An enthusiast who has a habit of browsing Facebook Marketplace for great bargains just stumbled upon a deal of a lifetime. According to u/Sycosisv’s Reddit post, they saw a nearby listing that offered an ROG Astral RTX 5080 GPU for just $500. Even though it wasn’t brand new, it’s still a massive discount from the current retail pricing of the white GPU, which is listed for $1,949.99 on Amazon, Newegg, and Micro Center.

5080 Marketplace grail $500 from r/PcBuild

The GPU seems to be in good condition based on the photos added to the listing, and the OP immediately jumped at the chance to get a powerful GPU for a fraction of the price. However, someone offered the seller $800 while they were in transit to pick up the GPU. The seller at first thought about backing out of the deal and offering $100 to the Redditor for their trouble. But, in the end, they decided to honor the original deal, and u/Sycosisv went home with a new-to-them RTX 5080. They’ve also already tested out the GPU and were happy to report that it worked perfectly.

The Nvidia RTX 5080 is one of the most powerful gaming GPUs you can buy at the moment, but its high price is making it hard for us to recommend it as one of the best graphics cards for gaming. But at $500, the RTX 5080 turns from an expensive piece of gear into a must-have for your gaming PC build. By comparison, $500 would only get you a Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB, which has significantly less performance (but is still quite usable).

Prices for PC components have been rising uncontrollably in recent years. It started with the GPU shortage that began with the cryptocurrency mining boom and continued with the massive demand by AI hyperscalers. When GPU pricing started to get back down to “normal” levels, PC builders and enthusiasts were hit by the memory and storage chip crisis, resulting in a massive jump in prices of RAM sticks and SSDs. It also affected graphics cards, especially those that feature high amounts of VRAM, and we’re now hearing reports that CPUs are in short supply, too.

Because of this, many people are holding off on purchasing new PCs or upgrading the components of their current ones. But if you really need to get computer parts right now and can’t spare that much cash, buying used is the way to go if you know what you’re looking for.

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.

There’s at least one trucker in the U.S. who looks forward to getting stuck in traffic. ZanaZamora shared a video on Reddit where they made the best use of what would usually be a frustrating time. After an accident closed the route they were on, they eagerly slid over to the passenger seat and played on a powerful $6,000 gaming PC. Disappointingly, it isn’t a truck simulator that we see Zamora indulge in during this jam. Instead, this closet racecar driver enjoys a bit of Assetto Corsa Competizione (ACC) action.

Stand still traffic? Time to switch to the other seat~ from r/simracing

“Been waiting to get stuck in traffic ever since installing this rig just to make this video lol,” wrote Zamora on Reddit, earlier this month. “Road was shut down due to an accident, said we could u turn across the median, I said one minute I need to do something REAL QUICK.”

The trucker has what looks like an awesome sim rig, with the immersive widescreen, driving yoke, various input pads, and dials. In a separate post, where Zamora also reveals their motorbiking hobby, we learn more about what the setup consists of. Components confirmed include “pedals are by SIMMSON, wheelbase is Simagic Alpha Evo Pro, wheel is Conspit GT300. Flight stick is Moza AB9/MH16, and throttle is Winwing Orion 2. The button box is by PXN, and the pad is an off brand stream deck.” Also, the monitor is on an adjustable arm, and there are “bass shakers” in the seat. Nice.

As for the PC driving the sim side of Zamora’s on-road life, another reply from the trucker reveals that the CPU in the PC is an Intel Core i9-14900 of some sort. This is paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU.

Zamora’s dedication to high-end PC sim gaming is something to behold. If I get stuck in traffic, I might put the radio on, play some MP3s I put on the car’s SD card about five years ago, or watch YouTube on the phone. I’ll also note that you'd need a very bright screen to enjoy any complicated gaming environment in a vehicle. Neither of my laptop screens is very readable when even the slightest amount of sunshine pops from between the clouds in England.

Asus and Noctua have been collaborating on ultra-quiet graphics cards for some time now by pairing Noctua’s most advanced 120mm fans with massive custom heatsinks. That collaboration has continued in the Blackwell generation with the Asus RTX 5080 Noctua Edition, an absolutely ginormous air-cooled graphics card that promises no-compromises performance and temperatures alongside the lowest possible noise levels. That’s an exceedingly high bar to clear in one product.

Making air-cooled computer hardware quieter is simple enough, in theory. Improve thermal transfer by adding a vapor chamber or heat pipes to the base plate of a heatsink, increase its surface area by adding more and larger fins to the fin stack, and take advantage of the improved heat dissipation by slowing down the fans cooling said heatsink. Eventually, you get imperceptible noise levels. Easy enough, right?

In practice, this recipe runs into all sorts of obstacles. Cases can only accept so large a heatsink without running into clearance issues. Sockets, slots, and PCBs can only take so much weight before they start to deform. The heatsink itself can only be so costly as part of the overall bill of materials. If you’re an engineer designing a typical graphics card for the typical PC, you have to balance all these concerns, and louder, faster-spinning fans on a smaller heatsink are typically one result of those tradeoffs.

The Asus GeForce RTX 5080 Noctua Edition embraces an entirely different set of constraints. This graphics card is all about low noise levels, and the two companies have spared no effort or expense in making the quietest possible GPU air cooler out there, size and weight be damned.

We’ve had the pleasure of reviewing some of Asus’s Noctua Edition cards in the past, and they’ve certainly provided both impressive noise levels and thermal performance. But this RTX 5080 marks the first time the duo has deployed three such fans on a Noctua Edition graphics card: in this case, NF-A12x25 G2s. As someone who got his start as a case and heatsink reviewer many moons ago, those fans immediately stand out as something different.

The NF-A12x25 G2s boast a list of engineering refinements that would make an aeronautical engineer blush. Everything from the curvature of each blade to the ridges on the fan hub to the winglets at each blade tip is said to be optimized to improve the distribution and evenness of airflow with typical Noctua obsessiveness. The impellers (or rotors) themselves sit so close to the fan frame that trying to slide a sheet of printer paper between them will make the impeller move. Crazy stuff.

To further refine the noise character of the card, Noctua has supplied Asus with two types of NF-A12x25 G2 fans, one of which runs slightly slower and the other of which runs slightly faster than the other. Noctua says this avoids “periodic humming or vibrations caused by beat frequencies.”

The fans are paired with a custom heatsink that pairs a vapor-chamber baseplate with 11 heat pipes running through a 14.5” long fin stack, which is certainly plenty of metal. But not all of the card’s four-slot height is dedicated to fins and heat pipes. About two slots are occupied by the full-size NF-A12x25 G2 fans themselves.

We didn’t take our Noctua Edition apart because it’s a loaner, but we can see that the huge vapor chamber at the base of the heatsink covers both the GPU itself and the GDDR7 memory that rings it for a complete thermal solution. The VRM power phases and inductors are also joined to the fin stack with their own metal contact plate and thermal pads.

All told, this is one of the largest and heaviest air-cooled graphics cards I’ve ever handled, weighing in at a whopping 5.9 lb (2.7 kg). It absolutely dwarfs the RTX 5080 Founders Edition.

For all its focus on quiet operation, the design of the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is inescapably polarizing. The plastic fan shroud and metal backplate are all finished in a muted brown color with a subtle sparkle that only reveals itself under direct lighting. The NF-A12x25 G2 fans themselves are the brown-and-tan models that Noctua obsessives will love and the uninitiated may hate. I think it’s great, but other Tom’s Hardware staffers can’t stand it.

The Noctua faithful will find plenty of subtle nods to its brand on this 5080, and these touches are all done with the same subtlety and attention to detail typical of other Noctua products. Metallic accents on the face of the card suggest wings or eyebrows, and the flow-through cutout on the backplate borrows one half of Noctua’s owl logo.

The painted stripes on the backplate that suggest stampings or embossing are so well done that they made me do a double-take to ensure they weren’t actually part of the metal.

All told, this card will look fan-tastic in a Noctua-themed build, but many will be left wishing for a Chromax model that’s dressed entirely in black for better coordination in the average PC. Maybe a future Noctua Edition can cover both bases, but for now, brown is all you get.

Let's take a look at performance, power, and thermals on the following pages.

Specs

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We compared the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition to the RTX 5080 Founders Edition using five games from our upcoming rounds of retesting for our GPU Hierarchy. Since this is just a brief test, we favored 4K gaming with a mix of RT-enabled and raster games alike.

Stock for stock, the Noctua Edition is just 4% faster than the Founders Edition, which obviously isn’t much given the Noctua card’s huge increase in size and weight compared to the dual-slot FE. But as you’ll see in our noise testing results, absolute performance isn’t really this card’s mission.

We’ve also rolled up our overclocking results into these charts, and you can see that the Noctua Edition is a strong overclocker indeed, thanks to its massive heatsink. We saw an 11% gain in performance from pushing core and memory clocks to the limit. But the Founders Edition is just 2% slower than the Noctua Edition if you raise its clocks in turn.

In the case of both cards, 10% or better gains from overclocking is a surprisingly large leap in the Blackwell era, and you should absolutely fire up Afterburner on your RTX 5080, no matter its make or model.

In any case, our performance results prove the Asus RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is a full-bore RTX 5080. The two companies clearly didn’t need to impose any power or thermal restrictions on the way to quieting it down, and that means you’re still getting all the performance you’d expect from the second-best gaming graphics card on the market.

Overclocking notes, clock speeds, and power consumption

Overclocking modern GeForce GPUs has followed a simple enough formula for a long time: increase power limits to the max, push core clocks until stability issues arise, and then pull back a bit. Since Blackwell GPUs generally don’t offer core voltage controls, we’re mostly interested in how much higher a power limit third-party cards expose and how high we can push core clocks as a result.

Firing up MSI Afterburner reveals that we have 25% of extra power limit headroom to play with, which is quite generous for a Blackwell card. Memory overclocking is still limited to a +375 MHz increase, however, which is common to all GDDR7 Blackwell cards. Since the Noctua Edition’s cooler is designed to cool both the memory modules and the GPU, we just max this offset out; there’s no reason to expect any instability that would require us to choose a lower memory clock.

After maxing out the power limit and memory clocks, we settled on a stable +436 MHz offset for core clocks, which delivered a mean clock speed of 3227 MHz across the games we tested. That’s 18% higher than stock and, along with the memory clock speed boost, was good for 11% real-world performance gains in our tests, as you’ve already seen.

Overclocking modern graphics cards usually incurs a large corresponding increase in power consumption, but we only saw about 20W higher power consumption from the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition with our OC applied.

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Gaming performance is important and all, but c’mon, this graphics card—and this review—are really all about the noise levels. You’re here to see whether this card lives up to Noctua’s reputation for high performance and low noise levels.

We measure noise with a calibrated Triplett SLM-400 meter on a tripod placed one meter from our open test bench. Our testing environment is a typical carpeted room with no specialized acoustic treatment. All other possible noise sources in the room are shut down, unplugged, or otherwise minimized prior to testing.

The noise floor of our testing environment, as indicated by our meter, is 32.6 dBA. Both the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition and the Founders Edition stop their fans at idle, so they’re no louder than the ambient environment.

Fire up a gaming load, however, and the Noctua card increases the noise levels of our test environment by just 0.3 dBA, whether stock or overclocked. That’s an incredible acoustic performance, and while it’s not technically silent, it’s likely as good as you’re going to get from anything with fans.

Recall that dBA is a logarithmic scale, so small absolute changes here indicate large changes in loudness. The Founders Edition card is quite a bit louder to the ear than the Noctua Edition, especially when overclocked. To even hear the Noctua Edition’s fans, I have to place my ear right next to the side of the card, at which point you can hear the very slightest hum of fans spinning and a whisper of air moving.

But with noise levels this low, basically any other sound is going to be louder than the Noctua Edition 5080, especially if you’re gaming. Your breathing will be louder, HVAC systems will be louder, keypresses will be louder, mouse movements will be louder, airplanes overhead will be louder, passing cars will be louder, and birdsong will be louder. You get the point.

Unless you’re playing game audio through $10,000-a-side speakers in an acoustically treated room with your PC in the same space and demand the absolute lowest possible noise floor as a canvas for your audiophile gear, the satisfaction of a graphics card this quiet is an extremely particular one.

But if you’re hell-bent on building as fast and quiet a gaming PC as is possible, you will have the satisfaction of knowing that this RTX 5080 is delivering its incredible performance while remaining practically imperceptible to the ear in return.

It’s worth noting that Asus provides a dual-mode BIOS switch on this card that offers a Quiet vBIOS in addition to the default Performance, but we didn’t run it through our full suite of tests because we only saw a 0.1 dBA difference in its favor on our noise meter when we loaded up our gaming tests. If you have ears that sensitive, though, the option is available.

dBA readings alone don’t tell the entire story of what it’s like to use a graphics card, of course. Using a frequency analyzer, we can break down the components of a card’s noise character and show just how broad-spectrum or tonal it is – and where those tones fall on the audible spectrum.

The GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition’s noise character is generally broad-spectrum, but it exhibits a prominent spike around 170Hz on our analyzer that comes across as a low tonal hum. It also has quite a bit of high-pitched coil whine (potentially appearing around 5KHz) that varies with output frame rates.

By the same measure, the Noctua Edition RTX 5080’s sonic signature is essentially broad-spectrum, aside from some coil whine that is more perceptible than the card’s otherwise incredible SPL measurements would suggest (note the vast difference in Y-axis scale between the two cards here).

If Asus were somehow able to source inductors that were buzz-free at the switching frequencies demanded by a GPU VRM, this card would be practically silent. But that noise remains the one challenge standing in the way of sonic perfection from this card, and the buzz it produces would still be audible even if it were somehow passively cooled.

Thermal performance

With its default Performance vBIOS, the Noctua Edition RTX 5080 runs just 4 °C cooler than the dual-slot RTX 5080 Founders Edition across all of our gaming workloads. Frankly, we were expecting a bit more of a delta between these two cards, given the Noctua Edition’s massive size and weight. But that’s a mostly academic desire, since performance is already slightly higher and noise levels are so much lower than the Founders Edition at stock.

Our manual overclock also produces only a 0.5 °C rise in temperatures compared to the default vBIOS settings. Usually, overclocking requires tradeoffs in power consumption, noise levels, or temperatures, but in the instance of this RTX 5080, the performance gains you get are practically free.

If we normalize noise levels to 37 dBA at one meter between these cards by greatly raising fan speeds on the Noctua Edition with our manual overclocks applied to both cards, the true strength of the Noctua Edition cooler becomes more obvious. Load temperatures drop to just 51.3 °C under our manual overclock, or a full 14 °C lower than the FE card under the same conditions.

Overall, our thermal and noise test results are highly complimentary of Asus and Noctua’s engineering efforts here. To produce a card this quiet and fast while sacrificing nothing is an impressive achievement.

At the same time, these results show just how much it takes to improve on the RTX 5080 Founders Edition cooler. Sure, the FE is louder and slightly warmer-running, but it also weighs a kilogram less, occupies just one-third the volume, and delivers largely the same gaming performance as this Noctua Edition. If you demand better, you’re going to pay for it in size, weight, and a much larger price tag.

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The Asus GeForce RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is a testament to obsession. It’s what happens when two companies thoroughly quash one engineering problem and let other constraints fall where they will.

Industrial design is a matter of taste, but the tan and brown palette of this card is incredibly polarizing. I’m fine with it, but other Tom’s Hardware staffers despise it. If you’re a Noctua diehard, though, you’re already down with the brown, and none of us are going to convince you otherwise.

If you hate fan noise, the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is unquestionably the quietest graphics card I’ve ever tested. The noise floor of my testing environment is just 32.6 dBA, and this card only raises that by a mere 0.3 dBA under a gaming load.

This is incredible acoustic performance, and it doesn’t require giving up anything in the way of power limits or clock speeds to get there. This is a full-on RTX 5080 that delivers all of its formidable gaming performance in near silence.

The only thing holding this card back from sonic perfection is a bit of coil whine at high frame rates. Coil whine is notoriously hard to eliminate in any graphics card, and this card controls it better than most, but it is audible.

Despite its primary focus on quiet operation, the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is a great overclocker, too. We got 11% higher performance from overclocking compared to stock, all with zero increase in noise levels and practically no increase in operating temperatures. That’s a first in all my years of testing graphics cards.

Silence comes at a cost. This is the largest and heaviest air-cooled graphics card I’ve ever tested, even larger and heavier than the notoriously massive RTX 4090 Founders Edition. You need a correspondingly large ATX mid-tower or larger enclosure to hold it, and I’d strongly recommend using a GPU support bracket or a vertical mount to help manage its bulk.

At its $1,699 list price in the States, this RTX 5080 is already one of the most expensive such cards around when compared to Nvidia’s $999 MSRP, and even considering the stratospheric street prices for partner RTX 5080s right now, the Noctua Edition is eye-wateringly expensive—if you can even find one in stock.

The thing about Noctua products and collabs is that if you want this, you already know it. Considerations of value don’t really apply. If you’re ready to put down this much money on an RTX 5080, you can be confident that this Noctua Edition isn’t just about looking quirky for its own sake. It has unparalleled acoustics coupled with strong gaming and thermal performance that all add up to an enviably well-rounded graphics card.

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Billet Labs is back and has finalized its cast-iron Victorian radiator gaming PC build. Alex from the London-based PC cooling innovators shared a detailed hour-long video with insights into the build, which should answer all your what, why, and how queries. However, he thought that even for this impressive radiator-as-a-PC build, “cooling something like a 5090 is probably out of the question,” so an RTX 5080 and Ryzen 7 9800X3D combo were judged to be the sweet spot.

We covered a teaser for this incredibly stout Victorian-era cast-iron PC build just ahead of the New Year. Thankfully, we now have a lot more information about this fascinating build and the concept/process behind it.

The video begins with Alex explaining that this amazing-looking PC is destined - not for some showroom or exhibition - but for an “actual usable long-term gaming PC, for myself.” Previously, we saw estimates that the charming but portly radiator was 110 pounds (~50kg) in weight. Now we have a clearer set of figures. The radiator is actually about 178 pounds (81kg) empty, and 218 pounds (99kg) when filled with coolant.

Commenting on this hulking mass of metal, “the thermal mass is absolutely insane,” enthused Alex. “And, secondly, it looks %^&* awesome!”

The key approach to the design and build was to keep the Victorian artifact’s visual appeal intact, and mount PC parts “as invisibly as possible, on the bottom.” But an immediate challenge to this idea was the fact that “there’s not a single flat surface, and not a single hole that I can bolt anything to,” wryly commented the PC liquid cooling specialist.

The first practical step in the build process was the 3D scanning of the bottom of the radiator to create an accurate 3D model. Armed with this, Felix designed a highly accurate 3D printed mounting system for PSU, mobo, GPU, and so on. This 2-part plastic chassis was fixed to the central underlying spine of the radiator, with corresponding half-pipe fixings securing it in place.

Though we had the impression this was going to be a fanless radiator system, the below-decks chassis design included room for sliding in a trio of super-thin 120mm fans.

To mate the heat-generating components with the radiator and plumbing, Billet Labs chose an Alphacool water block for the RTX 5080, and its own prototype AM5 CPU cooling block.

On the topic of PC build components, the list was roughly as follows:

Another nice touch with this fantastic PC build project was the choice of the power button. Felix sourced a sprung antique brass gear lever to power up the PC stylishly. This was fitted into one of the side vents on the rad using a custom mount.

Before the end of the video, we see the antique cast-iron PC used for a bit of gaming and benchmarking. In a ‘torture test,’ drawing about 520W of power for over an hour, the water temperature appeared to stabilize at under 30C. Notably, the RTX 5080 peaked at 75 °C during the most extreme testing Alex could throw at it.

Finding an antique cast-iron radiator isn't that easy in 2026, but at least Amazon still sells some modern ones in various sizes.

AMD has released a tantalizing update about the Steam Machine’s possible release date. Commenting on the state of its business during the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call on February 3, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su seemingly confirmed the release of Valve’s new mini PC over the coming months, with a suggestion that the Steam Machine is “on track” to begin shipping early this year.

This follows comments made during the same call that a new Xbox could launch in 2027, thanks to a brand new semi-custom SoC from the company. As for the Steam Machine, that device was already believed to launch at some point during Q1 2026, based on comments made to Tom’s Hardware during our initial Steam Machine hands-on late last year.

This update is the first public statement made by a relevant third party regarding the Steam Machine’s potential release date, however. Su, during the call, said that “from a product standpoint, Valve is on track to begin shipping its AMD-powered Steam Machine early this year.” This, alongside the new Xbox SoC, were provided as context for AMD’s future plans following a “double-digit percentage” drop in SoC revenue during the “seventh year of… a very strong console cycle.”

Following on from Valve’s success with the portable Steam Deck, this new system is a fixed machine designed for the living room. It comes equipped with a new, semi-custom six-core AMD Zen 4 CPU, along with an AMD RDNA 3 GPU with 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and 28 Compute Units. This combo, according to Valve, should allow you to play games with a 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, as long as you’re using FSR upscaling.

Valve has not publicly commented on this new release speculation, but given the earlier comments regarding a Q1 2026 release window, these new comments from AMD would suggest faith that the production schedule for the Steam Machine remains on track. The global NAND supply crisis makes it difficult to speculate on how much it’ll cost, too, with Valve keeping quiet for now. However, a recent retail listing suggested it could cost between $950 and $1,070, depending on the model, although that remains very much unconfirmed for now.

Update 04/02/2026 7:14 am PT: One Redditor shared an AI-generated image of a fake deal. We've removed it and updated the story accordingly.

Original Story

What started as one fortuitous shopper’s success story in securing a graphics card at an amazingly low price has escalated into an all-out bragging contest. Redditors are flooding a viral thread to flaunt the incredible steals they’ve scored on Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50 (codenamed Blackwell) series (codenamed Blackwell), some of the best graphics cards that you can buy at the moment.

The Reddit thread kicks off with what could otherwise have been the steal of the century. The original poster recently purchased a PNY GeForce RTX 5080 Overclocked Triple Fan graphics card for $562.49, 44% below its MSRP. PNY's rendition is one of the very few custom GeForce RTX 5080 models on the market that stuck with Nvidia's $999 MSRP.

Meanwhile, another Redditor gave fellow users a friendly heads-up about multiple PNY GeForce RTX 5070 Overclocked Triple Fan graphics cards at another Walmart store with $439.20 price tags. While it's not the biggest haul, the custom GeForce RTX 5070 model from PNY sells for $629.99, so the Walmart deal represents about a 30% discount, which is great in today's market.

Thanks, Walmart from r/pcmasterrace

The common denominator among the Redditors who bought a cheap Blackwell-based graphics card is Walmart's under-the-radar electronics clearance aisle. Even before the graphics card shortage, many buyers were finding GeForce RTX 5090 steals with the characteristic Walmart yellow sticker. The number of lucky shoppers has increased over the last couple of months now that the cat is out of the bag, and more and more people are hunting for clearance sales on computer hardware at their local Walmart stores.

However, not every scavenger hunt has a happy ending. One unlucky Redditor had bought a PNY GeForce RTX 5090 Overclocked Triple Fan graphics card at MSRP, which is rare nowadays given market conditions. Fortunately, the shopper opened the package in the parking lot to verify the purchase, found a GeForce RTX 4080, and immediately returned it to the store.

There's always a risk of purchasing high-value computer hardware at Walmart's clearance area. Sometimes these marked items are online returns where dishonest buyers use the swindler scam, and Walmart doesn't properly verify them. At other times, you may get lucky because markdowns result from damaged packaging or missing contents. It's one of those hit-or-miss situations.

The graphics card market has become an absolute nightmare for consumers over the past couple of months. As you can see from our GPU price tracker, prices continue to soar, and there is limited inventory across all U.S. retailers. It's near impossible to find a graphics card at MSRP, much less good deals on them. Desperate PC builders and upgraders have started looking beyond traditional retail channels and poking around in unorthodox places, such as Walmart clearance areas or thrift stores, which have produced a couple of interesting finds. Sometimes, it's just about being in the right place at the right time.

A new leak from tech YouTuber der8auer claims that Nvidia is ending a program dubbed "OPP", purportedly an incentive scheme used by Nvidia to ensure that at least some of its graphics cards were sold to consumers at MSRP by AIBs like Asus and others.

By way of historical background, the creator said in his YouTube video that Nvidia’s GPUs were previously being sold for way above the suggested retail price for the last few generations, and consumers were starting to notice and complain about it. So, the company instituted the OPP program, which, according to de8auer’s sources, is some sort of cash back for participating AIB partners. Although the techtuber does not know what OPP stands for, this is how it allegedly works: board partners sell some models at MSRP and then report that back to Nvidia, after which the GPU manufacturer would give them a rebate on the cost of the chip and the memory of that particular GPU they sold.

According to der8auer's leak, Nvidia apparently stopped this program a few days ago. The sources did not say the reason behind the move, although it is easy to surmise that it’s caused by the ongoing memory crisis. We've reached out to Nvidia for comment. There were rumors late last year that the company no longer bundled VRAM with the GPU chips that board partners ordered, but Nvidia refuted this at CES, telling HardwareLuxx [machine translated], “No changes on how Nvidia is handling the memory allocation.”

If the OPP program is indeed real, it seems that the continuous increase in memory pricing is making it difficult even for Team Green, with its record revenues fueled by the boom in AI infrastructure build-out, to sustain the GPU and memory subsidy that allows board partners to at least sell some models at MSRP.

RTX 5070 Ti is not end-of-life, but expect limited supply anyway

Aside from the end of the “OPP,” der8auer also touched on the recent RTX 5070 Ti news. Another YouTube channel, Hardware Unboxed, was told by an Asus representative that the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB have been discontinued or marked as end-of-life (EOL). Asus refuted this a few hours later, saying that “Certain media may have received incomplete information from an Asus PR representative regarding these products,” and that “Asus has no plans to stop selling these models.”

However, industry sources reportedly told the tech tuber that Nvidia is prioritizing the RTX 5080 over the RTX 5070 Ti for its GB 203 supply. Both GPU models use the same chip, but since the GB 203 has a high yield rate, it’s been rumored that the GPU manufacturer wants to maximize its profits and prioritize the more expensive RTX 5080. Because of this, some say that the supply for the 5070 Ti will be heavily cut and that it’s going to be shifted towards the 5080.

Nevertheless, that does not mean we expect to see RTX 5080 prices to drop. In fact, the opposite has been true in recent days, with prices for different RTX 5080 models from various AIBs showing an increasing trend on Amazon. And with demand for both memory and AI chips remaining strong, we don’t expect gamers and their wallets to get a reprieve anytime soon.

Following a gloomy bunch of GPU shipping stories on Reddit, we return with an extraordinarily positive tale that highlights the same system that often fails customers. One lucky customer bought an Asus ROG Astral RTX 5080 White OC on Amazon and received the GPU despite cancelling their order. Amazon then told them to keep the card and the refunded money, netting the user a free GPU worth $1,850.

Free 5080 Astral in White?! from r/ASUSROG

The Redditor, u/spaceman293, posted in the r/ASUSROG subreddit, mentioning how they'd cancelled the Amazon order because Micro Center had the same GPU in stock. However, a few days later the RTX 5080 ended up showing up on their doorstep anyways. Once our diligent citizen informed Amazon of their mishap, the multi-trillion-dollar corporation generously told u/spaceman293 to just keep it.

This win serves a stark contrast to the usual accounts we see on Reddit — most recently, someone who ordered an RTX 5080 received a relabeled RTX 5060 Ti instead. Funny enough, that case and this one are both results of the same system. Amazon is a big company with operations so sprawling that it's often not worth it for the retailer to go after smaller incidents — and sometimes, those end up favoring the customer.

Delays in shipping go hand-in-hand with major vendors, so it's not strange to see a cancelled order still get delivered. By the time u/spaceman293 pulled out, there's a chance that the unit was already in the pipeline, ready to travel to its now forfeit destination. In these trying times, small victories like these are just as important to highlight as the upsetting ones.

A new entrant has emerged in the long-running series of GPU scam cases documented on Reddit — this time, it's an RTX 5080 being covertly swapped for an RTX 5060 Ti. An unfortunate customer ordered an RTX 5080 from Amazon, only to be left bewildered by a different GPU inside the box that showed no signs of being a 5080, despite being labeled as such.

Did I get scammed? Just bought an RTX 5080 off of Amazon. from r/buildapc

The Redditor added images of the product he received on Imgur; those, along with the post's caption, show that this supposed Asus Prime RTX 5080 has an 8-pin PCIe connector. Nvidia's Blackwell cards above the 5060 Ti class don't ship with that style of power plug anymore, opting for the incendiary 16-pin connector instead, so this is a dead giveaway we're not looking at a 5080.

Despite that, someone clearly tried to hide the obvious fallacy by putting genuine RTX 5080 stickers on this card, which you can tell by the slightly crooked application. What we're actually looking at is an Asus Prime RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB. The design for that and the Prime 5060 (non-Ti) is nearly identical, but subtle differences are noticeable. Anyhow, this RTX 5060 Ti was dressed in 5080 clothing to pull off the scam, which seems to have worked.

The leading theory in the comments points toward a deceptive swap on the customer's end. Not this customer, but someone else who ordered both an Asus Prime RTX 5060 Ti and 5080, filed for a return on the 5080 but sent the 5060 Ti in the box instead. They guess Amazon didn't bother checking the package contents — even if it did, the mere presence of a GPU would've likely been enough to accept it — and resold the 5080. Our very own Matt Safford scored an i5 CPU for $10 thanks to another such scam last year.

The unlucky buyer on Reddit then became the new recipient of this GPU. The story tracks and, beyond speculating that someone else in the shipping chain was responsible, lines up with previous "comingling" incidents. Another RTX 5080 was swapped for a literal brick, and before that, people have received pasta instead of silicon, too. Usually, scammers don't go to the length to swap stickers between two legitimate SKUs, so at least this one put some effort in.

At this point, filing for a return/refund on this GPU should get the Redditor their money back, or maybe they can work out an exchange with Amazon's customer service. In times like these, where AI has snatched production lines and GPU prices are on the rise, securing a good deal and watching it slip away can feel extra upsetting, so we hope the victim (and the scammer) gets their due.

A Reddit user has reported that Nvidia — a company with a $5.2 trillion market cap — declined to replace their brand-new GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition, one of the best graphics cards, and that the company is trying to “burn my house down” after the card’s 12V-2x6 connector lost its retention clip during the first attempt to remove the cable.

The post, shared on Thursday, December 4, in the PCMR Reddit, includes support transcripts in which the user says they were initially told the connector was safe to use before the case was escalated and ultimately ruled “customer-induced damage.”

The retention clip plays an important role in anchoring the plug inside the socket and helps ensure full insertion. This is particularly important because Nvidia attributed the widespread RTX 4090 melting incidents to partially seated 12VHPWR connectors, and the revised 12V-2x6 standard was introduced with the RTX 50 series to improve reliability.

A clip failure removes one of the few mechanical safeguards that prevent the plug from backing out under cable tension. Support logs quoted by the user indicate an initial assessment that “everything looks totally normal from pictures.” However, the customer insisted that, after seeing the disasters the connector has caused, they weren’t willing to leave it as is. The nature of the replies led the original poster and those commenting to speculate that Nvidia support was relying on AI to analyze the customer’s pictures and respond to their concerns.

This isn’t a first for the 5080, which has been the subject of at least one earlier Reddit thread in which an owner asked whether a broken clip could cause long-term issues. Other reports include a 5080 power cable allegedly melting at the power supply side and isolated cases of 5090 connector damage. These incidents have not yet formed a clear pattern, but they sit alongside high-profile reminders that the underlying design may be flawed.

Warranty outcomes have varied across vendors. In the RTX 4090 cycle, Nvidia said it would handle RMAs for connector-related failures, even when third-party adapters were involved. Board partners did not always match that posture.

MSI previously rejected an RMA when a CableMod adapter was used, and the case only came to light after customers shared support transcripts. Cooler Master sparked its own controversy when a representative advised a user to dismantle part of a 12V-2x6 plug to fit an RTX 5070 Ti. The company later apologized and withdrew the connector from sale, noting that its internal guidance had been incorrect.

The Reddit user behind the new 5080 claim says they have asked Nvidia to reconsider the diagnosis, arguing that a mechanical failure on the first unplug should not be treated as misuse.

We've seen our fair share of GPU scams around here, with unlucky buyers receiving all sorts of fascinating oddities like rice and macaroni, or even a literal brick in lieu of the card they actually ordered. It's a tale as old as time, and, unfortunately, another Redditor has been shrouded in this narrative. After waiting for a while for GPU prices to come down, our victim finally bit the bullet, only to find sediment, and not the kind that makes silicon.

Received Rocks In Place Of Asus Tuf 5080 From BestBuy from r/pcmasterrace

On November 25, u/GnarDead ordered an Asus TUF RTX 5080 from Best Buy for $1,200, well below the MSRP for this variant. Three days later, the GPU finally arrived... or so they thought. Even before opening up the box, the red flags were already there. The 5080 wasn't put inside a generic cardboard box to conceal its identity, and the shipping labels were directly slapped onto the retail box itself, and the seal was "clearly tampered with."

Opening up the box only confirmed the suspicion as our victim found literal rocks sitting where the GPU was supposed to be. If you're getting some déjà vu reading all this, it's because scams like these have become increasingly commonplace, and bad actors have learned to fool automated systems (that detect weight), and even humans, by simply faking the heft of the package. By the time someone checks, it's already too late, so customer support is the last resort.

Unfortunately, for our unlucky buyer here, even Best Buy's support teams turned them down, saying they couldn't do anything about it and that a refund was not possible after conducting an investigation. Comments suggested taking the matter to social media and blasting Best Buy with hashtags, while others reminded u/GnarDead of the importance of recording unboxings, so that you have conclusive evidence in case of any claims like this. Right now, it's a sort of your word against mine situation.

The best plan of action in the thread was a credit card chargeback. Asking the bank to reverse the transaction after filing a billing dispute is a pretty surefire way of getting your money back. We sincerely hope the victim gets a refund, and for everyone reading, let this serve as a reminder of how unreliable customer protection systems can be at major retailers. Like we always say, remain vigilant until due process takes its course, and remember that nothing scares these companies more than bad PR.

We've seen a lot of creative GPU mods as of late, but all of them involve the graphics card still running and pushing frames. In this instance, it's someone else who does the pushing and running, with the card acting as a mere vessel for its master's kineticism. Someone took an RTX 5080 — not just any 5080, but the ROG Astral variant, one of the most expensive models out there — and somehow transformed it into a skateboard.

She's a 5080 Astral but she looks like a 5090, and she handles like a TUF from r/pcmasterrace

You read that right; a GPU was turned into a skateboard by u/ashleysaidwhat on the r/pcmasterrace subreddit. The post is scarce of any details, and the modder shared no wisdom in the comments either, so we don't know how this contraption came about... or why. Though it appears that the card lacks a PCB, as you can see through the cooler, which could hint at a bunch of possibilities.

Firstly, we might simply be looking at a dead GPU, so Ashley stripped it down and repurposed the cooler/chassis as a deck. It would certainly be one of the most expensive decks, though, since the ROG Astral RTX 5080 retails for over $1,700 right now, which is far more than even complete skateboards from high-end brands.

Conversely, it could be one of those hollow cards that show up with no memory or core; not much you can do after being scammed, so why not turn an unfortunate situation into a fun experiment? Another possibility is that the cooler itself is cooked, like we saw in a recent GPU repair story, so it's being put to better use now while the PCB awaits a transplant.

Whatever the case may be, the comments on the original post echo our initial reaction, with one user saying, "What the TUF." Not just a hardware modder, the mind behind the madness is actually proficient at riding their modded RTX 5080, and the dog accompanying them seems to be having a good time as well, so who are we to judge?

Many consider cars to be the most exciting thing out there. Those adrenaline-pumping feats of engineering, harmonizing cutting-edge hardware and software to push the boundaries of physics. A lot of people, though, are equally enthusiastic about PCs and how they contribute to the world of racing. After all, a car is technically just a computer on wheels, so why not combine the two to birth something truly unique that honors both cultures?

That's exactly what Nvidia did, in its latest episode of GeForce Garage, where it partnered up with modder JCustom (Justin Chu) to fit an entire gaming PC inside a wheel of a Porsche 911. The build also has a real key fob to turn it on or restart it, wirelessly.

Our journey begins with an HRE FF21 wheel (not acually Porsche, we know) that alone starts at $750 and that's before the custom paint job on top. See, this rig is being built for someone very special that we'll reveal at the end; they have a Porsche 911 Turbo S in the Python Green colorway, so our modder Justin decided to color-match the entire build to that. That meant power-coating the sides (barrel) of the wheel to be the same green, and even updating the silver to resemble what Porsche uses from factory.

The main PC is placed right behind the spokes and appears like it's floating because the custom-built motherboard tray is mounted directly to the wheel's barrel, with the help of some tabs that extend into the tray. You can see how that looks in the next set of pictures after this. The end-result is flawless, but achieving such elegance was only possible after Justin put the wheel inside CAD to iron out all the details and create the necessary parts himself.

Speaking of, the motherboard tray is what houses most of the cabling as it's actually quite thick — from the pictures, we can estimate ~3 inches. The tray is suspended from four sides via metal beams that provide rigidity, and to advance this magical appearance, Justin used a back-connect motherboard. This way all the wires would conveniently route through this tray compartment, and the motherboard assembly itself would be the only thing visible on the outside.

The tray includes an SFF power supply, too, and sleeved PCIe cables for the GPU, which is a Founder's Edition RTX 5080. Back-connect graphics cards have existed for a while, so it's interesting to see Justin stick with a classic choice here. You can check out the full specs of the PC in the table at the end to see what else he paired up with this GPU. Lastly, the tray also has little LED diffusers placed across the perimeter to provide a subtle ambient glow to the wheel, almost like underglow on a real car.

To cool the entire system, Justin separated the custom liquid-cooling into its own apparatus, sitting beneath the wheel assembly. This compartment fits the pump, reservoir, radiator and all the tubing for the loop, which is connected to the CPU and GPU via quick-disconnects at the back of the wheel. This is where you can also see that the rearside is entirely flush, implying that the PC can even be wall-mounted in the future.

If you look closely, the water block on the CPU is tubeless, which means the water actually flows through the block's mounts itself. You can also see a miniaturized version of the aforementioned Porsche 911 floating inside it, further paying tribute to the petrolhead this PC's owner is. The GPU block, on the other hand, is made by Modern Cafe and showcases a small trophy on one side (more on what that is later), along with a spinning wheel on the other side that doubles as a flow meter.

The cooling system essentially becomes a display stand for the wheel, complimenting each other both functionally and aesthetically. The build is finished off with a Python Green paint job on the stand as well, and Alcantara is glued onto the sides to simulate the luxurious feel of a Porsche's interior. A Porsche Knight badge is placed in the middle of this stand, while the wheel's center cap is upgraded with a screen for displaying telemetry data (playing what seems like custom animations), accompanied with a small GeForce Garage pin underneath.

Given how powerful the specs are, it was kind of surprising to see Nvidia test two games with multi-frame gen enabled. In Borderlands at 4K with max settings and DLSS set to performance, the PC achieved 160-180 FPS. Over in Cyberpunk 2077 with max settings, along with path tracing, we saw 160-170 FPS. Forza Horizon 5 maxed out with ray tracing set to high netted around 200 FPS; DLSS was set to high but no MFG.

So, who's the lucky recipient of this technological marvel? Well, that would be up-and-coming actor Micheal Rainey Jr., who recently won an NAACP award for his role in the Starz's Power franchise, where he plays Tariq. The mini version of that exact trophy is what was enclosed inside the 5080, highlighting Michael's accolades. When he's not winning over judges, though, you can find him obsessively playing videogames, like Call of Duty.

Interestingly, prolific filmmaker Steven Spielberg — the guy who made Saving Private Ryan — wanted to direct a COD movie but Activision turned him down; instead, selling the film rights to Paramount. It would be destiny's calling to see Paramount just hire Spielberg after all, where he ultimately casts Michael as a tank driver, bridging together his acting and gaming journeys in the most poetic way possible.

The sheer amount of times that people have received everything but the high-end GPU they ordered is frankly too absurd to count at this point. We've already seen metal blocks being delivered instead of a graphics card, pasta and rice packaged inside a 5090 box, and a 5070 Ti that was actually just a bag of salt. In comparison to that, receiving just a bland ol' brick instead of an RTX 5080 seems almost uninspired, but that's exactly what happened to u/GlassHistorical5303.

Our victim (who we'll call Glass for ease) ordered a PNY GeForce RTX 5080 from the firm's official store on Amazon. Unfortunately, what they got was a brick wrapped up in the same anti-static bag that the actual GPU usually comes in. Apart from the obvious implication that someone at the factory might've swapped the card, this actually suggests that a reverse-scam was in effect here. Someone may have gotten the real 5080 they wanted, took it out of the box, replaced it with a brick, and returned it to Amazon who didn't bother to properly check the contents.

Amazon sent me a brick instead of a 5080 from r/pcmasterrace

Earlier this year, Asus unveiled the ROG Astral RTX 5090 Dhahab Edition—a special version of its Astral 5090 made partially with real gold, meant for sale in the Middle East. It followed up with a slightly less ridiculous RTX 5080 Dhahab Core with supposed worldwide availability. So far, we've only been able to speculate on its price; our best approximation was scalpers on eBay selling the Dhahab 5090 for upwards of $22,000, but now we have our actual, first look at what these cards cost.

Listed on Microless, a UAE-based retailer, the RTX 5090 Dhahab OC will run you just $9,205 which is suppposedly discounted 11% from a $11,506 listed price. Perhaps the most interesting bit is that Microless actually ships around the globe, so you can technically get this gilded 5090 delivered to North America—rendering it not exclusive to Middle Eastern markets, contradicting the original announcement. The 5080 Dahab Core, on the other hand, is listed at $2,589, constituting a 158.9% price increase over a regular 5080's MSRP.

Now, you may be wondering why even mention MSRP when it's only a mirage these days, but just today we spotted RTX 5080s from Zotac and MSI listed at $999 on Newegg, which is their suggested price from Nvidia. Asus' ROG Astral RTX 5080, though, retails for $1,799, and it's actually available at that price at most stores. Therefore, the cost difference between the Dhahab Edition and the base Astral RTX 5080 almost becomes sensible? That's because there is around $700 worth of real, 24K gold cladding this card. When you add that up, it low-key becomes a decent deal, considering you get the bragging rights to owning a gold GPU.

Both the Dhahab 5080 Core and Dhahab 5090 OC share the exact same design with borderline-stereotypical accents draping the golden shroud. There are shiny blue highlights around the perimeter of the card with illustrations of everything we've been conditioned to associate with the Middle East: camels, opulent skyscrapers, and calligraphy. Short of being dipped in oil, it's the perfect representation of the Arab World, exorbitant price included.

Asus and Noctua have finally launched their fifth collaborative graphics card, the GeForce RTX 5080 Noctua Edition, originally teased at Computex 2025. Following prior models based on the RTX 30 and 40 series, this new iteration introduces a significant redesign that includes the first-ever triple 120x25mm fan setup on a gaming GPU, employing Noctua’s next-generation NF-A12x25 G2 fans alongside a thoroughly custom-engineered heatsink.

The cooling system integrates an extensive vapor chamber with eleven heatpipes—seven 8 mm and four 6 mm, a notable increase from previous Noctua Editions, which typically featured fewer heatpipes and smaller heatsinks. This design aims to balance efficient thermal dissipation with minimized acoustic output. Our review of the Noctua Editiorn RTX 3080 already praised the design from back then, so we expect this to be even better. Check out the official introduction video, which goes over every aspect of the card in detail:

Noctua’s new NF-A12x25 G2 fans incorporate advanced aerodynamic features such as Progressive Bend impellers and SupraTorque motors designed to maintain high airflow and static pressure in demanding environments like large heatsinks. The fans are deliberately offset in rotational speed—arranged in an A-B-A sequence with speed variations of roughly ±50 RPM—to mitigate acoustic phenomena like beat frequencies and periodic vibrations.

Asus’ internal testing at a 360W power target using FurMark stress tests reportedly showed the Noctua Edition achieved GPU temperatures of approximately 57°C and VRAM temperatures near 52°C, with noise levels measured at 21.4 dB(A). These figures would represent a substantial noise reduction—about 14.5 dB(A) less—compared to Asus’s own ROG Astral RTX 5080 variant, while maintaining similar or lower operating temperatures. When fan speeds were artificially limited to 500 RPM, the Noctua Edition remained the quietest option tested and maintained temperatures well below the GPU’s thermal limits.

The card supports Asus' 0dB semi-passive fan control, which shuts off the fans entirely under 50°C GPU temperature, allowing for silent operation during light workloads. Additionally, there's a dual BIOS switch that enables users to toggle between a quieter fan curve or a performance mode emphasizing the lowest possible temperatures. Asus' GPU Tweak III software will allow further customization of fan curves and undervolting to fine-tune noise and thermal performance.

Physically, the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is considerably larger than standard models, extending 385 mm in length and occupying nearly four slots due to the thick triple-fan assembly and enlarged heatsink. This size makes it incompatible with many mid-tower cases and necessitates careful system planning.

Clock speeds on the Noctua Edition are set with a boost clock of 2700 MHz, modestly above the Founders Edition’s 2600 MHz but below some factory-overclocked variants, reflecting Asus' apparent focus on thermals and acoustics over maximum out-of-the-box frequencies. The card also features phase-change thermal pads aimed at improved longevity and consistent thermal performance, addressing issues like pump-out and dry-out associated with traditional thermal pastes.

New Jersey-based system b uilder Maingear has launched a beige desktop to tempt in fans of retro PCs who, despite themselves, crave modern processing power. The new Maingear Retro95 is what some might call a ready-made ‘sleeper build,’ a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The “limited drop” Retro95 is available today, with prices starting at $1,599.

In Maingear’s words, the new Retro95 is “brings back the unmistakable style of a '90s-era horizontal desktop, now supercharged with cutting-edge hardware.” Some of the hardware you will find in top-end configurations will include the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, up to 96GB DDR5 RAM, and 8TB of PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD storage.

In addition to those performance component essentials, Maingear says that the Retro95 is “engineered with modern thermals and whisper-quiet air cooling for high performance with low noise.” That means no liquid or hybrid cooling, but it is good to know that high-end systems will come with Noctua fans and an 850W PSU. These cases also have capacity for an optional optical drive.

The case caught our eye, and we recognized it as SilverStone’s FLP01 horizontal desktop case. A Maingear spokesperson confirmed that this is a "customized iteration of the Silverstone FLP01."

“Honoring the classic era of gaming”

Nvidia is expected to follow up its current lineup of RTX 50 series desktop GPUs with a Super refresh. According to a new set of specifications posted by reliable Nvidia hardware leaker @kopite7kimi on X/Twitter, expect Team Green to launch at least three new models including the RTX 5070 Super, RTX 5070 Ti Super, and the RTX 5080 Super. These look like pretty safe bets for inclusion in our frequently updated Best Graphics Cards for Gaming in 2025 feature.

If we go by the rumored preliminary specifications, the new Super models will offer a substantial jump over the non-Super counterparts, primarily due to the increased VRAM. The RTX 5070 Super is said to feature the GB205 GPU based on the Blackwell architecture, paired with the PG147-SKU65 PCB. It will have 6,400 CUDA cores, which represents an uplift of just over 4% compared to the 6,144 CUDA cores on the regular RTX 5070. The power draw also sees a jump from 250W on the RTX 5070 to 275W on the RTX 5070 Super.

As for the VRAM, it is expected that the RTX 5070 Super will be upgraded to 18GB of GDDR7 memory with a 28 Gbps bandwidth on a 192-bit bus interface. As we suggested in a previous report back in April around a similar set of leaked specifications, Nvidia might be planning to replace the 2GB GDDR7 memory modules on the existing RTX 50 series lineup, with 3GB modules to gain an additional boost in performance.

If you want one of the best graphics cards on the market but can't stump up the cash for a 5090, the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition has just come back into stock in the UK, meaning you can score one directly from Nvidia (via Scan) for "just" £949.

Finding a card as potent as the 5080 at MSRP is pretty hard these days. While we're not in the stock doldrums of the pandemic era, where the only way to get an Nvidia graphics card was to win Takeshi's Castle, MSRP cards are still rarer than hens' teeth, and this one is definitely not to be sniffed at.

This is the cheapest 5080 on the market in the UK, less than the cheapest AIB card, the Zotac Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Solid Core (£989.99 at Scan), and considerably cheaper than the £1,599 you can expect to pay for a Founders Edition 5080 on Amazon. Indeed, Scan is the only official UK vendor of Founders Edition cards, and the only place we'd recommend buying one from.

A powerhouse of the Nvidia Blackwell stable, the RTX 5080 comes with a base clock of 2.30 GHz and a boost clock of 2.30 GHz. 10752 CUDA cores pair with 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM. As we noted in our RTX 5080 review, it runs cool and quiet and is comfortably the second fastest Blackwell GPU on the market. One of the card's biggest drawbacks is sketchy pricing and availability, making this MSRP offering so enticing.

The gains over the previous-gen 4080 are modest, but as per our GPU benchmark hierarchy, the 5080 comfortably beats the 5070 Ti, and is a formidable alternative to AMD's RX 7900 XTX and RX 9070 XT.

New, possible details about a potential RTX 5080 Super have emerged, thanks to an X posting from well-reputed hardware leaker Kopite, who has a solid track record when it comes to all things Nvidia. The RTX 5080 Super is alleged to address GPU memory limitations with 24GB of fast GDDR7 memory, and a TGP (Total Graphics Power) that's rumored to exceed 400W. The leaker has not shared any details in regards to pricing and availability.

GDDR7 memory modules are currently available in 16Gb (2GB) and 24Gb (3GB) densities, with even higher capacities down the pipeline. The denser option directly translates to a 50% increase in VRAM capacity, even if the memory bus width remains the same.

Despite sharing the same 256-bit bus width as the RTX 5080, the RTX 5090 Mobile achieves its 24GB configuration with denser memory modules. The remainder of the Blackwell family sticks with standard 16Gb modules, similar to GDDR6X. However, this new leak suggests Nvidia might be eying transitioning to denser 24Gb options for the RTX 50 Super refresh.

The RTX 5080 Super reportedly employs the full-fat GB203 die, similar to the RTX 5080, with 10,752 CUDA cores or 84 Streaming Multiprocessors. The 256-bit interface enables eight memory modules, which have been populated with 24Gb (3GB) modules for 24GB of GDDR7 memory, rated at 32 Gbps. This puts the memory bandwidth at an impressive 1 TB/s, or 6.6% faster than the stock RTX 5080. Nvidia is also said to increase the power requirements for the RTX 5080 Super over 400W.

Asus has brought the joy of wood grain to its graphics card lineup. The PC and components giant has just taken the wraps off its first RTX 50 graphics cards to swell the ranks of the ProArt family, and they all feature “a classy brown wood grain design.” Moreover, this first quartet of RTX 50 ProArt cards is the firm’s “first to offer USB Type-C support for enhanced versatility for creative workflows.” Two of the models also sport an M.2 slot, which will please some users, as long as Asus’s price premium isn’t too ambitious.

The most desirable model among the new Asus ProArt GeForce RTX 5080 models is the OC Edition with M.2 SSD slot. We’d probably rank the non-overclocked M.2 slot packing card next, followed by the ProArt GeForce RTX 5080 OC, and then the ‘vanilla’ but still wood effect finished and USB Type-C port packing model.

Regular readers will be well aware of the key attractions of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, and if not, please check out our extensive review and consider its place among the best graphics cards on the market in mid-2025. Asus has two new ProArt cards, which will offer ‘reference’ specs, and two with an overclock applied to the GPU. We can’t drill down on those figures, though, as Asus hasn’t added the specs to the product pages at the time of writing.

Like a log in your PCIe slot

Probably the more important differentiation here is with the cooler, M.2 slot, and USB Type-C connectivity, though. The Asus ProArt design looks a lot like a reskinned Prime card, but here it has ProArt motifs and the headlining wood grain effect along the top. Like you’ve installed a log in your GPU slot.

Asus’s cooling system is listed as “2.5 slot small form factor size,” but it isn’t low-profile or similar. The triple spinner design is taller than the PCI bracket and probably approaches 300mm in length. Asus says the cooler features a MaxContact design with vapor chamber, and there’s a phase-change GPU pad between the cooler and the GPU to help keep this card cool, calm, and collected.

Moving along to the other special features here, all four new ProArt RTX 5080 models also feature USB Type-C support, which is great for a growing number of monitors and devices.

If you choose one of the models with an M.2 slot, you can benefit from up to PCIe Gen5 speeds. Moreover, the ample cooling of the graphics card should also cover the needs of any toasty SSD you might equip.

Wood be welcome

Computex 2025 is currently in full swing, and Asus is eager to show off its latest gaming innovations at the expo. Tom’s Hardware is on the ground, and our team looked through the company’s latest developments.

This includes some new peripherals, such as the ROG Falcata split keyboard and ROG Harpe II Ace mouse, and new GPU innovations, like the RTX 5080 Noctua, which features Noctua’s legendary cooling solutions, new BTF graphics cards that are now also compatible with non-BTF motherboards, and a Thunderbolt 5 GPU dock.

The ROG Falcata is a mechanical split-keyboard, allowing players to place the two halves of the keyboard in the most optimal position. This would make gaming for several hours much more comfortable, as your keyboard will now follow the natural angle of your wrists.

We’ve also tried the ROG Harpe II Ace mouse, which generally felt light and good, similar to other gaming mice from other top-tier manufacturers like Logitech. Hopefully, we can get our hands on these units in our testing lab to see how they stack up against our best gaming keyboards and best gaming mice.

Asus has several interesting new GPU-related innovations on show in Taiwan. It released an RTX 5080 version of its Noctua Edition GPU, which features three Noctua NF-A12x25 G2 120mm fans. This massive cooling solution allows the graphics card to run quieter, but it also makes it one massive GPU. The Asus GeForce RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is about four slots thick and over 360 mm long.

The company also released the next generation of its BTF GPUs, which now come with an adapter. The first version of these BTF GPUs had extra gold connectors for power that made it impossible to plug into a non-BTF motherboard.

But this time, Asus recessed those extra connectors, allowing you to plug them into a non-BTF motherboard and then use the usual 12V 2x6 power connector. And when you finally upgrade to a BTF mobo, you can just attach the included adapter, allowing the GPU to get power straight from the motherboard instead of the connector.

Aside from looking much cleaner, it also has the potential to solve the melting issues that many high-powered GPUs have with the 12VHPWR and its successor connector. Hopefully, this implementation is far more robust (especially as the adapter is made from metal), but only time will tell if it runs into issues.

Asus also showed off the ROG XG Station 3 — a Thunderbolt 5 external GPU dock that delivers up to 80Gbps of performance and is compatible with the latest GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

Asus has already announced its partnership with Bethesda and a limited-edition ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 OC Doom Edition graphics card, celebrating the release of Doom: The Dark Ages, which launched today. Now enhance its appeal, the Doom-inspired graphics card is being released as part of a Doom Edition bundle, limited to just 666 units globally, and available exclusively through Bethesda's Gear Store for an incredible $1,999.99, or $1,899.99 without a copy of Doom: The Dark Ages.

The ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 16GB GDDR7 OC Edition from the bundle has undergone a significant aesthetic transformation by Asus, adhering to the whole Doom theme. All modifications were executed aesthetically, so it feels shallow as the ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 OC Doom Edition offers the same performance as its vanilla counterpart. The value would increase if Asus had fine-tuned the graphics card's parameters to make it feel more special, like providing a higher factory overclock to distinguish it from the standard model.

With an eye-watering price tag, the ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 Doom Edition Bundle definitely caters to hardcore Doom fans. The Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5090 WindForce 32G, when available, retails for $1,999. Consequently, paying nearly $2,000 for a GeForce RTX 5080 is quite a stretch. Asus could have gained favor with consumers had the company used a GeForce RTX 5090 in the bundle instead. To put it in perspective, the standard ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 16GB GDDR7 OC Edition is priced at $1,799.99, meaning that the extra $200 premium is for the graphics card's Doom makeover and other swag.

Asus is bringing some snowy flair to its latest GPUs: the company just teased white editions across its lineup of RTX 50-series graphics cards. These include the premium ROG Astral as well as the TUF Gaming, and Prime series. These new variants will be showcased at this year’s Computex trade show, which kicks off next week.

The teaser only includes triple-fan (and quad-fan in case of the Astral) RTX 50-series graphics cards, which potentially means that Asus might not have plans to offer the same treatment for its dual-fan GPUs this year.

As of writing this article, the company’s website lists the above mentioned white GPUs across the RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti and 5070. As for the RTX 5060 Ti and 5060, there are no fully white cards, but the Dual series is interesting with its dual-tone (black and white) finish.

New benchmarking figures appear to reveal that the NVIDIA RTX 5090 laptop GPU may not be all that it's cracked up to be, revealing some disappointing performance figures when compared to the 5090.

The RTX 5090 laptop GPU arrived in late March 2025, but its launch was plagued by several issues, including delayed review units. A few reviews were available soon after the GPU became available, like Tom’s Hardware’s review of the Razer Blade 16, but it took some time for us to see an RTX 4090 vs. RTX 5090 comparison on nearly identical units. Jarrod’s Tech has released a video evaluating two XMG Neo 16 laptops that were equipped with both GPUs, and the results are interesting, to say the least.

The XMG Neo 16 (2024) used an Intel Core i9-14900HX paired with 32 GB of DDR5-5600 RAM and an RTX 4090, while the newer XMG Neo 16 (2025) is equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX with 32 GB of DDR5-6400 RAM and an RTX 5090 GPU. Because of these specifications, one would expect the newer laptop to run faster, especially as it has a newer top-of-the-line laptop CPU, faster memory, and the RTX 5090. More than that, the newer GPU uses faster VRAM and has 50% more memory than the RTX 4090. Unfortunately, Jarrod’s Tech’s test results tell a different story.

Concerned and bemused owners of Gigabyte graphics cards continue to document harrowing signs of thermal putty leaking out of their graphics cards despite the company's efforts to assuage fears that there's nothing to worry about.

Last month, Gigabyte addressed issues of thermal gel creep in its RTX 50-Series and AMD Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs, telling customers that in early production a slightly higher volume of gel was applied, which "may cause the excessive gel to appear more prominent, extended, and could potentially be separated from the designated area."

The company says there's nothing to worry about and the creep won't affect performance, reliability, or lifespan, but that hasn't stopped concerned users from continuing to document worrying signs of the dreaded thermal creep.

In particular, Reddit users u/supatx uploaded a series of images, which you can see in the Reddit embed below, documenting the problem unfolding over the course of a couple of weeks. The first two images show the first signs of the issue, small leakages on the main board. Images three and four "show where the thermal putty has dripped down onto the riser," they shared. Five and six "shows where the thermal putty has dripped down and no longer provides heat dissipation to most of what seems to be a VRAM chip." The final harrowing images show the gap in the system where the putty used to be from photo four.

5070ti Aorus Master Leaking Thermal Putty from r/gigabyte

The Gigabyte subreddit is awash with such reports. "I got my card about a week ago and seeing all those posts made me want to double check," another user shared. After a week of light use, their images show putty leaking from all the usual spots after just five hours of total use, with the card horizontal the whole time. "Is it ok?" another asked sheepishly.

While plenty of comments recommend just wiping up the excess and cracking on, Supatx's images appear to show that eventually, all of the putty in question will leak out, leaving nothing behind and presumably no thermal performance either. That could cast some doubt on Gigabyte's claim that the problem is caused merely by excess, with the images on display here apparently showing no thermal putty left behind on at least some parts of the board.

Gigabyte says that users with more questions or who require further assistance should contact their regional Gigabyte customer service center.

A new report claims that Nvidia has recently raised the official prices of nearly all of its products to combat the impact of tariffs and surging manufacturing costs on its business, with gaming graphics cards receiving a 5 to 10% hike while AI GPUs see up to a 15% increase.

As reported by Digitimes Taiwan (translated), Nvidia is facing "multiple crises," including a $5.5 billion hit to its quarterly earnings over export restrictions on AI chips, including a ban on sales of its H20 chips to China.

Digitimes reports that CEO Jensen Huang has been "shuttling back and forth" between the US and China to minimize the impact of tariffs, and that "in order to maintain stable profitability," Nvidia has reportedly recently raised official prices for almost all its products, allowing its partners to increase prices accordingly.

Despite the hikes, Digitimes claims Nvidia's financial report at the end of the month "should be within financial forecasts and deliver excellent profit results," driven by strong demand for AI chips outside of China and the expanding spending from cloud service providers.

The report states that Nvidia has applied official price hikes to numerous products to keep its earnings stable, with partners following suit. As an example, Digitimes cites the RTX 5090, bought at premium prices upon release without hesitation, such that channel pricing "quickly doubled."

The report notes that following the AI chip ban, RTX 5090 prices climbed further still, surging overnight from around NT$90,000 to NT$100,000, with other RTX 50 series cards also increasing by 5-10%. Digitimes notes Nvidia has also raised the price of its H200 and B200 chips, with server vendors increasing prices by up to 15% accordingly.

According to the publication's supply chain sources, price hikes have been exacerbated by the shift of Blackwell chip production to TSMC's US plant, which has driven a significant rise in the price of production, materials, and logistics.

There is some hope that the measures could be temporary; however, following the news that the US and China have agreed on a trade deal that should cut tariffs by 115%, thanks to a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs. As with latent price increases being passed on to consumers, however, it could be some time before prices start to fall.

We visited the Asus HQ in Taipei for a technology briefing, to enjoy some NUC desktop and ROG laptop hands-on time, and to glean exclusive hardware design insights. Tom's Hardware readers are probably going to be most enthralled by the details and images we have of the upcoming ROG NUC 2025 (a very close relation to the NUC 15 Performance). We also saw the complete Asus ROG 2025 laptop lineup with RTX 5080 and 5090 GPUs, stripped down to the silicon for some PCB peeking.

Asus Headquarters

Asus’ open-book HQ

Our visit to the Asus LiGong building was in mid-March, while several key components were still a secret. Two of the company's business units welcomed us on the day: The Asus NUC team and the Asus ROG gaming laptop technical marketing team.

As you might expect, Asus has quite an impressive headquarters in Taipei's Beitou District. The LiGong building we visited is its newer headquarters, styled like an 'open book' (the logo you see is on the rear, the spine of the book). However, certain divisions like VGA and motherboards have remained at the longer-established Asus Li-De building across the road.

Inside Asus LiGong, there seemed to be little reason for employees to leave other than to go home to sleep. There was a whole floor dedicated to a modern, glistening food court with a wide range of cuisines, a 7-11 convenience store, a juice bar, chains like Starbucks and MOS Burger, hang-out spaces, and I even noticed an on-site travel agent. After regular work hours, people also stick around for the on-site gym, clubs, and social events — we noticed the Asus orchestra had started practicing as we left.

It is also interesting to note that Asus manufacturing spinoff Pegatron remains very close to Beitou. Even though it is now an independent company, Beitou remains a good site for the ODM firm's headquarters.

Asus NUC

What’s going on with NUC?

It was incredibly interesting to spend time with the NUC team and learn how the different teams from Asus and Intel will work together in 2025. We also got to analyze the latest product stack and ponder the team's plans for the future.

The lead NUC executive we met was Mavila Wu, whose current full title is Deputy Division Director of Product Division, NUC Business Unit, at Asus. An Asus employee for approaching 20 years, Wu hosted the presentation, device showcase, and Q&As. However, other Asus executives (including some ex-Intel NUC folks) were there to share insight and field questions.

◼ NUC team transition

Our discussions began with a talk about the NUC product transition from Intel to Asus, which officially began about 18 months ago. The change meant a big cultural and technological transition. However, Asus has maintained the geographically broad expertise from the merger, with teams still collaborating between offices in Oregon, Arizona, and Taipei.

The transition occurred during the NUC 12 to 13 era, with Asus firmly holding the reins on the recently announced NUC 14 line. Of course, the emerging NUC 15 Pro, NUC 15 Pro+, NUC 15 Performance, and the closely related ROG NUC 2025 are now well-established Asus products. The Expert Center (AMD-powered) NUC-a-like products are maintained and benefit from similar thermal, power management, multiphase designs, and other advancements that we have seen come to the (Intel-powered) NUC machines recently.

◼ Asus NUC improvements – noise profile and thermals

We asked the team to highlight some of the biggest differences a user might notice between an old Intel NUC and a contemporary Asus NUC. It turns out that some design targets were changed due to Asus’ influence.

The NUC team pointed out that Asus is stricter about what is considered an acceptable level of device noise. We were told that an Intel NUC might have run at up to 45dB under load, but Asus makes sure the active cooling systems in new devices won't exceed 38dB—a noticeably quieter profile.

With the latest generation of NUCs we see they typically have their Lunar Lake or Arrow Lake processors running at TDPs configured from 25 to 40W. For a long time, these standard NUCs have been roughly 4x4-inch devices of varying heights.

◼ Asus NUC 15 Pro+

During the visit, we were pleased to see the new NUC 15 Pro+, which continues the 4x5-inch form factor that we saw debut with the NUC 14 Pro+. Specifically, these are 144 x 112 x 42mm (0.7 liter). Side by side, the Nuc 15 Pro+ body seemed negligibly bulkier than its standard compact NUC siblings (which start at 0.48 liters), but the benefits might be well worth it if you want more processing power.

The slightly larger chassis Asus uses for the Pro+ can be used effectively. According to the technical team at the presentation, the new rectangular chassis enables the use of Intel's new Arrow Lake H processors configured at up to 65W this generation. Remember, they still have to keep the noise levels below 38 dB.

Opening up the Pro+ and comparing it with its brethren shows the significantly reconfigured cooling in this model. Instead of all the cooling apparatus being mostly on one side of the PCB, the Pro+ features an array of heatpipes extending over the side of the PCB with the CPU, with the motherboard flanked by fin stacks connected to the heatpipes. Last but not least, we have what’s likely to be the largest fan you could fit (approx 90mm), attached to the hinged lid of the device, directing air over the left/right fin stacks.

◼ Asus ROG NUC 2025 and NUC 15 Performance

Another highlight of the NUC team meeting was getting to check out a sample of the ROG NUC 2025. This 3-liter device packs a lot of CPU and GPU processing power, but the Asus team assured us that it is very quiet, with its triple fan design and what looked like more than half the volume of the chassis used by the dual vapor chamber enhanced cooling system.

The ROG NUC 2025 system was powered up during the visit, but we didn't run any programs on it. But, you wouldn't know it was even on, if it were not for the ROG RGB lighting zones being lit.

Inside this high-performance yet compact machine is a potent mix of an Intel Core Ultra CPU (Arrow Lake HX) plus one of Nvidia's new Blackwell architecture GeForce RTX 5070 Ti or 5080 laptop GPUs.

We were told that the CPU was configured to run at 55W, and the GPU at up to 140W, by default. But power limits are dynamic, depending on system workloads, and the CPU could chew through significantly more than 55W if required, and the headroom was available. A sturdy 330W PSU keeps the power flowing to the ROG NUC's laptop processors, and is sufficient enough for some USB ports to function as charging/power sources.

Other attractions of the ROG NUC (2025) highlighted by the team were its support for up to five displays, its Intel Killer networking, and its onboard Thunderbolt 4 ports.

Asus's ROG NUC 2025 device will be available from H2 this year. Professionals who might need the same kind of power, without the RGB and ROG styling, should look at the near-identical NUC 15 Performance. The only thing it lacks is the typical ROG styling and RGB. A bonus for the pros is that there will be more configurations available, including a barebones option.

◼ More NUC conversation nuggets

We talked about cooling NUCs, or rather, mini-PCs in general. Interestingly, the team at the meeting insisted that NUCs aren't easier to cool or thermally manage than laptops. They might be thicker and deeper, but laptops have a large surface area for venting and heat convection, it was reasoned.

Asus also wanted to highlight the quality and reliability of its NUC line. It was claimed that the Asus NUCs (and Expert Centers) went through far more rigorous heat, humidity, and endurance testing than the "industry standard." Moreover, we were quoted a return rate of under 0.5% for NUCs. This compared well with the mini-PC average of over 3%, according to the Asus team.

◼ NUC is crucial for Asus’ grand AI plans

Going forward into 2026 and beyond, Asus sees AI as a driver for the NUC business unit. We've heard lots of this kind of thing before, but Asus isn't talking about Microsoft's lame Copilot. Instead, it has large customers who want to use Edge AI applications. We are talking about tasks like deepfake image protection, medical AI, customer service AI, and so on. With a quoted 80% of the unit's business with SMBs, governments, education, and other large organizations – this shows AI isn't just a tech talking point in this instance.

Asus 2025 Laptops

Asus’s high-end 2025 laptop range

The range of Asus laptops available in 2025 is quite staggering, with the company developing products for many niches, with additional geographic and retail partner exclusive models. So, at Asus LiGong, it was a relief to focus solely on the latest ROG designs for 2025 featuring the newest mobile processors from AMD and Intel, as well as (of course) the brand-new Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs.

Specific Asus ROG devices we got a close look at, including a peek at the PCBs, were the ROG Flow Z13, ROG Strix Scar 16, ROG Strix Scar 18, ROG Zephyrus G14, the ROG Zephyrus G16, and the ROG XG Mobile GC34 – all 2025 models. For completeness, there are also non-Scar versions of the Strix models launching, the Strix G16 and Strix G18, which basically trim the “AniMe Vision” frills.

◼ How Asus designs its laptops

Before looking at the shiny new 2025 hardware, it was interesting to hear about the process Asus goes through from concept to finished laptop. Sascha Krohn, the firm's Director of Technical Marketing and a 10-year veteran at Asus, offered the most insight in this segment of our visit.

We were told that every design would start with digital renders, which sounds logical. Once things were narrowed down on the digital side, the earliest prototypes would be made in the physical world. So, the earliest physical sample could be simply made from cardboard or foam, or increasingly nowadays, 3D printed. It would still be pretty quick and cheap to iterate at this stage.

◼ Asus ROG XG Mobile and ROG Flow Z13 (2025)

Before the laptops, we got to see these two very interesting devices in the flesh and powered up. You've likely seen these devices in our news, but reviews may or may not have been published by the time you read this.

Firstly, let's look at Asus' latest iteration of its ROG-branded portable eGPU. The new ROG XG Mobile (2025) stands on the shoulders of its predecessor with two important new features: the upgrade to Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs (laptop GPUs) and Thunderbolt 5 connectivity.

Both while under load and while idle, this eGPU was pleasingly quiet, as it should be, and the solitary RGB area was a ROG logo case cutout. We had mixed feelings about the smoked semi-opaque case, as from a distance the unit just looked like it needed to be wiped clean of fingerprints, or something.

The RTX 5090 laptop unit (24 GB) we had in hand was also very compact and light. It measures 8.2 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches (208 x 155 x 29.6 mm) and weighs just 1.3kg. That figure is more impressive because there's a built-in 330W power brick, so all you need is a standard IEC mains cable for power. There's a kickstand, too, providing some more placement or mounting flexibility.

Remember, this is more than an eGPU. It also has fast ports and an SD Express card reader. Asus will also be making an RTX 5070 Ti laptop GPU (12GB) variant.

Though we didn't have much time to play with the Asus ROG XG Mobile, we were pleased to see a rev. 2.0 PCB from the device. On this unpopulated sample, it is easy to see the various port connector pads to the right and the large GPU area flanked by locations for up to eight GDDR7 ICs. To the far left are the locations for all the power stage components. Putting this PCB in context with the assembled device shows how compact the internal 330W PSU really is.

We have reviewed earlier iterations of the ROG Flow Z13 and will be deep-diving into the 2025 edition, which beats a brand-new path with a Strix Halo APU at its heart, aka the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395.

We met the Z13 product manager, Albert Lee, who said that the scale of demand for this gaming tablet had been a (pleasant) surprise.

These tablet hybrid devices aren't very affordable due to the complex and large (hence expensive) AMD chips, plus premium supporting components. However, markets like China, which had at first seemed reticent, suddenly became very keen for stock, according to Lee. The well publicized AI processing power of these Strix Halo platforms might have piqued the interest of Chinese power users. This is good for Asus, and probably good for AMD's plans to develop and sell similar - or even stronger - APUs.

◼ ROG Strix and Zephyrus (2025) gaming laptops

We also saw and had some hands-on time with the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16, ROG Strix Scar 18, ROG Zephyrus G14, and ROG Zephyrus G16 – all 2025 models, of course.

Across the board, these models feature the latest CPUs from AMD and Intel, as well as RTX 50 series graphics. The family will initially launch for those with the appetite and budget for higher-end devices. Thus, we will see RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 variants of these powerful laptops come first.

For the best performance on the go, the thicker, heavier ROG Strix family is an easy choice. With one of these AniMe Matrix lid capped machines, you will enjoy CPUs up to 55W and GPUs with up to 175W TDPs. We were told that if a task required max CPU resources and wasn't interested in GPU acceleration, the CPU would be able to run at a sustained 140W, with boosting up to 175W, too (manual mode). When gaming, users should expect the CPU to run at up to 80W, and the GPU at 175W, for a total platform max power of 255W.

Our opened-up laptops and PCBs revealed some interesting features of the Strix laptops. These are really easy to get into, too, with a tool-less system reliant on a sliding latch which enables the bottom covers to be slid and popped off with very little effort.

It was evident that the two different sized ROG Strix models shared the same PCB design, but they fit into the two different sized chassis thanks to the floating position of the I/O daughterboard on the left (looking down on an opened unit).

The triple fan cooling system has the smallest fan approximately beneath the top of the trackpad/keyboard boundary to cool the chipset. To one side are the removable memory slots and an M.2 SSD slot, to the other another M.2 SSD slot (both are Q-latch). A sizable end-to-end vapor chamber unifies this cooling solution.

Another interesting observation in the ROG laptops was the intrusion sensor design. With the easy detach bottom cover of the Strix Scar models, this might be a particularly good idea to prevent electronic damage through carelessness. In the images you can see a black foam ‘obelisk’ on the PCB, this is hollowed out and it encircles a light sensor. When the bottom cover is on, no light can get to the sensor, but when the cover is popped off and the sensor exposed it will initiate a system shutdown – if the user has forgotten to do this, or left the machine asleep, inadvertently.

Moving along to the ROG Zephyrus refresh machines, and (as usual) these slim, attractive designs make a significant break from traditional gaming laptop aesthetics and builds. One could say they are more like a MacBook Pro or Dell XPS design, but they still offer gaming credentials – and this year’s Zephyrus machines pack in the latest and greatest silicon.

Talking to Krohn about the new Zephyrus, it was highlighted that to deliver gaming laptops so sleek, compact, and light it was necessary to keep the number of watts the CPU and GPU can consume in check. This has always been the case for this line, and if purchasers aren’t happy with this compromise, they are directed to the ROG Strix line instead.

Comparing the 16-inch Zephyrus and 16-inch Scar, for contrast, the Zephyrus is around one kilo (2.2 pounds) lighter, and less than half the volume of the Scar. Meanwhile, the Zephyrus G14 weighs about the same as an Apple MacBook Pro 14.

Asus has a number of tricks up its sleeve that mean investing in higher spec GPU-equipped members of this gaming laptop family is still worthwhile. The new Zephyrus G14, equipped with an RTX 5080 (the highest spec at this size) makes use of liquid metal on the CPU and GPU for better thermals, though it still uses a heatpipe-based cooling system.

The first new Zephyrus G16 machines with RTX 5080 or RTX 5090 laptop GPUs will feature a vapor chamber cooler. We aren’t sure whether the new RTX 5070 Ti machines will sit in the vapor chamber or heatpipe camp.

Opening up these new Zephyrus units, we see a similar sight to the 2024 models. The G14 has a replaceable M.2 2280 SSD and Wi-Fi card, and the G16 improves on this with a welcome extra M.2 2280 slot for storage expansion. The design is very clean, making best use of the limited space in these slim devices.

◼ Liquid metal shouldn't be user-serviced

We asked about the specter of liquid metal run-off, or dry spots causing issues. The internet is full of discussions of this phenomenon. In answer, Krohn said that this was incredibly rare to see in RMA samples.

Furthermore, we were told the appearance of tarnishing once the processor surfaces are exposed by a technician isn’t typically evidence of a dry spot, but a simple chemical reaction with some impurity that had found its way there. Asus insists it uses more than enough TIM to mean there will not be dry spots.

Last but not least, those who think they have liquid metal-based issues are encouraged to contact Asus support, and not to loosen or remove the laptop's heatsinks.

Asus Q&A

Asus ROG laptop executive Q&A

Sascha Krohn, the Director of Technical Marketing at Asus, was happy to share some insight into his background, education, career, and more.

Krohn was born in Germany, and you may be surprised to hear he didn't study any computer technology-related subject at university, concluding his studies after obtaining a joint degree in Biology and Spanish.

Sensing his future was in tech, Krohn thought firing out emails at an assortment of computer companies was worth a shot. As luck would have it, AMD called back with an offer of a customer support role at its UK HQ. After his grounding at AMD, the young man returned to Germany to work for a memory firm, which became his springboard to a career and a settled life in Taiwan.

The current Technical Marketing head at Asus moved to the sweet potato-shaped silicon island in the mid-to-late 2000s to work for Foxconn and set up its Quantum Force components division. His fast-paced career path saw him then move between Lucid Logix, Cooler Master (3 years), and BitFenix (3 years).

Thankfully, Krohn found an anchor at Asus and has been there for over a decade. Now, he enjoys his position as Director of Technical Marketing, which is a rather wide-ranging position, as you might expect.

◼ Krohn’s gaming PC’s of yore

Krohn's first remembered PC gaming experience was with a Compaq-branded desktop, on which Prince of Persia was installed. The PC had a turbo button that doubled the digital clock speed readout, so we suspect it was an i486DX machine. However, the young Krohn preferred his Sega Master system for casual gaming.

Later, PCs would become more attractive, and this was in the Pentium III era. Specifically, Krohn recalls purchasing a Pentium III 700e from MediaMarkt, which came with an ATI Rage graphics card of some kind. It wasn't long before the young enthusiast overclocked this pre-built from 700 MHz to 1 GHz+, and upgraded to an Nvidia GPU, likely a TNT2 card.

The first PC-DIY system that Krohn built himself from scratch was based on an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ processor, installed on an Epox motherboard. This system's CPU could be overclocked from 1.5 to 2.3 GHz without huge effort or esoteric cooling. An Nvidia GeForce 4MX was also added for extra gaming horsepower.

◼ Krohn on the future of mobile computing

It is always interesting to hear what a person in such a position at a major tech company identifies as future trends. Krohn wasn't cagey about his predictions. He reckons that the coming year will see iGPUs get even more powerful—and these are increasingly popular in hot segment devices like the ROG Flow Z13 and ROG Ally.

One of the first laptops with Nvidia’s new top-of-the-line mobile GPU, the HP Omen Max 16 is designed to take on the best gaming laptops and beat them into submission with high performance and stunning visuals. We tested a fully decked out version of this 16-inch laptop, which came packed with an RTX 5090 GPU, Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, a 2TB SSD and a 2560 x 1600, 240 Hz OLED display. That adds up to a pricey $4,329 price tag.

As you might expect from a decked out mobile gaming rig, our review config of the HP Omen Max 16 offered strong frame rates in both real-world play and in benchmark tests, though some competitors with the slightly-lesser RTX 5080 GPU often kept pace with or exceeded it. Its OLED panel offered vibrant colors and wide viewing angles while the speakers provided rich tin-free audio. But its keyboard felt mushy and lifeless.

At 6.1 pounds this mostly-aluminum laptop feels really heavy in the hand and, when you add in its 2-pound power brick, a huge weight in your laptop bag. You might expect that kind of weight out of a rig this powerful, but some competitors are slimmer and lighter while offering similar or better frame rates.

What is the design of the HP Omen Max 16 like?

The HP Omen Max 16 is an attractive — but heavy — laptop. Its black chassis, with an aluminum base and lid, give it a premium look and feel. The number "016" is emblazoned on the deck and above the lid, just in case you ever forget that it’s a 16-inch laptop. It also happens to be in a style very reminiscent of Alienware. The overall aesthetic is ok, neither exciting nor innovative, but certainly premium.

At 6.1, this is a hefty machine At 0.98-inches thick, it’s chunky too. It weighed so much that adding it and its chunky charger to my laptop bag made the whole contraption a real burden. By comparison, the Razer Blade 16, equipped with the same RTX 5090 GPU as our Omen (albeit with a weaker processor), weighs 4.7 pounds and is just 0.69 inches thick. The Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 with RTX 5080 is 5.5 pounds and a thicker, 1.18 inches. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 16, also with an RTX 5080, is actually heavier at 6.3 pounds, but not as thick at 0.90 inches.

The Omen Max 16 has plenty of ports, including two USB Type-A 10 Gbps ports, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI 2.1 out port, and a 3.5 mm audio jack. There’s also a round barrel connector for the 2-pound, 330-watt power supply.

There’s plenty of RGB lighting for those who like that kind of look. The full-size keyboard with a numeric keypad, has pudding-style keycaps where the light can shine through the legends. There’s also a lightbar on the front lip of the laptop, where it can reflect off of a glossy tabletop.

What are the specs of the HP Omen Max 16 we tested?

What are the gaming and graphics performance on the HP Omen Max 16?

With its RTX 5090 graphics and Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, our configuration of the Omen Max 16 provided powerful gaming performance in both synthetic and real-world play. This is definitely a top-of-the-line configuration that’s about on par with other RTX 5090-powered laptops we’ve tested.

I spent some time playing Cyberpunk 2077 on it at both Ultra Ray Tracing and Ultra (non-Ray Tracing) settings. With ray tracing on, running at the screen’s native 2560 x 1600 resolution, my frame rate hovered between 65 and 70 frames per second. But with it off, I saw a smoother, 95 to 105 FPS range.

The numbers were not quite as good on a synthetic Cyberpunk 2077 test we ran where the Omen output 72 FPS at 1920 x 1080 and 47 FPS at 2560 x 1600, with Ray Tracing Ultra settings. These numbers were better than competitors like the Razer Blade 16 (66 / 43 FPS) and Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 (62 / 38 FPS).

On Shadow of the Tomb Raider at the highest settings, the Omen Max 16 produced a smooth 175 FPS at its native resolution and 116 FPS at 1080p. Surprisingly, the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 and its RTX 5080 card performed a little bit better at 1080p and about the same at 2560 x 1600.

Again, in Far Cry 6 at Ultra settings, the HP Omen Max 16 hung with its competitors but was not at the top of the pack. At 1080p, the Aorus Master 16 beat it by 11 FPS and the RTX 5080-powered Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 was also a few FPS ahead.

In Borderlands 3, the Omen trailed the Aorus Master 16 by a few FPS. It was still strong at 156 FPS at 1080p and 109 FPS at 2560 x 1600, however. The Razer Blade 16 crashed during the test.

On Red Dead Redemption 2, at medium settings, the Omen 16 managed a strong 128 FPS at 1080p and 77 FPS at 2560 x 1600. The 1080p number led the field while the Razer Blade 16 (121 / 94 FPS) won at 2560 x 1600. On this test, the Aorus Master 16 trailed the field.

To see how the system performs over time, we run the Metro Exodus benchmark 15 times with RTX enabled. During this test, the HP Omen Max 16 averaged 121.24 FPS, a little bit less than the Razer Blade 16 which got 125.77 FPS. The FPS ranged from 135.59 FPS on the first run to 114.35 FPS on the last run, showing that performance dropped slightly as the system heated up.

During that time, the GPU clock speed averaged 1,582.37 MHz and its temperature averaged 83.15 degrees Celsius. The CPU’s P-cores ran at an average clock speed of 4.03 GHz and its E-cores ran at an average clock speed of 2,397 MHz. The CPU temperature averaged 99.68 degrees Celsius.

What productivity performance can you expect on the HP Omen Max 16?

WIth its Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, RTX 5090 graphics, 32GB of DDR5 RAM and 2TB PCIe 4 SSD, our configuration of the HP Omen Max 16 handled every productivity task we threw at it admirably. Whether we were surfing the web, copying a large group of files or transcoding a video, the results were speedy.

The Omen pulled ahead of its competitors on Geekbench 6, scoring 3,097 in single-core testing and 19,822 in multi-core. That barely beat the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 and Gigabyte Aorus Master 16, both of which have the same Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and handily pounded the Razer Blade 16 and its AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor.

It took 2 minutes and 54 seconds for the Omen to transcode a 4K video into 1080p. That time is ahead of the Razer Blade 14 but still more than 30 seconds behind the RTX 5080-powered Strix Scar 16 and Aorus Master 16.

The HP Omen Max 16’s PCIe 4 SSD copied 25GB of files at a rate of 1,395.4 MBps. That’s a little behind the Razer Blade 16 and Strix Scar 16. However, it’s comfortably ahead of the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16.

What is the display on the HP Omen Max 16 and how does it perform?

The HP Omen Max 16 is available with both IPS and OLED display options. Our review unit came with the more-expensive OLED option, which was extremely sharp and colorful. The 2560 x 1600, 240 Hz panel looked great whether I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 or watching videos on YouTube.

When I watched a video of scenes from a Costa Rican jungle, fine details like the scales in a snake’s skin were sharp and easy to make out. Colors like the green of a frog or the red of a parrot were especially vibrant. The colors didn’t fade even at 90 degrees to the left or right.

The Omen’s screen hit an impressive 141.4% of the DCI-P3 color gamut by volume on our light meter. That beats the Razer Blade 16 (114.6%), Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 and Gigabyte Aorus Master 16. The panel was also really bright at 362.8 nits in SDR mode. That’s about on par with competitors except for the Strix Scar which hit 457.2 nits.

What is it like to use the keyboard and touchpad on the HP Omen Max 16?

The Omen Max 16’s keyboard is definitely not my favorite for typing, but it’s not terrible for gaming. The pudding-style keys feel mushy, lacking the kind of tactile feedback I like to get when writing and editing. The keyboard has a full numeric keypad, along with a column for - / + and second Enter keys. This makes things feel a little cramped but you do get a lot of keys for a 16-inch laptop.

Another thing I really don’t like: the arrow keys are not in an inverted T shape like they are on so many other laptops. Instead, the up and down arrows are smaller than the right and left keys and are shoved in-between the right and left. This makes moving the cursor around unpleasant. However, despite the shortcomings of the keyboard, I was able to hit a strong 106 wpm in 10fastfingers.com test, with just a 3.5 percent error rate. Both of those numbers are on the high end of my typical score.

While I was playing Cyberpunk 2077, the feel of the keys was less distracting for moving around than it was for typing. I had no problem turning quickly with WASD keys.

The 4.95 x 3.1-inch clickpad offers smooth, accurate navigation. The pad responded well to multitouch gestures such as pinch-to-zoom and two-finger scroll.

What do the speakers on the HP Omen Max 16 sound like?

The Omen Max 16’s speakers provide audio that’s rich and layered if not overly loud. When I listened to "AC/DC’s Back in Black," the guitar and drums appeared to come from different sides of the machine. Better still, there was not a hint of tininess, even at maximum volume. However, it wasn’t the loudest laptop I’ve heard with volume that was enough to fill a medium-sized but not a large room.

The output during gaming was also excellent. When I played Cyberpunk 2077, the spatial audio was really noticeable with gunshots that sounded like they were coming from a different direction than the voice of Jackie, a helpful NPC, who was behind me.

What is upgradable on the HP Omen Max 16?

The HP Omen Max 16 is relatively easy to upgrade. The bottom surface of the laptop has six Philip's head screws, only one of which is captive. Once you pry the cover off, there are markings showing where each major component – the GPU, CPU, DDR5 RAM and SSDs are located.

If you want to upgrade the RAM, you can remove the panel above the two DIMM slots. There are also two M.2 2280 SSD slots, one of which is filled with the boot drive. The second SSD slot is readily accessible, but the first one, which is used for the boot drive, is partly covered by the heat pipe from one of the two fans. That's a notable issue.

To replace the boot drive, you’d probably have to remove the fan or you’d have to slide the SSD out from under it. We didn’t want to risk removing the fan to find out so we’d suggest only adding a second drive rather than attempting to upgrade the boot drive.

What is the battery Life on the HP Omen Max 16?

Despite its 83 Whr battery, the HP Omen Max 16 doesn't offer strong battery life, which is sadly still somewhat common in gaming laptops.

In our tests, it lasted a mere 3 hours and 20 minutes on our endurance test. It’s important to note that this is not a gaming test; it’s a web surfing test that visits a variety of web pages, including some that stream video or show 3D animations. The Razer Blade 16, which was similarly equipped, lasted 7 hours and 21 minutes, which is more than twice as long.

We also ran HP’s computer through PCMark 10’s Gaming battery test, during which it lasted a mere one hour and 25 minutes. The RTX 5090-powered Razer Blade 16 lasted an hour longer on the same test.

How warm does the HP Omen Max 16 get when working or gaming?

The HP Omen Max 16 stays pretty cool when you’re not gaming but it gets warm during intense play. During web surfing, the keyboard hit just 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit, the bottom was a modest 93.3 F and the touchpad was just 85.3 F.

However, when we ran Metro Exodus, the keyboard was a toasty 113.8 F, the bottom measured 105.2 Fand the area above the Del key on the keyboard hit a full 125.8 degrees. That being said, these types of temperatures are consistent with what we see on most high-powered gaming laptops. In general, you should use them on a desk or table.

Webcam on the HP Omen Max 16

The 1080p webcam captured high-quality images in my testing. Colors like the blue in my shirt or the brown wood on a door behind me were accurate and vibrant. Fine details like the stubble on my face were clearly visible, even when I took a photo with the sun shining through a window behind me. There’s also a physical shutter to protect your privacy.

Software and Warranty on the HP Omen Max 16

The HP Omen Max 16 has just one major first-party utility: Omen Gaming Hub. Omen Gaming Hub has all the features you need for controlling a high-end gaming laptop, including overlays and charts for your CPU, GPU and RAM, performance tuning and overclocking controls, and settings for the RGB keyboard and front light bar.

Using Omen Gaming Hub, you can exert fine control over the fan speed, boost performance and clean out unnecessary files. You can also remap the keys on the keyboard so they perform macros or serve as different keys, A beta feature called Omen AI uses artificial intelligence to adjust your settings to get the best performance for certain games; however, it currently works with only three games – Counter-Strike 2, League of Legends and Apex Legends.

HP backs the Omen Max 16 with a standard one-year warranty. You can pay up to $385 to extend that to three years and include accidental damage and theft protection.

What configurations are available for the HP Omen Max 16?

The HP Omen Max 16 is available in four main configurations, available either via HP.com or Best Buy depending on which you choose. There’s also the option to custom configure your Omen Max 16 on the HP website.

The base model goes for $2,499 and comes equipped with a Core Ultra 7 255HX CPU, RTX 5070 Ti graphics, 16GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, a 512GB SSD, a 2K IPS screen and WiFI 6E. Our decked out $4,339 configuration ups the specs to a Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, an RTX 5090 GPU, 32GB of RAM, an OLED 2K screen and a Wi-Fi 7 card.

When you configure your laptop to order you can choose among Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti, 5080 and 5090 GPUs, Core Ultra 7 or Ultra 9 CPUs, up to 64GB of RAM, 1080p or 2K displays with an OLED option and up to 2TB of storage.

Bottom Line

There’s a lot to like about the HP Omen Max 16, particularly in the expensive, high-end configuration we reviewed. You get graphics performance that’s good enough to play your favorite games at high frame rates, even with the settings turned up and ray tracing turned on. You get one of the most vibrant displays on the market and speakerss that are great for listening to music or hearing footsteps creeping up behind you in a first-person shooter, even without a headset.

However, at more than 8 pounds of heft in your bag if you include the charger, this is a heavy laptop and one that can’t be used unplugged for very long, even if you’re doing productivity work. The Razer Blade 16, which we tested with an RTX 5090, offered similar or better performance and weighs just 4.72 pounds for the laptop with a 1.75 pound power brick while enduring more than 7 hours on a charge.

If you’re looking to save money, going for a competitor with an RTX 5080 chip inside might be a better choice. The Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 with RTX 5080 goes for about $1,200 less than the HP Omen Max 16 we tested and yet it sometimes bested HP’s laptop by registering slightly higher frame rates. Gigabyte’s keyboard, though lacking a numpad, had a better tactile feel than HP’s, though the unit we tested did not come with an OLED panel.

However, if you want top of the line performance, you can afford to pay a premium and you don’t plan to carry your laptop around much (or you don’t mind the weight), the HP Omen Max 16 has a lot to offer.

The latest Steam Hardware survey from April shows Nvidia’s RTX 50 series GPUs making their first appearance almost four months after launch. Conversely, despite their apparent retail popularity, AMD’s RX 9000 GPUs are nowhere to be found on the list. While the absence of RDNA 4 is confusing, it might all boil down to a lack of adequate supply at MSRP.

The April Steam Hardware survey reflects a return to normality after the previous survey was skewed by an unexplained surge of Chinese users, knocking several statistics off the charts. Typical figures for operating systems, system specifications, and CPU/GPU vendor, among others, remained unchanged. Nvidia still reigns supreme in the GPU market with a 74.39% share, while Intel leads the CPU arena at 60.35%, closely followed by AMD.

Several new GPUs have gained traction among gamers, per the Steam Hardware survey, including Nvidia’s RTX 5080 (0.38%), RTX 5070 Ti (0.28%), and RTX 5070 (0.38%). The RTX 5090 being excluded from this list is self-explanatory, as that GPU is far out of the reach of the average user. After exhaustively searching the list, we found no GPU from AMD’s RX 9070 family. That’s quite telling since this has recently been one of AMD’s most successful GPU launches, coupled with Nvidia’s many shortfalls this generation.

There is a new AMD GPU on the survey, though — new to the survey statistics, at least. AMD's RX 7800 XT appears for the first time in the April 2025 figures, landing at 0.27% (the same as the 5070 Ti). The RX 7900 XT, 7900 GRE, 7600 XT, and 7600 all remain missing in action, along with virtually all Intel Arc GPUs (other than the integrated "Arc Graphics" that sits unchanged month-to-month at 0.22%).

Nvidia's RTX 50-series product stack has seen a decline in demand in the German market. According to ComputerBase, most RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 AIB partner models are selling for at or below their respective MSRPs. The only exception is the RTX 5090, which is still in high demand and is struggling to stay on store shelves.

A table of RTX 50-series pricing shows what the GPUs were selling for last week, versus what they were selling for in March: At the end of March, the cheapest RTX 5080 models were priced at €1,169, versus last week's price of €1,119 (which matches the MSRP).

Silverstone has debuted an ultra-high capacity 2500W power supply that has enough juice and connectors to power four 12V-2x6-equipped GPUs. The Hela 2500Rz comes with four 12V-2x6 power connectors and utilizes the latest ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.0 standards. It's burly enough to run four RTX 5080 GPUs, one of the best graphics cards.

We first saw the 2500Rz last year, but it has apparently taken Silverstone almost a year to finalize the design and release it to the public. The highlight of the unit is its enormous 2500W power capacity, which is so high that it only works in households with 240-volt outlets. As a result, the vast majority of U.S.-based households will not be capable of powering this unit with a standard 110-volt outlet.

Melting RTX 50 issues keep emerging like there's no tomorrow, and this probably won't change until Nvidia tightens up the power delivery or revises the design altogether. A user at Quasar Zone reported thermal damage on MSI's preventive yellow-tipped 12V-2x6 power cables, which were originally meant to simplify cable seating and prevent melting, via Harukaze. Thankfully, the accompanying RTX 5090 remains unharmed, at least by visually inspecting its power connector.

This issue is not newfound, as the 12VHPWR connector has also wreaked havoc on a handful of last-gen RTX 40 GPUs as well. RTX 50 GPUs draw power through the six 12V terminals on the 12V-2x6 connector, each with a strict current limit of 9.5A. Naturally, GPUs have load-balancing capabilities, but reference RTX 50 models are unable to determine per-pin current measurements, preventing effective load distribution across the pins, and that's a design choice Nvidia made.

Consequently, a poor connection on some pins forces the entire load through the correctly seated ones. Several reviewers have witnessed this firsthand, with individual pins spiking to more than 150 degrees Celsius.

The affected user owned an MSI RTX 5090 Suprim, which came bundled with MSI's yellow-tipped 12V-2x6 cables (4x 8-pin to 16-pin), serving as a foolproof visual aid for ensuring proper connector seating. Likewise, power was supplied by an ATX 3.1 compliant 1,300W supply from Superflower, so the PSU wasn't the source of the problem. Either way, all it took was a small gaming session with the GPU at 400W for the user to discover an entire 12V terminal row on their cable, burnt to a crisp.

Because apparently high-end GPUs weren't already expensive or scarce enough, Asus has partnered with Bethesda and ID Software to create a Doom: The Dark Ages-inspired RTX 5080 ROG Astral graphics card. Asus revealed in a press release that the new card (officially known as the ROG Astral RTX 5080 Doom Edition) will be a limited edition GPU boasting a color scheme matching the game's dark theme, paired with exclusive game merchandise.

The graphics card itself is a twin of the vanilla ROG Astral RTX 5080, sporting a huge 3.8-slot form factor with four fans, three on the shroud and one located on the backplate. The Doom Edition variant swaps the Astral's normal ROG colors for a dark green and gold scheme featuring Doom graphics on the backplate and Doom-inspired logos all over the card.

One interesting addition is the design element of the fans. The central and left fans on the shroud keep their traditional black color, but the right and rear fans are green to mimic the Shield Saw, a new weapon in Doom: The Dark Ages. Similarly, the heatsink has been colored gold to align with the card's Doom aesthetic.

Asus has paired the limited-edition card with an exclusive T-shirt, mouse pad, yellow key card, and an ROG-exclusive Doom Slayer Legionary in-game skin. Optionally, buyers can also purchase the Premium Edition of the game along with the graphics card.

Spec-wise, the ROG Astral RTX 5080 Doom Edition sports an RTX 5080 GPU, with 16GB of GDDR7 memory, and a default boost clock of 2,760MHz, with an OC mode that goes up to 2,790MHz. The card is cooled with a "patented" vapor chamber heatsink, milled heatspreader, and phase-change thermal pad (instead of thermal paste).

The Doom-inspired graphics card will be sold exclusively at the Bethesda Gear Store, where, interestingly, a placeholder / joke price has it listed in search results as costing $666,666.66.

It has only been a few months since Nvidia officially announced its RTX 50-series graphics cards, but rumors are already pointing to a potential Super series refresh. According to a post on the Chiphell forums, a hit-and-miss source for hardware leaks, Nvidia might already be working on an RTX 5080 Super with 24GB and an RTX 5070 Super with 16GB of VRAM.

The key enabler behind these rumored memory configurations is said to be Nvidia’s use of 3GB GDDR7 memory modules. These modules essentially allow for more flexible VRAM amounts than the traditional 8GB or 16GB increments. By leveraging 3GB chips, Nvidia can gain the ability to offer configurations like 18GB (6×3GB) and 24GB (8×3GB) VRAM for its desktop class GPUs without making any major PCB redesigns.

This can also help Nvidia make refreshes or upgraded versions (like the aforementioned Super variants) easier to deliver without changing much hardware or firmware. With the higher amount of VRAM, these graphics cards will potentially have the ability to handle larger textures at higher resolutions, and more complex scenes with fewer performance drops.

China's top three internet companies reportedly stockpiled billions of dollars worth of Nvidia H20 GPUs before the U.S. export restrictions went into effect in April. Nikkei Asia reports that ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent anticipated the likelihood of an export ban on the China-specific H20 last year, and have since been snapping up as many H20 GPUs as they can get their hands on.

The three companies have reportedly accumulated around 1 million H20s — or about a full year's supply. While that is a significant number of GPUs, the companies' full supply was cut short by a month, as they requested that Nvidia ship them their fully-requested volume of H20s by the end of May. If all three companies managed to get their hands on all the H20s they requested, the total value would exceed $12 billion.

High demand for computing power is apparently the main reason for the companies' stockpiling: Tencent's integration of DeepSeek into WeChat is a huge contributor to China's demand for computing power.

The Nvidia H20 will serve as a stop-gap solution for Chinese companies until homegrown AI GPUs are able to provide similar — or better — performance. Huawei is reportedly working on a new Ascend GPU claimed to rival the performance of Nvidia's GB200, which would give China the same AI computing capabilities as Western countries.

Starting in April, the U.S government banned the exportation of Nvidia's H20 HGX AI GPU designed for the Chinese market. The government cited the GPU's memory and interconnect bandwidth, as well as its potential use in supercomputers, as reasons for the ban. The new restriction will force Nvidia to take a massive $5.5 billion financial hit, as it can no longer sell its existing inventory of H20 GPUs to China.

The H20 is a cut-down variant of the H100 — Nvidia's predecessor to the current HGX B200. Similar to the RTX 5090D and RTX 4090D, the H20 is a datacenter GPU tailor-made to comply with the U.S government's export sanctions to China, featuring dramatically reduced AI and HPC performance compared to its bigger brother.

Colorful is expanding its Blackwell product stack with a new variant of the RTX 5080 iGame Vulcan that's coated in white and features a quad-fan design, according to VideoCardz. That makes it one of the only RTX 5080 models (along with Asus' Astral) featuring a four-fan cooling solution — which is, arguably, overkill. The GPU is priced at $1,790 (12,999 RMB), which is roughly 80% more than Nvidia's base MSRP (but that figure is pretty much meaningless these days).

Colorful segments its GPU offerings into various families: iGame, Colorfire, and Colorful. Within the iGame series, the AIB has other sub-brands, such as Vulcan (high-end) and Neptune (liquid-cooled), along with Advanced and Ultra/Ultra W for the mid-range. Beyond iGame, Colorful categorizes its NB, Battle-Ax, and MEOW offerings under the Colorfire and Colorful brandings.

In addition to the existing iGame Colorful RTX 5080 in black, Colorful is launching a white model with an extra fan on the back. Quad-fan cooling solutions are quite exotic and are often found in high-end, niche products such as Galax's last generation SG (Serious Gaming) family (which included a removable rear fan). The GPU features an all-white aesthetic: covering the shroud, fans, and even the I/O bracket. The card measures 360 x 149 x 71mm, excluding the bracket, and is powered by a single 12V-2x6 connector.

Another stand-out feature is the card's included color screen (800x216), which is reportedly detachable (it connects to the GPU magnetically). The LCD's angle seems like it will be adjustable, which means it will work in both vertical and horizontal mounting setups. (Additionally, you can simply attach it to a USB-powered stand and place it on your desk.) The GPU comes with two BIOS options, which are selectable via a physical OC toggle, raising the boost clocks from 2,617 MHz to 2,685 MHz.

While four fans might be overkill for typical GPU cooling needs, they offer extra thermal headroom for modified power settings. Asus' Astral RTX 5080 models can achieve a 450W TGP by updating the vBIOS (official). That said, it's unclear whether Colorful will go the extra mile, like Asus did.

Although this particular model isn't listed on Colorful's official website, VideoCardz reports it can be found bundled with other components at the "Colorful store," which is likely their Chinese online storefront.

If you're a PC enthusiast or gamer who likes to showcase your high-end hardware, there's a good chance you've seen or even used a vertical bracket for your GPU. While it can certainly enhance the aesthetics of your rig, you might want to reconsider, especially if you own a Gigabyte RTX 50-series (codenamed Blackwell) graphics card.

According to a discussion thread on Quasar Zone, a popular Korean community forum for PC hardware and games, one user noticed thermal gel oozing out of their one-month-old RTX 5080 GPU. After purchasing the card, the user reported playing World of Warcraft for two hours daily. Notably, the GPU was mounted vertically using a riser kit.

While this could have been an isolated incident, further comments in the thread suggest that the melting thermal gel issue is also affecting other Gigabyte models, including the Gaming OC, Windforce, and Aorus Master series.

It's worth noting that Gigabyte launched its RTX 50-series lineup with server-grade thermal conductive gel in place of traditional thermal pads. The company claims this material provides “better heat dissipation efficiency without shifting for long-term usage.” However, it’s possible that Gigabyte didn’t fully account for vertical mounting, although thermal gel is typically non-conductive and considered safe in most scenarios.

Leave it to Alienware to make a statement. The pre-built PC company owned by Dell used to stand out with its spaceship-themed design. With its new, top-end Area-51 gaming desktop, Alienware is doing it with size.

The system is massive. The case is, finally, designed to fit parts that meet PC-building standards — a much-needed change that I hope trickles down to the lower-end Aurora desktops. You don't need a full-sized tower to do that, but this system also has large fans and room for some of the largest after-market graphics cards, which not all of the best gaming PCs can handle.

With options up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 and Intel Core Ultra 9 285K or up to the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, the machine is expensive. Those willing to shell out for it will get a strong gaming performer that's surprisingly quiet, as well as a great selection of ports.

Design of the Alienware Area-51

Finally, an Alienware desktop with industry-standard components. But to get that, you have to go all-in for a full desktop tower.

The Alienware Area-51 is a boat of a PC. While it looks very similar to the more compact Aurora R16, it's in a massive 80-liter chassis that measures 22.4 x 24.04 x 9.12 inches (569 x 610.5 x 231.6 mm). You should probably get a friend to help lift this 76.1-pound system out of the box.

The case is a white and silver affair, with a metal front and some plastic around the chassis. For this price, I would have preferred full aluminum. The glass side panel shows off the clean inside, with many of the components obscured by large heatsinks (a big improvement over the Aurora).

The whole front of the PC features an oblong RGB light ring around the air intake (and there's plenty of RGB inside the case, naturally). The system intakes through the front dual 180 mm fans and the two 140 mm spinners on the bottom. The fans on the 360 mm CPU liquid cooler's radiator (in our review unit, though some come with 240 mm radiators) up top are, oddly, also intake fans. The radiator is gasketed to prevent air from coming in or escaping around it. All of this air is pushed out of the back in a positive pressure scenario – there is no fan in the rear to guide the air out. In fact, there aren’t even mounting holes to install your own fan. Alienware representatives told me that in their simulations, placing a fan in the back made it harder for hot air to escape the case.

There are three dust filters: one at the top of the system for the radiator fans, one at the bottom for the fans by the PSU, and one at the front for the intake fans. It's a nice touch, as some prebuilts go without these pieces. Although for $5,000-plus, it should come with everything.

Systems we compared to the Area-51 are smaller, as most gaming PCs are these days. The Aurora R16 is 18.05 x 16.5 x 7.76 inches, while the Corsair Vengeance i7500 is 18.3 x 17.8 x 9.1 inches.

Alienware Area-51 Specifications

Ports and Upgradeability on the Alienware Area-51

This desktop has a pretty solid port selection. On top of the PC, there are a pair USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports, along with separate Mic in and headphone jacks.

Ports on the back are connected to Alienware's motherboard, which is slightly different between the Intel and AMD models. With Intel, I'm excited to see the two Thunderbolt 4 ports, as you don't see a ton of those on desktops. There are also two USB-C ports, four USB-A ports for older peripherals, an Ethernet jack, and a series of audio ports. The AMD model uses USB4 in lieu of Thunderbolt and also features an extra USB 2.0 port.

To get into the system, you have to remove a single screw that's meant for safety during shipping. There's no need to put it back (unless perhaps you’re moving and need to move the PC around a lot). From there, you twist a knob that unlocks the side panels, press a corresponding button for the side you want to open, and the panel drops down for you to easily remove.

In what mostly feels like a return to form for Alienware, the inside of the box is filled with industry-standard components. While there's a custom motherboard that Dell designed for this PC, it's a standard ATX size. You can replace the motherboard, but because the power button, fans, RGB lighting, and front I/O are controlled via a special AlenwareFX daughterboard on the backside of the case, you'll need to buy a $35 adapter kit to make the switch. Additionally, your motherboard needs to support the ATX12VO power supply, or you'll have to swap the PSU out, too.

Considering how pricey these PCs can be, I wish Alienware would make the motherboard adapter kit free to interested customers who have a receipt. But this is still a significant step up from the proprietary boards and non-standard case designs Alienware has been using for years.

The one problem I see some gamers having with the motherboard otherwise is that it has two DIMM slots for RAM. While Alienware offers up to 64GB of RAM, some people may prefer to start with less and add more as their budget allows, or might prefer more RAM for tasks like video editing. Alienware reps told me the choice for two slots prioritized speed over capacity.

The SSD slots (there are three, each under heatsinks) and RAM slots are easily accessible, and you can fit a quad-slot graphics card up to 450 mm in length into the PC, explaining why the other two PCI slots are so low down. The SK hynix boot drive is PCIe 4.0 (and plenty fast for gaming), but the top drive slot supports PCIe 5.0 for faster drives. The other two SSD slots are PCIe 4.0.

While our review unit came with a 360 mm AIO radiator, the system fits 240 mm, 280 mm, and 420 mm coolers as well (Dell doesn't sell those last two), so you could trade the Alienware-branded one out for your own in the future.

A 1,500W PSU using the emerging ATX12VO standard shouldn't need to be upgraded immediately, but the 850W option in some configurations might need replacing sooner. Finally, Dell is moving away from the server-style PSUs we see on the Aurora line into something you can easily swap out. I hope this change trickles down.

Near each major component, there's a QR code, similar to what I've seen on many of the Framework Laptops that I've reviewed. These codes bring you to parent company Dell's website, with step-by-step video guides on how to update or maintain the components.

The back side of the case has nice cable routing, which seems to be using precision-fit cables. There's room back here for two 2.5-inch SATA drives and a 3.5-inch drive for even more storage.

Gaming and Graphics on the Alienware Area-51

We tested two Area-51 review units: one with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and an RTX 5090, an another with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D with the same GPU. Unsurprisingly, that leads to some pretty powerful gaming performance.

We compared it to a series of systems with RTX 4090 GPUs, including the Alienware Aurora R16 and Corsair Vengeance i7500.

The Aurora and Corsair Vengeance both have Intel Core i9-14900K processors (the R16 has the KF variant), which are actually faster at gaming at resolutions below 4K than the more recent Core Ultra 9 285K, creating a bottleneck at 1080p. While I doubt people paying for RTX 5090 are going to often be playing at 1080p, competitive gamers who want to lower the resolution for a higher refresh rate might want to keep that in mind. Though in our testing of the newer Ryzen-based Area-51, it was only meaningfully faster in 4K at a few games.

I used the Intel-based Area-51 to push forward in my journey in Alan Wake 2. As I finally escaped a forest filled with hungry wolves and a cultist wearing a deer head, the game ran at its highest settings at quality render resolution (1440p) and ultra ray tracing with no issues. With 4x Frame Gen on, the game ran between 160 and 200 frames per second. Without frame gen, it hovered just under 60 FPS. The PC was remarkably quiet the entire time. I could hear fan noise — it wasn't silent — but it took a while until the fans needed to ramp up enough that I could be bothered by them.

When testing the AMD model, I tried playing the detailed Sims-style life simulator Inzoi, at the Ultra preset at 4K, with hardware RT on. The game ran between 67 and 83 FPS as I managed a family of 3 in a Los Angeles-style city. Surprisingly, I saw higher frames when I moved characters outside of their home.

On the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark at the highest setting, the Intel Area-51 reached 244 FPS at 1080p and 169 FPS at 4K, while the AMD version was nearly identical. Both the Aurora and Vengeance outperformed at 1080p, but the Area-51 won out at 4K.

1080p scores were closer with Cyberpunk 2077 on Ray Tracing Ultra presets. The Area-51 reached 122 FPS, just 3 frames behind the Vengeance. Here, the Ryzen system fell short at 122 fps at 1080p, but was about the same at 4K.

Far Cry 6 is a CPU-heavy title, and the Ultra benchmark again showed the Core Ultra 9 285K's gaming limitations. At 4K, the 4090 in the Corsair actually snuck past the Intel Area-51's 5090. But it was the Ryzen-based Area-51 that fared the best, hitting 127 FPS at 4K.

The AMD Area-51 easily took the crown on Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4K on medium settings, netting an impressive compared to the Intel model at 109 FPS. The Ryzen system also showed a nice jump at 1080p (182 FPS vs 159 FPS).

Borderlands 3, another CPU-intensive title, put the Ryzen Area-51 ahead of the pack at 4K, reaching 166 FPS. But the Intel version was behind the Aurora and Vengeance once again. 251 FPS at 1080p and 119 FPS at 4K are nothing to sneeze at, but that's still slower than older hardware.

We stress test gaming desktops by running the Metro Exodus benchmark on a loop 15 times, which takes about half an hour. On that gauntlet, the Intel-based Area-51 achieved an average of 160.67 FPS. The Ryzen option averaged 164.55 FPS.

During the stress test, the Intel CPU's P cores ran at 5.12 GHz while the E cores reached 3.33 GHz. The CPU measured 56.75 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, the GPU ran at 2,708.93 MHz and measured 63.61 C. The system was again very quiet during the benchmark. I could definitely hear the fans, but they weren't roaring like they do on some systems.

Meanwhile, the AMD's Zen 5 cores averaged at 4.04 GHz and measured 58.7 C. The GPU ran at 1,741.43 MHz and measured 46.4 C. The AMD system was even quieter than the Intel one was during this test.

Productivity Performance on the Alienware Area-51

Both the Core Ultra 9 285K and Ryzen 9 9950X3D were on the ball when it comes to productivity work. Here, they're both paired with 64GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD.

On Geekbench 6, the Ryzen-based Area-51 earned the top single-core score of the group at 3,384148, just beating out the Core Ultra 9 version (3,148). The cooling in the Vengeance i7500 brought the multi-core score just a bit higher than the Intel Alienware's 21,786.

Alienware's tower transferred 25GB of files at a rate of 1,898.26 MBps with the Core 285K and a blazing 3,414.29 MBps in the 9950X3D system, beating the Vengeance but falling short of the Aurora. The difference between the two Intel systems is likely the different drives they were using. While they're both 2TB SSDs, the Intel system had a SK hynix PC811 while the AMD option came with a Samsung PM9E1 SED SSD.

The Area-51 dominated on Handbrake, transcoding a 4K video to 1080p in 1 minute and 46 seconds with the Ryzen chip and 1:53 with the Intel processor.

Software and Warranty on the Alienware Area-51

There are three Alienware-branded apps on the Area-51, but only one feels important. That's Alienware Command Center, with features to monitor system performance, launch games, and adjust AlienFX RGB backlighting. If you choose to use it to adjust audio settings, it will launch the separate Dolby Atmos app.

Alienware Customer Connect is designed for the sole purpose of sending out customer surveys. On $5,000 and higher systems, this shouldn't be there. Alienware Digital Delivery lets you download any software you purchased in a bundle with your desktop.

Dell sells the Alienware Area-51 with 1 year of Alienware Care, including on-location repair in 1 to 2 business days. That can be increased to up to 5 years for additional fees, and adding one year of accidental damage protection adds $109.

Alienware Area-51 Configurations

We tested a $5,759.99 configuration of the Alienware Area-51 with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, Nvidia RTX 5090, 64GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, 1,500W power supply, tempered glass door, and a 360 mm liquid cooler for the CPU. That tower has since dropped to $5,359.99.

Our AMD review unit runs for $5,749.99 with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, but otherwise identical specs.

The cheapest version of the system as of this writing is $3,749.99 with a Core Ultra 7 265, RTX 5080, 1TB SSD, 32GB of RAM, 850W PSU, and a 240 mm CPU cooler. The AMD version starts at $4,349.99 with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RTX 5080, though Alienware says more configurations will come down the line.

Depending on the model, SSD storage ranges between 1TB and 8TB.

In our review unit, Alienware also included a wired Dell keyboard and mouse. These are probably the ones your office gives out at work, and they're not good. If you're spending this much and don't have peripherals, you should invest in gaming-grade accessories, not these office supplies. You can choose not to have this e-waste packed in with your system when using the configurator before buying.

Bottom Line

The Alienware Area-51 is a significant improvement over the company’s recent gaming desktops. It uses standard parts (though a motherboard upgrade needs an adapter kit). It's also surprisingly quiet, and the top-end configuration we tested with an RTX 5090 tore through many games.

The difference between the top-end AMD and Intel versions was less than we expected, possibly coming down to cooling or simply Alienware's implementation of the chip. We expected a bit more of the AMD system, especially at 1080p, so my general guidance would be that unless you're attached to one platform or another, to get what you can get for the best price unless you're looking to update the CPU down the line.

If you're looking for something that’s at all compact, the Area-51 isn't for you. There, you should look into the latest configurations of the Alienware Aurora, or other mid-towers.

While some building purists will still find qualms with the system, the community of pre-built buyers will benefit from a big-box high-end option using standard parts and surprisingly quiet cooling. They just have to also manage to afford it.

Igor's Lab has discovered a worrying trend among all Nvidia Blackwell RTX 50-series graphics cards, including even faux-budget GPUs like the RTX 5060 Ti. According to a lengthy blog post the outlet published, most if not all RTX 50-series AIB partner cards are allegedly prone to high-temperature hotspots in the power delivery area, which could potentially damage these graphics cards after extended heavy use.

The problem lies in the construction of power delivery systems for the affected graphics cards. Igor's Lab states that several components that make up the power delivery system, such as the FETs, coils, drivers, and traces connecting everything together, are grouped too close together, creating temperatures that can potentially deteriorate the power delivery system over the course of a card's life, potentially killing the card after just a few years of use.

Despite launching just a week ago, Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti 8GB struggles in numerous games. In-depth testing by Australian reviewer Hardware Unboxed reveals a stark difference between the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB and its 16GB sibling. Despite sharing the same "RTX 5060 Ti" moniker, unsuspecting customers drawn by the $50 savings could snap up the 8GB model, unaware of its limitations. Testing shows a significant performance drop-off, frame time stutters, texture pop-in issues, and in some cases game crashes.

Nvidia opted to not send any reviewers the 8GB cards, so Hardware Unboxed bought a unit for independent testing. Considering many RTX 5060 Ti owners won't upgrade for several years, 8GB will become increasingly restrictive, and there's only so much upscaling and frame generation can do.

Both RTX 5060 Ti models use the GB206 die with 4,608 CUDA cores and a 128-bit interface. The RTX 5070 vs RTX 5060 Ti 16GB may favor the latter in memory capacity, but our testing and current street prices show the RTX 5070 wins that matchup. Despite the lackluster gen-on-gen improvements, the RTX 5060 Ti is still no slouch, landing within 10% of the RTX 4070.

As decent as the 16GB model might be, it's almost a no-brainer that slapping a limited 8GB frame-buffer would gimp the RTX 5060 Ti heavily. That's a memo Nvidia seemingly didn't get — or filed in the trash can while talking up neural rendering.

When it comes to the best gaming laptops, there’s been a heavy focus on systems featuring Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs for the past two years. However, Nvidia launched new “Blackwell” gaming GPUs for laptops as part of the new RTX 50 Series. As a result, a new wave of gaming laptops is starting to hit the market, and Asus is among the first to jump on the bandwagon.

Enter the ROG Strix Scar 16, a 16-inch class gaming laptop featuring an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, 32GB of RAM, and an RTX 5080 GPU. While the RTX 5080 isn’t the top entry in Nvidia’s laptop GPU family, as you’ll see, it still packs a punch. However, you will pay a significant price premium ($3,299 as reviewed) to enjoy the latest that Nvidia has to offer.

Design of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16

Asus’s ROG family of products is often infused with rather outlandish design touches that help them stand out from the crowded field of gaming laptops, and the ROG Strix Scar 16 is no exception. The first thing you’ll notice when removing the laptop from the box is the ROG logo on the lid, which initially looks like a standard reflective chrome badge. However, as soon as you turn the machine on, it lights up in all its RGB glory to add color to the black exterior of the laptop.

But that’s not the only illumination on the aluminum lid – Asus also has included a diagonal strip of white LEDs that dance around with a scrolling effect when the laptop is in standby mode. Asus calls it AniMe Vision, which features an array of 810 LED lights that shine through the milled holes in the lid. When the laptop is turned on, flashes of light display “STRIX” branding by default. There are several premade animations you can select from, or you can import a GIF of your own to customize your laptop further.

Wait, there’s more! An RGB light ring runs around the entire perimeter of the bottom half of the enclosure, and the keyboard features per-key RGB lighting. The ROG Strix Scar 16’s lighting can be configured using Aura Sync in Armory Crate.

The ROG Strix Scar 16 features a 16-inch 2560 x 1600 display with thin bezels along the sides. The top bezel is thicker to accommodate the 1080p webcam and infrared sensors for Windows Hello that are front and center. The bottom bezel is larger still, roughly twice as wide as the top bezel, and incorporates ROG STRIX branding.

The keyboard deck and the chassis bottom are constructed of plastic. Although I would have preferred an aluminum unibody at this price point, the plastic at least feels high quality.

A massive touchpad sits below the keyboard and features Asus’ virtual NumberPad feature. After pressing NUMLK on the top right-hand corner of the touchpad, it lights up with a full number pad that you can use to make quick entries in apps like Calculator or Microsoft Excel. It works well enough, and I find it a suitable alternative to including a full physical number pad on the keyboard, especially if it’s a feature you won’t use frequently.

The ROG Strix Scar 16 is a big laptop, and Asus thankfully puts the space to use by incorporating a large assortment of ports for connectivity. You’ll find just two USB 3.2 Type-A ports on the right side. However, the bulk of the connections are on the left side, which is home to a proprietary power connector, a full-size 2.5 GbE LAN port, an HDMI 2.1 port, another USB 3.2 Type-A port, two Thunderbolt 5 ports, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Regarding wireless connectivity, the ROG Strix Scar 16 has an Intel BE200 card, which combines Wi-Fi 7 with Bluetooth 5.4.

The ROG Strix Scar 16 measures 13.94 x 10.55 x 0.90 inches and weighs 6.28 pounds. For comparison, the Razer Blade 16 is 13.98 x 9.86 x 0.69 inches and weighs 4.72 pounds, while the 5.67-pound Alienware x16 is 14.36 x 11.41 x 0.73 inches. The Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 weighs 5.4 pounds and measures 14.06 x 10.0 x 1.18 inches.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 Specifications

Gaming and Graphics on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16

The ROG Strix Scar 16 features high-end hardware, including an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, a GeForce RTX 5080 laptop GPU, and 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory. The Core Ultra 9 275HX has 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. The performance cores have a base clock of 2.7 GHz and a maximum turbo clock of 5.4 GHz, while the efficiency cores have a 2.1-GHz base clock and a maximum 4.6 GHz turbo clock. The RTX 5080 has a 175W TGP and a 1,500 MHz boost clock.

I had time to play various games on the ROG Strix Scar 16, but I spent most of my time running and gunning in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The game is a visual masterpiece with its lush environment, high-quality textures, realistic reflections, and intricate detail of real-world objects. With the resolution set to 1440p and the detail setting cranked to “Ultra,” I averaged between 70 and 100 fps in the game, depending on how much action took place on-screen.

The ROG Strix Scar 16 started strong in our Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Highest setting) benchmark, delivering 177 fps at 1080p. Performance at 1600p fell sharply to just 112 fps. The Aorus Master 16 (Core Ultra 9 275HX, RTX 5080) took the crown at 1080p (185 fps), and scored slightly more than Asus at 1600p (114 fps). For comparison, the Blade 16 (Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, RTX 5090) delivered 166 fps at 1080p, but vastly outperformed at 1600p (161 fps). The x16 (Core i9-13900HK, RTX 4080) was at the back of the pack, achieving 117 fps at 1080p and 79 fps at 1600p.

Cyberpunk 2077 (Ray Tracing Ultra settings) was the most recent game added to our benchmark suite, so the x16 didn't make the cutoff for testing. However, we do have a showdown between the systems with Blackwell GPUs. The ROG Strix Scar 16 hit 61 fps at 1800p and 35 fps at 1600p. The Aorus Master 16 performed similarly, with 62 fps at 1080p and 38 fps at 1600p. The Blade 16 surpassed those numbers by around 10 percent at both resolutions, with 66 fps at 1080p and 43 fps at 1600p.

Far Cry 6 (Ultra settings) saw another flip-flop in the rankings, with the Aorus Master 16 besting all competitors, including the RTX 5090-equipped Blade 16. It averaged 120 fps at 1080p and 113 fps at 1600p. The ROG Strix Scar 16 was a few ticks behind at 112 fps and 103 fps, respectively. The Blade 16 performed more in line with the x16 at 1080p (each hitting 97 fps), while its 94 fps at 1600p was enough to earn second place.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Medium settings) proved to be a challenge for the ROG Strix Scar 16, and is a testament to the early driver issues that have plagued Nvidia’s RTX 50 Series laptops GPUs (as we noted in our Blade 16 review). The system would not run the benchmark at 1080p resolution. It would, however, run at 2560 x 1600, and we recorded 77 fps at that resolution. The Aorus Master 16 fared even worse, managing just 54 fps at 1600p.

The Aorus Master 16 won the Borderlands 3 (Badass settings) benchmark showdown by default — our Blade 16 couldn't even run the benchmark, achieving a heady 172 fps at 1080p and 121 fps at 1600p. The ROG Strix Scar 16 was the next-closest competitor with 156 fps and 113 fps at 1080p and 1600p, respectively.

We use Metro Exodus for our stress testing, running the in-game benchmark 10 consecutive times using the RTX preset. During the test, the ROG Strix Scar 16's efficiency and performance cores averaged 3.11 GHz and 4.61 GHz, respectively, with a CPU temperature of 74 degrees Celsius. The RTX 5080 averaged 1.845 GHz with a core temperature of 72 degrees C.

Productivity Performance on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16

Thanks to its use of a Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, 32GB of DDR5-5600, and a fast Western Digital SN8000S PCIe 4.0 SSD, the ROG Strix Scar 16 proved to be a top performer in our productivity suite.

The ROG Strix Scar 16 quickly shot to the top of the Geekbench 6 synthetic CPU benchmark charts. It recorded a single-core score of 3,071 and a multi-core score of 19,597. This put it slightly ahead of the Aorus Master 16 with the same processor, which came in at 3,049 and 19,175, respectively. The Blade 16 with its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor was a bit behind the rest of the pack (2,922, 16,025). The x16 was one of the last laptops we tested with Geekbench 5.x, so it is not represented here.

Switching gears to our file transfer test, which involves copying 25GB of mixed-media files, the ROG Strix Scar 16 delivered a speedy 1,841.40 MBps. For comparison, the Omen 16 led the pack at 1,913 MBps, while the Blade 16 came in at 1,729.51 MBps. The Aorus Master 16 was dead last at 665.26 MBps.

We use our Handbrake benchmark to transcode a 4K video file to 1080p, with the Aorus Master 16 and ROG Strix Scar 16 handily besting the competition — it wasn’t even close. The former took just 2 minutes and 17 seconds to finish the operation, while the latter took 2 minutes and 22 seconds. The x16 with its older processor took over 4 minutes on the test.

Display on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16

Asus equipped the ROG Strix Scar 16 with a 16-inch 2560 x 1600 display with Mini LED backlighting. Given its gaming aspirations, the panel refreshes at up to 240 Hz, which makes it a great dance partner for the RTX 5080.

Our tests showed that the ROG Strix Scar 16’s panel covered 81.2 percent of DCI-P3 and 114.7 percent of sRGB. The Mini LED backlighting allowed the laptop to stand far above its peers in brightness, as we saw 457.2 nits with SDR content. Brightness with HDR content topped 1,200 nits, which tracks with Asus’s claim of 1,200 nits.

I played several games on the display, including Forza Horizon 5, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Action was smooth and tear-free, with vibrant colors all around.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16

Asus outfitted the ROG Strix Scar 16 with a full-size keyboard, offering 2mm of key travel. Four media keys are tacked on to the right side of the keyboard: Play, Pause, Previous Track, and Next Track. There are also five programmable “M” keys at the top of the keyboard deck that correspond with volume up/down, microphone off, power mode (which cycles through Silent, Performance, and Turbo), and a shortcut for Armoury Crate. The function of each button can be configured using Armoury Crate.

Using the keyhero.com typing test, I achieved 90 words per minute at 97.93 percent accuracy with the keyboard. It’s not my best performance with a laptop keyboard, as my fingers had to stretch a bit more than I’m used to, which slowed me down a bit.

You’ll find a rather large glass trackpad below the keyboard, which I found to operate smoothly, with a satisfying click response. As previously mentioned, the touchpad includes Asus’ nifty NumberPad feature, which instantly displays a touch-enabled number pad when you tap the NUMLK.

Audio on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16

The ROG Strix Scar 16 features four speakers (two tweeters plus two woofers). I found the audio quite good, with loud and clear volume (I didn’t go past 80 percent to save my hearing) and adequate bass.

I played some tunes with the laptop, including “Something in My Heart” by Röyksopp. The electronic drums and bass synth sounded pleasing to me along with the quavery vocals. The real test, though, was with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, where the sound effects were particularly poignant, from the whip cracks to Indy’s feverish punches, to the grunts he makes when he jumps from ledges. I still prefer to opt for one of the best gaming headsets when listening to music or gaming, but you won’t be disappointed by the audio system in the ROG Strix Scar 16.

Upgradeability on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16

The ROG Strix Scar 16 is one of the easiest laptops that I’ve ever had the opportunity to open. When I first flipped the laptop over to expose its bottom panel, I was perplexed as to how to open it -- there were no visible screws to remove. I started poking around at the rubber feet to see if those needed to be removed, but they wouldn’t budge. Then, I noticed a small latch at the front of the chassis with an arrow on it.

I pushed the latch in the direction of the arrow, and it slid over, revealing a red indicator. This red indicator signified that the bottom panel was unlatched. I then slid the panel toward me and was able to lift it off the chassis, exposing the interior. It’s a simple system, and I’m surprised that more manufacturers haven’t integrated something similar.

With the bottom panel removed, you can access the system's upgradeable components. Unlike more compact ultraportables that have RAM soldered onto the motherboard, the ROG Strix Scar 16 has two SO-DIMM slots — our review unit had both slots occupied with 16GB DDR5-5600 SO-DIMMs.

In addition, two M.2 slots accommodate full-length 2280 SSDs (only one was populated on our review unit). Even better, the ROG Strix Scar 16 supports the PCIe 5.0 interface, although our review unit was equipped with a Western Digital SN8000S 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. However, it’s nice to know that the option is available if you want to upgrade to a faster SSD interface.

Battery Life on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16

The ROG Strix Scar 16 uses a 90 Whr battery. To see how long the laptop can operate on a charge, we ran it through our usual endurance benchmark — our test browses the web, streams videos, and runs light OpenGL tests with the brightness set to 150 nits.

In the end, the ROG Strix Scar 16 lasted 6 hours and 30 minutes. That put it in second place behind the Blade 16, which lasted 7 hours and 21 minutes.

The x16 (5:37) and Aorus Master 16 (5:02) were further back in the pack when it comes to endurance.

Heat on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16

The ROG Strix Scar 16 does an excellent job of exhausting heat generated by its top-shelf hardware components with its twin internal fans. While running the Metro Exodus stress test, the bottom of the chassis was warm to the touch but not uncomfortable. The fans audibly spun during the entire test, but the sound was not objectionable and was easily overpowered by the internal speakers (or a pair of the best headphones, if you wish).

Our temperature measurements showed that the keyboard was 102.9 degrees Fahrenheit between the G and H keys, while the touchpad was much cooler at 82.7 degrees F. The underside of the chassis measured 119.6 degrees F, and the hottest part of the keyboard that we measured was between the F5 and F6 keys (120.3 degrees F).

Webcam on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16

Like most new laptops arriving on the market these days, Asus has outfitted the ROG Strix Scar 16 with a 1080p webcam. Given the $3,300 price tag, it would have been nice to have seen some more impressive hardware – video and images came out slightly grainy, although overall colors and skin tones were accurate.

The camera is more than adequate for videoconferencing, but I’d look for a third-party setup if you’re into game streaming.

Software and Warranty on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16

Asus includes several apps with the ROG Strix Scar 16, including the oft-maligned Armoury Crate. Armoury Crate is an all-in-one software utility for controlling performance profiles to adjust RGB effects for the chassis and keyboard (with Aura Sync). It can even control the AniMe display on the lid using AniMe Vision. AniMe Vision allows you to upload your own GIFs to customize the LED display on the lid.

Other apps preinstalled include MyAsus, which allows you to register your device, perform system upgrades, and run hardware diagnostics. CapCut is a short-form video and graphics editing app, ScreenXpert is a window manager for use across multiple displays, while GlideX is a screen sharing app.

The most annoying preinstalled app, however, is McAfee. The app continually bombards you with pop-ups and warns that your trial period will soon end. I’d immediately ditch the app and rely on Microsoft Defender or any less resource-intensive anti-malware app.

The ROG Strix Scar 16 comes with a one-year warranty from Asus.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 Configurations

The ROG Strix Scar 16 is available in two configurations from Asus, with our review unit being the cheapest offering. The system features an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, 32GB DDR5 memory, 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, RTX 5080, and a 16-inch 2560 x 1600 Mini LED 240Hz display. As configured, this system costs a staggering $3,299.99.

Currently, the only other configuration is this same system with an RTX 5090 instead of the RTX 5080 – all other specifications are the same. The premium to jump from the RTX 5080 to the RTX 5090 is substantial, as the flagship system costs $4,299.

Both systems are only available directly from the Asus online store.

Bottom Line

The Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 has a strong foundation, with a solid chassis, plentiful ports (including 2.5 GbE), Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, a fast SSD (which is further futureproofed with PCIe 5.0-enabled M.2 slots), and a vibrant 1600p Mini LED panel.

The wildcard with this laptop comes down to the RTX 5080 graphics card. While overall performance was strong, lingering driver issues still prevent consistent playback with some popular video games. It’s likely that future driver issues may lessen or even completely resolve these performance and compatibility issues. However, if you’re spending over $3,000 on a new gaming laptop, you don’t want any barriers to entry in whatever game may be in your library.

RTX 5070 vs RTX 5060 Ti Introduction

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB are the two most recent GPUs launched by Team Green. Since the beginning of 2025, Nvidia has released five Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs — six if you want to count the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB as a separate entry.

To say that supplies have been limited and insufficient to keep up with demand would be a gross understatement, but the same applies to any of the best graphics cards right now. In fact, of all the Blackwell RTX GPUs, the 5070 and 5060 Ti are currently the most readily available; just don't expect to find most models at MSRP.

Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy ranks all the graphics cards by performance, and naturally the more expensive cards come out ahead of their less expensive siblings. But how do the RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB stack up? We'll look at the performance, approximate pricing — because no GPU prices are reliably set in stone right now — as well as other aspects of the cards to help you decide which one might be right for your gaming PC.

Most of the features between the two GPUs will be identical. Both use the Blackwell architecture and support DLSS 4 and MFG, for example. Still, let's start with the specifications to see how the 5070 and 5060 Ti stack up.

RTX 5070 vs RTX 5060 Ti Specifications

As you'd expect, the RTX 5070 offers more raw performance on paper and in practice. It uses a GPU that's 45% larger, with 41.6% more transistors. More importantly perhaps, it has 33% more SMs, tensor cores, RT cores, and related computational units. It also has 50% more memory bandwidth and a 50% wider memory interface, plus 50% more L2 cache.

Memory interfaces don't scale as well as core logic on modern process nodes, and there are other aspects of the Blackwell GPU — the video encoders/decoders, display outputs, etc. — that don't really change, which explains why the chip size and transistor counts don't necessarily scale linearly.

Clock speeds aren't quite the same, at least on paper. The 5060 Ti has a 2572 MHz boost clock and the 5070 has a slightly lower 2512 MHz boost clock. But we're also looking at the 5070 Founders Edition with reference clocks, and a PNY 5060 Ti 16GB OC that has a 2692 MHz boost clock. Plugging in those numbers gives the 5070 30.9 teraflops of FP32 compute and the PNY 5060 Ti has 24.8 TFLOPS. That means the 5070 'only' has 25% more compute on paper — which isn't actually all that accurate.

In our full suite of gaming benchmarks, the 5070 Founders Edition averaged clock speeds of 2826 MHz while the PNY 5060 Ti 16GB OC averaged 2776 MHz. That means despite theoretically 180 MHz lower clocks, in practice Nvidia's 5070 card came out 50 MHz ahead.

That means the 5070 FE offers about 34.7 TFLOPS compared to 25.6 TFLOPS, a 35.5% advantage. Practically speaking, though, the 5070 should be up to 35% faster in games that are compute bound, and up to 50% faster for games that are memory bandwidth bound — and potentially the 5060 Ti could close the gap if VRAM capacity comes into play.

RTX 5070 vs RTX 5060 Ti Gaming Performance

There are multiple facets of performance to discuss. We'll start with gaming performance, as that's what the majority of people looking at the RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB care about the most. We have an expanded test suite of 21 games, with 15 rasterization benchmarks and six ray tracing benchmarks — slightly more than the 18 games we use in our GPU hierarchy (we're planning to add these into the hierarchy but haven't tested every GPU yet).

The charts group things together by overall performance (geometric mean across all 21 games, where each gets equal weighting), rasterization-only performance, and ray tracing-only performance. We also have separate tables that show the percentage differences below the charts (sorted in reverse order due to the vagaries of Excel).

It's safe to say that neither the RTX 5070 nor the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB are primarily targeted at native 4K ultra gaming. The 1440p result works as a proxy for 4K with DLSS quality mode upscaling, and the 1080p result stands in for 4K with performance mode upscaling, though there would be potential differences. Upscaling does have some overhead, but since we're looking at two Nvidia GPUs we can expect a pretty consistent delta cause by DLSS. CPU bottlenecks would potentially affect performance at lower resolutions as well, which we can see by the results.

At 4K, the RTX 5070 leads the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB by 32% on average, with a performance difference of -5% (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) to +43% (A Plague Tale: Requiem). Indiana Jones is known to want a lot of VRAM — you can even run the ultra setting on cards with less than 12GB — while various other games appear to want more memory bandwidth.

Dropping to 1440p, the 5070 lead shrinks fractionally to 31% overall, and this time there are no performance deficits. There may be a few other games out there that can push beyond 12GB of VRAM use, but from our test suite — a rather demanding suite overall, we'd say — 12GB remains sufficient in all games for 1440p, and in all but one of the games for 4K.

1080p starts to run into CPU limits, even more so at medium settings, which shrinks the delta between the 5070 and 5060 Ti to 28% at ultra settings and 24% at medium settings. That's still a sizeable gap, with a few of the games showing basically equivalent performance due to the CPU bottleneck (Baldur's Gate 3, Flight Simulator 2020, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Stalker 2 end up tied in one or both cases).

Looking at the rasterization and ray tracing performance, overall there's not much difference at the various resolutions and settings. 4K ultra does run into VRAM limits on one of the RT games, so that the gap is slightly narrower there than at 1440p and 1080p, and our RT test suite does end up with lower FPS than the rasterization games at ultra settings. Medium settings with RT enabled actually runs faster on average for our test games, but only Control and Cyberpunk are truly demanding RT games in our title selection.

RTX 5070 vs RTX 5060 Ti Content Creation Performance

Our content creation test suite consists of a variety of test that all loosely fall into the "professional" category. We have multiple AI tests, 3D rendering benchmarks, video transcoding performance courtesy of SPEC Workstation 4.0, and the SPEC Workstation 4.0 Viewport benchmarks (basically the same tests as SPECviewperf).

As expected, the RTX 5070 generally walks away with the content creation crown. It's 45% faster in the Blender 3D rendering benchmarks, 33% faster in MLPerf text generation tokens per second, and 20–43 percent faster in the Procyon and SPEC AI tests that we ran. The 5060 Ti 16GB did have a faster time to first token in MLPerf, though it's possible that's due to updates to the benchmark (we'll recheck the 5070 in the near future, once our test rig isn't busy).

For SPEC Workstation 4.0's Viewport tests, there's another instance of the 5060 Ti 16GB garnering a win — it's 2% faster in Creo. But overall the 5070 still has a 23% lead. Handbrake video transcoding meanwhile ends up as a tie, which is expected as the fixed function encoding and decoding hardware is the same, so the only difference would be GPU clocks during that test.

Neither GPU is specifically marketed as a professional solution, though we anticipate there will be professional variants of both chips (with more VRAM and drivers that enable additional accelerations in some of the SPEC Viewport tests). Mostly, the AI results are interesting as a hobbyist solution, though it's possible future games might leverage the AI hardware more.

RTX 5070 vs RTX 5060 Ti Conclusion

Which is better: RTX 5070 or RTX 5060 Ti 16GB? Price, as we said at the start, will arguably be the biggest factor in deciding between the RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB. It's also the one thing that we can't really pin down at present. Since the 5060 Ti launched just a few days ago, pricing and availability are more likely to fluctuate in the near term. The 5070 has been out for a month now, and we have a better idea of what to expect.

First, let's talk about MSRPs and performance. On paper, Nvidia gives the 5060 Ti 16GB a $429.99 MSRP and the 5070 has a $549.99 MSRP — so $430 and $550. That means the 5070 is supposed to cost 28% more than the 5060 Ti 16GB. And based on the performance results, that's exactly in line with what you get.

Linear performance scaling generally means you're better off buying the more expensive card — we would normally expect to see diminishing returns. So if you buy an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB at MSRP and get 0.171 FPS/$ across our gaming tests, versus the RTX 5070 with 0.170 FPS/$, we give the win to the 5070. The reason is because the GPU doesn't exist in a vacuum; there's the rest of the PC to consider.

Alternatively, let's talk current street prices. These will change dramatically over time, but we can currently find an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB for $509.98, or an RTX 5070 for $619.98. That's the second pair of tables in the above gallery, which obviously skews in favor of the 5070 at current prices. And that's what you need to look at, first and foremost.

Finally, imagine a PC where the CPU, motherboard, SSD, RAM, PSU, and case together cost $750 for example. Now you're looking at a total cost of $1,180 for the 5060 Ti 16GB compared to $1,300 for the 5070 build (using the base MSRPs for the GPUs). That works out to just 10% more total money for about the same 25~30 percent performance uplift. It's what the last set of tables above show, and again, it favors the 5070 heavily.

Given the 25~30 percent performance advantage of the RTX 5070 over the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, spending up to 30% more on the RTX 5070 would make sense. It's the clear winner at current online prices, or at the given MSRPs. In fact, we would argue that it's worth spending up to 40% more for the 5070 compared to the 5060 Ti, as we normally expect diminishing returns.

We don't know where prices will end up, in the U.S. or elsewhere, but you can use the above 30–40 percent figure as a guideline. If the RTX 5070 were to cost $550, we wouldn't recommend spending more than $425 on the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB — and $400 would be better. Conversely, if the best price you can find on the RTX 5070 ends up being $700, then the 5060 Ti 16GB would be worth $500 to at most $540. (And you can replace the dollar signs with whatever monetary symbol you choose.)

Long-term, we expect both GPUs will trend toward about a 30% higher price for the RTX 5070 vs RTX 5060 Ti 16GB. Anything less makes the slower card very difficult to justify, even if it does technically offer more VRAM. So unless you specifically need a card with 16GB, perhaps to run a particular LLM, the RTX 5070 offers the better overall value right now, and will probably continue to do so in the future.

The latest addition to the Nvidia R570 branch of GPU drivers, 576.02, has resolved many stability problems troubling RTX GPUs for the past three months, including crashes and black screens.

Adding to the mix is increased synthetic performance, as reported by ComputerBase, whose data suggests an up to 8% performance bump in 3DMark Steel Nomad. Alas, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, as it appears a new set of stability woes has surfaced with these new drivers, as indicated by user reports.

It is important to understand that improved synthetic performance might not directly reflect real-world tests, such as games and content creation. Either way, with the onset of enablement drivers (R570) for the RTX 50 series in February, a wide range of stability problems affected nearly all RTX GPUs. I personally had to roll back to an older 566.xx release to get RTX HDR working properly. Fast forward to March, and back-to-back hotfixes ironed out most of these quirks for Blackwell.

RTX 40 and RTX 30 GPUs, still plagued by crashes linked with G-Sync and Frame Generation, had to hold out until the latest 576.02 release that is said to fix most of these problems. ComputerBase did some testing and revealed that these drivers also deliver better synthetic performance on RTX 50 GPUs. This is further backed by several user reports at r/Nvidia, though the numbers could vary.

We're looking at uplifts ranging between 6%-8%, depending on the GPU in 3DMark's Steel Nomad benchmark. The most notable performance shifts can be observed with the RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080, while the RTX 5090 remains largely unchanged.

We won't say no to free performance, but user reports still indicate lingering game crashes, black screen issues, stuttering, and other anomalies across the RTX GPU stack. Some of the mentioned game titles include Monster Hunter Wilds, FFVII Rebirth, and Black Myth Wukong, just to name a few. That's to say, there have been mentions of increased gaming performance with several games, so it's hard to draw a decisive conclusion.

The general consensus is that you should update to the latest drivers. In case you face any stability problems, try downgrading to the 572.xx release or 566.xx, but this comes with the trade-off of losing access to certain features.

GPU Benchmarks Introduction

Tom's Hardware exhaustively benchmarks every GPU to find out which are worthy of our list of the best graphics cards. Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy ranks current and previous generation graphics cards by performance. Whether it's playing games, running artificial intelligence workloads, or doing professional video editing, your graphics card typically plays the biggest role in determining performance — even the best CPUs for gaming take a secondary role.

Our 2026 GPU Hierarchy testing spans three generations of Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, as well as Intel's Arc B-series GPUs.

Our testing has been made easier by the fact that no truly new gaming GPUs have been introduced in almost a year. If you haven't already upgraded your graphics card after the GeForce RTX 50-series and Radeon RX 9000-series launches in 2025, well, you're still looking at the exact same products now.

AMD did make its formerly China-only Radeon RX 9070 GRE available globally after Computex 2026, but in our review, we found that $549 product to be too expensive given the level of performance it delivers and the compromises made to hit its price point. Check out that coverage for all the details.

Most of the products we recommend remain at elevated prices compared to their MSRPs, but this is just life in mid-2026. It's admittedly cold comfort, but unless you're shopping for an RTX 5090, graphics card prices haven't risen much more than they already did earlier this year.

Compared to the doubling or tripling of prices we've seen for RAM kits and SSDs in 2026 versus last year, a GPU upgrade remains a relatively affordable (and self-contained) option, either as a boost for an existing PC or part of an all-new parts list.

Let's dive into our ranking of GPUs past and present so you can figure out how all those cards stack up.

Prime Day exceptional graphics card deals

These are a few of the standout deals from Amazon's 2026 Prime Day event, which is currently taking place. Be sure to check out our full list of the best Prime Day graphics card deals, too. The GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy continues below.

Our full GPU hierarchy using traditional rendering (aka rasterization) comes first, and below that we have our separate ray tracing hierarchy. We've also mashed up these results into one overarching ranking for the complete pictures.

The results are all collected at native resolution, without enabling DLSS, FSR, or XeSS upscaling or frame generation.

As a brief refresher of the cards in this version of our hierarchy, Nvidia's cutting-edge Blackwell architecture and its DLSS 4 suite of tech upgrades the quality of both upscaling and ray reconstruction on RTX 50-series GPUs. It also adds Multi Frame Generation support. As of mid-2026, MFG can add anywhere from one to five AI-generated frames in between natively rendered ones.

Even if you're not into framegen, DLSS 4.5 upscaling and its transformer neural network architecture can offer a big boost in image quality at the same output resolution compared to earlier DLSS versions. That tech can benefit all GeForce RTX GPUs going back to the RTX 20-series, albeit at a heavier performance cost on older hardware compared to earlier DLSS versions.

Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture powers its prior-gen RTX 40-series cards. Ada introduced DLSS Frame Generation, which can double output frame rates in supported games. Ada cards don't benefit from MFG, though.

AMD's Radeon RX 9000 series cards, powered by its latest RDNA 4 architecture, get a big boost to both ray-tracing and AI capabilities with dedicated RT and matrix math accelerators. AMD uses those capabilities to enable its FSR 4 upscaler and its much-improved image quality in a small but growing range of titles, whether through native support or with driver-level overrides.

The FSR Redstone update last year brought ML Frame Generation to RX 9000-series cards. Like FSR 4.x upscaling, ML Frame Generation can be directly integrated in games or enabled through a driver override.

Meanwhile, the last-gen RDNA 3 architecture powers seven RX 7000-series seven desktop cards. Until very recently, RX 7000-series cards couldn't officially run FSR 4 upscaling, but an official version of that tech will be made available for those cards in July 2026.

Intel's Battlemage-powered Arc B580 and Arc B570 offer major improvements in performance and efficiency compared to its Alchemist architecture. Battlemage only serves the entry-level end of the graphics card market today. Intel introduced a larger Battlemage chip in the form of the Arc Pro B70 earlier this year, but that product is intended for AI and professional visualization, and it's priced like it.

On page two, you'll find our 2025-2026 test data for posterity. Page three has our 2024–2022 benchmark suite, which covers previous-generation GPUs running an older test suite and a Core i9-12900K. Page four has an even older 2020–2021 test suite with only raster games, running on a Core i9-9900K testbed. The legacy tables are no longer being actively updated. There's also the "Ancient Legacy GPU hierarchy" (without benchmarks, sorted by theoretical performance) for reference purposes.

The following tables sort everything solely by our performance-based GPU benchmarks, from fastest to slowest. Factors including real-world pricing, graphics card power consumption, overall efficiency, and features aren't factored into the rankings here. The latest results use an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D testbed. Here are the tables and benchmark results — rasterization games first, then ray tracing games, and finally the content creation results.

GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy 2026: The tests

For our latest GPU benchmarks, we test every card at a mix of high and ultra settings, depending on the game. We test across three resolutions: 1080p, 1440p, and 4K.

All the scores are expressed as percentages relative to the top-ranking 1080p ultra card, which is of course the GeForce RTX 5090.

Our 2026 test suite comprises the following games. 11 are raster titles, and of those, four have RT support. We test another four games that either require RT to run (DOOM: The Dark Ages and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) or look best with RT (Assassin's Creed Shadows and Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced.)

• Black Myth Wukong (+RT)
• Alan Wake II (+RT)
• Apex Legends
• Counter-Strike 2
• Fortnite
• Arc Raiders
• Stalker 2
• DOOM: The Dark Ages (RT required)
• Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced (RT only)
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (+RT)
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (RT required)
• Marvel Rivals
• Assassin's Creed Shadows (RT only)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (+RT)
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy 2026: Raster gaming

The FPS score is the geometric mean (equal weighting) of all 11 games. Note that the specifications column links directly to our original review for the various GPUs.

Rasterization GPU Benchmarks, Key Findings

• Unsurprisingly, the RTX 5090 takes the top spot across the board, but prices remain stratospheric in mid-2026. It's also difficult to fully engage the GB202 GPU for pure raster gaming unless you're playing at 4K.
• Among current cards, the RX 9060 XT 8GB and RTX 5060 duke it out for the best performance per dollar at 1080p.
• The Radeon RX 9070 is the 1440p raster value champ. The recently introduced RX 9070 GRE sits just behind, and the RTX 5070 is a somewhat distant third.
• At 4K, the RX 9070 XT is the cheapest way to get into 4K 60 FPS native gaming. But the RX 9070 and RTX 5070 are also strong options among current GPUs if you're willing to enable a dash of upscaling.

Overall, if you're only interested in native raster gaming, Radeons are a strong choice in 2026. But Nvidia offers superior DLSS 4.5 upscaling and Multi Frame Generation support across all RTX 50-series cards, which makes matching your GPU's performance to your monitor's refresh rate a snap.

FSR 4.x upscaling isn't on par with DLSS 4.5 yet, and FSR ML Frame Generation is limited to a 2x framerate boost where it's available.

Rasterization GPU Benchmarks Rankings 2026

Remember that we're not including any upscaling or framegen results in the above table. DLSS, FSR, and XeSS offer differing image quality, and we want to keep things directly comparable.

Don't buy any of the cards at the top of our hierarchy without a high-refresh-rate 2560x1440 or 4K monitor to match. Even one of our best gaming CPUs, like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, can only do so much when a powerful card becomes CPU-bound.

In general, if you're still running a 60 Hz fixed-refresh-rate monitor, it's entirely possible that you're not seeing all the frames your graphics card can generate. Practically any current-gen graphics card from the RTX 5060 on up is good enough for high-refresh-rate gaming at 1080p in 2026 even without upscaling or framegen, and the RTX 5070 or RX 9070 will give you the same experience at 1440p.

In this era of upscaling and framegen, a high-resolution monitor is no longer an obstacle to the best gaming experience. Upscalers work best with higher-than-1080p output resolutions, and the advent of the DLSS 4.5 upscaling model especially means that you can get both smooth performance and crisp image quality from surprisingly modest graphics cards.

But if you don't have a high-refresh-rate 1440p or 4K monitor to begin with, you can't take full advantage of the free boost to both performance and image quality that AI-powered upscaling offers, nor can you enjoy the full smoothness boost of framegen. Check out our list of the best gaming monitors for a potential upgrade if you're still rocking a 1080p 60 Hz display from the 2010s.

On to our 2026 raster results. Among currently available graphics cards, Blackwell rules the top three spots. The RX 9070 XT ends up fourth, just behind the potent (but much more expensive, as of June 2026) RTX 5070 Ti.

Moving into the midrange, the RX 9070's strong raster performance gives it the edge over the RTX 5070, but it's close. And the 5070 has the full arsenal of DLSS 4.5 features at its disposal in virtually every modern game.

Given the image quality and smoothness advantage of DLSS 4.5 upscaling and MFG, the 5070 got the nod in our most recent round of best graphics card picks after our 2026 retests.

The recently introduced RX 9070 GRE lands between the 5070 and the lower-end 5060 Ti and 9060 XT, a position for which Nvidia has no current-gen answer (and no easy path to one.) But AMD may have priced the GRE too high at $549, and we're already seeing big price drops on that product that might make it uniquely appealing in a market where the RTX 5060 Ti is its direct price competition.

The formerly midrange RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is hopelessly overpriced for the performance it offers in mid-2026, and the formerly somewhat affordable 8GB model is also selling for elevated prices now, making the entire 5060 Ti family impossible to recommend.

The RX 9060 XT 16GB holds down the entry-midrange 16GB position by itself, and its $459 price tag isn't so absurd as to make it un-recommendable. But as RX 9070 GREs start going on sale for $500-ish, the step up is going to look mighty tempting.

As we move further down the stack, the $300-ish Arc B580 represents Intel's best card right now, but it remains very much a budget part in mid-2026, trading blows with the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 4060. The only reason it lands as high as it does in our results is that its 12GB of VRAM prevents its performance from totally plummeting at 4K, as it does for those older 8GB cards.

The RTX 5060 is 24% faster than the Arc B580 at 1080p and 17% faster at 1440p, and its prices are proportionately higher. The scarce RX 9060 XT 8GB is a whole 30% faster at 1080p and 23% faster at 1440p, for similarly more money.

We don't think the potential longevity afforded by the B580's 12GB of VRAM is worth the massive performance tradeoff versus current-gen 8GB GPUs. Save up a few more bucks and grab an RTX 5060 or RX 9060 8GB instead (and enjoy the more widely adopted DLSS 4.5 or FSR 4 versus XeSS while you're at it).

The $250 Arc B570 is still a good value in mid-2026, and as the only modern, decent graphics card available for (well) under $300, it's still worth a look if you can't stretch to an RTX 5050. But recent software ills that took months to fix have led us to consider it more of a gamble than a product worthy of a recommendation, even though those issues did eventually get corrected.

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks 2026

For 2026, we're testing a range of RT titles that present a progressively more difficult workload to the GPUs under test.

Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced, DOOM: The Dark Ages, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are all relatively lightweight RT titles that will run on a wide range of RT-ready hardware. Spider-Man 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Assassin's Creed Shadows represent greater challenges to compute resources, VRAM, or both. And Black Myth Wukong and Alan Wake II still bring even the most powerful graphics cards to their knees at native resolutions.

Our results for those more demanding games represent more of a jumping-off point for upscaling and framegen rather than native performance. But lighter RT titles mean that you can explore the differences in image quality that ray tracing offers without crushing your GPU flat.

In any case, graphics cards at the top of our RT tests are ready for practically any RT game. But as you'll see, that's still quite the high bar to clear in 2026.

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks, Key Findings and Notes

• The RTX 5090 really comes into its own with RT enabled, as expected.
• AMD's RX 9070 XT outperforms the RX 7900 XTX in our RT tests, showing that the ray-tracing improvements in RDNA 4 deliver.
• Even with those improvements, the RX 9070 XT can only manage a tie with the RTX 4070 Ti with RT in play, coming in eighth place overall.
• Maintaining 60 FPS in RT titles (as a good foundation for upscaling and framegen enhancements) is a very tall order. Among recent products, you'll want:
  • an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, RTX 5070, or RX 9070 GRE to handle ~60 FPS RT at 1080p without running out of VRAM
  • An RTX 4070, an RTX 5070 or RX 9070 at 1440p, or an RX 9070 XT or RTX 5070 Ti for the best possible experience
  • An RTX 5080, RTX 4090, or RTX 5090 at 4K

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks Rankings 2026

The RTX 5090 and RTX 4090 lead our RT results. But if you want to enjoy high-end RT without a 4090- or 5090-sized bankroll, the RTX 5070 Ti proves itself as the last card with a reasonable price-to-performance ratio before things get crazy.

The 5070 Ti leads the RX 9070 XT by a wide margin in our RT tests, and it's anywhere from 10%-15% behind the absurdly overpriced RTX 5080 across the board. But if you want the absolute best RT performance possible without stepping up to a 4090 or 5090, the extra cash for a 5080 is your best — and only — option.

That said, you should really explore DLSS 4.5 upscaling and MFG on the 5070 Ti before spending big to step up to a 5080.

The RX 9070 XT remains AMD's fastest RT GPU, outpacing the 7900 XTX across all tested resolutions. It leads the RDNA 3 halo card by about 10% across the board, which is an impressive generational leap considering its 33% deficit in CUs versus the XTX.

But the 9070 XT can only trade blows with the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 5070 with Nvidia competition in the picture. It beats out the 5070 at 1080p and 1440p, but DLSS 4.5 upscaling and MFG give Blackwell gamers more flexible options for boosting performance with only minimal impact to image quality versus both RDNA 4 (and Ada).

Of course, the RX 9070 XT has FSR 4 upscaling and framegen at its disposal in compatible titles, but support for those features isn't as widespread as DLSS.

Meanwhile, the RX 9070 comes in slightly behind the RTX 5070 at 1080p and 1440p for RT. Even though its 16GB of VRAM prevents the 9070's 4K RT performance from completely nosediving, the average frame rate at that resolution isn't high enough to make it a 4K RT choice.

At 1080p, the RX 9070 GRE presents an intriguing RT option for Radeon gamers, delivering a near-60-FPS average baseline that would make a great FSR 4 foundation. But its 12GB of VRAM quickly becomes a liability at 1440p versus the 9070, and 4K is out of the question.

Overall, our demanding 2026 RT test suite shows that the bar for entry to a good RT experience remains high, especially as elevated prices on the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB mean that the first "real" RT-ready Blackwell card at 1080p and up is the RTX 5070. And on the Radeon side, you really want an RX 9070 GRE or RX 9070 for the best experience.

Test Setup and Hardware for GPU Benchmarks

We've used several different PCs for our testing over the years. The latest update switches to an AMD Zen 5 processor: the unparalleled Ryzen 7 9800X3D and its 3D V-Cache-enhanced performance.

Here are the specifications for our latest GPU test PC.

Tom's Hardware 2026 GPU Benchmarks Testbed

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6000 CL30
Motherboard: Asus TUF Gaming X670E-Plus Wifi
SSD: Inland Performance Plus 4TB
PSU: MSI MPG Ai1600TS 1600W

We test across the three most common gaming resolutions, 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, using a mix of high and ultra settings, depending on the title. Where possible, we use 'reference' cards for all of these tests, like Nvidia's Founders Edition models and AMD's reference designs. Most midrange and lower GPUs don't get reference models, however, and in some cases we only have factory-overclocked cards for testing. We do our best to select cards that are close to the reference specs in such cases.

For each graphics card, we follow the same testing procedure. We run one pass of each benchmark to "warm up" the GPU after launching the game, then perform our actual test runs across each resolution.

We carefully review our test data and check for anomalies. For example, we always expect the RTX 5080 to be faster than the RTX 5070 Ti. If it's not, and we're not in a CPU limited situation, we'll recheck both cards to ensure that our standings our accurate. We also check and retest in cases of subtler issues, as when a transient hitch or frame-time spike causes a large dip in 1% low FPS.

Due to the length of time required for testing each GPU, updated drivers and game patches inevitably come out that can impact performance. We periodically retest a few sample cards to verify our results are still valid, and if not, we go through and retest the affected game(s) and GPU(s). We may also add games to our test suite over time, if one comes out that is popular and conducive to testing. See what makes a good game benchmark for our selection criteria.

GPU Benchmarks: Individual Game Charts

The above tables provide a summary of performance, but for those that want to see the individual game charts, for both the standard and ray tracing test suites, we've got those as well. These charts only cover current-gen GPUs for readability.

These charts are up to date as of June 2026.

GPU Benchmarks — 1080p

GPU Benchmarks — 1440p

GPU Benchmarks — 4K

GPU Benchmarks — Power, Clocks, and Temperatures

Most of our discussion has focused on performance, but for those interested in power and other aspects of the GPUs, here are the appropriate charts. We'll run these from highest to lowest settings, as 4K ultra tends to be the most strenuous workload on most of these GPUs.

If you're looking for the legacy GPU hierarchy, head over to page two! We moved it to a separate page to help improve load times in our CMS as well as for the main website. And if you're looking to comment on the GPU benchmarks hierarchy, head over to our forums and join the discussion!

Choosing a Graphics Card

Choosing a Graphics Card

Choosing a Graphics Card

Which graphics card do you need? To help you decide, we created this GPU benchmarks hierarchy, comprising 48 GPUs from three generations of hardware for Nvidia and AMD and also including Intel's Battlemage cards. Not surprisingly, the fastest cards are using the latest GPU architectures, though they're not always a major upgrade over the prior generation.

Of course, it's not just about playing games. Many applications use the GPU for other work. But a good graphics card for gaming will typically do equally well in complex GPU computational workloads. Buy one of the top cards and you can run games at high resolutions and frame rates with the effects turned all the way up, and you'll be able to do content creation work as needed. Drop down to the middle and lower portions of the list and you'll need to start dialing down the settings to get acceptable performance in regular gameplay and GPU benchmarks.

If your main goal is gaming, you can't forget about the CPU. Getting the best possible gaming GPU won't help you much if your CPU is underpowered or many years out of date. So be sure to check out the Best CPUs for gaming page, as well as our CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy to make sure you have the right CPU for the level of gaming performance you're looking to achieve.

And don't forget about your monitor. Be sure to get a display whose refresh rate range matches the average frame rates of the graphics card that you want in the games that you play. Check out our list of the best gaming monitors for a starting point.

GPU Benchmarks from 2022–2024

Our 'legacy' GPU benchmarks used different hardware. Here are the details for the 2022–2024 configuration that used an Alder Lake 12900K CPU.

Tom's Hardware 2022–2024 GPU Testbed

Intel Core i9-12900K
MSI Pro Z690-A WiFi DDR4
Corsair 2x16GB DDR4-3600 CL16
Crucial P5 Plus 2TB
Cooler Master MWE 1250 V2 Gold
Cooler Master PL360 Flux
Cooler Master HAF500
Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

We have upgraded our test system and changed our test suite for 2025, effectively resetting our benchmarking and rankings. However, the old data — collected using a Core i9-12900K PC — remains valid. We aren't testing new GPUs with the old testbed, as that would double the time required for what is already a lengthy process, but we felt it would be helpful to some to keep the final data available.

We also had an interim system that never quite got wrapped up, which had a Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU. Our original CPU was one of the impacted units that failed over time, which explains in retrospect why so much of the data felt a bit questionable. Thankfully, the new Ryzen 7 9800X3D system seems to be running just fine. Here are the 12900K results.

For these GPU benchmarks, we tested nearly every GPU released between 2016 and 2024, plus a few extras. All graphics cards were tested at 1080p medium and 1080p ultra, and we sorted the table by the 1080p ultra results. Where it made sense, we also tested at 1440p ultra and 4K ultra. All the scores are scaled relative to the top-ranking 1080p ultra card of the time, which in our suite is the RTX 4090 — especially at 4K and 1440p.

The above summary charts show the relative performance of the cards we've tested across the past several generations of hardware at 1080p ultra — swipe through the above gallery if you want to see the 1080p medium, 1440p, and 4K ultra images. There are a few missing options (e.g., the GT 1030, RX 550, and several Titan cards), but otherwise it's basically complete. Note that we also have data in the table below for some of the other older GPUs.

The eight games used for our standard GPU benchmarks hierarchy are Borderlands 3 (DX12), Far Cry 6 (DX12), Flight Simulator (DX11 Nvidia, DX12 AMD/Intel), Forza Horizon 5 (DX12), Horizon Zero Dawn (DX12), Red Dead Redemption 2 (Vulkan), Total War Warhammer 3 (DX11), and Watch Dogs Legion (DX12). The fps score is the geometric mean (equal weighting) of the eight games. Note that the specifications column links directly to our original review for the various GPUs.

*: GPU couldn't run all tests, so the overall score is slightly skewed at 1080p ultra.

While the RTX 4090 does technically take first place at 1080p ultra, it's the 1440p and especially 4K numbers that impress. It's less than 2% faster than the RTX 4080 Super at 1080p ultra, but that increases to 9% at 1440p and then 25% at 4K. Also note that the fps numbers in our table incorporate both the average and minimum fps into a single score — with the average given more weight than the 1% low fps.

Again, keep in mind that we're not including any ray tracing or DLSS results in the above table, as we use the same test suite with the same settings on all current and previous generation graphics cards. Since only RTX cards support DLSS (and RTX 40-series if you want DLSS 3), that would drastically limit which cards we could directly compare. You can see DLSS 2/3 and FSR 2 upscaling results in our RTX 4070 review if you want to check out how the various upscaling modes can help.

The RTX 4090 comes at a steep price, though on paper it's not that much worse than the previous generation RTX 3090. In fact, we'd say it's a lot better in some respects, as the 3090 was only a minor improvement in performance compared to the 3080 at the time of launch, but with more than double the VRAM. Nvidia pulled out all the stops with the 4090, increasing the core counts, clock speeds, and power limits to push it beyond all contenders. There are two problems with the 4090, however: It's not available at MSRP any longer, due to demand from the AI sector — it often costs $2,000 or more — and there are still concerns with pulling 450W of power over the 16-pin connector.

Stepping down from the RTX 4090, the RTX 4080 Super and RX 7900 XTX trade blows at higher resolutions, while CPU bottlenecks come into play at 1080p. We'll be switching our testbed in the near future, with the current results from our 13900K testing in the charts at the bottom of the page.

Outside of the latest releases from AMD and Nvidia, the RX 6000- and RTX 30-series chips still perform reasonably well and if you're using such a card, there may not be any need to upgrade at present. Intel's Arc GPUs also fall into this category and are something of a wild card.

We've been testing and retesting GPUs periodically, and the Arc chips running the latest drivers now complete all of our benchmarks without any major anomalies. (Minecraft was previously a problem, though Intel has finally sorted that out.) They're not great on efficiency, but overall performance and pricing for the A750 is quite good.

Turning to the previous generation GPUs, the RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series chips end up scattered throughout the results, along with the RX 5000-series. The general rule of thumb is that you get one or two "model upgrades" with the newer architectures, so for example the RTX 2080 Super comes in just below the RTX 3060 Ti, while the RX 5700 XT basically matches the newer and less expensive RX 6600 XT.

Go back far enough and you can see how modern games at ultra settings severely punish cards that don't have more than 4GB VRAM. We've been saying for a few years now that 4GB was just scraping by, and these days we'd avoid buying anything with less than 8GB of VRAM — 12GB or more is the minimum we'd want with a mainstream GPU, and 16GB or more for high-end and above. Old cards like the GTX 1060 3GB and GTX 1050 actually failed to run some of our tests, which skews their results a bit, even though they do better at 1080p medium.

Now let's switch over to the ray tracing hierarchy.

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks 2022–2024

Enabling ray tracing, particularly with demanding games like many of those we're using in our DXR test suite, can cause framerates to drop off a cliff. We're testing with "medium" and "ultra" ray tracing settings. Medium generally means using the medium graphics preset but turning on ray tracing effects (set to "medium" if that's an option; otherwise, "on"), while ultra turns on all of the RT options at more or less maximum quality.

Because ray tracing is so much more demanding, we're sorting these results by the 1080p medium scores. That's also because the RX 6500 XT, RX 6400, and Arc A380 basically can't handle ray tracing even at these settings, and testing at anything more than 1080p medium would be fruitless.

The five ray tracing games used are Bright Memory Infinite, Control Ultimate Edition, Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus Enhanced, and Minecraft — all of these use the DirectX 12 / DX12 Ultimate API. The fps score is the geometric mean (equal weighting) of the five games, and the percentage is scaled relative to the fastest GPU in the list, which again is the GeForce RTX 4090.

If you want to see what the future may hold with ray tracing, check out our Alan Wake 2 benchmarks where the full path tracing barely manages playable performance even with upscaling on non-Nvidia GPUs. However, and this is a critical point, the number of games where RT truly makes a striking difference in visuals is extremely limited. For most games, we still feel running pure rasterization rendering makes more sense.