Intel has published an internal test driver with the "RPL-NEXT" label, presumably in reference to Raptor Lake Next CPUs that Tom's Hardware first reported on in June. On the same day as the driver was uncovered, shipping manifests from Vietnam were published by Club386, showing exports of CPUs labeled "Raptor Lake Next" dating back to August, complete with cache and clock speed information.

The driver was first spotted by @momomo_us on X, and we were able to find it by searching the name in Intel's software database. The file is locked (hence the padlock icon), and clicking on it will redirect you to an Intel login page. Given that and the "testbuild" label, it looks like this is an internal driver test that wasn't meant to be published.

Judging by the existing conventions, the driver package is for the Smart Sound Technology (SST), a audio digital signal processor integrated into the silicon since the Alder Lake days. Audio codecs like those of Realtek use SST for offloading duties like noise reduction, echo cancellation, low-power audio playback, and wake-on-voice without adding to the CPU load, and saving precious watts in the process.

For broader context, Raptor Lake Next is Intel's refresh of the Raptor family of CPUs, meant to plug into existing LGA-1700 motherboards. Given the currently insane DDR5 memory prices, gamers ought to be happy on two fronts: getting newer chips for their existing motherboards, and the ability to use more affordable DDR4 instead, an ability all but confirmed by Gigabyte's recent BIOS updates.

According to Club386's shipping manifests, there are so far four chip models en route from Intel's Vietnam facilities. Their specs suggest that they're replacements for extant Core i5 and Core i7 models, as a previous leak indicates that Intel doesn't yet have any plans for replacements for its Core i9-14900K chip.

As such, the listed models should top out with the 99DLMV part number, with 16 cores in an 8P + 8E arrangement, a meaty 3.5 GHz base block, and 30 MB of cache (presumably L3). This is the only model with a 125W TDP, and its base clock is higher than that of the Core i9-14900K, so it should be a speedy enough affair despite not having the high core counts of the halo models. Chances are it'll be a nice gaming CPU with pretty high turbo clocks, but only reviews will confirm that.

Interestingly, the 99DLMT has 20 cores (8P + 12E), but its much lower 65W TDP and 2.1 GHz base clock, which indicate that this model might be an efficiency-oriented productivity chip. In the table below, we added our guesses as to which models match existing chips.

There's no word about pricing, but we'd expect the new chips to ring in at roughly the prices of the existing models. As points of reference, the Core i7-14700 is currently $366, or $330 for the "F" variant without integrated graphics. At the lower end of the above table, the Core i5-14400 is sitting at $208, or only $161 without an IGP.

The FlipGo is yet another entry into the portable dual-monitor field from JSAUX (the previous one being the more ambitious FlipGo Horizon Pro), and it definitely makes a good first impression. Not only do you get two 16-inch 2560 x 1600 IPS displays, but the FlipGo also supports touch input (on Windows systems). In addition, it incorporates a built-in USB hub that gives you two additional USB-A ports and one USB-C port for your peripherals.

JSAUX provides all of this functionality in a product that comes in at a bit under $500, which is in line with other portable dual-monitors on the market. However, there’s a hefty toll for the functionality that’s provided in this package for those expecting to actually use it as a travel companion.

Design of the JSAUX FlipGo (PM0204)

When I first received the shipping box for the FlipGo, I was shocked at how large and heavy it was. My shock was made even more apparent when I removed the FlipGo from its protective padding, revealing a massive dual-screen device weighing an incredible 4.18 pounds. That’s more than half a pound heavier than a 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro.

The choice of materials contributes to the 4+ pound weight of the FlipGo. JSAUX uses a thick aluminum chassis that resists flexing and feels incredibly premium to the touch. That premium feel even extends to the hinges that connect the two displays. They are robust, with no play, allowing you to easily open the FlipGo to whatever display angle you desire.

While JSAUX labels the FlipGo as a “portable” monitor, this is not something that you’ll be able to easily slip into a laptop bag or even a backpack. The dual 16-inch screen frame measures 14.41 x 9.45 inches and is 0.7 inches thick. For most people, the FlipGo will take up a permanent residence on your desk, or perhaps travel with you from one side of your office building to the other. But carrying it around for travel seems like a bridge too far.

With that said, the specs on the FlipGo are quite impressive. You get two 16-inch 60 Hz IPS displays, each with a resolution of 2560 x 1600. Considering that most competitors in this space give you dual 1920 x 1080 panels, this resolution upgrade is much appreciated here.

Both screens feature a glossy finish, which is uncommon for dual-screen monitors. However, that’s because both panels support 10-point touch input natively in Windows 11. Unfortunately, touch input is not supported in macOS, so you’ll want to consider the FlipGo (non-touch) if you’re a Mac user.

Connectivity-wise, the FlipGo’s primary ports are on the left side of the bottom panel. Here you’ll find two USB-C ports and two mini-HDMI ports. On the right side of the bottom panel, you’ll find ports provided by the internal USB hub: two USB-A and one USB-C. Adjacent to the USB hub hookups is a three-way jog wheel for the OSD and the power button.

JSAUX offers a stand that allows you to prop the FlipGo up in landscape (one monitor stacked on top of the other) or portrait mode (both monitors standing up vertically, book-style). However, our review unit only came with a red faux leather protective cover. Without the stand, I could use the monitor with the bottom panel sitting flat on my desk and the top panel sitting vertically. Alternatively, I could use it in portrait mode.

JSAUX FlipGo (PM0204) Specifications

OSD on the JSAUX FlipGo (PM0204)

The FlipGo uses a relatively basic on-screen display (OSD), which is controlled using a three-way jog wheel. Despite there being two displays, you don’t have independent control over picture settings. Adjustments made on one display apply to both, for better or worse.

You can flick the wheel right or left to adjust brightness up or down. Moving up and down with the jog wheel navigates through the OSD, while pressing on it takes you one level deeper until you select an option (similar to the previously reviewed FlipGo Horizon Pro). Likewise, pressing once on the power button takes you back one menu, and a long press turns off the monitor.

You’ll find the usual assortment of adjustable settings in the OSD, like brightness, contrast, and sharpness. There’s a separate menu for color temperature, saturation, and hue. There are also options to switch between HDMI and USB-C inputs.

Connecting and Operating the JSAUX FlipGo (PM0204)

The FlipGo comes with an assortment of cables in the box. You get two USB-C cables, a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable, and a USB-C wall adapter. As I previously mentioned, the FlipGo does not support touch input on macOS. In addition, the FlipGo only supports mirror mode for both screens on macOS and requires you to use both USB-C and mini-HDMI to HDMI cables to connect (Windows 11 supports both mirror and extend modes). Because of these limitations and the fact that you’d be better off buying the cheaper non-touch model for macOS, I performed all of my testing with a Windows 11 laptop (HP OminiBook X).

Setting up the FlipGo couldn’t have been easier. Although JSAUX includes two mini-HDMI ports on the FlipGo for use with older laptops, if you have a USB-C port that supports DisplayPort, you can use that instead. With my OmniBook X test laptop, I was able to use just one USB-C cable to handle both power and video/data for the FlipGo. The FlipGo also supports 60-watt power passthrough to your laptop, which you can leverage by running dedicated power through the second USB-C port.

Using just a single cable between the FlipGo and the OmniBook X, I primarily used the two displays in portrait mode. In this mode, I could have two separate webpages open, side-by-side next to the OmniBook X’s internal panel. While I could use the FlipGo in landscape mode, the bottom panel had to lie flat on my desk, given that no stand was provided with my review unit to prop it up.

Touch support functioned, as expected, on both panels without needing to install any additional software. In short, the FlipGo operated flawlessly.

Display Performance on the JSAUX FlipGo (PM0204)

The FlipGo uses two 16-inch IPS panels, each with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 and a refresh rate of 60 Hz. JSAUX listed maximum brightness at 500 nits, but as you’ll see with our test numbers below, that figure was quite optimistic.

As I previously stated, due to the lack of a stand provided with my review unit, I primarily used the FlipGo in portrait mode, and it performed wonderfully here. The large panel sizes combined with the extra resolution over 1080p panels made them ideal for putting two webpages side-by-side. More frequently, I found myself pairing a webpage with an instance of Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. I especially appreciated the extra vertical resolution to limit scrolling up and down in Excel.

Compared to the FlipGo Horizon Pro that I previously reviewed, the panels on the “regular” FlipGo were far superior. Not only were they much more colorful and vibrant, but they were also vastly superior in brightness (319 nits versus 247.4 nits). However, I must note that the 319 nits that we recorded were a far cry from the 500 nits that JSAUX claims.

For our color tests, the FlipGo covered 97.2 percent of DCI-P3 and 137.2 percent of sRGB color spaces. That put the FlipGo well ahead of its competition, with the Aura Triple Aero 15.6 Pro Max coming the closest (at 85.4 percent and 120.6 percent, respectively). Given the higher-quality panels on the FlipGo compared to the FlipGo Horizon Pro and the glossy finish on my OmniBook X’s display, overall color balance matched pretty well across all three displays, adding to the enjoyment of using the portable monitor. I’ve often found that portable monitors have slightly (and sometimes far) inferior panels than their laptop counterparts, which can lead to a jarring experience when looking from one to the other. That is definitely not the case with the FlipGo.

Bottom Line

The JSAUX FlipGo is a remarkable piece of hardware for productivity warriors. At first sight, the FlipGo impresses with its high-quality build, stiff hinges, and plentiful video input options. JSAUX even incorporates a USB hub that gives you a couple of USB-A ports and a USB-C port to expand your peripheral footprint.

The FlipGo also tops the charts when it comes to color performance and brightness, more than justifying its $479 street price. I have two reservations concerning my review unit, but only one is really applicable. My review unit lacked a stand to prop the FlipGo up in landscape or portrait modes; however, shipping units from Amazon now include that part. So, crisis averted on that front. My other complaint is unavoidable: the 4.18-pound weight is considerable and is probably a bit more than most people are willing to deal with when traveling. However, it makes a perfect companion for expanding real estate on your desk without the massive footprint that comes with hooking up a traditional desktop monitor.

Whether you've had a NAS drive for a while, or you're looking at setting one up, the most important thing is making sure you have plenty of storage capacity. So, if you're looking to replace or boost your current storage drives, then this double-up deal from Newegg on 2x Western Digital WD Red Pro 10TB Hard Disk Drives for $785.98 might be helpful. The price of storage has skyrocketed over the last year due to the ongoing AI infrastructure rollout, so finding a relative deal on HDD storage has become a rare sight indeed. You can save $134 on this deal. The list price for the two drives is $919.98, with a single WD Red Plus 10TB listed for $459.99.

● Grab this HDD deal at Newegg

WD Red Pro hard drives are designed and constructed to be more reliable. These are not your average consumer drives, as they've been engineered to be more robust and cope with vibrations, small shocks, and continuous operation. With NAS drives often operating 24/7, you want reliable hard drives that are up to the task of sustained use. This two-pack of drives instantly starts you off with 20TB of storage capacity.

The benefits of going with NAS-specific WD Red Plus HDDs include the fact that they are optimized for lower power consumption and lower operating temperatures than standard HDDs, ensuring lower electricity bills and hopefully great longevity. These WD Red Plus 10TB drives come with a 3-year limited warranty, which should help you to replace this expensive drive should there be any unfortunate drive failures.

The WD Red Plus drive has a 512MB cache and is rated to operate at speeds of up to 216 MB/s with a 7200RPM speed, supporting a workload of up to 180TB/year. That's a fair amount of data for a single drive, and should give the Red Plus plenty of longevity in your NAS setup.

For Asus ROG's 20th birthday, the company released a slew of computer parts (enough for a supremely expensive build). But it's not overlooking its more recent entry into gaming handhelds, with the new Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20, a revamped version of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, which is already one of the best handheld gaming PCs.

The $1,299.99 gaming handheld ($2,499.99 if you get it in a bundle with XR glasses, a Pelican case, and a Dbrand Killswitch case) doesn't change performance at all. Instead, it makes some common-sense tweaks to its existing $999.99 handheld, adding TMR joysticks, rubberized grips, a see-through design, a transforming D-pad, and, most importantly, an OLED display.

If you already have an Ally X, this isn't a reason to upgrade. But if you're looking to get into handheld PC gaming and are willing to splurge, the changes here sure are nice.

Design and Display on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20

If you put the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 and the original next to each other, it's impossible not to notice the differences. But still, these are largely the same system, inside and out. They have the same button layout, the same grips, the same screen size, speaker placement, and vents.

The most visible difference is that the X20 has a new, transparent plastic case with a black tint, along with gold menu buttons, a gold stripe across the back (rather than silver), and a large "20th Anniversary" ROG badge on the rear. I prefer the original Xbox Ally X's plainer design; the clear plastic looks more like a toy. I also found that it let the status lights shine through the top of the system, just abover the screen, which is distracting.

There is one minor change in the menu buttons: where the Ally X had a library button, the Ally X20 has a screenshot button. It's more useful in general, but it's also a great way to accidentally take a screenshot.

But once I picked up the Ally X20, the original couldn't compare. The chassis feels more substantial, especially with rubberized grips on the back of the prongs. There's a new directional pad, which feels more substantial; it also twists between a 4-way and 8-way pad, though I found switching between these two modes quite awkward. The 8-way D-pad is better for fighting games, while the 4-way with more distinct cardinal directions will make more sense for action-adventure and platform games.

The new TMR joysticks, which should show less wear with age, feel tighter. All of this adds up, even though there is no performance difference between the two devices. They share the same AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme chip.

The other big change is the screen. Both use 1920 x 1080 touchscreens, but the Xbox Ally X20 has a 7.4-inch OLED panel, slightly larger than the original's 7-inch IPS display. While the screen size isn't much of a difference, the narrower top bezel is noticeable.

And the OLED screen looks great. It's only slightly more vivid on measured color tests. But it's definitely brighter, and it's absolutely an improvement. The OLED screen doesn't measure as well as the OLED screen on the Steam Deck OLED, but in isolation, I thought Asus's panel looked great, and it has a much more recent chip than the Steam Deck.

Forza Horizon 6 looked beautiful, with lush greenery on the sides of tracks and realistic, colorful paint jobs. In God of War: Ragnarok, dark areas with deep blacks made dim light stand out.

Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 Specifications

Battery Life on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20

The Ally X20 has the same 80 Whr battery as its predecessor. To get an idea how long you can play a demanding game for, I booted up God of War: Ragnarok, set the screen to 50% brightness, and used the 17W performance mode. With the game running on low settings with AMD FSR 3.1.4 at 720p, the machine had 47% charge left after an hour and 15 minutes of gameplay.

That suggests that I could have hit about 2.5 hours had I kept going. That's down from about 3 hours on the original Ally, though it's not apples to apples, as I played different games. It's to be expected that an OLED display would use a bit more power, however.

Software and Warranty on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20

The ROG Xbox Ally X20 uses the same Full Screen Experience that the original Xbox Ally X originated. Portions of Windows don't even load unless you switch to desktop mode, which saves RAM and helps boost performance.

For some features, Asus includes Armoury Crate SE. That's where you can make changes to the lighting around the joysticks, adjust power management (whether in the app or in the Xbox menu), and calibrate your joysticks and triggers.

Asus sells the ROG Xbox Ally X20 with a 1-year warranty.

Bottom Line

The Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 is the definitive form of Asus' handheld. It feels better in the hands, has joysticks that should last longer, and the OLED display is a noticeable improvement.

All of that being said, games play the same across the two devices. If you already have an original ROG Ally X, this isn't worth the upgrade. You won't get any more performance, and the IPS screen on the original is still plenty bright and colorful, even if the blacks aren't as good as on an OLED screen.

If you're buying a new machine, it's a tougher choice. The X20 is $1,299.99 — a $300 increase over the original, which is staying on the market. If this is your sole gaming machine, that may be worthwhile for the improved screen, TMR joysticks, and a slightly more solid build. But it's a lot of money; the original Xbox Ally X will play games the same way for $300 less. Neither will play games as well as the Intel Arc G3, but the only system with that available right now is $1,799.

The X20 is worth getting if it's going to be your only gaming PC for a few years. The $1,299.99 price is high for a handheld, but given that the $999.99 version is effectively the best deal in handhelds right now, it makes some sense to invest if you want the best experience.

A Chinese team has claimed a new world record for real-time transfer speeds across 24-core optical fiber cable. The collaboration between the National Key Laboratory of Optical Communication Technology, and Network of China Information and Communication Technologies Group, Pengcheng Laboratory, and Fiberhome Fujikura Fiber Optic Technology Co., Ltd. hit speeds fast enough to download “more than 20,000 4K movies” in one second, reports the Chinese government website for Hubei Province.

We note that this new 3.2 Pb/s real-time optical transfer speed world record comfortably eclipses the 2.5 Pb/s record set by the same teams earlier this year. The improvement represents an almost 30% performance uplift within a year.

According to the source, these speeds could mean, if and when they are successfully rolled out, “3.2 million households simultaneously enjoying gigabit broadband.” Or you could say this speed is roughly 3.2 million times faster than a typical one-gigabit internet connection. Both are probably more useful and practical comparisons than knowing that one person would be able to download 20,000 4K movies in a single second.

In technical terms the 3.2 Pb/s test proved the success of the spatial division multiplexing and S+C+L multi-band transmission technology used by the team. Major hurdles faced by the researchers included crosstalk interference, and handling the varying spec requirements of the S+C+L transmission bands.

The new 3.2 Pb/s transmission record was achieved using commercially compliant hardware architectures in real-time. Thus, the headlining result could be practical and deployable in the real world in the not-too-distant future, with enough will and effort.

Contrast that to pure academic lab optical fiber transmission milestones which have reached transfer speeds (across similar 24-core telecommunications fiber) of up to 5.29 Pb/s. However, these incredibly impressive lab results often lean on advanced or experimental signal processing and laboratory equipment.

AMD's Zen 6 processors are out! Well, the EPYC 9006 family of server CPUs is out, anyway. These aren't chips that mere mortals like you and I can reasonably acquire, so there aren't really many third-party benchmarks out there yet, but somebody ran GeekBench 7 on one, and you know what that means: time for some wild speculation, such as the supposed 15% single-threaded IPC increase you might have seen reported this week. However, it isn't quite that clear yet. Well-known enthusiast and occasional leaker HXL (@9550pro) spotted the EPYC 9996 result, and now Russian enthusiast "three twenty six" (@326powah) has done a direct comparison with his Ryzen 7 9700X at the same clock.

Let's lay out the details: the AMD EPYC 9996 is an absolutely gargantuan server processor with 256 "Zen 6c" cores spread across eight "Monarch" CCDs with 32 cores apiece. Each CCD has 128MB of L3 cache, which is reportedly split into two 64MB domains for each 16-core CCX. This gives us 4 megabytes of L3 cache per CPU core, which happens to be the exact ratio that AMD has maintained since Zen 2. Meanwhile, 326's Ryzen 7 9700X is a desktop CPU with eight Zen 5 CPU cores and 32MB of L3 cache, giving it the same cache-per-core ratio yet an overall smaller local cache for the CPU cores, to say nothing of the 1GB of L3 cache on the full EPYC 9996.

Yes, 1GB of L3 cache. That enormous CPU is also served by a 1024-bit memory bus, likely running at 12,800 MT/s, giving it a colossal 1.64 TB/second of memory bandwidth. However, the specific benchmarks we're comparing here are single-threaded benchmarks, and as a result, they aren't likely to be bottlenecked by memory bandwidth on either machine; even 326's relatively pedestrian DDR5 memory at 6000 MT/s CL34 is more than sufficient for a single-threaded, lightly vectorized workload like Geekbench 7. Matching the CPU core clock rates at 4.1 GHz actually gives us a pretty decent core-to-core comparison of performance, even if all factors are not equal.

So how does it come out? Frankly, it's a massacre. That's true whether we look at the Windows 11 results he posted first or the CachyOS Linux results that he posted later, although the Zen 5 part doesn't get embarrassed quite as badly in Linux. The Dell PowerEdge R9815 server hosting the big EPYC part scored 2847 in the single-threaded test; 326's Ryzen desktop scores 2483 in Linux and 2318 in Windows.

Looking at the Gala-to-Honeycrisp Linux results, the biggest performance gulf is some 24% in the HTML5 Browser test, which is normally quite sensitive to memory latency. That could easily be caused by the massive L3 cache of the EPYC CPU. Other tests aren't so easily dismissed by configuration mismatches, though. The 19% gain in asset compression, the 21% gain in video encoding, and the 17% gain in photo editing all point to real architectural differences between Zen 5 and Zen 6 that seem quite promising for its desktop debut next year.

What's fascinating is that these results won't have been affected much by the considerable SIMD horsepower of the Zen 6 CPU core, as Geekbench—at least historically speaking—makes relatively light use of CPU SIMD, and in fact, this specific test is marked as "AVX2," meaning it definitely isn't using the muscular AVX-512 units present in either CPU. In fact, most of these tests are actually measuring CPU integer arithmetic and memory subsystem performance more than raw CPU number-crunching power, so Zen 6 coming out so far ahead here is really interesting.

Obviously, you shouldn't take this as gospel that "Zen 6 has 15% higher IPC than Zen 5," though that's arguably a plausible conclusion; there are just too many confounding factors to say that so far. Indeed, another one of those factors is that this isn't the Zen 6 CPU core that we'll be getting in desktop CPUs. The EPYC 9996 is a high-density part that uses Zen 6c, the specialized dense core design meant for increased area efficiency at the cost of its ability to scale to high clocks. After all, 4.1 GHz isn't exactly a high clock rate these days, and particularly not for chips manufactured on a bleeding-edge 2nm-class manufacturing process.

That's the part that should get you excited. Zen 5 had a very modest IPC uplift over Zen 4 (including even some regressions), and combined with a similarly modest clock rate gain, it wasn't a very exciting release for most desktop users. Zen 6 seemingly may have a significant IPC advantage as well as, if rumors hold, a fairly extreme clock jump over the current-generation parts. If that holds, this may be another leap like from Core 2 to Core i7, and these parts are confirmed to be coming to an AM5 socket near you. We'll be waiting with bated breath for the launch early next year. Hopefully there's RAM to buy by that point.

Having jettisoned 4F² memory cells from its roadmap, Micron must use different methods to continue scaling its DRAM devices in the coming years to keep up with rivals planning to use smaller DRAM transistors towards the end of the decade. Instead, Micron intends to introduce wafer bonding with its upcoming 1ε DRAM process technology and adopt High-NA EUV lithography for subsequent generations. Meanwhile, the company is developing new types of memory, including vertical high-bandwidth memory (vHBM) and vertical edge inference memory (vEIM), which will be integrated directly on top of processors.

"DRAM is nearing atomic limits at this point," said Scott DeBoer, president and chief technology and products officer at Micron, during the company's event this week. "Although we have confidence in several more planar nodes, we are very focused on making sure that we introduce 3D DRAM at the optimal time from a cost and performance point of view."

Wafer bonding, High-NA EUV, and new materials

Micron's current 1γ DRAM process is already in high-volume manufacturing, whereas its successor, 1δ, is scheduled to enter volume production in the second half of 2027. The latter promises a mid-20% increase in bit density and is optimized for future AI memory products, including HBM5, vHBM, and vEIM. Beyond 1δ, Micron plans to introduce wafer bonding with its 1ε process, which is currently under development. However, the company has not disclosed how it intends to implement wafer bonding or what improvements it expects from the technology.

For subsequent generations — ζÅ and ηÅ — Micron plans to adopt High-NA EUV lithography (ζÅ, zeta angstrom, Micron's 1^st Generation sub-10nm-class DRAM node) and new materials (ηÅ, eta angstrom, Micron's 2^nd Generation sub-10nm-class DRAM node) to continue shrinking DRAM cells. For many of its upcoming fabrication technologies that will be used over the next five to 10 years, Micron is also collaborating with Albany NanoTech. Of course, as with all organizations like Albany NanoTech, we are mostly talking about fundamental, or pre-competitive, IP that could be used for DRAM production at some point.

 "Albany NanoTech, our announced focus on advanced lithography [is] really driving High-NA EUV roadmap for DRAM," said DeBoer. "In particular at Albany with our team there, focused on the next five to ten years."

Micron is also developing 3D DRAM technologies and lists two generations — 3D1 and 3D2 — in its roadmap already. However, the company has not disclosed its architectures or launch schedules, as it intends to introduce 3D DRAM only when the technology offers sufficient advantages in manufacturing costs, complexity, and performance over conventional planar DRAM.

"When we look at three 3D DRAM we have that on the roadmap, as I mentioned, and it is shown here in between one zeta and one eta," said Micron's CTO. "But in reality, this is a parallel path, and we will implement it [3D DRAM] in a fashion that is ideal for cost, complexity, and device performance."

Going vertical, becoming critical

Beyond developing new process technologies for its upcoming DRAM products, Micron is also working on all-new types of DRAM products that are tailored for very specific use cases, including vertical HBM (vHBM), vertical edge inference memory (vEIM), and various custom HBM (cHBM) implementations.

vHBM will place memory stacks directly on top of processors (such as AI accelerators and AI GPUs) rather than next to them. This approach promises substantially lower latencies and higher bandwidth thanks to shorter connections. However, placing memory above a processor creates significant thermal challenges and limits the number of memory stacks that can be integrated on top of an ASIC. Therefore, Micron expects vHBM to complement conventional HBM, which will continue to provide the bulk of memory capacity in many AI accelerators.

Another technology under development is vertical edge inference memory (vEIM), which shares architectural and packaging characteristics with vHBM but targets different applications. Whereas vHBM prioritizes maximum bandwidth for high-performance AI accelerators, vEIM is focused on energy efficiency for edge AI processors used in autonomous vehicles, robotics, and other power-constrained devices. Nonetheless, even the 1^st Generation vEIM targets formidable 2 TB/s bandwidth at <1pJ/bit energy, which is in line with what HBM4 currently offers (at 8 GT/s over a 2,048-bit interface). Micron intends to optimize these products with customers according to their bandwidth, capacity, and power requirements.

Both vertical memory architectures will require advanced packaging technologies, particularly hybrid bonding, which enables much denser connections than conventional microbumps. Thermal management will also be critical, especially for vHBM. To meet cooling requirements, Micron is developing specialized heat-spreading structures to transfer heat from hot regions of memory base dies through the DRAM stacks.

The company has not disclosed when vHBM, vEIM, or cHBM will enter commercial production. What is important about the development of such types of memory is that it indicates that future improvements in memory performance will increasingly depend on advanced packaging and closer integration with processors, which will require collaboration between DRAM makers and logic developers. In turn, this transforms memory from a commodity to a critically important ingredient of an ASIC design.

Professional Windows crusher NTDEV has showcased their next-generation tool for compressing Windows 11 into the tiniest of tiny installs. Based on their newest and unreleased Pico11, they managed to create a “proof of concept I put together to see how small I could make a Windows 11 ISO while keeping a working desktop and a few familiar apps.” Moreover, it’s a perfect installer to shove on a 700MB CD-ROM without wasting space, with this demo version weighing in at 699,811,840 bytes.

The test system (a VM with 4GB allocated) used around 883MB of RAM.

In the above video, NTDEV demos a freshly installed Windows 11 ISO that had been processed with Pico11. The desktop looks familiar to anyone currently using Windows 11. “Calculator and Settings still open, Notepad saves files, and Paint still lets me draw questionable logos,” highlights the dev. However, it is also pointed out that “Task Manager might look a little older than you remember.” The older Task Manager seems to be a lightweight legacy version. It may have been possibly swiped from Windows 7, but its exact origin isn’t divulged by NTDEV.

At this time, NTDEV admits what you see is “an experiment, not a replacement for a normal Windows installation,” and that’s mainly because Windows Update and general servicing have been removed to fit inside the constraints of CDR capacity. If you are interested in creating Windows installs like this, the good news is that NTDEV says they are working on adding what they describe as Pico11 capabilities to the Tiny11 builder tool, which you can find on GitHub.

Tiny11 has already demonstrated impressive Windows 11 ISO building capabilities with its Tiny11 mode, Tiny11 Core mode, and Custom mode. Pico11 sounds most closely related to Tiny11 Core as it eschews servicing and recovery support. However, there appears to be some more under-the-hood tweaking, which may have been evidenced in this new showcase by the presence of the older version of Task Manager.

Tiny11 has historically been responsible for even smaller Windows 11 installs, but the extreme 100MB distillation of the OS, for example, came without any Windows 11 UI. Builds could also be remarkable for using tiny amounts of RAM – as little as 176MB. More typical and useful were custom builds powered by Tiny11 where 'bloatware' was removed and that weighed in at around the 2GB mark.

Hopefully we will learn more about Pico11 and get greater insight into its capabilities soon.

Cadence, one of the largest electronic design automation (EDA) companies, has unveiled Maestro, its new portfolio of domain-specialized AI models tailored for its chip design agents, in a press release sent just ahead of earnings. In initial results compared with general-purpose AI models, Cadence claims up to a 30% improvement in the quality of results and that Maestro effectively uses fewer tokens for the same task, with up to 5x the token efficiency. The first models “are available to select early access customers” in Q4 2026, and customers may run them on Cadence’s cloud, public clouds, or customer-controlled on-premises environments and post-train them on their own “proprietary data, designs, and workflows.” To learn more about Maestro, we spoke with two Cadence executives: Rob Knoth, senior group director of strategy and new ventures, and Paul Cunningham, senior vice president and general manager.

This approach is distinct from Synopsys’ own specialized model, GPT-Synopsys, which will run on OpenAI-hosted infrastructure, without using customer data to train the model. The models of both EDA giants, announced less than a month apart, now split on where a customer’s design data goes. Where they might not differ is why: Paul Cunningham, senior vice president and general manager at Cadence, told Tom’s Hardware Premium that agent costs have “really started to explode,” adding, “And I think the world realized so.” That makes it a natural step, he said, to move more of the agents’ iterating “into the weights of the models themselves.”

Maestro takes this step through Cadence’s AI Super Agents, which “interpret design intent, decompose tasks” and “orchestrate the Maestro portfolio with other leading frontier and open-weight models,” evaluating trade-offs to guide decisions with domain expertise. It also uses reinforcement learning (RL), where Cadence’s “deterministic solvers evaluate outputs against engineering objectives, constraints and ground truth,” and, importantly, the results feed back into the models for improvement.

The models include Nvidia’s Nemotron, and customers can run the customer-data training step themselves with Cadence’s fine-tuning harness, potentially “on their own GPUs, on their own network,” Cunningham said. He added that Nemotron, specifically, was “giving really solid results and actually improving very, very fast.”

One constant that keeps popping up with agentic EDA is the need to nail down what the numbers actually measure. In chip design, quality of results usually refers to the design’s power, performance, and area, though Cadence didn’t specify what its 30% figure measures. Both it and the 5x token efficiency figure are measured against “a general-purpose foundation model,” which Cadence told us is the open-source model Maestro started from before its training. The company wouldn’t name the foundational AI model that Maestro is derived from beyond mentioning that it is “one of the leading open source models that’s very competitive with commercial frontier models.”

Cadence credits the token savings to balancing its EDA and system design automation (SDA) “tool calls with LLM invocations.” As an analogy, Cunningham said, “You don’t need to drive to Safeway in the jet engine,” and you want to use “the right model at the right time for the right task.”

Runtime does matter, too: as Rob Knoth, senior group director of strategy and new ventures at Cadence, told Tom’s Hardware Premium in September that a tool call could take anywhere from hours to days to return a value, while the AI industry’s training loops are “used to minutes.” Efficiency could also lower costs, since Maestro use counts toward Cadence’s agent pricing, a subscription with a consumption allowance and charges for use beyond it, Cunningham said. He didn’t say whether the token savings cut a customer’s bill.

Being flexible for the customer is a key element of any solution, and for Cadence’s competitor Synopsys, this lies in Autopilot, which Synopsys says allows customers to “choose among commercial, open-source, and fine-tuned language models” across “Synopsys-managed and customer-managed deployments,” with cloud or on-premises infrastructure. For agent security, such as sandboxing, Cadence says it’s working with Nvidia on an integration with Nvidia’s OpenShell Reference Architecture, which Nvidia launched last week, naming both Cadence and Synopsys. These options can help protect customer intellectual property.

Cadence has had a busy 12 months with customers and agents alike. During Cadence’s July earnings call, CEO Anirudh Devgan said ChipStack, its design and verification agent, “has more than 20 customer engagements,” and ViraStack, its custom and analog agent, “more than 25 customer engagements.” Socionext said just last week that it was applying InnoStack. Silicon Labs has also credited ChipStack with accelerating debugging, and both companies say they are watching Maestro next.

Cadence's agentic consolidation began with its acquisition of ChipStack back in November 2025. In June 2026, the company claimed that its agent had reached Level 5 autonomy, which we explored in detail. In September, Knoth teased Maestro’s ingredients to Tom's Hardware Premium a month early, two days before the GPT-Synopsys announcement: “reinforcement learning loops, domain-specific post-training of open-weight models, model routing.” Maestro is now sitting under all four super agents, targeting a similar year-end window to Synopsys’ Autopilot; the table below has the full timeline.

This rapid pace of progress means that a clear distinction has to be made between early access and general availability. Both Cadence and Synopsys can point to customer engagements, and, at least in the latter’s case for the AgentEngineer portfolio and Autopilot platform, general availability remains a goal by year’s end; Cadence hasn’t given a general availability date for Maestro. For GPT-Synopsys, though, only “early technology engagements are underway,” according to its partners. The platforms and agents remain works in progress.

For Maestro, Cunningham hopes for “more case studies, more quantifiable benefits” through Q4. The real story, as he aptly put it, is that “we’re going to bring agents and agentic AI natively into our vertical, not that our vertical is going to get embedded into general-purpose agents.” Only customer results on real workflows will test Cadence’s 30% number, but going by what both companies have shown so far, their own early figures are extremely promising and exciting for the EDA industry.

China is spending more time loitering near undersea cables in the Pacific Ocean than any other nation, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S.-based think tank in Washington, DC. The analysis compared the behavior of 200 research vessels from 47 different nations, including the U.S. and Russia, and found that Chinese vessels spent a "statistically significant larger share of time" near critical infrastructure.

The analysis, reported by Indo-Pacific Defense Forum, notes that Chinese activity was particularly suspicious in this regard. It notes that the "persistent and disproportionate activity" means that China "may be leveraging its research fleet for underwater data collection that may aid... analysis of terrain for sabotage or submarine operations."

Civilian research vessels provide a unique cover for states looking for "plausible deniability" for their research gathering activities. The report mentions the activity of a ship from the Xiang Yang Hong research fleet which, between July and October 2024, spent time near three undersea cables that connected the U.S. with Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Guam and others.

The ships move in a "lawnmower" pattern which, it notes, is associated with surveying to create accurate seafloor maps. While the ships themselves aren't part of the PRC's navy, the data they collect could be used to serve China in future conflicts.

These "gray zone research activities" continue in an era of Chinese conflict with its neighbors as it asserts territorial claims in the South China Sea against states like the Philippines and Vietnam, not to mention its claims over Taiwan, which Beijing considers a breakaway province.

It also follows a pattern of authoritarian states looking to dominate undersea infrastructure. Last week, a report in The Telegraph found 500 incidents of Russian monitoring near undersea cables over the last five years. Meanwhile, Iran has threatened to attack undersea cables in the Strait of Hormuz in the event of further assaults by the United States if conflict erupts again.

Intel and AMD have spent decades competing for the processors inside PCs and data centers, but the rivalry hasn't stopped the two companies from working together when their interests align. And now, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has reportedly discussed potential areas of cooperation with AMD chief Lisa Su, adding another possible partnership to the mix as Intel tries to regain its footing in the semiconductor industry.

According to a recording (embedded below) of Tan’s October 24 fireside chat with Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association (CASPA) President Jimmy Cheng, the Intel CEO outlined his plans to rebuild the company’s CPU business, develop chips tailored to specific customer workloads, and attract more customers to its foundry operations. However, Tan did not publicly detail the reported areas of potential cooperation with AMD CEO Lisa Su.

Intel has traditionally built its business around its own processor roadmaps, but Tan says the company needs to be more flexible as customers look for silicon designed for particular workloads. He pointed to Intel's Xeon processors as one area where that approach is changing, alongside continued development of GPUs and accelerators.

"We have to reclaim the leadership in CPU. That is something that I am very determined to do." Tan said.

He also described a change in how Intel approaches customization. "Intel is so proud they never want to modify for customer needs," he said. "I'm modifying it for customer needs, and so that, I think, to me, is a fast-growing area, and I'm double, triple down on it."

The strategy extends beyond conventional CPUs, with Tan identifying application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), co-packaged optics (CPO), physical AI, and advanced packaging as potential growth businesses. He wants two or three of these areas to eventually contribute around 10% of Intel's revenue each.

Intel's foundry business is another major part of Tan's plans. He said the company's 18A manufacturing process had reached volume production, while development of its next-generation 14A process was progressing strongly. Intel has already released version 0.5 of the 14A process design kit (PDK), which provides chip designers with the technical information and tools needed to develop products for the process.

Tan said version 0.9 was coming next, followed by version 1.0 for volume production in early 2027. "We have multiple customers [who] really want us to really scale their business," he said, referring to interest in Intel's foundry services.

However, Intel did not identify those customers or disclose the size of any potential manufacturing orders during the discussion. Notably, in January, Intel had two prospective customers evaluating 14A test chips, with firm supplier decisions expected during the second half of 2026 and the first half of 2027. Tan also described foundry manufacturing as a business where trust matters as much as technology. Customers hand over wafers that will eventually become products on which their own revenue depends, making missed deadlines or manufacturing problems costly. "The moment we take on the foundry, take on the wafer is a lot of responsibility to make them successful," he said.

He recalled one customer who had waited six to eight months hoping he would become CEO before presenting 15 areas where Intel had fallen short. Tan said he addressed the problems individually, after which the customer agreed to deepen its relationship with Intel.

That said, the prospect of further cooperation would not be entirely new. In October 2024, Intel and AMD established the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group alongside other technology companies to coordinate improvements to the x86 instruction set architecture and make it easier for hardware and software developers to support both companies' processors.

That cooperation has since moved into AI software. Last week, it emerged that AMD was integrating its ZenDNN optimizations into Intel's open-source oneDNN library, bringing the companies' CPU optimization work for PyTorch AI inference under a common software path. The companies have also worked together on Advanced Matrix Extensions and other x86 capabilities through the advisory group, showing that they cooperate on shared technologies while continuing to compete for customers. For now, however, neither company has announced a new agreement arising from the discussions.

AI has forced PC component prices up with no slowdown in sight over the last year. While building your own might be expensive, pre-built gaming PCs continue to offer the best value in many cases. With that in mind, you could secure a huge $1,070 discount on an Alienware Aurora gaming PC at Newegg right now, featuring an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 and 32GB DDR5 RAM for $2,199.99.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

Dell's premium Alienware gaming brand usually comes with a price premium compared to budget or no-brand models. With this $1,070 discount applied, you're getting a rig for 4K-capable gaming at a fairer price than you would get by buying from Dell directly. Alongside the RTX 5070, this ACT1250 model ships with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF processor and a 1TB SSD.

The GPU is often the big-selling feature in a gaming PC. With the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, you're getting one of Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPUs with 6,144 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR7 VRAM, operating on a 192-bit memory bus. What that means for gaming is that you've got a card that will smash through high frame rates, even with the highest graphics presets, at 1080p.

At 1440p, you're also going to see good performance, although the most demanding games might need a drop down or two. You can also fall back to using Nvidia DLSS with multi-frame generation for an uplift, powered by AI to add extra frames into the mix for smoother gameplay, especially if you want to game at 4K. Our GPU benchmarks show that the RTX 5070 is a strong option compared to its rivals, offering slightly better performance than the RTX 4070 it replaces.

You're getting an Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF CPU with this build. This is a 20-core Arrow Lake CPU with 20 cores, with eight good-for-gaming performance cores, along with 12 efficient cores for multi-threaded work. This is locked, meaning you can overclock it, and it ships with a max boost clock speed of 5.5 GHz.

This isn't a CPU able to compete with top-spec AMD rivals, but it's a solid enough performer when you couple it with the RTX 5070's power. Elsewhere, though, you're getting 32GB of DDR5 memory, so no compromises there. There's also a 1TB SSD, leaving you enough storage for at least a few big AAA installs.

You'll be saving $1,070 with this pre-built Alienware Aurora ACT1250 gaming PC at this $2,199.99 Newegg sale price. With the RTX 5070 in this build, you've got a 4K-capable machine that'll let you play modern games for years into the future.

The AI-powered inrush of software vulnerability reports over the last year has shined a light on how many critical pieces of open-source software are chronically underfunded. The latest victim is PHP, the scripting language powering about 71% of websites, making the news due to a critical remote code execution vulnerability. The PHP Foundation, which develops and oversees the language, reportedly counts only one full-time person and 14 "mostly part-time" contractors. That's bad enough, but the real problem goes far deeper thanks to the internet's lazy development practices and systems administration.

In an interview with Reuters, the PHP Foundation's Executive Director Elizabeth Barron spells it out clearly: she's the only full-time person on staff, and works with the contractors' help. Pertaining to the software itself, the team's job is to develop and maintain the PHP core, including taking care of security fixes. The core team accepts contributions from the world at large, in an arrangement not too dissimilar to Linux kernel development — except that project is far better-manned, with many full-time contributors and company-employed developers.

Naturally, the PHP foundation collaborates with other companies and many cybersecurity firms, but the dev team was stretched thin even before the increase in security vulnerabilities with the help of countless AI agents. Barron does note that there was no reported exploitation of PHP2Shell before the security fix came out.

But the lack of a higher funding level likely led to the "structural failure" to address the underlying vulnerability in a timely manner, as the out-of-memory condition (OOM) that eventually led to the 2026 exploits was originally discovered in 2024. Given how widespread PHP is, and how many third-party extensions there are, the work on fixing the OOM problem "stalled and restarted repeatedly over months." It didn't help that the Chainguard security firm broke the PHP2Shell embargo too early by accident.

Even still, the team is thankful for the money it has, as "without the Foundation’s funding it would have been impossible to have multiple people work on this issue full time, eventually through weekends and around the clock to coordinate and communicate with other involved parties." One would hope that this latest incident releases the purse strings of more companies that make their living off of PHP.

And yet, this failing is far larger than just bugs in the core language, which, notably, were only one point update away. In theory, any server running the current 8.x brand of the software should be upgraded in minutes with the released patches, but reality was far different, as websites went down for hours or days out of fear of exploitation.

The real problem reared its ugly head: nearly 73% of PHP installations were running versions well past their end-of-life (EOL) date, meaning that obtaining fixes is now far harder. Many professionals who worked with the language, including yours truly, had spent decades warning of this reckoning, even considering many Linux distributions were backporting fixes.

Many of these servers were still running PHP 7, a version that was completely EOL'd four years ago, with many years of advance warning, and that originally came out in late 2015, almost eleven years back. If that doesn't sound silly enough, let it sink in that around 7.7% of PHP sites were still running version 5.x, which first saw the light of day 22 years ago in 2005, and saw the final sunset in 2018. It's safe to say that everyone had plenty of time to prepare.

To further illustrate the ridiculousness of collective complacency: the jump from PHP 5 to 7 and then from 7 to 8 required changing sections of website code, but the vast majority of said changes are simple to find and apply, and even before AI, there were already automated code-patching tools around. A couple years ago I mapped them all out for a PHP 5-to-8 codebase conversion myself.

Most of the alterations were about dropping support for ancient functions and libraries, which themselves had had long-standing warnings of incoming deprecation. Not a lot of core language features underwent modification, and a lot of convenient syntax was added to help clarify fiddly, error-prone code, too. That the overall situation got to this point beggars belief and illustrates how complacency, laziness, and cost-cutting are a far bigger force than a cadre of AI bots digging for flaws.

YouTube retro gaming experiment channel Throaty Mumbo created a Windows-like desktop environment on the NES. The project took advantage of the EverDrive N8 Pro, an FPGA-powered NES cartridge that handles the heavy x86 emulation. Throaty Mumbo has made the NESPC project available on GitHub and included firmware for an RP2350 he used to make a USB interface for keyboard, mouse, and MIDI functionality.

Throaty Mumbo started out with ROMs he found on the internet, trying out a Chinese Windows 98 ROM that didn’t really do much. It had Paint, Windows Explorer, and plenty of things that looked like Windows 98 programs, but none of them were actually functional; only images of what the programs approximately look like. He also tried out a ROM of Linux, a project named NES86 by decrazyo, but it was incredibly slow and unusable, leading him to create his own ROM.

Since the NES’ 6502 8-bit microprocessor was too slow to emulate x86, Throaty Mumbo used the EverDrive N8 Pro, which has a much more powerful ARM-based Cyclone IV FPGA. It simply goes into the cartridge slot and takes advantage of the NES’ cartridge-side processing, basically making it act similarly to an external graphics card by outsourcing tasks to another processing unit. To run x86, Throaty Mumbo used Next186, an open-source FPGA soft processor core that can make the FPGA execute Intel 80186-compatible instructions as if it were an x86 CPU.

Throaty Mumbo first showed his NESPC project with a command-line interface, demonstrating how fast you can navigate the environment and run command-line programs like tty-tetris, which didn’t work well at such a low resolution, but he did show a command-line train animation running quite smoothly. He finally showed that he built a whole desktop environment that looked like a very stripped-down version of the Windows 98 ROM earlier. His UI, however, was more functional, serving as a menu replacement for the EverDrive N8 Pro menu ROM, even having a fully playable Minesweeper in the Start menu. The UI also had program icons that served as ways to start game ROMs and access files inside the EverDrive N8 Pro cartridge’s storage.

Throaty Mumbo wasn’t satisfied, however, as moving a mouse cursor and typing with an NES controller isn’t the best desktop experience, so he tried adapting a Family BASIC keyboard for the Famicom to it using the NES expansion slot and a breakout board to connect jumper wires to specific pins. It didn’t work very well, with each keystroke outputting multiple letters and symbols; the bulk on the bottom also didn’t allow the NES to sit flat on the desk.

Throaty Mumbo then thought of using an RP2350 microcontroller with custom firmware so he could connect a USB device into the NES controller ports. This worked much better, even allowing smooth mouse inputs, but it only had one USB port, so it could only take either a keyboard or a mouse. His solution to this was to use a keyboard with a USB hub built into it, which worked great. Throaty Mumbo further experimented with this USB input as a MIDI device, plugging in a USB piano keyboard and playing with a very basic digital audio workstation (DAW), even playing some Mario soundtracks from NSF (Nintendo Sound Format) files.

To get even more of a retro PC experience, he added his previous 3D-printed NES CD drive project, the NESCD, which plugs into a port on the EverDrive N8 Pro cartridge and the expansion slot, allowing him to play music in the background while playing an NES game at the same time without losing any performance. He then upgraded the NESCD with a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32 to add WiFi capability, allowing for 4 MB/s download and 90 KB/s upload speeds. Since the internet capabilities are very limited, the NES uses Throaty Mumbo’s laptop as a proxy to fetch the NES’ requests from the internet and simplify them to be more easily displayed on the limited resolution. However, Throaty Mumbo also added an option to connect directly to the internet, which would be a miserable experience.

Modders have discovered a way to remove imposed half-speed AI performance limits on Nvidia RTX 20, 30, and 40-series GPUs with a firmware exploit, VideoCardz reports. Without the limitation, the RTX 4090 can achieve double its peak tensor rate, and matrix math can improve by up to 80% for the RTX 3090 Ti, with gains on other cards varying. Real workloads gain significantly less than the RTX 4090’s doubled peak would imply, and chatbot token speeds remain about the same, as that performance is dependent on memory bandwidth.

For all impacted GeForce generations, Nvidia imposed a limit that, per its own published specs, runs FP32-accumulate math at half each card’s FP16-accumulate rate. That does not apply to its Turing and Ampere pro cards. The unlock returns native matrix-math throughput to owners of the cards, which can speed up prompt processing and image generation.

Three separate projects offer generation unlocks, each with its own unofficial Linux module, while experimental Windows builds pursue a different approach. Card coverage varies by generation, with gpu-unlock handling Ampere and listing the GA102/GA103/GA104/GA106 series IDs. An Ada fork, gpu-unlock-ada, covers the RTX 4090 and, experimentally, the 4090 D, 4070 Ti Super, and the 4060 Ti 16GB. The turing-unlock project, adapted from gpu-unlock, works with the RTX 2080 Ti. See Table 1 for a breakdown.

How much faster the cards get

The peak doubling is for tensor rates, with the Ada fork developer’s RTX 4090 moving from 165.6 to 331.6 TFLOPS on FP16 and 165.5 to 330.6 TFLOPS on BF16. The gpu-unlock-ada README states that, in one independent owner’s matrix-multiply benchmark, cuBLAS GEMM medians only saw improvements of 12–34% and up to 20%, respectively. A separate data point, for an RTX 4070 Ti on Windows, saw larger matrix-multiply gains of +80.1% and +76.4%, the difference possibly caused by power limits.

In the matrix-multiply benchmark, a tested RTX 3090 Ti scored +35% for FP16, +80% for BF16, and +94% for TF32, based on a user’s test with a modified Nvidia driver. The gpu-unlock README lists BF16 matrix-multiply gains from user reports of +25–67% for the RTX 3090, +70–73% for the 3080 10GB, +56–59% for a memory-modded 20GB version, +73–81% for the 3070, and around +80% for the 3060 12GB, though it notes they are not directly comparable. The power limit “matters a lot”: the lowest figure, +25%, came from cards capped at 225 W. For Ampere, LLM prefill improved 14–36%, with diffusion and FlashAttention speeding up, but LLM decode and INT8 stayed “about the same.”

An RTX 2080 Ti with a 22GB memory mod, a Dell OEM card limited to 250 W, saw FP16 matrix-multiply improvements of +36% to +64% depending on size; BF16 is unaffected, since Turing has no BF16 hardware. A user’s variant of the card at 260 W saw a +59% improvement. A separate project, KohakUnlock, on a Leadtek 2080 Ti 22GB saw an 85% improvement on an instruction rate test, with a best matrix-multiply median of +53% against a second, locked card of the same model.

There is “not a claim of a 2× application/game speedup,” says KohakUnlock’s README. See Table 2 for a rundown of the numbers for all three generations. The turing-unlock README notes that the mod “may damage your hardware,” while KohakUnlock adds that it “can hang a GPU or host, prevent boot, corrupt data, or damage hardware,” so caution is advised.

How the exploit works

The explainer for gpu-unlock states that the rate limits are in two “speed selector” registers that the host driver can’t write, but Nvidia’s signed SEC2 “Booter” firmware has a stack buffer overflow which can be exploited to run code in “heavy secure” mode. This was discovered after Nvidia published a debug Booter encrypted with a known public test key. A single 4-byte write with the V67 payload opens the privilege mask so the host can set the full rate, and the module then resets the card before Nvidia’s driver binds it.

The underlying bug is described in Jon Pry’s “A Canary in the Crypto Mine: Defeating Stack Protection in a GPU Secure Coprocessor,” published on Zenodo in June. The stack overflow was found on the CMP 170HX in the Heavy Secure Falcon, and the V67 constants come from WildFlash1st/cmp90hx-unlock. The pre-driver timing gpu-unlock uses appear to come from WildFlash1st’s separate Windows EFI bootloader, cmp90hx-unlock-for-windows, while the best-known use of the exploit is the CMP Unlocker for the CMP 170HX. Zagitta, the maintainer of gpu-unlock, said on Hacker News that the project is their work but “the exploits … aren’t my ideas by any means” and that the unlock “just flips the 2 bits” needed.

Zagitta said that RTX 40 support is in progress and that forks are already unlocking those cards. Zagitta added that Hopper and Blackwell cards are “out of scope for this approach” at least.

The Ada fork says other boards “remain unverified” and that shared firmware “does not establish support for untested cards.” The turing-unlock project, likewise, has a list of untested Turing IDs. Gaps remain for GA103 and most Ada and Turing cards. None of the projects contains a roadmap, but data is being gathered, as gpu-unlock is asking GPU owners for compatibility reports.

A hacker has successfully breached a vulnerable server, claiming a prize pot worth $2,021.22 in Bitcoin after exploiting PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, a posting on the Steal My Bitcoin website has shown. The challenge's creator confirmed the win on October 25, ending an experiment designed to test claims that exploiting critical software vulnerabilities is becoming easier.

The challenge, hosted on the website a day earlier and announced through a forum post, initially offered approximately $502 worth of Bitcoin. Donations subsequently increased the pot to 0.02511679 BTC, worth $2,021.22 at the time of the win. The creator's website recorded the successful claim at 15:47 UTC on October 25, after the challenge had been running for approximately 19.28 hours.

The experiment follows the disclosure of CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, two critical PHP vulnerabilities that can allow remote code execution under certain conditions. The flaws received critical severity ratings, and fixes were released on October 21. Turning the vulnerabilities into a reliable attack, however, requires more than simply running a publicly available exploit against an arbitrary server.

The challenge's creator, posting under the name ‘cloudlandsdev’, had said the project was designed to see whether anyone could use the vulnerabilities to compromise the server and claim its Bitcoin. “Made this because I'm curious if anyone out there has figured out how to actually use this PHP RCE, we spent the last few days panicking. Have fun!” the creator wrote.

PHP2Shell refers to two vulnerabilities in PHP’s request-handling and memory-management processes. Under vulnerable configurations, an attacker could potentially exploit these flaws to execute code with the privileges of the web server account.

The experiment quickly attracted attention, but the resulting traffic also became a problem. In an update, the creator said visitors were exhausting the server's available computing resources shortly after each capacity increase. Limited storage also prevented the server from retaining all its logs, complicating efforts to document a successful attempt.

The winner, ‘KillaBoi’, published a proof of concept on GitHub describing the attack against the live challenge and providing a local test environment. The exploit took advantage of PHP's handling of multipart uploads and session data, where, by pushing a PHP worker beyond its memory limit, the attacker could leave internal state in an inconsistent condition. Subsequent requests then exposed memory contents through session cookies, providing information about the locations of PHP's memory structures and executable code.

Notably, the attacker used those addresses to construct a forged PHP data structure that triggered command execution during cleanup. The final request returned evidence that the command had run inside the PHP process. Although the server was successfully compromised, the recovered private key did not match the advertised prize address. However, on-chain data shows the funds were subsequently sent to an address “bc1qr4…lk7a9”, labeled as a Kraken cold wallet.

Bitcoin recovery efforts have previously involved reverse-engineering software rather than exploiting a live server. In 2024, hardware hacker Joe Grand, known as ‘Kingpin”, and researcher Bruno recovered access to 43.6 BTC belonging to an owner identified as Michael, who had forgotten a 20-character wallet password.

The researchers reverse-engineered an older version of RoboForm's password generator and identified a flaw that made the password predictable. They recovered the wallet in November 2023, when the Bitcoin was worth approximately $1.6 million. Its value had climbed to nearly $3 million by the time the recovery was reported in May 2024.

A more recent case involved a Bitcoin holder who recovered five BTC worth roughly $400,000 in May 2026 after losing access to the wallet for years. The pseudonymous owner, known as ‘cprkrn’, said Anthropic's Claude AI helped identify a backup file from December 2019, which could be decrypted using a password the owner had previously written down in a notebook. The backup contained the keys needed to access the Bitcoin.

The latest event comes as security teams face pressure to patch PHP installations following the public disclosure of PHP2Shell. A separate report on the vulnerability disclosure controversy detailed how premature publication disrupted the coordinated release process. That said, for now, evidence of the latest successful attack suggests that exploiting these PHP vulnerabilities may not be that hard after all.

Reddit communities are increasingly tightening their rules around artificial intelligence, with some restricting AI-generated submissions and others limiting discussions about the technology. The latest crackdown comes from Reddit’s r/opensource community, whose moderators announced sweeping restrictions on October 24, banning projects built with AI, projects that use AI, and software intended for AI. The announcement has sparked backlash over its broad wording, with some developers saying AI-assisted coding does not automatically make a project low quality or any less open source.

Notably, the new rules go beyond AI, with projects promoted in r/opensource now required to have been actively maintained for at least a year, have multiple contributors, maintain an existing community, and use an OSI-approved open-source license. Common student projects, such as note-taking apps and PDF viewers, are also excluded, while requests for maintainers or additional contributors are no longer permitted.

The moderators also require Reddit accounts to be at least a year old and have a history of significant contributions. They warned that users who contact the moderators after attempting to post could face a permanent ban and a mute. The announcement takes a particularly hard line on AI-assisted development.

“If it's obvious you're using AI in your project, we don't want it. Tokens are cheap, and we don't care how many you spent to make your amazing project,” the moderators wrote.

The policy also tells people who do not speak English to find another community, arguing that moderators cannot reliably distinguish AI-written English from AI-translated text. That provision has drawn separate criticism, with one commenter calling the hostility toward non-English speakers “disgusting.”

Other developers objected that the rules could exclude legitimate projects simply because they were built by a solo developer or used AI tools. One developer said their nine-year-old project had more than 300 GitHub stars but only one contributor, leaving it at risk of exclusion despite having no AI involvement.

The restrictions have also prompted questions about whether projects such as the Linux kernel could fall foul of the new rules as AI becomes more common in software development.

Meanwhile, Linux has taken a different approach. In April, the kernel project formalized rules allowing AI-assisted code contributions, with disclosure requirements and human contributors remaining responsible for submitted code and any resulting bugs or security problems. The policy initially introduced an “Assisted-by” tag for AI involvement.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has previously pushed back against blanket opposition to AI tools. “AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one,” he said in July, during a discussion about AI-assisted code review.

For context, the r/opensource debate does not mean Linux has been banned. Moderator Wolvereness said the kernel would satisfy the project's minimum requirements and suggested that whether a project was obviously AI-generated would be a subjective decision. That leaves considerable room for moderators to interpret the policy differently across projects.

The backlash has already prompted the creation of r/TrueOpenSource, a rival subreddit launched by Reddit user u/esk6plays. The r/opensource moderators acknowledged the new community in an edit to their announcement, describing it as a potential refuge for users affected by the restrictions.

The debate is not limited to Reddit’s open-source community. In April, the moderators of r/programming temporarily banned posts about large language models, saying the volume was overwhelming technical discussions. In May, they replaced the trial ban with a policy treating most AI and LLM content as off-topic, while allowing deeply technical discussions of implementation. Meanwhile, open-source projects such as Gentoo and NetBSD have imposed restrictions on AI-generated code contributions, reflecting concerns about code quality, licensing, and accountability.

Open-source maintainers have also struggled with the volume of AI-generated contributions and reports. Projects including cURL, tldraw, Node.js, and OCaml have faced problems involving questionable bug reports or large AI-generated patches, prompting concerns about the time needed to review submissions and verify their quality. These cases have fueled calls for better disclosure and human review, rather than a single approach across every project.

That said, the latest restrictions contrast with OpenAI's efforts to encourage the use of its coding tools in open-source projects. Through its Codex for Open Source program, the company offers eligible maintainers six months of ChatGPT Pro with Codex, API credits, and conditional access to Codex Security.

OpenAI says the support is intended to help maintainers with coding, issue triage, code review, security work, and release workflows, although it does not directly address the r/opensource controversy.

Denmark’s Ministry of Digitization, which has since been merged with other ministries and is now called the Ministry for Research, Education, and Digitization, has reportedly ended its experiment to replace Microsoft Office with an open-source alternative. According to Danish publication Computerworld [machine translated], the pilot project was launched in 2025 and involved 38 employees, all of whom would start using the British open-source Collabora office suite instead of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

The experiment was initiated by the then Digitization Minister Caroline Stage, who wanted to reduce the country’s dependence on American technology. Denmark isn’t alone in moving away from U.S. software, with France and the Netherlands both taking steps to replace Microsoft Windows. However, it seemed that the experiment fizzled out less than six months after it started. It had reportedly ended by the time the Danish government called for an early election in February 2026, with some employees complaining about issues with style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and challenges with tracking changes.

But even though it’s been months since the experiment reportedly ended, Prof. Mikkel Flyberbom of the Copenhagen Business School complains that the project hasn’t been properly evaluated. “It’s a good idea to test alternatives in a pilot project,” the professor said in an email. “However, I wish that the ministry would take the opportunity to learn from the pilot project and share those experiences with other parts of the public sector.”

The Microsoft Office alternative had to work with the then Ministry of Digitization’s central case management system called F2, but it’s unclear why it only chose Collabora for the project. While Collabora is based on LibreOffice, which is one of the most popular and mature open-source alternatives to Microsoft’s office suite, there are also several other alternatives it could have tested, like OnlyOffice, OpenOffice, and Calligra. There have also been recent attempts to use AI to create open-source versions of subscription-based software like Microsoft 365 and the Adobe Creative Suite, but governments would likely want to choose a reliable and stable build instead of these experimental AI-built apps.

It’s still a mystery why the Danish government chose to work with only open-source Microsoft Office alternatives in its testing. It probably would’ve been better if different teams used three alternatives and then the project proponents conducted a review after the testing period to determine the best solution. Nevertheless, the question is moot with the apparent failure of the open-source experiment.

AI spending is generating revenue for technology providers, but most other S&P 500 companies have yet to show comparable gains in productivity or profit margins, a report by Apollo’s Daily Spark analysis has shown.

Artificial intelligence has helped fuel a boom in technology spending, but the financial benefits remain difficult to spot across much of corporate America. Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok said on October 24 that revenue per worker and profit margins were rising for the Magnificent Seven technology stocks while remaining flat across the other 493 companies in the S&P 500.

Notably, Slok’s analysis found no clear evidence that AI is boosting productivity growth, despite heavy investment in the technology. Revenue per worker and profit margins have risen among the Magnificent Seven but remain flat across the other 493 companies in the S&P 500, according to the report. “Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech,” Slok wrote.

Running AI models at scale can quickly drive up costs since many providers charge by token usage, so bills climb as employees make more requests or AI agents process data and handle increasingly complex tasks. Slok said mainstream companies were beginning to view token spending as a cost center rather than a source of growth. Venture capital-backed businesses are spending more on tokens, he noted, while established companies have less incentive to pay for the newest models if cheaper alternatives can do the job.

That creates a problem for AI providers hoping to turn growing adoption into a lasting revenue stream. Selling more computing power and model access can boost suppliers’ sales, but customers need to see corresponding gains in productivity, revenue or operating costs to keep spending at the same pace. Moreover, if AI expenses rise without a measurable improvement in business performance, the additional spending could weigh on margins.

“AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins.” Slok added. “The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector.”

Slok’s analysis also points to a broader limitation: AI adoption remains concentrated among a relatively small group of companies. Unless usage spreads across more industries and produces measurable results, the technology’s effect on the wider economy could remain limited.

The same tension is emerging in India’s financial technology sector. A PwC India survey reported by Business Standard on September 11 found that 84% of surveyed fintech respondents had yet to see measurable financial results from their AI investments.

That has not stopped companies from pressing ahead. The survey also found that 48% of respondents identified proprietary intelligence as a leading strategic priority. Meanwhile, 30% expected customer experience to drive AI agent adoption over the next three to five years, followed by cost reduction and productivity gains at 22%.

Trust is another hurdle for businesses looking to deploy AI agents in financial services. As per the survey, 41% of respondents identified customer trust and adoption as the biggest barriers to scaling agentic payments, while 33% pointed to fraud, security and risk management as major concerns.

AI agents could expand the technology’s role in business by handling multistep tasks rather than simply responding to prompts, although their ability to access tools, process information and act across company systems also brings additional usage costs and security concerns.

Nvidia has been developing tools to address some of those risks, previously, introducing its Open Agent Safety Platform, a hardware-and-software security stack designed to help businesses control AI agents and restrict potentially harmful actions. Rising token consumption has also prompted companies including Microsoft, Meta and Amazon to rein in AI usage as employees adopt the tools and agentic workloads drive up bills. The trend highlights a growing challenge for businesses: encouraging wider AI adoption without allowing operating costs to spiral.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also acknowledged the problem, describing AI token costs as a “huge issue” for customers seeking better value from their spending. The infrastructure behind the AI boom carries its own price tag with Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft having committed enormous sums to data centers, chips and the power needed to run AI workloads.

When it comes to mechanical keyboards, IQUNIX has always been ahead of the curve. Before COVID turned the mainstream onto mechanical keyboards, the company had already been releasing some of the best mechanical keyboards available, quietly making the case for PBT keycaps and premium materials that have since become the norm.

With a catalog of traditional mechanical keyboards under its belt, it’s not surprising that the company would be ready to branch into new territory. It has the Hall Effect demographic covered with its EZ series, but the MQ80 goes another direction entirely. It takes all of the lessons the company learned about how to create an exceptional typing and gaming experience and compressed it. It’s all aluminum, low profile, and offers some of the best-sounding keystrokes of its kind, but steep competition and poor portability hold it back from being the go-to pick it might otherwise be.

IQUNIX MQ80 Specs

Design and Construction of the IQUNIX MQ80

The IQUNIX MQ80 breaks the mold for IQUNIX, but carries the same 75-percent layout as countless mechanical keyboards before it. The form factor is sometimes referred to as a “Compact TKL,” since it shares most of the same keys — minus the blank spaces in between. The result is a condensed slab of keys, including a full function row, arrow cluster, and seven navigation and editing keys.

Nothing too out of the ordinary there, but the MQ80 marries that compact layout with an impressively low height of only 0.4 inches (10.8mm) at the front and 1.08 inches (27.5mm) in the rear. The keycaps are the same height across every row, and while they're scooped to keep your finger centered above the switch, they otherwise feel identical below the finger tip. This makes it an easy transition if you’re coming from a laptop or Apple Magic Keyboard, but first-time LP users should be prepared for a learning curve.

The keyboard is wireless and supports both 2.4GHz and Bluetooth 5.1 connections, as well as wired if you need to use it while it’s recharging. It sports a 4,000 mAh battery which IQUNIX claims can sustain the keyboard for up to 350 hours. This is with the usual caveats of that being over Bluetooth with all of the lighting disabled, etc. etc. — but I was able to use it for close to two weeks between recharges, even with the lighting on.

The MQ80 is a bit of a curiosity, if I’m being honest. It's thin, yes, but it’s certainly not light. It uses a heavy, CNC-milled aluminum case, just like the company’s prior models and countless others aiming for that “premium feel.” It’s a case study in how looks can be deceiving.

In fact, it has been a pretty common occurrence for people to comment on how surprising its weight is. The keyboard tips the scales at 2.6 pounds, which is around what you encounter with a full-size mechanical keyboard or nicer TKL. From a low profile keyboard that everyone assumes will be airy and effortless to carry around, it flies in the face of what you might expect.

So while technically, yes, it’s a portable keyboard (IQUNIX even provides a nice hardshell carrying case to tote it around in), it's not one I could see most people wanting to carry every day. Instead, this seems designed to live on your desk, providing a solid option for fans of the profile who prefer to use it for all of their typing — not just on the go.

In typical IQUNIX fashion, the MQ80 is built to an enthusiast's standard. The case features intricate milling with plenty of small accents that lend it a vaguely cyberpunk impression. The keycaps feature colored legends and contrasting accents that complete its visual identity. The keyboard is available in white or black with keycaps to match, and both look fetching.

The keycaps are made of thick PBT plastic. They have a light texture to add some grip to your typing experience and use dye sublimated legends that won't chip or fade over time.

The switches below those keycaps are Kailh Rose Red, a lightweight linear switch with a 40g actuation force, 2.8mm of travel distance, and a 1.2mm actuation point. Despite their shortness, they offer 70% of the movement of a full-height switch. This makes them easier to transition to in how they feel to bottom out, but they still feel sensitive. This is a keyboard to use with a light touch or you'll find yourself with strings of single letters or running from cover before you mean to.

The switches are hot-swappable with any Kailh Choc V2 alternative, but there just aren't many options. Gateron has run away with the variety end of the low profile switch market, but you can swap them out if you're inclined to do so.

The keyboard features per-key RGB backlighting, customizable within the VIA web configurator or with shortcut keys. The keycaps aren't backlit, however, so it's not great for use in the dark if you aren't a touch typist.

The internal structure of the keyboard is where things get really interesting. The MQ80 came into the world following a run of pre-built custom keyboards IQUNIX produced under its SUPER product line. It pulled direct influence from the boutique, limited run, group buy custom keyboards popular on r/mechanicalkeyboards. All of those lessons come into play with the MQ80.

Beneath the keys lies a multi-layer assembly that makes even the best gaming keyboards look simple in comparison. It's an intentional system meant to filter and refine the sound and feel of every keystroke without the need to customize or adjust anything yourself.

Moving from the top down, the switches snap into a fiberglass (FR4) plate, a middle-ground material that balances firmness with crisp keystrokes.

Beneath the plate and PCB are two layers of foam, each with different acoustic properties, and a plastic film. The first layer of foam is thick PORON and fills in the empty space between the switches, plate, and PCB. It cuts reverb and helps isolate each switch. A much thinner, less dense sheet of IXPE foam and a plastic PET sheet sit below the switches to add a crispness and pop to each keystroke.

Below the circuit board is another layer of PORON foam that filters soundwaves that pass through and cushion each press. Finally, in the very bottom of the case is another layer of IXPE foam intended to reflect mid-range sounds and act as a final buffer before hitting the aluminum of the case.

It sounds like a lot and it is, but it doesn't end there. The PCB assembly attaches to the case with a modified gasket mount ("Le-Tray Gasket Mount") that imparts some of the qualities of gasket mounting into this much slimmer design. Six arms from the assembly attach to the case with silicone buffers, holding it aloft to deliver pillowy bottom outs.

As a wireless keyboard, IQUNIX also had to fit a battery into its slim frame. It's surprisingly large given the space constraints with a 4,000mAh capacity. This translates into 350 hours of rated uptime, but only when using Bluetooth and no RGB backlighting. In practice, keeping RGB on high and using 2.4GHz, it lasts around 45 hours but your specific figure will depend on use.

Typing Experience on the IQUNIX MQ80

While there's an obvious pre-requisite to prefer low profile keys, you'll also need to be a fan of linear switches. And not just that, you'll need to be a fan of lightweight, fast actuating low profile switches with keycaps that feel identical under your fingers.

If I sound a little salty, I'm not. It's just that I've used hundreds of mechanical keyboards and typed A Song of Ice and Fire worth of words on them, including more than a fair share of competing low profile keyboards, and it's still a pain in the ass to switch back to them.

At least at first, because you do get used to it and the light touch required. Before long, I remembered to pay special attention to the navigation bumps on the "F" and "J" keys. Once everything clicked, I honestly felt faster and more nimble as a typist.

Surprisingly, this didn't translate into actual WPM in my case. I average right around 110 WPM on my day-to-day full height keyboard. Swapping to the MQ80, my raw speed increased slightly, likely due to the lightweight switches and the floating posture I adopted to accommodate its height. My actual average words-per-minute on MonkeyType actually decreased to 105 WPM due to having to backspace to correct typos.

So, typing speed is a bit of a wash (at least for me) but it's hard to argue that the sound and feel of typing on the keyboard is less than exceptional. The multiple layers of sound dampening quiet and deepen the sound of each keystroke in a satisfying way. The Le-Tray Gasket Mount system also gives bottom outs a softness that's reminiscent of, but slightly stiffer than, the gasket mounts used on most full height gaming keyboards.

The thing is, since IQUNIX launched the MQ80 to Kickstarter in early 2025, Nuphy released the third iteration of its Air75 series, the Air75 V3, and it delivers a typing experience that I feel is at least as good and is objectively more customizable with its Gateron low profile switches and tactile and silent switch options at checkout.

As a heavy handed typist, I prefer a lot of tactility, especially on a keyboard with perfectly flat rows. The only option for "not a light tactile" were Kailh Black Cloud switches and would have run me half the cost of the keyboard itself.

None of this is to say that the typing experience is bad. It's genuinely not. IQUNIX knows its stuff. All of this is simply to say that there's an important trade-off and if you don't like light linear switches or paying a premium to replace them, the MQ80 probably isn't the keyboard for you.

If you like that light touch, the custom keyboard-esque feel of its keystrokes filtering through all of that foam and milled aluminum, then you're probably going to love it.

Gaming Experience of the IQUNIX MQ80

Most of the same considerations from the typing experience apply to gaming as well, but fragging enemies is really where the MQ80 felt most at home to me.

Those lightweight switches that were a liability to typing accuracy suddenly feel like hair triggers. If you're connected using the 2.4 GHz dongle or plugged in via USB, its 1,000 Hz polling rate ensures that every keystroke comes through instantly - though, it still doesn't compare to the growing number of 8,000 Hz keyboards out there on paper. Whether you'll be able to tell the difference is up for debate.

While the layers of cushioning and damping don't have a direct impact on how effective the MQ80 is for gaming, much like typing, they just make the experience that much more pleasant.

Apart from its switches, there's a dearth of dedicated gaming features unique to the keyboard. The keys are reprogrammable and support string macros, but you won't find a fancy software suite to support the experience here. Instead, IQUNIX went open source and the MQ80 is better for it.

Software for the IQUNIX MQ80

Where the MQ80 comes into its own is its programmability. Unlike many traditional gaming keyboards, it doesn't have downloadable software that needs to stay running in the background. Instead, IQUNIX opted to support VIA, a web-based configurator that allows you to make changes on the fly while also saving them to the keyboard.

It's simple on the surface, but is surprisingly powerful once you dive into it. Every key can carry up to four different actions or macros, broken into layers for quick shortcut access. Much like holding Shift, you hold or tap a key of your choice and access those additional layers of keymaps.

While this functionality isn't unique to VIA or the MQ80 by any means, big gaming companies usually require you to keep their software running to access layered functions (ex. Razer HyperShift). Here, every change is written directly to the keyboard's firmware and will work on any machine, exactly as programmed.

The web client itself is fairly simple. You have a graphic of your keyboard layout with all of your current mappings on display. Underneath are all of the different commands that can be mapped, including things like media controls, additional F-keys (all the way to F24), macros, RGB controls, and virtually anything else you might want to assign to a keystroke.

The biggest feature you'll miss out on, apart from proprietary features like game-synced RGB backlighting, is the ability to assign backlight colors to individual keys. It's possible to change the brightness, hue, and saturation across its dozen or so preset animations, but creating an entirely custom lighting scheme requires creating your own code and flashing it to the keyboard manually.

The Bottom Line

The IQUNIX MQ80 is a very good keyboard. For a lot of users, I'm confident that they would describe it as "Great" or even "Amazing." I wouldn't fault them for that. This is essentially the luxury option in the low profile space at this point.

But it's too heavy to easily tote around without questioning your life choices. If portability is important to you, I highly recommend the Nuphy Air75 V3. Or, if you're looking for something a little more office friendly than the Nuphy, the Lofree Flow 2 is another great choice that also comes with a tactile switch option.

At the end of the day, all three of these options are good for the money but only the MQ80 feels like a luxury option thanks to its heavy case. If you're not planning on carrying it back and forth to work and you like a fast switch, the MQ80 is a solid choice.

Russia has lost another data center in its ongoing conflict with Ukraine after drones hit a government data center in the suburbs of Gorodets, some 230 miles east of the Kremlin and over 600 miles away from the frontlines. According to Data Center Dynamics (DCD), the freshly drone damaged data center is operated by the Russian Ministry of Finance and was said to hold several state registries, including the Federal Taxation Service’s tax database.

“The facility is one of two key data processing centers of the Federal Tax Service of Russia operating in a geo-distributed mode,” DCD reported, citing a Russian media outlet. “The damage to this facility could potentially affect the operation of state information systems of the Russian Federation.” Ukraine has targeted Russian data centers multiple times since the start of October, which it started doing after Moscow escalated the conflict by striking Ukrainian data centers. While the Russian finance ministry reportedly operates two other data centers — one at the Federal Data Processing Center in Dubna, Moscow Region, and another in Yerzovka, Volgograd Region — losing a third of its data centers could have a major impact on government services that it provides.

A modern society’s reliance on digital services means that data centers are now critical infrastructure and have become major targets in conflict. Russia’s Yandex bot traffic collapsed after the Ukrainian drone strikes, but its disinformation bot network simply migrated to unaffected data centers to continue operating as normal. Another recent instance of a civilian data center getting caught in a conflict was in the Middle East, after Iranian forces hit AWS sites in the UAE and Bahrain in response to the United States’ bombing campaign that began in February. This has led to disruptions to many digital services in the area, which is why Amazon has advised many of its clients to move to other regions to avoid further disruptions.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started in 2014 when it forcibly occupied the Crimean Peninsula, but the current situation started when Moscow escalated the situation and attempted to take Kyiv in 2022. But what makes this 12-year conflict especially deadly is the new technologies and strategies that are being implemented in the front lines, including the widespread and innovative use of drones.

While SSD pricing isn't quite as bad as what we see in the RAM market, buying more storage for your PC is still quite painful. Samsung recently released a new 'budget' version of its 990 M.2 SSD, and it just got a surprising $200 discount at Amazon. The 990 2TB SSD is now $329 instead of $529, offering a solid 38% saving.

● Grab this deal at Amazon

The 990 SSD is an interesting product because it is one of the few SSDs released after the AI pricing crunch sent storage prices into orbit. As such, we know what Samsung thinks this drive is worth in the current climate, namely $529. While 2TB of storage would have been much cheaper a year ago, a 38% discount on a new SSD is not to be sniffed at, especially given all signs point to these drives getting more expensive, not cheaper, in the future.

We reviewed this drive at launch last month and liked its full-fledged Gen 4 throughput, decent power consumption, and good all-around performance. The 990 is essentially a QLC-based 990 EVO Plus, featuring Samsung's PiccoloQ controller and V9 QLC Flash memory.

As you can see from our testing data, it scores very close to the 990 EVO Plus in latency testing, while beating the 990 EVO drive in bandwidth and 3DMark overall score.

This drive also scored well in our PS5 test, so this drive could serve as an expansion drive for your shiny new PlayStation if you so choose. At its original list price, this drive makes no sense as a purchase up against the 990 Pro or Samsung's Gen 5 9100, but at this price it is a good chunk cheaper than both of those options.

Amazon does have a 36% discount on the 990 Pro 2TB, now $409 instead of $639 if you want to spend a bit more on that slightly more performant drive. Or, if your motherboard supports Gen 5, you might want to eat the $85 jump for the 9100 Pro 2TB, currently $415 at Amazon. This regular 990 also has a 1TB model on sale, but that discount is just 17%, so its $189.99 price tag makes it poorer value compared to this 2TB model.

As we approach the end of 2026, these storage prices remain tough to stomach, but things don't look like they are going to improve any time soon. In fact, all signs point to the AI pricing crunch continuing to make things worse going forward, meaning leaving it too long could make storage even more expensive in the future.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has put the annual cost of licensing the company’s AI software at around $2,000 per GPU to 'run all the software that Nvidia provides that runs agents on these AI factories,' according to a recent video of the comments (below), a pricing model that could generate $50 billion over five years under a proposed scenario involving five million paid licenses outlined by FourWeekMBA.

Huang discussed the pricing at GTC Berlin on October 22, where the company outlined its broader push to build an AI infrastructure business spanning chips, software and AI-agent security. “Software licensing will become increasingly a major part of our company’s business. The way that we license will be…for example, it’s about $2,000 per GPU per year to run all the software that Nvidia provides that runs agents on these AI factories,” said Huang.

The numbers add up quickly. At $2,000 per GPU each year, Nvidia would bring in $10 billion annually if five million GPUs were covered by paid licenses. Over five years, that would amount to $50 billion, provided customers kept renewing their subscriptions. The catch, however, is that Nvidia has not disclosed how many GPUs could be covered by the proposed $2,000 fee, or whether that’s its standard price. It’s also unclear which software the license would cover, or if there is overlap between products.

The distinction matters because Nvidia already charges for enterprise software. Its AI Enterprise platform is listed at $4,500 per GPU for a one-year subscription. Huang’s reported $2,000 figure is lower, but Nvidia has not confirmed that the two prices cover the same products or licensing terms. It should not be treated as a confirmed price cut.

The licensing discussion comes as Nvidia develops more of the infrastructure needed to deploy and manage AI agents in enterprise environments. These systems can use tools, access data, and execute tasks, creating new security and management challenges for businesses running them at scale.

On October 21, Nvidia announced its OpenShell Reference Architecture, a system that combines its Vera Rubin computing infrastructure, Vera CPUs, and BlueField-4 data processing units (DPUs) running Nvidia Sentry. OpenShell provides a secure runtime for AI agents, establishing boundaries around their actions and access to tools and resources. Sentry monitors agent activity independently and can quarantine an agent that attempts to cross those boundaries, according to Nvidia. The architecture is designed to bring security controls into the underlying infrastructure rather than relying solely on safeguards built into an AI model or application.

Nvidia had previously introduced its Open Agent Safety Platform in September. The newer reference architecture builds on that effort, extending the approach to enterprise infrastructure and edge systems.

Other companies are also incorporating these controls into their products. Anthropic is integrating OpenShell and BlueField hardware with Claude Managed Agents to give businesses additional control over what their AI agents can access inside execution sandboxes. Salesforce has developed a Slack Admin Bridge for OpenShell that lets administrators review agent access requests, approve or reject permissions, and monitor activity directly in Slack.

The proposed software pricing fits Huang’s wider argument that Nvidia is becoming more than a supplier of GPUs. The company has expanded into networking, systems, enterprise software, and infrastructure designed to run AI workloads. Speaking on the BG2Pod podcast recently, Huang said, “One of these days, people might not categorize us as a chip company anymore.” He pointed to Nvidia’s presence across industries including healthcare, automotive, telecommunications and life sciences, where the company provides broader technology stacks rather than chips alone.

That said, Nvidia has not said when the $2,000-per-GPU fee would take effect or which software it would cover. It also remains unclear how the proposed pricing would fit into the company’s existing enterprise software business.

Gamers can now experiment with playing their favorite Steam titles on a jailbroken PlayStation 5. The game launcher is actually based on the Playden launcher designed for macOS and adapted for the PlayStation, allowing you to sign in with your Steam account and install games from your library directly to the console. Playden for PS5 is a GitHub project that lets you run Steam games on the console, notes VideoCardz. When you launch a game on Playden for PS5, it sets a private Windows environment and is run through prospero-win, which is a PS5 port of Wine.

Note that the launcher itself does not run the game — instead it builds a separate PS5 app created for the game that you installed, allowing the Steam title to appear as a separate tile on the console’s home screen. Aside from that, its files, settings, and crashes are isolated from the launcher and other games. There’s also a separate runtime kit that handles Wine for PS5, the required graphics drivers, the Windows environment, and a template app shell for your games.

While Playden for PS5 successfully launches Steam games, it does not necessarily mean a smooth start-to-end experience for every title. The creator notes that it’s still in the Alpha stage of development, with X user v7dt1 saying that even though they were able to launch a game, it eventually crashed. On the other hand, u/Cevap shared on the r/PS5_Jailbreak subreddit that they were able to play Portal through the launcher with no issues, except for the lack of a mouse cursor and the inability to hit ESC to open the options menu. Still, the developer of the launcher lists several compatible games, including American Truck Simulator, Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal, GTA: Vice City, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, and more.

Of course, users need a jailbroken PlayStation 5 if they want to use this launcher. But aside from that, the creator said that using it poses several risks, including the fact that it’s an unofficial Steam client. While there haven’t been any problems with third-party Steam clients, the app notes that Valve does not officially support it and any risk that comes with the use of the launcher “is yours to accept.”

Sony announced that it will cease physical game disc production by January 2028, which did not sit well among many fans. In fact, a petition against the move has nearly hit 200,000 signatures just a week after the announcement. Alongside that announcement, we started seeing a number of jailbreaks and emulators for the PS5, allowing users to take back control of their hardware, likely to the chagrin of Sony executives.

Windows XP became available at retailers for the first time on this day back in 2001. It was ushered in with Microsoft's largest and glitziest launch event since Windows 95, but the bigger news was its delivery of an OS with modern underpinnings and features. Thankfully, it lived up to the hype and would ensure nearly 13 years of favor among enthusiasts, but that might be partly due to the failure of the unloved Vista.

The NYC launch event for Windows XP in 2001 was the centerpiece of a lavish $500 million campaign Microsoft had planned for the new OS. However, celebrations were somewhat muted due to the aftermath of 9/11. Microsoft actually dumped its intended ‘Prepare to Fly’ launch slogan for ‘Yes You Can’ for this obvious reason.

Nevertheless, the launch was still a significant event and featured NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani joining Bill Gates on stage. Gates framed the big launch as evidence that “New York is back and open for business.” There was also a free lunchtime concert in Bryant Park featuring Sting, followed by a Times Square NYC takeover. Meanwhile, retail stores like CompUSA, Circuit City, and Best Buy opened at midnight for eager tech beavers to grab a copy of Windows XP at its freshest.

At the launch presentation, Gates said that the debut of Windows XP represented the end of the era of MS-DOS, which had underpinned a UI or shell known as Windows for many years. For consumers, that stretched all the way up to the much maligned Windows Me.

As we mentioned in our 40-year retrospective of Windows last year, Windows XP was the real ‘Start Me Up’ moment. That’s because it brought the Windows NT core to consumer PCs – replacing the archaic DOS and its restrictions and drivers. Thus, Windows XP would become well regarded for reliability, performance, and security (after a few teething troubles), and its new UI was claimed to make tasks 25% easier to complete, too.

Some of the technical features that would be widely welcomed in XP included USB plug-and-play support that worked, built-in CD burning software, and ClearType support as new LCDs started to usurp bulky CRTs on desks.

During Windows XP’s supported life (October 2001 to April 2014), there would be three major Service Pack (SP) releases. It also saw DirectX 8.1 to 9.0c arrive for gamers. In the meantime, Windows Vista made something of an unwanted splash, launched to consumers in January 2007. Windows XP’s lengthy extended support meant that folks could skip Vista entirely and move straight to Windows 7 when it hit retail and new-build systems in October 2009.

Overall, it is interesting to observe that Windows XP’s lifespan was actually over two years longer than Windows 10, which was (in)famously launched as “the last version of Windows.”

Even as optical media sees a resurgence and new CD players hit the market, some optical drive and component manufacturers have ended production. As a result, PS Audio and Naim have halted production of their high-end CD players, raising questions about the maintenance and repairability of these new devices. Headphonesty says that of the eight new models, four are from Musical Fidelity, two from Marantz, and one each from Arcam and NAD.

Musical Fidelity reportedly sources its key components from SUOS-HiFi, with three of its new models using SUOS disc mechanisms. In contrast, the fourth uses a SUOS-sourced servo but a tray-loading mechanism from an unnamed manufacturer. On the other hand, Marantz reportedly develops its drives in-house, though it’s unclear whether it also outsources production to a third party. As for the two remaining manufacturers, they did not reveal who made their optical drives.

PS Audio had to end production of the PMG Super Audio CD Transport because D&M, Marantz’s parent company, has ceased external orders for its optical drives. Although the company bought D&M’s entire remaining stock, it wasn’t enough to keep production going. Naim faced the same issue with its Uniti Star—though it didn't name its optical drive supplier, it had to find an alternative when the manufacturer stopped production. Naim was evaluating a replacement manufacturer when it, too, stopped making the components the Uniti Star needed. While both companies retained some optical drives in inventory, they are only for repairs and replacements.

What hardware deals are you hoping to pick up during Black Friday?

These issues highlight the problem of relying on a single manufacturer for such a critical component. But even though these manufacturers would love to find alternative sources for the drives that they need, it’s likely that only a few companies are capable of making such a niche product, even if demand has grown substantially recently.

The best option for them would be to design these parts in-house, which is what Marantz is doing. That way, even if the current maker they rely on goes out of business, they could plausibly find another one to take over production (or even build it themselves). This is difficult to accomplish, though, with PS Audio CEO Paul McGowan saying that building its own optical disc reader is beyond the company’s capabilities.

OpenAI’s AI agents built hidden channels to talk across walls put up between them in red-team tests, communicating by manipulating the CPU cache with no network link or shared file, according to a company blog post. The containment was intended to stop that kind of secret-swapping, but the agents found multiple ways around it when asked. Security researchers already showed that a covert cache channel can move data between cloud virtual machines (VMs); a hijacked agent on a shared cloud server could, in theory, exchange data on the same physical machine, and do so undetected by network monitoring.

The agents in question were set up in separate microVMs, on shared hosts, with OpenAI’s sandboxing software, and were asked to swap synthetic secrets without a network connection or shared writable files. One agent evicted select data from the CPU’s cache while another timed the reloading, enabling the two to communicate with fast and slow reads using a protocol they agreed on first. The same cache-timing technique was used to extract data in the Spectre and Meltdown attacks; but unlike in those cases, the covert channel here needs two willing parties.

One X user, tech commentator Ryan Orhan, wrote that the isolation “wasn’t necessarily broken at the software level,” calling it “a pretty remarkable demonstration of why secure agent containment is such a difficult problem.”

The company’s concern is that models might “find unauthorized ways to communicate with agents in other sandboxes,” with communication outside permitted channels constituting a failure of containment. A 2017 paper at the NDSS security conference demonstrated a covert cache channel between two Amazon EC2 VMs, fast enough to carry an SSH connection, but now agents can build one themselves when asked, including the encoding process. In principle, such a channel could be weaponized, with the sender being code an attacker controls or directs, for example, a prompt-injected agent in a cloud sandbox. The receiver could be a process on the same physical machine, and the data would then leave without any network traffic for monitoring to catch.

The agents turned up three other channels, too: shared storage, where one agent alternated bursts of writes with idle time while the other timed the difference; competition for CPU time in a shared execution container; and a TLS certificate cache in OpenAI’s offline web setup. In most of these tests, OpenAI pointed the agents at the channel or gave them a protocol, and most of the channels are slow and hard for models to exploit.

The red-team testing involved teams of frontier-model agents that worked in parallel and cooperatively toward three objectives: to reach the live internet, to cross an internal security boundary, and to talk across isolation boundaries. Extra tests assumed the inner protections had already failed, with an agent out of its sandbox, past the monitors and in full control of its host machine, to see whether it could still reach the live internet.

The agents came from some of the company’s most capable models, including the “upcoming GPT-6 Astra Cyber model and an internal frontier model,” and were given infrastructure source code, configuration details, and documentation describing potential vulnerabilities, so the defenses were tested under conditions favorable to an attacker. The tests ran on isolated, purpose-built copies of the company’s research infrastructure and used “hundreds of billions of tokens” in total.

The post comes after several cybersecurity incidents involving OpenAI’s agents, including the July Hugging Face breach and a Sept. 20 DNS episode that led to an 11-day pause in training. With training resumed Oct. 1, the company continues to disclose vulnerabilities across “several microVM projects” and has made red-teaming with its most capable models part of the safety cases that decide whether training and evaluation go ahead. The company believes future models will be able to find vulnerabilities not yet known about.

AMD Director of Client Product Management Travis Kirsch sat down with a Japanese publication to share the backstory of the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D and its relaunch this year. Kirsch told MyNavi Tech+ [machine translated] that AMD CEO Lisa Su was one of the proponents of bringing back the groundbreaking X3D processor that first debuted in April 2022.

While some may think this was a simple relaunch of a four-year-old processor, the company had to do extensive re-engineering and update its manufacturing process with TSMC just to bring it back. The decision to relaunch it was well-timed, too.

While the world is suffering from extremely high DDR5 memory prices when it finally arrived in the middle of 2026, Kirsch said that “this was planned before changes in the memory market occurred, not as a countermeasure to DDR5 shortages,” and that it was “the final gift to local users who have used our AM4 for nearly a decade, offering systems that use DDR4 the last change to upgrade their PCs.”

Beyond the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the Japanese publication also touched on AMD’s value offerings, or lack thereof. Four Ryzen 3 processors are available new today—one for AM5 and three for AM4—which raises the question of whether AMD is abandoning the entry-level market.

Kirsch said that while the company aims to offer a product for every price point, AMD is mostly focused on the premium, high-performance gaming market — we see this in the October Steam Survey results, with AMD closing in on Intel at 48.4% CPU share. As for the affordable CPU market, he said it’s no longer as big as it used to be, as laptops have taken over this segment.

Of course, any discussion with a tech executive these days would almost always touch on the memory chip shortage. “…there are things we can control and things we cannot. Market price trends are the result of everyone moving (and there’s nothing we can do about it),” Kirsch said.

“We are simply focused on providing consumers with choices in any situation. This is to ensure that consumers have the opportunity to purchase the best AMD PCs, regardless of the price.”

Nvidia is collaborating with German energy firm PreussenElektra GmbH (PEL) to explore converting old nuclear power plants into AI data centers. In an official announcement on October 21st, the U.S. chipmaker and the German firm entered a preliminary partnership to assess whether the latter's decommissioned nuclear power plant sites in Germany can be converted into high-performance AI data centers. The plan does not involve using nuclear power to power any future data centers. Instead, the project is focused on leveraging the existing power, water, and other infrastructure already present at the sites.

“Our former power plant sites have valuable industrial infrastructure and offer opportunities for new, future-oriented uses. Together with NVIDIA, we intend to conduct a sound assessment of whether and how these conditions can be leveraged for AI factories. In doing so, we are combining the responsible reuse of our sites with new economic opportunities for the regions,” says Guido Knott, Chairman of PEL’s Management Board.

The open-ended exploration will assess existing energy grid links, available land, and industrial infrastructure at the former nuclear sites to see if they meet the strict operational requirements of “AI factories.”

The move aims to find alternatives to building massive data centers from scratch amid the unprecedented AI infrastructure buildout. New data centers require well-located land, industrial-zone approvals, proximity to water infrastructure for cooling, and high-voltage grid connections, things nuclear plants already have. By repurposing these facilities, Nvidia hopes to significantly reduce cost and development timelines.

“AI factories require access to power, land and high-capacity infrastructure, and former industrial sites could provide a strong foundation for this next generation of computing,” said Markus Hacker, senior regional director at Nvidia. Together with PreussenElektra, we will assess how its sites could meet the technical and operational requirements of AI factories and contribute to Germany’s high-performance AI infrastructure.”

Germany permanently shut down its last remaining operational nuclear power plants in April 2023, following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and is dismantling about 30 nuclear power plants across the country. PreussenElektra is currently responsible for decommissioning and dismantling eight of the plants, which are likely the sites to be assessed. The company, alongside Nvidia, has made it clear that the data center assessment initiative is strictly in an experimental feasibility phase.

No investment amounts, approved development plans, or definitive construction agreements have been finalized yet.

Reverse engineer and cybersecurity bounty hunter log4j recently found they were getting “weirdly targeted ads” on their Samsung TV and discovered privacy breaches. As they live-tweeted their discoveries, they found increasingly concerning code in the Tizen operating system, including detailed user telemetry from packet logging, audio categorization, screenshots, cross-device identification for ad tracking, and more, all designed to extract as much user information as possible to improve targeted ads.

log4j posted on X that they were concerned with how specific the ads on their 2025 Samsung TV were. They decided to reverse-engineer the Tizen OS on their TV to see what it was doing—they “discovered PRIVACY HORROR,” log4j states, marking the start of subsequent posts sharing more concerning findings.

The tester theorizes that Samsung TVs are so sluggish because they do a lot of post-processing of user data, including audio, screenshots, and AID (a cross-device tracking ID for ads), plus computer vision processing and models running on the TV. The hacker even found a region-specific convolutional neural network (an AI) that tracks user behavior, citing examples like what videos the user watches, which ads are skipped, and video progress. Log4j also found behavior for TVs without microphones, stating it will find connected devices with microphones, such as a soundbar or a connected Bluetooth device, to record audio.

Hugging Face engineer ngxson commented that they would test the microphone behavior using their Flipper Zero and found that the TV opened the microphone for five seconds, then stopped. ngxson waited for another microphone response but found none hours later. However, ngxson explained that their Tizen TV was already rooted and had multiple settings disabled, so an unmodified TV may behave differently.

What hardware deals are you hoping to pick up during Black Friday?

The hacker used OpenAI tools to hack the TV, but the company eventually banned them for cyber abuse, as stated in an email they received. log4j defended themselves, saying they never used OpenAI’s tools to exploit or find vulnerabilities, only for local reverse engineering, and that they didn't breach the terms of use. In a comment below their post about the ban, log4j said it seemed OpenAI banned their account because of a primitive classifier.

However, Samsung TVs and Tizen aren’t the only culprits in reportedly breaching user privacy; other brands like LG have also been accused of spying on customers. Many owners have also reported their TVs slowing down despite no new features or heavy apps running, suspecting it is mainly bloatware, but it could also be the spying behavior Log4j found. The hacker is also working on a comprehensive write-up of their findings, including how others could do it themselves.

At the end of the post series, they jokingly say they “finally found a company that truly listens to its customers.”

For anyone looking to buy a premium gaming laptop with an OLED display, the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI is worth considering. The laptop is currently on sale at Best Buy for a limited time for $2,224.99, saving you $550 off its original price of $2,774.99. The discount also applies to the higher-end 32GB RAM model, available for $2,399.99, saving $800 off its original price of $3,199.99.

• Check out the 16GB model deal at Best Buy
• Check out the 32GB model deal at Best Buy

The Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI is a fairly thin gaming laptop with a maximum thickness of just 18.9 mm. The laptop features a 16-inch OLED panel with QHD+ (2560 x 1600) resolution and a 16:10 aspect ratio, giving you more vertical screen space. It also offers a fast 240 Hz refresh rate, plus support for G-Sync, VESA True Black HDR500, and 100% DCI-P3 color gamut coverage.

Despite its thin profile, the laptop is claimed to deliver desktop-class performance thanks to Intel’s top-of-the-line Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor, which features 24 cores and boost clock speeds of up to 5.5 GHz.

Handling the graphics is Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti laptop GPU with 12GB of GDDR7 memory, offering the benefits of the Blackwell architecture, including DLSS 4 and the latest DLSS 5, multi-frame generation, and improved ray-tracing performance. Memory options include 16GB or 32GB of DDR5-6400 RAM, while a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD provides storage for all your games and other data.

For I/O, you get three USB 3.2 Type-A ports, a USB 3.2 Type-C port, a Thunderbolt 4 port, a headphone jack, 2.5-gig Ethernet, HDMI 2.1, and a microSD card slot. For wireless connectivity, you get Bluetooth 5.4 and Wi-Fi 6E. Other notable features include a 92 Wh battery, a quad-zone RGB backlit keyboard, and a 1080p IR webcam.

Overall, the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI offers a promising combination of a high-refresh-rate OLED display, powerful hardware, and a relatively slim design. At $2,224.99 for the 16GB model or $2,399.99 for the 32GB variant, the current Best Buy deal makes it a great option for those looking at desktop-class performance in a portable package.

Proton AG, which provides privacy-focused services like Proton Mail and Proton VPN, has decided to host the Flock camera map that security researcher Joshua Michael built from leaked Flock data. While the original Flock Surveillance Map is still available online, its creator is facing legal threats from the company, especially after Flock sent the researcher a cease-and-desist letter. In addition, Michael’s website is accessible only from within the U.S., requiring users outside the country to use a VPN to access it.

By contrast, Proton’s Flock camera map is easily accessible worldwide. Its location in Switzerland also makes it a little more complicated for the surveillance company to take legal action. Its move to preserve Michael’s work also follows the company’s privacy ethos.

“You have a right to know who’s recording you when you leave home, especially when a private company controls the data and it’s unclear how law enforcement uses that information,” the company said. “This map lets you search by ZIP code to see where Flock’s license plate readers are located. Use it [to] make informed decisions about how you move through your own area and whether you need to reach out to your municipal leaders.”

Flock and other automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras are at the center of the privacy debate between law enforcement and citizens. While the former argues these machines help make communities safer, many of the latter worry about the technology's potential misuse. Their fears aren’t unfounded, either — there have already been multiple cases of police officers misusing Flock cameras to stalk romantic partners and even one case of mistaken identity due to a lapse in police procedure.

However, Proton’s map is based on data from November 2025. This makes it more of a snapshot of the company’s network at that time, rather than a live map of Flock’s ALPR cameras. For a more up-to-date map, consider downloading MapQuest, which recently released an update showing the locations of ALPR cameras from Flock and other companies. This could help you plan your trip if you have privacy concerns and want to avoid getting picked up by an ALPR camera.

Why settle for ordinary when you can spice up your gaming setup with a pair of unique-looking RGB-laden desktop PC speakers? Edifier’s Hecate G2000 Pro speakers instantly stand out in both looks and sound, with the small desktop 2.0 speakers outputting a much larger soundstage than their size would have you believe. These versatile speakers are enjoyable for both gaming and music listening, and offer good value with plenty of connectivity options.

Design of the Edifier Hecate G2000 Pro

The design of the Edifier Hecate G2000 Pro 2.0 system has a different speaker design that I haven't really seen before: A squished and elongated hexagonal shape, with a clear, see-through speaker enclosure and bright RGB lighting. They look unique and modern, maybe even a little futuristic — and while I’m not a fan of the overuse of RGB lighting in general, I like them. (You can also easily turn the lighting off, so you aren’t left stuck with distracting flashing lights 24/7.) Both speakers aim the sound toward your ears with a 10° tilted angle built into the shape of the speaker, so there's no need for any angled desktop speaker pads or stands.

The right speaker contains all the tech, with controls on the top of the speaker — four rubberized silicone buttons — and power and connectivity options on the rear. The two speakers are connected by a hardwired 1.5-meter braided cord, which is plenty of length for most desk sizes. Large rubber feet on the bottom of the speakers soothe vibrations and stop the speakers from slipping around the space. The speakers are solidly built and feel very sturdy and weighty when you hold them.

On the rear of the speakers is the opening for the bass reflex port, a clear port that you can see inside the transparent speaker enclosure, and complete with a little mesh dust filter midway along the port to keep the inside of the enclosure clean.

Performance of the Edifier Hecate G2000 Pro

I put the Edifier Hecate G2000 Pro speakers through their paces, testing them while gaming and listening to lossless audio via my PC and via Bluetooth on my phone.

In gaming, the sound is clear and positional audio cues are easy to detect. The 7.1 virtual surround sound is enabled via the Xear software and does some heavy lifting in games that have good positional audio composition; however, in games that have more of a stereo soundscape, the 7.1 just seems to add echo and reverb to the mix, and doesn’t sound good at all. While playing Battlefield 6, I was impressed with the volume and gravitas of the cinematic explosions and sound of crumbling infrastructure, with individual sounds of gunfire and footsteps easily identifiable in the chaos. My set of Logitech speakers that I usually use on my gaming PC includes a subwoofer, so the bass rumble of explosions is far greater — with the desk and room vibrating when the volume is high. You won’t get that with the Edifier Hecate G2000 Pro, but the rumble is still impressive for a small 2.0 speaker setup, and the clarity and depth of the soundstage are impressive.

There is no port for a subwoofer on the G2000 Pro, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing for what are essentially a pair of bedroom PC speakers. Being able to watch a movie or play games without waking up the whole house or even your neighbours gives these speakers a valuable niche, but they still have enough power with 32W total output power to turn up the volume and blast some tunes when the timing is right. You can add some dynamic bass boost via the Xear software, but I found that sound from the speakers without the added bass was far superior, with the default flat EQ offering the best experience.

Inside the Hecate G2000 Pro is a single 3-inch speaker driver. It does a great job for just one driver, but not having any separate tweeters or high-frequency speakers means it’s trying to accomplish quite a bit. The overall soundscape suffers slightly because of this, with some muddying at lower volumes — but only slightly. The overall sound is superb for a pair of small mid-range desktop gaming speakers, with an excellent soundstage and big sound not relative to the size of the G2000 Pro. Obviously, they aren’t as bottom-heavy as a 2.1 system with the lack of a dedicated subwoofer, but the bass is still impressive for such small speakers.

Specs

Features and Software of the Edifier Hecate G2000 Pro

One of the best aspects of the Hecate G2000 Pro is the number of connectivity options you have for your audio sources. There’s an AUX port that I used to connect to my sound mixer, a USB-C port for connecting directly to the PC (included USB-C to USB-A cable plus a USB-A to USB-C adapter) via USB-C or USB-A, and also a Bluetooth connection. Although the speakers work flawlessly when connecting via Bluetooth, I did find the source audio wasn’t as clear as it was via the AUX or USB connection. There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack located on the rear if you want to connect a pair of headphones — and you can enable 7.1 surround for the headphones in the Xear software options.

The downloadable audio software for the G2000 Pro is very basic. Right-click on the speaker icon for interactive actions, and you can enable/disable the EQ, Dynamic Bass, Audio Brilliant, Smart Volume, and Voice Clarity; there’s also a separate 7.1 surround option for use with headphones through a connection on the speaker. You can also change the lighting without having to use the buttons on the speakers themselves. A volume slider is included, but it's completely unnecessary with the physical buttons on the speakers and various Windows OS volume controls. Most of all, the small selectable UI elements make for a terrible experience; the radial buttons are tiny and an annoyance.

I also found that making any changes to the lighting managed to disrupt any music that was playing on Spotify, so there are some software conflicts there. To be honest, you do not need this software at all to use these speakers on a Windows PC, and I could not notice any discernible improvement in sound quality when listening to music. The 7.1 audio in games is okay if the game supports it, but leave it off in a game that doesn’t; the sounds you hear can be pretty terrible.

Bottom Line

For a mid-range set of speakers at $249 MSRP, the Edifier Hecate G2000 Pros are pretty good. They are an improvement over the Edifier G2000 speakers ($109 MSRP) in power output, driver size, and pretty lighting, but do lack the ability to connect a subwoofer. The sound quality, clarity, and loudness are impressive for the speakers' size, and these speakers sound great even without the added PC software. They are loud enough for any bedroom gaming setup and will appeal to anyone who loves to add a little RGB illumination to their gaming space. The transparent speaker enclosure is novel and looks great, and definitely offers something unique to any battlestation.

We're back with another weekly roundup, containing everything that we've published on Tom's Hardware Premium this past week. From a brand-new type of SSD to reasons why buying that expensive audiophile-grade headset might not be the wisest idea for gaming, and much more. To read any of the articles featured in this roundup, be sure to subscribe to unlock access.

TP-Link’s alleged ties to China have drawn scrutiny from regulators, even though the company says it split from its Chinese parent company back in 2024. With the FCC’s ban on foreign-made consumer routers in place, it has pledged nearly $1 billion in U.S. R&D and manufacturing, and has also signed a letter of intent with Key Tronic to assemble its Wi-Fi 8 routers in Mississippi, hoping to win approval. We chronicle the saga of keeping those routers off U.S. shelves, and how TP-Link hopes that Key Tronic will once again unlock the U.S. market for the networking firm.

• TP-Link proposes $1 billion US Wi-Fi router manufacturing alliance with Key Tronic — potential deal seeks to end ongoing saga blocking its Wi-Fi 8 products from American homes

Last week saw the release of Nvidia's RTX Spark platform, with a brand-new high-end Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra in tow. However, despite the device's focus on running local AI workloads and inference, it can be a capable gaming machine. There's just one thing getting in its way: a 3:2, 3270x2180 display that demands a lot out of the relatively humble Blackwell-based GPU within. We tested the ideal custom-resolution cocktails to bolster gaming performance on the Surface Laptop Ultra, with benchmarks on how it performs in Control Resonant, and how to get a better gaming experience out of Nvidia's pricey slab of silicon.

• One easy change makes Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra with RTX Spark a better gaming system — custom resolutions make DLSS easier on the device

Gaming PCs and setups aren't merely about getting the best performance possible; it's also about immersion, comfort, and ease-of-use. All of those elements are heavily informed by your choice of gaming headset. With the market saturated up and down, ' audiophile'-grade headsets are sitting on storefronts with some of the heftiest price tags. So, is pure audio fidelity really the be-all and end-all for gaming headsets? We argue that other elements, like microphone quality and additional quality-of-life features, can make a bigger difference.

• Why you don't need an audiophile headset for gaming — comfort, convenience, and a good mic win over pure audio fidelity

Tape storage is far from obsolete. As the AI boom produces and demands massive datasets that don't always need to remain on expensive SSDs or HDDs, tape shipments jumped by 57% year-on-year in Q1 2026. But where does the technology go next? We explore how companies like IBM, HPE, and Quantum are building new standards beyond LTO-10 with new standards and upcoming cartridges with up to 365TB native capacity, balancing time-tested reliability, performance and cost.

• LTO roadmap extends to 365 TB per cartridge as tape storage refuses to die —25-year-old format sees 400x capacity increase without changing form factor

China's domestic chipmaking technologies have lagged behind Western counterparts due to a lack of access to advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. However, despite this setback, the country continues to rely on older DUV machines instead. We talked to experts to find out how much further DUV can go.

• China can make advanced chips without EUV, but the bill keeps growing — DUV multiple patterning means bigger dies, lower yields, and longer manufacturing times

SSD controller designer FADU announced its File-Semantic SSD (FS-SSD) and detailed the technology in a white paper. The FS-SSD puts the filesystem directly onto the SSD's flash to bypass host CPUs, enabling GPUs, DPUs, and NICs to open and read files directly. The company also presented initial tests, with results that still need to be qualified by real silicon. The FS-SSD builds upon existing frameworks and a Gen6 controller, and the company claims that partner samples should be shipping by Q3 2027.

• FADU puts the filesystem inside the SSD's flash to bypass host CPUs — File-Semantic PCIe 6.0 SSD delivers 460,000 ops/s to GPUs and DPUs, samples due by Q3 2027

On the AI front, Deepseek released its latest AI model. Named Deepseek V4-Flash-1017, the model scores well across intelligence and agentic workloads broadly. However, further analysis of the open-weight model shows that it is more prone to hallucination than Western closed-source counterparts, which is important as the model sits directly between GPT 5.6-Sol and Claude Opus 5, but at a much lower cost-per-task ratio than either of the two, potentially making it an attractive option for those looking to run tasks with verifiable outputs like programming or OCR functions.

• Deepseek's latest AI model is smarter than ever, but its low running costs come at a price — uses only one-quarter of the HBM and one-eighth of SSD storage but still battles hallucinations in agentic workloads

Vast swathes of modern tech infrastructure rest on open source software, yet many of the projects used by billions of people are either underfunded or understaffed. We explore a sobering report wherein 11 out of 23 critical pieces of open source infrastructure only have one or two maintainers. We look back at major vulnerabilities like Shellshock and Log4Shell to show what neglect can truly cost, and why the people maintaining these critical pieces of online infrastructure deserve more support.

• Nearly half of critical open-source software relies on just one or two low-paid maintainers, opening the door to potential threats — report details critically underfunded projects that remain understaffed or unfunded

To read any of the articles we mention above, as well as unlock Bench, you'll need to purchase a Tom's Hardware Premium subscription. Your support goes a long way in helping us to publish deeper, more insightful articles that might not otherwise be covered.

A Steam Frame user asked for the ability to use an external optical drive with their headset, and Valve added the feature a day after one of its developers saw the post. Aiodensghost wrote the post in the Steam Frame General Discussions forum, saying that they wanted to watch a movie on the road and install abandonware from 2006 on their device, with Valve developer gaberowe responding a day after.

“I wanted to use my Steam Frame to be able to watch a movie on the road and thought it was no big deal to use the detachable disc drive I had on my computer,” Aiodensghost said on Oct. 18. “Turns out that the Frame cannot power the player and even if it could, it lacks the drivers to read a disc. Valve, this not only killed my ability to watch a movie, [but it also] killed my ability to install my abandonware from 2006. You don’t sell NFS Carbon anymore, and while I have the disc, the Frame isn’t able to read it.” Just a day later, gaberowe responded with, “We will look into this. Thanks for alerting us.”

The Valve developer then proceeded to add the feature in under 10 minutes, pushing commit b68e4a1 to the deckard-linux-no-oopsies GitHub repository, which is described as “the Linux kernel sources used in SteamOS ARM for the Steam Frame.” While this does not automatically mean that the Steam Frame will get optical drive support in the next update, this development shows that Valve developers take gamers’ requests seriously.

More enterprising users who can’t wait for the feature could also build and install the modified kernel themselves instead of waiting for the official software update. Adding CD-ROM drive support to the Steam Frame is a relatively simple exercise, though, as the commit only enabled a pre-existing Linux kernel feature instead of building an entirely new feature from scratch.

While the Steam Frame is primarily designed as a streaming device, it can also be used for standalone gaming. So, by enabling external CD-ROM drive support, users could let their headset directly read their CDs instead of needing another device to stream the contents of the disc from. It might look awkward, though, if you don’t have a long-enough cable, and you’ll have to hold your external optical drive on your head.

It's been over 20 years since the first Guitar Hero arrived on the gaming scene in 2005 and catapulted music rhythm games to the top of the charts. This was followed by multiple Guitar Hero iterations and competition from rival rhythm games such as Rock Band, and even Clone Hero on the PC. Now, in 2026, band-based rhythm games are due to make a return with the imminent release of Stage Tour from developer RedOctane Games. This brings new opportunities for brand-new music peripherals, and one interesting entry with a unique spin is the InfinaKore Fender Telecaster guitar controller from manufacturer Drakong, which will retail for an MSRP of $129.99 / €129.99 / £119.99. This new controller has a modular design to let creative users fully customize the guitar to their own look and feel, and even 3D-Print their own parts.

• Preorder the InfinaKore Guitar Controller at Amazon

The premise of open-source and customizable peripherals isn't a new one, but it certainly does make this new guitar controller from Californian-based peripheral maker Drakong (Part of HyperKin) interesting. Being able to take the core of this guitar controller and modify the shape, size, and color of the body and head by 3D printing your ideas or community designs will allow you to instantly transform this controller into something else.

Apart from the customization aspects of the InfinaKore controller, the guitar peripheral hosts the latest tech, with the top frets using low-profile Kailh Choc switches (these are hot-swappable) and the bottom frets using membrane switches, with the strum-bar and whammy-bar using hall-effect switches for less wear and tear.

The fret bar has some of the frets styled like a D-pad for some interesting strumming possibilities, plus the controller can be easily stored away thanks to a foldable neck, allowing convenient storage and transportation.

There's also tri-mode connectivity, a 4-mode slider switch, tilt functionality for entering the power-up mode, or just use the new dedicated power-up button. Even better, the buttons are mappable.

There's plenty of rhythm music gaming to look forward to when Stage Tour drops later on in the year, and this could be a great controller to complement the game.

Texas has suspended the construction permits of 17 data center projects and disabled a web portal that automated filing for new permits after it was discovered that they were still being issued a month after calls for the process to be paused. Governor Greg Abbott asked for new permits to be halted in September 2026, but watchdog groups FracTracker Alliance and Public Citizen both published reports detailing more than two dozen permits issued to Texas data center projects, reports 404 Media.

Now, the portal that previously automatically authorized permits is unavailable. “TCEQ’s electronic filing application used for automatic authorizations has been temporarily shut down to ensure all applications are reviewed by agency staff to determine if they are related to data centers," a message on the website reads.

The portal, called STEERS, is used to rubber-stamp construction approvals. But despite Governor Abbott's call for no new permits to be approved, it seems that nobody thought to take STEERS offline. Sam Law, a researcher at FracTracker, says that it's been happily approving new projects, including those for OpenAI and Amazon that went through the system earlier this week. All 17 of the suspended permits are for stormwater construction, a process that sees construction companies raise and level the ground. It's also a process that is a vital part of the approval process for all construction projects in Texas.

Governor Abbot put the brakes on 1,800 data center projects while work was done to audit them. Concerns were raised about their power use and generation, how much water they would consume, and the impact that they would have on their communities. “Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life,” Abbott wrote in a statement provided at the time. “Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first.”

The situation in Texas follows New York's year-long ban on data center projects larger than 50 megawatts that came into force earlier this year. The Responsible Data Center Development Act was signed into law as Senate Bill S10642 by New York Governor Kathy Hochul in July. It was another instance of a change in stance on data centers that is gathering momentum in the United States. While President Trump announced an "AI Action Plan" to accelerate adoption of AI tools and infrastructure rollout in July 2025, he announced a mandate forcing AI data centers to pay dividends to communities in October 2026. In Northern Virginia, Amazon bowed to a community backlash to plans to build four new data centers — going so far as to offer its land up for housing instead.

While the continued focus on AI tools helps drive demand for more capacity and more data centers, communities and local officials are increasingly concerned about the impacts they have on their surroundings. Water shortages and deforestation have become key issues affecting the communities in which data centers are being placed, as has the increase in the cost of energy.

If you are wondering why the GeForce RTX 5090, despite being one of the best graphics cards, has evaporated from retail shelves, the answer lies in China’s industrial conversion factories. A newly surfaced video reveals the staggering scale of the country’s grey-market AI operations, showing industrial workshops dismantling brand-new GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards to repurpose them for the AI boom.

So, what exactly is a GeForce RTX 5090 doing in China when the graphics card is not even officially available there? The answer is simple. They are there to be transformed into AI workhorses. The recently leaked footage offers a glimpse inside these Chinese workshops, where skilled technicians meticulously desolder the pricey flagship’s GB202 silicon and GDDR7 memory chips. They then transplant the components into a dual-slot blower design tailored for server use.

The GeForce RTX 5090 blower graphics cards will ultimately end up in high-density server racks where they will become the backbone of massive AI compute clusters. The scale and efficiency of these operations are impressive, with production lines converting shipments of brand-new GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards, from Nvidia's custom partner models to the chipmaker's highly coveted Founders Edition. After testing and validation, workers would repackage these modified GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards and ship them to clients, likely data centers or AI labs.

Many of these Chinese factories are scattered throughout the country. The conversion process is massive in scale, and probably thousands of GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards are being repurposed every day. Middlemen in these grey-market supply chains are constantly hunting for GeForce RTX 5090 stock to fuel these operations.

Nvidia has reportedly halted production of the GeForce RTX 5090 and is, in all likelihood, redirecting the valuable silicon to higher-margin professional GPUs like the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell. At the same time, a vast network of Chinese conversion factories continues to operate at full speed. Redirected supply and aggressive grey-market recycling have nearly wiped out GeForce RTX 5090 stock from U.S. retailers.

Custom GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards now start at an eye-watering $8,500. However, a new workaround has emerged to sidestep the stock shortage and inflated prices: prebuilt gaming systems. Sometimes these GeForce RTX 5090 prebuilts cost less than a standalone GeForce RTX 5090, while offering a fully assembled system with a manufacturer's warranty.

If you had told me a few months ago that buying an entire gaming system would be cheaper than a single high-end graphics card, I would have called you insane. Yet here we are. In today’s chaotic market, prebuilt systems often offer better value than standalone graphics cards.

Ukraine's military intelligence agency GUR released details of a new 3D-printed Russian cruise missile that was first deployed around September and October of this year. The missile is faster than traditional weapons, hitting speeds of 500mph, and has a range of over 700 miles. According to Business Insider, these cruise missiles, called “Filin,” are more affordable than the traditional Kh-101 cruise missile that costs more than $2,000,000 per launch. This is why some fear that these weapons would be used by the Russian military in “missile spam” tactics against Kyiv to overwhelm its air defenses.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was originally planned to last just a few weeks, has turned into a multi-year war of attrition. This has made the frontlines a costly effort for both man and machine, which is why both sides are looking for more cost-efficient ways to conduct warfare. While drones have seen widespread use in this conflict, they’re relatively slow and are easier to shoot down. The Geran-5, which has been known to disintegrate in flight, could only hit a maximum speed of 270 mph, while the Filin can reportedly hit speeds of 500 mph and has a range of 745 miles. While this still isn’t as fast as modern fighter jets like the F-16 Fighting Falcon, the increased top speed could make it that much harder for Ukrainian air defenses to deal with the threat.

The GUR said that the Filin has a carbon and fiberglass fuselage, while also featuring some 3D-printed parts. It also said that Moscow was able to keep costs on the cruise missile low by relying on commercially available parts from both domestic and foreign companies. It used Russian-made engines instead of the Chinese turbojets found in many Shahed drones, while many electronic components, such as the flight controller, inertial navigation systems, equipment controllers, and counter-jamming hardware, are said to come from Western nations and their allies. The Ukrainian intelligence agency listed the following sources: 35 components come from the U.S., 22 from China, and 13 from Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the Netherlands.

While 3D-printing isn’t necessarily cheaper than traditional manufacturing methods, it’s sometimes more cost-efficient for producing items that require unique geometries, such as solid rocket fuel or jet-engine turbine blades. It has even allowed a tech hobbyist to build a DIY MANPADS for under $100. While the Filin will likely cost way more than a home-made 3D-printed missile, the fact that it’s significantly more affordable than traditional cruise missiles could allow Russia to launch more of them, spelling trouble for the Ukrainian defenders.

These days, it's exceedingly difficult not to be jaded and weary about the tech market. Memory, graphics cards, and now storage are becoming impossible to obtain; there's basically no new consumer hardware being released; and there's AI everywhere. Technology YouTuber TrashBench (TB), too, is tired and was harkening back to the halcyon days when everything was fresh and straightforward — so he went back in time with a retro build.

More specifically, he recreated a facsimile of the first machine his parents bought him in 1996 when he was a wee lad, to play The Need for Speed: Special Edition — a PC-improved version of the first ever game in the series. According to the man, it was thanks to this machine that he fell in love with computers in general.

TB kicked things off with an Intel Pentium MMX 200 MHz CPU sitting atop an Epox Pronix EP-P55-BT motherboard, boasting what was at the time a new, fresh, convenient ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket. This motherboard popped up during the RAM transition from SIMM to DIMM, which is why you'll see two slots of each on the top. 32 MB of RAM went right in, a generous amount for the year.

Funnily enough, the CPU barely needed cooling, which is why a simple 40-mm fan suffices, although anyone who's lived through this era will tell you that those were guaranteed to start whining after just a few months of heavy usage. There is no case cooling, as it's just not needed.

However, he did need to correctly set the motherboard's jumpers, as such luxuries like automatically detecting CPU speed and voltage were just becoming normal. Yes, this meant that you could burn out a CPU if you played the jumper game wrong.

For graphics card duty, he enlisted an S3 Trio32 card, which was pretty, ahem, modest even in the era, and had no 3D rendering capabilities whatsoever. In this era, the now-ubiquitous 3D accelerator cards were just coming into fashion, and he eventually replaced the S3 with a Matrox Mystique 3D, another offering of dubious quality. Yet those were happy days, as any form of 3D acceleration was far better than none.

Storage comes by way of a Western Digital Caviar 22100 hard drive with a whopping two gigabytes of storage and the uncanny ability to emulate the dulcet tones of a jackhammer. TB eventually swapped it later for a roomier 80 GB unit. Again, due to the idiosyncrasies and constant transitions of the era — hardware doubled in speed and capacity nearly every year — he had to set a jumper to clip it to the likely amounts of either 8.4 GB or 33.4 GB, as the addressing space of BIOSes and disk controllers of the time were limited.

The build wraps up with an OG Sound Blaster 16 sound card and a CD-ROM drive. After test-driving the machine with Need for Speed, he moved on to Microsoft Flight Simulator 98, which necessitated a joystick. Naturally, he got the much-beloved Quickshot QS-123, a staple in many home PCs, and one that needed replacement in about six months, as its build quality matched its price.

A video purported to be “authentic, original 360p footage captured inside a CompUSA retail store in New York City” has been shared on YouTube, allowing retro computing fans to step back in time to November 2000. This was the Windows Me, Pentium III, and Athlon era, dominated by computers constructed using a lot of translucent plastics and beige boxes already a distant memory. However, computer stores like this bulged with displays and fast-selling stock before internet shopping would start to eat many of these businesses away.

The video reveals a nostalgic CompUSA, greeted by a wall of CRT monitors. The store looks crowded and almost chaotic with peripherals, PCs, and devices - and boxes filling a lot of space in the aisles.

The first item is a noteworthy trio of laptops. It looks like three stylish Sony VAIO machines in a line. In the center of this display is probably the most interesting device from the time, which we believe to be a Sony VAIO C1 Series ‘PictureBook’ PCG-C1VN subnotebook. Searches indicate this device was powered by the Transmeta Crusoe TM5600 processor running at 600 MHz, supported by 128MB of SDRAM, and a 12GB HDD. The tiny form factor, weighing in at around 2.2 pounds (1kg), was built around an 8.9-inch TFT display of 1024 x 480 pixels. It also had a dGPU, an ATI Rage Mobility with 8MB dedicated VRAM.

Above this trio of laptops, there's a spec card for one of the larger laptops available in store. Squinting at the 360p video, it appears the unnamed portable has an Intel Pentium III 700 MHz CPU, S3 graphics, 128GB of RAM, and a 20GB HDD.

Next up, the video shows some New Yorkers (or tourists) browsing desktop machines including Compaq Presario PCs, with characteristic translucent accent faceplates – clearly inspired by the iMac. Again, we would expect these came with Celeron/Pentium III processors, or AMD Athlon/Duron chips from that era. Graphics cards in these would typically be Nvidia RIVA TNT2 or GeForce2 MX cards.

Later on, the video shows a significant amount of store space stacked with boxes for perhaps 100 Compaq Presario desktops. On one box you can see the model number ‘5WV294.’ According to our searches, that model would come with an AMD Athlon 1.0 GHz, 128MB RAM, 30-40GB HDD, an optical drive, and Nvidia GeForce2 MX or S3 Savage4 / ProSavage 3D graphics.

The video also shows Apple Mac desktops powered up next to matching monitors. Even with Apple’s serious professional desktops, by 2000 the beige era was long gone. A spec card shows that one of the Apple desktops on display is the Power Macintosh G4 Dual 500. Yes, it had twin 500 MHz G4 processors, as well as 256MB memory, a 40GB HDD, a DVD RAM drive, and a 16MB video card, costing an eye-watering $3,500. We previously mentioned the ‘iMac era’ and indeed, an in-store wall of perhaps 50 boxed iMac computers is shown later in the video.

A 21-inch ViewSonic A110 monitor displaying a demo reel with Apple monitors and Apple Macs is also featured. It is a high-end model, priced at $750. Printers appear in the video too, with various HP models boxed up. The video also shows a shelf of unboxed printers and MFPs on display, and you can see someone pondering over one. Mice, mouse mats, and a Windows Me ‘Take Me Home’ promotional in-store display also catch the cameraman’s eye.

The video ends with a scene at the checkout, and folks buying sundries and peripherals. The last customer appears to be inquiring about a mail-in rebate for an HP printer. Some things never change.

CompUSA collapsed due to competition from big box stores, the ascent of online retailers, and various managerial missteps. The store brand saw mass closures and liquidation in 2007/8, with a handful of stores kept alive by Systemax/TigerDirect. The CompUSA retail identity was finally retired in 2012.

Razer has been updating its gaming mouse lineup systematically over the past two years, and it's finally the Basilisk's turn to get a real update. The last update we saw to the Basilisk line was the Basilisk V3 Pro 35K in October 2024, which was basically just the Basilisk V3 Pro with a new sensor.

The Basilisk isn't Razer's most popular gaming mouse line, but it is the more versatile, all-rounder line for people who aren't chasing performance above all else. The Basilisk V4 Pro maintains the general design of its predecessor — a contoured, right-handed gaming mouse with bright RGB lighting and a handful of extra buttons, for the serious gamer who isn't trying to break esports records. It features Razer's newest Focus Pro 50K optical sensor, gen-4 optical mouse switches, and up to an 8,000 Hz polling rate, plus multiple forms of connectivity and up to 200 hours of battery life (over 2.4GHz at 1,000 Hz).

It is admittedly pricey, like all of Razer's flagship mice, at $169.99 for both colorways (black and white), and it launched with Razer's Mouse Dock V2 Pro — which is sold separately for $69.99.

Design and Comfort of the Basilisk V4 Pro

Following in the footsteps of its other recent next-gen mouse launches, Razer has kept the design of the Basilisk V4 Pro largely the same. The Basilisk V4 Pro has basically the same size and shape as its predecessor — it has a right-handed ergonomic shape with a contoured thumb rest and a hump that sits slightly back and to the left. It has large primary mouse buttons with shallow finger grooves, and a slight contour on its outer edge that makes it relatively easy to pick up and move.

It's not exactly the same as the V3 Pro, however. The V4 Pro has two new buttons, for a total of 12 programmable buttons on the mouse: the left and right primary buttons, three thumb buttons (instead of the usual two) and a trigger button in the thumb groove, a clickable tilt wheel (three "buttons" — center click and left/right click), two buttons above the tilt wheel, and an extra button on the left side of the left mouse button. The third thumb button and the extra button on the left mouse button are the new ones; the third thumb button sits in front of the first two and is set to open up Razer's AI prompt by default, while the extra button on the left mouse button is set to switch through profiles by default.

I'm... actually not a big fan of the new buttons. Or, well, I don't really think they're necessary — the Basilisk already had plenty of buttons for a mouse that's not all about having buttons, and I don't really see myself incorporating these new buttons into my workflow in the near future. The extra button on the left mouse button is a little too far forward — this is a very long mouse (it measures 5.02 inches / 127.5mm long), and the extra button is right at the front edge. I have medium-sized hands and relatively long fingers, and the button felt too far for me to press comfortably. It's not a big deal if you plan to leave it set as a profile switch button (which are often located on the bottom of mice), but it's not really viable as a real extra button.

Worse, however, is the location of the third thumb button — the AI prompt button — which is located in line with the other two thumb buttons. I generally have no issue with three rows of thumb buttons, as my daily driver is the Razer Naga V3 Pro, but this new AI button is the same size as the other thumb buttons and it pushes everything back a little. This puts the first thumb button (MB4) back too far to press comfortably (and that's a mouse button I use often). And while you can swap the buttons around, the AI prompt button is slightly too far forward. Basically, there are now three buttons where there should be only two, and they all feel slightly off.

The tilt wheel has three different modes you can switch through with the button right above it: two tactile modes (24 and 48 steps), and free-spin mode. I generally love free-spin mode, but the tilt wheel on the Basilisk V4 Pro is a little too sensitive and will backscroll if you even think about moving your finger near it. The precision-tactile scroll hits a great balance and feels great, however, so this didn't bother me too much.

The Basilisk V4 Pro comes in both black and white colorways; ours came in white, which has shiny black accents so it's a little more Stormtrooper than iPod. It has a smooth matte white body with dimpled rubber texturing for grip on both sides. While it's nice to have built-in side grips, I suspect they will wear down like the grips on the V3 Pro — and then you'll have to find or make your own grip tape, as the mouse comes with none. The mouse is roughly the same size as its predecessor, but it weighs less: the black version weighs 3.53 ounces (100g), which is almost half an ounce lighter than the V3 Pro 35K (3.95oz / 112g). It's not an ultralightweight mouse (or anywhere close), but the weight difference is noticeable and the mouse is definitely easier to pick up.

On the bottom of the mouse, you'll find pure PTFE feet — two near the front, a strip at the back, and a strip under the thumbrest, as well as a strip around the sensor, a power switch, and a connection switch button that is not programmable.

In the box, the Basilisk V4 Pro comes with a USB-A dongle, a USB-A to USB-C converter, and a 6-foot (2m) braided USB-C to USB-A cable. While the cable is braided, it is not one of Razer's flexible HyperFlex cables — it's meant for charging the mouse and plugging the dongle into your PC, not for using the mouse in its wired form.

Specs

Performance of the Basilisk V4 Pro

The Basilisk V4 Pro sports Razer's latest optical sensor, which is the Focus Pro 50K Gen-3 optical sensor. It has a maximum resolution of 50,000 DPI and a maximum speed of 930 IPS, and it can handle up to 90 G's of force. This is the third Razer mouse to feature this sensor (others are the Viper V4 Pro and the Naga V3 Pro), and it's a solid sensor that works with Razer's dynamic sensitivity (the sensitivity can be set up to change based on how quickly you move your hand) and rotation tool in Synapse. It tracks well across just about every surface, including glass that's at least 4mm thick.

The Basilisk V4 Pro isn't an ultra-lightweight mouse, but its shape and grippiness mean it's pretty easy to pick up and move quickly if you're playing an FPS. The trigger button is right under your thumb, however, so you may accidentally trigger (haha) it if you have a tendency to pick up your mouse a lot. The Basilisk's shape isn't quite as natural-feeling as that of the DeathAdder V4 Pro, but it's a comfortable mouse for a variety of games — from multi-button-needing MMOs to competitive shooters (though, perhaps not for peak competition). While I still take issue with the placement of the new buttons, it is nice to have a few extra buttons without jumping straight to 19.

The Basilisk V4 Pro sports Razer's Gen-4 optical mouse switches, which are rated for over 100 million clicks. The switches have a nice, crisp sound that's not too loud (not as loud as Logitech's, anyway), though it's not a mouse for those trying to minimize mouse clickiness. The primary buttons have a solid, tactile feel, and I had no issues with misclicks or double-clicks while I was testing. While the tilt wheel's free-spin mode was too sensitive for me to get to work properly, I love the precision tactile mode — it blends speed and tactility perfectly.

Features and Software of the Basilisk V4 Pro

The Basilisk V4 Pro is programmable with Razer Synapse 4 (not Razer's web-based version of Synapse). You can use Synapse to remap the mouse's 12 programmable buttons (14 programmable controls, if you include scroll up/down; the connection switch button on the bottom of the mouse is not programmable). Synapse has a variety of remap options, as well as a built-in macro recorder / editor. Synapse is also where you'll be able to customize the mouse further by tweaking things like the scroll wheel, DPI stages, and surface calibration. There's also a sensitivity matcher that will match the Basilisk V4 Pro's sensitivity to match that of your old mouse.

You can also use Razer's Chroma Studio to customize the mouse's lighting and sync it with games and/or your other Razer peripherals. The Basilisk V4 Pro has seven RGB lighting zones: a five-zone underglow strip along the bottom curve of the mouse, as well as one in the scroll wheel and one in the logo on the palm rest. The lighting is bright and the underglow's five zones blend nicely — the underglow strip is tilted outward so it's pretty visible when the mouse is just sitting on your desk.

Wireless Experience and Battery Life of the Basilisk V4 Pro

The Basilisk V4 Pro has three forms of connectivity: 2.4GHz wireless, Bluetooth, and wired (via USB-C), though it doesn't really come with a mouse-ready USB-C cable. Razer rates it at 200 hours of battery life over a 2.4GHz wireless connection with a 1,000 Hz polling rate, which is excellent. This number does drop to 54 hours at an 8,000 Hz polling rate, which is... still pretty good, to be honest.

The Basilisk V4 Pro launched alongside Razer's Mouse Dock V2 Pro, which is a wireless charging dock with built-in RGB lighting and an integrated 8,000 Hz wireless receiver. The Mouse Dock V2 Pro is sold separately for $70, and comes with a wireless charging puck that slots into the bottom of the mouse. It sits on your desk (it's small — 3.28 x 2.2 x 1.71 inches / 83.5 x 56 x 43.5mm) and serves as a magnetic dock and wireless receiver for your mouse. It has eight RGB lighting zones around the base, and it lights up to indicate battery level (flashes red when the battery is low). It's made for the Basilisk V4 Pro and V4 HyperSpeed, but it will also work with the Basilisk V3 Pro 35K, the Basilisk V3 Pro, the Cobra Pro, the Cobra HyperSpeed, the Naga V3 Pro, and the Naga V2 Pro (up to 8,000 Hz polling rate for all except the Naga V2 Pro).

The Basilisk V4 Pro is also compatible with Razer's HyperFlux V2 charging mouse pad, but you'll need to connect to your PC via the mouse's dongle for 8,000 Hz polling.

Bottom Line

The Razer Basilisk V4 Pro is an expected update to the Basilisk V3 Pro / 35K. The bump in battery life, from 150 hours in the Basilisk V3 Pro 35K to 200 hours in the Basilisk V4 Pro, is very nice (and 54 hours with an 8,000 Hz polling rate isn't bad, either). While I didn't like the new buttons, I'm sure some people will (although I find it difficult to believe that every mouse and keyboard needs a dedicated AI prompt button), and the reduced weight feels good even if, at 100g, it's still nowhere near the ultra-lightweight category. The Basilisk V4 Pro is a great gaming mouse for gamers who want something a little more exciting and versatile than a DeathAdder V4 Pro, but not as button-heavy (or as heavy) as a Naga V3 Pro.

Micron's next-generation 3D NAND, which will enter mass production in 2H 2027, is set to offer three significant advantages: it will double storage density, increase I/O performance by 50% compared to the company's current-generation NAND memory, and decrease power consumption, the company revealed at an event this week. To achieve these aggressive goals, Micron plans to take a page from YMTC's book and adopt wafer-on-wafer bonding. Meanwhile, Micron is also developing new materials and denser memory cell architectures to extend 3D NAND scaling beyond G11.

"We had mentioned we will bring in wafer-on-wafer bonding technology at the right time when it’s cost-effective, and it brings in capability that is important for the product specs at the time, and this is the right timing for that technology," said Scott DeBoer, president and chief technology and products officer at Micron, during the company's event this week. "So this G11 technology is the world's most advanced NAND. It will ramp in the second half of next year, [and] it is based on wafer-on-wafer bonding technology."

G11: Over 400 layers and wafer bonding

Micron's G11 3D NAND represents a substantial advancement over its current G9 (N160) generation. The company expects the new memory to achieve approximately twice the bit density of G9 (3D TLC 21 Gb/mm² => 3D TLC 42 Gb/mm²?), which means a dramatic increase compared to Kioxia's BiCS10 or Samsung's V10; increase I/O speeds by up to 50% (3,600 MT/s => 5,400 MT/s?); and reduce data transfer energy consumption per bit by more than 25%.

These improvements should benefit both conventional high-capacity SSDs for client and data center applications and emerging AI-oriented storage devices, which require greater bandwidth and energy efficiency.

One of the key changes introduced with G11 is wafer-on-wafer bonding, which enables Micron to manufacture different parts of its NAND device on separate wafers using different process technologies — a new 3D NAND node to build a NAND array and a logic fabrication process to make peripheral circuits and I/O — and subsequently bond them together. The company has used CMOS-under-array architectures for several generations. Still, wafer bonding provides additional flexibility to optimize memory arrays and peripheral logic independently, which means more capacity and performance if all goes as planned.

Another important innovation is the transition to more than 400 NAND layers. Micron has not disclosed the exact number of active wordline layers or the number of memory decks used by G11, but the company says the technology will feature an industry-leading memory cell pitch, which suggests that its density improvements will come from both additional layers and smaller cell dimensions.

Micron expects to disclose more technical details about G11 in 2027, closer to the start of high-volume manufacturing in the second half of next year.

Beyond G11: New materials and denser memory cells

Without any doubt, Micron will continue scaling 3D NAND along all three dimensions rather than simply increasing the number of layers going forward. While conventional 3D NAND scaling initially relied primarily on adding more memory layers, future generations will also require reductions in cell dimensions along the X and Y axes to improve bit density while keeping manufacturing complexity in check.

To achieve this, Micron is developing what it describes as breakthrough high-mobility materials, ultra-dense cell architectures, and more energy-efficient devices and data paths. These technologies could improve transistor characteristics, enable further reductions in memory cell dimensions, and reduce the energy required to move data within NAND devices.

"Beyond G11, we have a strong roadmap, not going to go into great detail on it today, but really focused on new materials densifying the cell architecture, and continuing to focus on that XYZ scaling going forward," said DeBoer. "[…] The current industry direction and Micron’s direction is scaling both by adding layers [and] also by shrinking the cell dimensions."

The company has not disclosed specific architectural details, density targets, or production schedules for its post-G11 generations, though its roadmap suggests that future NAND scaling will increasingly depend on innovations in materials, cell architecture, and peripheral circuitry rather than layer-count increases alone. Meanwhile, since the number of active layers is arguably the easiest way to increase storage density, we would not expect the race towards the highest layer count to slow down substantially in the coming years, especially given strong demand for 3D NAND-based storage.

SK hynix early on Friday announced that it had decided to abandon plans for a potential initial public offering (IPO) of Solidigm, its U.S.-based enterprise SSD subsidiary, citing unfavorable stock market conditions and semiconductor share price trends. At the same time, SK hynix confirmed it plans to build a new fab for Solidigm in the U.S. to address growing demand for enterprise SSDs. Although an IPO could have helped finance a new fab in the U.S., SK hynix claims that its subsidiary’s expansion remains a priority.

Solidigm specializes in high-capacity data center SSDs based on floating gate 3D QLC NAND memory. As AI infrastructure deployments accelerate, demand for high-capacity storage increases, whereas Solidigm's existing manufacturing capacity is barely sufficient to address its projected needs. Consequently, SK hynix believes that Solidigm requires additional production facilities in the U.S., although it has yet to disclose the planned fab's capacity, investment requirements, or construction schedule. Such a facility could also strengthen SK hynix's American manufacturing footprint, which is important, given the current environment and on-shoring trends.

SK hynix had considered multiple options — including direct investment, a pre-IPO funding round, and IPO of Solidigm — to finance capacity expansion. An IPO would have enabled SK hynix to raise capital from outside investors without taking on more debt. Furthermore, it could have revealed the true value of the subsidiary, which SK hynix believes is not properly reflected in its own market capitalization. In addition to financing the expansion, the proceeds could have been used for dividends, share repurchases, and share cancellations.

However, SK hynix says that increased market volatility and the ongoing correction in semiconductor stocks have made an IPO less attractive. As a result, the company believes that current market conditions would prevent Solidigm from achieving a valuation that adequately reflects its growth prospects. Consequently, it has discontinued its review of both pre-IPO financing and an IPO, even though it will continue to evaluate alternative funding mechanisms.

The cancellation of the IPO raises an obvious question: why would SK hynix abandon a financing mechanism that could provide billions of dollars for Solidigm's expansion just as demand for enterprise SSDs is at a record high and set to increase further over the next couple of years? After all, constructing a modern 3D NAND fab requires tens of billions of dollars, and external financing could reduce the burden on SK hynix's balance sheet and preserve capital for other projects (e.g., new capacity elsewhere).

One possible explanation is Solidigm's exceptionally strong profitability. Micron's enterprise storage division recently reported a non-GAAP gross margin of 90%, and given Solidigm's unique position in the market (it controls 21.1% of the enterprise SSD market together with its parent company), its margins may well be higher as it sells exclusive products. If extraordinary margins are sustainable over the next two or three years, its operations could substantially boost SK hynix’s consolidated profitability and generate considerable cash for future investments. Given these circumstances, SK hynix could potentially finance Solidigm's U.S. manufacturing expansion through a combination of internally generated cash and debt even without diluting its ownership. Financing the entire project with cash alone may also be possible, even though such an approach would be less likely given the massive capital requirements of advanced semiconductor production facilities nowadays. In any case, it is natural for SK hynix to prefer retaining full ownership of a highly profitable subsidiary to selling part of it at a valuation it considers inadequate.

The latest board to land on our test bench is a small-form-factor Intel option, the Gigabyte Z890M Aorus Elite Wifi7 Ice. This Micro ATX motherboard costs only $209 on Amazon and packs most of the ATX version's features into a smaller package. The board is optimized for Intel’s Core Ultra 200S Plus processors and pairs best with Micro ATX chassis, but its best feature is its looks. It’s one of the better-looking Micro ATX options, especially if you’re looking for a white-themed build.

The Z890M Aorus Elite offers three M.2 sockets (2x PCIe 5.0) and four SATA ports for storage, 2.5 GbE and Wi-Fi 7 (160 Hz) for networking, and a basic audio solution. The rear IO delivers nine USB ports total, including one 40 Gbps Type-C port (with DisplayPort capability). All of that is typical fare for the form factor. You also get two full-length PCIe slots (one reinforced) and heatsinks covering all M.2 sockets, giving the board a more premium look than its direct competition. It also adds two RGB lighting zones, one by the VRMs on the left and the other under the chipset heatsink, adding glow to your chassis.

Overall, performance in our testing was average, with the board doing well in some tests and slightly below average in others. For gamers, it performed well in our 3DMark tests and in real games. In short, there’s nothing to worry about from a performance standpoint. The Z890M Aorus Elite also supports AI features, including AI Perfdrive, which offers customizable BIOS performance presets for one-click CPU improvements.

Below, we’ll examine the board's performance and other features to determine whether it deserves a spot on our list of the best motherboards. But before we share test results and discuss details, here are the specifications from Gigabyte.

Specifications of the Gigabyte Z890M Aorus Elite Wifi7 Ice

Inside the Box

The box includes the usual accessories. You get two SATA cables (white), a rubber pad, an extra thermal pad for M.2, an EZ connector for the front panel, and an installation guide. The collection here is sparse, but typical for the price point.

Design and Features of the Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice

For what tends to be a budget motherboard class (and typically, well, ugly), the Aorus Elite WiFi 7 Ice is an attractive Micro ATX SKU. Where its peers don’t offer complete heatsink coverage on the bottom half, this one does. It also uses a large heatsink for the primary M.2 socket, unlike its peers. It also has integrated RGB lighting (under the VRM and chipset heatsinks) for an extra bit of flair. All in all, it’s one of the better-looking Micro ATX motherboards around.

Zooming in on the top half, starting on the left, we get a better look at the Aorus eagle design, along with the RGB feature. The VRM heatsink below has a lot of mass and surface area, so it does a good job keeping the MOSFETs below running in spec. Above that are the two “UD” (solid pin) 8-pin power connectors (one required) for the processor.

Past the CPU socket, the next thing we run into is the four DRAM slots with the locking mechanism at the top (where there’s room). Gigabyte lists support for up to DDR5-9200(OC), which is plenty fast for the platform. Surprisingly, our fastest kit (DDR5-8800) didn’t play nice with this board, but the DDR5-8200 kit worked fine. As always, for best results, stick to the memory QVL.

Next to the RAM slots on the left are the first two (of six) 4-pin fan headers. Each header supports PWM and DC-controlled devices. Each header supports up to 2A/24W output, which is plenty, especially for a smaller chassis with fewer fans. Gigabyte Control Center (GCC) and the BIOS control the fans via the Smart Fan 6 applet.

Above the DRAM slots is the Q-LED feature. Four LEDs, CPU/Boot/VGA/RAM, light up during POST. If a failure occurs during that time, the offending RGB stays lit, giving you a general idea of where the problem may be. Next to it, in the upper-right corner, are three simple buttons: power, reset, and Q-Flash.

Down the right edge, you'll find the first (of three) 3-pin ARGB headers. The other two are along the bottom edge. GCC and the RGB Fusion app inside control these headers and the integrated lighting, offering users plenty of canned LED effects and customization. Below that are the 24-pin ATX connector to power the board, another 4-pin fan header, the front-panel USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) connector, and a 19-pin front-panel USB 3.2 Gen1 (5 Gbps) header. Between those is a front-panel HDMI output, making it easy to add secondary displays for monitoring or further chassis customization.

Power delivery on the Z890M Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice is capable, but it doesn’t quite reach the level of "robust." The board has 15 phases, 12 of which are dedicated to Vcore. Power comes from the dual 8-pin EPS connectors and is controlled by the OnSemiconductor NCP81537 8-phase controller (teamed configuration). From there, power moves on to the OnSemi NCP302155 60A DrMOS MOSFETs and then to your processor. The 720A available isn’t a lot, but it can handle the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, and even the Core Ultra 9 285K — though I’m not sure how hard I’d push it overclocking the 285K or 270K Plus. Just be sure to keep air flowing through your chassis, as these components will get warm under sustained heavy use.

On the bottom half of the board, starting on the left edge, we spy the audio solution. The Z890M uses the budget Realtek ALC897 codec, plus a few dedicated audio capacitors (yellow and black). While one of its direct competitors has a better one, this codec is fine for most users, and there's no reason to avoid it unless you're making music with the board or consider yourself a PC-focused audiophile.

In the middle of the board are two full-length PCIe slots. The primary slot, using Gigabyte’s PCIe UD Slot X reinforcement) connects through the CPU and runs at PCIe 5.0 x16 speeds (no bifurcation, FYI). The second slot at the bottom sources its bandwidth through the chipset and runs up to PCIe 4.0 x4. There’s plenty of bandwidth for expansion; just make sure your graphics card doesn’t cover the second slot if you need to use it.

Between and above the PCIe slots are three M.2 sockets. The top socket, under the beefy EZ-Latch heatsink (made good contact, note), connects through the CPU and is the main PCIe 5.0 x4 (128 Gbps) M.2 socket. Under the plate-style heatsink (also using EZ-Latch along with EZ-Click to secure the M.2 without screws) are two more M.2 sockets. Both sockets connect via the chipset, support 80mm devices, and run up to PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds. The bottom socket supports up to 110mm modules, while the middle socket supports the more familiar 80mm. If you need the additional speed or redundancy RAID offers, the board supports RAID0/1/5/10 modes for NVMe SSDs.

We've also captured several images of the ICs that make this motherboard work, including Realtek Ethernet and audio, ASMedia (for the front HDMI), and OnSemiconductor MOSFETs/PWM controller.

Moving right, past the chipset heatsink and the other RGB lighting element, we spot a couple of Thunderbolt headers and four SATA ports (supporting RAID0/1/5/10 modes). At the bottom of the board is a slew of headers, offering the typical connectivity in this area, with nothing worth calling out.

Below, we’ve listed all the connections across the bottom of the board.

• Front panel audio
• (2) 4-pin RGB header
• 3-pin ARGB header
• (2) USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) headers
• (2) 4-pin system fan headers
• SPI TPM header
• 2-pin reset jumper
• 2-pin Clear CMOS jumper
• Front panel header

The rear IO area is pretty sparse compared to high-end boards, but it uses some venting to help keep the VRMs running cooler. On the left (in white) are four USB 2.0 ports, followed by four USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) ports in blue. Below those is the DisplayPort (v2.1) output. Next to the blue USB ports is your sole Type-C port. In this case, it's USB4 (not Thunderbolt 4) at 40 Gbps and supports DisplayPort output as well. To the right, you'll find the 2.5 GbE port and, below that in red, the only USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type-A port. Finally, on the right, are the quick-connect Wi-Fi 7 (160 Hz) connectors and audio stack: dual 3.5mm jacks for mic and line-out, plus an SPDIF optical output.

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Firmware

Gigabyte’s updated “UC BIOS 2.0” defaults to Easy Mode. It’s logically laid out and displays a wealth of system information, including processor, RAM, fan speeds, and several selectable options such as XMP profiles, RAM tweaks, Re-Size BAR support, Smart Fan 6 access, and more. The Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice uses a white background with the ‘Aorus orange’ accents and black text, creating a high-contrast, easy-to-read screen similar to the Aorus Infinity, but with a white background instead of Aorus branding. The BIOS also offers different themes in EZ mode via a dropdown if you want to change it.

All headings still appear across the top in advanced mode, but they are now larger ‘buttons’ and easy to select with a mouse. The highlight bar (where you are on the page) is a light blue here and easy to see. Every option you need and want is at your fingertips, and you don’t have to drill down several layers to reach the most commonly used functions – especially if you populate your selections in the Favorites section.

Software

Gigabyte Control Center (GCC) is a one-stop solution for controlling various functions, including RGB and Fan control, hardware monitoring, and overclocking. It also helps you find, download, and install driver updates for your system. It’s a simple application that does its job. It’s also a much cleaner tool than the previous App Center. It earns our approval for the breadth of functionality it offers users. There’s also the curiously named AI Snatch to help with overclocking.

Test System / Comparison Products

We’ve updated our test system to Windows 11 (25H2) 64-bit OS with all updates applied as of late April 2026. On the hardware front, we’ve updated the RAM kits to ones appropriate for the platform. Peripherals, including cooling, storage, power supply, and graphics cards, remain unchanged. We also use the latest publicly available BIOS unless otherwise noted. The hardware we used is as follows:

TEST SYSTEM COMPONENTS:

• CPU - Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus
• Cooling - Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420
• Storage - Crucial 2TB T705 M.2 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD
• RAM - Kingston Fury Renegade - 32GB DDR5-7600 CL38 (KF576C38RWAK2-32)
• RAM - G.Skill Trident Z5 CK - 32GB DDR5-8200 CL40 (F5-8200C4052G24GX2-TZZ5CK)
• RAM - V-Color 256GB (2x128GB) DDR5-8000 CL64 (TECQ5128G80Q864K)
• GPU - Asus TUF RTX 4080 16G
• PSU - EVGA Supernova 850W P6
• Windows 11 64-bit (25H2 - 26200.8037)
• NVIDIA Driver 595.97

Benchmark Settings

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Benchmark Results

Our standard benchmarks and power tests are performed using the CPU’s stock frequencies (including any default boost/turbo) with all power-saving features at default. We set optimized defaults in the BIOS, then enable the XMP profile to set the memory. If the BIOS enables boosts by default, it runs like that. We set the Windows power scheme to Balanced (default) for this baseline testing, so the PC idles appropriately.

Synthetic Benchmarks and Real World Applications

Synthetics offer a valuable way to evaluate a board's performance, since identical settings should yield similar results. Turbo boost wattage and advanced memory timings are areas where motherboard manufacturers can still optimize for stability or performance, though, and these settings can impact specific testing scenarios. We’ve also combined our previous ‘timed’ benchmark applications into this section..

Performance on the Aorus Elite was around the average among the tested boards. Some benchmarks were above average, while others were slightly below—nothing to worry about so far.

3D Games and 3DMark

Starting with the launch of the Arrow Lake refresh chips, we’ve updated our game tests. We’re keeping the F1 racing game but have upgraded to F1 25. We’ll also continue with the ever-popular, aesthetically pleasing Cyberpunk 2077. We run both games at 1920x1080 resolution using the Ultra preset (details listed in the table above). Both games are set to use DLSS.

The goal of these settings is to determine whether performance differs at the most commonly used (and CPU/system-bound) resolution, with settings most people use or strive for (Ultra). We expect the difference between boards in these tests to be minor, with most falling within the margin of error. We’ve also added a minimum FPS metric, which can affect your gameplay and immersion.

As we’ve seen for a while now, the 3DMark tests don’t show much separation from worst to first, and we see that again across our varied datasets. 3DMark scores were fine; in fact, they were the highest so far in these tight results, while gaming results were average overall. Not only does it do work, but as expected, the board also plays games just fine.

Overclocking

Over the past few CPU generations, overclocking headroom has been shrinking on both sides of the fence, while out-of-the-box performance has increased. For overclockers, that means less fun. For the average consumer, you’re getting the most out of the processor without manual tweaking. Today’s motherboards are more robust than ever, and most support power-hungry flagship-class processors, so we know the hardware can handle them.

You can extract even more performance from these processors by manually adjusting settings or using the fancy AI overclocking that board partners have been touting. Results will vary and depend on the CPU's cooling and quality. In other words, your mileage may vary. With that in mind, we’re not overclocking the CPU for these review articles. However, we'll test our different memory kits to ensure they meet the specifications.

Memory testing went OK, with the board surviving a 30-minute stress test using the DDR5-7600 and DDR5-8200 kits without issue. That said, it struggled with the DDR5-8800 kit and failed after about 5 minutes. If you really want to push memory speeds, stick to the QVL list for your best chance of reaching higher speeds.

Power Consumption / VRM Temperatures

We used AIDA64’s System Stability Test with Stress CPU, FPU, cache, and Memory enabled for power testing, using the processor's peak power consumption value. We measured wall wattage with a Kill-A-Watt meter, which captures the entire PC (excluding the monitor). The only variable that changes is the motherboard; all other parts remain the same. We now use only the stock power-use/VRM temperature charts, as this section aims to ensure the power delivery can handle flagship-class processors.

Stress testing with our flagship-class 270K Plus and the Team Group DDR5-7600 kit at stock yielded a peak of only 330W at the wall, tying our lowest result so far. The board also sipped power at idle, dropping to around 56W, the lowest result we’ve recorded for the platform. This board sips power compared to some others.

VRM temperatures ran warm, but are not a concern. Throughout the 30-minute test, the system (excluding the monitor) averaged 232W, and our sensors on the back of the board, directly under the MOSFETs, recorded temperatures peaking at just under 60 degrees Celsius, while HWInfo and the internal sensor showed similar peaks at about 60 degrees Celsius. That value is well within specification for the MOSFETs doing all the work below. We’re confident that the power delivery can handle whatever you're likely to throw at it. Chances are, the CPU temperature will limit you before the board does, but keep airflow good to keep temperatures down.

Bottom Line

Gigabyte’s Z890M Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice is a solid all-around motherboard for the Micro ATX form factor and smaller builds. Its icy-white aesthetic and ‘full coverage’ of heatsinks are rare for this class of board and give it a premium vibe compared to its peers. Hardware-wise, it includes most of what you’d expect from the Z890 platform, though I’d like to see another USB4 port on the rear IO, and perhaps a better audio codec. Still, this is one of the better-looking and better-equipped of the Z890M Micro ATX options.

As for the competition, the Asus Prime Z890M-Plus ($216.99) has more expansion slots (4), additional “AI” features, and SATA ports (6), but fewer rear USB ports, and it just doesn’t give off the same premium vibes as the Gigabyte Z890M. ASRock’s Z890M Riptide Wifi ($252) costs quite a bit more than the others and offers more robust power delivery (like the Asus) and decent looks, but its specs are otherwise similar. Aesthetically, the ASRock is also less pleasing than the Gigabyte, and it has only one PCIe slot (so no room for expansion if needed). MSI has the Pro B860M-A WiFi ($158), which uses a lesser mainstream chipset, offers 5 GbE (and slower 6E Wi-Fi), and is otherwise comparable to the Asus with its extra PCIe slots. Oh, and it doesn't look great.

Overall, the Z890M Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice is one of the better-looking Micro ATX offerings and nicely priced, earning a spot on our best motherboards list (for Intel Micro ATX). The icy-white aesthetic and minimal PCB visibility will turn heads in a white case. Hardware-wise, it has the specs you expect for this class of board. If you’re in the market for a Micro ATX Intel board, the Z890M Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 Ice should be your first stop, especially if you want to show off your paired white components.

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If you've been thinking about making the transition from an IPS monitor to an OLED display to upgrade your gaming setup, today's deal is a great way to pick up a new QD-OLED screen for a great price. Save $50 at Best Buy on Acer's 27-inch Predator XB27OU QD-OLED gaming monitor, now only $329.99, a great price for onboarding the latest technology into your gaming setup. Experience gorgeous inky blacks and eye-popping colors with the amazing contrast offered by QD-OLED displays, perfect for accentuating your favorite games.

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The Acer Predator XB27OU has a max resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 pixels; it's a QHD (2K) display that's superb for a mid-range gaming PC where the graphics card shouldn't struggle too much to meet the frame rate and resolution requirements. It has a very fast 240Hz refresh rate for seamless gaming, and thanks to the OLED tech, the gray-to-gray response time is a staggeringly low 0.03ms, giving your games very smooth motion and avoiding ghosting compared to slower monitors. This monitor also fully supports AMD's FreeSync Premium tech, so you can match the refresh rate of the monitor to the frame rate of your games to eliminate screen tearing completely, for a much better gaming experience.

Let's not forget about the other great aspect of QD-OLED displays - the color representation. The Acer Predator XB27OU sports an impressive 99% DCI-P3 color gamut, a Delta E<2 accuracy, and even supports HDR10, a 10-bit color solution that improves contrast, color depth, and brightness compared to standard dynamic range.

You can connect your gaming PC and even a couple of game consoles thanks to the inclusion of two HDMI 2.1 ports and a DisplayPort 1.4 port. Plenty of connections for the ultimate gaming battlestation.

Amazon will no longer build four new data centers on the site of the George Washington University's campus in Loudoun County, just outside of D.C., and will instead repurpose the majority of the 122-acre space for mixed-use and residential development following significant pushback from the local community. It will also donate 25 acres of the property to Loudoun County to be used for a community arts center and new recreational facility. On top of all that, it'll even give $5 million to the county's fund for housing, reports The Washington Post.

That's quite the turnaround compared to plans to build in a county that is already dubbed "Data Center Alley" because it has the largest concentration of data centers on the planet. But residents' concerns about the noise generated by such data centers and the incredible amount of power that they require to function have seen the county's approach to new data center buildouts change of late. Amazon first submitted its proposal to build the new facilities in July, and Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis J. Randall and Amazon met in September, where it was put to the company that it may be better to find an alternative use for the land.

Josh Weissman, Amazon’s vice president in charge of data center development, said the company had jumped at the chance to purchase the former university campus when the opportunity arose, but added that the company considered the county’s “pointed concerns about data center development at this particular site.” Weissman added that “While we see the property’s legal development potential differently than the County does, we concluded that the best outcome for all is to come together on a shared vision for this campus rather than engage in costly litigation.”

The building of new data centers has always been a necessity given our growing use of cloud-based services and storage systems. But the recent boom in AI use has seen demand for additional, and larger, facilities ratcheted up to new levels. But with that demand comes opposition, with local communities wary of the impact these mammoth facilities can have on the areas in which they live, including spikes in the price of electricity. Officials have begun taking steps to try to grease the wheels of data center construction. Just days before this news broke, President Donald Trump called for data center builders and AI hyperscalers to pay local communities a dividend amid energy-related price increases. In a social media post, Trump went on to say that data centers would be required not only to make their own electricity but also to give or sell excess energy back to the local community. Water shortages and deforestation have also become key issues affecting the communities in which data centers are being placed.

Back in Loudoun County, officials pointed to what could be achieved when choosing dialog over confrontation. “By choosing dialogue over reflexive disagreement, Loudoun County and Amazon created an opportunity for the County,” Randall reportedly said via statement. “This agreement provides new places for our Loudoun residents to gather, create, and play. And, most importantly to me, we will provide more attainable homes for working families.”

Export controls have kept ASML's most advanced EUV lithography machines out of China. Instead, the country's chipmaking industry has relied on less-capable deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines. By using multiple exposures on critical chip layers, these older machines are still capable of producing performant silicon. However, as multiple patterns are applied there are more chances for defects, longer manufacturing times, and higher bills. We spoke to experts like Chris Mack, co-founder and CTO of semiconductor firm Fractilia, to find out how much further DUV can go.

For years, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography has been seen as China’s biggest choke point in the country’s attempts to build cutting-edge chips. The machines, made exclusively by Dutch manufacturer ASML, use 13.5nm-wavelength light to print some of the most intricate features found on modern processors. Sales of ASML’s EUV systems are subject to export restrictions, forcing Chinese manufacturers to squeeze ever more out of older deep ultraviolet, or DUV, lithography instead. The EUV gap alone between China and the West is at least half a decade, according to some analysts.

But even without access to EUV machines, China has gotten surprisingly far in recreating what it offers through existing technology.

Teardowns of Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro in 2023 found the phone’s Kirin 9000S processor had been made by SMIC using a second-generation 7nm-class manufacturing process without EUV. More recently, analysis of Huawei’s Kirin 9030 found SMIC had pushed its DUV-based process closer still to the density associated with 5nm manufacturing – although it continued to lag behind the leading processes used by TSMC and Samsung.

Multiple patterning

The trick is multiple patterning. Rather than trying to print an overly intricate chip layer in a single pass, Chinese manufacturers are dividing up the complex design into several simpler patterns. Repeat the process enough times and you can etch up something approximating the proper layer you intended.

The trick works. But according to lithography expert Chris Mack, co-founder and CTO of Fractilia, asking whether a chip can be made without EUV overlooks the trade-offs manufacturers make in order to do it.

“When this transition first began, what everyone in the industry said as conventional wisdom is that cost-wise, three exposures on a 193 immersion tool cost about the same as one exposure on an EUV tool,” Mack said in an interview with Tom’s Hardware Premium. “At three, it was about even,” Mack explained. “But as soon as you hit four masks – 193 masks being replaced by one EUV mask – then EUV became more cost-effective.”

It’s also likely to produce a higher quality product with fewer defects. Each time a wafer is patterned, that new pattern has to line up perfectly with everything that’s already been etched beneath it. The more individual exposures needed to produce a single layer, the more opportunities there are for things to go wrong. “If you have, say, four 193 masks, you've got all those different overlays, and you've got all these different process variations that start to accumulate,” Mack said.

Chip designers can try and avoid that by leaving more space around features so the finished processor can actually be manufactured reliably. But that means the chip ends up bigger – and bigger chips become expensive very quickly. Making each die larger means fewer fit on every wafer, and wafers cost a lot of money – tens of thousands of dollars each.

“You don't sell wafers, you sell die,” Mack said. “The question is: how many die can I fit onto that wafer, and how many of those die yield, and therefore how many chips can I sell per wafer?”

The efficiency gap

There is some evidence of what that efficiency gap can look like in practice – albeit in memory rather than logic chips. In a June report, Morgan Stanley estimated that Chinese DRAM manufacturer CXMT was producing only around one-third as many bits per wafer as Western competitors. The analysts believed the older process node only accounted for around a third of that shortfall, but said access to lithography was a “hard ceiling” on Chinese memory development. “For advanced logic chips, in theory there could be other innovations to engineer around EUV, but they are not likely to be very efficient and effective,” said Douglas Fuller, a researcher at Copenhagen Business School, in comments to Tom’s Hardware Premium.

It is also why claims that China has reached a particular semiconductor process “node” need to be treated with caution. “If somebody says it's X node – the seven nanometer node, the five nanometer node, the three nanometer node – these words almost have no meaning,” Mack said.

That can be seen in SMIC’s latest chips. Reporting suggests its N+3 process represents meaningful progress towards 5nm-class manufacturing – but the actual measurements show it remains significantly less scaled than established 5nm processes from Samsung and TSMC. That doesn’t mean DUV has reached the end of its useful exploitation.

Stretching DUV's efficacy

Micron is an example of how far DUV can be stretched, producing competitive DRAM chips using DUV, multiple patterning and tight process control. Its 1-alpha generation of chips was developed without EUV. “They pushed 193 farther than any of the other memory makers did,” Mack said. “They were able to make very competitive chips with 100% 193 compared to Samsung and Hynix making them with many layers of EUV.”

Morgan Stanley believes CXMT’s planned move to 1-alpha DRAM – which it wants to use for HBM3e – is achievable without access to EUV, citing Micron as evidence. Indeed, “by the end of the decade, advanced packaging will allow firms to use DUV to produce the latest generations of DRAM,” reckons Fuller.

Micron also designed its products around the manufacturing technology available to it, rather than simply trying to recreate an EUV process on older equipment – something which could be a useful lesson for Chinese manufacturers. “If the entire ecosystem of 193 immersion were available to China,” Mack explained, “then they could probably push a long way with 193 multiple patterning, especially if they optimise designs for the fact that they're going to be using that.”

But Micron was making memory, whose highly repetitive structures make close co-ordination between chip design and manufacturing easier than it is for the much more complicated logic processors found in phones and computers.

“Memory is a lot easier than logic,” Mack said.

And even Micron eventually concluded that EUV was worth using. Its newer 1-gamma DRAM process uses EUV lithography, with Micron saying the technology helps it achieve more than 30% greater bit density per wafer than its preceding 1-beta generation.

EUV is hardly a magic wand, either. Mack points to stochastic effects – tiny random variations caused by the small number of photons involved in an exposure – which mean manufacturers can improve pattern control by increasing the EUV exposure dose. But it also pushes the cost back up quickly.

Because of that, Mack believes there is ultimately a limit to how far multiple patterning can economically substitute for EUV. “I would be hard pressed to really believe that a three nanometer or a two nanometer node is going to be economically viable without EUV,” he said.

That doesn’t mean Chinese chipmakers simply hit a technological wall and stop. They can keep pushing DUV while accepting larger dies, poorer yields, longer manufacturing times – or some combination of all three.

They can also throw capacity and money at part of the problem. Morgan Stanley assumes CXMT remains stuck on its 1-alpha process without EUV, yet still increases its share of global DRAM bit supply from 14% in 2026 to 16% in 2028 simply by building more greenfield capacity. The bank also expects China’s AI chip self-sufficiency to rise from 42% in 2025 to 70% by 2030 through new advanced-node capacity, improving yields and heavy state support – while EUV, HBM and advanced software leave a persistent gap. And so without EUV, the experts reckon China can only get partway to bridging the gap with the West. ““I would be hard pressed,” said Mack, “to really believe that a three nanometer or a two nanometer node is going to be economically viable without EUV.”

Bambu Lab’s long-anticipated tool changer will launch on November 3rd. Dubbed the H3C, the 3D printer has 9 tools held by a Vortex-like rack mounted on the front of the chamber. Tool changers are the wave of the future, as they can switch colors faster and with less waste than Bambu Lab’s current AMS system.

Unfortunately, most of the information about the new 3D printer is shrouded in secrecy, but there are plenty of details that are already public knowledge. Bambu Lab is quite proud of this latest engineering feat, which you can see in the video below, and I’ll admit, I’m pretty impressed, too.

Here’s what we can confirm about the H3C: It is a member of the H-line of flagship printers, which includes the H2S, H2D, and H2C. As you can imagine, it is most similar to its namesake, the H2C, which is a 7-tool induction-heated “nozzle swapper” with a motorized Vortex rack to hold tools not in use. The H2C is one of the larger Bambu Lab machines, with a 330 x 320 x 325mm build volume.

The 11-second-long teaser video shows the tool rack dropping down, along with a satisfying metallic snick. As you might imagine, tool heads that are stored above the build plate are not going to get in your way when you’re watching that first layer go down. This is an annoying problem with the Bondtech INDX system, which we reviewed paired up with a Prusa CORE One, which forces you to peer through the tool rack to see what's going on inside the printer. Visibility on the Bambu H3C is probably better.

If you type “H3C leak” on YouTube, you can find several YouTubers who do not have machines under review dissecting the clues sprinkled around the internet. One “AI-enhanced” image showed 10 spools, which I can now finally confirm is completely wrong. Today’s video clearly shows only nine colorful Bowden tools arching over the top of the printer. We’re not at liberty to say what’s holding the spools, but I think it’s safe to acknowledge that it's a very Bambu sort of system.

The H2 line has been touted as a home manufacturing hub, so you might wonder if the H3C is the same? Perhaps it is. I had an opportunity to talk to Dr. Tao at Formnext last year when the H2C was fresh, and he was very interested in creating multitasking machines that could do more than just 3D print.

Sadly, not everyone was impressed with adding a laser to the H2D, but since the Bambu Lab A2L has an optional blade cutting and embossing tool, we can safely assume that the notion of multitasking is alive and well. I once programmed an Ender 3 to pick up Sharpie markers, so just think about the things a much more sophisticated machine with a team of sharp engineers could program.

I can’t wait to tell you more about the H3C. There are definitely a couple of surprising things about this printer that are going to come out of left field. We’ll let it all out on November 3rd.

Lava, an Israeli security firm, says that it has been able to identify 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 chips within the network of China Telecom, a state-owned company that provides telecommunications services within the country. These same chips have already been barred from export by U.S. export controls, a report by The Information notes, which begs the question of how they have turned up in a Chinese data center. Such chips can only be sold to whitelisted buyers who agree not to export them to sanctioned parties, including those in China.

However, banning companies from buying Nvidia's high-performance GPUs and AI data center chips hasn't always worked. In 2025, it was reported that Chinese companies smuggled $1 billion worth of Nvidia AI chips into the country in three months. At the time, the B200 chips were the most sought-after, but some distributors were already gearing up to sell B300-series chips when they became available.

While the latest finding shows that the proliferation of export-controlled chips into China continues to be an issue, Nvidia has downplayed the report but didn't deny the findings. "Governments, researchers, and media have all found insignificant diversion of controlled US products, less than one half of one percent in recent court cases — a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of domestic compute China already has," an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "With tens of millions of GPUs in service in approved countries, this report again demonstrates that smuggling is a nonfactor, blocked by governments on both sides of the globe."

It's unknown how B300 chips found their way into China Telecom's server racks, nor can Lava confirm exactly where within the company's network they are located. But they are there, with Lava identifying them via Nvidia's own DCGM Exporter tool. The software can be installed by data center operators and is used to monitor server health and performance, and while designed for internal use, it can oftentimes be accessed beyond the data center's network. Oddly, it doesn't always require password authentication, either. Nvidia previously confirmed it was working on a tool that would allow its chips to be located, but it is yet to be released.

It's easy to see why Chinese firms are keen to get their hands on the Blackwell Ultra B300. Announced in March of last year, the data center GPU is one of the most powerful on the planet, offering huge performance gains with 50% more memory and FP4 compute than the previous-generation B200. At the time, Nvidia touted that the chip was "built for the age of reasoning," while name-checking more sophisticated AI LLMs like DeepSeek R1. At the time of its announcement, the B300 was expected to ship by the end of 2025, and it didn't take long for it to become hot property. In August 2026, nine people were indicted in Taiwan over the illegal export of B300 GPUs to China. This came just days after Supermicro confirmed that it had fired several employees following an investigation into smuggling. The complicated smuggling process included the use of a Taiwanese server trading firm called Flying Tiget Tech — a firm with whitelisted status for GPU purchases.

Nvidia's chips have proven so vital to AI data centers that demand for even its older silicon has caused skyrocketing prices. The company's A100 servers have tripled in price, despite being five years old, and can cost up to $82.,000. The ongoing crackdown on Nvidia chip smuggling has even seen some resort to retooling gaming GPUs to run AI workloads where possible.