As I am sure many readers can relate, I heard the hallowed, somewhat daunting words that friends and loved ones say to the resident PC geek or tech enthusiast in their lives — "Can you make me a PC?"

Of course, I've done it dozens of times, but this was the first time that my wife, who regularly plays (or attempts to run) AAA games on a basic RTX 3050 gaming laptop, wanted something higher-end. I would figure out the components, and she could pick out a case, specifying other aesthetic frills she would like. It couldn't be a big, black, boring box, and it had to be an interesting color. My wife eventually settled on the Thermaltake Tower 250 in the eye-catching "Hydrangea Blue" colorway. The PC case is an evolution of the original Tower 100, which we reviewed in 2019.

Things began to come together, and being a resourceful sort, we managed to corral all of the components to build a (slightly larger than usual) ITX-based system.

This isn't a super-high-end build, sporting an AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and RTX 4080 Founders Edition GPU, which I had intended to use in a different build. With that, alongside a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD from Sabrent and 32GB of Klevv RAM, it is quite a performant system, which should easily run just about every modern AAA title without issue at 1440p.

Once the case arrived and we started the build process, I noticed something unusual. The Thermaltake Tower 250 rotates the motherboard 90 degrees, compared to a standard configuration. This allows for a vertically-placed GPU, a motherboard placed in the center, and then support for an all-in-one cooler's radiator on the right. This isn't an issue in itself, but it does cause the motherboard's I/O to be pointing to the top of the case, in addition to any GPU display cables.

Where for art thou, I/O

The top of the Thermaltake Tower 250 is quite crowded; there are two preinstalled exhaust fans, in addition to the front I/O panel of the case. There's also a cut-out for cables, in addition to around an inch of clearance next to the fan shroud for anything coming from the motherboard IO, which feeds into a hole for the plastic shroud that covers it, leading out of the case.

So, if you want to plug anything into your motherboard, you'll have to navigate a frustrating labyrinth of cut-outs every single time. Many people will set and forget their rear I/O, ports, and with two USB-A and a Type-C port at the front, many just won't need it. Since this PC uses Wi-Fi, routing the antenna through was very simple, and I added a handful of USB-C cables to be routed to the desk to have a couple of chargers, in case she needs to plug things in.

What I didn't anticipate was the sheer number of random cables my wife would want to plug into her system at any given time. With the front I/O already populated, plugging in USB devices became more difficult than it really should be. When factoring in the heft of a DisplayPort cable in addition to everything else, things got pretty crowded.

So, the process of taking the top of the case off and wrangling around inside to plug in devices continued. This slight inconvenience turned into annoyance, and I answered the repeated calls of "Can you plug this in please?" repeatedly for a whole week, until I buckled and bought a generic USB hub from Amazon.

You shouldn't really have to do that for the sake of convenience, especially when a motherboard has enough IO for everything. But now that the saga is over, it also highlights another design issue for the Thermaltake Tower 250.

Building cleanly still results in visible cable mess

To Thermaltake's credit, the Tower 250 is broadly well-designed and very simple to build inside, and it took less than an hour for me to assemble a full system, including an all-in-one cooler and RGB frills, which were listed as "mandatory" under my wife's requirements. The case has consistent and simple channels for almost everything, including support for a full-sized PSU. Cable channelling for the GPU is well-thought-out, meaning we hid the majority of a white 12V2x6 cable into a corner, which cannot be seen from most angles. With everything put together, it looked and ran well, until I realized that the I/O pointing out at the top can become a bit of an eyesore.

With several cables running out at the top, the effort put in elsewhere to hide cables so efficiently was seemingly for naught. Above the I/O, there's an inch or two of clearance where cables can be routed. The problem is that with the Hydrangea Blue colorway of the case, the internal metal sheets are white, so if you have any black cables, they stick out like a sore thumb. This is admittedly minor compared to my other grievance, but it also has a fairly simple solution.

If Thermaltake built a detachable shroud for this part of the Tower 250, which puts some effort into hiding the cabling, it would also allow for a larger cable routing channel through the rear, making it simpler to actually make use of the motherboard I/O, or offer a wider cut-out, which makes accessing the rear IO much more accessible. Adding more steps between allowing a user to make use of the features of the components within the system is a black mark on an otherwise well-designed and good-looking PC case.

It scares me to say this, but I have been using Linux for a quarter of a century! Long before the Raspberry Pi was my main hobby, installing Linux on a myriad of devices was my jam. From the early days, when an AMD K6-2 333 and 128MB RAM powered my initial exploration of the world of Unix and Linux, to today, which sees Linux running on my Ryzen 5600X system, a Raspberry Pi laptop, and my beloved Steam Deck.

In those 25 years, I have tried many different Linux distributions; in fact, here is a list of distros that I have used over the years. This list is not exhaustive, because I reviewed a lot of Linux distros for Linux Format magazine.

• Corel Linux
• Mandrake Linux (Mandriva)
• Open Suse / Suse Linux
• Ubuntu (2006 onwards)
• Debian
• Crunchbang Linux (Debian)
• Fedora
• Manjaro
• Arch
• MX Linux
• Bodhi
• Raspberry Pi OS
• Armbian
• DietPi
• AnduinOS
• Bazzite
• CachyOS
• Linux Mint
• ZorinOS

The keen-eyed amongst you will spot that the majority of these distros are Debian-based. Yes, I prefer Debian-based distros, chiefly because I know apt rather well. But I can confidently use Fedora, or Arch (Aur) based systems too. So with all this confidence, why do I keep coming back to Ubuntu? Well, it boils down to a few reasons.

Ubuntu “just works”

I’ve run Ubuntu on everything that I could. My laptops all ran it, something called an O2 Joggler (a rebranded OpenPeak device), which was a photo frame with an early Intel Atom CPU, also ran Ubuntu.

My Asus eeePC ran it for a short while, until I moved to Cruncheee, a version of Crunchbang Linux (Debian) for the eeePC. What links all of these devices is that Ubuntu just works. Sure, in the early days, some Wi-Fi cards and obscure hardware forced me to tinker in the terminal, but in recent years, I’ve not had to delve into the terminal to fix a critical issue. For newcomers and those who prize reliability over the “bleeding edge”, Ubuntu is hard to beat. I can drop my nearly 70-year-old dad in front of Ubuntu, and he can use it easily. It just works.

Ease of use, no matter your level of knowledge

That leads me nicely into this section, and Ubuntu’s ease of use spans the gamut of users.

Linux is often seen as the difficult and, dare I say, “nerdy” OS choice, and typically those attracted to Linux are more computer-savvy than others. However, Linux is open to everyone. Ubuntu is proof of that. From my perspective, Ubuntu offers the ease of use that macOS provides, but without the walled garden that Apple promotes. Ubuntu is free, and it works on older hardware. The installation process has been streamlined, particularly over the last couple of years, with a redesign and tweaks to reduce friction for new users.

I recall installing Corel Linux and Mandrake Linux (now known as Mandriva) back in the early 2000s. They both had a great installer for the time. Remember, this was a time when the installer would scrutinize your system and ask you to make every decision along the way (including writing a custom X.org file), which would scare some from trying. I mention Corel Linux (a Debian-based distro) because that was the first Linux distro that worked for me. The installer felt, dare I say it? More Windows than Linux, and for someone moving over, it was easier to use.

Corl Linux was great fun, and the CDE (a variant of KDE) user interface was similar to Windows of that era, so not too much for me to learn. Corel Linux just gave me a basic install, not too many apps to choose from, but enough. Unlike the time that I downloaded Mandrake Linux (two days to download two CDs!) and chose to install everything. The app menus were rammed full of stuff that I had no idea about.

I loved Mandrake Linux. It felt great and worked well on the hardware of the era. However, I tried a few out, and some, like the KDE CD burning tool K3B, stuck and became a favorite.

The choice of flavors

Linux, at its most basic level, is all about “choice.” You can choose your distro, your window manager, desktop, apps, and more. Where Ubuntu, well, actually the Ubuntu community, does things a little differently is in the flavors of the OS. Each flavor, be it official or community-maintained, has “buntu” in its name.

This makes them easily identifiable to the end user. Sure, there are other distros based on Ubuntu that put their own name and spin on things (Pop! OS springs to mind), but the above list are the Ubuntu distros that many think of. I’ve also placed some suggested use cases for each distro, but ultimately that choice lies with you.

If I wished, I could install Ubuntu and then install another desktop environment, all via the software center or the terminal. In the past, I used to install Ubuntu and then install KDE. Now I just install Kubuntu and enjoy the KDE Plasma user interface.

Great documentation

Good documentation is what every project needs, and Ubuntu sets a high standard for documentation. If you were to Google “How can I change directory in a Linux terminal?”, chances are that you will get an answer that refers to Ubuntu. Either a direct Canonical / Ubuntu-backed document or something from a forum post. Ubuntu has been around so long now that it permeates the search results. Raspberry Pi is also doing the same thing, which I love to see!

The official Ubuntu documentation is excellent and covers trivial and technical issues with clarity. However, the unofficial documentation is also top-notch and provides knowledge for those uncommon issues, particularly when using applications not provided by Ubuntu.

As somebody who has over a decade of experience writing and editing technical documentation and tutorials, I really appreciate good documentation.

“You’re just an Ubuntu fanboy!”

I’ll support any cause that aims to open up computing to everyone. Free/libre software has proven itself to be used in science (NASA, CERN, ESA), technology (waving arms around to mime “Internet”), entertainment, etc. Why pay for an operating system when you can get a great one for free?

My recent Bazzite experiment has proven to me that Linux is now a capable gaming platform, and yes, I already own a Steam Deck, so I should’ve realised. But using a 4060Ti and 12th-gen Intel system to game is a bit different from what the Steam Deck can offer, and it has a bigger impact.

Digging into my personal history with Ubuntu, and in the early 2010s, I ran installfests at locations as diverse as Barcamp Blackpool, Oggcamp, and a disused paint warehouse in the center of Liverpool. I also co-created UCubed, an Ubuntu-centric unconference which later became the genesis for the Raspberry Jam movement, thanks to Alan O’Donohoe, who used UCubed as a template for the worldwide Jam movement.

Nobody at Canonical paid or asked me to do that. I felt that, after using Ubuntu for many years and being part of a larger tech community that included numerous software developers and system administrators, I had to give something back.

Wrapping Up

You may not agree with me, heck, I love that you will probably comment about “Why distro X is better than Y!” and “GNOME sucks, I use Openbox!” but this is just my opinion, based on experience and life events that have ultimately shaped how I use Linux. Your journey will be different, and so will your choices. I respect them all and urge you to continue your Linux journey.

For more than two-and-a-half years, I've been blessed to call the inimitable Secretlab Magnus Pro my main workspace. A colossal sit-stand desk, the hulking slab of metal comes with a nifty integrated sit-stand controller, two gargantuan legs, extensive cable management, and an eye-wateringly expensive magnetic ecosystem — the entire surface is magnetic, and can be used with a range of metal cable management devices, headphone stands, and cable sleeves. It is truly the Rolls-Royce of office furniture, vast and expensive, the purview of only the most hardcore work surface connoisseurs.

Yet on reflection of my time behind Secretlab's (probably) bombproof behemoth, I've come to the awful realization that I might have played myself. Somewhere along the way these last two years, I simply stopped standing up to use this desk, a full 50% of this desk's potential left on the table, if you'll pardon the pun. More specifically, I've realized that I own one of the world's most luxurious standing desks for gaming, yet I never stand up to game.

The benefits of using a standing desk are well-documented and numerous. Did you know that standing up at your desk after lunch can reduce blood sugar spikes by up to 43%? Reducing your time spent sitting can lower blood pressure in older adults, reduce pain and fatigue, and, of course, help your posture. There's even some evidence to suggest that moving between sitting and standing makes you more productive at work.

But it's not productivity I'm after. While I've historically been happy to stand up at my desk for work, it's for play where I've generally neglected standing up altogether, leading to my realisation that I've stopped standing up completely while at my desk and probably need to take a long, hard look at myself. But it got me thinking: Is there any market at all for a desk that lets you stand whilst gaming? The Magnus Pro is dynamite for productivity, but would I ever want to stand up to game behind it?

A place called vertigo

There are numerous reasons why someone might choose to sit down while gaming. Notably, gaming is generally a relaxing thing you do to unwind. The bash marks on my Xbox controller and that Samsung monitor I smashed in 2017 might disagree with me, but for inexplicable reasons, I feel like anyone standing up to game would generally be untrustworthy.

I associate standing up to game with those old Xbox 360 arcade machines you'd find at GameStop (or your local equivalent), or with going to the Casino. If you dialled into an Xbox Live party or your usual Discord haunt and found out that one of your friends was standing up to play during that particular session, you'd probably ask them if everything was okay, or perhaps if there was something wrong with their chair.

Either gaming is relaxing (like a nice leisurely Rome Total War conquest), or it is quite intense (the throngs of the new Battlefield 6). For me, both call for the planted assurance of being sat in a sturdy chair (Secretlab's Titan Evo if you were wondering). I'm pretty sure doing any kind of FPS or fast-paced gaming standing up would make most people feel a bit nauseous or dizzy.

It was 10 years ago last month that MSI launched the first RGB motherboard, the X99A Godlike Gaming. And as a PC and components editor, it feels like I've lived every rainbow-strewn moment of the last decade surrounded by software-controlled lights. From SSDs, laptops, mousepads, GPU water blocks, power cables – you name it. About the only PC or PC part that didn't get the RGB treatment was the CPU (unless you count Newegg's 2019 April Fools video).

We even built a few custom PCs with as much RGB as we could find. I didn't hate RGB back then, and I still don't entirely hate it now. But man, my eyes are ready for a break after building and using PCs in cases like the InWin 309 Gaming Edition for the past several years.

I mean, look at it. It had a controller that let you play Tetris on the front panel, for some reason. It was fun for a few minutes in 2020 when I was still mostly stuck at home, but by 2023, I'd rebuilt my gaming rig inside a Fractal North case without RGB or even a side window. It's still the case (and the PC) that I'm using today as my main work and gaming system, and I haven't seen anything since that's made me want to switch.

HP Omen 35L Stealth Edition

But if I were buying a prebuilt gaming rig in late 2025, I would seriously consider HP's just-announced Omen 35L Stealth edition. The company has offered its mid-sized gaming rig with a basic steel case before as a budget option. But interestingly, now it's giving the system its own name and a marketing push. Clearly, HP thinks there is demand for a gaming rig that's boldly black and boxy, although it's still hedging its bets with the non-Stealth 35L, which has the typical side window and RGB intake fans.

I like the simple look of the 35L Stealth Edition, though. If not for its mesh front and top, it would look almost… Kubrickian, with a thin white font proclaiming the Omen brand and 35L model / volume on the front and side, and not really anything else in terms of adornment. Still, I'd like to see a color-swapped version in white with black letters, which the company already does with the non-Stealth 35L.

Port selection on the back of the model the company had on display at a press event in NYC was at least decent, with two 10 Gbps USB-C ports and six USB-A. But note that four of those ports seem to be USB 2.0. Port selection will also likely differ, at least between Intel and AMD models.

The Omen 35L and 35L Stealth Edition are expected to go on sale in October, starting at $1,499. The CPU options range from the Ryzen 7 7800X3D to the Ryzen 9 9950X3D on the AMD side, with just two last-gen CPU options from Intel: the Core i5-14400F and Core i7-14700F. (The imbalance of those CPU options also tells a story of a big shift in the industry). GPUs run the gamut of Nvidia's current Blackwell range, from the RTX 5050 up to the RTX 5090. Sorry, AMD fans, there are no Radeons in the Stealth's spec sheet.

As a builder, I'm much more likely to roll my own gaming PC (Lian Li's excellent wood-accented LanCool 217 would be a good place to start). But I hope the Omen 35L Stealth Edition sells well enough for HP to continue iterating on its non-RGB gaming rig, and for other companies to consider their own non-lit PCs. I don't expect RGB to go away, but it's always nice to have choices. And for a long time in the prebuilt gaming and PC case space, it's felt like the primary (and often only) thing most companies paid any real attention to was RGB. I'm ready to focus on – and look at – something else.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

I’m in the market for a new laptop this fall, but because of a deal-breaking limitation in Intel’s new chip design, I will not be considering a Lunar Lake system. Formally unveiled this week at IFA Berlin, Intel’s new Core Ultra (Series 2) “Lunar Lake” laptop CPUs promise significant improvements over the prior-generation “Meteor Lake” chips, including much better AI performance, vastly superior battery life, and strong integrated graphics. Premium laptops powered by Lunar Lake, which goes under the brand name Intel Core Ultra 200V series, will be everywhere this fall. 

I need my next laptop to have 64GB of RAM. However, for the first time in modern PC history (Apple has done it on Macs), Intel has decided to build the DRAM onto the same package with the CPU, which means that neither the laptop manufacturer nor laptop owners will be able to add more either before or after sale. Intel is only selling Lunar Lake CPUs with either 16 or 32GB of memory onboard, so anyone who wants more memory than that is out of luck.

That rules out any system with Lunar Lake at its heart. My current daily driver laptop is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (6th Gen) with 16GB of RAM that I bought in 2018. I still love it for its lightweight chassis, good battery life, fantastic keyboard, and convenient TrackPoint pointing stick. 

But after six years of faithful service, my laptop is now a bit too slow for my workloads, particularly because 16GB of RAM gets filled up just from using web tools, editing code, cropping photos, and watching videos. The amount of RAM eaten by the websites that populate my 80+ browser tabs has grown over time so, in 2024, 32GB is what I would need just to keep pace. However, I also want the ability to run virtual machines so I can test out different Windows Insider builds or Linux flavors while keeping each environment in its own window. To have each VM run reasonably well, I should probably allot 16GB of RAM for it to use.

So, if I’m running one VM in a window and I have my usual load of browser tabs, photos open for editing, videos running, and code to edit, I’m going to need more than 32GB of RAM to do it comfortably. Then consider that, like most people, I probably won’t buy a new laptop again for several years. 64GB might be what I need for just my regular work in 2028, without even running a single VM. If you’re a power user like me, 64GB might be a good choice for you also.

Lenovo just announced a new ThinkPad X1 Carbon which sounds really appealing to me. The X1 Carbon (Gen 13) Aura Edition is the lightest version ever, tipping the scales at just 2.16 pounds, and yet it maintains the same 57 Whr battery as prior-gen models. Its processor is said to be much more power efficient than prior generations, promising up to 18 hours of battery life. Between its NPU and its Arc GPU, the laptop’s processor (depending on which SKU) could have up to 115 TOPS, which would be great for AI workloads, particularly as more and more AI gets built into Windows.

However, even if the X1 Carbon (Gen 13) aces all of our benchmark tests when we inevitably review it, I won’t buy one, because it has a Lunar Lake processor and therefore cannot come with any more than 32GB of RAM. The problem isn’t limited to the X1 Carbon or to Lenovo. If I wanted another ultraportable productivity laptop such as a Dell XPS 13 or an Asus ZenBook 14S, I’d have the same problem. 

“16GB and 32GB configurations address most workloads for the target market of these processors,” an Intel spokesman told me when I asked about Lunar Lake’s limited memory options. “We offer other products that support higher capacities of memory.”

Among the “other products,” Intel is referring to are the company’s Core Ultra (Series 1) “Meteor Lake” laptop processors, which first launched in December 2023. These are the last-gen CPUs that Lunar Lake is replacing and yet, because they don’t have the RAM built into the package, laptop vendors such as Lenovo and Dell can use them with 64GB. 

Another possibility for me and others who want 64GB laptops is to get one with a larger, more power-hungry processor than Lunar Lake inside. After all, if you’re doing as much intense work as I am, a higher-wattage CPU could make everything run more smoothly. All of the Lunar Lake processors announced this month are part of Intel’s U-series, which means that they only have 17 to 30-watt TDPs (thermal design power). 

Intel will inevitably release updated H-series processors, which have 45-watt or higher TDPs and are designed for workstations and gaming laptops. Those will likely have 64GB memory optionss or will continue to have the RAM on the motherboard. But laptops with new H-series CPUs probably won’t launch until January at the earliest and, even when they do, they will be thicker and heavier than the X1 Carbon. For example, Lenovo’s ThinkPad P14s, which has a Meteor Lake H-series Intel CPU, is 3.55 pounds and 0.73 inches thick versus 2.16 pounds and 0.59 inches thick for the X1 Carbon (Gen 13). 

I also could go with a current-gen laptop that has one of AMD’s new Ryzen AI 300 CPUs. For example, Lenovo is releasing a ThinkPad T14s with an AMD Ryzen AI chip inside and up to 64GB of RAM in October. It will weigh 2.86 pounds and be 0.66 inches thick when it launches in October. Some Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X-powered laptops, including the Dell XPS 13 (9345) with Snapdragon, are also available with 64GB of RAM. 

I will definitely consider switching to an AMD laptop such as the T14s to get my 64GB fix, but what I don’t want to do is go with a model that is much larger and heavier than my current, 2.5-pound, 0.59-inch thick X1 Carbon (Gen 6). Having a system that’s  this light is really helpful both when I’m commuting and when I’m traveling. If I’m not carrying lunch or a second laptop (usually a review unit) with me, my backpack feels empty with just the X1 Carbon in it. 

And, when I’m sitting on the couch at home, the X1 Carbon fits perfectly on my lap, without taking up a ton of space; it even fits nicely on an airplane tray table. If I’m doing more processing-intense work at home, I’ll be doing it on my powerful desktop PC, so I need my laptop to be light more than I need it to be powerful. And I really, really want the TrackPoint. That’s why I really want another X1 Carbon. 

Right now, if you shop at Lenovo.com, you can custom configure a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 12), the older model that Gen 13 is replacing, with 64GB. You can do the same with an XPS 13 on Dell.com. The catch is that you have to live with last year’s processors, which deliver a lot less performance (only 11 TOPS on the NPU) and power efficiency than Lunar Lake. 

A spokesman for Dell told me that the company believes that most users who want 64GB of RAM should consider larger and more power hungry laptops such as the Dell XPS 16, which uses H-series processors. Those who still want a thin-and-light laptop can either buy the Dell XPS with a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, which is available with 64GB of RAM, or a last-gen Intel Meteor Lake laptop. 

Intel won’t comment on future products, but we know that Panther Lake will succeed Lunar Lake sometime in 2025. It seems likely that the company will continue to build RAM into the CPU package, at least on SKUs that are designed for lightweight laptops. If the power efficiency gains that Intel touts from having RAM on the package are real, I imagine this trend is going to continue and perhaps expand to gaming and workstation-class laptops with the upcoming Arrow Lake mobile chips (H series) as well. Perhaps AMD and Qualcomm will follow suit, but for now, both of Intel’s competitors are leaving the RAM off of the processor package and therefore allowing OEMs to bundle 64GB of RAM.

If the trend continues and expands, OEMs will continue to be at the chipmaker’s mercy when it comes to choosing how much RAM they can offer in their laptops. DRAM vendors who make money on selling RAM to laptop vendors are also going to lose that business. And, laptops that allow you to upgrade your own RAM – already a rarity because many companies solder RAM to the motherboards – will be non-existent. Lenovo recently came out with a new version of the ThinkPad T14 that has user-replaceable DIMMs; Lunar Lake will make that impossible on the next generation of the product, at least if it uses Intel.

Today, if you want a lightweight laptop with 64GB of RAM, you need to either buy a last-gen, Meteor Lake-powered laptop while these models are still available or you’ll need to consider one with an AMD chip inside such as the upcoming ThinkPad T14s Gen 6. There’s nothing wrong with AMD’s processors, especially its new Ryzen AI 300 models, but a lot of popular ultraportables, including the X1 Carbon, are only sold with Intel inside. You could also consider a Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered laptop like the XPS 13, but it’s still early days for Windows on Arm and it’s possible there will be programs you want to run that either won’t run or will run in emulation mode with that chip. And, if you want a ThinkPad, you can’t get one with Snapdragon and 64GB of RAM.

As for me, I’ll be hoping for a Black Friday sale on the X1 Carbon (Gen 12), especially now that it is being displaced by a newer model. Or I’ll be checking the prices and performance on the ThinkPad T14s with AMD Ryzen AI 300 when it comes out. I’d love to have the faster speeds, better energy efficiency and lighter weight we’re likely to see in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 13) model, but I need 64GB of RAM or more. It’s a shame that I have to choose between performance and memory capacity, but Intel has put picky shoppers like me in this position.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

Ever since Intel made an initial announcement about “AI PCs” for Windows in October 2023, everyone’s been guessing about what’s involved in putting local AI horsepower on a properly-endowed laptop or desktop PC. Back in December, Intel began shipping its first “AI PCs,” a series of laptops with its Core Ultra “Meteor Lake CPUs,” the first to come with built-in Neural Processing Units (NPUs). And many consumers bought one, with hopes that Microsoft would add new local AI features that take advantage of this added processing power.

As of today’s (May 20) Microsoft event, the waiting and wondering are mostly over as the software giant unveiled a new class of computer, the Copilot+ PC, that will get a series of exciting and exclusive Windows AI features. Unfortunately, laptops with Intel Meteor Lake or AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs aren’t powerful enough to make the cut so, if you bought one hoping it would benefit from future Windows updates, you wasted your money. The first Copilot+ PCs will only come with Qualcomm Snapdragon X series processors.

For more detail on the event, check out our blow-by-blow coverage of this event. This live blog is my primary source for images, quotes and information as presented in this story.

Us versus Them (People and PCs, That Is…)

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella got up early on to talk about the new Copilot initiative, he put emphasis on moving past the cloud and onto the device where AI is concerned. Said he: we need to learn “how to build computers that understand us, instead of us having to understand computers.” FWIW, I agree. He continued: “I think we’re real close to [that] breakthrough.” 

I completely endorse the idea that computers should help bear the load of making themselves more useful, friendly and productivity-enhancing. It’s interesting to see this however, as a play to get users of all stripes, from hobbyists to IT professionals, data scientists, and software developers to pony up for new and more expensive PCs in the name of attaining a brave new nerdvana. It’s just a shame that those who buy an Intel-powered  “AI PC” today are left out of the party.

During today’s event, new Surface Laptop and Pro PC models carried some of the burden of demonstrating what kinds of benefits a Copilot+ PCs can deliver. MS EVP and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi described them as the “fastest Windows PCs” ever built, thanks in no small part to a re-architected Windows 11 OS (presumably, some preview version of the upcoming 24H2 release expected later this year). 

Indeed, the afore-linked Tom’s coverage asserts that “Mehdi…claimed that the PCs are 58 [percent] faster than Apple’s new[] MacBook Air with M3 processor.” That’s significant. A new Windows 11 feature called Recall can help users “find anything [they’ve] ever seen or done on [their] computer[s].” Recall works with voice prompts, too: a demo showed a voice search that produced “a chart with purple text … created earlier in the week” from a PowerPoint deck. Good stuff!

Copilot+ PCs that are powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X series CPUs are on the way from all the usual OEMs, including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo. And right now, those Snapdragon CPUs are the only ones which qualify a system for the Copilot+ PC branding and the added features that come with it. 

One big issue with using a PC that has a Snapdragon processor is that it requires Windows on Arm and there could be compatibility issues. However, a raft of enhancements to Windows on Arm will support Copilot+ PCs, including native Microsoft and 3rd-party apps for the Arm platform and a new Prism emulator that promises solid compatibility with x86 apps. Adobe is also bringing its Creative Suite to Windows on Arm.

These new Surface models are much faster than their predecessors, too: the Surface Laptop Copilot+ Pro is said to be 80% faster than the Surface Laptop 5). What’s more it can run three 4K monitors along with its built-in display (which has no notch) and promises the longest battery life for any Surface model, period. Similar stats apply to the Surface Pro Copilot+ PC model as well. Sounds pretty amazing, eh?

What About Existing “AI PCs?”

There’s at least one fly in the ointment, though. There are already so-called “AI PCs” in user’s hands. I’ve got one right next to me as I write this story: a pretty powerful Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i (Intel Core Ultra 9 185H with built-in ARC Meteor Lake GPU and built-in NPU, 32 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTC 4050,and more). The problem is that its built-in NPU fails to deliver the kind of performance (40+ TOPS or Trillion Operations Per Second) that Microsoft says is needed to meet Copilot+ PC hardware requirements. Intel’s Meteor lake chip, its current state-of-the-art for laptops, can only hit about 10 TOPS, but next-gen Lunar Lake processors could meet the requirement. 

When I checked this item on the Lenovo website at the end of April it came with an online price tag of just over $2,100. But when I tried to visit its link just now, it’s showing “out of stock.” My best guess is that Lenovo probably won’t build any more. Instead, it will probably wait to get the parts it needs to put valid Copilot+ PC units together, then resume shipping when those are in hand.

But gosh, people who’ve already paid good money for early models of AI PCs may feel left behind in the wake of these now-clarified hardware requirements. The real gotcha comes from the CPU and NPU requirements which exceed currently available laptops like the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i. Qualcomm-powered laptops are probably coming soon, but Intel and AMD-powered competitors may take a while to hit store shelves. If history is any guide, that probably means October or November, once Windows 11 24H2 is in general distribution and suitable hardware to support Copilot+PC requirements is up for sale.

The real question has to be: Is it worth spending US $1,500 or more for a new Copilot+ PC to take advantage of its AI capabilities? Based on Microsoft’s discussion of its new Surface models with Copilot+PC capability, there’s likely to be plenty of pure performance to help justify the cost. The AI features that Copilot will bring to Windows 11 also appear to have at least great potential value. 

Thus, the answer for those already planning a hardware refresh, or buying a new PC in the right timeframe is probably an emphatic “Yes!” But for those who’ve just recently bought what they thought was a state-of-the-art PC that doesn’t meet Copilot+PC hardware requirements that answer is somewhere between “Ouch!” and “No!”

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

Did you know that pigs eat humans “far more often than people expect?” If not, surely you must have heard the important, breaking news that a priest “died” in 2016, went to Hell briefly and returned to inform the rest of us that demons like to play Rhianna’s Umbrella song over and over again. If you aren’t aware of these important news stories then maybe you haven’t been spending enough time using Windows’ search box and widgets section, which at least for me, are filled to the brim with tabloid trash headlines.

The stories come courtesy of Microsoft’s MSN content network, which syndicates content from hundreds of web publishers: some reputable, some less so. Full disclosure: Our parent company, Future Plc, has a syndication agreement with MSN and many of its sites, including Tom’s Hardware, occasionally have articles appear on the network. What’s problematic here, though, is not that MSN syndicates content but that it often pushes the equivalent of the Weekly World News table of contents right into the Windows operating system where it can be hard to avoid. 

If you go to the search box in Windows 11 or 10 and click on it, likely with the intent of searching for an app or document on your local drive(s), you are presented with a slew of news headlines. Depending on who you are (and perhaps what you’ve clicked before), it can feel like you’re looking at the magazine rack in a supermarket checkout line. 

You get even more headlines, with larger photos and more details, if you choose to click on (or possibly just hover over) the weather icon which lives on the left or right side of your taskbar. I just wanted the full forecast today when I clicked, but instead I was presented with this key headline: “Horror as Man Reveals Father-in-Law's Browser History at Family Gathering.”

Don’t get me wrong: I love reading about the 26 year old who spent $50K to look like an alien (in 2017, but covered as news last week) or the 9-foot “man-eating” alligator who came to someone’s door as much as the next person. But that kind of information shouldn’t be delivered as part of my operating system; I can get it on a website or on social media. 

Windows is the most popular operating system in the world and people rely on it to get things done. Pumping embarrassing, low-quality news right into utilities like the search box is an unwelcome distraction, especially for someone who is easily distracted by it. You can turn off the search box’s “search highlights,” but they are enabled by default and you can’t remove all of the headlines from the weather widget. You can turn off the widget entirely, but then you won't get the temperature and precipitation right on your taskbar.

 Can Be Misleading 

A couple of weeks ago, I saw something in my Windows search box that was a lot worse than distracting: it was a series of dangerous conspiracy theories about former NIH Director Dr. Anthony Fauci. I’m not here to debate Dr. Fauci’s contributions and I don’t think Windows search box should be either.

On March 9th, a headline in the search box’s “trending news from the web” section had a picture of Fauci with the headline “Hid the COVID truth.” However, when I clicked through to the actual story, its own headline was much less accusatory and read “Fauci Says He's Always Been 'Honest' as COVID Origins Questions Raised.” So, while the headline itself lent the impression that Dr. Fauci was caught lying, the article it linked to merely pointed out that Fauci was subject to criticism from politicians who think that he’s not telling the truth. That’s a big difference. 

I wrote in to a Microsoft PR about this to ask how it happened and, perhaps it was my complaint or perhaps it was dumb luck, but I haven’t seen any more COVID conspiracy theory articles in my feed since then. However, Windows is still bombarding me (and probably you too) with garbage content that would make a supermarket tabloid blush.

Your feed of content will vary based on what you’ve clicked on and what Microsoft knows about you and your preferences. For some folks I spoke with, the content is boring and unnecessary but not necessarily worthy of the National Enquirer. Others get their own set of trash. For example, Managing Editor Matt Safford got “I’m a doomsday prepper with an outhouse full of nuclear war supplies” as one of his recommended articles recently.

The article about Hell keeps popping in my feeds, more than a month after the first time I saw it. I think that’s because someone – likely the author – keeps changing the dateline to make it appear as if it’s brand new. It’s originally from Popular Mechanics, which I always thought was above this kind of thing, but is the laziest form of non-journalism I’ve seen in a while. Apparently someone put up a TikTok video claiming that they had been to Hell and the author at Popular Mechanics thought that writing about some random person posting an outrageous TikTok would be a good idea.

All of these low-quality articles also appear on MSN.com and, by default, on the new tab screen in Microsoft Edge. We expect to see garbage content or promotions for it on social media or on the web. But when it’s pumped right into the UI of your operating system, that’s a bridge too far.

Microsoft should either disable these distracting headlines by default or stop charging for its operating system and call it “free with ads.” After all, the company wants PC builders to pay a whopping $139 for a Windows 11 Home license, but then it tries to make money off of those same users by getting them to click on low-quality MSN content that makes money from advertising.  Of course, you can also find ways right now to get Windows 11 for free or cheap.

Both Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a “Focus Assist” mode, but even with that on, the OS is trying to drive users down a rabbit hole of silliness. While writing this article, I was distracted several times, but the good news is that now I know “the scary truth about cutting mold off your bread.”

How to Stop Distracting Headlines in Windows

The good news is that you can, to an extent, turn off the news headlines in Windows. By “to an extent,” I mean that you can turn them off in the search box and the new tab page in Edge, but you can only block particular news sources in the widget board or you can get rid of the weather icon altogether. However, I like seeing the local temperature in my taskbar.

Disable Search Highlights (From Search Box)

The "Search Highlights" are the MSN promos you get when you first click on the search box and haven't even searched for anything. The headlines aren't always as distracting here as in the widgets. When I took the screenshot below, it was pushing Ireland tourism links.

In Windows 10, you can disable Search Highlights by right clicking on the search box and unchecking Search -> Show Search Highlights.

In WIndows 11, navigate to the Search permissions menu in Settings, which you can do by searching for it. Then toggle “Show search highlights” to off under “More settings.”

Limit Distractions in the Widgets Board

The widgets board is the set of headlines and other stuff you get when you click on or hover over the weather icon on your taskbar. In Windows 11, by default, just moving your pointer over the icon,  you see the board and it takes up a lot of screen real estate.

You can disable the widget board entirely, but then you lose the weather icon, which also sometimes shows stock or traffic info in your taskbar.  

You can disable the widgets by right clicking on the taskbar and selecting Taskbar settings. In Windows 10, you can set "show news and interests" to off. In Windows 11, you set "widgets" to off.

If you just want to limit the amount of trashy or misleading headlines on the widgets board, you can do that by clicking the "..." menu on a story block and selecting "Hide stories from ..." or "Fewer stories like this." If you hide stories from an annoying publication, you won't get headlines from that particular source again.

In an ideal world, though, Microsoft would allow you to disable all news headlines and just have the weather forecast.

Remove News from New Tabs in Edge

If you use Edge browser, you will notice that, by default, you get a slew of distracting headlines any time you open a blank new tab. However, it's easy to get rid of all of the headlines and have nothing more than nature scene wallpaper and a search box on blank tabs.

Just click the settings gear in the upper right corner and then select "Content Off"  under the content menu.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team. 

Can an AI help you learn how to perform important tech tasks such as building a PC? With all the hype around generative AI – using artificial intelligence to create new written or visual content – I wanted to find out. The results were eye-opening – and pin-bending.

With the launch of ChatGPT, a free chatbot that uses OpenAI’s impressive GPT-3 language model, anyone can request and, in seconds, get a computer-written article on just about any topic. The main limitation is that GPT-3 is only trained on data going back to 2021, so it won’t be able to write about current events. Oh, and it can also be horribly and dangerously wrong, introducing factual errors that aren’t obvious to someone who isn’t familiar with the topic at hand. 

Last week, we found out that a couple of sites, CNET and Bankrate, have been publishing AI-generated personal finance articles, though it’s unclear whether they are using GPT-3 or a different model to perform the task. These early attempts have been a mixed bag at best for readers; CNET had to issue some corrections after readers discovered some embarrassing factual errors. 

We have no plans to use AI to write our articles on Tom’s Hardware, because we have way too much respect for both our audience and ourselves to turn the keys over to a bot. However, for science, I wanted to see just how close the technology is to mimicking a competent tech writer. So I asked ChatGPT to “write an article on how to build a PC.” 

Here’s what I got back, word-for-word:

Building a PC can seem daunting, but with the right tools and knowledge it can be a fun and rewarding experience. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you build your own PC.

1. Gather your tools and components. You will need a screwdriver, thermal paste, and any other necessary tools that may come with your components. You will also need to purchase all the components for your PC, including the CPU, motherboard, RAM, storage, power supply, and case.

2. Assemble the CPU and cooler. Start by installing the CPU into the socket on the motherboard. Make sure it is properly aligned and gently press down until it clicks into place. Next, apply a small amount of thermal paste to the top of the CPU. Carefully place the cooler onto the CPU, making sure it is properly aligned, and secure it into place with the mounting bracket.

3. Install the RAM. Locate the RAM slots on the motherboard and press down on the tabs on either side of the slot to open it. Carefully insert the RAM into the slot, making sure it is properly aligned, and press down firmly until the tabs click back into place.

4. Install the motherboard into the case. Place the motherboard into the case and align it with the standoffs. Carefully screw the motherboard into place using the screws provided.

5. Install the power supply. Locate the power supply mount in the case and slide the power supply into place. Secure it with the screws provided.

6. Install storage and any additional components. This includes hard drives, SSDs, and any additional components you may have.

7. Connect the power supply cables. Connect the 24-pin ATX main power cable and 4/8-pin ATX 12V power cable to the motherboard. Connect the power cables for any additional components such as hard drives and SSDs.

8. Connect all the peripherals. Connect your keyboard, mouse, and monitor to the appropriate ports on the motherboard.

9. Power on the PC and test it. Press the power button and make sure the PC boots up and all components are functioning properly.

Building a PC can be a fun and rewarding experience, and it allows you to customize and upgrade your computer to your specific needs. With this guide and a little bit of patience, you'll be able to build your very own PC in no time!

At first blush, this copy doesn’t look that bad. It’s grammatically correct, formatted in a scannable way and looks like a human could have written it. But if you followed this advice, you’d end up with a non-working computer, because it’s missing key details that you really need in order to build a PC without breaking any parts.

 Devil in the Details

The instructions on how to place the CPU into the motherboard illustrate everything that is wrong here. 

“Start by installing the CPU into the socket on the motherboard. Make sure it is properly aligned and gently press down until it clicks into place.”

There’s some critical information missing here. As anyone who has built a PC in the past several years knows, CPU sockets have retaining arms that you must lift before placing the processor. If you attempt to “gently press down” without lifting that arm, you’ll bend the pins (if your processor has pins). Most motherboards come with a piece of protective plastic covering the socket that you need to take out. And most processors have a triangle symbol in one corner that you must match up with a triangle on the socket to make sure the chip is positioned correctly.

When installing AMD chips or Intel chips, the socket could look slightly different, but ChatGPT doesn’t mention either vendor. Similarly, some chips such as the Ryzen 7000 series have contact pads instead of pins on the bottom (with the pins in the socket), but the pins or lack thereof aren’t mentioned.

If we want to give ChatGPT’s text a very generous reading, we can interpret “make sure it is properly aligned” as implying that you should lift the retention arm, remove any slot covers and align the arrow on the chip with the board. But actual readers wouldn’t assume any of those things.

Most importantly, if you attempt to “press down” on a CPU until it clicks, you could very easily break it or the socket. An experienced PC builder would know all of these details, but a newbie — the target audience for a story like this — would not. If they followed this step to the letter, they could destroy their chip or their board (or both).

The CPU installation step is just the most egregious example of the AI assuming that the reader already knows what it's talking about and doesn’t need the fine details. It also assumes that the reader knows how to open and close the chassis, how to distinguish among and attach various cables and that they need to install an OS.

 No Acknowledgement of Variations

Perhaps, the most glaring problem with ChatGPT’s PC building instructions is the lack of any step that involves installing a graphics card. To be fair to the bot, it’s always possible that the person building the PC is going with an integrated GPU. 

However, it’s quite likely that a PC builder would want discrete graphics and the instructions don’t even acknowledge this possibility. Step 6 says to “install storage and any additional components,” but I doubt most readers would get what they need from assuming that a GPU is one of the unnamed “additional components.” In our Tom’s Hardware tutorial on how to build a PC, we have an optional step on inserting a graphics card.

The step on installing RAM also makes a key assumption. “Locate the RAM slots on the motherboard and press down on the tabs on either side of the slot to open it,” the AI writes. However, many motherboards now just have a tab on one side rather than two. And readers might be helped if they knew that RAM modules have a notch on the bottom that aligns with a hump in the slot so you can’t put them in backwards.

The step on installing a cooler also doesn’t acknowledge that the steps will vary greatly depending on whether you are using an air cooler, an AIO or something else. It just says “carefully place the cooler onto the CPU, making sure it is properly aligned, and secure it into place with the mounting bracket.” Not all coolers have the same way of mounting. 

It’s fair to say that, if you ask ChatGPT or another AI for a more specific PC build story, you’ll get instructions that are a little more targeted. My colleagues asked ChatGPT how to build a computer with a Core i9-11900K, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD and an RTX 2070 GPU and the result had a step which said, “Install the graphics card (Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070) into an available slot on the motherboard.” That's better, except you should use the top PCIe slot, not just any available slot.

The new text doesn’t tell you to push your CPU down until it clicks, but it still lacks key details you’d need about installing the processor, RAM and even the graphics card. 

More importantly, if we wanted to use an AI to write an article that answers a relatively broad question like “how do I build a PC,” we need it to write about the fact that you might have an AMD or Intel CPU, you might have discrete graphics (or not), and you might be using a 2.5-inch SATA drive or an M.2 NVMe SSD. The details matter a lot.

 What’s Missing: Human Experience and Empathy

The biggest problem with ChatGPT’s advice is that the AI does not have the ability to put itself in the readers’ shoes and imagine itself going through the steps it prescribes. Every time I write an article — particularly a how-to — I start by asking myself, “Who is this for and what should I assume that they know before reading this?” 

In the case of a PC building tutorial, I would assume that my target audience is made up of folks who have used computers and are familiar with what the main parts are (if they don’t know what a CPU is, then this task is too advanced for them). But I would not assume that they have ever opened up a computer and installed its components.

Then, I’d think about not only what task you need to accomplish for each step, but the tips and tricks I use to accomplish that task when I perform it. For example, I like to plug in my motherboard and CPU ATX power cables before I install my cooler or case fans, because I have found that the fans make it hard for me to access the power connectors with my thick fingers. An AI wouldn’t know that.

Perhaps more importantly, if you charge a human editor with editing / fact-checking an AI’s article, the human editor is going to miss these omissions, unless they are experts themselves. If I handed the article above to an editor who had never built a PC, they might think it was fine and approve it for publishing. And if the human editor is an expert and they have to do a ton of rewriting to make the AI’s article passable, what is the point of having an AI write an article in the first place?

I have no doubt that an AI like ChatGPT could eventually get better at anticipating a reader’s needs and writing articles to target those needs. I also have no doubt that machine learning can be used effectively today for other tasks, such as research. However, we have a long way to go before we can trust an AI to offer advice that is as helpful as what you’d get from a human who has lived experience, judgment and empathy.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team. 

Access to high-speed internet at home is practically a necessity these days. That need became even more apparent during the COVID-19 lockdowns, which forced families to work and learn from home. While most children have gone back to in-person learning, many adults have remained in work-from-home mode with no plans to change. Throw in our copious consumption of streaming TV services, large downloads for operating system updates, PC and console games, apps, etc., and it's clear that having a fast and stable internet connection is a high priority for many people.

Unfortunately, for many Americans, actual choices in high-speed internet carriers for your home are often extremely limited.

Why I Decided to Drop Spectrum Internet

I’ve been a long-time Spectrum Internet customer, even when it was previously known as Time Warner Cable. But having Spectrum internet isn’t by choice; it has long been the only option I have living in rural Garner, NC, situated just southeast of Raleigh. While AT&T Fiber and Google Fiber are available within 20 miles of my address, neither services my neighborhood. Given the regional internet monopolies around the country, Spectrum is still my only choice for high-speed cable/fiber internet.

But why did I decide to give Spectrum the boot? I was sick of having to jump through hoops yearly to keep my current service at a reasonable price. I’ve been paying $69.99 for 400/20 internet, but every year Spectrum jacks the rate to $84.99. Then I have to call their customer service line and waste 45 mins of my day to get them to reduce the rate back to $69.99. Sure, it’s a once-a-year thing, but I’ve been looking for an out.

A friend, who also just so happens to be stuck with Spectrum, asked me about other ISP options when it dawned on me that T-Mobile offers Home Internet at $50/month. I asked her to see if her address was eligible for service, and it was. She decided to take T-Mobile up on their two-week free trial offer and signed up for service.

At that moment, I asked myself: Could I also potentially ditch spectrum and go with a 5G wireless service as my primary link for home internet?

What is T-Mobile Home Internet?

T-Mobile Home Internet provides internet service to your home using a 5G gateway using T-Mobile's cellular network. The 5G gateway contains a 4G/5G modem that connects to T-Mobile's cellular network and combines a Wi-Fi 6 router for linking up all your devices. T-Mobile only offers its Home Internet service in areas with excellent coverage (for obvious reasons). And even then, not all addresses are serviced, based on network capacity.

T-Mobile Home Internet costs $50 per month when you sign up for Autopay ($55/month without Autopay), including all taxes and fees. If you are an existing T-Mobile Magenta Max mobile customer, your monthly price drops to just $30/month with Autopay. The 5G gateway is provided free, so there is no monthly equipment (modem) fee to pay (as is often the case with fixed-line providers like Spectrum and Comcast), and there are no long-term contracts to sign.

The goodies don't stop there. T-Mobile currently offers home internet customers 50% off YouTube TV for a year, Paramount+ free for a year, and Philo TV for $15/month (versus the standard rate of $25/month). If that wasn't enough, new signups get an Amazon Echo Show 5 (second generation) for free.

According to the company, you can expect "typical" download speeds of between 33 Mbps to 182 Mbps and upload speeds ranging from 6 Mbps to 23 Mbps. However, as you see below, actual speeds can be much higher, rivaling legacy cable companies. The other big thing that most people would probably want to know is the current situation with data caps, given that this service works on T-Mobile's cellular network. Surprisingly, the answer is that there are no data caps. While Comcast and Spectrum have implemented data caps on their fixed-line customers in multiple U.S. markets, T-Mobile thankfully eschews the practice–at least for now.

As for overall performance, T-Mobile provides the following disclaimer:

Speeds can vary depending on location, signal strength and availability, time of day, and other factors. Our speed projections are based on our analysis of internal and third-party data.

T-Mobile says its home internet service is available to 30 million Americans.

Signing up for T-Mobile Home Internet

Getting signed up for service was relatively easy. First, I clicked this T-Mobile link to enter my phone number and see if my home address was eligible. Once eligibility was confirmed, I was able to chat with a representative who asked me a few questions and sent me several secure links to enter my name, address, billing information, and social security number (to perform a credit check for the new hardware that would be sent to me).

After about 10 minutes, the signup process was complete, and I was informed that the 5G gateway would arrive within two business days. On the second business day, the 5G gateway arrived as promised via UPS, and I was eager to test it out.

First Impressions and Setup

After removing the 5G gateway from the box, I was struck by its size. It measures 8.5 inches tall and is silver in color. It’s shaped like a cylinder, reminding me of the first-generation Amazon Echo. On the back of the device, you’ll find a power port, a power button, a reset button, a USB-C port (which worked just fine charging my smartphone), a phone jack and two Ethernet ports. Unfortunately, compared to modern wireless routers, T-Mobile’s 5G gateway is lacking in port selection. So you may want to pick up one of the best network switches we’ve tested.

You’ll find a small, circular touch display on the top of the device. You can swipe across the screen to see your current signal strength, messages from T-Mobile, the number of connected devices, and battery status. Yes, the 5G gateway has an integrated battery, and it will continue to function if the power plug is pulled (this feature should come in handy during power outages).

To set up the gateway, you must first download the T-Mobile Internet app and install it on a smartphone. I then plugged the gateway into the wall in my office on the second floor of my house and powered it up. It booted up, performed a quick software update, then confirmed signal strength of three out of five bars. The app itself is very basic, with few controls for the router. You can see network status, signal strength, connected devices, change the SSID/passcode, and adjust the frequency bands. That’s about it. There are no parental controls, advanced wireless controls, access controls, MAC filtering, or anything like that. This is just a barebones setup that should work fine for most households. Power users will likely want to look elsewhere or simply connect their existing router to the 5G gateway.

At first, I was concerned about the signal strength, as I had the gateway situated on top of a bookshelf next to my cable modem, which isn’t near a window (T-Mobile suggests placing the gateway near a window for the best signal). I then stuck it near a window in my office and was greeted with the same three bars. I next took the 5G gateway downstairs on the opposite side of the house and placed it near a window. I still obtained three bars. At that point, I decided to just put it in the original location near the cable modem and proceed with the setup. After the initial setup, signal strength has hovered between three bars and four bars.

Upon opening the T-Mobile Internet app, I was asked to scan the QR code on the bottom of the gateway to expedite setup. This prepopulated the SSID and passcode, then began communicating with the gateway and the T-Mobile network for activation. After about 30 seconds, the setup process was complete, and I was ready to go.

At any given time, we have 40+ Wi-Fi devices connected to our wireless router (a first-generation Netgear Orbi RBR50 Wi-Fi 5 mesh router with two satellites). We're talking multiple laptops, smartphones, tablets, Smart TVs, Amazon Echo speakers, and about a dozen Kasa smart light switches, light bulbs and power outlets. Given the sheer number of Wi-Fi devices in my home, I opted to piggyback my Orbi off the 5G gateway to make things simple (granted, I could have just changed the SSID and password on the 5G gateway to match my Orbi, but I didn’t want to drop coverage that my router and two satellites provide through the whole house and outdoors).

Testing Performance

I first connected just my iPhone to the 5G gateway over Wi-Fi and performed a Speedtest. To my amazement, I registered download speeds exceeding 470 Mbps, while uploads came in at nearly 72 Mbps.

For reference, my Spectrum internet connection gives me 430 Mbps to 450 Mbps and tops out at around 21 Mbps for uploads. Subsequent tests have shown the 5G gateway hitting peak download speeds of 557.37 Mbps from my MacBook Pro (connected directly to the 5G gateway) around 3 p.m., which is unheard of for home internet out here in the sticks.

For a worst-case scenario, I tested again around 9:00 p.m. ET, and the 5G gateway's speeds dropped to around 400 Mbps for downloads and 40 Mbps for uploads. That's a steep drop-off, but still, plenty of throughput for our needs.

I next performed the same tests with my Orbi router plugged in via one of the 5G gateway’s two Ethernet ports. The download and upload speeds were unaffected, so I stuck with that setup.

I’m not a big gamer, so I’m primarily concerned with having a fast and stable internet connection 24-7-365. In the days that I’ve been testing T-Mobile’s Home Internet service, it’s been flawless. I haven’t experienced any service interruptions or significant speed shortfalls. The 5G gateway has remained slightly lukewarm to the touch, which cooler than the toasty Arris Surfboard SB6183 cable modem I’ve been using for years.

The 5G hotspot can simultaneously handle multiple Smart TVs streaming, my daily conference calls, my large file downloads, and just about anything else I throw at it.

Wrap-up

I went into this test a little skeptical of using a cellular-based internet service for my home internet, but those worries never came to fruition. Signing up for T-Mobile Home Internet was easy, the setup process with the app was minimalistic with little room for error, and the actual internet service has been rock solid. Throw in the fact that I’m saving $20 per month ($240/year), and the switch has been a no-brainer for our family.

About the hardest part of this whole process will likely be the phone call that I will need to make to Spectrum’s customer retention department to tell them that I’m canceling my existing service.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

Traditionally, we think of Windows as the operating system for the masses and that each new version is a no-brainer upgrade, even for those with older PCs. Right now, after six years on the market, Windows 10 makes up 78 percent of all Windows installs with Windows 7, which launched in 2009 (12 years ago!) taking second place at 16 percent. Windows 10 grew this fast because there was absolutely no reason not to upgrade. It works on every PC that runs Windows 7 or 8, it’s free (see how to get Windows 10 for free or cheap) and it has a slew of new features. 

Microsoft didn’t make Windows 10 a free and easy upgrade just to be kind. The company wants to spend its time supporting the latest OS and it wants people using features like the Microsoft Store and Edge browser. It wants developers using its latest SDK to make groundbreaking apps that help the platform grow.

But Windows 11 changes all that, leaving a significant number of Windows 10 computers -- even high-end workstations from just three years ago and possibly current Surface Studio  -- out in the cold, because they won’t meet the minimum requirements, which have changed significantly for the first time since Windows 7 launched in 2009. 

To be fair, these new requirements, particularly requiring TPM 2.0 functionality (more on that below) and DX12 GPUs, are designed to provide a higher minimum baseline of security and performance than we’ve seen before. And Microsoft even seems like it’s expecting a significant number of users to stay on the current OS, having recently announced that it plans to support Windows 10 through 2025.

Update (6/26): Since we originally published this article on Friday morning, the situation has gotten more opaque as Microsoft spokespeople have said that, if a CPU is not on the company's compatibility lists, it may not work with the final release of Windows 11, even if it otherwise meets standards. Also, the company edited a document which had said that TPM 1.2, rather than the newer TPM 2.0 would be acceptable so that now only TPM 2.0 is mentioned.

This is a sea change for Microsoft, because the company has previously prioritized new OS adoption over most else. In fact, the company was likely disappointed when it took two years longer than expected to reach 1 billion active monthly devices for Windows 10. With Windows 11, it’s going to take a lot longer and, as with Android devices, there’s likely to be more computers running older operating systems than the latest one for years and years to come. That’s bad news for users and developers. 

These new minimum requirements don’t look too strenuous at first glance. According to Stephen Baker, vice president at analyst firm NPD, less than 4% of PCs sold in the last year have storage drives that were 64GB or smaller and the amount of systems with less than 4GB was “inconsequential.” In other words, almost all 2020-era new PCs would fit the bill, even if they don't have one of the best SSDs.

However, most people don’t buy a new PC every year. In fact, according to Baker, the average replacement cycle for computers is 4 to 5 years. And I’m sure we all know people or have computers in our homes that are older than that. 

You might think that the only computers affected by these changes are netbooks or sub-$200 laptops like the Dell Inspiron 3000 series (circa 2018) and Amazon VivoBooks, some of which had 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage quite recently. However, even a major workstation CPU that came out in 2018 will likely not be able to run Windows 11 and it's quite possible that any PC processor older than 8th Gen Core Intel or AMD Ryzen 2000 series will not be supported in the final release.

For example, Intel’s Xeon W-3175X, which launched in Q4 of 2018 for $2999 and sports 16 cores, drops into a platform that does not come with built-in TPM support. You can purchase a motherboard that has a TPM header and add a TPM chip after the fact, but many systems don’t have this by default. It’s hard to argue that a massive HEDT (high end desktop) system from less than three years ago should not be able to run Windows 11.

 TPM: A Deal Killer for Some 

The problem for most users is not the RAM, storage or GPU requirements, but the need for TPM 2.0, a feature most consumers don’t even know about that isn’t present on many computers from just a few years ago and is disabled on a lot of current-generation systems too.

A Trusted Platform Module (TPM) provides a secure way to store encryption keys, certificates and other sensitive data in hardware. For example, if you use Bitlocker encryption, TPM is what prevents someone from being able to just remove your hard drive, stick it in another computer and read the data.  

In a blog post, Microsoft explained its rationale for the TPM requirement saying:

“PCs of the future need this modern hardware root-of-trust to help protect from both common and sophisticated attacks like ransomware and more sophisticated attacks from nation-states. Requiring the TPM 2.0 elevates the standard for hardware security by requiring that built-in root-of-trust.” 

And, to be fair, TPM 2.0 is hardly brand new. Starting in 2016, Microsoft required that “all new device models, lines or series” of devices come with TPM 2.0 implemented and enabled by default. However, clearly, that only applied to the company’s partners making OEM laptops and desktops, because many current motherboards come with TPM disabled by default and some recent high-end chips don’t have it on board. The good news is that, if you have a processor from the last three to five years, there’s a good chance you can enable TPM in the UEFI BIOS and solve this problem.

CPU Limits 

Though it seems likely that preview builds of Windows 11 will install on any machine that meets the on-paper requirements of TPM 2.0 with secure boot, a 1-GHz 64-bit dual-core CPU, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage space, Microsoft has hinted that any processor that's older than an 8th Gen Intel Core series CPU or AMD Ryzen 2000 chip may be left out in the cold.

Microsoft posted official AMD and Intel CPU compatibility lists, which omit processors that came out as recently as 2017 and are still actively sold. For example, Microsoft's own Surface Studio 2, which can cost up to $5,000 and is still made and sold, tops out with a 7th Gen,  Core i7-7820HQ CPU. While it's possible that these compatibility lists aren't the final word for when Windows 11 launches, a company exec has strongly implied that they are.

Speaking on Twitter,  Microsoft VP Steve Dispensa wrote that "Windows 11 is only supported on the CPU list I posted above. There are more requirements than just TPM 2.0 support (and all supported chipsets should have TPM 2.0, so that's not generally a blocking requirement)."

Even if earlier CPUs would work, there a lot of PCs on the borderline here that don’t have TPM capability. Senior Writer Michelle Ehrhardt reports that her Core i7-6700K that she bought in 2016 did not have a TPM option in the motherboard BIOS so she’s probably out of luck. Some motherboards offer the ability to add a physical TPM module as an upgrade but who is going to do that?

Also note that there will be no more 32-bit Windows. So, if you have an old netbook with a 32-bit processor, there is no way it will run Windows 11.

 Incompatible GPUs 

Where Windows 10 required only DirectX 9 support, Windows 11 demands that your GPU handle DirectX 12. DirectX 9 is a standard that goes all the way back to 2002 when it debuted on Windows 98, Me and XP, but version 12 is only from 2015. 

Now, to be fair, Nvidia GPUs as old as the Fermi (GTX 400), AMD chips as old as Graphics Core Next (Radeon 7000) and integrated Intel graphics going back all the way to Haswell (2013) work with DirectX 12. But if you were thinking of throwing Windows 11 on your Viliv N5 UMPC, a personal favorite of mine which runs on a low-power Atom processor from 2010, you’re out of luck. 

Bifurcated Windows  

At some point it was inevitable that Microsoft would stop supporting older hardware. However, even if the CPU compatibility list grows to include older models, the TPM requirement by itself may force a lot of people with even four year old PCs to either stick with Windows 10 or upgrade to new computers.

The cynic in me says that Microsoft and OEMs are looking for reasons to drive a new PC upgrade cycle. But it’s also inevitable that, to guarantee a decent user experience with graphical features like rounded edges and translucent window widgets or modern security features like secure boot, you need to up your requirements. Just don’t expect to see Windows 11 hit 1 billion active devices any time soon. 

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team. 

Despite tariffs and other industry challenges, the price of both SSDs and DDR4 RAM has fallen a great deal this year, but if you’re configuring a laptop or prebuilt desktop, you wouldn’t notice. In their never-ending quest for profits, PC vendors are charging hundreds of dollars for memory and storage upgrades that should only add a small amount to the cost. The good news is that, if you’re smart, you don’t have to pay the premium.

Many Tom’s Hardware readers prefer to build their own desktops and the outrageous cost of storage and RAM on prebuilt desktops is one reason why. For one example of many, let’s take Alienware’s popular Aurora Gaming Desktop. At press time, Dell.com was selling the base model for $799 with just 8GB of 2666 MHz DDR4 RAM and a 1TB hard drive. If you’re buying the Aurora and want to customize it with 32GB of high-speed, 2,933 MHz XMP RAM, which we like, you’ll pay a whopping $500 extra. It’s only $300 extra if you opt for the 2,666 MHz speed. A more modest upgrade to 16GB of low-speed RAM is $100, but you’ll pay $200 to get that at the preferred 2,933 MHz speed.

Huge Markups on Desktops

On Amazon.com, you can currently get a 32GB kit of HyperX branded RAM, the same brand Alienware uses, for just $162 with a 3,000 MHz speed and XMP support (we don’t know if the timings are exactly the same because Alienware doesn’t list them). If you don’t have your heart set on the HyperX brand, our favorite 32GB kit, the Patriot Viper SteelSeries, is available for just $112 right now. Even if you don’t consider the fact that the 8GB stick of RAM you are upgrading from is worth $30, Alienware is charging 3 to 4x what you would pay on the open market.  The markup on 16GB isn’t as bad, as dual-channel kits go for anywhere from $60 to $80 on Amazon for 3,000 MHz and 2,666 MHz kits cost about the same.

The battle of SSDs versus hard drives has long since been won by solid-state storage. There’s no good reason, in 2019, to have your boot drive be an old-school, spinning platter. If you want to ditch the Aurora base config’s 1TB hard drive for a 1TB M.2 PCIe SSD, you’ll pay $350 extra. The 1TB Adata XPG SX8200 Pro, which tops our list of best SSDs, is currently just $127 while you can often find a 1TB Intel 660p on sale often for less than $100-. We also shouldn’t forget the $40 value of the 1TB hard drive it’s replacing. 

I’m not trying to pick on Alienware here. HP.com lets you custom configure HP Obelisk desktop and charges $350 to go up from 8GB of 2,666 MHz RAM to 32GB of 2,666 MHz RAM, but it doesn’t offer a 2,933 RAM option. The company charges a lesser $175 to move up from a 1TB hard drive to a 1TB SSD. But that’s still a steep price, given that the retail price differences between a 1TB hard drive and a 1TB SSD is now often as little as $60-$70.

GPU and CPU Upgrades: Not Bad

Depending on which upgrade you choose, configuring with a faster processor or GPU, may not carry a huge markup. Alienware charges only $150 extra to move from an Nvidia GTX 1660 card to an RTX 2060 Super, which is roughly the price difference between these two cards on the aftermarket. The same is true about the $150 it costs to go from a Core i5-9400 CPU to a Core i7-9700 processor. HP charges $210 to move from GTX 1660 to RTX 2060 Super on the Obelisk, which is a markup, but not a crazy one.

Even Worse: Laptop Gouging

The memory and storage gouging problem is even worse on laptops, because many of them aren’t user upgradeable. If you shop at Apple.com, you’ll pay an extra $400 to go from 16 to 32GB of RAM on a MacBook Pro 13-inch and another $400 to step up from 256GB to 1TB of SSD storage and there’s no way to upgrade them yourself. Apple solders both the RAM and storage to the motherboard, part of what enables its thin design, so the company does have to retool the motherboard to make certain configurations.

Microsoft is the biggest storage gouger I’ve ever seen recently, charging $300 to move up from a 128GB Surface Laptop 3, which is so low-capacity nobody should buy it, to a 256GB model. You can upgrade the SSD on a Surface Laptop 3, but you’ll likely void the warranty and definitely have to remove the rubber feet (which may not easily glue back on). It’s far easier, however, on a Surface Pro X, which opens up with a SIM card removal tool.

If you buy a ThinkPad X1 Carbon from Lenovo.com, you’ll pay $591 to go up from a 256GB SSD to a 1TB model. But on the bright side, that has user-upgradeable storage so you can spend $120 on an aftermarket drive and clone your OS from smaller drive. However, its RAM, like that on the Surface Laptop 3 is soldered to the motherboard.

Because they generally have larger chassis, most gaming laptops can have their RAM and storage upgraded. Every single model on our list of best gaming laptops is storage-upgradeable and only one, the Alienware m15, isn’t RAM-upgradable.

Why They Gouge

Why do PC vendors overcharge you for storage and memory? The simple answer is “to make more money,” but the more-detailed reason is that they are trying to improve margins by charging more to tech-savvy buyers.

“Lower priced products have lower margins (typically) so the OEM has to make up that cost somewhere,” said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD. “Given that buy up buyers are more concerned with configuration than price, those products might very well have higher margins,” he added.

How to Avoid Gouging

Though PC vendors would love to charge you 400 percent more than the going retail rate for storage or RAM, there are a few possible ways to save yourself the money.

1. Consider margins below 50 percent: All things being close to equal, you’re better off getting the upgrades at the time you buy: they’re covered by the PC’s warranty and they’re guaranteed to work well with the other hardware. So, it’s probably worthwhile to pay 50 to 100 percent more for a part than you would at retail. If it costs you $150 to get an SSD that would cost $100, you should probably pay it.

2. Try preconfigured models: In many cases, it’s cheaper to buy a more expensive configuration that comes with several upgrades at once: more RAM, more storage and a better CPU / GPU. In the case of the Aurora, Dell is currently offering a model for $999 that has a GTX 1660 Ti card, 16GB of 2,666 MHz RAM and a 512GB SSD. If you custom configured the $799 base model to have all those specs, it would actually cost $1,149 ($150 more).

3. Upgrade it yourself: If you know that a laptop or prebuilt desktop is user-upgradeable, you can just buy the parts and upgrade the RAM / storage yourself after purchase. Most desktops are upgradeable. For laptops, you can check the user manual or visit Crucial’s memory / storage finder and look for your model there (if it’s not there, it’s probably not upgradeable).

You’ll also want to check and make sure that upgrading doesn’t void your computer’s warranty. In most cases, upgrading is fine, but some vendors don’t allow it.

4. Find a similar competitor with a cheaper config: if you’re not committed to a particular make or model, you can often find a less-expensive one that comes with everything you need. For example, if you were thinking of getting a Dell XPS 13, you’ll pay $1,379 for a model with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, but you can get an Asus ZenBook 13 with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD for under $1,000. At press time, the only ZenBook available had a slightly older processor (an 8th Gen Core i7 vs a 10th Gen Core i5 on the Dell), but those performance differences are slight and most times you can find a cheaper system with the same gen CPU.

5. Accept lesser specs: Build quality matters, and some people just want a Surface Laptop or a MacBook Pro, even though both models overcharge you for extra storage / RAM. You can save money by settling for less storage. While I wouldn’t recommend anyone buy a system with just 128GB, you can use cloud backup services to make 256GB liveable. You can even get by with 8GB of RAM for mainstream computing tasks, but you’ll need to limit your use of browser tabs.

Bottom Line

You have to spend money to get a PC with good performance and build quality, but there’s no reason to blow most of your budget getting another few GB of storage or RAM. Vendors are really good at enticing with marketing that says a laptop starts below $1,000 when the price of a reasonably-configured model is far higher. Be savvy and you can save.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

Most RAM buying guides, including ours, insist that 16GB is the value sweet spot, and for good reason: Many consumer programs tend to spill over 8GB of use, while few consume more than 16GB. Going with less than that “sweet spot” will cause some data to be written to much-slower virtual memory on your storage drive. Going up from 16GB to 32GB doubles your cost from around $60 to $120 (at current market pricing).

For most people, 16GB is probably OK, but if you’re a power user like me, more RAM is more than worth the cost, because you’re literally paying to get some of your time back.

Using Lots of RAM for Everyday Tasks

As an editor, I end up doing a ton of multitasking, which starts with editing my own photos. When I open Photoshop, a single image spikes the program’s footprint to 300-400MB. Sure, it puts some files away after that and eventually drops to around 100MB, but that spike impacts how much data other, smarter programs are able to cache. I typically open six similar images at once to compare them before I pick one or two to edit. And while I’m editing those, Photoshop’s memory use often jumps to around 2GB.

Though 2GB is admittedly a small part of 16GB, let’s consider what other programs I’m running: I’ll typically have eight or more work-related sites open in one web browser and two or three other tabs showing the worksheets and documents that relate to my current task.

Add two or three tabs for comparing factory specs, two or three more for price engines, and even two or three for previous articles that I’m hoping to link to. My workflow is that, whenever I reach a point in the discussion that hits on any of those tabs, I bounce through them, find what I’m looking for, and pop that information into my article.

Meanwhile, I have a second browser running my social sites: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tom’s Hardware forums, and all the other forums I more stealthily view take up around 2GB. And my third browser? It’s full of all the stuff that I don’t mind being linked to my webmail account, but don’t want to get ads for in my work email.

Other services? I’ve too many to list, as I even have a DVR running just to provide programming that I can view with audio at 1.5x. I can’t find a web player to do that. Skype? Ring? Check.

Browser Slowdowns and RAM-Gulping Apps

With all of those apps and tabs open, dumping six photos into Photoshop used to cause Chrome to panic, dumping a ton of cached images and ads that were stored in memory to the drive. After that, bumping through my tabs would result in some pages going blank and reloading, some not scrolling properly until I waited for certain ad services to reload and images to reappear. When seconds count, reloads were taking minutes from my day. Every day. And so, two years ago, I upgraded to 32GB. Problem solved.

Other reasons to install more than 16GB include the use of applications that need more than 16GB to run at full speed, including some video editing and 3D modeling software, or even the editing of poster-sized images. But my favorite reason to run 32GB on our dual-channel test systems is that this capacity currently provides two ranks of memory per channel.

A rank is the group of ICs (chips) that fill one 64-bit interface of a DIMM, so that dual-rank modules have twice as many ICs and both interfaces active. Our AMD Ryzen 3000 memory deep-dive proved that four ranks of DDR4-2800 can outperform two ranks of DDR4-3600! And while a recent review revealed a 16GB kit that contained two dual-rank 8GB DIMMs, the lower-density chips used to create those rarified modules have been out of production (to the best of our knowledge) for around two years (hence the rarity).

What’s Your Time Worth?

Whether you go with two dual-rank 16GB or four single-rank 8GB DIMMs, the fact that you’re doubling up either the number of modules or the number of ICs per module means that you’re also doubling the price. After over a year of escalating prices, this year’s memory pricing has fallen to a point below that of when I did my upgrade. 32GB kits are now available for under $120.

If you’re thinking “but that’s still twice as much as $60”, I’d first ask you what your time every day is worth. Then, understanding that you’ll probably be buying modern RAM at modern density, I’d ask how much you’ve already spent on your system to boost performance. Compared to a complete system price of at least $600, that extra $60 begins to look like a bargain.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

Intel’s next-gen mainstream CPUs, dubbed Comet Lake-S, aren’t expected land in desktops until sometime in 2020. But the rumors and leaks about the company’s upcoming 14nm (++++?) processors have started to pile up. And boy, it’s hard to see how these chips -- which look to be a fifth (if you count Coffee Lake Refresh) re-warming of the company’s 2015-era Skylake architecture -- are going to find favor among just about any enthusiast or system builder next year.

Assuming the leaks hold true --  and we shouldn’t assume that they all will -- Comet Lake-S looks like the kind of lineup that would have been seen as a tepid, skippable update five years ago when Intel had little real competition in the desktop space. Here in the back half of 2019, AMD’s Ryzen 3000 processors (following on the well-received previous-generation Ryzen parts) have injected excitement into the desktop world, thanks to substantive performance (and performance per dollar) gains the likes of which we haven’t seen in going on a decade. Add in the bandwidth-doubling PCIe 4.0 interface packed into new AMD X570 motherboards and backward-compatibility with previous-generation, lower-priced X400-series boards and what Intel looks to be readying for early next year honestly borders on insulting.

What We Think We Know

Before I go any further, let’s take a quick recap of what we know -- or at least what we think we know -- about Comet Lake-S so far. According to recent reports from Hong Kong’s XFastest, at least partially corroborated by an ECS slide posted by Japan’s ASCII (both of which are covered in more detail here, Intel’s new mainstream desktop CPUs will have up to 10 cores, with a max TDP of 125 watts, while sporting the same 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0 bandwidth (a spec that’s been around since Ivy Bridge back in 2012) and the same (official) DDR4-2666 memory support of 2015’s Skylake chips.

Here’s a quick rundown of the leaked (again, unverified) specs of Comet Lake-S, according to recent reports, compared to last year’s Coffee Lake Refresh:

*specs in chart are unconfirmed

There’s no mention of the all-important clock speeds here, which would give us a solid sense of just how much better Comet Lake-S will perform compared to Coffee Lake. But the Core i9-9900K is already a very power-hungry, hot-running part with its eight cores--especially when overclocked.

If Intel is going to add 25% more cores and (presumably) increase clock speeds to some extent while sticking to its well-worn 14nm process node, that reported 125W TDP rating is likely conservative in the extreme. After all, at stock speeds, we saw the “95W” 9900K consume upwards of 145W at stock settings when running Blender. Granted, TDP ratings are a measurement of required heat dissipation at base frequencies, not power consumption. But if the 8-core 9900K is any indication, its 10-core replacement running on effectively the same architecture and process node is going to need some serious cooling, even at stock settings.

So even if Intel adds a couple of cores and keeps pricing relatively steady, as it’s done in the recent past, it’s still tough to see how, say, a 10-core K series chip in the roughly $500 range is going to make a whole lot of sense when a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X sells for about that price (and will probably be less by early next year). With that Ryzen chip, you get a good in-box cooler, plus backwards compatibility that means you can install it in a sub-$70 B450 motherboard, all the way up to a high-end X570 model. With Comet Lake-S, you’re likely going to need a brand-new board with a new chipset.

Yes, Intel looks to be implementing yet another socket change for these new parts, requiring new motherboards for anyone who wants to swim in Comet Lake’s waters. This is hardly surprising given the company’s track record in that regard, but again Intel now has very strong competition from AMD -- which has been pushing out faster, bigger, more powerful CPUs on the same AM4 socket since September of 2016.

I’m sure Intel’s tactic makes motherboard vendors happy, but especially given what AMD has been able to push on AM4, Intel’s rumored move to yet another socket feels like a kick in the face (or at least the wallet) to its loyal customers. At the very least, it will likely push more frustrated consumers toward Team Red.

Stiff Competition

Speaking of AMD, let’s look at how the above rumored Intel specs compare to what’s available from Ryzen 9 3900X today, as well as what will be available soon (AMD says September) with the 3950X.

AMD in 2019 is offering more cores at a lower TDP (thanks to that sweet 7nm TSMC manufacturing process and AMD's different method of measuring TDP), and faster officially supported memory speeds than what it looks like Intel will be bringing to the table next year with Comet Lake-S.

And I barely mentioned the bandwidth-doubling PCIe 4.0 interface yet. We’ve covered it in detail and from different angles before, so I won’t go into detail here. But if Intel is indeed sticking with 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0 for its next-gen CPUs, AMD’s 24 lanes of PCIe 4.0 (which you’ll admittedly need a fairly expensive X570 motherboard to officially make use of) represents a 200% bandwidth increase compared to what Intel will reportedly offer with its new CPUs. Add the lanes from the chipset as well as the CPU, and that disparity is almost certainly going to increase even more. Granted, many won’t take advantage of all that bandwidth, but with SSD prices continuing to fall, more and more people are likely to run up against the limitations of Intel’s PCIe 3.0 lanes.

Zen 2 Isn’t Perfect

Of course, not everything is Zen in the world of Ryzen. Shortages of AMD’s high-end parts persist nearly two months after their launch, our testing has shown that not all Ryzen 3000 cores can hit the top advertised speed of the CPU, and almost all X570 motherboards require active cooling -- something that hasn’t been common since the days of dedicated northbridge and southbridge chips.

But if you don’t want to deal with the whir of an extra fan (and an extra potential point of failure), you can of course opt for a lower-cost previous-generation 400-series motherboard with AMD, although you’ll then lose PCIe 4.0 support. But it’s certainly nice to have that option, flexibility, and upgradility. Yes, I’m looking at you, Intel.

If we’re indeed several months out from new competing parts from Intel, and if all the company manages to deliver in early 2020 is yet another set of re-tweaked, hot-running 14nm CPUs with at best a couple of extra cores, AMD doesn’t have much to worry about in the short term, to say the least.

Granted, if 10nm still isn’t delivering the yields necessary for mass rollout, Intel likely feels like it has to release something. And there’s no doubt that Comet Lake-S will sell well enough to system integrators for new Intel-based desktops in big-box stores and for compact systems where Ryzen’s lack of integrated graphics (outside of its lower-end APUs) is a problem. New Intel chips will help move new PCs, especially in a world where the blue team’s long dominance means many mainstream customers don’t know enough to consider alternatives.

But with all the positive (and mostly well-deserved) press that AMD has been getting this year, even mainstream consumers are soon likely to start considering alternatives, as more and more AMD machines show up in Best Buy and on Amazon’s curated choice lists. Unless Comet Lake-S somehow turns out to be far more impressive than it looks on paper (granted, again from unconfirmed leaks), Intel’s next-gen desktop chips will be a Broadwell-like stop gap at best. And for enthusiasts -- even those who have been long-time Intel fans -- another round of modest performance gains packaged with yet another round of required motherboard upgrades is only going to increase the tide of consumers turning toward AMD.

Granted, the enthusiast and gaming desktop market isn’t the biggest focus for Intel, but the company is arguably facing even tougher competition from AMD on the server space with EPYC Rome, where margins are much, much higher. And if Intel starts losing customers en masse in the enterprise IT space as well as among gamers and enthusiasts, it will take some serious technology advancements to turn things around.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

Intel's new 10th Generation processors are here with 10nm "Ice Lake" and 14nm "Comet Lake" processors. But if the average person walks into a store, they may not know which one they're getting, never mind which one they should get. The CPU model numbers, one of the most important on a spec sheet, have been updated in a way that requires learning a new pattern to understand the features and figure out what you're getting. It's part of a 

There are a number of ways in which Intel has changed up its naming scheme this time around (a four-to-five digit number to include the “10” for 10th Gen, for example), but a few stand out as particularly bad. On Ice Lake, there's the difficulty of separating between U and Y series and how hard it is to determine your exact graphics model. On Comet Lake, there's the question of knowing that you're getting something based on an old architecture (if you care), and confusion over not getting Intel's new Gen11 graphics, but it otherwise follows a more traditional structure.

There's another underlying question: which one should a person buy? How would they know?

Now, if you read Tom’s Hardware all the time, this may not be a big problem for you. We eat spec sheets for breakfast and save some more for lunch. But this is a big issue for the average person going and buying a new laptop. Intel should be making it more clear what you get, not less.

Get a Decoder Ring

Here's Intel's graphic to help explain the new naming:

It’s easy enough to understand the part before the hyphen. That hasn’t changed. And the 10 for “10th Gen” makes perfect sense. It’s after that where things get tricky.

Both Ice Lake and Comet Lake follow that with a SKU number. For Ice Lake, that's two digits, and for Comet Lake it's three. Then, Ice Lake ends with G and a number (1, 4 or 7), identifying its level of graphics. Comet Lake, for now, ends with a U for U-series. It's likely we'll see H series and possibly other models later this year or early next.

Intel, Y are U changing things?

Intel is still classifying its mobile processors as U-series and Y-series. The former are in most ultraportables, while the latter are in tablets and extremely quiet fanless designs. The Y series often mean you’re getting lesser performance and a lower TDP in favor of near-silence. But the new names eliminate the letters altogether.

Here are two sample Ice Lake processor names. Pay close attention:

Intel Core i5-1035G7

Intel Core i5-1030G4

Do you see a U or a Y? I don’t. But the top CPU is a U series and the bottom is a Y-series. The big difference, it seems, is now the last number before the “G” (we’ll get to the G soon). A “5” means U-series and a “0” means Y-series. Of course, zeroes show up through both names, which could confuse some more casual buyers. Additionally, the 28W Core i7-1068G7 is also a U-series chip, breaking the pattern.

On the Comet Lake side, processors do end in a Y or a U, as customers have been accustomed to.

It’s likely that some laptop vendors won’t make this easier. After all, many simply market them as “Core i5” or “Core i7,” without any numerals on them. But where they are listed, and people can make a distinction, it should be crystal clear.

Changing Graphics Distinctions

Graphics have become perhaps more confusing than any other change. Previously, spec sheets would list the version of integrated graphics you were getting. For instance, the Whiskey Lake Intel Core i7-8565U used Intel UHD Graphics 620. With the specialty Coffee Lake-based Intel Core i7-8559U used in the 2018 Macbook Pro, you’d get Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655.

Those demarkations are gone with Ice Lake. Now, you’ll know what graphics level you have by the number after the letter “G”. So if we pull those two Ice Lake processor names from before:

Intel Core i5-1035G7

Intel Core i5-1030G4

We know that the top processor has better graphics than the bottom processor. Seven is higher than four. Technically, both of those have Intel Iris Plus graphics, and will likely be marketed as such. But G7 means it has 64 execution units while G4 means 48 EUs. And G1, with 32 EUs, now means Intel UHD graphics with no model number involved.

The Comet Lake laptops all have the de-numbered Intel UHD graphics. This is just to be assumed, but not mentioned with the same G1 as Ice Lake.

Again, if you’re a regular reader of Tom’s Hardware, you’ll likely find the spec sheets, know what this means, and get on with your life. But the majority of people will see “Iris Plus” and assume that they’re exactly the same.

In theory, this could be simple, like i3, i5, i7. Not everyone knows that that means, but they know higher numbers generally mean better performance. But with Iris Plus and UHD graphics sharing the same identifying letter on Ice Lake, it will be harder to distinguish between them.

Which Chip is for Whom?

Of course, beyond the naming itself, there's another question. How do you expect the average person to know if they're getting Ice Lake or Comet Lake? It's all wrapped up in "10th Gen" for Intel.

On a call with press, Intel argued that the majority of the customers don't know or care which process node the processors are on as long as they get a computer with a faster chip.

Intel also suggested that Comet Lake is the chip to get for better performance for productivity and multi-threaded workloads, while Ice Lake is the one to get for better AI performance and stronger graphics. If I had to guess, I imagine that will split the audience for the chips more towards Comet Lake.

But even preference could steer you one way or the other. Dell's XPS 13, for instance, is getting an upgrade to Comet Lake. But it's XPS 13 2-in-1, with a 360-degree hinge, uses Ice Lake. Is it not possible that people want a convertible laptop and multi-threaded performance? Or that they want a clamshell and prefer better visuals? Will most people know what they're getting?

It's unclear if Intel has any plans to further educate the general buying public about what these mean or even that there are two separate architectures. You don't exactly see signs at Best Buy referring to a laptop's chipset by its Intel codename. 

We haven't had the opportunity, as of this writing, to test either chip in a retail laptop, so right now we can't make a recommendation.  

Time To Get Educating

When you take the time to truly learn the new naming, there is some logic to it. But that logic assumes that customers know and understand spec sheets and will take the time to completely learn the new scheme. That’s unlikely at first.

Intel, in an attempt to simplify naming, has also complicated it. And that means it needs to find a way to educate consumers, possibly with new store signage, prominent space on its own and partner websites, and, hopefully, a lot of tech enthusiasts with patience willing to teach family and friends.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

While companies like G.Skill set about creating new part numbers for AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs, Corsair reminds us that many of its modules are already compatible with AMD’s new 7nm processors. A quick view of its RAM lineup showed 12 of the 57 kits it lists as compatible.

The firm even posted a video extolling the virtues of its highest-data-rate DRAM, mentioning kits up to DDR4-4000 specifically within the AMD context. But there’s a catch: It doesn’t appear under the option of X570-compatible kits linked above. There’s a second catch: We couldn’t find a “page 2” of the search results, and narrowing our search to get a different 12 results simply returned the one or two kits that matched the queue from the first 12.

And there’s even a third catch: When using Corsair’s part identifier, all associated have a latency of at least one cycle for every 200 MHz data rate (such as DDR4-3200 C16). As its competitors announce better-spec kits, such as DDR4-3600 C14, we can only hope that the firm’s validation process will return some real gems in short order.

Edit July 12: Corsair has validated the following list of kit: The first number is the capacity, the last number CAS latency, and the next to last number the data rate. We still don't see DDR4-4000, but DDR4-3600 will be more-appropriate for most users since firmware automatically drops the memory controller to infinity fabric ratio when higher data rates are employed. 

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

The Electronics Entertainment Expo, E3, is often thought of as a primarily console-focused show. But as we approach the end of one console generation and the beginning of another, and with console juggernaut Sony skipping out on the show altogether, PC gaming filled the gap here in Los Angeles.

Now, consoles aren’t going anywhere. While Sony isn’t here at the Los Angeles Convention Center, we know it’s next-gen, AMD-powered PlayStation is on the way. Microsoft revealed Project Scarlett, it’s next Xbox (also powered by AMD) at its own conference. Square Enix had a few console-specific games, likes its Final Fantasy VII remake on PlayStation 4. And Nintendo streamed its E3 Nintendo Direct online, providing more fodder for its Switch console.

But if there’s one stalwart, it’s the PC.

That’s one part of Microsoft’s strategy. The company is putting its gaming on console and PC, especially among its Xbox Game Studios. Over 60 games were at the Xbox press conference, and almost every single one was showing up on PC day and date with Xbox One and, in the future, Scarlett.  To a degree, this is a continuation of its existing plans, but also a furthered commitment, with more in-house studios than ever building games for both platforms. And perhaps the biggest standout that’s not on PC yet - Halo: The Master Chief Collection - will be coming (which we’ve known for a bit) with the addition of Halo: Reach.

That’s also why Microsoft has added a PC component of Xbox Game Pass, with a $9.99 monthly charge for over 100 PC games. It’s also part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, combining console and PC game subscriptions with Xbox Live Gold for $14.99 a month.

Over at Bethesda, Ubisoft and Square Enix, a number of the highest-profile games were also highlighted on PC. Bethesda showed off Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Doom Eternal, Rage 2 and a number of others, while Ubisoft trotted out Watch Dogs Legion, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint and its own UPlay Plus (stylized UPlay +) streaming service for its library of PC games (though that will eventually also make its way to Google Stadia as well). Square Enix showed off Outriders, a new shooter from People Can Fly coming to PC and consoles, Marvel’s Avengers, and a remaster of Final Fantasy VIII.

And, of course, our sister site PC Gamer had a whole show full of games on the PC, including Borderlands 3, Shenmue III and a number of indie games like Sam Barlow and Annpurna’s Telling Lies and Tripwire and Torn Banner’s Chivalry II.

AMD’s presence was also outsized at E3 this year, as it debuted its RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT GPUs as well as its Ryzen 3000-series stack. The company paraded The Coalition on stage to show off Gears 5 on PC, Gearbox to display Borderlands 3, Ubisoft for Breakpoint and some new developments for the Unity engine.

And with AMD’s parts in consoles for yet another generation (Xbox One and PS4 both use a modified AMD “Jaguar” CPU and custom AMD graphics), it should only be easier for console and PC games to be ported to each other and be developed alongside one another.

That’s all besides a ton of peripheral companies showing off their wares at the show, many with mice, keyboards and headsets to show off.

This all highlights the PC in two ways: One, as a steady stalwart as console hardware prepares to change (however promising the new hardware sounds); and two, as a thriving gaming ecosystem even as those new consoles and the cloud continue on as rival options.

So if you’re looking for something to play on your PC in the next few years, there’s plenty coming. And if you were worried about the future of the platform, well, it’s clearly not going anywhere in the near future.

Image Credits: Getty

MORE: E3 2019 Coverage

MORE: All Gaming Content

It’s time for Computex, everyone’s favorite international computing trade show. Each year the Tom’s Hardware team heads east to Taipei, Taiwan  to see first-hand what the industry has in store for the future. We’re gearing up for an exciting Computex this year, and already expect a titanic showing from MSI, as well as something super from Nvidia. Of course rumors abound as to what AMD plans to reveal at Computex 2019. Whatever Team Red has in store for us, an early keynote leaves no doubt that AMD’s announcement will impress its loyal fans and offer Intel continued competition.

Computex is a harbinger of future tech and an opportunity for reporters to gauge the direction of the industry as a whole. This is the time for all of the big chip and motherboard makers to shine. With both DDR5 as well as PCIe 5.0 on the horizon, and Intel’s 10th generation Core processors rapidly approaching, this Computex is sure to be a crowd pleaser for those who follow cutting-edge hardware. While last year’s show was quieter than usual, there was a lot to love, especially for fans of the innovative and unconventional.

As for me, I expect to see more screens in more places, beeffier laptops, compact cases galore, and the requisite overload of RGBs. All signs point to some sort of Ryzen announcement. Can we expect the same from Intel? Who knows, maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see more foldable laptops. And let’s not forget, Computex isn’t all about the chips. ESports monitors, BFGDs, and other gaming-centric displays will also likely make waves in the rumor mill. Will the manufacturers deliver?

What do you expect from this year's Computex? A Qi charging mouse pad? New USB-C connectivity? Big news from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel? Let us know what your big predictions are in the forums.        

With upcoming headset releases from Oculus in the form of the Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S, and fresh competition—yes, of course I’m talking about the Valve Index—the state of VR hardware is as vibrant as ever. Since the Oculus Rift came out for consumers 3 years ago, VR headsets and controllers, as well as GPUs have all improved. While the latest hardware is not necessarily leaps and bounds better, it is certainly better: 2K or not quite 2K panels are now pretty much standard, we're starting to move away from requiring base stations and we have virtual fingers!

There have been significant quality of life improvements as well. We have better lenses, faster refresh rates, a larger FOV and, eventually, eye tracking, all of which bring clarity to the virtual world.

While the hardware improvements are great, and needed, VR is still not mainstream. Nor have we obtained the crystal clear promise of truly immersive VR, even the best VR headsets have flaws. 

I’m skeptical that, even if we had the VR hardware, our current GPUs would be able to muster the processing oomph to power them. Additionally, next-gen headsets will require a much greater leap in components. I want 4K panels for each eye. I want a refresh rate as fast as a top-of-the-line gaming monitor and a variable one to boot. I want eye tracking software that selectively processes pixels depending on where you look on the screen and perfect hand tracking. Clearly, I’m a needy person.

While the pinnacle of VR hardware may still be a bit of a ways off, the industry is still at pace for healthy growth and development. Games may be lacking (where’s my Half Life 3?), but the state of VR is good, and given its infancy, possibly even great.

And that brings us to this week’s Community Questions: What do you think of the state of VR? Have you bought in yet, or are you still in wait-and-see mode? Why? Let us know in the forums.

At Microsoft’s Build 2019 developer conference here in Seattle, there’s a word I heard far less than many expected: Windows.

Since CEO Satya Nadella took the reigns of Microsoft in 2014, there’s been a big focus on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform and suite of services, which Nadella worked on before his ascendancy. Funding to the Windows division has been cut, Windows head Terry Myerson left, and a lot of work has been put on Microsoft services on other operating systems, like iOS, macOS and Android.

And at Nadella’s keynote, that was clear. Windows was brought up a few times as part of Microsoft 365, its combination of Office products, enterprise mobility and security, and, of course, Windows 10.

But Windows is still going strong. And one executive hinted at that strength.

Rajesh Jha, executive vice president of the Experiences and Devices group (which encompasses Office 365, which he previously headed up), made a joke about it when he hosted the Microsoft 365 technical keynote at Build.

“If you’re all here to learn about Windows and Office, you’re still in the right place,” Jha joked just half an hour following Nadella’s keynote, which barely mentioned either.

Then he spouted the big number: one billion people using Windows.

That’s individuals, businesses and education. And they’re not all jumping ship at once. Windows may not be the focus of the company anymore (Microsoft missed the chance to move it to mobile phones. It knows it), but it’s a hugely profitable business for Microsoft.

In a recent profile of Microsoft under Nadella, Bloomberg Businessweek pegged Windows as being a $20 billion-per-year business. In its Q3 Fiscal Year 2019 earnings report in April, the revenue from MIcrosoft’s “More Personal Computing” group, was $10.7 billion. Some of that included Windows OEM revenue (up 9 percent), Windows commercial products and cloud services (up 18 percent) and Surface revenue (up 21 percent) -- all devices or services that depend on Windows 10.

And interoperability is hugely important. Android and iOS owners still use Windows and Office, so it makes sense to focus on it (and, of course, those devices are selling like hotcakes. Some people's first machines run Android, not Windows). It also makes sense to put the spotlight on Azure, the burgeoning new star on Microsoft’s Redmond campus and beyond. And surely, Microsoft would rather not just have developers do work on Windows 10, but also Azure, the Microsoft Graph and Office.

Much of the immediate future of Windows 10 - the imminent May 2019 update - has already been revealed in the form of Insider builds. Builds of 19H2 and 20H1 are still forthcoming, even in some Insider Builds.

So at Build 2019, Microsoft focused elsewhere. It’s weird for the company to be so quiet about its operating system with a billion users, but developers and users don’t have to worry about its disappearance.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

He finally did it, Thanos did it; he got all of the infinity stones, and with one foul snap, he decimated half of the PC gaming population. 20 million souls, turned to ash, as their plush little pinkies stepped away from their mechanical keyboards and RGB gaming mice one last time. How could he do it, the mad titan?! This day extracts a heavy toll.

According to a recent report from John Peddie Research, by 2022, 20 million PC gamers will have switched to console or cloud-gaming services. Prophetic commentary on the state of console and PC gaming has come to pass, and we are all but doomed. Where do we find purpose in this new world? How do we live with the fact that such a sizeable chunk of our glorious PC community is no longer with us, taken to the unwashed world of console hell forever? We are truly in a dark-age of technology.

The so-called “death” of PC gaming is nothing new. This time, it’s not tablets or the rise of mobile gaming that’ll replace our computers. Peddie claims that stagnation in PC performance will lead gamers to toss their towers in the trash.

Advancement is no longer, JPR states “the innovation that took place in the past and clever new things have all but stopped”. Clever new things you say? I mean yeah sure, if we’re talking specifically about Intel right now, it has sat on 14nm for far too long, at least in the mainstream market anyway, but again and again we’re seeing advances across the board. The leaps and bounds AMD has made from its FX series processors to its Ryzen chips is incredible to say the least, and Intel has responded by upping its core counts and clock speeds.

GPUs are continually pushing boundaries both in how they compute, and features they introduce, with Nvidia and AMD now supporting ray tracing going forward (ironically something JPR still gives credit to). Combine that and the multitude of PC-specific developers, from publishing houses to one-man teams smashing through those graphical barriers to deliver us, time and time again, more photorealistic or artistic content and it’s just an incredible time to game on PC.

The Death of Moore’s Law

This brings us on to Moore’s Law. Right this one really grinds my gears (cue Peter Griffin meme from 2009). Moore’s Law? Not actually a law. It’s not a guarantee, it never has been and it’s not like gravity. And what’s more than that, it’s not the only way to improve performance. In fact, nowadays dropping a manufacturing process size barely improves performance at all.

There’s so many more factors involved, from the architecture that’s used, to how you design the chip, to how much power you throw into it. Take Hyper-Threading for example. When this first came out, aside from the bugs, it was revolutionary in increasing performance, by a factor of about 60-percent per core or so. That’s an architectural change, not thanks to Moore’s “Law,” yet it produces an impressive performance boost nonetheless. Now that’s not to say Moore wasn’t a genius; he was, but to rest so heavily on that as the one and only thing powering development is, ironically for a tech forecasting company, shortsighted at best and asinine at worst.

Going forward it seems that the monolithic chip design of the last 20 years is dead. It’s all about modularity, AMD’s Infinity Fabric showcases just what can be done when you have a solid interconnect like that. In fact, now we’re looking at processors that are not only pieced together in a modular way, but 3D ones too that are stacked, and ones with very specific hardware developed for specific tasks (ray-tracing cores for instance). And don’t even get me started on graphene, silicon-germanium and other such materials.

Even if Moore’s Law ceased to function today, and the silicon foundries across the planet, went, “no, you know what, 7nm is the limit,” the industry would still find a way to improve performance. And if they didn’t, it’s not only PCs that would suffer but consoles as well. So again, what the hell JPR?

A Simple Choice?

John Peddie talks about console and PC gaming as if platforms are this binary choice. There can only be one. But what about the folks who own both? I’ve got two PCs thanks to my work (one a Ryzen 7 2700X, one an Intel Core i7-8086K), a Macbook Air, a PS4 Pro and a Nintendo Switch. Can you not do both? Must you absolutely be one or the other?

Of course, you can argue that, because most current-gen consoles use x86 processors and other common components (hard drives, DRAM), that they are practically PCs at this point. You can even play a lot of the same games on both PCs and consoles, or even the same save file if you own an Xbox.

But ultimately, none of this matters. None of it. You can spit and squeal all you want about how innovation is lacking here, that consoles are going to be more powerful there. But in the end, it’s all about the experience. It’s about what you can do. To me, a PC represents freedom. Freedom to choose how I want it to look, how I want it to run, what peripherals I buy. I choose what games I play, from 2004 classics like Dawn of War, to long time friends like World of Warcraft, to the latest AAA Assassins Creed. It means to be at the cutting edge of what’s possible, and to be free to do whatever on earth you want to do.

I spend my days at my rig, working, writing here for Tom’s Hardware, editing photos, creating social media, shopping, rendering video, watching YouTube and Twitch, streaming music, installing way too many mods for Skyrim, and tweaking my UI in WoW (yes I’m one of them, still), you get the idea. The list is endless as to what you can do, and I don’t even do that much with these things compared to some.

And let’s not even talk about just how much money goes into eSports these days. According to esportsearnings.com, in 2008 the total prize money across the globe was $7 million, in 2014, that figure was up at $37 million. Last year? 2018? $158 million. That’s an increase of 2,157% over the course of a decade that’s just insane. And that’s the thing. The biggest growing sectors right now in PC gaming, are those that are accessible by everyone. Hell you can run Overwatch at 1080p on an $95 / £80 Ryzen 3 2200g at near enough 60 fps if you want. You don’t need to spend a lot, and it'll give you access to so much more.

And that’s the thing, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a $500 ITX rig, an £1600 gaming notebook or a €5000 liquid-cooled system, we’re all part of the same community and we can all do exactly the same thing as anyone else. The PC is aspirational. If you want to upgrade it, you can, if you want to buy new hardware that lights up like a Christmas tree, you can. If you want to hook up a controller, drop into an emulator (disclaimer: with games you legally bought), you can. There’s nothing stopping you.

Yes the landscape will change, yes PC gaming will change, but ultimately these arguments brought up, time, after time, after time, are just so pointless. Year on year this industry makes record breaking money, eSports continues to grow at a rate that, I’ll be honest, baffles my mind. So don’t worry about it, enjoy your rig, your laptop, your console and play how you want to play. We’ll let these industry analysts worry about their stocks and shares, and let them throw these fear mongering terms around and get on with what we know best. Gaming.

MORE: All Gaming Content

As editor-in-chief of Tom's Hardware, I get to play with some of the most expensive gear around, but my favorite computer costs as little as $5 (£4.66 in the UK). I'm talking about the Raspberry Pi, the single-board system that's sold more units than any other personal computing platform except for PCs and Macs.

If you don't already own one of the 25 million Raspberry Pis that have been sold since 2012, now would be a good time to dump the change out of your piggy bank and use it to buy one. With just a Broadcom BCM2837 Cortex-A53 CPU and 1GB of RAM on the "high-end" Raspberry Pi 3B+, this computer isn't meant to replace your primary PC. But it can do a slew of things that your x86 computer can't or shouldn't.

To help you move forward on your Pi journey, we've just launched the first-ever Tom's Hardware Raspberry Pi channel, which will house a variety of tutorials and sample projects, along with the latest Raspberry Pi news. If you're just getting started, check out our article on how to set up a Raspberry Pi.

With a Pi, you can create devices that include everything from a robotic arm to a Wi-Fi security camera to a standalone web server. You can even build your own retro gaming system, complete with a old-fashioned arcade joystick and buttons.

The Raspberry Pi's secret sauce comes from a few main things:

• The GPIO (General Input / Output) Pins: Modern Raspberry Pi models each have 40 pins that you can use to connect them to all kinds of external devices, from sensors to motors to LED lights. You can even attach different "hats" that provide added functionality by popping them onto the GPIO pins. For example, the Sense Hat adds a gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, thermometer and pressure sensor. You don't get pins like this on an x86 PC.

• Huge ecosystem with plenty of support: There are thousands of accessories and tools that make it easy to create your own devices with Raspberry Pi. And there are a ton of great online resources to help you. In addition to our brand new Raspberry Pi channel, you can check out the official Raspberry Pi forums, the Raspberry Pi subreddit, the Raspberry PI DIY subreddit and all these projects on Instructables.

• Low price: The price of a Pi makes it affordable to use in lots of different home projects. Want to make your own arcade machine this week, a fart detector next week and a local web server the week after? The cost makes it easy to keep buying new ones.

If you're the kind of person who enjoys the challenge and sense of satisfaction you get from building your own PC, working with Raspberry Pi is like that, but on steroids. And unlike your PC, which you probably only upgrade once every few years, you can build new things with Raspberry Pi every week.

Raspberry Pi Projects

If you're a parent, playing with Raspberry Pi is a great way to connect with your kids while teaching them valuable STEM skills. My six-yeaold and I regularly work on Pi projects together. Here are some of the things have made or are in the process of making:

• A Retropie video game console that plays old arcade games.

• A universal toy controller that operates his Lego motors via Bluetooth LE.

• A virtual "window to Scotland" that shows live webcam streams of the countryside.

• A simple traffic light that changes from green to yellow to red.

For the holidays, I gave many of my friends Raspberry Pi-powered greeting cards. I got them Raspberry Pi Zero Ws, installed a lot of free games on them and then put a video message for each person on the desktop.

If you don't like building things, Raspberry Pi is still useful to have around. Because it runs Linux, you can use it to test out Linux apps or do simple Linux development, while still running Windows or macOS on your main PC. You can even connect to the Pi via remote desktop so you don't have to attach a separate keyboard, screen or mouse.

Sure, you could stick to working on PCs only, and that's fine, but bringing a little Pi into your life is so much more fun. Here's how to get started with Raspberry Pi.

MORE: 25+ Linux Commands Raspberry Pi Users Need to Know

MORE: Raspberry Pi GPIO Pinout: What Each Pin Does

MORE: How to Use Raspberry Pi as a VPN Gateway - Tom's Hardware

It was an idea ahead of its time, if its time were 2005: Build a tiny desktop PC that fits into your pocket and only works when you plug it into the appropriate dock. Businesses, schools and even hospitals can then provide a series of dumb workstations where users can plug in the tiny PCs. Appliance makers can use these PCs to power their smart TVs and refrigerators and then, when faster versions come out, users can upgrade their washing machines by swapping out a small card or stick.

Unfortunately, both of these highly-touted use cases don’t make any sense in an era of cloud computing and ubiquitous cellular connectivity. No doubt that’s why Intel has come to its senses and discontinued its Compute Card. The only one crying over the death of this credit-card sized PC is NexDock, a small company that planned to build a laptop you could power with a Compute Card. Everyone else seems to have forgotten this product even existed.

Upgradeable Appliances?

In theory, it would be nice to give your connected refrigerator a performance boost, but in practice, there’s no incentive for manufacturers to support this functionality or consumers to take advantage of it. Appliance makers do push out software updates, but getting a fresh UI for your TV’s built-in streaming box is no reason to change its CPU.

Supporting a computer upgrade would be a nightmare for appliance vendors. Does LG really want to get a ton of phone calls asking why your air conditioner won’t boot after you’ve swapped out its compute module? Do consumers really want to spend $200 or more for that upgrade? And wouldn’t vendors rather just sell you a new refrigerator than help you improve the one you already paid them for?

Physically Secure Computing?

At first blush, the idea of a physically secure computer seems to make sense. If you keep the whole computer in your pocket and then plug it in to a docking station when you’re using it, all of the software and data goes with you when you leave. You can even carry different modules for different purposes: work and play, for example.

And Intel was hardly the first company to build a tiny desktop that you could take with you. For example, FXI, a now-defunct Norwegian company, introduced its Cotton Candy computer-on-a-stick way back in 2011. Back then, the company touted its product’s ability to keep your data secure when you walk into an internet cafe or hotel business center.

At around the same time the Cotton Candy came out, a generation of inexpensive stick PCs with Android or Linux released and then, eventually, we started seeing Windows sticks, including Intel’s own Compute Stick. You can still buy these products, but today their small size is their selling point, not their ability to provide a secure environment. If you’re making a digital sign or a kiosk, these space and power-saving devices are still useful in 2019.

In 2015, Kangaroo, a division of the InFocus, came out with the Mobile Desktop, a portable mini PC with a built-in battery and the ability to output to a tablet. In 2016, Kangaroo came out with a notebook that had a removable module you could pop in and out of the side. Neither of those products took off and Kangaroo is no more.

Then, in 2017, Intel unveiled the Compute Card and, because team blue was behind it, that modular PC looked like it actually had a shot to catch on. At a demo that year, the company brought in partners like LG, Dell and HP who promised to develop devices that depended on the cards.

But when you really think about it, these portable desktops don’t really help with security at all. People have portable computers that keep their data secure; they’re called laptops and they don’t require a dock, because they have a screen and keyboard built in. And, if you need something that fits in your pocket, most people already have one in the form of a phone that has 4G connectivity.

In a world where most people don’t have lightweight mobile devices and therefore use internet cafes or hotel computers when they travel, a portable compute module brings security. Unfortunately for Intel, Kangaroo, FXI and many others, that world ended when smartphones and laptops became affordable and portable enough for mainstream users back in 2008 or 2009.

With these kinds of inherent problems, it’s a wonder that the Compute Card ever came out in the first place. The question isn’t why it failed, but why companies keep tilting at windmills with a concept that doesn’t make sense in the 2010s and beyond.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

Building a PC has changed dramatically in recent years. While it may be physically easier to build a PC, the number of items to consider for a build list has gone up dramatically. Back in the day, the prime considerations were the number of Mhz, the amount of RAM the GPU and system required, your monitor and if you needed a sound card.

The purchase process is a bit different nowadays. Today, a builder needs to decide their monitor's resolution, color depth, refresh rate and form factor, as well as the form factor and size of the system itself, networking considerations and more.

That “more” is largely due to a number PC-related technologies to enter the scene that builders may want to their new system to support. This includes the introduction of G-Sync, FreeSync, virtual reality (VR) and ray tracing. VR-ready builds really deserves an article unto itself, and ray tracing, pitched as the future of gaming, is mostly novelty at this point (this is, of course, subjective and endlessly debatable).

However, variable refresh rate (VRR) technologies seem to have finally reached a mature stage and is all but mainstream, available in most monitors and even some TVs. G-Sync and FreeSync are, for the most part, bug free, easy to use and add demonstrable improvements to the quality of a game’s graphics. Even better, Nvidia cards can now use G-Sync with FreeSync monitors certified G-Sync Compatible by Nvidia. Although your mileage may vary, gamers are no longer required to pay a $200-$300 tax to purchase a VRR monitor that is compatible with their Nvidia GPU.

The widespread adoption and availability of G-Sync and FreeSync means there are more of you using the tech than ever before. So, now is a perfect opportunity to pose a new discussion topic to our readers in this week’s Community Questions.

What are your thoughts on G-Sync and FreeSync? Are either worth the investment? How does the experience gaming at a lower resolution with VRR compare to 4K? Which refresh rate tech is better? Let us know your thoughts in the Tom’s Hardware Forums.  

Each week we tap into the collective knowledge of the Tom's Hardware community to find the answers to our most pressing questions. This week we want to know what's the best battle royale game.

Epic Games announced the details of its Fortnite World Cup, and the numbers are massive. With a competitive prize pool of $100,000,000, Fortnite is gearing up to take esports to a whole new level. The Fortnite World Cup announcement is capping off another winning month for Epic Games’ quintessential Battle Royale. Epic recently confirmed with Variety Magazine that 10.7 million concurrent players watched the in-game Marshmello concert. Fortnite saw another 7.6 million players concurrently on Saturday, February 16th, the largest number of concurrent players during non-event times. Fortnite is a game of millions and a force to be reckoned with, not just in esports, but for the entertainment industry writ large.

To put those numbers in perspective, I took a look at some other enormous competitive events, namely the World Cup and the Super Bowl. According to FIFA, the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa “was shown in every single country and territory on Earth” and was beamed to TVs across the globe, reaching “over 3.2 billion people around the world or 46.4 percent of the global population.” While impressive, keep in mind that those numbers are “based on viewers watching a minimum of one minute of coverage.” There were 2.2 billion viewers that watched 20 consecutive minutes of coverage, which is still a bonkers number of people. The Fortnite numbers pale in comparison there, but how about when compared to a more regional event, like say the Super Bowl?

The Super Bowl hit its peak in 2015 with over 114 million viewers. Since then its viewership has been on the decline, decreasing by 3-5% each year. Last year 98.2 million people watched the New England Patriots defeat the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl LIII.

Clearly, Fortnite is no Super Bowl or World Cup, but still its numbers are mighty impressive. Accounting for broadband penetration in the US adds further perspective to these numbers. In 2017 there were roughly 110 million households with a broadband subscription. This means that Fortnite was playing in the equivalent of roughly a tenth of all broadband-equipped US american households during the Marshmello concert event. Of course, Fortnite’s audience is global, and the Super Bowl plays on pretty much every TV in the US, so this is more an apples to oranges comparison, but still it's interesting to ponder.

While Fortnite may be the biggest Battle Royale game, is it the best? That's of course up to subjective opinion. I myself am not an avid Royale player, but I hear Apex Legends is a new comer that may give Fortnite a run for its money. And let’s not forget the OG PUBG, the game that started the genre--way back in March of 2017.

And so, dear readers we pose this question for you to discuss over the weekend. What’s the best battle royale game? Let us know what you think in the Tom’s Hardware Forums.

We recently updated our GPU Performance Hierarchy to include a few brand-new cards, which got us thinking: What’s our favorite graphics card of all time? Everyone has their own personal golden age of gaming. If you were born in the late 1970s, perhaps it was the DOS era of PC Gaming known for its innovative 2D RPGs, adventure Ggames and shooters. Or if you’re like me, gaming utopia began in 2011. Behind each of our gaming golden years lies a graphics card powering our screens and pushing out the pixels that make up some of our favorite games.

My golden age of gaming includes GTA IV and V, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Alan Wake, Fallout New Vegas, Civilization V, Portal 2, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, Torchlight II, Valkyria Chronicles, Street Fighter IV and, well, you get the point. It’s an astonishingly long list of games that spans multiple generations. Incredibly, through it all I used one GPU over that seven-year span to play all those games. I owe many fun hours and good times with friends to the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti. It was the little GPU that could and I fondly remember its purchase.

Despite being a mid-range card, the GTX 560 Ti was fairly powerful compared to its contemporaries. With 2GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4Ghz and a core processing speed of 822 Mhz, the 560 Ti could play pretty much any game you could throw at it in full HD. It’s performance was even competitive with it’s older brother the GTX 570. The 560 Ti was built from the ground up for DirectX11 and featured powerful tessellation abilities, making games like Civilization V feel truly expansive. Tesselation allowed for graphics to be more detailed and contain smoother surfaces. Its $249 MSRP was a steal and a far cry from the exorbitant amounts we’ve come to expect for a new high-power GPU today.

It was an incredible value back then, and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti remains my favorite GPU of all time. Perhaps the mini GTX 1080 powering my current system will be my new favorite one day, but it has a lot of games to burn through to get there.

Do you have a favorite all time GPU? What piece of silicon do you owe most of your gaming to? Let us know in the Tom’s Hardware Forums.

Boot drives rarely get the attention they deserve. The type and capacity of your C: drive significantly affects how fast your system boots, how quickly your programs load, and how long you have to spend tapping your toe before you can actually get your game on.

It’s where all your programs get installed and files get downloaded by default, making your boot drive a huge potential bottleneck for everything you do in your operating system. So why are the boot drives on most modern PCs so disappointing?

To be fair, plummeting solid-state drive (SSD) prices have now thankfully relegated the near-tortuous experience of a spinning-platter boot drive to budget-priced PCs.

Just how far have SSD prices fallen? Intel’s X25-m launched at $595 for the 80GB model in 2008. For roughly a third of that price ($209) a decade later, I bought a Crucial MX500 drive with 25 times that Intel drive’s capacity (2TB). And there are strong indications that SSD prices will fall significantly more as 2019 progresses.

But even on premium laptops and gaming rigs today, system sellers (be they boutique builders or big-name PC makers) often seem out of touch with the realities of modern pricing and storage needs.

Dell ships the $899 entry model of its latest XPS 13 (9380) with a 128GB (let’s call it 120GB class for the sake of simplicity) NVMe boot drive. The first model that steps you up to 250GB class is priced above $1,200. Granted, you get double the RAM and a newer CPU for that added cost as well.

But no PC approaching $1,000 should be shipping with cramped storage these days when you can buy fast 250GB-class drives at retail for as little as $70, or even less than $50 if you’re willing to step down to a PCIe x2 drive rather than an x4 option. Obviously, big companies like Dell buy their drives in bulk and can get much better pricing than I can surfing Newegg.

Then there’s the gaming PCs. We’ve seen several pre-built rigs in recent months (be they laptops or desktops) priced well above $1,000 with 250GB-class SSD boot drives. Now, 250GB is definitely better than 120GB. But many game installs these days are ballooning up to and above 100GB. And even if there’s a secondary hard drive for storage, that’s not the ideal place to install your favorite games.

There are speedy 500GB-class NVMe SSDs available at retail hovering around the $100 mark. When I wrote this, Intel’s 512GB SSD 660p was on sale on Newegg for just $80, and Crucial’s competing 500GB P1 drive (both are based on the same QLC flash with the same controller) was selling for $75! At those prices, even the 250GB option above makes little sense.

Regardless, if you’re spending $1,500 or more on a gaming rig I think it’s reasonable for a tenth of that cost to be spent on the drive that’s going to be responsible for running your OS and games. Because no matter how fast the graphics card or CPU is, a cramped boot drive--particularly one that forces you to install things on a much-slower hard drive or frequently uninstall and re-download games--is going to lead to a painful gaming experience.

Given the continuing slide of SSD prices, here are some guidelines for what I’d like to see from PC makers in 2019. My ego isn’t inflated enough to think that large companies are going to change their plans based on my advice. But at least for anything I review personally, sticking close to these capacities and price points for a PC’s boot drive should be beneficial to a system’s overall score. More importantly, a PC that adheres to these reasonable storage rules will deliver a better experience to potential buyers.

120GB class: Unless it’s in a sub-$500 budget laptop, this cramped capacity should never be considered. Doubling the capacity adds tens of dollars to the cost, at most. Even if that cost is passed directly to the consumer, you’d be doing a service to anyone who may buy your PC.

250GB class: In most cases, this should be considered the absolute minimum--especially if there’s no secondary storage drive.

500GB class: This should be the minimum for a gaming laptop--even one with a 2.5-inch secondary hard drive, unless maybe the laptop is a budget gamer with a price tag under $1,000. Even then, 500GB is increasingly a reasonable ask.

1TB class: Once the realm of computing luxury, reasonably fast 1TB NVMe SSDs are now priced between $150 and $250. So any media creation or gaming-focused PC priced about $2,500 and up should come with a 1TB SSD boot drive. Gigabyte followed this rule recently with its Aero 15 X9 laptop. But Corsair wasn’t so generous with the 480GB boot drive on its otherwise impressive $3,600 revamped One i160.

These guidelines should also be considered for anyone building their own system. I recommend that you use some type of SSD for any system going forward, an NVMe drive for any system where performance matters (like a gaming or content creation rig), and a 500GB drive as a minimum for anything other than a basic budget machine.

For more help on choosing the right drive for your build or next pre-built rig, you can check out our SSD buying guide.

In case you’re wondering whether I put my money where my PCIe lanes and SATA ports are, my personal system has both a 2TB Intel NVMe 660p and the previously mentioned SATA Crucial MX500, both of which I bought late last year. Granted, I’m an outlier who’s really sick of dealing with fragile, slow hard drives. But as someone who’s been covering and testing storage nearly a decade, there’s never been a better time to buy a roomy, speedy, reliable SSD. And it’s looking like things are only going to get better from the consumer’s perspective as 2019 ambles on.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

So many noteworthy things happened in 2018, from frustrating data breaches and hardware vulnerabilities to triumphant product launches. But, from the looks of it, 2019 could even more memorable with long-awaited new technologies such as 7nm chips hitting the market and prices dropping further on some key components like SSDs.

Here are 19 quick predictions for 2019.

CPUs

• Get ready for 64 Cores: AMD keeps upping the ante on cores with its Threadripper lineup. In 2018, the 2990WX came with 32 physical cores and 64 threads, a step up from the original Threadripper's 16 cores and  32 threads. The company has already announced "Rome" server chips with 64 cores and 128 threads so it only makes sense that a third-gen Threadripper would hit that core count.

• Intel shortages shape the industry: The leading PC chip-maker didn't have enough manufacturing capacity for 14nm chips in 2018 and those problems will likely continue through the first half of 2019. As a result, we'll see higher prices on budget CPUs like the Pentium Gold series and we definitely won't see any major price drops on 9th Gen Core.  We may see availability issues as well.

• Keep waiting for 10nm: Last summer, Intel said not to expect its long-awaited, 10nm Ice Lake chips until 2020. If we see any 10nm Intel chips in 2019, they will be in limited supply and likely not in high-performance products. In summer 2018, the company sold a few 10nm Core i3 mobile CPUs to Lenovo which used them on budget PCs in China only. The company will keep tweaking its 14nm chips for incrementally better performance.

• AMD 7nm is on the way: AMD is on record saying that its next-gen chips, likely called the Ryzen 3000 series, will use a 7nm process. These chips seem likely to arrive by Q2 of 2019, delivering dramatically better performance than their predecessors.

• AMD takes share from Intel: With Intel's CPU shortages and AMD's likely release of new, 7nm chips for consumers, 2019 will be a big year for team red's processors. We anticipate more design wins for AMD, particularly in the laptop space where progress has been slow. As of Q2 2018, according to Mercury Research, AMD had 12.3 percent of the desktop PC market. Expect that to grow significantly by the end of 2019.

For a more detailed, reasoned set of predictions see Paul Alcorn's look at CPUs in 2019.

GPUs

• AMD Takes the GPU Fight to Nvidia: AMD's mid-range and budget cards have a lot to offer, but on the high-end, team red has no answer for Nvidia's powerful RTX cards. In 2019, that could change dramatically. According to some leaks, the company will be releasing 7nm GPUs based on its upcoming Navi platform. The chips are purportedly called the Radeon RX 3080, 3070 and 3060, but no matter what they are called, they should give power users some compelling new choices.

• Nvidia releases new budget GPUs: 2018 saw the emergence of the high-end, GeForce RTX cards. In 2019, we'll get low and mid-range cards that replace the GTX 1030, 1050 and 1060 lines, but don't support ray-tracing. All of Nvidia's cards, including the RTX 2080 and 2070 should make the move to mobile.

Read Chris Angelini's 2019 GPU predictions article for more details on what we may expect on graphics in the coming year.

PCs

• Surface Pro Gets USB Type-C: After years of stubborn, pointless resistance to the new standard, Microsoft will finally add USB Type-C charging to its flagship tablet / 2-in-1. Many of my fellow journalists will write long think pieces thanking Microsoft, but I will grouse about it not being Thunderbolt 3.

• New Snapdragon laptops arrive, but is third time the charm?: The first two generations of Always-Connected PCs -- Windows 2-in-1s powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon CPUs and 4G modems -- were big disappointments due to their slow performance and relatively high prices. The chipmaker recently announced the Snapdragon 8cx, an upcoming chip that's expected to match the performance of a mobile Intel Core i5 processor.

• In 2019, OEMs such as Lenovo, HP and Samsung will likely come out with new ACPCs that use the 8cx chip, but their performance will depend more on Microsoft's ability to get developers building native ARM apps than on Qualcomm's processing prowess. As long as the laptops have to run the most important Windows apps using x86 emulation, performance will suffer.

• More dual-screened laptops appear:  We'll see more experimentation in 2019, though this category will never be mainstream. Asus's Project Precog, a dual-screened 2-in-1 with built-in A.I. that the company showed at Computex 2018, is likely to come out and rumors indicate that Microsoft's long-awaited Andromeda project may come out as well.

See Andrew Freedman's look at Laptops in 2019 for a more in-depth look at where PCs are going.

VR

• Standalone headsets take center stage: The biggest barrier to mass VR adoption is that the most compelling headsets, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, both require powerful PCs. In 2018, we saw a few standalone headsets like the Oculus Go hit the market, but none of them offered the highest-end experience for gamers. In 2019, the upcoming Oculus Quest could bring PC gaming quality VR titles to the masses for the affordable price of $399. Other vendors will respond.

Read Scharon Harding's VR Gaming in 2019 article for a lot more predictions and details.

Storage

• SSDs Get Cheaper: You'll soon be able to buy a name-brand 1TB SSD for $100. Prices for mainstream SSDs will drop below 10 cents per GB. SSDs keep getting less expensive because of technologies such as QLC (quad-level cell) and 96-layer 3D NAND, both of which cut manufacturing costs, and a production glut.

• Bye, bye Optane cache. We hardly knew ye: With drives so cheap, nobody will want 16 or 32GB of storage cache. This technology was never that popular anyway.

• SSDs Common in Budget Systems: By the time back-to-school season rolls around in 2019, 256 to 512GB SSDs will come standard on sub-$500 laptops and desktops like those in Dell's Inspiron and HP's Pavilion lines. Hard drives will still appear as secondary storage drives in gaming PCs or workstations that need more storage on the cheap. And external hard drives will remain an attractive option for backup.

To see more detailed storage predictions, see Matt Safford's dedicated article on storage in 2019.

Mobile

• 5G hype outweighs reality: Mobile network vendors and chip-makers want you to believe that 5G will change your life in 2019, but you probably won't see the benefits of this emerging technology until 2020 or beyond. However, in 2019, we will see a ridiculous amount of advertising and unwarranted media attention for 5G.

• For example, we recently learned that AT&T plans to put a "5G E" indicator on new phones even though these devices will just be connecting to a faster LTE network that the carrier decided to call "5G Evolution." That reminds me of 2012 when T-Mobile decided to label HSPA+, a fancier version of 3G, as 4G. Very few devices or network locations will support true 5G in 2019, but we'll be sure to hear about every single one of them over and over again.

• More gaming phones hit the market, but games still lag: In 2018, both Razer and Asus released gaming phones that are designed specifically for mobile gamers as they promise faster performance and have screens with high refresh rates.

• In 2019, I expect to see refreshes from Asus and Razer and we may even see other players enter the space. But unlike AAA PC games which require beefy specs, Android games will still play just fine on non-gaming phones.

Console Gaming

• PlayStation 5 arrives: Nobody knows for sure whether then next-gen PlayStation will come in 2019 or 2020, but considering that Sony said last May that the PS4 is at the end of its lifecycle, the company seems likely to unveil a successor sooner rather than later. My guess is that we'll see a public announcement, if not availability, by Q4.

A.I. / Smart Home

• Cortana death rattle continues: You knew things were over for Microsoft's digital assistant when the company decided to let Alexa into Windows. Today, you can have the socially and digitally awkward experience of asking Cortana on your PC if you can talk to Alexa. In the next major Windows 10 release, due in spring 2019, Cortana will be separated from the Windows search function, making it less important and prominent than before. We don't know how long it will be before Cortana goes away altogether, but in a voice assistant market dominated by Amazon and Google (with a little Apple thrown in), her future is in dark mode.

• We reach peak Alexa: Now that you can get an Alexa Big Mouth Billy Bass and an Alexa-powered toilet, there's nowhere left for digital assistants to go. We'll see more Alexa and Google Assistant skills in 2019, but there's not much more to do with additional device types or platforms that hasn't been done.

Laptops — both productivity and gaming machines — made great strides in 2018. Some got thinner, others packed more power and there was more choice at more price points than ever before. I expect 2019 to be an exciting machine for notebooks on both fronts, so it’s time to make some predictions (and, perhaps, wishes) about what we may possibly see next year.

New Graphics Cards

Nvidia’s 10-series is on the way out for desktops, and it’s about time a mobile version of those chips come to laptops. With the current generation, most of the chips are on par with their desktop counterpart, which could point to some ray-tracing RTX cards coming to mobile. In recent weeks, we’ve seen some alleged Geekbench specs leak for an RTX 2060 (both with and without Max-Q design) and an RTX 2070 with Max-Q design. An October report suggested the possibility of everything from an RTX 2050 up to an RTX 2080 Max-Q.

Whiskey Lake H

Most high-end gaming laptops are running on Intel’s Coffee Lake-H CPUs. But Whiskey Lake is here, and we haven’t seen the overclockable chips for mobile yet. It wouldn’t be surprising to see H-series Whiskey Lake to power upcoming gaming laptops. But there’s also the possibility Intel skips to 9th Gen chips for branding purposes to match desktops and gives the CPUs a new name.

Dual Screens

We got a taste of dual screens this year with the Lenovo Yoga Book C930, but there’s surely more to come. Asus’ Project Precog, a dual-screen laptop with built-in AI debuted at Computex, so maybe this is the year we’ll see it hit production. And while we never saw Microsoft’s Andromeda tablet, there have been rumors that the company may bring it to market in a larger size.

AMD Makes a Bigger Play

AMD may hit the shelves in more laptops this year. We’re waiting on the company’s Picasso chips with integrated Radeon graphics to better compete with Intel’s latest, and Microsoft is rumored to use one for an upcoming Surface. That makes it sound like AMD may be prepared to butt heads with Intel more than it has in previous years, where it has shown up largely in unnamed laptops on shelves at big box retailers. But even if it does make a splash, it still has a big fight to put up against Intel, which is entrenched in entry-level, productivity and gaming notebooks.

Faster Displays

We can’t stick to 1080p forever. Many high-end gaming and performance laptops offer 4K display options, but you can’t go above 60 fps. Maybe that didn’t matter before, but if we get GPUs that can legitimately play at 4K, we need faster panels. So I hope to see high-refresh-rate 4K displays in 2019.

Style Points

People care about what their laptops looks like. If you take it with you, it’s an accessory, and if you leave it on your desk, well, you still care what it looks like. There were great strides in 2018, like the black and gold MSI GS65 Stealth in gaming and the super-sleek Huawei MateBook X Pro for productivity.

Expect some new designs as companies continue to streamline their looks and make them more acceptable to the masses. I expect some gaming devices to be toned down a bit (though RGB isn’t going anywhere), and for mainstream laptops to adopt some more premium trappings in order to lure users. And there have been rumors of Microsoft’s Surface lineup getting a full-scale redesign in 2019, and that lineup has guided the industry before.

MORE: Best Gaming Laptops

MORE: Gaming Laptop Reviews

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The news about solid-state drives (SSDs) has been mostly positive lately, and the trend of downward pricing and increasing capacity is likely to continue as we head into 2019.

We’ve already seen predictions that SSD pricing could fall more than 50 percent in 2019, although at least one manufacturer (WD/Sandisk) seems to be adjusting production to brace the impact of falling prices. But really, as we saw through the 2018 holiday season, SSD prices have already slid to impressive lows. I personally bought a 2TB NVMe Intel 660p drive from Newegg on Thanksgiving day for $249, as well as a 2TB SATA Crucial MX500 for $209. I know, that’s a lot of cash to drop on storage but, well, I’m not really a fan of hard drives and these drives finally let me kick the old spinning platters out of my PC forever.

With SSD sale prices hitting 10 cents per gigabyte and capacities expanding (Samsung’s new QVO drive will be offered at capacities up to 4TB), 2019 looks to be an excellent time to buy an SSD. But what’s driving capacity up and prices down? First off, the market has started to shift to QLC (quad-level-cell) NAND, which is cheaper to make than the TLC (triple-level cell) that’s baked into most existing consumer drives. QLC is in general slower than TLC, with less endurance. But with improvements in caching and cell resilience, QLC drives should generally be fast-enough, with enough rated endurance to keep most gamers and general-purpose PC users happy.

The other thing pushing down pricing is a shift to 96-Layer 3D NAND, which increases densities while lowering costs by stacking more storage cells on top of each other. All the major SSD makers have shifted or are expected to shift to 96-layer NAND in high capacities in 2019, although Samsung has the lead there and Intel/Micron seem to be lagging a bit behind.

Samsung’s Z-NAND Brings Competition to Optane

Intel’s next-generation 3D XPoint phase-change storage tech impressed us this year, with the 905p proving to be the fastest SSD we’ve ever tested. But Samsung will bring some competition to the ultra-fast (and ultra-expensive) storage front in 2019 with its competing Z-NAND technology. Samsung has been touting the potential of Z-NAND for years, but high-end Enterprise parts based around the technology only started to ship in limited quantities in 2018, and we expect to see more Z-NAND drives roll into data centers (and perhaps our testing rig) as 2019 progresses.

But, don’t get your hopes up yet about a consumer Z-NAND drive, at least yet. While it’s possible that the Samsung could release consumer-focused Z-NAND model next year, it seems unlikely given how few have yet to even make their way to professional customers. Plus, Samsung’s traditional consumer NVMe drives like the SSD 970 Pro are already fast enough in some tests (like sequential reads and writes) to give Intel’s consumer Optane drives a run for their phase-changing money.

What we’re more likely to see from Samsung in 2019 is a next-gen NVMe M.2 drive or drives (possibly an 980 EVO and 980 Pro) that ramp performance up even further (hopefully at lower prices). Because while the company long held a strong lead on consumer performance SSDs, upstarts like MyDigital SSD are increasingly offering compelling competing products that are nearly as fast as Samsung’s best, at significantly lower prices.

Quick Predictions

• 4TB consumer SSDs will become common
• QLC will replace TLC in mainstream SSDs (for better and worse)
• Prices will plunge below 10 cents per gigabyte for mainstream drives

MORE: Best SSDs

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Graphics in 2019: A Calm Before the Storm

The life of a graphics card reviewer was calm through most of 2018. Only there at the end, when Nvidia introduced its three Turing GPUs, did things get hectic. We dove deep into Turing as an architecture, the flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080, and the entry-level (but still very expensive) GeForce RTX 2070.

AMD couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Its Radeon RX 590 took the fight to GeForce GTX 1060 6GB late in the year. But getting the aging Polaris GPU in front of Nvidia’s card across our benchmark suite took an awful lot of power consumption. And at its $280 price point, the RX 590 has a hard time making a value case against $200 Radeon RX 580s.

AMD Stays Mainstream

We’re counting on AMD’s performance/watt position to improve in 2019 as it readies the Navi design on TSMC’s 7nm node. Just don’t expect the company to go after Nvidia’s high-end crown. It’s far more likely that we’ll see Radeon RX Vega-class performance at a lower price and, of course, reduced power consumption.

Aspirations for enthusiast hearts will have to wait for 2020 or beyond, when Navi’s successor is introduced. Until then, expect AMD to target smooth performance at 2560x1440 by pairing Navi to GDDR6 memory.

Nvidia Fills in its Line-up

With its Turing architecture already well-established at the high end, 2019 will see Nvidia flesh out the rest of its portfolio, including mid-range and entry-level options, along with mobile GPUs.

Real-time ray tracing may not be practical on models below the GeForce RTX 2070, but several of Turing’s other architectural advances would be helpful at lower price points. Concurrent execution of floating-point and integer math, a lot more SRAM (if lower-end Turing SMs look anything like the existing implementations), and faster memory all have the potential to uplift performance.

Beyond hardware news, 2019 will see a slow trickle of developers join EA/DICE with shipping games that take advantage of the Turing architecture’s RT cores. Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS) should get more play as well, though it remains to be seen if the technology shows as well in retail games as it does in hand-picked demos.

Intel Bides its Time

With its Xe family not expected until 2020, Intel’s plans for 2019 include faster integrated graphics. The Gen11 architecture should represent an impressive step forward compared to today’s best effort. As many as eight sub-slices give the top-end configuration a total of 64 execution units—up significantly from the 24 EUs found in the HD Graphics 630 engine common across a lot of the company’s desktop CPUs (but fewer than the 72 found on Iris Pro Graphics 580 back in the Skylake days).

Of course, knowing the team in charge of Intel’s aspirations, 2019 should be loaded with Xe hype, teased in painfully small doses.

Do you have your own thoughts on what will happen in the graphics world next year? Feel free to share in the comments below!

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Virtual reality (VR) is like The Little Engine That Could. It keeps chugging along and pushing, despite adoption obstacles and uphill-like momentum. But every year, VR pushes closer to becoming mainstream tech. And if you know the story of The Little Engine That Could, you know that he eventually succeeds. Will 2019 be the year VR finally reaches the top of the gaming mountain, becoming a broadly accepted, realistic and coveted platform?

Let’s gaze into our crystal ball for some predictions about the reality of VR in 2019.

No, VR won’t die. The market will grow, but consumer growth will be slow.

Analysts generally agree that the VR market will continue growing throughout 2019. But while business use expands rapidly, consumer VR will continue growing slowly, thanks to barriers-to-entry, like price, space requirements and many headsets requiring a well-specced gaming PC.

Analysts peg the market as growing at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate)  of 50 percent, give or take, depending on whom you ask. A September 2018 report notes that the global VR market represented $4.5 billion in 2017. Signs also point to growth for VR gaming specifically. Grand View Research says the global VR gaming market will surpass $45 billion by 2025. And in 2017, gaming, as well as media and entertainment represented over 30 percent of VR revenue, according to P&S Market Research.

So even though we’re expecting slow consumer growth, we expect that as VR grows overall, so too will VR gaming-related sales, primarily from VR headsets. VR headset prices are continuously dropping—partially due to component prices falling—and, therefore, accessibility is growing.

Standalone headsets will come into their own in 2019.  We’ll all have our eyes on Oculus Quest in 2019, because It could potentially tear down many of those VR barriers. At $400, the standalone headset can offer a similar experience to the Oculus Rift without requiring IR sensors or connection to a gaming PC or smartphone.

While its mobile CPU may not be as powerful as a modern Intel or AMD processor, its wireless functionality, 6-degrees of freedom (6-DOF, for 360-degree movement) and bundled controllers are also important steps in making VR gaming more appealing.

Already-released standalone head-mounted displays (HMDs) will get a boost. Google is working on a 6-DoF controller for the Google Daydream, and HTC is also working on a 6-DoF controller for the Vive Focus, which we predict will finally hit the consumer market in 2019.

VR headsets will get more powerful.

Outside of Oculus Quest, there are many other reasons to watch HMDs in 2019, as fields of view (FOVs), displays, eye tracking and wireless capabilities continue to advance.

The rumored Valve headset is expected to have an impressive 135-degree FOV. And by 2019, Pimax should be done shipping out its 8K, with a dual-resolution of 3840x2160 and 200-degree FOV, and 5K Plus, with dual-resolution of 2560x1440 and 200-degree FOV, headsets. Consider that the HTC Vive Pro has dual 1440x1600 resolution and a 110-degree FOV.

Pimax is also supposed to release an eye-tracking module in Q1 2019. The brand overall  can make an influential splash in 2019. We reviewed a pre-production version of their 5K+ and found it may offer a peek into mainstream VR’s future.

Speaking of eye-tracking, the tech is also on track to improve in 2019, thanks to components vendor developments—although it’ll probably take longer to reach consumers. Take Synaptics, which in August released a new display driver claiming to be the first dual-display 2K resolution combined with foveal transport support, which keeps images in the direct line of sight.

Visual Camp tech, meanwhile, promises the power to navigate and make menu selections with the eyes and foveated rendering for better performance. The company claims to have developed a VR game that offers “gaze and object targeting.”

Finally, Oculus Quest isn’t the only one cutting the cord. HTC brought wireless experiences in 2018 with the HTC Vive wireless adapter. And that’s a feature too helpful for other vendors to ignore.

VR accessories will keep flooding in.

In 2018, many VR accessories emerged touting their ability to make VR more immersive. There’s Mudra Inspire, a wristband-turned-VR controller, the HoloSuit, a full-body VR suit, to start. Next year, expect to see even more, whether it’s VR shoes, VR treadmills, VR backpacks or newfound ways to virtualize hands beyond joystick controllers.

Valve’s next Knuckles controllers will likely debut in 2019—our best guess is after GDC (Game Developer Conference) in March. Afterwards, you’ll probably hear of development of games that use the unique inputs Knuckles bring to the table.

PlayStation VR and smartphones will play a bigger role.

PSVR has proven it has a place in VR. Not only had it sold over 3,000,000 PSVR consoles and 21.9 million games and “experiences” as of August, but it also has popular exclusive VR titles, like Tetris Effect, Borderlands 2 VR and Resident Evil 7. Gamers are already anticipating PSVR’s 2019 titles and more exclusives.

As far as Xbox VR goes, Microsoft scrapped its original plans. But some people still have their fingers crossed. Evidence, as cited by UploadVR, includes Microsoft buying inXile Entertainment, developer of VR game The Mage’s Tale. And at E3 2018, Microsoft announced its acquisition of Ninja Theory, maker of VR games Dexed and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice VR Edition.  Microsoft is likely playing VR safe for now, so we’re not holding our breath for Xbox VR in 2019.

According to P&S Market Research, smartphones are contributing to a “stable platform” for VR.  Mobile VR circumnavigates some roadblocks by letting users tie the experience to something they’re more likely to have than a powerful gaming rig—a smartphone. AMD this month announced AMD Radeon ReLive for VR, which lets you stream VR games to mobile VR headsets. While the offering has some limitations, as noted in our hands-on, it does point to vendor interest in smartphone-based VR.

More VR games...and maybe an update on those Valve VR titles.

All that being said, if you’ve already bought into VR, there’s perhaps nothing more exciting (or guaranteed) than new games set in 2019. Lone Echo 2 for Oculus Rift, Population: One for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality and Stormland for Oculus Rift are some of the most anticipated VR games for 2019.

We’re also still waiting for those three Valve VR games CEO Gabe Newell promised back in 2017. Valve released its first game in five years, Artifact, in November. So we’re hopeful 2019 will bring news of Valve’s pending VR games, especially if the Knuckles controllers arrive. If Valve doesn’t actually release the VR titles next year, we’d at least take an update (please!).

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Disruption is an overused term in tech circles, but we've seen true disruption in the processor market over the last two years as AMD reemerged as a potent foe to Intel. Intel, resigned to providing incremental updates with each new generation of processors, was suddenly faced with an agile competitor that brought processors with higher core counts and lower prices to market at a frightening pace. These advances came while Intel tripped over its shoelaces during its perennially-delayed transition to smaller 10nm processors, which opened a big window of opportunity for AMD.

The resulting changes have reinvigorated the processor landscape, and now we enjoy the benefits of faster and cheaper processors across the board. But the fight has only just begun, and the coming year presents the possibility of even more drastic changes as Intel cedes the process leadership position to AMD. As a result, 2019 is sure to be a year of even more explosive changes, let's take a look at what we expect to see.

For Intel, A Whole Lotta 14nm

Intel announced this year that its 10nm processors wouldn't be available until the end of 2019, so after a four-year delay, we can expect those processors on shelves in time for the holidays. In the meantime, the company plans to keep chugging along with 14nm processors even as it faces severe shortages due to unanticipated demand. These shortages are predicted to last into next year, with more conservative estimates pegging the end in Q1, while more dire predictions stretch into Q3. In either case, that means we won't see big price drops from Intel until its 10nm chips come to market.

Intel brought out its third-gen 14nm Coffee Lake processors earlier this year to help plug the gap, but we expect yet more new 14nm products to come to market in the early part of next year. That includes the rumored Comet Lake-S processors. Those chips are said to come with up to 10 cores and a dual-ring bus. 

Intel also purportedly has its new "HK" chips in the hopper. These chips are based on the existing Coffee Lake processors but come without integrated graphics. That should allow the company to harvest more chips due to the ability to sell chips with defects in the graphics unit, while also possibly providing more thermal headroom for longer turbo boosts and higher overclocking capabilities.

Meanwhile, AMD Goes Full 7nm

AMD's Lisa Su recently announced its Zen 2 microarchitecture paired with the 7nm process in the EPYC server chips. Those chips will start shipping in early 2019, giving the company the first process lead over Intel in its history. That means the company designed its Zen 2 architecture around its 7nm process, so we can fully expect the Ryzen 3000 series to land with the smallest process on the market at some point next year, likely in the Q2 timeframe.

There is plenty of speculation about the new Ryzen 3000 series chips, but few concrete details. We've covered those topics here. The benefits of the smaller process node could bring chips with higher core counts, or at the very least, processors that suck less power and generate less heat. Oh, and lower prices per core, which is always the most welcome feature.

The HEDT Showdown

AMD's Threadripper lineup will also receive a 7nm makeover in 2019, but we're not sure if the company will scale up to 64 cores and 128 threads like it did with its EPYC Rome processors. AMD did use the same 32-core 64-thread EPYC Naples design for its current Threadripper lineup, so it's a strong possibility. In either case, the company has laid the architectural foundations for such a feat, which would radically alter the face of the high end desktop.

How could Intel respond? Intel recently introduced its 48-core 96-thread Xeon Cascade Lake-AP (Advanced Performance) processors that support 12 channels of DDR4 memory. We're not sure of the pricing of these high-end chips, but we're sure they'll never come to the high end desktop, despite rampant speculation.

Intel also released its new 28-core 56-thread Xeon W-3275X processors for professional users, but the ~$4,000 price tag will dissuade enthusiasts. That's the type of pricing model Intel is stuck with for its 14nm processors, so we don't expect more exotic designs like the Cascade Lake-AP to come to the enthusiast space. 

We Will See Intel's 10nm, Eventually

Intel does have a solid plan to right the ship in the wake of its delayed 10nm process, but the types of adjustments the company outlined at its recent Architecture Day will take quite a while to make it to market.

Intel's 10nm processors would arrive at the end of 2019, but whether they will come in any significant volume remains an open question. Intel announced earlier this year that systems will be on shelves for the holidays in 2019, implying that the company will bring mainstream 10nm processors to market first. Those Ice Lake processors will likely come with the Sunny Cove core architecture, which we've outlined here. A few scattered benchmarks have popped up in online databases, revealing that the processors will come with a new cache hierarchy that features larger 48KB L1 and 256K L2 caches. We've also seen recent documents that claim these chips will come as MCMs (Multi-Chip Modules), implying that Intel might be using multiple chips together in a single processor package. These listings could also indicate a new Kaby Lake-G generation that comes with a separate graphics unit.

Intel also purportedly has 10nm Tiger Lake chips further out on the roadmap, but those likely won't debut until early 2020.

AMD Keeps Climbing

Intel has an overwhelming share of both the desktop PC and server markets, but with market shares of 83% and ~95%, respectively, it's a virtual impossibility that the company won't lose more market share over the coming year. Intel is plagued with a nagging manufacturing capacity shortage due to record demand while AMD has plenty of capacity with its 12nm and 14nm processors being fabbed at Global Foundries. AMD also has a fresh production line being spun up at TSMC, so it isn't likely to face the same shortages.

Whip in AMD's lead to the 7nm era and Intel faces a tremendous challenge. AMD could possibly bring cheaper and denser chips to market well ahead of Intel, giving it a tangible advantage that spans all facets of the desktop and notebook markets to the data center.

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It's a great idea, on paper anyway: you give Intel and AMD some healthy competition by building a series of Windows 10-powered 2-in-1s that use Arm processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 and 850. Qualcomm's processors are much more power-efficient than their x86 competitors and they're really good at doing things like running background programs while asleep or connecting to LTE via their built-in 4G modems. Unfortunately, thus far, they aren't great at running Windows programs, but manufacturers don't seem to have gotten the memo.

Companies such as Samsung, Lenovo and HP are charging as much as a thousand dollars for these devices, which they call "Always-Connected PCs." That's an exorbitant amount for what's essentially a latter-day netbook, an underpowered but very-portable computer that, at best, is only powerful enough to serve as a secondary device for someone who already has a capable PC waiting at home.

I just reviewed the Samsung Galaxy Book 2, the first 2-in-1 to ship with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 850 CPU, a processor that is purpose-made to run Windows 10 on Arm. At first glance, this detachable looks like it's worth every penny of its premium price ($999 in the U.S. , TBD in the UK). You get a gorgeous 12-inch OLED display that makes colors liker the blue in an ocean come to life. There's an attractive metal chassis, great sound output, a pair of sharp cameras, a bundled keyboard with really good tactile response and a decent stylus in the box.

Performance Issues

But the Book 2's beauty is only skin deep. During my tests, its Snapdragon 850 chip struggled with Chrome, the world's most popular web browser while its paltry 4GB of RAM made multitasking painful. When I surfed the web with over a dozen tabs open and a YouTube video streaming in another window, there was significant lag. Every time I changed tabs, I had to wait a couple of seconds for the page to redraw, even though the pages were finished loading. At times, the system locked up for a few seconds.

To see how a similarly-priced, Intel-powered computer would handle the same workload, I tried opening over a dozen tabs and playing video on a Surface Pro 6 with a Core i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM. Not only was there no perceptible lag when changing tabs, but web pages loaded a lot faster, even though both the Surface and the Galaxy Book 2 were on the same Wi-Fi network.

One major performance challenge is that Snapdragon chips have to run standard win32 apps like Chrome in x86 emulation mode. If you download an app from the Microsoft Store, it will be compiled for ARM processors already and  run more smoothly. So Edge,  Microsoft’s own browser, ran better than Chrome, but it still had plenty of lag when switching tabs.

Incompatible Apps

Snapdragon chips can only run 32-bit win32 apps, so you can rule out any program that, like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Creative Cloud, is only available in 64-bit versions. And, even among 32-bit apps, any that require special drivers won't work. So, OpenVPN, a very popular VPN client that I need for work, won't run on an Always Connected PC because it needs to install its own TAP driver in order to work and the driver isn't compatible with Arm.

Microsoft and Qualcomm know that Snapdragon's x86 emulation isn't great, so they preload these devices with Windows 10 in S mode, which only allows you to install apps from the Microsoft Store but can be disabled in a couple of clicks. So, if you're happy with Edge, Microsoft Office and the scaled-back image editing, coding and other software you find there, you can have a palatable, though unimpressive user experience. That is,provided you don't load many programs at once and you don't store too much data.

Low-end Specs, High-end Pricing

Keep in mind that most of the Snapdragon computers, including the Galaxy Book 2 and the older HP Envy x2 and Lenovo Miix 630, you get just 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage at the most. In 2018, no computer that costs more than $500 should have less than 8GB of RAM, but all of these systems are priced at $799 or higher.

Some may argue that Always-Connected PCs are good enough to be primary PCs for less-demanding users, but that explanation just doesn't mesh with reality. Someone like my septuagenarian mother, who knows how to use PCs but doesn't understand how they work, has even less tolerance for lag and unresponsiveness than a tech enthusiast like me. When I click on something and the system pauses for a few seconds, I will sit there and wait because I know the system is overwhelmed. But my mother will get frazzled and start clicking over and over again, because she expects the system to "just work."

Second Coming of the Netbook

As netbooks like the Asus Eee PC showed all the way back in 2008, there's a place in the market for light-weight, long-lasting companion devices. If you have a powerful desktop at home but need a computing device to use for note-taking in class or writing work emails on the train, you can benefit from secondary computer like an Always-Connected PC. However, that benefit isn't worth anywhere close to $799.

Cheaper or Better Alternatives

At the height of the netbook craze in 2008 to 2010, new 10 or 11-inch laptops with Atom processors usually cost $500 to $650  (£390 - £500). At that time, ultraportable laptops like the MacBook Air cost at least $1,000 more than that. Today, you can get a superior primary device for around the same price or, at most, $129 /  £104 more than the Galaxy Book 2. The Surface Pro 6 costs $1,029 /  £1,004 with keyboard or  $1,129 / £1,104 with pen.

If you don't require a detachable and just want a powerful lightweight laptop, you can get a bendback 2-in-1 like the Lenovo Yoga 730 or a traditional clamshell like the Asus ZenBook 13 for less than $800 / £899.99.

When you just want a secondary device, the true use-case for these Snapdragon laptops, you can get a good one for less than $600 / £600. Microsoft's detachable, 10-inch Surface Go starts $399 / £379 or $599 / £599 with keyboard and pen. Even that's a lot of coin. If you can live with a bendback Windows machine, you can find one for less than $350 / £350 in the Acer Spin 1 or Dell Inspiron 11 3000 2-in-1.

And finally, if you just need to surf the web and send some emails, the best low-cost choice is a cheap Chromebook, which you can get for less than $300 / £300 and sometimes less than $200 / £200. And, unlike the Always-Connected PCs that cost 3 to 5 times as much, it will run Chrome browser without a hitch.

Outlook

None of the suggested alternative above come with 4G LTE modems, though the Surface Go is supposed to be getting a cellular option eventually. No doubt on-board 4G is a huge convenience, but there are simple alternatives like using the hotspot feature on your phone, that make it more of a nice-to-have than a necessity.

I really hope Arm-powered Windows computers become serious competitors for their Intel and AMD-based brethren, but to get there, they will need to either offer equivalent performance or humble, budget-friendly pricing. But no matter how great their screens or chassis, today's Always-Connected PCs just aren't worth the money.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

High-end PC gamers and enthusiasts are the kind of consumers most companies dream about: a collection of people eager to spend thousands of dollars on performance hardware. And two years after the well-received 10-series cards from Nvidia, a Vega response from AMD that failed to move the performance-per-dollar needle significantly forward, and enduring over a year of crypto-driven price craziness, those consumers were pretty eager for something new to get excited about.

But here we are more than two months out from the Turing launch, and Nvidia doesn’t have a whole lot to show for its effort, other than a trio of high-priced cards that are consistently failing to arrive in stores at their promised starting prices.

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang first announced its Turing architecture, packed with AI cores and real-time ray tracing features, he called the latter feature “the Holy Grail of our industry.” It was hyperbolic posturing to be sure—something we’ve come to expect from most major product launches--but also believable. The demos shown off by Nvidia promised a level of real-time visual realism that had only been seen before in pre-rendered cutscenes or Hollywood CGI masterpieces from studios like Pixar.

Now, Nvidia is selling its own Founders Edition cards at their promised prices, which is fine. But at the initial RTX launch, the company put up a slide showing third-party 2080 Ti cards starting at $999, 2080 cards at $699, and RTX 2070 cards at $499.

A quick look at Newegg and Amazon tells us that most RTX 2080 cards are selling for more than the premium Founders Edition pricing (north of $800 in the US and £600 in the UK), nowhere near $700. And the same is generally true of third-party RTX 2080 Ti cards—if you can find them in stock. As we wrote this on the official launch day of the RTX 2070, third-party variants of that card weren’t yet showing up for sale. And Nvidia’s own product page had a “Notify Me” button for its $599 FE variant (£549 UK), which will presumably arrive on October 17th as promised. But recent history tells us it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll see a 2070 card anywhere near its promised $499 starting price anytime soon.

Of course, card scarcity and inflated prices are nothing new for graphics card launches—I remember paying about $30 (22.74 pounds) over MSRP for my ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT in the weeks after it launched in mid-2007. But a $30 premium is a lot easier to tolerate than $100 or more.

And the high card prices are particularly hard for consumers (and reviewers) to take when the most-hyped features of RTX--namely ray tracing and AI-assisted super sampling (DLSS) can’t be definitively tested yet, because there are no games that support those features yet.

We’re expecting Battlefield V in November, and though Shadow of the Tomb Raider is out now, there’s no official word on when its ray tracing features will roll out. So while Microsoft pushed its DirectX Raytracing API out in the recent October update, RTX buyers--or potential buyers--are left with a modest list of promised games for both ray tracing and DLSS, and no clear indication of just how well the new cards will run with games with these future features.

As our own Chris Angelini asked in his RTX 2070 review, “Will ray tracing make enough of a difference to compel a graphics upgrade?” That’s definitely not a question reviewers should be asking three cards into a graphics card line launch--particularly one that’s arriving more than two years after its predecessor. And rather than competition from AMD, its those still-very-available previous-generation 10-series cards that are posing the biggest argument against Nvidia’s expensive new RTX cards. Again, let’s throw to our esteemed emeritus EiC for his expert analysis:

“So, what’s up with the lackluster reception of Turing-based graphics cards? It’s a three-part interplay of hyped-up technology that can’t be used yet, comparisons to plentiful Pascal-based cards, and a resulting (negative) perception of value. In generations past, Nvidia gave us more performance at a comparable, if not better price.

This time around, the company is mostly competing against its own cards with MSRPs reflecting a lack of competition. GeForce RTX 2070 is basically a step sideways for anyone who was previously eyeballing GeForce GTX 1080. GeForce RTX 2080 is a step sideways for anyone with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Only GeForce RTX 2080 Ti sets itself apart as an unrivaled winner among folks who were previously willing to pay $1200 for Titan-class frame rates. Buy Pascal or buy Turing; Nvidia wins either way.”

That last bit is key of course. While Nvidia would probably be happier if consumers picked up one of its latest cards, it’s making money either way. And without a competitive lineup from AMD--which isn’t expected at least until its 7nm Navi cards arrive sometime in 2019--Nvidia has little incentive to lower its prices.

Though it’s impossible to say yet exactly how well RTX cards are selling, clearly they are selling, as evidenced by the spotty availability of the $1,200-plus RTX 2080 Ti and the fact that third-party RTX 2080s are still mostly priced at $100 or more above Nvidia’s starting MSRP.

It’s understandable that the low availability and high prices would annoy (and in some cases, anger) enthusiasts who are used to getting more pixel-pushing power for their money. But at least there are (for the time being at least) plenty of GTX 1080s and GTX 1080 Tis available for those who don’t want to pay more for untested features such as ray-tracing and DLSS.

The bigger issue is why Nvidia is, in effect, over-promising and under-delivering with its RTX lineup--at least here in the early days of Turing card availability. Of course the company will rightly say it doesn’t have control over the price of third-party cards or when developers push out new games or updates. But with no new high-end cards from AMD on the market yet either, it’s unclear why Nvidia launched these cards when it did, rather than wait a few months. And of course it could have sold its own Founders Edition cards at slightly lower prices, pushing its third-party partners to be competitive.

We’re sure to see more than a few enticing games with ray tracing and DLSS features by 2019. By then the stock of 10 series cards may have dried up, and we’ll be able to actually evaluate the RTX cards on their key new features.

Until then, many looking for value in the high-end card market will likely keep looking to older cards--or waiting to see what AMD can deliver with Navi. Even if Navi only brings enough competition to bring down prices on today’s Turing offerings, that will be a boon for Nvidia’s sales numbers. Hopefully more RTX cards in consumers hands will also entice more game developers to push through features that take advantage of the uniqueness of Nvidia’s Turing hardware.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

This week Microsoft released a pair of new computers: the Surface Pro 6 and the Surface Laptop 2. The new systems have Intel's quad-core 8th Gen processors, speedy SSDs, high-res displays and . . . a serial port that connects to your Reagan-era mouse. Ok, I'm kidding about the latter, but Microsoft is dead serious about living in the past when it refuses to offer USB Type-C ports on its latest PCs.

Microsoft might be the last major PC vendor not to offer Type-C on its high-end consumer PCs (which is especially strange, considering the Surface Book 2 and Surface Go both have that port). If you look around the industry, you'll still find some mainstream consumer and budget systems that don't support the standard, but everyone from HP to Apple offers this reversible connector for data, video and charging.

By writing off this critical port, Microsoft has left its customers disconnected from a burgeoning ecosystem of peripherals. It has also given consumers and businesses a really good reason not to buy its products. At this point, I wouldn't buy any computer that doesn't have at least a USB Type-C port, if not a Thunderbolt 3 connection, which is compatible with USB-C but also works with faster peripherals such as eGPUs. There are several reasons that everyone needs USB-C:

Universal Charging

Before Type-C, every brand of laptop had its own, proprietary connector and some brands had more than one. But with the new standard, any laptop that requires less than 100 watts of power can use interchangeable power bricks. Left your ThinkPad's AC adapter at home? No problem. You can borrow the one that came with your friend's MacBook Pro or your coworker's Dell XPS 13.

If you have an Android phone or other, non-Apple mobile device that was made in the last couple of years, it probably charges via Type-C. So you can use the same laptop power brick to charge your laptop, your phone and even your Nintendo Switch. By sticking with its own, proprietary Surface Connect port, Microsoft is forcing users to buy one of its chargers if they need a second brick.

Right now, the company charges a hefty $79 for a 65-watt charger ($57 on Amazon). You can pay the same price for a Surface Connect to Type-C dongle, which you can combine with a Type-C AC adapter to get a charger, but at that point, you're talking about spending more than $100 just to charge. No thanks.

You can buy a laptop-capable Type-C charger from a reputable brand for under $40. But swapping chargers is just the tip of the iceberg.

Power Banks

No matter what kind of laptop you have, you can never have enough battery life. Considering that the Surface Pro line has always had mediocre endurance, I'm sure the new Surface Pro 6 could use a little extra juice. If it had USB Type-C, you could attach it to a third-party power bank like the Anker PowerCore Speed 20,000 PD, which offers another 20,000 mAh of power; that's a few more hours of unplugged usage.

Docking

Microsoft would love to charge you $199 for its proprietary Surface Dock, but you can find a Type-C dock for under $130. But what's a few dollars between friends? The real problem is that you can't use other devices with Microsoft's dock.

At our office, we recently started hot desking (aka hoteling), a process where many workers use different desks every day and guests can just slide into an open space and start working. With USB Type-C, you can deliver power and data to any compatible laptop, Mac or PC, over the same cable. Any business that wants to even consider doing hot desking should stay far far away from Microsoft's new Surfaces.

New Peripherals

Though most external hard drives and Flash memory drives still use USB Type-A, Type-C models are out there and they can deliver faster transfer speeds. The new USB 3.1 Gen 2 standard delivers 10 Gbps, twice the bandwidth of old-fashioned USB 3.0.

But, considering how much Microsoft charges for its computers, there's no reason that the company should go with plain, vanilla USB-C. It should offer Thunderbolt 3, which can deliver up to 40 Gbps of data over a single connection. If these devices had Thunderbolt 3, they could dock with eGPUs, which would allow them to play AAA games or do serious video editing.

Microsoft Has Its Reasons

USB Type-C isn't exactly an unproven, fly-by-night technology. This standard has been in place for four years now and it started appearing on major computers all the way back in 2015. Microsoft was late to the game, but finally put a Type-C port on the Surface Book 2, which debuted in late 2017 and on the Surface Go tablet that shipped this past summer. So what gives?

However, on the latest Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, Type-C is conspicuously absent. At the launch event, a Microsoft rep told Tom's Hardware that customers are "divided" in terms of demand (some want it and some don't) so the company's response is to offer it on some devices and not others. Say what?

It's hard to believe that a major computer manufacturer would deliberately leave off a critical port because some consumers may not want it. First of all, by eschewing Type-C, the company is asking people NOT to buy the Surface Pro. People have a choice and, if they want Type-C, they're not going to switch from a Surface Pro tablet to a $1,499 Surface Book 2. They're just going to purchase one of the many competing Windows devices that has this critical port.

Perhaps the real reason Microsoft hasn't gone with USB-C is that the Redmond software giant just doesn't want to spend the money or time to change its chassis design and incorporate an extra port. Considering how much time and effort supposedly goes into developing these products, it's hard to believe that none of the designers could figure out how to poke another hole in the aluminum or swap out the mini DisplayPort for a similarly-sized Type-C connector.

Bottom Line

While Microsoft may offer a more eloquent reason for not embracing USB-C on all of its products, there's really no excuse. For any new tablet or ultraportable laptop, Type-C charging should be standard, particularly if you're spending more than $800.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

The arrival of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX graphics cards has left many consumers underwhelmed, with the promise of a ray tracing-enabled tomorrow not doing much for enthusiast PC gamers today. With ongoing rumblings about new AMD graphics cards on the horizon, many are awaiting the Red Team’s response to Team Green’s next-gen RTX graphics cards.

There are many reasons AMD could make waves in the GPU market next year, which we'll discuss below, but most of the following points are hypothetical or opinion (based on what we know today). A lot depends on how things could go for AMD at this point. We of course don't know exactly how things will play out. But let's consider what 2019 and beyond might look like for AMD on the graphics card front.

What’s Good for CPU Is Good for GPU?

AMD’s Ryzen processors marked the return of real competition in the CPU market, seemingly forcing Intel to adjust its strategies with its 14nm product stack (not that Intel will admit it) as it stumbles to reach the 10nm processing node. The debut of Ryzen in 2017 resulted in an almost immediate benefit for the consumer: Intel was suddenly selling CPUs at a lower cost-per-core with the arrival of its 8th generation Coffee Lake silicon, and pricing and performance between the two processor peddlers has been increasingly competitive ever since.

If AMD takes the lessons it learned rolling out its first- and second-generation Ryzen CPU lineups (presenting a compelling price-to-performance ratio and focusing on its advantages) and can somehow bottle that momentum into its graphics products, AMD could snag a sizeable chunk of Nvidia’s consumer market share, as it did with Intel in the CPU segment. However, this will depend on the next major graphics release the company puts forth. 

New GPU Lithography & Architecture Inbound

AMD already has new Vega-based Radeon Instinct graphics built on its 7nm process in the pipeline, and CEO Lisa Su gave gamers a glimmer of hope when the new AI and machine learning GPUs were announced, by stating the company plans to bring the new process to consumer GPUs in the future. That future appears to be coming quite soon, with AMD verifying that its roadmaps and products (including “Navi,” it’s next graphics architecture) are on track for production at TSMC’s 7nm fab.

Newer AMD technologies like XGMI (essentially Infinity Fabric over PCIe, AMD's answer to Nvidia's high-bandwidth NVLink tech) and Asynchronous Compute support could also give AMD the potential to close the performance gap with its competitor. However, this depends entirely on whether or not AMD can put forth a product that competes with the likes of Nvidia’s top tier offerings in rasterized game performance.

As 2018 is starting winding down, it’s clear that AMD isn’t ready to bring a new graphics architecture to market before the end of the year. However, with 7nm production well under way, there is hope that the company will launch a new architecture in early 2019. Either way, AMD should have new high-end cards on offer in the not-too-distant future.

Ray Tracing Still Isn’t a Thing (Yet), but AMD Already Has It

As we previously noted, the promise of ray tracing glory in real time in your favorite games can’t be substantiated at present. There aren’t any titles (again, as of right now) that take advantage of Nvidia’s Tensor and RT core-packed Turing GPUs and the company's ray tracing acumen. We've also conjectured that widespread ray tracing adoption will have to filter through gaming consoles (an industry in which AMD is clearly the dominant force) to gain mainstream acceptance. Although there are several games coming soon, Nvidia has placed a large bet on the feature taking off with only a small handful of titles in the pipeline close to the launch date. Still, for many, the up-front hardware cost of entry to ray tracing glory (at least, Nvidia’s version of it) is just too steep (at least, until RTX 2070 arrives in October or pricing comes down).

Still, Nvidia’s investment in making real-time ray tracing available at a consumer gaming level is admirable, and it could spike developer interest for ray tracing in general. However, developers don’t have to buy into Turing-based GPUs in order to implement real-time ray tracing techniques in their games. AMD also has its own ray tracing technology called Radeon Rays.

Unlike Nvidia’s RTX ray tracing technology, Radeon Rays is an open-source developer tool that conforms to the OpenCL 1.2 standard (RTX runs over the DXR API), so it can be deployed with non-AMD hardware and in multiple OS environments. Nvidia’s tech requires proprietary hardware (its Turing GPUs) in order render the ray-traced effects and rasterized gameplay in parallel. But AMD’s Radeon Rays (and the latest release of ProRender) can support real-time GPU acceleration of ray-tracing techniques, mixed with traditional rasterization-based rendering on the Vulkan 1.1 API, which is fully supported by GNC-based AMD GPUs loaded with the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin.

Similar to RTX, Radeon Rays has yet to make an appearance in a PC game, and at present, it’s not known if there are any plans in the near-term to make AMD's ray tracing an in-game reality. So too, performance of such a feature is just hypothetical until it's put in the spotlight with a working game demo (which, as far as we know, hasn’t happened yet). It’s also possible AMD may not be that interested in ray tracing for games, despite a heavy presence in the professional market with Radeon Rays. However, the framework is there for the company to pursue Nvidia down the ray-traced rabbit hole if the technology becomes the next must-have feature in PC gaming graphics (as Nvidia likely hopes).

A Possible Price Advantage?

The high price of Nvidia’s new RTX-series graphics cards also weighs heavily on enthusiasts, with the top-end RTX 2080 Ti starting at a not-so-cool $1,000 (or $1,200 for a Founder’s Edition model) and the RTX 2080 starting at $700, although cards available at retail often exceed these MSRPs. AMD usually launches new graphics architectures at a competitive price point for similarly performing counterparts (see Vega 64 vs. GTX 1080, for example), but this time around Nvidia has given its competition a high price ceiling to work with.

If AMD can get in the same same performance ballpark as Nvidia with rasterized game performance as the 20 series cards, pricing may be more reasonable than the asking price of RTX.

Additionally, the most recent set of tariffs could mean increased pricing for many PC components, including GPUs. Although AMD’s Drew Prairie seemed confident that the company would be able to avoid price hikes with its CPU supply chain, the representative could not comment on the aftermarket (AIB) GPU market.

Both major graphics manufacturers will have to deal with the new tariffs somehow, by way of avoidance with clever sourcing and shipping agreements, or paying the taxes and absorbing or forwarding the cost to consumers (or likely some mixture of both). What each company will do is yet to be determined. But either way, AMD has plenty of price runway to launch its next-generation Navi graphics cards, and its cards could be made even more attractive if the company does a better job of avoiding costs and price hikes than Nvidia.

Uncertainty Abounds, but There's Plenty of Opportunity for AMD

With Nvidia’s focus on ray tracing, its high RTX-card price points, and less-than-stellar generational gains for traditional rasterized gaming performance, AMD has been handed an opportunity to close the gap or even take the lead over its competitor in the GPU market. As we’ve noted, this will all depend on where the aforementioned chips land in the performance and price stack when AMD launches its next generation graphics architecture. The only thing we know for sure at this point is that AMD has new graphics cards coming (likely in the first half of 2019). While we'd still put AMD in underdog territory on the graphics side, its recent successes on the CPU front with Ryzen proves the company can deliver an exciting, competitive product after years of less-than-stellar silicon.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.

Updated August 28, 6:30 p.m. ET with clarification from Intel. The badges will not feature the "Optimized for Connectivity" phrasing. That will only be used in marketing materials and point of sale.

Intel just announced its 8th Gen Core mobile processors… again. There are two sets: the Amber Lake Y-series for fanless devices and the Whiskey Lake U-series. That marks four “8th Gen” lines of mobile processors, two of which have the U-series appendage.

If you’re a regular visitor to Tom’s Hardware, you’re probably no stranger to reading processor names. An enthusiast will know that an Intel Core i7-8650U is a Kaby Lake-R processor and that a Core i7-8565U is a Whiskey Lake chip. But the fact I can bring this up at all as a nitpicky complaint shows that this is just getting to be a bit much. 

If you’re anything like me, you’ve helped a friend or family member get a laptop or other tech. Now imagine having to explain why one 8th Gen Core i7 is different from another 8th Gen Core i7. On the shelf in Best Buy, two laptops with Intel’s “8th Gen Core i7” tags will have the exact same stickers.

There's just one thing you may see in marketing materials and in stores:

See that? “Optimized for Connectivity.” That yellow text, on marketing materials for the new U-series notebooks, refers to the CPUs’ integrated Gigabit WiFi. It’s the only obvious difference, unless you’re good at reading spec sheets, that you’re looking at something with the the latest and greatest. I can tell you that my less-techy friends and family wouldn’t know the difference. That's even though the Kaby Lake-R chips end in the number 0 and the Whiskey Lake chips end in the number 5.

I suppose that the confusion could be washed away by making sure they see those words in the store, (though that will depend on how stores lay out signage). After all, it’s slightly faster, and that’s all they really need to know. If you like using Alexa or Cortana, it’s better for that, too. And maybe they’ll sleep better at night knowing about the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations. Perhaps they should be waiting for 9th Gen Core, but if you need a laptop now, you get one now.

“[W]e are working with the PC manufacturers to explain this to consumers in various materials,” an Intel representative told Tom’s Hardware when asked for comment.

This points to stagnating progress on Intel’s part (we’re still waiting on the company to release a 10nm CPU)  that doesn’t just affect its stock price. It can affect consumer buying habits, even if you just use a laptop to browse the web, stream TV shows and post pictures of your kids on Facebook. If the average person can reasonably suggest they don’t know how to get your latest product because it’s confusing, you have a different problem altogether.

Should Intel have renamed this 9th Gen? I don’t think so. It’s not much of a leap in terms of technological progress. But at least as of this initial announcement, Intel isn’t doing an amazing job of explaining why Whiskey Lake, the company’s best-performing mainstream chips (it suggests. We haven’t tested any laptops with them yet) is impressive. And the chip-maker sure isn’t making it easy to walk into a Walmart and get one off the shelf and walk out knowing you have the fastest chip you can afford.

It’s back to school time and holiday shopping will start soon, too. If those in need of laptops may possibly make poor decisions based on a naming convention, Intel needs to get to 9th Gen fast or find a better way of educating customers who don’t read spec sheets on the regular.  To those people, I hope you have an enthusiast in your life. You’re going to need one until 9th Gen Core comes around.

The PC versus console war is more fierce than ever. There's no denying that both machines provide great results, but we think the PC has the upper hand when it comes to playing Fortnite Battle Royale. Here are a few standout reasons why we think the PC is the superior option:

The Benefit of Keyboard + Mouse

The best thing about playing Fortnite Battle Royale on PC is that you get to play with a keyboard and mouse. That means you will be able to navigate better in the game. You can swivel around quickly and spot enemies around you. With a joystick this becomes a bit more difficult. The keyboard and mouse have separate inputs for walking and aiming, so you'll be able to function more efficiently, rather than with a joystick where the player has to aim, fire, walk, and build from a single input.

Better Aiming

The mouse allows you to aim with ease as you will have the whole grip of your hand on it. You'll not only aim quickly, but you can also have a greater crosshair range. Auto aim on the console will hinder your improvement over time. You can easily move your crosshair to any part of the enemy and it also gives extra support when you are jumping and shooting. So using a mouse definitely is better when it comes to aiming.

Better Building

This is another benefit of using the PC to play Fortnite Battle Royale rather than the console. Due to the better navigation of keys on the keyboard (or mouse, in some cases) you can build a lot faster. Players can also set keys according to their preferences and reach, and it will be a lot easier for them to not only build faster, but also edit the buildings that are already built. Granted, it will take some time to get used to the keys on the keyboard but once your hands are set on the keys, you will build like Flash. So PC definitely wins when it comes to building.

Better Graphics

You will get a lot more FPS on a PC (if you have a good one) than a PS4 or Xbox One. The limit of FPS on a console is 60 FPS, whereas you can get up to 300 FPS on a PC. Now judge for yourself, which one is better, 60 FPS or 300 FPS? This is why most professional players prefer playing on PC, as it will deliver smooth gameplay with minimal lag.

MORE: Fortnite Battle Royale - How to Do More Damage

MORE: Fortnite Battle Royale Guide: 20 Best Tips and Tricks To Win

MORE: Get Maximum Fortnite Performance: 'Epic' Mode

It’s been years since I was willing to work on any PC that boots from a mechanical hard drive. Once you get used to the snappy response times and speedier gameload times of an SSD, going back to a hard drive feels like computing through a thick layer of molasses.

And with the release today of the fast and surprisingly affordable Intel 660p, the first quad-layer-cell (QLC) SSD, we may be near a point where hard drives don’t make a whole lot of sense for the majority of PC users—even budget buyers. At the very least, I don’t think I’ll ever buy another hard drive, and that’s not just because of cutting-edge SSD tech.

To be fair, I own an 8TB Seagate hard drive that’s served me well for a couple of years. And I just carried it over to a new Ryzen 5 2600X-based build which serves as my main home productivity/gaming PC. That drive has a few terabytes of files on it, including thousands of irreplaceable photos and videos that I use as part of my travel writing and Scotland-focused Facebook page.

Office 365 Is All the Backup I Need

If that drive suddenly died in the coming days or months, I might be tempted to replace it, given that 6TB hard drives look to be headed toward the $100 price point at some point this year (external 6TB drives currently hover around $120). But the truth is, even at $100 or less, I don’t really need that much space.

All my can’t-lose files are backed up on the 5TB of OneDrive space (technically 1TB per user, though you can share folders between users) that I get from my $80-per-year Microsoft Office 365 subscription. With that also comes the benefit of having all my work files and photos available from any connected PC that I care to sign in to with my Microsoft account. Oh, plus the ability to install Microsoft Office on up to five PCs.

That said, even if I didn’t have an online backup option, I wouldn’t trust a hard drive with my can’t-lose data, because I’ve had several mechanical drives die unexpectedly on me over the years. And after nearly a decade using SSDs, I’ve experienced exactly one solid-state death.

Plus, my hard drive really isn’t speedy enough for my data storage needs anyway. I’m not great at properly sorting my photos, and so when I open a folder of thousands of files on my hard drive, it can take several seconds for the drive to spin up and thumbnails to show up, or for files to re-sort by date or size. Yes, I know I should be more organized and use something like Lightroom for image handling, but I’m not there yet and I honestly don’t know if I ever will be. You can pry Windows Explorer and a basic folder structure from my cold, dead mousing hand.

Bulk SSD Storage Is Already Surprisingly Affordable and Prices Will Fall Soon

If I had to buy a new drive for bulk storage today, I’d probably opt for an SSD. Micron’s 1100 drive, for instance, is arguably a steal at its current selling price of just under $300 for the 2TB model.

It’s based on fairly recent 3D TLC flash, and it sells for $100 less than most competing SSDs of the same capacity. Sure, 2TB can’t compete with 12TB hard drives. But given that I’m using a 512GB Samsung NVMe SSD as my boot drive, I could probably live with “just” 2TB of bulk storage, especially given it would be much faster than my comparatively pokey hard drive.

Micron’s 2TB drive is a bit of a fluke right now, and once QLC drives become increasingly common and the cheap China-made NAND we saw at Computex starts flooding the market, SSD prices will drop precipitously once again. Barring any major natural disasters affecting production (always an unfortunate possibility) or other major market disruptions, by the time my existing 8TB hard drive starts to give up its mechanical ghost (hopefully a few years down the line) I should be able to pick up an affordable 4TB-or larger SSD. Heck, an 8TB SSD might even be an option for a few hundred bucks by then.

Sure, mechanical drives will likely be cheaper and vastly more spacious for several years to come. And for those who truly need several terabytes of cheap storage—particularly for server and bulk backup setups where capacity and price matter much more than speed—hard drives will remain staple products.

What About External Backup Drives?

There’s no denying that external drives are enticing for those who need cheap portable storage and backup for their files. But I’d argue even harder these days against using an external drive for backup. Sure, they’re cheap, but an external hard drive powered solely by the USB port is, if anything, going to be even slower than an internal drive. And much worse, it’s all-too-easy to knock over an external hard drive, or drop it. If you do this while the drive is powered up, there’s a very good chance you’ll lose your data on the spot as the drive head crashes into the platters or the platters crash together.

If I needed an external drive today for a laptop or desktop that doesn’t have the space for an additional internal drive, I’d buy the above-mentioned Micron SSD and slap it in a cheap 2.5-inch hard drive enclosure, like this $9 Sabrent model that claims to be optimized for SSDs. I’ve had two portable drives die on me in the last decade or so, one after a just few months without ever dropping it. I don’t trust hard drives with important data in general, but I trust portable hard drives even less.

Hard Drives Are Starting to Feel Like a Niche Product

For the first time today—at least for me personally—SSDs have gone completely mainstream, and hard drives, once unquestionably dominant, have started to feel like niche products.

I wouldn’t recommend a hard-drive-based PC to anyone at this point, even budget buyers. The savings just isn’t worth the very real performance you’ll gain from running an SSD boot drive. Even for backup and bulk storage, so long as your file libraries don’t stray into the several-terabyte range, I’d recommend paying for an online solution (perhaps one that lets you encrypt your files and offers two-factor authentication if you’re worried about security) for a year or two.

By that time, you’ll likely have gotten accustomed to the conveniences of available-anywhere online storage and you may want to stick with your service of choice (I’m personally very happy with OneDrive and Office 365).

Even if you decide you want to go back to having all your files backed up locally, by that time a cheap, roomy SSD may be a real option. There will always be people with huge media libraries who won’t want to part with their massive hard drives. But for me, I think my current 8TB Seagate Barracuda drive will be the last mechanical drive I’ll ever own. And I doubt I’m alone.

Late last week, the State of New York's Public Service Commission kicked Charter Communications, which runs the internet service provider (ISP) Spectrum, out of the state. It's unprecedented, but its reasoning is sound. But if you're a Spectrum subscriber (like me) you're also a little worried.

The commission's reasoning is that Charter didn't meet promises it made about its 2016 merger with Time Warner Cable, which made it the country's second biggest cable company. Charter had agreed to increase speeds and expand its broadband offerings to 145,000 homes and businesses in rural areas of the state. According to the commission, it didn't meet those agreements, and now Spectrum has got to go. (Charter says that it reached 86,000 new homes and businesses, which is nice, but far from the promised goal.)

Charter has 60 days to file a plan with the state to find a new provider for its subscribers and must continue service without disruptions. And with Charter sure to appeal, this will likely go to court for a long time. If you have Spectrum, it's probably not going anywhere immediately.

But...what if it does?

That's the unanswered question. By all rights, New York is doing the appropriate thing here. It is exercising its power against a giant corporation that made promises to better internet access and speeds for citizens but didn't follow through. But for many New Yorkers, Spectrum is the only option. In theory, another provider will step up and buy the network--perhaps Comcast, RCN, or Optimum. Who knows? Maybe Charter will create a shell company and sell Spectrum to itself somehow. And with all of the appeals, this will probably takes years, not months, to resolve in court.

But this highlights a big issue in New York and across the United States: a lack of choice in ISPs. If something goes wrong, and if there is a disruption in service, thousands of people will be left without internet. If customers don't like their new ISP, there really isn't anywhere else to go.

And perhaps I'm one of the rare people in New York to say it, but Spectrum has been working out OK for me. Sure, they raise my rates for no other reason than they can, but the alternative in my building, Verizon Fios, would require me to purchase their proprietary router.

In my last apartment, though, it was Spectrum or bust. My only other option would have been DSL, which, for a person who makes a living on the internet and streams an unhealthy amount of Netflix, is just unusable. Charter and Spectrum didn't deliver, but if you're one of the thousands of subscribers in New York without anywhere else to go, a question is in the back of your mind: what happens to my internet access next?

So yes, let them go. But for New York (and every other state), it's not enough to just get rid of the ISPs that don't meet their goals. You need to get more ISPs in to drive down prices and foster healthy competition. While it may take a few years for this to get through the courts, a lot of us don't know what will happen to our broadband next.

Imagine that you've saved up your pennies for a Maserati Ghibli, because you love that car's tight cornering and comfy suspension. But when you take delivery of your own vehicle, it has loose steering and a rough ride. You take the car back to the dealer and complain, but the company doesn't see a problem. It's driveable, so it’s not defective.

Update (7/26): I've added details about other users who have reported serious defects in their X1 Carbons.

When I reviewed the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (6th Gen) in March, I called it the "Maserati of business laptops" because of its awesomely snappy keyboard, luxurious soft-touch deck and bright, colorful display. Back in May, I gave the laptop my highest endorsement, ordering one with $1,400 of my own money and writing a column about it. However, after returning three different units because of sub-par keyboards and / or screens, I can say that this Maserati sometimes ships with Yugo GV handling or an AMC Gremlin suspension.

Sadly, I'm not alone. The Internet is filled with reports from other consumers, detailing a variety of different X1 Carbon quality control problems, from a lid that doesn't completely close to paint rubbing off of the chassis during regular use and a backspace key that doesn't work if you press it at the wrong angle. Check out the "Other Users Report Other Problems" section further down for more.

Perhaps most alarming of all is that Lenovo appears unwilling or unable to address many of these quality control problems. After my case was escalated to a high-level customer service agent and I asked for a unit with the wonderful keyboard I had tried before, he admitted that the company has no way to tell which keyboards are coming out of the factory and insisted on giving me a refund rather than trying to get me a new laptop.

Playing the Keyboard Lottery

ThinkPads are world-famous for their responsive keyboards, which is one of the main reasons why this series of business laptops has a cult following. Over the years, I've reviewed dozens of different models, and most of them have had fantastic tactile feedback. The two review units I tested in March offered some of the best typing experiences I've ever had, with strong responsiveness that reminded me of my favorite clicky, mechanical keyboards.

If you buy an X1 Carbon, you may get the same keyboard that I saw on my review unit or you may end up with something that works, but unfortunately doesn't feel quite the same. Like most computer companies, Lenovo sources its components from a variety of different vendors. That means that, in the case of the X1 Carbon for example, you could end up with a keyboard that was manufactured either by Sunrex or Chicony.

I have no idea which keyboard maker is better or even which brand of keyboard(s) I experienced because, in order to find out, I would have had to completely disassemble the notebooks and risk breaking them. The company offers a parts lookup web tool where you can get a precise list of every component in your specific laptop, but the keyboard model was conspicuously absent. However, given the variety of typing feels I found across six different X1 Carbons I tried, Lenovo has some consistency issues. Here's a list of the ThinkPads I tested in the order I tried them:

To be fair, even a stiff ThinkPad keyboard is better than those you'll find on many other laptops. And, if you haven't experienced a truly epic typing experience on other units, you might not notice if you get one with a less-than-stellar keyboard. For example, the customer service rep I dealt with said he was unable to see a problem with the mushy keyboard on the unit I sent back.

Screen Sadness

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon isn't just any laptop; it's a flagship ultrabook that costs well over $1,000. In this price range, you should expect a bright, colorful display on any configuration, but with Lenovo, you may not get it. According to Laptop Mag, the average $800+ premium laptop has a screen brightness of 323 nits and can reproduce 120 percent of the sRGB color gamut.

The 1080p touch panel on one of my review units was a respectable 293 nits with 129 percent of the sRGB gamut while the eye-popping HDR panel on the other review unit was an impressive 469 nits with 199 percent gamut.

Because I wanted the most battery life and I don't need touch, I bought my first X1 Carbon with a 1080p non-touch display, which looked noticeably dim and registered a paltry 269 nits with 109 percent coverage of the sRGB color gamut. When I bought a unit from Costco with a 1080p non-touch screen, it was an even-dimmer 258 nits, but had a wider 130-percent gamut. According to Lenovo PR, these panels should hit 300 nits, but both looked really dull and lifeless. By comparison, Dell's XPS 13, which costs less than the X1 Carbon, has a 1080p base panel that registers a luminous 372 nits.

The unit I purchased with a 2K, non-HDR panel registered a much-brighter 299 nits with 127 percent gamut. But, just as it does with keyboards, Lenovo also uses a variety of different screen manufacturers for the X1 Carbon. According to the company's parts lookup, Lenovo uses eight different panels, with three of them available for 1080p, FHD units, one for 1080p touch, two for 2K non-HDR and two for 2K HDR.

Even though one was a little dimmer than the other, both 1080p screens I tested were the same AUO B140HAN03.1 model. It's hard to say whether one of the other two models would have been bright enough to hit 300 nits. My 2K screen was made by LG, but the company also sells the laptop with a 2K screen from AUO.

Three Purchases: Zero Wins

When my first unit arrived in June, I immediately noticed several problems. The screen, a 1080p non-touch panel, was dim and lifeless. The TrackPoint had a serious drift problem which caused the cursor to start moving on its own and, sadly, some of the keys on the keyboard -- including the spacebar -- felt stiff and mushy.

I could have lived with a couple of stiff keys, but the awful screen was really hard to bear. So I ordered a unit with a 2K screen and, after three weeks (each order takes two to four weeks to fulfill), my second X1 Carbon arrived. Though its screen was brighter and sharper, the keyboard was uniformly mushy and uncomfortable, with some of the keys making a sound and having a feel that reminded me of pressing on plastic wrap.

In the 10 years I worked for Laptop Mag, I reviewed scores of ThinkPads. Not all of them had equally good keyboards.

Without expensive equipment, it's hard to quantify exactly what was wrong with the keyboard, but I still had possession of one of the two review units Lenovo had sent us for testing last spring. When I put my second X1 Carbon next to the review unit, eight different people in my office were immediately able to tell the difference.

One colleague even pointed out that the texture of the palmrest and the lid were different on my unit. Where the review unit had a soft-touch, almost rubbery lid and deck, my second purchased laptop's chassis felt harder and slightly less pleasant to the touch.

To get a slightly larger sample size, I went to a local Costco, which had the X1 Carbon on display. The floor model appeared to have the same, snappy keyboard and soft texture as the review units I tested. So I purchased a unit at the store, hoping that it would have the same typing experience as the one on display.

Unfortunately, the Costco unit I bought didn't feel quite the same as the review unit, either. It was far better than purchase number two, but some of the keys just weren't as tactile, including the A key and the backspace. The Costco model also had an extremely-dim 1080p panel so I returned it, too.

On another note, the Costco laptop I bought came the closest to having the review model's keyboard and it had a February manufacture date. The two versions I bought from Lenovo were manufactured in May or June so it seems possible that the company was using better keyboards earlier in the year.

Other Users, Other Problems

After publishing this article, I found a number of consumers detailing quality control issues on their ThinkPad X1 Carbons via Reddit. And, unfortunately, it looks like Lenovo has problems not only with its keyboards and screens, but also with other build quality issues like how the lid closes.

Polish programmer Maciej Mensfeld wrote a Medium article about the myriad problems with his new X1 Carbon and Lenovo's apparent inability to fix it. He took a picture showing how the lid doesn't close the whole way and also said that the paint began rubbing off almost right away. Even worse, he says that the machine would get frighteningly hot whenever it was docked via Thunderbolt 3. He also experienced a high-pitched noise when using a USB headset while docked.

"I feel extremely disappointed," Mensfeld told me. "I spent weeks researching and, based on the initial reviews (including one on your website), I felt that I was making a good decision investing more money to get this piece of hardware."

Even worse, when he sent his laptop in for service, the company reportedly sent it back to him a few days later without fixing the problems. He writes that Lenovo then sent a replacement to the retailer he originally purchased from, Notebooks.pl, but the store called him and said that the new unit had all of the same problems so he would have to wait a month for another one. He experienced all of these problems, even though he paid extra for on-site service.

"I've felt that they aren't taking me seriously," he said, speaking about Lenovo customer service.  "At the beginning they even accused me of bending the lid. I paid extra for the on-site warranty and what did I get in return? Three weeks without a laptop and a really stressful time."

Reddit user Lukas Krasa reports having paint that scratched off of their X1 Carbon's chassis, almost right away. Others replied by saying "common issue." Krasa said that he is hesitant to return his laptop, because he's worried that a replacement model would have the same problem, along with other issues.

Another Reddit poster, Aleksndr_a, posted a video showing that his backspace key didn't work if he hit the left side of it. However, in a private email, he told me that the Lenovo tech support helped him fix the issue by removing the key cap and popping it back on.

More than Just the X1 Carbon

Lest you think the keyboard problem is limited to the current X1 Carbon or is just my bad luck, it's important to note that I've expenced keyboard inconsistency on a number of different ThinkPads over the years, and I'm not the only one.

The /r/thinkpad subreddit has a number of posts from readers asking about which brand of keyboard is best for different models. In one thread, readers talk about the different feels you get if your ThinkPad T420 has a keyboard that was manufactured by Chicony, Alps or NMB. And here's another where the reader complains about trying to get an NMB keyboard (the consensus best) on an X220 and ending up with Chicony three times.

In the 10 years I worked for Laptop Mag, I reviewed scores of ThinkPads and, especially in the last couple of years, not all of them had equally good keyboards. Earlier this year, after the first ThinkPad T480 we tested had mushy keys, Lenovo sent a second unit which felt a bit better, but was still not nearly as snappy as 2017's T470. The company said that the first T480 unit it sent was a pre-production model, but that doesn't really explain why the T480s we got also had a keyboard that felt flat and lifeless.

Our ThinkPad T570 unit, which we purchased from CDW last year, also had keys that were shallow, mushy and less than ThinkPad-like. The workstation-class ThinkPad P50s is another model I tested that had mushy keys. I can't say without buying several copies of each of these models whether these problems were commonplace, but clearly the X1 Carbons I used are not an aberration.

Customer Service: Past and Present

It's also worth noting that I experienced quality control issues four years ago when I bought a ThinkPad T440s. The first unit I got suffered from a dim screen and a stiff TrackPoint button, but a second copy, which I received after Lenovo PR learned of my situation, was fine. I figured and hoped that my case at the time was an isolated incident and that I didn't just get a better quality system because I'm a journalist.

Imagine going to a restaurant that serves you under-cooked food and you send it back to the kitchen, but the chef just tells you to go eat somewhere else.

I don't want or seek out special treatment because of my job. However, I'm pretty sure that Lenovo customer support was aware of my position, not because I told them, but because they reached out to me after I mentioned my first return on social media. Last week, I handed the second X1 Carbon, the one with the worst keyboard, directly to our PR contact and asked for a statement on the record about its keyboard.

Instead, I got a message from my customer care rep saying that they couldn't help me and would instead offer a full refund. It seems very likely that an everyday consumer who complained about keyboard quality would experience a similar result and be offered a full refund at best or charged a 15-percent restocking fee at worst.

Re-Thinking the ThinkPad X1 Carbon

If Lenovo had sent me an X1 Carbon review unit with one of the keyboards I got when I bought my own laptop, particularly unit number two, I would not have given the product a perfect, 5-star rating. Lenovo PR insisted that they do not deliberately send laptops with better keyboards to reviewers, and I believe them, both because I've received ThinkPad review units with subpar keyboards before and because I saw one excellent keyboard -- the one on the Costco floor model -- in the wild.

I'd still really like to have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but it seems like the best way to win this parts lottery is not to play.

Despite my experiences, I still recommend the X1 Carbon, but with some significant caveats. You need to know that when you're buying this laptop you may or may not get the best possible keyboard and screen. And, barring a serious defect that makes the device unusable, you have to be willing to live with that, because customer service probably cannot get you a better one.

Many less discerning users, particularly those who haven't gotten to try multiple units side-by-side, won't even notice. And, for me, the worst X1 Carbon keyboard is a lot better than the best Dell XPS 13 or MacBook Pro keyboard. The dimmest, 258-nit screen is still probably bright enough for less picky users who don't spend a lot of time working near the window on a sunny day.

Even with less-than-the-best parts, the X1 Carbon still has a lot of great things going for it. It's incredibly lightweight (2.5 pounds), offers great performance and lasts over 10 hours on a charge. The laptop is also one of the few you can get with a pointing stick, a little nub between the G and H keys that makes it easy to navigate around the desktop without lifting your hands off of the home row; for me, that's a critical feature. It also has a great mix of ports, with dual Thunderbolt 3 connectors, HDMI out and standard USB Type-A ports.

In Lenovo's defense, every PC manufacturer sources its components from a variety of companies. And 99.9 percent of the time nobody notices or cares. However, when your company is world-famous for making the best laptop keyboards, all of your customers should get that experience, not just the lucky ones who win the parts lottery.

When any customer experiences a problem with component quality, the response from customer service should be to get them the better part, not to send their money back to them and tell them to hit the road, without a laptop. Imagine going to a restaurant where the waiter serves you undercooked food, you send it back to the kitchen hoping to get the meal you ordered, but instead the waiter throws your money back at you and tells you to go eat elsewhere. Would you return to eat at that restaurant again?

The Outcome

Update (11/19/2018): About two months after I published this story, I went to Costco and bought another X1 Carbon unit that has a much-brighter screen. The keyboard is snappy, but doesn't seem as snappy as the review units I tested. In the end, it is still an excellent laptop with a good typing experience so I've kept it and use it as my everyday laptop now. Buying from Costco allowed me to make sure that, if I got a defective model, I could at least exchange it for another one right away.

As the current editor-in-chief of Tom's Hardware and former editorial director of Laptop Mag (through April), I've tried hundreds, perhaps thousands of different notebooks in the past decade. But believe it or not, I operate on a budget like everyone else so it has been a full four years since my last laptop purchase. This week, I decided it was time to upgrade my personal device and there was a good memorial day sale that was difficult to resist.

Update (11/19/2018): I some quality control problems with the first three units of the X1 Carbon I bought. The screens on a couple of them were way dimmer than expected and the keyboards not as snappy as on the review unit. However, in the end, I bought a unit from Costco ($1,399 for Core i7 / 16GB / 512GB and 1080p) and have been very happy with it.

So what does a person who writes or edits hundreds of laptop reviews a year buy for himself? I went with Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon, a super-light 14-inch ultraportable that, on sale, cost me $1,367. People are as different as the their laptops so my choice isn't right for everyone, but here's why I went with the Carbon.

Knowing it's time to upgrade

These days, people are holding onto their computers longer than ever before. If you play the latest games, design your own 3D animations or work in engineering, you always need more performance and will upgrade more frequently if you can afford it. However, for the kind of tasks I perform -- editing documents, writing code for small apps and browser extensions and using web tools -- you can get by with the same system for many years.

Intel and AMD would love it if you got a new system (or at least a new CPU) every year or two, but the reality is that you can run the latest build of Windows 10, the current version of Office and the web browser of your choice very well on computers that are old enough to remember the year when you used it to watch Rebecca Black's *new* Friday video over and over again (that was 2011).

As with a human relationship, you know it's time to dump your computer when either you're no longer getting what you need or your needs have changed. If your PC isn't fast enough for the apps you want to run today or you have a laptop that doesn't last long enough on a charge anymore, those are good reasons to upgrade.

"I'd rather gouge my eyes out with the business end of a DIMM, than buy a laptop with a 1366 x 768 display. "

I decided it was time to replace my old laptop, a ThinkPad T440s with Core i5 CPU, because it has slowed down dramatically, particularly when I connect it to my docking station and work across multiple monitors. Perhaps it's the Spectre / Meltdown patches I applied or the fact that I have even more apps and tabs open recently, but I experience a lot of lag when docked (it's better when detached). When I go to switch tabs and the computer pauses, I start tearing out what's left of my hair.

Why I chose the X1 Carbon

When I review and recommend PCs for work, I look at how they serve their target audiences' requirements. I know that, even if a computer isn't one I would buy for myself, it can be a great choice for others. When the audience is me, here's what I look for:

• Portability: As a Tom's Hardware editor, I'll always have a place in my heart and in my life for desktop PCs, but I need to be able to work in many different places: my home, the train, my office and on trips. Even within my house, I end up working in five different rooms.

The X1 Carbon weighs just 2.49 pounds when other 14-inch laptops are between three and four pounds. I can take it anywhere without even feeling its mass in my bag. It fits easily on my lap and on coach-class airline tray tables.

• Long battery life: I don't want to suffer from battery anxiety when I'm trying to get things done. Even if I have access to a power outlet as I do at home, I don't want to be tethered to the wall when I'm trying to work in bed or sitting on the couch. My laptop needs to last at least 10 hours on a charge, preferably more.

The ThinkPad endured for more than 11 hours on Laptop Mag's web surfing battery test, which is 2.5 hours above average for premium laptops.

• Great keyboard: I'm a touch typist and key feel is extremely important to me. I need snappy feedback so I can work faster and keep my fingers from getting sore.

ThinkPad keyboards have a well-deserved reputation for offering the best typing experience, but even among Lenovo's laptops, the X1 Carbon stands out for its springy keys and deep travel. The keyboards on other ThinkPads I tested this year -- the ThinkPad T480, X280 and T480s -- were not quite as responsive. The soft-touch deck on the X1 Carbon adds to the comfort as it feels like a gel rest under my wrists.

• Pointing stick: Call me a weirdo or an old-timer, but I love using a nub to navigate around the desktop, because I never have to move my hands off of the home row. Today's touchpads are good, but I can work faster and target small objects better with the stick.

If you want a laptop with a pointing stick in 2018, you have a few choices, all of them business laptops. Some commercial laptops from Dell, HP and Toshiba have nubs, but Lenovo's red TrackPoint pointing sticks are the industry standard for comfort and accuracy.

• Mix of ports: I still need USB Type-A ports to accommodate all the USB flash drives I get handed as press kits, but I want Thunderbolt 3 ports so I can charge the laptop and connect to external monitors over a single cable.

Unlike some other super thin and light laptops (cough cough XPS 13), the X1 Carbon has ports for both new and old technology, with dual Thunderbolt 3 connections, two USB type-A ports and HDMI out.

• Sharp, colorful screen: I'd rather gouge my eyes out with the business end of a DIMM, than buy a laptop with a low-res, 1366 x 768 display. In order to fit two windows side-by-side for multitasking, my screen has to be at least 1920 x 1080 resolution. Good color and brightness helps too.

The X1 Carbon's base model screen is 1080p with a healthy 300 nits of brightness and good color reproduction. You can also get it with an eye-popping 2560 x 1440 display that supports HDR and reproduces 200 percent of the sRGB color gamut.

• Strong performance: This almost goes without saying, but my new laptop has to have a CPU with four physical cores, a speedy SSD and at least 16GB of RAM.

The 2018 version of the X1 Carbon (marked as 6th Gen) has Intel's latest quad-core Kaby Lake-R CPUs and is only available with speedy M.2 PCIe SSDs. You can't buy it with a hard drive, even if you wanted to.

Features I don't need

There are several features that many other people would put on their priority lists, but just don't matter to me. I don't need a 2-in-1 because, after I played with it in tablet mode a few times, I would inevitably revert to using my laptop exclusively as a clamshell. I'd love to be able to write and edit articles with a pen, but the handwriting recognition in Windows 10 just isn't good enough to let me compose articles in Google docs or edit pieces in our web-based CMS.

I don't intend to play PC games or do serious video editing on my laptop so discrete graphics would be wasted on me. I don't intend to use my laptop as a stereo so I don't need great speakers (the X1 Carbon's tinny speakers are its biggest flaw).

"The laptop is not only fast on its own, but it also makes me faster."

How much I paid

The X1 Carbon checks all of my requirement boxes in a big way, but it's also a fairly expensive laptop, with a starting price that normally hovers around $1,350 for a configuration with a Core i5-8250U CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. But because of Lenovo.com's 2018 Memorial Day sale, which is still active as I write this, I was able to get the X1 Carbon with 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD and a Core i5-8350U CPU for just $1,367.

The base model was available for just $1,069. If the sale is still active when you read this and you want to buy, be sure to use coupon code THINKMEMORIAL at checkout so you can get the maximum discount.

Configuring the X1 Carbon: A screen dilemma

I had a hard time deciding whether to pay about $150 extra to get the laptop with its gorgeous 2560 x 1440, HDR screen. I tested a model with that screen and the found that it is the richest and most colorful notebook display I've seen. However, it consumes more energy than the non-touch, 1080p panel and it has an extremely reflective surface which doesn't fare well when you're next to a window on a sunny day.

In our battery test, which surfs the web continuously at a fixed 150 nits of brightness, an X1 Carbon with the HDR screen lasted 10 and a half hours, only 30 minutes less than another configuration with the 1080p touch screen option. However, given how glossy the screen is, the best way to avoid glare is to pump that brightness up all the way to 400 or 500 nits. Lenovo's official estimate is that the HDR screen will last 90 minutes less than the 1080p, non-touch panel I chose.

In the end, I decided to go with the 1080p, non-touch screen so I have the best chance at getting long endurance. I have mixed feelings about passing on the beautiful reds, blues and greens from the HDR panel, but if I were at a press event and my battery died, I'd have some very strong feelings indeed.

I hope to find a desktop monitor with this kind of color saturation so I can enjoy the picture quality when I'm sitting at home. If you have any recommendations for an extremely vibrant monitor, please share them in the comments below.

X1 Carbon alternatives

If you're not as picky about keyboards and don't care about pointing sticks, but want a lightweight laptop with a beautiful screen and awesome battery life, the XPS 13 9370 is a great choice and starts at only $999. And if you don't have a full $1,000 to spend, the HP Envy 13 is a fantastic choice with a keyboard that's almost as good as the Carbon's. Asus's ZenBook UX330UA isn't quite as premium as the Envy, but it costs only $749.

Bottom line

I went with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon because it's a tool that suits the way I work and helps me function at a higher level. The laptop is not only fast on its own, but it also makes me faster, thanks to a durable chassis that balances perfectly on my lap and a best-in-class keyboard.

Just as a professional baseball player needs just the right glove to help him make the most of his natural fielding ability or a musician needs the perfect guitar to make her best music, I need the right computer to help me do my best writing, editing and coding. For me, that system is the ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

Google, you complete me. On the other hand, maybe you shouldn't. Yesterday at its I/O conference, the search giant unveiled two creepy A.I. features: one that finishes your sentences in Gmail and another that literally makes phone calls for you, using a deceptively human voice.

As a tech geek I'm impressed, but as a human who values communication, I'm bummed out. The language you choose when writing and the intonations you make when speaking are your own. If a computer does the talking for you, then your "word" isn't really yours.

Whose words are they?

Google's new Smart Compose feature helps you finish your sentences. For example, if you start typing "Hav" at the beginning of a message, it suggests completing the phrase as "Haven't seen you in a while." If you start writing "Does next T," it suggests that you say "Does next Tuesday work for you?"

On the face of it, these suggestions seem innocuous. If you really meant to say "haven't seen you in a while," you can save yourself two dozen keystrokes by hitting tab. But what if, you really were thinking about saying "Haven't hung with you in a minute," which means essentially the same thing ("a minute" means a long time in context), but is devoid of personality?

Chances are that to, save yourself the effort, you'll just start accepting Google's suggestions to save yourself the hassle. All of a sudden your "voice" is the same as everyone else's.

If, as a recipient, you know that your conversation partner is using canned text, everything they say has less meaning. How excited can you be about getting birthday greetings on Facebook when you know that none of your so-called friends actually remembered your special day?

And while it's always good to save your fingers from extra strokes, your sentiments are meaningless if you can't even take 3 seconds to enter them on your own. I tried writing a sample termination letter using Gmail and here's what I got.

Smart Compose is fairly conservative right now. I tried typing some insults or highly-personal things and it didn't suggest anything. But I'm sure that Google will refine this tool so that it's much more aggressive in the future.

It's important to note that there's nothing inherently unethical about using auto suggestions, but it still takes "you" out of your communication.

"I suspect that Google’s automatic writing will be banal but not unethical. ," former New York Times Ethicist Randy Cohen told me. "Much email writing is already lackluster in both form and content."

To be fair, Smart Compose isn't the first feature to make suggestions. Gmail users on phones have seen suggested replies for a while now and a number of other platforms also suggest words and phrases. However, Smart Compose shows that this trend is growing and starting to transform how we write.

I'd like Google Assistant to make some soul-sucking calls. Perhaps it can call and argue with the insurance company.

I have a bot holding on line three

Soon computers will go beyond writing and literally speak for you. Demoing a feature it calls Duplex, Google played a recording of a customer calling a restaurant to reserve a table. The customer, who turns out to be a bot, sounds exactly like a real person, even using verbal ticks like "um" that make it sound completely realistic. It has a complete conversation, asking questions and responding to queries from the person at the restaurant.

You can check out the audio of a sample hair salon call below (courtesy of our sister site, Tom's Guide).

The immediate goal of Duplex is to perform rote tasks that really ought to happen online. Many restaurants already take reservations via the web so the Google Assistant is merely filling the gap by calling a small business that's still on analog.

Frankly, I'd like Google Assistant to make some of the more soul-sucking calls I have to endure. Perhaps it can call and argue with the insurance company about doctor bills. Then it can answer calls from a relative and feign interest in the gossip she wants to share. I'm sure it would be great for dealing with bill collectors.

However, it's much more likely that you'll be talking to a bot than having one speak for you. As it stands, most PC vendors make it difficult for you to reach person when dial tech support. How long before they replace every human in the call center with a realistic-sounding bot?

How can you plead your case to a bot or get a bot to do something outside of its script for you? What if you need to get in to see the doctor right away because you're feeling ill, but the bot on the other end of the line says that there are no appointments available today? It won't take pity on you and try to squeeze you in.

And if you think robocalls are annoying today, just wait until telemarketers and political candidates get ahold of Duplex (or something like it). Tell you what. I'll have my bot talk to your bot.

What do you think about Google Duplex and Smart Compose? Are you excited about the convenience or creeped out about losing your humanity? Share your thoughts in the comments below.   

Good laptops complete tasks faster; great laptops make you faster. On the strength of world-class business systems like the X1 Carbon, which helps you get more done, and elegant consumer laptops like the Yoga 920, which lasts all-day long, Lenovo has won Laptop Mag's Best and Worst Brand ratings for the second year in a row.

Apple, the former champion, dropped all the way to seventh place in the rankings, which are scored based on innovation, design, support / warranty, value and selection and, most of all, product quality. HP and Dell placed second and third while Acer, Asus, Microsoft, Razer, MSI and Samsung took up the other positions.

Lenovo has a well-deserved reputation as the king of productivity. With their focus on long battery life and great usability, Lenovo's best laptops, especially its ThinkPads, take away some of the annoying friction that prevents you from completing your tasks. Using one is like upgrading your hands and brain from a Core i5 to a Core i7.

Take for example, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (6th Gen), the only laptop to earn a perfect 5-star score from Laptop Mag in the past year. The X1 Carbon's best-in-class, responsive keyboard makes it feel like you've got a partner pushing your weary fingers back up as you type. If you're like me (and still love pointing sticks), you can use the TrackPoint to navigate around the desktop, without lifting your hands off of the keyboard in order to tap the touchpad.

You don't have to waste time whipping out dongles either as the X1 Carbon is one of the few super-thin laptops that still has full-size USB ports. And, with over 11 hours of endurance and fast-charging, you don't need to waste time sitting by the outlet.

But people cannot live on productivity alone. Lenovo also earned high marks for the gorgeous Yoga 920 2-in-1 with its iconic watchband hinge and 10-hour battery life and the Legion Y920 gaming laptop, which offers powerful performance and a mechanical keyboard. In all, Lenovo notebooks received 10 Laptop Mag Editor's Choice awards, 3 more than their nearest competitor.

Of course, Lenovo isn't the only PC vendor that makes great laptops. Every manufacturer, even last-place Samsung, has its bright spots. HP nearly overtook Lenovo, because of fantastic, highly-rated products like the Envy 13t, which sports a keyboard that can compete with any ThinkPad's, and the beautiful Spectre x360. Dell has the best consumer laptop in the XPS 13 and the top gaming rig in the Alienware 17.

Why Apple Keeps Falling

On the other end of the spectrum from Lenovo, Apple continues dropping in the ranks because the MacBook-maker seems to have stopped caring about notebook usability. With the exception of the very-outdated MacBook Air, all of Apple's current laptops have flat butterfly-style keyboards and Thunderbolt 3 / USB Type-C connectors as their only ports. So, in order to use a modern-day MacBook (Air excluded), you have to be willing to pay well over $1,000 in order to have an inferior typing experience and carry a bag full of dongles.

Considering that MacBooks, especially the Pros, have always targeted creative professionals, Apple has shown utter disregard for its core audience. If you're a professional video editor or 3D animator, do you really want to be unable to use the USB Flash drive a colleague just handed you? Do you want to type slower and with less comfort? And, by the way, you won't be able to actually edit video in 4K, because none of the MacBooks is available with a 3840 x 2160 resolution display.

When it comes to design, Apple has been phoning it in (and holding it wrong) for years now. Today's MacBooks look identical to last year's and nearly identical to any MacBook from the last 8 years or so. And while some people still like silver aluminum (with the occasional touch of gold), the MacBook look is all played out.

In terms of technology, Apple is also stuck in 2010. Even though all the PC-makers are selling 2-in-1s, Tim Cook's company won't even put a touch screen on the MacBook. Instead, his strategy is to get people to buy iPad Pros with keyboards and use them instead of actual laptops.

This is the company that runs a commercial where kids ask "what's a computer," while typing away on their slates. Note to Apple: computers are those silver things you used to care about, but continue to sell.

To be fair, Apple remains the leader in tech support with helpful phone agents, great web resources and a network of stores you can bring your laptop to for service. Lenovo's support is pretty poor, with agents getting a number of Laptop Mag's questions wrong. But what good is support if you don't like your laptop?

To get a MacBook today, you really have to be in love with the macOS operating system and not want to change to Windows. And while there are still plenty of Apple diehards, the company is giving them few reasons to stay.

To say I'm not excited about current-generation virtual reality headsets such as those from Sony, Oculus/Facebook, and HTC would be inaccurate. I have yet, however, to pillage my bank account and purchase one of these beasties. I've seen modern virtual reality in action, and as impressive as it is, I've seen it all before—long before actually, in the early days of 3D gaming. VR had an earlier heyday during the Age of Grunge, and the Decade of Flannel: the 1990s.

3D-dedicated hardware like 3dfx's Voodoo Graphics chipset, which was available on cards that worked in conjunction with a system's 2D display card, were just emerging at that time. Blocky, pixelated graphics dependent on sprites gave way to smoother, faster, more-impressive visuals thanks to these "3D accelerators." Eventually, the industry presented 2D/3D combined cards, sort of like the ones that our systems use today—only they weighed a lot less back then because they weren’t nearly as powerful as the Radeon and GeForce cards of today.

VR's Big, Bulky Past

What didn't weigh less were the first VR goggles. These headsets of yesteryear debuted with blocky, pixelated graphics and neck-straining bulk, all to render low-frame-rate visuals that flickered a lot and—for some unfortunate users—also produced splitting headaches. If you happen to still have one of those headsets of yesteryear, the layer of dust on it might be worth investigating for archeological research.

In other words, I’ve been bitten by VR before. And I’m still holding back in wariness of having experienced the gaming world’s first, sputtering attempts to kick-start wearable immersion.

VR Is Still Too Pricey

Another reason I’m not jumping aboard yet—and this is a big one—is price. It's cool to be a tech journalist, because we often get to play with the latest bleeding-edge tech. But early on, the newest is also the most expensive. The original HTC Vive debuted at $800, and the Rift went on sale to the general public for $600—without motion controllers. Granted, the tech (and bulkiness) has much improved since Nirvana’s In Utero first landed on record-store shelves. But today’s headsets still feel clunky, have cumbersome wires, and feel awkwardly isolating. That last bit feels particularly odd given our current world of constant connectivity, nifty wireless gear, and e-enabled social interaction.

Thankfully, tech prices drop as time goes by, and both the first-generation Vive and the Facebook-backed Oculus Rift are down to about $500 at the time of this writing. But $500 is still a lot of money for a tethered viewfinder that requires an expensive gaming computer to use. And if you don’t happen to already own a graphics card capable of handling VR, you can forget about buying one without paying several hundred bucks over MSRP nowadays. Thank ongoing coin-minding demand for that.

Where Are the Must-Play Games?

And games? The pickings aren't slim, but where are all the AAA titles with glorious, head-tracking impressiveness? Super Hot VR and Robo Recall are fun, to be sure. And it's fantastic that some franchises familiar to the traditional gaming masses—such as Fallout, Doom, and Elite Dangerous, are available in VR forms. Most of the major titles landing this year, however, appear bereft of VR support. And battle royale titles like Fortnite and PUBG are clearly the new hotness, with nary a nod to VR.  

Two years after the initial release of the Oculus Rift, VR is still stuck in a new-tech chicken-and-egg scenario, waiting for a killer app, something so amazing that it needs to be experienced—and that will entice millions to plunk down the money for hardware. If you've been a gamer long enough, a previous example of that was Quake in the early 3D days—particularly when Id software introduced an OpenGL patch for the already monstrous hit, creating the pretty-at-the-time GLQuake.

Optimism Remains

Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking this fresh take on VR tech, by any means. There’s more than just gaming at stake—see the Oculus Rift pop single, a push to use VR in education, a television miniseries with VR interludes, and so on. I still think VR will take off this time. GDC 2018 was very heavy on VR, with myriad announcements for cool stuff such as standalone sets (notably, the Oculus Go), and second-gen VR including the upcoming Vive Pro.

I'm convinced that, unlike 3D in cinemas—which tried to sweep us away in the 1950s, 1980s, and again a few years ago without convincing the masses of its long-standing appeal—virtual reality is poised to take off and remain vital in this most recent wave. My hesitation may stem from bad experiences in the 1990s, but once the price comes down enough, I'll probably leave those memories in the wastebasket with my Toadies CDs and Crocs.

Bio: Joel Durham, Jr., has been a gadget geek since birth, and went pro engineering networks in 1995. In 1997, he began a tech-focused writing career, penning stories and columns for the likes of PC Gamer, CNET, ExtremeTech and Maximum PC. Now, after a hiatus for health reasons, he’s back and ready to overclock everything within reach once more.

Monitor tech has come a long, long way in the last few years. We’ve seen ultra-high refresh rates (like in Alienware’s 240Hz AW2518H). We've seen variable refresh for smoother gaming via Nvidia G-Sync (and AMD’s competing FreeSync tech). We've seen full-array backlighting and 1,000-nit brightness for excellent HDR output (in Dell’s UP2718Q, for example), among many other advances.

But while monitors have undoubtedly improved in myriad ways, the high-end models always seem to be prohibitively expensive—especially when compared to the gobs of screen real estate you can get by going with a similarly priced HDTV. That’s why, last summer, I swapped my 28-inch G-Sync-equipped Acer XB280HK monitor for a 49-inch Sony XBR49X900E TV.

Scandalous? Maybe to some PC gamers. But clearly I’m not alone in my desire for a really big PC screen, as evidenced by Nvidia’s announcement of its so-called “Big Format Gaming Displays” (BFGDs) back at CES 2018 in January. (We’re still awaiting availability and pricing on those, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see BFGDs sell for north of $3,000.)

BFGDs Aren't TVs, and Most TVs Aren't Great for Gaming

That said, the Nvidia displays (which will be sold by Asus, Acer, and HP) really are 65-inch monitors, and not TVs. They sport 120Hz refresh rates and G-Sync support, and they don’t have a built-in TV tuner. Many TVs are non-starters for serious gaming (due to input lag and refresh rates that are usually locked at 60Hz). But if you’re the type of gamer who wants to just enjoy your game—rather than amassing every hardware advantage to out-frag the quick-clicking teenagers of the world—a properly chosen TV can deliver a great gaming experience.

Plus, a TV can deliver the goods for other types of content better than any similarly priced monitor, because 4K HDR content just looks better on a big screen—especially when you aren’t sitting a foot in front of the panel and leaning in.

In my experience, a (very) big screen also makes for less eyestrain when working on productivity tasks. There is a whole lot of screen real estate available for documents, spreadsheets, and Web pages when your display is both 4K resolution (3,840x2,160 pixels) and you don’t have to ramp up Windows Scaling higher than 100 percent.

At that setting and resolution, a UHD screen is the same as stacking four 1080p screens in a 2x2 grid (minus, of course, the middle bezels). The same is in some ways true, of course, of smaller 4K monitors. But if the screen isn’t large enough to see things such as small text and UI details, all that extra real estate is useless—unless maybe you do your computing with the assistance of a loupe. The 27-inch 4K LG screen I’m writing this on, for instance, looks great. But Windows (rightly) suggests that scaling should be set to 150 percent. Dropping it to 100 percent makes onscreen text really tough to read unless I lean in close and squint—not great for my eyes, or my spine. I leave the scaling at 150 percent, and even then, things are sometimes smaller than I’d like.

A well-chosen 4K TV solves that text-size problem, and it excels in other areas, though you’ll of course need serious desk/wall space. My 49-inch Sony TV at home—which I’ve mounted to the wall for easy access to the rear ports and to move it back a bit from my desk—gets nearly as bright as current high-end HDR monitors. (Reviews peg the XBR49X900E at a bit under 1,000 nits.) HDR content, of course, looks great, and I don’t need a recent-model PC connected to the screen to watch protected content. Netflix and Google Play support are baked into the TV’s smarts—and I’ve recently added to that by plugging in an Amazon Fire TV.

I also personally have zero issues with gaming performance, as the input lag on the Sony XBR49X900 is quite good for a TV—Rtings.com pegs it at about 34ms in Game Mode. 2016’s Doom reboot is about as frenetic as my gaming gets, and it looks gorily great and plays just fine. And as I noted in my recent post about the excellent game They Are Billions, most of my gaming interests lean toward real-time strategy, with the occasional RPG thrown in when something grabs my interest. If you’re a competitive online gamer, you’re almost certainly going to want a dedicated monitor with speedier response times.

All-Around Performance and Value

Really, though, what sold me on the idea of using an UHDTV as a monitor—and the Sony XBR49X900E in particular—is its ability to do many things surprisingly well, and at a reasonable cost. At about $900 as I write this, my chosen TV-made-monitor is far from cheap. But it saves me the serious additional cost of having an expensive monitor and a pricey good-looking TV. It’s excellent for productivity work and surfing the Web—especially when I come home from work after staring at my “puny” 28-inch 4K office monitor all day.

And my Sony TV even works well for photo editing. I’m no professional photographer, but I do have a travel blog and accompanying Facebook page where I share my images and experiences—primarily from several trips to Northern Scotland. After a couple of calibration tweaks, I’ve been very happy editing photos on this screen—especially given I can catch up on Ash Vs. Evil Dead in a big window while working, or tinker with how an image looks in the Web interface on my site, while looking at alternatives at the same time.

So, while monitors continue to advance, and some like Samsung’s recent 49-inch ultra-wide GHG90 are also getting massive, I think I’ll stick with my big-screen TV. And given that TV prices continue to fall (and my eyes certainly aren't getting any younger), my next monitor will probably be a TV, as well.

My only real complaint? TV companies don’t seem to make high-end TVs below the 49-inch class these days. I originally wanted a 43-inch TV for my monitor replacement because my home workspace is a bit cramped. But I couldn’t find a model in that size range last year with solid HDR abilities, low input lag, and accurate color. That’s okay, though. I’m extremely happy with the performance of the 49-incher I bought last year. I just push my chair back a few extra inches, pull my keyboard drawer forward, and get lost in the pixels.

We have seen a whole lot of speculation (and a fair bit of desperation) surrounding Nvidia’s next-generation graphics cards—and for a few good reasons.The company’s existing 10-series “Pascal” architecture is pushing two years on the gaming market, and AMD seems unable, at least at the moment, to muscle the performance goalposts forward on the graphics high end, with its Radeon Vega 64 comparable with the GeForce GTX 1080, but not the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. So there's not a lot of competitive impetus to push next-gen cards on the market, when the current gen is doing just fine.

Plus, of course, there is no lack of demand. Thanks to the seemingly bottomless bank accounts of coin miners, it’s been nearly impossible to pick up any performance-focused graphics card for well over six months, without paying hundreds more than the MSRP. Case in point: the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. It debuted just over a year ago at $699—and it was selling on Newegg as we wrote this for a starting in-stock price of $1,079.

All that said, those hoping that Nvidia’s next-gen cards are going to fix the current problems plaguing the enthusiast gaming space may be setting themselves up for disappointment. Let’s take a look at what we know (or what we think we know) about Nvidia’s ostensible GeForce GTX 2080 and GTX 2070 right now. Spoiler alert: it ain’t much. For starters, they may not even be called "GTX 2080" or "GTX 2070."

What We Know (and Don't Know) About Nvidia's Next Consumer Cards

Yep, we’re not even sure on that naming convention. Speculation about a so-called GTX 2080 and 2070 seems to initially have come from TweakTown, which in the same story speculated Nvidia could launch new cards at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC), which is coming up next week in San Jose. We’ll have personnel at the event, in case that happens. But a launch of a card that soon seems extremely unlikely at this point. In fact, our own sources tell us not to expect next-gen high-end Nvidia cards until the July timeframe, which puts a hard launch even at Computex 2018 out of the picture, as well.

That said, while we will likely have to wait a bit longer than many gamers would want, our sources also indicate that the next-gen top-end Nvidia consumer cards will skip Nvidia's Volta architecture. Volta found its way into the $3,000 Nvidia Titan V, but it otherwise has been absent in the consumer gaming space; the next-gen cards should jump straight to an architecture called “Turing” that we know almost nothing about. Hopefully that means, at the very least, that we’ll see more of a performance boost than we’d normally expect from one generation of cards to the next.

Regardless of what a potential GTX 2080 hides under its cooling apparatus, though, it may not matter much on a practical level for the vast majority of gamers. Given the existing price of GTX 1080 Ti cards, TweakTown is speculating that Nvidia’s next-gen card could be priced as high as $1,499. Again, we don’t know. But given the seemingly unyielding demand for high-end cards in the $1,000-plus price range, even if Nvidia doesn’t price its new cards obscenely high, they’re almost certainly going to sell for hundreds above the MSRP, anyway.

Our only hope for relief on that front (apart from a cryptocurrency-market meltdown) may be that new cards with more mining muscle might shift the focus away from existing Pascal-based chips (as well as AMD’s Vega offerings) and bring some high-end gaming cards back down into the realm of reasonable affordability.

How the Market Might Improve

There may soon be some relief to gamers’ coin-mining woes from elsewhere, as well. As we recently reported, profits seem to be stretching thin for Ethereum miners, and some (admittedly small) cities in the United States are banning coin mining in various ways. Wenatchee, Wash., which as of 2013 had the cheapest electricity in the country (thanks to dams on the Columbia River), banned at-home Bitcoin mining for a year in February. And across the country in New York State, Plattsburgh recently voted for an 18-month moratorium on commercial cryptomining, in an attempt to manage its own hydroelectric resources. In other words, some municipalities seem to be wising up to the fact that coin miners are flocking to areas to exploit cheap power.

If these trends continue, gamers looking for new high-end cards could see some price relief in the next few months. If this unwinds fast enough that millions of existing graphics cards get dumped onto eBay and Craigslist, that could keep the price of next-generation cards reasonable, as well. It’s a tenuous hope. But hey, in a world where RAM prices are triple what they were not long ago, graphics cards are selling at double their launch pricing, and even power supply prices are going up, it sometimes feels like hope—and credit card debt—are all that PC gamers and builders have these days.

What do you think? What would you like to see in Nvidia's next-generation graphics cards? Chime in with your take in the comments below.