The appetite for retro computing grows ever larger, and there are probably hundreds of thousands of homebrew software projects targeting machines from the last century. However, few of those are full-featured, 32-bit, and GUI-driven operating systems that can fit in a single floppy, with some modern conveniences to boot. Enter the upcoming HamsterOS, set for release in November.

HamsterOS is seemingly targeted at using PCs from the 386/486 era, along with DOS software. After loading from the floppy disk, it'll present a user interface with most every commonly used utility: a notepad, image viewer, calculator, file finder, drive icons, and a window manager. The file browser should have up to five windows once, complete with per-type icons.

Crucially, HamsterOS includes an in-kernel VM86 DOS box, and a FreeDOS fallback for programs that might not run well within. Other noteworthy tech aspects include support for FAT 12/16/32 with read-back verification, dedicated format and disk utilities, a partition manager, and even SCSI diagnostic tools. The operating system defaults to 16-color VGA resolution, but the ability to use 256 colors exists as a diagnostic option. There's a neat fallback to VGA as a safe mode after three failed crashes, too.

Mean Hamster, the company developing HamsterOS, didn't publish any sort of mission statement, but judging by the feature set and integration with its HamsterWeazle floppy image management utility (for use with GreaseWeazle drives), it seems to be a more practical means of managing and/or using machines from the era.

The list of hardware support is what you'd expect for 1980 and 1990's era machines, comprising ATA IDE and CD-ROM, ISA floppies, serial and PS/2 mice (with wheel support, too). The only supported soundcard is the Sound Blaster 16, though loadable drivers should let tinkerers expand the list; plus it's possible that the built-in FreeDOS support allows for using most any type of hardware regardless.

The multitasking architecture is cooperative, meaning it's somewhat old-school in its approach, with each program in charge of regularly yielding control back to the OS. This is different and inferior at face value than the now-standard preemptive multitasking, but it ought also to allow for generally increased responsiveness with slow disks, lower RAM usage, and broader compatibility with DOS applications. To keep things running smoothly, HamsterOS includes I/O stall detection if it's frozen for over 8 seconds. HamsterOS isn't just meant to run DOS stuff, though, as it has its own app format.

Mean Hamster flatly says that "HamsterOS is well past the 'can it boot' stage" and that most every listed feature is already implemented. The company says it's focusing on stability and performance improvements as well as bugfixes. It seems to be calling the OS a "product," so it seems likely that it'll be commercial and closed-source, unlike most projects of this type. A good tool is always worth paying for, though.

Enterprising enthusiast Wenting has turned an M5Stack PaperS3 dev kit with an e-ink screen into a more-or-less fully functional Game Boy. If you're not a hardware hacker yourself, there's a fair chance you've never heard of Wenting Zhang or Modos Labs. The engineer's "Wenting Channel" on YouTube has been a favorite of niche tech nerds for a long time, showcasing all kinds of hardware hacking expertise. Zhang spent the last several years turning that expertise into Modos Labs, a company whose high-refresh e-Ink displays we've covered before.

Okay, it won't play real cartridges, the sound is kind of jank, and the performance isn't always full speed. Still, this is quite an achievement for a few reasons. The PaperS3 is an e-Ink dev kit, not really a commercial product. It's intended for prototyping and, well, exactly this sort of hardware hacking. A key detail to understand is that this device isn't powered by some multi-core Rockchip or Allwinner SoC, but rather by an ultra-low-cost ESP32-S3 microcontroller with just two cores running at clock rates measured in hundreds of MHz, not GHz. Moreover, its e-Ink display is not really intended for the kind of smooth refresh normally required for playing video games, yet Zhang pulled it off.

To understand how this Game Boy emulator is even possible, you have to understand Zhang's breakthrough with E-ink hardware, which he originally developed for his open-source monitor project, the Modos Flow. He has a whole video explaining the tech, but the summary is basically that he replaced the display controller of a typical e-Ink display with a powerful FPGA so that he could treat every single pixel as an independent display region and then only update the parts of the screen that are actually changing each frame.

How, then, did he achieve this on the embedded controller in the PaperS3? It's only possible because the Game Boy screen is very low resolution by modern standards at just 160x144 pixels. The screen on the PaperS3 is 960x540, so he was able to multiply the resolution by three to give him enough room for dithering to reproduce the four possible shades of the original Game Boy screen. This process takes up almost the entirety of the second CPU core in the ESP32, leaving just enough room for audio processing while the actual emulation happens on the first CPU core.

The end result is a very convincing facsimile of the Game Boy's display, except instead of being a tiny and dim LCD, it's a razor-sharp, crystal-clear e-Ink display. Zhang even implemented some quality-of-life features, such as partial Bluetooth LE controller support as well as dedicated quick-save and quick-load touchscreen 'buttons' to save the emulator's state. You can even load a state directly from the front-end, allowing you to instantly resume where you left off when you have to stop.

That's not to say the project is flawless, though. For one thing, it relies on touchscreen controls with no haptic feedback because the device simply doesn't have the requisite hardware for it. Perhaps more pressingly, the PaperS3 only has a simple piezo buzzer for sound, and while Zhang pulled off some real hackery to get recognizable Game Boy audio out of the mono buzzer (by using pseudo-polyphony like a ZX Spectrum hacker), it doesn't quite sound like a real Game Boy. The hacker also doesn't discuss the battery life of the device while running his emulator; given that he's pushing both CPU cores of the microcontroller to their limits, and also that e-Ink displays are actually quite power-thirsty when driven at 60 Hz, we can't imagine it's great.

If you're keen to try out "Paper Boy S3", Zhang says he's uploaded it to the M5Burner tool that serves as both a firmware flasher and app store for the M5Stack devices. However, as he notes himself in his video on the project, PaperS3 is actually already discontinued by the manufacturer, so you might have a hard time getting hold of one if you don't already. Still, the project serves as a fascinating demo for what can be done with ultra-low-end hardware and a direct counterpoint to at least one of the weaknesses of e-Ink displays.

Sony has unceremoniously informed its PlayStation customers in the United Kingdom that 551 movies from StudioCanal will be removed from their accounts on September 1, 2026. If you bought any of the films included in this list, you'll no longer be able to access them. There is no workaround, no method to offload them to another device; just absolute, emotionless deletion that doesn't even offer refunds.

The lineup includes some truly legendary movies such as Terminator 2, Apocalypse Now, Mulholland Drive, Moonlight, and Dawn Till Dusk — essentially every film that StudioCanal distributed in the UK. Sony cites licensing agreements between it and the French company as the reason behind the sudden removal. The announcement doesn't include any other details beyond the list of the affected films.

Sony began selling movies and shows on the PlayStation Store in 2008. During the PS3 era, you could actually transfer the content to view on other devices, but that feature was removed on the PS4. In 2021, after the PS5 had launched, Sony stopped selling films and TV series entirely on PSN, which meant that it likely wouldn't renew contractual agreements with studios and distributors going forward.

The only exception to this rule was in 2023, when Sony began a similar deletion spree of Discovery Network shows but signed a new licensing deal to keep them on the platform. It remains to be seen whether public backlash can usher in a similar response for StudioCanal movies this time. You might not have heard its name before, but the studio is responsible for bringing countless popular movies to the UK.

For now, this is yet another distressing reminder of the digital precedent corporations have set for us. You no longer truly own any digital content you purchase; rather, it's just being licensed to you indefinitely. And you agree to this precedent "willingly" when you accept all those terms and conditions that veil ownership rights under fine print.

The moment the provider decides it's not viable to maintain said content, you're at risk of losing access to something you already paid for. It's like a subscription service with extra steps — as if people aren't growing wary enough of those already — except it was never advertised like that.

Despite Valve’s efforts to prevent scalpers from taking advantage of the Steam Machine’s limited supply, there are still a few opportunists out there who are taking the risk of selling the pre-order slot that they have won. A quick search for “Steam Machine” on eBay would pull up results for pre-order slots sold at a significant premium above Valve’s own $1,049 retail price.

We see various listings for the 512GB version selling between $1,363.70 to $2,800 — a 30% to 167% premium. Scalper prices for the 2TB version are far more egregious, with listings priced between $2,399 and $2,899, making it 93% to 140% more expensive than buying it directly from the Steam Store.

Valve has already anticipated this event, especially given the massive interest in the Steam Machine and limited supply. This has happened multiple times before, especially with the arrival of the PlayStation 5 and every Nvidia GPU launch since the 30 series. To avoid frustration among legitimate gamers who couldn’t score a console during the first run of pre-orders but see several listings from third-party sellers with excruciatingly tall markups, Valve set up a randomized reservation system to make buying the Steam Machine as fair as possible.

“A launch that starts at a specific day and time tends to reward bots, people with fast internet connections, talented gaming fingers for quick F5/refresh reactions, and those who can schedule their life around that moment. By accepting reservation signups over the course of a few days, without any incentive to be first, we're hoping to take away some of that friction,” the company said on the Steam Machine FAQ section. “The longer timeframe also allows us to do some extra validation on the signups to make sure they're real accounts, with only one per household.”

There are some stringent requirements before a Steam account can be considered for the privilege of buying a Steam Machine. This includes: a Steam account in good standing, a Steam purchase on or before April 27, 2026, and only one Steam Machine per household. These criteria will make it quite difficult for professional scalpers to scoop up multiple Steam Machine units and sell them at a premium on the used market. Despite that, it seems a few people are willing to trade their slot for cash and have put their reservations up for sale on eBay.

If you weren’t lucky enough to secure a Steam Machine reservation, you might get tempted to pick one up from these scalpers. However, we strongly advise against that, as you’re taking several risks. For one, there is no guarantee that the seller you’re talking to is legitimate. Even though they may have 100% rating, it’s quite easy to game the system to achieve this. You might end up getting scammed out of your hard-earned cash, especially if they ask for payment first before shipping the item.

While being among the first to get a Steam Machine might bring a good feeling, you shouldn’t let FOMO dictate your spending decisions. In fact, it might even be better to wait a little longer because the first batch of Steam Machines will only have one 16GB stick of RAM, meaning it won’t have the advantages of dual-channel memory. While there’s no guarantee that future releases will use two 8GB sticks instead, Valve said this may change.

Price hikes! Get your price hikes here! Hot on the heels of Apple's upward push of dollar figures, ganging up with Framework, and harnessing the disillusion caused by the price of Valve's Steam Machine... It's now Microsoft's turn. The ailing division is enacting yet another increase to the price of the Xbox Series consoles, at $100 more for the 512 GB versions and $150 more for the 1 TB model. The pricing will come into effect in roughly a month and change, on August 1st.

The firm is also killing the 2 TB version of the Xbox Series X, in an echo of Apple slicing away the higher-RAM variants of its Mac Studio computers. If you were on the fence about buying one of those, it would be wise to rush, as at the current price of "only" around $799.99, stocks are unlikely to last. Here's the new pricing, in all its glory:

• Xbox Series S, 512 GB, Digital Edition: $499.99
• Xbox Series S, 1 TB, Digital Edition: $599.99
• Xbox Series X, 1 TB, Digital Edition: $749.99
• Xbox Series X, 1 TB: $799.99

Microsoft is also adding a few options for payment and alternative purchases. Buy Now, Pay Later for splitting purchases across short-term installments for consoles bought at the Microsoft store, confirming rumors of a partnership with well-known payment processor Klarna. If that's not quite your jam, there's also interest-free 12-month financing available at Amazon for Xbox hardware.

The company is expanding Xbox trade-ins, stating that it's "working with retail partners" to enable players to sell their consoles to stores for cash or store credit. This isn't a new thing in the gaming world, as GameStop and Amazon have historically had this feature, but Microsoft's wording makes it sound like the program will be expanded to more retailers. As always, you can buy a certified refurbished console from the Microsoft Store and a number of retailers.

The highly anticipated Steam Machine is being shot down by flak due to its high release price, but all of a sudden, the $1,349 on ask for the 2 TB version doesn't sound so absurd, considering the superior hardware, gigantic game library, and low prices for games. Following Microsoft's logic, the upswing for the now-dead 2 TB version of the Xbox Series X would be $300, putting it at a nice round $1,099.99. Are you not entertained, if not excited, to be living in such interesting times?

Riot Games has announced that it plans to let players stop its Vanguard anti-cheat from loading at Windows start-up, the company has announced, ending the boot-time behavior the kernel driver has had since 2020. The new mode, Vanguard On-Demand, loads the driver only when a Riot game launches and unloads it on exit, made possible by a Windows 11 25H2 feature that records driver activity even while Vanguard is dormant. It works only on PCs that also have UEFI Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity (HVCI), and IOMMU switched on. Riot anti-cheat lead Phillip Koskinas said roughly 35% of players already clear that bar, while about 3% are running incompatible hardware.

Riot calls the qualifying checklist Vanguard Pre-Check, and many prebuilt PCs and laptops sold in the past couple of years ship with the features on by default, and Koskinas estimates the share of fully secured machines at 34.33% and rising one to two percentage points a month. Everyone else will need to enable the settings manually, and most are UEFI options that Vanguard can’t change, meaning a trip into BIOS for those who want to do so.

The feature leans on Microsoft's Runtime Driver Attestation Report, built with the company's Xbox OS Security team and new to Windows 11 25H2. It records every driver loaded since boot as a running, append-only hash kept in the TPM, which is the same measured-boot method the Windows Boot Manager already uses for boot-start drivers. Vanguard can then confirm at launch that no vulnerable driver slipped in while it sat idle, closing the gap that forced the always-on design before. Older Windows releases lack that reporting hook, however, so 25H2 is a baseline requirement.

Riot Games has spent years pushing the same security stack as a barrier to play, having begun enforcing TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot on Windows 11 in 2020. The company drew backlash when it brought it to League of Legends in 2024, and in December, flagged a pre-boot motherboard flaw across Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock boards. Last month, a Vanguard update bricked DMA cheat hardware in a move that was likely tied to stricter IOMMU enforcement.

VBS and HVCI are likely to become sticking points for users who are most likely to want the option to toggle Vanguard’s anti-cheat. Both run parts of the kernel inside a hardware-isolated enclave, and benchmarks have long since shown a small but noticeable degradation to frame rate, which is why many gamers leave them off. Turning VBS on also activates Microsoft's vulnerable driver blocklist, which can disable older peripheral drivers.

Alternatively, payers can leave Vanguard as-is, with Riot saying it’s not “making anyone change anything” and is willing to wait until the ecosystem matures.

Valve has confirmed that the first batch of Steam Machines will only come with a single stick of 16GB RAM, limiting the device to single-channel memory. The company confirmed this in a correction to Gamers Nexus (GN), after its engineers initially said that Steam Machines could either come with a single 16GB stick or two 8GB sticks. “We misspoke here,” Valve wrote in its email to the media channel. “All units will actually have one 16GB stick of RAM.”

Tests have shown that using single-channel memory can reduce performance by about 9% to 13% compared to dual-channel memory, meaning gamers will feel the difference, especially in 1% lows. This is especially hard on the Steam Machine, which uses already aging hardware — a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 graphics with only 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM. Note that AMD launched Zen 5 in 2024, while the RDNA4 GPUs dropped in early 2025. We also already have details for Zen 6 CPUs and have heard rumors that RDNA5 GPUs will arrive next year.

However, the company probably made this decision to keep the costs for the Steam Machine as low as possible. The device’s $1,049 base price is already steeper than what many are willing to pay for — an estimated $300+ price increase from the $700 to $750 target price that Valve presumably targeted. While its engineers did not confirm these numbers, they also said that the Steam Machine would have gotten a “probably similar” price hike to the one the Steam Deck experienced recently. Nevertheless, there is hope that later batches will have dual-channel memory, with Valve telling GN that there is a chance of this happening in the future.

This is another blow to the much-awaited living room PC console that is supposed to finally give PC gamers a chance to enjoy their Steam library with a console-like experience. Valve originally announced the Steam Machine and the Steam Controller in November last year, which was also around the same time that memory chips have started to be in short supply due to the massive demand from AI hyperscalers. The device was originally slated to launch in the first quarter of 2026, but the ongoing memory crisis forced Valve to hold off until it finally released the console this summer.

Although having only a single stick of RAM is a disadvantage to any system, more optimistic gamers can consider this a boon as they could easily upgrade the console to 32GB if they have an extra matching 16GB DDR5-5600 SODIMM stick lying around at home (or are willing to spend extra to buy one). Upgrading the console’s RAM is a rather involved affair, though, requiring you to remove a lot of components and sub-boards just to reach the RAM slots. But if you’re the adventurous kind and could score a good deal on laptop RAM, this might be a viable solution to getting more performance out of your Steam Machine.

The preorder pages for GTA will drop at midnight local time in the US tonight, and you can buy both the Standard and Ultimate editions at the links below. Digital preorders of either variant get a month of GTA+ subscription as a preorder bonus.

Hype is cyclic. Once upon a time, there was Daikatana, the game that would have John Romero making us his female canine, but flunked hard. Then there was Half-Life 2, a game that still begs for a third installment today. Spore showed us how excellent ideas still need equal execution. In modern times, No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 both had massive hype and massive flops, turned around with many years' labor. And yet to this day, there's nothing quite like the buzz surrounding Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto VI, or as it'll be forever known, GTA 6.

The Standard edition goes for $79.99 and has the base game, the Vintage Vice City Pack with retro-themed cosmetics, and the '55 Vapid Stanier vehicle. The Ultimate Edition goes for a cool $99.99 and contains extra side missions and activities, additional vehicles, guns, and a truckload of outfits and other cosmetics for Jason and Lucia both.

These preorders at retailers mean you purchase a physical box that has a slip of paper inside with a download code, but not physical media. As such, this is for collector's item purposes. Without further ado, click away to your favorite e-tailer.

• Amazon
  • Standard Edition
  • Ultimate Edition
• Walmart
  • Standard Edition
  • Ultimate Edition
• Best Buy:
  • Standard Edition
  • Ultimate Edition

We won't bother rehashing details about the impending sequel to Rockstar's massively successful and still giant money printer Grand Theft Auto V. Suffice to say that the November 19 release is so hotly anticipated that employees are calling sick already, and there are reports of entire workplaces planning to shut down for the day. Many publishers and studios are reshuffling their release calendars so as not to get drowned in what is guaranteed to be the talk of the Internet for at least a few weeks, too.

Meanwhile, PC gamers will have to wait a year to see the game running natively on their systems and will have to drown their sorrows in one of the literal thousands of games that never make it to consoles. Regardless, Take Two Interactive's revenue is probably going to rival that of some AI companies — but in real dollars.

The Steam Machine was finally released on Monday, and many gamers were disappointed with its $1,049 starting price, which doesn’t include a Steam Controller (you have to pay an extra $79 to bundle one). Unfortunately, Valve’s hands were tied in this due to the current RAMpocalypse, where even the cheapest RAM kits now cost four times as much as before. While engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat said that they cannot give a hard number for the console’s original price point, they told IGN in an interview that it would have experienced a “probably similar” price increase to the one the Steam Deck got in May 2026.

Given that the Steam Deck 512GB and 1TB experienced a price increase of around 45%, it stands to reason that the Steam Machine would have received the same hike if it were already in the market. So, if we extrapolate the numbers, the Steam Machine would’ve been originally priced at around $729.91. The 1TB Steam Deck’s price jumped by 46.22%, but we can’t just apply that increase to the higher-tier Steam Machine because it has double the storage capacity. But if we check our SSD price tracker, the price difference between the cheapest 1TB and 2TB SSDs was just at $28 when they were at their lowest. If we add this to the 1TB "version" of the living room PC console, then we can safely estimate that Valve’s target price for the 2TB Steam Machine is around $950-$1,000.

The Steam Machine is still more expensive than the PlayStation 5 Pro, even at its original prices, because Valve refuses to subsidize its hardware sales with the sales on the Steam store. After all, the Steam Machine has an open hardware philosophy, allowing buyers to do what they want with the console. You can install Windows 11 on it and just stick with PC Game Pass to play your games on the console, meaning Valve will make zero dollars on game purchases from you.

This stark price difference could make the Steam Machine unpalatable to console gamers who are interested in switching to PC gaming through the living room PC console. After all, several tests reveal that the PlayStation outperforms the Steam Machine in several titles (although the Valve hardware still performed well enough). But the advantage that gamers are paying for in the Steam Machine is the abilities of a desktop PC (you can pretty much install anything you want on it without going through the Steam store and you don’t have to subscribe for online play), combined with the convenience of a living room console (like HDMI-CEC and the ability to switch the console on or off from the controller). Interested gamers will also likely have a library of titles ready to play.

Hopefully, the Steam Machine’s price will come down once the memory supply finally stabilizes, but it will probably be years before this happens, if at all. Valve’s new gaming console is quite a niche product — it’s built for PC gamers with an extensive Steam library who want to play games on their living room couch or while lying in bed without going through the hassle of building an SFF PC. But if you prefer playing games on your desk or already have a substantial game library on your PlayStation, you’re probably better off sticking with your current hardware.

It’s hard not to be impressed by what manufacturers have achieved with the numerous options that are now available among the best PC gaming handhelds. What was once a domain left largely to Valve with the Steam Deck has evolved into a broader market, with the bulk of the systems available running Windows 11.

These devices pair sleek exteriors with high-refresh IPS or OLED displays and pack powerful (for a handheld) computing hardware inside. However, even the gaming handheld market has been squeezed by rising component prices, leading us to the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, the subject of this review. It’s by far the most powerful gaming handheld we’ve ever tested, thanks to its Intel Arc G3 Extreme SoC, but it’s also the most expensive ($1,799).

At every turn, the Claw 8 EX AI+ impressed with its performance, but the staggering price tag incessantly looms over the experience.

Design of the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

We hope you like purple, as that’s the only color currently available for the Claw 8 EX AI+. Purple isn’t my favorite color in the world (that distinction belongs to blue), and it gives me Joker vibes from the 1989 Batman starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Not only is the top of the chassis molded in purple plastic, but it also has a sparkly finish that makes it look a bit jewel-like. The lower half of the system is constructed of traditional black plastic.

The handgrips on the Claw 8 EX AI+ are well-spaced, perfectly sized for my hands, and evenly distribute weight, which helps mask the system’s 785-gram heft. Speaking of the handgrips, there’s a laser-etched dot texture molded where your palms and index fingers rest on the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ — this helps keep it in place instead of sliding around in your hands (especially if they perspire during long gaming sessions).

Controls-wise, the Claw 8 EX AI+ doesn’t break any new ground, which is generally a good thing. If you’re familiar with an Xbox controller, there are backlit ABXY buttons on the right, with a joystick just below, along with another joystick on the left side, with a D-pad (which features a metal dome) below it. Both joysticks sport an RGB ring at their bases. There are also four buttons on the face of the handheld, flanking the display, with the bottom-left button assigned to bringing up the MSI Quick Settings overlay for the Xbox Game Bar. The bottom right button launches MSI Center M, for launching and configuring games.

You’ll find the usual allotment of bumper and triggers at the top of the Claw 8 EX AI+. While the triggers feel nice, the bumpers are a smidge “wiggly,” but that’s a nitpick on my part. If you’re a fan of macro buttons, you may be disappointed to find that there are only two on the back of the Claw 8 EX AI+, versus the three or four you’ll find on competing systems like the Steam Deck.

Unlike Lenovo’s Legion Go series of handhelds, you won’t find a touchpad on the Claw 8 EX AI+. So all of your screen navigation will be limited to touching the screen with your finger, or using the joysticks in the Xbox overlay or MSI Center M.

All of the I/O ports are located at the top of the unit; here you’ll find a power button that doubles as a fingerprint reader, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a microSD reader, a 3.5mm audio jack, and volume buttons.

There are two intakes (one for each cooling fan) located beside the macro buttons, while vents below the IO panel exhaust heat.

Although I’ll talk about the screen in detail later on, I must mention that the display doesn’t fit neatly within the confines of the center mass of the Claw 8 EX AI+. Instead, the bottom portion of the screen extends roughly half an inch below the body. It looks a little wonky at first, but it seems to be the only way that MSI could fit the 8-inch display, at least without making the whole device bigger.

The Claw 8 EX AI+ measures 12.6 x 5.12 x 1.98 inches, compared to 11.42 x 4.76 x 2.00 inches for the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, 11.64 x 5.38 x 1.66 inches for the Lenovo Legion Go 2, and 11.73 x 4.6 x 1.97 inches for the Steam Deck OLED.

MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ Specifications and Components

Gaming and Graphics Performance on the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

The Claw 8 EX AI+ features the new Intel Arc G3 Extreme SoC, which includes a 14-core GPU (4.7 GHz max clock) and a 12-core Arc B390 GPU that clocks up to 2.3 GHz.

The default power mode is MSI's AI Engine, which typically runs games at 25 watts, but can vary between 15 watts and 30 watts depending on the workload. There's also an Endurance Mode, which leverages the Intel Endurance Gaming Efficiency Preset. This limits the chip to 15 watts and targets 30 frames per second (FPS) while gaming. Finally, Manual Mode allows you to run PL1 Max at 35 watts.

For our testing, we used the default AI Engine Mode when on battery, and Manual Mode when plugged in (35 watts PL1 Max, 45 watts PL2 Max). We ran games at 1280 x 800 and 1920 x 1200 resolutions on the handheld, leveraging the Xbox Full Screen Experience to limit resource consumption from additional Windows software. Please note, however, that the ROG Xbox Ally X benchmarks were run at 720p/1080p due to its 16:9 aspect ratio display, while the Steam Deck is limited to 1280 x 800 resolution.

While playing Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, I was able to easily achieve 150-160 FPS on medium graphics settings at 800p with XeSS Balanced and the AI Engine power mode engaged. Battlefield 6 saw performance in the 70 fps range at 800p, with Auto detail settings and XeSS Balanced enabled.

Spoiler alert: the Arc 3 Extreme powering the Claw 8 EX AI+ is an absolute beast (in the handheld segment), delivering a 20 to 30+ FPS advantage over its peers across all the games in our benchmark suite. Starting with Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark (Medium, DX12), the Claw 8 EX AI+hit 98 FPS at 800p on battery power and 112 fps when plugged in (a 30+ FPS advantage over the ROG Xbox Ally X. Bumping the resolution to 1200p, the Claw 8 EX AI+ was faster at 1200p on battery power (67 FPS) than the ROG Ally X and Legion Go 2 were at 720p/800p on battery power. The system also impressed, reaching 72 FPS at 1200p when plugged in.

When benchmarking Cyberpunk 2077 (Steam Deck preset), the Claw 8 EX AI+ again showed its performance might, crushing all rivals. It delivered 78 FPS on battery power and 85 FPS when plugged in at 800p. At 1200p, those figures fell to 48 FPS and 52 FPS, respectively. We're at least getting a semblance of playability at 1200p resolution in the handheld space.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Favor performance, Vulkan) saw the Claw 8 EX AI+ run the tables again, hitting 115 FPS at 800p and 87 FPS at 1200p while plugged in to the wall. Of course, those numbers fell slightly on battery power, but were still above anything that the ROG Xbox Ally X or Legion Go 2 could muster.

It was more of the same in Borderlands 3 (Medium, DX11), which saw the largest performance variance between the Claw 8 EX AI+ on battery power and when plugged in. The handheld hit 94 FPS at 800p while plugged in, a full 18 FPS faster than with battery power. At 1200p while plugged in, it still managed to pull 78 FPS at 1200p.

Forza Horizon 6 is the newest addition to our benchmark suite, so we only have Steam Deck numbers to compare with the Claw 8 EX AI+. The Claw 8 EX AI+ hovered around the 100 FPS mark at 800p and managed 72-76 FPS at 1200p, depending on whether it was running on battery power.

For stress testing, we ran Metro Exodus 15 times at 800p at Medium quality settings to simulate roughly 30 minutes of gameplay. The Claw 8 EX AI+ hit an average frame rate of nearly 70 FPS on the benchmark. For comparison, the ROG Xbox Ally X managed 63.44 FPS using the same settings.

The Claw 8 EX AI+’s two performance cores averaged 4.06 GHz, the eight efficiency cores averaged 3.18 GHz, and the four low-power efficiency cores averaged 3.0 GHz.

Windows 11 and MSI Center M on the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

The Claw 8 EX AI+ supports the Xbox Full Screen Experience, just like the ROG Xbox Ally X. However, it doesn't have its own dedicated Xbox app. You can access the interface by opening the Xbox app and selecting Full Screen from the top-right corner. You'll then be able to reboot the system directly into the Full Screen Experience, bypassing unnecessary Windows 11 components that could affect gaming performance.

All the benefits and limitations of the Full Screen Experience, as discussed in our ROG Xbox Ally X review, apply here, so I won't belabor those points. I would like to elaborate on the MSI Center M, which provides its own dedicated, gaming-centric interface. The full-screen interface can be navigated using the thumbpads, eliminating the need to tap the screen.

MSI Center M pulls in all of your games from multiple sources, including the Xbox Store, GOG Galaxy, Epic Games, and Steam (among others). It pulled games from all those sources, and most of them displayed a nice, high-resolution thumbnail. One exception was Cyberpunk 2077, which only displayed a low-resolution Start Menu icon that was blown up to a blurry mess.

You can customize navigation within MSI Center M to use the joysticks in Gamepad Mode (for gaming) or Desktop Mode (for using the standard Windows 11 interface). You can tweak sensitivity for the joysticks, and the Desktop Mode provides key mapping so that you can see which UI shortcut each button corresponds to.

Another component of the software package is MSI Quick Settings, an overlay that appears in the Xbox Game Bar. It can be recalled using the MSI Quick Settings button beside the left joystick. MSI Quick Settings features a sleek, easy-to-use interface that provides access to power profiles, screen brightness, gamepad control modes, display refresh rate, and screenshot capture (among other things).

Display on the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

The Claw 8 EX AI+ features an 8-inch IPS display with a 120 Hz refresh rate and a 1920 x 1200 resolution. Given the $1,799 price tag, it would have been more fitting for MSI to include an OLED display, as we saw with the Legion Go 2. I think that’s a big miss by MSI, and one that I hope will be rectified in future versions.

Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we were unable to perform detailed, instrumented tests on the Claw 8 EX AI+’s display. So you’ll have to trust my eyeballs and the manufacturer’s specs for the time being. MSI claims that the display on the Claw 8 EX AI+ covers 100% of the sRGB color space and offers a peak brightness of 500 nits.

Although I didn’t have a Legion Go 2 on hand for a side-by-side comparison, I do have a Legion Go and a Legion Go S on my testing bench. We measured the former at 476.7 nits, and the Claw 8 EX AI+ seemed at least as bright (at maximum brightness) as the Legion Go, if not brighter, across multiple games and while using the Windows 11 interface.

Games generally looked good on the Claw 8 EX AI+, with good color balance. I racked up plenty of hours in Battlefield 6, trying my best to soak in the lush reds, oranges, and greens of the city architecture of the Saints Quarter map without getting my head blown off. Forza Horizon 6 looked magnificent in the colorful Japanese landscape, with vibrant city centers and majestic outdoor environments reflected in the vehicles' finishes. Everything looked good, but color vibrancy and overall visual “pop” would have been even better with an OLED panel, but I digress.

Battery Life on the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently playing more laid-back games; ones that won’t make my blood boil because of tense online matches. In particular, I’ve spent time playing Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight.

I played the game at 800p with medium settings, Intel XeSS Balanced, power mode set to AI Engine, and display set to 50 percent. After playing for an hour (with an average of around 150 FPS), the battery dropped from 100 percent to 52 percent. Switching the power mode to Endurance, locked at 30 FPS, I still had 66 percent battery after an hour (when starting at 100 percent).

If I were to drop the brightness a bit, I could see battery life extending past 3 hours in Endurance mode.

Audio on the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

The Claw 8 EX AI+ has a pair of 2-watt speakers, which are fine. They’re perfectly serviceable for most games. Given that I spent plenty of time playing Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, I noticed that the character voices sounded pretty good, and the plastic “clicking” sound of Lego stacking together during building exercises came through loud and clear.

Sound output was a bit more muddled in Battlefield 6, although I prefer to play games like that with headphones on anyway. In fact, given the mobility of handheld gaming PCs, most people will likely default to headphones for the best possible audio experience with the Claw 8 EX AI+.

Heat on the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

While running the Metro Exodus stress test, the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ registered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit on the back of the chassis, close to dead-center. Moving towards the top of the unit, heat levels rose sharply to around 109 F near the cooling fans' exhausts.

The Arc G3 Extreme chip averaged 77.3 degrees Celsius.

Upgradeability on the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

Cracking open the Claw 8 EX AI+ is incredibly easy – only six Phillips-head screws hold the back panel in place. Once the screws are removed, you can use a well-placed plastic pry tool to insert it between the black and purple halves of the chassis where they meet. Once you pry open a small section, the rest pops off easily.

Once inside, you’ll see the battery in the lower portion of the chassis and a full-length 2280 PCIe 4.0 SSD nestled between the two cooling fans (secured with one screw). In our review unit, the SSD was a 1TB Micron 2500 with QLC NAND.

MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ Configurations

As of now, there’s only one configuration available of the Claw 8 EX AI+ with an Arc G3 Extreme SoC. Our system came with the aforementioned Arc G3 Extreme chip, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and an 8-inch 120Hz 1200p IPS touchscreen, for a whopping $1,799.99 at Best Buy.

Bottom Line

The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is an impressive machine that offers a solidly-built chassis, good ergonomics, and good battery life. However, the most impressive aspect of the handheld is its performance. The Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip allowed the Claw 8 EX AI+ to absolutely dominate our gaming benchmarks, delivering anywhere from a 20 to over 30 FPS advantage at 1200p or 800p resolution.

But that performance comes at a steep price: $1,799. That’s more than just expensive; it’s MacBook Pro pricing for a handheld, which is shocking, to say the least. For comparison, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 with 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and an OLED display retails for $1,349.99, and we already had extreme reservations concerning its price tag.

The Claw 8 EX AI+ is $450 more expensive and doesn’t even have the OLED display of the Legion Go 2. The saving grace for the Claw 8 EX AI+ is the Arc G3 Extreme chip, which gives unmatched performance across the board. However, it remains to be seen if the price premium is enough of a draw to more casual gamers.

While the coming availability of the Steam Machine is stealing headlines about Valve, the company quietly announced that it’s also working on SteamOS to give it wider compatibility. Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the engineers Tom’s Hardware talked with to dig into the details of the upcoming console, told The Verge that the company is collaborating with Nvidia “very closely” to develop support for Team Green GPUs. Additionally, he mentioned the possibility of dual-booting SteamOS with Windows or other operating systems in the future. The measures would allow users to build their own DIY Steam Machines in future.

SteamOS 3.0 was built from the ground up for the Steam Deck, which uses AMD hardware. For years now, enterprising users could install the operating system on other systems that feature Team Red hardware. However, if you use parts from other brands like Intel and Nvidia, you’re going to run into a lot of complications. One enthusiast made SteamOS work with an Intel Arc B580 desktop GPU, but it required a lot of advanced steps and troubleshooting that would certainly turn off more casual users.

Valve released the latest version of the gaming operating system, SteamOS 3.8.10, just last week, and it comes with compatibility updates for Intel and AMD platforms, including upcoming Intel-powered handhelds. While support for Nvidia graphics cards isn’t expected to arrive this year, Graiffais told The Verge that “it’s certainly something that we’re working on in the background.” He also mentioned a SteamOS installer that would make it easier for users to wipe an existing operating system and replace it with SteamOS. While it cannot partition a drive for dual-booting yet, Pierre-Loup hinted that the feature might eventually arrive in the future.

Windows is still the most dominant OS for gaming, and we can see this in the latest Steam survey results, with Windows 11 getting nearly 70% of the market share. However, Linux, especially through SteamOS, is quickly gaining ground. Although it still has a negligible 3.99% share (compared to Windows’ overall 93.85%), it has already overtaken macOS’s 2.16%. This result is likely driven by the popularity of the Steam Deck, despite its recent price hikes, and we expect this to jump even higher once gamers get their hands on the Valve Steam Machine in the coming weeks.

Valve's Steam Machine is launching, finally, with reservations starting today. While the hardware is the same as it was when it was announced late last year, almost nothing else in PC gaming seems the same. There's a massive component shortage. Prices are high on tech in general, and speculation about how the Steam Machine would be priced took over the conversation about the entire launch.

Ahead of the system's launch and reservation queue opening, I talked to Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat to discuss the system: how it was engineered, why Valve made the decisions it did, and how the company came to pricing that starts at $1,049.

"It's definitely the case that you know our original design was based on memory and storage prices from, you know, two years ago or so," said Griffais. "And so we were in a different segment than we were hoping to be, but I think it's more of a reflection of where the market as a whole is than Steam Machine itself, right?"

The engineers didn't dare forecast the reception to the price, nor how that would affect sales. But Griffais suggested that Valve expects anyone who wants the power in a Steam Machine would still have to pay a similar amount in another device, but highlighted what's unique to the Machine — the form factor, how quiet it is, the CEC integration, and the dedicated Bluetooth controller antenna.

I posited the possibility of people going for a console, instead. Even the PlayStation 5 Pro is currently cheaper, at $899. But the two engineers suggested that's not the right comparison.

Griffais said there's more to compare than just specs and price. He suggested that PC gamers would also have to rebuy games they want to play, and that some of them would have to get used to the idea of paying to play games online.

"I think the value of the Steam machine is inherently tied to the value of your Steam library in a lot of ways, right?" Aldehayyat said. "Like, the more games you have on Steam, the more valuable the Steam machine is to you, and the Steam machine makes your existing library even more valuable. So, those two kinds of decisions are very much intertwined. And I think at least early on, we suspect that it's for people who already have a big Steam library… it's just going to make a lot of sense to them."

The lack of subsidies

A lot has been made of the fact that Valve is not subsidizing the hardware, which the company has said would turn the PC into a more closed ecosystem. There has always been an assumption that Valve has subsidized the Steam Deck off of the profits it takes from the sales on the Steam Store.

That's not quite the case, the Valve engineers said."

If you look at like certain SKUs at certain points of time, it might be below or above cost bya small margin," Griffais said. "I think there's some comments that we made around it, you know, being painful and all that early on, that was more about being as close as possible to cost than anything, yeah, same thing [with the Steam Machine], right?"

In fact, Griffais claimed that despite recent cost increases to the Steam Deck OLED due to the component shortage (and, now, the Steam Machine), they're being more aggressive on pricing now than they used to be.

"We understand that the higher price is less accessible to people… and so we're even more aggressive now, trying to be as close as possible to the actual cost of the parts that we're shipping," he added."

But it's important that the Valve hardware is a self-sustained program, it's not subsidized by software sales," Aldehayyat said. "So that's kind of the important piece that we can get across."

8GB of VRAM? 4K support? Really?

As soon as the Steam Machine was announced, enthusiasts honed in on one very specific point on the spec sheet: the semi-custom AMD RDNA3 graphics with 28 CUs and, to many, a sparse 8GB of VRAM.

Griffais said that Valve is "very aware" that it is being "kind of aggressive" with 8GB of VRAM. But the way he talked about it, it seemed that the team was also taking a sort of artistic license with what players want out of a small box like this. He said that the team did calculations that that for "the kind of stuff that you would want to play" 8GB could support the level of detail and performance one would expect out of a small, TV-based system."

The cases where you're running out of VRAM are actually cases that you would not want to be playing on a system like that," he said. "Yeah, it'd be too slow… The cases where you're exercising the VRAM limits are actually cases that you wouldn't want to play as a real user, in my opinion" He admitted however, that it's possible that in the future that some games may need more VRAM to reach the same performance.

Still, on SteamOS, the team has been working to make VRAM more efficient. For starters, the current iteration of SteamOS was really only meant for APUs, but now has logic for discrete GPUs and VRAM. That came with a different set of features to add, like handling VRAM under stress to get the best possible outcome. The team at Valve is still working on it.

In Aldehayyat's opinion, the upgrade cycle for PCs has been "slowing down dramatically," and that they're seeing games come out with a better ability to scale across CPU and GPU generations, and that the PC ecosystem isn't designed with a single fixed performance target in mind.

"So, again, like for us, the metric that we care about is, can you play the games on Steam? Can you play every game on Steam? And we think the Steam machine absolutely can, right now, and we think the longevity for it is actually quite good, given the current reality of the upgrade cycles," Aldehayyat said. "I mean, maybe 10 years ago a device like this wouldn't last as long, wouldn't have the legs to be competitive for as long, but… given what the market is doing right now, and the upgrade cycles, it still has the longevity to be a good device for people for many years to come.”

But that 8GB of VRAM wasn't in isolation on the spec sheet. It also highlighted the idea of playing at 4K at 60 frames per second, provided you have AMD's FSR upscaling technology running. In my testing of the machine, that's possible for some games, but the Steam Machine really feels like a 1080p or 1440p box.

"A big part of that messaging actually came because we found a lot of people who are not as familiar with tuning their gaming settings want to just make sure that it's compatible [with] their 4K TV," Aldehayyat said, pointing out that not everyone understands the difference between render resolution and native TV resolutions. He agreed that 1080p and 1440p are probably the sweet spot.

Despite that messaging, 1080p is set as the default resolution across SteamOS globally out of the box, which Grifafis said was to have the "baseline be on the safe side." Like the Steam Deck and Steam Controller, Valve doesn't provide a ton of instructions when you start, so that's something players will need to figure out, whether they decide to change this on a game-by-game basis or across the system (or at all).

Griffais said the team wants to "make that more visible," though he didn't specify how Valve may do that. He also suggested that because Valve is testing games as part of the verified program, it could have different base resolutions on a per-game basis, like a higher resolution for a low-res indie game or an older game that doesn't need as many resources.

Several components, one big heat sink

Inside the Steam Machine's small frame is a massive heatsink and 120 mm fan that cools almost all of the critical components, including the CPU, GPU, and memory. That decision lets Valve make the smallest box possible, but it's certainly not the easy way of doing things.

One other benefit of not having two separate heatsinks big enough for a worst-case scenario is that the large, single option can be allocated to the CPU and GPU as needed.

"So, if the CPU is not eating up its entire thermal budget, the GPU can use that, or if the GPU is not eating its entire thermal budget, the CPU can share that," Aldehayyat explained.

But covering all of the components is difficult. Ideally, you want the smallest gap possible between a thermal module and a CPU or a GPU.

"In reality, things vary; the CPU is tall, and the GPU is taller, and the motherboard bows and the thermal module has tolerances, so actually getting the design to have enough compliance in the right places to accommodate all those tolerances was by far the hardest challenge we had to overcome," he said. "But by overcoming it, I think we ended up at the most compact design, cost-effective design. It's also the quietest."

Having one heatsink also allows for one fan, which Valve spins at lower rotations per minute to keep the system nearly silent.

The design requires just a single screw to access the components — a Torx T9 bit. Valve will partner with iFixit again on repair guides, and also plans to have them sell replacement parts, including the many daughterboards that attach to the mainboard under the heatsink, such as the ports.

The SSD is easily accessible, beneath the power supply. But if you want to access the other major replaceable part — the memory SO-DIMMS — you'll have to take off the whole heatsink.

"I don't say it was impossible, it was just, given the time and engineering resources we have, we just could not come up with a solution that that worked," Aldehayyat said. The SSD is on a flex cable, but they weren't able to do something like that with memory because of signal integrity. Trying to make an access hatch through the power supply, he said, was a safety problem.

Shortages and availability

Valve has opened a randomized reservation system for the Steam Machine. That new portion — the fact that you don't have to be on Steam at a specific time to try to get in the first batch of systems — was built on the back of the existing Steam Deck reservation process. But other console shopping experiences were also an influence.

"My experience trying to buy a PS5 painted a lot of that stuff," Griffais said. "We think the broad strokes of the system are good, but there's still an effect where people are rushing at the door, trying to refresh. Our websites might have problems, and then that seems unfair to people that run into that, right? We want to make sure that there's an even playing field initially, and then work from there.

At the moment, Valve is predicting that the reservation queue will go through the end of the year, with the waitlist picking up spots on canceled orders. But depending on supply, things could change.

“Six months was as far as we were willing to make predictions," Aldehayyat said. "If there's more demand, we are obviously planning to make more."

Memory and storage are by far the biggest choke points in the supply chain, but they're not the only ones. Aldehayyat noted shortages in FR-4 (a material used to make printed circuit boards) as well as some capacitors, stating that that "if this was a normal time, people would be concerned about these things," but that in supply shortages for memory and storage "this just doesn't really crack the top 10 problems."

This led Griffais to think openly about what it means to find more supply right now. Getting supplies from a wide variety of vendors, he said, also means getting a bunch of different prices, suggesting that you could make more in a way where the pricing comes out differently.

"And so we're still trying to figure that out," he said. "If there's ever a bunch of people that want the machine, but the supply is not there on the back end, we'll have to make hard decisions about, okay, what are we doing to secure more supply,” Griffais pondered. “And does it still result [in] the product at this price? Or would we have to rethink that,” he said.

Finally, Griffais admitted, much like the rest of us, that Valve doesn’t know how the hardware shortages will evolve. “Maybe things are going to go back down, and then it's all good, and it can continue to go like that, but maybe not,” he said. “So I guess what we're trying to convey… is that it seems like all bets are off, and we're going to work through it, just [like] the users as well.”

The Steam Machine is finally here, and Valve is aiming to get its small gaming PC into the hands of more gamers and fewer scalpers. While the Machine starts at $1,049 and goes up from there, the company is still expecting intense interest and has limited components.

The company is instituting a new, more randomized reservation system that aims to ensure that bots, people with faster internet connections, and people who "can schedule their life around that moment" aren't prioritized.

Reservations are open now on Steam, and you can sign up for the Steam Machine configuration or bundle that you're interested in anytime before Thursday, June 25th at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET. When the sign-up period ends, Valve will randomize the list in order to determine the order. After that time, all new sign-ups will join the end of the waitlist.

Following the randomization, people who signed up will get one of two emails on that day. They will either be added to the reservation queue, and there's a Steam Machine with their name on it, or you’ll be on a waitlist and will be informed when units become available. The waitlist consists of people further down on the list than there are Steam Machines in this production run, and you're waiting for people with reservations to cancel or for future batches.

To sign up, you need a Steam account in good standing, with a purchase made on the platform before April 27, 2026. Only one reservation is allowed per household, with Valve looking at payment methods, shipping addresses, and "other information" to remove duplicates. While the purchase limitation stops scalpers from making new accounts to get on the line, it also may prevent new potential Steam customers from getting into the ecosystem.

You can sign up for multiple configurations, and if you're given a spot for more than one, you'll get a reservation for the "highest end one" and be removed from the other lists. If you sign up for multiple and don't make any lists, you'll be placed on a waitlist for the system you were closest to getting. The lists are also broken down by region: North America, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Australia.

The week of June 29, Valve will start emailing customers in the reservation queue. They'll get an option to purchase, with 72 hours to buy before Valve skips to the next person in line. The reservation queue is expected to last through the rest of the year, suggesting many waitlist customers will be waiting quite a while.

Pricing and a lack of subsidies

The Steam Machine comes in four configurations: 512GB, a 512GB bundle with a Steam Controller, 2TB (including two extra faceplates, a wooden one and a red one, pictured above), and a 2TB bundle with a Steam Controller. Here are the prices:

The company said increases in the cost of components led to these prices. "The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable," the blog reads. "So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price [of] the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months."

The company added that they couldn't source some components at all, which reduced the number of systems available at launch.

Valve said it's not subsidizing the Steam Machine because it goes against its belief in the "openness of the PC ecosystem."

"When companies sell their hardware under cost for competitive advantage, or buy exclusive content for it, they're doing that to build a more closed system, one where you don't get to choose what software you want to use," the blog reads. "We don't want that for PC hardware, and we don't think you should want it either. You shouldn't feel like you have to buy Valve hardware; you should be able to view it as just one option alongside all the devices for playing games, and select the one that makes sense for you."

Previously, Valve had said there would be no subsidy, but suggested it was because it was competing with PCs and because of the engineering work the company had done.

For those who can't get a Steam Machine or want to use other hardware, Valve says it's working on getting SteamOS to work on more hardware. Beginning with SteamOS 3.8, Valve says you will be able to put the OS together with a DIY rig, though for now, it only supports AMD GPUs.

For a long time, the best gaming PCs were relegated to desks. Under the TV has long been the realm of the console, even if some, myself included, have hooked midtowers up to their living room screens. Valve's Steam Machine is an attempt to bridge that gap, letting people who play games on their rigs and on their handhelds also play comfortably on the couch.

The hardware isn't brand new. Like the Steam Deck, Valve has turned to AMD for semi-custom chips using some older technologies. In the case of newer, intensive games, this makes the Steam Machine a 1080p or 1440p computer, though it can support 4K on older games and in some cases with FSR.

But the Steam Machine is pricier than many had hoped, coming in at $1,049 for the 512GB version and, in our review unit, a $1,428, 2TB bundle that includes two faceplates and a Steam Controller. That's largely a result of the current state of the component market, but it will leave a lot more people asking if the Steam Machine (can or should) fill their needs, given the cost.

Design of the Steam Machine

The Steam Machine really looks less like a gaming PC than a mini PC. It's a black box that, at 5.98 x 6.14 x 6.39 inches including the system's feet, can fit discreetly on a TV stand or a desk.

The one part that really stands out is the integrated LED strip with 17 addressable RGB LEDs, which can share the Machine's system status or be customized to your liking. For instance, you can see the strip appear like a light bar when you download updates, and you can choose from solid colors, rainbows, or animations, like breathing. You can even control each of the 17 lights individually for a truly chaotic look. My preference was mostly to keep it off entirely for a minimalist effect.

The front of the Steam Machine is effectively a faceplate, which pops on and off with magnets. Valve ships two extras with the 2TB version: a fuzzy cloth-like red plate, and one with dark wood, which went well with my furniture. The company has also committed to releasing files for people to 3D print their own. (They have a good track record of this, having recently released CAD files for the Steam Controller and its puck.) It doesn't, however, have plans to sell the wooden and red plates separately.

Located at the base of the system are the front ports: a pair of USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, a microSD card slot, and the power button.

The rest of the ports are on the rear: DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0, the AC power connector, an Ethernet jack, two USB-A 2.0 ports, and a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port. (Despite not being officially labeled HDMI 2.1, the HDMI port does support 4K at 120 Hz, and has some other niceties, like HDMI-CEC to turn on televisions).

Also on the rear is the exhaust for the 120 mm fan attached to the heatsink that cools the APU. It's much more obvious than the intake, which is behind the front panel and draws air in from the sides. That fan is truly whisper-quiet. Even while benchmarking, I barely even heard it, and I had to pay attention and move my head near the system to notice anything at all.

Steam Machine Specifications

You can decide whether you believe the Steam Machine is a PC or a console. In Valve's eyes, it's a PC, and the spec list certainly looks like one. On paper, it's easy enough to see the significant jump from what Valve uses in its other gaming system, the Steam Deck, simply by nature of moving from Zen 2 to Zen 4 and RDNA 2 to RDNA 3.

The processor is a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 chip with six cores and 12 threads, going up to 4.8 GHz with a 30W TDP. Meanwhile, the integrated graphics are also semi-custom, using AMD's RDNA 3 with 28 compute units, going up to a maximum sustained clock speed of 2.45 GHz and a 110W TDP. The big number people are thinking about here is the 8GB GDDR6 RAM, which many enthusiasts feel is no longer enough to play some games above 1080p, let alone future-proof a system.

The system is powered by a 300W power supply, smaller than both the one in the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5.

Like the Steam Deck OLED, Valve has integrated a discrete Bluetooth antenna alongside the Wi-Fi 6E connection, which should help with latency. There's also a built-in antenna for the Steam Controller.

The Steam Machine starts with a 512GB SSD, but a more expensive option (the one we're testing) comes with 2TB. For further storage, you can add a microSD card (or swap out the SSD entirely).

Gaming and Graphics on the Steam Machine

If you're coming from the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine is a powerful upgrade. If you compare it to other gaming PCs on the market, you'll see that its GPU's aging technology is far from the most powerful option on the market.

First, let's put this GPU into context. Based on testing, we found that the Machine's graphics card would land somewhere towards the bottom of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. To figure this out, we put together a Linux machine running Bazzite, with an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X and 16GB of DDR5-5600, memory along with both the Radeon RX 6600 — the bottom GPU on our list — and the RX 7600, which is the next AMD-branded step up.

In the Unigine Superposition (1080p Extreme) and GravityMark benchmarks, both of which run natively on Linux, the Steam Machine's graphics ran in between those two Radeons. Using our Cyberpunk 2077 configuration for raster testing desktop graphics cards, the same happened, with the Steam Machine producing 79.98 frames per second, behind the 7600X at 85.48 FPS. This is capable gaming performance, but bottom-rung compared to modern desktop GPUs.

I spent some time playing Resident Evil Requiem on the system. With the resolution set to 2560 x 1440 without any upscaling or advanced features like hair strands, the game ran largely smoothly through the Cedarbook Apartments section, as Leon sneaks past zombies, takes on a violent boss, and escapes through the other side of the building, though there were a few hiccups as he first entered the dark building. The game typically ran between 60 and 70 FPS, though there were some drops to around 20 FPS during the environmental transition, which were extremely noticeable. Here are my recordings from MangoHud, showing how the game ran:

On SoulCalibur 6, the game ran great at 4K, hitting the game's 60 FPS frame limit with maximum graphics settings as I progressed through Arcade mode as Siegfried. Granted, that game came out in 2018 and isn't super intensive, but people have all kinds of games like that in their Steam libraries, and they should play well.

Games that barely run on the Steam Deck, like Black Myth: Wukong, can be made to easily run on the Steam Machine. It's just clear that Valve isn't aiming for people looking for the highest-end performance on every game.

In my time playing around on the Machine, I did notice some crashes and slowdowns, often (but not always!) related to changing settings. One time, this led to the entire Steam Machine crashing and leaving artifacting on-screen when it booted back up. (Another reboot fixed this.)

Some of this may be due to the fact that some games see the Steam Machine as a Steam Deck. You can turn off that auto-detection, which helped to a degree. Valve says it is updating its APIs ahead of availability to avoid these kinds of problems.

One way we tested the Steam Machine was in comparison to the Steam Deck. On paper alone, it's no surprise that the Machine blows the Deck away, but we wanted to see exactly what kind of gains you could get when moving a game from the handheld to the desktop. Here, we tested at our typical handheld settings, though we ran the Steam Deck at native 800p while the Steam Machine was tested at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K.

When I tested, I found that most games would only run at 1080p, unless I went into game settings and changed the maximum display resolution to 4K. Valve reps told me that "1080p is the system default game resolution on Steam Machine to ensure a good gameplay experience out of the box," but you can change it on a global level in Settings > Display, or, like I did, on a per-game basis.

What this reveals is a vision of SteamOS that is significantly stronger than we've ever seen, playing most of our test games at 4K better than the Steam Deck can at 800p, including Forza Horizon 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2. But again — that's at settings designed for the Deck. And it also proved that not all games can run at 4K on the Steam Machine, including Cyberpunk 2077 on the Steam Deck preset. If you were someone plugging your Steam Deck into a dock and outputting that to your TV, you would get a better experience on the same settings.

You'll see some things missing. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, one of our go-to systems-testing games, wouldn't allow the game to run above 60 FPS, even with V-Sync off. That game was tested exclusively at higher settings, where that wasn't an issue.

When comparing to prebuilt PCs, we chose the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme and Acer Nitro 60 that we tested last year. These were two of the last sanely-priced systems we saw before the component crisis got really bad, priced at $1,099.99 and $1,599.99, respectively. The CyberPowerPC boasted an Intel Core Ultra 5 225F and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060, while the Acer had a Core i7-14700F and RTX 5070. Each offered 32GB of RAM. Notably, you can't find these systems at these prices now, which simply highlights the type of problem Valve had in pricing the Steam Machine. (The newer Acer Nitro 65 is over $2,000.)

For the most part, those larger boxes with desktop-class GPUs significantly outperformed the Steam Machine without any upscaling, FSR, DLSS, or similar technologies. Most importantly, the highest-end settings were playable on those machines. But those boxes are also significantly larger and have room to fit power-hungry components – and they cost a lot more now.

Valve definitely has size on its side. If you want something smaller than a mini-ITX build that comes with SteamOS installed, this is for you. But on paper, if you have nearly any GPU from the last three to four years, you already have a faster machine. And given that the Steam Machine starts at $1,049, that matters a lot.

When testing using our prebuilt desktop methodologies, which include some aspirational settings, it is clear why Valve says you need FSR to get 4K at 60 FPS. Based on the aging hardware alone, it should be clear that you won't be playing games at their top settings. But FSR can certainly help the Steam Machine along.

For example, on Red Dead Redemption 2 at medium settings, the Machine played the game at 20 FPS at 4K. But with FSR 2.0 in Performance mode, it reached 60 FPS.

On Forza Horizon 6's Ultra settings, the game ran at 30 FPS at 4K, but turning on FSR 3.1.5 Performance nabbed an extra 10 FPS.

Still, Cyberpunk 2077 was unplayable on Ray Tracing Ultra even at 1080p. Here, FSR 3.0 performance made it technically playable (up to 41 FPS from 15 FPS), but given the latency that could introduce, I wouldn't try it. (You can play this game on the Machine though — see the Steam Deck comparison above.)

If 60 FPS is your goal, the Steam Machine isn't a 4K machine, and I'm not sure Valve should have advertised it as one. It's much more suited for 1080p or 1440p gaming with appropriately middling-to-high settings, depending on what you're playing.

Upgradeability of the Steam Machine

The only exposed screws on the Steam Machine are on the rear. The two captive Torx T9 screws are in the top corners of the machine, so at least you don't have to worry about losing them. From there, a small pry tool pushed into in two purposeful-looking indents on the bottom lifts the back cover right off.

From in there, you'll see some studs coming in from the bottom. If you look closely at the feet, you'll see they have the same Torx indents in the center of the rubber, and that they're actually screws. This is way better than how some devices require you to remove adhesive to take off screws that are under feet. It's a neat trick that shows Valve had repairability in mind.

Back inside, two more T9 screws hold the fan assembly to the chassis. With these out, you can remove the internals in one massive piece.

From here, you'll be able to see all the ports on small daughterboards, as well as the antennas for the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. But the real jewel is at the bottom: an easily accessible M.2 SSD slot mounted below the power supply. Ours came with a 2TB drive, which is fairly roomy, but this may become a must-have upgrade for 512GB Steam Machine owners if storage prices ever come down. And this drive is also held in with the same Torx screw, so you can use one screwdriver to make that swap.

Getting to the memory is far more involved and is more of a repairability compromise than we typically like to see. You need to remove the giant heatsink, which cools all of the components with the single fan, in order to get to the DDR5 SO-DIMMS. Given how tightly packed the Steam Machine is, with many cables and ribbon cables to daughterboards throughout the outside of the heatsink and PSU, that's a complex order that takes time and more risk than I think many Steam Machine owners may want to take. But given that the daughterboards are there, you should be able to replace broken ports, even if you have to do it in groups. Valve tells me it will partner with iFixit on repair manuals, similar to the Steam Deck.

Productivity Performance on the Steam Machine

The semi-custom, six-core/12-thread Zen 4 chip in the Steam Machine can hold its own against some current mobile chips.

The closest modern chip we had a record for is the AMD Ryzen AI 7 445, which has the same core count (with four Zen 5c cores and two Zen 5 cores), with a max boost clock of 4.5 GHz and a configurable TDP of 15-54 W. Valve's chip has 30W, but the GPU is discrete and isn't included here.

The Ryzen AI 7 445 ("Gorgon Point") in the Acer Swift Go 16 AI was marginally faster in single-core performance, but significantly faster in multi-core performance. On Handbrake, the Gorgon Point chip was 23 seconds faster than the Steam Machine, which completed the task in 6:33.

In our charts, you can also see comparisons to Intel's Panther Lake Core Ultra 7 355, a weaker chip than Valve's, and the Core Ultra X7 388H, which was stronger (but in far more expensive systems). Apple's M5, under air in the MacBook Pro, was the fastest of the bunch on both tests.

SteamOS and KDE Plasma Desktop

If you've used a Steam Deck before, everything on the Steam Machine will feel familiar. SteamOS 3 is the same here as it is on the handheld, just running on more powerful hardware. If you haven't used a Steam Deck before, but have used Steam's Big Picture Mode on a PC, you'll still be mostly at home, as the interface is very similar.

SteamOS continues to be Valve's primary advantage over the largely Windows-based ecosystem of gaming PCs. It's easily handled entirely with a controller. If you've used SteamOS on the Steam Deck, you might want to consider the Steam Controller, as you'll have all of the same buttons to navigate the operating system (and that's before you get into the fact that gameplay will feel similar).

Valve has adopted the Verified program from the Steam Deck to the Steam Machine. In Valve's documentation, it states that you need to hit 30 FPS at 1080p to be verified, which is pretty low stakes. Games that already run on Steam Deck should be shoe-ins, while the stronger hardware should enable more games to run on the Machine and earn the badge.

If you want a more typical desktop PC experience — perhaps you're playing at a desk – you can use the KDE Plasma desktop. While I suspect most people will never enter the desktop mode, Valve has added some significant updates here over the years, and I appreciate that you can use your computer as a computer. If you like to tinker and install extra software that isn't available through Steam, it's a great option.

Still, not all games run on Steam. While you can add most games to Steam through the "Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library" flow, not all work well. Some launchers have unofficial versions you can run through Linux, like the open-source Heroic Games launcher that will run Epic Games and GOG.

I wish that Valve offered a way to dual-boot Windows and SteamOS on both the Machine and the Steam Deck for these edge cases. The company said it would back when it announced the first Deck. With a 2TB drive, there is plenty of room.

"While Steam Deck is fully capable of dual-boot, the SteamOS installer that provides a dual-boot wizard isn't ready yet," Valve's page on Windows resources reads. "This will ship alongside SteamOS 3 once it's complete."

The Steam Machine is part of an ecosystem

There is a point in using the Steam Machine where I saw it as more of a platform. It was no surprise that the Steam Deck was built around playing games on a Valve platform, even if you can install other OSes. But with the Steam Machine in play, there's a fuller picture: playing your Steam games on the go, uploading the save to Steam Cloud, plopping yourself on the couch, turning on your Steam Machine, and resuming the same game, running locally, with the same controls thanks to the Steam Controller.

Perhaps one of the coolest things you can do is move your SD card from device to device. If you have an SD card in your Steam Deck, you can move it to your Steam Machine, and the games will be immediately playable. (Or, if you prefer, you could quickly move the games to the internal SSD.)

There are plenty of parts you can sub in there: You can play Steam on any handheld, or come home to your own custom-built rig, or use another controller. Despite its hardware, Steam still supports a ton of devices and ways to play.

But if you do have Valve's hardware, it starts to feel like an ecosystem on the level with Apple's, just focused exclusively on gaming. You get some benefits there — sleep and wake work just as well on this desktop as it does on Valve's handhelds. SteamOS is the best version of Steam's Big Picture mode out there. And this is way smaller than most DIY PCs. If you're all in on Valve, this is the way to go. But if you want more power and future-proofing, subbing in a more powerful PC will last you longer in the long run.

One thing that has been notable about the Steam Deck is Valve's commitment to updates. There have been a ton, adding features, squashing bugs, and making it more stable. In fact, that history is the one thing that makes me feel reasonably confident that the bugs I have seen will eventually be fixed.

Of course, Steam doesn't have every single game. Some won't run on SteamOS because of anti-cheat issues with Linux. Others simply have compatibility problems. Valve does have a method for running non-Steam games through Steam, but some, notably Epic Games' Fortnite, don't play well with it. You can install Windows or other launchers via Linux, but you will lose some of the ease the ecosystem offers. Valve offers minimal support for Windows, but at least it's something.

Steam Machine Configurations and Warranty

There are four configurations of the Steam Machine. First, there are two models of the computer; Both of them are identical with the exception of the storage. We reviewed the more expensive $1,349 version with a 2TB NVMe SSD and two extra faceplates, and bundling it with the Steam Controller brought it to $1,428.

The base model is a cheaper $1,049 option with a 512GB SSD. Bundling that with a Controller brings you to $1,128.

512GB isn't huge for a gaming system. Valve's spec sheet highlights that no matter which option you get, it comes with a high-speed microSD card slot. Luckily, the SSD is easy to access (See upgradeability above).

The $1,049 starting price is higher than consoles, including the more powerful PlayStation 5 Pro ($899) with 2TB of storage. A base PS5 Digital Edition is $599 with 825GB of storage. An all-digital Xbox Series X starts at $599.99. If you're looking for a living room solution to play games and don't care specifically about settings and your Steam library, those consoles are a better value.

In Asia, the Steam Machine will be sold through Valve's partner, Komodo, which also sells the Steam Deck. It will be available in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, but will not be sold in South Korea.

If you're buying this for a Steam library, you could also put Steam on any other computer and run it in Big Picture Mode. And given that supply is tight, that may be a better option for those willing to consider alternatives.

When we put together a parts list to estimate what a custom build looks like to match the Steam Machine, including a Ryzen 5 7600X, Radeon RX 7600, 16GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, a Gigabyte B650M Gaming Plus WiFi Micro ATX AM5 Motherboard, a 650W PSU, a case, cooler, and 1TB of storage, we hit $1,048.83. While our build gets you double the storage of the base Steam Machine, it doesn't get you the small case, dedicated Bluetooth or Steam Controller antennas, or super quiet operation. So if you're only comparing the Machine to other PCs, the price isn't terrible — it’s just the market, in general, that is.

Valve sells the Steam Machine with a one-year warranty.

Bottom Line

Valve's Steam Machine is a complicated little box. It was clearly designed for a simpler time, when components were plentiful, and it would be a somewhat affordable desktop that could be a more powerful option for Steam Deck owners to play their Steam games at home.

But it's not a simple time. The Steam Machine is still cute, still has a good selection of ports, still has an easily upgradeable SSD, and, most importantly, still runs SteamOS and gets all of the benefits that come with it. If you were docking your Steam Deck to the TV and wanted more performance, this will get you there, once Valve irons out the last of the bugs.

If you're just looking to get into gaming, a base-level PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X is a better deal. You can buy one and a Nintendo Switch 2 and spend less than the Steam Machine.

You can also get many of the benefits of the Steam Machine on other devices. If you have an effective gaming PC or laptop, Steam Big Picture Mode will do most of the work there. Valve is also working to bring SteamOS to more machines, though currently it's only working on Radeon GPUs.

But if you want something small for your living room that plays years of Steam titles and maybe even has a cute little wooden faceplate, the Steam Machine is for you, but you should go in understanding its limitations.

On this day in 1996, id Software unleashed Quake on the unsuspecting public. The game’s influence is difficult to overstate, with its pioneering 3D engine inspiring the first wave of 3D accelerator PC expansion card purchases, the establishment of online multiplayer competitive culture, and much more. Perhaps its impact on 3D gaming can only be matched by the same development team’s previous outing with Doom.

At launch, Quake drew criticism for its intense violence and gore, which also echoed Doom’s path to infamy among media and political pundits, and caused problems for ratings boards and regulators. However, id Software ignored such noise, insisting they simply made games they enjoy playing. Quake would be the last major id Software production with the ‘classic lineup’ due to burnout and various personal conflicts, notes Wikipedia.

Looking more closely at the technology behind Quake, it was clear the dev team eschewed ‘faking it with 2.5D tricks’ like in previous seminal PC FPS titles such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, System Shock, and others. Instead, Quake hit the scene with true 3D polygonal worlds and character models. The true 3D transformation meant that for the first time in FPS, games could enjoy real 3D collision and physics, as well as things like fully 360-degree vision and movement, and more.

With id Software’s new game engine arriving in the Pentium era, but still crushing the best CPUs of the time, it made a market for PC 3D accelerators. These add-in cards first became essential to PC gamers in the late 90s with full 3D engine titles arriving, led by Quake. So in the same era, we saw important hardware releases like the 3dfx Voodoo, ATI Rage, and Nvidia Riva cards. QuakeGL became the killer app to drive sales of these products.

As mentioned in the intro, 3D gaming engines and hardware aren’t the only long-lasting legacies we can attribute to Quake. The game also popularized online multiplayer gaming. Another huge influence Quake had was in inspiring (and allowing) the growth of a talented modding community. As well as numerous custom maps and campaigns, the moddability of Quake enabled total conversions like Team Fortress and Quake Rally, to drop a few names.

Quake would inspire imitators, tributes, and influence many more 3D gaming titles in the years and decades to come. There have also been several Quake sequels, remakes, and the game even sparked machinima film-making, where a game’s 3D world becomes a movie set. Many modern developers, including the founders of Valve, first cut their teeth on Quake modding.

Nowadays, folks have the luxury of the complete source code for winquake, glquake, quakeworld, and glquakeworld available on GitHub. It was released “for entertainment and educational purposes,” but under GPL, it can be used for possible commercial projects, too. Those into this kind of digital archaeology may also be interested in the GitHub repositories for Quake 2 and Quake III Arena.

In summary, Quake didn’t just splash down with one big innovation; it was the weight of multiple key advances that made it so important to the history and the future of PC gaming.

A curious new game titled Congratulations On Your Purchase recently appeared on PC digital marketplaces priced at $999. Its main claim to fame is that it is proudly “the most expensive game on Steam.” Buyers who purchase, download, and run this title will enjoy “a first-person luxury experience set inside a palace.” Perhaps most importantly, though, they will collect a ‘golden ticket’ Steam Achievement showing “you are now one of us” with the $999 proudly displayed at its center. It might be a cynical exercise in tapping into those compelled into conspicuous consumption, or it might be satire.

While Congratulations On Your Purchase asks for premium money, viewing the promotional video and screenshots doesn’t really give us palatial, luxury, exclusive vibes. It is more like being transported into a game credits screen where one is being congratulated for completing a Nintendo 64 game. The minimum system requirements of a GTX 1060 or RX 580 definitely seem like overkill for this 3D walking simulator ‘adventure.’

However, the gameplay, which can last about 10 minutes if you stretch it out, isn’t the point. “The most expensive game on Steam. A palace, a red carpet, paparazzi, and a wall where you leave your name — visible to every owner who comes after you. Ten minutes,” reads the Steam sales pitch – which may be AI-generated according to the small print. “The price is not a mistake. It is the point.”

Further insight into how the devs hope to get their hooks into the target audience to reel in $999 a pop is provided by the Steam page. “You paid for this. Not accidentally. Not on impulse. You saw the price. You read the description. And then you bought it anyway. Welcome.”

Towards the end of the Steam page sales pitch, the devs add a paragraph on the philosophical value of this kind of purchase. Of course, the answer isn’t discouraging towards the level of expense. Rather, the choice of how, when, and where to spend your cash is claimed to be “philosophically speaking, unanswerable.”

While Congratulations On Your Purchase may also be satirical, it can be added to your Steam Cart, purchased, and thus might raise a nice bit of pocket money for the devs at Minimum Viable Prestige and the publishers Worth It Studio. Visiting the game's associated website at www.steamelite.zone seems to confirm there have been two buyers, so far, leaving two personalized messages on the Congratulations On Your Purchase wall. We'd also grumble that this Steam game isn't even original in its satire/cynicism, as it shares much in common with the $999 Apple iOS app from the noughties dubbed I Am Rich.

Our conclusion is that you should definitely spend your money elsewhere this Amazon Prime Day week.

69-year-old Claude Guillemot, who founded Ubisoft alongside his four brothers, died on Friday, June 19, after his private twin-engine Cessna 421 crashed on approach to La Baule-Escoublac Airport in France, near the country’s Atlantic coast. Le Parisien said that Ubisoft has confirmed the passing of one of its founders in the accident.

“Ubisoft ‌was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Claude Guillemot, co-founder of the group and chairman ​of Guillemot Corp, in an accident,” the company said. “Our thoughts are with his family ⁠and loved ones during this difficult time. No ​further statements will be made at this time.”

Claude and his brothers founded Ubisoft in 1986 when they established the business by importing and distributing games in the country. It was also during that same year that it launched its first game, Zombi. In 1989, the startup was already making millions of dollars in sales and revenue, but it made its first globally successful original title, the platformer Rayman, in 1995. This allowed the company to go public in 1996, when it raised $80 million in its IPO.

Its successful public debut injected enough cash for it to open studios across the world, including Canada, China, and Japan. From humble beginnings, the company grew into one of the biggest names in gaming and entertainment, owning some of the most popular gaming titles and franchises in the past and present like Assassin’s Creed, Brothers in Arms, Far Cry, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, Prince of Persia, The Division, and Watch Dogs, among others.

Despite its success, Ubisoft has recently been facing some troubles. This includes a major cyberattack on its servers which forced the company to take Rainbow Six Siege completely offline as well as issues with generative AI in Far Cry 7, with one insider saying that it “looks like s**t.”

The Guillemot brothers no longer own 100% of Ubisoft, although they still own a considerable stake. According to Investing.com, Guillemot Brothers S.A., a holding company that manages the brothers’ stake in Ubisoft, is still the largest shareholder with 12.27%, while institutional bank JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the second largest shareholder with 9.94%. Chinese gaming company Tencent Holdings Limited owns 9.46% of the company, with the rest spread out across different mutual funds and ETF, retail investors, and other institutional investors.

Claude Guillemot was the president of the Guillemot Corporation (different from the Guillemot Brothers S.A.), which was the original company founded in 1986 and still owns brands like digital audio solutions provider Hercules, DJ equipment maker Djuced, and gaming accessories manufacturer Thrustmaster. His younger brother, Yves Guillemot, still serves as the CEO of Ubisoft.

Aside from helping build one of Europe’s largest gaming empires, reports say that Claude also holds a pilot’s license and was an avid and experienced pilot. He was en route to the airport near the accident site for a planned air show this weekend when the tragedy struck. Alongside the Ubisoft co-founder, a 70-year-old flight instructor was also killed in the accident.

Officials haven’t made any statements yet regarding the cause of the accident. It will likely take months, if not years, before we get a comprehensive accident report from the Bureau d'enquêtes et d'analyses pour la sécurité de l'aviation civile (BEA), the French equivalent of the U.S. NTSB, tasked with investigating aircraft accidents.

Earlier this year, Epic Games admitted its launcher sucked and committed to building a newer one that's much more competitive with Steam. Yesterday, at Unreal Fest, the company unveiled a roadmap for the next 12 months, promising significant upgrades in the form of Epic Games Launcher V2. The platform is being rebuilt internally so it's faster and includes a lot more features that will bring it up to parity with Valve's offering.

The biggest change is a redesigned storefront that's truly personalized to the individual user. Games will be recommended based on taste and playstyle, while the game pages will try to do more than just show the price, title, and cover. Epic Games Store already looks more modern than Steam, so the visual efforts are appreciated, but it's the underlying speediness and a sense of curation that will really matter.

The v2 launcher will supposedly open up 5x faster on average upon cold boots, while restoring it from the system tray will be 6.5x faster on average. That's a huge improvement, but keep in mind that Epic got these numbers from a ridiculous test bench comprised of a 32-core AMD Threadripper, an RTX A6000, and 128GB of RAM. Not exactly consumer-grade hardware, especially during these times.

There's a lot more coming apart from the upgraded storefront. For instance, Epic will finally add sprawling player profiles with avatars and your game activity. That will enable everything from DMs to better voice chat and game-independent parties. You'll be able to write manual reviews for games instead of relying on star ratings. Developers will be able to add their own patch notes, directly integrated inside the store, aided by a new notification system that'll inform players of the coinciding update.

The roadmap itself is split into three distinct categories: Up First, Up Next, and On Deck. Chunked installation of Fortnite is among the first new features we'll see, along with cross-region gifting and a private beta for Epic Games Launcher V2. Then, some of the aforementioned improvements are mentioned in the Up Next list, which will also bring the public beta of the new launcher for everyone to try.

Finally, things like universal controller support, akin to Steam's extensive toolset, will debut toward the end of the next 12 months. New APIs meant to help developers better understand the player base will be part of this update. The redesigned storefront is also part of this timeframe, so don't expect it in the following months. Perhaps the most interesting feature mentioned here is third-party communities, which, if implemented right, could be as useful as Steam Forums.

All of these little changes, along with the more prominent ones, will combine to form the Epic Games Launcher V2. If this timeline is to be believed, by this time next year, we'll have a much more competitive and robust EGS than ever before. Steam is a great platform in its own right, but competition is always important to drive innovation. Regardless of what you feel about Epic, the company's efforts to rebuild its launcher are ultimately better for the consumer.

MSI unveiled its Claw 8 EX AI+ handheld at Computex earlier this month, and it has just appeared on the company's website for $1,799, while Newegg has it listed for $1,699. It features Intel's new Arc G3 Extreme APU with flagship Arc B390 integrated graphics and 32GB of LPDDR5X memory. MSI says it tried everything to keep costs as low as possible, and that it'll be a tough year ahead with chances of even more price hikes.

Andy Chu, the brand's product marketing lead, told FRVR that "it’s a really difficult year for Intel and especially the OEM like us [...] because we also need to take those cost hikes for those key components like memory and also storage.” It's no secret at this point that DRAM and NAND prices have skyrocketed over the past few months, and even major vendors are struggling to keep up.

Every console is now more expensive than it was at launch, including the once bastion of affordability: the Steam Deck. The OLED version of Valve's handheld retails for $949 despite featuring last-gen hardware. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ brings a huge performance boost over it, so the price almost looks justified in comparison. The ROG Xbox Ally X with the Ryzen Z2 Extreme is available for $999 everywhere, and that's AMD's mainstream rival to the Arc G3 Extreme at the moment.

"All I can say is we have tried every approach to get the memory and also storage at a lower cost. Like, deepen the relationship between us and also those suppliers, like to have some deals… and I think we have done everything we can do to make our system as affordable as possible," continued Chu. Not much you can do when hyperscalers annex all the production lines, offering fatter margins to these manufacturers.

It's a bit ironic to explicitly market your product as "AI+" while publicly complaining about the very consequences of said AI boom, but we digress. "Unfortunately, I think the situation, the result is what you see right here. So, I would say, yes, it will be a tough year for us and for the gamers,” warns Chu. We've already heard plenty of admonitions from various companies, but it's disheartening nonetheless to see the situation perpetually spiral out of control.

The executive goes on to say that "there’s much room for another price hike," so even the $1,799 price tag could go up in the following months. For context, you can find AMD's Strix Halo-equipped handhelds above the $2,000 mark, and they are significantly more capable machines. Even though they're far and few in between, let's not discount laptops either that have Panther Lake silicon and cost less than $2,000.

To be clear, the Claw 8 EX AI+ is a competent device that we were impressed by in our hands-on at Computex. Since Intel is only launching the Arc G3 Extreme right now, there was no cheaper base Arc G3 to put inside this thing either. Intel has mandated memory speeds for Panther Lake, but MSI could've surely cut down on the 32GB pool to save costs and make the handheld more affordable overall with 24GB or even 12GB configs.

Goldeneye Recomp v1.0 has been released on GitHub by developer SunJaycy. Gaming-focused social media channels are excited with this release, which provides “a native PC port of GoldenEye 007 (Xbox 360 / XBLA), built by statically recompiling the original game into C++ with the ReXGlue SDK,” states the dev. “No emulator — the game runs as a real native executable.” I played the original Nintendo 64 classic for hours in the late 1990s, but this version comes with numerous benefits, including support for modern Windows controllers, online multiplayer, widescreen support, and post-FX filters, all at a purported stable 60 FPS frame rate.

GoldenEye was a seminal release for consoles, establishing that FPS games were a compelling proposition beyond the realms of PCs and keyboard/mouse control. Nintendo / Rare showed that slick, responsive FPS controls were possible on a console, and it felt good to play, with widespread praise from both reviewers and fans. In effect, GoldenEye trailblazed this genre on consoles, thanks in part to the N64’s 3D power and sensitive analog controller. Without its strong approval, we may not have seen the subsequent console developments/releases of games like Perfect Dark, Timesplitters, and many more.

Though it may be exciting for old GoldenEye N64 players (and even those who’ve only experienced the game on N64 emulators), getting the GoldenEye 007 — PC Recompilation installed isn’t a cinch right now. As SunJaycy highlights on the GitHub page for the project, “This repository contains no game code or assets. It is only the source that wraps the game (menus, hooks, online, post-FX, build config).” They go on to explain that “You must find the game files yourself. This game was never released publicly.” So, that’s a challenge you’ll have to work through on your own.

If and when you get the Xbox 360 version of the game recompiled for PC, though, you should expect the following thrilling benefits:

• Runs natively on Windows — no emulator, no BIOS.
• Controller support.
• Online multiplayer — host or join matches over the internet (LAN, Hamachi, playit.gg, or a public server).
• In-game pause/settings menu (ESC): video, resolution, frame limit, fullscreen, online setup.
• Post-FX filters (brightness, contrast, saturation, vignette, presets…).
• Smooth, stable 60 FPS (recompiled, with GPU-pacing fixes for the original's frame timing).

Instructions are provided for building the Windows version of the game from its collected sources, plus the Goldeneye Recomp v1.0 code.

Coincidentally, this Recomp release comes as the latest James Bond title, 007 First Light game, rides high in the charts on PCs and current-gen consoles. First Light is also the centerpiece of the latest Nvidia GeForce bundling promotion. PC gamers can grab a free copy of the action-adventure game 007 First Light when they purchase a qualifying GeForce RTX 50-series graphics card, gaming desktop, or laptop.

Game speedrunning enthusiasts once discovered that a greasy disc was the key to enabling a big time-saving trick in SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom on the original Xbox. Speedrunner SHiFT, the current leaderboard champ in the game, reveals how, with the right console generation choice, the right drive, the right configuration of greasy smudges, and with mastery of the 'lag clip' technique, you could complete SpongeBob running from the optical drive in record time.

The above video is partly a detective story, as the competitive speedrunning community focuses intensely on any not-so-obvious speed advantages that can be achieved. The dream is to slice seconds off the completion time of this game and achieve a speedrun of under 40 minutes. SHiFT discusses how the gunked-up game disc tactic was confirmed as a winning strategy, while not breaking any community guidelines.

The original Xbox version of the SpongeBob game is the default choice of the speedrunning community, as it has faster loading than the PS2 and GameCube versions. However, there were various versions of the Xbox, too. For example, there are four different optical drive manufacturers, among other nuanced differences. So, detective work and experience were used to narrow down the best vintage machine.

Speedrunners, including SHiFT and Zim, worked for hours testing various combinations of optical drives, laser modules, and connector cables. They even wondered if the video chip (which varies between production years on Xbox) or the TV connector method had an impact on timings. In a daze from a super-long streaming session, they eventually decided to look at the condition of the disc. It was smudgy, but it could be worse...

An inspirational moment then occurred, and they tried making the disc filthy and smeary with grease and sweat. However, it was ultimately found that a strategically placed pattern of smears, with eight strokes emanating from the center like the petals of a flower, was a winning choice. This grease config made it easy for the player to induce the elusive lag clip timesaving technique – no hardware tinkering necessary – without making the optical disc unreadable.

They had found “the holy grail” of SpongeBob lag clipping speedrunning. SHiFT’s conclusion was confirmed in some correspondence with the then-champion among SpongeBob speedrunners, who goes by the unimproveable handle swagmasterdoritos. The master admitted, “I clean my discs via licking them then using a pillowcase to wipe and clean.” An image shared by swagmasterdoritos showed the spit-cleaned disc featured petal-like streaks. That’s how they had been enjoying super-slick lag clipping throughout the game: there was nothing particularly unique about their original Xbox.

Two new entrants have broken into the top five of the leaderboard in the last five days, but SHiFT's time of 40m 27s is still more than 90s ahead of the nearest challenger. Nowadays, the community has given up on optical disks. You will see that all the top SpongeBob speedruns play the game from the Xbox HDD. Some thought lag clips were too inconsistent, and that potentially damaging game discs by smudging or scratching them was unethical.

Xbox embarked on an impressive course-correction spree earlier this year, thanks to a leadership swap bringing in Asha Sharma as the new CEO. A hundred days later, she has penned a candid internal memo along with Xbox strategy chief Matt Brody, going over the future of the company. It was released online as a blog post, with the main takeaway being the surge in component costs — even a giant like Microsoft will be forced to pay over 5x more for storage next year, compared to 2025.

The situation is a bit ironic considering Microsoft is one of the biggest constituents of the AI boom, and a central player in the AI phenomenon that is driving up storage and memory prices globally. Despite that, in February 2026, Xbox paid 2x as much for storage as it did last fall, and those costs have already doubled since then. By 2027, the price hike is set to the 5x multiplier; Xbox will shell out more than 500% of what it originally used to pay two years ago. RAM has followed a similar trajectory, Sharma says.

The blog post explains how everyone in the industry is affected by the component crisis, but that Xbox is impacted more harshly because of "the choices [we] made over the last half decade." Such dire circumstances have made it harder for the company to make as many consoles as the players want, forcing "a new business model and partnerships for hardware" to be considered.

"Going forward, this cannot continue," said the Xbox executives while revealing the company has invested over $20 billion in the past five years, but lost $500 million in annual revenue during the same period. That wording suggests that perhaps the next-gen console needs to be built by someone else. Third-party OEMs can help offset some of the cost that would otherwise be spent subsidizing the console.

The blog post reaffirms that the team is still committed to Xbox Helix through all the hardships, but it doesn't seem like it would be a direct competitor for the PS6 anymore. The console-PC hybrid approach has likely pushed it well past affordable territory. CEO Asha Sharma has even recently talked about how spending thousands of dollars in a single console generation is not feasible.

So, it'll be interesting to see how the Xbox Helix would be justified during this era, especially with component costs piling up. Current estimates put it well over $1,000, which sounds egregious in a vacuum. Unfortunately, a PS5 Pro now costs $900, and a 1TB Steam Deck OLED will run you $950 today. The Xbox Helix almost doesn't sound bad by comparison when you take into account the massive generational leap.

The rest of the blog post talks about how Xbox only has a 3$ operating margin — for every $100 made, only $3 are left as profit after everything is deducted, for example. Realities like those are what pushed the company to only have two exclusives for 2026 and 2027. Bloomberg also reports that a layoff is on the cards, claiming it will be announced on June 30, 2026, right after Microsoft's fiscal year ends.

The radical new business models being teased at the moment could point toward more subscription services, deeper financing plans, or simple hardware partnerships, as we mentioned earlier, where OEMs build the console for Xbox. It's a bit too early to speculate all that, but it's clear that the company is not giving up easily. A lot hinges on the success of Xbox Helix next year, which is now all but confirmed to be a luxury device.

Valve is bringing an end to one of Steam's longest-running payment options. On its official Steam support page, the company has confirmed that it will be discontinuing Steam gift cards by the end of 2026. It will no longer be restocking physical gift cards at retail stores and expects existing stock to wrap up by the end of the year. Customers with existing Steam gift cards will continue to be eligible to redeem them at any time, subject to applicable local laws.

For those interested in grabbing one of the last remaining physical Steam gift cards, several retailers should still have them in stock, including Best Buy. Users who prefer gifting Steam Wallet funds will still be able to purchase and send digital Steam gift cards directly through Steam, meaning the gifting option itself isn't going away, only the physical retail cards are being phased out.

• Buy Steam gift card from Best Buy

According to Valve, ever since the launch of physical Steam gift cards in 2012, scammers have increasingly used them to defraud unsuspecting victims. Over the years, the company has taken several measures to combat the problem, including working with retailers and law enforcement agencies, adding warnings to gift cards, restricting redemption to the currency of a user's Steam Wallet, and even removing cards from sale in regions where suspicious activity was detected.

Unfortunately, scammers have continued to adapt despite these safeguards. "As we have continued to put more and more restrictions in place, scammers have adapted. They continue to have an impact on Steam customers and other unsuspecting individuals. So we've made the difficult decision to end the Steam Gift Card program at retail stores," the company notes.

Valve's decision comes just a few weeks after it introduced a reservation-based system for its newly launched Steam Controller to combat scalpers and automated bots. The $99 controller sold out almost immediately after pre-orders opened, with some units quickly appearing on eBay for as much as $300. In response, Valve restricted reservations to eligible Steam accounts with a purchase history and good standing, helping ensure genuine customers received priority over resellers.

If you thought the hype around GTA 6 was already at a fever pitch, baby, you ain't seen nothing yet. A Redditor has been posting some concerning information on the /r/GTA6unmoderated/ subreddit that he believes points to the forthcoming release of a third trailer for what will likely be the largest entertainment product launch of all time. That information consists of acoustic recording data, traffic monitoring, and, incredibly, even oxygen concentrations, all allegedly collected live in person at Rockstar's HQ.

To say this is unprecedented for a video game launch would be an understatement. This person is purportedly spending a significant amount of their time literally crouched in bushes outside the Rockstar North headquarters in Edinburgh, Scotland, to record this data and observe employees coming and going from the studio, all in an attempt to predict when a new video game trailer will come out.

HQ oxygen analysis. Executives working weekends. from r/GTA6unmoderated

The poster claims that increased oxygen levels at the HQ point to executives working weekends, while spikes in acoustic and decibel levels point to increased activity. The user also posted a significant set of "Rockstar Carpark Data," which purportedly shows a significant increase in cars arriving at the HQ, including several "notable" models such as a Rolls-Royce Cullinan and a Ferrari 296 GTB.

Needless to note, this could of course all be an elaborate prank. The user has only posted on Reddit four times, and the data that they're posting really doesn't seem like it would actually correlate with anything. There's also the sheer absurdity of someone going to such lengths for this purpose. However, in comment replies, the user claims to be someone who "contracted with the government for audio surveillance" for "years". He also claims that he's "not doing anything illegal", and that he "literally just did it for [his] side hustle and [because he] was bored." He also claims to make upwards of £300,000 a year at whatever he does for work now.

Further, when a Redditor sarcastically asked, "Why not just bug the place at this point?" he replied in earnest, "I wouldn’t be able to pull it off," before admitting he doesn't want to "go the illegal route." Kudos to him for avoiding actual illegal activity, we suppose, but we're not convinced that his current surveillance operations aren't already over the line. He's supposedly already had one set of monitoring gear (pictured above) confiscated by, presumably, Rockstar's security staff, and frankly, if this is legitimate, we're surprised he hasn't had a run-in with the Police Service.

The obvious comparison to make is to the Pentagon pizza theory, which states that you can use spikes in fast food orders, especially pizza delivery, to determine when US government agencies are about to take decisive actions. As amusing as that is, this is decidedly a step further. We do have to acknowledge that the enterprising surveillant is at least not harassing employees directly or trying to enter the building, but we find it very unlikely that the poor employees trying to crunch and complete what might be the biggest video game of all time aren't aware of this cad—again, assuming this is all real and not some kind of complicated troll.

Even others in the GTA community, who are no doubt just as enthusiastic about the game, have condemned the user's behavior. After GTA6 Countdown posted about his behavior on X, GTABase posted the quote tweet above, calling the overeager fan's actions "unnecessary and dangerously obsessive." It's good to see that calmer heads are prevailing, even as many in the Reddit threads seem to be aiding and encouraging the dubious investigator, including suggesting laser listening devices.

Folks, we're excited for GTA 6, too, but as the kids say, this ain't it. Hiding in bushes, setting up microphones, monitoring cars coming and going, and monitoring oxygen levels might (or might not!) strictly be legal, but that doesn't make them reasonable or rightful things to do because you want a company to tell you more information about its upcoming game. GTA 6 is still scheduled for launch on current-generation console platforms in mid-November, which is a little over five months away from today. If you're primarily a PC gamer and you're itching to play, keep in mind that the PC release is not even formally confirmed yet, so it's time to start shopping those console deals—sooner rather than later.

Argentine developer Dante Leoncini has gotten the original Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95, the Symbian slider phone that launched in 2007, and has added mouse and keyboard support, he said in a post on X this week. Leoncini says that while some slowdowns remain, he has pinned down the cause and is working on a fix, the latest step in a series of efforts to run heavyweight software on the dual-core, 332 MHz handset. Half-Life shipped in 1998, needing a 133 MHz Pentium and 24MB of RAM at minimum, specs the N95 clears on paper. To date, Leoncini has managed to run Quake 3, Crash Bandicoot, and emulate Sega, ScummVM, and NES on the handset.

The N95 pairs a 332 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 2420, a dual-core part built around the ARM11 design, with a PowerVR MBX 3D accelerator, 64MB of RAM, and a 240x320 display, all under Symbian OS 9.2 and S60 3rd Edition. An 8GB storage variant, released later in 2007, doubled the memory to 128MB.

Because the phone runs an Arm processor and a non-Windows operating system, getting Half-Life onto it requires a native Symbian build rather than emulation of the PC version. Leoncini has said before that the limiting factor on his earlier Quake 3 work was the CPU, which aligns with the slowdowns he’s now chasing.

Ports of Half-Life to unusual platforms generally lean on Xash3D, an open-source engine compatible with Valve's GoldSrc that’s been built for Android, the Raspberry Pi, and the Meta Quest. Whether Leoncini's N95 version uses it isn’t confirmed, however.

The OMAP 2420 architecture has managed to carry a game running at 30 FPS before. Way, way back in 2008, GMSArena reported that developer Olli Hinkka had ported Quake III Arena to S60 3rd Edition phones running the same chipset, with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support and the option to host a multiplayer server on the phone itself. That port ran on the N95 8GB, N82, and E90, but not the original N95, which carried half the RAM of the 8GB model; Leoncini hasn’t said which N95 variant he’s using.

Half-Life is one of several things Leoncini has built or ported for the N95, alongside a from-scratch Blender clone called Blendersito and his own game engine, both on his GitHub. Running. In terms of the N95 as his choice of hardware medium, it’s far from the weirdest one we’ve seen.

A quirky tech enthusiast has attempted to load games to their Sega Genesis console through a vinyl record player. “The idea is, basically, we’re going to record the game data as sound and then play it back,” using a turntable connected to a Sega Genesis, explained Throaty Mumbo, a self-described “weird and impractical tech challenge” aficionado. As well as a console and a record deck, a Mega EverDrive Pro and Raspberry Pi Pico 2 board were used for this project. “This should be a quick, easy project,” predicted Throaty, knowingly.

As the TechTuber indicated, this project shouldn’t be an insurmountable challenge. The Sega Genesis was released in 1989, offering a super-fast and convenient game cartridge loading system. However, using designed-for-audio media like compact cassette tapes was a common way for home computer users to load apps and games until the mid-1980s, when the slow but widely available and cheap tape format gave way to floppies. Vinyl was/is just another contemporaneous hi-fi audio format.

After introducing the challenge, the first serious step towards the intended goal was to test loading a small homebrew title to the Genesis using the Mega EverDrive Pro cartridge-to-SD card backup system. It worked, as expected.

With that foundation laid, it was time to (re)prove the sound-as-data concept by using an old Nintendo Famicom Data Recorder and a standard cassette tape. A Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was utilized as the bridge to convert audio signals to data ready for the Genesis. It connected to the EverDrive via USB. You can see in the video from around the 25 to 27-minute mark that some small homebrew ROMs were indeed loaded and run on the console (a fractal demo and a version of Breakout) this way.

Now came the time to switch to vinyl. It's only a format change, so what could go wrong? The Teenage Engineering PO-80 Record Factory was chosen as the vinyl player. Assembling this device was a frustrating process for the TechTuber, who blamed the quality of the instructions. Then the Genesis ROM data was transferred to vinyl using a 3.5mm audio connection.

The PO-80 was chosen for its advertised ability as being much more than a player; it can also be used to “cut your very own first 5-inch vinyl record,” according to the packaging shown in the video. Checking out the official PO-80 product page, it is difficult to complain about audio quality, though, as the makers are upfront about this $149 gadget’s “lo-fi sound.” Sadly, lo-fi lived up to its billing, as it simply wasn’t hi-fi enough for storing and playing back Genesis ROM data without corruption.

Throaty spent hours trying to get the loading from PO-80 recorded vinyl to work, fighting against audio clipping (too loud) or inputs being too quiet, but this vinyl-to-Genesis data attempt ultimately failed. At least tape was proven to be a functional, though slow, alternative to game cartridges for the Genesis.

The Steam Machine seems to be everything that the gaming world is talking about right now, partially because PC building took a nosedive thanks to high prices, and also because it's a Valve product. The console/PC hybrid (PConsole, maybe?) remains a highly anticipated product despite rumors of a price hike. The release is now set in stone and imminent, as Valve has officially confirmed the summer 2026 launch window and expanded its Verified program to include Machine and Frame alongside the Deck.

"Today we are expanding the Verified program to include Steam Machine and Steam Frame, both of which are shipping this summer," the company stated. The news should ease the worries of many an expecting gamer, given today's constant worries about AI servers slurping every RAM and NAND chip on the face of the earth, as well as Valve's own statements about component scarcity delaying the release. Plus, the company always works on its own schedule, so much so that Valve Time is a term.

The release of the Machine has been taking flak, given that while Valve was initially hoping for an estimated $600 to $800 price — in the ballpark of the higher-end consoles — the rumored pricing is climbing around or over $1000. This fact is somewhat corroborated by a February statement from a Valve executive who, like most anyone in the world, stated the price revision was due to the AI-driven component shortage.

No manufacturer can escape that particular black hole, as even the PlayStation 5 Pro is currently going for $899. Paying a slice more for seemingly superior hardware and a gigantic library of cheap games arguably makes more financial sense if you're a frequent gamer.

Steam Verified is a developer-focused program where game makers ensure that their titles are capable of running on the Deck (meaning they'll run fine under Linux), that the UI elements and text are readable at standard resolutions, and that sensible default graphics settings are used. The baseline performance target was 30 FPS at 1280x800 resolution for the Deck, and now 30 FPS at 1920x1080p for the Machine.

Since those latter figures are bound to cause some confusion, it should be double-noted that they're a baseline — the Machine is advertised as capable of 4K, 60 FPS gameplay with the use of upscaling, or in other words, business as usual. The specifications bear this out, as the CPU therein is a six-core unit with a 30 W TDP target, and the GPU is an RDNA3 design with 28 CUs, a 2.45 GHz clock speed, and a 110 W TDP. For comparison's sake, the entire Steam Deck has a 15 W maximum TDP. The rest of the Verified recommendations for the Machine are exactly the same as the Deck's.

Despite price hikes, Steam hardware remains popular. Just recently, the Steam Deck instantly ran out of stock even after its price was bumped up to $789 and $949, depending on the version. Given that zeitgeist and the general thirst for new hardware, it looks like the Machine will do just fine. We just hope that Valve makes enough of them and does its best to prevent scalping.

Nintendo has officially disclosed that it's planning on releasing a new version of the Switch 2, updated to comply with European Union regulations. According to these new rules, certain devices, including portable handhelds, need to have easily user-replaceable batteries if they wish to be sold in the region. The law goes into effect from February 18, 2027, so we can assume Nintendo will have an updated Switch 2 out by then.

The company has a dedicated "Compliance with EU Directives and Regulations" page on its website that was just updated with a new "Batteries Regulation" section. It mentions how the EU's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive has made replaceable batteries mandatory and that "Nintendo is implementing measures to comply with these requirements by preparing versions of products to meet the Regulation."

The last part of the sentence is the important bit; it confirms that the company will launch a Switch 2 with user-replaceable batteries sometime between now and February 2027. The products falling under this category come with model numbers starting with "BEE," and in the future, they'll have an additional code "OSM" visible on the package to indicate "separate products for regulatory purposes."

That specific wording makes it sound like the Switch 2 units that comply with the new battery rules are different from a regular Switch 2, almost discouraging users from opting for it willingly. Moreover, the "BEE" model number is also designated to Switch 2 Joy-Cons and the Pro Controller, so it remains to be seen whether they'll be updated with replaceable-battery models as well.

Whatever ends up happening, it's important to keep in mind that we're talking about the European Union only, so don't expect to see a potentially revised Switch 2 being sold in North America or Asia. Of course, it can be imported, but we don't know whether Nintendo will region-lock the consoles to ensure they only work in the EU. Currently, Switch 2 models and games (outside of Japan) are not region-locked.

Lastly, you can still swap out the batteries in a regular Switch 2 today, but it's a very involved process, similar to a modern smartphone — if not harder. There are about 36 steps listed in iFixit's guide just for getting the battery out, and another 27 after for reassembly. The console overall has a 3/10 repairability score, lower than the original Switch, and much lower than even the latest iPhone 17 Pro lineup.

MSI has long been a partner of Intel's with its Claw handheld, but at Computex, the company's Claw 8 EX AI+ looked like the strongest version yet. That's largely based on the fact that it's using the Intel Arc G3 Extreme, based on the company's Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) chips, with integrated graphics ready to take on AMD.

The system, which comes in one color, 'void purple,' has two extended grips on the sides. On the ground at Computex in Taipei, Tom's Hardware's Jeffrey Kampman confirmed that the Claw 8 EX AI+ "felt excellent in my hands," and that "the grips are large and well-contoured and distribute the weight of the system well."

Those grips also feature hall-effect triggers and sticks, and what MSI refers to as a "highly responsive D-Pad," along with a linear motor for rumble feedback.

Ergonomics have become a big deal. When Asus moved to its ROG Xbox lineup, it added some pretty serious grips to the sides. It makes the system wider, but also far more comfortable to hold. The same holds true here.

The system boasts an 8-inch, 120 Hz display with a variable refresh rate. The screen isn't totally flush between the grips, and juts out below them a bit in a weird style choice.

In our hands-on time with the device, Hogwarts Legacy ran well on the integrated B390, but we'll need to spend time testing in a less controlled environment to learn more for sure.

While MSI is still using its own Control Center M, its integrated into the Xbox Full Screen Experience, so you shouldn't have to deal with the Windows desktop unless you truly want to.We're hoping that the 80 WHr battery (the same size that you find in the Asus ROG Ally X), will allow for at least a few hours of gaming on a charge. Panther Lake has proven to be fairly efficient, but gaming is a pretty heavy workload.

Variations of the Claw will come with up to 32GB of RAM. MSI hasn't listed storage, but points out there's a single M.2 2280 SSD slot on the Claw. While MSI has yet to announce specifics on release dates or pricing, an early page on Best Buy that has since been pulled down suggested that a version with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage may be $1,699.99. But like much at Computex, there's not official pricing, so it's all still up in the air.

Nvidia has been releasing major improvements to its DLSS suite of neural rendering tech throughout 2026. The first major update came at CES with DLSS 4.5 upscaling (or "Super Resolution"), which introduced a more advanced and more computationally intensive transformer AI architecture for better image quality at lower input resolutions. The second was DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation, which introduced 5x and 6x multipliers along with a dynamic mode that shifts multipliers on the fly for the smoothest gameplay experience.

Now, at Computex 2026, Nvidia has revealed DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, its advanced denoiser for better ray-traced and path-traced image quality in games.

For a refresher, DLSS Ray Reconstruction replaces hand-tuned denoisers with a neural rendering model that both infers what pixels should look like in noisy areas where light rays weren't cast and upscales the resulting image to a higher-resolution output. The model uses temporal and spatial inputs from game engines to produce its sharp, stable, and high-fidelity output images.

DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, coming in August, improves this set of techniques in three ways. Using an improved transformer architecture, it can process 35% more input data and uses 20% more parameters within the same compute budget as the previous-generation transformer architecture.

DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction also inherits better spatial awareness and processing of input data from DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, resulting in more accurate lighting, more stable images, and clearer motion. Nvidia says the mew model has also been trained on a larger data set to improve its utilization of game inputs and offers developers more control over its temporal accumulation behavior, both of which result in improved image quality.

Unlike DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, which incurs substantial performance penalties on older hardware, DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction will remain 100% compatible with every GeForce RTX GPU, including RTX 20-series and RTX 30-series products.

Nvidia touts a couple of scenarios where DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction makes a big difference in image quality, and the improved performance of the model is indeed easily visible.

In Pragmata, the flickering of a laser trap becomes much more dynamic, and it doesn't leave persistent artifacts when those same lasers deactivate.

And in Alan Wake II, a wall of TVs displaying nothing but static transforms from a mere suggestion into a crisp, convincing reproduction of CRT snow. And the reflections from those TVs on the nearby floor also becomes much more dynamic and lifelike.

Ray Reconstruction has always been the most specialized of the DLSS model family, so it's perhaps unsurprising that it's the last of the three to be updated this year. Nvidia says it'll come to 27 games in August via the Nvidia App, including hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Pragmata, and Resident Evil Requiem. And of course, it's fully compatible with the Blackwell GPU on the RTX Spark.

The benefits of Ray Reconstruction will soon move beyond games, too. Nvidia is bringing this model to Blender, where it will replace slow denoisers that incur significant wait times for the viewport to re-stabilize every time the camera is moved. Along with Nvidia Optix, Ray Reconstruction in Blender promises a much more interactive viewport experience and near-final image quality, resulting in a better representation of one's creative vision and less disruption to the creative flow state.

We'll be going hands-on with some of Nvidia's latest products and releases at Computex 2026, and it's likely we'll be able to see DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction in action. Stay tuned for more details as we get them.

What initially seemed like a promising and legitimate foray into the retro gaming handheld market has rapidly evolved into a PR challenge for Lenovo. The company has cracked down on unauthorized Chinese merchants who were illegally selling Lenovo G02 to international buyers, violating the device's regional restrictions. To make matters worse, several unscrupulous sellers were reportedly preloading thousands of pirated games onto the G02.

Lenovo made it abundantly clear to Tom's Hardware that, despite licensing its branding for the G02 retro gaming handhelds, any distribution or sale outside China was strictly prohibited. In recent days, multiple sellers from Chinese e-commerce platforms, including AliExpress and Alibaba, have started selling the G02 globally. The breach not only violated Lenovo’s explicit restrictions but also caused the company potential legal complications, as some G02 units were later found to contain thousands of illicit ROMs.

Lenovo’s swift investigation into the unauthorized sales of its G02 retro gaming handheld has already yielded positive results. The first waves of AliExpress and Alibaba listings for the G02 are no longer available for purchase and effectively halted international purchases that extend beyond the device's intended market.

As soon as one listing is taken down, another sprouts up almost instantaneously. Resellers are persistent in profiting from the G02, so they will do whatever to circumvent Lenovo's crackdown. Shortly after the delistings, another Alibaba merchant had already begun offering the Lenovo G02 for $41.40, albeit with a minimum order quantity of 40 units. The bulk-sale approach will make it difficult for Lenovo and Chinese platforms to track and control the flow of the devices. Bulk sales appeal to international resellers and gray market operators, so who knows how much the Alibaba seller will move before Lenovo pulls the listing.

Needless to say, the G02 has turned into a nightmare for Lenovo. The company will likely have to employ additional resources to police Chinese e-commerce platforms and tighten its distribution channels to prevent the G02 from leaving China.

Epic Games' outspoken CEO Tim Sweeney has taken to X to criticize Valve over its recent price hike of the Steam Deck. Valve raised the prices ofits handheld this week, with the 1TB model now costing $949. Even though many consoles have seen their prices jump by $50 to $100 in recent months, this is still nothing compared to the extra $240 to $300 that Valve slapped on the Steam Deck. The increases have been driven by the memory and chip shortages stemming from the AI infrastructure build-out, but Sweeney wasted no time criticizing Valve on X for the much higher price increases it applied.

While his post initially mentioned the significant rise in component costs, which everyone is suffering from, he eventually ended it with “severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts” in an apparent potshot at Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s penchant for superyachts. While Newell's Valve is behind some of the most notable game franchises in history, including Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike, he also has a love for massive sea-going vessels. Luxury Launches reports that he owns six vessels, including the 365-foot (111-m) superyacht Leviathan that he took delivery of in 2025, totaling around a billion dollars in value (and not counting the millions he’s spending on maintenance, crews, and other costs). He uses the vessels privately, but also for marine research and ocean exploration.

Valve’s hardware is generally designed to compete against gaming PCs and does not face off with dedicated gaming consoles that have their hardware costs subsidized by sales of gaming titles. So, if we compare the 512GB Steam Deck’s $789 against the Lenovo Legion Go 2 and the Asus ROG Xbox Ally, you’d find that it’s still within the same price range.

As for the rumored Steam Machine, the company hasn’t announced the living room PC console’s price yet, but Valve said that it won’t subsidize it to make its price closer to the PlayStation or Xbox. Instead, it will be priced similarly to other gaming PC builds — and with memory and storage chip prices the way they are right now, it's possible the Steam Machine may be priced at or above $1,000. But, at the very least, you’d own the hardware you buy, and you can freely replace SteamOS with another operating system should you want to do so.

Different companies are responding to the global memory shortage in different ways. While some, such as Sony, Nintendo, or Valve, choose to raise prices to offset higher component costs, others opt to downgrade hardware specifications. According to Redditor Pixogen, Anbernic has quietly reduced the memory capacity of its RG34XXSP retro gaming handheld yet again without any official announcement. However, the company says that the standard memory capacity for the device remains 1GB and that this is an "unexpected error."

The RG34XXSP, which debuted in May 2025, quickly established itself as a popular retro gaming handheld thanks to solid specifications with a competitive price tag. The Game Boy Advance SP-inspired device launched with a generous 2GB of LPDDR4 memory. The ample memory enabled the RG34XXSP to run tons of classic games flawlessly, with very smooth emulation. However, the global memory shortage has significantly affected Anbernic, which has reduced the RG34XXSP's memory capacity.

In January 2026, Anbernic implemented the first downgrade to the RG34XXSP by halving the memory. Instead of 2GB, the clamshell retro gaming handheld device shipped with 1GB, but at the same price. The move understandably led to disappointment and frustration among retro aficionados. Now, a new report has surfaced claiming that Anbernic has once again halved the memory capacity, bringing it down to just 512MB, resulting in a 74% reduction compared to the original.

512 ram RG34xxSP - Update - Samsung 740 K4E4E324EE EGCF - 512 LPDDR3 from r/ANBERNIC

In the latest teardown of the RG34XXSP, the gaming handheld in question features a single Samsung K4E4E324EE-EGCF chip, which is a 512MB LPDDR3 memory module. The change reveals that Anbernic has not only reduced the device's memory capacity from its original specifications but also slapped an older, slower memory module into the RG34XXSP.

In a statement to Tom's Hardware, Anbernic says that the "current standard memory capacity is 1GB," and said that if a customer has received a 512MB version, this is "an unexpected error." Notably, the company didn't deny that this could have happened, and recommended that any affected users should contact the company's after-sales service team, who will "assist with a replacement as a priority." The company did not address the disparity between the listed LPDDR4 spec and the inclusion of LPDDR3.

The implications of the memory swap extend beyond the simple reduction in memory size. LPDDR4 is faster and more power-efficient than LPDDR3. Anyone with a 512MB RG34XXSP will probably experience reduced performance, especially with more demanding emulation. So customers should definitely reach out if they find this is the case.

The RG34XXSP’s prior hardware downgrade reflects the struggles many companies face as they attempt to deliver affordable products amid the memory shortage. As such, the company is claiming that this latest memory twist doesn't seem to be a downgrade or intentional, and claims that the handheld should still be shipping with 1GB of RAM.

Call of Duty has a massive gravitational pull. With Modern Warfare 4, developer Infinity Ward has detailed performance optimizations and extensive graphical options for the PC port. Infinity Ward went as far as saying this title has a "focus on PC." The studio also dropped support for older consoles for this release, too — only PlayStation 5/Pro, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2 owners need apply.

For this entry, Infinity Ward promises a "major leap in visual quality," and says the game was "built natively for current-generation consoles and PC", something many might take to mean that the graphics engine is now free from whichever technical shackles kept it bound to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

When it comes to PC specifics, the studio had a lot to say, namely that there will be platform-specific performance optimizations, and that MW4 will include "multiple upscaling and frame generation options" among "extended graphics options" including support for Nvidia's excellent DLSS 4.5.

Any AAA release on PC is now expected to have extensive graphical options, upscaling, and frame generation from the get-go, but Infinity Ward's statement is very much welcome regardless — particularly in a landscape of high-budget releases that don't even look all that great while having downright unreal system requirements to run halfway decently.

The studio says the PC version of the graphics engine offers better ray-tracing and faster-performing ray-traced reflections (all likely due to Ray Reconstruction features of both Nvidia and AMD cards), as well as higher-quality ambient occlusion, shadows, and volumetric effects. Infinity Ward also calls out "competitive-focused settings" to prioritize FPS during intense matches.

Should it pan out as advertised, Infinity Ward's efforts will be a breath of fresh air. There's no denying the graphical brilliance of the games, but broadly speaking, the PC releases of contemporary entries have been mixed when it comes to performance. While the multiplayer portions are generally well-optimized due to the hyper-fast nature of the gameplay, the single-player campaigns have long been plagued by stuttering, mainly induced by on-demand shader compilation, eliciting entire treatises on how to tune game and driver settings.

There's also the fact that in this day and age, neither new graphics cards nor fresh consoles are bound to happen soon thanks to the AI hardware crunch. In turn, this hopefully forces major studios and publishers to actually devote more resources to optimization, instead of riding the now-flat wave of regular hardware upgrades. The subpar performance and graphics of far too many modern titles can't hold a lumen to efforts like Crimson Desert, Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, and God of War Ragnarök. Maybe studios not having new hardware to play with is a blessing, so they can work on actually making use of the hardware we already have.

After teasing the range earlier this year, Intel has officially revealed its Arc G3 range of chips designed for the best handheld gaming PCs. The Arc G3 range includes two SKUs, the Arc G3 and Arc G3 Extreme, that are built on Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3, or Panther Lake, silicon, and packing either the Arc B390 or Arc B370 integrated GPU, which are still the only two graphics processors on the market with Intel’s Xe3 architecture.

Intel has previously tried breaking into the handheld market with partner MSI, but it’s a space that’s been dominated by AMD’s Ryzen Z-series processors. Valve launched the Steam Deck with a custom AMD SoC, which was refined in the Steam Deck OLED, and both the ROG Ally X and Lenovo Legion Go S have stuck with Team Red. Intel’s G3 series looks like an attempt to establish Intel as a name in PC gaming handhelds, rather than just throwing laptop SKUs in the unique form factor as we’ve seen with devices like the MSI Claw.

Both chips use a 14-core CPU with 2 P-cores, 8 E-cores, and 4 LP E-cores. The main difference between them is the integrated GPU. The Arc B390 comes with 12 Xe3 cores while the Arc B370 comes with 10. Intel has yet to confirm clock speeds and power draw for the new range.

It has provided some other details, however. For starters, the G3 Extreme series will feature Intel Precompiled Shaders. AMD has recently partnered with Microsoft to provide something similar on desktop with Advanced Shader Delivery. The idea is that you download a precompiled set of shaders rather than compiling them at runtime, vastly reducing the time it takes to get into a game.

We’ve yet to see a true head-to-head battle between the Arc G3 and Ryzen Z ranges, but our testing of the B390 shows that it’s one impressive iGPU. Using high settings at 1080p with XeSS set to Balanced, we were able to achieve above 80 fps in Cyberpunk 2077. Mind you, that performance was inside a 16-inch Lenovo reference laptop. Expect lower performance inside a thermally-constrained handheld.

As with all recent Intel Arc graphics, Arc G3 chips come with full support for XeSS 3, including multi-frame generation, AI upscaling, and latency reduction. You’ll only be able to access those features in supported games, however. Unlike AMD, Intel doesn’t currently offer driver-level frame generation along the line of AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF).

Intel says the chips will also arrive with Wi-Fi 7 R2, dual Bluetooth 6, and Thunderbolt 4. Partner systems from Acer, MSI, and OneXPlayer will start rolling out "in the coming months." Intel will be showing off several handhelds with the new Arc G3 range at Computex, and Tom's Hardware will have folks on the ground in Taipei to check them out in the flesh.

Acer and Intel are hoping to shake up the mobile handheld market with the Predator Atlas 8, a portable gaming device that takes on AMD’s dominance in the space with the new Intel Arc G3 and G3 Extreme processors, packing Arc B370 or B390 iGPUs. Acer is also promising up to 10% better AeroBlade cooling compared to the company’s previous systems, thanks to a dual-fan setup with what the company says is the first metal fan in a gaming handheld.

Other key features include an 8-inch 1920 x 1200 (16x10) touchscreen with 500 nits of peak brightness and a 120 Hz variable refresh rate. Acer lists the “IPS-level” screen as delivering 100% of the sRGB spectrum and 77.68% of the Adobe color space. The battery is listed as “up to 80 Wh,” with a 60Wh option that will likely be paired with the lesser, non-Extreme, chip.

That’s a fairly large battery for a handheld (80 Wh matches the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X), but it’s unclear at this point how the power consumption of Intel’s new chips will compare to the (mostly aging) AMD silicon in existing handhelds, like the Ryzen Z2 series. And the screen, while not OLED, sounds like it could suck down its share of power as well. But of course, as with all mobile gaming devices, battery life will vary widely depending on the kind of game you're playing and the settings.

You’ll also get the main features of Intel’s modern graphics, including ray tracing support and XeSS 3 upscaling. And Intel’s Endurance Gaming software is on board to balance frame rate and unplugged longevity. An XBOX Game Pass subscription is also included with this Windows 11 handheld; Acer says you’ll get two months of Game Pass Premium and three months of PC Game Pass.

Interestingly, the trigger switches are dual-mode, using both a micro switch and Hall effect, letting you switch between the former for speed in FPS titles and the latter for games that require an analog touch. Acer is also tossing in its PredatorSense software (for the first time on handhelds), providing system monitoring, performance mode switching, and access to game settings via a dedicated PredatorSense button.

Port selection and connectivity are about what we’d expect in a modern gaming handheld (especially one with Intel-based internals). You get two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a UHS-II microSD slot for expanding storage, and Wi-Fi 7 / Bluetooth 5.4.

At 810 grams (1.79 pounds) for the 80 Wh model, the Predator Atlas 8 will weigh less than Lenovo’s Legion Go (854 g), but more than the Steam Deck OLED (640 g). In the couple of photos that Acer has shared thus far, this doesn’t look like the sveltest handheld on the market, and we’re curious to get some hands-on time with it once we hit the ground for Computex 2026 in Taiwan.

Acer says the Predator Atlas 8 will be offered in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Australia in October (sorry, Asia). We’re still waiting on pricing, but given the volatility of the RAM and SSD markets, we likely won’t know that until we’re a lot closer to launch.

DIY gaming enthusiasts have repurposed ASRock’s BC-250 mining boards into “Steam Machines” since late 2025, when the boards started appearing on eBay for well under $150. The board comes equipped with a PS5-derived SoC and 16GB of GDDR6 memory, making it a capable platform for playing PC games via Linux distros such as Bazzite. Now, YouTuber ETA Prime reports that someone has figured out how to unlock the SoC’s 40 CUs, giving the mining blade more GPU cores than a base PS5.

The 40 CU hack comes via a driver-level register patch from a GitHub post by duggasco (via Old Lamer on YouTube). The patch unlocks all 40CUs through a kernel module parameter that writes to two hardware registers during GPU driver initialization. The hack not only unlocks all the CUs on the SoC but also boosts power consumption to 125W at 1,500 MHz. The GitHub poster recommends that users set the GPU at 1,500 MHz at 900 mV to keep temperatures in check. Overclocking the GPU to 2GHz, a common overclock on these boards, overwhelms the cooling system.

Unlocking the full 40 CUs gives the BC-250 nearly double the amount of GPU cores to work with. The mining board comes with B-grade PS5 dies, resulting in only 24 CUs unlocked out of the box to avoid enabling potentially defective cores on the SoC. As a result, switching on all 40 CUs on the chip does not magically make any potentially defective cores functional and should be done with caution.

ETA Prime recorded up to a 28% performance increase with the extra 16 CUs unlocked. In Cyberpunk 2077, the 40 CU configuration achieved 17% greater performance, reaching 42 FPS compared to 36 FPS with the stock configuration. Hitman 3 similarly achieved 19% better performance with the 40 CU configuration, reaching 69 FPS compared to 58 FPS with the stock 24 CU configuration. GTA 5 saw a 24% improvement with the 40 CU configuration, reaching 72 FPS compared to 58 FPS with the console running the stock 24 CU configuration. Finally, Spider-Man 2 achieved 28% greater performance, achieving 46 FPS compared to 36 FPS with the stock 24 CU configuration. All of the aforementioned games were tested at 1080p high settings with the GPU clocked at 2 GHz.

The YouTuber’s benchmarks show that the extra CUs provide a significant performance boost for the mining board. The only caveat is that BC-250 owners will need to win the silicon lottery — having 40 perfectly working CUs to make the hack functional. That said, the hack also supports activating 32 or 38 CUs, so owners who didn’t win the silicon lottery aren’t left completely in the dust. The extra performance only makes the BC-250 an even better option for DIYers to build a cheap, yet capable gaming machine during the RAM crisis. For the uninitiated, the BC-250 does not require dedicated RAM featuring 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

Valve's Steam Deck OLED is seeing a massive price increase. Widely considered one of the best handheld gaming PCs since its launch in 2023, the 512GB model is now $789, while the 1TB version is $949. Those are $240 and $300 increases, respectively.

In a blog post, Valve wrote that the price increases are "due to rising memory and storage costs."

"Steam Deck itself hasn't changed; these new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole," the post reads.

The 512GB Steam Deck OLED was previously $549, while the 1TB upgrade was $649. As low-end gaming laptops have dried up, these were seen as a great value. But back in February, the handheld started going out of stock due to those same component shortages.

In this light, the Lenovo Legion Go 2, which we reviewed at $1,349.99, and Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, at $999.99, don't seem quite as outrageous anymore. The entry-level Asus ROG Xbox Ally, despite some performance issues and technical problems, may look more attractive than ever if it keeps its $599.99 price.

Memory and storage have also wreaked havoc with Valve's plans to launch its upcoming Steam Machine PC and Stream Frame VR headset. Those were delayed from the first quarter of 2026 into a murkier time. This price hike also suggests that those systems, which use newer technologies, will be even more expensive. Valve did launch its Steam Controller earlier this month.

The Steam Deck OLED follows a pattern of years-old machines getting price hikes as their manufacturers deal with the current component landscape. Microsoft increased the standard Xbox Series X to $649, while Sony's PlayStation 5 recently jumped to $649.99 for the base model and $899 for the PS5 Pro. In September, Nintendo will raise the price of the Nintendo Switch 2 by $50 in September. (If you're doing the math, yes, a 1TB Steam Deck costs more than a PlayStation 5 Pro.)

The Steam Deck OLED's prior pricing had previously led the market, leading us to question the expense of some Windows-based alternatives. We'll have to see if this price holds, but if it does, it may reorganize the entire value proposition of this product category in the first place.

Head Over Heels was a hit isometric arcade puzzler adventure game originally published by Ocean Software in 1987 for home computers. Development of the game’s sequel was canned in 1989, when Ocean decided to pivot to console gaming titles, notes ITV News. However, with retro gaming booming in the 2020s, the sequel has finally been released for Atari ST and Commodore Amiga - 37 years later - coded by original programmer Colin Porch. The sequel’s full title is Return to Blacktooth, a Head Over Heels adventure.

In the ITV News video, we see Colin sat at his trusty Atari ST playing the new Return to Blacktooth game. The veteran developer, now in his 80s, was inspired to finish the work he had started on the Head Over Heels sequel nearly 40 years ago after an Ocean Software reunion event. A conversation with his old Ocean boss spurred Colin into working to complete the game he had started working on, but had then abandoned as it was no longer wanted, 37 years prior.

During the reunion, the programmer's ex-boss said, “Oh, you have to finish it. There’s a big demand for retro games now.” Colin was more than pleased to return to his keyboard to complete the development of Return to Blacktooth. “It’s been a labor of love because I was so passionate about the game,” said the veteran programmer.

As well as appealing to older computer enthusiasts and gamers, retro games can find a market among younger players attracted to the simpler arcade-like experience, which can have a lot in common with recent mobile games. In the case of Return to Blacktooth, though, gamers will find some deep puzzles beneath the cute retro isometric graphics.

Return to Blacktooth features the same pair of characters as the original, Head and Heels, who must explore the game’s five distinct planets (across 300+ rooms) in a quest to collect the priceless crowns. There are a plethora of cunning puzzles, devious traps, and hidden surprises in store, and the two characters’ unique but complementary in-game abilities must be used to succeed.

Your ST or Amiga (or emulator) needs to be configured with at least 1 megabyte of RAM. Sorry to share that bad news during the ongoing RAMpocalypse, half-meg machine owners. The game is ready for download now, priced at $12.99, but Thalamus says physical boxed copies will also become available from Q3 this year.

Under normal circumstances, any brand would be delighted to get its product in the spotlight, but some publicity can indeed be bad publicity. Lenovo’s G02 retro gaming handheld has become the center of a growing controversy after users who purchased the device reported it was seemingly preloaded with thousands of illegal game ROMs. In response to these allegations, Lenovo has contacted Tom’s Hardware to clarify the situation and has confirmed that it has launched an investigation into the matter.

To understand the G02's situation, it's necessary to start from the beginning. Although the G02 proudly sports Lenovo branding, Lenovo didn't design or manufacture it. Instead, the G02 is a white-label device. If you're not familiar with the term, it refers to mass-produced products that typically come from a single manufacturer and are re-branded and sold under other companies' labels.

As a result, the G02 is subject to a strict regional brand licensing agreement that limits its sales to the Chinese market. "Lenovo does not authorize the sale of this device outside of China, including third party platforms such as AliExpress or other reseller sites. Any such sales are not conducted or sanctioned by Lenovo or its authorized licensees," a company spokesperson told us.

That explains why Lenovo never officially announced the G02, nor did the device appear on the company's website or in its marketing channels. The G02 doesn't officially form a part of Lenovo's global product lineup, and its existence remained largely unknown to the public until foreign customers managed to buy one off a Chinese online e-commerce platform.

Lenovo made it clear in its statement to Tom’s Hardware that the company doesn't sell or distribute the G02 outside China under any circumstances. The prohibition also includes sales through third-party platforms such as AliExpress and other international reseller sites, which often serve as channels for gray-market imports.

Lenovo highlighted that G02 devices shipped by Lenovo or an authorized licensee do not include memory cards or preloaded games. Therefore, Lenovo suspects that a third party may have added the illegal ROMs to the G02 without the company's knowledge or approval once the device left the authorized channels.

AliExpress sellers generally refrain from explicitly advertising the G02 as bundled with any preloaded games, likely to avoid drawing attention to potential copyright issues or to avoid violating platform policies. Despite this, user feedback on this specific listing revealed a different story. Notably, one customer left a review stating that their device allegedly arrived with an astonishing 40,000 games pre-installed, four times more than the initial report. The claim is plausible given the G02's support for over 30 emulators, so that's a lot of Sony, Sega, and Nintendo ROMs.

"Devices officially distributed by Lenovo or its authorized licensees in the China market do not include memory cards or preloaded games. Any software or content found on devices sold outside of authorized channels may have been added by third parties without Lenovo’s knowledge or approval," the spokesperson said. "Any content installed by the user—and any issues that may arise—are the sole responsibility of the user of the device, as explicitly stated in its instruction manual."

In light of recent reports about third-party vendors selling the G02 with preloaded ROMs, Lenovo says it has launched an investigation into the matter. The company will probably have to thoroughly check its supply chain, distribution networks, and vendor partnerships to find any bad apples. The company says it will take swift and appropriate action as necessary.

The Lenovo G02 was never supposed to leave China, but it has. Now, Lenovo is in firefighter mode to correct the situation, because many companies, specifically Nintendo, don't take matters lightly when it comes to piracy. While any ensuing lawsuit would surely span international jurisdictions and encompass a complex set of facts about who did what and when, it's simpler and cheaper to nip the problem in the bud before lawyers ever have to darken a courtroom door.

Intel is expected to host a grand reveal for its rumored "Arc G3" series of chips for handhelds at the upcoming Computex 2026 show. According to Videocardz, one of those handhelds is being cooked up by Acer and is called the "Predator Atlas 8," suggesting it's an 8-inch device, likely going up against the MSI Claw 8.

The Arc G3 series is Intel's expected handheld push based on Panther Lake silicon, customized for maximum efficiency and competing against the Ryzen Z2 platform, which it teased at CES (though without the "Arc G3" name).

The Predator Atlas would be Acer's fourth handheld following the three models from its "Nitro Blaze" lineup: Blaze 7, Blaze 8, and Blaze 11. You might've never heard of those names because Acer hasn't released the Blaze 8 and 11 in global markets, while the Blaze 7 was never marketed enough to make a splash. Donning the new handheld in Predator branding, though, would suggest a more serious attempt at converting some of the Acer Predator laptop audience to a handheld.

Apart from the fact that it may reportedly feature an 8-inch screen, we don't know anything else about the rumored Predator Atlas 8. We do know quite a bit about Panther Lake, however. The Arc G3 was known as "Core G3" up until a couple of months ago, with leaks suggesting that the series has been delayed into Q2 2026. Intel has also famously taken digs at AMD's Z2 series, claiming it uses "ancient silicon," so it'll be interesting to see how G3 performs.

As mentioned, Intel teased its handheld push earlier this year alongside the Core Ultra Series 3 launch, but we didn't really get any details at the time. Since then, rumors have pointed toward two different SKUs: a standard Arc G3 and a G3 Extreme — both are tipped to have the same 14 cores split across a 2P+8E+4LP-E configuration, with integrated graphics where the silicon is expected to differ.

The base model likely has an Arc B370 iGPU with 10 Xe3 cores based on the "Celestial" architecture. The same graphics, core config, and a (P-core) boost clock speed of 4.7 GHz are also seen on the Core Ultra 5 338H processor, so the G3 could be an offshoot of that silicon. The Arc G3 extreme reportedly houses an Arc B390 iGPU instead, which would consist of 12 Xe3 cores; the Core Ultra X9 388H and Core Ultra X7 386H have the same iGPU.

Given Panther Lake's advances in gaming performance and efficiency across the board, the Arc G3 lineup should easily stand its ground against AMD's Ryzen Z2 family. We should expect the Red and Blue Teams to trade blows at mid to high power levels, but at lower wattages, Intel may be hard to beat, considering Lunar Lake was already impressive in that department.

Backing up physical media on older consoles such as the GameCube, Wii, original Xbox, and Xbox 360 has long been a frustrating experience for retro gamers. However, according to a YouTube video from Archades Games, modern Blu-ray players can now rip physical media from these consoles to a PC with new specialized firmware from OmniDrive.

The OmniDrive firmware unlocks the ability for compatible Blu-ray players to read the proprietary formats of physical media on older consoles. Compatibility is strictly limited to select external and internal Blu-Ray disc drives that use the MediaTek MT1959 chipset and are compatible with the firmware OmniDrive provides.

The YouTuber showed the process of getting the firmware installed on compatible Blu-ray players. Users will need to check OmniDrive's support list to see if their Blu-ray player is in the list, then install the right firmware appropriate for their drive. OmniDriver offers two firmware options, one designed for full-sized Blu-ray players and the other for external slim drives. Currently, compatible Blu-ray players include models from Asus, LG, Buffalo, and Verbatim.

Game consoles that are supported include the original Xbox, Xbox 360, GameCube, Wii, and Dreamcast. Physical media from other consoles, such as PlayStation 3, 4, 5, and the Xbox One/Series consoles, technically work, but the content on physical media for these consoles is encrypted.

The YouTuber demonstrated the firmware's capabilities by ripping an Xbox 360 game using the Media Preservation Frontend, an open-source disk-dumping tool. The tool was able to see the Xbox 360 game perfectly in a Blu-ray player equipped with OmniDriver's firmware and convert the game into an ISO file.

The ability to rip old console game discs with modern Blu-ray drives is a drastic improvement over previous methods that gamers have been forced to use to extract game data from retro consoles with unique formatting previously. In the past, copying a retro game often required the console itself to be modified. With OmniDrive’s firmware and a compatible Blu-ray player, ripping these older games is nearly as simple as ripping a traditional DVD movie.

This method of ripping physical game media will likely become the norm moving forward for retro gaming enthusiasts for the purposes of game preservation and game emulation. However, if you plan on using this firmware yourself, be sure to check if your Blu-ray drive is compatible, as flashing the firmware on an incompatible drive will almost certainly brick the Blu-ray player.

Star Citizen was first unveiled to the world back on October 10, 2012, with a promise to revive the space sim genre on an unprecedented scale. Cloud Imperium, the studio behind the game, initially chose to crowdfund it through Kickstarter but switched to its own platform later once the project expanded in scope. Nearly 14 years later, Star Citizen has just crossed $1 billion in total funding, and there's still no release date in sight.

To be clear, you can play Star Citizen right now; the game does exist in an alpha state with most of the promised features already included, but it's riddled with bugs. Cloud Imperium releases timely updates to add new items and gameplay, along with some very expensive microtransactions. If you back the project, you're given a pledge ship that should be playable in-game... in most cases.

Recently, during the DefenseCon event, the studio revealed the "Anvil Odin" ship that costs $5,000, even though you can't fly it yet. It's supposed to drop via a content patch later on as the team continues development. That's been the story of Star Citizen in general forever — the game seems to be stuck in a perpetual development cycle with over 1,000 employees across various studio locations working on it together.

To put the numbers into context, GTA VI (based on reports) is the only other game in history to have a $1 billion budget. Ubisoft's Beyond Good and Evil 2, originally announced back in 2007, is perhaps the only project predating Star Citizen. It's still unreleased, but unlike Star Citizen's crowdfunded approach, Ubisoft has been working on that game behind closed doors with a private payroll.

Moreover, when Star Citizen was announced, the PS3 and Xbox 360 were nearing end-of-life, and now the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S are nearing end-of-life. This game's development has already spanned across three different console generations. By the time it's out, it would need to be released on PS6 and Xbox Helix as well, which itself raises questions about whether we'll get an outdated product at the end.

Christ Roberts, the architect behind Star Citizen, has hinted at a 2027-2028 release date, saying that the studio plans to formally launch it in a year or two after 'Squadron 42' is out. Squadron 42 is a single-player cinematic adventure set in the same universe. It was announced alongside Star Citizen as a linear, story-focused experience, with both titles originally carrying a 2014 release window.

What changed between now and then is, seemingly, the scale of the project. There was an engine switch from CryEngine to the in-house StarEngine to allow for 64-bit precision. Cloud Imperium added Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) to track object locations in real-time across servers. To make that seamless, Server Meshing was introduced, stitching multiple servers into one universe, dynamically switching players between them as they pass planets.

Squadron 42 is currently aiming for a release sometime in 2026, but there's no concrete release date, which is concerning given its unique track record. Star Citizen is by far the most expensive crowdfunded game in history, but also one of the most successful ones, since people just keep giving these guys more and more money. Fun fact: Tom's Hardware covered Star Citizen for the first time in late 2012, almost 14 years ago.

Gamers receive hope once again that Valve’s long-delayed Steam Machine is moving forward towards a launch and not ending on the chopping block. The Khronos Group, which created the Vulkan graphics API standard, and is its developer and maintainer, has just listed the AMD Steam Machine as the latest entry in its list of conformant products. While this is in no way, shape, or form a confirmation that the console is arriving soon, it’s still a step in the right direction. It indicates that Valve is still actively working on the console despite the setbacks driven by insane memory and storage prices.

This certification does not mean that all Vulkan games will play well on the console — instead, it only says that the future Valve console complies with all the standards set by the body. In other words, the hardware, operating system, and drivers behave as expected with Vulkan, giving developers peace of mind that the entire stack would work consistently. The console’s inclusion in the list does not indicate performance or game compatibility, though.

Valve announced the Steam Machine along with the Steam Controller and the Steam Frame in November 2025. This has got many fans excited, especially as the Steam Deck brought SteamOS to a level of polish and compatibility that allowed users to play a big chunk of their Steam libraries on the handheld console. Unfortunately, this was also the time the memory and storage prices started to spiral out of control. Because of this, the Steam Machine runs the risk of becoming too expensive and moving out of reach of its target customers, especially as Valve is adamant that it will not subsidize its hardware.

Even though Valve announced the three gadgets simultaneously, the console, controller, and VR headset weren’t intended to launch simultaneously. So, even though the Steam Machine was delayed several times, the company saw no reason to hold back the Steam Controller. Fans could finally get their hands on the $99 accessory after it launched in late April, with Tom’s Hardware giving it four out of five stars in its review.

The gaming giant still hasn’t announced an official release date for its latest console, but we hope that the company can secure an affordable memory and storage supplier sooner. That way, it can deliver Steam Machine before the end of the year at a price that most gamers can afford.

007: First Light, developed by IO Interactive (of Hitman fame), is one of the most anticipated games coming out this year, but it seems to have hit a roadblock right before the finishing line. The game's Steam listing has just revealed that it comes with "Denovo Anti-Tamper" DRM to safeguard against piracy on PC. As you'd expect, customers who paid for the game in advance are frustrated.

Steam Forums for the latest James Bond adventure are now filled with players expressing their disappointment and, conversely, a few trolls showing gratitude for the DRM's inclusion. To be clear, pretty much every modern game release on PC is protected by DRM to some degree; Steam has a built-in DRM feature that many titles use as a basic precaution, for instance. It's easy to bypass, however, as it usually requires just swapping out a single .dll file with a fake one that passes the ownership check.

That being said, adding Denuvo is a deliberate choice. The software has even been found to affect FPS in certain cases, and it's not free. Studios spent millions to incorporate it in their titles, only for it to end up affecting the people who actually bought the game. The pirates will always find a way, whether it's through hypervisor bypasses or just conventional cracks that break the DRM entirely.

Speaking of which, all current versions of Denuvo have already been cracked by a new voice in the community. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight was pirated on day one, coinciding with the game's official launch just yesterday. It was in early access for three days before that for those who pre-ordered it, which is likely the window of opportunity the pirate utilized to ready the crack.

Therefore, 007: First Light shipping with Denuvo only hurts paying customers who might experience slightly worse performance because the DRM is consuming CPU cycles. It's one of the most common misconceptions in the community that Denuvo Anti-Tamper runs at the kernel level — it does not; those are anti-cheat programs. Denuvo runs entirely in user space and is embedded inside the game's executable.

That's why mods that alter the game's .exe file in any way are shut down because of Denuvo's strict memory-injecting protections. Also, if your internet ever goes down and the game hasn't pinged Denuvo's servers for more than 48 hours, it may even refuse to launch. There is an entire Steam Forums page dedicated to these lockouts, and we recently saw the PlayStation community fall into turmoil because of a similar policy, too.

Now, we're not going to sit here and pretend that piracy will magically fade away if there's no Denuvo to incentivize the pirates even more. Those familiar with the seven seas will chart that course no matter what, but it ends up being a paradox for the paying customer. From the developers' perspective, it's a no-brainer to use DRM to maximize sales rather than to protect the customer who has already paid.

And it's not like the devs don't have any other choice to curb illegal installs; Cyberpunk 2077 famously dropped without DRM and in a broken state, but it's since established itself as one of the most successful games in recent memory. Of course, we don't condone piracy, but a good game should and will sell on the merit of its quality.

Moreover, piracy is actually shown to increase overall sales, according to a 2017 European Commission report, a few years after Denuvo launched. Illegal users often convert to paying ones. Some people use pirated games as demos before buying the real thing, and many of us pirated games in our childhood, which led us to become part of the hobby as paying adults, adding another customer to the industry.

It has been less than a month since the Steam Controller launch, and the device has already nearly caused a fire for at least one person. Redditor Toikka on the Steamcontroller subreddit revealed a nearly catastrophic incident involving their Steam Controller’s magnetic puck charger arcing electricity after attaching itself to foreign metallic material.

This unfortunate circumstance occurred when the Steam Controller owner was charging their Pixel Watch 3 in close proximity to their Steam Controller charging puck. The puck's magnetic attraction was strong enough for the Pixel Watch’s wristband to contact the puck's pogo pins, causing the device to short-circuit and heat up. Luckily, the owner managed to remove the wristband from the puck before any real damage occurred. The damage was purely cosmetic, consisting of dark spots on the Steam Controller puck and burn marks on the Pixel Watch wristband.

PSA: Watch out for the exposed contacts of the Puck! Almost started a fire due to metallic smartwatch strap from r/SteamController

The event exposed a design oversight in the Steam Controller’s charging puck. The exposed pogo pins will conduct electricity to any metal surface that makes contact with them. Many of the responses in the aforementioned Reddit post highlight this oversight, with several comments recommending that Valve add a data pin to the charger to ensure it knows it is connected to a Steam Controller rather than some random object.

Thankfully, Valve responded to Toikka and is reportedly investigating the charging incident. Valve may release a revised charging puck in the future that addresses this issue, but we’ll have to wait and see.

For now, this story serves as a good lesson to Steam Controller owners to proactively watch where their charging pucks are located, especially surrounding other magically attracted objects and devices. For more details, the Steam Controller’s manual also highlights this problem and warns against putting magnetically sensitive devices near the puck. Valve even mentions possible disruptions to some medical devices if the puck is in close proximity.

The Steam Controller is Valve's latest gaming product that takes the input controls from the Steam Deck and squeezes them down into a controller form factor. The controller is available for $99 on the Steam store and features 35+ hours of battery life.

A retro PC enthusiast has modified the VBIOS of a vintage graphics card to embed a version of Snake – the game everyone used to play on their dumb phones. This tiny dose of serpentum fun is playable whenever the system is booted, and once exited, the PC will continue to boot as normal. Bits und Bolts completed this S3 ViRGE DX mod by hacking the VBIOS and injecting Snake 512, a free version of the game condensed into just 512 bytes and written in x86 assembly.

Before the Snake 512 embed was wrangled, Bits und Bolts decided to mod the S3 ViRGE VBIOS by adding a dynamic (text) splash screen to show the actual GPU frequency. This effort is bolted on to prior work where the TechTuber injected a graphical splash screen, and the task takes up roughly the first half of the video.

From 10 minutes 43 seconds in, we get to see the vintage computing enthusiast inject Snake 512 into the video card BIOS. Snake 512 was designed to fit in the 512 bytes of a disk boot sector and run in x86 real mode. Bits und Bolts thought this OS-independent assembly code was thus a great fit for wedging into a VBIOS.

The intrepid vintage computer fan couldn’t just copy the GitHub code and paste it into the BIOS. So, Claude Code was consulted to prepare the commented GitHub code and turn it into hexadecimal code suitable for injecting into a VBIOS.

With this code ready to be pasted, Bits und Bolts opens up the S3 ViRGE VBIOS in Ghidra, a reverse engineering framework developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States. This tool is now free, open source, and available on GitHub.

Next, an empty section of the target file was found, just after the splash screen, and the new code was pasted. The code block needed referencing / patching, so it would be triggered after the splash screen rather than just be ignored at boot. Then the checksum needed fixing.

The way Snake 512 in a VBIOS was implemented was as follows:

• Power up the system
• Embedded modded image splash screen displays
• Prompt offers option to play Snake (press N) or skip (Esc)
• The prompt also times out, so boot will continue if there is no user input.
• N – play Snake game
• Esc – system reads and shows actual GPU clock
• Booting continues

Please note that USB keyboards don’t work with this implementation of Snake 512. Also, there is no sound. However, with everything running as intended, Bits und Bolts moves on to some further customization - editing the Snake 512 game colors (in Ghidra again). The vintage computing enthusiast had previously bookmarked sections of the code where colors for the border, background, snake head, snake body, and others were defined. Now these were edited to other values from the VGA color palette using hex values for appropriate rows/columns. At the end of the video, with everything working and colored as intended, the TechTuber quips, “Who says the ViRGE can’t play games?”

The last time we wrote about the escapades of Bits und Bolts was when they modded the S3 ViRGE DX VBIOS to disable the ‘pedestal bit,’ which caused S3 graphics blacks to be rendered as a dark grey. We’ve also previously reported on a Doom port that was released as a Coreboot BIOS payload (of course, it is too big to actually go in the BIOS).

A Lenovo-branded G02 retro handheld launched in China earlier this month, coming in at an affordable $63.56 on AliExpress compared to the thousands you have to pay for the Lenovo Legion Go 2. There were some questions if this was a legitimate Lenovo product or just another hardware manufacturer using the logo of a prominent brand, but a Lenovo employee in the company’s Product and Licensing department reportedly confirmed to Retro Dodo that it was an official, white-labeled device the company intended to sell only in China. More interestingly, they have unearthed that the handheld ships with thousands of copyrighted games, mostly from Nintendo.

“The G02 device is produced through a regional brand licensing agreement meant for the China market only and is not part of Lenovo’s official global product portfolio,” the company told the publication. “As such, products developed through these agreements may differ from Lenovo products sold through authorized channels.”

However, it wasn’t the handheld’s branding that caught Retro Dodo’s attention — instead, it was the fact that it came with thousands of copyrighted titles out of the box, most of them from Nintendo. It’s unclear if these games are licensed at all; after all, Nintendo is famously protective of its intellectual property, and it’s unlikely that it would readily allow a third-party hardware manufacturer to include Nintendo titles. Furthermore, the Japanese company built a reputation as a litigious company, targeting anyone that poses a threat to its IP.

The G02 is just a white-labeled device, meaning that its manufacturer just signed a deal with Lenovo to use its name for marketing purposes. However, the maker of the Legion Go handhelds still approved the regional licensing deal, even though we’re unsure if it reviewed the final product before it went on sale. One possibility is that the factory behind this retro handheld console loaded these ROMs after approval to boost sales, even though its AliExpress product page does not advertise that it comes with these games. Another alternative hypothetical scenario is that the developers behind this console accidentally included all the titles they were using to test the device in the general release.

Whatever the case, this could become a legal problem for Lenovo. After all, even if it’s just a white-labeled device made by a third-party manufacturer, it still carries the company’s branding. The company, in theory, could do some damage control to prevent this from becoming a bigger issue, like recalling the affected products or remotely deleting them, if possible. But the fact that Nintendo games were likely distributed outside of official channels would catch the attention of the Japanese company’s lawyers.

One of the largest digital archaeology projects has hit a key milestone: Minecraft devotees have just completed downloading and archiving 24TB of data, preserving a million squared block region of the game’s infamous 2b2t server.

This milestone project is retold in the video above, and/or you can read more about the technical details behind the feat on a GitHub page maintained by one of the download team. The project was delivered thanks to the “thousands of dollars spent, and countless hours wasted,” writes Crayne (GitHub organizer), supported by Fuch, Mahan, Steve3, and many more avid Minecrafters.

The archived region comes from the oldest and most infamous ‘anarchy server’ in Minecraft, dubbed 2b2t. It was founded 16 years ago and has been running since then. A dose of anarchy is inevitable in this server/world as there are basically no rules, no bans, and an anything-goes culture permeates the place. Visitors will therefore notice 2b2t is full of griefed landscapes, ruined bases, and remnants of structures, new and old.

As some folks aren’t keen on the undiscovered history and hidden bases of 2b2t being snapshotted like this, the Minecraft archivists had to work carefully. The project was already a massive undertaking, with 24TB of data covering a million × million blocks area of the Overworld (and more) that took multiple enthusiasts years to survey and archive. If the archivists had been detected, some 2b2t players would very likely have hunted and killed their bots. But as of now, the following have been successfully downloaded:

• A 1,024,000² (1m²) area of the Overworld (Dec 25 2025 - Apr 13 2026),
• A 512,000² (512k²) area of the Overworld (Nov 11 2024 - Dec 12 2024),
• A 256,000² (256k²) area of the End (Jan 23 2026 - Feb 15 2026),
• A 100,000² (100k²) area of the Nether (Jun 9 2025 - Jun 14 2025)

So, how and where can you get this 24TB of 2b2t world data? The team says they will need “a few weeks” to create a torrent containing it all. Moreover, they're asking downloaders to be patient – which almost goes without saying for a 24TB archive. Separately, there will be high-res renders and data mining spreadsheets made available, too.

The Minecraft fans behind this project encourage those interested to check out their GitHub for open-source tools related to this massive archive. More large-scale world downloads are teased, so you can also connect with the project team via Discord, Patreon, and the aforementioned GitHub.

A modder by the name of tschicki has built a custom "PlayStation 2 Portable" from scratch, powered by a reverse-engineered motherboard that features original PS2 silicon. The hardware sits inside a 3D-printed shell with proper controls, USB-PD charging, and a bespoke cooling solution. The project is entirely open-source and available on GitHub for anyone to follow along with, if you have the right skills and patience required.

Work on the PS2 Portable actually began way back in 2022, but it was only made public last year. The four-year development period really shows when you take a look at how polished the finished product is. The design is inspired by modern handhelds such as the ROG Ally; it has an ergonomic shape with large grips that house two 5000mAh batteries to enable up to 4.5 hours of playtime on a single charge.

On the front, there's an asymmetric control scheme that actually features hall-effect joysticks and face buttons from the PS Vita 2000 model. There's a blue accent piece running along the top, enveloping the triggers and the USB-C port, providing some variety in an otherwise minimalist aesthetic. You'll also find vents up there for exhaust. The rear is largely plain with a few threaded screws and a cutout with a grill for intake.

The entire assembly is broken down into just two parts: a top half and a bottom half that screw into each other. The cooling is handled by a custom heatsink solution that uses the fan from the Switch Lite to keep the ICs under control.

This transitions us nicely into the actual crux of the project. The modder took six original ICs from the SCPH-7900x or SCPH-9000x PS2 models and put them on a custom motherboard.

Built upon the existing work of community veterans who have mapped out PS2 mainboards over the years, Tschicki reverse-engineered the entire circuitry of the console. They were then able to manually draw up a new motherboard layout that integrates the aforementioned original chips with completely new traces, video routing, and power management.

The donor ICs handle the bulk of the processing, such as the Emotion Engine (EE) and the Graphics Synthesizer (GS), while RP2040 microcontrollers are responsible for secondary tasks like thermals, controls, sound, and more. The modder used a custom FPGA-based video processor to get direct video out from the GS instead of going through an analog-to-digital converter that'd otherwise degrade the quality.

As such, the PS2 portable supports many resolutions, but it's wired up to a 5" 480x800p IPS LCD running at 60 Hz. To ensure the controls work on this screen, the RP2040 is utilized to convert data from the buttons and joysticks into native DualShock 2 signals, with full rumble support. Another RP2040 monitors the battery and controls power, allowing for fast charging or "charge and play" at 5V, 9V, or 12V.

Finally, to actually use the console, tschicki customized the original boot ROM to directly launch into homebrew, from where you can use the two microSD card slots present on the device to access your games. One slot hooks directly to the PS2 Memory Card's data lines and tricks the system into thinking one of those bulky 8MB Memory Cards is plugged in. You can use this for boot files and game saves, for instance.

The other slot bypasses the PS2's memory controller entirely and uses the open-source MX4SIO routing standard that doesn't try to emulate a memory card. Instead, it relies on custom homebrew apps running on the console to talk directly to the SD card's native storage interface. Once the custom MX4SIO driver is initialized, you can load up any game you want, which means this slot is better for library storage.

This is possible because the BIOS chip from the actual PS2 is one of the six ICs lifted from the original console, along with the CPU+GPU, the RAM (two separate chips), the I/O processor, and the SP2 audio processor. Anyhow, after the games are loaded, the handheld can play PS2 titles natively via custom software like OPL (Open PS2 Loader) or NHDDL, and supports PS1 games via DKWDRV. There is no emulation happening here.

Because of the sheer stature of custom modding work done, the PS2 Portable is one of the most impressive community projects in recent times. The fact that everything from the 3D printer files (STLs), the PCB schematics, the FPGA code, and the software firmware is open source is just the cherry on top. You can build your own identical handheld, but it's not going to be easy, and Tschicki even warns against it.

All of the relevant resources are available on GitHub, including the BOM (bill of materials) for the mechanical assembly and each PCBA. There's a 10-part documentation with steps you can follow, but they're incredibly detailed and only meant for experts with high-level soldering and programming knowledge. Do not attempt this as a fun DIY project, but then again, curiosity killed the cat.

Now, technically speaking, a portable PS2 already exists — it's called the PlayStation Portable (PSP), and it was one of the most successful consoles of all time. But it doesn't have the PS2's massive catalog of classics, so there's an argument to be made there. That being said, emulation has come a long way, and your phone can even play AAA PC games now, so stick to emulation if you're only after the nostalgia and not the microsoldering anguish.