The first quarter of 2026 was quite favorable for AMD as the company managed to increase its unit share on the market of client systems and skyrocketed its share in servers past 33%, according to Mercury Research. In addition, the company's revenue shares set records across client and server market segments, so AMD now controls 38.1% of all x86 CPU market value and 46.2% of all x86 server CPU revenue share. Perhaps an alarming sign is that the company's desktop PC unit and revenue shares declined sequentially, though they are up year-over-year (YoY).

Consumer CPUs: AMD gains ground, but only modestly

In the consumer PC segment, AMD continued to gain ground in the first quarter of 2026 as its client CPU unit share rose to 29.6%, up slightly from 29.2% in Q4 2025 and up sharply from 24.1% the same quarter a year ago, according to data by Mercury Research.

The quarter, however, showed a split between desktops and notebooks as Intel has managed to claw back 3.2% of the desktop PC market. Also, Intel remained the dominant supplier of client CPUs with a 70.4% share, though its position weakened from 75.9% in Q1 2025 as AMD did rather well in notebooks.

However, when it comes to the revenue side of things, AMD's position remained particularly strong. The company's client CPU revenue share reached 31.4%, slightly above the previous quarter and substantially higher than a year ago (26.6%), which perhaps reflects the company's continued strength in premium client processors. Nonetheless, Intel still controlled nearly 69% of client CPU revenue, which is a big deal. How things will unfold in the second half of the year — when Intel launches its Nova Lake processors for client systems that it pins a lot of hopes on — is something that remains to be seen.

Desktop CPUs: Market share comes, market share goes

In the desktop PC segment, AMD gave back a portion of the massive gains it made during the exceptionally strong holiday quarter, but still maintained a historically high position, so the decline can be considered as a correction, rather than a new trend.

AMD's desktop CPU unit share stood at 33.2% in Q1 2026, down from the record 36.4% in Q4 2025, but well above the 28% recorded in the quarter a year earlier. Intel regained some ground sequentially and increased its desktop share to 66.8%, but remained far below its year-ago level of 72% as AMD continued to hold a much stronger position than it did in recent years.

On the revenue side, AMD remained strong despite the sequential share drip: the company's desktop CPU revenue share was 37.6%, down from the record quarter before, but still notable 3.2% higher than a year earlier. Intel continued to generate most desktop CPU revenue overall, but AMD's ability to maintain a high revenue share relative to its unit share shows the continued strength of premium Ryzen CPUs.

Mobile CPUs: Another record quarter

In the mobile PC segment, AMD delivered its strongest result ever as it managed to once again increase its share and set its highest share in laptops ever.

AMD's mobile CPU unit share climbed to 28.3% in Q1 2026, up from 26% in Q4 2025 and from 22.5% a year earlier, the best quarter ever for the company's mobile processors. For obvious reasons, Intel commanded the lion's share of the market — 71.7% — though its lead narrowed further as AMD increased its share by improving availability and expanding its footprint in segments (e.g., business and commercial notebooks) traditionally dominated by Intel.

As for revenue share, AMD's progress was even more impressive. The company’s mobile CPU revenue share rose to 28.9%, an increase from 24.9% in Q4 2025 and from 22.2% in Q1 2025, which reflects stronger sales of higher-value notebook processors. Intel continued to control the majority of notebook CPU revenue overall (71.7%, down from 77.5% in Q1 2025), but AMD's ability to approach 28.9% revenue share clearly indicates its increasing competitiveness in higher-margin premium laptops that historically favored Intel almost exclusively.

Server CPUs: Another breakthrough quarter

While the first quarter was good for AMD's mobile processors, it was exceptional for AMD's EPYC CPUs for servers. The company not only set a record in terms of unit share, but it has also managed to skyrocket its revenue share by 5% in a single quarter.

AMD's server processor unit share climbed to 33.2%, up from 28.8% in Q4 2025 and 27.2% a year earlier, the data by Mercury Research shows. Intel still shipped the majority of server processors with a 66.8% share, but its position weakened both sequentially and year-over-year as EPYC adoption continued to expand across hyperscale cloud providers, enterprise deployments, and AI/HPC infrastructure.

On the revenue side, AMD's performance was even more striking: the company's server CPU revenue share reached a record 46.2%, which means that AMD now commands nearly half of all x86 server CPU revenue while shipping roughly one-third of units. This gap between unit share and revenue share reflects significantly higher average selling prices of AMD's processors in general and the popularity of the company's high-core-count premium configurations. While Intel generated more server CPU revenue than AMD, ASPs of its Xeon products were lower compared to those of EPYCs, which is in line with market performance in prior quarters.

Summary

AMD started 2026 on a strong note: it expanded its share in both client and server CPUs and set new records for overall x86 CPU revenue share, according to Mercury Research.

The company posted particularly strong gains in notebooks and servers, where EPYC adoption pushed AMD’s server revenue share close to half of the entire x86 server market. While AMD's desktop CPU share declined sequentially after an exceptionally strong holiday quarter, it remained well above year-ago levels, so the strong momentum for the company continues.

In general, AMD continues to strengthen its positions in the most profitable parts of the x86 CPU market, while Intel retains shipment leadership but loses further ground in revenue share and premium segments.

Gaming laptops can be pricey, and in the past few years, they have only gotten more expensive. The components inside laptops have gotten more expensive, the market below $1,000 has effectively been decimated, and finding a good deal is harder than ever. But we're still testing, and while the goal posts of what defines a budget gaming laptop may be a bit more expensive than they used to be, there are still ways to save.

At Tom's Hardware, we test many gaming laptops every year at a range of prices with different features and parts, so we know what to expect at every price point, no matter what your budget. While even the budget gaming laptops may not be cheap, we can still point out where you get the most for your money. We thoroughly benchmark all of the best budget gaming laptops in numerous games, extensively measuring gaming performance under a wide range of graphical conditions to suss out the best cheap laptops on the market.

Most gaming laptops under $1,500 will use Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5050 and RTX 5060 graphics cards. Many of them will use the latest Intel Core Ultra or AMD Ryzen mobile processors, though sometimes you'll still find last-gen options. Above $1,500 (which, unfortunately, is still on the low end with all-new components these days), you should have the latest. That being said, don't cut corners so far that you settle for 8GB of RAM or just 256GB of storage. Those are outdated specs for gaming laptops.

With a budget gaming laptop, you'll be able to play most games — even graphically intensive ones — on medium or high settings, if not better. If you're playing lighter games, like esports, you should still be able to achieve high frame rates.

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Best Budget Gaming Laptops You Can Buy

Best budget gaming laptop overall

The Acer Nitro V 16S AI is, as of this writing, typically selling around $1,500. This laptop is great for those who are willing to trade off some gaming performance for a bright and colorful screen and a ton of ports, including a microSD card slot.

Those ports, paired with a speedy storage drive in our tests, make the Nivro V 16S AI a solid productivity machine alongside one that can play most games. Acer is using an RTX 5060 with an 85W graphics card, so it's not the most performant system out there, but it's well-balanced if you're going to use just one laptop for gaming, work, or school.

The 16-inch, 1920 x 1200 IPS screen goes up to 180 Hz, allowing for smooth gameplay for esports and indie games. Our system came with a 1TB storage drive, which should hold a few games, and there's room to add another inside. It also came with 32GB of RAM, which should be a bit future-proof.

There is a bunch of bloatware that you'll probably want to uninstall, and the webcam is just 720p.

Read: Acer Nitro V 16S AI review

Best budget gaming laptop for work and play

We had previously seen this laptop as high as $1,800, but lately it's been on sale closer to $1,500. The machine is another good mix of productivity and gaming. Like many other budget systems, it's using an 85W GPU (in this case, an RTX 5070), which means you won't get the most powerful gaming performance.What it does allow for, however, is strong battery life, lasting 9 hours and 13 minutes on our test. We also found the keyboard and touchpad to be quite comfortable.

The Ryzen AI 7 350 is a recent chip, and one that offers strong productivity performance, should you be using this system for work other than just gaming.It would have been nice to see Wi-Fi 7 at this system's full price, though on sale, Wi-Fi 6E is more forgivable. That being said, the display and audio are both middling, so this may be best if you use a monitor or speakers to bump up your experience.

Read: Gigabyte Aero X16 review

Best for battery life

If you want something a bit more minimalist, the Alienware 16 Aurora, the gaming brand's stripped-down machine, may work for you. This one has been consistently available.

The Aurora has an attractive chassis that mixes its plastic body with an alumium lid. The indigo color seems almost black, but has a navy shimmer in the right light.

The biggest benefits we saw were in the 16-inch, 2560 x 1600 IPS display, which goes up to 120 Hz. That screen was brighter and far more vivid (112% of sRGB color volume, 312.2 nits) in our measurements compared to other budget machines.

We also appreciated the Aurora's 96 WHr battery, which helped the system last for 9 hours and 41 minutes on our battery test.

The 80W RTX 5060 is fairly low-power, which might help with the longevity, but means you'l have to set your expectations while gaming. Additionally, the storage could be faster, though you could consider swapping that out down the line.

Read: Alienware 16 Aurora review

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What to Expect From the Best Budget Laptops for Gaming

On Tuesday, AMD reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2026. Driven by record demand for AMD's EPYC server processors, Ryzen CPUs, and Instinct accelerators, the company's revenue totaled $10.253 billion, slightly down quarter-over-quarter (QoQ), but up significantly year-over-year (YoY). Furthermore, AMD raised its long-term outlook for the server CPU market, expecting it to reach $120 billion by 2030 due to increased demand from AI and agentic AI workloads. At the same time, the company admitted that sales of its AI accelerators were down sequentially.

For the quarter ending March 28, AMD generated $10.253 billion in revenue, down slightly from $10.270 billion in the fourth quarter, but up 38% compared to $7.438 billion in the first quarter of 2025. The company's GAAP net income nearly doubled to $1.383 billion from $709 million as its gross margin hit 53%, up 3% YoY. Operating income rose 83% year-over-year to $1.476 billion.

"We delivered an outstanding first quarter, driven by accelerating demand for AI infrastructure, with Data Center now the primary driver of our revenue and earnings growth," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD chair and CEO. "We are seeing strong momentum as inferencing and agentic AI drive increasing demand for high-performance CPUs and accelerators. Looking ahead, we expect server growth to accelerate meaningfully as we scale supply to meet demand."

Data center: A record quarter and great prospects

While traditionally the lion's share of AMD's revenue came from selling processors and system-on-chips (SoCs) for client devices, in the recent years the company's data center segment delivered the bigger portion of the company's revenue while also showing rapid growth. In the first quarter, AMD's data center division earned $5.8 billion in revenue (up 57% year-over-year) and $1.6 billion in operating income (up from $900 million a year ago). AMD said server CPU sales increased more than 50% from the same quarter last year, with both cloud and enterprise demand growing over 50%.

Lisa Su said AMD is seeing significantly higher CPU demand because AI workloads increasingly require CPUs for orchestration, data movement, head-node operations, and agentic AI execution. As a result, AMD now expects the server CPU market to grow at more than 35% annually through 2030 (compared to its prior forecast of around 18% CAGR), reaching $120 billion in 2030. In fact, the company expects sales of its EPYC processors for data centers to increase 70% year-over-year and sales of Instinct AI accelerators to be up 46% YoY in the second quarter.

 "In response to this demand, we are working closely with our supply chain partners to meaningfully increase our wafer and back-end capacity to support this growth," Su said. "As a result, we now expect server CPU revenue to grow by more than 70% year-over-year in the second quarter, with robust growth continuing through the second half of 2026 and into 2027 as we ramp our next generation EPYC processors."

AMD also revealed deeper engagement with major AI infrastructure customers. During the quarter, the company expanded its partnership with Meta, which plans to deploy up to 6 GW of AMD Instinct GPUs across several generations, including custom Instinct MI450-based accelerators integrated into AMD's Helios rack-scale AI platform. AMD said shipments tied to the Meta deployment are scheduled to begin in the second half of 2026.

In addition, the company indicated that demand for its Instinct MI450-series accelerators and Helios systems from its alpha customer is already exceeding its initial expectations for 2027. Furthermore, multiple customers are now evaluating large-scale deployments for both training and inference workloads.

"With this expanded visibility, we have strong and increasing confidence in our ability to deliver tens of billions of dollars in annual data center AI revenue in 2027 and to exceed our long-term growth target of greater than eighty percent in the coming years," Su said.

At the same time, sales of AMD's Instinct accelerators — while growing 38% year-over-year — dropped slightly quarter-over-quarter due to lower sales to customers in China. Nonetheless, the company remains optimistic about Instinct's trajectory in Q2 and then in the second half of the year when the Instinct MI450-series starts to ramp.

AMD not only set its own record in enterprise hardware sales during the quarter, but it continued to outsell Intel, which recorded $5.1 billion in revenue and $1.5 billion in operating income in the first quarter.

Client and Gaming: Great results, but tepid outlook

When it comes to sales of client Ryzen CPUs, Radeon GPUs, and game console SoCs, AMD's revenue increased $3.6 billion, an increase of 23% year-over-year. Client revenue alone reached $2.9 billion, up 26%, driven by strong Ryzen processor demand and commercial PC share gains. Gaming revenue rose 11% to $720 million due to stronger Radeon GPU demand.

" Semi-custom revenue declined year-over-year as expected at this stage of the console cycle, while engagements with customers on next generation platforms remain strong," said the head of AMD. "In graphics, revenue increased year-over-year, led by demand for our latest generation Radeon nine thousand series GPUs.

AMD warned that both client and gaming revenue in the second half of the year would decline by more than 20% compared to the first half because of higher memory and component costs.

" Similar to the PC market, we believe that second half demand in gaming will be impacted by higher memory and component costs, and we are planning the business accordingly," said Su.

Embedded: Slow growth, good prospects

AMD's embedded revenue reached $873 million, up 6% year-over-year as industrial and edge demand improved. The business unit generated $338 million operating income, up from $328 million a year ago. The success of AMD's embedded division was driven by the company's strong positions across a variety of market segments that span from aerospace to communications and from defense to scientific applications.

"Design win momentum for [embedded products] grew by a double-digit percentage year over year, with billions of dollars in new wins across markets, reflecting the continued expansion of our embedded business from a primarily FPGA-focused portfolio to a broader set of adaptive embedded x86 and semi-custom solutions, significantly expanding our TAM," said Su.

Q2 outlook: Massive growth expected

AMD projects Q2 2026 revenue to reach about $11.2 billion ± $300 million. At the midpoint of the guidance, this would represent a 46% increase compared to the same period last year and about 9% growth sequentially. The company also expects non-GAAP gross margin to be around 56%.

"[Q2 results will be ]driven by a very strong growth in our data center segment, [modest] growth in our client and the gaming segment, and a double-digit growth in our embedded segment," said Jean Hu, AMD executive vice president, CFO and treasurer.

Whether you're a student submitting homework, at work typing away at documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, or you're just someone who wants to access resources online and connect with family and friends, you want a laptop with the components and features you'll need to get the job done. That means a great screen, a comfortable keyboard, and long battery life (and nice design doesn't hurt, either!).

The laptop space is more competitive than ever. Windows machines come from many companies using silicon from three major CPU vendors: Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Apple, meanwhile, has a range of powerful and portable systems based on its own Apple Silicon.

In 2026, Intel's most recent chips are its Intel Core Ultra (Series 3) chips, code-named Panther Lake, while AMD launched its "Gorgon Point" Ryzen AI processors at CES. At Computex, Nvidia announced that its RTX Spark chips will launch in laptops from Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and more starting in the fall, taking on Qualcomm in the Windows on Arm space. Earlier this year, Qualcomm released its Snapdragon X2 Elite Xtreme, Elite, and Plus chips.

On Macs, Apple's top chips are the M5 series, including the M5 Pro and M5 Max, which can be found in the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lineup.

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Best Laptops You Can Buy Today

The Best Laptop (and Mac) overall

The MacBook Air has been a go-to laptop recommendation for quite some time, thanks to strong performance, a fanless design, excellent built quality, and long-lasting battery life. With the version of the chip with M5, you get the benefits of years of hardware revisions since the Air's last redesign with M2, including a minimum 16GB of RAM and a 12-megapixel webcam.

The M5 chip in the MacBook Air showed off excellent single and multi-core performance. In fact, it;s closest rival was the same chip in the MacBook Pro, which gets a boost because of an active fan.

That being said, the system can throttle under heavy workloads like rendering. But for most people's typical tasks, including writing, editing, making spreadsheets, editing photos, listening to music, programming, and general multitasking, you'll have a very powerful machine.

Apple has boosted the base MacBook Air's price to $1,099, but it now starts with 512GB of memory. Given the price of components these days, the laptop is still a great value. If you want a Mac but don't want to spend that much for it, you could take a step down to the entry-level MacBook Neo, starting at $599, as long as you're willing to sacrifice on power, memory, ports, and a backlit keyboard.

Read: MacBook Air (M5) review

Best Windows laptop

The Dell XPS 14 is back, and while you might expect its performance or design to be the headlining feature, it's the battery life that wows. With its base 1920 x 1200 LCD display, which has a variable refresh rate that goes all the way down to 1 Hz, it lasted 20 hours and 41 minutes on our battery test.

That's not to say the battery life is all there is to like about this laptop. The 3-pound chassis is sleek, and Dell added a function row back to the keyboard, making it way easier to use over the touch bar of yesteryear.

If you're OK with 12 hours of charge, more expensive models with a tandem OLED display have way better colors and more powerful Arc B390 integrated graphics.

That being said, both of them have a low-travel keyboard without space between the keys, which definitely tripped up my fingers, so you'll need time to get your muscle memory going. And the starting price, at $1,600, is a lot to ask but is unfortunately common as the memory crisis rages on.

Read: Dell XPS 14 (2026) review

Best ultralight laptop

Some of the best laptops are barely noticeable in your bag. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, at 2.15 pounds is extremely light.

Still, despite the weight, you get plenty of other benefits. The speakers are surprisingly good for a laptop of this size. Perhaps most impressively, the system ran for 16 hours and 38 minutes on our battery test, outlasting many of the laptops we bit against it by multiple hours.

The system also offers a lovely display. The POLED touchscreen measured 476 nits of brightness while falling in similar gamut ranges as other OLED notebooks that weren't as luminous.

There are some downsides. There are limited ports outside of Thunderbolt 4/USB-C, including a lack of a headphone jack. And CPU performance fell behind some competitors, like Apple's M5 MacBook Air and a thicker AMD-based 2-in-1 from HP.Still, the laptop impressed for its airiness and multimedia strengths. And as tested with 32GB at $1,519, it's not a crazy price as the costs of many laptops skyrocket during an ongoing component shortage.

Read: Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition review

Another great Windows clamshell

We can argue about how much the AI PC is really any sort of revolution, but there are still some strong ultraportables coming out. The HP OmniBook Ultra puts the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 in a sleek chassis with strong productivity performance.

HP is offering up decent battery life here, running for 12 hours and 52 minutes on our battery test. That's not the best, but all things considered including the high-resolution display, it's not bad. It's also nice to see Thunderbolt 4 ports on an AMD system, which is exceedingly rare.

The experience is knocked down a bit by a significant amount of bloatware, but if you're looking for a strong AMD laptop, the HP OmniBook Ultra is a strong competitor if you don't mind doing some uninstalling.

Read: HP OmniBook Ultra review

The best budget laptop

If you're looking for an affordable laptop, Apple does it best these days. The MacBook Neo starts at $599 ($499 with an education discount), but you rarely feel like you're not getting enough – unlike most Windows laptops in this price range. The Neo has a premium, all-metal chassis, a bright, vivid screen, and a custom mechanical trackpad that lets you click anywhere. And yes, you get all of macOS running on what was formerly an iPhone chip.

The quality of the 13-inch chassis and screen are key here. You're not getting something plastic. You're not getting something low-resolution, and you're not getting something dim. You also get a great webcam for this price range, and the system stays remarkably cool. There are some niceties you sacrifice, however. Apple has gone without a backlit keyboard. And the two USB ports aren't labeled, so you'll have to remember which is the faster 10 Gbps USB 3 port (the back one) for backup drives and monitors, lest you end up with an error message.

I suspect that most people with light workloads — especially students and people using home computers doing a lot of work in the browser — won't have too much trouble with the 8GB of RAM. That being said, 16GB systems can be found in the Windows world for a bit more money, though you'll need to hunt for sales.

But if a premium laptop experience (including great build quality and a high-res screen) are important to you, Apple delivers that better than any Windows machine priced close to the Neo’s $599 starting price.

Read: MacBook Neo review

The Best Laptop for work

There are plenty of reasons why the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a classic. It's thin design and strong build quality are beloved by ThinkPad diehards. The latest model, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11), offers long battery life and great speakers.

Perhaps most critically, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon offers an excellent keyboard. Lenovo's reputation was built on great typing experiences, so this is crucial. For those who love Lenovo's TrackPoint, it's still here, allowing you to move the mouse without ever taking your fingers away from the home row on the keyboard.

The latest version comes with Intel's 13th Gen Core processors. We reviewed it with a Core i7-1355U, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD.

The one real issue we had is that the base screen could benefit from being a bit brighter. Those who want the most vivid experience can opt for an OLED panel, but at a higher price.

When shopping for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11), keep an eye out for Lenovo's frequent sales, as there's often a deal available.

Read: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11) Review

The Best Windows Tablet

Microsoft may push the Surface Pro as a do-it-all AI machine, but the truth is it's just a really nice, portable, slim PC that lasts a long time on a battery and includes a beautiful OLED display. It's definitively one of the best Surfaces to date.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors offer enough performance to keep up with x86 competitors, making this one of the first Arm-based Surfaces that doesn't feel like it's lacking. Add on more Arm-compatible apps than ever, including the Chrome browser, and there's far less to miss from previous Intel models. That's not to say it's perfect — there are still some gaming issues, as well as drivers for specialized peripherals that may need to be rebuilt for the new platform.

The 45 TOPS NPU powers some of Windows 11's Copilot+ features, like Cocreator, Live Captions, and Windows Studio effects. None of these are showstoppers, but they're cool tricks.'

If you want a premium tablet running Windows 11, the Surface Pro is one of the only premium games in town. And that means paying a premium for a separate keyboard. But for those who love this form factor, the Surface Pro remains the best option out there.

Read: Microsoft Surface Pro review

A more powerful Mac laptop

The MacBook Air is a great starting point, but if you want an air-cooled processor and a few more features, the base MacBook Pro adds a few niceties. The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts with an M5 processor, has three Thunderbolt ports (including one on the right side), and a beautiful micro LED display.

For those willing to spend an extra $150, there's a nano-texture display option that is completely worth it if you ever use your laptop outside. The matte display looks excellent, and was great on desks near windows.

If you need the most power possible, we also reviewed the MacBook Pro with an M5 Max, including a 40-core GPU, a mix of Apple's latest performance and super cores, and a blazing fast SSD.

Both the 14-inch and 16-inch laptops offer great speakers and beautiful displays, but you will have to pay quite a bit for any storage or memory upgrades you want, and you won't be able to make changes later.

Read: MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5) review
Read: MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max) review

The Best Gaming laptop

Razer Blade 18 offers some of the strongest gaming performance we've seen in a laptop, but also features excellent design, comfortable features, and the latest connection standards. At $5,199.99 as tested, it sure should be good. It tops our list of the best gaming laptops.

The major highlight is the dual-mode display, which has two options: 3840 x 2400 at 240 Hz or 1920 x 1200 at 440 Hz. Those two choices (which you can switch between in Razer Synapse) is enough to showcase both intensive, graphics-driven games at high settings and esports where frames are more important than resolution and detail.

The laptop, packed with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU in our review configuration, outperformed the field in our gaming tests, especially at the lower resolution.Razer is one of the few laptop makers using Thunderbolt 5 ports (we've also seen them from MSI and Apple), so this system is ready to go if you're using advanced peripherals or the fastest external storage drives.

Perhaps the biggest downside is that the Blade's dual 2TB storage drives use PCIe 4.0 rather than 5.0. You won’t notice this in games or mainstream productivity, but if you want PCIe 5.0 speed for future proofing or 8K video editing, the Titan may still be the way to go. The Blade 18 does support PCIe 5.0 drives, if you want to upgrade to speedier storage in the future.

Read: Razer Blade 18 review

Other Laptops We Tested

💻 Asus Zenbook A16

The Zenbook A16 has Qualcomm's powerful Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme processor, including 48GB of RAM on the package. While the chip is fast, the laptop, while lightweight, didn't meet our expectations. While light, it flexed and didn't feel premium; battery life was lesser than competitors; and while emulation is better than it used to be, there are still some compatibility issues with Windows on Arm for power users.

Read: Asus Zenbook A16 review

💻 Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra

Samsung's Galaxy Book6 Ultra is a powerful system for creatives, thanks in part to the RTX 5070 GPU in the version we tested. The OLED screen is beautiful and you get an nice design (albeit one that is quite similar to Macs), but this laptop is pricey, and you get a shallow keyboard.

Read: Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra review

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Budget portable PCs specialist Chuwi has released an official apology to customers who received devices that didn’t match up to expected specifications. Despite offering a full refund to any affected parties, some will think the apology doesn’t go far enough given the waste of time/effort in receiving a wrongly specced (downgraded) device. Moreover, Chuwi maintains that the issue was due to a “production error,” which stretches credulity because of the firmware-level adjustments that cloaked the processor swap ‘scam.’

Putting the Chuwi apology in context, earlier this month, we reported on the emerging scandal of CoreBook X laptops being discovered packing older Ryzen 5 5500U (Zen 2) processors, instead of the advertised Ryzen 5 7430U (Zen 3). We highlighted that this couldn’t just be a simple parts mix-up, as Chuwi also seemed to use firmware-level modifications to fake the processor's identity to mirror the newer part.

A casual user could see the Zen 2 Lucienne chip described as a Zen 3 Barcelo-R chip inside system status tools in Windows controls, as well as in popular apps like CPU-Z and HWiNFO64. Subtle differences in reported cache quotas and clock speeds first raised suspicions, though. News and reviews site NotebookCheck lived up to its name by tearing down a CoreBook X sample, revealing the engraved processor OPN on the Ryzen, and thereby confirming the actual downgrade.

At the time, Chuwi vaguely blamed different production batches and leftover stock. Its latest announcement on the matter isn’t much better in that respect, but at least we see an apology and a seemingly simple process to get a full refund is offered.

With the typical performance delta between Ryzen 5 5500U and Ryzen 5 7430U at around 10%, but up to 20% on this laptop, a part-refund/compensation scheme may have been a more fitting response to affected customers.

Edit 3/8/2026 7:25am ET: Clarified the nature of the benchmark win in the title and moved the analysis of poor scaling to the second paragraph.

Apple's desktop and notebook processors traditionally lead the pack in single-thread workloads, as industry-leading single-thread performance has been the company's focus for a long time. However, Apple's M5 Max processors not only outperform rivals by a huge margin in single-thread workloads, but beat all of them — including the 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX — in multi-thread workloads in the Geekbench 6 benchmark.

There is a major catch here as the Geekbench 6 multi-thread benchmark is a brief, bursty test intended to mimic common consumer tasks such as archive compression, PDF processing, and image editing. Its short runtime and bursty nature prevent it from fully stressing ultra-high-core-count processors like the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX.

Furthermore, many of the suite’s multi-threaded subtests scale efficiently only to roughly 8 – 32 threads, which leaves much of such CPUs' parallel capacity idle, but which creates an almost perfect environment for Apple's CPUs that feature a relatively modest number of cores, but which evolve noticeably in terms of per-core performance from one generation to another. Also, keep in mind that Geekbench 6 is a synthetic benchmark that reflects the potential of the tested hardware but may not reflect its performance in real-world applications.

Additionally, when it comes to GPU compute performance, not everything is that rosy for the M5 Max.

Single-thread and multi-thread champion

According to recent Geekbench 6 results, Apple's 18-core M5 Max not only beats its direct predecessor, the 16-core M4 Max, in single-thread (4,353 points) and multi-thread workloads (29,644 points), but also the 32-core M3 Ultra that is supposed to be Apple's unbeatable multi-thread machine.

Furthermore, Apple's new flagship CPU beats AMD's 96-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX in single-thread (which is not surprising) and multi-thread workloads in Geekbench 6. It should be noted that while most Threadripper Pro 9995WX CPUs score around 26,000 GB6 points in multi-thread workloads, there is one example when this processor hits 30,170 points, which is a bit ahead of M5 Max's 29,644 points.

Apple's M5 Max processor in its maximum configuration packs six 'super' performance (SP) cores featuring increased front-end bandwidth (i.e., wider decoder?), enhanced branch prediction, and a new cache hierarchy to deliver unbeatable single-thread performance as well as 12 new performance (P) cores designed to deliver power-efficient multithreaded performance in professional applications, up from 16 cores (12P + 4E cores) offered by the M4 Max. We do not know details about microarchitectures of Apple's 'super' performance and performance cores, though the 12% single-thread performance difference between M5 Max's SP and M4 Max's P cores is evident.

As for the memory subsystem, the M5 Max features up to 128 GB of LPDDR5X-9600 memory connected to the host via a 512-bit interface, offering 614 GB/s of bandwidth, up 12% from M4 Max (546 GB/s). For now, no workstation processor can match the memory bandwidth of M5 Max or M4 Max. Efficient cache and memory subsystems are crucial for single-thread performance, so this part of the M5 Max also played a significant role in its performance boost compared to the predecessor.

Not quite a GeForce RTX 5090

In addition to its revamped CPU subsystem, Apple's M5 Max also boasts a new GPU that is based on a PowerVR-derived microarchitecture developed by Apple. As it turns out, a big integrated GPU and plenty of memory bandwidth can deliver serious GPU compute oomph: the M5 Max scores 232,718 points on the GeekBench 6 GPU compute benchmark when using the Metal API. Apple's previous-generation M4 Max scores up to 204,453 points in the same tests. Evidently, the new GPU is better than the predecessor, but not that significantly.

When compared to non-Apple GPUs, the one inside the M5 Max easily beats the iGPU inside the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, which scores 133,447 points when unconstrained by thermals. When it comes to discrete graphics cards, Apple's flagship iGPU is ahead of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5070 (207,061 points, Vulkan), but trails the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti (253,890 points, Vulkan) and has no chance against the GeForce RTX 5090. Still, building an integrated GPU that delivers compute performance comparable to one of the best graphics cards is a breakthrough.

After teasing desktop Ryzen AI 400 processors at the beginning of the year, AMD has finally provided details on its new (but slim) desktop product stack. Previously known as “Gorgon Point,” the desktop range shares DNA with the Ryzen AI 400 mobile lineup, carrying the same Zen 5 CPU cores and RDNA 3.5 graphics with a focus on power efficiency over peak performance. AMD is offering two variations of the processors, one with the PRO designation for enterprise and another without it, but neither will be available as boxed retail units. At this time, they’ll only show up in OEM systems.

The desktop lineup features three processors and six total SKUs. For each chip, AMD is offering 65W and 35W versions, again showcasing how similar these chips are to AMD’s mobile offerings. The top-end Ryzen AI 7 450G comes with eight Zen 5 cores, 16 threads, a boost clock of 5.1 GHz, 24MB of cache, and Radeon 860M graphics with eight RDNA 3.5 CUs. There are two six-core offerings with the 440G and 435G, which only differ in maximum boost clock and cache amount. Both include Radeon 840M graphics with four RDNA 3.5 CUs.

AMD is using a 65W TDP for these chips, and the 35W versions are noted with an “E” suffix (i.e. Ryzen AI 7 450GE). Otherwise, the specs are identical, from the core counts and iGPU to the maximum boost clock speeds.

The differentiator compared to AMD’s other consumer chips is the 50 TOPS NPU, earning them Microsoft’s Copilot+ certification. The silicon here, including the NPU, GPU, and CPU, is identical to the mobile Ryzen AI 400 lineup. The 450 on desktop is identical to the 450 on mobile, short of the power limit and form factor. As with all Zen 5 chips, Ryzen AI 400 desktop CPUs slot into the AM5 socket.

Although the silicon is identical, AMD is only pushing out the bottom rung of its Gorgon Point lineup on desktop right now. On mobile, AMD climbs up to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 475, which features a 60 TOPS NPU, Radeon 890M graphics with 16 RDNA 3.5 CUs, and 12 cores that can boost up to 5.2 GHz.

AMD hasn’t made any performance claims about the desktop chips yet, which isn’t surprising given this is a new category of product for Team Red. Given that the thermal design is similar and the silicon is nearly identical, we expect to see slightly higher overall performance from the Ryzen AI 400 desktop offerings compared to their mobile counterparts. As we’ve seen with consumer chips like the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X, Zen 5 is fairly efficient around 65W, with the optional 105W TDP mode offering only slightly higher performance for nearly double the power.

AMD will only offer these APUs in OEM systems for now. They come with Copilot+ certification, which calls for more than just an NPU. Critically, Copilot+ calls for at least 16GB of system memory, which is a variable AMD can’t control with boxed retail units. For now, AMD says commercial designs with these chips will be available in Q2 2026.

In total, AMD says it will have over 200 commercial designs available with its PRO chips, but that includes mobile offerings as well. Some of the OEMs AMD is working with include Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo. As you can see in the slide above, AMD is featuring smaller desktop designs, which is likely where we’ll see Ryzen AI 400 desktop chips in action.

In addition to desktop offerings, AMD is introducing its Ryzen AI PRO 400 series for mobile, which mirrors the consumer lineup in the product naming and specs, as you can see in the table above. With both the mobile and desktop offerings, the PRO validation is what sets these chips apart from AMD’s consumer lineup. AMD includes additional features, like a multi-layer security ecosystem and manageability for IT administrators.

We should see designs with these CPUs roll out shortly. We’ve asked AMD if we can expect the lineup to expand up to AMD’s 12-core Gorgon Point design that we see on mobile. We’ve also asked about the fate of the long-rumored Ryzen 9000G APU lineup, though we don’t expect much news on that front at this time.

AMD ended 2025 with fanfare as it managed to increase its market shares across all major CPU product segments, according to Mercury Research, and achieved a 29.2% share of all x86 processors shipped in the fourth quarter, which is an all-time record for the company. The company now controls its highest unit share across desktop, laptop, and server CPU markets while also capturing the most lucrative parts of these markets, and now controls 35.4% of x86 CPU revenue share.

Client CPUs: AMD gains 3.8% of the market in a single quarter

In the client PC segment, AMD finished 2025 with one of its strongest quarters ever, partly because Intel struggled to get enough client silicon from its own fabs and from TSMC, but to a large degree because of highly competitive desktop CPUs and meticulously calculated mobile CPU lineup.

AMD's client CPU unit share rose to 29.2% in Q4 2025, up 3.8% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) and 4.6% year-over-year (YoY), driven by sales of both desktop and mobile offerings.

Intel remained the clear volume leader with about 70.8% of client CPU shipments, which is a sharp decline both sequentially and compared to the same quarter a year ago, which is not surprising as Intel had to reassign its internal manufacturing capacities to produce server CPUs instead of client silicon and could not get enough silicon from TSMC.

What is perhaps more alarming for Intel is that its client PC CPU revenue share declined to 68.8%, allowing AMD to control 31.2% of the dollar share of PC processor sales, up 2.9% QoQ and 7.4% YoY. This reflects AMD's higher average selling prices (ASPs), stronger sales of premium desktop and notebook processors, and continued gains in higher-margin segments.

Intel admits that it is hard to compete against AMD with its current lineup and hopes that things will begin to change in late 2026 – 2027, which means that AMD will likely continue to enjoy eating Intel's lunch in the coming quarters.

Desktop CPUs: A new record set by AMD

Given AMD's strong Ryzen 9000 lineup, Intel's inability to ship enough 14th Generation Core, and lack of Core 2 Ultra refresh in the fourth quarter, AMD was poised to win market share away from Intel in Q4, which is exactly what happened.

AMD's desktop CPU unit share climbed to 36.4%, increasing both sequentially and year-over-year as demand for its latest Ryzen processors remained strong among gamers and enthusiasts. Of course, Intel retained the majority of desktop shipments with a 63.6% share, but this is down by a whopping 9.5% from the fourth quarter of 2024, a bad hit for the company. The gap between AMD's and Intel's desktop CPU market shares is still around 27%, meaning that the blue company maintains its undisputable lead, but the pace at which AMD is shrinking it looks quite formidable.

On the revenue share side of things, AMD's performance was even more notable. The company's desktop CPU revenue share reached 42.6% in Q4 2025, which clearly indicates strong sales of higher-margin processors and a favorable product mix. Intel still generated 57.4% of desktop revenue overall, but mostly due to its great relations with large PC OEMs that tend to sell mainstream systems, and where Intel is a little more flexible than AMD to win contracts.

Mobile CPUs: AMD posts highest unit share ever

The mobile PC segment has always been Intel's stronghold as the company has traditionally offered a very wide range of CPUs that could power anything from an ultra-low-power thin and light laptop to a full-fat desktop replacement machine. Yet, it is getting harder for Intel to protect its stronghold with its Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors now that AMD has greatly broadened its lineup of processors for notebooks.

After floating around 22% of the market for several quarters, AMD delivered a strong recovery in Q4 2025, capturing a 26% unit share and gaining 4.1% of the market QoQ, according to Mercury Research. Intel remained the dominant supplier with 74% of the market, which represents roughly three-quarters of mobile CPU shipments. When compared to its result in the fourth quarter of 2024, Intel only lost 2.2%. However, it remains to be seen what AMD manages to do while Intel will be ramping up its Panther Lake and then Nova Lake CPUs in the coming quarters.

As far as revenue share is concerned, AMD also posted meaningful 3.3% sequential and year-over-year gains as its mobile CPU revenue share reached 24.9%. Intel continued to generate the majority of mobile CPU revenue, a little over 75%, but AMD's progress clearly indicates that the company is getting increasingly competitive not only in the high-volume laptop CPU segment, but also in higher-margin segments of the notebook market.

Server CPUs: Another quarter, another percent of the market for AMD

As data center CPU market is particularly conservative, it is hard to quickly gain or lose share. For AMD, this translates into 'another quarter, another percent of the market' gain, which means that the company is gaining ground from its rival slowly but surely and is closing the year with a new high.

Although Intel shipped 71.2% of all x86 server CPUs during the quarter (without taking into account shipments of Hygon Dhyana CPUs), AMD's server CPU unit share reached 28.8%, up 1% sequentially and 3.1% year-over-year as adoption of EPYC processors across cloud, enterprise, and AI/HPC deployments is accelerating.

As for revenue side of matters, AMD's server CPU revenue share climbed to a record 41.3%, which highlights its success in selling higher-priced, higher-margin processors. Intel commanded the majority of server CPU revenue overall — 58.7% — though it is evident that it is losing to its rival in the premium segments of the market.

Summary

If we were to summarize AMD's performance on the CPU market in 2025 in one sentence, we would say that the company was not only shipping more CPUs, but was increasingly capturing the most lucrative parts of all the markets it served due to its strong product mix and high ASPs. By contrast, Intel shipped fewer CPUs and increasingly lost the most lucrative contracts to its rival.

As a result, AMD closed 2025 with a record momentum as it managed to increase its market share across client, desktop, mobile, and server CPUs and reached a new all-time high in both x86 CPU units and revenue share, according to Mercury Research. In the fourth quarter of 2025, AMD shipped 29.2% of all x86 processors by volume and 35.4% of all x86 CPUs by revenue, both record numbers for the company.

While AMD's success was driven by a strong product mix, Intel's declines were a result of a combination of events, including a lack of competitive offerings for the high-end parts of the market as well as supply constraints in the low-end. Intel admits that to improve its position going forward, it will need to regain performance and process technology leadership as well as have enough manufacturing capacity to serve the market. Which is exactly what its management is working on these days.

After months of consistent decline, Intel’s consumer CPUs have enjoyed a small but significant spell of market share growth, at least according to the latest Steam Hardware Survey (January 2026 data). The latest statistics raise a couple of key questions. Firstly, could this mark the beginning of an Intel comeback? Secondly, why might Intel platforms be more attractive in the current PC market?

So, the change in share is quite small, at 0.25% up in Intel’s favor, in January 2026 data. We know the SHWS hasn’t got the strongest reputation for rigorous statistical accuracy, despite the size of the user base. Nevertheless, it is entertaining to ponder whether something larger is happening in the CPU market, and why the balance could be shifting.

An Intel comeback?

Though Intel has broken its downtrend in this latest set of survey statistics, it isn’t possible to say whether this is truly a change in fortunes. As Aristotle (probably) said, “one swallow does not a spring make.” So, one result doesn’t provide a lot of certainty for extrapolations.

We’d need three months of data to confirm a popularity plateau, resistance point, or reversal of fortunes for Intel in the gaming CPU market. That means we are still a long way off the establishment of a reliable trend.

Why might Intel gain market share in 2026?

If we assume that Intel is once again going to consistently grow its consumer CPU market share, it is interesting to look at its current strengths and recent platform announcements.

Ahead of the RAMpocalypse, PC DIY forums and social media generally seemed to steer builders toward AM5 plus DDR5 for creating a potent ‘future-proof’ PC system. After several months of exploding RAM pricing, this particular path to PC Nirvana has lost its glossy shine.

In the PC DIY space, pricing and availability may have worked in Intel’s favor over recent months. The iconic PC chipmaker’s 13^th and 14th-generation processors appear to have remained in stock, often discounted. They can be used with cheaper DDR4 RAM (that upgraders may already have), with plentiful well-priced DDR4 motherboards (e.g. B760) still at retailers. Moreover, these remain decent platforms for most gamers, who will typically be performance-limited by their GPU choice. We've also seen some fairly drastic and generous discounts on Intel's current generation processors, with Core Ultra 200 series chips bundled with motherboards, coolers, popular games, or even just slashed in price in the second half of 2025.

A cultural shift from future-proofing to buying the best value $/FPS system today seems to have taken hold in Q4 2025 and persists to this day.

At CES 2026, we also noticed more positives for Intel. Its next-gen Panther Lake chips for laptops were far more warmly welcomed than AMD’s Ryzen AI 400 series refresh. This won’t have started to trickle through to Steam survey results, of course, but Intel traditionally has stronger laptop-maker support, and Panther Lake should ensure that isn’t eroded in 2026.

The proverbial news cannon that is CES is firing new products on all barrels, but every now and then, there's a stray remark that makes our ears perk up. In a round-table interview Tom's Hardware attended at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, AMD's David McAfee was discussing the sorry state of the ongoing chip crisis, and he let out a hint that AMD could bring back older AM4 desktop chips, presumably 5000-series Ryzen processors and APUs based on the Zen 3 architecture.

As even non-techies know by now, buying a brand new computer is a prohibitively expensive proposition, thanks mainly to the absurd prices of DDR5 memory. In addition, folks moving from machines that are just four years old will find themselves in the unenviable position of having to buy overpriced memory and a new motherboard on top of that, as the move to DDR5 also implies a socket change for both Intel and AMD chips.

When questioned about the rock-and-hard-place situation these users are in, McAfee stated that AMD "[is] certainly looking at everything that [it] can do to bring more supply and kind of reintroduce products back into the [AM4] ecosystem to satisfy the demands of gamers that maybe want that significant upgrade in their AM4 platform without having to rebuild their entire system", further adding that he thinks this is "definitely something [AMD is] very actively working on."

It should be noted that a remark by one person does not make for a company-wide mission statement, but at least at face value, this move would make full sense for both AMD and customers. Furthermore, the context for the aforementioned statement was that AMD's telemetry obtained through the Adrenalin software corroborated that a significant portion of users are still running 2000- and 3000-series chips.

In addition to that, McAfee noted that many of its retail partners are seeing higher numbers of CPU-only purchases, indicating that shoppers are buying new-old chips to grant a tangible speed boost to their existing machines in these troubled times, where just buying 32 GB of DDR5 memory, a new CPU, and a motherboard will easily bite you for over a grand.

While the scenario described is of someone upgrading just their CPU, older machines will likely have 8 to 16 GB of memory, thus asking for another DIMM or two. DDR4 prices have also been steadily rising, though Samsung has reversed its decision to stop DDR4 production, while SK hynix has reportedly increased DDR4 production at its Wuxi facility. Looks like, for the time being, keeping existing machines going is the only option many enthusiasts will have.

The AMD Ryzen 5 5800X — launched on November 5, 2020 — recently hit the top spot in Amazon UK’s list of best-selling CPUs. The refreshed 5800XT, which arrived in July last year, is likewise in the top ten most popular processors in Amazon US, with the chip sitting in fourth place.

This is unusual, given that these use the five-year-old Zen 3 architecture and the nearly decade-old AM4 platform. The age of these chips means that they’re often picked by PC builders sticking to a budget and are commonly eschewed by mainstream and high-end enthusiasts for more modern Zen 4 and Zen 5 options.

However, the ongoing memory crisis has enthusiasts flocking to older DDR4 modules as prices have surged to record highs. It has gotten to the point that 64GB DDR5 memory kits now cost more than an entire PlayStation 5 console, even with discounts. Analysts and industry experts are saying that there is no relief in sight in 2026, with prices expected to climb through the first quarter of next year.

That's why demand for decent gaming processors that use older DDR4 RAM has skyrocketed, with AMD’s first X3D chip, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, now costing more than new 9800X3D processors in the secondhand market.

Unfortunately, the 5800X3D is no longer in production, so gamers who want a new processor without paying for the DDR5 premium must settle for the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X or 5800XT. In our review of the 5800X, the chip delivered excellent gaming performance while balancing single-threaded and multi-threaded capabilities. However, it had a high launch price of $450 while offering almost the same numbers as the more affordable Ryzen 5 5600X.

Thankfully, the price of the 5800X has fallen since then, with the Amazon UK listing it for £184.19 or around US$250. On the other hand, the newer AMD Ryzen 7 5800XT is much more affordable in the U.S., as you can get it for just US $199 as per this Amazon US listing. By comparison, the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X is also listed for $198.49 in Amazon US at the time of writing. While the 9600X will certainly beat the 5800X and XT in almost all metrics, the fact that the former uses more expensive DDR5 RAM is likely the main reason why many budget and mainstream PC builders are opting for the older processor that uses more affordable memory kits.

AMD this week released a document titled "Performance Monitor Counters for AMD Family 1Ah Model 50h-57h Processors" (discovered by InstLatX64) that reveals numerous architectural details of AMD's Zen 6-based CPUs, including the EPYC 'Venice' processor for data centers, through performance monitoring interfaces. As it turns out, Zen 6 is not exactly an evolution of Zen 5, but rather an all-new design with a different ideology.

AMD has been talking about its Zen 6-based CPUs in very general terms for quite a while, revealing that they will feature up to 256 cores and be made using TSMC's 2nm-class process technology. This week's PMC document for software developers states that the Zen 6 microarchitecture is no longer an incremental evolution of Zen 4/Zen 5, but a deliberately wide, throughput-oriented design with an eight-slot dispatch engine and simultaneous multi-threading (SMT).

In such a design, two hardware threads dynamically contend for a shared pool of dispatch slots, so, at the same clock speeds, the single-thread performance of Zen 6-based processors may not be as high as that of Apple's 9-wide (or wider) CPUs in all situations. However, in some instances, this type of architecture promises very high performance. Furthermore, the core has dedicated counters for unused dispatch slots, backend stalls, and thread-selection losses, which confirms that wide issue and SMT arbitration are the factors AMD is betting on with Zen 6.

Zen 6 also substantially expands AMD's visibility into vector and floating-point execution, underscoring the architecture's emphasis on dense-math workloads. According to PMC documentation, Zen 6 processors support full-width AVX-512 execution with FP64, FP32, FP16, and BF16 data formats, including FMA/MAC operations and mixed FP-INT vector execution (including VNNI-class, AES, and SHA operations). Furthermore, it delivers sustained 512-bit throughput high enough to require merged performance counters for accurate measurement. This is hardly proof that Zen 6-based CPUs will be AVX-512 performance champions, but it does show that Zen 6 can retire enough vector work per cycle to overwhelm legacy measurement methods.

In general, Zen 6's performance-focused capabilities suggest it is AMD's first microarchitecture designed from the ground up for data center use cases. It remains to be seen which features will be retained in client offerings and how well these perform. But based on what we can observe today, Zen 6-based CPUs will be number-crunching monsters.

London-based Caligra recently showcased its c100 Developer Terminal, touted as a brand-new computer platform. At a San Francisco Bay Area event, interested parties were given a sneak peek of the retro-licious wedge form factor metal bead-blasted computer. “Designed from the ground up for experts,” the c100 targets those wanting a computer that is “made for making,” and is purposed to accelerate your work.

Caligra is quite bold in its marketing of the c100, as you will already have grasped. The company takes the following stance, “We think the world needs a brand of computing that stands behind creative technical work, dedicated to creating instead of consuming.” Thus, the Caligra c100 is aimed unwaveringly at “Scientists and artists. Engineers and designers. Hackers and painters.”

Whether its ambitious plans will succeed will rely on a number of factors. We’ve already highlighted the design, with various images. Other essentials that it will have to get on target are the hardware specs, software, and pricing.

Hardware: A modern Ryzen and plenty of RAM

Though it looks reminiscent of a wedge computer of old, the c100 is, of course, thoroughly modern inside. According to the pre-order specs, buyers of the so-called Developer Terminal will get:

Those are respectable specs for a modern computer. The integrated design is also pleasingly premium. It looks nicely portable, too, an aspect of the c100 that isn’t made a lot of by the company.

Software, old school name but modern Linux based

Caligra has named its c100 OS ‘Workbench.’ That’s retro-famously the GUI that was rolled out with the Commodore Amiga computer line, but is not at all related to it. To cut a long story short, this new Workbench is Linux-based.

We like the approach of Workbench, billed as “An OS that does less,” so that your work can take center stage, and be what you focus on. It may resonate with users who are fed up with OS bloat, AI, cloud, etc

“We’ve removed the distractions, so it’s just you and your ideas. A clear space for deep thought,” says Caligra. “With a focus unlike anything available from big tech, Workbench is entirely dedicated to accelerating your work.”

Workbench uses an rpm-based core system, but while it is “not a distribution,” it is touted as an ideal host for containers and packages from open source and commercial repositories. Specifically, packages from the Fedora project can be added by root users, and tools like distrobox allow for software from other distros to be added.

Unlike a truly bespoke, clean sheet, ‘new computer system,’ if Workbench development ended one day, we don’t see any reason that you wouldn’t be able to use this hardware for a Windows, or other flavor of Linux, install. Hopefully, that doesn’t jinx it…

Pricing and availability

We did a rough calculation of the component hardware costs of the c100, and considered several unique parts central to this pleasing design. We think it would cost between $1,200 and $1,500 to make something similar, hardware-wise. So at $1,999 for the product, software, industrial design, support, and so on, the c100 seems like a reasonable proposition. You can pre-order 'Batch One' machines now for a $99 deposit, with shipments pencilled in for January 2026.

A new PassMark entry has surfaced for AMD’s unreleased Ryzen 7 9850X3D, giving the first look at how the chip compares against the current 9800X3D, one of the best CPUs. The listing, which appeared in the database this week and was posted on X, reports a CPU Mark score of 41,840 from a single sample. That places it roughly 5% ahead of the 9800X3D’s 39,962-point average in the same benchmark. PassMark’s breakdown shows a single-thread score of 4,632, compared to the 9800X3D’s 4,425, again landing in the 5% range.

PassMark assigns a high margin of error to early submissions with only one system contributing data, but the figures track with the specifications already associated with the 9850X3D. Shipping details and an inadvertent AMD product-page appearance have pointed to an 8-core, 16-thread Zen 5 part with 96 MB of L3 cache, a 120 W TDP, and a 5.6 GHz boost clock. That is a straightforward frequency increase over the 9800X3D’s 5.2 GHz peak, and the uplift in PassMark’s single-thread test aligns with a step of that size.

The only subtest mentioned by the leakers was PassMark’s Memory Mark, where the new chip reportedly scored 4,421 points. A comparable 9800X3D baseline sits at 4,390. The 1% difference suggests no major change in memory behaviour, which is consistent with the absence of known platform or cache layout changes between the two parts.

AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D Benchmarks

The jump from the 7800X3D to the 9800X3D brought a much larger swing in PassMark, with multi-thread throughput rising by about 17% and single-thread performance by 18%. AMD’s architectural changes in Zen 5, paired with higher operating clocks, underpinned that increase. If the incoming 9850X3D holds to the first numbers, it would mark a more minor refinement rather than a repeat of that generational shift.

The comparison also helps demonstrate how AMD’s X3D lineup is stacking up ahead of the company’s next desktop update cycle, which is expected to begin early next year. The 9800X3D has occupied the top position in gaming performance charts since its launch. The 9850X3D’s early showing suggests it should remain in that role, though with a narrower advantage than the one its predecessor enjoyed over the 7800X3D.

Synthetic figures from a single PassMark submission are only a preliminary indication of performance. Broader testing will be needed once retail chips are available, but the PassMark listing offers the first measurable reference point for where the 9850X3D may sit in AMD’s established X3D stack.

It appears that AMD's Ryzen 9000 (codenamed Granite Ridge) series, renowned for delivering some of the best CPU performance out there, currently remains unaffected by rumored price hikes. Two industry sources that wish to remain anonymous, one from one of the largest U.S. distributors, have informed Tom's Hardware that there have been no indications of impending price adjustments for Ryzen processors, and no evidence suggests such changes are imminent, contrary to recent rumors.

The computer hardware industry has been under significant scrutiny due to sustained demand for DRAM and NAND, driven by artificial intelligence, which has affected both availability and pricing of consumer hardware components. Memory prices have surged to unprecedented levels. Following recent price increases for Radeon graphics cards, AMD has been the subject of considerable attention amid rumors of an alleged price increase for Ryzen processors. According to our sources, the manufacturer has not implemented any Ryzen price hikes thus far.

Unlike SSDs, graphics cards, or memory, processors are less susceptible to price fluctuations caused by NAND shortages. AMD recently revised the prices of Radeon products; therefore, the chip manufacturer may be delaying adjustments on processor pricing to prevent further customer dissatisfaction, assuming there was any minimal credence to the rumor to start with.

It is increasingly difficult to find affordable memory in stock, whether for upgrades or building a new system. Therefore, it is reassuring to know that AMD's Ryzen processors, which are excellent for gaming and productivity, should remain available at reasonable prices, at least for now.

The current top three best-selling processors at retailers such as Newegg and Amazon are all Ryzen models. Specifically, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, recognized as the leading gaming processor, occupies the foremost position in both instances. The most recent Steam Hardware Survey indicates that the Red Team has attained a record-high market share of 42.61%, representing an increase of 0.52% from the previous month. It is merely a matter of time before AMD attains a 50% market share, provided that Intel persists in its current decline.

It is evident that AMD's Ryzen processors are progressively capturing a larger share of the gaming market, resulting in a challenging situation for Intel. The company's latest Core Ultra 200S (codenamed Arrow Lake) processors are unable to compete with AMD's Ryzen products effectively. Intel has recently elevated the pricing for previous generations of processors, likely attributable to the lackluster sales of Arrow Lake.

Ryzen currently maintains strong market momentum. AMD would be wise to uphold its existing pricing strategy for Ryzen processors, even if this results in a marginal decrease in profits, given the current uncertain landscape.

AMD has quietly listed the Ryzen 7 9850X3D processor in its 'Drivers and Downloads' section (via Gray). With this official mention, the existence of the product is all but confirmed, and if the new CPU does exist, it could be the next best processor for gamers in this generation of CPUs.

AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor with eight cores running at up to 5.20 GHz with a 96MB last level cache already offers formidable performance in games. It has even inspired our Editor-in-Chief to call it the best gaming CPU. A higher product number almost certainly means higher performance, unless we are dealing with an OEM-specific SKU designed for a particular system.

Tom's Hardware has inquired about the new SKU, but due to the long weekend, we don't expect a quick response.

Now that TSMC's advanced packaging technologies enable AMD to place the extra SRAM tile below the compute tile itself, major thermal issues are solved and the way for higher CPU clocks is open. Also, now that the silicon is in production, it means better binning and tuned firmware for voltage and power delivery is available.

To that end, if Ryzen 7 9850X3D really arrives, we can expect a fine-tuned variant of the existing architecture — same 8 cores/16 threads and a large stacked L3 cache — but with enhanced boosting behavior and higher peak clock speeds when cooling allows. This would likely yield higher single-threaded performance and slightly improved responsiveness in workloads that care about latency or light-threaded bursts (e.g. gaming, UI tasks, light editing).

On the flip side, because higher clocks adds thermal density, sustained multicore workloads will require a more potent cooling system. That means while occasional bursts and quick tasks improve, heavy-duty throughput under long loads likely remains similar to the current model.

In general, it looks like the upgrade targets feel and real-world responsiveness rather than raw parallel compute, otherwise the CPU would move to a 12-core Ryzen 9 league that has different rules both in marketing terms of performance and actual consumer expectation.

AMD's desktop Ryzen X3D processors are a gamer's prime tool, thanks to the FPS boost offered by their capacious 3D V-Cache. The latest entrant in the series is the Ryzen 5 7500X3D, almost a stealth release of sorts, without a lot of fanfare. However, at only $269 (or £244.99), this chip is literally the definition of cheap and cheerful for a gaming build, and prospective UK shoppers should be able to easily find it in one of the stores below. Perhaps best of all, AMD's new budget gaming chip drops into the AM5 socket, providing a cheap option for the company's modern platform.

• Get Ryzen 5 7500X3D at Overclockers UK - £239.99

The main specifications go as follows: six cores and twelve threads, a wonderful 96 MB stack of 3D V-Cache, and a clock speed up to 4.5 GHz. This squarely pins the 7500X3D as the best option for budget-conscious gamers. Most games respond very well to the presence of the 3D V-Cache, with generally higher average FPS, but perhaps more importantly, a nice uptick in the 1% lows, for those moments where the action is really packed. The low number of cores might put off professional users, but that's never the 7500X3D's point to begin with.

Overclockers UK is one of the best-known retailers and is currently running the cheapest price at £239.99, with standard delivery for £3.99. Box sells a lot of things, including the Ryzen 5 7500 X3D for £249.99, and there's free shipping included on orders above £100.

Scan is also an ever-present retailer, and will sell you the chip for £244.99, plus £5.48 for next-day shipping. CCL's price is marginally dearer at £259.99 plus £3.95 shipping, though currently the store has a BUY3GET5 coupon code if you order items from three different categories. This will save you 5% on your basket, so is not to be sniffed at if you also need other parts.

You can also try your luck at AWD-IT, currently selling the chip for £269.99 with free shipping included, though the store is currently accepting preorders only. Oddly enough, Amazon UK doesn't seem to have the chip even listed at the time of writing. AMD has confirmed to Tom's Hardware that the 7500X3D is an EMEA exclusive SKU, with the chip only available in the U.S. by way of a Micro Center pre-built currently.

The only noteworthy fact is that, like most of AMD's mid- to high-end desktop processor family, the Ryzen 5 7500X3D does not ship with an included cooler. The baseline TDP is only 65W, though, so most any contemporary cooler will do just fine. If you're looking for ideas, we're more than happy to suggest the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 dual-tower cooler, a bit of kit that currently will set you back only 30 quid at Overclockers. That's way more cooling power than you'll need, meaning the fans on it will be mouse-quiet even when gaming.

Adeia has filed a pair of patent infringement lawsuits against AMD in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, claiming that AMD’s chips incorporate patented innovations covered by its hybrid bonding IP portfolio.

The company says ten patents are at issue — seven covering hybrid bonding and three tied to process nodes used in advanced logic and memory manufacturing. The litigation, announced November 3, follows what Adeia describes as years of failed licensing talks. AMD has not yet commented.

Hybrid bonding technology sits at the heart of AMD’s 3D V-Cache design, the feature that gives Ryzen X3D processors their gaming advantage and server-class cache density. Instead of solder bumps, it fuses copper and dielectric surfaces directly between dies, creating a near-monolithic connection at micron-scale pitch. That allows a 64MB slab of SRAM to be stacked on each Zen compute die without overwhelming its thermal or electrical limits. The technique is widely understood to use TSMC’s SoIC process family, a form of hybrid bonding that enables ultra-dense 3D integration.

Adeia, which spun out of Xperi, claims ownership of a large portfolio of bonding and interconnect IP. Its DBI and ZiBond technologies have already been licensed to major players in memory, CMOS image sensors, and 3D NAND. The company now argues AMD’s products make “extensive use” of the same concepts, asserting that its patented work has “greatly contributed” to AMD’s success.

Hybrid bonding could be the foundation for the next phase of chip scaling, as performance gains shift from transistor density to vertical integration. AMD’s roadmap leans heavily on stacked designs, not just for Ryzen but for EPYC and future accelerators that layer compute, memory, and I/O. If Adeia’s claims survive early procedural challenges, the case could test how much of that stack belongs to the IP holder and how much to the foundry in any judgments that follow.

Few expect any near-term disruption to AMD’s products, since injunctions in patent cases of this kind are rarely granted under post-eBay v. MercExchange precedent. The more immediate question is whether Adeia’s claims can survive the early procedural hurdles that often decide the outcome long before trial.

AMD and its foundry partners are almost certain to challenge the patents through inter partes review at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, arguing that the asserted claims are either too broad or already covered by TSMC’s process IP.

If the patents hold up, the case could set a new boundary between proprietary bonding methods and foundry-specific implementations, effectively defining who owns the connective tissue of 3D chip design. A negotiated settlement remains the most likely outcome, but the ruling could influence how every hybrid-bonded processor, from Ryzen to Intel’s Foveros Direct, is valued in future licensing deals.

Orico, a Chinese tech company specializing in storage solutions, has entered the mini PC market with its Omini line of desktop PCs. According to IT Home [Machine Translated], the company is launching two new models — the Omini Plus and the Omini Pro. The former closely resembles the Mac Mini, while the latter looks like a shrunken Mac Pro, but AMD Ryzen chips power both.

The Pro mini PC uses high-grade aluminum for its PC case and features a “cheese grater” design on the front for optimal airflow. On the other hand, the Plus model has a design similar to the Mac mini, with its components accessible via its removable foot. However, it also has a vent in the back above its ports, reminiscent of the larger Mac Studio.

The Omini Plus is available in a single configuration, powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 7535H (now renamed the Ryzen 5 150) paired with 16GB DDR5 memory and a 2TB SSD. It also features a plethora of ports, including two USB4 Type-C ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, two 2.5G Ethernet ports, one DisplayPort 1.4, one HDMI 2.1 port, and a 3.5mm jack. All this is supported by dual heat pipes and a large fan to keep everything cool, especially as its volume is only about 0.8L. This mini PC is priced at RMB 3,799 (around $535) at the current exchange rate, though it’s available for pre-order at RMB 3,399 ($478).

We also have the Omini Pro, which comes with more options. It starts with an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS processor with an integrated AMD Radeon 780M GPU. Although you can get this as a barebones unit, meaning you’ll have to supply your own memory and storage, it can also be had with a 32GB DDR5 SODIMM kit (upgradable up to 256GB) and a choice between a 1TB and a 2TB SSD. It also comes with two storage slots, with a total capacity of up to 8TB. Aside from the more powerful hardware, you get the same number of ports as above, which is already plentiful. The Omini Pro starts at RMB 3,099 (~$435) for the barebones version, although it’s on pre-order for just RMB 2,699 (around $380).

These devices aren’t designed for gamers specifically, but you can do some casual gaming on the side. Nevertheless, they’re largely good enough for most productivity applications, with the Omini Pro capable of onboard AI processing thanks to its built-in NPU. So, if you want a stylish mini PC that evokes Apple’s aesthetics but works with Windows 11 or Linux, these are great options to check out, provided they become available in your location.

It is no secret that AMD is quietly preparing to refresh its Granite Ridge family of desktop processors with several new models to solidify its market position, particularly among OEMs. Chi11edog on Tuesday revealed specifications of range-topping Ryzen 9000-series 'Granite Ridge Refresh' processors, and if they are accurate, then the new CPUs will be considerably more cache-heavy than predecessors.

If the information from Chi11edog is to be believed, then the new lineup will be headed by the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2: a 16-core processor clocked at 4.30 GHz – 5.60 GHz and equipped with a whopping 192 MB of L3 cache (up from 128MB in case of the 9950X3D) as it will come with two 3D V-Cache chiplets (one chiplet per core chiplet die). The default thermal design power (TDP) of the CPU will reportedly increase to 200W from 170W on current models, but the processor's performance increase could be well worth it in applications that demand high memory bandwidth, such as games.

For gamers who do not want to invest a small fortune in a top-of-the-line CPU, AMD will purportedly offer the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. This eight-core CPU will run at 4.70 GHz – 5.60 GHz and feature 96 MB of L3 Cache using internal SRAM and an external 3D V-Cache chiplet. Since the CPU will differ from the existing Ryzen 7 9850X3D with a higher turbo clock, it will retain a default TDP of 120W.

Since the information comes from an unofficial source, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, it makes great sense for AMD to refresh its Ryzen 9000-series 'Granite Ridge' lineup based on the Zen 5 microarchitecture, both from a technology and marketing strategies point of view.

AMD's Zen 5 CCDs have been made for well over a year on a proven TSMC N4 fabrication technology; their yields are probably very good, so the company can safely boost clock speeds, raise power limits, and stack more cache without spending too much on redesign. Also, the new Ryzen 9000-series processors will keep using the AM5 platform, enabling drop-in upgrades for existing users, higher performance for those who are in the market for a new desktop, and new models for PC makers who tend to like selling something different from what they did a year before.

In short, the launch of Granit Ridge Refresh enables AMD to squeeze extra performance from the existing architecture without major investments or requiring partners to release new motherboards (still, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 will likely require higher-end platforms anyway). The refresh also acts as a preemptive strike against Intel's upcoming releases, keeping AMD visible in enthusiast and gaming segments that demand every extra bit of performance.

After weeks of speculation, AMD has finally unveiled the latest chip in its Zen 5 family: the Ryzen 5 9500F. The only catch is that it's a China-exclusive launch (at least for now), which makes sense considering the Ryzen 5 7500F also debuted in China first, before arriving in markets outside of China.

As expected, the Ryzen 5 9500F has a 6-core, 12-thread processor built on Granite Ridge silicon. It has a 5 GHz boost clock, up from a 3.8 GHz base clock. There's also 32 MB of L3 cache on board, along with a 65W TDP — the same as the higher-spec'd Ryzen 5 9600 and 9600X.

Speaking of the 7500F, the new 9500F is seemingly at least 7% faster than its predecessor, and up to 24% faster in certain CPU-intensive games. AMD's own benchmarks put the 9500F around 15% ahead of the 7500F on average, which is a very respectable gen-on-gen uplift. While the chipmaker did not publish any productivity claims, these numbers largely align with last week's Geekbench leak, where the 9500F was stacked quite closely to the 9600 and 9600X, despite having lower clock speeds.

Remember when choosing a gaming CPU was simply a decision that revolved around which Intel CPU to buy? If you cast your mind back to the previous decade, Intel was the undisputed king of gaming CPUs, its dominance so absolute it seemed unshakable. AMD, meanwhile, was struggling. So, Intel eventually became a default choice for many people looking to put a gaming PC together.

But then, like a bolt from the Red, AMD's Ryzen arrived on the scene — a plucky underdog with a chip on its shoulder, and a mission to disrupt the status quo. It wasn't an immediate knockout, but rather a calculated, relentless assault. In this article, we'll detail how AMD managed to take the gaming performance crown away from Intel, and where each company stands now.

Intel's iron grip (2011 - 2017)

In the early to mid-2010s, the PC-gaming scene revolved almost entirely around Intel’s quad-core “Core i” series chips, kicked off by the Conroe processors. Ivy Bridge parts such as the Core i7-3770K offered the best frames-per-second money could buy, edging past their Sandy Bridge forebears, and were more popular than AMD’s FX line, despite similar performance. Haswell followed in 2013, and its 2014 refresh, Devil’s Canyon, cemented Intel’s dominance.

The formula was simple, consistent, and highly profitable for Intel: deliver quad-core processors (often Hyper-Threaded for eight threads) with strong single-core performance and high clock speeds. Year after year, Intel iterated with modest architectural tweaks here, slight frequency bumps there, and perhaps minor power efficiency gains.

The core count, however, remained stubbornly fixed at four for the mainstream desktop flagship. Gamers seeking the pinnacle of performance had one destination: Intel's Core i7 CPUs (or the enthusiast HEDT platform, which was even more niche and expensive).

During this era, AMD’s strongest answer was the eight-core FX-9590, whose thermal and single-thread deficits made it an afterthought for gamers, leaving Intel free to execute small, reliable uplifts each generation. Even as innovation slowed (Skylake and Kaby Lake delivered <10% gains in many titles), Intel’s iron-fisted grip held strong because alternatives could not match its per-core performance, and resulting gaming performance.

But by 2016, cracks were forming in Intel's iron gauntlet. Its mainstream desktop platform had been capped at four cores and eight threads since 2009. While annual refreshes delivered higher frequencies and new chipsets, they offered little else.

AMD's Zen architecture (2017 - 2018)

Intel's equilibrium was shattered in March 2017 when AMD released the first-generation Ryzen 7 1800X. The CPU featured eight Zen cores, sixteen threads, and an MSRP of just $499, which was half the price of Intel’s octa-core Core i7-6900K it dared to challenge. In our review from 2017, we noted that in games like Battlefield 4, the Ryzen 7 1800X provided the "same performance as Intel's Core i7-6900K," but at half the price.

AMD's strategy was bold and disruptive: Ryzen offered significantly more cores and threads at every price point compared to Intel's entrenched lineup. The flagship Ryzen 7 1800X delivered double the number of cores and threads for the price of Intel's quad-core, 8-thread Core i7-7700K.

While many raw gaming benchmarks still favoured Intel, Ryzen delivered then-workstation-class multi-thread muscle to mainstream boards, and platform features such as unlocked multipliers across the stack, alongside affordable AM4 motherboards, which only amplified its value proposition.

Reviewers quickly framed Ryzen as the CPU for everything else: streaming, content creation, and heavy multitasking. Cinebench scores that tied or beat chips twice its price, and gaming results only a few percentage points shy of Intel at 1440p and above, meant builders could pocket the savings for a better GPU or SSD.

In 2018, the Ryzen 2000 series (Zen+) refined the formula, closing the gaming gap slightly further and solidifying AMD's position as a serious contender.

In our review of the 2700X, Tom's Hardware said: "If you're searching for a more productivity-oriented processor, Ryzen 7 2700X is incredibly attractive. It offers superior performance compared to the Core i7-8700K in many of our threaded tests, and is much more competitive in lightly threaded applications than previous-gen models."

The "bang for the buck" factor was undeniable. Gamers who also streamed, edited videos, or ran demanding applications alongside their games found immense value in Ryzen's core-heavy approach. AMD successfully reframed the conversation, forcing reviewers and consumers to look beyond just peak gaming FPS and consider overall system performance, efficiency, and value.

In short, Ryzen rewrote the cost-per-core equation and convinced enthusiasts to reconsider AMD for the first time in a decade. Intel still held the ultimate gaming crown, but the foundations of its dominance were visibly cracking under AMD's high core counts and aggressive pricing. Following this, the Zen 2 chips, such as the Ryzen 3600, released in 2020, offered great value to users, especially when paired with the low-cost B450 chipset AM4 motherboards, ensuring that AMD was competitive in the mainstream.

Intel strikes back (2017-2020)

Just seven months after Ryzen’s debut, Intel pulled the curtain early on 8th-gen “Coffee Lake.” For the first time since Core 2 Quad, mainstream Core i7s jumped to six cores and twelve threads, Core i5s to six cores, and even Core i3s gained true quad-cores.

The flagship Core i7-8700K paired its expanded core count with 4.7 GHz turbo clocks, restoring Intel’s gaming lead while closing the multi-thread gap that Ryzen had exposed. This was a massive, almost panic-induced shift, validated by the significant performance leap it delivered, especially in multi-threaded tasks. Suddenly, the quad-core i7-7700K looked outdated overnight.

Coffee Lake also marked a philosophical shift. Intel abandoned its leisurely “+200 MHz and done” cadence, revised its 14 nm process (14 nm ++), and launched an all-new Z370 platform expressly to feed the hungrier silicon. Intel also relentlessly pushed clock speeds to their thermal and power limits.

This megahertz war yielded impressive peak gaming numbers but came at a cost: skyrocketing power consumption and significant thermal challenges requiring expensive cooling solutions. It was a brute-force approach, leveraging Intel's mature 14nm process (stuck in "+++" iterations) to its absolute extreme.

Beyond core counts and clocks, Ryzen forced Intel to confront architectural and efficiency shortcomings it had neglected during its unchallenged years. AMD's Zen architecture, built on a more modern process (initially GloFo/Samsung 14nm, then TSMC 7nm), offered compelling performance per watt.

A subsequent Intel 9th-gen refresh added soldered heat-spreaders, bumped i7s to eight cores, and introduced a mainstream Core i9 (for years a HEDT exclusive), illustrating how thoroughly Ryzen had reset the competitive baseline.

Intel's struggles with transitioning to 10nm (later Intel 7) became a major liability, hindering its ability to respond efficiently. The pressure from AMD ultimately pushed Intel towards more significant architectural redesigns (like the hybrid core design in 12th-Gen Alder Lake) and a renewed, albeit still challenging, focus on process technology advancement.

While AMD's Zen 3 architecture dominated when it debuted, Intel managed to take back the performance crown from AMD's impressive Ryzen 9 5950X. But one thing was clear: the era of effortless Intel dominance was over. AMD had fundamentally changed the market, forcing innovation and delivering tangible benefits to consumers through intense competition. The stage was set, and a war was brewing.

Alder Lake and Rocket Lake vs Zen 3 (2020-2022)

By late 2020, AMD's Ryzen 5000 series processors had solidified the company's position as a formidable challenger to Intel's long-standing dominance. The Zen 3 architecture delivered impressive performance gains, with the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X offering exceptional multi-core performance that often outpaced Intel's 10th-generation offerings. However, Intel wasn't sitting idle.

The launch of 11th-generation Rocket Lake processors in March 2021 marked Intel's counter-attack, with the i9-11900K claiming up to 19% IPC improvements and attempting to reclaim single-threaded performance leadership.

The competitive landscape was intensely tight. Intel's Rocket Lake chips managed to edge ahead in single-core performance, with benchmarks showing the i9-11900K achieving higher single-threaded scores than AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X.

Gaming performance remained closely contested, with Intel claiming 2-8% advantages in various titles. However, AMD maintained its multi-core superiority, particularly in the higher-end segments where Intel was limited to 8 cores while AMD offered 12 and 16-core options.

The situation grew more complex with Intel's 12th-generation Alder Lake launch in November 2021. This hybrid architecture, combining Performance cores and Efficiency cores, represented Intel's most significant architectural shift in years. The flagship Core i9-12900K delivered substantial performance improvements. In our review, we said:

"The Intel Core i9-12900K is the fastest gaming processor on the planet, while the Core i5-12600K offers unprecedented gaming performance at its price point. Whip in superior pricing and excellent performance in all other types of workloads, and both Alder Lake processors handily beat competing AMD models."

Alder Lake had reclaimed gaming performance leadership, with the 12900K often outperforming AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X despite having fewer traditional cores. However, continued intensifying competition led to another breakthrough for AMD.

Cacher in the die (2022-2023)

It was against this backdrop of intensifying competition that AMD unveiled its ace card: the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Announced at CES 2022 and launched on April 20, 2022, this processor represented AMD's most audacious engineering gambit yet. Priced at $449, the 5800X3D was positioned as the "Ultimate Gaming Processor," promising to reclaim the gaming crown from Intel's freshly minted Alder Lake lineup.

The 5800X3D's core specifications told a story of strategic compromise in service of a singular goal. Built on the same 7nm process and Zen 3 architecture as its siblings, the chip featured 8 cores and 16 threads, but with notably reduced clock speeds compared to the standard 5800X.

Base clocks dropped from 3.8GHz to 3.4GHz, while boost clocks fell from 4.7GHz to 4.5GHz. This reduction was not accidental but rather a necessary trade-off to accommodate the chip's new stacked 3D V-cache technology. The chip featured 96MB of L3 cache – triple the 32MB found in the standard 5800X. This was achieved by adding 64MB of SRAM directly atop the existing 32MB L3 cache.

The result was a processor that could store vastly more game data closer to the CPU cores, dramatically reducing the need to access slower system memory.

However, this breakthrough came with significant compromises. The 5800X3D was completely locked from traditional overclocking, with AMD disabling both manual multiplier adjustments and Precision Boost Overdrive. This limitation stemmed from the 3D V-Cache's sensitivity to voltage, with the stacked cache unable to handle voltages above 1.3-1.35V, significantly lower than the 1.45-1.5V range typical of other Ryzen processors.

The additional cache also generated more heat and complicated thermal management, as structural silicon spacers placed over the CPU cores to maintain die flatness impeded heat dissipation.

Despite these limitations, the 5800X3D's gaming performance was nothing short of huge. In CPU-intensive games, the additional cache delivered substantial performance gains, with some titles showing improvements over both the standard 5800X and Intel's flagship 12900K. In our review of the 5800X3D, we said:

"The $449 Ryzen 7 5800X3D's 3D V-Cache tech represents an innovative engineering effort that conquered the technical challenges associated with bringing the first desktop PC chip with 3D-stacked SRAM to market, and to great effect. The end result is a comparatively low-power chip that delivers incredible gaming performance, dethroning Intel's $589 Alder Lake Core i9-12900K and $739 Core i9-12900KS from the top of our gaming charts."

The chip particularly excelled in games that benefited from large cache sizes, such as strategy games, simulators, and certain competitive esports titles. It was a specialist, but one with a devastatingly effective specialty: pure gaming dominance. The 5800X3D, throughout its lifespan, would be regularly discounted, making it an excellent choice for those who hopped on the Ryzen bandwagon early, as it was a simple drop-in upgrade for AM4 users through a BIOS update.

Even today, AMD is still releasing 3D V-Cache-equipped AM4 chips, most recently, the 5500X3D, for the Latin American market. In 2023, AMD would release the 5800X3D's Zen 4 successor, the 7800X3D, on the new AM5 platform.

In 2023, ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed that the company was developing its own 3D silicon technology, though with a different approach than AMD's. Rather than placing cache on top of CPU cores, Intel planned to stack CPU dies on top of cache tiles, effectively inverting AMD's design philosophy. However, this technology was years away from commercial deployment and notably excluded desktop processors in favor of server applications.

AMD's second-gen 3D-V Cache (2024-Now)

In late 2024, AMD's second-generation 3D-V Cache technology arrived with the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. In our testing, the chip thrashed Intel's Core Ultra 285K by 35% on average in our testing suite, and it thwarted the Core i9-14900K by 30% in gaming workloads. It is a monstrous chip for gaming workloads, and to this day, it has no rival.

The chip brought the most revolutionary structural change yet to 3D V-Cache technology. AMD completely inverted the traditional stacking approach, moving the 64MB cache die from above the core complex die (CCD) to below it. This seemingly simple change had profound implications for thermal management and performance.

By placing the cache underneath the cores, AMD eliminated the thermal barrier that had previously prevented the CPU cores from making direct contact with the cooling solution. It also led to higher clock speeds, which were previously limited compared to its predecessors.

The trajectory of CPU gaming performance has undergone a complete reversal since the introduction of 3D V-Cache technology. Where Intel once maintained an iron grip on gaming performance leadership, AMD now holds an almost unassailable position in this crucial market segment.

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D exemplifies this transformation, delivering gaming performance that exceeds Intel's flagship processors by margins that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

The implications of this reversal extend far beyond raw performance numbers. AMD has effectively captured the gaming crown that Intel had dominated for over a decade. The combination of superior gaming performance, full overclocking support, and competitive pricing has created a value proposition that Intel currently cannot match, at least at the high-end.

18A-PT could enable Intel to compete

While Intel's Arrow Lake stuck to familiar core layouts, the future might hold something different. The upcoming Nova Lake may feature 52 cores in total, built on new process technologies such as Intel's 18A and TSMC's 2nm-class nodes.

18A-PT, a high-performance variant of 18A, is on the cards, and that technology might enable Intel to utilize 3D die stacking to potentially compete with AMD's gaming crown.

However, this is not expected to land until at least 2028, meaning that AMD could have years to gain market share among gaming enthusiasts.

According to the Steam Hardware Survey, things don't exactly look catastrophic for Intel, as they currently stand. As of July 2025, Intel still maintains a lead over AMD, capturing 58% of users, compared to AMD's 41%. So, while AMD might hold the power crown, the battle for overall market domination still rages on, and it remains closer than ever before.

AMD continued to win CPU market share from Intel on the desktop PC and server fronts in the first half of the year, but its position on the mobile CPU front got significantly weaker than it was in the second half of last year. However, when it comes to revenue share, AMD has every reason to celebrate as its Q2 2025 results demonstrate spectacular gains compared to the same period a year before, according to recently released data by Mercury Research that was provided by AMD.

Consumer CPUs: AMD gains in the high-end, Intel maintains unit share lead

While Intel faces all kinds of troubles, it still sells by far more consumer (client) CPUs than everyone else in the industry. In Q2 2025, Intel saw a slight rebound in consumer CPU unit share, gaining around 0.2% sequentially, but this small uptick was overshadowed by a notable 2.8% decline compared to Q2 2024, indicating that Intel continues to face long-term competitive pressure in the consumer PC space.

AMD’s total consumer CPU unit share stood at 23.9% in the second quarter of 2025, down 0.2% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ), but still up 2.8% year-over-year (YoY). However, when compared to Q3 and Q4 2024, it looks like AMD's unit share has been stagnating, or even getting lower.

However, AMD's total consumer CPU revenue share rose to 27.8% in Q2 2025, up 1.3% from Q1 and a whopping 9.8% increase compared to the same quarter a year ago, which suggests that AMD is not necessarily shipping more CPUs in volume but is selling more high-end or higher-margin products. By contrast, while Intel maintains its unit share at around 75%, sales of its higher-end processors are lower than usual as AMD gains in the high-end segments.

Desktop CPUs: AMD triumphs

While unit-wise Intel continues to outsell AMD in the desktop PC market, this is where AMD boasts spectacular gains. In Q2 2025, AMD’s desktop CPU unit share rose to 32.2%, a gain of 4.2% sequentially and a robust 9.2% YoY. For Intel, the Q2 2025 desktop CPU unit share stood at 67.8%, down both QoQ and YoY, which means that Intel now outsells AMD 2:1, down from 8:2 in 2023 and 9:1 in 2016 – 2018.

This marks one of AMD’s strongest year-over-year gains in recent years for desktops, reflecting the success of its latest Ryzen 9000-series processors and growing traction in both consumer and commercial systems. While Intel still maintains the majority of the desktop CPU market, these declines highlight a continuing shift toward AMD, particularly in the enthusiast and performance segments.

On the revenue side, AMD made even more dramatic gains. The company's desktop CPU revenue share climbed to 39.3%, an increase of 4.9% sequentially and an incredible 20.5% YoY. This shows that AMD is not only shipping more desktop processors but also selling higher-value models, likely driven by strong demand for its premium SKUs, such as Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9, as well as Ryzen X3D models. Conversely, Intel's revenue share fell by roughly the same amount as its Core Ultra 200-series CPU for enthusiasts is not really popular.

Notebook CPUs: Intel starts to regain unit share

Intel maintained a strong lead in mobile PCs with a unit share of 79.4% in Q2 2025, which is up 1.9% from the previous quarter, but a drop of 0.3% from the same quarter a year ago. AMD's mobile CPU unit share came in at 20.6%, down 1.9% QoQ but still up 0.3% year-over-year. Given how competitive AMD's higher-end Ryzen AI processors for laptops are, we can only wonder how Intel manages to win market share from its small rival, but the numbers speak for themselves and show that AMD has lost market share for two consecutive quarters.

From a revenue perspective, AMD's mobile CPU revenue share came at 21.5% in Q2 2025, down 0.7% from Q1 but still up 3.9% YoY. This indicates that AMD is selling a higher proportion of mid-range to premium notebook processors compared to a year ago, even if unit volumes dipped. For Intel, the revenue share decline matches AMD's gain — meaning that despite holding the lion's share of units, Intel is losing some ground in higher-end segments of the mobile market, where AMD's offerings look more competitive.

Server CPUs: AMD is high-end champion, but unit share gains are stagnating

Intel retained the majority of server CPU shipments with a unit share of 72.7% in Q2 2025. 3.2% YoY, which highlights the company's long-term challenges in this segment. By contrast, AMD made a strong 3.6% year-over-year and 2.1% quarter-over-quarter unit share gain in the first quarter of 2025 due to the latest EPYC platform ramp. In the second quarter, the company's unit share reached 27.3%, which is a tiny 0.1% gain.

The steady rise in unit share reflects growing demand for EPYC processors, driven by performance, efficiency, and competitive total cost of ownership. Nonetheless, stagnation of AMD unit share gains in Q2 may indicate that Intel has managed to find the right balance of performance, efficiency, TCO, and price with its Xeon 6 offerings.

From a revenue standpoint, AMD's share climbed to 41% in Q2 2025, a substantial 1.5% increase QoQ and an even larger 7.2% gain YoY. This growth in revenue share suggests AMD is capturing a share of the higher-end server CPU market with its high core-count offerings. Equally, Intel's revenue share fell by the same amounts, highlighting that while it still outsells its rival 7:3, AMD is increasingly competitive in the most profitable segments of the server CPU market.

Summary

AMD on Wednesday added the sixth processor to its Ryzen AI 300-series lineup. The CPU in question is the quad-core Ryzen AI 5 330 product that will be the entry-level product in the family, thus priced below others and making Ryzen AI more accessible to customers on a budget. While the CPU will come with a reduced number of general-purpose cores, it will still offer a 50 TOPS NPU, thus being fully compliant with the requirements of Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs.

AMD's Ryzen AI 5 330 is a quad-core processor operating at 2.0 GHz – 4.50 GHz, equipped with an AMD Radeon 820M integrated GPU featuring 128 stream processors (two GPU clusters) and an NPU with 50 TOPS performance. Just like other members of the Ryzen AI 300-series family, the model 330 comes with a dual-channel DDR5 memory controller, but unlike other CPUs in the lineup, the new unit has a configurable TDP (cTDP) of between 15W and 28W.

AMD does not disclose how many Zen 5 and Zen 5c cores the CPU has, but this is common for the general specifications of AMD's processors. In fact, the company also does not disclose whether the CPU uses Strix Point or Krackan Point silicon, but we can expect this information to be disclosed once the company adds the new SKU to its website.

As AMD's 96-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX approaches its launch, unofficial benchmark results have been posted to the Geekbench database, revealing some details about its performance. While the CPU clearly shines in AMD-conducted benchmarks showing its potential for professional workstation workloads, when it comes to the drag race-style Geekbench benchmark, it is not all that clear-cut. In fact, it runs neck-and-neck with Apple's M4 Max in threaded benchmarks, with the leader changing in some runs, while losing in single-thread work against Apple's chip. 

For now, there are multiple test results of AMD's 96-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX in the Geekbench database. The best single-thread result for AMD's workstation flagship is 3,122 points, which is noticeably higher than the 2736 points scored by its direct predecessor, the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX. Since the new CPU is based on the improved Zen 5 microarchitecture and runs at a higher frequency, it is pretty much expected that it would be 14% faster in this benchmark.  

However, as expected given its workstation focus, the single-thread performance of AMD's Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX in Geekbench isn't competitive with consumer PC-oriented processors. The latter are designed for burst performance for a short while to guarantee system responsiveness and fluent user experience. By contrast, the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX barely hits its 5.40 GHz turbo frequency in GB6's single-thread scenarios.

When it comes to GB6's multi-thread performance, there is another peculiarity with AMD's workstation-oriented Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX. On the one hand, the unit scores 30,170 points in the base case scenario, leaving behind its Zen 4-based Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX predecessor by a whopping 15%, or at 25,899 points. But on the other hand, the M4 Max is competitive, either beating or only slightly trailing the Threadripper chip in the multi-core score, depending on the run.

Meanwhile, one should remember that Geekbench 6 multi-tread test is a short-duration benchmark designed to simulate everyday tasks like file compression, PDF rendering, and image filtering. Because of its quick runtime and bursty workloads, it can't fully exploit the capabilities of ultra-high-core-count CPUs like the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9995WX. Many of GB6's MT tests scale only up to 8–32 threads efficiently, leaving a large portion of the 9995WX's cores underutilized, but leaving headroom for Apple's, AMD's, and Intel's client CPUs to thrive in consumer workloads because of their high clocks.

Before drawing conclusions, we should wait for tests conducted by an independent test lab. With the launch fast approaching, you can expect to see plenty of benchmarks when the chips arrive this month.

Benchmark results of AMD's upcoming 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 9980X have been added to the PassMark database, and they are quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, the high-end desktop processor designed for creative professionals set the absolute record in PassMark's multi-threaded desktop CPU test, as observed by NotebookCheck. But on the other hand, the processor's results were rather unimpressive in the single-thread test, which is barely surprising given the positioning of the unit. Still, keep in mind that we might be dealing with a pre-production CPU. 

AMD's 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 9980X scores 147,481 points in PassMark Multithread CPU Mark, leaving behind 96-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX (145,572), its direct predecessor, Ryzen Threadripper 7980X (136,517), and outperforming Apple's 32-core M3 Ultra (73,785) and AMD's 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D (70,238) by more than double. While it is logical that the Ryzen Threadripper 9980X beats its predecessor with the same core count, it is very surprising that it manages to beat the 96-core CPU, although by a slim margin. 

PassMark CPU test measures performance across a variety of metrics, including those specifically built to scale with core/thread count. For example, Compression, Encryption, and Physics tests will spin up as many threads as the CPU has. Therefore, it is unexpected that the 64-core processor has beaten a 96-core processor in this test. 

When it comes to single-thread CPU performance in PassMark, not everything is that rosy for AMD's 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 9980X CPU with an up to 5.40 GHz single-core clock. The unit scores 4,594 points, which is on par with Apple's 14-core M4 Max (up to 4.50 GHz, 4,603 points) or Intel's 24-core Core i9-13900KF (up to 5.80 GHz, 4,587 points). However, due to relatively low clocks of the model 9980X and peculiarities of the Zen 5 microarchitecture, the Ryzen Threadripper 9980X is dramatically behind Apple's 28-core M3 Ultra (5,133 points, up to 4.05 GHz) and Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K (5,096 points, up to 5.70 GHz). Yet, it is not that significantly behind the Ryzen 9 9950X3D/9950X (4738/4736 points, up to 5.70 GHz). 

AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 9980X is a 64-core CPU that belongs to the Shimada Peak family and is based on the Zen 5 microarchitecture. The processor supports AMD's simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) technology, operates at 3.20 GHz – 5.40 GHz, and is equipped with 64MB of L2 cache as well as 256MB of L3 cache. AMD positions such CPUs for those who want to have ultimate performance in games as well as professional-grade applications, and would even like to overclock their processors or tweak performance using other means. 

AMD this week said in a blog post that ASE Technology, the world's largest outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) provider, has transitioned to EPYC and Ryzen processors across its data centers and client systems, respectively. The transition has resulted in significant performance improvements and energy efficiency gains. However, perhaps more important is that ASE is now evaluating AMD's Instinct MI300-series processors for AI workloads.

By adopting AMD's EPYC processors for servers and Ryzen CPUs for client desktop and laptop PCs, ASE achieved a 50% boost in system performance and a 6.5% reduction in power consumption compared to its previous infrastructure, which resulted in a 30% decrease in total cost of ownership, delivering both operational and financial benefits. AMD's blog does not disclose which processors ASE used before adopting AMD-based solutions, nor does it indicate whether all systems in ASE's fleet now use EPYC or Ryzen processors. However, the mention of operational and financial benefits points to a substantial adoption of AMD-based systems.

"We need to handle a big volume of data analysis, including leading-edge technology for AI applications and our smart factories," said Jekyll Chen, Director of IT Infrastructure for ASE. "We work for many semiconductor companies. Our challenges are the need for high performance, low latency, and high core count, in alignment with ASE's ESG policy. Stability and scalability are two primary goals for us."

There are some new signs of life in the next-gen AMD Ryzen development cycle. On Monday, Finalwire added “preliminary support for next-generation AMD desktop, server and mobile processors.” Yes, that means the system utilities development software team will have received some early information morsels about 'Ryzen 10000 series' processors, if AMD follows the expected naming convention that is. Twitter/X user HXL spotted the update, but at the time of writing, there has been yet another update to the latest beta mentioning processors such as the Intel Core Ultra 3 (AKA Arrow Lake-H/S) series.

As you can see, the first beta of the next-gen AIDA64 is graced by the preliminary support for AMD’s next-gen chips. However, before we go on, readers should be warned to rein in any excitement. Looking back at AIDA64's history, such an announcement typically comes around a year ahead of any product launch. Therefore, if this plays out as expected, 'Ryzen 10000' chips will likely be central to AMD’s product launch plans at Computex 2026.

Medusa Ridge coming to desktop

Even though it may be a year off, we have a few leaks-based information morsels about the 'Ryzen 10000' lineup that are worth summarizing here. On the desktop side of things, probably of greatest interest to our PC enthusiast audience, leaked info from March suggests upcoming Zen 6 architecture processors will remain compatible with the AM5 socket. These CPUs are apparently codenamed Medusa Ridge.

It would indeed be a great nugget of news for AM5 platform adoptees if it were to be confirmed that 'Ryzen 10000' chips would be compatible with the existing socket. Moreover, the potential move to 12-core chiplet dies (CCDs) with the next generation could be a major step for consumers.

We think it is likely that AMD will use TSMC's N3P (3 nm-class) process for its Zen 6-based products in 2026. With AMD’s 3D V-Cache packing processors proving to be a powerful lure to gamers, it is also expected to deliver Zen 6-based Ryzens into the X3D subfamily.

Will the 'Ryzen 7 10800X3D' be the next ‘gaming legend’ from AMD’s stables? Check out our Ryzen 7 9800X3D review to see the devastating mix of price and (gaming) performance it will have to eclipse.

Medusa Point on mobile

We're seeing traces of AMD's more affordable Strix Halo options, with the octa-core Ryzen AI Max 385 marking its debut on Geekbench. Powering the HP ZBook Ultra G1a, Strix Halo appears poised to expand into the mainstream segment with eight and six-core variations. Performance indicators in Geekbench aren't as impressive as we expected, though we shouldn't consider them as definitive due to this being a leak, typical run-to-run variations, and laptop power settings.

CES marked the debut of AMD's flagship APU family this generation, Strix Halo, under the Ryzen AI 300 Max line, for AI/ML developers and gamers. AMD launched four different variants, ranging from 6-16 CPU cores and 16-40 GPU cores, catering to a wide range of consumers. Most of the first and second quarters have been occupied by the premier Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and 390, with mini-PCs costing up to $2,000. Meanwhile, laptops, limited to the HP Zbook Ultra G1a and Asus ROG Flow Z13, exceed the $5,000 price point, fully decked out with 128GB of LPDDR5x RAM.

The Ryzen AI Max 385 sports eight cores and sixteen threads based on the Zen 5 architecture, alongside a 32 Compute Unit equipped integrated GPU (Radeon 8050S) based on RDNA 3.5 and a 50 TOPS capable NPU. The CPU is advertised to reach 5 GHz, only 100 MHz below the flagship model. This suggests similar single-core performance, but the actual results indicate otherwise.

One of Gigabyte's B650 (AM5) motherboards now lists support for AMD's unreleased and likely soon-to-launch Ryzen 9000G series APUs, as reported by VideoCardz. This suggests that AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9000G APUs will probably be supported on existing 600 and 800 series motherboards, of course, with a necessary BIOS update. That being said, names, specifications, and pricing still remain unconfirmed.

We first heard of AMD's Ryzen 9000G processors in late March, with leakers suggesting they'd employ Gorgon Point silicon. These APUs succeed AMD's incumbent Phoenix-built Ryzen 8000G lineup, which first debuted in January 2024. As for the underlying silicon, there are some nuances since Gorgon Point is rumored to be a refresh of Strix Point (Ryzen AI 300), alleged to offer single-digit performance increments across the board.

Gigabyte has inadvertently published a list of supported memory modules for unreleased Ryzen 9000G APUs on its B650M GAMING WIFI6E motherboard. This marks the second unofficial confirmation that these APUs will slot into existing AM5 motherboards. Nothing is official until AMD gives the official green light, so we'll still mark this as a leak.

A common thread among increasing user reports of failing Ryzen 9000 CPUs was their connection to an ASRock AM5 motherboard. Citing a conversation with the partner at Computex, Tech Yes City has brought to light that ASRock's initial PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) presets were set too aggressively for initial CPU samples. It is believed these aggressive settings are what ultimately lead to the premature demise of these processors. AMD declined to comment on the story, while ASRock wasn't immediately available.

Earlier this year, reports of failing AMD Ryzen 9000 (Granite Ridge) processors were common on Reddit and other forums. ASRock initially dismissed reports connecting their motherboards to the problem as 'misinformation', all the while supplying a new BIOS to address boot-up and memory compatibility issues. Affected users had no other choice but to RMA their broken CPUs.

According to new details from Tech Yes City, the problem stems from the amperage (current) supplied to the processor under AMD's PBO technology. Precision Boost Overdrive employs an algorithm that dynamically adjusts clock speeds for peak performance, based on factors like temperature, power, current, and workload. The issue is reportedly confined to ASRock's high-end and mid-range boards, as they were tuned far too aggressively for Ryzen 9000 CPUs.

I first heard that Cooler Master’s Hyper 612 air cooler had impressive performance from users in China, but I had no idea quite how much it would impress me. Despite its medium size, it provides performance competitive with larger dual-tower air coolers. Cooler Master claims its performance is enabled by new superconducting heatpipe. And while normally I would ignore such claims as marketing fluff, the Hyper 612 Apex has the performance to back it up!

Will the Hyper 612 Apex make our list of the best CPU coolers? It certainly has the performance to warrant consideration. But the price of $79 is higher than most of the air-cooled competition, especially from tough competitors like Thermalight. Let’s take a look at the specifications and features of the cooler, then we’ll go over thermal performance with both Intel and AMD CPUs, as well as noise levels.

Cooler specifications

Packing and included contents

The packaging features Cooler Master’s dark purple and pastel design, showcasing the product in the center. Inside, the packaging is separated into two separate parts.

Included in the box are the following:

• Single-tower heatsink with pre-installed fans
• Cryofuse thermal paste
• Mounting accessories for modern AMD & Intel platforms
• Installation manual
• PWM splitter cord

Features of Cooler Master’s Hyper 612 Apex

▶️ Heatsink Design

At first glance, you might think this is a thick single tower cooler – but look again!

If you take off the top cover, it becomes apparent that the heatsink isn’t as large as it might appear – almost half of the unit’s thickness is from the fans that come with it.

▶️ High-quality Cryofuse

Cooler Master includes its Cryofuse thermal compound with the cooler, which offers good performance only a couple of degrees away from the best pastes we’ve tested – but as you’ll see in our benchmarks below, it really doesn’t an edge from its thermal paste!

▶️ Sturdy metal backplate

For users of Intel platforms, a sturdy metal backplate is included that won’t bend under pressure.

▶️ Six superconducting copper heatpipes

The design of this unit’s heatpipes are interesting. Cooler Master has mentioned that the company was using machine learning to improve its heatpipes in the past, and this cooler appears to be the first to utilize these advances.

Looking at the cross-section of the Cooler Master image above, you can see that the heatpipes have been staggered to evenly spread heat through the aluminum fins of the tower. Cooler Master makes some interesting claims about the heatpipes themselves. I’ve included one of the marketing slides below.

And here’s a bottom photo of the sample we were sent for testing, showing how the heatpipes are weaved for maximum heat dissipation.

▶️ Complete RAM Compatibility, no matter the size of DDR5

Unlike liquid coolers, which generally don’t interfere with memory DIMMs on a motherboard, many air coolers overhang the DDR5 or DDR4 slots, creating compatibility concerns. This is not an issue for Cooler Master’s Hyper 612 Apex, which does not overhang them in any manner, ensuring compatibility no matter how short or tall your RAM sticks are.

Real world testing configuration – Intel LGA1700 and AMD AM5 platform

My results may differ from others because I emphasize results that are comparable to real-world use. This means that I test CPU coolers inside a closed desktop case, which increases cooling difficulty compared to other testing methods.

Many will test CPU coolers outside of a case, on an open test bench. Open benches have lowered ambient temperatures, which makes weak coolers appear stronger than they are. Some publications have also used generic thermal plates to test cooling solutions. I reject both of these methods because they don’t accurately reflect the real-world conditions where a CPU cooler is typically used.

My previous reviews have tested Intel’s latest platform, using the Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake CPU. But we’re retiring this from our testing suite. Between BIOS changes and Windows updates, Arrow Lake’s thermal characteristics have changed in some scenarios, rendering much of our previous testing data useless.

With today’s review, we’re also testing AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This is a beast of a CPU, providing the best gaming and multithreaded performance on the market. It can prove quite challenging thermally when PBO is enabled for overclocking.

AM5 and 1851 installation

The installation of this cooler is simple for both Intel and AMD CPUs.

1. You’ll first need to apply the included backplate if you’re using an Intel CPU. AMD users will need to remove the default mounting mechanism.

2. Next, you’ll need to install the standoffs against the mounting holes.

3. Take the support bars and place them on the mounting standoffs, and secure them with a screwdriver.

4. Apply the included thermal paste to your CPU. If you have any questions on how to do this properly, please refer to our handy guide on how to apply thermal paste.

5. Mount the heatsink on top of the CPU, using a screwdriver to secure the screws on each side of the tower.

6. Slide each fan into the appropriate spot against the heatsink

7. Place the cover on top, and then use the included PWM splitter cable to connect the fans to your motherboard.

CPU-only thermal results with PBO enabled: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D

Without power limits enforced, the hottest CPUs on the market will hit their peak temperature (TJ Max) and thermally throttle with even the strongest of air coolers and even most liquid coolers on the market in intensive stress testing. For the best liquid coolers on the market, the results of this test will be shown using the CPU’s temperature.

However, when the CPU reaches its peak temperature, I’ve measured the CPU package power to determine the maximum wattage cooled, to best compare their performance. It’s important to note that thermal performance can scale differently depending on the CPU it’s being tested with.

We’ll start by looking at the performance of this cooler with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU, with the disclaimer that I’ve only had a limited amount of time to test coolers with this system.

The results on AMD’s Ryzen 9950X3D were very good, though not as impressive as some of the other results you’ll see below. Despite the smaller amount of comparison data in this chart, we can see that the Hyper 612 Apex manages to outperform Thermalright’s Royal Knight 120SE and is only beaten on the air cooling side by the larger Royal Pretor 130!

CPU-only thermal results with power limits removed: Intel’s i7-14700K

Now let’s switch it up and take a look at how this cooler performs with Intel’s i7-14700K. The performance here is insane, matching many 360mm AIOs. It’s almost able to handle the full heat of the CPU.

I’ve trimmed this list to only show air coolers (omitting liquid cooling results) in order to make it easier to discern the strength of this little single tower air cooler. At 245W cooled, it sits between the performance of ID-Cooling’s Frozen A620 GDL and Thermalright’s fan-favorite Peerless Assassin 140! To see this level of performance from any single tower air cooler, even one with dual fans, is quite impressive!

Maximum noise levels

A cooler’s maximum performance can’t be considered the only key metric, because some coolers run louder or quieter than others. The maximum noise level this cooler operates at is 45.6 dBA. Most will find this an acceptable volume, but some users might want to limit its speed if they are particularly sensitive.

200W Power Limit

My recent reviews have focused more on tests with both the CPU and GPU being stressed, but many of y’all have indicated that you would like to see more CPU-only tests. Listening to that feedback, I’ve tested thermal and noise performance for AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D at stock CPU settings, which limits power consumption to 200W.

Performance here is still very much punching above the single-tower weight class with this lowered power limit, with the Hyper 612 Apex trailing the flagship Royal Pretor 130 by only 1.6 degrees C!

150W CPU + 290W GPU results

Testing a CPU Cooler in isolation is great for synthetic benchmarks, but doesn’t tell the whole story of how it will perform. If your GPU is running a full load, that heat doesn’t just disappear – it makes it harder for your CPU cooler to do its job due to the increased heat within your computer case.

The CPU power limit of 150W was chosen based on the worst CPU power consumption I’ve seen reported in gaming with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D. My personal experience tells me most games use much lower amounts of power, but this might be biased by the games I play.

The results here line up with our previous ones, with the Hyper 612 Apex trailing our best air cooling results with a dual tower by only 2 degrees C. While this is expected from a cooler with a price tag like the Hyper 612 Apex carries, it isn’t as expected from a cooler with just a single heatsink tower!

140W CPU results

The last round of test results we’ll look at in today’s review is a test with a 140W power limit imposed. This level of power is dramatically easier to cool for most CPU coolers – and as a result, this is the easiest test we’ll run with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU for most reviews – but I’ve recorded lower power results for comparisons with SFF and air coolers for future reviews.

Interestingly, in this lower power scenario, the Hyper 612 Apex didn’t perform quite as well compared to its competition. Still, it is less than a single degree behind our best air cooling result in the limited comparisons above.

Noise Normalized CPU-only thermal results

Finding the right balance between fan noise levels and cooling performance is important. While running fans at full speed can improve cooling capacity to some extent, the benefits are limited and many users prefer a quieter system. Many users consider these tests to be the most important of all, so let’s take a look at the cooler’s noise-normalized performance.

We’ll be looking at two different, distinct tests. We’ll first look at our traditional noise-equalized results with Intel’s i7-14700K, which places a full CPU load with the cooler’s noise levels set to 38.9 dBA.

The performance of Cooler Master’s Hyper 612 Apex was again extremely impressive for its size, stronger than any other single tower air cooler I’ve seen before – and on par with most modern high-performance, dual-tower air coolers.

To be honest, at first I thought I had screwed something up or perhaps some setting was incorrectly applied. I ended up remounting this cooler three times to be sure, and resetting my BIOS settings, but the results were consistent (within margin of error) on each test.

Now let’s take a look at our noise-equalized tests utilizing AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU. Two changes (in comparison to our first test) have been made to increase the difficulty of this challenge. The noise level of the CPU coolers has been reduced to 37.3 dBA, and I’ve also run a full load on MSI’s RTX 4070 TI Super GPU at the same time to increase the difficulty of this benchmark.

The noise-normalized results with an AMD CPU seem to be even more impressive than on Intel, outperforming the mighty Thermalright Royal Pretor 130, if only by a few watts!

Conclusion

Cooler Master’s Hyper 612 Apex is an impressive cooler that shows that there are still ways air cooling can be improved, delivering thermal performance comparable to some of the best dual-tower air coolers on the market. It has a clean, minimalist aesthetic that will look great in your PC’s case. Its noise-normalized performance is also almost unbelievably strong. The only downside to this cooler is the cost. At $79.99, it is one of the pricier air-cooling options. But then, no one said that compact air cooling perfection was going to be cheap.

Thermalright is well known for delivering quality competitive coolers at rock-bottom prices, often raising the bar in performance and value. The company can do this because it typically directly manufactures its own products, having strong vertical integration as part of its business model. Its latest budget air cooler, the Royal Knight 120 SE, is currently available for just $30 on Amazon, making it one of the cheapest dual-tower air coolers you can buy.

Will the Royal Knight 120 SE make our list of the best CPU coolers? Let’s take a look at the specifications and features of the cooler, then we’ll go over thermal performance with both Intel and AMD CPUs, as well as noise levels.

Cooler specifications

Packing and included contents

The cooler packaging is a plain brown box that showcases the design of the heatsink. The inner contents are well protected by molded foam and plastic coverings.

Included in the box are the following:

• 15mm TL-C12015B 120mm fan
• 25mm TL-C12B V2 120mm fan
• Offset Dual-Tower heatsink
• TF7 Thermal paste
• Mounting accessories for modern AMD & Intel platforms
• Installation Manual

Features of Thermalright’s Royal Knight 120 SE

▶️ Dual-tower heatsink

The heatsink has two towers, with one side thicker than the other. It has a simple black and silver aesthetic, with no unnecessary bling.

▶️ Offset heatsink for RAM compatibility

The heatpipes of the cooler are angled to give the cooler an offset so that it doesn’t interfere with RAM slots. All sizes of DDR5, no matter how tall the heat spreader, are supported with this cooler.

▶️ Two fans of different thicknesses

There’s more to a cooler than just the heatsink or radiator. The bundled fans have a significant impact on cooling and noise levels, as well as how the cooler looks in your case. This cooler arrives with two different types of fans. The first is a low-profile 15 mm fan that also helps avoid RAM compatibility issues. The center is more typical, at 25 mm thick.

▶️ Real-world testing configuration: Intel LGA1700 and AMD AM5

My results may differ from others because I emphasize results that are comparable to real-world use. This means that I test CPU coolers inside of a closed desktop case, which increases cooling difficulty compared to other testing methods – many will test CPU coolers outside of a case, on an open test bench. Open benches have lowered ambient temperatures, which makes weak coolers appear stronger than they are. Some publications have also used generic thermal plates to test cooling solutions. I reject both of these methods because they don’t accurately reflect the real-world conditions a CPU cooler is used in.

My previous reviews have tested Intel’s latest platform, using the Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake CPU. But we’re retiring this from our testing suite. Between BIOS changes and Windows updates, Arrow Lake’s thermal characteristics have changed in some scenarios, rendering much of our previous testing data useless.

With today’s review, we’re also testing AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This is a beast of a CPU, providing the best gaming and multithreaded performance on the market. It can prove quite challenging thermally when PBO is enabled for overclocking.

AM5 and 1851 installation

The installation of this cooler is simple for both Intel and AMD CPUs.

1. You’ll first need to apply the included backplate if you’re using an Intel CPU. AMD users will need to remove the default mounting mechanism.

2. Next, you’ll set the rubber standoffs on both Intel and AMD systems.

3. You’ll now want to take the mounting bars and place them on top off the standoffs, securing them with the included screws.

4. Apply the included thermal paste to your CPU. If you have any questions on how to do this properly, please refer to our handy guide on how to apply thermal paste.

5. Mount the heatsink on top of the CPU, using a screwdriver to secure the screws in the middle of the unit.

6. Attach the fans to the heatsink using the included clips, and then use the included PWM cable to connect the fans to the motherboard.

CPU-only thermal results with PBO enabled: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D

Without power limits enforced, the most thermally demanding CPUs will hit their peak temperature (TJ Max) and thermally throttle with even the strongest of air coolers and even most liquid coolers in intensive stress testing. For the best liquid coolers I’ve tested, the results of this test will be shown using the CPU’s temperature. However, when the CPU reaches its peak temperature, I’ve measured the CPU package power to determine the maximum wattage cooled to best compare their performance. It’s important to note that thermal performance can scale differently depending on the CPU it’s being tested with.

We’ll start by looking at the performance of this cooler with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU, with the disclaimer that I’ve only had a limited amount of time to test coolers with this system.

Thermalright’s results on AMD’s Ryzen 9950X3D were reasonably good, with the cooling 234W on average. I expect this level of performance from most dual-tower air coolers, but users wanting the very strongest performance will want to look at something like Thermalright’s Royal Pretor 130 instead.

CPU-only thermal results with power limits removed: Intel’s i7-14700K

Now let’s switch it up and take a look at how this cooler performs with Intel’s i7-14700K. The performance in comparison to other coolers is much better here, the second-best results I’ve seen from an air cooler thus far. That said, I haven’t yet tested the Royal Pretor 130 on this system yet – I expect extremely strong performance based on the performance seen above on AMD’s Ryzen 9950X3D.

But of course, a cooler’s maximum performance can’t be considered in isolation. You should also consider the noise levels of a cooler. The loudest this cooler operates at is 43.4 dBA, a moderate level that most users should find acceptable.

Noise Normalized CPU-only thermal results

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

We’ll be looking at noise-normalized testing in two different, distinct tests. We’ll first look at our traditional results with Intel’s i7-14700K, which places a full CPU load with the cooler’s noise levels set to 38.9 dBA.

While the cooler performed well when its fans were allowed to run at full speeds, the noise-normalized performance here is underwhelming – cooling only 222W. That’s less than FSP’s NP5 single tower air cooler and equivalent to Thermalright’s own single tower air cooler.

I’ve recently started noise-normalized testing on AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Two changes have been made to increase the difficulty of this test. The noise level of the CPU coolers has been reduced to 37.3 dBA, and I also run a full load on MSI’s RTX 4070 TI Super at the same time.

With the disclaimer that I’ve only had a limited amount of time to collect data for this test, Thermalright’s Royal Knight 120 SE did not perform well in this scenario, cooling roughly 23W less than Endorfy’s Fortis 5 Black. I suspect the poor performance with lower noise levels is related to the low static pressure of the fans included with this cooler.

200W Power Limit

My recent reviews have focused more on tests with both the CPU and GPU being stressed, but many readers have indicated they would like to see more CPU-only tests. So we’re going to look at thermal and noise performance for AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D at stock CPU settings, which limits power consumption to 200W.

This test has more promising results for Thermalright’s cooler, keeping the CPU at 79.2 degrees C on average. That places it just behind LevelPlay’s 240mm AIO, and a few degrees ahead of Endorfy’s Fortis 5. Noise levels reach 42.9 dBA on average in this test.

150W CPU + 290W GPU results

Testing a CPU Cooler in isolation is great for synthetic benchmarks, but doesn’t tell the whole story of how it will perform. If your GPU is running a full load, that heat doesn’t just disappear – it makes it harder for your CPU cooler to do its job due to the increased heat within your computer case.

The CPU power limit of 150W was chosen based on the worst CPU power consumption I’ve seen reported in gaming amongst various outlets covering AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D. My personal experience has shown most games to use much lower power, but this might be biased by the games I play.

Keeping the CPU at 70.6 C in this test, we can see the Royal Knight 120 SE is plenty strong enough for even the most intensive gaming scenarios. The average noise level was 42.4 dBA, a moderate level that won’t bother most users.

140W CPU results

The last round of test results we’ll look at is with a 140W power limit imposed. This level of power is much easier for most CPU coolers to handle. As a result, this is the easiest test we’ll run with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU for most reviews, but I’ve recorded lower power results for comparisons with SFF and air coolers for future reviews.

Thermalright’s Royal Knight 120 SE kept the CPU at an average of 61.2 degrees C in this scenario. I expect this result to be about average, but as you can see if you’re really picky above you can bring CPU temperatures closer to 52C with something like Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III Pro. Noise levels reached 40.9 dBA. While this isn’t loud per se, I feel like most coolers should run quieter on this low-intensity test.

Conclusion

Thermalright’s Royal Knight 120 SE is a reasonable deal at only $32 USD, and provides good performance in general – especially on Intel systems. However, its noise-normalized performance is rather poor. Users who prioritize silent operation should consider an alternative cooler instead.

Each spring, most leading PC hardware vendors gather in Taiwan for Computex, a huge showcase of everything from giant laptops to mini PCs, monitors, cooling, storage, CPUs and graphics cards. If you love PCs like we do, this show is the most important one of the year.

This year’s expo was dubbed “AI Next,” because every computer and component has to at least claim to benefit from AI. However, many of the most innovative products were iterating on tried-and-true formulas that are either unrelated to or tangentially related to the training and inference features we commonly associate with AI.

This year’s standouts include a Minecraft-themed cooler, a blazing fast SSD, even-faster SSD controllers and a case that makes us all wish we were back in 1989. These are the 16 best products of Computex 2025.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 Series

The Ryzen Threadripper 9000 ‘Shamida Peak’ series builds on the company’s commanding lead over Intel’s competing workstation processors, stretching the performance advantage up to a ludicrous 2.2X faster than Intel’s fastest chip. That performance comes courtesy of the move from the Zen 4 architecture to Zen 5, along with the use of the faster TSMC 4nm process node.

The flagship Ryzen 9 9995WX touts 96 cores and 192 threads, with peak boost clocks of 5.4 GHz and a 300W TDP, delivering what should be devastating performance in threaded workloads when the chips arrive in July. As with the last generation, AMD introduced both WX-Series Threadripper chips for higher-end workstations, while the non-Pro Threadripper models slot into the HEDT segment.

The new Threadripper 9000 series drops into the same sTR5 motherboard platforms as the previous-gen Threadripper processors, making upgrades as simple as a BIOS update. The new processors deliver up to 22% more performance in threaded workloads than their predecessors. AMD does expect a few motherboard refreshes as part of the launch, but most vendors will stick with their existing platforms. That’s a win for upgraders, especially given that all existing sTR5 CPU coolers will also be compatible.

The Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series solidifies AMD’s already commanding lead in the workstation market through the virtues of the Zen 5 microarchitecture and an upgraded TSMC 4nm process node. We expect these chips to thoroughly beat Intel’s competing Xeon W-series chips in nearly every facet when they arrive for our review in June.

Read more: AMD Announces Threadripper HEDT and Pro 9000-Series CPUs: 96 cores and 192 threads for Desktops and Workstations

– Paul Alcorn

AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT

Now that Nvidia has dropped its mid-range level cards, AMD used Computex as a stage to set up its competitors. AMD's Radeon RX 9060 XT comes out in a few short weeks, and we're very interested to see how it compares to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti.

The card starts at $299 for an 8GB version and $349 for a 16GB model, though that assumes you'll be able to find them at retail price (a caveat we're seeing a lot with GPUs lately).

The 9060 XT will use AMD's new Navi 44 architecture with 32 Compute Units (CUs), and it boasts a 3,130 MHz boost clock, even higher than the Radeon RX 9070 series. In some charts, AMD had the 9060 XT beating the 5060 Ti, though it compared a 16GB AMD card to an 8GB Nvidia card. That being said, the 16GB 9060 XT's $349 starting price does put it on better price footing.

We're hoping this card will deliver in the value segment where it's desperately needed.

Read more: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT launches on June 5, starting at $299

– Andrew E. Freedman

Phison E28 SSD controller

Phison pioneered the PCIe 5.0 SSD transition with its award-winning E26 SSD controllers that powered nearly every one of the new speedy SSDs when they first arrived, but now the Phison E28 promises to take performance and efficiency to new heights.

The original E26 controller was powerful, but it traded off higher power consumption for extreme performance, thus resulting in higher heat generation that not only required robust cooling solutions but also hampered its use in laptops.

The Phison E28 delivers huge efficiency gains by using a smaller 6nm process node that cuts power consumption dramatically. At Computex 2025, Phison demoed its new controller handily beating the competing SMI 2508 in power consumption during nearly every type of operation. That equates to lower heat generation, meaning these SSDs won’t require bulky coolers, and will also help PCIe 5.0 SSDs finally make their way into mainstream OEM laptops.

Phison didn’t skimp on performance to reduce the power consumption, though. The Phison E28 delivers up to 14.8 GB/s of sequential read/write performance and a blistering 2.5 / 3.0 million random read/write IOPS, speeds which were unthinkable a mere few years ago.

Phison says we’ll see a wave of E28-powered SSDs coming later this year, with a likely CES 2026 launch date. In fact, we saw plenty of E28 SSDs scattered throughout the Computex show floor at all of the main SSD vendors, proving that we won’t have to wait much longer for SSDs with extreme speeds coupled with excellent power efficiency.

Read more: Phison's E28 controller's 14.8 GB/s, 3,000K IOPS, and 7W power draw could make it the new king of PCIe 5.0 performance

– Paul Alcorn

Asus ProArt RTX 5080

Asus's take on the RTX 5080 for creatives has a woodgrain finish, which we've seen a lot on cases, but not as much on GPUs. But that's not the only way the ProArt RTX 5080 ProArt stands out.

Some variants of this GPU also have an M.2 slot for PCIe 5 SSDs so you can expand storage on the card. There's also a USB Type-C port on the back to add another port to the PC.

There are two versions of the card with "reference" specs, while the other two will have overclocks.

We don't see a ton of aftermarkets that impress us by being classy, but this card will look great in a lot of trendy cases with wood. Hopefully it performs as well as it looks.

Read more: Asus RTX 5080 ProArt comes with a wood grain finish and M.2 slot option

— Andrew E. Freedman

Crucial T710 SSD

At the moment, the fastest consumer SSD around is Crucial’s T705, which delivers an impressive 1.55M IOPS of random reads and 1.8M IOPS of random writes. But Crucial is debuting a massive upgrade in the T710.

The T710 promises to be 28 percent faster at random reads and 42 percent faster at random writes. The optional heatsink is about half the thickness of the one on its predecessor, saving space.

The M.2 chip is single-sided where the T705 was double-sided. The drive also uses 67 and 80 percent less power per IOPS random read and random write. Both of these features make it viable for use in a laptop where the prior model was not.

Read more: Crucial announces T710 SSD with 14.9 GB/s of performance, X10 portable SSD up to 8TB

– Avram Piltch

Predator Triton 14 AI

At 3.5 pounds and 0.68 inches thick, with a snazzy haptic touchpad and a pretty, 14.5-inch 2880 x 1800 OLED screen, Acer’s Predator Triton 14 AI looks to take on the best of what Razer has to offer, while appealing to both gamers and creators on the go.

It also has an oddball pairing of a lower-power Lunar Lake Core Ultra 9 288V CPU with RTX 5070 graphics. Time (and testing) will tell how this affects frame rates. But it also might mean significantly better battery life for those times when you aren’t gaming. I look forward to getting this ultraportable gamer in for testing to see how it compares to the also-new Razer Blade 14.

Read more: Acer has a new pair of 14.5-inch laptops for gaming on the go

– Matt Safford

Corsair Air 5400

I saw dozens of cases at Computex, but Corsair’s Air 5400 stands out because it combines the popular curved glass front and side panels with a fair bit of innovations and firsts. Rather than churning out another dual-chamber chassis, Corsair added a third chamber, isolating the 360 mm radiator by basically putting it outside the rest of the case, pulling in air from the front and venting it out the side.

To cool the GPU and other components, a duct funnels the bottom intake (provided by a trio of reverse-blade fans) directly over the motherboard area, while heat gets exhausted out of the top. And back-connector motherboards are supported for the cleanest interior possible.

The Air 5400 is also the first case I’ve seen with three USB-C ports on the top panel. But while I appreciate the more modern move here, I still would have preferred at least one USB-A port.

Read more: Corsair’s Air 5400 features a triple-chamber design for high-performance cooling

– Matt Safford

SilverStone FLP02

This case makes us want to party like it’s 1989! If you’re old enough to remember (or have spotted in your parents’ garage) a PC from the late 1980s or early 1990s, SilverStone’s FLP02 will take you back to a time when beige cases were all the rage and floppy disks were still at the top of the storage food chain.

This mid-tower case has all the classic design elements we loved when George H. W. Bush was president of the United States and most people weren’t using Windows yet. There are three 5.25-inch bays that have covers which look like 5.25-inch floppy drives but don’t function. You can remove the fascia and place an optical drive or set of ports or other internal drive inside.

There’s a hard power switch, a turbo button and a key lock. The key lock actually works in that it prevents you from turning the PC on or off if you have it turned. The turbo button controls your fan speed.

There are also a series of modern front ports that are hidden under a magnetic panel. These include two USB Type-A ports, a USB-C port and a 3.5mm audio jack.

With the FLP02, you can get the best of both worlds: a bold beige look that brings feelings of nostalgia and room for modern parts like an ATX motherboard, a long graphics card and plenty of fans.

Read more: SilverStone reveals late-80s style tower PC case — proudly beige but thoroughly modern inside

– Avram Piltch

Seasonic Prime Power Supplies

The biggest problem in PC building over the past couple of years has been the infamous melting power connector problem. If you use a graphics card with a 12VHPWR connector like the RTX 4090 and there’s a problem with how well it’s plugged in, the connector could melt and take your GPU with it.

Seasonic’s next-gen Prime power supplies attempt to solve this problem using sensors that detect if there’s a voltage problem, connect to an external device and alert the user. If the user is not around to act on the alert, the power supply shuts down to prevent damage to your equipment.

Read more: Seasonic’s next-generation Prime PSUs to will try to stop connectors from melting

– Avram Piltch

Asus ROG Falcata

Look, I’m not sure there’s a huge market for a high-end, split keyboard for gamers. But I have definitely had moments playing FPS and RTS titles where I only needed half the keyboard and the other was cramping my mouse game.

For those who have that feeling often, or who also prefer a split layout for more comfortable typing, Asus has delivered the Falcata. It features pre-lubed HFX V2 magnetic switches that feel smooth, and the whole keyboard feels built like a tank – albeit one that has been split down the middle and held together by a braided USB-C cable.

After a brief time with it, I was left wanting to spend more time with Falcata, both for gaming and productivity. I probably don’t want to know how much it’s going to cost, though, because the Falcata is clearly a niche product, and it feels nearly as premium as the company’s $500 ROG Azoth Extreme.

Read more: Asus ROG Falcata brings split layout and magnetic switches to competitive gaming

– Matt Safford

Cooler Master Elite case line

In a climate where everything feels like it’s lurching toward unaffordability, I was shocked when Cooler Master told me that all of its Elite PC case lineup is expected to sell for less than $100, and that at least one of the curved glass models should sell for just $70. That doesn’t include tariffs, though, so there’s a good chance the prices will be at least somewhat higher in the U.S.

But even if you tack on an extra $20 or so, these still look to be some nice-looking mainstream cases that would have cost significantly more a couple of years ago. Sure, you might not be able to afford a GPU, and inflation is still inflicting pain on our wallets elsewhere. But it’s nice to know we can look forward to some decent sub-$100 PC cases later this year from Cooler Master.

Read more: Cooler Master plans to launch a curved-glass case for around $70 – at least outside of the U.S.

– Matt Safford

Lian Li V200

Not to be outdone by anyone on the affordable case front, Lian Li’s V200 is somehow expected to sell for $110, complete with two glass panels, touch controls on the front for power and fan speeds, and a big 8.8-inch screen embedded in the side of the bottom chamber. That screen will also be sold separately – for $85. So if you really want to feel like the V200 is a bargain, think about it like you’re buying the screen and getting the rest of the case for $25.

Again, I would expect this case to sell for at least a little more when it comes to the U.S., but even for $130, this case seems like a bargain when Corsair wants to charge $249 for its case screen alone.

Granted, Corsair’s screen is much larger and supports touch input, but it’s hard not to be impressed by a pretty $110 PC case with a big screen on the side and other fancy features. Lian Li even angled the bottom intake area so the fans do a better job of blowing cool air at your GPU while also giving you a better look at the RGB in your fans.

Read more: Lian Li is replacing mesh front panels with tempered glass on its new Lancool cases

– Matt Safford

MSI X50 Gaming Monitor

OLED panels are all the rage nowadays with gaming monitors, especially QD-OLED panels, because of their increased brightness levels and superior color. MSI combines QD-OLED technology's fantastic color reproduction and responsiveness with an ultra-rapid refresh rate of 500 Hz with its MPG 271QR QD-OLED X50.

The monitor boasts a 2560 x 1440 resolution and a response time of 0.03 ms. It's also DisplayHDR True Black 500 and VESA ClearMR 21000 certified. MSI even uses an AI Care Sensor to intelligently determine if a human is sitting in front of the monitor and adjust brightness levels or power down the monitor completely to improve panel longevity and reduce power consumption.

In addition to the AI Care Sensor, which is part of MSI's broader OLED Care 2.0 protection suite, the MPG 271QR QD-OLED X50 also comes with a 3-year burn-in warranty.

Read more: MSI’s new 500 Hz QD-OLED monitor leverages AI tech to save it from burn-in

-- Brandon Hill

Asus ROG Strix Ace XG248QSG Monitor

When it comes to gaming hardware, a lot of the marketing around monitors involves bragging rights, and Asus definitely has that covered with the world's first and only 610 Hz gaming monitors. While Acer was technically the first to hit the 600 Hz mark last year, the new Asus ROG Strix Ace XG248QSG manages to squeak by with 610 Hz overclocked (600 Hz native).

To reach that lofty mark, Asus had to go with a tried-and-true TN panel, which it has enhanced and now dubs "Super TN." Super TN technology aims to improve color reproduction and brightness, both sticking points with this older (and seldom used technology for modern gaming monitors).

With that said, the ROG Strix Ace XG248QSG sports a 1920 x 1080 resolution (Full HD), AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync compliance, DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 support, and covers 90 percent of DCI-P3.

Read more: Asus debuts 24-inch 610 Hz Full HD gaming monitor with a Super TN panel

-- Brandon Hill

Thermaltake MineCube 360 Ultra ARGB AIO

If you can’t ride your PC like a chicken jockey, you can at least get a Minecraft-themed cooler. Thermaltake’s MineCube 360 is a 360mm AIO cooler with a twist: it has a cube on top of the CPU that shows scenes from Minecraft.

Four sides of the cube hold separate, 3.95-inch, 720 x 720 resolution screens. Presumably you can put images other than Minecraft scenes on these, but why would you want to?

The cooler also features a 360mm radiator and SWAFAN EX12 ARGB fans. The fans attach to each other using magnetic quick connections and you control the whole thing using TT RGB software.

– Avram Piltch

V-Color Xfinity Manta DDR5 RAM

We’ve seen all kinds of RAM modules with different aesthetics. There are DIMMs with RGB and others with 3D printable toppers. Thermaltake even makes a full-color LCD screen you can attach to the top of your memory.

However, we’ve never seen anything like V-Color’s Xfinity Manta. This DDR5 RAM features a programmable LED screen on the front of the module. This monochrome screen can show anything from the amount of RAM to your CPU speed.

The Manta DDR5 modules also features RGB lighting on top.

Read more: V-Color puts displays on memory modules

– Avram Piltch

We're wrapping up our third day of Computex 2025 coverage, and it seems there's no end to the fascinating hardware announced so far. There's a lot of ground to cover for today, but also, be sure to see what's previously been covered in our Day Zero, Day One, and Day Two stories and look at the Tom's Hardware Computex 2025 hub.

Optical SSDs, Immersion-Cooled Workstations, Manjaro Linux Gaming Handhelds, 512GB G-Skill DDR5

Kioxia is determined to make optical SSDs more mainstream, and it was on hand at Computex to demonstrate the technology. Kioxia uses one of Kyocera's Optinity PCIe cards, which delivers optical connectivity via PCIe 5.0. One of Kioxia's CM7 Enterprise SSDs was attached to the Optinity PCIe card and was shown delivering identical performance to the same SSD using a traditional electrical connection.

While delivering the same performance as an existing solution isn't by itself an impressive feat, what is remarkable is that Kioxia can offer this performance with optical cabling 30 meters in length (or greater). Kioxia also claims superior signal integrity that is more reliable in "challenging environments."

Heat is a boss-level enemy of high-performance PCs, and enthusiasts always look for new ways to improve cooling output. Enermax is no stranger to developing high-end components to deliver power and cool PC hardware, and its latest demo takes those efforts to the extreme. Witness the Cirrus Mk1, which uses two-phase liquid immersion cooling to efficiently transfer heat away from hardware components to an external heat exchanger.

The cooling system can handle up to 3,300 watts of power, and to demonstrate this capability, Enermax's test system used an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7960X processor and four GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs attached to a Gigabyte TRX50 AI-TOP motherboard. Powering everything (including the cooling system) were two Enermax Platimax II 2400 watt PSUs. The cooling Cirrus Mk1 alone costs $50,000 before you even think of adding hardware, so it's definitely not for the average gaming enthusiast.

The market for handheld gaming PCs continues to explode, and the introduction of the Nintendo Switch 2 will likely further drive interest in the category. Zotac's Zone 2 is the follow-up to last year's Zone and features an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (rather than the handheld gaming PC-centric Ryzen Z2 Extreme). The system features a 7-inch 1080p display with a 120 Hz refresh rate, up to 32GB of LPDDR5x, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. The system runs Manjaro Linux with KDE Plasma 6 and, most certainly, Proton to provide the broadest compatibility with games.

If you are looking for extreme performance or capacity regarding DDR5 memory, G.Skill has you covered. On the former front, the company showcased 2x 24GB DDR5 memory using SK hynix ICs, hitting a speed of 10,934 MT/s on an ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 APEX motherboard. Also on display was a 4x 64GB DDR5-7000 setup running on an ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard.

If you'd rather lean more into capacity than outright performance, it also loaded up eight 64GB R-DIMM DDR5-6600 CL42 modules for a total of 512GB with an ASUS Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE motherboard.

• Kioxia demos optical SSD, boasts of high performance and 30m+ cabling
• This $50,000 immersion-cooled workstation can support four Nvidia RTX 5090s
• Zotac Zone 2 demoed with Manjaro Linux and an AMOLED panel — 12-core Zen 5 CPU and 32GB RAM under the hood
• G-Skill demos ultra-high capacity DDR5-6600 512GB RAM and 'extreme' 10,934 MT/s module at Computex 2025

The Best of Everything Else

• AMD's FSR Redstone uses machine learning to achieve parity with Nvidia DLSS
• Seasonic's next-generation Prime PSUs to will try to stop connectors from melting
• Tryx's new PC case has an embedded curved display
• Zalman shows off woodgrain ATX and Micro-ATX cases
• Royal Kludge highlights new mechanical keyboards at Computex 2025, available in 60% to 96% layouts
• Thermal Grizzly's open-air der8enchtable is designed for dedicated PC tinkerers
• Cooler Master is working on an all-aluminum case fan that spins up to 4,000 RPM
• Zalman returns to its roots with turbine engine-inspired ZET lineup of CPU air coolers

Zotac's Computex 2025 booth has a beautiful handheld for showcase, pairing a 7-inch AMOLED panel with AMD's powerful Ryzen AI HX 370 APU from the Strix Point family. Breaking from Windows and SteamOS, Zotac has opted for Manjaro Linux as the Operating System. The handheld is currently called Zone 2, but its final name, pricing, and availability are still unconfirmed.

Zotac's original Zone 1 handheld debuted in September last year. It is powered by AMD's last-generation Ryzen 7 8840U, introduced in December 2023. Zotac has clearly been on a slower release schedule compared to the competition. Initially revealed at CES in January, Zotac has once again showcased the expected follow-up to the Zone 1 at Computex. Their representative confirmed that the "Zone 2" designation isn't final, but that's what it will likely be called, with an expected launch window sometime later this year.

The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 APU powering this handheld features a 12-core (4x Zen 5 + 8x Zen 5c) layout, the Radeon 890M (12 CUs) iGPU, along with a 50 TOPS capable NPU. While other alternatives are sticking to the handheld-focused and conservative Ryzen Z2 Extreme, Zotac is choosing the faster and potentially more expensive option. 24/32GB LPDDR5x memory options complement this with a 1TB PCIe 4.0 (M.2 2280) SSD that is user-upgradeable.

Enermax, which is known for its high-end PC components like power supplies, cooling solutions, and PC cases, just showed off an immersion-cooling system at Computex 2025, designed to handle up to 3,300 watts of power. The Cirrus Mk1 uses two-phase liquid immersion cooling to effectively cool components.

The thermally conductive dielectric liquid used for the system has a low evaporation point, allowing it to effectively transfer heat away from the CPU and GPU. A condenser inside the tank then transfers that heat away and pushes it out to a heat exchanger located away from the system.

This means that the Cirrus Mk1 uses two independent thermal loops, ensuring better efficiency and thermal management. This also ensures that the refrigerant is isolated from the rest of the environment, especially as it uses short-chain PFAS. This specific coolant has zero ozone depletion potential and ultra-low global warming potential, but it’s still likely expensive, so you don’t want to accidentally spill it.

The system displayed on the showroom floor features an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7960X paired to four Nvidia RTX 5090 GPUs and a Gigabyte TRX50 AI-TOP motherboard. Overall, the system is quite hefty, measuring 700 mm tall and 500 mm in diameter and weighing 70 kg. It also has a heat exchanger and a control pump, so this device will take up a lot of space on your desk.

Power is delivered through two Enermax Platimax II 2400 watts, putting out a total of 4800 watts for both the cooling and computer systems. This is more than what the average outlet can handle, so you definitely need a custom-made electric circuit if you plan to deploy this system.

If you've been looking to pick up a cheap gaming PC to enter the PC gaming scene, get your hands on cheaper games and better modding support, this could be a useful deal for you. It's a no-nonsense, practical build that will perform like a current-generation games console (ish) but can tweak a game's video settings to a greater extent for a better experience.

Available from AWD-IT, this prebuilt Air Mesh Ryzen 5 5500 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Gaming PC is just £549, saving £400. With a selection of components that also includes the RAM, storage, and PSU, this PC comes complete with almost everything you need to start gaming straight away.

There is, however, one thing missing, and that's the OS or operating system. You can install your own Linux-based OS or pick up a copy of Windows cheaply or for free and install it yourself. If that's a little too complicated for you, then you can select a copy of Windows in the drop-down menu, but this will cost you an extra £89

This system is pretty barebones, but you can add to it at a later date if you wish. It's easy to upgrade with more RAM or more storage, like a 1TB SSD or higher. To give you an idea, the price of just the RTX 4060 GPU is around £270, so you're picking up every other part, including the case, motherboard, RAM, CPU, PSU, SSD, etc, for just £279. Plus, you also get free shipping included.

At Computex 2025, G-Skill has unveiled two new eye-catching DDR5 offerings, demoing a 512GB capacity setup and a new extreme overclock with speeds topping out at over 10,000 MT/s. We took to the floor to bring you the latest.

As mentioned, G-Skill is presenting a new extreme overclock speed demo, showcasing multiple DDR5-10,000+ dual-channel overclocked systems using SK hynix DDR5 ICs. It achieved speeds of up to 10,934 MT/s 24GBx2 using an ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 APEX motherboard and Intel Core Ultra 9 285K CPU.

G-Skill also demoed overclocking on high-capacity DDR5 setups, again using SK hynix DDR5 ICs. We saw a demo of 64 GBx4 at DDR5-7000 CL38 using the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero, AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and on a separate MSI MEG X870E Godlike motherboard with AMD Ryzen 9 9900X.

It also showed 64GBx2 running DDR5-8400 CL48 using an MSI B850 M-ATX motherboard with AMD Ryzen 9600X, and finally 32GBx2 at DDR5-9000 CL48 on the MSI MEG Z890 UNIFY-X motherboard with Intel Core Ultra 9 285K.

G-Skill also showed off three "ultra-low latency" spec builds, running DDR5-6000 CL26 192GB (48GBx4) with the MSI MAG B850M MORTAR WIFI motherboard and AMD Ryzen 9 9900X, DDR5-6400 CL28 192GB (48GBx4) with the Gigabyte X870E AORUS MASTER motherboard and AMD Ryzen 9 9900X, and DDR5-8400 CL34 32GB (16GBx2) with the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z890 APEX motherboard and Intel Core Ultra 9 285K.

Speed aside, we also got a look at G-Skill's high-capacity offering, an overclocked R-DIMM DDR5-6600 CL42 setup with a monstrous 512GB capacity (64GB x 8), again using SK hynix DDR5 ICs. The system is built on an ASUS Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE motherboard and an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7985WX processor.

Also on display is a novel DDR5-10000 64GB CAMM2 module (above). Compression Attached Memory Module technology uses connectors arranged in a grid rather than the customary line you'd expect to find on a DIMM. The memory can lie flat on the motherboard, providing more clearance to the CPU for cooling and featuring shorter traces between the CPU and memory modules for improved signal integrity.

The final eyecatcher is a new neon RAM concept dubbed Neox that we can confirm absolutely pops, both standalone and in the systems we saw. Check out the gallery below.

We're now on our second official day of Computex 2025 coverage, and there is still plenty of exciting hardware news to share. Also, check out our Day Zero and Day One cover, and keep track of our dedicated Computex 2025 hub.

AMD Unleashes Its Performance Might with New Radeon and Threadripper Chips

With Jensen Huang's keynote earlier this week, Nvidia had its day in the limelight, but AMD is now in the driver’s seat with some pertinent hardware announcements.

First up is the Radeon RX 9060 XT, which the company says will launch on June 5 with a $299 price tag for the 8GB VRAM version. If you want to double your VRAM to 16GB, the starting price is $349. As the successor to the RX 7600 XT, the 9060 XT uses a Navi 44 chip built on a TSMC N4P process (as opposed to TSMC N6). The 9060 XT also substantially boosts the number of transistors from 13.3 million to 29.7 million. Leaked benchmarks suggest that the 9060 XT is on average 6 percent faster than Nvidia’s competing GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB at 1440p, although we’ll have to wait until we get actual hardware in our lab to verify those numbers.

Keeping with the GPU side of things, AMD also announced the Navi 48-based Radeon AI Pro R9700. The GPU has 32GB of GDDR6 memory to tackle your most demanding AI tasks and offers 96 TFLOPS of peak FP16 performance. AMD says the launch is scheduled for June, and the usual suspects delivering cards will include ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, and Sapphire (among others).

The last major news from the AMD front pertains to processors, namely, the Threadripper Pro 9000 WX Series. The family starts with the 9945WX, which offers 12 cores, 24 threads, 64MB of L3 cache, and up to a 5.4 GHz maximum boost clock. However, the range-topping chip is the monstrous 9995WX, sporting 96 cores, 192 threads, 384MB of L3 cache, and up to a 5.4 GHz max boost clock. There are also new Threadripper 9000 HEDT processors, with the flagship in the line being the 64-core 9980X.

• AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT launches on June 5, starting at $299
• AMD launches Radeon AI Pro R9700 to challenge Nvidia's AI market dominance
• AMD Announces Threadripper HEDT and Pro 9000-Series CPUs: 96 cores and 192 threads for Desktops and Workstations

SSDs Take Center Stage at Computex

We love the best SSDs here at Tom’s Hardware, and plenty of future contenders were on display this week at Computex. Patriot was on hand with two new SSDs aimed at the consumer market. The PV563 is the world’s first DRAM-less PCIe 5.0 SSD, but still delivers competitive performance with up to 14,000 MB/s reads and up to 11,500 MB/s writes. There’s also the PV593, which includes onboard DRAM. While its read speeds are identical to the PV563, its write speeds are higher at 13,000 MB/s.

Phison is a top vendor of SSD controllers, and the company has a new product on the horizon: the E28. This PCIe 5.0 controller should easily shoot to near the top of the benchmark charts with 14.8 GB/s reads and 14 GB/s writes. Random read and write IOPS are pegged at 2,600K and 3,000K, respectively, while consuming 15 percent less power than competing solutions using 6nm nodes.

TeamGroup is a big name among SSD vendors, and the company unveiled several new SSD colors, including the T-Force AI-Flow. The T-Force AI-Flow uses thermoelectric (TEC) technology for cooling. TEC is controversial because of its high power requirements and potential for condensation buildup. Still, TeamGroup contends it has worked out these kinks with its artificial intelligence-infused cooling solution.

TeamGroup also showed off a crazy-looking triple-SSD cooler called the GD120T. It’s just a concept at this time, and can cool three M.2 SSDs simultaneously using a 120 mm AiO solution. Finally, the T-Force DUO360V2 CPU+SSD AiO Cooler can handle your processor and SSD simultaneously.

• TeamGroup teases T-Force AI-Flow X thermoelectric SSD cooler at Computex 2025
• Patriot unveils world's first DRAMless PCIe 5.0 SSD and 9600MT/s DDR5 CUDIMM memory
• Phison's E28 controller's 14.8 GB/s, 3,000K IOPS, and 7W power draw could make it the new king of PCIe 5.0 performance
• Phison's Apex RAID demo showed us blistering 113 GB/s speeds in Computex demo
• Adata launches ‘Trusta’ enterprise line at Computex — SSDs and RAM for Edge AI and Enterprise users

The Best of the Rest

• TP-Link expands tri-band Wi-Fi 7 family with new routers and an outdoor satellite
• V-Color puts displays on memory modules
• Zotac preps low-profile GeForce RTX 5060, Mini-ITX RTX 5060
• Colorful unveils new RTX 50-Series laptops, wild G-Helmet PC case, and more at Computex
• be quiet! shows off new keyboards, coolers, and PC cases at Computex 2025
• PNY launches new high-speed microSD Express card for Nintendo Switch 2, with 890 MB/s read speeds
• Lian Li is replacing mesh front panels with tempered glass on its new Lancool cases
• Asus ROG Falcata brings split layout and magnetic switches to competitive gaming
• Geometric Future highlights new PC cases, AIOs, and PSUs at Computex 2025

Colorful has taken the covers off some of the most striking new products we've seen anywhere on the Computex 2025 floor, with new motherboards, graphics cards, gaming laptops, and more to behold.

We got a great look at Colorful's debut AM5 motherboard, the CVN X870 ARK FROZEN. It includes a novel On/Off switch that lets you unlatch your GPU from the board to prevent PCIe connector wear.

Under the hood, it sports a 14+2+1 power phase design, 5G, Wi-Fi 7, and a new X3D Game Mode.

We also got look at Colorful's distinctive range of RTX 50-Series GPUs, including its head-turning iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Advanced OC 16GB × DOOM EDITION, which naturally includes Doom colorway accents.

Also new to Colorful's lineup is iGame Shadow DDR5 16GB memory (6800, decked out with a distinctive Chinese ink wash painting design. If features SK hynix M-die chips with overclocking up to 8400 MT/s and a 10-layer PCB design.

Colorful also showed off its new RTX 5060 Ultra W OC 8GB in a distinctive white chassis:

Colorful also has new mini PCs featuring AMD R7 HX225 and AMD Ryzen Al Max+ 395 processors packed into a tiny form factor.

On the portable front, Colorful unveiled its new Rimbook and Origo laptops. The latter is a gaming variant equipped with RTX 5070 and either Intel's i9 or Ultra 9 processors, whereas the Rimbook is a new light ultrabook, coming to "some areas" in June.

Another real head-turner is the iGame G-Helmet PC case, with 0.8mm aluminum panels and a design "inspired by a spaceship command module."

The company also showed off its iGame Ultra Series PC facelift, and this new iGame Neptune all-in-one chassis, replete with stacked radiators that cool the CPU and GPU in a sandwich layout. The Neptune comes with the iGame Z790D5 Neptune motherboard and Intel Core i9-14900K (SP100+), as well as a 2TB M.2 SSD and fully modular iGame 1250W Gold power supply with new ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 standards and the iGame's own GeForce RTX 5080 Neptune OC graphics card.

Finally, we saw the excellent Colorfire MEOW Series PC, a quirky and fun PC designed to pay homage to the glory days of gaming from the 80s and 90s, replete with Bobi cat graphics and a handheld console front.

Phison has been showcasing its data storage innovations at Computex 2025. Of particular interest, we attended a partner demo where the firm utilized 32 of its latest and greatest PCIe Gen5 SSDs in a RAID setup. During the demo, we saw CrystalDiskMark report data transfer rates as high as 113.6 GB/s for reads, and 104.6 GB/s for writes.

The PS5028 for AI Workstation Live Demo

This demonstration of extraordinary speed was enabled by a powerful modern workstation PC and a mix of cutting-edge storage components. Specifically, Phison utilized an AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7978WX CPU, installed on an Asus Pro WS WRX90E-Sage SE motherboard, as the foundation of the system.

The storage subsystem consisted of 32 of Phison’s potent new E28 Gen5 SSDs installed across a trio of Apex Storage X16 Gen5 add-in cards. All these components were installed in a sweet-looking be quiet! chassis, as you can see.

Phison’s new E28 Gen5 SSD rubs shoulders with the best in consumer mid-2025 PC land. A single E28 Gen5 in a modern PC will be able to deliver data transfer speeds of up to 14.8 GB/s reads and 14.0 GB/s writes. The Phison E28 Gen5 is being marketed as “the weapon of choice for serious gaming and productivity,” so it is definitely targeting consumers. Its controller features a quad-CPU architecture, is fabbed on TSMC’s 6nm node, and supports up to 32 TB.

Here we had 32 of Phison’s new E28 Gen5 SSDs; however, each Apex Storage X16 Gen5 add-in card can fit 16 M.2 SSDs (there’s a clue in the name), so two would have sufficed for a 32x SSD demo. We guess three cards were installed for optimal performance, load balancing, or another nuance of the Threadripper-powered Windows system.

The storage performance in this setup seems remarkable. Witnessed data transfer rates as high as 113.6 GB/s for reads, and 104.6 GB/s for writes might seem amazing. However, it was confirmed by a Phison rep that the Windows kernel was actually holding back performance.

AMD has been busy at Computex 2025, where the chipmaker unveiled the exciting Radeon RX 9060 XT and the Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series. To cap off its series of announcements, AMD is thrilled to introduce the Radeon AI Pro R9700, a PCIe 5.0 graphics card designed specifically for professional and workstation users.

RDNA 4 is an architecture geared towards gaming, but that doesn't mean AMD can't apply it to professional-grade graphics cards. For instance, RDNA 3 saw the mainstream Radeon RX 7000 series successfully coexisting with the Radeon Pro W7000 series. The same situation will occur with RDNA 4. AMD has already unveiled four RDNA 4-powered gaming graphics cards, yet the Radeon AI Pro R9700 is the first RDNA 4 professional graphics card to enter the market. The new workstation graphics card aims to replace the RDNA 3-powered Radeon Pro W7800, which has been faithfully catering to consumers since 2023.

The Radeon AI Pro R9700 utilizes the Navi 48 silicon. It's currently the largest RDNA 4 silicon to date, with a die size of 357 mm² and home to 53.9 billion transistors. Navi 48 is also found in the Radeon RX 9070 series. It's a substantially smaller silicon than the last-generation Navi 31 silicon, which is 529 mm² with 57.7 billion transistors. It's nothing short of impressive that Navi 48 is roughly 33% smaller but still has 93% of the transistors of Navi 31.

Navi 48, a product of TSMC's N4P (4nm) FinFET process node, adheres to a monolithic design. On the contrary, Navi 31 features an MCM (Multi-Chip Module) design, consisting of chiplets interconnected to a monolithic die. That's the reason why Navi 31 is so enormous. The GCD (Graphics Complex Die) alone measures 304.35 mm², whereas each of the six MCDs (Memory Cache Die) is 37.52 mm².

With Navi 48, AMD returned to a monolithic die and, with N4P's help, reduced the die size by 33%. Nonetheless, Navi 48 is up to 38% denser than Navi 31. The former has a density of 151 million transistors per mm², whereas the latter comes in at 109.1 million transistors per mm².

In terms of composition, the Navi 48 features 64 RDNA 4 Compute Units (CUs), which enable a maximum of 4,096 Streaming Processors (SPs). In contrast, the Navi 31 is equipped with 96 RDNA 3 CUs, for a total of 6,144 SPs. More CUs don't necessarily mean more performance since RDNA 4 delivers considerable generation-over-generation performance uplift over RDNA 3.

AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700 Specifications

The Radeon Pro W7800 leverages the full Navi 48 silicon, so it's rocking 4,096 SPs, 9% fewer than the Radeon Pro W7800. This correlates to the graphics card having 9% fewer AI accelerators. In the Radeon AI Pro R9700 's defense, the CUs are RDNA 4, and the AI accelerators are second-generation.

Regarding FP16 performance, the Radeon AI Pro R9700 peaks at 96 TFLOPS, 6% faster than the Radeon Pro W7800. AMD rates the graphics card with a 1,531 TOPS of AI performance.

AMD claims the Radeon AI Pro R9700 offers 2X improved performance over the Radeon Pro W7800 in DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B. For some strange reason, AMD compared the Radeon AI Pro R9700 to the GeForce RTX 5080. Tested in a few large AI models, the Radeon AI Pro R9700 delivered up to 5X higher performance than the RTX 5080.

The Radeon AI Pro R9700 is equipped with 32GB of GDDR6 memory and a 256-bit memory interface. This configuration results in a memory bandwidth of up to 640 GB/s, 11% more than the Radeon Pro W7800 32GB but 26% less than the Radeon Pro W7800 48GB. As for the Infinity Cache, the Radeon AI Pro R9700 still has 64MB, the same as the Radeon Pro W7800 32GB.

With 32GB of onboard memory, the Radeon AI Pro R9700 can tackle most AI models. It has the capacity of the Radeon Pro W7800, but not as much as the 48GB variant. The Radeon AI Pro R9700's typical blower-type design will enable users to rock up to four of them inside a single system, such as AMD's Ryzen Threadripper platform, which has good multi-GPU support. With four of them, users will have access to 128GB, more than enough for heavy models that exceed 100GB of VRAM usage.

AMD announced its new Zen 5-powered Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9000 WX-series and non-Pro processors here at Computex 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan, touting up to 96 cores and 192 threads in the flagship 9995WX. AMD's newest 'Shamida Peak' Threadrippers bring the benefits of the Zen 5 architecture to AMD's premier WX-Series workstation and non-Pro processors, saying they deliver up to 2.2X the performance in rendering than Intel's fastest competing Xeon-W chips.

AMD also revamped its non-Pro Ryzen Threadripper 9000-series chips, with the flagship 9980X HEDT chip wielding 64 cores and 128 threads. AMD's full Threadripper 9000 series will be available in July.

The Threadripper 9000 chips have much in common with their predecessors, the Threadripper 7000 series, with AMD continuing to split the chips into the Pro and HEDT swimlanes. The chips also have the same core counts, base clocks, and cache capacities (up to 384MB) as the prior-gen models across the range of the product stack, but the peak boost clocks have been bumped up to 5.4 GHz for all models, an increase ranging from 100 to 300 MHz. The TDP ratings also remain the same 350W for all models.

The processors provide up to 22% more performance than the prior-gen in threaded workloads, and the lion's share of their increased performance from the jump from the Zen 4 architecture to Zen 5, which imparts a 16% IPC gain, and the move from 5nm to 4nm for the compute dies.

AVX-512 support is also fully baked into the design, dramamatically improving performance in applications that utilize the dense instruction set. The chip also come with all of the same I/O connectivity as before, including up to 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes, but memory support has been bumped up from DDR5-5200 to DDR5-6400. ECC is fully supported and AMD's Pro chips feature the AMD Pro Technolgies suite of RAS features.

As with all of AMD's Threadripper chips, these models have the same design as AMD's data center chips, in this case, the EPYC 'Turin' 9005 series, but come with special firmware and power tuning to optimize them for workstation platforms.

As you can see above, the chips have a large central 6nm I/O die flanked by rows of 4nm compute dies. With this generation, AMD has rotated the eight-core compute dies 90 degrees and arranged them into four vertical rows of three chips apiece, for a total of 12 compute dies with 96 cores for the flagship 9995WX. AMD removes four of those chips to create the 64-core 9980X, with further adjustments to the number of compute dies for the different models.

Both families of Threadripper 9000 chips will drop into the same sTR5 socket as the prior-gen chips. The WR90 platform with support for eight channels of memory will house the Pro chips, while value-optmized TRX50 boards with support for four channels of memory house the HEDT processors.

After a BIOS update, the new chips are compatible with existing motherboards. AMD expects a few new refreshed motherboard models from vendors, but it says the chips will largely leverage the existing ecosystem of sTR5 motherboards. As such, all of the existing sTR5 coolers on the market are fully compatible with the new processors.

AMD shared a few benchmarks to underline its performance superiority over Intel's Xeon-W lineup, but as with all vendor-provided benchmarks, take them with a grain of salt. We've included the full test notes below.

AMD claims the 96-core Threadripper 9995WX is 2.2X faster than Intel's 60-core flagship W9-3595X in the Cinebench multi-core rendering benchmark, an incredible lead. It's also 22% faster than the previous-gen 96-core Threadripper 7995WX.

AMD also shared a broader spate of benchmarks, with impressive gains ranging from 140% to 245% faster than the W9-3595X in a diverse set of real-world applications like media and entertainment, design and manufacturing, and LLM inference verticals, among others.

Overall AMD's Threadripper 9000 series appears poised to continue its utter dominance over Intel's competing workstation processors. AMD hasn't shared pricing yet, but given that its most affordable previous-gen HEDT model weighed in at $1,400 while the flagship retailed for $4,999, these chips will undoubtedly be pricey. As you'd expect, we'll have our own benchmarks coming around the time of launch in July.

Jack Huynh, the Senior Vice President and GM of AMD's Computing and Graphics Group, will take the stage today in Taipei, Taiwan, for the company's Computex 2025 keynote. The event begins today at 11 p.m. ET, and we'll be covering it live here with all the latest updates.

While we aren’t yet sure what the company will reveal, rumors have been circulating for months about AMD’s coming Radeon 9070 GPUs and next-gen Threadripper CPUs, so it's possible those will make an appearance. We also expect to hear plenty about AI, AI, and more AI, spanning from desktop PCs and laptops to the edge and data center applications. Pull up a seat, the event begins shortly.

Jack Huynh has taken to the stage, talking about AMD's AI ecosystem for PCs and data center, touting both its CPUs and GPUs as drivers for the future of AI.

Huynh is outlining the need for its "Project Amethyst" with Sony to develop FSR4 to speed performance in gaming. All using AI, of course, to optimize frames with ML Resolution.

Huynh says super resolution was only the opening chapter, and that the company wants to take it even further. in the second half of the year the company will introduce FSR "Redstone" to push performance further by creating realistic light behavior.

Redstone will come to all RDNA4 later this year, with 60 titles coming.

AMD announced the Radeon RX 9060 XT with 16GB of VRAM, giving it an advantage over the 5060 Ti. The cards launch June 5 worldwide for $349.

AMD claims 15% more performance per dollar across a test suite of 40 games.

Huynh outlined the performance of the company's fleet of AI PC processors, claiming anywhere from 1.3X to 3X faster performance than competing Intel chips.

Huynh demoed a real-time translation from Chinese to English using an AI PC with a voice-to-voice tool.

AMD demoed an AI algorithm used for radiologists, but with the model running on a local AI PC. The model analysed an image from a CT scan.

The program runs locally to keep data secure without uploading it to the cloud. AMD also demoed using the AI to write a comprehensive report on the analysis.

AMD is having issues with its livestream, which is now frozen. We'll keep waiting for it to resume while reading the YouTube comment section that insists this is an Nvidia attack (spoiler alert; it isn't).

The livestream is up and running again, with Lenovo on the stage talking about its partnership with AMD.

Here's a link to our coverage of the Radeon RX 9060 XT launch with all the details.

Here's an image of the Navi 48 die. Navi 48 uses the TSMC N4P (4nm) FinFET process node.

AMD is having yet more issues with its livestream, so here's something from the future: AMD will also announce the Radeon AI Pro R9700. You can read our full coverage at that link.

Still waiting for the livestream to work...

AMD is also announcing its Threadripper Pro 9000 WX-series and non-pro models today with up to 96 cores and 192 threads. You can read our full coverage here while we wait to see if AMD can fix the livestream.

Well, folks, it appears that AMD's livestream is officially dead, at least for now. We'll keep our eyes peeled to see when or if it resumes.

Computex 2025 soldiers on as we're now into the trade show's first "official" day. You can catch our Day Zero coverage here and keep track of our dedicated Computex 2025 hub.

Swanky Cases Catch Our Eye

Computex is an opportune time for case manufacturers to show off not only their upcoming retail products, but also outlandish concepts and limited edition models. InWin definitely caught our attention with its ChronoMancy, which stands nearly four feet tall. The ChronoMancy almost looks like something you'd find deep below the ocean's surface (although InWin says that it was designed to look like a trophy).

The case opens when you wave your hand in front of it, or you can simply press a button. Given its size, the ChronoMancy can fit E-ATX motherboards and the most powerful Nvidia RTX 50 Series graphics cards.

InWin also showcased several other cases, including the WIEW, COVALENT, TACTIX, SHIFT, and DLITE.

Hyte was also on hand with its X50 case, available in various colors, including a vibrant red (Hyte calls it Cherry). While most PC cases embrace hard edges and sharp angles all around, the X50 goes "softer" with round corners. The case supports up to ten fans, up to a 360 mm radiator, and will accommodate full-size ATX power supplies.

The X50 Air carries the same design language, but features micro-mesh side panels instead of laminated glass. Hyte says the X50 will go on sale this summer for $149.99, while the X50 Air will be cheaper at $119.99.

For those who are into retro design, look at the SilverStone FLP02. It's designed to look like a tower case from the late 80s/early 90s, complete with the off-white color and faux 5.25-inch floppy drives. Despite its appearance, the FLP02 can accommodate the latest and greatest graphics cards, and the front panel even has hidden USB-C and USB-A ports. SilverStone says that the FLP02 will arrive in stores during the second half of 2025, priced at $220.

• InWin celebrates 40 years with the ChronoMancy — futuristic 1.1m case opens with the wave of a wand
• Hyte's new X50 PC case comes with a rounded aesthetic, high-performance mesh, and fun colors
• SilverStone reveals the FLP02 late-80s style tower PC case — proudly beige but thoroughly modern inside
• Cooler Master plans to launch a curved-glass case for around $70 – at least outside of the U.S.
• NZXT goes big and small at Computex with the H9 Flow and H3 Flow cases
• Cooler Master unveils new pre-built PC with a 360 x 360mm radiator, new QUBE 500, and more
• Corsair's Air 5400 features a triple-chamber design for high-performance cooling

New Gaming Laptops and Handheld Gaming PCs

If you're interested in premium gaming laptops, Razer has you covered with a new Blade 14. According to the company, this is the thinnest Blade 14 it has ever released (15.7 mm at its thinnest point). However, that doesn't mean that the laptop is underpowered; far from it. It is available with RTX 5070 or RTX 5060 GPUs and a powerful AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processor paired with up to 64GB of LPDDR5X memory. You'll also find a sweet 14-inch 2880 x 1800 OLED display with a 120 Hz refresh rate and Nvidia G-Sync support. Pricing starts at $2,299.99 if you opt for the RTX 5060 GPU.

MSI was also on hand with four new gaming laptops with 16-inch, 17-inch, and 18-inch displays (all offering a 2560 x 1440 resolution and 240 Hz). Depending on how you option the systems, you can get RTX 5060/5070 GPUs, Ryzen 8000 or Core Ultra 200 HX processors, and up to 96GB of DDR5-6400 memory.

If you want something more portable, the Claw A8 gaming handheld uses a Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor with integrated Ryzen graphics. The device now sports a 120 Hz 1920 x 1200 IPS display and supports up to 24GB of LPDDR5X-8000. The Claw A8 features a relatively beefy 80 WHr battery, which should give it long endurance, and you'll find two USB-C ports, a microSD reader, and a fingerprint reader onboard. M.2 2280 SSDs are also supported, so you won't have to worry about searching for not-as-popular 2230 or 2242 cards.

• Razer unveils new Blade 14 laptop with Nvidia RTX 50 series GPUs and 3K 120Hz OLED display
• MSI brings AMD gaming handheld, updated mid-range gaming laptops to Computex

The Best of the Rest

• Crucial announces T710 SSD with 14.9 GB/s of performance, X10 portable SSD up to 8TB
• Asus introduces 3000-watt PSU — enough capacity to power 4 RTX 5090s
• Sudokoo shows off brand-new CPU cooler and fan designs — new kid on the block puts more displays inside PCs
• Cherry unveils next-generation keyboard switches with inductive sensing technology — claims no mechanical wear and 50% power reduction
• Elgato now lets you turn any device you want into a Stream Deck

NZXT’s Kraken line of liquid coolers dates back more than a decade. And along with its long line of PC cases, motherboards, and PSUs, the company has plenty of experience dealing with PC heat dissipation. Today, we’re looking at the company’s latest flagship AIO, the Kraken Plus 360 RGB.

What sets this cooler apart from competitors is its ability to excel in two scenarios: By default, it operates stealthily, delivering essential thermal performance. Most users will prefer this mode of operation. However, for those who want to win overclocking competitions or simply just want the best possible temperatures, unlocking the fan speeds results in total thermal domination, at the cost of noise levels.

Let’s take a quick look at the Kraken Plus 360 RGB’s specifications, then we’ll dive into its features and our benchmark testing.

Cooler specifications

Packing and included contents

The packaging for the cooler is the typical cardboard, showcasing the product on the outside.

Included in the box are the following:

• F360 RGB Core Fan
• 360mm radiator
• Mounting accessories for modern AMD and Intel platforms
• Installation manual
• Connection cables
• 1.54-inch 240x240 LCD Screen

Features of NZXT’s Kraken Plus 360 RGB

▶ Heatsink and Fan design

The design of the radiator seems fairly normal, with a standard-sized 27 mm-thick radiator.

The main obvious difference in this unit’s design versus competitors is the inclusion of a unified fan, the F360 RGB Core.

This choice has the advantage of a cleaner look and simpler installation. But the downside is in the theoretical situation where one motor might fail, forcing you to replace it with a new unified fan or three separate new spinners.

These fans support ARGB lighting with 8 LEDs each, controlled by NZXT’s CAM software. They’re just a little thicker than traditional fans, at 26 mm. Airflow is rated at 77 CFM per fan, with a maximum of 3.07 mm H20 static pressure per fan. Fan speeds are rated at 500-2400 RPMs, +-10%.

▶ Pre-installed thermal paste, large copper cold plate

The AIO arrives with pre-installed thermal paste applied to a large copper cold plate. But make sure you get the installation right on the first try, because there’s no extra paste included.

▶ 1.5-inch LCD Display

On top of the CPU block is a 1.5” LCD with a 240x240 resolution. While this is useful, I’d like the screen to be larger. Most high-end AIO competitors incorporate a 2.5-inch or larger screen and 480x480 resolution (or higher) into their AIOs.

▶ CAM Software

To control and customize this AIO, you’ll need to download NZXT’s CAM software. By default, the AIO operates based on the temperature of its liquids. You can change this to respond to the CPU's temperature, or another sensor, if you so desire.

There are a few different options for customizing the AIO’s small display. You can display up to two separate temperature sensors.

Alternatively, you can set the display to a clock face – or use it to play videos from YouTube.

▶ Complete RAM Compatibility, no matter the size of DDR5

As is typical with most AIO liquid coolers, NZXT’s Kraken Plus 360 RGB does not interfere or overhang RAM DIMMs, allowing for full compatibility, no matter how tall (or short) your DDR4 or DDR5 is.

Real world testing configuration – Intel LGA1700 and AMD AM5 platform

My results may differ from others because I emphasize results that are comparable to real-world use. This means that I test CPU coolers inside a closed desktop case, which increases cooling difficulty compared to other testing methods.

Many will test CPU coolers outside of a case, on an open test bench. Open benches have lowered ambient temperatures, which makes weak coolers appear stronger than they are. Some publications have also used generic thermal plates to test cooling solutions. I reject both of these methods because they don’t accurately reflect the real-world conditions where a CPU cooler is typically used.

My previous reviews have tested Intel’s latest platform, using the Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake CPU. But we’re retiring this from our testing suite. Between BIOS changes and Windows updates, Arrow Lake’s thermal characteristics have changed in some scenarios, rendering much of our previous testing data useless.

With today’s review, we’re also testing AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This is a beast of a CPU, providing the best gaming and multithreaded performance on the market. It can prove quite challenging thermally when PBO is enabled for overclocking.

AM5 and 1851 installation

The installation of this cooler is simple for both Intel and AMD CPUs.

1. You’ll first need to apply the included backplate if you’re using an Intel CPU. AMD users will remove the default mounting mechanism.

2. Next, you’ll need to install the standoffs against the mounting holes.

3. This cooler does not need mounting bars, but has them built into the CPU block. If you’re using AMD, you’ll need to remove the default Intel brackets and replace them with the AMD supporting ones. Press the CPU block against the standoffs, and secure it with the included thumb screws.

4. Next, you’ll need to connect the fan and CPU block wires, which have a few connections: PWM, SATA, and others that connect to the AIO and fans.

5. Once complete, turn on your computer. You’ll see that despite the extra cabling, the AIO has a very clean look and won’t cause the appearance of cable clutter!

CPU-only thermal results with PBO enabled: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D

Without power limits enforced, the hottest CPUs on the market will hit their peak temperature (TJ Max) and thermally throttle with even the strongest of air coolers and even most liquid coolers on the market in intensive stress testing. For the best liquid coolers on the market, the results of this test will be shown using the CPU’s temperature.

However, when the CPU reaches its peak temperature, I’ve measured the CPU package power to determine the maximum wattage cooled, to best compare their performance. It’s important to note that thermal performance can scale differently depending on the CPU it’s being tested with.

We’ll start by looking at the performance of this cooler with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU, with the disclaimer that I’ve only had a limited amount of time to test coolers with this system.

The Kraken Plus’ results on AMD’s Ryzen 9950X3D are extremely impressive – the second-best I’ve seen thus far. Keep in mind, however, that to achieve this level of performance you’ll need to manually configure the AIO to run at full speed. By default, this AIO will run silently. Next up, we’ll examine how thermal performance can vary depending on whether this AIO is running at full speed or running silently.

CPU-only thermal results with power limits removed: Intel’s i7-14700K

Now let’s look at how this cooler performs with Intel’s i7-14700K. The performance here is insane, matching many 360mm AIOs and almost able to handle the full heat of the CPU. Keep in mind that I test coolers at 23 degrees Celsius! So if you’re using the cooler in an environment with a lower temperature, it may be able to handle the full power of the CPU.

Just as with AMD’s flagship CPU, the NZXT Kraken Plus 360 RGB shows the second-best performance I’ve seen from any AIO yet. But again, this is at full speed, which can be quite noisy.

If you set the cooler to run in silent mode, it won’t perform as strongly, similar to a good air cooler. However, it does run dead silent in that scenario, quieter than I am capable of measuring.

Maximum noise levels

A cooler’s maximum performance can’t be considered as the only important metric, because some coolers run louder or quieter than others. The maximum noise level this cooler operates at is 49.2 dBA, which isn’t as quiet as some competing coolers. So if dissipating the maximum amount of heat isn’t your main priority, you’ll likely want to limit its speed.

Please note that this cooler is listed twice in this list. At full speed, it might reach 49.2 dBA, but in silent mode, it operates so quietly that I can’t measure the noise level properly.

200W Power Limit

My recent reviews have focused more on tests with both the CPU and GPU being stressed, but many of y’all have indicated that you would like to see more CPU-only tests. So I’ve tested thermal and noise performance for AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D at stock CPU settings, which limits power consumption to 200W.

With a stock power configuration for AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D, NZXT’s Kraken Plus 360 RGB shows its dual nature again, running silently, but with thermals similar to an air cooler at default settings. When the cooler is allowed to run at full speed, it jumps ahead with some of the best results we’ve seen on this AMD platform.

150W CPU + 290W GPU results

Testing a CPU Cooler in isolation is great for synthetic benchmarks, but doesn’t tell the whole story of how it will perform. If your GPU is running a full load, it makes it harder for your CPU cooler to do its job due to the increased heat within your computer case.

The CPU power limit of 150W was chosen based on the worst CPU power consumption I’ve seen reported in gaming with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D. My personal experience tells me most games use much lower amounts of power, but this might be biased by the games I play.

For this and the next test, I didn’t feel the need to test the cooler at its maximum potential. It performs well enough in silent mode, with the third-best results we’ve seen on AMD’s flagship CPU. If you really need the best thermals in this scenario, I’m sure you’ll get them if you allow the AIO to operate at its loudest noise levels.

140W CPU results

The last round of test results we’ll look at in today’s review is a test with a 140W power limit imposed. This level of power is dramatically easier to cool for most CPU coolers, making it the easiest test we’ll run with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU for most reviews. But I’ve recorded lower power results for comparisons with SFF and air coolers for future reviews.

As with the previous results, I’ve limited testing to the silent mode here. There’s really no need for better thermals in this situation, and the cooler runs dead silently in this mode. Sure, if you let the fans at full speed, it would reduce thermals into the 50s, but what’s the point of that?

Noise Normalized CPU-only thermal results

Finding the right balance between fan noise levels and cooling performance is important. While running fans at full speed can improve cooling capacity to some extent, the benefits are limited, and many users prefer a quieter system. Many users consider these tests to be the most important of all, so let’s take a look at the cooler’s noise-normalized performance.

We’ll be looking at two different, distinct tests. We’ll first look at our traditional noise-equalized results with Intel’s i7-14700K, which places a full CPU load with the cooler’s noise levels set to 38.9 dBA.

With 257W cooled, NZXT’s Kraken Plus 360 RGB is one of the best AIOs on the market, hands down! Technically, Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III Pro did a single watt better, but that is a margin of error difference. As far as I’m concerned, these coolers perform equally strong when noise is normalized.

Now let’s take a look at our noise-equalized tests utilizing AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU. Two changes (in comparison to our first test) have been made to increase the difficulty of this challenge! The noise level of the CPU coolers has been reduced to 37.3 dBA, and I’ve also run a full load on MSI’s RTX 4070 TI Super GPU at the same time to increase the difficulty of this test.

Conclusion

NZXT’s Kraken Plus 360 RGB is a killer cooler with a dual nature: In its default mode, it operates silently, with noise levels so low I can’t properly measure them. Alternatively, users who don’t mind noise can enable the full, raw power of the AIO, letting it tackle the heat of the hottest overclocked CPUs, like Intel’s i7-14700K or AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D.

My only complaint about this AIO is that the 240 x 240 1.5-inch screen isn’t quite large enough to be useful. If you’re going to add a screen at all, it should be bigger and with a higher resolution. And if you don’t care about a screen, there are plenty of well-performing AIOs that cost a lot less than the new Kraken. Most aren’t as quiet as this beast in silent mode, though.