Our local AI explorations in 2026 have so far focused on two main platforms: Nvidia’s GB10, as seen in the DGX Spark and Dell Pro Max with GB10, and AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395, aka Strix Halo, as seen in the Corsair AI Workstation 300 and the Ryzen AI Halo. We’ve generally favored GB10 systems for these kinds of local AI development sandboxes. Their solid all-around performance and broad AI software compatibility make them easy to love, even if raw LLM inference throughput isn’t that high.

But Apple’s Mac Studio is another compelling option for local AI trailblazers who want systems with large unified memory pools, powerful GPUs, and high memory bandwidth to enable faster tokens-per-second throughput than either GB10 or Strix Halo can provide. And until someone builds another unified memory SoC with a memory bus as wide as what Apple uses for its Max and Ultra chips, Apple Silicon is, in fact, the only game in town for more memory bandwidth from a chip of this design.

Why focus so much on memory bandwidth for local LLM performance to begin with? To keep it very short, the decode phase of LLM inference is virtually always sequential. Every output token (starting with the first one generated as part of the prefill process) has to be run through every layer in a model in order to generate the next token, and so all the active model weights in a layer have to be streamed to the GPU from its memory as the token makes its way through each one.

Because the amount of computation required for each individual token at each layer is tiny, the speed of the entire decode process basically becomes dependent on how fast those model weights can be streamed in from GPU memory. That makes systems with large memory pools (for holding large models) and high memory bandwidth (for streaming those model weights to the GPU) appealing, and Apple Silicon is the only platform that lets you have both characteristics at a (relatively) reasonable cost.

Apple’s last Mac Studio refresh was in March 2025 and marked the introduction of two versions of the system. The higher-end version uses the M3 Ultra SoC with 819GB/s of memory bandwidth across both the 28-CPU-core, 60-GPU-core mode and the 32-CPU-core, 80-GPU-core model.

The M4 Max version of the Mac Studio encompasses two versions with greater divergence in specs than just core counts. The base M4 Max includes a 14-core CPU (10 performance cores and four efficiency cores) with 410GB/s of memory bandwidth, and it can be upgraded to a 16-core CPU (12 performance cores and four efficiency cores) with 546GB/s of memory bandwidth.

We reviewed both of these systems at launch, but Apple generously lent us another M4 Max with the 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, and 128GB of memory for LLM-specific tests. At the time, the price of that system was $3,699 or so, close to the DGX Spark’s $3,999 list price.

But as the RAMpocalypse has rolled on, the Mac Studio has become more limited in its configuration options and harder to find in stock. The M4 Max version we tested now tops out at 64GB of RAM, and lead times for that system are over two months out. Regardless, it’s the most comparable system that Apple has for the DGX Spark and GB10 platform more generally, at least back when dollar-for-dollar meant something in this market.

Before we get into performance results, we wanted to dig into the nitty-gritty of the M4 Max’s 40-core GPU, but Apple doesn’t share much (if any) detailed architectural information on its GPUs, including the number of shader ALUs that make up each GPU core, so it’s hard to directly compare the M4 Max to GB10 or the Radeon 8060S in the Ryzen AI Max+ 395.

The Radeon 8060S on board Strix Halo has 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, each with 64 shader ALUs for a total of 2,560. AMD clocks the 8060S high, at 2900MHz, to achieve its roughly 14.8 TFLOPS of peak FP32 vector math.

Meanwhile, GB10 has 48 Blackwell SMs with 128 shader ALUs each for 6,144 total CUDA cores, and it too clocks relatively high, at 2450MHz in our testing. It offers a whopping theoretical 30 TFLOPS of FP32 vector compute.

Way back in the day when Apple first revealed the M1 GPU, however, the company disclosed that each core encompassed 128 execution units. Assuming that the same organization has carried through to current Apple GPUs, the 40-core M4 Max GPU would have 5,120 execution units or shader ALUs. That provides an idea of the scale of the GPU, at least, though without knowing clock speeds, we’re hesitant to speculate further about peak FLOPS or other theoretical performance measures.

Apple also only provides raw memory bandwidth figures for the M4 Max, but we can do some back-of-the-napkin math to surmise that the chip likely uses LPDDR5X-8533 on a 512-bit bus to achieve its 546 GB/s of rated memory bandwidth, twice as wide as both GB10 and Strix Halo. The lower-end M4 Max likely uses LPDDR5X-6400. In turn, the M3 Ultra likely uses a 768-bit-wide bus with LPDDR5X-8533 across both of its variants.

We covered the design of the Mac Studio in detail in our initial review, but it’s worth a quick tour to re-familiarize yourself with it. The top and sides of the system are largely featureless, save for an inlaid black Apple logo up top. The front panel has two 10Gbps USB Type-C ports and a UHS-II SD card reader.

The Studio’s thermal design uses a clever intake system that draws in air from vents around the system’s circular foot before exhausting it through a vent at the back of the chassis.

The M4 Max Studio we tested has a whopping four Thunderbolt 5 ports on its back panel with support for data rates up to 120Gbps. Although we’re not testing it today, you can enable RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 for low-latency clustering of Mac Studios using utilities like Exo. These ports also support Thunderbolt displays or DisplayPort 2.1 Alt Mode.

This system also has two USB 3 ports running at 5Gbps, 10Gb Ethernet, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a headphone jack, so it’s got all the connectivity you could practically want out of a compact desktop in 2026.

With those basics out of the way, let’s get to testing.

To test LLM inference performance, we once again turn to llama.cpp, which includes native Metal/MLX support on Apple Silicon when built from source. We used the llama-benchy project as our benchmarking harness.

We tested three models of various memory footprints and architectures: Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B, a recent mixture-of-experts model; Gemma 4 12B, a small dense model, and OpenAI’s gpt-oss-120b, a large mixture-of-experts model. We used Unsloth’s four-bit quantizations of these models for our testing.

Out of the gate with Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B, the Mac Studio delivers prompt processing speeds that beat Strix Halo but are still behind GB10, especially with longer contexts.

Flip over to the throughput results, and the M4 Max pulls ahead of both GB10 and Strix Halo, turning in higher tokens-per-second throughput than both those systems at all context depths.

But despite having double the memory bandwidth of GB10 and Strix Halo on paper, the real-world improvement in token throughput on the M4 Max is just 25% on Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B. That’s certainly welcome, but it’s not nearly the speedup you might expect with twice the memory bandwidth on tap.

The dense Gemma 4 12B, on the other hand, really seems to let the Mac Studio’s bandwidth advantage shine. Tokens-per-second throughput scales more linearly with memory bandwidth with this model, and so the Mac Studio delivers a 1.8X increase in throughput over GB10 and a 2.26X increase over Strix Halo.

But prompt processing speeds are only in line with (or even slightly worse than) Strix Halo here, which isn’t a fantastic result for latency if that’s important to your application.

Finally, we’ll look at gpt-oss-120b. Prompt processing again lands between Strix Halo and GB10, and tokens-per-second throughput is far higher than with either of those systems. But the Mac Studio’s tokens-per-second throughput is, on average, 1.5x higher than GB10 and 1.6x higher than Strix Halo, despite its much higher memory bandwidth. Those are still impressive leads, but they show that memory bandwidth is just one component in judging the performance of an inference pipeline.

On the whole, our LLM inference testing shows that the M4 Max GPU can generate many more tokens per second than competing systems with large unified memory pools, but a memory bandwidth specification alone isn’t a good proxy for delivered performance. The actual boost you get from the M4 Max in LLM inference is highly dependent on the architecture of the model you want to run, so real-world benchmarking is still important.

Image generation performance

LLMs aren’t the only AI workload that one might want to run locally. Image and video generation also matter, and the performance of these diffusion models is generally bound by the compute throughput of the underlying GPU.

Running our Flux.2 Klein image generation test on the Mac Studio initially failed due to an apparent lack of GPU support for the FP8 data type that the ComfyUI workflow uses by default.

We were able to modify the ComfyUI workflow to use the base FP16 version of Flux.2 Klein on the Mac Studio, but that initial compatibility issue shows that you might not enjoy as smooth an image or video generation experience on Apple Silicon as you might on GB10 or even Strix Halo.

Compatibility issues aside, the M4 Max GPU requires even more time than the already pokey Radeon 8060S in this image generation test. Nvidia has repeatedly demonstrated the DGX Spark running as an image and video generation companion for Macs in its demos this year, and this result demonstrates why that pairing might make sense.

Image generation performance with the latest M5 GPU and its dedicated Neural Accelerators for matrix math might be better here, but we don’t have an M5-powered system at hand to compare against the M4 Max. Apple does claim that the M5 Max is “up to 3.8x faster” at image generation than the M4 Max, so take heed if this workload is important to you.

General CPU performance

We already gauged the CPU performance of the M4 Max in our initial review, but we wanted to stack it up against Strix Halo and GB10 directly to see how it performs against these popular platforms in the AI space. To establish a CPU performance ballpark for the M4 Max, we fired up the just-released Geekbench 7 and got to it.

In this benchmark, the M4 Max turns in a whopping 27% advantage in single-core performance and a 21% boost in multi-threaded performance versus the Ryzen Max+ 395’s 16-core, 32-thread Zen 5 x86 CPU.

And comparing Arm to Arm, the M4 Max delivers a 39% single-threaded advantage over the Cortex-X925 “big” core on the Nvidia GB10, along with a 22% advantage in multi-threaded work.

Those results are seriously impressive on their own, but Apple has even more advanced CPU cores in its arsenal now on board the M5 series. We’d expect even larger advantages in general use from those chips.

Geekbench is fine for a quick synthetic test, but I wanted to make sure that its results held in a real-world task, so I compiled the CPU-only version of llama.cpp from source across all three of our test systems using the Clang 21 compiler running across all available physical cores.

With all 16 of its CPU cores in the game, the M4 Max finishes this compilation job in about 37 seconds, anywhere from 33% to 37% faster than the Nvidia and AMD competition here. That’s even faster than the M4 Max’s Geekbench multi-threaded performance delta would suggest.

At least going by these high-level tests, Apple’s CPU performance among SoCs with large unified memory pools is best-in-class, and by a wide margin. And again, that’s with the last-gen M4, not the latest M5.

When judging the efficiency of Apple Silicon or any other platform, one might be tempted to just glance at a power meter like a Kill-a-Watt with the system under load and leave it at that, but instantaneous power draw isn’t the right metric when judging the efficiency of a system for a given task.

Task energy (the amount of power consumed over time) is much more informative. A system that needs a lot of power but finishes a task quickly may consume less task energy and is therefore more efficient than one that consumes a moderate amount of power but takes much longer to finish a job.

To judge inference efficiency, we set up a fixed-length workload with gpt-oss-120b using llama.cpp and llama-benchy: first processing a 2048-token prompt against a 32768-token context depth, then generating 1024 output tokens. We chose that context depth to ensure that our test ran long enough to collect useful data. We recorded this data in watt-hours so that it reflects both energy consumed and time to completion.

At least in this synthetic workload, the M4 Max is more efficient than Strix Halo, but the sheer prompt-processing speed of GB10 lets it finish much faster and use less total power than the Mac Studio does, even though it’s outputting fewer tokens per second in the decode stage.

This test once again suggests that fixating on tokens-per-second throughput alone is perhaps not ideal for judging a system’s inference performance. An ideal LLM inference system would have both high prompt processing speeds and high tokens-per-second throughput for the shortest possible inference turn.

We’re curious how Apple’s latest M5 Max GPU would perform on this workload, as the company claims big gains on prefill compared to the M4 Max and has given that chip even higher memory bandwidth than the M4 Max. If that’s true, the combination of fast prefill and high tokens-per-second on decode would likely make the M5 Max competitive with GB10, if not an outright leader here.

We also gauged idle and load noise levels of these systems to see what it’s like to share space with them. For reference, the noise floor in our testing environment is about 32.6 dBA. We measure sound pressure levels at a distance of 18” from these systems to approximate what it’s like to work with them on top of a desk.

The Mac Studio is impressively quiet both at idle and under load. It barely raises the noise level in our testing environment at idle, and under load, its fans are barely perceptible. Practically any other noise you make or hear in your space will be louder. This is superlative performance.

Our time with a 128GB M4 Max Mac Studio demonstrates why these systems have been so popular among local AI trailblazers. For starters, the spec we tested has an incredibly potent 16-core CPU that’s leagues ahead of both Nvidia’s GB10 and AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 in both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance.

The massive memory bandwidth advantage of the 40-core GPU configuration of the M4 Max versus Strix Halo and GB10—546 GB/s vs 273 GB/s—also translates directly to higher tokens-per-second throughput in local LLM workloads. The M4 Max’s LLM inference performance is by far the highest of any unified memory platform we’ve tested.

But our tests demonstrate that there’s much more to delivered performance than that raw bandwidth figure. Depending on the model you choose, you might see the M4 Max generate as few as 27% more tokens per second or as many as 82% more TPS than an Nvidia GB10 box, at least with the llama.cpp inference engine.

This result emphasizes that you can’t just eyeball memory bandwidth and conclude that twice the bandwidth means twice as many tokens per second for LLM inference. Testing actual workloads remains essential.

And the Mac Studio doesn’t totally wipe the floor with the competition in our tests. For work like image generation, the Nvidia GB10 GPU still holds a large advantage over the M4 Max. Apple claims this workload will perform significantly better on the most recent M5 Max with its latest GPU architecture.

Beyond its impressive raw performance with LLMs and in general processing tasks, the Mac Studio is a master class in industrial design. It looks distinctly classy on a desk, and its cooling design keeps it incredibly quiet. Under load, it’s barely louder than the Nvidia GB10-powered Dell Pro Max and Ryzen AI Halo are at idle. And when the Studio itself is idling, it’s practically silent. This level of performance in such a compact, quiet, and refined chassis is incredibly impressive.

There’s one major asterisk, though: the ongoing RAMpocalypse means that even if you do want to use a Mac Studio as a foundation for your local LLMs, these systems are no longer available in the configuration that we tested.

A Studio with the high-end M4 Max as seen in this review currently tops out at 64GB of RAM for $5299, and the M3 Ultra version tops out at 96GB (with an even higher 819GB/s of memory bandwidth) for the same price. But neither of these configurations are available from stock, and lead times for both are about two months out, meaning that you practically can’t buy a Mac Studio new right now.

If you really want to try out local AI on Apple Silicon with a large memory pool to match, the best current option may be a MacBook Pro with an M5 Max inside, which is still readily available from stock, still allows you to get up to 128GB of RAM, and benefits from Apple’s latest GPU architecture with dedicated Neural Accelerators for matrix math operations.

But depending on your SSD choice, a 128GB M5 Max MacBook Pro with the highest-end 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU is still a $7K to $10K system today. Even in today’s world of rising prices for access to frontier models, that’s a lot of tokens from the cloud – and, almost assuredly, more intelligent ones – than anything you can get from a single 128GB system from any vendor.

But if you’re dead-set on a single Apple Silicon system with the most memory possible, and you want it now in order to ride the local AI wave, a maxed-out M5 Max MacBook Pro is your only ticket at the moment. Given the refinement and flexibility of the Mac Studio as a desktop or server, we can only hope Apple brings that chip to this system, too.

When I had a kid, I found myself taking a lot more photos. When a baby lies on its back considering a ceiling fan for half an hour, you can suddenly find yourself with dozens of cute shots. And it doesn't stop when they grow up.

At a certain point, this bounty of photos weighed on me. I would look at my photo library on my phone or computer and worry about what would happen if something went wrong. It was time for a backup methodology more advanced than plugging in an external drive a few times a month.

At first, I thought about a NAS, which seemed like the obvious solution. But as I researched (and saw how expensive HDDs are these days), I opted for a mini PC. I was lucky enough to score a Mac Mini with M4, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage on Apple's refurbished store a few weeks before the company raised its prices. The best time to buy it would have been at $399 on sale at MicroCenter. The second best time was when I did it.

An M4 Mac Mini is overkill for my project. M1 would've done the job. Any number of older Intel- or AMD-based mini PCs would've been sufficient, and most homelabbers rely on Linux or even Windows for a reason. The M4 will future-proof this machine. It is, though, admittedly funny to me that one of the most powerful computers in my home is running headless in a closet.

But the Mac has other benefits. For one, my home has a lot of Apple products in it. While I'm equally comfortable with Windows and macOS, my wife is exclusively in Apple's ecosystem. So when I realized I would want this system to back up her photos and documents too, making that easy was important. I'm able to access it from either my MacBook Pro or my custom-built PC over VNC or SSH on the command line. There are a few other benefits of using macOS if you have other Apple devices in your home.

My overkill hardware

The M4 Mac Mini is far more than this project needs. But on the plus side, it should see support for a long time. And frankly, getting one during the shortage was just kind of a thrill.

The 256GB of storage is being used exclusively for the operating system and any applications. All of my actual data is on a series of external drives, most of which I already had lying around. That includes a 4TB PCIe NVMe SSD and 2TB PCIe NVMe SSD in enclosures (the former with Thunderbolt 3). But I also wanted a spinning hard drive for longer-term storage. For that, I opted for a Seagate FireCuda Vault X, which isn't the cheapest option, but can connect over USB-C bus power without the need for external power.

All of this is hidden on the top shelf of a closet. This isn't the ideal space, but it's the only one that will work. I live in an apartment, and that closet is where the sole Ethernet connection comes in. I already had my router and modem there. I've hooked up the Mac Mini to the router, connecting it to my home network.

The Mac Mini runs non-stop. That's good, because the power button is on the bottom, and I'd hate to have to pick it up every time I want to shut it off. (Also, I need a step-stool to reach that shelf.)

Backups and redundancy

The SSDs and HDD are all connected to the Mac Mini via the system's USB-C ports. The Thunderbolt enclosure and the HDD are attached to Thunderbolt 4 ports on the rear (the latter to ensure it gets the wattage it needs), while the 2TB SSD in the USB-C enclosure is connected to a 10GB/s USB-C port on the front.I've put too much thought into each drive's purpose.

The main drive is the 4TB USB-C drive, which has two volumes on it (unlike partitions, which macOS also allows, volumes are more flexible with free space). My main volume is for extra copies of important documents, my Apple Photo library, and also for backups of photos I keep outside of Apple's library (I have a tendency to clean house every few years). If I create any files I want to back up on my Windows PC, this is where I go to back them up on site. And lastly, I have a folder just to store files that aren't critical but that I might want to access from any machine. Why keep them on my laptop when I have terabytes of storage to play with?

But the second volume, which is just a small portion of the drive, is also for excess data I don't want to keep on the internal drive. At the moment, that's largely dedicated to macOS content caching (see below).

My 2TB SSD is for Time Machine backups. I can use macOS's built-in backup tool over the network to back up my laptop without plugging anything in.

The HDD is a redundancy play. That's currently split in half — one volume as an alternate Time Machine destination (letting me switch between the SSD and HDD), and the other volume is a copy of my important documents and photo library, which is cloned each night using Carbon Copy Cloner.

This is all in my home, of course, so if my computers and Mac Mini were in the same fire, much of my data would still be lost. Without an offsite backup, I would be in violation of the 3-2-1 backup rule (three backups on two storage devices, with one of them offsite). I keep many of my most important photos and files elsewhere in the cloud, in a mix of iCloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox. It's not a great system, and could use improvement, but it's better than nothing. If HDD prices were to go down, perhaps I could replace the Vault with another one and swap them once a month, keeping the other at a family member's home.

Running headless

I could put a monitor on the top shelf of my closet, but I've opted for a better model: running the Mac Mini headless.

Mostly, this meant setting up the Mini (with a monitor, naturally), to prepare it before booting it up. For me, this included removing a lot of the iCloud syncing it would normally do (I only want it downloading my original, full-sized photos from iCloud, but it doesn't need to get texts), preventing automatic sleeping, allowing for file and screen sharing on the network, and making security decisions that allow me to access the system and files remotely and securely while also deciding how often I want to have to take the thing down from the closet to log back in with a password.

From another Mac, it's very easy to use virtual network computing (VNC) via the built-in screen-sharing utility. From Windows, I can still use a program like RealVNC to access the desktop. I also reduced motion and graphics, set a solid color background, and made other tweaks in an attempt to reduce the amount of data or lag I might see over a remote connection.

There's also the option for SSH. I'm still working to be a bit more proficient at the command line, but you can do that either in macOS in the Terminal or Windows in the Command Prompt or PowerShell.

I've also seen that some people swear by running the Mac Mini headless by using an HDMI dummy plug to force high resolutions when remoting in. But using Mac Screen sharing, I haven't particularly had a problem.

Managing on the go

Typically, I'm more than OK with having what amounts to a backup server accessible locally. But what if I need a file that I'm storing on the server and I'm not at home?

For that, I've created a Tailscale network consisting of my laptop, the Mac Mini, and my iPhone. This gives each device a semi-permanent address I can access it through, as long as both are on the network.

That makes it easy enough from a laptop. Unfortunately, iOS doesn't have the super-easy Screen Sharing tool that macOS does. So on mobile, I have the RealVNC mobile app, which can access the Mac Mini either through the local address or Tailscale. Using a virtual desktop on a phone's touch screen isn't ideal, but it's not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.

Mac benefits and drawbacks

Let's be clear: macOS is not designed for servers (macOS Server was discontinued in 2022). I am very aware that home networking purists would much rather use their preferred Linux distribution, or even Windows. And that's OK!

But if you have Apple devices in your own home, there are some benefits to having a Mac in your homelab.

My favorite of these is content caching, which can keep copies of macOS or iOS updates, App Store updates, or data stored in iCloud in the cache, so that they can be sent to other devices on a local network more quickly.

For those who are using macOS, it's nice to be able to use Time Machine, and mount other drives in the Finder the way you would with a Thunderbolt or USB-C drive and just have it on the desktop.

And yes, for management, the aforementioned Screen Sharing app is pretty solid, and it’s one less piece of software you need to worry about.

Additionally, the machine is whisper-quiet, rarely uses more than 3% of the CPU (and often less), and is efficient enough that I've noticed no substantial change to my electric bill.

The only real drawback for my use case is that while the M4 SoC will keep this project future-proof for a bit, adding RAM is impossible. I opted for the 16GB RAM / 256GB SSD model for budgetary reasons, but it's possible that, depending on what else I want to do with it, that could eventually hamper me down the line. It's especially the case if I ever want to get more into local AI.

However, once I get more advanced, there are some applications that would run more easily if I had gone for a Linux device. Instead, I'll need Docker or VMs.

What I need next

A project like this one is never truly finished. I have the Mac; I have it backing up my stuff (It ends up that after all this, I'm still working on getting my wife to back up her end). There's much more that I want to do down the line. Perfect, however, is the enemy of getting started at all.

One good item for this project would be a small uninterruptible power supply in the case of a power outage. Another would be a dock. A number of third-party companies make docks specifically for the Mac Mini that can fit an SSD, which might be a good way of organizing my cable mess. But if I ever switch computers, that dock will likely end up being less friendly for cable management.

There's also a whole bunch more I want to do with the Mac Mini. I don't have a ton of Smart Home equipment in my apartment, but what I do have is a mix of older Alexa-focused stuff. If I wanted to control that with Apple Home, I could try hosting Home Bridge. Or if I want to move to a more private system, I could install Home Assistant on the Mac Mini using a virtual machine.

I could also toy with PiHole, though again, I would have to use Docker or a Virtual Machine. That would let me block ads across my network (while whitelisting the ones I want to support, of course).

Further down my list are a Plex or Jellyfin server. I don't own that much physical media, but being able to access what I do have virtually could lead me to consider it among my subscription options. I could also use one of these to offload my MP3 collection from my laptop.

But for now, the file server and backups have given me some peace of mind. My photo library certainly isn't getting any smaller. I just hope storage prices fall before I need another drive.

Steam Machine fans who weren’t lucky enough to get a chance to buy the console on its first drop will have to wait until as late as December 2026 to get it. Valve said in its update that the reservation queue varies between products and regions, meaning Valve is already going through the waitlist for some versions of the consoles in select areas. However, it seems that others would have to wait longer if they chose a particularly popular trim of the Steam Machine in a region where there are many buyers, too.

“We’re fulfilling orders on a daily basis, sending out emails to reservation holders with the option to purchase in the order in which they landed on the list post-randomization. We expect everyone in the reservation queue will have the option to purchase by the end of this year,” Valve said in its update. It also added, “With each reservation queue and corresponding waitlist being per-product, per-region, they can move at different speeds based on demand. This means for some products in some regions, we've reached the end of the reservation queue and have started inviting folks from the waitlist.”

That means users who reserved the Steam Machine but haven’t had the chance to buy them yet can expect to get their hands on one before the new year. While this means that all the original reservations will finally be fulfilled in 2026, it doesn’t offer much comfort for those who want to have a new gaming PC console just in time for the holiday season.

Valve lets you 3D-print your own Steam Machine case, face plates

Users who haven’t received their Steam Machine yet (or even those who didn’t order one) could 3D-print their own shell for the console in the meantime. That’s because the company just released the CAD files for the “Gabe Cube” on GitHub in STP format. This lets you create your own face plates and case based on Valve’s own designs, ensuring that the cases or skins you create yourself will exactly match the PC console.

We’ve already seen some manufacturers offer custom plates and skins for the Steam Machine, although Dbrand had to drop the Portal 2-inspired Companion Cube after Valve threatened to sue the company for copyright infringement. With the release of these files, you can 3D-print or create your own skin (even your own Companion Cube skin) without worrying about getting sued as long as you follow the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license that Valve put on the PC console. ‘

If you’re brave enough, you can even make your own case for the Steam Machine and transfer the innards to that custom one you build. Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the Valve engineers who gave us in-depth details on the Steam Machine, warned that doing so might void your warranty, though.

“Your Steam Machine is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you want,” Griffais said on the GitHub post. “That said, we highly recommend you leave it to professionals. Any damage you do will not be covered by your warranty – but more importantly, you might break your Steam Machine, or even get hurt! Be careful, and have fun.”

Intel’s codename "Panther Lake" Core Ultra Series 3 mobile processors were designed for laptops, but now we are starting to see them trickle over into mini PCs. That includes the recently launched MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG (starting from $569, $1,999 as tested). This particular design is pleasingly compact and low-key in a traditional NUC manner, but can this matte black panther roar?

Design of the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

Simply put, the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG is a very compact roughly 4.5 x 4.5 x 1.5-inch design with an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H chip inside.

The Core Ultra 9 386H delivers 16 cores and threads of processing power (6P + 8E + 2LPE) running at up to 4.9 GHz. MSI is also selling models with the Ultra 7 355, and Ultra 5 322 processors.

The Cubi’s shell is sturdy and pleasant enough in a matte black finish, made from recycled plastics. Inside, the motherboard is held firm inside what looks like a folded sheet aluminum frame.

Another welcome feature is the external power switch. This is a small power button puck on a slim connector that is 18 inches (45 cm) long. There’s a dedicated port for this on the left side of the Cubi, and the end of the puck is mounts with a little double-sided foam tape..

The power button dongle is a nice touch for those who might mount the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG somewhere out of view, like behind a monitor or under a desk. Those who keep the Cubi in reach can benefit from the fact that the power button on the unit has an embedded fingerprint reader. I found the biometric unlocking here to be hit and miss, however, and it often didn’t recognize my thumb.

MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG Mini PC Specifications

Ports and Upgradeability

MSI has implemented a couple of physical convenience features in the build, starting with the three-step toolless access system.

All you have to do to pop the metal bottom off is turn a slotted screw, push a metal latch, and pull a ring. The trouble is I did need a tool to turn the first slotted screw, I fear my fingernail would have split if I hadn't grabbed a screwdriver. The force of pulling a tiny ring attached to the latch was also slightly concerning.

Beyond the Core Ultra 9 386H processor, our sample came loaded with 32GB of DDR5 (2x 16GB DDR5-5600 SODIMMs made by Samsung) and a removable 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe 2280 DRAM-less SSD from Phison. With these inserted, the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG was fully populated. \The Wi-Fi card is also removable from its M.2 2230 slot.

On the front of the unit, there are three ports: USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 and USB 2.0 ports, and a 10 GBps USB-C port. On the back, there are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two HDMI 2.1 ports (one with MSI PowerLink, which turns the PC on with a monitor), and a pair of 2.5G Ethernet jacks. Finally, on the side of the system, there's a Kensington lock slot.

I feel that the MSI is slightly stingy with ports here. Most notably, there is not even a single USB Type-A port in the rear. So I had to use a USB-C dongle to keep my wired keyboard connected at the back for the tidiest possible setup.

It is good to see various USB ports on the front, however. And I appreciate that this small device allows up to four displays at once (2x HDMI, 2x USB-C DP-Alt).

For wireless networking, there is Wi-Fi 7 on board and Bluetooth 5.4 is also built-in.

There is no 3.5mm audio jack here, which would have been welcome on the front. You'll need Bluetooth, or to use audio out through HDMI or USB Type-C ports.

Test System Setup

Productivity Performance on the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

The MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG was built to be an office workhorse, so there won’t be many complaints about performance. It comes wielding Intel’s latest silicon, with 16 cores to take CPU-demanding tasks and multitasking in its stride. And the system does its job while sipping very low amounts of power, and rather quietly.

In Cinebench 2026, Maxon’s current-gen CPU rendering benchmark, the little MSI Cubi comes last in the rankings of our recent crop of mini PCs. Though low in comparison to its peers, its score isn’t disastrous here, as this is testing the kind of CPU muscle that won’t be called upon by a typical home or office user of a mini PC like this.

Similarly, in CPU-heavy benchmarks like Blender and Handbrake, the MSI Cubi lags behind the crowd. Even against the GMKtec EVO-T2, which also uses Panther Lake silicon and has fewer P-cores, the MSI still lags here. We are certain this is due to MSI’s default configuration maxing out at around 55W. The GMKtec machine was seen pulling over 70W at the wall.

On a more positive note, during our demanding tests, the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG stayed admirably cool and quiet. This feat was clearly aided by the chosen lower power limits and use of Intel’s newest energy-sipping mobile silicon in this form factor.

Gaming and Graphics on the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

Unlike some mini PCs, this one isn't squarely targeted at gamers. Still, with a mere quartet of Xe3 cores pushing the 3D visuals along, this compact and quiet mini PC can do some gaming.

I fired up Forza Horizon 5 for a bit of racing down in Mexico. I liked the High and 1080p settings, and the game managed 45-40 frames per second. The frame rate felt like it dropped precipitously every few minutes as I was driving around, though. This indicates that the game's suggested Low or even Medium settings would be a better choice for consistency.

Our benchmarks included a trio of 3DMark synthetics and two PC gaming standards. 3DMark Solar Bay is a great way to frame and compare cross-platform iGPU performance. Meanwhile, Steel Nomad turns to screws on raw graphics performance with its heavy modern GPU load, and will be better for comparisons when we start testing the higher-end mini PCs, some with dGPUs. Last and definitely not least, Speed Way is a 2025 benchmark from UL that uses DirectX Raytracing tier 1.1 for real-time global illumination and real-time ray-traced reflections.

Next up, some real gaming courtesy of Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Cyberpunk 2077. The former scales well with processor resources and can still look and run great on humble iGPUs. As for Cyberpunk 2077, it can really push and tax even the strongest modern GPUs, so here we've used two settings to show how the little MSI Cubi can - and can't - play this game.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider performed quite nicely on the Intel Graphics (four Xe3 cores) fed by the dual-channel DDR5-5600 memory configuration we had. Using the High settings at 1080p makes for pleasing visuals, and I would argue the 37 FPS average was perfectly adequate for this solo-play atmospheric adventure.

Cyberpunk achieved a similarly playable frame rate using the Steam Deck preset at 1080p. On a big screen this is a little bit blurry / smeary. Moving up to the High preset at 1080p (with upscaling and frame gen turned off) dropped the frame rate below the magic 30 FPS, though, and below most folks' tolerance. If you had no other avenue to enjoy this demanding title, there could still be a spot in between these settings that would work for you.

In comparison to the other devices we have recently tested, the MSI NUC sat near the bottom of the pile. It only undercut the Geekom A9 Max 2026, which should have benefited from a great performing Radeon 890M iGPU but was kneecapped due to its single-channel memory configuration. This system is really made for work, and while you can technically play on it, you'll want something stronger for a good experience.

Power, Heat, and Noise when using the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

According to system tools like HWiNFO, the Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor inside this MSI Cubi has a TDP of 25W, with PL1 30W and PL2 65W. During testing, I measured total system power consumption with a plug-in power meter, as well as reading CPU temperature using a Windows tool.

In an idling state on the desktop, the system pulled around 17W consistently. At the same time, the CPU temperature would stick around 40 degrees Celsius.

During prolonged stress testing of the MSI Cubi, the highest consistent wattage consumed was around 55W. It seemed to stabilize at approximately the 75 degrees Celsius level.

I would characterize this as a quiet mini PC. Its MSI Frozr AI Pro fans were more or less unnoticeable in idle and light loads. My meter showed 30.8dB, and the meter doesn't measure below 30, so there's a possibility it may be even quieter. Meanwhile, the 37.3dB at max fans wasn't horrible, and it takes effort to tease this much noise out of the MSI.

Software and Warranty on the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

MSI’s latest NUC comes with MSI Center pre-installed. This is a suite of controls and extras wrapped up in a tabbed Windows interface. The main tab is packed with system monitoring information, but this new version of the tool offers to leverage AI to “automatically recognize various user scenarios, triggering appropriate adjustments in performance, sound effects, display mode,” and more. Elsewhere, MSI’s NUC was pleasingly free of bloat and third-party clutter, including a wonderful lack of short-lived free trials. Businesses really don't want to deal with that.

MSI sells the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG with a 1-year warranty as standard, but opting for a pre-built configuration with Windows 11 Pro on Amazon will also boost your warranty to 3 years of advanced tier coverage.

Configurations of the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

Nosing around online retailers in the U.S. today didn’t uncover the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG with the exact configuration, as tested. We got in touch with MSI about the 32GB RAM model, as tested, and were informed that it was only available business-to-business and its MSRP was $1,999 but that depends on factors such as order size.

On Amazon we saw a barebones version with the same Core Ultra 9 386H for $809. Upgrading to 16GB of RAM (single-SODIMM, single-channel) and a 1TB SSD, with Windows 11 pre-installed skyrockets the price to $1,661 (with Win 11 Home) and $1,767 (with Win 11 Pro), respectively.

MSI is also marketing Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG mini PCs with Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor 355 and Ultra 5 Processor 322 configurations. You can find these on Amazon, both in 16GB/1TB/ configurations for $1,549 and $1,079, respectively.

Bottom Line

Though the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG is clearly aimed at businesses with its productivity focus . Its understated looks and quiet operation may attract those who want a small-form-factor productivity PC at home, especially if they intend on putting together a minimum-fuss multi-monitor setup.

If the MSI’s quiet, efficient, and compact form isn’t a killer combination for you, and you are open to less established brands, we have recently tested several other mini PCs from companies like Arctic, Beelink, GMKtec, and Geekom.

These less established brands definitely offer better value with more potent processors, and more generous memory/storage configurations, at better or similar pricing to the MSI. In the MSI’s favor, I’d say it quietly satisfies its target market more than adequately, and sprinkles attractive bonuses like fingerprint security, the remote power button, MSI Power Link, the touted ‘tool-less’ component access, and 3-years of advanced warranty coverage when you choose a Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG with Win 11 Pro.

Correction, July 30:, 2026 This review originally said the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG includes vPro remote management. It does not. We regret the error.

u/DaKrazyKid went on Reddit to exhibit their mini-ITX gaming PC build dubbed "RAM Machine," which features 36 RAM sticks. The OP said the Steam Machine, with its paltry 16GB of RAM, inspired the build, which has 16 RGB RAM sticks controlled through SignalRGB to give you all that RGB goodness, and they’re giving it away to one lucky commenter in the r/PcBuild subreddit. It’s unclear if the Redditor is affiliated with SignalRGB, although the giveaway seems to be sponsored by the company because of the disclaimer that excludes employees, affiliates, and subsidiaries of SignalRGB, their immediate family members, and persons living in the same household from the sweepstakes.

Although the PC itself isn’t a top-of-the-line unit, it’s a decent build that offers better specifications than the Steam Machine. The RAM Machine comes with an Intel Core Ultra 5 CPU, a single-fan RTX 5060 GPU, 32GB of Patriot DDR5-8200 RAM, and a 2TB Patriot SSD, all attached to a B860-I motherboard and powered by a 750-watt PSU. While this might not give you native 4K gaming, this is more than enough for 1080p gaming and could even handle some 1440p titles. We checked the cost of this mini-PC on PCPartPicker, and a similarly specced unit costs more than $1,500. This makes it 50% more expensive than the Steam Machine and quite a valuable giveaway.

RAM Machine Giveaway - To enter this giveaway, simply leave a comment. from r/PcBuild

This isn’t the first time that SignalRGB has sponsored a giveaway of a wild-looking PC if the company indeed sponsored this. Just last year, it turned a microwave into an all-in-one PC and gave it away to one lucky winner. It also had another raffle in 2023, this time a powerful gaming PC built inside a Starfield control panel case. The biggest thing these three PCs have in common, of course, is that they use SignalRGB to control the RGB lights in these systems. Although this is a free app you can use to control the RGB lights on your computer, no matter what brand they’re from, it also offers a Pro subscription which costs $5.99 a month or $45 a year. This tier gives you more advanced features like cooling control, system monitoring, macros, and more.

If you want to join the giveaway, all you need to do is head to the Reddit post and leave a comment. Don’t get your hopes up, though, as it already has more than 78,000 comments at the time of writing.

AMD introduced its mid-cycle Ryzen AI 400 chips for laptops at the beginning of the year. Predictably, mini PC makers have decided to update their Ryzen AI 300 designs from last year with the newest generation processors. While the gains from the new silicon might be politely described as incremental, Geekom here has also taken the opportunity to upgrade the cooling system.

The firm also decided to go with a single 32GB DDR5-5600 SODIMM configuration here. Considering the ongoing RAM shortages, it says it decided to do so to allow for less wasteful upgrades down the line. However, AMD iGPUs like the Radeon 890M here, are heavily impacted by the reduced bandwidth of using single-channel system RAM.

Nevertheless, the 32GB/2TB device configuration supplied looks like a relatively generous offering in the current climate.

Design of the Geekom A9 Max 2026

Geekom basically sticks to the classic 5x5-inch NUC design with its anodized silvery metal Mini PC. If you’ve seen a Geekom A-series Mini PC before, it will be immediately familiar, and it offers appealing, though derivative (NUC x Mac Mini), stylishness.

The A9 Max 2026’s dimensions are officially listed as 135 x 132 x 46.9mm (5.3 x 5.2 x 1.9-inches). Geekom’s spec didn’t mention the weight of the device, but it tipped our scales at 705g (~1 pound and nine ounces). These weights and measurements don’t include the external PSU or VESA mounting bracket supplied. Other bits in the box include a region-appropriate cloverleaf plug and cable for the PSU, screws for that mounting bracket, and an HDMI cable.

We’ve already mentioned the metal shell of this Mini PC, which has a UV coating to make it more durable. Geekom says that there is also an inner metal frame, and removing the black plastic bottom reveals a metal bottom layer. It suggests its selection of construction materials and techniques makes the A9 Max “extremely sturdy [and] it can withstand up to 200Kg of pressure.”

You power up the Geekom A9 Max with its front-mounted power button. It’s a simple button, which lights up to indicate power. There’s no built-in biometric sensor, and no Copilot button, either.

Geekom A9 Max 2026 Mini PC Specifications

Ports and Upgradeability

Starting from the front, Geekom has chosen to put four USB‑A 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) on the front panel, one of which is configured for fast charging any connected smart devices. To the right of these is a 3.5mm audio jack, and then there’s the flush and slightly convex power button.

Turn the unit clockwise, and you see the Kensington slot as the sole user port interrupting the neatly perforated metal vista. The rear is black plastic with sizable vents at the top. Below the vents are a DC barrel jack, twin HDMI ports, twin 2.5G Ethernet ports, twin USB4 ports (with DP-Alt support), another USB‑A 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) port, and a USB 2.0 port. The other perforated side of the device features the SD 4.0 card reader slot.

There’s nothing else on the top of the Mini PC but the Geekom logo. On the bottom, there are VESA mounting screws and four rubber feet, which have to be removed to access the inside.

Once you pry the sticky feet off, there are four crosshead screws to remove. Then I used a guitar plectrum to flip the bottom off. The bottom comes away without any attached wiring. However, you can’t do much yet, as four more screws need to be removed so the metal shielding layer on the bottom can be removed. Rather than untaping all the antenna wires, which partly fix the inner metal underside to the rest of the inner components, I managed to open it up like a door.

With eight screws removed, I had access to the SSD and RAM slots. The Geekom A9 Max has two M.2 SSD slots. The 2280 slot was populated with a Kingston branded 2TB drive with a thermal pad on top. You can just about see that underneath it is the M.2 Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 card. To the side of this 2280 SSD is another slot, which it is claimed is usable for drives in the 2230 form factor. I noted a thermal pad was already stuck on the metal shell, which would run the length of a 2230 drive if installed and the unit screwed back together, that’s nice attention to detail.

More user-configuration options provided by this tiny motherboard were provided by the pair of SODIMM slots. Geekom had fitted a single Micron 32GB DDR5-5600 module, so one slot was left free. The decision to sell this device in a single-channel configuration was “mainly to provide better long-term upgrade flexibility,” I was told in an email. “Since the A9 Max only has two memory slots, a factory-installed 2×16GB setup would require users to replace both modules when upgrading to 64GB or 128GB in the future. With a single 32GB module, users can simply add another 32GB stick later to achieve 64GB dual-channel memory more easily and cost-effectively.”

I’d agree more with this idea if the Mini PC had 16GB of RAM in total, but I fear it will be a long time before buyers of machines of this type will be able to justify purchasing another 32GB SODIMM – to unleash rather than constrain the Radeon 890M. More on that later.

Test System Setup

Productivity Performance on the Geekom A9 Max 2026

AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 470, with its Zen 5 CPU architecture and 24 threads running at up to 5.2 GHz, won’t be holding anyone back in office productivity, general computing, and similar day-to-day tasks. It also has a great reputation for efficiency, inheriting the mantle of its predecessor, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, which gathered many design wins for AMD. Here, the CPU is fed by an ample 32GB of system RAM, and the 2TB PCIe Gen4 x4 SSD storage equipped is pretty fast too, with read/write transfer speeds of up to 6,139 MB/s and 5,499 MB/s, respectively, according to CrystalDiskMark.

Single-Threaded

Multi-Threaded

In Cinebench 2026, the A9 Max 2026 scored 4,667 points in the multi-core test. That's very similar to the Beelink SER10 MAX with the exact same processor. No surprise. However, the Beelink has dual-channel RAM, which doesn't make a lot of difference in this kind of CPU-heavy rendering workload, as you can see. In the HandBrake video encoding test we see a similar story, with the Geekom middle of the pack, outpacing the Intel competition, but a smidgen behind its AMD brethren.

During our demanding tests, the Geekom A9 Max 2026 stayed admirably cool, but its peak noise level might make you want to move it to a less prominent area of the desk, or use the VESA mounting option to hide it behind your monitor.

Gaming and Graphics on the Geekom A9 Max 2026

In its marketing materials, Geekom pitches the new A9 Max as a computer for all niches, mentioning its CPU and AI compute power, as well as indeed gaming and being able to “conquer AAA titles with ease” thanks to the “Radeon 890M integrated graphics, clocked at a high frequency of 3.1GHz.” So, without further ado, let’s run through our standard set of synthetic 3D engine and gaming tests.

Before beginning the games benchmarking proper, I felt like firing up the old-but-gold Far Cry 5 for a bit of mayhem in Montana. After trying a few preset settings, I settled on 1080p Medium. The High preset was just a bit too slow, and Low settings seemed barely any faster. With Medium settings chosen as the sweet spot for this configuration, I adventured through the attractive wilderness and enjoyed eliminating a few crazy cult members. The average FPS of just above 30 FPS, with a minimum of 26 FPS (according to the built-in benchmark) was enough to enjoy the single-player game without being too distracted by performance issues. I am accustomed to 1440p gaming in this title with a higher quality level and a better frame rate. But it wasn’t insufferable on the A9 Max configuration we tested.

Our benchmarks included a trio of 3DMark synthetics and two PC gaming standards. 3DMark Solar Bay is a great way to frame and compare cross-platform iGPU performance. Meanwhile, Steel Nomad turns to screws on raw graphics performance with its heavy modern GPU load, and will be better for comparisons when we start testing the higher-end mini PCs. Last and definitely not least, Speed Way is a 2025 benchmark from UL that uses DirectX Raytracing tier 1.1 for real-time global illumination and real-time ray-traced reflections.

3DMark Solar Bay tests seem like the best fit for this iGPU, with frame rates smooth enough that it doesn't hurt your eyes to watch. Sadly for the Geekom, it placed last in the pack in this test, even behind the office productivity targeted MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG.

Next up, built-in real game benchmarks courtesy of Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Cyberpunk 2077. The former scales well with processor resources and can still often look and run great on humble iGPUs. As for Cyberpunk 2077, it can really push and tax even the strongest modern GPUs, so here we've used two settings to show how the little A9 Max 2026 can - and can't - play this game. High settings in this game resulted in a grating 17 FPS. Using the Steam Deck preset resulted in a far more playable 29 FPS.

Moving over to Shadow of the Tomb Raider (SOTTR), and the A9 Max 2026 as configured managed just a 26 FPS average. If you have no other avenues to enjoy this game, you’ll have to nudge settings lower to get above a consistent 30 FPS. Opting for 720p visuals could also help, if you were willing to do so.

We had a similarly disappointing gaming experience during the Minisforum X1 AI Pro 470 review, which also combined this exact AMD Zen 5 mobile processor with a single 32GB stick of DDR5-5600. Check the details of that article to learn exactly the difference reconfiguring the DDR5 to dual-channel can make (spoiler: equipping dual-channel memory made a very big difference in our 3D gaming performance tests). In our newest mini PC tests, the Beelink SER10 MAX comes with the same AMD  Ryzen AI 9 HX 470  processor but is kitted out with dual-channel RAM and can hit a far smoother 54 FPS in the SOTTR High preset.

Power, Heat, and Noise when using the Geekom A9 Max 2026

This little computer was pleasingly thrifty when it came to power use. Measured at the wall, I observed a mere 7W of power was being pulled by the system when idling in Windows 11. Under the heaviest loads I could muster, the system power consumption rose to about 79W. System tools showed that the idle / stress CPU temperatures were around 34C and 79C, respectively. Perhaps Geekom could quiet the IceBlast 3.0 fans, then? Or, if you buy this, you’d have latitude to slow the fan profiles in the BIOS.

Geekom’s A9 Max 2026 was quiet at idle, with my readings showing it made about 29 to 30dB noise. The loudest it got was around 41dB, when I was trying to stress the system by running CPU and GPU benchmark tests simultaneously.

Geekom boasts about its new IceBlast 3.0 system here. I found that it works well enough as shipped, but it isn’t the quietest under load and may benefit from user tweaks. There’s no software for these kinds of adjustments, though, so it is a BIOS tweak / reboot process you’ll have to work through.

Software and Warranty on the Geekom A9 Max 2026

Geekom ships the A9 Max 2026 with no custom software at all. It's just clean Windows 11 Pro, as supplied. Also, we note that the marketing material boasts the system fully supports both Windows 11 and Linux. At the time of writing, there is only one fully populated option for would-be buyers of the A9 Max 2026 - identical to our test unit - so you can’t potentially save money by going barebone / Linux.

A 3-year warranty is provided with the A9 Max 2026.

Configurations of the Geekom A9 Max 2026

At the time of writing, there is only one configuration of the Geekom A9 Max 2026 is available, and that is precisely the one tested with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 470, 32GB / 2TB, and Windows 11 Pro pre-installed. Amazon currently has this machine on a 'limited time deal' with 10% off reducing the price from $1,599 to a more reasonable $1,439.

On some stores, you may still be able to find last year's model, with an HX 370.

Bottom Line

Geekom’s A9 Max 2026 is a handsome, durable, and performant all-arounder. However, we will say again that its Radeon 890M iGPU is seriously hamstrung by the single-channel RAM configuration it is sold with. This lack of bandwidth becomes painfully obvious when 3D gaming.

Pondering the A9 Max 2026’s pricing more carefully suggests that mini PC desktops like this are no longer the bargains they used to be. The very modest uplift provided by AMD’s AI 400 Gorgon Point chips doesn’t really make a strong case for the 2026 refresh models.

This updated 2026 release competes with Geekom’s own older editions, as mentioned in the above Configurations section. However, the Minisforum AI X1 Pro 470 which we reviewed in March seems to offer more expandability (3x M.2 SSD slots, OCuLink), a fingerprint reader, Copilot button, and is a little quieter under load. You can still grab that Minisforum Mini PC with a similar build but slightly larger footprint for $759 barebones, or 32GB/2TB + Windows 11 Pro for $1,399.

If you want to dabble in games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider with pleasing graphic details and reasonably smooth 30FPS+ frame rates, please budget to add a matching 32GB DDR5-5600 SODIMM to the retail configuration, or wait and see if there’s a barebones model arriving. A cheaper barebones model would allow buyers to source their own dual-channel memory kit (we’d go for at least a pair of DDR6-5600 16GB modules), and M.2 SSD - and don’t forget an OS.

Arctic's latest under-the-desk Senza PC design is using an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 mobile processor. Sure, the upgrade has also allowed Arctic to shove ‘AI’ in the product name, but this is a very appealing design with great build quality, good performance, a reasonable selection of ports, and silent operation as the cherry on top.

Design of the Arctic Senza AI 370

This definitely isn’t the smallest mini PC around. Its dimensions could probably fit more like three mini PCs in a row. The largest part of this device measures 21.10 (L) × 7.09 (W) × 1.97 (H) inches. In addition to the sizable main unit, there’s also a 120W external PSU and a front panel dongle with some handy ports and an LED-illuminated power button.

The central section of the main unit is where all the performance components are located. Its ‘wings’ are basically passive cooling radiators with heatpipes spreading out from the center, perforating a multitude of fins on either side.

The Senza, its front panel dongle, and PSU are designed to mount discreetly under your desk. After confirming that everything worked post-unpacking, I dutifully followed the instructions and used the printed template to mount the PC and front panel neatly beneath my oak desk. My desk is so heavy I had to work on it as if I were working under a car, lying on my back, but it slotted into place the first time thanks to the accuracy of the template and my deft use of an awl. All the fittings (screws, fabric fasteners, braces, and straps) are provided in the box with the Senza AI 370.

Arctic Senza AI 370 specifications

Ports and Upgradeability

On the PC back panel, there is a decent selection of ports. The mix includes a USB4 Type-C port, two USB 2.0 Type-A, and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports. Dedicated video out options are provided with HDMI 2.1, and DisplayPort 2.0 - but the rear USB4 port can also handle video out, too. Two 3.5mm jacks are also there for audio in and out. Wired networking support is provided with a 2.5G LAN port.

The rear is also where you plug in the supplied 120W PSU via a barrel jack. Lastly, there’s an unusual looking dedicated dual USB-C (two Type-C ports positioned at right angles to one another), which mates with the front panel I/O dongle cable supplying USB4 data and power.

The use of a front panel I/O dongle is a great idea, and it makes thepower button easy to reach. I would have liked to see more ports, here, personally.

As I am always plugging various peripherals into my PCs, I decided to connect the under-desk USB4 port on the main body of the Arctic Senza AI 370 to an above-desk dock. Specifically, I used StarTech’s driverless 208UE USB4 dock to give easy access to a host of fast connectivity options.

Inside the Senza AI 370, there is quite a lot of empty space but limited expandability. It’s easy enough to get in and see the guts of the device, with just four Phillips screws holding the metal panel in place. Under the panel there are no RAM slots, but you can see the soldered Micron DDR5-8000 chips surrounding the AMD processor. Before you buy, ensure 32GB of RAM will be enough for you for the foreseeable future.

I also found an Arctic heatsink atop an M.2 2280 slot. The sample device came with 1TB of fast PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage installed. System tools revealed it to be a Chinese YMTC PC411 SSD.

We also spied an M.2 2230 slot populated with a Mediatek Wi-Fi 7 (2x2 MIMO) + Bluetooth 5.3 card. You could swap that out for repair or upgrade purposes one day, if required. There are no further internal expansion ports.

Test System Setup

Productivity Performance on the Arctic Senza AI 370

The Arctic Senza AI 370 doesn’t break a sweat with day-to-day productivity tasks, browsing, and similarly light workloads. AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is a very capable chip with its Zen 5 CPU architecture featuring 12 cores and 24 threads, the integrated Radeon 890M graphics, and a power-efficient NPU for on-device AI.

Despite relying on an older AMD processor, the Arctic Senza AI 370 shows it can match and even beat the two Ryzen 9 AI HX 470 mini PCs that have also recently been subjected to our newest suite of tests. Let’s single out Cinebench 2026 multicore scores first. Here the Senza clearly leads the pack of newer AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Ultra mini PCs, at almost 7% faster than the second-placed Beelink SER 10 Max. In the Blender Monster render test, the Senza’s HX 470 rivals actually do win by a tiny amount, but the difference is small enough to be within the margin of error.

Another productivity test, targeting video encoding performance this time, shows that the Arctic won’t be usurped by its newer generation challengers. The Senza AI 370 proudly leads the Handbrake table, and a victory is a victory, but the actual difference is so small it is essentially a draw between the three AMD mini PCs.

I think the Arctic’s good performance in these productivity tests can be put down to the system’s significantly better memory bandwidth.

Gaming and Graphics on the Arctic Senza AI 370

The Senza AI 370’s APU should make it a decent enough performer in games, at least if you're realistic with the settings. Its Radeon 890M iGPU comes with 16 RDNA 3.5 CUs, and it is accompanied by fast dual-channel DDR5-8000 in Arctic’s silent machine.

Before moving onto our standard synthetic and iconic PC gaming tests, I decided to run around in one of my favorite 3D gaming titles, Ubisoft’s The Division 2. I enjoyed taking down a Bloodhound and its high-tech escort troops, and liberating an enemy control point. The action was fluid enough, without experiencing any stutters or other low-performance tells. I played in FHD using the High preset, and later saw using the built-in benchmark tool that the Arctic Senza AI 370 achieved an average of 53 FPS across a diverse set of game scenarios.

Next up, our benchmarks include a trio of 3DMark synthetics and two PC gaming standards. 3DMark Solar Bay is a great way to frame and compare cross-platform iGPU performance. Meanwhile, Steel Nomad turns to screws on raw graphics performance with its heavy modern GPU load, and will be better for comparisons when we start testing the higher-end mini PCs, some with dGPUs. Last and definitely not least, Speed Way is a 2025 benchmark from UL that uses DirectX Raytracing tier 1.1 for real-time global illumination and real-time ray-traced reflections.

In 3DMark Solar Bay, which uses an engine / resolution most appropriate to the graphical firepower of most of this crop of iGPU-only mini PCs, the Senza AI 370 easily beats the newer-gen Ryzen competition. However, it is clearly outclassed by the Intel Arc B390 iGPU in the GMKtec EVO-T2.

Moving on to more real games, let’s check the data provided by the multi-scene benchmarks built into Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Cyberpunk 2077. The former scales well with processor resources and can still often look and run great on humble iGPUs. As for Cyberpunk 2077, it can really push and tax even the strongest modern GPUs, so here we've used two settings to show how the silent Senza can perform.

A pattern seems to be established in the synthetics above, which continues into our real gaming tests. Specifically, the passively cooled Arctic Senza AI 370 is the best choice for iGPU gaming if you don’t want to spend far more cash on the potent Panther Lake GMKtec EVO-T2. The Arctic consistently outclasses both the newer HX 470 processor-based challengers, though we see the Beelink SER10 Max with dual-channel RAM do much better than the Geekom A9 Max 2026, constrained by a single stick of DDR5-5600.

On Cyberpunk 2077, the Steam Deck and 1080p preset felt noticeably more fluid than the High 1080p option. If I were to persevere with this demanding title on the Senza AI 370, I’d perhaps try some form of upscaling to see if I could maintain the High quality setting but with an improved FPS.

It's worth repeating, the silent Senza seems to outclass the newer AMD challengers across gaming tests thanks to its superior memory subsystem based on its soldered 32GB LPDDR5X‑8000 dual‑channel RAM.

Power, Heat, and Noise when using the Arctic Senza AI 370

When I left the Senza AI 370 to idle, my power meter measured wattages at or below 10W from the wall for the whole system. When the system was pushed with simultaneous CPU and GPU benchmarks running, power draw seemed to peak at a little under 92W.

System tools showed that during light activities like browsing the web and typing reports like this one, the CPU temperature stayed around 30 degrees C. Playing The Division 2 for 30 or 40 minutes, the reported CPU temperature seemed to stay between 60 C and 70 C. It didn’t constantly creep upwards; it would sometimes go towards that upper bound, and sometimes fall again. However, running a workload like Cinebench R23 multicore the temperatures seemed to creep inexorably upwards, with the highest measurement I saw at 96 C.

Between tasks, the reported CPU temperature would fall very rapidly. I saw it dive from 75 C to 45 C in under 10 seconds after one of the recent benchmarks I completed. That’s pretty impressive given that there’s no fan.

In my testing before installing it under the desk, oddly enough, I could actually hear a sound when the YMTC PC411 SSD was being accessed. I'm unsure what it was, but I did notice it.

Software and Warranty on the Arctic Senza AI 370

Arctic’s Senza AI 370 ships with a clean copy of Windows 11 Pro installed. That's it. There were no bundled utilities, dashboards, or custom monitoring and tuning software. Arctic sells the Senza AI 370 with a two-year warranty.

Configurations of the Arctic Senza AI 370

Arctic sells just a single Senza AI 370 configuration: the one we tested with a AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370,32GB LPDDR5X-8000 memory and a 1TB SSD. Windows 11 Pro is included, but Arctic says that the machine is Linux compatible.

Those in Europe can head directly to the official company website and snag a Senza AI 370 for the MSRP of €1,199.99. Meanwhile, UK buyers can grab a device from Arctic’s official Amazon web store for £910.49. Compared with many of the other mini PC prices we are seeing, that seems very reasonable for a fully populated mini PC with fast memory and storage plus unique silent / passive appeal. Those German and UK prices include VAT at 19% and 20%, respectively.

I asked Arctic about the availability of the Senza AI 370 in the U.S. and was told that no official distributor had been set up for this device. The company is seeding the device to U.S. media, however, to gauge interest in devices like this.

Bottom Line

If you want a mini PC that you can't see or hear, the Arctic Senza AI 370 is for you. Many will be attracted by mini PCs for their minimal physical footprint, but Combine that with its silence, well-behaved thermals, plus solid performance, and there's really not much to complain about.

Concerning performance, Arctic’s choice of soldered 32GB LPDDR5X-8000 memory and a fast SSD gave this device equal or better application and gamingi performance compared to its newer-gen Ryzen 9 AI 470 HX equipped mini PC rivals we have tested recently. It is noticeably cheaper, too, but sadly not easy to grab if you live stateside right now.

Finding a good deal on a prebuilt gaming PC isn't easy these days, especially with the ongoing global memory crisis. But what are the chances of stumbling across an unbeatable deal while you're out shopping for rotisserie chicken? Well, that's exactly what happened to one lucky Costco shopper, who walked away with a heavily discounted iBuyPower gaming PC for $1,140, down from its original price of $1,899.99. Now that’s a true winner winner, chicken dinner.

According to their post on the PC Master Race subreddit thread, u/klcp20 stumbled on one of the last display units at Costco during their weekly groceries run. While display units are generally sold at a discount to free up showroom space, buyers should keep in mind that such systems may have been on display for months and could be missing some accessories.

snagged a costco display unit couple of weeks ago from r/pcmasterrace

As per the shared spec sheet, the iBuyPower prebuilt PC includes an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which is rated as one of the best gaming CPUs that you can purchase today. Other components include 32GB of DDR5 memory, a 2TB SSD, and an Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics card with 12GB of VRAM.

The system also comes with an AIO liquid cooler, a keyboard and mouse combo, and a copy of Windows 11, making it a well-rounded gaming PC for modern AAA games at 1440p and even some 4K gaming with the right settings. The buyer also notes that they plan to swap the included power supply, suggesting they aren't entirely confident in its quality.

Such deals don't come around often, but this also isn't the first time a display PC has been sold at a massive discount. Just a few months ago, another Costco shopper reportedly picked up what seems to be the exact same iBuyPower prebuilt gaming PC for $1,000, down from its original retail price of $1,899.99.

It is important to note that such discounts are largely dependent on individual stores and their inventory. We highly suggest keeping an eye on display units and limited-period discounts, especially at big-box retailers. If you're already making a trip for groceries, it might be worth taking a quick detour through the electronics section.

We've seen a few battery-powered PCs around here — after all, what are laptops but small computers running on Lithium-ion cells? When it comes to fueling actual desktop systems, though, the story is always one of compromise, however, this field of cutting-edge shenanigans has hit a new milestone thanks to creator Uwoslab. He just built an interconnected power bank out of 192 AA cells, enough to run a modern AM4 system without jeopardizing its performance.

The build is rather straightforward and actually started with 400 AA batteries as the creator had bought four separate packs containing 100 cells each. His plan was to wire up 8 cells in parallel, then connect those little banks in series until he had 50 of them. Simple math tells us eight multiplied by fifty is 400, but ultimately, he only ended up wiring 192 batteries together, split across 3 large wooden boxes.

The boxes were used as anchor points to connect the batteries together and provide structural rigidity. They were laser-cut to fit the cells perfectly and were made out of wood. The creator put clips and contact pads at either ends of the apparatus to serve as the negative and positive terminals, respectively, with four cells going into each slot. He then duct-taped the whole thing together to make it even more secure.

Each box held 64 batteries and Uwoslab built three of them, so that's how we get to the 192-count mentioned earlier. This same creator has actually tried to power a PC off of 9V zinc-carbon batteries before, but that experiment failed for the most part since the PC wouldn't stay on for more than a few seconds. His prior experience informed him to switch to Alkaline batteries instead that carry a higher voltage — 1.5V, to be exact.

Since PCs work on 12V, wiring together eight 1.5V cells gets you exactly 12V needed for stable operation, hopefully. Uwoslab was also using "high-drain" Pookell AA Alkaline batteries that trade capacity for higher voltage ratings. If you were to combine 400 of these bad boys in a perfect hypothetical, you'd generate about 160 watts of power for ten straight hours.

Unfortunately, AA batteries are not the most efficient and they drop in voltage over time as they're drained, which makes powering something as (relatively) sensitive as a modern x86 computer a lot more difficult. But it can still be done. The biggest mistake people make at this stage (as if this is a common occurrence) traditional wall-plug power supply attached to a 12V-to-220V inverter. Instead, he ran his parallel battery grid directly into a 12V DC-to-ATX adapter board plugged straight into the motherboard.

We don't know much about the PC itself apart from the fact that it's an AM4 system without a dedicated GPU, so it's a G-series chip. There's no storage device either; we're booting straight from a flash drive. And what are we booting into? Hanna Montana Linux. Yes, you're reading that correctly. The popular Linux distro from 2009 based on Disney's teen popstar was recently revived and given a modern makeover.

Not only does the battery-powered PC easily boot into Hanna Montana Linux on first try, but it even passed the built-in Linux CPU stress test (stress-ng) with flying colors. The CPU was pegged at 98% usage and dropped down to a stable 11.95V during the testing, while the battery bank was reading out at 13V initially. The experiment was a raging success, perhaps better than any Alkaline-powered PC that came before it.

Fabien Sanglard, who currently works as a Software Engineer at Google, has meticulously detailed every computer he can find in the original Jurassic Park movie, finally letting interested fans and viewers know what computers they need to get if they want to recreate the park.

The complete list and corresponding details are available on Sanglard’s website, which shows a total of six unique working computers, a PDA, two large CRT monitors, and a classic mechanical keyboard. He also covered the software that received screen time, including the meteorology software used in the movie to show the hurricane about to batter the island, which was also used in actual newsrooms at the time.

Most of the equipment listed can actually be found in the Jurassic Park Control Room, and even though most were only found in this particular set, they were all real, and most actually worked.

Sanglard also quoted the film’s special effects coordinator, Cory Faucher, from the book The Making of Jurassic Park. According to Faucher, “Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers. All told, $875,000 worth of computer hardware loaned by Silicon Graphics, $350,000 worth from Apple and some $500,000 in additional hardware and software went into equipping both the set and off-stage control room.”

This meant that all the gear the crew and cast were working with cost $1,725,000 back in 1992 — that’s worth more than $4 million in today’s money. The only non-working unit in the set was the Thinking Machines CM-5, which one commenter said was only the front panels of the supercomputer with red LED lights. Most of the software that we see on screen was actually working, except for the scene where Nedry was supposedly talking to his getaway driver while looking at him from a security feed on his Macintosh. Eagle-eyed viewers have long noticed that this wasn’t an actual video feed but a prerecorded video playing in QuickTime; you can even see the mouse cursor hiding the pause button.

It’s nice to see all these high-end computers that actually work the way they were meant to, unlike the nonsense that we see in many Hollywood films and TV shows that have a person (or two) typing gibberish to counter a “hacker” and then stopping the attack by just unplugging the terminal from the power source. So, if you want to see all these vintage machines in action, go ahead and watch Jurassic Park again this weekend. You can also check out this 3D-printed retro PC that looks like it's from the '80s and '90s or this M4-powered iMac G3 if you want to see more classic PCs (but running on modern hardware, this time).

Sotheby’s is preparing a blockbuster History of Science & Technology sale packed with amazing artifacts and collectors’ items. While there are many items that could justify being singled out, the famous auction house has chosen to spotlight a working sample of the Apple-1 computer serial number 01-0033 (1976) on its YouTube channel. Remember this first 50 hand-built-by-Wozniak batch has a place in history as the first commercial Apple computers ever sold.

In the video above you can see Harry Sadler, the original and current owner of the Apple-1 computer up for auction, preparing, booting and demonstrating this ancient ‘pre-built.’ Sadler underlines that his rare example was bought from the Byte Shop in 1976. While he ended up working in IT, Sadler said that it was mainly a hobbyist machine, for experimenting, tinkering with BASIC, and so on.

Interesting, Sadler took his Apple-1 back to the Byte Shop after a couple of weeks to get a minor repair done. There he met Steve Jobs and inquired about vacancies at Apple Computer. Nothing came of that because of admitted inexperience, but in 2010 Steve Jobs visited and bought the Siri Inc. startup, where Sadler was the 10^th employee. So, Sadler did actually end up working for Apple.

The estimate for this machine is $300,000 - $500,000. It comes with original accessories like a cassette deck and keyboard, vintage monitor. There’s also an original Apple-1 Operation Manual, In-house copy of Apple Basic Manual, Apple-1 Cassette Interface Manual, Microchess manual, and various software on cassettes

I think this is rather high, as one of the rare wooden case models known as the ‘Moore Apple-1’ only achieved $475,000 (w/BP) for its client last year.

Other notable computers in the sale

This Sotheby’s sale has quite a few other notable computers among the tech artifacts listed. For example, there’s the Steve Jobs stage-used NeXT Computer from the ‘NeXT Introduction’ in 1988, and a similar model for European demos. Then there’s a Mark-8 minicomputer from 1974, a MITS Altair 8800 computer from 1974, as well as some complete sealed vintage Mac systems from early on in Apple’s history.

On the more scientific side of things, there’s lots of interesting artifacts associated with, owned, or used by iconic individuals like Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Richard Feynman, and even Albert Einstein.

The History of Science & Technology takes place on July 15, starting at 14:00 EDT live in Sotheby’s saleroom at 945 Madison Avenue in New York.

Late last week, we reported on a brand-new Steam Machine getting bricked during an update, and refusing to budge from a state freshly dubbed the ‘Red Line of Death’ (RLOD). The issue stirred fear in tech enthusiasts' hearts, still scarred by the notorious Red Ring of Death (RROD) from the Xbox 360 era. But we have some good news today, as Valve’s official account on Reddit has responded to provide step-by-step instructions to get any affected Steam Machine up and running again by clearing the CMOS.

Thankfully, the pronouncement of death was definitely premature in this unresponsive Steam Machine case, and easily fixed. It wasn’t dead, it was resting, or probably pining for the fjords. It just needed to have its CMOS setting thoroughly cleared, that's all.

SteamHWFeedback directly answered the distress call of OP me_hill on Reddit. A five-step recipe to recover Steam Machines with RLOD was provided to the beleaguered gamer. However, me_hill’s own flailing machine-reset procedure had already done the trick – inspired by numerous user comments on the thread.

It is good to have an official solution to the initially scary RLOD, though. For the sake of exactitude, we have pasted Valve’s official RLOD fixing steps below, verbatim.

If you're encountering this issue, please try the following:

• Unplug the Machine, then press the power button a few times. This ensures any stored energy in the PSU gets discharged. You may see the power indicator LED blip a moment.
• Plug the Machine back in. Note if your power LED glows (breathing pattern) white or not. If yes, please submit a Steam Support ticket and tag me, or send me a chat request with the ID.
• Hold the power button down for ~6s. You should see the power indicator LED (dot) flash momentarily. Release the power button when you do.
• The power indicator LED will start to cycle some color codes. These are designed to allow you to select various options for recovery/troubleshooting purposes. When the LED turns green, short-press the power button. This should perform a full "CMOS reset."
• On the next boot, you should see the RGB bar as blue - it may take a bit longer to boot due to a memory re-training.

There’d only been two public pleas by Steam Machine users about RLOD so far, as far as we can see. Perhaps several more users resolved these issues themselves, without any social media interaction, so it is difficult to know the scale of similar experiences. Nevertheless, we are relieved to learn that these symptoms are easily fixed and users can get back up and running on their coveted new gaming hardware pretty quickly – with the benefit of an officially sanctioned cure direct from Valve.

Taiwanese authorities have been stepping up their investigation into the alleged AI GPU smuggling by some Supermicro employees, and it was recently reported that the police “raided” the company’s Taipei office. However, Digitimes reports that the firm is pushing back against this characterization, with Supermicro insisting that it’s cooperating with the investigation. Instead, it voluntarily gave investigators access to the workstations and electronic devices of the employees suspected of violating U.S. export controls while also placing them on administrative leave.

“Supermicro’s offices in Taiwan were not raided by any government authorities,” Supermicro Chief Revenue Officer Matt Thauberger told customers and partners in a written statement. He also confirmed with the Taiwanese government that the company was not the target of any investigation and that it has been cooperating since May of this year. "We have zero tolerance for anyone who violates the law or our internal policies," he also wrote in the letter.

Supermicro insists that it is cooperating with officials in the investigation and even gave them access, and as such the police intervention wasn't technically a “raid.” It remains unclear, though, how long the company knew about the pending police action before the authorities arrived on the premises.

This investigation is part of Taiwan’s push to investigate the alleged smuggling of Nvidia AI chips into China through its territory. The island does not have any laws that echo the U.S.’s export controls, so it’s using a loose interpretation of other regulations. This is similar to what Singapore is doing, which recently seized a $42 million mansion and $772k stashed in a bank account that are owned by alleged AI GPU smugglers. But because it also does not have export control laws like Taiwan, the accused are instead charged with fraud and money laundering.

Aside from the case brought against Supermicro employees in Taiwan, three other individuals linked to the company, including its co-founder, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, have been arrested in the U.S. on charges of conspiring to violate the Export Controls Reform Act. They allegedly used a hairdryer to soften the glue on thousands of serial numbers on the banned servers and moved them to dummy units to make them harder to track. They were then reportedly shipped via a Thailand-based government-related entity before landing in Chinese tech giant Alibaba’s warehouses.

Although Supermicro isn’t directly accused in these two cases, the fact that many of its employees are being investigated and charged is probably raising concern among its partners and customers. It has even gotten to the point that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has urged it to fix its export compliance controls. This is likely the reason why the company has taken moves to clarify the situation, which has already caused its stock price to slide by 8% in U.S. trading.

When the Steam Machine was first unveiled, aesthetic customization was one of its biggest talking points beyond the hardware itself. At the time, Dbrand showed off a case modeled after the iconic Weighted Companion Cube from Portal 2 and later sold it for $99 — all without ever asking Valve permission for the use of its IP. Therefore, as expected, the case is now gone, and every order will be subsequently refunded.

RIP Companion Cube from r/dbrand

This is pretty characteristic of Dbrand, a company that prides itself on its edgy corporate branding where it often doesn't care about playing by the rules. That's fine as long as the rule-breaking is limited to cursing out your customers on social media, but it doesn't work when you violate copyright law. If anything, Valve was generous with allowing Dbrand to get away with selling the case for this long without repercussions.

That's precisely the takeaway from the company's official statement (embedded above) where it calls Valve "direct, fair, and respectful throughout." Valve's legal team reached out to Dbrand and asked it to shut down the entire operation; halt sales immediately and take down the sales page and all promotional content. Dbrand complied and even extended a hand for an official collaboration, but Valve turned down the offer.

The popular skin manufacturer has previously found itself in similar hot waters with Sony and Nintendo. You may remember the famous "Darkplates" saga where the company similarly took advantage of an open customization feature and started selling faceplates for the newly-launched PS5. On the other hand, it also sold unofficial Zelda skins for the Switch OLED, literally called "Clone of the Kingdom."

It's one thing to produce accessories with original designs, but it's a completely different thing to use said company's IP as the design, regardless of the engineering efforts behind it. That's why the Darkplates eventually came back, but the Zelda skin can't. And it's also why a Portal 2-themed case can't realistically exist without asking the company who owns Portal. Valve had to draw a line somewhere to protect its IP and avoid creating precedence for future litigation.

Anyhow, this machoistic corporate strategy has worked wonders for Dbrand's online following, but even the fans called out this move as comically stupid. Beyond the copyright violation, the chance of an official partnership is now gone, too. Dbrand said the Companion Cube case became its second-fastest selling product ever, implying things would've certainly worked out had Dbrand approached Valve ahead of time.

Meta PCs has announced preorders for Steamroller, the first prebuilt gaming PC running on SteamOS. The system features standard PC components that are broadly similar to those offered by Valve in the base variant of the Steam Machine. Priced at $1,299, the Steamroller is available for preorder now, with shipping set to begin on July 3, 2026. Buyers can also opt for an extended warranty, with two-year and three-year plans available for $180 and $240, respectively.

The Steamroller uses the Jonsbo D32, a well-ventilated m-ATX chassis with an AMD Ryzen 9600X, which is a 6-core, 12-thread CPU capable of boosting up to 5.4 GHz. Meta PCs mentions that the B650M/B650M Wi-Fi m-ATX motherboard will vary in brand and styling, meaning not all Steamroller PCs are alike, though they shouldn’t vary in terms of performance. For graphics, the system comes with AMD’s last-gen Radeon RX 7600 based on the RDNA 3 architecture with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. The system also includes 16GB of DDR5 RAM at 5600 MT/s, a 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD, a 240mm AIO liquid cooler, and a 650W Gold power supply unit.

In terms of hardware, the Steamroller seems competitive with Valve's new Steam Machine. Since it includes standard PC components, one also gains the ability to upgrade almost any component in the future, unlike the Steam Machine, which only allows you to swap the RAM and storage. That said, the Steam Machine is more compact, measuring at 152 × 162 × 156 mm (6.0 × 6.4 × 6.1 inches), justifying its console/living room PC purpose.

Another aspect to consider is practicality. The Steam Machine supports HDMI CEC, a protocol that allows it to communicate and control compatible devices such as your TV and soundbar. This allows you to power on the Steam Machine and your TV simultaneously, and even switch to the correct input, without leaving your couch or reaching for a remote. Unfortunately, HDMI CEC is not supported on most PCs, including the Steamroller. The Steam Machine also features standby and quick resume functionality, which allows you to put the system to sleep and jump back into your game almost instantly.

The Steamroller is essentially aimed at potential customers who want a gaming PC running on SteamOS with the flexibility of standard PC hardware. While it may lack some of the living room-focused features available on the Steam Machine, it makes up for them by offering a system that is easier to upgrade and repair, while also offering a way to experience SteamOS without assembling an entire system.

With widespread disappointment regarding the availability and pricing of Valve’s Steam Machine, influencers and creators have been mixing up ‘alternatives’ of various shapes and sizes. However, we think the Terk Box v1.1 looks like the closest alternative yet in design and spirit. The work, as spotted by Hackaday, appears to be a collaboration between Jacob Terkelsen, an ex-Tom's Hardware contributor currently working for AMD, and a 3D printing and SFF PCs enthusiast who goes by the handle of 3DCatt.

If you are a 3D printer owner, you can grab the source files for the Terk Box v1.1 direct from Printables.com. There you will find a parts list, which details the various screws, riser cables, and numerous other parts you will need. The .STL source files are all there, too, of course, under a Creative Commons license.

Specific component brands don’t seem to be suggested by the makers, which is probably due to the set of standards embraced by the various PC parts makers. However, we do note in the user comments some people may have had a hard time fitting their GPU. 3DCatt says the max length that will fit is “about 180mm long.” That isn’t all, though, as the recommended PCIe riser cable wasn’t long enough for some, depending on the GPU model. AMD’s Terkelsen chipped in that the build was suitable for his RTX 5060 LP graphics card, but he requested more room for a front 140mm case fan, among a few other tweaks.

The current revision of the Terk Box measures 167 x 168 x 225mm. That may be close enough to the official machine (152 x 162 x 156mm) to justify the extra effort of doing this instead of finding an off-the-peg compact Mini ITX case. Some of the compromises with the Terk Box v1.1 appear to be the fussiness with GPU choice we mentioned above, and the less-than-ideal positioning of the CPU socket in relation to the PSU. However, both 3DCatt and Terkelsen have hinted at refinements on the way to v1.2.

Since they have already strayed from the cubic confines of Valve’s actual Steam Machine, I feel they shouldn’t feel too shackled to the design they currently have. I’ll be watching further developments with interest.

In summary, this is a design much closer in stature and spirit to the original Valve effort, but it is definitely a work in progress. With the various component constraints, the DIY price for this won’t be the most compelling, either. Readers who are 3D printing and PC DIY aficionados, and we must have a few of those, might be able to contribute to the project with suggestions, tweaks, and remixes.

Leading Japanese capsule toy maker Tarlin International has announced an official collaboration with “the four major manufacturers” of the PC components industry. The teased result means that gachapon fans will be able to get their hands on tiny models of ASRock, Gigabyte, MSI, and Intel parts (plus fans, PSUs, and cases), accurate enough “that you can assemble and play with.” In 2026, PC building has become so expensive that perhaps Tarlin’s latest wares will fill an emotional vacuum in the market.

In the image above, you can see Tarlin has inked some kind of official licensing deal with ASRock, Gigabyte, MSI, and Intel. There’s already been four series of networking equipment gachapon launched by Tarlin, for some context.

As far as we can see from the social media posting, the new Tarlin gachapon series includes three branded miniature motherboards: the ASRock Z890 Steel Legend WiFi, the Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Plus, and the MSI MEG Z890 Ace. Premium stuff. Intel’s Core Ultra 7 270K Plus seems to be the only CPU choice. There are also case fans, a PSU, and a tower case for your minuscule components PC build.

Tarlin’s eccentric gachapon pedigree

Compared with gachapon rivals like Bandai and Takara Tomy, Tarlin has carved a niche, eccentric furrow in the industry. It has a reputation for turning everyday, mundane, or highly technical objects into accurate scale miniatures.

Examples of other incredibly niche Tarlin-produced capsules include its Temporary Toilet Series, a realistic Articulated Crayfish, and its series of Cisco rackmount network gear toys. In this context, it's “serious spec” PC component capsule toys, which are made to such exacting precision that they can be assembled to make tiny tower PCs, aren’t so unusual.

In 2024, we spotted a Japanese capsule toy machine filled with Intel CPUs. One gacha chancer acquired an Intel Core i7-8700 CPU after inserting 500 Yen (around $3.25) and twisting the customary knob.

Servers running x86 processors from AMD and Intel used to rule the market, both unit and money-wise, less than a decade ago, but fast forward to today, Arm-based machines command well over 45% of the server market, according to data released by IDC. While technically x86 machines still control 52% of the market in terms of revenue, the real winner is a different category altogether: GPU- and ASIC/FPGA-accelerated systems, which generated over 70% of the global server revenue in the first quarter of 2026.

Server market reaches $122.6 billion in a single quarter, Dell leads the game

IDC estimates that the global server market generated a record $122.6 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2026, up 30.4% year-over-year, as spending on AI infrastructure remained particularly strong.

Sales of ODM Direct servers — custom machines ordered by hyperscalers that run merchant or custom silicon — accounted for 50.2% of the revenue (down from 64.1% in Q1 2025) and reached $61.53 billion, up modest 2.1% year-over-year*. By contrast, sales of standard servers from well-known brands grew at a much higher pace, which suggests that branded vendors such as Dell, HPE, Supermicro, and others won a larger portion of AI infrastructure deployments than they did a year earlier. That was probably made possible by accelerating enterprise AI deployment and sovereign AI projects, which tend to buy machines from branded vendors, as well as hyperscalers increasingly turning to well-known suppliers for AI hardware.

When it comes to vendor rankings, Dell remained the largest server supplier by revenue with a 16.5% share of the market after its revenue surged 244.1% year-over-year to $20.3 billion, which was driven by exceptionally strong AI server demand. Supermicro remained in second place with $9.3 billion in revenue and a growth of 128.9%.

Lenovo ranked third with $5.6 billion and 36.5% growth, while IEIT Systems (which is a part of the sanctioned Inspur Group) dropped to fourth after revenue declined 7.0% to $4.0 billion. HPE was No.5 with $3.7 billion in revenue, up 17.2%. Other vendors — from Asus to Atos and from ASRock Rack to Gigabyte — commanded 14.8% of the market with $18.11 billion in revenue, up from 13% and $12.21 billion in the same quarter a year ago.

Arm-based machines rapidly gain revenue share

As AI servers dominated the market in Q1 2026, systems with various types of accelerators accounted for over 70% of the revenue. However, the rise of Arm-powered machines is the elephant in the room that is hard to miss, as it represents a tectonic shift in the whole market, both to the Arm instruction set architecture (ISA) in general and custom-built Arm CPUs designed by hyperscalers.

Non-x86 platforms generated $58.7 billion in revenue, a 107.6% increase year-over-year, which lifted their share of the market to 47.9%. Most of the non-x86 systems are Arm-based AI machines (think Nvidia's NVL72) as well as systems running custom CPUs, AWS, Google, and Microsoft, just to name a few. Still, also keep in mind IBM Z mainframes and IBM Power Systems (including storage) that use CPUs featuring proprietary non-x86 and non-Arm ISAs and which still generate $1 billion or more in revenue. IDC claims that Arm-based machines accounted for more than 95% of non-x86 revenue, so it is safe to say that Arm-based machines commanded over 45% of server revenues in Q1 2026.

One of the reasons why Arm-based machines now command a huge chunk of the server market is because they are used inside such systems as Nvidia's NVL72 'Blackwell' that sell for up to $6.5 million per unit. Each NVL72 rack-scale solution carries 36 compute trays with two Blackwell GPUs and one Grace CPU per unit, so while unit-wise each we are only talking about 36 processors, dollar-wise one NVL72 machine is as expensive as 928 entry-level 1P server (for $7,000) for cloud or edge applications or 433 higher-end 2P servers (for $15,000) for cloud or virtualization applications.

Given the fact that Nvidia will continue bundling its own Arm-based Vera CPUs with NVL72 'Vera Rubin' machines that will be more expensive than their Blackwell ancestors, we will not be surprised that Arm-based machines will account for well over 50% of the server market revenue in the second half of this year or in 2027. Also, keep in mind that Nvidia plans to sell server racks featuring only Vera CPUs for agentic AI applications, which will further drive sales of Arm-based machines.

Accelerated servers: The real winner

Since AI servers dominate server sales, it is not surprising that sales of accelerated servers are increasing. Systems equipped with GPUs produced $68.9 billion in revenue during the quarter (up 24.8% compared to the same period a year earlier) and accounted for 56.2% of all server sales. Servers based on other accelerator types, including custom ASICs and FPGAs, expanded to $17.7 billion, up 122.1% YoY. As a result, accelerated servers earned $86.6 billion in Q1 2026, which is around 70.6% of all server revenue.

X86 servers remain unit volume champions, but suffer from shortages

In contrast, x86 server revenue declined 2.9% to $63.9 billion, though IDC attributes this weakness to supply limitations rather than deteriorating demand. The market research firm claims that the industry's primary constraint is no longer customer appetite for general-purpose servers, but rather the availability of key components, including CPUs, DRAM, NAND memory, and hard drives.

Without any doubt, x86 servers remain working horses for the industry. In fact, many of them use accelerators, including ASICs, FPGAs, and GPUs, as they are used for a wide range of workloads, including AI, supercomputing, simulations, encryption, video transcoding, and many more.

AMD and Intel shipped nearly 20 million EPYC and Xeon SP processors for data center systems in 2025, according to Dean McCarron, the head and principal analyst at Mercury Research. He believes Nvidia is on track to ship four million Grace and Vera CPUs this year, which is considerably lower compared to shipments of AMD and Intel. It is hard to estimate how many custom Arm-based CPUs are deployed by AWS, Alibaba, Google, and Microsoft, but it is safe to say that we are talking millions of CPUs here; otherwise, the companies would not be able to justify development and production of custom silicon.

From a volume perspective, x86 servers remain the most popular machines, and it will probably take some time before ARM can challenge x86 in mainstream general-purpose servers. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that Arm-based data center CPUs are catching up with x86 parts in terms of volumes.

Summary

The global server market hit a record $122.6 billion in the first quarter of 2026 as AI infrastructure spending continued. Accelerated systems powered by GPUs, custom ASICs, and FPGAs generated more than 70% of server revenue, while Arm-based platforms — including Nvidia's Grace Blackwell as well as custom CPUs from Arm, Google, and Microsoft — captured nearly half of the market.

Although x86 servers based on AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors remain dominant in shipment volumes, supply shortages of CPUs, memory, and storage components constrained revenue growth, which further enabled Arm-powered AI-optimized systems to gain share. But while at 20 million data center processors per year, x86 volumes are untouchable for Arm today, things may change in the coming years. Nvidia is on track to ship 4 million CPUs in 2026, and other developers of custom Arm-based CPUs are certainly not standing still.

*There is one significant difference with IDC's 'ODM Direct' classification. IDC classifies revenue according to which company invoices the customer, not necessarily who manufactures the hardware. As a result, while many AI servers are built by ODMs like Compal, Foxconn, or Quanta, they are sold under brands like Dell or HPE. As a result, while the latter get more business from enterprises or sovereign AI deployments, this does not mean that big ODMs are losing business; they are actually gaining it, as the appetites of hyperscalers like AWS, Google, Meta, or Microsoft are not going anywhere, just demand from new entrants emerges.

Building a PC is a great experience. We sit there with a spreadsheet and multiple browser tabs, poring over the best CPUs, the best GPUs, PC cases, motherboards, RAM deals, and many more components.

The package arrives, and we are excitedly tearing into the boxes, putting the parts on the table, and we are ready to build! We reach into the toolkit and dig out the rusty old screwdriver we used to open a paint can back in 2014. We then spill standoffs and screws over the floor, ready for an unsuspecting foot at 2am!

But wait, it doesn't have to be like this! We've all done this, made the mistakes, and now we share my knowledge and that of the Tom's Hardware staff so you don't have to.

So tool up, and let battle commence!

• Check out all the PC tool deals on Amazon

Precision Kits

All the gear, and lots of ideas?

You need to start somewhere, and these kits have pretty much every tool that you could need to maintain a PC, all in a handy case. In my office/workshop, I have a general set of screwdrivers for general tasks, and a set of Hoto screwdrivers and bits for servicing my PC and any other parts I review.

Whether you call them Hex or Allen wrenches, this part of our toolbox is often overlooked. Why? Because we get one in every set of flat-pack, DIY furniture that's why! You can get cheap sets of Hex wrenches, but they are ultimately made from a material softer than Play-Doh, or have the power to strip a head. You need a good set of Hex wrenches and this set from Wera is awesome.

German made precision, strength, and a ball head to enable access to awkward screws. Grab this set now, and thank yourself later!

Everyone should own these great electric screwdrivers!

At least five Tom's Hardware editors own a Hoto screwdriver. I am one of them. It should be difficult to extol an electric screwdriver. After all, it is really just a motor that spins and screws / unscrews. But Hoto's new Pixel Drive is easy to glorify!

The main screwdriver chassis is chunky and features a rubberized finish to prevent it from slipping from your hands. The twist power ring offers three levels of torque, and the simple push-button forward/reverse is a joy to use. Throw in a bonus LED light ring, and you are ready to build and maintain PCs and have plenty of power to put up those shelves in the living room. All of the details are displayed on the LED display, so you know how much power you are putting down, and how much the screwdriver has left!

Screw Kits

Don't screw up your next PC build!

Let's be honest. We've all scrabbled around for a spare stand-off or screw to secure a motherboard to a chassis. We've cannibalized other components to ensure that our main rig has everything it needs to keep the motherboard in place and the GPU firmly attached to the case. But what if we just spent less than $10 for 400 screws?

That's right, for less than $10, we can have 400 screws, stand-offs, and insulation rings to secure every part of our PC.

In the kit, there are:

• Hard drive screws
• Motherboard screws
• Chassis fan screws
• SSD screws
• Insulation gaskets
• High-strength chassis screws (think GPUs)
• M2 screws
• Flat Phillips screws
• M3 Stand-offs
• Chassis hand twist screws

I bought myself a similar pack years ago since I deal with motherboards and system components on the daily, and it has proven its worth on more than a few occasions.

For less than $10, just throw it into your basket without thinking!

Flashlights

Save money on this 'illuminating' flashlight deal

A good flashlight is one of the most rewarding tools that we can own. It lights up the dark, helps us see obstacles and what we are working on, and could be used to signal planes, should you be trapped on the island from Lost.

Air dusters and cleaners

Clean the filth from your PC!

Air blowers/dusters are a popular choice for quickly blowing out fans and filters to remove any collected dust and fluff. They can also blow out the crumbs that linger under your keyboard. Air blowers are a great alternative to single-use compressed air cans.

The Wolfbox MegaFlow 100 (MF100) may sound like a 1990s Euro Rock tribute act, but it has 150,000 RPM of power to blow dust out of your PC at 45 meters per second!

This convenient blower is battery-powered and supports USB Type-C charging. The MF100 fully charges in 2.5 hours and provides up to 100 minutes of runtime on the first setting. The MF100 is small and compact, weighing only 0.66lb, so it can be easily stored when not in use. The MF100 is also supported by a 24-month guarantee and 24/7 customer service.

Not everyone wants to buy an $80 air duster. There are plenty that cost less that still move a lot of air and come with several attachments that are plenty useful for cleaning out your PC.

I clean out my desktop PC once or twice a year and my blower did a great job, but there were times when the amassed collection of dead skin cells, dog and cat hair, and other fluff was too much for my much weaker air duster. So I bought some cans of compressed air, and not the dollar store stuff either! I don't use them often, but they are handy when you need a little more power in a precise point.

Sometimes compressed air or turbo-force USB-powered jet fans aren't enough, and so you must get your hands dirty. Cleaning any electronic components should be done with care. Components aren't as static sensitive as their predecessors but we should take care not to trash our kit.

These nylon anti-static brushes come in a range of sizes and shapes to clean dust from components and inside drive bays, and to keep caked-on dust from your fan blades. It also includes a keycap puller and tweezers to deep clean the harrowing scene that lurks under your keyboard.

The final cleaning product that you need for building and maintaining PCs is Isopropyl Alcohol, IPA. Yes, 99% is overkill; heck, it's medical grade for first aid use, but if you really want to eke it out, get some distilled water and water down your mix to 70%. I don’t because it works well as it is.

My top tip, though, is not to spray it when the components are hot. There is very little risk of fire, but it will evaporate rather quickly. That said, in the electronics hobbyist world, rapidly evaporating IPA is used to identify super-hot chips, typically those that have shorted.

Thermal pastes

Thermal paste etiquette — pea-sized blob, an X, or a smooth layer like peanut butter?

Let's all agree that, however you apply thermal paste, that is the right way, ok? Thermal paste / TIM or thermal pads bridge the hot side of a component to a heatsink or heatpipe, which wicks away heat, keeping the component cool.

Thermal material is essential to keep your system cool, and I asked the team what they use. Our Editor-in-Chief, Paul Alcorn, said that MX-6 is his go-to thermal paste. So I looked around and found this handy kit that contains 4G of thermal paste and six handy wipes. The wipes are essentially isopropyl alcohol on a cloth, and they are used to prepare the surface for the new paste. They will wipe off the old paste, dust, dead skin (ewww) and leave the surface ready for pasting!

If you spot something better, or want to tell me I am wrong, hit the comments!

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Mini PC specialist GMKtec recently launched the EVO-X3, heralding it as a “next-gen AI workstation,” with early access registration beginning tomorrow (Monday, June 22). The firm also took to social media this weekend to show that the successor to the GMKtec EVO-X2, which we reviewed in February, had earned AMD CEO Lisa Su’s signature of approval. This is not entirely surprising, as so did the X2. So, let’s take a closer look at the new GMKtec EVO-X3.

Actually, the tech specs of the EVO-X3 aren’t very different from its predecessor. We can say with certainty that its design has been thoroughly revamped, though. Look at the difference between the generations. This is a good thing, as most of our reviewers ‘Cons’ regarding the EVO-X2 were drawn from its design and build. Specifically we grumbled about the cheap-feeling case, tricky internal access, and fan noise. A smart redesign would have addressed all these points, but we’d have to get some hands-on time with the new revision to be sure it delivers more than a cosmetic change.

The new GMKtec EVO-X3 is again built around the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 'Strix Halo' processor. Interestingly, a switch to the Ryzen AI Max+ 495 'Gorgon Halo' must have been deemed counterproductive. Many tech enthusiasts were underwhelmed by the AMD Ryzen AI 400 series refresh, too. We also know there are two launch configurations, both with 128GB of LPDDR5X-8000 RAM, but one having a 2TB SSD, the other 4TB. The machine is advertised as featuring two M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4x4 slots for up to 8TB of SSD storage.

As hinted above, the big change between generations appears to be in the build. GMKtec now boasts of the “silent triple fan thermal system” which makes the whole unit somewhat like a triple fan graphics card in a steel wrapper. GMKtec says that “The system is engineered to balance performance, efficiency, and thermal stability, making it suitable for continuous professional workloads across AI and creative scenarios.”

For ports, we note the EVO-X3 packs in an OCuLink connector, USB4 for data, power delivery and video out, and HDMI 2.1 video out. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 are also on board. There are also a few USB-A ports, an Ethernet jack, and a headset jack.

Prices up, a lot

The GMKtec EVO-X2 launched at $1,499 as tested with 64GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Today, EVO-X2 machines with this configuration are currently being sold for $1,999 on Amazon.com. However, the GMKtec EVO-X3 entry price is far steeper, admittedly with more RAM and storage. It is advertising the 128GB RAM and 2TB SSD version at $3,600, and the 128GB RAM plus 4TB storage version at $3,849. Both of those are said to be pre-launch discounted prices. Signing up for the early access registration can get you an additional $20 off those marked-down prices.

GMKtec told us that the pre-launch is live tomorrow, with purchased units being sent out from July 6.

Ever since buying out VMware in 2023, Broadcom has raised prices for existing customers. Although the play did result in massively increased revenue for VMware, it also triggered a slow but steady exodus away from the platform, as enterprises everywhere balk at the price tags and/or sue Broadcom.

UK supermarket chain Tesco is the latest entity to up and replace VMWare across its fleet of 40,000 servers, a move it expects to complete in 2027, Ars Technica reports.

This marks the largest publicly known migration off the platform in recent years, and arrives against the backdrop of the $134-million (£100m) lawsuit that Tesco filed last year against Broadcom. In the filing, Tesco claims that Broadcom committed a breach of contract by not honoring the perpetual licenses it bought in 2021, and that Broadcom's actions are at odds with multiple competition laws. Tesco also named VMware itself and Computacenter, the reseller, in the suit.

Tesco's story is a familiar one since the Broadcom acquisition. Much like other customers, the supermarket chain had reportedly bought perpetual licenses for vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, plus support services until 2026 with a four-year extension option. In 2023, Broadcom bought VMware and stopped perpetual licensing in lieu of subscriptions.

This resulted in highly elevated pricing figures for Tesco, apparently to the tune of a 175% price hike for VMware and a 350% upcharge for mainframe software. After the 2025 lawsuit, the situation predictably deteriorated further, and Broadcom stopped supporting Tesco's VMware suite, forcing the chain to find an unnamed third party for that job. CEO Hock Tan's shop goes as far as to refuse security updates to customers without subscriptions, too.

There's no word on which software Tesco's systems administrators have selected for the job, though the Ars Technica report says that the choice appears to be incompatible with both Veeam and Zerto, suggesting it's a lesser-known offering. Additionally, TechRadar notes that HP Enterprise just announced it's offering its customers a year's free licensing to Morpheus VM Essentials, along with a $1 license for Zerto migration software. The timing is interesting, as HP is looking to snag former VMWare customers.

Ever since the Broadcom acquisition, VMware has forced subscription bundling for support contracts, effectively doubled per-core pricing, specified a 72-core minimum for purchase (thereby nuking small business setups), added a three-year contract minimum, and enforced penalties for late renewals. Moving an entire server infrastructure off a hypervisor platform is significant. Even still, a few corporations have done so, and others are reportedly considering switching away.

The best gaming desktops don’t just chase raw speed – they deliver the right balance of power, style, and value. CyberPower’s Gaming Desktop GXi3800BSTV2 ($2,309.99 as tested) comes out swinging with a stylish new case, complete with analog lighting knob, a spotless interior, and plenty of RGB for a showroom look. Backed by an Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, it’s built to impress, and despite a few concessions, it’s hard not to admire how much CyberPower gets right for the money.

Design of the CyberPowerPC Gaming Desktop GXi3800BSTV2

The biggest draw for this particular CyberPower configuration is its MA-01 case. It offers analog RGB controls and hidden fans and radiators for a strikingly modern look. Though the fans aren’t truly hidden – they’re concealed behind plastic grates to give the impression that they’re not there – it adds a level of polish and cleanliness to the interior lines.

CyberPower did its best to avoid directly visible LEDs for a soft look and mostly succeeded; The LEDs in the CPU water block are an exception. It missed a minor opportunity to add more RGB lighting by using standard DIMMs rather than RGB-lit ones, but this tower arguably already runs over the line of too much RGB. Everything is visible through the artfully curved panel, which highlights the obvious about this case – it’s designed to be seen and shown off.

The three lighting dials are unlabeled. Starting from the top are controls for colors, brightness, and patterns; the latter includes breathing, strobing, and rainbow effects. (This seems to be the more basic version of the MA-01 case; on other versions, the dials are for Red, Green, and Blue for finer control.) Changing the color mix takes just seconds. You can also press in on any knob to achieve an all-white look. It’s easy to create a unique look without using software. (In fact, you can’t use software to control the lighting on this PC since the individual RGB elements are only recognized as a generic RGB strip in the Asus Armoury Crate app.)

Build quality is where this case, or at least this version, shows some budget elements. While it didn't creak or bend when I picked it up, the rolled steel panels feel thin. Additionally, the viewing panel, which CyberPowerPC says is tempered glass, feels plasticky and is not as clear as it could be. Last, the analog knobs feel cheap, and the bottom one tended to fall off in my testing. Size-wise, this case is decidedly in mid-tower territory at 9.5 x 17.7 x 20.9 inches.

CyberPowerPC Gaming Desktop Specifications

Ports and Upgradeability on the CyberPowerPC Gaming Desktop

CyberPower’s desktop offers respectable input and output, starting on the lower front panel with one USB-C and two USB-A ports and a 3.5 mm audio jack. This port placement should work well if this desktop is on top of a desk. The power button is on the adjacent side next to the case lighting control dials.

Around back, the Asus B860M Max Gaming AX motherboard offers USB-C (20 Gbps), four USB-A 3.2, four USB 2.0, DisplayPort, and three 3.5 mm audio jacks. At least one truly high-speed port like USB4 or Thunderbolt 4 would have been ideal. Also, Wi-Fi 6 from the built-in RealTek RTL8851BE wireless card is several years out of date.

Getting inside this CyberPower’s case isn’t straightforward. Both side panels look like they should pull off, but they are actually screwed in at the top. The top grate, which doesn’t have any obvious fingerholds, must be popped off to access the two Philips-head screws securing each panel. Removable dust filters line the right panel.

Motherboard expansion slots include one PCIe 5.0 x16, two PCIe 4.0 x16 supporting x4, and one PCIe 4.0 x16 supporting x1. Memory can be expanded with four DIMM slots. There are also three M.2 slots, one of which is PCIe 5.0. The other slots support PCIe 4.0, with one on the front and one on the back of the board. The latter is accessible by removing the tower’s right panel. You can also see the 3.5-inch drive cage in the lower chamber.

The 850-watt power supply isn’t modular, leading to a mass of tied-off cables, but it easily supplies enough juice for the components in this PC. CyberPower’s cable management is acceptable, with cables routed and bundled neatly enough for a mass-market PC.

Gaming and Graphics on the CyberPowerPC Gaming Desktop

The CyberPower we tested features a Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processor, Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics, and 32GB of DDR5-6400 RAM.

For some informal play, I launched Crysis Remastered. Playing at a 3840 x 2160 resolution with everything at “Can it run Crysis?” settings, I saw between 75 and 85 frames per second (FPS) outdoors, with slight dips in the jungle and wide-open landscapes with lots of shadows. Overall, the gameplay was exceptionally smooth.

We used two gaming desktops for comparison: the Acer Nitro 65 ($2,069.99 as tested) combines a Ryzen 9 9900X with an RTX 5070 while the iBuyPower Y40 Pro ($1,899.99 when we tested it, but very difficult to find now) pairs a Ryzen 9 7900X with an RTX 5070 Ti.

Starting in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at the Highest detail preset, the CyberPower and Acer tied the 1080p numbers at 209 FPS and were within one frame at 4K. Naturally, the RTX 5070 Ti-equipped iBuyPower dominated both, with 228 FPS at 1080p.

The story was similar in CyberPunk 2077 at Ray Tracing Ultra settings. The CyberPower achieved 71 FPS at 1080p but fell to 21 FPS at 4K, being within one FPS of the Acer in both instances. The iBuyPower surged ahead, with 87 FPS at 1080p, but even it couldn’t make a playable time of it at 4K, with just 29 FPS.

In Far Cry 6 at Ultra settings, the CyberPower led the 1080p scores with 141 FPS, well ahead of the Acer (132 FPS) and iBuyPower (125 FPS). Things evened out at 4K, with the CyberPower and Acer at 81 FPS and 82 FPS, respectively, and the iBuyPower about 25% faster, at 102 FPS.

Red Dead Redemption 2 at Medium settings was a disappointment for CyberPower, with its 126 FPS at 1080p noticeably trailing Acer (141 FPS) and especially iBuyPower (161 FPS). The gaps narrowed at 4K, though CyberPower was still last – it scored 51 FPS next to the Acer’s 54 FPS.

CyberPower redeemed itself in Black Myth: Wukong at Cinematic settings, its 55 FPS at 1080p overtaking the Acer (50 FPS) while being behind the iBuyPower (66 FPS). It tied the Acer with 25 FPS at 4K though it couldn’t catch the iBuyPower (32 FPS).

Overall, though CyberPower’s Core Ultra 7 270K Plus didn’t give its RTX 5070 enough of a boost to overcome the iBuyPower’s RTX 5070 Ti, it still produced impressive numbers, often leading the RTX 5070-equipped Acer by a decent amount.

Equipped with the RTX 5070, this CyberPower offers ample horsepower for gaming at 1080p/1440p and 4K, though fluid playability at 4K in the most demanding titles may require reducing the visual quality settings.

To stress test gaming desktops, we simulate half an hour of gaming by running 15 loops of the Metro: Exodus benchmark at RTX settings. The CyberPower desktop averaged 138 FPS with only a few tenths of an FPS variance between runs, indicating stable thermal performance. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus ran at an average temperature of 48 degrees Celsius while the P-cores ran 5.34 GHz at and the E-cores 3.77 GHz. The RTX 5070 ran at 61 C and had an average core clock of 2.74 GHz.

During testing, the desktop’s fans were noticeable but not intrusive; while gaming, I could hold a conversation with someone sitting next to me without the fan noise becoming a topic.

Productivity Performance on the CyberPowerPC Gaming Desktop

Equipped with a Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, the CyberPower proved formidable in our productivity testing.

While the rig's single-core score of 3,317 points in the Geekbench 6 benchmark was imperceptibly behind Acer's 3,348 points, it handily outclassed the iBuyPower’s older Ryzen 9 7900X and its 2,953 points. But it truly showed its strength in multi-core, with 22,485 points to Acer’s 18,282 and iBuyPower’s 17,226.

CyberPower slotted into the middle of our 25GB file transfer test, with 1,616.52 MBps to lead iBuyPower’s 1,501.6 MBps and trail Acer’s 1,719.57 MBps.

Last, this CyberPower dominated our 4K-to-1080p Handbrake test, completing the transcode in just 1 minute and 45 seconds. The iBuyPower (2:29) and Acer (2:51) were well off its pace.

Keyboard and Mouse with the CyberPowerPC Gaming Desktop

The GXi3800BSTV2 includes RGB-centric wired peripherals that might tide you over if you’re sticking to a budget. The CyberPower Nohi 02 keyboard is a basic desktop keyboard with a few notable extras. Though it’s described as a mechanical-like feel, its rubbery keypresses say otherwise. I nonetheless found it comfortable for extended typing and gaming. The layout is as expected and there's a handy volume scroller at top left.

The keyboard's RGB backlighting is bright and vibrant. No peripheral software is included, but you can switch between different lighting patterns using Fn and one of the number keys (1-9). Effects include a respectable assortment of wave, color shift, sweep, solid color, and several breathing variations. Lighting can be toggled with the key next to right Alt, effect speed with Fn + plus or minus, and brightness with Fn + Page Up/Down.

The CyberPower Elite M2 wired mouse is also basic. It’s only for right-handers, featuring two buttons on the left side. There are five sensitivity settings – the DPI numbers aren’t published – which you toggle pressing the button behind the scroll wheel. Average in size, the mouse fits my medium hands well and offers tactile, engaging clicks. The RGB effects illuminate the palm reset logo and the semicircle around the palm rest. Various color cycling patterns are available – simply hold down the DPI button to switch between them.

Software and Warranty on the CyberPowerPC Gaming Desktop

CyberPower’s software loadout is minimal. Asus Armoury Crate provides hardware monitoring and software overclocking but little else – the RGB devices in this desktop are only recognized as an addressable strip, and can’t be controlled there. (That’s what the knobs on the tower are for.) Otherwise, besides the default Windows 11 apps, there’s no extra software.

This CyberPower from Best Buy carries a one-year parts and labor warranty while systems purchased from CyberPower include two years of parts and three years of labor.

CyberPowerPC Gaming Desktop Configurations

Our CyberPower review unit features a Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processor with 360 mm liquid cooling, an Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics card, 32GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, and Windows 11 Home for $2,309.99 from Best Buy.

Best Buy didn’t have any other CyberPower desktops with the MA-01 case, though CyberPower offered many configurations starting at $1,699, which gets you a Ryzen 7 9700X and an RTX 5060 Ti. The top preconfigured model ran $3,815 with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D, an RTX 5080, 32GB of RAM, and a 4TB SSD. CyberPower also offers built-to-order models starting at $1,245.

Competing desktops with an RTX 5070 bracketed our CyberPower review unit’s price. At Best Buy, an Asus ROG G700 was $2,409.99 with a Core Ultra 7 265KF while an HP Omen 35L was $1,999, though it dropped to a Ryzen 7 8700F and a 1TB SSD.

To compare CyberPower’s prices to what it would cost to build a similar PC yourself, I mock-configured several systems using the AI PC builder on Newegg, landing within $100 in most instances. That's a pretty nominal premium to have the system built and ready to go.

Bottom Line

CyberPower’s GXi3800BSTV2 earns its place among the better prebuilt gaming desktops. The company's MA-01 case gives it a distinctive look, and the analog lighting controls mean you don't need software to dial in a unique theme. Equipped with a Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, 360 mm liquid cooling, and an RTX 5070, it produces strong gaming performance without getting too loud. You even get decent peripherals.

Some concessions were made to hit its price: the case relies on plastic instead of tempered glass, wireless is limited to Wi-Fi 6, and there are no Thunderbolt 4/USB4 ports. Even so, it still makes for a compelling value, even next to DIY builds. For gamers who want a flashy tower with the performance to match – and the convenience of a full-system warranty — the GXi3800BSTV2 is an easy system to recommend.

Correction, July 1, 2026: CyberPowerPC tells Tom's Hardware that the viewing panel on the MA-01 is tempered glass, not plastic. We have addressed this, but still feel that the window did not seem substantial.

Data center water use is one of the hot topics right now in the U.S. and is one of the primary reasons why such projects are being blocked across the nation. However, Amazon claimed that it’s improving its water efficiency and that it uses the least amount of water on a per kWh basis among the AI tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and Meta. Aside from that, it also said that despite using 2.5 billion gallons of water across the world in its data centers, it said that that amount is still a fraction of what other industries in the U.S. are using annually.

Amazon pointed at EPA data from 2017 that said Americans use 9 billion gallons of water daily just for landscape irrigation. This amounts to nearly 3.3 trillion gallons of water every year just for watering plants and gardens and doesn’t even include the irrigation needed for food production. This makes its 2.5-billion-gallon water consumption a literal drop in the bucket, amounting to just 0.075% of water used for keeping gardens green and thriving.

These gardens, however, have a direct benefit in that they could potentially keep ambient temperatures lower (versus an all-cement environment) and add to the aesthetics of the immediate area — the only question is how many people these developments benefit. Moreover, many new data centers in the U.S. are reportedly being built in areas suffering from water issues. While the overall data center water consumption might seem small if you look at the larger picture, we still cannot turn a blind eye to its potential effects on the local community.

For example, a Meta data center has allegedly caused a Georgia town’s deep-well water source to muddy — a sign that the level of the local water table is hitting low levels, allowing mud to be siphoned by the residents’ water pumps. Another site reportedly sucked 29 million gallons of water in 15 months, which caused low water pressures for residents. Reports like these make it harder for other data center projects to secure permits from local governments to start construction, especially as communities fear that these issues could happen in their area, too.

Amazon boasts water efficiency improvements

As the pushback against data centers’ egregious resource consumption has become front-and-center in many permitting fights, Amazon is showing that it’s taking steps to reduce its water consumption and claims that it’s on track to being “water positive” by 2030. It achieved this by implementing innovations in its data centers to reduce water use without reducing performance.

The company says that it mostly uses air cooling for its data centers, which uses up a lot less electricity compared to water cooling. But when ambient temperatures rise, it switches to Direct Evaporative Cooling, with the company spraying water on an absorbent medium, which the company describes as “a sophisticated, giant sponge,” and then runs the hot air through it to reduce temperatures by five to 10 degrees. It says that this is more power efficient than using chillers, reducing power use by about 20% to 25% during the hottest time of the day when power usage by other users is at its highest, too.

It also said that it raised the temperature thresholds in its data centers. While this meant that its servers ran hotter compared to previous years, it didn’t impact on the longevity of their hardware and they were still able to deliver the same amount of computing power as before. Through trial and error, the company discovered that it could keep running its servers using air cooling only, with its water-cooling systems only kicking in once the ambient temperature reaches 85 degrees F (or more than 29 degrees C). This resulted in 50% reduction in water use, says Amazon water specialist Beau Schilz.

Efforts like this are essential for data center operations to become sustainable. After all, despite the pushback against new data center projects, we cannot forever put a moratorium on them as AI’s demand for compute is increasing. But until AI hyperscalers can earn back the trust of the people and prove that they can build infrastructure without increasing costs for everyone else and hoarding the resources that communities need for their survival, then they can only expect opposition to continue.

Researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) collaborated with Google to recycle “old” Pixel smartphones and give them a second life as a low-cost data center. According to Google Research, retired smartphones are part of the “embodied carbon” that is associated with manufacturing and its carbon footprint. In fact, humanity’s penchant for mobile devices and replacing them every few years is one of the biggest contributors to e-waste, so the group from UCSD planned to give these discarded devices a second life as a “general-purpose computing platform.”

The study revealed that smartphones from just three years ago still deliver a higher single-core performance compared to servers like the Asus RS720A-E11, which can be equipped with Nvidia H200 or Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 GPUs and two AMD EPYC server processors, that you frequently find in the most powerful data centers. While the latter delivers performance that a mobile device can’t even dream of, the fact that the former still scored higher in the SPEC benchmarking suite on a per-core basis meant that researchers could still use them for compute tasks with a little creativity.

The first thing they did was to strip these gadgets of non-essential components — displays, batteries, cameras, speakers, chassis, etc. Only the motherboard remains, as it plays host to the SoC needed for running compute. The Android operating system is then replaced with a general-purpose Linux distro used in data center applications, which removes unnecessary bloat found in the original consumer device and allows for the deployment of orchestration software like Kubernetes. Benchmarking results revealed that 25 to 50 old phones wereequal to the computing power of a single dual-socket server-class CPU.

UCSD determined that a 20-phone cluster can support one application that a 75+ student class requires. So, instead of hosting it on the cloud, which would entail additional costs and resource use on the data center side, it could instead run these apps on a local deployment of these used smartphones. The research team plans to use 2,000 phones to build a local data center that can support “a hundred such classes at once.” Aside from getting the advantage of running apps locally and owning the hardware needed for them, the group also says that it’s only a “fraction of the usual cost,” likely referring to building a local server made from new components. This is especially true today, with the increased pricing for memory and storage chips.

The research team says that it expects to launch the full system later this year and is looking to see how consumer parts can withstand continuous use in a data center application. But even if the experiment is successful, we don’t foresee AI hyperscalers switching to servers made from used phone parts as they would often want to work with fewer parts and the reliability delivered by specialized hardware. Still, this is a great option for universities and educational institutions, as well as smaller entities that do not have the resources to secure brand-new parts and compete against tech giants with billions of dollars to burn.

This isn’t the first time scientists have looked at giving old phones a second life — another group of researchers looked at converting old phones into “tiny data centers” last year, even using one set of four old devices for underwater monitoring. After all, even though the SoCs found in these devices are considered “outdated” by modern standards, they should still be more than capable enough for many mundane tasks. NASA even repurposed the Qualcomm 801 SoC, a mid-range chip from 2014 and found in the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, to help the Perseverance rover find its way around the Red Planet like some sort of processor for a makeshift GPS. And for smartphones that no longer work, people are finding ways to extract the gold and other resources found on their boards for recycling.

AMD's Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform is finally here, with preorders for the powerful $3,999 mini PC now live in the U.S. through Micro Center. The company’s new developer platform is effectively an answer to Nvidia's DGX Spark, as both systems are designed as compact AI workstations capable of running large language models locally. First unveiled at CES 2026, the developer kit is available in two variants that feature identical hardware but ship with different operating systems- Linux or Windows 11 Pro.

Notably, the DGX Spark was originally introduced at the same $3,999 price point last year. However, Nvidia recently increased the price to $4,699 due to the ongoing global supply constraints affecting LPDDR5X memory and NAND flash. Apart from pricing, the Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform offers native Windows support, whereas the DGX Spark is limited to Linux-based environments. This gives users greater flexibility, including the option to dual-boot and use both operating systems.

The Ryzen AI Halo dev kit is powered by the flagship Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, featuring 16 cores and 32 threads, with a base clock speed of 3 GHz and a max boost clock speed of 5.1 GHz. It also features 128GB of unified LPDDR5X-8000 memory, 16MB of L2 cache, and 64MB of L3 cache, onboard RDNA 3.5 Radeon 8060S graphics with 40 compute units, and a dedicated NPU capable of 50 TOPS.

The mini-PC measures 149 x 149 x 43.18 mm, has an aluminum chassis, and includes a 2TB M.2 SSD, while wireless connectivity options include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. As for I/O, it is strikingly similar to what Nvidia offers, including a 10 GbE LAN, four USB-C ports (one for power input), and an HDMI 2.1b port. Unfortunately, there is no NVLink, which, in Nvidia’s case, allows two DGK Spark machines to pair. To cool the Strix Halo chip inside AMD, it uses a unique cooling solution that includes a baseplate, direct-touch flat heatpipes, an aluminum channel heatsink, and two lateral airflow blower-style fans.

If you are a developer or simply interested in experimenting with local LLMs, Micro Center is currently accepting preorders for the Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform, with local pickup available on July 10. Those looking for alternatives can also consider the Corsair AI Workstation 300, a slightly larger AI-focused system based on the same Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor. It is also currently listed at a lower starting price of $2,699 for the 1TB storage model and $3,399 for the 4TB model.

A Redditor and PC gaming enthusiast says their PC might have saved their life, after the rig deflected a bullet fired through the wall of their house by their neighbour. According to the post, the neighbour claims that the firearm was accidentally discharged by her dog, sending the projectile into the house. u/angelbabyzz says police state the PC changed the trajectory of the bullet — which she found under her pillow — and that it would have otherwise hit her while she was sleeping. On a positive note, Angelbabyzz is now planning how to spend their $3,500 insurance payout on a new gaming PC build.

Neighbour shot my PC through the wall from r/pcmasterrace

While trying to make sense of what was happening, Angelbabyzz recalls that their neighbor arrived sobbing and shaking. They claimed that their dog had discharged the firearm, shooting through the wall, tearing through the tower PC on the other side. Images shared by the Redditor show the tower PC full of shattered glass and detritus. Among the most seriously damaged contents are G.Skill Trident Z RGB memory modules. These, and the motherboard RAM sockets, appear to have been heavily impacted by a weighty-looking lead slug.

If this tale isn’t already bordering on the bizarre, two further details push it firmly into truth-is-stranger-than-fiction territory. Firstly, Angelbabyzz’s neighbor claims that their dog “accidentally discharged” their firearm. Secondly, the police told the Redditor that “the PC changed the trajectory of the bullet, and it would have hit me while I was sleeping if the PC hadn’t been there.”

Good neighbors

Despite their recent brush with death or serious injury, Angelbabyzz is sympathetic with her trigger-happy dog-owning neighbor. The Redditor feels “she is appropriately paying her dues in this situation and won’t be pressing for anything further.” This is on account of the “constant apologies,” as well as her gun being confiscated, the criminal charges, and the insurance / monetary penalties the neighbor will face.

After three days of cleaning up broken glass, Angelbabyzz now has the much more pleasant problem of shopping for a replacement PC with a $3,500 budget. So, after recalling their hair-raising story on Reddit and sharing the gruesome images, they are now asking for build recommendations on PCMR.

In some replies to the original post, Angelbabyzz reveals that they found the bullet under their pillow, but their SSDs are said to be completely undamaged. That might be a reference to the Samsung SATA drive we can see in some of the images.

While the RAM kit is probably the worst damaged component, we think it is worthy of keeping to frame in a presentation case - ‘My Trident Z saved my life.’ G.Skill offers a lifetime warranty on its RAM, but it only covers defects in materials and workmanship.

A lucky HVAC technician seems to have stumbled upon the PC of former AMD CEO Rory Read while at a customer's house. The client apparently ran a computer shop back in the day, so they had a bunch of unused equipment in the basement, which somehow included this PC. The case is doused in various signatures, including one from Dr. Lisa Su, accompanied by a message that reads "To Rory - All the Best from Team AMD."

I think i have Rory Read's (former CEO of AMD) PC from r/Amd

We looked at Dr. Lisa's signature on special edition Ryzen chips from a few years ago, and it matches the signature on the PC, but of course, there's no way to officially verify the authenticity. Looking at the case itself, it's a Xigmatek XEN6329 Mini-ITX chassis that currently goes for over $1,000 on the aftermarket. Moreover, the hardware inside looks quite dated, with the GPU likely being an ITX variant of the R9 285 from Sapphire.

That card came out in 2014, so it lines up with Read's tenure at AMD, and further suggests this computer was a parting gift from the higher-ups. For some reason, it was never used because it's completely dust-free and in new condition even after twelve years. The OP explained that the box still had all the packing materials intact and that the computer even came with a wrapped Windows 8.1 CD that was never touched.

Comment from r/Amd

The leading theory in the comments inferred that Read pawned off the PC at a computer shop, where it sat for years before being salvaged. Or perhaps it was sent for a repair, setup, or some maintenance before he decided to use it, although this seems less likely. Being a high-level executive, there's a chance he simply never looked for it again. Speaking of which, it's important to know the lore behind this PC's potential recipient to understand its value.

Rory Read was the head of AMD between 2011 and 2014, responsible for leading a course-correction that navigated the company through its darkest times. AMD had just suffered a disastrous launch in the form of its Bulldozer CPU architecture that fell flat against Intel's offerings, and the chipmaker had basically no stake in mobile computing during its biggest boom.

Read came in and secured partnerships with both Sony and Microsoft for their next-gen consoles — a partnership that still runs to this day. He also brought legendary chip architect Jim Keller back to AMD to work on the Zen architecture alongside Mike Clark. He then recruited Dr. Lisa Su in 2012 and personally mentored her to eventually take over the company, believing that an engineer needs to lead AMD long-term.

Read's job was only to stabilize the falling tower, stop the bleeding, if you will, and never to actually run the company long-term. He's known as a sort of turnaround specialist in the industry, having previously performed similar duties at IBM and Lenovo. In a way, he paved the way for AMD's incredible comeback, positioning the chipmaker perfectly for a resurgence under another competent leader.

Coming back to the PC itself, it includes signatures from other AMD executives of that era, such as Mark Papermaster, Rajan (Raj) Naik, Devinder Kumar, Colette LaForce, John Byrne, and Darrell Ford. That seems like way too much effort for someone trying to fake a collectible. Therefore, even though we can't be certain, this is one of the coolest pieces of PC industry memorabilia, one that shows the intersection between business and engineering.

What's a common characteristic of clouded leopards, Komodo dragons, and Sumatran tigers? Their habitats are all close to data centers — at least, if the proposal by DC Blox's to build a facility right next to the Nashville Zoo comes to pass. The 1.6-acre facility (69,000 sqft.) buildout is in the permit stage, but already raising more than a few issues both with the zoo itself and concerned Nashville residents, as evidenced by an online petition that counts over 322,000 signatories as of this writing.

The Nashville Zoo published a post in its blog detailing its major concerns. Besides the obvious concern about the power draw and its impact on the local grid, the zoo claims the facility could add to noise and light pollution, as well as lower the water quality in the surrounding areas. Altogether, those factors might have a negative impact on a number of hosted species and breeding programs, including the zoo's famous clouded leopards, animals "notoriously sensitive to any mechanical noise."

Nashville Zoo CEO Rick Schwartz reportedly said the entity was looking to use part of the 23.5-acre lot in question for an education and conservation center and that it was in talk for years with current owners MarketStreet Enterprises to buy part of the property for that purpose. MarketStreet's website lists the Nashville Zoo as one of its current tenants.

Technical details appear to be relatively sparse, but the datacenter would draw an estimated 50 MW of power from the local grid and reportedly include its own power substation. The 1.6-acre figure would hold the build's first phase, a relatively small parcel out of a 23.5-acre lot. DC Blox claims the project would use "closed-loop or waterless" cooling and comply with all local ordnances.

While 50 MW is definitely a lot of power, it's not anywhere in the same ballpark as that required by the vast majority of AI datacenters. This could mean the Nashville datacenter might be a "standard," relatively inoffensive co-location facility, keeping in theme with DC Blox's other operations. The proposed area is also quite compact in comparison to thousand-acre constructions demanding tens of gigawatts. Nashville already hosts another couple dozen datacenters, though none with a plan to pull up to 50 MW from the grid.

As an example, DC Blox's Birmingham facility does in fact use air cooling, and could draw up to 60 MW of power when fully built out. Having said that, the firm's website claims its operations are "AI-ready," meaning that the power and cooling requirements could rise in time, though theoretically such expansions would require additional permits. For its part, DC Blox says the datacenter would "not be an AI factory placing a burden on local resources," and further noted that the area had an existing permit for a datacenter, though there appear to be no records that such a facility was ever actually built.

Notably, while there appear to be no city-specific laws regarding datacenters, Tennessee law at least requires that datacenters pay for any grid infrastructure upgrades. Nashville's leadership is nevertheless considering adding restrictions to new datacenter investments, including but not limited to water, power, and noise regulations. Those would even ban buildouts larger than 500,000 sqft altogether.

The project is only in the permit stage, and in an odd spot at that. Local law generally requires that only land owners can apply or support a building permit, and yet DC Blox filed one while not yet owning the area, which is currently being sold by MarketStreet Enterprises. There's no confirmation on whether MarketStreet has co-signed or authorized the filing. Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell reportedly called the application "unusual" and is asking the Metro's legal department to look further into the situation.

ZanaZamora, the U.S.-based trucker who packs a powerful driving sim rig in their semi, just posted an update about it that went viral on Reddit. The sim racing and flight sim enthusiast said in r/SimRacing Setups that Conspit, the brand they used for the driving-sim wheel on their original gaming rig, worked with them on these upgrades.

The biggest change that we saw with the semi-truck sim rig is the white GT-Lite racing rig with a white-and-blue Pro racing seat. ZanaZamora said that it “not only looks fantastic in here but also fits better in the limited space. A surprisingly small footprint for such a beefy rig. The proper racing bucket seat is way more comfy, with proper posture not only adding to immersion but helping with feeling and reacting to the feedback from the controls better.” Aside from the rig and seat, they also received Conspit CPP Evo 3 pedals, an Ares Platinum wheelbase, a quick adapter, and a dashboard.

The Redittor and truck driver said that the parts and accessories are much smaller and lighter than their previous build, which is crucial for the limited space that they have inside their truck.

Years ago my post of my semi truck gaming rig here went fairly viral. I’m happy to share that it has continued to evolve into this now absolutely unhinged setup, replacing my passenger seat with an entire Sim Racing/Flight rig from r/pcmasterrace

Aside from these racing-centric upgrades, we also see a few other new parts. For example, it looks like they now drive a Corsair K95 RGB Platinum XT keyboard and a proper Stream Deck — significant upgrades from their old wireless keyboard and generic macro pad.

ZanaZamora said that their friend owns the truck that they drive, and that “he actually supports it for the most part,” referring to their “unhinged setup” that sits on the passenger side of the semi. When a commenter asked what “for the most part” meant, they said, “For the most part, as in ‘that’s cool, but I have bills to pay, don’t stay up all night gaming.’"

Even though some may think installing such an expensive setup in a truck is a bit risky for theft, the trucker said everything is bolted to the sim rig (which we assume is securely installed on the truck itself). “It’d be a pain to steal any of this,” ZanaZamora said. They also added, “It would take some time and tools, i.e. planning. And the only time I’m ever off the truck that long is when it’s parked securely at my house.”

A lightning strike has reportedly turned an internet connection into a destructive pathway for thousands of volts, leaving behind a damaged router and PC motherboard. The rare incident was shared on Reddit by user u/Greatfulx, who claims that during a recent thunderstorm, lightning entered their apartment complex through its coaxial cable infrastructure before damaging their network equipment and desktop PC.

According to the shared photos, the Ethernet port on their PC appears to have suffered extensive damage, leading them to believe the surge traveled from the router into the PC via the Ethernet cable. Notably, the damage on the motherboard appears to be concentrated around the Ethernet port rather than the entire board. While most modern Ethernet ports include surge protection designed to shield devices from electrical faults, an extremely high voltage power surge can potentially overload such safeguards. Additionally, the photos showcase the damaged router alongside large burn marks on nearby walls and the coaxial cable outside the apartment.

Router Blewup Motherboard from r/pcmasterrace

"Recent lighting storm struck my complex and traveled down my coaxial cable and into my apartment. Blew up in the middle of the night, so that was scary," the user wrote. "Thought I’d share, not in the position to rebuild so there that I guess!" The user told onlookers in the comments they were chasing up parties over possible negligence after one user pointed out a grounding/earthing attachment outside the building didn't appear to be connected properly.

The incident draws parallels to similar lightning-related hardware damage stories shared on Reddit. In one case, a user reportedly lost internet connectivity after a loud thunderstorm and initially assumed the issue was limited to their network connection. After some inspection, they discovered that the motherboard's dedicated LAN protection component, branded as "LAN Guard," had reportedly detached from the board. The user claimed that a surge possibly traveled through the Ethernet connection and was absorbed by the protective circuitry, potentially preventing more extensive damage to the rest of the PC. A similar lightning-related incident was shared by a user on Reddit who reported that a thunderstorm damaged their PlayStation 5’s Ethernet port while the console was connected via a wired network connection

Such incidents highlight a common vulnerability that is overlooked in most home electronic setups. While many users protect computers and other components with surge-protected power strips or uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), surges can enter through network and communication lines as well. If a lightning strike enters through a coaxial cable, modem, router, or switch, the resulting electrical energy may bypass protections designed primarily for AC power outlets.

Although no consumer-grade protection device can guarantee safeguard against a direct lightning strike, it is highly recommended that coaxial lines are properly grounded and that the use of surge protection for both power and data connections is used where possible.

Astera Labs demonstrated its recently introduced Scorpio X-Series 320 Lane Smart Fabric Switch, which appears to be the industry’s largest open memory-semantic fabric switch, at Computex 2026 in Taipei. The PCIe 6.0 switch with 320 lanes can be used to build large multi-GPU scale-up clusters, large shared KV-cache memory pools, and disaggregate data center infrastructure using custom topologies.

The switch provides 320 PCIe 6.0 lanes and 20 Tbps of switching bandwidth, up from 144 lanes and 9 Tbps for previous-generation devices. Astera Labs says the increased number of lanes enables larger scale-up domains, enabling the connection of up to 80 accelerators using a single switch. By contrast, older 144-lane switches support up to 32 accelerators per switch. For clusters with more than 64 accelerators, the company says the new device reduces switch hops from as many as three to one and cuts switch count by a factor of four to six while still providing all-to-all connectivity akin to that provided by Nvidia’s NVL72 systems (albeit with lower bandwidth and higher latencies). The switch can support both standard and custom accelerators as long as they use standard PCIe connectivity.

On the trade show floor, Astera Labs is showing off its switching capabilities with Intel’s Arc B70 Pro graphics cards. However, real-world deployments based on the Scorpio X-Series 320-lane PCIe switches will likely use more advanced Intel hardware. In general, the switch can be used to build clusters from all types of accelerators that do not support their own NVLink or UALink-like interconnections, including AMD’s Instinct MI350P and Nvidia’s RTX 6000 Blackwell. Astera has yet to showcase a full working cluster featuring 80 accelerators, as the company only got the Scorpio X-Series 320-lane PCIe switch from the fab eight weeks ago. Also, finding 80 similar accelerators is not easy. Nonetheless, based on the company’s demonstration, the switch appears to be working.

A key feature of the Scorpio X-Series is Hypercast, which is a hardware-based data replication engine intended to accelerate communication-intensive operations common in AI models. According to Astera Labs, MoE networks tend to route tokens across hundreds of experts and create large amounts of multicast traffic between accelerators. In such cases, traditional switching architectures either require repeated data transmissions or slow multicast-group reconfiguration, whereas Hypercast is designed to handle these communication patterns directly in hardware, reduce GPU networking overhead, and improve accelerator efficiency, Astera Labs claims.

The company also added In-Network Compute engines that offload collective operations such as AllReduce, ReduceScatter, AllGather, AllScatter, and all-to-all exchanges. These features can reduce communication latency by more than 50% in certain workloads, according to Astera.

Another important feature of the Scorpio X-Series 320-lane PCIe switch is its memory-semantic connectivity, which enables connected processors to access fabric-attached resources using native load and store operations rather than software-controlled transactions. This greatly simplifies usage of the device and improves real-world performance by reducing overhead and improving fabric efficiency at scale.

Astera says that the production ramp of the Scorpio X-Series 320-lane PCIe switch is set for the second half of 2026. Currently, the company is sampling the switch with leading hyperscalers.

Following the announcement of Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra ahead of Computex, the company is announcing another device with the RTX Spark system on a chip at its developer conference, Build, in San Francisco.

That new PC is the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. With the company pushing Windows as a platform for agentic AI with Nvidia's new processor, the Surface-branded mini PC is set to run sustained workloads with a 100W thermal envelope — more than you can get in a laptop.

Microsoft says that includes "long-running training jobs, agentic AI pipelines and local model fine-tuning."

The PC has an aluminum chassis with 1,000 air vents in a grid, which looks a bit like the flat top of the Xbox Series X. The system features two USB Type-C ports, HDMI, USB-A, Ethernet, and a headphone jack.

Nvidia states that the RTX Spark can deliver up to one petaflop of AI compute with 128GB of unified memory and can run models with up to 120 billion parameters locally.

The system will come set up for developers, with Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, and other applications preinstalled. Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) with support for Nvidia's CUDA technology will also come out of the box, along with PowerShell7.

Microsoft hasn't announced a price for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, but says it will be available this year at microsoft.com in the United States. While you can't make a pre-order, you can sign up to learn more on the device's web page.

Supermicro is showing off its upcoming machines based on AMD’s 6^th Generation EPYC ‘Venice’ processors, Instinct MI450 accelerators, and, of course, Nvidia’s Vera Rubin-based solutions. Arguably, the most important product that the company demonstrated at its CEO’s keynote is the VR200 NVL72 rack that uses Vera CPUs and Rubin GPUs. The machine, just like other upcoming liquid-cooled systems from Supermicro will use the company’s all-new coolant that has a 1000x higher electrical impedance compared to today’s mixtures, which may be quite important for next-generation AI machines.

“Our new coolant [uses a new] formula [and] reaches up to 1,000 times higher electrical impedance than a standard cooler,” said Charles Liang, chief executive of Supermicro, during his keynote speech at Computex. “In case there are small leaks, when you have a high electrical impedance, the system will not [shut down] [and will] keep running.”

Conventional water-based coolants used in direct liquid cooling systems have electrical conductivity (albeit lower than water), so if coolant leaks onto a motherboard, GPU, power delivery circuitry, or connectors, it can create leakage currents or even short circuits. A coolant with 1000 times higher electrical impedance is far more resistant to current flow, which reduces the likelihood that a minor leak will immediately shut down a system or damage electronic components. This is important as modern rack-scale AI solutions like Nvidia’s VR200 NVL72 are rumored to cost around $8 million, so their protection is crucial. Also, reducing downtime in AI data centers is important as these machines must make money for their owners.

Unfortunately, Supermicro’s claim is difficult to evaluate because the company does not disclose specifications of the coolant, such as conductivity (µS/cm), resistivity (MΩ·cm), or dielectric strength (kV/mm). It also remains tight-lipped about the baseline coolant used for comparison. Since modern water-glycol coolants are already fairly resistant, a 1000-fold improvement sounds significant, but without the actual details, it is impossible to determine the practical magnitude of the advancement. What Supermicro claims is that a minor coolant leak would be less likely to force an immediate server shutdown, which means lower downtime risk in large AI deployments. However, we have no idea whether the new coolant behaves more like a dielectric fluid and less like water-glycol coolants.

The new coolant will be used in all new liquid-cooled systems from Supermicro, including the upcoming AMD Helios and Nvidia VR200 NVL72 machines. Given that Nvidia nowadays does not leave many ways for its partners to differentiate, the coolant with 1000 times higher electrical impedance than conventional coolants will likely be among the key selling points of Supermicro’s Nvidia-based offerings.

Speaking of Nvidia’s AI systems, Supermicro is on track to release its Vera Rubin-based systems in the second half of this year, just like other makers. Supermicro intends to offer both NVL72-rack-scale machines based on Nvidia’s Vera CPUs and Rubin GPUs, as well as Rubin DGX systems with different processors.

As for AMD’s side of matters, Supermicro is also on track to release MI455X-based Helios rack-scale solutions in the second half of the year, though the company does not disclose whether these use UALink or UALink over Ethernet interconnections. In addition, Supermicro is also on track with 1-way and 2-way servers based on AMD’s 6^th Generation EPYC ‘Venice’ processors that are made using TSMC’s N2 process technology. These machines are also expected to hit the market in 2026.

The very first set of Nvidia Vera CPU benchmarks have just been released by Phoronix, with results from a set of common Linux benchmarks. While the tests were curated by Nvidia at its Santa Clara headquarters, the early data from those tests indicates that Vera is highly competitive compared to AMD's EPYC and Intel Xeon offerings, at least in the workloads Nvidia is targeting with the chip.

Phoronix was invited to NVIDIA's Santa Clara headquarters to test the upcoming 88-core CPUs. Vera is notable for all kinds of reasons, but most especially because it doesn't license an Arm processor core. Instead, like Apple's chips, it uses the ARM instruction set on a fully custom CPU core known as "Olympus." This isn't the first time Nvidia has produced a custom CPU core; that would be "Denver" in the Tegra K1 from 12 years ago. However, where Denver was a desktop-class CPU constrained by a mobile power budget, Vera is a server-class monster fed with a server-class power budget, and the proof is in the benchmark results.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel was able to test Vera across a range of benchmarks, including code compilation tests, synthetic memory benchmarks, AV1 video encoding, Python, Java OpenJDK, file compression, Lua JIT, and some database benchmarks. In most of the tests, the Vera processors are highly competitive against the competition, which includes AMD EPYC "Turin" processors in single- and dual-CPU configurations as well as an Intel "Granite Rapids" Xeon chip. As Larabel says, Vera offers "competitiveness to Intel/AMD x86_64 CPUs that [he has] never seen out of any other ARM or non-x86_64 processors." It doesn't win outright in most tests, but it's running very close to the EPYC configurations, which is shockingly good for a first-generation custom server core from Nvidia.

What's even more impressive is if you switch things over to a per-thread view of the data, which Phoronix does for some tests. Historically, Arm server vendors have achieved similar performance versus AMD and Intel in multi-threaded workloads by simply cramming a huge pile of cores onto a chip, but the single-threaded performance of x86 was beyond reach. Well, in a timed Gem5 compilation, only the AMD EPYC 9575F was able to beat Nvidia's Vera on a "performance per core" metric. In a Linux kernel build, Vera tops the stack of server chips by a decent little margin. It's real eyebrow-raising stuff, and speaks to the strength of the Vera core.

Looking at the geometric mean of test results, Vera comes out on top by a fair margin, in part thanks to very strong performance in LuaJIT FFTs, ClickHouse database server, and the Renaissance JVM benchmark, where it absolutely dusted the competition. This is genuinely exceptional, but there are caveats to this data. Larabel notes that Nvidia limited the scope of these initial benchmarks to its "intended markets and target use-cases," but it's also true that these tests are benchmarks that Larabel is familiar with and already runs on server CPUs for performance analysis. He says that today's results are a "small subset" of his typical preferred approach, which is to say that this data is valid, but may not represent all workloads or use-cases.

One key detail that the site wasn't able to test comes down to power efficiency. This is a big deal for consumer systems, but it's a much bigger deal for AI data center operators who are currently struggling with build-outs because the power infrastructure worldwide simply isn't robust enough to support megawatt AI training clusters popping up all over the place. Nvidia says that Vera has a 450W TDP, while the fast SOCAMM2 memory it uses consumes another 50 watts; the Xeon and EPYC chips used for comparisons are rated for 500W before accounting for platform memory power. Real power consumption can be very removed from TDP figures, though, so we'll have to wait and see how that plays out.

Another point in favor of Vera is software support. According to Larabel, Vera has "great upstream open-source support," which is encouraging for the future of these chips. Over the decades, we've seen many examples of promising hardware that falls by the wayside due to insufficient software support. All of the testing was performed on a mainline Linux kernel with no need for nasty Device Trees or hacky bespoke driver solutions.

While Nvidia's Vera looks legitimately formidable next to current-generation chips, both AMD and Intel have new chips on the way that look downright gobsmacking. AMD's planning to pack some 256 Zen 6 CPU cores into a single socket with the dense version of EPYC "Venice", while Intel's "Clearwater Forest" will combine up to 288 Darkmont cores with its bleeding-edge 18A process technology in a direct attempt to reclaim the performance-per-watt crown. The end of the year and next year's server landscape are going to be very, very different from today.

The Acer Nitro 65 vies for a spot among the best gaming PCs, and packs in a Ryzen 9 9900X processor, 32GB of DDR5 memory, and a GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card. Given its hardware pedigree, Acer positions the Nitro 65 as an entry-level 4K gaming system. The mid-tower system features an attractive design with a glass side panel, a curved glass front panel, and the usual RGB trimmings. Acer even includes Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, which is a welcome addition given the $2,069 asking price.

Editor's Note: The first Nitro 65 review unit we received exhibited lesser than expected performance and, upon further inspection, damage to some internal components. Acer sent us a second system, which is used here.

Design of the Acer Nitro 65

The Nitro 65 features a sleek black chassis made of a mix of stainless steel and plastic. The case and right side panel are made of steel, while the left side panel is constructed of tempered glass. Both panels are accessed by sticking your finger into a recessed groove and pulling toward you. Then, each panel pivots out and can be completely removed.

The curved glass on the front is embedded in a plastic housing that extends from the floor to the top of the chassis. The same plastic is used for another trim piece that sits below the left side panel. The two plastic pieces feature an engraved channel that combines additional ventilation holes and an RGB light strip that runs from the side of the chassis to the front.

Magnetic dust filters are provided at the top of the chassis and on the right-side panel (which houses two 120 mm RGB fans). There are two additional 120 mm RGB fans at the rear of the chassis, which are joined by the 120 mm RGB fan for the air CPU cooler and the RGB DDR5 memory sticks.

The Nitro 65 measures 18.4 x 17 x 9.6 inches and weighs 28 pounds.

Acer Nitro 65 Specifications

Ports and Upgradeability on the Acer Nitro 65

Taking things from the top, the Nitro 65 offers a pretty good selection of ports. You get two USB-A ports and one USB-C port. The inclusion of the latter is much appreciated, and is a point that we harped on in our review of the Nitro 60. There’s also a 3.5 mm audio combo jack along with power and reset buttons.

The rear I/O ports come courtesy of the Gigabyte B850M C motherboard. Here you'll find four USB-A 2.0 ports, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, and one USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port. That should be more than enough plugs to appease most enthusiasts, but it would have been nice to see at least one Thunderbolt port at this price point ($2,099). You'll also find HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort ports, a 2.5 GbE port, and a trio of 3.5 mm audio jacks. Another interesting addition is a WiFi EZ-Plug for the included Wi-Fi antenna, which is a simple plug-and-play affair rather than the typical screw-in antenna connectors.

As for expansion slots on the motherboard, the B850M C features one PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots. There are also two M.2 slots (1x PCIe 5.0, 2x PCIe 4.0). There are also four DDR5 DIMM slots supporting up to 256GB of memory.

There’s also a tray for mounting additional SSDs and HDDs, accessible by removing the right-side panel. Finally, our review unit shipped with a non-modular 850W power supply. The lack of a modular design is somewhat surprising at this price point.

Gaming and Graphics Performance on the Acer Nitro 65The Nitro 65 review unit that we received features a Ryzen 9 9900X processor, 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, and a GeForce RTX 5070 GPU.

To have some fun with the system before jumping into the standard benchmark suite, I played a few rounds of Battlefield 6. I played the game at 2560 x 1600 resolution with the Ultra preset and DLSS enabled. Performance averaged between 140 and 150 frames per second (FPS) during my fragging sessions.

The systems that we have assembled for comparison are the Acer Nitro 60 (Core i7-14700F, RTX 5070), Asus ROG G700 (Core Ultra 7 265KF, RTX 5070), and the iBuyPower Y40 Pro (Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5070 Ti).

Unsurprisingly, the systems equipped with an RTX 5070 were quite evenly matched in the gaming benchmarks, with the iBuyPower Y49 Pro eking out the best numbers in most benchmarks thanks to its beefier RTX 5070 Ti.

In the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark (Highest detail preset), the Nitro 65 delivered 209 FPS at 1080p and 70 FPS at 4K. That put it about 5 percent ahead of the Nitro 69 and ROG G700 at 1080p, but on even footing at 4K. The Y40 Pro pulled out to a commanding lead with 228 FPS at 1080p and 89 FPS at 4K.

Cyberpunk 2077 (Ray Tracing Ultra preset) is a more demanding game and can be quite punishing on even the best gaming systems. Here, the Nitro 65 managed 69 FPS at 1080p, compared to 65 FPS and 70 FPS for the Nitro 60 and ROG G700, respectively. Those three systems hovered around 20 fps at 4K resolution. The Y40 Pro, however, flexed its muscles with 87 FPS at 1080p and 29 FPS at 4K. With that said, none of these machines offer playable 4K performance, so you’ll likely want to stick with 1440p/1600p or 1080p to make the most of what the RTX 5070 can provide.

Far Cry 6 (Ultra preset) saw the Nitro 65 top the charts, achieving 132 FPS at 1080p compared to 125 FPS on the Y40 Pro. However, the Y40 Pro turned the tables when cranking the resolution to 4K (102 FPS for the Y40 Pro versus 82 FPS for the Nitro 65).

The Nitro 65 performed nearly identically to the Nitro 60 in Red Dead Redemption 2 (Medium preset), with the two systems achieving 141 FPS and 143 FPS, respectively, at 1080p, and the same 54 FPS at 4K. The ROG G700 was half a step behind (120 FPS, 50 FPS), while the Y40 Pro was half a step ahead (161 FPS, 66 FPS).

Finally, we come to Black Myth: Wukong (Cinematic preset), where the Nitro 65 actually ended up at the back of the pack at 1080p (50 FPS) and tied for second place at 4K (25 FPS). Not surprisingly, the Y40 Pro led with 66 FPS at 1080p and 32 FPS at 4K resolution.

Metro Exodus remains our go-to for stress-testing gaming PCs, and we run each through 15 loops to simulate 30 minutes of gameplay. During the stress test, the Nitro 65 averaged 143 FPS. Across the 15 runs, the Ryzen 9 9900X averaged 57.7 degrees Celsius, while the RTX 5070 averaged 60.24 C. The fans were quite audible during the stress test (and during general gaming). Acer’s decision to go with air cooling for the CPU at this price point is a bit of a puzzle.

Productivity Performance on the Acer Nitro 65

With a Ryzen 9 9900X, 32GB of DDR5, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, the Nitro 65 wasn’t quite as strong in productivity performance. It came out strong in our Geekbench 6 synthetic CPU benchmark, scoring 3,348 in single-core (the highest of the group) and 18,282 in multi-core (second place behind the ROG G700).

In our 25GB file transfer test, the Nitro 65 didn’t quite have the juice to climb up the performance ladder. It delivered 1,719.57 MBps compared to 1,816.50 MBps on the ROG G700 and 1,861.60 MBps on the Nitro 60.

Finally, the Handbrake 4K-to-1080p video transcoding test placed the Nitro 65 in third place, with a time of 2 minutes and 51 seconds. The ROG G700 turned in the best time of 2:03, while the Y40 Pro rolled into second place at 2:29. The Nitro 60 was at the back of the pack at 3 minutes and 10 seconds.

Keyboard and Mouse on the Acer Nitro 65

The Nitro 65 ships with a basic wired USB keyboard and mouse. The mouse is designed for right-handed gamers and has a very cheap plastic feel. Yes, it’s lightweight, but I just can’t get past the plasticky feel. The main buttons click with authority, as do the two side buttons. The scroll wheel is rubberized and has satisfying detents as you flick it up and down. DPI is adjustable via a button behind the scroll wheel. There’s also an RGB strip that runs across the top and side of the mouse, and light also peeks out from the scroll wheel.

The keyboard is also rather mediocre and feels cheap. The entire keyboard deck flexes to a high degree when twisting it, and the plastic covering the Num, Caps, and Scroll LEDs wasn’t even aligned properly. The keyboard, however, features an integrated scroll wheel for volume control and single-zone RGB backlighting.

Software and Warranty on the Acer Nitro 65

The Nitro 65 is relatively light on factory-installed bloatware. The biggest offender is a free 30-day trial of the McAfee antivirus suite. This would be the first app to get the boot from me. There is also a small smattering of game demos and subscription apps that Microsoft throws into the Start Menu by default.

The only item of note is Acer Jumpstart, which is nothing but a shortcut that opens your browser to Acer’s homepage.

The Nitro 65 ships with a one-year parts and labor warranty.

Acer Nitro 65 Configurations

The Nitro 65, as far as we can tell, is a Best Buy-exclusive offering from Acer. There is no mention of the system on Acer’s website, and it’s not available from its online store. However, there are four configurations available from Best Buy’s online marketplace.

Our review unit came with a Ryzen 9 9900X processor, 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, a GeForce RTX 5070 GPU, a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, and an 850W power supply for $2,069.99 at Best Buy. There’s also a configuration that swaps out the RTX 5070 for a Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU (with all other specs remaining the same) for $2,229.99.

There are also cheaper configurations available, starting at $1,379.99 for a Ryzen 7 8700F with 16GB of DDR5, a 1TB SSD, and a Radeon RX 9060 XT. Swapping out the RX 9060 XT for an RTX 5060 raises the price slightly to $1,399.99.

Bottom Line

The Acer Nitro 65 is a well-equipped gaming desktop with strong gaming and mid-pack productivity performance with a Ryzen 9 9900X processor and RTX 5070 processor on deck. With a price tag of over $2,000, we expected a bit more performance. And with systems hundreds of dollars less employing liquid cooling, it’s a bit of a head scratcher that Acer uses an air cooler that can be grating on your ears under load.

The Asus ROG G700 still remains a more compelling offering in this segment (while saving you $70), with similar performance and a water-cooled CPU to help keep noise levels down.

On Wednesday, the Taiwan Keelung District Prosecutors' Office executed search warrants across 12 locations and is now seeking to detain three individuals in the island’s first formal crackdown on illicit AI semiconductor exports to China. According to a fresh report from Bloomberg, the trio is accused of forging shipping documents to sneak AI servers manufactured by US-based Super Micro Computer Inc. (Supermicro) into China, Hong Kong, and Macau, in direct violation of Washington’s trade restrictions. While the scale of this specific bust is relatively small, purportedly involving around 50 servers, the political and economic implications are far more significant.

If the name Supermicro sounds familiar in the context of chip smuggling, that’s because the company is currently sitting at the center of the largest tech-evasion case in U.S. history. Just months ago, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Supermicro co-founder and Senior VP Wally Liaw for orchestrating a breathtaking $2.5 billion smuggling ring that reportedly used front companies in Thailand to route restricted NVIDIA hardware to Chinese tech giants like Alibaba.

Though Taiwanese prosecutors claim this new 50-server case was initiated independently of the U.S. investigation, it targets the exact same vulnerability. Smugglers have long used Taiwan as a transit hub, banking on the hope that local compliance teams look the other way. The fact that Taipei is now using local forgery and fraud laws to lock people up signals a major policy shift under President Lai Ching-te, who is under immense pressure from Washington to secure the global AI supply chain.

For those tracking this story closely, Taiwan's sudden aggression isn't really a surprise. Reports of underground hardware in China include thriving repair shops working on illicit Nvidia GPUs and firms stripping restricted NVIDIA silicon off dead boards to build custom "Franken-cards," show chip smuggling is a significant issue.

Yesterday's raids in Taiwan suggest the government is finally taking a harsher stance on the issue. The timing of the Taiwan crackdown is pretty ironic, though; just this week, NVIDIA dropped its Q1 Fiscal 2027 financial results, and the numbers show that the company essentially has a license to print money, regardless of what happens on the black market.

Nvidia pulled in a staggering $81.6 billion in total revenue, an 85% increase year-over-year, with a mind-melting $75.2 billion of that coming strictly from its Data Center division. Driven by insatiable demand for its Blackwell architecture GPUs, Nvidia's growth has gone entirely parabolic. The most critical piece of data for the smuggling narrative was buried in Nvidia's forward guidance, though; management explicitly stated that the company is assuming zero data center compute revenue from China moving forward.

The analysis here is simple: Nvidia has successfully decoupled its legal financial future from China. Nvidia doesn't need the market, and some would argue it doesn't need the regulatory headache. For the black market, the walls are closing in fast. When chip smuggling was just a U.S. DOJ priority, enforcement was limited by geography. Now that key manufacturing and transit hubs like Taiwan and Singapore are actively hunting down middlemen using local criminal fraud laws, the supply chain is fracturing. Getting banned Hopper or Blackwell chips into mainland data centers just became exponentially more fraught.

Innovative London-based PC cooling firm Billet Labs is back with another water-cooled system, this time aiming for a completely passive, fanless build. The video below explains why this interesting build was conceptualized, how it was built, its benefits and drawbacks, and how it performs, all with an eye on thermals.

Felix from Billet Labs starts the video presentation standing next to another of the firm's special projects – Walley. This machine is wall-mounted and shows plenty of Billet Labs signature flair. Its multiple powerful fans can get rather noisy when the system is under duress, though. If the fan speeds are scaled back, things start to get uncomfortably warm. The new custom build, therefore, targets a gaming PC that is much quieter.

Regular readers may be familiar with Billet and founder Felix on YouTube, most recently for ‘Raddy,’ the Victorian radiator PC. However, Raddy proved to be a bit noisy for a living room gaming machine, and it included some fans, so its performance components are being reused here.

Felix reveals that the hulking cast-iron radiator cooled beast known as Raddy wasn’t silent due to cavitation bubbles in the pump, which necessitates radiator flushing once a week. Not a trivial task. Also, Raddy wasn’t a fully passive design as it incorporated fans.

So, the new PC and Raddy share a lot of the same components, particularly the performance parts like an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, and an Aorus Pro B850 motherboard.

The new build used a trio of radiators in different sizes, ranging from large to very large. They were arranged above the heat-generating components, taking advantage of what Felix describes as a convection chimney effect.

For about the next 30 minutes of the video, we get to witness the skills behind the Billet Labs build process. The main stages roughly consisted of building the platform (based on an 8mm aluminum plate), mounting the PC parts, adding cooling, and then plumbing. From about 33 minutes in, we get to see the new living room gaming PC fire up Windows 11 for the ‘first time,’ and performance / thermal testing commences.

Felix isn’t satisfied with the silence of the building at first. So he had to turn off the motherboard fan and also adjust the pump speed to 80%. The machine was then tested until temperatures began to level off, over various workloads. Testing began with idling for half an hour, playing Peggle for a while, and then running Cinebench for half an hour. Things got serious as Halo 3 was fired up for a session. In the real gaming tests (Halo 3, Expedition 33, Cyberpunk 2077), the GPU never thermal throttled, but the CPU would a little as it hit 95 °C or more.

More stress testing was initiated, culminating in running Cinebench and FurMark simultaneously. This pulled over 450W of power and brought the radiator water temps up to 60C+, which is the maximum rated level for the pump. A throttling CPU was observed again in these tests. A full table of tests, power output, and temperatures is shared in the Reddit post embedded below.

Fan-less gaming PC - 5080/9800x3d/32gb/2tb - Yes I’ll probably add fans next from r/pcmasterrace

In conclusion, Felix reckons passive water cooling alone isn’t really enough for a powerful modern gaming rig. Even a single case fan would probably be enough to make a world of difference. So, stay tuned for a follow-up video where you can see how the same Billet Labs PC performs with a 120mm fan atop, pulling air upwards, accelerating that chimney effect.

For anyone who has built their own PC, you probably know that incredible feeling of accomplishment when you finish. For an enthusiast, there’s just nothing like it. Flipping on the power switch, then pressing the power button on the case, and that sense of relief once you actually see the BIOS screen and watch it all come to life, accompanied by a swathe of RGB lighting illuminating the chassis like a warehouse rave.

There's the added benefit of hearing the machine finally take its first breaths, the fans spin up, creating a rush of air through your case. But then there’s that ever-constant hum in the background of those fans and the wind noise and other vibrations that make up the whole of the noise coming from your PC.

There are a few people out there, masochists perhaps, who don’t care about noise. The rest of us strive to have a quiet PC. Why a silent PC, some may ask? A silent PC helps with immersion if you’re a gamer, or can improve productivity by not being a loud distraction. You may be thinking, “I’ll just buy quiet fans and be OK.” And, in part, you’re not wrong.

But noise comes from a variety of sources. Be it fans on your case or on your AIO/CPU Air Cooler, a video card, or even chipsets and VRM heatsinks; fans are everywhere. There’s also noise from hard drives, pumps in an AIO or custom loop coolers, the ever-annoying coil whine, and even resonant vibrations from the chassis.

The good news is that, aside from coil whine, everything else is something you can mitigate in some fashion. Unfortunately, coil whine is something you simply have to tolerate, unless you want to apply clear nail polish to the chokes/inductors. You may be able to RMA the product due to coil whine, but you could be in the same boat after if it's a problem that plagues you later down the line.

Noise in your PC is, in fact, a byproduct of heat and airflow, and achieving the quietest PC possible requires balancing multiple competing factors. You also have to consider the tone versus loudness. Specific frequencies, like the high-pitched squeal of the chokes, can be more unappealing than lower-frequency noises. Building a quiet PC is not just about fans and buying better parts, but about working within the physical limits of your setup and figuring out how much money you’re willing to spend on silence.

Why it's challenging: the physics problem

The higher your processor or video card’s TDP/TBP (Thermal Dynamic Power/Total Board Power), the louder it gets, or the more cooling area you need to keep things quiet. The more powerful a system is, the more headwinds you face to keep it cool and prevent thermal throttling. In other words, it requires more effort to remove the heat from a fire-breathing 600W RTX 5090 and a 200W Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 than it does from a 250W RTX 5070 and a 120W Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

Thermal density on the dies themselves has also increased dramatically over the last several years. As more transistors are packed into a tiny space and stacked on top of each other, it becomes physically harder to remove the amount of heat generated within the same space. Because of this and other factors, keeping today’s high-end processors at or below their throttling points has become increasingly difficult, requiring larger coolers and more airflow to keep them running at peak performance.

Ideally, you want laminar airflow where air moves uniformly, parallel, and in the same direction at a constant velocity, but that’s nearly impossible inside a PC case. Moving air creates turbulence, which generates sound. Turbulence in fans can come from many sources, including the shape of the blades and the air passing over them, as well as being in front of or behind mesh panels, grills, heatsinks, or radiators. In short, when airflow encounters obstructions, it becomes audible as it weaves through and around them. There’s also the consideration of how multiple fans react together. If some are running at slightly different speeds, they can produce a rhythmic, off-putting resonance.

Since we know that more power and performance mean more heat, and that fans need to move more air to cool, more airflow means louder operation. And there lies the rub. If you cherish silence more than anything, something has to give. Between high-performance, cooling, and silence, you need to pick two. One will almost always be compromised for another.

Another noteworthy point is that diminishing returns of silence are also very real. While in general it’s easy to reduce noise from loud to moderate, it’s harder to go from moderate to very quiet, and even more difficult to move from very quiet to ‘near silent.’ Each small improvement requires disproportionately more effort, compromise, or cost. Massive AIOs or custom water-cooling loops aren’t cheap, and most silent fans and cases aren't either.

What can you do about it?

The first thing to be reminded of at this point is that it’s all a balancing act. You can only make a machine that outputs 750W so quiet without thermal throttling, losing performance, or spending a lot of cash. Therefore, setting your expectations is key, especially if you’re running a high-power machine. Even though it can be an uphill battle with some hardware, there are ways to get a quieter PC, at a cost or for free, even if your PC matches the output of a personal space heater. The good news is that everything below applies to any machine, be it an HTPC or a monster full-tower gaming rig.

What you can do for free

One of the first things you can do without spending any money is clean out the dust in your case, especially your dust filters, and from the components, like the CPU and GPU heatsinks and power supply intake. The more they get clogged with dust, the less air passes through to cool your system, lowers usable thermal dissipation surface area, and the more turbulent (and louder) the airflow can get, and the faster your fans need to spin to keep temperatures down.

Case placement is another factor you can easily change and matters for both dust and noise. Under the desk, or further from ear level, is ideal, so long as it’s not sitting directly on carpet (the worst place for dust!) and has access to cool air for the intakes. Proper cable management also helps, though it is often a minor detail, as most cables are tied up in the back and out of the way of fast airflow.

Another good way to reduce noise is to optimize your PC’s airflow and adjust your fan speeds. If you can run them slower, adjust it via the BIOS or through your motherboard’s software, like Armory Crate, Gigabyte Control Center, etc., and keep an eye on temperatures afterward to make sure you’re not starving any components for cool air. In the linked article, we discuss the importance of airflow, the good and bad of positive versus negative air pressure, and how to achieve those states, and it is, without a doubt, worth a full read.

At a high level, intake CFM (Cubic Feet /Minute - it’s not just fan count!!) greater than exhaust CFM is a positive-pressure environment, while more CFM exiting the case than coming in yields a negative-pressure environment. There are pros and cons to both configurations, but positive-pressure tends to be the most commonly used.

With positive airflow, the increased ‘pressure’ inside forces air out of the exhaust fans and vents, preventing dust from entering through cracks and crevices. Positive pressure is ideal for preventing dust build-up. It makes sense to use it with a high-airflow case with front mesh, a tower air cooler, and optimal for blower-style graphics cards, as it creates a balanced airflow pattern inside your chassis and keeps the temps of your core components in check.

Negative pressure is the opposite, where, at the cost of increased dust inside your chassis, it’s getting air out of the case at a greater rate. It’s good for preventing hotspots due to the vacuum effect, to use with restrictive front panels, and for small-form-factor PCs where clean airflow is hard to come by. It can even offer lower video card temperatures in specific cases, such as a restricted front panel, where heat is quickly removed from the chassis.

On the hardware side of things, starting from your CPU, you can adjust the voltage, called Vcore, through your BIOS or via overclocking software to use less power under load. Typically, you do this by using an offset that reduces voltage globally across all speeds and loads. On many AMD processors, this is even a good way to get more performance, as you can undervolt and overclock, raising the CPU multiplier for higher boost clocks. For many Zen 4 and Zen 5-based processors, you can often undervolt by 10-20mv and still boost your peak clock speed by 100-200 MHz.

On my personal Ryzen 9 9900X3D, I achieved a stable -15 mV undervolt and a +200 MHz overclock. It isn’t a night-and-day difference performance-wise, but if we can get more from less, why not? Obviously, your mileage may vary, but this reduced the maximum load temperature by several degrees and lowered the part's power consumption by up to 2%.

You can also limit your GPU's power usage by manually adjusting the voltage, the voltage curve, or by lowering the power limit. I find it easier to lower the power limit on very powerful and power-hungry cards, since it's a simple slider. You can also set an FPS limit to match your monitor’s refresh rate, so the card won’t try to produce any frames past that limit, whether it’s 120, 165, 180, or 240 Hz, thus saving power.

For example, I set a couple of my games, mainly esports titles, to a 240 FPS limit, and with my graphics card, an RTX 5090, it rarely breaks 400W. Whereas, when left to its own devices, it will try to output every frame it can, and use the full 600W+ power budget, assuming you don’t have any other bottlenecks. Graphics cards also have variable-speed fans you can adjust via software (MSI Afterburner, for example), and this is another good way to hear the sounds of silence. But be careful here, as video cards will drop ‘boost bins’ as temperature rises until it’s below a threshold. The cooler your card, the longer it stays at maximum boost clocks.

Paying for the premium of silence

You can buy a new case with sound-dampening materials like the be Quiet! Silent Base 802 ($199.99) or other silent options such as the Dark Base Pro 901 ($199.90), Fractal Design Define 7 ($204.99), or even the old Antec P101 Slient, if you can find it. The downside of these cases is that you lose the front mesh and airflow, so if you have high-power components, the internals could run warmer than in a more free-flowing design, raising your internal temperatures and, thus, fan speeds and noise. If those options won’t work, you can take a look at our Best PC Cases article to see what we picked out across a wide variety of sizes.

Often, cheap stock fans that come with cases, especially off-brand chassis, are often noisey and inferior to those you purchase from popular quiet fan brands like Noctua, be quiet!, or Arctic. Buying quiet fans based on their specifications is a good start, physically, and will allow you to go from loud to moderate with just a little effort. Our Best PC Fans article can certainly help with that endeavor. If money is no object, we liked the Noctua NF-A12x25 G2 (2x @ $64.95, or one @ $34.95). If these are too expensive, our pick for best budget silence-optimized fans is the Arctic P120 Pro. Also, the larger the fan, the more air it can move, and generally quieter while moving the same amount of air.

When picking parts for your PC, you can choose quiet parts from the beginning, such as CPU coolers, like the Noctua NH-D15 Chromax.black ($129.95), the be quiet! Dark Rock Elite or Dark Rock Pro V (both are $84.90), or the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120SE ($39.90) for a budget-friendly air cooler option.

In the world of AIOs, one of the best for silence is the be quiet! Silent Loop 3 (360mm $129.50), or the budget Montech HyperFlow Silent (360mm $76.00 - though our review said it wasn’t the quietest on the market). If you need a high-performing AIO with silence in mind, the Corsair iCue Link Titan 360RX RGB AIO ($159.99) and its magnetic bearing dome fans had “chart-topping noise-normalized performance” and the “Lowest noise levels in common scenarios” according to our review. Custom water cooling is another way to reduce noise compared with air coolers or AIOs. While you can replace the fans on those devices, a custom loop lets you pick your own radiator, fans, and pump to optimize for performance, quiet, or a balance of both. While this cooling method costs more than the other options, you have complete control over the parts that make noise and greater control over the pump and fans. You can also expand it to add more radiators for more cooling capacity and reduced fan noise.

Major contributing parts to noise out of the way, other things matter too. When silence is golden for your build, consider moving to SATA-based SSDs to eliminate noise if you're using HDDs for anything other than cold storage, where they’re inactive/sleeping most of the time. Another potential upgrade that could save some decibels is your power supply. Most of these days run in a ‘hybrid’ mode, where the fan stays off until a certain temperature or load is reached. But the more efficient it is, think Gold/Platinum/Titanium 80 Plus or Cybenetics certifications, the better chance it remains silent at light to medium loads. The be quiet! Dark Power 13 ($111.90) is a solid choice for quiet operation and reliability. If that doesn’t work for you, please check out our Best Power Supplies guide for other options.

Takeaways

Building a quiet PC can be quite challenging, especially if you’re trying to make it ‘near-silent’, as there are many considerations that go into making something that quiet. If you have a power-hungry system, it’s going to be that much more difficult to knock off some decibels compared to a low-power system, as it has less heat to evacuate. Still, there are plenty of things you can do to improve your acoustic performance from obnoxious to tolerable without emptying your wallet or losing performance.

• Dust and clean out your case
• Adjust fan curves
• Undervolt your CPU or GPU
• Set FPS limits in your games
• Move your PC away from ear-level
• $ - Rubber isolation for fans/HDD/pumps
• $$ - Upgrade to a more efficient power supply
• $$$ - Replace fans/coolers/case with ‘silent’ models

In the end, making a quiet PC isn’t as easy as slapping “silent” fans in your case and calling it a day, though that is a start. Every watt of power your system uses becomes heat, and that heat has to go somewhere. Between fan turbulence, pumps, vibration, coil whine, and even the way air moves through the mesh on your case, countless factors are working against true silence.

The reality is that building a quiet PC is one massive tightrope walk, balancing performance, acoustics, and cooling. The closer you get to silence, the more effort, money, and compromise it tends to require. You may never eliminate noise, especially with today’s high-powered hardware. Still, with the right expectations, some tuning, and perhaps a bit of cash, you can turn an obnoxiously loud system into something more pleasing to the ear.

My PC has a decent case with decent parts. When I think of boutique builds, they have top-of-the-line specs with cases perfectly coated with automotive-quality paint. The revamped Maingear MG-1 in the new MK.II chassis straddles the line, with options for up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 and AMD Ryzen 9950X3D2 in a chassis that has personalization options but doesn't look like it belongs in a street race.

In our configuration, with the top CPU and GPU, that leads to a build that costs over $7,000 (that's the case for the high end on the best gaming PCs these days), though this system starts at $2,249. There are a ton of options, but the system is always a pretty standard case with a tempered-glass window and a customizable face plate. It makes for a system that you wish you'd built, but without all of the bells and custom tubing whistles that some boutique systems get into.

Design of the Maingear MG-1 (2026)

The Maingear MG-1's new chassis, the MK.II, is a very standard mid-tower. It's rectangular without too many frills. It's a black aluminum box with a window on the left-side panel with ample views of the components, RGB lighting, and very clean cable management, thanks largely in part to the motherboard's rear-side connectors. Other than the blue power button on the top to serve as an accent, it's pretty standard.

That is, except for the magnetic front panel. It's not dissimilar to the one from the original MG-1, but this one has a curved scoop around it that diffuses RGB lighting and makes it easier to replace with other custom panels that Maingear would be happy to sell you. It's also shorter, with room for your hand to slide underneath to easily pull it off to replace or clean. It's a pretty nifty system.

The 18.78 x 19.65 x 9.06-inch chassis is noticeably larger than the previous one, which was 19 x 16.88 x 8.13 inches. That extra width makes it more likely to end up on the floor than on a desk.

The front panel is in front of three 140 mm intake fans, the bottom of which sends air beneath the GPU. Another fan is located at the back of the PC to let hot air out of the case. Our review unit also has Maingear's 360 mm CPU liquid cooler doubling as an exhaust. The front intakes are behind a dust filter. Another magnetic filter is on top, above the radiator. Another filter, with a convenient handle, is beneath the power supply on the bottom of the case.

Our MG-1 review unit came with MSI Center preinstalled, which is where you would adjust the RGB lighting (most of the motherboards available are from MSI, with the exception of one Asus X870E option). While our motherboard itself didn't have any, the app was able to change the fans, a lightstrip built into the case, the RAM, and the face plate. The GPU's lighting can only be white, which is a limitation of the Founders Edition.

The case itself is just fine. It's not as premium as the ones that Maingear sells using premium auto-paint. If you go for a high-end model here, you're doing it for the parts on the inside.

Maingear MG-1 (2026) Specifications

The price as configured isn't a massive markup over doing it yourself. When I put together a build with similar parts (the GPU, cooler, fans, and case weren't exact, as some of those are Maingear branded and the 5090 FE wasn't for sale), it came out to $6,597.02 at the time of writing. That's not bad, considering this is built so nicely.

Ports and Upgradeability on the Maingear MG-1 (2026)

The front panel of the Maingear MG-1's new MK.II chassis doesn't have as many ports as I would like. There's a single USB-A port and USB-C port, along with a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The USB-C port seemingly fits in where a USB-A port would usually go. Maingear is actually down one port from its previous model, which had two Type-A ports. It's a significant downgrade in my eyes, and I wish Maingear kept the old port layout. Otherwise, there's a power button and a reset button.

The ports on the back of the rig are entirely dependent on your motherboard. Our review unit came with an MSI MAG X870E Tomahawk Max WiFi PZ with a plethora of USB-A ports, a few USB-C ports, as well as Ethernet, audio, and HDMI connectors. Your video outputs will be based on the GPU. The RTX 5090 Founders edition has one HDMI port and three DisplayPorts. Most Nvidia GPUs have this same layout, but it’s always worth double-checking.

The inside of the new MG-1 is immaculate. From the glass side panel, there are almost no cables. Sure, you can see the GPU connector (our review unit included braided black extension cables to class things up), the tubing for the AIO, and a single stray cable from the CPU cooler's pump stretching through a grommet to the back. But that's it, because the motherboard uses backside connectors. You'll also see here that the GPU is supported by a bracket (it appears to be 3D printed) screwed into the case.

The backside is a really clean job. Everything is tied up nicely and out of the way. While I could nitpick that a few of the motherboard connectors are blocked by the job, I can't think of a way you would better wire this case. I certainly couldn't do something this nice on my own. The back also features a sled behind the motherboard where you can mount three 2.5-inch drives.

Below the main chamber, the PSU is out of the way. Extra cables are included with the system for modular power supplies, but Maingear didn't jam them underneath, which I appreciate. There's also a sled for larger hard drives, should you still like to use spinning metal.

It would be a big shame to cut open this cable management job, but since everything in this prebuilt is totally standard, you'd be able to make any upgrades you want. Our system doesn't need much in the way of upgrades right now, other than possible storage or RAM.

Gaming and Graphics on the Maingear MG-1 (2026)

Like most systems paired with the most powerful consumer graphics card you can buy, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 paired with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, the new MG-1 tears through most of our graphics benchmarks.

I used the system to continue my playthrough of Resident Evil Requiem, and it was the most visually impressive way I've played the game so far. With these high-end components, I set the resolution to 4K with path tracing and hair strand effects on. I had the game scan the system to prioritize quality, relying on mostly high settings. I turned off frame-gen to see just what the raw metal could do, but the game mandated upscaling.

It was impressive. As Leon, traversing rooftops and covering Grace during a sniper mission, the MG-1 ran the game between 65 and 75 frames per second. It did dip to around 55 FPS during big explosions and fire effects as he approached the chapel after taking out all of the infected zombies outside. Maingear's fans were definitely audible, but they weren't at such a roar that a half-decent headset couldn't cover them.

Notably, Maingear came out significantly ahead on every single test at 1080p, though in 4K, the systems were mostly even. Where a system fell behind, it was usually the Intel-based Alienware.The Maingear was typically the top performer, but where it wasn't, like in Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4K, it was only by 1 or 2 frames — effectively within the margin of error.If you're looking to play games in 4K, this system will do it, and then some.

To stress test systems, we run Metro Exodus at RTX settings 15 times in a row to simulate about half an hour of gaming. Here, the MG-1 averaged 188.39 FPS and was consistent across the runs. The CPU cores averaged 4.6 GHz with a temperature of 59.7 degrees Celsius, while the GPU ran at 2,420.25 MHz and at 68.12 C.

Productivity Performance on the Maingear MG-1 (2026)

Unsurprisingly, a gaming rig that costs over $7,000 with an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D2, 32GB of RAM, and a fast 2TB SSD is also quite good at everyday tasks.

On Geekbench 6, the MG-1's 9950X3D2 notched a single-core score of 3,574 and a multi-core score of 23,741. Those were slightly ahead of the 9950X3D in the Alienware Area-51.The Alienware Area-51 with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K had the lowest single-core score (3,148) while the HP Omen Max 45L's Ryzen 9 9900X3D was lowest in multi-core.

The PCIe 5 SSD in the Maingear was speedy, copying 25GB of files at a rate of 2,782.43 MBps. The Alienware Area-51 with 9950X3D, however, was one of the fastest prebuilts we've seen, at 3,414.29 MBps.The Maingear MG-1 transcoded a 4K video to 1080p in one minute and 32 seconds, the fastest of the bunch, followed by the AMD-based Area-51.

Software and Warranty on the Maingear MG-1 (2026)

Outside of the clean build, one of Maingear's largest benefits is that you avoid a lot of the excess software found on a lot of prebuilt systems.

The Maingear only came with the necessities. MSI Center was onboard, which is necessary to control the RGB lighting. It also allows for basic performance monitoring.Otherwise, our review rig came with system software from AMD and Nvidia, the major silicon manufacturers. There was no bloatware, no trials, no garbage.Windows 11 does have some of its own bloat, like putting a shortcut to LinkedIn in the Start Menu, but that's not an issue Maingear can fix.

Maingear sells the MG-1 with a one-year hardware warranty on top of the manufacturer's warranty on the components. The company also promises lifetime customer support. A 2-year warranty is an extra $99, while a 3-year extension costs $199.

Maingear MG-1 (2026) Configurations

We tested the Maingear MG-1 in an extremely high-end configuration, including an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D2, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. You can see the exact parts list in the table above, but it all added up to approximately $7,067 in Maingear's configurator.

It's worth noting that the SSD in our system, the Samsung 9100 Pro, isn't available on Maingear's site as of this writing. A Maingear rep told us that "we unfortunately had to pull that from the configurator due to supply shortages." In our pricing, we used the most expensive 2TB SSD Maingear currently offers, the XPG Mars 980 Pro.

Maingear offers the MG-1 as a quickship option with 10 prebuilt options. The base model, the MG-1 Ruby, starts with an RTX 5060 Ti, Intel Core Ultra 5 225F, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage. The top-end MG-1 Ultimate features our CPU and GPU, but goes up to 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD storage. Configurator models start a bit cheaper thanks to the option for an RTX 5060.

Most gamers don't need to add the Ryzen 9950X3D2 in a gaming rig. As we found in our review of the chip, it matches the Ryzen 7 9800X3D in most games and is slightly slower than the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, a chip that is $400 less on the market and $633 less in Maingear's configurator. If you're doing some specialized data science, by all means, it may help. But for gamers, that's an easy place to save money, even on a high-end rig.

Custom MG-1 builds are eligible for Maingear's BYO RAM program. So if you have a few DIMMs just sitting around or you happen to find some on a miracle of a sale, you could send them to Maingear for integration into the system.

Bottom Line

The new MG-1, in a larger case with more airflow than its predecessor, can offer seriously strong performance if you choose the right parts. The Ryzen 9950X3D2 and RTX 5090 tore through our benchmark suite. As usual, Maingear delivers on the boutique build front. I couldn't manage cables this nicely if I tried. I wouldn't mind if the case were a bit more heavy duty, but it does the job well enough with the exception of its paltry front panel port selection.

Maingear offers a ton of configurable options, so you can really make this PC your own. That does, however, make it tough to compare the fact that you could get this same case with an RTX 5060 and an RTX 5090. Some issues I have at $7,000 aren't a problem when you spend $2,000.

You buy this type of PC so that it feels like you built it, even if you didn't. This one is built more nicely than I could, with power I could only dream of. But I might pick a slightly different case with more ports if I had the money to buy a PC with specs this nice.

Apple, arguably the largest phone and computer manufacturer in the world, isn’t immune to the chip shortage, as it once again reduced the highest memory capacity available for the Mac Studio and Mac Mini. Apple's Mac Studio could be configured with up to 512GB of Unified Memory at launch, which is more than enough for professional usage and local AI applications.

Now, if you visit the Apple Store, you can only purchase the Mac Studio with a maximum of 96GB of Unified Memory, while the Mac mini is only available with up to 48GB (down from 64GB).

Apple's Unified Memory architecture has become popular for running local AI models and agentic AI applications like OpenClaw. When the latter exploded in popularity in early 2026, many AI developers and enthusiasts jumped at the opportunity to acquire a small PC with a very high memory pool. This resulted in a shortage that pushed delivery times from six days to six weeks.

This situation, combined with the global memory chip shortage, has forced Apple to discontinue the 512GB SKU and increase the price of the 256GB upgrade to $2,000 in early March. However, the increase in price did not dissuade buyers, as company chief Tim Cook warned during the company’s latest earnings call that supplies for both the Mac Studio and Mac mini could remain constrained for months.

Despite the increased prices and the removal of higher-capacity versions, delivery times for both the Mac Studio and Mac Mini haven’t improved. The M4 Max Mac Studio with 64GB of Unified Memory can take six to seven weeks to deliver, while all other configurations, including the 36GB and 96GB variants, can take between nine and 10 weeks. Prospective buyers of the M4 Mac mini with 16GB of Unified Memory may fare slightly better, with a three-to-four-week delivery window; this worsens to 10 to 12 weeks if you upgrade the memory to 24GB or 48GB.

We’re also starting to see shortages affect high-capacity MacBooks. While 24GB and lower-capacity MacBook Air laptops are still thankfully readily available, you need to wait about two to three weeks if you want the 32GB version. 48GB versions and up of the MacBook Pro also now entail a wait of one to two weeks, while even the budget MacBook Neo, which became insanely popular among students and entry-level buyers, takes around two to three weeks to deliver.

Cook said during the company’s first earnings call of 2026 that the company is chasing memory supply and that it will have a greater impact on its Q2 earnings. We’re now feeling the brunt of the shortage, as we see Macs, high-capacity MacBooks, and the entry-level MacBook Neo experience extended delivery times. Thankfully, mid-range buyers can still easily acquire the standard iMac, entry-level MacBook Airs, and MacBook Pros.

You’ve probably seen a few examples of PC DIYers installing figurines in their elaborate, RGB-infused fishtank builds. Chinese TechTuber Soda Baka has scaled this phenomenon up to create a tower PC large enough for a human to work and play inside. What looks like a figurine in some of these PC pictures is actually the TechTuber posing. The video is shared on China’s Bilibili.

We aren’t 100% sure of the purpose of this build, other than spectacle, due to things getting lost in translation. However, a short skit in the video (machine translated) indicates the build was influenced by Baka’s little cousin being barked at by his mom “You play computer games all day, why don’t you just live in a computer!” Something like that.

We also get the feeling this is a canny video sponsorship deal as air conditioners start to become highly desirable, now that we are moving into warmer months in the Northern Hemisphere.

The human-habitable PC tower project gets underway with Soda Baka sketching and modeling before the construction begins in earnest. We see various huge components being fabricated, that look like case fans, GPUs, AiO CPU coolers, RAM sticks and so on. The TechTuber doesn’t forget to add splashes of RGB lighting, of course.

Some real-PC stuff is installed in the mega-PC, so there’s something to do once the side panel is put on… You can see Soda Baka sitting at a compact desk playing a game on the screen attached to the AiO – how modern.

Now things heat up, literally, as to simulate PC-scale heat at this large scale some hot-coal sauna installations are used. We see the TechTuber boosting the heat/humidity levels with a bottle of water. Apparently it doesn’t take long for the enclosed computer room (in the PC) temperatures to rise above 100°F (38 degrees Celsius).

Because all the huge fans and coolers are fake, our trapped TechTuber has to turn on the installed 12kW AC unit, which boasts 820m³/hr air circulation to cool the ‘PC system.’ Quickly enough the atmosphere changes to become “like a spring evening in the North [of China].” Was it all an elaborate Midea 3^rd Gen Pro AC unit sponsorship promotional video? Maybe it was.

Amazon’s data centers in Bahrain and the UAE have been hit multiple times by drone and missile strikes from Iran since the U.S. started bombing the country in February 2026. This left the company’s ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 disrupted, with the AWS Health Dashboard indicating that it will take months before they can go back online.

“The Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) has suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East and is currently unable to reliably support customer applications,” Amazon said in its latest update. “While some workloads continue to function normally, we strongly recommend customers migrate all accessible resources to other Regions and restore inaccessible resources from remote backups as soon as possible. Relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations in this AWS Region. This process is expected to take several months.”

These sites were first hit in early March, a few days after the U.S. started its bombing campaign on Iran. A few weeks after that, AWS Bahrain was hit once more, this time by drone strikes, further disrupting operations. The last reported strike happened in early April, putting several zones into a “hard down” status. Although both sites remain partially operational, it seems that Amazon has refrained from billing customers who used these servers and continues to encourage them to move to other regions and avoid further disruption due to the conflict.

Even if the missile and drone strikes haven’t completely leveled the two data centers, Amazon is still on the hook for months of repairs. Aside from these direct hits, the shockwave and post-explosion fires they caused have compounded the damage to the sensitive equipment used in these sites. The company also reported that fire suppression systems have caused flooding and water damage to various equipment, while cooling systems have suffered from mechanical failures.

There’s currently an uneasy truce in the area, as the two parties are at the negotiating table trying to end the war. However, hostilities could resume at any time, especially as the U.S. and Iran cannot agree on several points, making it risky for Amazon to start repairs right now. But even then, the ongoing chip shortages could make it harder for the company to get the components it needs to get these services up and running again, unless they have backup servers in their inventory ready to be deployed if peace in the region has been achieved.

Speaking during Apple’s second fiscal quarter 2026 earnings call, CEO Tim Cook warned that supplies of the company’s Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops could remain constrained for months. According to Cook, surging demand driven by artificial intelligence workloads outpaces Apple’s manufacturing capacity.

The surge comes amid growing interest in “local AI,” where models run directly on personal machines rather than on remote cloud servers. Privacy concerns, latency reductions, and rising cloud inference costs have pushed many developers and companies toward on-device AI processing.

Cook’s warning marks one of the clearest signs yet that the AI boom is beginning to reshape the personal computer market in ways that extend beyond traditional GPU manufacturers like Nvidia. The comments also officially confirm our report that some Mac models were facing significant shortages and shipping delays, primarily driven by an "ordering frenzy" for high-memory configurations, spurred by demand to run local AI agents, such as the "OpenClaw" mode.

Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio have become particularly attractive for AI development because of the company’s Apple Silicon architecture. Unlike conventional desktop systems that separate CPU and GPU memory, Apple’s unified memory architecture allows AI models to access large pools of shared high-bandwidth memory more efficiently. This makes the systems especially useful for running local large language models, AI agents, and inference workloads.

The higher-end Mac Studio configurations can also be equipped with massive amounts of unified memory, allowing developers to run increasingly large AI models directly on desktop hardware. Combined with relatively low power consumption, the systems have gained popularity among AI developers seeking alternatives to expensive server-grade hardware.

Industry observers have noted rising interest in Apple desktops from AI enthusiasts over the past year. Online developer communities have increasingly discussed using Mac Studio systems for running open-source AI models locally, particularly as demand for high-end AI GPUs continues to strain global supply chains.

Apple’s supply warning also arrives during broader pressure across the semiconductor industry. Advanced chip packaging technologies and high-bandwidth memory production have already been strained by soaring demand for AI infrastructure. Several semiconductor firms have warned of prolonged shortages tied to AI-related manufacturing bottlenecks.

The constraints may also reflect Apple’s growing ambitions in artificial intelligence. The company has been steadily expanding its AI strategy following the introduction of Apple Intelligence across its ecosystem. While Apple has historically emphasized on-device AI processing for privacy and efficiency reasons, the recent surge in demand for its desktop systems could further strengthen its position in the emerging local AI computing market.

The shortages could persist for “several months,” according to Cook, suggesting customers may face extended shipping delays for some Mac mini and Mac Studio configurations.

The residents of a small town in Pennsylvania are currently amid a fight for their community, as data center developers have applied for permits to build six campuses within the area. The proposed data centers will be built in the town of Archbald, which has a population of just 7,000 people, and will include 51 data warehouses. The Washington Post reports that each of these data warehouses will be about the size of a Walmart Supercenter, all of which would encompass about 14% of the town’s 17-square-mile area. The Archbald town council approved zoning changes that allowed data centers back in 2023, but some of the people in the town of 7,000 have started pushing back on these developments when they started applying for permits in 2025.

Archbald used to be at the epicenter of coal mining and transportation in the area. However, it has since turned into a quiet town with the decline of the coal industry in the early 1900s, which is why many were surprised by the developers’ interest in putting up data centers in the area.

But because a main power line cuts directly through the town, data centers would have easier access to the power they need without needing to invest significantly in grid infrastructure. The 500-kV Susquehanna-Roseland power line connects the 2.5-gigawatt Susquehanna nuclear power plant to New Jersey and goes directly over Archbald. When paired with the abundant land and fresh water available in the area, it just made sense for AI hyperscalers to build their infrastructure where the resources they need are readily available.

The community is passionately pushing back against these developments, though. Many are concerned about the effects of these sites on local utilities, as well as their potential for noise and light pollution. Communities neighboring data centers have started complaining of higher electricity rates and reduced power quality, and it has gotten to the point that President Donald Trump personally asked hyperscalers to promise that they’ll take steps to address the issue via the “ratepayer protection pledge.” Nevertheless, it seems that these commitments aren’t enough, as many local governments have started pushing back on these projects, resulting in delays costing billions of dollars.

The community’s fight against data centers in Archbald has gotten so heated to the point that four out of the seven town council members have resigned from their positions, alongside several planning board members. Some of the former councilors said that they resigned because the attacks have started going personal, especially on social media, and also cited the shooting of an Indiana politician’s home over another data center fight.

While the developers and the town government are grappling over permits, one project took advantage of a loophole and started cutting trees on their property. While this was a legal move, newly elected Archbald town council member Larry West stated that it revealed the town’s dirty past, which, according to The Washington Post, took decades for the coal dust to clear. “Now, it’s happening again, but this time, it’s data centers,” West said.

Maine Governor Janet Mills just vetoed a bill that would ban all new data center projects in the state. This moratorium applies to all data centers that exceed 20MW of consumption and would have halted all approvals until October 2027, while a state council studies their impact on the local power and water supply, as well as their effect on surrounding air quality. According to Bangor Daily News, the governor said she supported the temporary moratorium on this power-hungry infrastructure if the legislature exempted a site that’s already under construction in Jay, a town in Franklin County that sits around 60 miles north of Portland.

“A moratorium is appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates,” the Democrat governor said in a statement. “But the final version of this bill fails to allow for a specific project in [Jay] that enjoys strong local support from its host community and region.”

The site where the Jay data center is being built was once a paper mill that suffered a catastrophic accident, leading to its closure in 2023. It’s reported that the $550 million project will use existing infrastructure, limiting its impact on the electric grid and energy bills, while also contributing to Jay’s property tax revenue. Furthermore, it’s expected to create 800 construction jobs and open 100 additional high-paying permanent positions once the data center begins operations.

It’s reported that the Democratic governor has never had a veto overturned by the legislature, which is led by the same party. However, the Maine House of Representatives voted against the exemption, 115-29, which is more than enough to meet the two-thirds majority required to override Mills. Aside from disagreeing with the majority of the Maine Democratic Party, this also exposes her to a political challenge as she attempts to secure a nomination as the Democratic contender for a U.S. Senate seat, facing political newcomer Graham Platner.

Despite her move to block the bill, Mills said she will issue an executive order to create a state council to study the impact of data center projects in the state. She also signed a bill that put into law a measure preventing data center projects from taking advantage of the state’s business development tax incentive programs.

Residents and local governments have started pushing back against data center projects after many communities with nearby infrastructure have reported increased electricity costs and poor power quality. It has gotten so bad that President Donald Trump convened some of the biggest hyperscalers at the White House and made them promise to “pay their own way” for their electricity needs.

With AMD releasing its flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU, Alienware has become the first PC brand to debut the chip on its Area-51 gaming desktop. According to the company, it is the most powerful Alienware desktop that they have ever built powered by an AMD processor. Naturally, it doesn't come cheap with pricing starting at $4,449.99 for a config with AMD's new chip, but one has to consider the $900 MSRP of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2.

• Check out the Alienware Area-51 from Dell.com

In addition to the existing Ryzen 9000 series configurations, the Area-51 desktop lineup will offer the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 CPU, AMD’s most ambitious consumer desktop CPU. It features 16 cores, 32 threads, and a massive cache of 208MB, making it one of the best CPUs for gaming. The CPU will be paired with a standard ATX Alienware X870E motherboard available with up to 64GB of dual-channel DDR5 XMP memory at 6400 MT/s. For graphics, Alienware sticks with Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series, ranging from the RTX 5070 to the RTX 5090. Storage options include 1TB/2TB NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen 5 SSD or a 4TB NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen 4 SSD. Depending on the configuration, the Area-51 can be paired with either an 850W Gold or 1500W Platinum power supply, along with options for a 240mm or 360mm AIO liquid cooler.

We recently tested the Area-51 with top-of-the-line Intel and AMD configurations and found it to be a noteworthy improvement over the company’s previous gaming desktop offerings. It features a rather large 80-liter chassis measuring 22.4 x 24.04 x 9.12 inches (569 x 610.5 x 231.6 mm), with a ‘Lunar Silver’ finish and a glass side panel to showcase the internals. It uses standard PC hardware, meaning you’re not fully restricted to OEM parts if you plan to upgrade in the future. However, you may need to purchase a $35 adapter kit for the included AlienwareFX daughterboard.

There’s plenty of I/O available, including two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, and dedicated microphone-in and line-out ports at the front. At the back, there are two USB 4.0 Type-C ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, five USB 2.0 Type-A ports, and additional line-in, line-out, and SPDIF audio ports. The system also includes a Realtek RTL8125BG 2.5G Ethernet controller, along with a MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 wireless networking chip.

As expected from any Alienware product, there’s a large RGB light ring around the air intake, along with additional lighting inside the case. Apart from the included CPU liquid cooler, the case comes with dual 180mm fans at the front and two 140mm fans at the bottom.

The base configuration, priced at $4,299.99, includes a 1TB SSD, 32GB of RAM, an Nvidia RTX 5070, an 850W PSU, and a 240mm liquid cooler. That said, Alienware’s system configurator recommends opting for the 1500W PSU and 360mm liquid cooler combo, which bumps the price up to $4,449.99. At the top end, a fully maxed-out configuration can go all the way up to $7,049.99.

You might recall that we put out a call for our readers to submit their PCs over on the forums recently, and many of you responded. With dozens of entries and configs to choose from, we whittled down the list to a dozen of the best-of-the-best to crown a winner in the inaugural Tom's Hardware Premium Rig Rundown. There was a bevy of entrants, spanning from dedicated wall-mounted OpenClaw setups, all the way to PC's with all the screens and RGB you could shake a stick at.

Our panel of staff has reviewed your submissions, and we're ready to show you the shortlist that had us in awe. So, thanks to the dedicated community of enthusiasts and PC modders who showed us that dedicated PC building and PC modding are still well and truly alive in 2026, despite the best efforts of AI companies and hyperscalers pricing us mere mortals out of NAND and RAM.

So, without further ado, here are the builds that impressed us the most, with our lucky winner at the end of the article.

The PC Cruiser by MissMercedes

What do you do when you're a car expert and a PC enthusiast? Take an iconic Chrysler RC Car and turn it into a real, working computer, naturally. Car journalist MissMercedes did exactly that with the PC Cruiser.

A 1:6 scale RC car turns the chassis into a case, but with the nominal amount of space inside, some deep modifications were required by removing the rear seats of the PT Cruiser model to ensure that everything could fit inside. The next challenge was to find the components to actually fit inside. With a budget build in mind, MissMercedes found an Antec H310N ITX PC, sporting an Intel Core i5-9400, and 16GB of (presumably some kind of DDR4) RAM.

MissMercedes wanted to boast that the V8 moniker would also stand true for the number of cores inside, and so the CPU was later upgraded to an Intel Core i7-9700, with the motherboard supporting Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. After tossing in an NVMe SSD, it was off to the races.

One problem remained: the 90W power supply couldn't quite handle the heft of the upgraded CPU, and so MissMercedes locked the clock speed to 3 GHz. For a budget work computer, relying on integrated graphics is more than fine enough for a journalist (ask me how I know), so this build is designed for aesthetics, not pure computing heft.

Builder MissMercedes also has designs on upgrades in the future; Cooler Master's V-series coolers have an engine-like look, but were not yet available to purchase. Other potential additions include small speakers and a healthy dose of RGB. But, the most eyebrow-raising addition is the potential to add a battery, as the RC parts of the PT Crusiser chassis are still fully functional.

Our thoughts: The PC Cruiser

Andrew Freedman: I love seeing motherboards fit in unexpected chassis without requiring modification. That's my dream. I'm so glad that this exists for the sake of it, and that lots of other people could now go and just do it after seeing this.

Matthew Safford: This build gets points for its name alone! Not sure I'd love having to pop the hatchback every time I wanted to plug something into the rear ports, though. Can't wait to see what you do whenever Cooler Master gets around to releasing its new V-Series CPU coolers!

Stewart Bendle: This is awesome. Adding a personal touch by modding your PC in line with your hobby/career.

Joe Shields: Unique build for sure! Creativity is a '10' on this one. That said, I would have picked a different car for an even better 'cool' factor, but getting everything inside that little PT Cruiser RC car without any obvious modifications is an absolute win. Well done.

Brandon Hill: That's probably the coolest PT Cruiser that has ever existed. The battery upgrade would be a great addition to this rig.

Sayem Ahmed: Now, this is the exact kind of build that I wanted to see on Rig Rundown. Not everything has to have the best, newest, top-of-the-line specs, or have a set of Lian-Li's glowing power cables. Taking a lower-powered PC and stuffing the chassis into a pretty iconic car is great fun for a build. I love it. I don't think my aunt's old PT Cruiser was this cool.

The Master Center by DronePilot

DronePilot's setup is almost dizzying to get your head around. From the sheer number of screens, to simply imagining how to set this all up in the first place. Regardless, this is less of a rig and more of a command center. Sporting a 12th Gen PC, a Lenovo Legion Go, a Haswell-based Mini-PC, a 13th Gen Intel Laptop, and a 13th Gen HP ProDesk Mini all in one place, and to have it all work exactly the way you want it to, takes an astonishing amount of work.

It's not all about the PCs, though, as the setup also features a $500 speaker setup, a bevy of ports, full Cat5, routed through switches, and, indeed, runs underneath the house itself, offering you pretty much everything within arm's reach.

The setup also functions as a real-world call center and includes a KVM to manage the sheer number of systems (and the number of TVs and displays!) this rig offers. It's an appropriately complex setup that goes beyond the scope of many of our humble desks at Tom's Hardware.

The amount of effort that's gone into the Master Center is immediately apparent, which is why it made our shortlist.

Our thoughts: The Master Center

Paul Alcorn: I am a fan of huge monitors for productivity use cases; this is an awesome setup.

Matthew Safford: Love to see a TH reader who also uses a 55-inch TV as their main monitor. And there is plenty else to be impressed with here.

Is that an Intel 4th Gen Haswell Mini PC you've got running Windows 11? If so, kudos to your abilities, and for keeping a PC that is still useful out of the trash heap! If it does what you need it to do, it's still useful.

Joe Shields: I'm on the other side of large TVs for monitors... depends on the use case. High DPI or bust when you're sitting that close.

A mid-range system feels curious, but if it works for his purpose, it works! No need to overspend! Looks like you have command of darn near everything and the ability to easily access all systems. Well done!

Stewart Bendle: Definitely a fan of the command center. The warmest room in Winter.

Sayem Ahmed: DronePilot's Setup is mighty impressive. Everything from the frankly ludicrous number of screens, to the actual layout of the room itself is super-well considered. Special shout to the speaker setup too, it's a point that often goes missed in a lot of setups, but not this one.

The Wall-mounted masterpiece by SilenceIsGolden

When a lot of people make their PCs, they want them to stand the test of time. But, as technology moves on, it becomes inevitable that one day, you'll have to replace your beloved build. But, for SilenceIsGolden, who told their wife that this would be the only PC built in the next decade, they pulled out all of the stops.

The results are nothing less than beautiful, blacked-out and wall-mounted Antec Core P3 Pro in black serves as the ultimate commitment to a computer, designed to weather the storms of time itself. Featuring 96 GB of RAM, 8 TB of total NVMe storage, including a curious Intel Optane 900p 480GB drive, a rip-roaring 9950X3D, and RTX 4090, the computer is indeed no slouch.

Even more impressively, the entire system is custom-looped and water-cooled with a suite of AlphaCool waterblocks, covering the CPU, GPU, SSDs, EK Fittings, and D5 Next pump. This was complemented with a customized Thermaltake Core Pacific DP100 distro plate, which was painted black, with some custom heatsinks thrown on for aesthetics. Alongside a handful of finishing touches, like Lian-Li's light-up Strimer RGB power cables and Alienware AW3425DW OLED display to drive it all.

SilenceIsGolden's goal of building a silent, custom-looped build certainly looks the part, but they are still looking for a way to silence the Seasonic x Noctua Prime TX-1600's PSU coil whine. When fully mounted to the wall, and with the smart-looking RGB, this build certainly looks lovely and heavy.

Our thoughts: The Wall-mounted masterpiece

Sayem Ahmed: Silence is indeed Golden for this slick wall-mounted build. The blacked-out look is very nice, but it must be pretty hard to dust a semi-open-air case like this. I appreciate the dedication to water cooling here, too. While a lot of folks buy the glowing power cables to put some awful animation over it, this actually looks really nice. I would love to do something like this, but I would also live in fear of the PC falling and cleaning it. My only real worry is for the plaster on your walls.

Stewart Bendle: These dust magnets look very cool in a clean, minimalist room. The RGB and color choices work well.

Matthew Safford: It's great to see Intel's still impressive Optane 900p drive in a modern, powerful build. And I hope you picked up all 8.5TB of solid-state storage before prices started climbing last year!

Andrew Freedman: I've never been in love with the look of a Strimer, but I quite like the RGB on this one. It looks like the electricity is flowing out of the walls and through the rig.

Joe Shields: Wall-mounted builds always get the nod in my book. This one takes it to the next level with the matching water cooling ecosystem and overall clean appearance. The high-end hardware complements the build well.

The Home Arcade by Destruk

Who hasn't dreamed of reliving the glory days of gaming with a dedicated at-home arcade setup? Modern emulation has gotten to the point where it is a reality, and with a bit of love and effort, you can get your own arcade-perfect setup at home. Destruk's home arcade gaming machine sets out to do just that.

Sporting an Intel Core i7-14700K, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, a staggering 10TB in NVMe SSD storage, alongside a total 72TB in HDD storage, this setup is an arcade archivist's dream. Powering all the graphical heft of emulating MAME and CPS3 is an RTX 4060, which should do that job without so much as breaking a sweat. But the real beauty in this arcade setup is in the peripherals, of course.

A pair of Sinden Lightguns can emulate the arcade shooters of old, in addition to dual Atari Sixer joysticks, running through a serial to USB interface, two Atari Paddle controllers, two DualShock 3's, A Kensington Orbit Trackball, a Quickshot 2 joystick powering all the 90s action, in adition to two spinners, and two eight-button traditonal Noir Arcade layouts, complimented by a pair of eight-way joysticks and buttons, Skylanders Portal, and a Commodore 1541 disk drive. The arcade unit by GameRoomSolutions is wrapped in Gatchaman artwork, a nod to the classic anime, and whose cast features in the 2008 arcade fighter Tatsunoko vs Capcom.

This is all seemingly organized chaos, and it looks excellent. With the setup powered by a staggering 65-inch Roku TV, Destruk explains that the total cost of this setup came to less than $4,000, built before the RAMpocalypse. Somehow, Destruk still has three USB ports left and is planning to add a racing wheel and pedals.

Our thoughts: Home Arcade

Joe Shields: Yes, please. I always wanted a stand-up arcade game in my basement. The standup console with the buttons and the accessories on the wall is impressive.

Andrew Freedman: Do you have 'The Simpsons'? Can I come over and play 'The Simpsons'?

This system is prepared for everything. Lightguns? Atari joysticks? PS3 controllers (my least favorite PlayStation controller, but hey, not my rig!)? The Skylanders Portal of Power? That's dedication to playing games the way the developers intended.

Stewart Bendle: Everyone should have a home arcade. It should be mandatory. This is a sweet little construction that would certainly keep me entertained for days.

Sayem Ahmed: I have a real soft spot for emulation machines, and this feels like the natural conclusion of what I would want to achieve. It's great to see that the arcade spirit is alive and kicking, with a pair of Sinden Lightguns at the ready if you ever want to run through Point Blank or any other number of arcade classics at home. The mention of attaching a racing setup to this is interesting. I could use a bit of Outrun in my life. I'm also not sure how it's possible to work on 900 Pinball games, but if you can run Black Knight 2000 on there, I'll be at your door in a flash.

Manual Metal by Edman565 (Winner)

Manual Metal by Edman565 might be one of the wildest PC builds that we've ever seen at Tom's Hardware. Edman545's dedication to building the ultimate hard-lined, custom-looped build has collectively floored us.

From the images alone, we can see a total of 11 displays, and multiple devices powering Manual Metal, which has been named appropriately, as the build seeks to evoke the same feeling as tuning a manual car, with appropriate styling for the hard-lined steel pipes, and controlled via a custom built panel, with all of the switches and knobs you could want. Furthermore, the system has two radiators placed outdoors, for that extra cooling boon.

To get to the meat and potatoes of the build itself, we're looking at a Ryzen 9 9950X3D, alongside an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, 128 GB of DDR5 RAM, and a total of 3.5 TB of NVMe storage. But, the more impressive part of all this is the cooling setup, which is powered by a total of ten Noctua Industrial F12 fans, two PrimoChill radiators, a Thermaltake Pacific W8 on the CPU, an AlphaCool Core Swift on the GPU, dual-looped Bykski PWM pumps and reservoirs, and custom stainless steel tubing and valves.

Aside from the dizzying number of displays, there's enterprise-grade networking involved here too, with an Intel X550-T2 Dual 10GB/s PCIe adapter, a dedicated Creative Sound Blaster, and a Game Capture card too.

The cooling setup here is by far one of the most impressive things about this build: "I commissioned a custom mount for the reservoirs. I used two so that it can be configured as two loops, depending on which valves are open. Being the only clear part of this system, I can tell the water is flowing by the vortex created when the pumps are cranking," said Edman565.

They also noted that one pump could easily power the system, but installing two allowed for manual adjustment of the flow rate for the outdoor loop. Even more impressive, the custom control panel evokes a classic fighter-jet feeling, which was entirely custom-made just for Manual Metal. It's pretty astonishing and resulted in a near-unanimous win for our panel.

Our thoughts: Manual Metal

Matthew Safford: Love seeing those old Dell 4:3 monitors (which I remember using in my college's library) put to good use! There's so much impressive customization going on here, I don't even know where to begin.

Andrew Freedman: Sometimes, you just have to drop your hands in admiration that someone has done something that you will never have the skills, space, or insurance coverage to do. The PC is incredible, but I'm wowed by the home improvement work.

Joe Shields: Wow. This is. Wow. If I wasn't married with two kids, it's how I would do it. Custom controller, outside cooling, 3D printed parts. Absolutely amazing setup, even if some of the screens are 4:3.

Sayem Ahmed: I think we have our winner, folks. This is really one of the most impressive systems that I've seen to date. The control panel not only looks cool, but serves as an excellent way to measure things in an analog-like way without resorting to a screen, which is frankly, more boring, and way less cool than this.

I cannot imagine the number of man-hours that it took to build Manual Metal. Everything from the fluid paths to the cable management and sheer amount of effort and love radiating from this system is everything an enthusiast should aspire to.

DIY forever.

Well done to Edman565 for winning Rig Rundown with the astonishing Manual Metal build. We'll be in contact with you shortly.

Passive PCs are great for those who like to keep background noise to a minimum in their work environments. Traditionally, passive designs have leaned towards the adoption of ‘quiet’ visual designs, too. But that doesn’t have to be the case, as the new Kubb Mini range demonstrates (h/t Fanless Tech). These compact 3-inch cubes are priced at $500 (€430) and come in some rather vivid red, orange, green, and blue options - as well as staid old black or white.

Well, you can make up your own mind about the compact design and visual appeal of the Kubb Minis. But also please see how minuscule these devices are, given the context of the human hand PR shot (in the gallery below).

Beneath the colorful aluminum exterior

Passive cooling of these PCs isn’t the trickiest, as the CPU options have rather low TDPs. For example, the Intel Twin Lake N150 with 4C/4T and a top speed of 3.6 GHz has just a 6W processor base power. The Core i3 N300 CPU with 8C/8T and a top speed of 3.8 GHz has a slightly higher TDP at 7W. Both CPUs are fabbed at Intel 7 and have 6MB of Intel Smart Cache on board. Neither should be a challenge to a small passive cooling setup.

The $500 (€430) configuration of the Kubb Mini comes with the weaker N150 processor, but it isn’t barebones. The processor is supported by 16GB LPDDR5-4800 RAM, a 256GB NVMe SSD, and Windows 11 Pro comes pre-installed. Opting for the Core i3 N300 CPU, with all else remaining equal, adds $105 (€90) to the checkout price. Neither config can add more than 16GB of RAM, but 512GB and 1TB storage options can be had for more of your hard-earned cash.

You don’t get oodles of connectivity, which isn’t a big surprise. What you do get is: Realtek RTL8111H 1 GbE, Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 + Bluetooth 5.2, 2 × USB 3.2, 2 × HDMI 2.0, 1 × USB 3.2, and 1 × audio 3.5mm. It looks like there is a barrel jack for the 12 V DC power adapter around the back, but the device can also be powered by one of its precious USB-C ports.

Kubb envisions users buying this 3-inch (8cm) square PC for “office tasks, management, accounting or web browsing.” It also heralds the Mini as a great, silent, thin client that uses significantly less power than a traditional desktop PC. Perhaps more appealing to our audience, Kubb reckons the Mini would also be a good choice for “entertainment and retrogaming for the whole family,” plugged into the living room TV while not becoming an eyesore.

Kubb also makes more powerful (larger) fanless designs and its stables, dominated by cube-like solutions, feature wood- and leather-cased PCs, too.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Apple confirmed it is discontinuing the iconic Mac Pro line of desktop computers. Apple Silicon is efficient enough to deliver similar performance in a smaller chassis, such as the Mac Studio, which will likely become Apple's premier desktop solution going forward. However, that doesn't stop enthusiasts from hunting down bargain-bin deals on older Mac Pro models, and sometimes you get two for the price of one.

Garage Sale Find. They said something was sliding around in it. from r/macpro

Over on the r/macpro subreddit, u/blank_reg got their hands on an unusual 2010 Mac Pro at a garage sale. The owner told them something was rattling, or rather rolling around in there, only for the buyer to find a 2013 Mac Pro just sitting inside. The tower was gutted, with no internal components beyond a power supply and front-panel connectors, likely to make room for the trash-can Mac Pro.

OP didn't say how much he paid for this bundle package, or whether the other Mac Pro even works. From the looks of it, we can deduce that the owner was probably using the 2010 chassis as an enclosure for the 2013 Mac Pro, allowing them to easily mount expansion items that would be otherwise impossible inside that circular chassis. The tower is still empty, though, so perhaps they took them out before reselling it.

These Mac Pro models are legendary in their own ways; many would argue that the 2010 Mac Pro represented the peak of modularity in Apple's desktop ecosystem. It gave users the ability to upgrade pretty much everything: CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, and is even compatible with modern AMD cards with some tweaks. It was the complete opposite of the closed-off approach usually associated with Apple devices.

The 2013 Mac Pro that followed essentially reset everything and prioritized aesthetics over flexibility. It was small, quiet, and had excellent graphical performance for the time, but thermals were somewhat poor. Dual GPUs also fell out of style as software support for them ended on mainstream workstations. Apple didn't update this Mac Pro for the next 6 years, and when they finally released a new model in 2019, it just went back to the old cheese-grater design that worked.

In u/blank_reg's case, the 2010 Mac Pro has no internals but a case, while the 2013 Mac Pro it houses has internals but doesn't have a case. For anyone that doesn't know, the trash-can Mac Pro can't run without its case on... unless you hold a magnet near its power button. That trips up the chassis sensor, which might explain why this skinned Mac Pro is sitting inside a giant metal carcass of its predecessor.

Corsair launched its AI Workstation 300 in the summer of 2025 with AMD's Strix Halo silicon on board to appeal to local LLM enthusiasts looking for a powerful yet compact mini-PC. At the time of our review in February, prices for the top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 variant had already risen to around $3,000 from a launch price of around $2,299, and we already criticized its subpar value proposition compared to rivals like the DGX Spark and its GB10 brethren.

Now, all configs of the AI Workstation 300 have gotten even more expensive. The top-of-the-line variant equipped with a Ryzen AI Max 395+ APU, 128 GB of LPDDR5X-8000 RAM, and 4 TB of storage has been bumped up to $3,399.99. Keep in mind that this is the only AI Max 395+ config available on the site, too, since the 1 TB SSD option is out of stock, and you can't down-spec the memory.

If the 1TB model was available, however, it would cost $2,699 now, up $700 from its $1,999 launch price. Finally, the Ryzen AI Max 385 config with 64 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD has gone from $1,599.99 to $1,699.99, constituting just a $100 hike.

Cumulatively, those make for $1,100, a $700, and $100 price hikes across the board, but in the grand scheme of Strix Halo systems, these prices are pretty much the going rate.

For instance, another popular Ryzen AI Max+ 395 model, the Beelink GTR9 Pro, is going for $2,999 right now, and it comes with only a single 2 TB SSD. Adding another high-end 2TB PCIe 4.0 drive would cost you at least $350 right now, by which point you'd already be in the Corsair model's territory.

We reviewed the ever-popular GMKtec Evo X2 a couple of months ago as well, which is currently priced at $2,349 on Amazon for the same chip and a 2 TB SSD, but only 96 GB of RAM instead of 128 GB. If you want that much memory, you'll have to shell out $3,299, but you only get 2 TB of storage instead of 4 TB on the Corsair. Heck, even the Framework Desktop would be slightly more expensive when configured the same way.

Regardless of the context, Corsair's price changes came without an announcement, so we don't actually have an official reason for the price increase, but it's pretty easy to connect the dots. The ongoing component shortage caused by the AI boom is a likely root cause, and it's been made worse by escalating geopolitical tensions blocking off critical trade routes.

RAM and storage are extremely costly at the moment, even for vendors buying in bulk, so that added cost is going to get passed down to the customer. Recently, Ayaneo even had to halt orders for its upcoming Next 2 handheld featuring Strix Halo chips because the company simply could not get the parts at a reasonable price. But hey, if you're chasing tokens amid AI boom that started all this, maybe it doesn't matter how much pricier your Strix Halo machine gets.