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The story begins with YouTuber Max Tech, aka Vadim Yuryev, who took to X in a now-deleted post to express his disappointment with laptop memory prices. In particular, he posted a screenshot from Dell's website, showing a Snapdragon X Plus-equipped XPS 13 with 16 GB of RAM. The issue? Going from 16 GB to 32 GB apparently cost a whopping $550... at least in the screenshot.

In reality, the upgrade's worth just $150 on Dell's site right now, at least on the laptop Yuryev's original tweet referenced. For context, Apple has charged $400 for the same 16 GB upgrade for years, way before any DRAM shortage, so people were rightfully shocked. However, as mentioned, this screenshot was either actually altered or, more likely, showed a $550 price hike because memory wasn't the only thing being upgraded.

See, Dell's laptop configurator works in a confusing manner where selecting certain options triggers others to automatically change, too. For instance, the jump from 16 GB to 32 GB RAM may have come with a jump in SSD capacity as well, or even a higher spec'd CPU, but since these changes happened silently in the background, they look like standalone charges for the RAM alone.

As you can see in our screenshot above, when you select the 32 GB RAM option, it prompts you to confirm the change since the CPU will be upgraded alongside it — from a Snapdragon X Plus to X Elite, so the total cost of the upgrade is $300, but Dell is offering a $150 discount on that. Try playing around with the configurator yourself to discover just how much of a maze it is, though you can still tell what's changing. A pricing error or perhaps a currency/region issue in the original screenshot also can't be ruled out, but one thing is certain: Dell definitely isn't charging $550 for 32GB of RAM. At least not yet anyway.

The OP must've realized his oversight after replies and media coverage pointed it out, at which point he deleted the original post. Unfortunately, Framework already replied with a scathing post, letting users know that it'll need to raise memory prices soon as well, but that it won't overcharge customers like "apparently" Dell and Apple. A point made based on erroneous information, but perhaps deserved nonetheless.

Framework's tweet remains up, but the post above it from Vadim is gone. However, Framework's point that its memory upgrades are more affordable than rival laptop makers (for now) still stands. Moving forward, that will change. "We are going to need to increase our memory pricing soon," Framework warned in a follow-up. "But we won’t use this as an excuse to gouge customers like Dell apparently has, and that Apple does as their norm," the company added. Only time will tell when Framework will increase its prices and by how much. A few weeks ago, the company stopped selling standalone RAM in order to stop the supply from being consumed by scalpers.

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There are discounts of up to 35% off Bambu Lab products that you can take advantage of site-wide. You can also subscribe to the Bambu Lab newsletter for an extra $10 off voucher on goods over $100, which you can put towards filament spools, accessories, maker's supplies, spare parts, and materials, and even towards a 3D printer itself.

• See all Bambu Lab End of Year deals

This is a huge sale for the holidays, and to help you choose, we've put together some of our favorite deals and listed them below. We've also had the opportunity to review all of these printer models, so we can provide an extensive and authoritative review of the performance of the models listed, so if you're unsure, make sure to dive into our reviews to help you decide which 3D printer to pick.

Bambu Lab 3D Printer Deals

Automatic Material Systems Attachment Deals

AMS addons (Automatic Material Systems) for Bambu Lab printers add the abilities to perform multi-color prints, or help with filament drying and storage. Depending on the 3D printer combination and compatibility you can link multiple units. Unfortunately, only one AMS unit (listed below) is on sale right now, with the others out of stock until February at the earliest.

Filament Starter Bundle Deals

Unless you're using a resin 3D printer, you're going to need filament to actually print your models. Bambu Lab have discounts on its own range of filament spools right now, with some brilliant bundles on sale for beginners to pick up below.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, or CPU Deals pages.

The announcement, first made by President Donald Trump via Truth Social, comes after months of internal debate within the U.S. administration over how to apply export restrictions without accelerating China’s ability to develop domestic alternatives. The H200, a powerful GPU from Nvidia’s Hopper generation, significantly outperforms the previously approved H20 and had been considered too capable for Chinese markets under earlier rules. Its reauthorization hints that there’s been a shift in Washington’s approach, namely to maintain technological superiority, but it will allow controlled access to limit the pace of Chinese self-sufficiency.

An unexpected U-turn

The decision to allow H200 exports follows concerns that sweeping restrictions were producing unintended results. Since the initial wave of AI chip bans in 2022, Chinese firms have intensified development of homegrown accelerators, with Huawei’s Ascend 910C making significant progress in training and inference workloads. While still behind Nvidia in absolute performance, Huawei’s architecture is increasingly seen as serviceable for national and commercial deployments, especially as its fabrication partners improve yields.

Internal discussions in Washington, as reported by multiple sources, shifted focus from outright denial to managed access. Officials seem to have eventually concluded that permitting H200 sales — while keeping newer architectures like Blackwell and the upcoming Rubin out of reach — could slow China’s push for chip independence without giving away the U.S. lead in performance. The H200 remains one generation behind Nvidia’s cutting-edge designs but is fully capable of training modern foundation models and large-scale AI systems.

This repositioning allows U.S. regulators to reassert some control over China's access to advanced silicon while capturing financial and political value from every sale. Under the terms of the new export framework, each H200 must be manufactured by TSMC, shipped to the U.S. for inspection, and then re-exported to China. The 25% duty is collected at the U.S. checkpoint, with the funds directed to federal revenue.

Beijing convenes tech firms and weighs conditions

Chinese regulators have not publicly responded to the U.S. announcement but are said to have begun internal reviews. According to reporting by The Information, officials from the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology have held meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent to assess their projected demand for H200 GPUs. The companies have been asked to provide use cases and expected unit volumes, with the understanding that the government may impose caps or usage guidelines.

Two sources present at those meetings told The Information that regulators are considering import limits tied to domestic procurement. Companies may be required to demonstrate that they are also investing in Chinese accelerators such as Huawei’s Ascend or Cambricon’s Siyuan series. This model, used previously to guide purchases of data center components and server platforms, allows Beijing to balance near-term hardware needs with its goal of reducing reliance on U.S. suppliers.

China has also continued to apply informal pressure to shift buyers toward domestic chips. In August, Chinese regulators issued guidance to steer state-backed entities and infrastructure projects away from Nvidia’s H20, resulting in widespread cancellations of contracts. The H200 presents a different scenario, given its substantial performance advantage, but officials are expected to apply similar discretion in determining which sectors and use cases are eligible.

SuperCloud, a domestic cloud services provider, confirmed that it expects major Chinese companies to proceed with H200 purchases if permitted, though in a subdued fashion. “The training of leading Chinese AI models still relies on Nvidia cards,” said Zhang Yuchun, a general manager at SuperCloud, when speaking to Reuters. “I expect the leading Chinese tech companies to buy a lot although in a low key manner.”

Production limits may slow short-term access

Nvidia’s ability to meet demand in China will likely be constrained by supply. The company has kept H200 output relatively low as it focused on ramping production of its Blackwell-class B100 and B200 GPUs, as well as preparing for its Rubin successor. Also speaking to Reuters, two sources familiar with Nvidia’s supply chain said that H200 manufacturing has been deprioritized in favor of fulfilling high-margin orders from U.S. hyperscalers and sovereign AI programs in allied countries.

Chinese firms looking to place orders may therefore find themselves at the back of the queue. Alibaba and ByteDance are both thought to be “keen to place large orders” should Chinese regulators give them the green light to do so. However, the companies are concerned about supply and are said to be actively seeking clarity from Nvidia on this.

If all this goes ahead, the H200 would reintroduce training-scale compute capacity to Chinese AI developers after a long period of reliance on repurposed hardware and grey-market acquisitions. The chip delivers roughly six times the performance of the H20 and approaches the capabilities of Nvidia’s H100, which has been banned from China since late 2022. Unlike most Chinese accelerators, the H200 supports Nvidia’s CUDA software ecosystem, simplifying model porting and cluster integration.

Ultimately, Nvidia is unlikely to resume large-scale H200 production unless it receives strong approval from both U.S. and Chinese regulators, and equally strong demand from Chinese customers. The chip is already considered a transitional product within Nvidia’s roadmap, with Blackwell occupying the top end of the current generation and Rubin expected to extend that lead in 2026.

Enforcement measures target diversion and smuggling

U.S. officials have attached a number of technical and procedural conditions to the H200 export approval. Each unit must be shipped to the U.S. before entering China, creating a traceable logistics trail that allows U.S. Customs and Commerce Department inspectors to verify compliance. Nvidia has also introduced optional location-verification software that can confirm whether a chip is operating in an authorized geography.

The system uses a combination of secure telemetry and latency-based network checks to determine the approximate location of a GPU within a customer’s infrastructure. While not mandatory — at least not yet — the feature has been privately demonstrated as a tool for audit and compliance. Nvidia has framed the technology as a data center management solution rather than a surveillance system, and the company has emphasized that it cannot remotely deactivate or control chips in the field.

Nonetheless, the software has raised concerns in Beijing, with the Cyberspace Administration of China questioning whether the technology constitutes a backdoor or allows external access to sensitive operations. Nvidia has stated that the system, which will first be made available on Blackwell chips, cannot be used for eavesdropping and does not transmit any user data to third parties. It remains to be seen whether Chinese buyers will enable the feature or attempt to route around it using intermediaries.

The compliance measures reflect a broader concern that export controls, while useful on paper, have proven difficult to enforce. We’ve seen several examples of banned Nvidia GPUs like the A100 and H100 appearing in the likes of Chinese university research and start-up product documentation since their respective bans. Many of these were likely acquired through grey-market channels or indirect resellers in third countries.

The U.S. Justice Department has already indicted several individuals involved in smuggling high-performance Nvidia chips to China in violation of export rules. Cases are ongoing in multiple districts, and officials have signaled that enforcement will intensify as more tracking capabilities become available.

A concession?

The approval of H200 exports arguably represents a concession rather than any long-term structural change in U.S. policy. The Biden and Trump administrations have consistently maintained that the U.S. must retain leadership in AI hardware and semiconductor manufacturing. The H200, while advanced, is no longer Nvidia’s leading product, and allowing access to it gives Washington a tool to slow China’s push for independence without giving up the top tier of its technology stack.

From Beijing’s perspective, the decision provides short-term relief. AI developers can resume training at scale using supported hardware and familiar toolchains, but the long-term imperative remains unchanged. China continues to invest in domestic foundries, chip design houses, and packaging capacity. Huawei is expanding its Ascend production targets, and other firms are attempting to design new architectures that bypass the limitations of restricted U.S. IP.

The H200 will be welcomed by those who can access it, but the approval comes with strings attached and no guarantee of duration. Chinese firms must navigate what could be a complex approvals process, limited supply, and reputational risk. Nvidia, meanwhile, must manage Washington’s expectations while preventing its technology from slipping beyond authorized use.

The success or failure of this arrangement may determine how future export rules are written. If H200 exports proceed smoothly, it could serve as a model for calibrated engagement, but if compliance breaks down or political conditions shift, the window may close just as quickly as it opened.

Sources close to the matter allege that DeepSeek is involved in a high-complexity smuggling ring focused on getting Blackwell chips into China illegally through the use of fake data centers. Shell companies purchase data centers worth of Nvidia servers somewhere in Southeast Asia, setting up the data center and its hardware entirely to spec. Nvidia's OEM partners send contractors to inspect the installation, confirming successful installs and export compliance.

After this inspection is finished, smugglers reportedly disassemble the entire data center rack by rack, shipping the GPU servers in suitcases across the border into mainland China, where the purchase and use of certain Nvidia chips are restricted by the United States government. According to the report, sources with knowledge of these smuggling operations claim that smugglers and clients prefer 8-GPU rack servers like the HGX B200 over the powerful GB200 NVL72 for this smaller size and ease of covert transportation.

When asked for comment, an Nvidia spokesperson gave the following statement to Tom's Hardware:

We haven't seen any substantiation or received tips of 'phantom datacenters' constructed to deceive us and our OEM partners, then deconstructed, smuggled, and reconstructed somewhere else. While such smuggling seems far-fetched, we pursue any tip we receive.

DeepSeek's Need for Nvidia GPUs

DeepSeek, the most recognizable Chinese AI firm in the United States, thanks to its R1 LLM making worldwide headlines one year ago, has long been connected with Nvidia GPUs. Its sensational R1 model was trained on only 2,048 Nvidia H800s in two months, a number of GPUs far smaller and more efficient than any Western competitor. Since this time, DeepSeek has consistently been linked to the stockpiling and purchase of as many Nvidia GPUs as it can obtain, with reports constantly swirling about DeepSeek somehow bypassing export restrictions and securing huge numbers of the newest Nvidia chips.

Interestingly, DeepSeek's latest internal reports seem to indicate plans to use Nvidia chips for its newest AI models. In a whitepaper released on December 2nd on DeepSeek V3.2, DeepSeek suggests their bottleneck on performance matches that of frontier models like Gemini-3.0-Pro is pre-training compute; "We plan to address this knowledge gap in future iterations by scaling up the pre-training compute." Pre-training compute is a workflow that Nvidia GPUs and CUDA software perform better than most other competitors, suggesting that DeepSeek engineers count on something changing for its access to high-caliber pre-training compute power.

DeepSeek's track record proves that Nvidia's pre-training abilities fill a niche unmatched by domestic Chinese products. Reports in August claimed that Huawei's Ascend GPU servers were unable to run necessary training workloads, prompting a return to Nvidia hardware in the R2 training process. This was despite government intervention and doctrines calling for DeepSeek to turn to domestic Chinese products for its AI workload. While the Huawei Ascend servers were used for inference for the models, the company could not turn anywhere but to Nvidia, much to the chagrin of China.

Nvidia's Future in China

The Trump administration recently announced plans to unrestrict the Nvidia H200 GPU in China, opening up Nvidia's sales in the country. Speculators claim that this policy U-turn from the White House, which has spent much of 2025 toeing a line of complete export isolationism to China, comes as fears of Huawei's CloudMatrix 384 and Ascend 910C systems grow. Reputable claims hold that these servers match the H200 and GB200 NVL72 in certain performance metrics, causing the U.S. government to release the H200 into China.

This new policy is based on a compromise between flooding China with easy-to-access American Nvidia tech and banning it altogether. The hope is to satiate Chinese tech needs and take away motivation for firms like Huawei to develop their own Nvidia competitors. The adoption of this doctrine, oft-touted by Nvidia's lobbying efforts to the White House, marks a major shift in the "Chip War" trade offensive between Beijing and Washington D.C., which has moved from preventing China from any access to next-gen tech to hoping to slow China's tech power that is beginning to threaten Western tech dominance.

While Trump's Commerce Department continues to insist that China will never see Nvidia Blackwell hardware, keeping the export exceptions limited to Hopper-generation hardware like the H200, time will tell if further Nvidia lobbying and fears of the Chinese tech sector will open the doors further. And of course, if DeepSeek truly is involved in conspiracies of phantom data centers, they won't even need the U.S. to allow them access to Blackwell.

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According to the report, he meetings were led by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Both agencies have overseen AI chip procurement since the first round of controls took effect back in 2022, and both are now attempting to balance two conflicting pressures: China does not currently produce a domestic equivalent to the H200 for large-scale training workloads, yet the government continues to press companies to adopt homegrown silicon whenever possible. Officials requested estimates of each company’s H200 requirements earlier in the week and told attendees they would issue guidance once responses are reviewed.

The H200 sits one generation below Nvidia’s new Blackwell platform but remains vastly more capable than the export-compliant H20 that was built specifically for the Chinese market. The H20 contributed just $50 million in revenue during Nvidia’s October quarter, compared to $4.6 billion in the period earlier this year when the company could still ship H100-class processors into China. Nvidia’s overall China revenue fell 63% year over year to about $3 billion in the same quarter. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has since said that Nvidia has virtually no market share left in China.

Trump’s approval of H200 exports follows a meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and introduces a new mechanism for moving high-end GPUs into China. Chips manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan would be imported into the United States for security reviews, taxed at 25% and then re-exported to approved Chinese buyers. U.S. officials told The Information that the arrangement was designed as a middle ground whereby Blackwell remains off-limits, but a complete ban on H200 shipments was viewed as likely to accelerate China’s domestic chip development.

Chinese regulators, meanwhile, are considering restrictions of their own. One proposal would cap the amount of Nvidia hardware a company can buy relative to its existing and planned purchases of domestic accelerators. Another would bar H200 use in sectors regarded as strategically sensitive, including finance and energy. If adopted, these measures would be communicated through informal “window guidance”, the same method authorities used earlier this year when they urged companies to avoid Nvidia hardware and prioritize suppliers such as Huawei.

If Beijing authorizes H200 imports, demand is expected to be substantial. Companies are said to have begun preliminary discussions with Nvidia about potential orders after Bloomberg first reported in November that the U.S. was weighing approval, and, according to Reuters, the likes of Alibaba and ByteDance are said to be “keen” to begin purchasing Nvidia’s chips. For now, China’s policymakers are attempting to determine how to meet short-term AI training needs without undermining the long-term push for semiconductor self-reliance

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Nvidia officially positions its tracking technology, which can approximate the physical location of its AI processors, as a way for infrastructure operators to oversee their GPU fleets as well as monitor their health. As an added bonus, the feature also addresses political demands in the United States to curb illegal diversion of advanced AI GPUs to restricted markets such as China, North Korea, or Russia, according to Reuters. The capability has only been demonstrated confidentially as the company has not yet deployed it publicly, though it does not deny its existence. Yet, it has not formally confirmed that the software can determine the physical location of Nvidia's hardware.

"We are in the process of implementing a new software service that empowers data center operators to monitor the health and inventory of their entire AI GPU fleet," an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "This customer-installed software agent leverages GPU telemetry to monitor fleet health, integrity, and inventory."

Reuters reports that the mechanism behind the tracking software can not only read GPU telemetry, but also incorporates timing measurements taken from communication between customer systems and Nvidia servers. By analyzing this latency, the software can estimate the location of the GPU with roughly the same precision offered by standard Internet-based geolocation services, according to Reuters. There are two things to note, though. Actual location-based services use IP address and Wi-Fi positioning, but while the former makes sense for data center hardware, Wi-Fi positioning may not work well in remote rural areas, where many of China's AI data centers are located. The company stresses that this is a customer-installed software agent rather than a hidden function, and that it relies on legitimate GPU telemetry rather than any concealed access pathway.

The feature is slated to appear first on the latest Blackwell-generation components, which include strengthened capabilities for 'attestation,' a process that verifies that the hardware and software stack have not been altered. According to Reuters, citing a company representative, these AI accelerators contain more advanced verification logic than the preceding Hopper and Ampere families; however, it is unclear whether Nvidia can remotely disable hardware if it is used in a prohibited region.

Meanwhile, China’s main cybersecurity regulator has summoned Nvidia for questioning over concerns that verification functions could act as backdoors accessible to the U.S. government. Nvidia has firmly rejected the notion that its hardware contains any backdoors, and reading hardware telemetry does not undermine cryptographic protections and other security features.

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• Grab this deal at Newegg

The MSI Codex R2 gaming PC features very decent components for a budget 1080p gaming machine and also a couple of surprises. The hardware of this particular build configuration includes an Intel Core i5-14400F processor, Nvidia RTX 5060 graphics card, 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, and 2TB of storage. Along with the core components are a 650W 80+ Gold-rated power supply, ARGB fans, and even an included MSI mouse and keyboard. As I previously mentioned, it's surprising to find 32GB of RAM and a larger 2TB SSD in prebuilt PCs, especially at this price.

There's also an opportunity to upgrade in the future. Although you're limited to the LGA 1700 socket on the motherboard, the Intel Core i5-14400F could be upgraded to a much more powerful CPU, such as the Core i7-14700K, or even Core i9-14900K, depending on whether you can find the parts at a good price. But overall, this is a tremendously good prebuilt, considering the RAM alone is worth roughly $300-$500.

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It's unlikely the CORE One L will have a kit version, as the AC-powered heat bed is not for tinkerers. The 3D printer is still built with easy maintenance in mind and open source parts for lifetime repairability. The printer is also designed to operate completely offline if you choose, without dependence on the cloud for complete security. However, if you enjoy the convenience of mobile apps, the Prusa App offers remote printer operation, full access to Printables.com for model selection, and a lite version of PrusaSlicer for custom slicing on the go.

The CORE One L has a few clever tricks up its sleeve: it can flip the top vent open or close on its own, a flip of a switch makes loading (and running) TPU super easy, and strategically mounted fans control air flow and heat so the door can remain closed at all times. The chamber can hit 60 °C, making engineering-grade filaments as easy to run as PLA. It will also be the first 3D printer compatible with Prusa-backed OpenPrintTag, an open source initiative to create a universal “smart” spool with NFC tags that customers can reuse as they wish.

The CORE One L retails at $1,799 (including import duties and tariffs) and comes with 24/7 customer service and a complete ecosystem. This machine lives up to its reputation and is one of the best 3D printers we’ve tested to date.

Specifications: Prusa CORE One L

Prusa CORE One L: Included in the Box

The Prusa CORE One L comes 98% assembled. It includes a full set of tools and a full 1 kg spool of Galaxy Black Prusament PLA (plus a bag of Gummy Bears). There’s also a USB stick with models to test out and a handbook on 3D printing with your new machine. The PrusaSlicer is available for free download from the website.

Design of the Prusa CORE One L

The CORE One L is at its heart a larger CORE One, with a few critical changes. The most obvious is the size, now sporting a 300 x 300 x 330 build volume, which is about twice the size by volume, if not exactly plate size.

The slim, all-steel exoskeleton now has aluminum walls to cut down on heft, which means the new printer checks in at about the same weight (48 pounds) as the smaller CORE. This keeps it still somewhat manageable to move by a single person and sit on a desk.

It has the same indents on either side to conceal the spool holder and customizable storage space, though now magnets will only stick to the frame. The door and upper parts of the side panels are translucent black polymer. The top panel snaps into place. The top vent can now be opened or closed by the printer itself. It’s still not exactly airtight, with many gaps at the seams, but a few gaps in the frame won’t spoil the system.

The exoskeleton provides a strong, stiff frame for the printer while also minimizing materials and avoiding the cheap plasticky feel we get from other brands. The indented sides reduce the interior space of the printer, making for less space to heat.

The biggest change to the CORE One L is the heat bed, which is now a solid chunk of aluminum, heated with AC power. It provides uniform heating from corner to corner, which is essential with such a large surface. There are two fans underneath the bed to distribute the heat like a convection oven. This eliminates the need for a second heating system, as the bed can now be used more efficiently to warm the entire chamber for technical filaments.

The CORE One L still shares many 3D parts with its Prusa siblings, which are produced at the large Prusa Research print farm in Prague (or in Delaware by Printed Solid if you buy one in America). CORE One 3D parts are made with PC Blend Carbon Fiber, printed on a combo of MK4s and CORE One machines. Prusa also does its own injection molding, which you can see on the LCD case.

Another thoughtful touch is the door hinge, which can be flipped if you rather have it open on the other side. The door can completely open 180 degrees, but Prusa encourages users to go ahead and keep it closed for any material, thanks to their active cooling system. The door has a sensor that will warn you to keep it shut and stop the print when the door is opened. This is a nice safety feature for schools, parents of small children, and pet owners. Thankfully, the sensor can be switched off if you want the freedom to poke your nose or a camera in there.

The CORE One L specs don’t include acceleration rates, as the company is famous for putting quality over speed. The machine does come with a high flow nozzle, input shaping and factory tuned print profiles for over 200 filaments. Still, I opened up PrusaSlicer to see what kind of settings they’re using for speed and acceleration. The top printing acceleration rate of 3000 mm/s² would not impress a Bambu user who easily has twice the speed. However, acceleration isn’t everything. Using their default settings, both the CORE One L and the similarly sized Bambu Lab H2S printed a Maker’s Muse calibration castle in about one hour and 15 minutes using .25mm layer height and default settings. Sure, the Bambu might be faster printing a big, plain box, but how often do you print things that are so boring?

The CORE One L finally has an onboard accelerometer, though it’s completely factory calibrated and ready to print as soon as you plug it in. It also has an NFC antenna to make getting the machine online and connected to the Prusa app and slicer very easy. The app is entirely optional for those who wish to keep their printers offline. The CORE One L has a USB port for manually loading files, which is the printer’s only place for file storage.

Like the CORE One, bed leveling is fully automatic, with no manual adjustments. First layers go down perfectly smooth thanks to a load cell sensor that has replaced the bedslinger’s PINDA probe. The sensor is connected to the nozzle, which allows the CORE One L to physically tap the print surface for a more precise measurement. The sensor is also used to calculate Z Height, and it does it so well that there is no need for human intervention. Of course, there’s still a live Z adjustment available in the menu should you need it. During testing, we did not.

Assembling the Prusa CORE One L

The Prusa CORE One L comes nearly assembled. You just have to unpack it and remove a few screws that held the bed down during shipping. The screen arrives packed inside, attached to the front trim plate, and just needs to be slapped on the printer with magnets.

Our machine came with the optional filtration system, which did need more complex assembly. That involves removing the back panel to access the electronics, plugging the fans to the board and screwing everything back together. It was fairly straight forward, but I did have to hunt down the directions online.

Leveling the Prusa CORE One L

Bed leveling is a no-brainer, as the Prusa CORE One L is fully automatic. There are no manual adjustments and no need to adjust the Z offset. The printer uses a load cell sensor connected to the nozzle, which physically taps the print surface for precise measurement.

The printer trams the bed and calculates the required z height before each print.

Loading Filament on the Prusa CORE One L

Loading filament is very simple. Simply place the spool into side mounted rack and feed the plastic into the reverse Bowden tube until it reaches the hotend. The printer will automatically detect it and pull it in the rest of the way. The screen will then ask what kind of material you’re using to set the temperature. Once it gets hot enough, it will pull the filament into the hotend and ask if the color has changed. If it has, you can say yes and move on. If the answer is no, it will purge more material.

To remove material, go to the Filament menu from the main screen and click unload. It will remember what material was last installed, determine if the filament is still there, and then heat it to the appropriate temperature. Once hot, it will retract the plastic until you can easily remove it.

If you’re running flexible filaments, there’s a switch where the tube enters the chamber that allows you to switch off one of the filament sensors (another is on the tool head). This allows soft TPU to load as easily as PLA and I didn’t have any trouble at all.

Preparing Files / Software for Prusa CORE One L

You’ll need to download PrusaSlicer, which is free and open source. It is developed by Prusa Research and serves as the foundation for many other slicers. It comes with hundreds of profiles for every material and nozzle size that Prusa Research makes.

PrusaSlicer can also directly access Printables.com, which offers a wide selection of free file models for both fun and practical prints. If you’re using the mobile app, files can be sent directly from Printables to the online EasyPrint slicer and then directly to your printer if you choose to have it online.

Printing on the Prusa CORE One L

The CORE One L comes with a full 1 KG roll of Prusament PLA Galaxy Black. If you want more colors and materials like silks and multicolor filaments, you should check out our guide to the best filaments for 3D printing for suggestions.

We used the sample material to print a Benchy to see what the CORE One can do with its fastest default slicer settings. We used Speed Benchy rules for fairness: 2 walls, 3 top and bottom layers, 10% infill, a .25 layer height and .5 layer width. Using these settings, we got a very nice benchy in 23 minutes with a bit of wisps probably due to the humidity in the house.

I printed a few soap dishes I found on Printables for a practical PLA print. These were a little chonky looking despite the .2 layer height, due to the curves. It had 3 walls for strength printed in Prusament PLA Marble Grey, which makes home goods look more posh. It took 5 hours and 54 minutes to print three of them.

I also printed some cute clips, which mix practical with whimsical. These “Vicegriptor” locking clips have surprising bite when printed in PETG. A word of warning – you need to be very careful loosening them up the first time, or you risk breaking the print in place joints. Once they’re limbered up, they work really nice for holding chip bags and the like.

I printed eight at a time on the CORE One L’s roomy bed, taking 3 hours and 13 min, using a .2 layer height and default settings. This was printed in Greengate’s recycled Deepwater Blue, a sparkly filament created for 3D Print Bunny.

For TPU I made another ill-fated dog toy for my Standard Poodle Ripley. The print was excellent, but 3D printed dog toys for strong chewers is still not that great. The filament loaded very easily, thanks to the new switch, and I had no trouble at all pushing it through to the Nextruder.

This printed in 6 hours and 6 minutes, using Inland Rainbow TPU and a .2mm layer height. It lasted about 6 hours after I gave it to the dog too. Before the dog destroyed it, it had very nice smooth and glossy surfaces and very slight blemishes from layer lines.

We ran a lot of high-temperature material from it, like this Fiberon Red PET-GF15 by Polymaker. This is a form of Polyethylene terephthalate, like PETG, but without the G (glycol), which is usually added to make the material behave. Instead, Polymaker added 15% glass fiber to make the PET stiff, dimensionally stable, and thermal resistant. It prints fast and super hot, and this needed 280 °C on the nozzle and 80 °C on the bed. I filled the bed with parts, and it printed very nicely without warping. There were some goobers on the edges that will brush off.

Bottom Line

The CORE One L is a great addition to the Prusa lineup, filling a space between the “medium” MK4/CORE One and the Prusa XL tool changer. It gives you Prusa quality and security in a larger size without having the larger pro price tag. It has a retail price of $1,799 (including import duties and tariffs) and comes with 24/7 customer service and a complete ecosystem.

Its new aluminum bed with even AC-powered heating is excellent, and it has a few perks like the camera, TPU switch, and self-opening top vent that could be easily added to the smaller CORE One. It will also be the first printer to try out OpenSourceTag when it hits the market.

We’re also keeping our fingers crossed for a tool changer mod through a partnership with Bondtech, but details are still vague as of this writing.

If a Prusa CORE One L seems just a bit too spendy for your budget, the smaller Prusa CORE One comes in at $999 for a kit. The delightfully budget-friendly Bambu Lab P1S Combo is currently on sale for $549, and if you need some massive CORE XY size, the Creality K2 Plus is worth checking out at $1199.

Throughout this year, we saw Microsoft being more committed towards gamers with the launch of the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X, their first handheld consoles made in collaboration with Asus. These consoles came with exclusive features, including the Xbox full screen experience (FSE) and Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD). Microsoft also improved the Windows gaming experience on Arm devices by enabling local game installs through the Xbox app, expanding compatibility and performance in the Prism emulator, and providing native anti-cheat solutions.

With 2026 fast approaching, Microsoft has announced that it will be expanding Xbox FSE to Windows PCs, including desktops, laptops, and 2-in-1s, next year. The feature is currently being tested in a preview and can be accessed by updating to the latest Windows 11 build and signing up for the Windows and Xbox Insider programmes.

Xbox FSE is a controller-first interface that essentially allows you to launch games faster, with minimal distractions. It can also consolidate all of your game libraries from various online stores, including Microsoft Store, Steam, Epic Games, and Battle.net, into one place. Additionally, one can expect a boost in gaming performance as booting into FSE instead of Windows Explorer results in less RAM usage.

Microsoft also plans to expand Auto Super Resolution to handheld gaming devices next year, starting with a preview for the ROG Xbox Ally X. Auto SR was first introduced on Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X processors, with an aim to deliver sharper visuals and smoother framerates in DirectX games running at lower resolution.

Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) is also set for an expansion to more Windows 11 devices that allows the system to preload game shaders during download, thus allowing supported games to launch faster, run smoother, and consume less battery when you first launch the game. Lastly, Microsoft says that it is working on improving system behaviors that matter most when you are gaming, including background workload management, power and scheduling improvements, graphics stack optimizations, and updated drivers. The company will be sharing more information during the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC) scheduled in March 2026.

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This decision would enable China to continue to access Nvidia's CUDA-based AI accelerators, as many AI systems still rely on that particular software stack. While China is attempting to standardize an instruction set of its own, the open-source CANN, it has been noted that Nvidia chips are preferable for companies such as Deepseek for training advanced AI models.

According to sources speaking to Bloomberg, multiple scenarios were considered, including flooding the market to "overwhelm" Huawei, to exporting no AI accelerators, which would mark a dramatic shift, if the previously-approved Nvidia H20 (a cut-down H200) were to be affected. Ultimately, the decision rests somewhere in the middle.

China won't get access to Nvidia's latest Blackwell architectures, but it will retain access to the full-fat H200. The White House likely hopes that this move keeps the latest Nvidia chips, while also keeping the country locked into Nvidia's carefully crafted CUDA-shaped moat. "The Trump administration is committed to ensuring the dominance of the American tech stack - without compromising on national security", said White House spokesman Kush Desai, in a statement to Bloomberg.

White House officials are reported to have reviewed the performance of Huawei's AI accelerator ecosystem, in particular, the CloudMatrix 384 system, which utilizes 384 Ascend 910C chips. The CloudMatrix 384 is positioned directly against Nvidia's (export-controlled) GB200 platform, but with obvious tradeoffs in performance and efficiency.

While Bloomberg notes recent rumblings that Huawei is preparing to up its 910C chip production to 600,000 units next year, the report claims U.S. officials concluded "that Huawei would be capable in 2026 of producing a few million of its Ascend 910C accelerators," according to the insider.

The AI race is now bound by pure performance, and the Trump Administration clearly hopes that retaining its architectural advantage by restricting Blackwell will keep Western frontier AI models at the forefront of the industry.

Just last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang commented that he would be uncertain whether or not Chinese companies would even end up purchasing the H200. Huang has long since been a vocal detractor against export controls of AI GPUs, as Nvidia wrote off $5.5 billion in AI chips in April 2025. Whether or not the availability of H200 systems on the Chinese market will be enough to recover the shortfall remains to be seen.

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Today, Snapmaker confirmed it has secured “tens of millions in US dollars” in Series B funding. The round was co-led by Hillhouse Ventures and Meituan, with additional participation from Shunwei Capital, Longzhu Capital (Meituan), Nanshan Innovation Investment, and continuing support from existing shareholders Cowin Capital and Orient Securities Capital.

Shunwei Capital is notable for being the investment firm co-founded by Lei Jun, the billionaire co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Xiaomi Corporation, and one of China’s most respected entrepreneurs. Xiaomi is the world’s third-largest smartphone manufacturer, behind Samsung and Apple. Often called the “Steve Jobs of China,” Lei Jun is well regarded as an angel investor.

Snapmaker announced in a press release that its new funding will be directed toward core technology R&D, global talent acquisition, and ecosystem expansion. The company has been producing 3D printers since 2016 and has twice broken Kickstarter records: first with the Snapmaker 2.0 in 2019 and again with the U1 tool changer this year. The Snapmaker 2.0 raised over $7.85 million, while the U1 brought in over $20 million, becoming the highest-funded 3D printing project in crowdfunding history. Over 20,000 people backed the tool changer, which will be coming to retail shelves in Q1 2026.

Snapmaker is something of a dark horse in the 3D printing world. Despite success with the Snapmaker 2.0 Kickstarter, its machines have been bulky, expensive, niche products designed for makers who want a 3D printer that can also laser-cut and CNC mill. The U1 tool changer flipped the script, offering a faster solution to multicolor printing that doesn’t waste filament and is cheaper than industry leader Bambu Lab’s flagship Core XY machines.

Priced around $750 during the Kickstarter, U1 flew off the shelves and proved that consumers crave a speedy machine that respects their time, budget, and recycling can. It also spurred renewed interest in tool changers. Before the U1, the only consumer tool changer was Prusa Research’s prosumer XL, priced at $ 3,099 for a semi-assembled unit.

Shortly after the U1’s launch, Bambu Lab announced the seven-nozzle, filament-saving P2S, followed by Prusa Research revealing a partnership with Bondtech to turn its new CORE One into a more affordable eight-color tool changer.

Snapmaker’s founder, Daniel Chen, said its new fundraising efforts will allow the company to pivot from a product leader to a global provider of a fully developed ecosystem. He said Snapmaker will “lower the barriers to creation and make 3D printing a universal tool accessible to everyone.” He plans to do this by recruiting top talent to research hardware R&D, AI software, and a content ecosystem.

This sounds like Snapmaker is not only planning to develop more tool changers, but is also going after Bambu Lab’s MakerWorld, a website that provides everything from filament and model files to spare parts for its users. Since Snapmaker is currently using Open Source OrcaSlicer for its software, we hope that Mr. Chen takes a page from the West and keeps the garden gate open to all makers.

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• Check out this deal on Amazon

That’s because this 16-inch Asus V16 gaming laptop is priced at just £849.99, down from as high as £1,199 just a few months ago, according to Camelcamelcamel’s data. While that isn't quite the record low we saw over Black Friday, it's still ~£150 cheaper than its rivals with matching specs. For your money, you’re getting the mobile version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060, which features 8GB of VRAM and 3,328 CUDA cores. It also includes support for DLSS 4, allowing you to enjoy ray tracing with multi-frame generation in games that support it.

Fitted in this rig is an Intel Core Ultra 240H CPU, which has those 10 cores we mentioned previously. Those cores are split, with six performance cores that allow the best performance for gaming, as well as four efficiency cores, which you'll want for multi-threaded task work. It has a typical 2.5GHz clock speed, but this Raptor Lake CPU can boost up to 5.2GHz when you need it to.

You've also got a 16-inch display with a 144Hz refresh rate, giving this Asus V16 laptop a good amount of screen real estate to have several windows open at once. It runs better than 1080p, too, offering a 1,920 x 1,200 screen resolution with a 16:10 aspect ratio. You might still want to tweak down your graphics presets in-game while you're running at 1200p in the most demanding games to get the best frame rates, but the games themselves should still remain playable.

Cheaper laptops typically see you miss out on having enough RAM or storage, but there are no such compromises here. You've got a 1TB SSD, featuring PCIe 5.0 speeds, as well as 16GB of DDR5 SODIMM RAM. While it probably isn't the best time to think about upgrading your memory with RAM prices skyrocketing, once the prices do stabilise, you can upgrade this model to a maximum 32GB, giving it that extra bit of longevity. Alongside the laptop itself, you're also getting three months of Xbox Game Pass thrown in for free.

This £849 Asus V16 is the cheapest gaming laptop with an RTX 5060 that you can buy right now, and you'll struggle to find an alternative for under £1000. If you're thinking about picking up a new laptop before Christmas that can offer solid performance at or above 1080p, then this Asus model is one of your best options. Expect it to sell out fast.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, or CPU Deals pages.

• Check out this deal on Newegg

On top of current and future CPU support, the Z890 Aorus Elite Wifi7 is a well-rounded motherboard with four M.2 sockets (one PCIe 5.0) and four SATA ports for storage, fast networking with integrated Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5 GbE, and enough USB ports (eight Type-A, one Type-C) to go around. The audio solution is also solid, using a last-gen flagship (ALC1220). The Aorus Elite’s black aesthetic and RGB lighting zones give off a premium vibe and are sure to look good with any dark or black build theme, especially with the matching black GSkill RAM that has its own RGB lighting.

GSkill's Trident Z RAM (F5-6000J3636F32GX2-TZ5RK), is the pièce de résistance out of this combo. the 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6000 kit runs at 36-36-36-96 timings at 1.35V. It’s not the fastest or tightest timings, but let’s be honest, you likely won’t notice the difference, and beggars can’t be choosers. Intel systems have a lot more headroom than Intel, but we're confident you’d be happy with the system’s performance using it. Under the black, RGB-laden heatspreaders are (typically) Samsung IC. If these speeds aren’t fast enough for you, there's room to increase speed, lower timings, or both.

Newegg also throws in a Cooler Master 360 Elite AIO ($70.07 on Amazon) to sweeten the already incredible deal. The AIO uses three 120mm RGB fans (up to 2,100RPM) and is said to run cool and quiet. Cooler master doesn't seem to list TDP support, but we know this will handle just about any CPU you use under it.

At under $650, this is one of the best active deals we’ve found that includes 32GB of DDR5 RAM at a reasonable speed. And while you can get away with 16GB and slower speeds, the former is not optimal, and you’d run into a wall sooner than later at that capacity. If you bought all of this individually, you’d be looking at almost $1,130 with the included AIO and game. Priced at $649.99 ($279.99/30% off), now is the time to jump on this deal, as they will get more difficult to find as time goes on.

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The Superpower turbine is purportedly "optimized for AI datacenters," a claim boiled down to delivering its full 42 MW with 39% efficiency, at an operating temperature up to a toasty 110° F (43° C). Judging by a quick search, that's significantly higher than contemporary designs, whose output drops at around 86° F (30° C), if not much sooner—and precisely when it's most needed, when servers are working the hardest.

Almost as importantly, Boom claims the new design is "waterless", a fact that should somewhat assuage ever-growing concerns about datacenters' water usage. Although the servers' cooling towers still need water to function, the fact that it would no longer be necessary to cool the turbines would definitely be a bonus.

Boom says it's taken an order for its new design from Crusoe AI for a substantial 1.21 GW of turbines. The company says it builds everything in Denver, Colorado, and that it intends to create a Superfactory for this new enterprise. Boom expects to deliver 200 MW worth of turbines by 2027, 1 GW in 2028, and up to a meaty 2 GW come 2029. Crusoe ordered 29 units, and the first of them ought to be delivered in 2027.

According to Boom's Blake Scholl, the idea came about due to the fact that xAI and OpenAI both are using converted jet engines, whose main limitation is twofold: commercial availability and falling output at high ambient temperatures, as they're designed for high-altitude operation. The Superpower turbine design is derived from the company's existing Symphony airspace-targeted turbine.

According to Boom, the Symphony engine is designed to power supersonic flight at speeds of up to Mach 1.7 at 60,000 feet. Superpower will run on natural gas, rather than jet fuel, of course. While news of a Concorde successor pivoting its tech to AI might give aviation fans pause, Boom says the new project will actually boost its core mission. "The fastest way to a certified, passenger-carrying Symphony engine is to run its core for hundreds of thousands of hours in the real world, powering Earth’s most demanding AI data centers," Boom says.

Turns out these supersonic jet-powered AI data centers will actually serve as a giant test bed for Boom's turbines. Naturally a profitable venture, Boom also says that the profitability from Superpower will fund "the remainder of the aircraft program," creating a self-sustaining path to supersonic flight.

It can be argued that the long-term future for energy generation is nuclear and with more renewables. The AI train stops for nobody, though, so having better local power generation options now, with rising power costs and stressed grids, is as good a stopgap as any.

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• Check all the Christmas Holiday deals at Secretlab

Comfortable chairs like the Secretlab Titan Evo have often appeared on our list of the best gaming chairs, offering all-day comfort and support for PC users, whether for gaming, studying, or work. Treat your bum and your lower back to some padded support, and even pick a finish that incorporates your favorite brand or game.

We often spend hours sitting at the computer without moving enough. One solution amongst many is to switch to a standing desk, where you can easily change position from sitting to standing and get the blood flowing back into your legs; some people even place a treadmill underneath for added exercise benefits. In Secretlab's Christmas sale, you can get your hands on the latest sit-to-standing desks with the likes of the Secretlab Magnus Evo and Magnus Pro, and grab a little discount while you're at it.

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We reviewed the Corsair Frame 4000D a while back and found it an excellent case for the money, praising its thermals and airflow options. At the time, we dinged it for the dearth of promised modular upgrades, but Corsair is taking a step towards fixing that today by mounting a Xeneon Edge beneath the case's main chamber.

The Edge's 2560x720 AHVA display is a nifty piece of kit that works as a standard monitor as far as Windows is concerned, so you can put basically any window on it you can imagine. It can be used for component monitoring, general information display, or for general utility shortcuts. It integrates with Corsair's iCUE software and is easily customizable.

The Xeneon Edge also has five-point touch functionality, it's not hard to imagine potential multi-tap gesture functionality, like swiping your fingers past it in one direction or another to change your system's power profile, fan settings, and RGB lighting all at once, like putting a car into sport mode. Or, hey, maybe slap a graph of DDR5 RAM prices on there so you can feel smug about what you've already got.

Indeed, there's already a SimHub plugin that some gamers are already making excellent use of, as well as a Spotify controller widget. We could also see the Xeneon Edge hosting live stream statistics or featured chat messages on a stream PC. Do you strictly need a screen on your case for those things? No, but as with so many other parts of PC building and customization, it would sure look cool.

If you're interested in this setup for your own build, Corsair is asking $399.99 for the case-and-display set, which it's calling the Frame 4000D LCD RS ARGB. That might sound steep, but that variation of the Frame 4000D is $109.99 to start with. Add the corresponding mounting kit for $39.99 and the Xeneon Edge itself at $249.99, and the grand total comes in at basically the same amount as the separate parts, minus the hassle of putting it all together yourself.

The Frame 4000D LCD RS ARGB setup comes in black and white to fit the most common color-coordinated setups nowadays. If you have the larger Frame 5000D Airflow case and want to add a Xeneon Edge to your existing setup, the mounting kit to attach the display to your case is $49.99 on its own.

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Some pictures of my Nvidia Dawn and Dusk demo machine + Brass FX5950 Ultra from r/pcmasterrace

“I took this home from work around 2005. It has a looping demo of Dawn and Dusk and a few other demos,” wrote the lucky Redditor. “It currently has a 7800 AGP inside it but I still have the original FX5950 Ultra. For some reason the card has a brass I/O plate, and a brass top rail decoration,” they explained. Then, to refresh the time-worn craniums of those who remember the nVidia Dusk Demo when it was a technical tour de force, Inclusive_3Dprinting shared the video below in breathtaking HD 720p.

If you want a deeper trip down memory lane, Tom’s Hardware featured the Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics card back in January 2004. It looks identical to the sample that Inclusive_3Dprinting shows sitting beside their demo system, except for our review model’s white metal I/O bracket.

As we mentioned back in 2004, this card, featuring the Nvidia NV38 GPU with 256MB DDR RAM on a 256-bit bus, was built to make the most of the then-cutting-edge DirectX 9 API. It was bundled with titles from the Tomb Raider and Rainbow Six franchises to show off its capabilities.

Those wishing to test out the old Dusk demo, featuring Dawn’s racy twin sister, can still test it on their choice of hardware thanks to the Internet Archive preserving access to this 83.4MB demo. The Dusk demo showcased true-to-life skin and hair visuals, delivering the most realistic human-like real-time character animations of the era on consumer hardware.

At some period, lost in the sands of time, the Redditor swapped out the FX 5950 Ultra in favor of a GeForce 7800GS, which we reviewed in February 2006. It has remained with this upgrade ever since, but thankfully the original brass bracket card wasn’t lost to time.

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Getting the S10000 gaming-ready, particularly to get both GPUs to cooperate in supported games, was no easy task. The GPU enthusiast had to make several changes to get the card to work at all with newer titles due to its age. This included using Windows 10 instead of Windows 11, and BIOS flashing the card so the S10000 would function with newer AMD Adrenalin drivers.

First, running the GPU out of the box on Windows 10, RandomGaminginHD discovered several weird quirks with the card. The S10000 only supports up to FirePro driver version 17.4 and not AMD's Adrenalin counterpart, which is critical for getting game optimizations. Under GPU-Z, the card shows up under two distinct names, S10000 and W9000 X2.

After researching the GPU's name, RandomGaminginHD discovered that the two model names are, in fact, the same GPU, only the W9000 X2 was never released under that name. In fact, the enthusiast discovered that AMD had slapped a "S10000" sticker over a "W9000 X2" badge on his particular card, suggesting AMD renamed the graphics card from W9000 X2 to S10000 just before the product's release in November 2012.

The S10000 was technically gaming capable in its out-of-the-box form with the most recent FirePro drivers it supports, running Crysis at just above 60 FPS. However, the YouTuber discovered the FirePro drivers don't enable CrossFire support whatsoever, preventing the second GPU from spinning up in supported games.

To fix this, RandomGaminginHD BIOS-flashed the graphics card with firmware from a Radeon HD 7990 dual-GPU gaming card. This made the S10000 identify as an HD 7990 to Windows 10 and enabled support for AMD's Adrenalin drivers, specifically version 22.6.1 from 2022.

With the S10000 disguised as an HD 7990, performance increased substantially thanks to the 2022 Adrenalin drivers enabling Crossfire support. In Crysis, the S10000 was able to achieve over 110 FPS most of the time with both GPUs sitting at around 65% usage. RandomGaminginHD also tested Crysis 3, GTA V, and Mafia 2, and found all three titles ran well, especially Mafia 2, which was able to take full advantage of both GPUs —both sitting above 90% usage all the time.

Moving to modern games, our intrepid tester tried Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, and CS2. Despite all three titles lacking multi-GPU support, Arc Raiders and CS2 ran at playable frame rates, albeit with extremely low graphics settings. At the lowest settings — 70% resolution scaling at 1080p — Arc Raiders ran at around 40-45 FPS. CS2 fared better, with 120-160 FPS depending on the scene. Cyberpunk 2077 handled the worst on this card, producing just 20-30 FPS on the S10000 at the lowest settings with FSR set to its ultra performance profile.

The S10000 ranked among the most powerful workstation cards in 2012, as Nvidia had shied away from dual-GPU professional cards at the time. The S10000 sported two Tahiti GPUs featuring 1,792 shader cores, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and 28 CUs each. Memory was split across two 384-bit memory interfaces for each GPU, and each chip was connected to 3GB of GDDR5.

RandomInGamingHD's work to resurrect his particular S10000 shows how potent the dual-GPU graphics card was at the time. It was essentially an HD 7990 consumer graphics card, but with disabled cores on each die. If the second GPU worked in today's titles, the S10000 would likely be capable of playing Arc Raiders near 60 FPS and Cyberpunk 2077 at playable FPS, but with Crossfire and SLI support long gone in modern games, this is the best performance we'll ever see from this graphics card in those titles.

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The Core Ultra X9 388H got 3,057 points in the single-core test and 17,687 points in the multi-core test, both figures that put it way ahead of the Arrow Lake-H Core Ultra 9 285H, but also on par with the beefier Core Ultra 9 275HX.

That all is impressive enough, but compared to Ryzen AI Max+ 395, AMD's best mobile chip right now, the X9 388H's multi-core score is within the margin of error, but the single-core numbers are 8.7% ahead. The Geekbench listing also shows the CPU boosting to 5.1 GHz. Check out the table at the end of the article for a detailed breakdown.

These are exceptional values for a CPU that fits into an even tighter thermal envelope than Strix Halo. The X9 388H has a 45W default TDP versus the Ryzen AI Max+ 395's 55W default.

For some more context, the X9 388H is the highest-spec'd model from Panther Lake we've seen so far, featuring 16 cores in a 4P + 8E + 4 LP-E config, with no Hyper-Threading. The SKU also has the "X" designation because it features 12 Xe3 iGPU cores, but that's beyond the scope of this leak, though we've covered Panther Lake graphics before.

Panther Lake isn't supposed to come out until early next year, but excitement for the release is already dimmed. As it stands right now, surging memory prices may result in insane markups on laptops and other mobile devices featuring Panther Lake parts, no matter how impressive the SoC itself may or may not be.

Also, keep in mind that each Geekbench listing is different, so we have to wait for more benchmarks to come out before an average can be formed, but the first impressions with this leak sure do look great.

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Some of the company's biggest products are on sale right now, including the Secretlab Titan Evo and Secretlab Titan Evo Nanogen, as well as newer favourites like the Recliner add-on. With Secretlab producing some of the best gaming chairs that you can buy, these Christmas deals unlock a fantastic opportunity to upgrade your comfort and save some pennies while you're at it.

• Check out all of the Christmas deals at Secretlab UK

If you're going for that big upgrade, there are also further discounts of up to £120 on chairs and desks if you decide to splurge on a whole set of new Secretlab kit, depending on how much you spend. For instance, you can save an extra £40 if you spend over £690 if you purchase a chair, or an extra £120 sitewide if you spend over £1,799 in total.

These sale prices, along with these extra discounts, will stay live until 2nd January, or at least until the stock runs out, so you best be quick. You've got until 11am on 16th December to get your order in to guarantee delivery before Christmas, too.

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Filament Connector from Sunlu

Filament Connector

Sunlu, $42.99

What do you do with those scraps of filament at the end of the spool that are too short for anything important? If you have an AMS, you could set all your nearly empty spools on sequential mode and let the printer handle them. But it’s way more fun to weld the ends together and create a custom spool. The Sunlu Filament Connector is the only tool I’ve seen that will easily melt the ends to filament together without leaving lumps that could clog your nozzle. This tool heats up to 240°C, so it can splice together everything from PLA to Nylon. Just don’t splice your PLA to Nylon, that will never stick.

Nonsticky Nozzle Stuff from Slice Engineering

Nonsticky Nozzle Stuff

Slice Engineering, $14.99

Nozzles don’t have to get sticky and gross with filament build up, not when you have Slice Engineering’s Anti-Stick nano-coating. Paint the transparent repellent on a clean nozzle and it will stay clean for weeks…or months, depending on how often you print. A clean nozzle can prevent many types of print fails and keep filament from forming a blob on the toolhead. The coating works up to 300°C and is suitable for printing all materials. One bottle can hold over 100 coats.

Heat Set Insert Press from Mintion

Heat Set Insert Press

Mintion, $56.99

When your 3D printed project needs a bunch of screws to hold everything together, heat-set inserts are a must. These little metal fittings are warmed up and pressed into printed parts to create strong, reliable threads that won’t strip out like plastic can. You could install a few by hand with a soldering iron, but if you're doing a lot of inserts (or you want every one of them at a perfect 90-degree angle), a small heat-set insert press makes the job fast and neat. This kit comes with a soldering iron, stand, and 30 brass threaded inserts of assorted sizes.

Sticky Build Plates from BIQU

Sticky Build Plates

BIQU: $18.99 and up

Modern 3D printers come with pretty good build plates these days, but BIQU has them all beat with the CryoGrip Glacier and Frostbite. These plates can work at cooler temperatures, hence the frosty names. The Glacier is an all-purpose plate, while the Frostbite is only for PLA and PETG. Either way, prints stick like mad to these plates, which solves most of your first layer problems. They work wonders for anyone trying to print articulated models, so they are a must have for any beginner who prints a lot of fun fidgets and toys. The plates come in assorted sizes to fit every brand of 3D printer out there, so if you’re buying as a gift, make sure you know what type of machine it needs to fit.

Filament Dryer and Storage Box from PolyMaker

Filament Dryer and Storage Box

PolyMaker: $63.99

There are a lot of good filament driers on the market, but the PolyDryer by PolyMaker is one of my favorites. This system uses a removable box that doubles as a storage container, so filament can stay inside the box indefinitely. Hot air from the Dryer Dock is blown through openings in (and drawn out of) the bottom of the storage box. Extra boxes cost $25.49 each (or 4 for $93.49) which can be a bit pricey for storing all your filament, but you can certainly keep a few special rolls nice and snug. The boxes are more than just cereal containers with spool holders: each has its own hygrometer, a spot for color changing desiccant, and a port to feed filament out of so you can print directly from the box. The Dryer Dock gets up to 70°C, enough to dry ABS/ASA and Nylon.

Vacuum Bags and Pump from EIBOS

Vacuum Bags and Pump

EIBOS: $38.99

Once you dry your filament, you want to keep it dry. A cheaper alternative to boxes are reusable vacuum bags with zipper tops. I like the ones by EIBOS, which come with a USB powered pump with an easy use valve on the bag that screws onto the pump, so you don’t need to keep pressure on the pump. It takes about 56 seconds to remove all the air, for a nice dry environment. The bags are custom-made for 1KG filament spools, with plenty of room to spare.

Silica Gel Packets from Dry & Dry

Silica Gel Packets

Dry & Dry: $8.99

Silica packets are incredibly helpful for keeping your filament dry. You can tuck them into filament storage bags and boxes, and every multimaterial box will have a cubbyhole to stuff with packets of desiccant. Though you could reuse the packets that come with new filament, Dry & Dry packets with orange indicator beads are better. The orange beads will turn green when they are saturated with moisture, letting you know it's time to dry them in the oven to revive them. It only takes 2 hours in the oven or 12 minutes in the microwave to get them good as new.

Nozzle Maintenance Kit from Wham Bam

Nozzle Maintenance Kit

Wham Bam, $17

Sometimes the tools that come with a 3D printer aren’t enough. Wham Bam makes a full service kit that fairly brand agnostic and will come in handy whether you have an old Ender or a brand new Bambu. You get a set of nozzle wrenches, needles, and ram rods style nozzle cleaners to force stuck filament out of your way. There’s also a mini silicone “Slap Mat” to protect your bed, a coil of cleaning filament and my favorite tool, a pneumatic depressor to get those pesky collets (or push connectors) to unclench from your Bowden tubes.

Gloop! from 3D Gloop!

3D Gloop!

$14.99 and up

It's not glue, it’s Gloop! Gloop is the perfect gift for any maker because even if they have some, they could use some more. Gloop is a specially formulated “science sauce” that chemically bonds plastics together by melting them a bit. This is way stronger than any glue on the market, as proven by 3D Gloop’s tug of war contests at 3D printing festivals. Due to the chemical interactions, there are specific formulas for the most popular plastics: PLA, PETG, and ABS/ASA. Gloop has a limited shelf life when exposed to air, so only buy the giant vat-o-gloop if you need to assemble a huge model.

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So is the €39 Arduino Uno Q just an updated Arduino Uno R4? Oh no, it is something much more. The Q stands for Qualcomm, which recently purchased Arduino and now has its Arm-based Dragonwing SoC on the Arduino Uno Q. Still, the Arm CPU isn’t alone, as the Arduino Uno Q also has an STM32U585 microcontroller. Essentially, an Arm Cortex M33 (the same as the Raspberry Pi Pico 2’s RP2350) that runs the Arduino sketches (your projects) alongside the main CPU.

Who is the Arduino Uno Q for? What can you build with it? Does it perform better than just buying a Raspberry Pi 3 and Pico 2? Let's find out.

• The Arduino Uno Q is the first Arduino board after Qualcomm’s recent acquisition of Arduino.
• The Arduino Uno Q can be used as a single board computer, or it can be used via USB or over a Wi-Fi connection.
• The board integrates a Qualcomm Dragonwing SoC for AI and LLM capabilities, with an STM32 microcontroller for real-time control of GPIO.
• The Arduino Uno Q supports a new IDE, Arduino App Lab, which integrates Python and Arduino’s C language to build projects.

Arduino Uno Q Specifications

Look and Feel of the Arduino Uno Q

At a quick glance, the Arduino Uno Q and the Arduino Uno R4 appear the same, but they are quite different. The first noticeable difference is the omission of a DC power jack. The older Arduino Uno boards had a DC barrel jack and in all my years of tinkering with Arduino, I probably used it less than a dozen times.. If you want / need to supply a power source greater than 5V, the VIN pin can be used with a 7-24V supply.

The USB-C port provides power (5V, 3A max) and data connectivity, allowing you to connect the Arduino Uno Q directly to your PC. It also provides, via a hub, access to DisplayPort / HDMI, USB, and power. Using the Arduino Uno Q with a USB-C dock, HDMI display, keyboard, and mouse takes some getting used to. By which I mean, actually sitting down and writing code directly on the Arduino board. In the past, I’d plug it into a PC, write some Arduino code in the IDE, compile and flash the code to the Arduino, and off it went. But sitting here in the Arduino App Lab, writing the code and uploading it to the STM32 just feels alien.

Interestingly, Arduino recommends using the 4GB model as a single board computer, yet the first model released is the 2GB, which leads to a subpar SBC experience. If you prefer the more traditional Arduino workflow, you can connect via USB or Wi-Fi to a PC running the Arduino App Lab. All of your code runs on the Arduino Uno Q, but development and creation take place on your much more powerful PC. This is my preferred means of using the Arduino Uno Q.

When powering up the Arduino Uno Q, the gorgeous 8 x 13 LED matrix illuminates to show an animated Arduino logo, a nice touch that distracts from the rather slow boot process, 34.6 seconds to be exact. Not horrific; the Raspberry Pi 5 is around 20-25 seconds, depending on whether you use a microSD or an SSD. But it feels like a long time for those of us used to powering up an Arduino and seeing the code run straight away.

Qualcomm Dragonwing

The Arduino Uno Q boots directly into a version of Debian Linux, and it is pretty vanilla. The GNOME interface is pleasant and gets the job done. You could use the Arduino Uno Q as a low-power Linux desktop; it would certainly be a conversation starter. But ultimately, the desktop OS is more for getting the Arduino App Lab running than a full desktop OS. Perhaps this will feel a little different when the 4GB model is released. The paltry 2GB of RAM is just enough to get things working.

The newest addition to an Arduino is born from Qualcomm’s recent purchase of Arduino. The Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 is a quad-core Arm Cortex A53 SoC

The Arduino Uno Q is no Linux PC powerhouse, but it doesn’t have to be. Sitting around the Raspberry Pi 3 / Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W level of computing power, the Qualcomm Dragonwing SoC has enough compute to run Linux, and its two 13MP Image Signal Processors (ISPs) support two cameras, with AI inference models that can run on the CPU and GPU. That makes it a potent package for entry-level AI and IoT projects.

But this is not an Arm desktop PC. If you want that, go for a Raspberry Pi 5. The upside of a lower-power CPU is that when the Arduino Uno Q is used as a desktop PC, it draws around 3.3 W at idle and peaks at 4.5W with all four CPU cores under full load. For 90% of the time under stress, the Arduino Uno Q pulled 4.4W. We have to remember that there is no way to just power the STM32 microcontroller. We need to power up the Qualcomm SoC to access the microcontroller. This means that the ultra-low power afforded by a microcontroller project is lost. If that is a concern, then stick to a microcontroller-based board.

How does the Dragonwing communicate with the real-time STM32 microcontroller, and vice versa? The answer is “Bridge,” specifically Arduino's RPC (Remote Procedure Call) library, which enables sketches written for the STM32 to access Linux services and vice versa. The libraries are written in Python for the Dragonwing and Arduino C for use with the STM32. They are both abstracted enough to be easy to use.

The GPIO

The Arduino Uno Q has the same tried-and-tested GPIO pinout as the older Arduino Uno boards. The pinout reference is printed on the side of the connections, and it is great to see the ~ is still printed, reminding me which pins are PWM-compliant for my robot and Neopixel projects.

The Arduino Uno Q also has two higher-density connectors that are earmarked for high-speed camera/displays, audio, SDMMC, and as an expansion with more GPIO pins. Sadly, I cannot test this aspect of the board because, at present, there are no breakout boards or add-ons that support the interface. But I can see these interfaces being used to dock the Arduino Uno R to another board, enabling extra features like robotics in a simpler form factor.

The QWIIC interface is most interesting. It is the same interface as StemmaQT, MakerPort, and QWIIC, which really does make quick work of connecting up a project. QWIIC is essentially a breakout of the I2C interface, but you don’t strictly have to use it for I2C components, although many add-ons do. You’ll need to purchase compatible QWIIC addons, such as those found in the Arduino Plug and Make kit.

Connect up your sensors, in my case, an accelerometer, then load up your code. I chose to use the accelerometer example, and I quickly saw how the STM32 read the raw data from the sensor, which was processed by the Qualcomm Dragonwing to identify the pattern of movement. Lastly, the output was rendered to a web UI in real time. Powerful learning potential!

Arduino Shield Compatibility

Using the Arduino Uno form factor is a smart move for the Arduino Uno Q, chiefly because it provides access to the extensive Arduino Shield ecosystem. Much like Raspberry Pi HATs, Arduino Shields connect to the Uno form factor GPIO and provide extra functionality for projects. And much like the Raspberry Pi, the Arduino Uno Q introduces a period during which shield/HAT compatibility is in flux, despite the same form factor.

I’ve got Shields for Ethernet, IoT, NFC, GSM phone connectivity, RGB LED matrices, etc. The problem with the shields is that they either require a compatible library or a compatible pinout for the shield. It seems that my Adafruit RGB Matrix does not work with the Arduino Uno Q, my collection of Maplin (a now defunct UK electronics retailer) Arduino shields were also impacted by these conditions. If you rely on a shield for your project, stick with an older, well-supported, and known-to-be-compatible Arduino.

Arduino App Lab

No matter how you choose to use the Arduino Uno Q, you’ll be using the new Arduino App Lab in some form. Initially, I used it directly on the board, connecting a screen, keyboard, mouse, etc., via a USB Type-C hub. It worked, and I was able to write a simple “LED Blink” script, but the experience was slow and left me wondering if something was happening as I waited for something to happen. As I’ve already said, the best way to use the Arduino Uno Q is via the Arduino App Lab on your more powerful PC.

The Arduino App Lab is slick and looks great. But I found myself struggling to understand the concepts and workflows necessary to build a project. I’m not (that much of) an idiot, and I can easily write and flash code to my other Arduinos and clones. But the extra steps for the Arduino Uno Q led me to really sit down and read the documentation. Luckily, Arduino has great documentation, but there were times when I was lost. For example, using the Serial.println() is not supported on the Arduino Uno Q, replaced with Monitor.println(), but I was unable to get this working despite following the instructions.

The Arduino App Lab also introduces “bricks,” packages of Python code that bring functionality via an easy-to-use workflow. Some bricks provide AI-relevant features, such as keyword spotting (used in the Hey Arduino! example), while others link to external APIs for weather and web-based user interfaces. Some bricks run as-is; others require a container to run; all are handled by the Arduino App Lab.

Adding a brick to your project is easy. Just click on Bricks, select what you need, and the brick is part of your project. Follow the API documentation to integrate it into your Python code, and you will soon have a keyword-powered LED, etc. I like this feature, largely because it makes using external resources a trivial process for newcomers.

The Arduino Uno Q workflow is really pushing for using the Qualcomm SoC and the STM32 via the RPC “bridge.” You can just write Arduino code directly in the Arduino App Lab, there is no real reason for using the bridge unless you want the power of the Dragonwing SoC. But by doing that, you are really wasting the potential that this board has. You could just use any Arduino or clone board and save yourself the extra spend.

If the Arduino App Lab isn’t for you, then the Arduino IDE 2.3.6 works with the STM32 side of the Arduino Uno Q. After updating and installing the board, I was able to flash the Blink sketch to the Arduino Uno Q. I also tried to upload the Adafruit NeoPixel strandtest sketch to the Arduino Uno Q, but it didn’t work. I checked the wiring, pins, and configuration, but nothing worked. I transferred the project to an Arduino Uno and flashed the sketch. It worked.

I dug a little deeper, and it seems that the STM32 is not supported by Adafruit’s NeoPixel library, so I had to search for something that was compatible. I couldn’t find anything compatible with the STM32 from the Arduino libraries, so I had to abandon that element of the test.

Overall, the Arduino App Lab is a great start, and as the Arduino Uno Q gains traction in the community, it will see more features and tweaks. The workflow takes a little getting used to, but it does simplify the link between the Python code and the Arduino code, which will help newcomers cut their teeth.

Testing the Included Examples

The Arduino Uno Q includes a set of examples covering a wide range of projects you can build with it. From the simple “blink an LED” to AI-based image identification, via web user interface-controlled LEDs and a voice-controlled LED matrix. Some of these projects rely on just the board, but those that use some form of AI often need extra components connected to the USB Type-C port. So you’ll need to dig out a compatible hub. This is where it gets messy, as we now have a hub, Arduino Uno Q, a microphone, and USB-C power to make a voice-controlled project.

I tested the “Hey Arduino” project and can confirm it worked, but it took ages to get the container running for the example. We’re talking 55 seconds from clicking Run to the project being available. Ok, a minute isn’t too long to wait, but if I were integrating this into a project, I would have to ensure that this and the time it takes the Arduino Uno Q to boot, 34.6 seconds, are both factored in.

The projects themselves are great; they illustrate how to use the Arduino Uno Q, and more importantly, they show how to create a project that uses both the Dragonwing and STM32 in one project.

Why is that important? The Arduino Uno Q is a hybrid device; it is neither a dedicated Linux SBC nor a microcontroller, it is both at the same time. This isn’t the first time that Arduino has created a hybrid board. The Galileo was a joint project with Intel, and it brought an Intel Quark X1000 CPU to a new form factor. It ran a Linux distribution based on Yocto and was compatible with Arduino shields. I’ll be honest, Galileo was an interesting idea, and back in the day, I reviewed a unit, but it was a very different beast from the typical Arduino with an Atmel chip.

There was also the Arduino Yún, a microcontroller-based board featuring the legendary ATmega32u4 and an Atheros AR9331 CPU that supported Linux. More recently, we have the Radxa X4, which features an Intel N100 CPU running any operating system you choose and a built-in Raspberry Pi RP2040, as seen in the Raspberry Pi Pico. Sure, for the Radxa X4, there wasn’t a bridge between the two, but there is a serial connection, and with just a few Python libraries, you could make your own bridge between the Intel and Arm CPUs.

AI Performance

The Dragonwing SoC at the heart of the Arduino Uno Q runs Linux, supports a Python bridge, and handles AI tasks. The thing is, due to the memory and processing restrictions, we can run an LLM, but it is tiny, and performance is slower than other SBCs.

To prove a point, I installed tinyllama:1.1b via ollama, and in a prompt, I asked it “What is an Arduino?” The answer was forthcoming, if a little slow. It took 28 seconds to start formulating an answer, and this led me to test how a series of Raspberry Pis would perform. The Raspberry Pi 500+, a keyboard version of the Raspberry Pi 5, started answering the question in 2 seconds! Even the older Raspberry Pi 4 managed 4 seconds. Sadly, the Raspberry Pi 3B+, a board with similar specifications to the Arduino Uno Q, didn’t have enough RAM to start the LLM.

If you’ve got an old Raspberry Pi 4 laying around, spend $10 on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2, and learn how to connect the two using your own serial bridge. You’ve just built your own Arduino Uno Q clone.

Who is the Arduino Uno Q for and what projects will they create?

Those already invested in the Arduino ecosystem will love the Arduino Uno Q, and I can see many AI / LLM-based projects being created with it. Robotics, sensor monitoring, smart homes, and more can be achieved with the Arduino Uno Q. Merging the AI-centric Qualcomm SoC with the STM32 for the GPIO is a smart move. The electronics for your project run on a real-time microcontroller, while the Arm CPU handles all of the AI, Linux, and Python aspects of the project.

Bottom Line

I love the Arduino. It is the board where I cut my teeth with electronics and microcontrollers. The Arduino Uno Q is an interesting board, but ultimately the spec is a little too old and reproducible with kit that many electronics enthusiasts will already have to hand.

That said, if you are a fan of the Arduino and its form factor, you will love the Arduino Uno Q and the ecosystem it brings. The hardware is good, and the Arduino App Lab is a great starting place to learn how to merge the two sides of the Arduino Uno Q into one project.

My worry with the Arduino Uno Q is that it becomes just like the Intel Edison, Galileo, and Arduino Yun. The Intel projects were born of collaboration, whereas the Arduino Uno Q is the result of Qualcomm’s purchase of Arduino. Could that give the Arduino Uno Q more support than previous attempts? Time and popularity will ultimately be the means by which this is measured.

New analysis from Creative Strategies is calling this shift a "giga cycle," arguing that the unprecedented scale of AI demand is restructuring the economics of compute, memory, networking, and storage simultaneously. Global semiconductor revenue was roughly $650 billion in 2024, yet multiple outlooks now place the trillion-dollar mark in 2028 or 2029. AI is responsible for most of that upward revision.

AMD CEO Lisa Su recently lifted the company’s own long-term expectations, describing the AI hardware market as a $1 trillion opportunity by 2030 while projecting 35% compound annual growth for AMD overall and around 60% for its data-center business. She also spoke out against AI bubble talks that have dominated in recent months.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has set even broader expectations, describing the coming five years as a $3 trillion to $4 trillion AI infrastructure opportunity during the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call. This figure is based on system-level deployments across hyperscalers, sovereign AI projects, and enterprise clusters.

The broader implication is that every major category of silicon is expanding at once. Creative Strategies expects data-processing silicon to exceed half of total semiconductor revenue by 2026. AI accelerators, which accounted for under $100 billion in 2024, are projected to reach the $300 billion to $350 billion range by 2029 or 2030. That growth pushes system spending sharply higher. The AI server market is forecast to climb from about $140 billion in 2024 to as much as $850 billion by 2030, a trajectory that will reshape chip demand even before accounting for custom silicon.

This environment has elevated ASIC development to a central role in hyperscaler roadmaps. Broadcom expects its custom-silicon business to exceed $100 billion by decade’s end. The company has already disclosed a $10 billion AI infrastructure order from a customer thought to be OpenAI.

Memory and packaging remain the tightest constraints. HBM revenue is forecast to grow from roughly $16 billion in 2024 to more than $100 billion by 2030. Each HBM generation consumes a larger share of wafer supply than conventional DRAM, pushing the broader memory market upward as AI clusters scale. Advanced packaging faces similar pressure as CoWoS capacity is projected to expand by more than 60% from the end of 2025 to the end of 2026.

"The defining characteristic of the semiconductor giga cycle is that the market expansion is large enough to create greenfield opportunities across every segment of the value chain," says Creative Strategies, presenting the combined effect as a moment where every segment is growing in unison rather than a cycle concentrated in any particular area.

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The backport works best on 64-bit versions of Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows 8.x. You'll need to have your operating system up to date for the backports to work correctly. But if you prefer to limit Windows updates, The Bob Pony suggests installing at least KB976932, KB2999226, and KB3080149 or KB4474419 to help keep things running smoothly.

You can find the 230MB installer on the w7revived.chefkiss.dev website. Additionally, The Bob Pony offers mirror downloads, which you can check out in the tweet below. While backports are a fantastic way to enjoy the latest Steam features and enhancements, please keep in mind that they are unofficial solutions. Responsibility for any issues that may arise with your system lies with you since Steam stopped supporting Windows 7 and Windows 8.x in January of 2024.

While Windows 7 has been a fantastic operating system, progress marches on. You’ll notice that Windows 7 gamers on Steam are now quite rare, with only 0.05% according to the latest hardware survey. This operating system is nearing the end of its journey, so there's not much anyone can do about it.

Meanwhile, Windows 11, which has received much criticism, continues to gain popularity and now holds a 69.2% share. Since Microsoft recently ended support for Windows 10, many gamers are bitterly switching over to Windows 11. Currently, only 30.66% of Steam users still use Windows 10, which is a 2.17% decrease from last month. That's the last of the gamers who are still holding out on upgrading.

PC gaming boasts a wonderful community, full of passionate enthusiasts who keep Steam gaming alive for legacy Windows systems. As Steam continues to update its client regularly, it might only be a matter of time before we see fewer backports, or perhaps a day will come when Steam makes it impossible to backport anything at all. Many of these enthusiasts are balancing real lives, and their efforts to create these backports are truly acts of love.

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• Grab this deal at Newegg

With today's combo deal, you're saving $110, rather than buying them both separately. On their own, the Asus motherboard is listed at $119.99 on sale from $149.99, and the G.Kill Ripjaws RAM kit is $189.99. But, as a bonus, you're also getting the free gift of a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Spectrum V3 CPU air cooler worth $25.85 (until stocks last, or the offer expires). This is a great start for a budget gaming PC build, and you could pair this with a 5000-series AMD Ryzen CPU, and toss in a GPU to make up the core of a new build.

Although AM4 is an older platform that has been around for many years, it's still very capable and will run pretty much all modern games with a decent graphics card. CPUs like the 5800X3D and 5700X3D are still extremely potent, and if you can't get your hands on one of the X3D models, then a normal 5700X/5800X also does a very good job. Check our CPU hierarchy and look at reviews for 5000-series CPUs to pair with this bundle.

G.Skill's Ripjaws V-Series memory is DDR4 3200MHz (PC4 25600) with timings of 16-18-18-38, and a CAS Latency of CL16, with a voltage of 1.35V. The Asus Tuf Gaming Plus WiFi II motherboard has an AM4 socket and supports 3000, 4000, and 5000-series CPUs. The board features dual M.2 slots, the primary one with PCIe 4.0 x4 connectivity. There is a front panel USB 3.2 Gen 1 connection, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C and Type-A ports on the IO plate, and also a Thunderbolt 3 header. Connect to the internet via WiFi 6 (802.11ax), or fast 2.5Gb LAN port. This memory bundle might not package up the latest and greatest parts, but it's a solid offer, given what we've seen out there on the market currently.

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That's where this new script comes in, claiming it can rid your operating system of all the AI shenanigans Microsoft has piled on.

"RemoveWindowsAI" is a script created by zoicware, available on GitHub, that does exactly what it says: remove every AI feature in Windows 11, while guiding users to disable others that require manual intervention. It runs from a PowerShell console where you have to type out a simple command. There's a list of all the options, like Copilot and Recall, that can be disabled with the Registry Keys command, or by hiding AI components in the Settings app.

All the details for getting the script up and running are on the GitHub page, along with a YouTube tutorial you can follow. The creator says any new AI features added in preview builds won't be targeted with this script until they become a part of the stable release channel that sends out updates to everyone. This makes sense because, otherwise, there'd be simply too much to deal with since Insider builds are Microsoft's testing playground for AI.

There's also a separate guide for manually disabling AI features that the script can't handle, including Gaming Copilot, OneDrive AI, and Windows Studio Effects — all pretty simple toggles. As mentioned before, any new features that do become part of mainline Windows will be added to the script or at least the GitHub page if they require conscious action.

We tested it ourselves, and it works just as intended; the GUI command is easier to use if you're not comfortable playing around with admin settings. There's a "?" icon next to every toggle that explains what that feature does, too. There's even a "Revert Mode" toggle to restore all the AI functionality you've disabled, so you're not losing these features forever. The goal is to put the choice in the user's hands, as always.

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Will this engineering choice result in performance that stands out enough to make our list of the best PC cases? Let’s take a look at the specifications and features of the case, then we’ll get to the design and features before wrapping up our review with thermal and acoustic benchmarks to see how well the case performs.

Product Specifications

Features of HAVN’s BF360 Flow

▶️ Solid black and stone-textured design, massive 180mm fans

The stone-textured front panel covers two of HAVN’s enormous H18 (180mm) fans for air intake.

These fans are much larger than your typical PC parts. To give you a better idea of just how massive they are, here are a couple of photos with HAVN’s H18 placed next to Montech’s extra-thick E28 fan!

▶️ Air scoop for superior GPU cooling performance

The BF360 Flow incorporates an air scoop, which directs the airflow of the bottom fan directly toward the GPU, resulting in some of the best GPU temperatures we’ve seen in any PC case.

▶️ GPU anti-sag support

For lage GPUs, the case includes a highly adjustable anti-sag bracket that mounts on the motherboard tray area and can be slid up and down as well as swiveled out to best support your specific graphics card.

▶️ PWM hub

At the top of the case’s backside is a hardware PWM controller, supporting up to six fans (the maximum supported by this case).

Rear view, Storage support, cable management

Starting at the top left corner, you’ll see the PWM hub. Below it are two drive trays, which can each support two 2.5-inch drives or a single 3.5-inch drive.

If you by chance need more storage, an additional tray (not included) can be installed next to the cable management routing path.

The cable management paths have velcro straps to secure the cables and keep things organized. The cable pass-through paths are lined with a flexible material, and have securing braces (shown above) that can be used to keep cables from moving.

▶️ IO panel

The IO panel is located at the front and top of the case. It features a lighted power button, two USB-A ports, one USB-C port, and an audio jack.

▶️ Dust filters

The BF360 Flow has three dust filters – located in the top (pictured below), front, and bottom (below the PSU).

The dust filter on the bottom of the chassis is independent and easily removed. The other two filters are part of the top panel (shown above) and the stone-textured front panel (shown below), but are also easily removable.

▶️ Rear view

For the most part, if you’ve seen the back of one computer case – you’ve seen most. With this case, you have your standard seven PCI-e slots and exhaust fan, and the PSU slot at the bottom. What stands out in the BF360 Flow is the side panel cutouts or grips, which are used to remove the panels, and a pull tab at up top for removing that panel.

Thermal tests, test setup, and testing methodology

I’ve benchmarked this case primarily to focus on the efficiency of its thermal transfer.

Our thermal tests are presented to give you more information about the product’s performance, but aren’t intended as the sole judgment of the chassis. The style, price, features, and noise levels of a case should also be considered, and we all have different preferences. What I might like in a case, you might not, and that’s OK. My goal with these reviews is to give everyone, no matter their preferences, enough information to decide whether or not a product is right for them.

Maximum thermal performance – noise-normalized to 38.9 dBA

This set of tests is designed to appeal to those who love quiet PCs, with both system fans and the CPU fan noise normalized to 38.9 dBA. Consider this a measure of the case’s thermal efficiency when noise levels are set to run quietly. This first set of benchmarks examines CPU performance.

With our first noise-normalized test, which stresses only the CPU, the performance was basically “average,” cooling 267.4W compared to an average of 268.8 across the 11 cases we’ve tested this way.

Our second test stresses both the CPU and GPU, to make the case as warm as possible. The added heat of the GPU reduces CPU performance slightly, from 267.4W down to 259.7W.

But let’s not forget: one of the distinguishing features of the BF360 Flow is its air scoop, which directs airflow directly to the GPU.

This engineering design isn’t just for looks – it performs especially well, with the case turning in the second-lowest GPU temperatures we’ve seen in this noise-normalized test. Of course, the large, thick intake fans themselves certainly help thermals all on their own.

Maximum Noise Levels

I measured the noise levels with my sound meter from one meter away from the computer case, with the pre-installed fans running at their maximum RPM speeds, recording a measurement of 46.6 dBA. Personally, I think that’s too loud. But in contrast to other cases on the market, the noise level is about average.

Maximum thermal performance – fans at full speed

Our noise-normalized results are designed for folks who prefer silence, but what if you don’t mind additional noise and just care about maximum performance?

Allowing the fans to run at full speed increases CPU performance from 267W to 288W, an increase of about 8%. In contrast to the competition, the BF360 performed a little worse than others, but is only about 10W behind our best result.

Things look better, however, when we add the heat of a GPU to the test. Whereas many cases lose CPU cooling efficiency when the GPU’s heat is added, the impact on the BF360 Flow is almost non-existent. We measured 287.9W, with the HAVN case taking third place in this test.

And when it comes to GPU temperatures, the BF360 Flow shines. With a measurement of only 61.5C, HAVN’s case delivered the best graphics card temperatures we’ve seen in this test yet!

The temperature recorded was 61.8C, which is technically the best we’ve seen, though it is effectively tied (within margin of error) with Montech’s HS02 Pro case here.

One more thing

When HAVN sent along the BF360 Flow for testing, the company also included extra H18 fans. We wanted to see how much (or little) an additional fan might improve performance, and added an H18 exhaust fan above the CPU cooler. For the first test, we set a power limit of 150W for the CPU and also stressed the GPU (consuming 295W).

This test showed a three-degree improvement to CPU temperatures with the addition of an extra fan. GPU temperatures were technically 0.5C higher, but this is a “margin of error” difference, and both results are essentially on par with each other.

For the second test, we removed the power limits from the CPU. The same pattern emerged: slightly better CPU performance, with GPU temperatures essentially the same.

Conclusion

HAVN’s BF360 Flow delivers a highly effective approach to GPU cooling, made possible with its air-scoop intake design and massive 180mm fans. The case consistently produced some of the lowest GPU temperatures we’ve recorded, even outperforming many competitors built for high airflow.

Not everything is perfect with this case, though. The one-year warranty feels underwhelming for a case that’s priced above $150. And the lack of ARGB may limit its appeal to some gamers. But where it counts most, the BF360 Flow excels. Its subdued aesthetic, smart airflow engineering, and chart-topping GPU performance make it a compelling option for users prioritizing cool and consistent graphics card temperatures. If GPU thermals are a top priority, HAVN’s BF360 Flow stands out as one of the strongest options available today.

As per a report by the Indian Express, the Tata Group is working on building two semiconductor facilities in India, valued at around $14 billion, including a fabrication plant in the state of Gujarat and an OSAT (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test) in the north-eastern state of Assam. Additionally, the two companies are exploring an opportunity to scale tailored AI PC solutions for both consumer and enterprise markets in India, with an aim to become the global top five market by 2030.

“Intel’s technology has driven decades of advancement in computing, and as we continue to innovate, our ambition is to broaden our reach, accelerate growth, and deliver even greater value to our customers. We see this as a tremendous opportunity to collaborate with Tata to rapidly scale in one of the world’s fastest-growing compute markets, fuelled by rising PC demand and rapid AI adoption across India,” said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.

Prior to the aforementioned deal, the biggest chip project in India was announced earlier this year by Tata Electronics, in partnership with Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., valued at $11 billion. However, the latest deal between Intel and Tata is now the biggest investment for the semiconductor sector in India.

The partnership should also be a strong push for the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM), a flagship programme to develop a full-stack semiconductor ecosystem, from design to manufacturing and testing. Launched back in 2021 under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the ISM came with an initial financial outlay of around $10 billion and an aim to implement key incentive schemes and policy initiatives. Apart from the Tata Group, this initiative includes key global players such as Micron Technologies, Clas-SiC Wafer Fab, and Foxconn.

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• Check out this deal at Scan

With the MSI AIO cooler costing around £119.99 on its own, and games like Battlefield 6 selling for around £60, the retail value of this collection is around £450. That makes the £289.99 sale price for this Intel Core Ultra 7 265K bundle an absolute steal, especially if you’ve already sorted out the RAM for your build.

Let’s consider the elephant in the room first: performance. It’s fair to say that Intel’s Arrow Lake launch wasn’t a huge success for gamers, as our benchmarks below show, with performance that lagged behind AMD X3D rivals like the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and even against Intel’s older Raptor Lake CPUs like the Core i9-14900K.

Luckily, two things have changed since launch day to make this a better option for a gaming rig. First, the price, with the Core Ultra 7 265K dropping by around £100 since launch, and costing around £200 less than the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K, despite only lagging around 4.4% behind in our initial tests.

Combine that with Intel’s 200S Boost mode for these CPUs, which is able to boost gaming performance using memory overclocking by at least 7%, and you’ve got yourself a decently powerful CPU for gaming and multi-threaded work without breaking the bank.

The value proposition improves further with the free MSI AIO. Our CPU cooling expert, who tested the MSI MAG Coreliquid A13 360mm cooler, awarded it 3 out of 5 stars. It doesn’t have a particularly flashy design, lacking higher spec features like LCD screens, but it does have a set of three ARGB fans to keep your CPU cool. Our tests found it offered good thermal performance, along with a budget-friendly retail price – luckily, you’re getting it completely free in this bundle, so it’s even better value.

And, just to top things off, there is the free game, thanks to Intel’s holiday bundle. Running until 31st January, 2026, you can claim a free copy of Battlefield 6, Dying Light: The Beast, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, or Civilization VI with each purchase. The approximately £60 retail value of these games, plus the £119.99 price for the MSI AIO cooler, makes the equivalent value of this Intel Core Ultra 7 265K CPU just £110.

A £289.99 bundle price for this 20-core Intel CPU, AIO cooler, and a free game is hard to beat right now. This would be a great start to a new gaming rig, especially if you’re only fussed about gaming at 1080p. Make sure to grab this bundle fast, however, as it won’t be around for long.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard or CPU Deals pages.

The decision authorises shipments of Nvidia’s second-tier Hopper-generation chip in exchange for a 25% fee collected when parts arrive in the United States for security review before re-export. The Commerce Department is finalising the terms of the arrangement, which Trump said would also apply to AMD and Intel.

H200 sits below Nvidia’s latest Blackwell architecture yet remains far ahead of any processor China can legally import today. It is roughly six times more powerful than the H20, the downgraded model Nvidia specifically created to comply with earlier export controls. China restricted tech companies from buying the H20, arguing its performance gains over domestic alternatives were too modest to justify continued reliance on U.S. parts.

Trump’s announcement briefly lifted Nvidia’s share price, but the company’s prospects in China now potentially rest on decisions in Beijing as much as in Washington. The Financial Times reports that Chinese regulators have been discussing ways to allow only limited access to H200 — including an approval process where buyers must explain why domestic chips cannot meet their needs — and could bar the public sector from purchasing Nvidia hardware altogether. At the time of writing, no official confirmation of this has been released by the Chinese government.

The provisional opening nonetheless matters to China’s largest cloud providers. Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance have adopted domestic accelerators for some inference workloads but continue to prefer Nvidia products for training and maintaining large models, often sending jobs overseas where access to H100-class compute remains unrestricted. If allowed, H200 purchases would ease those workarounds, though companies would still have to navigate both governments’ approval systems.

Following the announcement, a group of senators described the move as a "colossal economic and national security failure", arguing that H200’s performance would give Chinese AI firms a meaningful lift. The bipartisan "SAFE CHIPS Act" introduced last week seeks to prevent the administration from approving exports of advanced chips, including H200, for 30 months.

The announcement also coincided with the Justice Department’s announcement of "Operation Gatekeeper", which alleges a smuggling network routed Nvidia parts into China and Hong Kong despite existing controls, piling yet more pressure on Washington to create a regulated channel for hardware that continues to leak across borders.

Whether H200 reaches China at scale now depends on two competing gatekeepers. Washington is attempting to shape the market through controlled exports and taxes, while Beijing reportedly weighs measures that would keep foreign accelerators available only where domestic suppliers cannot yet compete.

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The smuggling gang’s ruse was as follows: shipping labels on Nvidia H100 and H200 AI chip cartons/packages/pallets were changed to bear the name of a fictional brand, ‘Sandkyan.’ The troublesome trio was then alleged to have collaborated with employees from both a Hong Kong-based shipping company and a China-based AI tech company to slyly ease the forbidden cargo through U.S. export controls.

This smuggling operation was busted as part of Operation Gatekeeper, explains Bloomberg. The DOJ operation was set up to block exactly this kind of underhanded trading behavior and stop the spread of U.S. AI tech to those who may use it against American interests.

Arrests come as U.S. relaxes Hopper-for-China restrictions

Strict AI tech export rules have reportedly cost Nvidia billions in revenue, but the Trump administration has recently extended an olive branch to the company by relaxing export controls somewhat. In brief, Hopper-architecture chips like H100 and H200 are now ‘last generation,’ with Blackwell chips currently the desirable choice of AI data centers, and another generational upgrade planned for 2026. Thus, the US government reckons that giving China access to older (late 2022) chips like Hopper won’t adversely impact American technical superiority.

This easing of AI chip export rules is good news for Nvidia, which has lobbied for allowing China unrestricted access to its products. Its CEO, Jensen Huang, has long argued that letting Nvidia become the established default AI chip choice worldwide would create an unassailable American technology stack.

Throughout 2025, we have seen Nvidia’s established lead being eaten away by Chinese tech initiatives, very likely inspired by export restriction pressures. It remains to be seen how big an appetite the Chinese have for chips like H200 as we approach 2026. It will depend on how much China boasts about its homegrown AI technologies are really vaporware and/or wishful thinking.

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Although ASML claims that the technology it sold to Chinese chip manufacturers was old and not able to "produce state-of-the-art chips," as reported by Nos,analysts have still raised concerns over its dealings with a firm developing quantum technologies, which could have implications for military technology development and deployment.

The Dutch government has long been aware of the risks posed by China's access to chip design software and manufacturing hardware. That's partly why there's been such fallout recently around Chinese involvement with Dutch chip firm, Nexperia. But Dutch firm ASML may have had far greater dealings with Chinese businesses, and it's raising more than a few red flags.

Nos claims that the business that purchased the ASML chip manufacturing component was a division of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), a Chinese state-owned company that is a key component in the country's military industrial complex, producing key equipment for rocket systems and drones. It has also reportedly worked on the Chinese space program and fabricates chips for military use.

Nos has also accused ASML of supplying a deep lithography system (DUV) in its entirety to the Shenzhen International Quantum Academy. This is arguably more notable, as the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service has explicitly warned against China's development of quantum technologies.

Although ASML's DUV machines are older designs that produce chips in resolutions of around 38nm (the latest dual-stage extreme ultraviolet (EUV) systems can manage 8nm), analysts are still concerned about the direct provision of such systems, considering the concerns over Chinese technological development.

ASML has said it won't comment directly on sales to customers, but has suggested that what it has transferred to China is not cutting-edge, describing it as "old technology that can't be used to produce state-of-the-art chips." It added: "It is impossible for suppliers, such as ASML, to assess if a chip manufacturer in China should, or should not, be subject to export controls. National security is the responsibility of governments."

Indeed, it highlights that the designs it has sold to Chinese companies are not subject to export controls. This was confirmed when Nos spoke to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"Not all high-tech goods are, by definition, sensitive and subject to authorization under the export controls policy," it said in a statement. "This is also the case for parts of lithography machines. Lithography machines contain a great deal of parts, technology, and software. All those parts are needed for a machine to work, but not all parts play a crucial/strategic role."

That said, Nos claims to have spoken to industry experts who suggest the parts sold to Chinese companies were, in fact, essential for the operation of certain fabrication machinery and should be considered for export controls.

"The problem is that the Dutch government does not have any control over this export of parts", says Judith Huismans, China expert for RAND Europa and former head researcher for Datenna. She suggested governments should consider export controls for parts, too: "That way, you are not saying that ASML can no longer export anything to China, but it will give the government more control and tools."

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Celestial AI spent much of the last four years building a photonic interconnect platform intended to deliver high-bandwidth communication among accelerators without the electrical-signal penalties that limit today’s GPU-dense racks.

Its Orion architecture centres on light-based data movement between local compute domains, a design intended to expand usable memory and reduce power lost to traditional SerDes. Those capabilities explain why Marvell, which already ships a large portfolio of cloud-scale networking silicon, is positioning the acquisition as a way to collapse the boundary between server-to-server networking and on-package connectivity inside AI nodes.

The scale of the deal is pretty huge. For comparison, AMD bought Pensando for about $1.9 billion in 2022 to accelerate its data-processing-unit portfolio, while Nvidia’s strategy has relied on internal development and targeted acquisitions like Mellanox, which cost $6.9 billion but delivered an immediate foothold in high-performance networking.

Higher bandwidth and larger memory pools

Training and inference clusters built around accelerators such as Nvidia Blackwell are fundamentally constrained by bandwidth. Even with advanced SerDes and high-speed electrical links, the growth of model sizes is pressing against the limits of conventional interconnect design. Celestial’s approach replaces long-reach electrical paths with photonic waveguides that can sustain high throughput at lower power, while maintaining signal integrity across the many parallel channels now required by large-model workloads.

Marvell already supplies cloud providers with optical DSPs, PAM4 transceivers, and network-interface controllers. Bringing Celestial’s optical compute-fabric architecture into that portfolio creates an opportunity to span the hierarchy from server-rack switching down to chip-adjacent links. If the company can commercialize Celestial’s technology at scale, it could offer an alternative path to deploy large accelerator clusters without relying solely on GPU-centric fabrics. That shifts the company from a supplier of supporting components into a core enabler of system architecture.

Celestial’s technology also intersects directly with the memory debate in AI. Today’s accelerators hinge on ever-larger pools of HBM, a trend that pushes cost, thermals, and packaging complexity upward. Photonic interconnects promise to extend memory coherence over greater distances, allowing external memory and disaggregated resources to behave more like local pools. It is a best-case scenario that depends on manufacturing maturity, but it hints at why Marvell is investing so heavily. If coherent optical fabrics reach production scale, they could change the balance between compute and memory in future data center designs.

Positioning against Nvidia, AMD, and Intel

For all its ambition, Marvell faces a steep integration challenge. Nvidia’s dominance comes from tight control of hardware, software, networking, packaging, and system-level deployments. Every new GPU generation extends that advantage by increasing the pull of CUDA and NVLink.

AMD’s MI300 leverages unified high-bandwidth HBM memory to give CPU and GPU cores shared access to the same memory pool. In theory, this simplifies data movement and avoids explicit copies between host and device. Meanwhile, Intel’s strategy around Gaudi depends on creating price-efficient training nodes and leveraging its packaging scale, even as its photonics roadmap remains in flux. Falcon Shores, a GPU for AI and HPC, was canceled in June in favor of preparation for a new rack-level design, Jaguar Shores.

Marvell cannot match those companies with accelerators of its own, and the deal does not suggest the company intends to build one. Instead, the acquisition strengthens its position as an independent connective vendor in a market where accelerators need increasingly specialized fabrics to operate at scale. The idea seems to be that hyperscalers will continue designing custom silicon for training and inference, and that those systems will require neutral suppliers of the optical and electrical pathways that tie them together.

Nvidia’s own work in optics demonstrates the same trend. Its work on optical NVLink and PCIe successors points toward a future where bandwidth constraints limit cluster scale long before compute limits do. Marvell’s purchase of Celestial could therefore be seen as an understanding that the necessary solutions will not come solely from GPU or CPU vendors, and that the interconnect layer is becoming even more of a focal point in modern data center architectures.

Optical fabrics could reshape next-gen AI systems

The practical impact of this deal depends on how quickly Marvell can move Celestial’s technology from prototype to production. Factors like fabric maturity, packaging workflows, reliability under data center thermals, and integration with existing networking stacks all determine whether optical compute fabrics can be adopted at scale.

If Marvell delivers, hyperscalers could deploy racks in which memory expansion, compute scaling, and multi-node communication rely more heavily on photonics. That would reduce the power lost to electrical I/O and ease congestion in high-density GPU configurations. It could also feasibly allow disaggregated clusters to operate more like monolithic systems.

Multi-billion-dollar acquisitions in the semiconductor sector usually track emerging choke points. Mellanox, for example, addressed network performance when distributed training began to break existing fabrics. Pensando addressed per-node networking and security. Celestial AI fits a pattern in which bottlenecks have shifted onto chip-to-chip communication and energy costs tied to electrical bandwidth.

If those bottlenecks dominate the next five years, Marvell has just bought one of the few companies attempting to solve them with dedicated hardware rather than iterative tweaks to existing designs.

Staying true to its Norse mythology-themed products, Asgard has launched the Valkyrie II Racing Car Limited Edition 256GB memory kit. The four 64GB DDR5 memory modules, which feature a 10-layer PCB with 4GB SK hynix M-die integrated circuits, operate at DDR5-6000 with C32-45-45-90 timings. Asgard has optimized the memory kit for AMD platforms, so it comes with AMD EXPO support, but Intel XMP 3.0 remains uncertain.

Asgard has also released the Thor Black Gold Limited Edition 192GB (4 x 48GB) memory kit for individuals who don't want to spend an enormous fortune on memory. The kit comprises four 48GB DDR5 modules with a 10-layer PCB, incorporating 3GB SK hynix M-die integrated circuits. These modules operate at DDR5-6000 with notable timings of 28-36-36-72. Additionally, Asgard has tailored the Thor Black Gold Limited Edition toward AMD platforms, so AMD EXPO support is a given; however, support for Intel XMP 3.0 remains unconfirmed.

256GB and 192GB Memory Kit Pricing

Few vendors are willing to invest in releasing high-capacity memory kits due to the associated costs. With the current shortage driven by the AI boom, manufacturers are less inclined to do so, despite the substantial financial benefits that could be gained from soaring prices. Currently, only limited 192GB or 256GB memory kits are available on the retail market, and the few that are available already impose significant markups.

Despite the exorbitant price tags, Asgard's latest memory kits emerge as some of the most affordable options currently available on the retail market. The Valkyrie II Racing Car Limited Edition 256GB memory retails for $2,403.81, 14% lower than the Flare X5 256GB memory kit, which features nearly identical specifications.

Meanwhile, the Thor Black Gold Limited Edition 192GB memory kit is also more affordable and faster than the Corsair Vengeance 192GB memory kit. The former boasts a 15% higher data rate at a 45% lower price point.

The primary downside with Asgard is that it is predominantly a Chinese brand; consequently, it is nearly impossible to locate its products outside the Chinese market. Procuring and shipping memory modules from China entails paying tariffs, even if you manage to find Asgard products on eBay, Newegg, or Amazon through a third-party seller. Nevertheless, the latest memory kits from Asgard remain highly competitive on price, even in the current market landscape. It's a shame Asgard isn't a more global brand.

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This win was posted by u/uneektnt on the r/pcmasterrace subreddit, where they unwittingly hoped it's "decent enough for some games," not knowing the beast they'd just acquired. Specs-wise, we're looking at a Core i9-14900KS processor, the best consumer chip Intel has made to date (yes, it beats Arrow Lake). That's paired with Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti Super, a proper 4K-capable GPU that churns through 1440p-Ultra gaming like butter.

Got this beast at the pawnshop today from r/pcmasterrace

If that weren't already crazy enough, the PC also came with 64 GB (32GB x 2) of T-Force Delta RGB 6000 MT/s memory that's sitting at a casual $689.99 on Newegg right now — so, the entire PC was cheaper than just the cost of the RAM. To put that into perspective, this exact same kit cost less than $200 a few months ago. Aside from RAM, storage has also seen massive surges but, unfortunately, u/uneektnt didn't disclose that info, though we can at least see an M.2 SSD mounted in the pictures.

Taking to PC Part Picker, kitting out a similar system turned up a value of about $1,800 without a GPU, which we left out since most RTX 4070 Ti Super variants are overpriced right now. Generally, street pricing for this card floats around the $800 mark, and the cheapest we could find was a $979 PNY model. Regardless, you're looking at over $2,500 of parts that this lucky buyer was able to snag for almost one-fifth of its worth.

With that, the duology is complete: both a PS5 and, somehow, a high-end PC are cheaper than 64 GB of DDR5 RAM. Even if memory prices weren't in a doozy, this is an incredible deal that would've cost at least twice as much in routine times. It also serves as a nice contrast to a previous story where someone traded 192 GB of memory for an RTX 5070 Ti, which is a worse deal than it sounds.

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The authorization reportedly only covers Nvidia's H200, a processor that originates from 2022, but features formidable performance and comes with 144 GB of HBM3 memory (an important spec for training large AI models), so it is years behind the leading edge Blackwell GPUs. When compared to the HGX H20 — specifically designed to meet U.S. export control regulations of 2023 — it still delivers a formidable performance advantage over H20. Although Huawei now offers accelerators and rack-scale systems that can compete against Nvidia's H200 and even GB200 NVL72 systems, many Chinese companies still prefer Nvidia hardware largely because of their reliance on the CUDA-based software stack.

Semafor claims that the decision also reflects an assessment inside the U.S. government that the earlier restrictions did not significantly hinder progress by Chines AI leaders like Alibaba, DeepSeek, or Huawei. These companies continued to release advanced AI models and fill hardware gaps with domestically engineered products, therefore blunting the intended effect of U.S. policy and spreading Chinese AI standards when it comes to hardware, software, and eventually ethics.

An avid reader would ask whether the Department of Commerce — a part of the executive branch of the federal government — is overriding laws set in 2023. This is not exactly the case. The DoC is not formally canceling or rewriting the 2023 export control rules, but it is preparing to apply them far more flexibly. The ECCN 3A090/4A090 framework — which sets performance caps and interconnect thresholds for AI accelerators — remains intact. What is changing is the DoC's willingness to grant licenses for hardware that sits above those limits. By approving Nvidia's H200, the U.S. is effectively raising the practical performance ceiling that China may receive, without altering the existing export rules. Whether or not AMD can receive appropriate indulgences is something that remains to be seen.

One thing to keep in mind is that China rejected the H20 for political, not technological, reasons.

On the one hand, China is more likely to permit H200 imports than it was to accept the H20, because the H200 is a full-fat Nvidia GPU rather than a deliberately slow-downed, export-only model. Meanwhile, H200 will help China to develop its AI prowess faster than any domestic hardware.

On the other hand, China's approval is not guaranteed as availability of H200 could slowdown development of domestic AI hardware solution.

Last but not least, China may hesitate to re-open reliance on U.S. technology that the U.S. government could cut off again. Therefore, it may prefer to protect the momentum of domestic manufacturers like Huawei as it fits into China's broader semiconductor self-sufficiency plan.

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The Ministry of Defence says Atlantic Bastion is a response to rising Russian submarine operations around the UK, including recent movements by the intelligence-gathering vessel Yantar. Defence Intelligence has assessed that Moscow is modernizing its undersea fleet for operations against Western infrastructure such as communication cables and pipelines. The government wants a fast route from concept to field trial, and has committed millions of pounds this year to early development while promising more funding as platforms mature.

Atlantic Bastion forms a core pillar of the Strategic Defence Review by shifting anti-submarine warfare toward a hybrid force structure that mixes crewed ships and aircraft with long-endurance unmanned vehicles. The programme’s concept of operations centres on AI-powered acoustic detection and distributed sensing, feeding data into what officials describe as a digital targeting web that would allow forces to locate and track threats across large expanses of ocean and shorten the time between detection and action.

26 UK and European firms have submitted sensor concepts, and 20 companies have already submitted proposals to develop prototypes. The government says public investment has been matched 4:1 by private funding, and the most promising designs will move from lab work to sea trials over the coming weeks. The aim is to have initial capabilities operating in the water next year while broader procurement decisions take shape.

The First Sea Lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, is using today’s International Sea Power Conference to set out how Atlantic Bastion underpins a modernized Royal Navy. His remarks describe a service that has always evolved its methods in response to adversaries and now intends to combine advanced autonomy with the experience of trained crews. The programme’s geographic focus stretches from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to the Norwegian Sea, where it will build a persistent underwater network designed to withstand interference and continue operating during crises.

Partners such as Anduril, BAE Systems, and Helsing are positioning their autonomous platforms and control systems for the programme, arguing that data-driven operations at scale are now achievable. Their contributions range from large autonomous submersibles to AI-assisted sensing frameworks tested in British waters.

Just last month, the UK Ministry of Defence demonstrated a laser capable of shooting down high-speed drones travelling at 400mph, at a cost of $13 per shot.

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The particular listing momomo_us shared above sees the Xe3 iGPU scoring 2,383 points in Furmark's benchmark test at a reported max boost clock of up to 2,300 MHz, and at up to 36 watts of power. However, the GPU is outperformed by Intel's outgoing Arc 140V and 140T counterparts, with the 140V scoring 2,736 points and the 140T scoring 2,398 points, respectively. The 140V and 140T results were taken from the same database that the B370's results came from.

These results make Intel's flagship 140V Xe2 graphics chip 14% faster than the B370, and the 140T equal to the B370. To make matters worse for the B370, both 140-series iGPUs operate at between 10 and 12 watts less, making the B370 worse on energy efficiency as well.

Take these results with a pinch of salt since the B370 is not out yet, but these results are awfully similar to our previous article on the B370, which showed the Xe3 iGPU performing roughly the same with the 140T in Geekbench as well. That said, these results are not surprising. Intel confirmed this year that its Celestial (Arc C-series) Xe3 graphics chips would actually function off of its outgoing Battlemage GPU architecture rather than jumping on a new architecture, as many previously thought. Instead, genuine performance/efficiency improvements won't come until Intel debuts its Xe3P architecture.

The Arc B370 will reportedly be one of the likely several iGPU models included in Intel's next-generation Panther Lake architecture (the Core Ultra 5 338H is the first chip we've seen with the B370). Panther Lake will launch in January 2026, boasting Intel's 18A process node, Cougar Cove P-cores, and Darkmount E-cores. Intel hopes Panther Lake will be a "one-size-fits-all" solution for mobile, providing the power efficiency of Lunar Lake and the performance of Arrow Lake in one cohesive design.

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OpenAI's report released today, "The State of Enterprise AI", hinges on two major points: companies are using AI more, and workers are saving time as a result. OpenAI claims that in a survey of 9,000 workers across 100 companies, workers reported having saved 40 to 60 minutes of work per day on professional tasks with the use of ChatGPT. Of these 9,000 workers, 75% of respondents reported that AI has improved either the speed or quality of their work.

Because OpenAI's report appears to be more focused on marketing to enterprise than performing scientific resaerch, there is no way of knowing beyond the most favorable published numbers how this 75% metric breaks down. Much of the data isn't very specific.

The OpenAI report also makes a case that companies are using AI more, stating that "frontier firms" and "leaders" are sending 6x more prompts to ChatGPT than "laggards", or the median AI-using firms. However, all this "6x" number proves is that some companies use ChatGPT more than others, saying nothing about the quality of the work done or how this usage affects business numbers.

OpenAI may be looking to contradict studies from educational institutions published earlier this year. An August study from MIT showed that 95% of organizations that invested in AI business products "found zero return" despite corporate investments of $30-40 billion. The study shows that the "vast majority" of AI pilot programs stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on profit. Shortly after, a research initiative from Harvard Business Review found that most professional AI use constituted little more than "workslop", or work content that "masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”

In late November, Anthropic published its own research to respond to these allegations. The internal survey, submitted without peer review, found that using Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, cuts down the time it takes people to complete work tasks by 80%, from an average of 90 minutes down to 18 minutes, based on a look at 100,000 private Claude conversations. But as the company admits, buried deep in the website copy, these numbers have no promise of actually reflecting real-world efficiency. "This doesn’t account for the time that humans might spend on these tasks beyond their conversation on Claude.ai, however, so we think these estimates might overstate current productivity effects to at least some degree," says Anthropic's own study.

Regardless of these self-admissions of weak methodology and the cherry-picking of numbers, the AI industry is still publicly bullish on its own claims of enterprise profit increase.

In a statement to Bloomberg, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap directly addressed the MIT and Harvard Business studies. "There’s a lot of studies flying around saying this, that and the other thing. They never quite line up with what we see in practice."

The AI industry doesn't just have academia to reckon with in the new year, however. The physical realities of the needs of the AI industry to keep up with data center expansion are catching up, with a copper shortage expected to hit data center buildouts in the next decade, matching the current RAM shortage crisis currently caused by AI data centers. Add this to rising public fear and outrage over data center expansion's health risks and rising electricity prices, and the AI juggernaut will have more pictures to paint than one of productivity.

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The post claims that the B650 chipset is here to stay, at least for the time being due to the DRAM crisis making new motherboard purchases undesirable. Being an older model, B650s are cheaper and more abundant, which will serve as a lifeline for PC builders hindered by rising memory costs. AMD reportedly wants to help alleviate some of the pressure the industry is facing by letting consumers still pick the more affordable option when it comes to motherboards. This means that AMD is asking board partners to expand production of the B650 to provide the affordable alternative given the current situation.

It's not all good news, though, since current data reflects a steep decline for motherboard sales in November. Apparently, only half as many boards were sold this past month compared to October, a trend that's expected to follow in December as well. Due to the AI boom causing RAM prices to skyrocket, demand for new motherboards has fallen through the floor, so newer options are even less likely to perform in the market.

Thus, B650 lives — so much so that AMD is telling partners to expand production for B650, forcing them to reroute existing plans and start procurement for this new strategy. B840/B850 will coexist alongside B650 as the more feature-rich, PCIe 5.0 capable option, but consumers can choose the outgoing B650 chipset to save costs. There's still a lot of great B650 motherboards out there, some of which we even recommend in our roundups because of their often-stellar value.

That being said, we're talking about Board Channels here. Never once did AMD even confirm the original reports of B650 concluding production in Q3 2025, so a sudden turnaround could very well just be according to plan in the first place. But the timing makes sense, DDR5 pricing has made it impractical to consider upgrades, and motherboards remain unaffected from the crisis so far. Helping consumers leads to more sales, which only increases revenue.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spent much of last week meeting with U.S. legislators, including President Trump and Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee, which oversees U.S. export control programs. Huang clearly wasn't persuasive enough, though, as now the proposed Secure and Feasible Exports Act (SAFE) bill would force the Commerce Department to halt export licenses for the sale of the latest chips to U.S. adversaries, including China and Russia, for 30 months.

This ban could cover all existing chips and anything more powerful than them developed by any of the major companies over that same period. Although it primarily targets Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs, it would also cover Nvidia's last-generation Hopper designs, AMD's graphics chips, and Google's latest TPU designs.

This is devastating news for Nvidia and many of its chip-manufacturing contemporaries. China is a massive market for hardware and AI development, but it's certainly not proven to be the most willing of markets.

Chinese authorities have spent months pushing back on the on-again, off-again availability of Nvidia hardware by encouraging its domestic companies to use domestic chip suppliers where possible. It mandates that Chinese companies use at least 50% domestically produced hardware and, more recently, has claimed that new packaging and assembly techniques can close the performance gap between Nvidia and its local producers.

Chinese chip firms have responded with gusto, too, announcing enormous plans to manufacture several times the chips they managed in 2025, as soon as next year. It's not clear if those plans will be physically possible in such a short time frame, but they're shooting for the moon nonetheless.

But even if the companies can fabricate these chips, there's no guarantee they'll be used, despite the double-ended carrot-and-stick approach of both the U.S. and Chinese authorities.

Inference is one thing, training is another

China has made major leaps in its AI hardware development over the past few years, particularly in the past year, as it's sought to build more reliable access to powerful AI hardware, while the U.S. turned the tap on and off at the whim of its mercurial commander-in-chief. These conditions have led Huawei to make tremendous advances and to design high-power systems that scale well, at the expense of efficiency.

But that's mainly in the realm of inference, which is the day-to-day running of an AI algorithm after it has been fully trained. Nvidia's GPU versatility is particularly well-suited for AI training, and it has no real rival.

There have been some semi-hyperbolic claims of a new Chinese chip design that leverages 3D hybrid bonding techniques, and is claimed to deliver performance comparable to 4nm Nvidia silicon in training workloads. Given the restrictions in place for China's access to EUV machines from ASML, it's an interesting area of expansion.

It's not proven yet, and questions remain over its efficiency, how manufacturers would handle thermal dissipation - memory and compute bonded directly raises serious overheating concerns - and such a complicated design could lead to yield issues when produced at scale.

But even if all the claims about this hardware prove true and it's indeed a relative competitor to Nvidia, why wouldn't the companies that need this hardware at scale right now not just keep using Nvidia anyway? When Deepseek developers were forced to use locally produced chips for training, they ended up switching back to Nvidia hardware because the performance just wasn't there.

Despite all the blocks and barriers from various governments and organizations, it hasn't been too difficult for companies to allegedly get their hands on.

Singaporean companies have been used to allegedly circumvent trade blocks, and leasing computing power from international partners effectively allows Chinese national companies to use whatever hardware they like. There are always mules willing to help get the hardware across the border for a fee, too.

Speed is everything

So, even if new barriers are put in place to make it harder for Nvidia to ship hardware to China, it will probably still happen. It's better for training than anything Chinese producers can make, it's still readily available, albeit through ever-more convoluted routes, and the companies that want the hardware are trying to compete with markets that have better access to it. As Deepseek 3.2's latest whitepaper shows, the race for AGI is now entering the stage where those with the best pre-training compute might push ahead with breakthroughs. Now, the AI race is turning into a question of scale, regardless of who is making the chips.

In February, a Slovenian security researcher published an analysis of Sipeed’s NanoKVM that raised far-reaching concerns about the €30-€60 ($35-70) remote management device. Alarmingly, the researcher’s teardown showed the device shipped with a catalogue of security failures and an undocumented microphone that could be activated over SSH. After reporting the issues, many of those problems have been addressed over the intervening months.

The compact RISC-V board, which arrived on the market last year as a budget alternative to PiKVM, offers HDMI capture, USB HID emulation, remote power control, and browser-based access to a connected PC. It is beginning to show up in IT environments precisely because it requires no software on the target machine and can operate from BIOS to OS install.

The researcher says the device’s software stack exposes weak points from the moment it boots. Early units arrived with a pre-set password and open SSH access, a problem the researcher reported to Sipeed and which the company later corrected. The web interface still lacks basic protections, including CSRF defence and any mechanism to invalidate active sessions.

More troubling, the encryption key used to protect login passwords in the browser is hardcoded and identical across all devices. According to the researcher, this had to be explained to the developers “multiple times” before they acknowledged the issue.

The NanoKVM’s network behavior raised further questions, as it routed DNS queries through Chinese servers by default and made routine connections to Sipeed infrastructure to fetch updates and a closed-source binary component. The key verifying that component was stored in plain text on the device, and there was no integrity check for downloaded firmware.

The underlying Linux build was also a heavily pared-down image without common management tools, yet it included tcpdump and aircrack, utilities normally associated with packet inspection and wireless testing rather than production hardware intended to sit on privileged networks.

All this, paired with the discovery of a tiny surface-mount microphone, should make any user suspicious of the device’s true intentions. The researcher said the microphone is not documented in product materials, yet the operating system includes ALSA tools such as amixer and arecord that can activate it immediately. With default SSH credentials still present on many deployed units, the researcher demonstrated that audio could be recorded and exfiltrated with minimal effort, and streaming that audio in real time would require only modest additional scripting.

Thankfully, because NanoKVM is nominally open source, community members have begun porting alternative Linux distributions, first on Debian and later Ubuntu. Reflashing requires opening the case and writing a new image to the internal microSD card, but early builds already support Sipeed’s modified KVM code. Physically removing the microphone is possible, though the component’s size and placement make it a fiddly job without magnification. Sipeed has since addressed many of the security concerns around the device. However, the general consensus is that users should flash these devices to custom Linux distributions to mitigate potential issues, and many reviewers currently recommend Sipeed products for use in homelab environments.

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For me, overclocking started as just a hobby, but a fairly serious one. I would jet across the world to events like Computex and other live events, winning or placing across overclocking competitions. Unfortunately, not many places or people were willing to pay folks to overclock hardware. Shocking, I know. After some experimentation with launching my own bespoke PC, I knew that I didn't ever want to just sell normal PCs. I wanted to make performance computers that are better than what's out there for a similar price, where my overclocking talents could be used as an added benefit, not merely a pricing burden.

That's when a company I had a long-time relationship with approached me, and asked if they could take a percentage share of ownership and invest in launching my own brand of PCs. It all initially started as a very boutique operation, but eventually rolled over into a full-on system integrator, which is where I am today. Do you know how many Fractal Design cases you can fit into a garage? Asking for a friend.

Anyway, at this point, building and tinkering with PCs isn't just my hobby, or my work, it's my love. I hope you enjoy the forthcoming columns on Tom's Hardware Premium, where I get a chance to stretch my legs and wax lyrical about the things I love.

For the inaugural edition of Splave's Cave, I pick apart a very special graphics card, the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090. Yes, the 5090 came out months ago, and yes, there is a gold version, which I sadly do not own. But while the GPU I'm using isn't made of real gold, it's capable of capturing world-record gold. Here's how I set a 3DMark Port Royal World Record. Don't catch your fingers on that silicon, because it's about to get cold.

While I hate to be late to the party, a lot of work goes into overclocking top-tier hardware. Luckily, Asus has crafted an incredibly performant graphics card, with excellent R&D and overclocking departments that work hard on providing workarounds for the protections that any GPU might have. Yeah, those protections, the ones that make sure that the cards don't go boom or catch fire. We're finally in a place where those protections have extended far enough that we can pull out some wild performance from these GPUs at sub-ambient temperatures.

But, there is one thing: You can't try this specific technique at home. I am using a special, non-public BIOS for the GPU that offers a much higher power limit than the standard one would allow. I want to be fully transparent about this, and I'm sorry, but if you want to acquire the BIOS, it's not mine to give out. With that in mind, I know what I am doing, and I am fully prepared to smoke an incredibly expensive graphics card.

There are still challenges without power limits

Equipped with the bespoke BIOS, another challenge awaits. Even if the GPU's standard power limits are removed, thermal limits remain a bottleneck. If you let your card get super hot, it's going to still lower its clock speed in an attempt to avoid outright failure. So, this bespoke BIOS with its extended power limits is practically useless without sub-ambient cooling. For the standard OC BIOS, there's plenty of headroom, which the ROG Astral RTX 5090's cooler is equipped to handle; many cards can run +2000 MHz memory speeds without additional cooling, which is a feat of engineering in itself.

Simply put, the card is incredible. I've been doing this for a long time, and Asus' latest effort is head-and-shoulders above the next-best card I have touched. I'm not trying to wax lyrical about Asus because I am "glazing," as the kids like to say; they've really earned it, and I have nothing negative to say about it at all. The GPU is heavy because the cooler is so well designed. It commands a pricing premium because the components used within it are premium. It runs quietly and looks elegant and discreet. The Asus ROG Astral 5090 just shows up and does work; it's a real powerhouse of a GPU.

The 5090 die doesn't like being cold

Despite all of that fantastic engineering and being equipped with a custom BIOS, the GPU hates being cold. When using liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling, the ROG Astral RTX 5090 starts misbehaving at around -10°C to -20°C. By misbehaving, I mean that the screen goes black, the system hangs, and you have to wait until the card is above 0°C before you can boot it back into Windows — otherwise known as a 'cold bug.'

This is one of those situations where I just have to take a step back, take a deep breath, turn around toward my punching bag, and away from the expensive electronics, to let off some steam for a few minutes.

But, not liking the cold isn't an issue specific to Asus' ROG Astral 5090; it's an Nvidia issue. The RTX 5090 die itself doesn't like being cold, with users of other brands reporting similar experiences. Situations like this make me feel like we could really use a Kingpin right about now. He always had a way to finesse Nvidia into fixing cold bug issues, which isn't something a basement hobbyist can achieve.

Impressive results, despite limitations

But, with that being said, the ROG Astral RTX 5090 can still pull off some pretty impressive feats, without reaching extremely cold temperatures; this card could hit core clock speeds of 3600MHz+.

For comparison, the Asus ROG Matrix 4090, the first GPU to run at over 4 GHz, required cooling down to -190°C to accomplish that feat. Now, just imagine if the RTX 5090 could come close to running at those temperatures, it would simply be absurd. I know that Asus is exploring ways to overcome the cold limits of the RTX 5090 die, and I'll keep testing the new BIOSes they send my way. Hopefully, any amount of additional cold temperature tolerance will yield even greater results.

Meanwhile, with the card safely idling at -20°C, the ROG Astral RTX 5090 demands over 1,000 watts of power when you start a benchmark. This spikes the temperature from -20°C to +10°C instantly, and that's with a five-pound copper pot filled with LN2 attached to it. Whatever the case may be with the cold, the GPU has significant thermal demands, given the amount of power it's sucking up.

This can be tricky to maintain throughout the benchmarking process. If the benchmark ends before you taper down on pouring the LN2, it will drop from +20°C all the way to -50°C instantly when there is no load. That means more black screens, more time waiting to get it back to 0°C, and yes, you'll have to start over and attempt the benchmark again. Needless to say, that punching bag I mentioned earlier is getting a lot of use.

Regardless of all those headaches, once you manage to figure out the perfect cocktail of pouring the LN2 throughout the benchmark, and you see the score pop up, it makes the entire effort worthwhile. After a good amount of trial and error, I was able to set a 3DMark Port Royal record with a score over 48,000. A standard RTX 5090 usually achieves around 35,000.

Additionally, I achieved the GPUPI 32B world record and both Unigine Superposition records with the 1080p and 8K configs. These were achieved a little while ago, so it's likely that you'll spot me elsewhere on the leaderboards, too.

That about wraps it up for the first edition of Splave's Cave on Tom's Hardware Premium. Coming up next will be a guide on how to actually set yourself up for extreme overclocking, with a similar setup to the images posted in the article. Keep your eyes peeled, and thanks for reading.

For some context, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is supposed to succeed the Core Ultra 7 265K, but with four extra efficiency cores and slight clock adjustments. That makes the 270K Plus a 24-core chip, compared to its outgoing 20-core sibling. Intel has also increase the E-core base and turbo clocks by 100 MHz, and upped DDR5 support from 6400 MT/s to 7200 MT/s.

Specs-wise, we're looking at 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores that can boost up to 5.4 GHz. All of this should combine to offer a small jump in performance, which the new Geekbench listing confirms, and the data even shows it hitting almost 5.5 GHz in the tests.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus scored 3,235 points in the single-core test and 21,368 points in the multi-core test. Tallying that with the average scores on Geekbench and you can see those results beat out the Core Ultra 7 265K by 5.6% and 4.2%, respectively and that's despite using slow memory. The test was conducted on a Gigabyte Z890 Eagle WiFi7 motherboard outfitted with 64 GB of 4800 MT/s DDR5, so you can expect just a bit more juice with even faster RAM.

Those numbers are decent and these processors will launch on the current-gen LGA 1851 socket, so it can be a drop-in upgrade for many, though it won't make sense if you're already on 14/15th Gen. At least Intel is still maintaining the "Core Ultra 200" naming scheme to indicate it's not a true next-gen product. It's hard to imagine this release stirring up the market in any way, especially with how dominant AMD is right now, so it's best to consider the Arrow Lake refresh as a stopgap till Nova Lake surfaces.

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Design of the Acer Nitro 60

The Nitro 60 sticks to a familiar mid-tower gaming template, built around an all-black chassis with a tempered glass side panel that highlights its internals. Four RGB fans — two front intakes, one on the CPU cooler, and a rear exhaust — provide the expected glow of color. While it certainly looks the part, the design doesn’t differentiate it from the many towers in this price bracket. It’s a welcome demonstration of restraint from Acer, known for bolder and occasionally polarizing designs in its gaming line. This conventional approach provides a sense of normalcy.

The Nitro 60’s stout dimensions of 8.5 x 14.9 x 15.9 inches (WDH) make it smaller than many other mid-towers. Build quality is solid, with clean edges, a blackout interior, and tempered glass that lends a premium feel.

Lighting is divided into two zones: one for the two RGB DIMMs and another for the four fans. You can adjust colors and patterns in the Windows Dynamic Lighting app. Acer includes Gigabyte’s Dynamic Light app, but I wasn’t able to get this to open, preventing me from changing the lighting on the fans or DIMMs. I instead installed Gigabyte’s RGB Fusion, which ultimately enabled independent customization of the fans and DIMMs.

Specifications

Ports and Upgradeability on the Acer Nitro 60

Up front, the Nitro 60 provides two USB 3.2 Type‑A ports, 3.5 mm headphone and microphone jacks, plus power and reset buttons. It’s a decent selection, though the lack of a USB-C port is notable, particularly there is room for another USB port, but the cutout is blocked off. These connections are conveniently placed if the tower sits on a floor, though less so on a desk where cables tend to cascade downward.

Rear I/O includes a USB‑C 3.2 Gen 2x2 port, a USB‑A 3.2 Gen 2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, and three 3.5 mm audio jacks. An old‑school PS/2 port is also present, which feels dated (though it's still fairly common). The motherboard’s HDMI and DisplayPort outputs are disabled since the Core i7‑14700F lacks integrated graphics.

Networking is handled with a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet jack alongside built‑in Wi‑Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3. Faster Wi‑Fi 6E or 7 would have been better, but this configuration should suffice for most users. The included wireless antennas must be screwed in.

The side panels detach after you unscrew two thumbscrews for each. The tempered glass panel falls to the side after the screws are removed, so it’s important to support it while doing so.

Inside, the Gigabyte B760M C V2 motherboard and a tall 120 mm CPU air cooler take center stage. It’s notable that Acer used a readily available aftermarket motherboard rather than an OEM or proprietary model. Its expansion is generous, with four DIMM slots, four PCIe slots, and three M.2 slots. Cable management is mostly hidden thanks to the isolated PSU chamber, though the right‑side panel conceals some untidy bundles.

Storage expansion supports one 2.5‑ or 3.5‑inch drive, with SATA cables included. A modular 850 W Thermaltake power supply is a surprising inclusion, as many systems in this price range ship with non‑modular units. Extra cables are provided in the box.

For maintenance, the case features slide‑out dust filters beneath the PSU and on the top panel, simplifying cleaning. The front panel also comes off by tugging the handhold on its bottom edge.

Gaming and Graphics on the Acer Nitro 60

Our Acer Nitro 60 features a Core i7-14700F processor, a GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card, and 32GB of DDR5 RAM. Although the memory is rated for 6,000 MHz, it was only running at 4,800 MHz out of the box, which is how we conducted our testing. I had to access the BIOS to enable XMP1 for it to run at its rated speed.

To test the Nitro 60, I played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III at 3840 x 2160 at the Extreme preset with DLSS enabled and observed a fluid 90 to 100 fps in most maps, with no stuttering.

For context, we compared the Nitro 60 to several gaming towers. The closest rival is the Asus ROG G700 ($2,029 as tested), which pairs a Core Ultra 7 265KF with the same GeForce RTX 5070. We also included the CyberPowerPC Gamer Supreme ($1,859), built around an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RTX 5060 Ti, and the iBuyPower Y40 Pro ($1,899) which features a higher-end Ryzen 9 7900X and RTX 5070 Ti.

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider at the game’s Highest detail preset, the Nitro 60 competed with the ROG G700, producing 194 FPS to the latter’s 199 FPS at 1080p, while both produced 68 FPS at 4K. The RTX 5070 Ti-powered iBuyPower led the results, with 228 FPS at 1080p and 89 FPS at 4K, while the CyberPower with its RTX 5060 Ti trailed, with 149 and 46 FPS.

The demanding Cyberpunk 2077 (at the Ray Tracing Ultra preset) saw the desktops in a similar pecking order, with the Nitro 60’s 65 FPS at 1080p just behind the ROG G700’s 70 FPS. Both units also showed similar performance at 4K, with the Nitro’s 21 FPS against the ROG’s 20 FPS. The iBuyPower’s 87 and 29 FPS proved to be the best of the bunch, with the CyberPowerPC trailing with 53 and 15 FPS.

In Far Cry 6 (Ultra), the results were skewed at 1080p, with the CyberPowerPC taking the lead with 138 FPS, the iBuyPower in second place with 125 FPS, and our Nitro 60 narrowly behind it with 121 FPS. The desktops went back to their expected places at 4K, with the Nitro 60’s 81 FPS just ahead of the ROG G700’s 80. It remained behind the iBuyPower (102 FPS) and well ahead of the CyberPowerPC (59 FPS).

In Red Dead Redemption 2 (Medium preset), the Nitro 60’s respective 143 and 54 FPS at 1080p and 4K slightly outperformed the ROG G700’s 120 and 50 FPS, significantly outperformed the CyberPowerPC’s 104 and 37 FPS, and trailed the iBuyPower’s 161 and 66 FPS.

Last, in Black Myth: Wukong (Cinematic preset), the Nitro 60 remained consistent, producing 56 FPS at 1080p and 24 FPS at 4K, which was within one FPS of the ROG G700 at both resolutions. The CyberPowerPC slotted behind, with 41 FPS at 1080p and 17 FPS at 4K, while the iBuyPower’s stronger RTX 5070 Ti propelled it to 66 FPS at 1080p and 32 FPS at 4K.

The Nitro 60 demonstrates strong gaming performance in line with what we expect from an RTX 5070 desktop. Despite using an older Core i7-14700F, its gaming numbers were largely identical to what we saw from the ROG G700 featuring the newer, higher-wattage Core Ultra 7 265KF, particularly at 4K where most games will be GPU-limited. Had Acer enabled the XMP memory settings out of the box, its performance might have been even closer to the ROG G700’s.

To evaluate sustained gaming performance, we run 15 loops of the Metro Exodus stress test at RTX settings. During the approximately 30-minute test, the Nitro 60 produced an average framerate of 121.3 FPS across all runs, with minimal variation between runs suggesting stable thermal performance. The Core i7-14700F maintained an average temperature of 52 degrees Celsius while the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti averaged 61 C. The Nitro 60’s fans were well-behaved throughout testing. While not inaudible, they wouldn't be distracting over typical household background noise.

Productivity Performance on the Acer Nitro 60

Our Nitro 60 features a Core i7-14700F CPU, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. While the 65-watt CPU isn’t as formidable as the 125-watt K-series chips, it’s still a formidable performer for almost any task.

In our Geekbench 6 CPU test, the Nitro 60’s Core i7-14700F trailed the single-core results, producing 2,865 points. The iBuyPower did slightly better, with 2,953 from its Ryzen 9 7900X, the ROG G700 produced 3,092 with its Core Ultra 7 265KF, and the CyberPowerPC led with 3,335 courtesy of its Ryzen 7 9800X3D. In multi-core, the Nitro landed mid-pack, its 18,315 points ahead of the iBuyPower (17,226) and just trailing the CyberPowerPC (18,601) but out of range of the ROG G700 (19,057).

Our Handbrake 4K to 1080p video transcoding test saw the Nitro 60 finish dead last, completing the test in 3 minutes and 10 seconds. The others all broke the three-minute mark, with the CyberPowerPC finishing in 2:58, the iBuyPower in 2:29, and the ROG G700 in 2:03. This is the one test where the Nitro 60’s 65-watt CPU is not that adept.

Last, the Nitro 60 produced the best transfer rate of 1,861.6 MBps in our 25 GB file transfer test. The ROG G700 was second (1,816.5) while the CyberPowerPC (1,664.1) and the iBuyPower (1,501.6) picked up the last two spots.

Keyboard and Mouse with the Acer Nitro 60

The Nitro 60 we received did not include any peripherals. This is a mild omission at best, considering bundled peripherals are usually of entry-level quality, which most users will want to replace with a better keyboard and mouse anyway. Some people may even prefer picking out their own accessories.

Software and Warranty

The Nitro 60 ships with relatively little preinstalled software. Acer Care Center is the most practical inclusion, offering system updates and easy access to support resources. Acer also bundles Gigabyte’s Dynamic Light utility for RGB control, though it failed to launch during testing. I installed Gigabyte’s RGB Fusion on my own, which functioned properly and allowed customization of both the RAM modules and fans.

Less welcome is the assortment of bloatware, including a McAfee security trial and several lightweight game demos. Fortunately, these can be quickly uninstalled.

Acer provides a one‑year warranty with the system.

Acer Nitro 60 Configurations

Our review unit, sourced from Micro Center, features an air‑cooled Core i7‑14700F processor, GeForce RTX 5070 graphics, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD is on sale for $1,599 as of this writing but is $2,099 at normal price..

This configuration is competitively priced with the sale. At Best Buy, desktops with similar RTX 5070 setups—such as models from CyberPowerPC and HP’s Omen 35L—were within $100 of the Nitro 60. It also undercuts the $1,749 Asus ROG G700, which offers comparable specifications but swaps in a Core Ultra 7 265KF.

Entry‑level Nitro 60 models start at $879 at Micro Center, pairing a Core i5‑14400F with an RTX 5060, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. A $1,399 tier matches most of our review unit’s specifications but uses an RTX 5060 Ti. For $1,499, buyers can step up to an RTX 5070 paired with a Ryzen 7 7700. The highest‑end configuration, available from Acer’s online store, mirrors our review unit but upgrades to an RTX 5070 Ti for $1,799.

Bottom Line

Acer’s Nitro 60 delivers more than expected for a mid‑tier gaming desktop. With the Core i7‑14700F and GeForce RTX 5070 in our review unit, it proves to be a capable all‑around performer, even stretching into 4K gaming at the right settings. The design has appeal with its tempered glass side panel and the welcome inclusion of a modular power supply, a rarity at this price point.

There are a few shortcomings. Out of the box, the memory runs below its rated speed since XMP settings are not enabled, and no peripherals are included. Networking also tops out at Wi‑Fi 6 rather than newer standards, though this is unlikely to hinder most users.

Competition in this segment is intense. The Asus ROG G700 offers a liquid‑cooled CPU and a more eye-catching design, but at a higher cost. Meanwhile, the Nitro 60 remains price‑competitive against numerous mid‑tower alternatives from Best Buy and Micro Center. Taken together, its performance, design, and value make the Nitro 60 a strong contender for gamers seeking a well‑rounded desktop without overspending.

• Grab this deal at Best Buy

For the foreseeable future, RAM price increases are here to stay, whether we like it or not. Waiting just a few weeks has seen RAM prices rise higher and higher, with no end in sight. With large memory manufacturers like Crucial pulling out of the consumer market, the future is looking very grim indeed for PC enthusiasts looking to build computers. A lack of supply and extortionate prices for what RAM is left on the shelves are going to drive up the costs of any build. Earlier in the year, I was spotting deals on similar RAM kits for between $80-$100 for 32GB. It's not a pretty picture when you see how much the prices have risen on sites like PC Partpicker, where you can visually see the upward price trends in their charts.

Crucial's Pro Overclocking 32GB DDR5-6000 RAM kit consists of 2x16GB sticks that have a 6000MHz speed. They aren't the flashiest or fastest RAM sticks available, but they do come with timings of 36-38-38-80 and a CAS latency of 36. The kit is AMD EXPO and Intel XMP ready with profiles ready to set in your BIOS, and 6000MHz is also the sweet-spot for AM5 CPUs. The heat spreader is black and simple, with no RGB lighting in sight.

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• Check out this deal on Amazon

In fact, you’ll be spending just £468.95 to get your hands on this AOC Agon Pro AG276QZD2 gaming monitor at Amazon. This 35% discount, available for a limited time only, also brings it to a new low, according to Camelcamelcamel's data, saving you just over £250 as a result. It's also a pretty unbeatable price for a 27-inch 4K OLED display from a familiar brand right now, especially with these specs.

This AOC display features a similar design, as well as many of the same features, as the model we tested in our AOC Agon Pro AG276QZD2 review. This AG276UZD display has an even better spec sheet, however, with a top 3,840 x 2,160 resolution. That unlocks 4K gameplay, which will be a significant visual upgrade over an older LCD display running at 1080p, as well as offering a sharpness boost compared to 1440p.

Its 240Hz refresh rate, meanwhile, makes this a competitive option for a serious gamer, as long as you've got a GPU that can output a high enough frame rate at 4K to match.

Let's be honest, though, and say that the real upgrade here is with its QD-OLED panel technology. OLED panels are a vast improvement on older LCD displays, which aren't able to deliver the same brightness and color accuracy, as well as response times, that OLED displays like this one deliver. QD-OLED is one of the two rival panel techs battling it out at the moment, and our testing has seen QD-OLED coming out on top, with better colour volume over its WOLED rivals.

It's an OLED display from a known brand, so full HDR support is a given, with this AOC Agon Pro AG276UZD display including VESA DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification. That means it should manage a minimum peak brightness level of 400 nits, while also providing much truer blacks on-screen in the process.

If you're lacking a decent speaker setup, or your gaming headset has just run out of charge, you can also use this monitor's set of 5W internal speakers to keep the audio flowing. Two HDMI 2.0 and one DisplayPort 1.4 connections on the rear also give you the option to keep this monitor hooked up to your PC, alongside your handheld and game console, all at the same time. Meanwhile, a strip of LED mood lightning at the back will help illuminate your setup.

The £468.95 sale price on the AOC Agon Pro AG276UZD makes this one of the best value OLED gaming monitors out there right now, especially if you're keen to ditch LCD monitors entirely for a top-spec QD-OLED display like this one. This is a limited time Amazon deal, however, so don't expect the price (or the stock) to stick around for long.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, or CPU Deals pages.

The above video shows Noki’s journey from concept to working prototype. In the intro, he sums up the idea behind this work as a plan to create a “fully functional custom design C64 laptop, built like it could have existed in the 1980s, but powered by modern hardware.”

To begin this journey in hardware and software, Noki used 3D design software to model the Portable 64. He decided to split the finished design into parts for 3D printing on his Bambu Lab P2S. In total, there were about 30 parts, resulting in a total print time of 38 hours using a 0.4mm nozzle.

Next up, we see the designer and maker put the case together using superglue and metal pins. Subsequently, it is sanded, primed, spray-painted. It starts to look great already, with the original C64 reference colors – a kind of sandy beige.

The keyboard chosen to fit this computer wasn’t an off the peg design, and would constitute a major effort to build. For 3D printing, the keycaps alone took 24 hours to output. Noki used a finer 0.2mm nozzle to reduce layer lines on the final print.

For accurate legends, the maker scanned and vectorized an original C64 keyboard. Making a light on dark design, waterslide transfers with white laser toner was the method chosen. Waterslide transfers are quite fragile, so once in-place and dried, they were protected by several coatings of a clear acrylic lacquer spray.

PCBWay made the custom keyboard PCB. Noki had to solder 60+ small diodes to the board, and slotted in a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller – flashed with the well-known QMK customizable keyboard firmware, to act as an interface between the switches and the Raspberry Pi 5. One of the last processes the keyboard required was the soldering of the key switches. Noki chose a switchlock caps lock key for an authentic feel.

With the keyboard out of the way, the Portable 64 designed turned to building up the structure and supports for various PCBs and I/O plates. Knurled brass inserts pressed into pre-positioned holes with a soldering iron laid much of the foundations. It was also interesting to see the implementation of a push-latch magnetic mechanism for the retractable laptop handle.

The heart of the Portable 64 was a Raspberry Pi 5 running the VICE emulator. Noki wanted the option to use original hardware, so for this project leveraged the open-CBM library and custom-made adaptor(s). The 1541 .25 inch floppy adaptor would be quite easy to get working using the library and interface board. Joystick adaptors were prepared and mounted, including a custom 3D printed cover to mimic the original C64 look. However, the Datasette, the cassette tape storage device, took more work, as the client software had to be modified to stream the .TAP file into the emulator. “A bit of a hacky setup, but it works perfectly for this setup,” concluded Noki.

For the battery, a $10 UPS, which didn’t come with the required 18650 cells, was repurposed. Noki made a 3D printed part to allow cell access from a trapdoor under the laptop. A nice touch was a Python app, designed to show the battery status on ‘C64’ screen.

On the topic of the screen, a 10-inch 4:3 screen was selected for this project. It sat central with era-appropriate massive bezels. After mounting the screen and its PCB, a small mod was needed to wire brightness to a wheel on the side of the laptop. An audio volume wheel was positioned there, too. Ever the perfectionist, Noki decided to tamper with the screen firmware to banish on-screen messages regarding input sources and other features.

The final assembly steps were now ready to complete, with sprung latches added to the laptop lid. Torque hinges were used for easy, smooth, laptop screen angle adjustments. And now, the keyboard and screen were attached to the system PCB and all the panels screwed or snapped into place.

Testing time

The finished prototype as shown in the video takes 11 seconds to boot to the Commodore 64 BASIC screen. Our intrepid tech adventurer found the system satisfying to use. He could load original software from the 1541 floppy, and an original ‘Pac-Man’ game of unknown provenance still worked. Even the Datasette test worked nicely, but slowly, of course.

The legendary Competition Pro 9-pin joysticks worked as intended. A Python program running in the background converted joystick input, wired to the Pi 5’s GPIO, to the appropriate key presses.

If you were to take the Portable 64 on the road, you’d probably eschew original media, though. For truly portable C64 fun, an SD card packed with games and apps was Noki’s preferred choice. Apparently, this prototype weighed about 4kg, or about 8 pounds. We didn’t hear anything about untethered battery life.

Previous notable projects by Kevin Noki include a 1980s beige Apple iPad.

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