy about a 0.86dE grayscale error. That’s about as good as it gets.

Gamma tracking is excellent, with a tight 0.09 range of values and only 0.45% deviation from 2.2. The actual value is 2.21, visually indistinguishable from perfect.

Color Gamut Accuracy

Our color gamut and volume testing use Portrait Displays’ Calman software. For details on our color gamut testing and volume calculations, click here.

I might complain about the P27A2R’s lack of an sRGB mode, but when you look at its color gamut test result, you can’t help but be impressed. Only a slight under-saturation in red and green holds it back from perfection. Calibration lowers the number a bit, but visually, there is no difference. It looks great in all respects.

Comparisons

The P27A2R would win the gamut accuracy contest right out of the box. It’s hard to say much more than, this is a very accurate monitor, for $200. Definitely impressive. Though it doesn’t win the gamut volume comparison, it’s extremely close to the top. Visually, it’s equal to the Cooler Master and MSI displays.

Test Takeaway: The P27A2R’s frustrating OSD is offset by its superb color accuracy. It doesn’t need calibration and it hits all the marks for grayscale, gamma and color in the DCI-P3 realm. Only its lack of an sRGB mode holds it back from maximum greatness. For the money, there is nothing better.

MORE: Best Gaming Monitors

MORE: How We Test PC Monitors

MORE: How to Buy a PC Monitor

It’s easy to get spoiled by high-end gaming displays, especially with OLEDs becoming more common. However, though that technology delivers incredible imagery and performance, it will still cost you the price of two gaming consoles to put a 27-inch QHD OLED on your desktop. There are plenty of less expensive alternatives, though, and at the bottom of the price scale is Titan Army’s P27A2R. It isn’t at the bottom of the performance scale and it definitely delivers a lot for the money.

With 180 Hz, flawless Adaptive-Sync and a precisely tuned overdrive, the P27A2R showed me superb gameplay. There was no visible motion blur at 180fps, and input lag proved to be perceptually nonexistent. In that regard, it is nearly equal to an OLED, for a quarter the price.

The image has no real flaws either when compared to other IPS screens. Contrast is around 1,200:1 – above the industry average. Color accuracy is there right out of the box. The P27A2R has no visible grayscale, gamma or color errors. And it covers almost 92% of DCI-P3 which is also above average for wide gamut displays. The only bummer is that there’s no HDR.

If you really need USB ports or internal speakers, the P27A2R doesn’t have them. And the OSD’s joystick navigation is needlessly fiddly. But these things don’t diminish the gaming experience. Everything you need for satisfying play, or any other task, is there. In the budget monitor realm, Titan Army is making a superb effort. If you need a high-performing gaming display and you’re down to the last $200 of your budget, be sure to put it on your shortlist.

MORE: Best Gaming Monitors

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Sparkle's Titan could be the industry's fastest Arc A770 and join the ranks of the best graphics cards. Sparkle has listed its top-of-the-line Intel Arc A770 16 GB graphics card that not only boasts 16 GB of memory onboard but also comes with factory overclocked GPU and memory and has a cooling system to provide some more overclocking headroom (via SquashBionic).

When Sparkle re-entered the graphics cards market earlier this year, it introduced a host of Intel Arc-based offerings, including its Arc A770 Titan, that was meant to offer range-topping performance and demonstrate the company's technological prowess. Indeed, the Sparkle Intel Arc A770 Titan OC Edition graphic board clocks Intel's ACM-G10 GPU at 2300 MHz base clock (up from 2100 MHz recommended by Intel) and uses 16 GB of memory with a 17.5 GT/s data transfer rate.

The Sparkle Intel Arc A770 Titan OC Edition comes with two eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors and a massive triple-fan cooling system to enable some further overclocking potential for those who want to squeeze all the juices possible from Intel's ACM-G10 graphics processor. The fans stop spinning under light loads and begin to turn when the loads get higher.

An interesting peculiarity of the card is its ThermalSync thermal sensor on top of the cooler that detects temperature and adjusts the color of its LED light bar accordingly (which means 40 degrees Celsius, red means 90 degrees Celsius, and higher), which significantly simplifies monitoring the temperature.

Since Intel abruptly discontinued its Limited Edition Arc A770 16 GB graphics card, the market needed an amplified version of Intel's range-topping graphics offering to compete against products from ASRock and Acer.

Sparkle does not disclose pricing of its Sparkle Intel Arc A770 Titan OC Edition for now, though given Intel's aggressive behavior on the GPU scene, expect it to be priced competitively.

One of the largest Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations ever was rendered over the weekend. The CFD simulation of just one second of Concorde landing at 300 km/h rendered at a resolution of 40 billion cells (2976×8936×1489) and took 33 hours to process. This single second of simulation is said to take up to nine years using conventional CFD programs.

Dr. Moritz Lehmann, AKA @ProjectPhysX, conducted the simulations with the FluidX3D program on GigaIO's SuperNODE, which packs 32x AMD Instinct MI210 GPUs with a total of 2TB of VRAM.

We also have a few other entertaining videos of Lehmann's other CFD projects below, like an armchair simulation on $45,000 worth of GPUs, and the aerodynamics of a cow. Yes, a cow.

In the video above, you can see the iconic Anglo/French supersonic passenger jet with its flaps down at a 10° angle of approach, causing a lot of turbulence during descent and deceleration. This CFD shows what is happening to the airflow from a multitude of angles. From some views, it looks like the air is boiling off the Concorde's carefully crafted lines.

Dr. Lehmann shared more technical details about the Concorde CFD in a Reddit thread. Astonishingly, he said each frame of the simulation visualizes 475 GB of volumetric data, so the full minute takes up 285 TB total.

According to Dr. Lehmann, a "commercial CFD would need years for this, [but] FluidX3D does it over the weekend." Dr. Lehmann is actually the sole developer of FluidX3D, as well as a Khronos OpenCL Advisor. Living on the cutting edge of CFDs and graphics, he had the foresight to develop FluidX3D (OpenCL) with 32-GPU scaling 'out-of-the-box.'

If you want to delve even deeper, Dr. Lehmann has shared the SuperNODE AMD Instinct GPU benchmarks and FluidX3D source code on GitHub. The FluidX3D software is free for non-commercial use.

Armchairs and Cows Fly, and Other Lehmann ProjectPhysX CFD Projects

The above-detailed Concorde CFD is by no means the first such project shared by ProjectPhysX on social media channels. Before he got his hands on the GigaIO's SuperNODE, Dr. Lehman practiced his art on more modest systems.

In the example above, you can see what is claimed to be "the most detailed CFD simulation of a quadcopter ever," with a resolution of 3 billion cells. The embedded video was rendered using FluidX3D, again, but this time on a quartet of Nvidia A100 40 GB GPUs.

If quadcopters are too normal for you, what about a CFD simulation for an armchair at 50 km/h?

The above armchair video was again rendered on the 4x Nvidia A100 40GB GPU system. Armchairs are designed for comfort rather than their aerodynamic qualities, and you can see a lot of drag due to 'chairodynamics' in action. 

A similarly odd CFD available from Dr. Lehmann, for those who can't get enough of these simulations, shows the aerodynamics of a cow. This mad cow CFD render at 476×952×476 was completed on a PC with Titan Xp GPU with 12 GB of VRAM (Nvidia Pascal). So, enthusiasts can still have fun with tools like this, without having access to a server bursting with GPUs.

Sparkle used to be a rather well-known maker of graphics cards back in the aughts, but the company decided to leave this market in mid-2010s as competition got cut-throat and its embedded products turned out to be more profitable. This year the company decided to return to the graphics cards game with a lineup of Intel Arc Alchemist-based graphics cards called Elf, Orc, and Titan. All of them are displayed at Computex and all of them are contenders to join the list of the best graphics cards, should we get to test them.

Sparkle's initial lineup of graphics cards is pretty much straightforward and consists of five models and a concept: 

• The entry-level Arc A310 Elf board for the cheapest systems that still need a discrete graphics card.
• The dual-slot Arc A380 Elf graphics card with 6GB of memory that can fit into a Mini-ITX system.
• The dual-slot dual-fan Arc A750 Orc card with 8GB of GDDR6 memory onboard and two eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors.
• The massive Arc A750 Titan with a triple-fan cooling system and two eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors to maximize overclocking potential. 
• The range-topping Arc A770 Titan that has 16GB of memory and is equipped with an even bigger cooling system to squeeze all the juices out of Intel's ACM-G11 GPU.

• Just in case a massive triple-fan cooler is not enough, Sparkle has its A770 Watercooling Concept with a pre-installed water block for those who want to push the graphics processor a little bit further.

The company also had a low-profile A310 and A380 industrial cards and an A370 MXM module on display.

Sparkle's Arc A750 Orc and Arc A750 Titan graphics cards are designed for midrange gaming systems, and these two seem to feature the same specifications and similar performance out-of-box, but the Titan promises to have a slightly better overclocking potential thanks to its larger cooling system. What is a bit surprising is that the GPU boost clock listed by Sparkle for both cards is 2.20 GHz, which is below 2.40 GHz recommended by Intel itself.

As for the Arc A310 Elf and Arc A380 Elf graphics cards, they are clearly aimed at entry-level gaming PCs and its main advantages are world-class media decoding/encoding capabilities as well as performance higher than that of integrated graphics solutions. 

Interestingly, most of Sparkle's graphics cards are already listed at Newegg. The Arc A380 Elf costs $140, the Arc A750 Orc is priced at $240, and Arc A750 Titan carries a $260 price tag. These prices are in line with competing offerings based on the A380 and A750 GPUs.

Updated Thursday, June1 at 5:40 p.m. ET with more photos and context about what was on display in Sparkle's booth.

Taiwanese device manufacturer Sparkle, one of Nvidia's old AIB partners, has re-entered the graphics card market with a new set of Intel A series graphics cards. The A750 Titan, A750 Orc, and A380 Elf respectively feature a triple, dual, and single fan cooler designs.

Sparkle was one of Nvidia's original AIB partners starting in the 2000s, the Taiwanese company created several generations of Nvidia graphics cards including the 7900 series, all the way up until the GTX 700 series in 2013. We don't know what sparked the company's return to the GPU market, but extra competition among AIB partners is always good to see.

For now, Sparkle has just three new graphics cards, focusing on Intel's Arc A380 and A750 GPUs. The Arc A380 variant is known as the ELF and features a small single-fan cooling solution with a standard two-slot thickness. The shroud is painted in a light blue color, and textured with grooves surrounding each side of the fan. The card comes with three DP 2.0 connections and a single HDMI 2.0 connection.

The Orc and Titan, are dual fan and triple fan versions of Sparkle's A750 aftermarket graphics cards. Both cards feature the company's ThermalSync cooling solution that comes with a patent pending heatsink design and an extra thermal sensor that monitors GPU temperatures in conjunction with GPU's RGB lighting system. Both models also come with Sparkle's Torn Cooling solution featuring 0-db AXL fans, that are equipped with stripped structures and polished surfaces for enhanced cooling performance.

The only distinction between the Orc and Titan is the dual and triple fan cooling solutions, both cards share the same shroud design as the Arc A380, and feature a two-slot thickness. The triple-fan Titan is 305.5mm long, and the dual-fan Orc is 222mm long.

Pricing and availability are unknown at this time.

Gaming laptops are getting tall. This year, an increasing number of the best gaming laptops have moved to loftier screens with 16:10 aspect ratios, showing more of your games and work than ever before. The MSI Raider GE78 HX ($2,999.99 as tested) has been redesigned around this new screen size, with a race car-inspired look, funky RGB light bar and room for both an Intel Core i9-13950HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU.

The redesign gets a lot right. The system performs well and has a colorful display. The keyboard, while set back further than I'd like, is comfortable to type on. And there areplenty of ports on the system for work and play alike.

Those who regularly upgrade their PCs might want to consider the surprising difficulty of getting the base off of the system (though it is definitely possible, and there are plenty of repair opportunities when you're in there).But you may want to get a pair of headphones to block out the fan noise.

Design of the MSI Raider GE78HX

 The GE78HX Raider is embracing its identity as a gaming machine. For the last couple of years, MSI's Raiders were restrained in their design (or at least as restrained as you can be with an RGB light bar), using a silvery-blue finish that could almost fool you into thinking the laptop wasn't designed to help you take down opponents in first-person shooters. But this year, the Raider looks like its more expensive sibling, the Titan, with a red-striped racecar detail and a shiny black aluminum lid with an RGB dragon shield. Yep, we're back to gaming PCs looking like they're meant for teens.

MSI's signature here is a lightbar on the underside of the front of the system. While previous light bars have diffused the individual LEDs into one amorphous blob of light, this time the design looks like a bunch of tiny square bubs. It's just as colorful, but it's also kind of retro, like something you might find on a jukebox. As far as RGB goes, this is at least unique.

The 17-inch, 2560 x 1600 display is flanked by minimal bezels, though the top has a bit of extra chunk to fit the 1080p webcam with a privacy shutter.

There are ports dispersed across both sides and the back of the laptop. The left side has a Thunderbolt 4 port, an SD card slot and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The right side has a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port. In the back, there's an Ethernet port, HDMI 2.1, another USB Type-C port, and the power jack (which is shaped a bit like a USB-A port), but is not.
 

MSI's new Raider is 6.83 pounds and measures 14.97 x  11.73 x 1.13 inches. It just fit into my backpack — the mix of a taller screen and the ports on a bump on the back made it a squeeze. But it's far more portable than MSI's deskbound Titan GT77 HX, which is 7.28 pounds and 16.63 x 12.99 x 0.91 inches. If you want something a bit smaller, the Gigabyte Aorus 15X is 14.1 x 10.8 x 0.78 inches and 5.79 pounds, while the Asus ROG Strix G16 is 13.94 x 10.39 x 0.89 inches and 5.51 pounds

MSI Raider GE78 HX Specifications

Gaming and Graphics on the MSI Raider GE78 HX

The Raider is one of the first systems we've seen with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU, which, paired with an Intel Core i9-13950HX, proved to be powerful in gaming tests.

I used MSI's laptop to play Deathloop, which worked well at the native 2560 x 1600. On very high settings, it ran between 87 and 94 fps as Colt pursued Egor through Array Y.

The Raider often came close behind its larger sibling, the Titan with an RTX 4090, and advanced ahead of its the Gigabyte Aorus and Asus ROG Strix (both toting RTX 4070 GPUs) in 1080p. Native resolution comparisons were more complicated though, as these laptops stretched across various resolutions and aspect ratios.

MSI's new Raider came in reliably behind the more powerful Titan in 1080p on Shadow of the Tomb Raider (177 fps), Grand Theft Auto V (157 fps), and Red Dead Redemption 2 (115 fps) and Borderlands 3 (153 fps). It did outperform on Far Cry 6, at 121 fps, though that game is notoriously CPU-reliant.

At its native 1600p, the RTX 4080 in the Raider beat the RTX 4070 pushing a lower 1440p in all of our gaming tests. In games with DLSS support, such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Metro Exodus, quality mode upscaling can generally improve performance by 30–50 percent, sometimes more, and the resulting image quality often competes well against native rendering. DLSS 3 Frame Generation, where supported, can artificially boost the rate of frames sent to your display by 50–100%, but it causes additional latency and the actual feel of games with DLSS 3 doesn't improve nearly as much as the higher FPS would indicate. It's not a bad option to have, but personal preference becomes a real factor in what Frame Generation does to the overall experience.

To stress test laptops, we run the Metro Exodus benchmark on the RTX preset for 15 runs, simulating half an hour of gameplay. During the stress test, the Raider ran the game at an average of 75.37 fps (and was typically within two frames of that frame rate.) The CPU ran at an average of 2.85 GHz on the performance cores and 2.21 GHz on the efficient cores; the CPU package measured 53.09 degrees Celsius. The GPU ran at 1,190.38 MHz and measured 44.56 degrees Celsius.

Productivity Performance on the MSI Raider GE78 HX

The Raider, with an Intel Core i9-13950HX, 32GB of DDR5 RAM and 2TB of storage, has the makings of a monster productivity machine.

On Geekbench 5, the Raider reached a single-core score of 2,121 and a multi-core score of 21,063. Interestingly, in single-core, it was beaten only by the Aorus 15X (Core i9-13900HX) at 2,705. The Raider took the top score on multi-core among the systems, including the Strix G16 with Core i9-13980HX boasting ever-so-slightly higher boost clocks.

All of the laptops were quick at copying 25GB of files in our file transfer test. The Raider copied the files at 1,715.14 MBps, just in range of the Gigabyte but slower than the Titan (2,299.26 MBps). The Strix was the slowest here, but still serviceable. 

The Raider completed our Handbrake video editing test in 4 minutes and 8 seconds, beating both of its smaller rivals. It was smoked, however, by the Titan, which completed the same task in 2:38.

Display on the MSI Raider GE78 HX

MSI's display is impressive. It's bright and colorful, with a 17-inch diagonal and a 2560 x 1600 resolution at up to 240 Hz. The 16:10 aspect ratio is new for the Raider, and allows for a taller screen, which I typically associate with being useful for productivity work more than gaming. That said, the RTX 4080 can likely push the extra pixels above 16:9.

When I played Deathloop, a sunset over Array Y cast a lovely golden glow over the level's wheatgrass fields. Shadows and reflections looked great, though in some dark levels I wished I could turn the brightness up slightly.

I used the Raider to stream the trailer for Power Rangers: Once & Always so that I could feel like it's the '90s again. The colors were excellent, and every ranger suit was exactly as I remembered it when I was in grade school. In some darker scenes in the Command Center, it would've been nice to make it slightly brighter, but it wasn't a major issue. (None of this can fix the trailer's bad CGI, but then again, I suppose that's loyal to the source material.)

The Raider's 2560 x 1600 panel covered 163% of the sRGB gamut and 115.4% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. That puts it on par with the Titan's Mini LED panel. But the Titan is way brighter, at 511 nits to the Raider's 412 nits, which makes a difference.

The Aorus and Strix were both similar, covering 106 and 107% of the sRGB gamut, respectively, and measuring 277 and 279 nits of brightness.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MSI Raider GE78 HX

While MSI didn't opt for a mechanical keyboard here as it did on the Titan, I like a lot of the work it's done on the Raider. The company has fit in a full keyboard and a number pad, for those who like the extra numbers for macros (or Excel — who am I to judge?). The right shift key is a bit short to fit it in, but that wasn't an issue for me.

With this redesign, MSI is highlighting both sets of arrow keys. The WASD keys are clear, allowing more RGB lighting to show through. The arrow keys also serve as shortcuts to add a reticle to the screen, change fan speeds, play or pause media or turn off the touchpad. Behind those icons, the arrows are lit up by RGB. It's a cool effect, assuming you like the colorful backlighting.

My experience with the keys was good. They have linear travel, but come down with a thunk, and I appreciate that feedback. My only real issue was that the 5.1 x 3.2-inch touchpad is so tall that I had to reach further than expected onto the deck to actually type, which wasn't the most comfortable feeling. Still, on monkeytype, I hit 122 words per minute at 98% accuracy.

That giant touchpad, which takes advantage of the extra room from a taller screen, is smooth, responsive and feels solid when you click it. I had no issues with it, including with gestures, during testing. But the big touchpad and long deck mean you have to reach in further than you do on 16:9 laptops. I was halfway to my elbows to reach the top row — it was like having my fingers sit in the front row of a movie theatre, they were so close to the screen.

Audio on the MSI Raider GE78 HX

The Raider's speakers, which appear to spell out MSI, are potent. The two top-facing speakers and the four woofers did justice to Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun," balancing Chris Cornell's crooning vocals with slow synths and wailing guitars. There's even some bass there, as well, and punchy drums on the low end. And the speakers get loud, easily filling a room before hitting 100% volume.

When I played Deathloop, I could hear faraway gunfire, which helped me decide which parts of levels to avoid. Music was clear, and my own weapons were plenty loud when it came time to fire them.

The pre-installed Nahimic software has a few profiles, like music (the default), movie and gaming. I used the sliders to increase the bass a bit, but I think most people will be satisfied without changing anything.

Upgradeability of the MSI Raider GE78 HX

To open the MSI Raider GE78 HX, you'll need to take out 13 Phillips head screws. One is hidden under a factory seal sticker, but there's no removing rubber feet, which is nice. 

Prying the base off requires intense patience. I used a guitar pick-style tool to carefully work my way around the base. Loosening the clips was an exercise in frustration, including carefully getting in between the light bar and the bottom of the laptop. Eventually, it did come off, though I was surprised that it left a part above the laptop behind the hinge feeling loose.

The upgrade options here are pretty standard for a gaming laptop. The Wi-Fi card, RAM, SSD and battery are all accessible. There's an extra SSD card slot (and some extra shielding for when you install it) on our unit, allowing you to expand your storage when you need it. The RAM, which is also under a shield, can also be easily swapped out.

Closing the laptop is its own headache. It took myself and a colleague working together to line up the bottom, which has to work its way over the hinge. Even then, the audio jack wasn't aligned right on the first try. So while you can upgrade this laptop, do it knowing you'll need to set some extra time aside.

Battery Life on the MSI Raider GE78 HX

MSI's 99 WHr battery didn't prove to be long-lasting in our testing. The Raider only managed to browse the web, stream videos and run OpenGL tests with the screen at 150 nits of brightness for 2 hours and 32 minutes. That's the lowest of the group, with the Titan coming in at 3:58 and the Strix lasting a surprising 8:49.

Heat on the MSI Raider GE78 HX

When the Raider gets going, the fans run loud. Heck, sometimes they run that way at boot. But can those fans keep the system cool? To find out, we measured skin temperatures while running our Metro Exodus stress test.

At the center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, it measured 37.6 degrees Celsius (99.68 Fahrenheit), which may get toasty after prolonged gameplay. The touchpad was cooler at 26.6 C (79.88 F), though for gaming you're best off using a mouse.

The hottest point on the bottom of the laptop measured 44.6 C (112.28 F), while another hotspot hit 43.5 C (110.3 F). These weren't by exhaust, but rather in line with where the cooling solution is.

Webcam on the MSI Raider GE78 HX

The webcam on the Raider is a 1080p lens with an included privacy shutter. I don't see a ton of these shutters on gaming laptops, but it's an easy way to cover your camera without resorting to a sticker.

The standard camera works in conjunction with an IR camera to let you login with facial recognition using Windows Hello. In my experience, it let me log in quickly without issue.

The 1080p camera took detailed images and videos, showing off all of my hair and some developing wrinkles on my forehead. It was a bit dark, however, and my gray and blue shirt appeared to be almost in shadow.

Software and Warranty on the MSI Raider GE78 HX

There's no shortage of software preloaded on the Raider. The main app is MSI Center, which is supposed to be MSI's catch-all program for monitoring hardware status, grabbing serial numbers, switching power profiles and more. There are a number of optional modules to add, though the one I really wanted — Mystic Light to control RGB devices — kept failing to install.

Other MSI software includes True Color, to change screen temperature, toggle anti-blue light effects and switch to a movie mode, and MSI App Player, which lets you run Android apps in Windows (this seems wasteful when the Amazon Store is supported on Windows, though this does support the Play Store). Nahimic is on board for audio customization, while SteelSeries GG controls RGB on the keyboard and light bar.

Of course, there's a bunch of extra icons in the Windows Start menu, including WhatsApp, ESPN, Prime Video, TikTok and Instagram, which download when you click them.

MSI sells the Raider GE78HX with a 1-year warranty.

Configurations of the MSI Raider GE78 HX

We tested a $2,999.99 version of the MSI Rader GE78 HX with an Intel Core i9-13950HX, Nvidia RTX 4080 Laptop GPU, 32GB of RAM, 2TB of storage and a 17-inch, 240 Hz display. As of this writing, it's available at Micro Center, though the $2,9999 price is technically on sale. Micro Center originally had it listed at $3,299.99, but this sale price matches MSI's MSRP.

That's the cheapest version I saw. On MSI's site, a version identical to our review unit, but with a Core i9-13980HX 64GB of RAM, is $3,599.99 but out of stock, while a $4,000 option with an RTX 4090 and a Core i9-13980HX is also listed but not yet for sale (Amazon lists this version for $4,199, but actually has it in stock as of this writing).

Bottom Line

If you're looking for a gaming laptop that's powerful and just small enough to still be reasonably portable, the Raider GE78 HX is highly recommended. It offers strong performance, a bright display and plenty of ports, even if it gets kind of loud.

Those who want more power may want to consider going to even more premium laptops, like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 or MSI Titan GT77 HX, which are even larger and pack Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090, though those get a pretty serious price bump. Those who want something a bit smaller could opt for Asus' ROG Strix G16, though that has less power as we reviewed it, a 720p webcam and far more limited display resolutions.

That makes MSI's 17-inch powerhouse solid on paper, but also in our testing. It's a potent performer with a beautiful display. But if you're going to put a new SSD in, bring lots of patience along with with your screwdriver.

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Much of what we've heard about AMD's latest Dragon Range high-end mobile processor platform so far has been impressive, whether that be early benchmarks or claims from AMD. And the recent Geekbench 5 results for the flagship 5.4 Ghz 16-core Ryzen 9 H7945HX seem to solidify the trend, seeing it edge past Intel's Core i9-13980X in the single-core test, while falling just slightly behind on multi-core. Even much more power-hungry desktop processors like the 13900K and 7950X didn't do much better unless you look at the multi-core results. 

AMD's latest also makes a huge leap over the previous-generation eight-core Ryzen  6900HX, nearly doubling it in multi-core performance. To be fair, AMD's chiplet-equipped 7945HX stands out more against Intel in its best Geekbench run than it does if you average the results of the six results that were in the database when we wrote this (all from the same model Asus Zephyrus Duo 16). But even the average results are very close to recent Geekbench results for the 13980HX – and surprisingly close to much higher power-draw desktop processors like Intel's 13900K and AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X. But of course, Geekbench isn't the best benchmark for seeing how a CPU will perform during time-intensive tasks.

It will also be interesting to see how much power the Ryzen 9 7945HX draws under load. AMD's product page lists the chip as having a configurable TDP of between 55 and 75 watts. Intel's Core i9-13980HX, meanwhile, is listed as having a base power of 55W but a maximum Turbo power draw of 157W.

In a laptop with power and thermal constraints, and particularly in gaming laptops where the CPU and GPU are vying for a limited power budget, maximum performance may be less important than efficiency at a level that's 'good enough' to keep your GPU happy. And we've already seen Intel's 13950HX likely contributing to some gaming bottlenecking when paired with an RTX 4090 at 1080p in MSI's Titan GT77 HX.

So we're eager to see for ourselves how the best that AMD's Dragon Range has to offer holds up against a similarly equipped Intel-based laptop. But at the very least, it seems like AMD has yet again made serious gains against Intel in the high-end laptop space and is close to equal footing. If the company can deliver enough of these CPUs to meet demand, that should give gaming and workstation laptop makers another high-end option and hopefully push prices down a bit. Given the high price of GPUs (and so many other things), we'll take solid price-pressuring competition wherever we can get it.

Nvidia released its Ada Lovelace architecture in October 2022, starting with the GeForce RTX 4090 and then following up with additional variants. Prices have increased compared to the previous generation, some more than others, but these are still some of the best graphics cards currently available, with the 4090 occupying the top spot on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. 

But right from the start, we knew that Nvidia was holding back, saving room for a potential RTX 4090 Ti or a new Titan RTX Ada. Here's what we know about the future uber-GPUs of the Ada generation.

Nvidia currently has three desktop Ada GPUs in production, the AD102, AD103, and AD104 that are used in the RTX 4090, RTX 4080, and RTX 4070 Ti, respectively. It also has mobile RTX 40-series GPUs now in production that range from the entry-level RTX 4050 mobile up to the RTX 4090, which add the smaller AD106 and AD107 chips into the mix — though note that the mobile 4090 uses the same chip as the desktop 4080. The RTX 4090 Ti and Titan RTX Ada, depending on which way Nvidia decides to go, will naturally land at the top of the stack, and as such will also use the AD102 chip.

Right now, the RTX 4090, for all its performance and power, only uses a portion of the full AD102 GPU. It's a large portion, to be sure, with 128 out of a possible 144 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) enabled — 89% of the GPU cores, in other words. Except Nvidia also disabled 1MB of L2 cache on each of the twelve 32-bit memory interfaces, giving it 75% of the maximum L2 cache. All it needs to do is to turn on those missing pieces, and perhaps even crank up the clock speeds and power draw a bit, and we end up with a new, even faster RTX 4090 Ti.

And make no mistake, Nvidia already has basically fully functional AD102 chips in the wild. The professional Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation, for instance, has 142 of the 144 SMs turned on, plus the full 96MB of L2 cache. Except power draw is capped at a 'meager' 300W, which means the card generally won't run as fast for as long — not actually a bad approach, but we already know that with a bit more power and voltage, it's possible to get most Ada chips to run at closer to 3.0 GHz. That's effectively what we expect to see from a future RTX 4090 Ti and/or Titan RTX Ada.

Nvidia RTX 4090 Ti / Titan RTX Rumored Specifications and Other Ada GPUs

The currently rumored specs are basically similar to what we see with the RTX 6000 Ada Generation, but now with double the TGP (Total Graphics Power) and a slightly higher boost clock on the 4090 Ti, or even a significantly higher 800W power limit for the Titan RTX Ada.

The higher TGPs of course means these cards would be far more likely to hit the rated boost clocks. And if they're like other RTX 40-series desktop GPUs, it's more than likely they'll far exceed the boost clocks. Our testing of RTX 4090, 4080, and 4070 Ti cards to date has shown that real-world gaming boost clocks often average closer to 200 MHz above the official boost clock.

Everything else follows from the core counts and boost clock. In terms of raw specs, if the rumors are correct, the RTX 4090 Ti will hit peak throughput of 95.4 teraflops for FP32 work, and up to 1.5 petaflops for FP8 computations on the Tensor cores. That's 15% faster than the RTX 4090 in both cases.

To help the card sustain maximum throughput, the GDDR6X memory will also get bumped up to 24 Gbps, 14% faster than the 21 Gbps memory used with the RTX 4090. Coupled with 33% more L2 cache, the memory subsystem should be well-equipped to keep the rest of the GPU fed with data.

The Titan RTX Ada rumors are less solid, and currently show a 2520 MHz boost clock — the same as the RTX 4090. Given it's also supposed to have dual 16-pin power connectors and an 800W TGP, however, we would expect such a card (if it actually comes out) to push for even higher clocks. What we've seen of the latest GDDR6X 24 Gbps modules from Micron suggests power and heat from the memory won't be nearly as problematic as it was on the earlier RTX 3090, even with chips on both sides of the PCB.

There's still the power to contend with, however, and even if the cards don't always hit 600W/800W, they're likely to push well above 500W when running demanding games at 4K and maxed out settings. We've already seen that happen with the RTX 4090 cards we've reviewed once we manually overclocked them, but the 4090 Ti / Titan Ada will make that the norm rather than an OC.

Coping with that much power will require an exceptional cooling subsystem. We generally found the RTX 4090's triple-slot cooling to be adequate, but there are images and leaks floating around the web showing a quad-slot gold cooler. Perhaps they're fakes, but the extra slot width plus the gold coloring suggests we're more likely than not looking at a new Titan RTX Ada rather than an RTX 4090 Ti — or maybe Nvidia will do both, although the 4090 Ti would likely have a silver cooler. It's too early to say for certain how everything will play out.

The 4-slot Nvidia RTX 4090 Ti / Titan RTX Ada card images look comically large, and considering even the existing RTX 4090 already starts hitting CPU limits in many games at anything below 4K (at least if the game doesn't have ray tracing), this definitely feels like Nvidia is getting ready to jump the shark. Hopefully Nvidia provides an extra sturdy IO bracket (secured to the top and bottom of the cooler) that covers all four slots to help prevent sag. Or maybe Nvidia will just include a kickstand of some form like many of its AIB partners have elected to do with the RTX 4090.

That just leaves the pricing and release date, neither of which are known yet. Given the leaks of the cooler, we could see the new halo card within the next month or two, or Nvidia may hold out for a summer or even fall launch window, letting the card serve as the mid-cycle refresh at the top of the RTX 40-series stack. Launching at either GDC (in March) or the next GTC (also in March) is certainly a possibility, particularly if Nvidia opts for the "prosumer and creator" target market with a new Titan RTX Ada, and it could hold the RTX 4090 Ti for a later date.

Pricing will naturally be ridiculous. Any hope of a future RTX 4090 Ti or Titan RTX Ada card carrying a reasonable price tag basically went out the window when the RTX 4090 cards were routinely sold out or priced above $2,000 for the first three months after launch. We still suspect a lot of that came from professional users who were willing to pay more for top performance in AI and other computational workloads, and a 4090 Ti or Titan RTX Ada would cater to those same users.

If Nvidia goes with GeForce RTX 4090 Ti branding, it will probably set the price at $1,999. For a new Titan RTX Ada, $2,499 or even $2,999 seems likely. A Titan would offer most of what the RTX 6000 Ada already provides (depending on the VRAM capacity), plus higher clocks thanks to the increased TGP, and three grand would still be less than half the price of the true professional GPU. Those who are only interested in bragging rights at any price also appear to have sufficient funds to pay whatever Nvidia asks.

The rest of us can stick with more reasonable GPUs, like a replacement for the RTX 3060 Ti — or just wait for the inevitable RTX 50-series, which will probably arrive in late 2024. Because if there's one thing we know for certain, it's that no matter how fast the future RTX 4090 Ti and/or Titan RTX Ada end up being, at some point Nvidia will release an RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 (or some other name, perhaps) that will provide even higher performance than what the fastest Ada Lovelace graphics card can hope to deliver.

If we're lucky, maybe the current downturn in GPU and PC sales will even spur more aggressive pricing for a change. That happened, in theory at least, with the RTX 3080 in 2020. It's too bad cryptocurrency mining and the pandemic ended up ruining prices for the next two years and influencing the current round of higher prices.

We do at least have a codename for Ada's successor: Blackwell, presumably after David Harold Blackwell, a mathematician and statistician who specialized in game theory and information theory. Except we don't know for certain if Blackwell is solely a future Hopper replacement (for the data center market), or if it will span both the data center and consumer markets, similar to Ampere. Considering Ada Lovelace is only a few months old, pinning our sights on Blackwell at this stage seems a bit premature.

With many new 18-inch gaming laptops announced at CES 2023 back in January, you could say MSI was six years ahead of the curve back in 2017 when its Titan laptop had an 18.4-inch panel. Here in 2023 however, the company’s latest Titan GT77 HX is wrapped in last year’s chassis and ‘only’ has a 17-inch display.

So why stick with a 17-inch panel when your competition is moving to bigger (or at least taller) screens), especially when your product has Titan in its name? Well, 18-inch displays are still quite new, and so panel options are likely limited. By sticking with a more established screen size, MSI the company was able to deliver a gorgeous 4K Mini-LED display that may just be the best-looking screen I’ve seen in any laptop, period. 

Combine that with Nvidia’s brand-new RTX 4090 and a 13th Gen Intel Core i9 CPU, then toss in a pleasingly clicky Cherry mechanical keyboard, and the Titan GT77 HX has a very good chance of earning a spot on our best gaming laptops list. We’ll have to test it to know for sure but first, let’s look at the laptop’s design and specs. 

Design of the MSI Titan GT77 HX

MSI might call this laptop a Titan, but it's not the biggest laptop anymore — at least in terms of screen size. While some of its competitors are moving to 18-inch, 16:10 displays, MSI has kept the same chassis as last year, along with a 17-inch display. 

The Titan still brandishes a sports car aesthetic, with sleek curves, a prominent MSI badge and a few stripes and lines that look like you could slap a few tires on this thing to make it go fast. And as far as desktop replacements go, it's thin-ish at 0.91 inches thick. But while the front and top look like something out of Fast and the Furious, the back looks like MSI strapped a rocket to a car (maybe that's kind of Fast and the Furious, too). But there aren't any ports around back. The RGB-clad back of the device is all for dissipating hot air.

With the lid open, you'll find the 17.3-inch screen. The bezels aren't particularly large, with the exception of the one below the display. The webcam above the screen also comes with infrared sensors for the IR camera, and there's a fingerprint reader next to the trackpad. You've got options here when it comes to logging in and security.

The black metal deck is home to the Cherry mechanical keyboard (more on that below), which brings a ton of RGB personalization if you're into that sort of thing. But aside from some RGB in the rear exhaust, there are no light bars or other flashy features. The Titan GT77 HX’s design is more classic (some would say classy) than options like the Asus ROG Strix 18.

At 7.28 pounds and 15.63 x 12.99 x 0.91 inches, the Titan is designed to spend most of its days on a desk. The Asus ROG Strix 18, with similar components, is lighter at 6.83 pounds but is longer and thicker at 15.71 x 11.57 x 1.21 inches. None of these RTX 4090 laptops are going to be particularly svelte or portable. Even the Razer Blade 18 is 0.86 inches thick and 7.05 pounds.

MSI Titan GT77 HX Specifications

Gaming and Graphics on the MSI Titan GT77 HX

On paper, the Titan is a monster. It boasts an Intel Core i9-13950HX (as tested) and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090. And in most games, the pairing shows significant performance gains over their predecessors. We looked at the GT77 HX alongside Asus’ new ROG Strix Scar 18 (with the same GPU and a Core i9-13980 HX CPU) as well as last year’s Titan GT77 (RTX 3080 Ti, Core i9-12900HX). We also included results for the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 SE from mid-2022, which packed an RTX 3080 Ti and Core i9-12950HX as well.

As I would expect, the Titan GT77 HX had no issues handling Doom Eternal. As I played through the UAC Atlantica Facility portion of the Ancient Gods DLC, the laptop ran mostly above or near 100 frames per second (fps). I did see dips into the 80s (and rarely the 70s) as dozens of demons teleported into the arena-like level. But the frame rates never got low enough for me to visually register any performance issues. 

Out of the gate, the Titan had a strong showing on the Shadow of the Tomb Raider test (highest settings), delivering 180 fps at 1080p and 70 fps at 4K. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, with a Core i9-13980HX and an RTX 4090 hit 181 fps (effectively a tie) at 1080p and 124 fps at its native 2560 x 1600.

The Titan also outperformed on Grand Theft Auto V (very high settings), hitting 176 fps at 1080p (once again more than its 144 Hz screen could actually show) and 50 fps in 4K. The Strix Scar 18 hit 152 fps at 1080p and 132 fps at 1600p. Both showed improvements over their predecessors.

One odd spot for both RTX 4090 / 13th Gen Core machines was on Far Cry 6 (ultra settings). The Titan put up 102 fps at 1080p (71 fps in 4K) while the Scar reached 107 fps at 1080p (and 94 fps at 1600p). Those are both lower than the number we measured on last year's Strix Scar 17 SE (112 fps at 1080p).

In an ideal world, we'd still have last year's Strix on hand to test its Core i9-12950HX and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with current drivers, for a more apples-to-apples comparison in Far Cry 6. It seems possible (if not likely) that the 4090 is so powerful that the CPU is bottlenecking performance at lower resolutions. We've seen this with Far Cry on the desktop 4090, too.

That being said, we're seeing this in one game, and we're not pointing fingers at Intel here; AMD's best CPU may also have similar issues. What this all seems to suggest is the RTX 4090 is really designed for a high-res display like the 4K panel on the Titan. (Asus's Strix Scar 18 tops off at 2560 x 1600). At the very least, if you’re going to game with a 4090 at lower resolutions, you’ll want to enable lots of effects and turn other settings up high. Gaming at 4K shouldn’t cause this issue because the higher the resolution, the less of a bottleneck the CPU tends to be.

The laptops returned to normalcy on Red Dead Redemption 2 (medium), with the Titan reaching 127 fps at 1080p and 48 fps at 4K. The Scar reached 123 fps at 1080p and 85 fps at 2560 x 1600. Again, both of these are nice improvements over previous models.

MSI's new Titan finished strong on Borderlands 3, reaching 177 fps at 1080p and 71 fps at 4K. The Strix was slightly behind at 1080p (165 fps) and showed off 112 fps at its native 1660p resolution.

To stress-test the Titan GT77 HX, we ran Metro Exodus on its RTX preset at 1080p for 15 runs, which takes about half an hour. The system ran the game at an average of 100.76 fps, and after a higher first run of 103.33,  it stayed between a narrow range of 101.5 and 99.49 fps. The Core i9-13950HX's performance cores ran at an average of 4.15 GHz, while the efficiency cores measured 1.1 GHz. The CPU package measured a nicely low 74.3 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, the RTX 4090 ran at 2,174.85 MHz and measured 59.3 C, which was also cooler than the similarly equipped Strix.

As you should expect with a system this powerful, the fans will be noticeably noisy pretty much any time you’re gaming. That being said, the fans on the Titan produce more of a whoosh than an annoying whine, and for any action-heavy game, the speakers easily get loud enough to drown out the fans. 

Productivity Performance on the MSI Titan GT77 HX

A $4,600 desktop replacement should sure as hell be able to handle productivity tasks. Between the Intel Core i9-13950HX (as tested, see configurations, below), 64GB of RAM and 4TB of storage, it proved to be a strong machine in our productivity testing.

On Geekbench 5, the Titan achieved a single-core score of 2,071 and a multi-core score of 20,602, slightly edging out its closest rival, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and its Core i9-13980HX (2,066 single-core, 19,233 multi-core). These are pretty close, and could come down to something as simple as cooling. Both 2023 models made leaps over prior generations.

The Titan transferred 25GB of files at a rate of 2,299.96 MBps, surpassing the Strix (1,885.81 MBps). (Note that the 4TB of SSD storage is reserved for MSI's highest end model. See configurations, below). Neither, however, hit the speeds from last year's Titan.

MSI's desktop replacement also took the lead on Handbrake, transcoding a 4K video to 1080p in 2 minutes and 38 seconds. The Strix Scar 18 took 2:49, and both took more than a minute off of the previous generation's times.

Display on the MSI Titan GT77 HX

Other than the gaming performance afforded by the RTX 4090, the 17-inch, Mini-LED 4K display is the Titan GT77 HX’s other stand-out feature. And boy, does it stand out. MSI doesn’t say how many local dimming zones this panel delivers, but I can say that its perceived black levels approach those of my LG OLED TV, and this panel gets a lot brighter.

The screen is HDR 1000 certified, and MSI says it can deliver up to 1,000 nits. That’s definitely a peak number, achievable on just a small part of the screen at a time. Our test results below show a much lower number. But while I watched YouTube videos and did some gaming in my semi-darkened office, the screen was too bright for comfort at max, prompting me to turn it down after a few minutes of marveling at the intensity of the glow.

While watching the trailer for John Wick 4 I was drawn in by the strong stylized colors of the lighting in various scenes, which hadn’t really stood out when I watched the trailer on a different display before. And the blacks of almost everything in the trailer that isn’t dramatically lit, from Keanu’s hair to the many, many guns, were gloriously inky in a way that, again, I’ve only ever really experienced from OLED panels.

Between the brightness and blacks, the vivid colors, the 4K resolution and the 144 Hz refresh, this may be the prettiest screen I’ve ever used on a laptop – and I’ve been reviewing laptops for over a decade. While more than a few competing systems now sport taller, technically larger 18-inch displays, it’s doubtful that screens this nice exist for that size yet. If MSI decided to stick with 17 inches specifically so that it could deliver this screen, the company made the right decision, even if it makes the Titan name ring a bit hollow. 

On our colorimeter tests, the Titan proved to be the most vivid screen of our test group, covering 161.6% of the sRGB color gamut and 114.5% of the larger DCI-P3 spectrum. The Strix Scar 18's screen may have size in its favor, and while we found it nice and colorful, it didn't meet the Titan's numbers (109.4% DCI-P3, 77.5% sRGB).

The Titan was also the brightest of our test group at 511 measured nits, while the Scar 18 measured 402 nits (which again, isn't shabby). Both were improvements over last year's panels. 

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MSI Titan GT77 HX

For gaming and general typing, the Cherry MX mechanical keyboard on the Titan GT77 HX is a pleasure to use – and thanks to per-key RGB backlighting, it also looks quite good. MSI doesn’t specify which Cherry switch option is used, but judging by the tactile feel and lack of an audible click, it’s likely the company is using the Tactile switch, rather than the Click variant.

Looking at the layout, the right shift key is a bit short because it’s crunched up against the arrow array, although this wasn’t an issue for me while touch typing. The only noticeable downside of the keyboard for me is that MSI doesn’t use mechanical switches for the arrow or number pad keys – and that’s annoying because the arrow keys in particular are used in a lot of games. 

These keys are also significantly smaller than the primary keys. As a result, using the number pad in Excel felt more like keying things in on a calculator than a mechanical keyboard. There is room for improvement here, but I wish far more laptops offered mechanical keyboards like the Titan. 

While you’ll of course want to use a mouse for gaming, the Titan’s touchpad is pleasingly roomy at 6 inches diagonally. There’s a fair amount of room for Windows 11 gestures, and the surface is just the right amount of smooth and slippery. The click mechanism is a bit shallow, but not in a way that bothered me while I was mousing around the operating system.

Audio on the MSI Titan GT77 HX

As we saw with the previous Titan, the GT77 HX’s speakers aren’t much to get excited about. They get reasonably loud, and handle basic gaming and media consumption just fine. But when I listened to my favorite test track, Buck-Tick’s “Muma - The Nightmare,” the underlying beat and bassline was getting lost in the mids and highs. In other words, there isn’t as much low-end as I’d like – or as I’d expect in a large, high-end gaming laptop. I also craved a bit more volume – or at least I would if I could also add more low-end to balance out the highs.

MSI, as ever, bundles the Nahimic app for adjusting audio. But when I fired it up looking to improve my music-listening experience, I found the Music preset was already enabled. In short, the sound here is far from bad, but it isn’t on the same level as the performance delivered by the silicon and the screen.

Upgradeability of the MSI Titan GT77 HX

Getting into the MSI Titan GT77 isn’t that hard, so long as you remember to completely loosen all 11 Philips head screws. I got about halfway through prying the bottom off (using my old laundromat card as a spudger) before I realized I’d skipped a couple. Once you get started on one side, it’s fairly easy to work your way around the edges, loosening clips until the bottom lifts right off.

Inside, there’s quite a bit going on. Like the last Titan, there are four fans and a highway of heatpipes, leading from the CPU and GPU to the cooling fins at the back. And the 99.99 Whr battery looks like it would lift right out after removing four screws and the connection cable.

In terms of upgrades, the RAM slots were hidden under a silver metal shield, but popping that off revealed two empty and two populated slots in our review unit. Two of the three M.2 SSD slots were occupied by PCIe 4.0 OEM Samsung SSDs, but there is a third empty PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot just above the battery. You could also swap out the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip. But what’s here is an Intel Killer AX1690i Wi-Fi 6E card. So you probably aren’t going to get much better until we start to see Wi-Fi 7 options, perhaps late this year or in early 2024.

Battery Life on the MSI Titan GT77 HX

The 99.9 WHr battery in the Titan's chassis can only do so much with its power-hungry components. When you're gaming, you'll definitely want it plugged in for full performance. When you're not gaming? You'll still probably want it plugged in.

On our battery test, which involves streaming video, browsing the web over Wi-Fi and running OpenGL tests with the screen set to 150 nits, the Titan ran for just 3 hours and 48 seconds. The Asus ROG Strix Scar ran for 4:26, while last year's models had somewhat longer runtimes. In this case, desktop replacement means "don't take it too far from the outlet near your desk."

Heat on the MSI Titan GT77 HX

To see how hot the MSI Titan GT77 gets while gaming, we took surface temperature measurements while running our Metro Exodus stress test.

At the center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, the laptop measured 101.3 degrees Fahrenheit (39.5 Celsius), while the hottest point, at 104.3 F (40.17 C), was between the minus and plus buttons. The touchpad remained cooler at 79.8 degrees Fahrenheit (26.56 C). The hottest spot on the underside of the notebook measured 111.1 degrees Fahrenheit (43.94 C).

Most of these temperatures are lower than what we saw when testing the similarly equipped Asus Strix laptop, although you’ll probably want to keep both of these laptops on a desk rather than your lap, especially when gaming.

Webcam on the MSI Titan GT77 HX

What’s left to say about a 720p webcam in 2023? The camera that MSI includes above the display works, it includes an IR sensor for Windows Hello login, and it’s in the right place. But the image is grainy, lacking in detail, and the sensor doesn’t deal with low light or light variations (for example, from the ceiling fixture over my head or a window behind me) well at all. At least there is a physical shutter so you can turn it off and opt for one of the Best Webcams instead.

Software and Warranty on the MSI Titan GT77 HX

There isn’t much in the way of annoying pre-installed software on the Titan, but what’s here can be confusing. Aside from the Nahimic program for tweaking audio, there’s also MSI Center, a do-it-all program lets you monitor your internal hardware, scan for and install drivers, and back up or restore data. I expected to see Mystic Light settings in here for controlling the RGB keyboard as well. But when I didn’t, I searched the system for a standalone Mystic Light or some other keyboard app, wondering if perhaps the Cherry MX branding meant some other software had to be used. 

It was only when I remembered that MSI has often in the past used SteelSeries keyboards and the company’s GG software that I found the lighting and keyboard setting controls. SteelSeries GG is fine. But given this isn’t a SteelSeries keyboard (in fact, MX Cherry is emblazoned in RGB below the left Shift key), it’s odd to me that MSI is still using SteelSeries’ software for its keyboard controls.

Aside from the above, you also get the usual pre-installed links and cruft pinned to the Start menu of Windows 11, like TikTok, ESPN, Amazon Video, Spotify and others.

MSI sells the Titan GT77 HX with a one-year warranty.

MSI Titan GT77 HX Configurations

We tested the MSI Titan GT77 HX with an Intel Core i9-13950HX, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, 64GB of DDR5-4800 RAM and a pair of 2TB PCIe NVMe Gen 4 SSDs.

It ends up, however, that this won't be a retail model, though Intel tells us MSI was originally considering this spec at some point. The closest equivalent will have the Intel Core i9-13980HX, which can boost up to 5.6 GHz (that's 0.1 GHz faster than the chip in our review unit), and 2TB of storage rather than 4TB. Otherwise, our unit is exactly the same. That configuration costs $4,599.

The base model, if you can call it that, is $4,299 with an Intel Core i9-13980HX, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080, 64GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, along with the same 4K Mini-LED 144 Hz display found in all of the Titans.

The top-end model is an eye-watering $5,299, with a Core i9-13980HX, RTX 4090, 128GB of RAM and the 4TB of SSD storage that came in our review system.

Bottom Line

While the MSI Titan GT77 HX may not seem as titanic on paper as its 18-inch competition, it’s arguable whether taller 16:10 18-inch screens offer any real benefit for gaming. And for media consumption, 16:10 screens are worse because you’ll just end up with more black bars when watching 16:9 content. Instead, MSI found one of the best 17-inch screens I’ve ever seen and put it in its existing Titan chassis, alongside the latest and greatest silicon Nvidia and Intel have to offer.

The result is a laptop that may fly a bit under the radar in terms of its design. But its performance is better than any other laptop we’ve tested, while its screen will make all of your games and media look their absolute best. Your fingers will also thank you as they flutter across the Cherry mechanical keyboard. Just make sure to keep the big power brick close, because battery life is short, and you won’t get nearly the performance that this Titan is capable of without it plugged in, anyway.

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Hardware leaker MEGAsizeGPU has shared a photograph of a mysterious quad-slot cooler for one of Nvidia's upcoming GeForce RTX gaming graphics cards. However, the jury is still out whether it's for the rumored GeForce RTX 4090 Ti or Titan RTX Ada, which will eventually arrive to compete with the best graphics cards.

The cooler boasts a gold theme, implying it's probably the Titan RTX Ada. The I/O bracket features four display outputs stacked vertically. It's the first time we've seen such a design from Nvidia. It implies that the chipmaker is likely placing the PCB in a vertical orientation for the mysterious graphics card, which has been christened "The Beast." Therefore, the PCB won't be perpendicular to the motherboard like your conventional graphics card. Instead, the PCB will be in a parallel position to the motherboard. Given the vertical design, it'll be interesting to see how cooling manufacturers develop water blocks for the graphics card.

The small sticker on the graphics card's I/O bracket carries the "PG137" PCB board number, coinciding with the information from reputable leaker kopite7kimi from July last year. The PCB board number for the GeForce RTX 4090 was PG136. The display connectors on the Titan RTX Ada include one HDMI port and three DisplayPort outputs. The exhaust is significant in size and covers up to two PCI slots.

We can't see the entire cooler, but kopite7kimi has previously stated that the Titan RTX Ada will leverage three cooling fans as opposed to the two-fan configuration we've seen on current Founders Edition models. However, he didn't reveal the placement of the third cooling fan.

"The Beast" reportedly features the AD102 silicon that Nvidia currently uses in the GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 6000 Ada. Nvidia hasn't maximized the AD102 die yet. The GeForce RTX 4090 comes with 128 SMs out of 144, whereas the RTX 6000 Ada sports 142 out of 144. There's a little headroom for Nvidia to squeeze in a GeForce RTX 4090 Ti or Titan RTX Ada, for sure.

The GeForce RTX 4090 Ti will likely share the same configuration as the RTX 6000 Ada (142 SMs or 18,176 CUDA cores). If Nvidia plans to release a Titan RTX Ada, we can picture it with the full AD102 die (144 SMs or 18,432 CUDA cores). Kopite7kimi believes that "The Beast" will sport 48GB of lighting-fast 24 Gbps GDDR6X memory, which will likely be for the Titan RTX Ada. A GeForce RTX 4090 Ti may have a 24GB GDDR6X configuration, like the GeForce RTX 4090.

According to kopite7kimi, the graphics card has a total board power (TBP) of around 800W, which explains the robust quad-slot cooling system. For comparison, the GeForce RTX 4090 has 600W TBP, meaning the Titan RTX Ada has a 33.3% higher TBP. With an 800W TBP, the test board for the Titan RTX Ada allegedly draws its power from dual 16-pin PCIe power connectors (12VHPWR). However, consumers will have to be extra careful when plugging in the 12VHPWR connectors, as we've seen that an improper connection can melt your GeForce RTX 4090.

Despite all the leaks, there's no firm date on when we could see the Titan RTX Ada. However, the recently leaked photographs suggest that the graphics card has been in development and testing in Nvidia's labs for some time. So the chipmaker is probably just waiting for the right time to unleash the beast.

MSI is revamping its portfolio of gaming PCs at CES 2023, starting from its top-tier Titan down to a slew of new mid-tier and budget offerings. All of the laptops are jumping up to Intel's 13th Gen processors, and most of the laptop top offerings are coming with Nvidia's newly announced RTX 40-series. Almost every laptop has a Mux switch, and the top-end offerings are among the first laptops we're seeing with PCIe Gen 5 storage.

A refreshed Titan leads the pack. The Titan GT77 HX 13V will have up to 250W of power consumption between the CPU and GPU, and MSI says it will run the Core i9-13980HX on all eight P-cores at 5.2 GHz. MSI is leaving the Titan’s display at 16:9 aspect ratio, seemingly a rarity this year, but moving the 17-inch, 4K, 144 Hz display to Mini LED with support for DisplayHDR 1000. Next-gen Nvidia mobile GPUs, up to an RTX 4090, should increase performance 50% gen-over-gen. The Titan is also getting both DDR5 and PCie Gen 5 storage, which is new.

The Titan will also get a Cherry mechanical keyboard and will maintain its 99.9 WHr battery. It will start at $4,299 with an i9 and RTX 4080 with 64GB of RAM, and top out at $5,299 with an RTX 4090, 128GB of RAM and 4TB of storage.  It's expected in February.

The Raider GE series is getting a bit of a glow up with the GE78 HX and GE68 HX, which will top out at the same CPU and GPU and the Titan. A new design brings a 16:10 display and a light bar that lets you see each individual light, which is a neat retro effect. They have 1080p webcams, physical shutters and six speakers. They look a bit more like the Titan, though shouldn't be as heavy. These are also getting DDR5 and M.2 PCIe Gen 5.

The Raider GE68HX will start at $2,299 with an i9, RTX 4060, 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD, and go up to $2,6999 with an RTX 4070, 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. The GE78HX will begin at $2,999 with an i9 and RTX 4080, and to pout with an i9 and RTX 4090 at $3,999. It's expected in the middle of February.

At its CES booth in Las Vegas, MSI ran Crystal Disk Mark on a Raider GE78HX using its own Spatium 570 Pro. It showed blazing sequential read speeds of 12,301 MB/s and write speeds of 8,972 MB/s.

With the Vector GP78 HX and GP68 HX, you take a step down. There's RGB on the keyboard, but nowhere else. You still get the 16:10 displays at QHD+ and an i9, but the GPU stops at an RTX 4070, and the SSD is PCIe Gen 4. The Stealth 14 and 16 Studio are kind of outliers. They're getting Nvidia Studio drivers, but MSI still positions them as gaming laptops, with up to an RTX 4070, an i9 on the 16-incher and an i7 on the 14-incher, along with DDR5 and PCie Gen 4. These will come in two colors: "pure white" and "star blue," and include some RGB in vents in the shape of the word "Stealth," which doesn't seem so, well, stealthy to me. The Stealth 17 Studio will maintain the same chassis.

The Stealth 16 Studio will be available at Best Buy with a Core i7 and RTX 4070, starting at $1,999. The Stealth 14 Studio with a Core i7 and RTX 4060, will launch at $1,599. These are expected for late February, and pricing at other stores hasn't been finalized yet.

Budget and Mid-Range Options

MSI's budget and mid-range laptops are also getting a refresh. There's one new entrant: the Cyborg 15, using partially translucent materials, a Core i7 and either an RTX 4050 or 4060 (this is the only laptop in MSI's whole lineup without a Mux switch. It will start at $999.

The Pulse 15 and 17 will go up to an i7 and an RTX 4070, running at 140W, along with a QHD, 240 Hz display and four-zone RGB. Its top-cover is getting a new look, with a very large MSI logo. It will start at $1,449.

The Katana 15 and 17 will go up to an i7 and RTX 4070 as well, with a 1080p, 144 Hz screen. The Sword 15 and Sword 17 are expected to have very similar specs. The Katana will start at $999.

In addition to its gaming machines, MSI is adding 13th Gen Intel processors and Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-series graphics to its Creator line, including the Creator Z17 and X16 HX Studio (each with vapor chamber cooling) and is updating its Prestige business notebooks and Modern ultrabooks with 13th Gen Core.

Updated Jan. 5, 1:05 p.m. ET with more details about SSD benchmarks MSI ran on the Raider GE78HX.

MSI is preparing an update for its mighty Titan GT77 laptop. The revamped portable, an upgrade from the Intel Core i9-12900HX model we reviewed this summer, will feature a new 17.3-inch screen. The screen will make use of a 4K Mini LED 144Hz display, a world first claims MSI. The upgraded desktop replacement machine will debut at CES 2023, but MSI has yet to come clean regarding the other key upgrades that are expected to be applied. Although it is likely to transition to a more powerful CPU, GPU combo which could see it appear in our Best Gaming Laptops page.

The headlining new laptop display uses a 4K Mini LED 144Hz display which MSI reveals is manufactured by Taiwan’s AUO. In the press release It says that the AUO AmLED Mini LED technology promises super-bright backlighting, capable HDR performance, and a wide color gamut. Putting some numbers to those claims, we see that the display panel can achieve a max brightness of 1000 nits. It is VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certified with 1008 dimming zones to help with punchy contrast, and a 100% DCI-P3 color gamut is supported. The panel has a 3ms response time, with overdrive. Additionally, MSI say that each Titan GT77 display goes through strict quality control checks and calibration for accurate color reproduction before laptops ship.

As mentioned in the intro, we reviewed the existing MSI Titan GT77 just a few months ago. It scored very well on the whole, with minor quibbles raised due to the 720p webcam, mediocre display quality, and price. Thankfully, from this official MSI release, we now know that the revamped GT77 is going to provide an improvement with regard to its display quality. It would also be pleasing to find out that the webcam is being upgraded for those that use laptops like this for video conferencing and so on.

Conspicuous by their absence are any mentions of the new MSI Titan GT77 laptop with 4K Mini LED 144Hz display’s CPU and GPU upgrades. However, it is widely expected that Intel will unleash a whole host of new Raptor Lake CPUs for desktops and laptops at CES 2023. There have also been signs that Nvidia will debut its Ada Lovelace architecture RTX 40 series for laptops at the January event. For the Titan GT77 we will be expecting the cream of the new crop to be provided as configuration options to buyers with deep pockets.

The MSI Titan GT77 model we reviewed back in July is currently available for $3,999 at Amazon, but for those wishing to purchase the most powerful and cutting edge portable in early 2023, it is probably worth waiting for the full reveal of the next-gen 4K Mini LED 144Hz display model.

Twitter’s Kopite7kimi asserts that Nvidia is preparing a GeForce RTX Titan graphics card based on the Ada Lovelace architecture. However, this usually reliable leaker had strong words to share about the alleged product renders from earlier this week, slamming them for being “totally fake.”

On Wednesday, YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead (MLID) published what he claimed to be “real pictures” of a purported Nvidia RTX Titan based on the Ada Lovelace architecture AD102 GPU. We wrote about the alleged new product, highlighting the dual 16-pin power inputs and quad-slot design, but advised readers to add several spoons of salt. Now it appears that the graphics card renders, which were already questionable, were a complete fabrication.

So, something is seriously wrong with the comically large RTX 40 Titan renders, as shared by MLID. However, Kopite7kimi isn’t merely dismissive; he provides some details for the upcoming Titan. According to the Twitter-based graphics card leaker, the RTX 40 Titan will debut with a triple fan design from Nvidia. In other words, it isn’t simply an extruded RTX 4090 or 4080 reference design.

With the above battle of the leakers out of the way, we can still have some fun speculating upon what specifications the upcoming Ada Lovelace architecture Titan will possess. A fully enabled AD102 die would mean that the new Titan wields 18,432 CUDA cores, 576 Tensor cores, and 144 RT cores. Other probable specs are GPU clocks in the 2.5 to 2.7 GHz range. Moreover, this powerhouse graphics card, residing between the existing RTX 4090 and RTX 6000 Ada, would come equipped with 48GB of GDDR6X VRAM. The halo RTX 40 product could easily consume 650 watts or more when overclocked.

As we discussed earlier in the week, the existence of an RTX 40 Titan doesn’t mean that Nvidia won’t squeeze out another card based on the AD102 GPU. It would still have room for an RTX 4090 Ti, which is rumored to share the same core configuration as the RTX 6000 Ada (a pro GPU with a $7,500 to $10,000 price tag).

CES 2023 is just days away, so as well as looking for coverage of the new RTX 4070 / Ti graphics cards and RTX 40 laptop GPUs, we will now be watching for official hints and indications for an RTX 4090 Ti and / or RTX 40 Titan.

The GeForce RTX 4090 is one of the best graphics cards, but it may not be the best of what the Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture has to offer. According to the YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead (MLID), Nvidia has an ace up its sleeves: the Titan RTX Ada. This, of course, is just a rumor, so any information or renders should be taken with a healthy heaping of salt — several spoonfuls, at least!

It’s been a while since Nvidia launched a Titan product. The last Titan was the Titan RTX, a monster graphics card from the 2018 Turing days with a $2,499 MSRP. After that, Nvidia seemed to forsake the Titan brand with Ampere, instead offering the RTX 3090 Ti as an alternative, but it might return with Ada Lovelace — if the rumors are true. The YouTuber shared renders of a Titan RTX Ada prototype, which they claim are the product of actual photographs in their possession.

And let’s stop right there for a moment. If someone has photographs of a product, then why are they sharing renders of the product? (Yes, “We must protect our sources!”) Still, renders are far, far easier to fake, and there have already been a few meme renders of future Nvidia GPUs floating around. But if true, the future Titan looks comically huge.

The GeForce RTX 4090 is already pretty big, but the Titan RTX Ada will blow it out of the water based on these renders. The renders show a quad-slot graphics card with the same Founder’s Edition cooler aesthetic as Nvidia’s current RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 offerings. In addition, the PCB might be in a “sandwich,” with a thicker plate on the back of the graphics card to help with cooling. It’s a brilliant idea, as the Titan RTX Ada will most likely have 48GB of GDDR6X in split mode, where Nvidia places memory modules on both sides of the PCB (i.e., similar to the RTX 3090 and previous Titan cards).

The renders also show the Titan RTX Ada proudly flaunting a gold finish, which is characteristic of the previous Titan RTX graphics card. The quad-slot cooling system will probably be necessary if the rumors that claim the Ada Titan could be a 650W graphics card that can hit 700W with manual overclocking.

Nvidia utilizes the AD102 die for different Ada SKUs, including the GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 6000 Ada. AD102, which measures 608mm², houses 144 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). The GeForce RTX 4090 has 128 enabled SMs, while the RTX 6000 Ada sports 142 SMs. So there seems to be enough room for a GeForce RTX 4090 Ti, a Titan RTX Ada — or even both. The GeForce RTX 4090 Ti is rumored to share the same core configuration as the RTX 6000 Ada, so only the Titan RTX Ada will (allegedly) leverage the full AD102 silicon.

A complete AD102 die would mean that the Titan RTX Ada could wield 18,432 CUDA cores, 576 Tensor cores, and 144 RT cores. Clock speeds are unknown but would likely land in the 2.5–2.7 GHz range, just like the other 40-series GPUs. It also seems like the GPU will have 48GB of GDDR6X — twice as much as the GeForce RTX 4090. Now that Micron has been mass-producing 24 Gbps GDDR6X modules, the Titan RTX Ada will have double the capacity and probably more bandwidth.

The GeForce RTX 4090 has 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory and a 384-bit interface to deliver a memory bandwidth of 1,008 GB/s. Assuming that the Titan RTX Ada rocks 24 Gbps GDDR6X modules, it would theoretically pump out 1,152 GB/s, 14% more than the GeForce RTX 4090.

The GeForce RTX 4090 is a 450W TDP graphics card that draws what it needs from a single 16-pin power connector (12VHPWR). If the leaked renders are accurate, Nvidia may provision the Titan RTX Ada with two 16-pin power connectors. However, with all the cases of the connector and Nvidia adapter melting on the GeForce RTX 4090, many would think having two of the connectors isn't a good idea.

The leaker claims Nvidia hasn't decided on a firm launch date for the Ada Titan, so don't expect to see it on the market any time soon. However, the chipmaker reportedly has the Titan prototype on standby in its labs. So maybe it's waiting for AMD to try to make a power move with the RDNA 3 before it unleashes the beast, or perhaps it's waiting for the Spring GTC (GPU Technology Conference).

Price is also unknown, but given the overpriced GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards, we wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia slaps a $2,999 price tag on the future Titan Ada — which was also the price of the Titan V. The Titan RTX launched at $2,499, after all, and that was four years ago. Professional RTX 6000 Ada cards are currently in the $7,500–$10,000 range, so as a "prosumer" alternative, three grand wouldn't be too surprising.

Will we actually see the return of the Titan brand? We remain skeptical, as Nvidia seems to like having more expensive professional cards with a large gap between the GeForce model (RTX 4090 and previously the 3090/3090 Ti) and the equivalent professional card (RTX A6000 and now RTX 6000 Ada). But if Nvidia has taught us anything over the years, it likes to keep its options open. So with consumer cards already selling at over $2,000, why not push out an even faster model that bumps the price up 50 percent? Just don't pretend it's for gaming.

Chinese high-tech companies such as Alibaba's T-Head are unable to buy advanced CPUs and GPUs from American companies such as AMD, Intel, and Nvidia due to the recently imposed export control rules. Chinese entities are also apparently unable to license leading-edge CPU IP from Arm because of the same rules and the Wassenaar arrangement. 

According to a report from Financial Times, Chinese companies cannot get access to Arm's advanced Neoverse V-series CPU IP due to export control rules of the U.S. and U.K. as well as the Wassenaar arrangement on export controls for dual-use goods and technologies and conventional arms. Arm's Neoverse V1 and Neoverse V2 CPU core IP is designed to enable high-performance computing applications, including supercomputers. 

Arm does not sell processors, but licenses designs that power system-on-chips which can be used to build everything from smartphones to supercomputers. The recently set U.S. export regulations prohibit shipping American technologies that enable supercomputers with performance of over 100 FP64 PetaFLOPS or over 200 FP32 PetaFLOPS within a 41,600 cubic feet (1178 cubic meters) or smaller envelope to China. Arm's high-end Neoverse V-series designs are considered an American technology, and, as a result, Arm cannot license its designs to Chinese entities. 

The Arm Neoverse V-series designs can are aimed at HPC processors for supercomputers and and can be used to develop nuclear weapons — so they are subject to both the recently-imposed U.S. technology export rules as well as the Wassenaar arrangement. 

China's high-tech titan Alibaba made a splash when it unveiled its 128-core Yitian 710 server processor for cloud workloads last year and even set an integer performance records with the chip, a result which eventually was expelled from rankings due to lack of availability. But Alibaba could not use Arm's Neoverse V for its SoC. Instead, it used an undisclosed Armv9 core, which is either its own design or a custom implementation of an Arm Cortex core based on the latest instruction set from the British company — possibly a Neoverse N-series, if we had to guess.

"We feel that the western world sees us as second-class people," an engineer from Alibaba's T-Head told Financial Times. "They won't sell good products to us even if we have money." 

Alibaba's engineers and managers have reason to worry. Amazon Web Services has been using Arm's Neoverse V-series cores in its Graviton SoCs for some time and therefore had an advantage over Alibaba's cloud services.  

A source close to Arm told Financial Times that the company was working with Alibaba and other customers from China to find solutions that would enable them to meet their performance goals while also complying with both the Wassenaar arrangement and the latest U.S. export regulations.

One Redditor has unknowingly purchased an engineering sample (ES) of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan X graphics card, which used to be one of the best graphics cards. While it’s common to find ES samples of Intel or AMD processors on the second-hand market, it’s not every day that you see an ES sample graphics card, much less one from the Titan family.

The rare GeForce GTX Titan X has all the dressing of a retail sample except for the display outputs. While the original has a DVI port, an HDMI 2.0 port, and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs, the ES sample only retains the HDMI 2.0 and one of the DisplayPort outputs. The lack of video outputs initially made the Redditor believe that someone had scammed him with a fake Titan graphics card. However, an Nvidia forum representative has clarified that the graphics card is an engineering sample, judging by the part number that begins with 699.

“I don’t know where this came from but we sometimes seed engineering cards to partners and unfortunately it occasionally winds up on some marketplace,” replied the Nvidia representative in the Reddit thread.

Launched in 2015, the GeForce GTX Titan X leveraged the GM200 (Maxwell) silicon, which measured 601 mm² and housed up to eight billion transistors. At the time, TSMC produced the GM200 for Nvidia on the 28nm process node. The Redditor's GPU-Z screenshot didn't reveal anything spectacular about the engineering sample. It still has 3,072 CUDA cores operating at 1,000 MHz and 12GB of GDDR5 memory at 7 Gbps. Being an engineering sample, the graphics card boosted up to 1,076 MHz, 13 MHz lower than on the retail GeForce GTX Titan X.

The GeForce GTX Titan X is too long in the tooth to be a gaming monster by today's standards. The graphics card performs roughly in the same ballpark as the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. The Redditor tested it in Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p (1920x1080) with maximum preset, and the graphics card only managed to deliver an average framerate of 37.95 FPS. The GeForce GTX Titan X makes for a nice collector's item and belongs on a wall. The Redditor didn't share the price he paid for the ES graphics card, only that he bought it on eBay.

Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX Titan X at $999 seven years ago. It's funny how times changed when one grand could get you a flagship graphics card back then. Nowadays, you can't even buy a GeForce RTX 4080 for the same amount of money.

Since the Nvidia hack back in February, we've had a decent idea of what we might expect from Nvidia's RTX 40-series Ada Lovelace GPUs. Early figures put the maximum number of Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) at 144 for AD102, though we wouldn't expect Nvidia to launch with a fully-enabled GPU right off the bat.

Today, during the GTC 2022 keynote (which you can view in its entirety on YouTube, though the "good stuff" starts at the 6:03 mark and runs until about 24:32), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed the specifications for the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, along with details of the Ada Lovelace architecture. Most of the most recent leaks appear to have been reasonably accurate.

Core counts and clock speeds are all known at this point. The RTX 4090 will have 128 SMs with a 2,520 MHz boost clock, coupled with 24GB of GDDR6X memory running at 21 Gbps with a 384-bit interface. The memory configuration looks unchanged from the RTX 3090 Ti, which on the surface is basically correct. However, much like AMD did with RDNA 2’s Infinity Cache, Nvidia will apparently be packing up to 96MB of L2 cache in AD102, compared to just 6MB of L2 cache in GA102 — the RTX 4090 disables 24MB of the L2 cache.

Core counts receive a greater than 50% boost over Ampere, with 128 SMs instead of only 84 SMs maximum — and there’s still room for a 140–144 SM model in the future, perhaps a new Titan RTX, or at least a future RTX 4090 Ti. Core counts alone would provide a big jump in performance, but Nvidia has also tuned Ada to reach higher clocks, again similar to what AMD did with RDNA 2, and the result is the expected 2.5–2.6 GHz boost clocks on the announced models. That’s nearly 50% more than the RTX 3090’s 1,695 MHz boost clock and 35% higher than the RTX 3090 Ti’s 1,860 MHz — and Jensen says that Nvidia has hit clock speeds in excess of 3.0 GHz with overclocking in its labs. (Hello, 800W custom RTX 4090 cards?)

Combined, the GPU shader counts and clock speeds yield the theoretical maximum performance figure. RTX 3090 was rated at 35.6 teraflops, RTX 3090 Ti bumped that up to 40 teraflops, and now the RTX 4090 pushes the needle up to 82.6 teraflops — more than double the compute, in other words. While teraflops alone can be a somewhat meaningless figure, it’s still useful within similar architectures, and we’re looking at perhaps the largest generational jump in performance that we’ve seen from Nvidia since the GeForce brand first came into being.

It's not just RTX 4090, either, though some will undoubtedly be unhappy with the launch prices for the RTX 4080 16GB and RTX 4080 12GB models. Yes, much to my chagrin, Nvidia will have two different 4080 SKUs separated by memory capacity. Based on the specs alone, these will deliver wildly differing performance levels, probably larger than the gap between the RTX 3080 Ti and the RTX 3080 10GB. Of course, the price difference should make it immediately clear which model you’re buying, with the 16GB card starting at $1,199 and the 12GB model starting at $899. On paper, it looks as though the 16GB card will deliver about 20% more performance, give or take.

We're also looking at three separate chips: AD102, AD103, and AD104. Note that Nvidia hasn’t specified an exact launch date for the RTX 4080 cards other than "November." Perhaps that will be early November, given AMD now plans to announce RDNA 3 GPUs on November 3, which sets a pretty firm time limit. We’ll probably see RTX 4080 GPUs arrive right before whenever AMD’s RX 7900 XT retail launch occurs.

The bigger question will be real-world gains, of course, and the lack of substantial gains on memory bandwidth does raise some flags. However, keep in mind that when AMD basically slapped a bunch of L3 cache onto its RDNA design and then boosted clock speeds, cards like the RX 6600 XT were able to stay ahead of the previous generation RX 5700 XT, which had nearly twice the memory bandwidth — and that was with only 32MB on Navi 23. Up to 72MB of L2 cache should give Nvidia cache hit rates of 50% or more, which means the effective memory bandwidth is doubled.

Theoretical performance looks exceptionally strong, but what about the rest of the package? Nvidia provided the above benchmark results, comparing the three new GPUs against the existing RTX 3090 Ti. You can see that in traditional games, on the left, the RTX 4080 12GB can be slightly slower than the 3090 Ti up to quite a bit faster. Some of the above testing was done with DLSS 3 enabled, which is only available on RTX 40-series cards, giving them a sizeable performance advantage.

On the right, that's certainly the case. Racer RTX, Portal RTX, and Cyberpunk 2077 "RT Overdrive" all crank up the ray tracing effects to new extremes. We don't have baseline fps figures, but the RTX 4080 12GB is over twice as fast as the 3090 Ti in some cases, while the RTX 4090 is up to four times as fast. The RTX 3090 Ti was still allowed to use DLSS 2, but it's a bit apples and oranges.

Let's get into the architectural updates briefly for some additional background.

Core counts and clock speeds have improved, but more importantly, there are architectural updates that can further boost performance. On the GPU shaders, Nvidia says Ada cores are up to twice the power efficiency. The shaders also support a new feature called SER, Shader Execution Reordering, which appears to mostly help with ray tracing performance but may also be useful in traditional rendering modes.

Moving on to the RT cores themselves, Nvidia has added more ray/triangle intersection hardware, allowing for up to twice the throughput in that area. A new opacity micro-map engine also speeds up ray tracing for transparent textures. Similarly, the displacement micro-mesh engine apparently can add geometry "richness" without the BVH build and storage cost — meaning, fewer triangles for the BVH but more for the final render. Nvidia says that the 3rd gen RT cores can generate the BVH structure 10 times faster than the 2nd gen cores, while using 20 times less memory — or 5% of the VRAM requirement.

Note that all of these above changes — SER, OMM, and DMM — require developers to use NVAPI extensions to access them. That's unfortunate, as it means they're proprietary (for now) and won't benefit existing games.

Finally, the Tensor cores have been upgraded with Hopper's support of FP8 data types. That effectively doubles the compute throughput, assuming the workload can get by with the reduced precision. Note that the number of Tensor cores per SM appears unchanged, and throughput per Tensor core in FP16 operations remains the same. But the new Tensor cores are apparently part of the requirement for DLSS 3.

While the architectural updates are great, Nvidia has also been hard at work on software updates. DLSS 3 is now official, with support for it coming in several of the games shown during the keynote, and many more (over 35+) on the way. Nvidia showed a performance boost using DLSS 3 vs. DLSSS 2 in Cyberpunk 2077 of 63%, presumably with similar visual fidelity on the final output.

We haven't been able to test DLSS 3, obviously, so we'll have to wait and see how it fares, but DLSS 2 has already set a high bar for overall upscaling quality. DLSS 3 will take the existing inputs — frame data, motion vectors, depth buffer, and the previous frame(s) — and adds a new Optical Flow Accelerator. (It's actually not entirely new, as Ampere GPUs had a slower OFA, but apparently it's not sufficient for DLSS 3 — yet.)

DLSS 3 and the OFA can generate multiple (two) frames out of a single source image by looking at the previous data. So in theory, it could potentially double the framerate, and in motion, it will probably help make games look smoother, though we do wonder how individual frame comparisons will stand up. In some ways, it sounds a bit like asynchronous space warp (ASW) from VR getting some AI enhancement and being applied alongside upscaling, which actually sounds quite clever if you're looking to boost framerates.

The OFA is a piece of fixed function hardware, dedicated to generation the optical flow field. This is sort of like a motion vector map on steroids. The Ada OFA has a rated performance of 305 teraops, whereas Ampere GPUs had an OFA rated for 126 teraops (integer operations of some form). Again, that suggests a future update to DLSS 3 could enable the algorithm on Ampere GPUs, though perhaps there would be more of a quality loss.

For now, DLSS 3 will only work with RTX 40-series (and later) GPUs, which is certainly a concern. Game developers that support DLSS 3 will also get DLSS 2 "super resolution" support by default, and there will probably be a "Frame Generation" tickbox to enable the extra performance that DLSS 3 offers. Hopefully, if they want to cater to a wider set of gamers, they'll also see fit to add in FSR 2.0 and XeSS support as well. That probably won't happen, but we can dream.

It's worth noting that up until now, all versions of DLSS have worked on every RTX card, from the lowly RTX 2060 and RTX 3050 all the way up to the RTX 3090 Ti. There's a huge discrepancy in potential Tensor core compute on those GPUs, however, with the RTX 2060 only providing about 52 teraflops of FP16 while the 3090 Ti (with sparsity) has up to 640 teraflops. Now, with FP8 on RTX 40-series, even a hypothetical 20 SM RTX 4050 would provide around 200 teraflops of compute, while the RTX 4090 has up to 1.4 petaflops of throughput.

Pricing isn’t going to win any fans for Nvidia, as it’s bumping up the launch price by $100–$200 compared to the RTX 3080/3090 back in 2020. That’s not as bad as it could have been, and clearly Nvidia is trying to protect sales of the existing RTX 30-series GPUs for the time being.

At least it’s not the anticipated $1,999 price point that the RTX 3090 Ti had, which later proved unsustainable after crypto mining profitability collapsed, ultimately leading to price cuts and unhappy partners. EVGA announced last week that it would exit the graphics card business largely due to Nvidia’s tactics. We can’t help but think the RTX 3080 Ti and 3090 Ti pricing shenanigans of the past year played a big role.

Availability of the RTX 4090 is scheduled for October 12, 2022. That’s about a week ahead of when Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs are expected to launch, and of course, AMD Ryzen 7000-series Zen 4 CPUs will be available next week. That means anyone looking to upgrade to a completely new PC will have plenty of options soon.

Will there actually be a sufficient supply of RTX 4090 and 4080 cards to meet demand, though? That remains to be seen, but even without miners trying to scoop up cards, we expect 4090 to sell out for at least the first few weeks. Let's hope scalpers don't get in on the action and ruin it for everyone. As for the RTX 4080, that will arrive the following month, and retail availability will again be important for potential customers.

What about lower spec RTX 40-series cards — stuff that won't cost $900 or more? Unfortunately, the cards most people are likely waiting for haven't been revealed. We've heard rumors of RTX 4070 and RTX 4060, but so far, we've only seen AIB images for the RTX 4090 series, not 4080, and not anything lower down the pecking order. We've provided some insight into why the RTX 4090 and 4080 cost so much as well, not to excuse Nvidia but to also discuss more of what's going on.

Given Nvidia has stated that it expects to have excess GeForce gaming card inventory until perhaps April 2023 (you can hear this in the Q2 FY23 Earnings Report), that means there are a lot of RTX 30-series cards still waiting to be sold. And that "April 2023" estimate is probably a lot better than what will actually happen, which means Nvidia could be in an oversupply of RTX 30-series GPUs for almost another year!

Since mining pushed Nvidia to prioritize the larger, faster chips like GA102 over smaller chips like GA104, a lot of those cards are probably RTX 3080 and 3090 variants. Nvidia doesn't want to kill sales of those cards by releasing a newer, faster, and cheaper card, which explains why we're only hearing about RTX 4090 and 4080 right now, and why prices are generally creeping up.

But Nvidia has a big problem, namely AMD. AMD might be coming to market a bit later with RDNA 3 and the RX 7900 XT compared to RTX 4090. Still, with one-quarter of the overall GPU market share of Nvidia, plus CPU and console product lines it could use on wafers to avoid getting into a massive GPU oversupply situation, it's in a far better position to react. AMD has long said that its RX 7000-series RDNA 3 GPUs would come to market this year, and it's sticking to that.

We don't know if AMD will deliver better performance than Nvidia, but the chiplet design of RDNA 3 should mean it has far more ability to undercut Nvidia on prices. Who knows, we could end up with the reverse of the RX 580/570 situation in 2018, where you could pick up those AMD GPUs for a song. RTX 3050 for under $200 and RTX 3060 for under $250? That would be a nice change of pace. Black Friday could actually be quite exciting this year for PC gamers!

With the official reveal now out of the way, we're looking forward to testing all of the new graphics cards slated to launch in the coming months. Again, given the oversupply currently happening on existing GPU lines, the new parts will hopefully be readily available at retail — a stark contrast to the past two years. Still, even with the high prices, don't be shocked when all of the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUs are sold out at launch. It happens every time there's a new Nvidia architecture.

If you're looking to upgrade your PC with a new, high-end graphics card that costs more than $500, hit the pause button. While GPU prices continue to drop and some cards might look particularly tempting — like the RTX 3090 Ti for $920 below its obscene $1,999 launch MSRP — the best graphics cards are about to get some serious competition. That's especially true for the cards at the top of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. So if you're eying that RX 6950 XT for 'only' $934, I suggest you wait. 

Today's top cards — anything that's above an RTX 3070 or, quite possibly, an RTX 3070 itself — are likely to be displaced by faster models within the next two or three months. If you buy such a card now, you may kick yourself in November when you can get a better card for the same price, or the same, now-last-gen card at a discounted price. Still, cards that currently cost $500 or less, like the RTX 3060 Ti or below and RX 6700 XT or below, are less likely to be replaced in the near future. However, I'd suggest sticking to the sub-$250 space if you can't wait, as it's hard to beat the value you get right now from Radeon RX 6600 and RTX 2060.

If you need three good reasons to wait on upgrading your graphics card, I've got them: Nvidia RTX 40-series Ada Lovelace GPUs, AMD RX 7000-series RDNA 3 GPUs, and Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs. That last one probably won't land anywhere near the top of the performance ladder, but if Intel wants to gain some market share the A770, A750, and A580 could be priced very aggressively. That could cause AMD and Nvidia to respond with price cuts to the midrange and budget GPUs. In other words, everything is in a state of flux, from budget to midrange to high-end and extreme GPUs.

Which isn't to say nobody should purchase a new graphics card. If you're in dire need, or if you're building your first PC and simply can't wait any longer, it's okay to buy a decent budget or midrange offering. There's always new stuff coming down the pipeline, and potentially waiting until 2023 is probably too long for some people. Again, there's less likelihood of major pricing changes in the budget to midrange sector, so if you need a new GPU, that's where I'd look.

Let's quickly recap what's happening at the top of the GPU performance stack.

Everyone expects Nvidia to reveal the RTX 4090 at the very least on September 20 at the GPU Technology Conference. Nvidia has said it will talk about the next GeForce architecture, and why discuss the architecture without launching at least one graphics card? Nvidia will probably provide details on the RTX 4080 as well, and maybe even a Titan card.

Rumblings about performance indicate we could be looking at far more than a 50% improvement over the current fastest GPUs. Prices might set new records as well — in a bad way — but if you're considering upgrading to a new Nvidia GPU that costs more than $500, I'd definitely wait and see what happens. And if you're eying an RTX 3090 Ti, you might as well wait a month and then go whole hog and swipe your credit card for the RTX 4090, assuming it really is up to 75% faster. Or be sensible and pick up the RTX 4080.

In short, I fully expect RTX 4090 cards to go on sale by October at the latest. There's a good chance RTX 4080 will follow within a few weeks, if it doesn't launch concurrently. That will put pressure on Nvidia and its partners to clear out everything from the 3080 and up, which in turn should impact prices on the 3070 and 3060 series as well.

AMD may not be too far behind with its RDNA 3 GPUs. It demonstrated an unnamed but presumably high-end card at the unveiling of the full Ryzen 7000 CPU lineup. Let the dust settle from the CPU launch, which will happen on September 27, and AMD might be ready to shift over to new GPU launches by next month, certainly before the end of the year.

As with Nvidia, I expect AMD to start with its fastest GPU, Navi 31. The top model should have at least 50% more memory bandwidth and capacity compared to the RX 6950 XT, and if the current rumors are accurate, it will more than double the theoretical compute performance. Will AMD steal some of Nvidia's thunder and deliver a GPU that can beat the RTX 4090? It's possible, though we'll have to wait and see. The bad news is that if AMD actually does deliver superior performance, it will likely be equally expensive.

But again, you don't need to splurge on the top-shelf model. AMD should have a slightly trimmed down RX 7800 XT launching at the same time as or shortly after the RX 7900 XT. The potential for massive changes in price to performance don't stop there, either. RX 6700 XT is probably about as high as I'd go on a GPU purchase, as the newcomers will inevitably affect prices elsewhere, though the further down the stack you go, the less likely things are to change much in the next month or two.

The budget to midrange sector is also where Intel's higher spec Arc graphics cards come into the picture. Intel has demonstrated — using its own benchmarks, so apply a dose of skepticism — competitive performance from both the Arc A770 and Arc A750. Based on the recently published Arc specs, even the mainstream Arc A580 might offer some decent competition in the sub-$250 market.

Intel knows where things stand, and it knows it has an uphill battle for market share. Earlier reports of flaky drivers on the Arc A380 aren't going to instill confidence, which means even if Intel's Arc A770 can match or beat the RTX 3070, it won't be able to charge RTX 3070 prices.

I suspect Intel's A770 will go after the RTX 3060 Ti instead, the A750 will target the RTX 3060, and A580 will take on the RTX 3050. Possibly even more surprising is that Intel might even win each of those match ups. At which point Nvidia could easily reduce prices, which again points back to the recommendation to wait a bit.

I've put all of the rumored specifications together — though the A770 doesn't have rumored specs anymore, other than the price. I'm reasonably certain on the maximum configuration for Nvidia's AD102 GPU and Nvidia's Navi 31, but how many of the functional will actually be enabled, and what clock speeds will the chips run at? These are basically unknown, at least to me, though there have been loads of rumors — many less reliable than others. I've also plugged in "educated guess" pricing, but remember that price is the easiest thing to change at the last minute.

Arguably the most important specifications will be the GPU shader counts and theoretical compute. Experience indicates that such data ends up being a comparison between apples and oranges due to the differences between the various architectures, but assuming AMD and Nvidia both improve, and depending on final clock speeds, we could be in for a very interesting showdown in the next month or two.

For the current generation GPUs, Nvidia has a whopping 40 teraflops of theoretical compute on the RTX 3090 Ti, while the RX 6950 XT only has 23.7 teraflops. The potential specs for RTX 4090 put it at around 65 teraflops — a 60% increase — while the RX 7900 XT could go as high as 59 teraflops or more — more than double the current halo AMD GPU. Intel lands far below those two, with the A770 already behind the existing halo parts, but again that's to be expected since it will be going after the higher volume mainstream market.

Perhaps more important than the upcoming AMD and Nvidia heavyweights will be the penultimate GPUs. RTX 4090 and RX 7900 XT will almost certainly carry premium pricing to new levels, but what about RTX 4080 and RX 7800 XT? Past experience suggests stepping down one notch might reduce potential performance by 10–15%, while also cutting the price nearly in half. $999 for an RTX 4080 that's 30% faster than the existing RTX 3090 Ti? Yeah, that's one possibility. The same goes for RX 7800 XT versus the RX 7900 XT.

Again, I don't know for sure where any of these upcoming cards will actually land on price or performance, or even specifications. That's why I run all the benchmarks when the GPUs actually launch. About the only thing I'm confident in stating is that all the new GPUs will immediately sell out. What I hope is that supply will catch up to demand much more quickly than in the past two years. Miners won't be propping up unreasonable prices, so if the stars align we could see decent availability and pricing before the end of the year.

And even if the prices on the next-generation GPUs end up being more than you're willing to spend, the reported glut of current generation graphics cards building up in warehouses should inevitably lead to lower prices on existing cards. Worst-case, you wait a month or two and end up saving a few bucks (unless another "perfect storm" hits). Best-case, you end up with a 50% or more increase in performance without spending anything extra.

But hey, I've been wrong before, though admittedly not many people properly predicted the ramifications of the whole pandemic, or the 2020 cryptocurrency boom causing chaos in the GPU market. Unfortunately, even without those, scalpers might ruin the upcoming launch parties and holiday shopping season. Patience is still a virtue.

Like I said at the start, if you really need something right now, I'd look to cards priced below $500, and probably closer to $250. Take a gander at the Radeon RX 6600 and RTX 2060, both of which are excellent values. You can move up to something faster once things settle down. If those aren't fast enough, AMD's RX 6700 XT and RX 6650 XT are  also good values, and the 12GB of VRAM on the 6700 XT and RTX 3060 also warrant consideration.

I wouldn't go much higher on a GPU purchase right before new hardware is set to arrive. There's usually a trickle down effect on pricing, and Nvidia's cards in the $300–$600 range are still selling above their official MSRPs, which means they definitely have room to come down another $50–$100.

GPU leaker @Kopite7kimi is at it again today with another update on the upcoming RTX 4080 specifications. His latest rumors include a core count reduction for the RTX 4080 from the estimated 10,240 to 10,752 range down to 9728. This translates to a 10% reduction in core count.

Thankfully, this change doesn't appear to change the 4080's estimated Time Spy Extreme score of 15,000, which Kopite lists again in his latest Tweet. Performance appears to remain the same, for now at least. Kopite's other indicated specs for the RTX 4080 also remain intact, including the 420W power limit, 16GB of 21Gbps GDDR6X memory, and AD103 die.

Regardless of the source, apply a healthy dose of skepticism to these rumors and "leaks." Mistakes and incorrect guesses are inevitable, and the hardware specs might not be fully nailed down yet. One critical missing piece of information are the RTX 40-series core clocks. There's speculation, based on the higher power levels, that Nvidia will increase core clocks substantially relative to the existing Ampere line, but there's no hard data as yet.

RTX 40-Series Titan Rumor and L2 Cache Updates

Another Tweet from @kopite7kimi suggests the Titan branding may be coming back to the GeForce lineup in some shape or form. This RTX 40-Series Titan "has a chance" at using the full-fat AD102 chip, but Kopite hasn't confirmed whether or not that will actually happen. More likely is it will be a nearly complete AD102, since 100% functional chip yields on the presumably large GPU will likely be low.

There's an interesting question if we do in fact get a new Titan card. Will Nvidia once again have a Titan "hybrid" SKU that blurs the lines between Nvidia's A-series workstation GPUs and the company's GeForce gaming GPU lineup, with lots of memory and enhanced drivers? Or will we instead get an RTX 4090 Ti that skips the professional driver enhancements? Either way, we can safely guess a card with 48GB of GDDR6X memory won't come cheap. Kopite7kimi appears to have provided an educated guess for now is all.

In the same Tweet, Kopite also shared some L2 cache updates for the AD103 and AD104 40 series dies. The fully unlocked AD103 die will apparently have 64MB of L2 cache, while the AD104 die will have 48MB — that's the same as what the earlier leaks suggested back at the start of the year.

However, Kopite also suggests the RTX 4090 might have a reduced L2 cache size, or perhaps that AD102 won't have proportionately larger caches. Or it might be a move to differentiate the potential RTX 4090 Ti (or Titan) from the "lesser" RTX 4090.

Silicon Motion has today introduced its first SSD platform featuring a PCIe Gen5 interface. SMI's MonTitan SM8366 controller offers an unbeatable sequential performance of over 14GB/s. It also provides support for existing, specialty, and next-generation 3D NAND memory types, including 3D QLC NAND and even higher density flash. The platform is aimed at enterprise-grade applications though some of its innovations may become a part of SMI's consumer-oriented SSD controllers. 

Silicon Motion's MonTitan SM8366 is an NVMe 2.0a-compliant controller based on Arm core complexes. It features 16 NAND flash channels with a 2400 MT/s ONFI/Toggle interface to connect up to 128TB of 3D TLC, 3D QLC or XL-Flash memory. The controller supports DDR4-3200 and DDR5-4800 DRAM buffers with a dual-channel interface as well as a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface or dual independent x2/x2 or x1/x1 interfaces. SMI's MonTitan family also includes its SM8308 controller that has eight NAND channels, but the same feature set as its higher-end counterpart. 

SMI says that SSDs based on the MonTitan SM8366 will be able to offer sustained sequential read performance of over 14 GB/s as well as sustained random read/write performance of 3 million/2.8 million 4K IOPS. To put the numbers into context, performance of the SM8366-powered drives promises to be higher than that of Samsung's PM1743 drive featuring a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. 

But performance is only a part of the equation when it comes to enterprise-grade SSDs. The MonTitan SM8366 is a sophisticated platform with a plethora of features that support datacenter and enterprise use cases. In particular, SSDs based on the SM8366 will support OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD requirements as well as the Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) specifications to handle up to 1024 queuing pairs, supporting up to 128 namespaces. In addition, the chip supports AES 256-bit encryption, attestation, hardware root of trust, Secure Boot, and TCG Opal. 

Among the key features of Silicon Motion's new datacenter SSD platform are its proprietary PerformaShape and NANDCommand capabilities. SMI's PerformaShape is a Quality-of-Service capability that isolates certain SSD operations to maximize both bandwidth as well as user defined individual performance elements (QoS, latency, RR/RW, power). The NANDCommand feature seems to be even more interesting as it enhances LDPC algorithms with error correction and endurance extension for next-generation NAND devices with more layers as well as more than four bits per cell. We are unsure whether penta level cell (PLC) 3D NAND will be viable anytime soon in the enterprise, but at least SMI's SM8366 platform is said to be ready for it.

The new enterprise-grade SM8366 controller from Silicon Motion supports a variety of memory types thanks to the company's 5th Generation LDPC algorithms and extensions enabled by NANDCommand. Right now, SMI says that its platform can, among other types, work with Kioxia's 3D BiCS NAND and XL-Flash memory, the latest 176-layer 3D QLC NAND memory from Micron, and various types of 3D NAND chips from YMTC.  

Silicon Motion's SM8366 controller is made using a 12nm-class fabrication process and comes in a 21mm x 21mm FCBGA package with a built-in aluminum heat spreader. The chip will enable fabrication of SSDs in E1.S, E1.L, and E3.S modern form-factors as well as U.2/U.3 legacy form-factors. 

SMI's MonTitan SSD platform featuring the SM8366 controller will be available to early engagement platforms in Q4 2022 as reference hardware design kits with licensable turnkey and layered firmware stacks to enable development of customer differentiated solutions.

Nvidia is projected to release three high-end GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards based on the Ada Lovelace architecture later this year targeting demanding gamers. But apparently Team Green is also prepping a rather monstrous graphics board based on its top-of-the-range AD102 GPU that will carry 48GB of memory with a typical board power of 800W, clearly gunning for the top of the GPU benchmarks hierarchy and the fastest of the best graphics cards.

Hardware leaker @Kopite7kimi dubbed Nvidia's flagship GeForce RTX 40-series graphics card 'The Beast' without attributing a model name to it, but normally Nvidia would call it GeForce RTX 4090 Ti or Titan. This board is said to carry a GPU with 18,176 CUDA cores (up from 16,384 CUDA cores in case of the GeForce RTX 4090) as well as 48GB of GDDR6X memory featuring a 24 GT/s data transfer rate (up from 24GB of memory at 21 GT/s in case of the RTX 4090).

Considering the higher number of CUDA cores, additional memory, and substantially higher TBP, the alleged GeForce RTX 4090 Ti should be significantly faster than the alleged non-Ti variant, particularly in high resolutions with high detail settings. Meanwhile, the beasty card is said to feature a TBP of 800W and will need an extremely capable power supply unit as well as a sophisticated cooling system.

The rather extreme thermals of the monstrous Ada Lovelace card might cause consternation among ProViz professionals that work with highly detailed 3D models that can actually benefit from 48GB of GDDR6X memory onboard. Cooling an 800W card would inevitably mean more fans and higher fan speeds, neither of which are pleasant in a professional environment (outside of the data center).

What remains to be seen is how much will Nvidia charge for its 'Beast' graphics board with 48GB of memory. A fully-fledged AD102 chip is projected to cost a lot, and 48GB of GDDR6X memory should carry an extreme price tag too. Given the rumored specs, we expect Nvidia's alleged GeForce RTX 4090 Ti board will feature an MSRP above $2000, the price of the outgoing GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.

By way of comparison, even if Nvidia keeps clock speeds relatively consistent between generations, RTX 4090 Ti could have over 70% more computational power than the RTX 3090 Ti. Memory bandwidth meanwhile may only be 14% higher, so Nvidia would need improved caching or memory compression technologies to scale performance. Regardless, it looks like a massive bump in performance — and power use.

Nvidia has not yet formally announced its GeForce RTX 40-series graphics boards, so consider everything detailed here as rumors and speculation. This is certainly not the first nor the last time we'll hear some juicy rumors about Nvidia's upcoming Ada Lovelace solutions. The real question: What will it punish more, your wallet or your home circuits?

Diehard PC builders will tell you that even the best gaming laptops will never replace a desktop rig. But the MSI Titan GT77 is here to challenge that assertion, packing up to an Intel Core i9-12900HX — Intel's most powerful mobile processor — with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and a ton of storage.

Desktop replacements are often big and bulky, and while this Titan is still a very big laptop, it has slimmed down from the last time we saw it.

And it has tons of other trimmings, including a mechanical keyboard, and, depending on your configuration, lots of opportunities to upgrade down the line. But starting at more than $2,500, it's expensive and only goes up from there, hitting about $5,000 on the configuration we tested. If you want to replace your desktop, you'll have to pay the price.

Design of the MSI Titan GT77

As far as massive desktop replacements go, the redesigned MSI Titan GT77 is sleek. Don't get me wrong. It's still huge. You won't want to carry this around from place to place without a car. But still, its sportscar aesthetic is eye-catching, and, if you've seen the old, 9.2-pound 2019 design, a bit more compact.

Closed, the Titan is somewhere between a spaceship and a Ferrari. The black, plastic lid is fairly plain, with the exception of MSI's dragon shield logo (which, of course, lights up in RGB because why not?). The other thing you'll notice before you even open this notebook is that the Titan has a bit of junk in the trunk with some lines for texture. Alienware has been doing this for years to add extra ports in the back of the machine, but on the Titan, that's all exhaust for hot hair. But hey, that has RGB lighting, too (and replaces the RGB light bar on the front that you can see on MSI's existing GE76 Raider).  

LIfting the lid reveals a 17.3-inch display with moderate bezels (though particularly large along the bottom). The entire deck is black plastic, which is offset by the RGB mechanical keyboard (more on that below). Some of the same lines can be seen below the screen, bringing a bit of coherence to the different parts of the laptop. There's a small fingerprint reader next to the trackpad, which worked well when I was wearing a mask and couldn't use Windows Hello facial recognition.

The Titan weighs 7.28 pounds and is 15.63 x 12.99 x 0.91 inches, which is hefty, but fairly shrunken down from the old design. In fact, it's actually lighter than the MSI GE76 Raider, and, in some dimensions, smaller (8.8 pounds, 15.6 x 11.2 x 1 inches). Part of that may be because the Titan switched entirely to plastic. 

The Alienware x17 R2 is 6.82 pounds and 15.72 x 11.79 x 0.84 inches, while the Asus ROG Strix Scar G733Q is 5.95 pounds is 15.55 x 11.11 x 1.08 inches.

At just under an inch thick, it's good to see MSI using that space to jam the Titan full of ports. On the left side, there's the power jack, two USB-A ports, a full-size SD card reader and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The right side has a third USB-A port, a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports over USB Type-C, mini DisplayPort and HDMI for video and an Ethernet jack. I'm of the opinion that with Thunderbolt 4 on board, MSI could probably ditch mini DisplayPort here for another USB-C or USB-A port.

MSI Titan GT77 Specifications

Gaming and Graphics on the MSI Titan GT77

In our review configuration, the Titan came with Intel and Nvidia's most powerful mobile components: the Intel Core i9-12900HX and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. These provided strong gaming performance, though the gap was rarely huge between the HX and Intel's existing HK-series chips.

To test these out for myself, I played some Control, which is still deeply demanding a few years past its release. I pumped the settings as high as they can go, including ray tracing, at 1080p to match the screen. The game typically ran between 75 and 80 fps as I fought my way through past enemy Hiss in the Oldest House.

On Shadow of the Tomb Raider at its highest settings (1080p), the Titan played at 117 fps, beating the Raider and Alienware x17 (both with a Core i9-12900HK, RTX 3080 Ti) at 112 fps and 107 fps, respectively. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17, with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, hit 92 fps.

We saw a similar pattern on Grand Theft Auto High (1080p, very high settings), where the Titan achieved an average of 142 frames per seconds, surpassing the Raider (139 fps), Alienware (129 fps) and Strix (109 fps).

When we checked out Far Cry New Dawn (1080p, ultra), MSI's latest reached 125 fps. This time, the Alienware came closest at 117 fps, while the Raider hit 113 fps.

The systems were most competitive on Red Dead Redemption 2 (medium, 1080p), where the Titan topped the list at 86 fps. The Raider (82 fps), Alienware (78 fps) and Scar ( 75 fps) followed in the closest delta among the games between first and last place.

On Borderlands 3, the Titan came in second place at 105 fps; the Raider was ahead by a single frame. Meanwhile, the Alienware reached 97 fps and the Strix hit 87 fps.

We also stress tested the Titan by running Metro Exodus for 15 runs on the RTX preset, which takes about half an hour. The game ran at an average framerate of 89.41 frames per second, and it was largely consistent throughout. 

During Metro, the Core i9-12900HX's performance cores ran at an average of 3.03 GHz while the efficiency cores averaged 2.68 GHz. The CPU package measured 59.19 degrees Celsius. The GPU ran at an average of 1,243 MHz and measured 59.33 degrees Celsius.

Productivity Performance on the MSI Titan GT77

The MSI Titan GT77 marks the first time we're reviewing a laptop with one of Intel's 12th Gen HX series chips. Specifically, the Titan is rocking a top-of-the-line Intel Core i9-12900HK with 16 cores (eight performance cores and eight efficiency cores) and 24 threads, with a boost clock of 5 GHz. Our review unit also came with a whopping 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD storage.

On Geekbench 5, an overall performance benchmark that relies heavily on the CPU, the Titan reached a single-core score of 1,851 and notched a multi-core score of 15,999. While the MSI GE76 Raider and Alienware x17 R2, both armed with an Intel Core i9-12900HK, earned similar single-core performance scores, they weren't as powerful on multi-core (13,456 for the Raider, 13,710 on the Alienware). The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 G733Q, with its AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, achieved a single-core score of 1,487 and multi-core score of 8,231.

All of the laptops did well on our file transfer test, which copies 25GB of test files, but the Titan GT77 really blazed through the challenge. MSI's latest desktop replacement reached speeds of 2,639.03 MBps, handily surpassing the Alienware (2,268.18 MBPs), Raider (1,774.50 MBps) and Scar (1,449.66 MBps).

On Handbrake, in which we use laptops to transcode a 4K video to 1080p, the Titan finished our task in 3 minutes and 59 seconds. That's faster than both the Raider and the Alienware (4:44 and 4:45, respectively), and noticeably speedier than the Strix (6:11).

We don't usually run our Cinebench stress test on gaming notebooks, but this was our first look at the Core i9-12900HX, and we wanted to see what it could do. And let me say, it tore through the workload. It started off with a strong score of 22,112.12, and never dipped lower than 20,896.57. That's pretty stable, all things considered.

The CPU's performance cores hit an average of 3,732.71 GHz while the E-cores ran at 2,909 GHz. The Core i9-12900HX measured an average of 89.28 degrees Celsius.

Display on the MSI Titan GT77

We tested the MSI Titan GT77 with a 17.3-inch, 1080p, 360 Hz display. That's likely the ideal configuration for esports players, but it ends up that this particular screen isn't coming to the US. Still, since we have the tools, we put it under our light meter and colorimeter, as readers from elsewhere around the globe may still get some useful info from the numbers.

To my eye, the 1080p display is a no-go, despite what the colorimeter told us. The screen appears washed out (and, oddly enough, it seemed worse in the middle of the screen). The Thor: Love and Thunder trailer is typically filled with color. But on the Titan, every one of those colors, while present, looked dull. In scenes where Thor and Jane Foster (also, technically, Thor) fight in the streets, only their red capes stood out at all. Everything else was just kind of dull.

Those same issues occurred while playing games. Control has a ton of red lighting, but it was so washed out as to occasionally appear pink. Even in normal lighting conditions, everything looked bland. 

Despite that, the Titan's display put up decent, though not the best, numbers on our colorimeter covering 98% of the sRGB color gamut and 69.4% of the wider DCI-P3 gamut. The Alienware, Strix and Scar all surpassed 100% of the sRGB gamut, however, and had better showings on DCI-P3 (the Strix did the best at 77.3%).

At 318 nits, the Titan is decently bright, though the Alienware is slightly more luminous (325 nits). The Raider and Scar 17 were a bit dimmer at 259 nits and 261 nits, respectively.

Update: July 21, 2:07 p.m. ET: MSI tells Tom's Hardware that the washed out screen is due to a clash between MSI TrueColor and Intel's graphics driver, and that it is working with Intel to solve the problem. The original review continues below.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MSI Titan GT77

MSI has outfitted the Titan with a mechanical keyboard using low-profile Cherry switches with a claimed 3.5 mm of key travel. I'm not sure it feels particularly deep to me, but I sure love the way it feels.

The Titan's keys are linear switches, which make sense considering that it's a gaming laptop. While I personally prefer tactiles for typing, the linear switches here have a decent thocky sound and feel. (For a laptop, anyway. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.) The only oddity about it is that the arrow keys and numpad feel like typical membrane switches, as do the right control and function keys. Those are a bit smaller and don't fit the switches. I wish MSI made the arrow keys in a way that fit the Cherry switches, as some games do use those.

On monkeytype, I hit 116 words per minute with 98% accuracy. While they're nice for typing, they’re really advantageous for quick-twitch gaming, because they pop up and can be pressed again very quickly.

The 5.2 x 3.3-inch touchpad is a nice size, especially when you consider that  so many gaming laptops have small trackpads (after all, most gamers use external mice). But this trackpad is smooth and has plenty of room for gestures in Windows 11. It's a little shallow to click, but nothing I couldn't get used to.

Audio on the MSI Titan GT77

The Titan's pair of top-firing speakers and pair of woofers do a fine job, but still don’t replace a solid pair of headphones.

When I listened to Matt Maeson's "Hallucinogenics," the vocals and guitars were nice and clear, and some hand claps, while a bit buried in the background, could be made out. The bass, like many laptops, was subpar. The song got nice and loud, filling a small room in our office. At its highest volumes, it got a bit distorted, but it's plenty loud long before you get to that point. 

When I played Control, gunfire was punchy, and vocals, including Jesse's inner narration, were crisp and clear. Some of the ambient music was lost among the fighting, but could be heard more clearly elsewhere in the game. 

The Nahimic app has a number of sound profiles and an EQ. They don't make huge differences, though I suspect some might like the surround sound for gaming and movies.

Upgradeability of the MSI Titan GT77

While the Titan GT77 we tested was packed to the gills (at this price, it should be), those who pick configurations with less storage space or memory still have opportunities to upgrade.

Opening the Titan involves removing 11Phillips head screws from the bottom of the laptop. They're all the same length, so you don't have to remember what goes where. From there, you need to use a pry tool (I found one shaped like a guitar pick to be invaluable) and separate the clips to remove the bottom. The only tricky part was getting off the rear grill, which required a bit of prying upside down.

Once you get over the massive heatsinks cooled by four fans, you'll see that there are four SSD slots, so if you don't get a top-of-the-line model, there's plenty of room for expansion. Underneath a small heat shield, there are four RAM slots. Ours came with four sticks (64GB in total) of DDR5, but again, those who don't have those slots filled can add more down the line.

You can also access the battery and the networking cards.

Battery Life on the MSI Titan GT77

We rarely have high expectations of gaming laptops when it comes to battery life — especially for desktop replacements. But the Titan surprised us a little bit.

On our battery test, we have laptops browse the web, stream video and run OpenGL tests while connected to Wi-Fi with the screen at 150 nits. The Titan endured for six hours and five minutes. That's not a full work day, but it's  better than the competitors we tested against. The Raider ran for 4:57, the Strix ran for 3:44, and the Alienware x17 R2 didn't even make it to three hours.

Heat on the MSI Titan GT77

To see how hot the MSI Titan GT77 gets while gaming, we took skin temperature measurements while running our Metro Exodus stress test.

At the center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, the laptop measured 37.1 degrees Celsius (98.78 degrees Fahrenheit), while the touchpad remained cooler at 29.2 degrees Celsius (84.56 degrees Fahrenheit).

The hottest spot on the underside of the notebook measured 44.1 degrees Celsius (111.38 degrees Fahrenheit). It's likely more comfortable to use this on a desk, but it probably wouldn't fit comfortably on your lap anyway.

Webcam on the MSI Titan GT77

Considering that everything else on the Titan is pushed to extremes, the fact that MSI has opted for a 720p camera here is a disappointment (especially considering MSI's own GE76 Raider uses a 1080p lens!).

Admittedly, resolution isn't everything, and at my well-lit desk near a window, my green shirt was color-accurate and I could even make out resolution in my hair. But still, this laptop, as configured, is $5,000, so you shouldn’t need to go shopping for one of the best webcams on top of this investment.

There's also an IR camera for use with Windows Hello. Facial login was speedy and worked well throughout my testing.

Software and Warranty on the MSI Titan GT77

MSI's main piece of preinstalled software is called MSI Center. Formerly Dragon Center, it has some hardware monitoring tools, as well a confusing version of its lighting software, Mystic Light. I kind of wish MSI would go back to the old Dragon Center, as months in, this still feels a bit barebones.

In fact, to get to some of the lighting options, I had to install the Steelseries GG app, which previous MSI laptops have had. Here, I was able to adjust the lighting on the back of the device and make per-key customizations to the keyboard.

Otherwise, the other MSI apps are less useful. There's MSI App Player, which lets you run some Android apps. This is far less useful now that Windows 11 allows some (albeit a limited number and not from the Google Play Store). MSI True Color lets you choose between different color profiles and reduce blue light. 

There's still some filler. MSI adds apps like Music Maker Jam, which should be optional. Nahimic is on board for better control of the audio

MSI sells the Titan GT77 with a one-year warranty.

MSI Titan GT77 Configurations

 No matter how you configure the Titan, it is a very expensive notebook. We tested the Titan with an Intel Core i9-12900HX, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, 64GB of RAM, 4TB of SSD storage and a 17.3-inch, 1080p display with a 360 Hz refresh rate. In the U.S., that screen won't be available (you'll have to get a 4K, 120 Hz screen), but Intel tells me that our laptop with the 4K screen should cost around $4,999. We haven't found this configuration for sale, though.

Yeah, that hurts my wallet just thinking about it. I know people who have bought cars for less.

I haven't seen that option on the market, but there are others. The cheapest I saw, as of this writing, was a $2,599 model with a Core i7-2800HX, RTX 3070 Ti, 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. For $3,199, you can get a Core i7-12800HX , RTX 3070 Ti, 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD.

MSI directly sells a model with our exact specs, with the excision of 2TB of storage and the 4K screen, for $4,949.99, though it is out of stock as of this writing. In between, there are a few different combinations of CPU, GPU, RAM and storage, but expect to unload a few grand if you buy one of these. 

Bottom Line

The MSI Titan GT77 is an extremely powerful, incredibly expensive gaming PC designed for the highest performance. In most cases, it succeeds, though whether the performance the HX delivers for the price difference over an HK, especially in gaming, will be up to what your bank account can tolerate.

I see the Titan for what I would call the "gaming professional." That’s someone who games, but also makes videos, edits photos, streams or does other creative work on the side that can help payback some of the cost. For those looking at the Titan or something like it, I suggest first checking out the MSI GE76 Raider. That notebook can also get extremely expensive, but it starts a lot cheaper (under $2,000 if you're willing to consider 11th Gen CPUs), giving you more options to stick your toe in the high-end gaming laptop waters. The HX is impressive, but there's a wide range out there if you want to spend a bit less.

MSI is bringing back the Titan. The company hasn't released an updated version of its flagship desktop replacement since 2019, and the new version is packed to the gills with the latest components and a complete redesign.

The new Titan will utilize Intel's 12th Gen HX mobile processors, up to a Core i9-12900HX, with graphics going up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. That's a big change from the last time we saw a Titan, which was then using an Intel Core i9-9900K desktop chip. But that 2019 laptop was 1.7 inches thick, while the GT77 is 0.91-inches thick, making for a pretty drastic reduction in size.

MSI's new design features an RGB light bar along the backside of the laptop as well as colorful lighting on the dragon logo, letting everyone and anyone know that it's a gaming notebook.

The company claims that its OverBoost technology allows for 250W of power delivery to the CPU and GPU, which it suggests offers "desktop-caliber performance." MSI also says you get desktop-level upgradeability, with four memory slots (up to 128GB) and four m.2 slots (one of which supports PCIe Gen 5, though it won't ship with those drives just yet) for up to 32TB of storage. To cool the components, MSI is using four fans (which we've seen only in some of Alienware's X-series laptops), along with seven heat pipes and six points of exhaust.

The Titan will also get a new, mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Ultra Low switches, backlit with, yes, SteelSeries RGB. An MSI rep suggested that these aren't the same Cherry MX keys that have shown up on some Alienware laptops, but with a new profile that offers 3.5 mm of key travel, so I'm eager to try them.

MSI is also maintaining the 17.3-inch, 16:9 screen from predecessors, but it's bumping the resolution to 4K and the speeds up to 120 Hz.

The Titan will start at $3,199 and go up to $4,949, with an expected release in mid-June.

MSI Raider GE67 HX/GE77 HX

MSI's Raider series, a mainstay on our best gaming laptops list, is also getting a bump up to Intel's HX processors. It also sounds like the GE66 and GE76, with H-series chips,  will continue to sell through retail channels.

The upgraded versions both use Intel Core i7-12800HX and either an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti or RTX 3080 Ti. The GE77 HX, however, has a 17.3-inch, 2560 x 1440 display with a 240 Hz refresh rate, while the GE67 HX gets a 15.6-inch OLED 2560 x 1440 screen at 240 Hz. Razer had previously announced a Blade 15 with a 240 Hz, 1440p OLED screen, though they haven't shown up for sale yet. It's possible MSI could beat it to market.

Like the Titan, MSI claims the 17-inch version can also reach 250W to the combined CPU and GPU. 

The new Raiders are expected on shelves in late June, with pre-orders open today. They  start at $2,499 for the 15-inch laptop and $2,599 for the 17-inch version.

MSI is also announcing two other laptops with HX chips today: The Vector GP76, which goes up to a Core i9-12900HX and RTX 3080 Ti, and the artist-focused Creator Pro X17, which combines that Core i9 and godes up to Nvidia's RTX A5500. Exact pricing, configurations and release dates wren't announced for these laptops, other than that they're expected this summer.

It may be long in the tooth but Nvidia has released a new driver for Kepler architecture GPU owners. The driver fixes 12 vulnerabilities, four of which are classified as 'high' severity. However, there isn't anything else to get excited about, as there are no new features delivered to these ageing GPUs, and any existing non-security related bugs and issues have remained untouched. Nvidia ceased providing Game Ready support for Kepler GPUs in the summer of 2021.

The Nvidia GeForce Security Update Driver v473.47 WHQL is available direct from the linked page, for Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit) users, and weighs in at a smidgeon over 700MB.

With graphics cards being unreasonably priced and in short supply for years, some would say, it is understandable that some PC owners will have held onto Kepler GPUs, especially if they deliver good enough frame rates in the games that they play. 

Security Issues Addressed

There are twelve CVE vulnerabilities fixed by the new driver. Four of these vulnerabilities are categorized as being 'high' severity. The remaining eight vulnerabilities are of medium severity. For reference, a CVE score between 7.0 and 8.9 indicates a high severity vulnerability, if between 4.0 and 6.9 it is categorized as medium severity.

Pondering over the four high severity CVEs, all of them appear to give malicious actors on your PC a means to gain admin privileges. Other mischief that these vulnerabilities might allow include; arbitrary code execution, denial of service, information disclosure, and data tampering. One of the vulnerabilities, CVE‑2022‑28182, allows nefarious deeds to be done across a network, but the others require someone to be physically using your PC.

The above isn't the only security update Kepler GeForce users have received this year. Back in February we reported that a GeForce driver 473.04 and 472.98 WHQL patch was delivered by Nvidia to close "multiple security" threats. In short, if you have a Kepler GPU and you know you aren't going to get any Game Ready updates, it is still worth checking for security updates periodically.

With graphics card pricing coming down to much more reasonable levels, Kepler owners could be tempted to ponder over our regularly updated Best Graphics Cards for Gaming in 2022 feature.

The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti launched two weeks back, and we're finally done with our testing and evaluation. It now reigns as the king of graphics cards, surpassing its 3090 predecessor by up to 10% — provided you're testing at 4K. But that performance comes at a cost, and not just in terms of dollars. The RTX 3090 Ti also takes the crown as the single most power hungry GPU we've ever tested (not including dual-GPU solutions like the 2014-era Titan Z), pushing the limits of how much juice a graphics card can guzzle.

If all you want is the fastest GPU possible, efficiency be damned, this is now the best graphics card and the top solution in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. But much like sports car enthusiasts might look at a Ferrari or Lamborghini with no intention of buying one, most PC gamers will want to stick with the RTX 3080 or RTX 3080 Ti and give this a pass.

Similar to the recent RTX 3080 12GB, Nvidia chose not to sample reviewers directly for the RTX 3090 Ti. It suggested reaching out to the AIC (add-in card) partners, and Asus supplied us with its RTX 3090 Ti TUF Gaming OC. Perhaps part of the reason Nvidia didn't sample is because board partner models will generally perform better thanks to factory overclocks, and might even run quieter due to larger coolers. Here's a look at the specs for the various cards that at least plausibly compete with the 3090 Ti. 

The RTX 3090 Ti represents the culmination of Nvidia's Ampere architecture, featuring the now fully enabled GA102 GPU. That's the same GPU in the 3090, 3080 Ti, and both variants of the 3080, just with two extra SMs compared to the GeForce RTX 3090 that launched way back in September of 2020. 19 months later, we're getting a minor boost to core counts, a modest boost to clock speeds — on both the GPU and the GDDR6X memory — and a rather large kick in the pants to the price and power consumption.

That last bit is sort of interesting. We recently reported on some testing by Igor's Lab where he limited the 3090 Ti to 300W. It dropped performance down to the level of the RTX 3080 Ti, but with lower power than the RTX 3080 and even AMD's RX 6800 XT (using non-reference cards). Nvidia has effectively gone about as far as possible to the right on the voltage, power, and frequency curve, eking out the last few ounces of performance. Then Asus takes that just a bit further and squeezes another 90MHz out of the chip.

We do have to wonder how much of the power goes to the GDDR6X memory, which is notorious for using power and generating heat. Nvidia has switched to 16Gb modules rated at 21Gbps for the 3090 Ti, so the memory can all be on one side of the PCB and thus benefits from improved cooling — and we saw that in our testing as well, with the Asus card never getting above 100C on the GDDR6X, regardless of workload. We even overclocked the memory to 23Gbps and still stayed under 100C while running a mining test — but only managed 124 MH/s sustained for Ethereum, which is just 2 MH/s higher than a good RTX 3090, despite the difference in memory speed.

On paper, the RTX 3090 Ti is 12% faster than the 3090 on compute and has 8% more memory bandwidth. Running in OC mode (not the default Gaming mode), Asus tacks on 5% in core clocks, meaning in theory the card could be up to 18% faster than the reference RTX 3090. In practice, it will be quite a bit less than that, as we'll see soon.

Asus GeForce RTX 3090 Ti TUF Gaming OC

Asus provided its GeForce RTX 3090 Ti TUF Gaming OC for this review, a large card that includes the relatively common (for an extreme GPU) triple fans, and occupies 3.2 slots. It's not quite as chunky as the RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition, which is slightly thinner but weighs 2189g (or at least, that's what the 3090 FE weighed) and measures 313x138x57 mm. The Asus card tips the scale at 'only' 1676g, practically a featherweight! But it measures 326x104x63mm. It's a physically impressive card, which is a bit of a given considering the silicon and its cooling needs.

The packaging is equally imposing, with a long box that consists of a sheath over a slightly unusual interior box that has chopped-off corners. It looks somewhat cool, but it was actually quite difficult to open. For something that's just going to end up on a shelf or recycling center, Asus probably could have stuck with a traditional box.

The Asus RTX 3090 Ti TUF includes three DisplayPort 1.4 and two HDMI 2.1 outputs, which is slightly unusual as most cards these days only include up to four outputs. The IO bracket is still only two slots wide, which seems a bit odd considering the card more than occupies three slots. A wider bracket would have provided a bit of extra support, and unlike EVGA's GPU leash, Asus doesn't include anything extra in the package to deal with card sag.

Power comes via the new PCIe 5.0 16-pin connector, which is compatible with Nvidia's 12-pin connector as well. Included in the package is an adapter that takes three 8-pin inputs to drive the 12-pin output, providing a theoretical (in spec) power delivery of up to 450W, plus another 75W from the PCIe slot. While we don't typically disassemble GPUs, it's worth noting that Asus has a dedicated VRAM heatsink that's designed to help wick heat away from the memory. As we'll see later, it definitely works, and memory temperatures weren't an issue during testing.

Unlike Asus' higher tier ROG Strix line, the amount of RGB lighting on the TUF Gaming is relatively subdued. Only the small trapezoidal TUF logo on the top of the card lights up — there's no lighting on the fans or the rest of the shroud. Those who like a lot of bling will probably want to look at other alternatives, but if you prefer a more subdued look, the TUF Gaming performs well and has everything you could want.

Test Setup for GeForce RTX 3090 Ti

Our GPU test PC and gaming suite was updated in early 2022. We're now using a Core i9-12900K processor, MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 WiFi motherboard, and DDR4-3600 memory (with XMP enabled). We also upgraded to Windows 11 to ensure we get the most out of Alder Lake. You can see the rest of the hardware in the boxout.

Our gaming tests consist of a "standard" suite of eight games without ray tracing enabled (even if the game supports it), and a separate "ray tracing" suite of six games that all use multiple RT effects. For this review, we'll be testing at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p at "ultra" settings — which generally means maxed out settings, except without SSAA if that's an option. We also enable DLSS Quality mode in the games that support it, which includes all of the ray-tracing suite and three of the games in the standard suite.

Besides the gaming tests, we also have a collection of professional and content creation benchmarks that can leverage the GPU. We're using SPECviewperf 2020 v3, Blender 3.10, OTOY Octane, and Vray. Those last three all focus on 3D rendering and support Nvidia's RTX GPUs; only Blender 3.10 currently provides GPU rendering acceleration on AMD's RX 6000 cards. SPECviewperf consists of a suite of professional applications, including CAD/CAM, medical and 3D rendering.

Asus GeForce RTX 3090 Ti: 4K Gaming Performance

This is currently the fastest and most expensive graphics card, so 4K ultra makes sense — and Nvidia even pushes 8K gaming as an option, though that will generally require DLSS support to get to reasonable framerates. We can't test 8K, as we don't have an 8K monitor, but the 4K results should at least give you an idea of what to expect when you try to render four times as many pixels.

Keeping in mind that we're dealing with a factory overclocked card compared to a bunch of reference clocked models, we're still pleasantly surprised to see a solid 10% performance uplift overall, when comparing the Asus RTX 3090 Ti TUF Gaming OC against the RTX 3090 Founders Edition. That might not seem like much, considering the $500 (theoretical) increase in price, but let's just point to the 3090 and 3080 Ti: $300 more in that case only gets you 3.4% more performance on average. Another interesting comparison of course is the RTX 3080 Ti against the original 3080 10GB, where $500 extra also bought 10% more performance. Against the RTX 3080, which remains our pick for the best graphics card, even when priced closer to $1,000 than its official $699 MSRP, the RTX 3090 Ti delivers 25% better performance overall.

Let's also not count AMD out. While there's no question the RTX 3090 Ti is faster than AMD's RX 6900 XT, it's only an 18% gap in our standard test suite on average. That's in the best-case scenario for the Nvidia GPU, testing at 4K ultra. There are even games like Forza Horizon 5 where the 6900 XT still comes out ahead, albeit by a slim 4% margin. Generally speaking, Nvidia can win via brute force, but it's using about 50% more power and costs about twice as much as AMD's top offering.

Nvidia also likes to promote DLSS, not just as a solution for games with ray tracing, but for any game. Using the Quality mode, which at 4K looks very nearly the same as native, let's check out the three games that support DLSS. Horizon Zero Dawn performance improves by 30%, Watch Dogs Legion gets a 35% boost… and Red Dead Redemption 2 only gets a 15% improvement. Not all game engines are created equal, and apparently the way DLSS was shoehorned into RDR2 — over 18 months after launch, no less — proves this point. The gains are even less at lower resolutions.

Flipping over to our ray tracing test suite, the DLSS story changes completely. DLSS might be a nice extra on a card like the Asus RTX 3090 Ti in traditional games, but if you want to run maxed out ray traced settings, it becomes absolutely necessary at 4K. The 3090 Ti barely manages to squeak past the 30 fps mark at native, and half of the games fell well short of that mark. Turn on DLSS and performance nearly doubles, from 32 fps to 60 fps.

We don't have DLSS results for all of the cards in our charts, just because they start to get very crowded, so we'll just focus on the native performance for the remaining comparisons. It's interesting to see the Asus 3090 Ti outpace the reference RTX 3090 by 14% overall, which is close to the theoretical maximum. The Asus card has a 1950MHz boost clock in OC mode, whereas the RTX 3090 Founders Edition has a 1695MHz boost clock, giving a maximum difference of 15%.

While a 14% gap might not seem like much, again look at the other cards. The 3090 is only 3% faster than the 3080 Ti, which is 16% faster than the 3080 10GB card. Note also that the overclocked MSI 3080 12GB is 12% faster than the 3080 Founders Edition, nearly matching the 3080 Ti, so memory bandwidth is certainly a big factor in overall performance at 4K. The Asus 3090 Ti still only beats the RTX 3080 by 37%, so it's very much a case of diminishing returns. Meanwhile, it's 88% faster than AMD's best — and 250% faster if we enable DLSS.

It will be interesting to see how much uptake there is for AMD's FSR 2.0 once it releases to the public in the next couple of months. It will also be interesting to see if AMD starts equipping its future GPUs with matrix hardware (i.e. tensor cores), which is something Intel is doing as well with its Arc graphics cards. Considering Intel's XeSS is more of a direct competitor to DLSS, and it will also work on non-Intel GPUs, perhaps AMD will join Intel in combating DLSS in the future. It sure would be nice if we could have one universal solution for upscaling that all three companies could get behind, but I'll eat my GPU hat if that happens.

Asus GeForce RTX 3090 Ti: 1440p Gaming Performance

Dropping down to 1440p, the advantage of the 3090 Ti relative to the competition shrinks a bit. It's now only 7% faster than the vanilla RTX 3090, 20% faster than the RTX 3080 10GB, and 6% faster than the RX 6900 XT. Without a faster CPU providing data to the graphics cards, we're already starting to see CPU bottlenecks — Far Cry 6, Flight Simulator, and Horizon Zero Dawn are clearly running out of steam.

DLSS quality mode further proves that point. The overhead associated with DLSS means it only boosts performance a small amount in some cases. Watch Dogs Legion still got a 17% uplift, but performance in Horizon Zero Dawn and Red Dead Redemption 2 only went up about 7%. Buying a card like the RTX 3090 Ti for traditional games, even at maxed out settings, doesn't make a lot of sense unless you have a 4K or perhaps ultrawide 1440p monitor.

But, if you're really into ray tracing effects and the most demanding games around, native 1440p can very much make use of a faster GPU. The Asus 3090 Ti still beat the vanilla 3090 by 13% on average, for example. It was also 30% faster than the 3080 10GB, and 75% faster than AMD's RX 6900 XT — and again, enabling DLSS pays huge dividends, improving the Asus card's results by 60% overall.

Looking at the individual charts, the Asus 3090 Ti just barely breaks 60 fps on average in our six DXR games, but it falls below 50 fps in three of the games. With DLSS enabled, all six games are comfortably above the 60 fps mark, and if you have a high refresh rate G-Sync (or G-Sync Compatible) display, you can get a very smooth gaming experience.

But who are we kidding? This card is very much overkill for most gamers. You'll be better off waiting for the next generation GPUs later this year rather than plunking down two grand on just a graphics card now.

Asus GeForce RTX 3090 Ti: 1080p Gaming Performance

Okay, we see you rolling your eyes over there. Yes, 1080p gaming on an RTX 3090 Ti represents a very imbalanced workload. It's still 5% faster than the old RTX 3090, but you could get most of that with a factory overclocked 3090 card 18 months ago. For nearly triple the theoretical price, the RTX 3090 Ti is only about 15% faster than the RTX 3080 at 1080p. It's also basically tied with the RX 6900 XT, which now claims wins in half of the games in our test suite.

Not surprisingly, DLSS can't do much here either. The best result was in Red Dead Redemption 2, where performance improved by 4%. Not that you really need DLSS at 1080p with this sort of GPU, but CPU bottlenecks are very present in nearly all of the games. Flight Simulator is particularly bad, with performance that's only slightly higher than at 1440p, meaning it's almost entirely CPU limited.

Our DXR test suite still proves pretty demanding, however. All of the games can break 60 fps and then some, but the 3090 Ti still averaged 11% higher performance than the reference RTX 3090, and 27% better performance than the RTX 3080. AMD's RX 6900 XT still trails by 40%, and it can't even average 60 fps in four of the six games we tested. Turn on DLSS and the Nvidia advantage grows even more.

Based on what we know of the hardware, AMD's ray accelerators are about half as fast as the RT cores in Nvidia's Ampere GPUs. It's actually even worse than that, considering AMD's GPU clocks at over 2.3GHz in testing, while the Asus 3090 Ti sits closer to 2GHz. So 84 RT cores against 80 ray accelerators, and even at 1080p ultra the Nvidia GPU is 66% faster on average.

It's also interesting to look at Nvidia's previous generation Turing GPUs, though. The RTX 2080 Ti has 68 RT cores running at around 1.7GHz, and it's still within striking distance of AMD's RX 6900 XT. The 2080 Ti was faster in Cyberpunk 2077 and Minecraft, while AMD's card came out ahead in the other games. How much will AMD improve RT performance with RDNA3, and will Nvidia also find new ways to improve performance with Ada? We'll find out later this year.

Asus GeForce RTX 3090 Ti: Professional and Content Creation Performance

GPUs aren't just for gaming, they can be used for professional workloads, AI training and inferencing, and more. We're looking to expand some of our GPU testing, particularly for extreme GPUs like the RTX 3090 Ti. For now, we have a few 3D rendering applications that leverage ray tracing hardware, plus the SPECviewperf 2020 v3 test suite. We'll start there.

SPECviewperf 2020 consists of eight different benchmarks. We've also included an "overall" chart that uses the geometric mean of the eight results to generate an aggregate score. Note that this is not an official score, but it gives equal weight to the individual tests and provides a high level overview of performance. Few professionals use all of these programs, however, so it's generally more important to look at the results for the applications you plan to use.

What's immediately interesting is just how far ahead of the other GPUs the Titan RTX sits. That's because Nvidia provides some driver level enhancements to its Titan cards, and despite the Titan-esque price the RTX 3090 Ti doesn't get the same treatment. Flipping through the individual test results, it's mostly thanks to a massive lead in the snx-04 (Siemens NX) test that the Titan RTX gets the overall lead, though it also ranks first in the catia-06 and creo-03 tests.

The RTX 3090 Ti does nab several victories as well, claiming top marks in 3dsmax-07, energy-03, maya-06, and solidworks-07. AMD's GPUs meanwhile deliver mixed results. They're in the bottom half of the 3dsmax, catia, creo, and maya charts, but the RX 6900 XT takes second place in the energy test suite, gets the top result in medical-03, and the AMD cards are over three times as fast as the GeForce cards in snx-04 — only the Titan RTX beats them, by another 4X factor.

Next up, Blender is a popular rendering application that has been used to make full-length films. We're using the latest Blender Benchmark, which uses Blender 3.10 and three tests. Blender 3.10 includes the new Cycles X engine that leverages ray tracing hardware on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs.

As with the DXR gaming test suite, AMD's GPUs fall far behind Nvidia's offerings when it comes to RT hardware, at least as evidenced by Blender. Overall, the RTX 3090 Ti delivers over three times the performance of the RX 6900 XT. 

We also uncovered a bug with AMD's current drivers, where having PCIe Resizable BAR enabled caused a massive hit to Blender 3.10 rendering performance. That should be corrected in a future driver release, but if you're using Blender on an AMD GPU right now, you'll want to disable ReBAR in the BIOS.

OTOY Octane is another popular rendering engine, but unlike Blender, it doesn't have support for AMD's RX 6000 series GPUs. As such, we've limited our charts to Nvidia GPUs, where the RTX 3090 Ti unsurprisingly takes the top spot, delivering 6% higher performance than the standard RTX 3090. Most likely, these rendering applications depend more on memory bandwidth than GPU compute, which is why all three end up being around 6% faster with the 3090 Ti.

Nvidia also notes that there are rendering workloads that the RTX 3090 Ti (and 3090 and Titan RTX) can handle that simply fail on GPUs that don't have as much VRAM. This is true, and it's why true professional GPUs like the Nvidia RTX A6000 come with a whopping 48GB of VRAM. Comparative benchmarks however become meaningless when you can't even run the test on most graphics cards.

Like Octane, Chaos V-ray also lacks support for AMD's GPUs at present, so we've only tested the Nvidia RTX cards. Also like Octane, it has an older CUDA rendering path as well as support for a newer RTX path that leverages Nvidia's RT cores. The RTX mode boosts performance by about 30% on the newer Ampere GPUs, while the Titan RTX ran 40% faster.

[Note: We're still looking for a good AI / machine learning benchmark, "good" meaning it's easy to run, preferably on Windows systems, and that the results are relevant. We don't want something that only works on Nvidia GPUs, or AMD GPUs, or that requires tensor cores. Ideally, it will use tensor cores if available (Nvidia RTX and Intel Arc), or GPU cores if not (GTX GPUs and AMD's current consumer lineup). If you have any suggestions, please contact me — DM me in the forums, or send me an email. Thanks!]

Asus GeForce RTX 3090 Ti: Power, Temps, Noise, Etc.

Up to now, we've talked about performance and hinted that power use might be just a bit high. Now's the time for the rubber to meet the road as we check out real-world power consumption, using our Powenetics testing hardware and software. We capture in-line GPU power consumption by collecting data while looping Metro Exodus at 1440p ultra as well as while running the FurMark stress test at 1600x900. Our test PC for power testing remains the same old Core i9-9900K as we've used previously, to keep results consistent. We tested the Asus card in all three of its standard modes: Default (Gaming), OC, and Silent. These modes can be selected in Asus' GPU Tweak II utility.

So, this is interesting. Starting with the Metro Exodus results, we're probably running into CPU bottlenecks. Peak power use was "only" 438W, in both the default mode as well as in OC model. Silent mode did drop power use a bit, but unfortunately it looks like we may need to update our testing methodology for cards like this.

Flipping over to FurMark, at least we got some separation, and this likely tracks closer with the limits imposed by the card's firmware. In the default mode, we saw average power use of nearly 470W, the OC mode bumped that up to over 490W, and the Silent mode dropped the card to just over 440W. That's now the highest power use we've seen from a GPU in recent years without end-user overclocking, by about 80W. Perhaps there are some custom RTX 3090 or RX 6900 XT cards that came close to this level, but we didn't get those in for testing.

These results aren't particularly surprising. More GPU cores at much higher clocks, with higher clocked GDDR6X memory all combine to substantially increase power consumption. I used to think the early rumors of 600W RTX 4090 cards later this year were ludicrous. Now such talk feels more like a sense of inevitability.

Even in the "slowest" Silent profile, average clocks during our Metro testing were at 2GHz, and the OC mode boosted that up to 2074MHz. We've seen much higher core clocks from AMD's RX 6000 GPUs, but they're architected to run at higher speeds and tend not to be quite so power hungry. If the move from the 3090's 1850MHz to the 3090 Ti's 2074MHz needs 75W more power, just imagine how much juice a 2.5GHz Ampere GPU would need! Or don't — we'll probably find out with Ada, though.

Clock speeds in FurMark were quite a bit slower, as expected. Unlike in a game, FurMark puts a major load on the GPU and tends to use more power per clock than just about any other workload. Clocks averaged just over 1.6GHz  here, with the OC profile, 1.44GHz with the default Gaming profile, and dropped to 1.23GHz in Silent mode.

Asus does a great job at keeping the 3090 Ti GPU cool, with average temperatures of 65C in all three of the performance profiles while running Metro. FurMark as usual pushed things a bit harder, but only up to 67C in the OC mode. Fan speeds basically followed temperatures. In both the gaming and FurMark tests, there was only a 100 RPM difference between the Silent and OC modes.

We measured noise levels at 10cm using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter as well. The SPL was aimed right at the GPU fans in order to minimize the impact of other fans like those on the CPU cooler. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment measures 33 dB(A). Because we used a gaming workload for noise testing, there was less of a difference between the modes. After about 15 minutes, the Silent mode stabilized at around 48.9 dB(A), while the Gaming and OC modes were just a hair louder at 49.1 dB(A). GPU Tweak II reported fan speed of 74%, which means there wasn't a ton of headroom available, but noise and temperature levels were overall very good.

Asus GeForce RTX 3090 Ti: Hail to the King

There are many ways of looking at the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. It's a prosumer content creation card that's only moderately faster than its predecessor, at an even higher price. It's also the fastest graphics card for gaming currently available, still at an obscenely high price. One thing it's not is a full Titan RTX replacement, and we can only guess that Nvidia had too many people buying comparatively inexpensive Titan cards and opting out of the former Quadro and current A-series lineups that can cost twice as much.

There's no question of whether the RTX 3090 Ti represents a good value. In terms of FPS per dollar spent, out of the 57 graphics cards we've tested in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, the RTX 3090 Ti ranks 56th — only the Radeon VII represents a worse value. At the same time, we need to put things in perspective. If you're the type who has the money and wants the fastest hardware possible, the RTX 3090 Ti does improve performance by about 10% over the RTX 3090, which still goes for $1,900 at the time of writing. Again, not that you should buy such a GPU, but by that metric you could argue it's worth the extra $100.

The real concern with the RTX 3090 Ti isn't its performance or price, however, it's the fact that it comes so late to the Ampere party. The RTX 3090 was released in September 2020, 19 months ago, and all indications are that we'll get the next-generation Ada GPUs this coming September. We have no idea how much they'll cost, but there's effectively zero chance that a hypothetical RTX 4090 won't be faster than the RTX 3090 Ti — and it might even cost less.

If Nvidia keeps with its recent pattern of GPU launches, though, an RTX 4090 should be the least of your worries. We'll probably also get an RTX 4080 that delivers 30–40% more performance than the RTX 3090 Ti with a price of $999 or less. There's also the fact that GPU prices are trending down this year, finally, and have dropped over 35% since the start of the year. We expect that trend to continue, and there are even reports that AMD and Nvidia are both entering a state of oversupply.

However you look at things, splurging on a short-lived king of the hill doesn't make a lot of sense to us. But if you're flush with cash, or you do the sort of work where upgrading to a $2,000 graphics card that's only 5–10% faster than your current card will pay for itself in a few months, this is the card to get. Buyer's remorse might kick in once the next generation parts arrive, but you can then sell off the 3090 Ti (at a loss) and upgrade again, ensuring you stay on top of the GPU pecking order.

• MORE: Best Graphics Cards
• MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
• MORE: All Graphics Content

Today, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) announced that Crusher, a small iteration of the $600 million Frontier supercomputer that will be the United States' first exascale machine, is now online and generating impressive results. Crusher's 192 HPE Cray EX blades are crammed into 1.5 cabinets that consume 1/100th the size of the previous 4,352 square foot Titan Supercomputer, yet the new system delivers faster overall performance. 

Crusher features the same architectural components as the 1.5-exaflop Frontier supercomputer, which each HPE Cray EX blade packing one 64-core AMD EPYC "Trento" 7A53 CPU and four AMD "Aldebaran" MI250X GPUs, but Frontier won't be available to researchers until January 1, 2023.

However, researchers are now using Crusher to ready their scientific code for Frontier today, and with impressive results. Highlights include a 15-fold speedup over the Nvidia and IBM-powered Summit supercomputer with the Cholla astrophysics code that has been rewritten for Frontier, with 3-fold of the improvement chalked up to hardware improvements while another five-fold of improvement comes from software optimizations. Meanwhile, the NuCCOR nuclear physics code has seen an 8-fold speedup with the MI250X GPUs compared to the Nvidia V100 GPUs used in Summit. Additionally, the OLCF announced that LSMS materials code that crunches through large-scale simulations up to 100,000 atoms has also been successfully run on Crusher and will scale to run on the full Frontier system. The OLCF also touts an 80% increase over previous unspecified systems with Transformer deep learning model workloads. 

It isn't surprising that Crusher's new hardware outperforms the Titan Supercomputer — that old sprawling supercomputer came online in 2013 with 200 cabinets that housed 18,688 AMD Opteron 6274 16-core CPUs, 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs, and the Gemini interconnect, all of which consumed a total of 8.2 MW of power. The system was spread out over 4,352 square feet and delivered 17.6 petaFLOPS of sustained performance in Linpack and a theoretical peak of 27 petaFLOPS.

In contrast, Crusher only spans 1.5 cabinets, one with 128 nodes and the other with 64, for a total of 192 nodes that consume 44 square feet of space. Each water-cooled node comes with a single 64-core custom Zen 3 chip, the "Trento" EPYC 7A53 processor that AMD hasn't shared much detail about, though we do know it is an EPYC Milan derivative. The chip's I/O die is rumored to employ Infinity Fabric 3.0 to enable a coherent memory interface with GPUs.

The Trento chip is paired with 512GB of DDR4 memory (205 GB/s) and four AMD MI250X accelerators, each of which comes armed with two ~790mm^2 Graphics Compute Dies (GCDs) that wield the CDNA2 architecture and communicate across a 200 GB/s bus. In effect, these four 550W GPUs serve as the equivalent of eight GPUs in each node.

Each Trento CPU is carved up into four NUMA domains. Each domain (and its affiliated two banks of L3 cache) connects to two GCDs (one GPU) with a coherent memory interface at 36+36 GB/s over the Infinity Fabric, yielding 288 GB/s of total CPU-to-GPU bandwidth spread among the eight GCDs in the node.

Meanwhile, each MI250X GPU houses an HPE Slingshot 200 GBps (25 GB/s) Ethernet NIC (via a PCIe root complex) that connects to the HPE Slingshot network, for 100 GB/s of network bandwidth per node. All of this is compute horsepower is connected to a 250 PB storage appliance that offers a peak of 2.5 TB/s of throughput and uses the IBM Spectrum Scale filesystem.

The OLCF hasn't yet released power consumption figures, or peak performance in Linpack, for the Crusher system. However, we know that each 768 MI250X delivers a peak of 53 TFLOPS of double-precision, meaning a theoretical peak of roughly 40 PetaFLOPS (assuming linear scaling). 

Frontier will represent the first exascale-class supercomputer in the United States, but only because the oft-delayed Intel-powered Aurora supercomputer has been delayed again until 2023. However, Intel has changed its performance projection for the Sapphire Rapids and Ponte Vecchio-powered Aurora to a peak of two ExaFLOPS from the original projection of 1.5, which would give it the lead over Frontier, at least as far as peak measurements go. It would also purportedly tie the AMD-powered 2-ExaFLOP El Capitan system scheduled to come online in 2023. 

That means all three of the US exascale-class systems will be faster than China's two new exascale systems, the Sunway Ocealite and Tianhe-3 supercomputers, that both have purportedly reached ~1 ExaFLOP of performance but haven't been listed on the Top 500 for political reasons. 

HPE and AMD delivered Frontier on time in 2021, but the system is still undergoing integration and testing, sparking claims that the deployment has run into technical challenges. The delivery timeline is somewhat contested, with the DoE claiming the system is on schedule, but that could simply boil down to semantics (the use of 'acceptance' vs. 'available'). In either case, the US Department of Energy says Frontier is on-track to be available to researchers in January 2023. 

On Friday, Nvidia became the latest Silicon Valley tech giant to declare that it had suspended its Russian-facing business activities. The news will be a significant blow to PC gamers and enthusiasts in Russia, as now the holy trinity of PC performance components designers (AMD, Intel, and Nvidia) have withdrawn their business from the country in solidarity with Ukraine.

“We are not selling into Russia,” an Nvidia spokesperson told PCMag. Unfortunately, this brief quote seems almost to the full extent of the statement received by the magazine, as it goes on to explain that Nvidia didn’t elaborate on the reasons for its decision.

The only other info nugget revealed by the source regarding Nvidia’s Russia action is that it covers all Nvidia products. That means it won’t just withdraw product sales of the PC enthusiast and GPU mining favorite GeForce GTX-16, RTX-20, and RTX-30 series GPUs. Instead, the sales blockade will include Nvidia’s whole portfolio spanning data center, AI, automotive, and so on.

In the intro, we mentioned that the big three names of the PC industry have now made their positions clear regarding the war in Ukraine. As the statements from AMD and Intel, it isn’t entirely clear what Nvidia’s decision will mean to partner companies. We are thinking about systems makers who sell complete laptops and desktop systems in Russia, as well as, in this case, sales by Nvidia’s flock of add-in-board partners.

Remember, many Nvidia graphics card partners are in China, which hasn’t condemned Russia’s violent invasion of its neighbor. However, a few days ago, China slightly moved its stance, saying that it is highly concerned by the harm to civilians in Ukraine.

The official scope of U.S. sanctions on Russia doesn’t restrict the shipping of consumer electronics that wouldn’t be for military purposes. However, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia have gone the whole hog with their Russia sales block policies. In some cases, like with Intel, the spokesperson added a condemnatory statement about Russia starting the war with Ukraine.

Other important names in the PC universe that have recently decided to quit, halt or withdraw from any Russian business activities include Microsoft, Apple, and Samsung. These highly public-facing tech-heavyweight sanctions will be easily visible to people in Russia, who are now basically cut off from non-state media.

Perhaps a more critical suspension of IT business with Russia has come from Taiwan’s TSMC. The world’s largest contract chipmaker previously had the task of making chips designed by the likes of Baikal et al., but its services are no longer available.

Nvidia is not exactly eager to disclose the hardware specifications of its cryptocurrency mining processor (CMP) cards aimed at Ethereum miners. Instead, it gives the chipmaker flexibility in GPUs (and GPU configurations) it can use for a given hash rate. But as the lineup of Nvidia’s CMP cards is expanding and they leak to the open market, details about them start to emerge. As it turns out, Nvidia’s former flagship datacenter GPU — the GV100 — now powers Nvidia’s CMP 100HX board.

Nvidia has never publicly announced its CMP 100HX card, and the board is absent from the list of its cryptocurrency mining options on its website. However, the card has been available for a while. Someone has published a picture of the CMP 100HX at PC_Shopping forums and for Komachi_Ensaka to discover it. According to the post, the most exciting part about the card is that the accelerator produces around 80 MH/s, so it is not exactly clear why it is called the CMP 100HX (perhaps to differentiate from the CMP 80HX?).

Based on the images of the board posted, the CMP 100HX is based on Nvidia’s Tesla V100 compute GPU for data centers. It’s similar to the chipmaker’s rather extravagant Quadra GV100 and Titan V boards for Proviz professionals, enthusiast gamers, and ML/DL software developers. However, these are the only Nvidia Volta-based product aimed at client PCs and the only Volta-powered boards with display outputs.

For obvious reasons, the CMP 100HX mining card does not have any display outputs and comes with a passive cooler with two heat pipes, which further implies the data center origin of the board, but the mining nature of the product. Meanwhile, we have no idea about the GPU and memory configuration of the device. Due to its large heat pipes, the CMP 100HX might be too large for standard 2U rack servers, but since mining machines do not precisely follow standards, this is barely a problem as they can certainly fit into 4U boxes.

 Given that Nvidia’s cryptocurrency mining CMP-branded business has been on the decline for quarters (at least officially), it’s not surprising that the company is selling its leftovers to miners. Meanwhile, it is still rather interesting to see a unique GV100 GPU — which can do graphics, compute, and display interfaces — mining Ethereum.

It seems to be the year of fake products becoming a reality. Following Microsoft making an Xbox Series X mini fridge that sold out instantly, chair company Secret Labs is making a tiny version of its Titan chair, the Titan XXS.

The Titan XXS is a 1:2 scale model of the Titan Evo chair, seemingly aimed at children or ridiculously spoiled pets.

The whole thing started as a joke when SecretLabs posted about a "Titan Xxxxxs" on April Fools' Day, so that you could "pamper your kid or fur baby." The XXS, which will be sold in limited quantities, is not quite as small.

The chair has child-safe locking casters to prevent too much rolling around as well as adjustable-height armrests. This is a working chair that supports people up to 5'2" and 154 pounds (70 kg).

On its site, SecretLabs claims that the Titan XXS is designed as a collectible but can still be used safely by children. It's also backed by a five-year warranty. I don't know who is buying a chair just to put on display, though.

The Titan XXS comes in three colors: stealth (a fancy name for black) in leatherette, while frost blue and plush pink each come in SecretLab's SoftWeave Plus fabric. As of this writing, the stealth option is $299, while the other two cost $319. Blue and black are in stock for shipping now, while the pink version is estimated to ship on December 8.

AMD released its Radeon RX 6700 XT back in March, to generally favorable reviews. It's on our list of the best graphics cards (that you still can't buy at reasonable prices) and currently sits in eleventh place (tenth if you don't count the Titan RTX) in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, slotting in right between the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti. It's a great card and AMD's largest volume producer for its latest generation of RDNA2 GPUs. But it also uses the fully enabled Navi 22 GPU, and there will always be a certain percentage of chips that fail to pass muster. So where's the trimmed down RX 6700 non-XT? (FYI, that's a Photoshopped box image up top, in case that wasn't immediately obvious.)

When AMD released its first RDNA cards, the RX 5700 XT and RX 5700, they both launched on the same day — with new Ryzen 3000 Zen 2 CPUs joining the party. I was there; it was a testing and benchmarking nightmare! Not because the products were bad, but because it was too many new things from one company on the same day. That day was July 7, 2019 — a not-so-subtle jab at making it to 7nm well ahead of Intel and Nvidia. Launching multiple products on the same day can create problems, so I get that maybe AMD wanted to do a solo launch for the 6700 XT this round.

Anyway, the main point is that RX 5700 XT uses Navi 10 with 40 CUs and 8GB of GDDR6, while RX 5700 uses Navi 10 with 36 CUs and 8GB of GDDR6. This is a tale as old as time — well, GPU time at least, which only goes back 21 years or so. We've seen this with basically every GPU and CPU die for as far back as I care to remember. And yet, here we are, four months after the RX 6700 XT launch and still in the middle of massive GPU shortages, and AMD still hasn't released the vanilla RX 6700. It's very weird.

To make things worse, there are now credible rumors and leaks suggesting the Radeon RX 6600 XT will launch on August 11. Maybe AMD decided not to make a non-XT 6700 and will put harvested Navi 22 chips into RX 6600 XT cards, but all the current scuttlebutt says the RX 6600 XT will use Navi 23 with 32 CUs. There's not a particularly big gap between 32 CUs and 40 CUs, though the most likely configuration for the RX 6600 XT would be a 128-bit memory bus and 8GB of VRAM. That means there's still room for a Radeon RX 6700 12GB with 32–36 CUs... but where is it?

Right now, there's only a single desktop product using Navi 22 in AMD's RX 6000 stack. There are also two mobile variants that use Navi 22, the RX 6800M (full 40 CU chip with 12GB) and the RX 6700M (36 CUs and 10GB). It's possible and even probable that all of the harvested Navi 22 GPUs are just ending up as 6700M right now, but I'm still waiting for a desktop RX 6700. Maybe I'll end up waiting in vain, but we'll have to see how the RX 6600 XT performs and where AMD wants to price that first.

RX 6700 XT has an official MSRP of $479, and while everything remains massively overpriced at retail, at least there's been a clear downward movement of late. Our GPU pricing index puts the average eBay price of the 6700 XT at $725 for the past two weeks, another 6% drop from the previous two weeks, with higher quantities sold as well. There are rumors the RX 6600 XT might launch with a $399 price point, but that still feels like it should be the RX 6700, with the RX 6600 XT taking on the RTX 3060 directly at $329. Considering this will be the first SKU where AMD has a memory deficit (8GB vs 12GB), it might even need to undercut Nvidia.

Of course, there were also rumors of an RX 6700 6GB impending launch right around the time of the RX 6700 XT debut. Those didn't pan out, and maybe Nvidia putting 12GB on the RTX 3060 is to blame. Either way, Navi 22 in RX 6700 attire is still MIA. Will it eventually surface once supply for other parts catches up to demand? It still seems like it would have been better to add another option back when prices were radically inflated, if only to cash in on the GPU gold rush. Whatever the case, with RX 6600 XT right around the corner, let's hope graphics card prices continue to fall.

Since 2014, Secretlab has made a name for itself making premium gaming chairs with a strong range of movement. The Secretlab Titan Evo 2022 released today combines features of one of the best gaming chairs we’ve tested, the Secretlab Omega, and the Secretlab Titan, which accommodated the big and tall crowd, into one. Secretlab is discontinuing the other two chairs and offering the Titan Evo in three sizes, hoping to accommodate the whole market. 

It’s a risky endeavor, but the Titan Evo looks to accommodate a vast range of body types with very specific adjustments. That includes a redeveloped lumbar support system that lets you tweak both its firmness and height and armrests that have 4 different adjustments. This is the kind of chair that can accommodate so many different positions and seems built to last.

Note that with the Titan Evo, Secretlab is doing away with the smaller Omega and larger Titan. The Titan Evo comes in three different sizes to cover the whole range of sizes and come in different prices:

• Regular - tested ($449 for faux leather / $469 for fabric upholstery): for gamers 5’7” - 6’2” and weighing under 220 pounds with a max supported weight of 285 pounds
• Small ($429 / $449 for fabric): for gamers 4’11” - 5’6” and weighing under 200 pounds with a max supported weight of 285 pounds
• XL ($499 / $519): for gamers 5’11” - 6’9” and weighing 175-395 pounds

Secretlab Titan Evo 2022 Specs 

Design 

The Titan Evo rolls onto the scene with a full array of color options for both types of upholstery — fabric or fake leather — available. Although, the most vivid colors are on the $20 pricier, Softweave Plus fabric side. This is partially due to a new, automated weaving process that allows for more detailed patterns than the previous SoftWeave. Secretlab describes it as using “interlacing loops of high-strength yarn fibers,” which enables “smaller details to be incorporated into every stitch, enabling ... complex designs in a multi-layered textile with different layers of color.” 

Currently, you can get the chair with the fabric upholstery in (as seen above) Plush Pink, Mint Green, Frost Blue, Cookies & Cream, Black3 or Arctic White. However, I’m looking forward to seeing what other designs come to light with this new technology and Secretlab’s already established reputation for ornate designs with themes encompassing everything from League of Legends, to Game of Thrones and electronic DJs.

My review unit came in Black3, which, despite its name, carries subtle hints of white thread peeking throughout for a black or dark gray overall vibe, depending on your lighting Suede accents line the sides of the seat and backrest. The backrest also has a reminder of the year and size of the chair and a pinch of red curiously, yet inoffensively, threaded into a small area near the backrest’s suede too. There’s also a tiny number of silver accents contained to the armrest area, but they’re only noticeably for you to enjoy, not anyone watching your livestream. 

It’s not truly an all-black chair, but the sprinkling of white gives the Titan Evo extra character and helps it look a little more expensive. However, I can’t help getting some car seat vibes.

It’s a tight weave, and it doesn’t seem like anything will snag on these slicker threads, at least not for a long time. Machine embroidered logos in black on the back and front of the headrest are stealthy on the dark fabric. These logos also look like they won’t snag easily because they feel smooth, flat and stuck to the upholstery. Speaking of logos, Secretlab’s is stamped into each armrest, but they’re too small to be any bother, unless you’re offended by how similar it looks to the Delta Air Lines logo. 

Even the zipper at the rear of the backrest that gives you potential access to its innards is guarded by hard plastic. It makes getting inside the backrest hard, which is good because you shouldn’t have reason to mess with the foam inside anyway. 

Ultimately, the SoftWeave Plus upholstery has just the right amount of texture to make the chair feel durable but not scratchy. It also won’t stick to or encourage sweaty skin, like leather or faux leather upholsteries often can. Cleaning may be tougher, especially if you get crumbs or other muck in between those threads. But because the threads are so tightly woven, this wasn’t an issue for me during and testing and definitely less concerning than with some mesh chairs, like the Mavix M5. 

If you prefer leather, you may be disappointed that there’s currently no real leather upholstery option like there was with Secretlab’s previous chairs. However, Secretlab believes its new faux leather, called Secretlab neo Hybrid Leatherette, is so similar to the Napa leather it used, that few people would spend the extra for the real thing.. 

You can find countless gaming chairs all over the internet coated in polyurethane (PU) leather and many notably cheaper than the $449 Secretlab is charging for the regular-sized Titan Evo. The Cooler Master Caliber R2, for example, is currently $300, albeit with a smaller range of adjustments and less comfort. However, Secretlab claims its new fake leather is 12 times more durable than regular PU leather, thanks to a “base layer reinforced with ultra-fine fibers.” Plus, a “unique top laminate” claims to imitate the luster of Napa leather. Currently, the faux leather upholstery is available in (as seen in the the picture above) Ash, Stealth, Black, Royal and Classic. 

If you’re not buying it, Secretlab told Tom’s Hardware that there will be a Napa leather version available “at a later time”; however, the brand is expecting a lot of interest because of how similar and cheaper the Neo Hybrid Leatherette version is. 

Within the Titan Evo is a steel frame that you can’t feel at all through the upholstery and foam. The chair is complete with a hydraulic gas piston and aluminum alloy wheelbase.

The brand says it tests durability with the likes of drop tests, loading it with heavy weights and more. Other tests include immersing the upholstery in artificial sweat and putting it in a humidity chamber. As perhaps expected of a chair that foregoes real or fake leather, the SoftWeave version of the Titan Evo didn’t get warm, sweaty or sticky during my time with it.

New 4-Way L-Adapt Lumbar Support System 

One of the biggest changes Secretlab introduced in the Titan Evo 22 is its lumbar support system. The Omega chair I previously used had a detachable pillow covered in dreamy velour and stuffed with luscious cooling memory foam. It was so comfortable that it could stand on its own as an extra pillow in the  living room or bedroom, rather than just a freebie tossed in with a chair. 

The Titan Evo goes the way of the larger Titan chair, which uses an adjustable lumbar support system built into the chair. I was told that this is because smaller people who would use the Omega rather than the Titan also wanted built-in lumbar support. You can still buy the lumbar support pillow, but Secretlab spent 2 years completely redesigning its lumbar system for the Titan Evo so that L-Adapt, as it’s called, can offer two types of adjustability: thickness and height.

We’ve seen knob-based, adjustable lumbar support systems before. For example, the Razer Iskur has a knob for adjusting how firm the lumbar support area is. The Titan Evo also has that, plus a second knob for making that area move up or down along your back.

Firmness adjustments yield a noticeable difference when sitting in the chair. If you’re not, you can clearly see the backrest’s protrusion varying with each twist of the knob. I like a lot of lumbar support and usually have the system set to maximum firmness. Support felt hard and unwavering but didn’t stick out dramatically or push into me. In fact, I could actually use a little more lumbar support. 

You can still buy the Secretlab Signature Memory Foam Lumbar Pillow for $59, and I happened to have one on-hand. Placing it on top of the Titan Evo’s L-Adapt provided the excess care my greedy lumbar craves. The chair wasn’t uncomfortable without it, but it moved up a level with the chair included, hugging the deeper curve of my lower back more. Again, I like more lumbar support than average, so there’s a healthy chance you’ll be perfectly satisfied without the pillow. 

The problem with relying on a detachable pillow for lumbar support is that when I recline or adjust my positioning, I also have to adjust the pillow. And if I want it higher, I’d have to hold the pillow in place by applying a bit of pressure. The Titan Evo’s lumbar support system doesn’t have this problem, thanks to its height adjustment.

Generally, the height adjustment was harder to notice than the one that pushes the system inward and outward. In fact, I didn’t believe it was really moving until I placed my finger where the bulgiest part of the backrest was. But after I saw it with my own eyes, it was easier for my body to feel the height adjustment. The feature was most helpful when I adjusted the angle of my seat. For example, if I was sitting at a 90-degree angle I wanted higher lumbar support than if I was reclined. During a deep recline, I wanted lumbar support higher than with a medium recline. The fact that I can get that specific is a point in the Titan Evo’s favor. On the other hand, the differences were minute in my experience. But if you’re paying over $400 for a chair, it’s about time that meant being able to address fine details of your comfort. 

Secretlab’s L-Adapt feature is comprised of a lattice of hinges that’s supposed to move with you left and right.

This was the least noticeable feature of the lumbar system of all. The whole backrest is pretty firm to feel anything “moving” with me beneath. The Regular-sized Titan Evo I tested is for people under 220 pounds with a max of 285 pounds. I weigh significantly less than both measurements, so it’s possible someone with more heft could put a greater dent in the backrest and feel the hinges moving with them. That said, I never felt a noticeable lack of lumbar support when shifting from one side to another.

My inflexible, scrawny arms, (as well as a friend’s slightly longer arms), have another complaint in that the system’s two knobs are hard to reach and turn from a seated position. My appendages quickly grew weary while making adjustments. Additionally, it’s hard to read the words on the knob since it’s black-on-black, but Secretlab made the controls intuitive (clockwise for higher and more lumbar support, counterclockwise for lower and less support).

Comfort and Adjustments

The regular size version of the Titan Evo I tested is geared toward gamers who are 5’7” - 6’2” and under 220 pounds, but it can support a max weight of 285 pounds. I’m just tall enough to fit the recommendation and have over 100 pounds of wiggle room when it comes to the max weight. 

Secretlab’s Titan Evo is a solid chair. The chair’s cold cure foam has hardly any give. Secretlab describes it as “medium-firm,” but I’d go with hard — but not rock-hard. I came to this chair after months of using the Mavix M5, a mesh chair that uses a porous lattice pattern for support with obvious give. The contrast made the Titan Evo a bit jarring at first. 

The backrest was easier to get used to because I like a lot of back support and don’t want to feel like I have to press back to get full support whether I’m straight up or reclined. But the seat feels a little hard after a couple hours and makes me want to readjust. The seat does feel softer than the backrest when squeezing it. The angled sides are especially easy to press down, and I can hear air coming out of the foam as I do. This flexibility will help those who want to use the full width of the seat. 

Although I’ve gotten used to the seat’s firmness, a little more give would still make the chair a little more comfortable for long gaming sessions. A friend who weighs more than me but still under the 200-pound mark agreed, appreciating the hardness of the backrest but wanting a slightly softer seat. Someone with more weight, however, may prefer the more dense support.

Because of the seat’s firmness, my thighs definitely feel supported, making them easy to forget about while sitting. The seat also has what Secretlab describes as a "waterfall edge" on the lip that’s supposed to contour to the back of the legs, which I felt regardless of my recline angle. 

This is a spacious seat. When I’m sitting in one place for hours I tend to move around, and the seat here is great enough that I can sit with both legs crossed on top of it. The armrests’ ability to move up and down or in and out also makes this more feasible.

The seat’s point of contact is 18.5 inches across; however, the total width of the seat is about 22 inches, which is why I’m able to kick my feet up on it. The seat is also 19.3 inches deep (from the back of the knees to the back). The Razer Iskur’s seat is slightly tighter (17 inches, 21 inches and about 20 inches, respectively). And the AndaSeat Jungle’s seat is uncomfortably narrow (14.2-inches, 20.3 inches and 16.9 inches, respectively). 

The Titan Evo’s backrest is cut from a single piece of Secretlab’s proprietary cold foam (the same stuffing found in its previous chairs). It has a distinct shape with shoulder wings that gently curve in. This should come in handy for broad shoulders. The edges of the backrest also come in, making for a small hugging sensation that makes me feel safe but doesn’t necessarily add more comfort. I fit in well in the area surrounded by the wings, but the wings prevent me from sitting in the chair with my shoulders and elbows back and my arms close to my body.  

My review unit’s backrest measures 21 inches across at the shoulder level and is 33.5 inches long. For comparison, the Razer Iskur, which has similar height and weight recommendations (5’6”- 6’2”, under 299 pounds) is tighter at 19 inches and 32 inches, respectively. Meanwhile, the more affordable AndaSeat Jungle (recommended for people 5’0”-6’0” and under 211 pounds) has a backrest that’s slightly wider (22.6 inches) and shorter (32.5 inches) than our review focus.  

The backrest is very accomodating of both focused and lackadaisical gamers. It can sit at an 85-degree angle from the seat, meaning you can lean in close to your game and still have your back and shoulders supported. I like to get up close and personal with my screen when I’m gaming sometimes or doing detailed productivity work, like photo editing. The 85-degree recline makes those tasks go from feeling tense to natural, and a recline under 90 degrees is more rare among gaming chairs. For the more laidback player, the chair can recline back 165 degrees. As mentioned, the lumbar support system helps the recline a little in that you can move the lumbar support system up and down to accommodate your specific angle. The chair still felt trustworthy as I laid back, even with me spinning round in circles (why don’t they allow this chair at the dentist?). 

The recline lever on the seat’s right side is easy to grab without looking and even features handy finger grooves. But it can get a little jammed when you’re lowering it, requiring either some extra force or for me to lean forward a little to allow it to lock it in place. This is accompanied by an off-putting metal noise. 

Armrests are another one of the ways Secretlab chairs have stood out because you can move them so much. In this case, the armrests go up and down 3 inches, move sideways 0.8 inches, forward and back 1.4 inches and can also turn diagonally one notch outward or inward. Each movement has its own button and is usable regardless of any armrest adjustments you have already made. 

This all matches the functionality of the preceding Omega and Titan, except for the sideways movement, which used to be 1 inch instead of 0.8 inch. I bring this up because when I first built the chair, I wished the armrests were closer together. With both armrests as close to my sides as possible, I still had to open my wingspan slightly to rest my elbows, even with the armrests angled inward. If I’m using a smaller keyboard or just want to keep my arms as close to my body as possible, either for ergonomic reasons or maybe because I’m gaming with a controller, I wouldn’t get any armrest support. While the Omega’s armrests were 24.4 - 27.6 inches apart, the Titan Evo’s are 26-29.1 inches. It could be worse though: The Jungle’s are 27.4 inches apart and not adjustable in this way. 

Update 7/16/2021: The chair shipped with the armrests already attached to the seat, but apparently they're set to their furthest distance possible. However, Secretlab's assembly instructions don't note this at all. Secretlab informed me that the armrests can be installed closer together on the seat. Underneath the seat, it's easy to loosen some screws and slide the armrests along a bracket about 1 inch, providing extra flexibility and more comfort for how I like to sit. 

As a smaller complaint, I’d like the armrests to be able to move backward more to accommodate deep reclines. I also wouldn’t mind the armrests getting a little lower. With the seat and armrests both at their lowest positions, the armrests are 26 inches high. That’s just a smidge too tall to fit under my tiny desk.

The armrests are resistant to weight, requiring me to press down hard to make it give. But they don’t feel hard, meaning I can rest on them for hours. Their PU faux leather topping is also buttery soft, boasting smooth luxury I want to melt into. If you’re not into the faux leather feel though, you can pay extra and swap out the armrests’ magnetic tops. Secretlab is also releasing its Technogel Premium Armrest tops, which use “German-made memory gel [that ]conforms to your wrists and elbows in all directions for more even weight distribution and improved pressure relief,” according to Secretlab. 

Underneath the seat’s left side is a lever for turning tilt on or off. The tilt feature is accompanied by a knob for adjusting tension. It’s under the center of the seat and much harder to reach. When sitting at a 90-degree angle, I had to shove back hard to get the tilt working. It’s easier at a slight or greater recline, where I can get a nice rocking chair effect if desired. However, I found little use for this, as I do for rocking chairs (sorry grandmas). 

The lever for adjusting the chair’s height is underneath the seat’s right. The handle faces a different direction than the tilt lever to help differentiation. And it’s helpful for righties that the one you’re most likely to use is on the right side.

Magnetic Memory Foam Head Pillow

Believe it or not, I’ve actually been waiting for someone to shake up the neck pillow game, and Secretlab has by making the Titan Evo’s stick to the chair via magnets rather than a strap. Unfortunately, I still find the pillow to stick out too much and that it pushes my head forward in an unnatural way, although less so than with other chairs. This pillow is dense, requiring me to apply some pressure for it to conform to my head shape. 

The new approach to the pillow’s application and adjustment means there are no unsightly straps stretched across the back of the backrest. Instead, the pillow has a magical floating look, and the magnets worked well for the most part. With a deeper recline the pillow rarely slipped; although, in that scenario I wanted the pillow lower than the most southern part of the backrest’s magnets (by the top of the T logo), so, of course, the pillow fell. 

Another downside is that it’s easy to forget that the pillow has magnets in it, so just be careful tossing it near anything that’s sensitive to magnets.

The Titan Evo’s memory foam head pillow is better quality than any other free neck pillow I’ve seen included with a gaming chair.  When you squeeze it with your hand, it lovingly gives in to you and promptly unscrunches back into shape when you release. There are calculated curves here too. It’s just too bad I still haven’t found a neck pillow that I feel adds superior comfort. I ultimately prefer to use the Titan Evo without its neck pillow.

Assembly

Secretlab’s massive (about 30.5 x 26 inches) print-out instructions hint that it’s easier to build the Titan Evo with a friend, but I was able to complete it with just me, myself and I in about 45 minutes. I also used the tools in the box, a pair of Allen wrenches, including one with a comfy handle that also serves as a Phillips head screwdriver on the other end. 

It’s a hefty package at about 76.1 pounds, so you may need help getting it up any stairs. But I was able to wearily navigate the heavy backrest and thick seat without help. The hardest part, as usual, was getting the holes in the backrest to align with the holes in the bracket of the seat so the two could be screwed together. But while I normally need assistance with this part and extra patience, getting the holes to match up seemed a little easier on the Titan Evo than on other chairs I’ve built. 

I appreciated the armrests being attached to the seat out of the box. The armrests’ covers easily snap on magnetically, as do the covers for the brackets connecting the backrest to the seat, saving me some time and effort.

Bottom Line

The Secretlab Titan Evo 2022 offers almost all of the adjustments you can want in gaming chair and in a good-looking package. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a rival that feels and looks this good. The Razer Iskur puts up a good fight with its firm build, but its lumbar support system isn’t as adjustable and aesthetically, it looks like a bulky, scaly defect. At least in the case of the fabric upholstery version I tested, the Titan Evo is one of the few chairs that feels as durable as its price implies and further earns the high cost with its appearance. Plus, the quality of the Titan Evo’s pillow sets a new standard. 

This is a harder chair, and because of that your back should feel very supported. But for the same reason, the seat may feel tiresome after a couple hours. The ability to finetune the lumbar support and armrests should not be overlooked. However, the lumbar support pillow Secretlab used to include with its chairs provides even more support that conforms to deep curves better. Further, having the armrests closer together would take things to the next level, and being able to move the armrests backward more would be a nice bonus. 

The Titan Evo 2022 isn’t perfect, and there are some things I liked about Secretlab’s now discontinued Omega better. But this is still the cream of the crop among chairs we’ve tested and should be a sound investment for gamers seeking a versatile, supportive chair for the long haul.

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published on July 12, 2021 and updated on July 16, 2021 to provide more accurate information on the chair’s armrests. 

Nvidia’s powerful A100 GPUs will be part of its HGX AI super-computing platform, the Californian graphics-crunching colossus announced today,  with new technologies including its 80GB memory modules, 400G Infiniband networking, and Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage software also being added.

The A100, which recently flexed its Ampere-powered muscles to overtake the Titan V as the most powerful GPU in the OctaneBench benchmark, comes in two forms: one with 40GB of HBM2E and the other with 80GB. The larger model boasts the world’s widest memory bandwidth, transferring over two terabytes per second. Built on a 7nm process, you get 54.2 billion transistors arranged into 6912 shading units, 432 texture mapping units, 160 ROPs and 432 tensor cores. 

Tying these GPUs together within the massive racks of supercomputers are technologies such as Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage, which lowers latency by allowing direct access between GPU memory and storage. Infiniband networking at up to 400Gb/s allows bandwidth of up to 1.64 Pb/s per 2,048-port switch, with the ability to connect more than a million nodes.

“The HPC revolution started in academia and is rapidly extending across a broad range of industries,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “Key dynamics are driving super-exponential, super-Moore’s law advances that have made HPC a useful tool for industries. Nvidia’s HGX platform gives researchers unparalleled high performance computing acceleration to tackle the toughest problems industries face.”

Not exactly designed for home use, the HGX platform is used by companies such as General Electric, which simulates computational fluid dynamics to design new large gas turbines and jet engines. It will also be used to build the next-generation supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh, optimized for computational particle physics to analyse data from massive particle physics experiments, such as the Large Hadron Collider.

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) has announced the first details about the Orion storage subsystem of its upcoming Frontier exascale supercomputer set to go online in late 2021. Being the industry's first 1.5 ExaFLOPS supercomputer, Frontier will need a very fast storage subsystem. It looks like it is set to get one with up to 700 Petabytes of storage, 75 TB/s of throughput, and 15 billion IOPS (yes, billion) of performance on tap.   

"To the best of our knowledge, Orion will be the largest and fastest single file POSIX namespace file system in the world," said Sarp Oral, Input/Output Working Group lead for Frontier at OLCF. 

The Frontier supercomputer will actually have two storage sub-systems: an in-system storage layer featuring massive sequential read performance of over 75TB/s and around 15 billion read IOPS, as well as a center-wide file system called Orion that offers a whopping 700PB of capacity. 

The Orion Global File Storage System Layer: 700PB Capacity at 10TB/s

Since Frontier relies on HPE's Cray Shasta architecture, its global file storage system will largely rely on the ClusterStor multi-tier architecture that uses both PCIe 4.0/NVMe solid-state drives as well as traditional hard disk drives.

The Cray ClusterStor machines use AMD EPYC processors and can automatically align data flows in the file system with the workload and shift I/O operations between different tiers of storage as needed. Such shifting makes applications believe that they are accessing high-performance all-flash arrays, thus maximizing performance. 

As for the software side of matters, Orion will use an open-source Lustre parallel file system (used by loads of supercomputers worldwide, including OLCF's Titan and Jaguar) as well as ZFS with a volume manager. 

In general, Frontier's center-wide Orion will have three tiers:

• A metadata tier comprising of 480 NVMe SSDs with 10PB of capacity.
• An NVMe storage tier that uses 5,400 SSDs providing 11.5PB of capacity, peak read-write speeds of 10TB/s, and over 2 million random-read input/output operations per second (IOPS).
• An HDD storage tier based on 47,700 PMR hard drives offering 679PB of capacity, a peak read speed of 5.5TB/s, a peak write speed of 4.6TB/s, and over 2 million random-read IOPS.

OLCF says that Orion will have 40 Lustre metadata server nodes and 450 Lustre object storage service (OSS) nodes, a total of 1,350 OSTs systemwide. Each OSS node will provide one object storage target (OST) device for performance and two OST devices for capacity. In addition, Orion will employ 160 nodes for routing that will offer peak read-write speeds of 3.2 TB/s available to other OLCF resources and platforms. 

"Orion is pushing the envelope of what is possible technically due to its extreme scale and hard disk/NVMe hybrid nature," said Dustin Leverman, leader of the OLCF’s High-Performance Computing Storage and Archive Group. "This is a complex system, but our experience and best practices will help us create a resource that allows our users to push science boundaries using Frontier."

The In-Storage Layer: Up to 75TB/s at 15 Billion Read IOPS

Frontier's in-storage layer comprises of SSDs installed directly into compute nodes and connected to AMD's EPYC processors using a PCIe Gen 4 interface. These NVMe drives will offer an aggregate performance of over 75TB/s read speed, over 35TB/ write speed, and over 15 billion random-read IOPS. 

The OLCF did not disclose the capacity of the in-storage layer, but this is just local storage, so do not expect tens of petabytes here. 

Summary

Overall, the in-storage layer provides Frontier a whopping performance of 75TB/s, whereas the center-wide Orion offers a capacity of around 700PB. Combining this dual-layer and multi-tier storage subsystem provides just what a 1.5 EFLOPS machine with a 20MWatt power consumption needs: unbeatable storage performance to feed data to CPUs and GPUs and the ultimate capacity to store the large datasets that the supercomputer is made to process.

The GeForce RTX 3090 and Radeon RX 6900 XT target the extreme performance market, though the 3090 ends up in a category of its own. These are, respectively, the two fastest GPUs currently available from Team Green and Team Red — that's Nvidia and AMD if that wasn't clear — sitting at the top of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy and claiming spots on our list of the best graphics cards. These aren't great values, but if money isn't a concern, or you're looking for ways to burn through your stimulus check, which one should you buy? We'll look at performance, features, efficiency, price, and more to determine the winner.

Nvidia's RTX 3090 launched on September 24, 2020, one week after the RTX 3080. While it's officially part of the GeForce brand, Nvidia positions it as a new take on the Titan formula. Titan cards were previously only available directly from Nvidia as a reference design, with prices ranging from $999 (the original GTX Titan and GTX Titan Black) and eventually topping out at $2,999 (the Titan V). By comparison, $1,499 for the RTX 3090 seems somewhat reasonable, but there's a catch: You give up some of the enhanced features that the Titan cards offered, like improved driver support for professional workloads.

AMD's RX 6900 XT, by comparison, has a far more mundane history. AMD launched the RX 6900 XT on December 8, 2020. It's the top of the Big Navi product stack and uses the same Navi 21 GPU as the RX 6800 XT, only this time it's fully enabled with 80 CUs instead of 72. At best, it's about 10% faster than the RX 6800 XT, while the $999 official launch price represents a more than 50% increase in cost compared to its lesser sibling.

Of course, with the current GPU and PC component shortages, exacerbated by Ethereum mining, prices are even worse. Our GPU pricing index currently (April 2021) pegs the RX 6900 XT at around $1,900 on eBay, while Nvidia's RTX 3090 goes for roughly $3,000. Mining is obviously the biggest factor in those prices, with the 3090 nearly doubling the 6900 XT's mining performance, and most people should just ignore those prices and forget about getting the cards — they were already a tough sell at the official MSRPs. But if you could buy one of these GPUs at MSRP (or close to it), or you really don't care about pricing, how do they stack up?

1. Gaming Performance

For most gamers, performance plays a critical role in determining which graphics card to buy. We've benchmarked a baker's dozen of games at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K running ultra quality (or equivalent) settings. But that's just the tip of the gaming iceberg. None of the 13 games had ray tracing enabled, so we also have ten additional benchmarks with DXR (DirectX Raytracing) turned on, plus six more results with DLSS Quality mode enabled. Let's take each of those results in turn.

In traditional rasterization performance, things are actually quite close. Of course, that depends on the selection of games, but with 13 relatively recent titles, including games promoted either by AMD or Nvidia, this should be a good representation of how the RTX 3090 and RX 6900 XT rank overall. We'll start with the 4K results since that's the most demanding scenario, and CPU bottlenecks can come into play at lower resolutions.

RTX 3090 takes a modest 8% lead, though the devil’s in the details. Of the 13 games, ten have the 3090 in front, leading by anywhere from 2% (Far Cry 5) to 25% (Strange Brigade). Three games (Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Borderlands 3, and Forza Horizon 4) end up favoring AMD, with Valhalla looking suspect at lower resolutions. Drop to 1440p, and the RTX 3090's lead shrinks to just 1%, effectively tied. The RX 6900 XT now leads in six of the games, though several are basically tied. Valhalla meanwhile jumps to a 30% lead, and as an AMD-promoted game, that's an obvious concern. On the other hand, the 3090's biggest lead comes in Strange Brigade, which is also an AMD-promoted game. Finally, at 1080p, the 6900 XT takes the overall lead by 4%, still leading in half of the games but with very large margins in Valhalla and Horizon Zero Dawn.

Rasterization is all well and good, and the Infinity Cache helps AMD's RX 6900 XT stay competitive, particularly at lower resolutions. What happens with ray tracing and DLSS, though?

If you're interested in playing games with the enhanced visuals that ray tracing offers, things skew heavily in favor of Nvidia's RTX 3090. We've only tested at 1440p and 1080p this time because 4K proves to be too much for most GPUs — though if you're okay with 30 fps, the 3090 can still suffice. We've selected ten games with DXR support, including two AMD-promoted games. It's worth pointing out up front that the AMD-promoted games (Dirt 5 and Godfall) only use RT for shadows so far, which is arguably the worst use of ray tracing power. That means all four of the released games with AMD RT (Riftbreaker and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands are the two others) are at best on the same level of RT tech as Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Call of Duty, only this time with AMD-flavored optimizations. But that's a topic for another day; let's talk about performance.

First up, at 1440p with native rendering, the 3090 averages 70 fps in our overall metric, 43% higher than the 6900 XT's 49 fps. The 3090 has a range of 33 fps (Fortnite, at 'medium-high' RT settings — maxed out settings in Fortnite would further drop performance for a negligible increase in image quality) to 121 fps (Godfall). AMD's RX 6900 XT only comes close to the 3090 in DXR performance in two games: Dirt 5 and Godfall, both of which are AMD-promoted. The 6900 XT actually wins in Dirt 5, which seems suspicious at best, but the RT shadows really don't affect the game's visuals much. The biggest loss for the 6900 XT comes in Minecraft, which uses DXR to do "full path tracing," pushing the RT hardware to its limits — the 3090 is more than double the performance of the 6900 XT in that case.

Even 1080p native rendering with RT enabled is demanding. The RTX 3090 still leads by 38% overall, a bit less than the lead at 1440p as CPU limits and other factors come into play at lower resolutions. Most of the results are a bit closer, for example Minecraft now gives the RTX 3090 a mere 84% lead.

If that wasn't bad enough, enabling DLSS further increases the RTX 3090's lead. We only tested DLSS 2.0 enabled games (so we skipped Metro Exodus for now and Shadow of the Tomb Raider), and we only used DLSS Quality mode for those games. That means this is the worst performance you'll see from DLSS, but also the best visual quality. This is basically the "free performance with no truly discernable loss in image quality” setting. And the result for the 3090 is 62% higher performance on average at 1440p and 35% higher performance at 1080p.

AMD doesn't have a shipping alternative to DLSS yet — we're still waiting for FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), which might show up in Resident Evil Village next month, based on rumors. Even if it can boost performance, there's still the question of whether it can match DLSS 2.0 on image quality. Without FSR, right now, the 3090 more than doubles the performance of the RX 6900 XT, at both 1080p and 1440p, and the gap would be even larger at 4K. More importantly, the 3090 averages 86 fps at 1440p in the RT+DLSS games we tested, with only Fortnite falling short of the 60 fps mark.

RT isn't required for DLSS to work, either — Death Stranding, Marvel's Avengers, Outriders, and several other games support DLSS but don't implement ray tracing. It's not 'perfect' if you spend time pixel-peeping screenshots looking for artifacts, but the reality is that when playing most games that implement DLSS 2.0 (or later), especially at the Quality preset, you'll definitely notice the boost in fps and likely won't notice any loss of image quality. With Unreal Engine and Unity both providing engine-level support for DLSS 2.0, we'll likely see plenty more games flipping that switch in the future, which means AMD's GPUs will fall further behind. 

Winner: Nvidia

Overall, the GeForce RTX 3090 is undoubtedly the fastest gaming GPU currently available. AMD's RX 6900 XT looks pretty good if you confine any performance results to games that don't support ray tracing or DLSS, but add in either of those, and it falls behind — often by a lot. There are more than 30 shipping games with DLSS 2.0 support and at least two dozen games with various forms of ray tracing. There are more coming in both categories. Without FSR, AMD can't hope to compete with Nvidia's best, and even FSR may not be sufficient. Until the next-generation Nvidia Hopper / RTX 40-series (or whatever it ends up being called) arrives next year, RTX 3090 will likely remain the fastest consumer graphics card.

2. Price

Short of winning the lottery, aka the Newegg Shuffle, prices and availability for the RTX 3090 and RX 6900 XT are both horrible. Nominally, the RX 6900 XT costs $1,000 and the RTX 3090 starts at $1,500. Even if you get picked for a card at Newegg, we've generally seen prices of around $1,500 or more on the 6900 XT and $2,000 and up for the 3090. That's bad, but our GPU pricing index gives an average sold price of $1,850 for the RX 6900 XT and over $3,000 for the RTX 3090. Yikes!

Again, finding either card in stock at less than eBay prices will prove difficult. Given enough time, you might get lucky, but scalpers and other opportunists aren't sitting still. We'd be curious to know what percentage of GPUs acquired via lottery systems ultimately end up being sold elsewhere at a profit.

Whether you go with MSRPs, or Newegg Shuffle prices, or even eBay pricing, however, one thing is abundantly clear: The RX 6900 XT costs a lot less than the RTX 3090. It's certainly not as fast when it comes to ray tracing, but it can hold its own in rasterization games. Bang for the buck, then AMD's RX 6900 XT comes out on top.

The problem is that the RX 6900 XT doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's nearly the same card as the RX 6800 XT, just with up to 10% higher performance (best-case). The RX 6900 XT outperforms the RX 6800 XT across our entire test suite by 6%–8%. We could throw the RTX 3080 into the mix as well, but at least the RTX 3090 has more than double the VRAM. Anyway, there are much better values to be had, and neither one of these cards is worth the current asking price.

Winner: AMD, begrudgingly

Considering current prices put the RX 6900 XT at anywhere from $500–$1,200 less than the RTX 3090, it's easy to say that AMD's card offers the better value. Unless you're actually doing cryptocurrency mining, in which case the RTX 3090 is nearly twice as fast and doesn't cost twice as much. Anyone spending this much money on a gaming GPU probably isn't overly worried about the price difference, however, and would likely pay the premium to get Nvidia's superior RT and DLSS performance. Most users should just wait for prices to come down.

3. Features and Tech

Unlike other categories where things can shift a lot based on the specific GPUs being compared, features and tech are relatively consistent across the entire range of modern GPUs. We're basically looking at how AMD's RDNA2 architecture compares to Nvidia's Ampere architecture, along with other ecosystem extras like G-Sync and FreeSync. As such, our verdict here is the same as we've offered in the RTX 3070 vs. RX 6700 XT face-off.

Most importantly, and we've touched on this already, Nvidia DLSS has no direct competition yet. Don't even get us started on Radeon Boost, which can certainly improve framerates but often causes stutters and frame pacing issues when it starts and stops. In supported games, it's very difficult to spot the differences between DLSS Quality mode and native resolution with TAA — until you look at framerates and DLSS runs 20–50% faster. FidelityFX Super Resolution will need to be very good to catch DLSS, and it will need developer support, and both will take time.

Nvidia's Tensor cores can be used for stuff besides gaming as well. Background blur and replacement features are common in a lot of video conferencing solutions, but Nvidia Broadcast offers clearly superior performance and quality. The noise elimination on the audio side is particularly impressive and can do wonders for anyone with a less than ideal recording environment. Where else will the Tensor cores end up being useful? We don't know, but we're looking forward to finding out.

Elsewhere, technologies that seem similar still end up favoring Nvidia. G-Sync and FreeSync ostensibly provide the same thing: Tear-free gaming and adaptive refresh rates. Except, in practice, G-Sync tends to work better. G-Sync Compatible can also work with FreeSync displays, while FreeSync can't work on a G-Sync display. Yes, G-Sync monitors tend to cost more, but as the one item you're constantly looking at when using a computer, it's worth spending an extra $100–$200 for a better display. The same goes for Radeon Anti-Lag and Nvidia Ultra-Low Latency and Reflex. Both can improve latency by minimizing buffering, but NULL tends to be a bit better, and games that directly incorporate Reflex deliver far superior latency.

At the extreme end of the spectrum, Nvidia also wins when it comes to VRAM. 24GB of 19.5Gbps GDDR6X on a 384-bit bus compared to 16GB of 16Gbps GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus ends up no contest. Almost no games will benefit from having 24GB vs. 16GB of VRAM capacity, but the additional bandwidth Nvidia offers proves useful, particularly at 4K.

Winner: Nvidia

This is more of a subjective category, but we simply find that Nvidia's features work better than AMD's alternatives. The RTX 3090 nabs another win, and it will be hard for AMD to close the gap in this category. Nvidia currently controls about 80% of the gaming GPU market for PCs, and while AMD basically has 100% of the modern console GPU market, that ends up not being a huge factor right now. Nvidia has superior features and tech, and the Ampere architecture beats AMD's RDNA2.

4. Power and Efficiency

Up until the latest generation GPUs, Nvidia had an advantage over AMD in GPU power consumption and efficiency. Today, thanks to TSMC's N7 process, the two companies are mostly at parity. Nvidia would probably be ahead if Ampere were also made on TSMC N7, but instead, it opted for Samsung's 8N process, a refinement of Samsung's 10nm tech. Then again, if the Ampere cards were made at TSMC, there'd be even fewer GPUs to go around.

Looking specifically at the RTX 3090 and RX 6900 XT, we've already covered features and performance, and Nvidia won those categories. The flip side of things is that Nvidia's top RTX 30-series GPUs push power requirements to new highs. The reference RTX 3090 Founders Edition peaks at around 360W of power draw, using our in-line power measurement devices and Powenetics software. The reference RX 6900 XT meanwhile sits at around 305W peak power draw. That means Nvidia uses nearly 20% more power for slightly higher performance in non-RT workloads. Turn on RT and DLSS, however, and efficiency (fps per watt) goes back to Nvidia.

All of this goes back to the fundamental designs of the respective architectures. Nvidia enhanced Ampere with faster and more capable RT cores and Tensor cores, plus GPU cores that can do either double the performance for FP32 calculations or concurrent full-speed FP32 and INT32. AMD's solution was to enhance the existing RDNA1 architecture with ray tracing support and a few other DirectX 12 Ultimate features like Variable Rate Shading (VRS) and mesh shaders. Then it wrapped everything up with a massive 128MB L3 Infinity Cache that boosts overall memory throughput and efficiency.

Winner: AMD

The two top-tier cards are pretty close overall, with AMD coming in ahead by virtue of using 50W less power. Keep in mind that these results are for the reference cards running reference clocks, however. We've looked at some custom cards, and power on both sides of the fence tends to be in the 400W–420W range on the highest clocked models. We also don't think a 50W difference in pure power consumption is a huge deal at the top of the performance spectrum. Still, in redlining the GPUs for these exotic offerings, Nvidia pushed into muscle car territory with a massive engine that delivers a lot of horsepower while sucking down fuel. Just make sure your card's cooling is up to snuff — particularly on the GDDR6X memory.

5. Drivers and Software

Both AMD and Nvidia offer drivers on a regular cadence, typically with at least one release each month, more when there are a lot of new games coming out. Not surprisingly, depending on the game, performance and support can swing wildly in favor of one side or the other. A few examples from the past year are worth mentioning.

Watch Dogs Legion ran better at launch on Nvidia hardware, and even though ray tracing worked on AMD's latest generation GPUs, it was sort of broken — it didn't render all the RT effects correctly. It took several months for game patches and driver updates to finally rectify that situation, and Nvidia's GPU still easily wins WDL head-to-head. That was expected, as it was an Nvidia-promoted game: The RTX 3090 manages to run 1440p Ultra with DXR at higher performance than the RX 6900 XT can manage at 1080p. The same thing happened with Cyberpunk 2077, which only just recently received AMD RT support. Forget the buggy launch for a moment; the game simply ran better and looked better on Nvidia's RTX cards. Nvidia still holds the performance advantage, and given it was an Nvidia promotional title, we expected as much.

AMD has promotional games as well, however. Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Borderlands 3, and Dirt 5 fall into that category and generally run better on AMD's latest GPUs — sometimes markedly so. We're not sure what's going on at a lower level in the drivers and software, but Valhalla, in particular, favors the RX 6900 XT by as much as 44% at 1080p. Yeah, that looks incredibly suspicious, but is it any worse than what we see in WDL and CP77 with DXR? That's difficult to say without access to the code.

Zooming out to a higher-level view, looking at a wide swath of games, day-0 driver support and performance tends to be far less extreme than the few examples cited here. AMD and Nvidia mostly have driver updates down to a science, and while occasional problems slip through, they're usually corrected quickly.

What about stability and other aspects of the drivers? There was a lot of noise about black screens with the first-generation AMD Navi cards. We didn't encounter much in the way of problems that couldn't be fixed by a clean driver install, but AMD did acknowledge the issue and patched things up. We haven't noticed any significant problems in the past year or so, and we're not aware of any ongoing major issues with RDNA2 GPUs. Nvidia's Ampere launch drivers for the RTX 3080/3090 also had stability problems, but those were fixed with updates rolled out within a week or so of launch.

AMD most recently added some improvements to its drivers with the Adrenalin 21.4.1 update, which mostly seems to focus on game streaming technologies. Basically, using another device to stream games from your desktop should now work better, and livestreaming games to the internet should also be easier. These were areas where we previously gave Nvidia a slight lead, and while we haven't had time to do extensive testing, we're comfortable in saying both sides do pretty well at drivers.

Winner: Tie

It's easy to get caught up looking at minutiae when discussing drivers, but the reality is that both AMD and Nvidia have been doing this for a long time, and the current state of GPU drivers hasn't caused us any major grief on either side. If you've only used Nvidia GPUs and drivers for the past five or ten years, they're familiar and offer plenty of features. The same can be said for anyone who has only used AMD GPUs and drivers during that time — except AMD has improved more, so that where we previously would have given Nvidia the edge, AMD has closed the gap in the past few years. We switch between both vendors' products regularly, which can be a bit problematic sometimes (hint: Display Driver Uninstaller works great to truly clean out most cruft), and rarely have any cause for complaint.

Bottom Line

The Radeon RX 6900 XT and GeForce RTX 3090 are closely matched, with several areas that are very close, and even one category where we declared a straight-up tie. While we end up with a 3-to-3 scoring verdict, we put more weight on the categories at the top of the table, so we've listed criteria in order of importance. That's the tie-breaker, and Nvidia's wins in raw performance and features beat out AMD's wins in price and power.

The sad reality is that price and availability right now are still deal breakers for most gamers. It doesn't matter how good a graphics card is if you can't find one for sale, and that's where we've been for most of the past seven months. Things aren't likely to improve any time soon, either, based on the latest rumblings. Whoever can produce the most cards will inevitably win the overall battle. Based on what we see from the Steam Hardware Survey and our GPU pricing index, Nvidia leads in availability. There were 4.5 times as many RTX 3090 cards scalped on eBay compared to RX 6900 XT cards, and while the 3090 only shows up at 0.33% of all GPUs for the Steam survey (grains of salt with regards to Steam's obscure statistics, naturally), RX 6000-series GPUs don't show up at all.

The current rumors are that we'll see RTX 3080 Ti sometime in the near future, which will theoretically deliver similar performance to the RTX 3090 for a lower price — for those that don't need 24GB of GDDR6X. It's rumored to also come with an improved version of Nvidia's anti-Ethereum mining limiter, which should mean miners won't be as quick to gobble up supplies. While we wait for round two of Nvidia's Ampere GPUs, AMD still hasn't fully fleshed out its RDNA2 lineup, and likely the RX 6900 XT will sit at the top of the stack for the next 18 months at least. This means it might be fall of 2022 before we get the next generation Nvidia Hopper and RDNA3, both potentially using 5nm process technology and hopefully blowing our minds with performance improvements.

For now, Nvidia reigns as the king of the GPU hill. You just need to pay, dearly, for the privilege. Anyone with the funds and wherewithal to acquire either of these cards should be happy with the resulting performance. However, buyer's remorse when looking at the street prices remains a distinct possibility. Let's hope we see some real improvements in availability over the remainder of 2021.

Besides comfort, a gaming chair’s overall look has a big impact on whether or not it’s a the best gaming chair for your gaming den. If you’re streaming or web chatting, your chair, (especially larger gaming chairs), will make an appearance. And some people just don’t want to add an ugly piece of furniture to their home.

The Secretlab Titan in its SoftWeave Fabric iteration ($429) strikes a good look for gamers tired of the bright colors and stark lines of racing style chairs. Instead, it opts for a cleaner look fitting for minimalists. Yet, as a larger version of the Secretlab Omega targeting a bigger and taller audience, it still offers the features you want in a gaming throne, like adjustable armrests, a tall backrest and a multi-tilt mechanism.

Secretlab Titan Specs

Design of SecretLab Titan

The Secretlab Titan can come with three different types of upholstery: faux leather (starts at $399), leather (starts at $799) or fabric (starts at $429). Our review unit came in the fabric upholstery, which Secretlab dubbed Softweave Fabric (for a look at the Prime 2.0 PU leather option, see our Secretlab Omega review). Once you go SoftWeave, you get your choice of color: a black color scheme, Charcoal Blue (black with bright blue details) or Cookies & Cream, which is what I tested or, for $20 extra, a D.Va from Overwatch-themed one.

Secretlab’s Cookies & Cream colorway makes for a mostly grey chair. Black runs along the side, from the backrest to the seat. The material is a nice change in pace compared to the many leather and faux leather gaming chairs out there. It also adds to its overall sleek, expensive vibe.

The neck pillow, armrests and the base of the chair are all black, as is the Secretlab logo machine-embroidered into the top of the chair. The stitchwork of the Secretlab name and logo, the giant T on the backrest, and “Titan” on the back of the chair and seat all add to the high-class feel of the chair.

Secretlab’s SoftWeave Fabric is a signature blend, including the company's own yarn. The yarn produces a fluffy texture that’s cozy to sit in. SoftWeave is a breathable material, which helped cut down on sweating and sticking to the chair during long gaming sessions.

This patented fabric is supposed to be easy to clean but, because it’s weaved together, I found that dirt and crumbs can get caught in the material, even after damping a paper towel to clean it. 

After spilling things on my chair I can confirm that the SoftWeave fabric doesn’t hold onto crumbs. The good news is the fabric feels durable enough not to tear accidentally from jewelry or pets claws.

The chair’s frame is made from steel, and that’s all topped with Secretlab’s proprietary Cold-Cure Foam Mix, making for a firm chair that evokes straight posture (more on that in the next section).

Unlike the Secretlab Omega, the Titan doesn’t come with an additional lumbar pillow.

Pillow fans need not fret too much though. Secretlab does include a neck pillow with the Titan. It’s memory foam (different and softer than the chair’s Cold-Cure Foam Mix) covered in a velvet-like material with Secretlab’s name and logo stitched in. The pillow’s super-soft material brings a luxurious touch to the chair. 

Sitting in the chair’s aluminum alloy base are five XL caster wheels coated with PU faux leather. They move silently across my hardwood floors and don’t get caught on my low shag carpet either.

Comfort and Adjustments on SecretLab Titan

Secretlab recommends the Titan for gamers 5’9” - 6'7" and 290 pounds. At 5’8”, I’m just under Secretlab’s recommended height and not tall enough to sit comfortably with the chair raised 3.7 inches to its maximum height. At this setting, my feet don’t touch the ground. In this regard, I may have been better off with Secretlab’s Omega chair, which is considered a smaller size and appropriate for people up to 5’11” and 240 pounds.

Overall, this is a firm chair that can encourage you to sit up straight, thanks to its hard steel frame covered in Secretlab’s dense Cold-Cure Foam Mix. This differs from other types of memory foam in that each piece is crafted using one piece of foam and aluminum molds, rather than multiple layers of foam. The foam mix also uses air pockets to absorb pressure. It’s not the hardest chair; instead it provides some give. But your spine will still be encouraged to get straight by the Titan’s more rigid feel.

One of our favorite parts of Secreltab’s Omega chair is the generous inclusion of two ultra-luxurious pillows. But the Titan foregoes the large lumbar pillow in favor of a knob that changes the firmness of the backrest’s lumbar area. This tactic is less common, but we’ve seen it before, including on the Noblechairs Hero. 

Turning the knob on the side of the backrest to the  right makes the backrest protrude for more lumbar support. Turn the knob left to lessen support, and the backrest will recede. While an extra pillow would’ve been nice, (especially considering the quality of Secretlab’s lumbar pillow), my body didn’t miss it. The Titan’s lumbar adjustments proved sufficient. I liked it best at the middle setting, where I felt my shoulders were ultimately lifted and my posture improved.

The downside is the knob for adjusting lumbar support isn’t easily accessible because it’s on the side of the chair.

This is the first chair that’s made me comfortable using the recline feature. It has the light weight of a smaller office chair, making the 180-degree recline less daunting, while still offering the full comfort and security of a gaming chair. The lever to recline is conveniently on the right side under the armrest.

The full recline is accompanied by a multi-tilt mechanism that makes the chair tilt based on how you’re sitting for added support. Knowing I can adjust the tension of the tilting mechanism is comforting. If there’s too much tilt, I can just tighten the knob. Or if I like the ability to rock slightly without feeling stuck in place, I can loosen the tension. The benefit of the tilt mechanism is most noticeable when I do a full recline. The chair seemingly adjusts to my body weight shifting in the chair.

The Titan is a large chair with a fitting seat that doesn’t sink in when you plop down. The seat is 19.7 inches from front to back and 20.5 inches across. For comparison, the AndaSeat Jungle gaming chair, which I found to be in need of more seat, is 16.9 inches deep and 14.2 inches across (point of contact only). The Titan’s seat allows me to sit freely without my thighs spilling over the side or being cradled into the chair, like I experienced with the Jungle chair.

There are wider seats to be had though. The Anda Seat Spider-Man, for example, has a seat that’s 20.5 inches deep and has a point of contact that’s 22.4 inches wide, leaving me with more than enough room.

Secretlab crafted the included neck pillow with its own memory foam, plus a layer of cooling gel to dissipate heat. The pillow feels very dense, and when I squeeze it, it does take a while for it to return to its original form. Meanwhile, the cooling gel accompanied by the velvet-like pillow case is a good combination resulting in pillow that’s malleable, stays cool and aids my neck when I’m trying to exhibit good posture. 

However, those of you with naturally curly and coily hair may be weary of the pillow’s velvet-like material. Velvet is said to dry out curly hair, and although Secretlab hasn’t confirmed that the pillow uses true velvet, the material is very similar and, therefore, may also be drying.

For even more customization, the Titan’s armrests adjust in four directions for max comfort. A button on the inside of the armrests pivot them in, out, forward and back. The second button on the inside toward the back moves the armrests right and left. The button on the outside of the armrest adjusts the height. Made from metal covered in PU faux leather, the armrests provide a soft, no-slip, strain-free sitting experience.

Assembly of SecretLab Titan

This is a Titan of a chair, but assembling it was a much smaller task.  Secretlab provides all the tools needed to put this chair together, namely a Philips head screwdriver, an allen wrench and, of course, nuts and bolts. Included directions were easy to follow as they came via a giant notecard with a QR code for those who’d like to watch an assembly. It took me a little under 30 minutes to build the Titan.

Connecting the backrest to the seat is easier than I’ve experienced with other gaming chairs because there’s a metal frame. Instead of screwing the bolts into the fabric and potentially having a hard time finding the holes inside the chair, the metal bar is on the outside, making it easy to guide the bolts in and secure the chair. And the side panels are magnetic and cover up the metal frame.

The base isn’t as heavy as that of the Anda Seat Spider-Man gaming chair, so attaching the wheels was simple.The levers were already attached to the seat too. All I had to do was slide on the handles.

Bottom Line

The Secretlab Titan has a minimalist feel, from its assembly to its final look. The Titan is not a flashy gaming chair. It’s a subtle, yet pricey-looking design that can fit in any setting, from the office to the  gaming space. It’s also available in NAPA and PU leather.

Comfort is king, and the Titan doesn’t disappoint there either. Its firm foam design ensures that my body doesn’t sink. The levers are also conveniently placed, making  adjustments to the recline, tilt and height intuitive. And it’s hard not to love the ability to even adjust the armrests, including when I’m laying in a full recline with the Titan. And like a true Titan, the chair is firm and secure in its movements.

If you want a chair with a lot of available adjustments that feel firm and reliable and a look that’s a bit more elevated and matches its price tag, the Secretlab Titan is a good choice.