In what I can only assume is one of the first of many similar projects, a 3D-printed Steam Machine clone is making the rounds online. The custom gaming PC comes from Jacob Terkelsen, an AMD AI GPU engineer who recently posted his personal creation on X.

The Terk Box v1.1, as it's known, is a compact mini-ITX build that uses a custom 3D-printed case that you, too, can download and try out if you're so inclined. It's available on Printables alongside a parts list, which was created by a user named 3DCatt.

The custom chassis measures 167mm x 168mm x 225mm (6.5 x 6.6 x 8.8 inches), which puts it very close to the Steam Machine's dimensions. According to the parts list, the custom gaming PC uses a mini-ITX motherboard with a 400W FlexATX power supply unit (PSU).

It's unclear exactly what performance hardware and cooling solution was used for the build, but, as Terkelsen points out, additional ventilation had to be added to the back of the custom PC to keep the RTX 5060 GPU from thermal throttling.

Terkelsen notes that he's working with 3DCatt to improve the design, so it's highly likely that this neat little project will continue to evolve over time.

Considering the Steam Machine's custom AMD GPU with 8GB of VRAM can be lined up with an RTX 3060, the RTX 5060 in the Terk Box represents a rather huge performance uplift. However, it's not all sunny days.

Steam Machine or a custom PC? It might be harder to choose than you think

Since Terkelsen's tweet has been receiving a lot of attention, he returned to add some context about the overall project.

He notes that the cost of this custom Steam Machine is "nowhere close to $1000," which refers to the $1,049 price that Valve set for its new PC. He adds, "People fail to grasp how difficult SFF builds are..."

Terkelsen also clearly states that he recommends "the fully-engineered solution Valve has designed, from the software to the mechanical design."

It's not hard to see why. The Terk Box v1.1 is an interesting project that enthusiasts will get a kick out of, while the Steam Machine is a commercial product that underwent years of revisions and careful tuning. It arrives ready to play, no assembly required.

The worst part, and one that reflects the overall state of the PC component market, is that even a custom build like this costs a lot of money.

One last thing — the Terk Box v1.1 runs on Windows 11 with Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE). In reply to some comments, Terkelsen says that "Linux is far better these days, and this build would support Bazzite or CachyOS." Let me know in the comments section below if you agree.

Valve's SteamOS so far only works with AMD GPUs, but Valve has publicly stated that it's working with NVIDIA to bring support to RTX GPUs.

It's clear that we're in the early days of Steam Machine knockoffs, and I expect there to be plenty more arriving in the near future.

(via Hackaday)

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I feel like it's been years since Valve first announced its new Steam Machine; alas, it's only been about 7 months since we first saw the new gaming PC expected to take on living room consoles.

There has been plenty of discourse around the Steam Machine in that time, especially in regard to what pricing will look like, considering how expensive RAM and storage have become since Valve initially unveiled the device.

The latest leak, arriving earlier today via an X post from @Olrak29_ (via Videocardz), involves Geekbench 6 CPU scores for the Steam Machine's custom AMD 1772 processor.

These are actually not the first leaked Geekbench scores to appear online. In August 2025, some numbers showed up with the Steam Machine running on Windows.

What makes these new results particularly interesting is that they come from a system running Linux, presumably Valve's own SteamOS that's set to be the launch OS. As you can see, Valve's custom AMD chip actually performed better in Windows than in Linux, at least in a couple of instances.

If these results, whether in Windows or Linux, seem a bit wimpy, it's because they are.

We immediately injected the new Steam Machine Geekbench results into our CPU performance graph alongside gaming handhelds featuring the likes of AMD's Ryzen Z1/Z2 Extreme, Intel's Core Ultra 7 258V, and the custom AMD chip in the Steam Deck.

As you can see, the Steam Machine's custom AMD 1772 CPU isn't setting any records, falling firmly in the middle of the pack.

👉 Valve's new Steam Machine is just a PC at heart — here's how to build your own and how much it will cost

Its best Geekbench 6 CPU results on Linux come out to a 2,334 single-core score and a 7,392 multi-core score. In comparison, the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme in the Xbox Ally X hit a 2,813 single-core score and a 12,789 multi-core score in our testing.

This is but one synthetic benchmark test, and it's also only covering the CPU side, leaving the custom GPU's performance unknown.

What do the Steam Machine's new Geekbench CPU scores actually mean?

The Steam Machine's CPU is definitely trailing some chips that are already on the market, but context matters a lot in this scenario.

AMD's custom chip for the Steam Machine features 6 cores, 12 threads, and a boost clock up to 4.86GHz. The Z1/Z2 Extreme and Core Ultra 7 chips feature 8 cores running at a higher TDP, which makes a big difference, especially in compact devices.

So, yes, the Steam Machine might not have the strongest CPU power, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to perform worse than premium gaming handhelds.

Is the Steam Machine's perceived CPU performance gap a real issue?

The Steam Machine is expected to arrive with an RDNA 3 GPU featuring 8GB of VRAM. Unfortunately, I haven't yet seen any leaks in terms of the Steam Machine's GPU performance, but there are some hard facts to note.

The Steam Machine's GPU is a far cry from the integrated chips in gaming handhelds that share system memory, and it's very likely that the boosted GPU performance will completely annul any CPU deficit.

👉 4 reasons why SteamOS is quietly winning over PC gamers — and why Windows won't be dethroned any time soon

Where the CPU performance gap will most likely be felt is in huge open-world games that require a ton of processing and physics calculations. In the same vein, games will be especially hard on the CPU when attempting to hit high frame rates at high resolutions.

Is there any cause for panic regarding the Steam Machine's CPU performance?

I highly doubt that the Steam Machine's leaked CPU benchmark scores are anything to be concerned about.

The performance level could be felt in some edge cases where games are CPU-bound, but otherwise I expect the superior GPU to pull a ton of weight. This is especially true considering the Steam Machine is intended to be a living room device running on common TV resolutions and frame rates.

Valve has confirmed that its Steam Machine is still "shipping this summer" despite supply chain issues and rising hardware prices. There's still no word on pricing.

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Despite an ongoing memory crunch that's affecting wide swaths of the tech market, a new report from Jon Peddie Research (JPR) reveals that NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel discrete GPU shipments in Q1 2026 remained relatively flat compared to the previous quarter.

As JPR points out (via PC Gamer), the first quarter of the year is generally expected to be flat. Consumers are tapped out after the holiday season, and the major sales events in the tech market are yet to arrive.

In any case, I wasn't expecting the market to hold as strongly as it did, considering the inflated prices that most GPUs are currently experiencing and the lack of any new card launches.

Approximately 11.8 million GPUs were shipped in Q1 2026, with NVIDIA making up the bulk of the hardware.

In Q1 2026, JPR posits that NVIDIA and AMD's overall market share both dropped by 0.4%, whereas Intel increased by 0.4%. That means that NVIDIA fell from 91% in Q4 2025 to 90% in Q1 2026. AMD remained at 8%, and Intel remained at 1% market share, comparatively.

What's more impressive is that the attach rate for discrete GPUs in desktop PCs climbed to 76%, a 33.2% increase from the previous quarter. That's a huge jump. Conversely, JPR also notes a significant 25% year-over-year CPU market drop and a 24% quarter-over-quarter drop.

The GPU results, at least, look good at first glance, but there's some nuance to the numbers.

JPR is known to track all GPU shipments rather than direct point-of-sale purchases to the likes of you or me. That means the data includes GPUs gobbled up by OEMs and other manufacturers, who are undoubtedly attempting to stockpile hardware as prices continue to rise.

I don't doubt these efforts are skewing the numbers, and future reports like these could show far worse results.

AMD's GPU struggles continue as NVIDIA holds its market dominance

If I break down the overall 11.82 million shipments in Q1 2026, it works out to roughly 10.7 million units for NVIDIA, 1 million units for AMD, and 100,000 or so for Intel.

Despite only dropping 0.4% in Q1 2026, AMD's struggle to gain ground on NVIDIA continues.

Looking at Steam's May 2026 GPU hardware survey, the first AMD GPU shows up in 13th place, and it's not a discrete card but rather integrated Radeon Graphics.

In 25th place is the first actual discrete AMD GPU, the Radeon RX 9070 XT, with a 1.33% share of use on Steam.

The rest of those top 25 spots? Completely dominated by NVIDIA, aside from integrated Intel Iris Xe Graphics in 16th place with a 1.79% share.

Windows Central's take

Despite recent news from AMD regarding its FSR 4.1 tech coming to some of its older RX 7000 and RX 6000 GPUs, NVIDIA largely dominates the news cycle with its cutting-edge PC gaming advancements that AMD always seems to be chasing.

I can attest that many of those advancements feel like they border on magic. My RTX 5070 Ti has been treating me very well since I bought it last year, and I'm constantly amazed at the capabilities of DLSS and the overall performance the card can deliver across all games.

There's also the fact that NVIDIA dominates the high-end GPU market. And when I say dominate, I mean there's really no AMD alternative to an RTX 5080 or RTX 5090.

Considering how popular these cards are not just for developers, designers, and editors, but also AI professionals, you can see why AMD is having such a hard time clawing back market share.

I do hope that changes. NVIDIA might hold the biggest market share by far, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. An AMD Radeon revival would only benefit the overall market, providing NVIDIA with some much-needed competition.

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Over the past few years, it felt like generative AI was the only thing that most gigantic tech corporations could talk about. "Big Tech" is investing billions of dollars into the technology, but it mostly feels like chasing the horizon without a viable map to the destination.

Significant players in the game, including Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, claimed that AI would take over all white-collar jobs in 18 months. However, his sentiments were seemingly misconstrued, as he recently clarified that the reference was to mundane, repetitive tasks being replaced, not jobs.

However, AMD CEO Lisa Su felt differently about hype around AI in a recent talk to MIT graduates: "For everything that AI can do, AI can't decide which problems are worth solving. It can't make the hard judgments when the data is not there".

I've written extensively about AI, specifically Microsoft and OpenAI's multi-billion-dollar tie-up, which has manifested into multiple umbrellas. As the technology gains broad adoption and is integrated into workflows across organizations, job security is increasingly becoming a major concern among many professionals.

Even Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes that AI will replace humans for most things, save for coders, biologists, and energy experts. Why? His explanation was simple — these fields are too complex to augment using the technology, further indicating that they'd often require human intervention.

Lisa Su's remarks come at a time when companies like Microsoft are actively pivoting from Bill Gates's "software factory" vision and doubling down on security, quality, and AI transformation as their core business priorities. However, some reports suggest that AI has hit a wall due to a lack of high-quality training content.

As a result, major investors in the field, such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google, won't be able to develop significantly more advanced AI models. Nevertheless, Microsoft is transitioning Windows into a new era of agentic AI. And while what it all means for consumers remains unclear, we're likely to see AI become predominant across the company's portfolio.

At Build 2026, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella indicated that AI agents should be treated like real human employees. "You need to give them identities, you need to give them sandboxes, then you need to set policies to govern them," he added.

But how can we trust this ever-evolving (and occasionally disturbing) tech with sensitive data and critical information across every sphere of our lives and work, when it can delete a company's codebase while simply attempting to develop an app? What’s worse is that the AI tried to cover up the mishap — and when confronted, it lied.

While this is just a drop in the ocean of the many unfortunate incidents professionals have experienced with AI, it clearly underscores the importance of humans in the workplace and in the decision-making process. Such an incident is less likely if the operation were fully managed by humans — or at the very least, if human oversight were required at critical points. AI models can't make the most important decisions (yet).

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is a cornerstone of the global chip supply, accounting for roughly 70% of the world's foundry production (and more if you're talking only about the most cutting-edge semiconductors).

Considering the Taiwanese firm supplies tech giants like NVIDIA, Qualcomm, AMD, and Apple with chips, if there's one company that I don't want to see discuss price increases, it's TSMC.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. In a recent interview with the BBC, TSMC's Chief Financial Officer, Wendell Huang, cited inflation as a reason why the chip maker could be forced to hike prices.

The good news, at least for now, is that TSMC won't be hiking prices (if at all) in the same way that memory manufacturers have been doing for the last couple of years as AI's appetite grows.

Huang explicitly said that TSMC would not suddenly raise prices "fourfold, fivefold" for customers despite inflation causing the company's costs to increase.

TSMC is a publicly traded company, and so it rides the markets with plenty of pressure from shareholders. Indeed, earlier in the day, before the BBC interviewed Huang, TSMC's Chairman and CEO, CC Wei, reportedly told investors that he'd like to mirror his firm's competition and raise prices accordingly.

This is in line with a May report from Commercial Times suggesting that TSMC is planning a 2026 price hike of up to 15% on its 3nm products, some of the most advanced in the world.

TSMC is undoubtedly under a lot of pressure to deliver a lot of chips to some of the most valuable companies in the world, and its impressive stock price reflects that demand.

TSMC has a duty to maximize returns for its investors, and considering it's essentially working at maximum capacity in all of its operational foundries, it only makes sense, from a fiduciary standpoint, to raise prices.

The question of whether or not the AI revolution is a bubble doesn't seem to be playing a role in TSMC's operation. Huang told the BBC that "these [AI] companies are financially very strong with a lot of financial resources, so we believe that they're able to continue to invest."

Windows Central's take on rising TSMC prices

Although TSMC has not committed entirely to a price hike, it seems inevitable that the firm will eventually have to start charging more for its services. What would this move look like across the rest of the tech industry?

Considering TSMC's dominance, particularly in the world's most advanced chips, companies like NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm would immediately be forced to either absorb the raised costs or pass those costs on to customers. I don't want to make any assumptions, but you can probably guess which avenue is more attractive to shareholders.

And I don't think these effects would be felt only in AI markets. Everything from phones to PCs to automobiles with a chip inside would go up in price. Do note that NVIDIA's new RTX Spark platform, announced at Computex 2026 and coming to the Surface Laptop Ultra, is manufactured on TSMC's 3nm process node

Considering how much almost everything already costs in the tech world, this news doesn't give me hope for the future of affordability. It's but another step toward the end of personal PCs, a once-upon-a-time "conspiracy theory" that's not so much of a conspiracy anymore.

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Intel is calling its new Arc G Series processors, announced at Computex, the "next step in handheld gaming." After getting a chance to personally test the new MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ and Acer Predator Atlas 8, I'm inclined to believe the hype.

The closed demo, hosted in part by Intel Fellow (and general PC hardware wizard) Tom Petersen, revealed a lot of additional information about the new chips before I got to choose a device and game.

One thing I picked up on immediately is that these new Intel chips should probably be viewed as an Arc GPU with an integrated CPU, rather than a CPU with an integrated GPU. As Petersen pointed out, this is the first time Intel has created graphics-forward Systems-on-Chip (SoC), and they're built specifically for gaming handhelds.

Gaming on the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ and Acer Predator Atlas 8

MSI's Claw 8 EX AI+ was my first stop on the tour. It's a gorgeous Void Purple color with an oversized screen that extends just a bit out of the bottom of the device to accommodate the 8-inch screen.

MSI's shoulder buttons, triggers, D-pad, and standard buttons felt very crisp and responsive. Despite being larger than Acer's Predator Atlas 8, the Claw 8 EX AI+ wasn't too heavy and fit into my hands quite well.

One area where Acer has MSI beat is its thumbsticks. Despite most of its inputs feeling less snappy (I found the Acer shoulder buttons to be particularly soft), the joysticks felt a lot tighter with less chance of accidental movement.

Acer's Predator Atlas 8 is also a bit more compact, and it doesn't have the lower overhang for the screen despite also having an 8-inch display.

Audio out of both devices was respectable, and neither handheld made much fan noise despite running a rather demanding game.

I was equally impressed with the 8-inch displays, and I'll have to spend more time with the handhelds to really dial in the differences (if there are any). Both 8-inch screens have a 1920x1200 resolution, a 120Hz variable refresh rate, and tons of brightness.

Crunching the Intel Arc G Series performance numbers

LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight and Hogwarts Legacy were the games of choice in the demo room. You might not think that a LEGO game is taxing, but with a recommended requirement of an NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER/AMD RX 6650 XT/Intel Arc B580, it certainly isn't an easy go.

I can attest; I picked up the game before my flight to Taiwan, and my Steam Deck struggles to maintain even 30 FPS in most areas.

That's anything but the case on these new handhelds. The game ran perfectly, holding strong at 100-120 FPS on both systems. Yes, my Steam Deck is showing its age, but Intel had AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme handhelds available to show the direct difference in performance.

How do Intel's new Arc G3 chips compare to AMD's Ryzen Z2 Extreme?

AMD has had a stranglehold on the gaming handheld market for some time now, but its Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip is starting to show its age in the face of the new Arc G3 chips.

Petersen had plenty of graphs and charts ready to back up his claims, and I'm sharing them here to give you an idea of what sort of performance is expected.

Compared to the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme in the ROG Xbox Ally X, the Arc G3 Extreme chip averages out to being 42% faster at 1080p, with 2x upscaling enabled and both chips at a 35W TDP.

Dropping the Arc G3 Extreme to 17W and leaving the Ryzen Z2 Extreme at 35W, the Intel chip averages out to twice as much performance per watt in tested games. Even at 12W, the Arc G3 Extreme pulls ahead by an average of 37% in the games Intel tested.

This boosted efficiency is exactly what you want in a mobile device. It's even more impressive considering XeSS isn't as energy efficient as AMD's FSR.

While using the new Arc G3 handhelds, the smoothness was remarkable. Intel's intelligent bias control plays a big role in that feeling, focusing mostly on the GPU so that the CPU doesn't suck up all the power.

E-cores are scheduled first, and P-cores get parked when they drop below 13W, making the overall experience much more reliable and with fewer power spikes.

The new Arc G3 chips have all the big XeSS features you want when you're PC gaming. I'm talking about super resolution, multi-frame generation, and ray tracing. Not to mention handheld extras like boosted efficiency, precompiled shaders, configurable TDP, etc.

Pricing remains an issue

The global gaming handheld market is being stomped on by RAM and storage shortages, and what were originally affordable mobile gaming PCs have become expensive luxury items.

👉 Gaming handhelds are the new netbooks — will they suffer the same tragic fate?

Acer hasn't yet set a price for its new Predator Atlas 8 (expected to launch October 2026), but MSI's Claw 8 EX AI+ is supposed to make its debut at $1,500 in June. I hope that number holds out, despite it already being quite high.

In any case, the handheld market is experiencing some serious friction, and that's a shame considering the advancements in performance I saw at Computex. Intel's Arc G3 chips seem to be the real deal, and I look forward to having more time with them once the MSI and Acer hardware launches.

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Once a month, the PC gaming mega-giant Valve opens an optional hardware and software survey for its Steam users to gauge trends and ultimately spotlight the world's most common components. Much of it is predictable and follows obvious patterns, such as the average amount of memory (RAM) increasing over time and discontinued parts falling off the graphs.

Still, some tidbits offer insight into buying habits and product adoption. In particular, the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for April 2026 shows that NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 with 8GB of VRAM remains the most common discrete graphics card this year. For context, that GPU is now three and a half years old, and many gamers already debate the viability of 8GB cards in 2026.

It's a similar story for operating systems, as Windows holds an utterly dominant 93.47% adoption amongst Steam users, though it's divided between its two (technically) active versions. Windows 10 is in its End-of-Life phase, but Microsoft's Extended Security Updates (ESU) program offers an extension through October 13, and it looks like 25% of Windows users have opted for it.

Linux and macOS fluctuated into ever-so-slight negatives, but the values were less than 1 percentage point and shouldn't be considered alarming. At the very least, Valve reports Arch Linux as the most-used "distro", which is the foundation for its in-house SteamOS rival to Windows 11, pre-installed on its four-year-old Steam Deck handheld and the upcoming Steam Machine PC.

Windows Central's take: Unaffordability is forcing a new norm for PC gamers

Again, it's the natural order of things for incremental hardware and software upgrades to be reflected in Steam's survey, but seeing a quarter of users holding on to Windows 10 is telling. While activists worldwide are staging mock funerals for Microsoft's OS, many PC gamers seemingly aren't willing to budge until the bitter end, possibly due to their device's incompatibility-led obsolescence.

That, and seeing the RTX 3060 clinging on for dear life, helps justify my frustrations with a lack of optimization in modern AAA games. This isn't even the 12GB version that's still going strong in my wife's PC; this is the entry-level 8GB model in NVIDIA's RTX 30 Series that lacks native FP8 support for cutting-edge DLSS tech. Your average gaming rig is two generations old.

And against Microsoft's assurance that 32GB of RAM is the "no worries" count in a world of hilariously expensive DDR5 memory, there still hasn't been a significant shift away from 16GB as the most common count in Valve's latest survey. All of this keeps my hopes alive for the Steam Machine to come with "affordable" pricing.

That, and I'm suddenly checking up on friends and relatives who are stuck on Windows 10. We can always bypass the TPM 2.0 check and upgrade an unsupported computer to Windows 11 with a bit of extra work, but it's starting to feel tense for those who still outright refuse to move over. Are you still using Windows 10? What are your plans for October? Not long now.

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Building your own gaming PC is a rewarding adventure, but arguably one of the most intimidating for newcomers, based on how expensive the individual parts can be. Compatibility concerns may also seem obvious to experienced rig builders, but getting started can feel confusing, which is why I've happily championed pre-built PCs to anyone who'd rather skip the process entirely.

• RDY Trace X R01 for $2,599 at iBUYPOWER.com

iBUYPOWER has been around for as long as I've been working here, though its US-based operations haven't given me much opportunity to get my hands on its inventory to see if the experts behind it are up to snuff. That's changed this year, as an extra-special international offering gives me the chance to get up close and personal with a sample of its RDY Trace X R01 and the high-end parts inside.

How much does the iBUYPOWER RDY Trace X R01 cost?

You can buy the iBUYPOWER RDY Trace X R01 for $2,799 at the official online store, though common sales tend to drop it from this standard price. Right now, a $200 discount brings the RDY Trace X R01 to $2,599.

Alternatively, Best Buy stocks the Trace Gaming Desktop for $2,269.99 with matching specs despite the missing "R01" name tag. iBUYPOWER maintains an Amazon presence, though the AMD-based Trace X R01 isn't currently listed.

For now, Best Buy has the best price on the RDY Trace X R01 with the specs matching my sample. Whichever you choose, you'll get a full-size mechanical keyboard and wired mouse included in the box.

Is the iBUYPOWER RDY Trace X R01 well made?

iBUYPOWER shipped this sample PC from California to my sleepy little town in the United Kingdom, and the gigantic RDY Trace X R01 still arrived safe and sound. Nothing had come loose in transit, and the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card was boxed separately, surrounded by a sea of foam padding. Yes, you need to install the GPU yourself, but it's one of the easiest components to handle. Seriously, there's no need to be nervous about it.

Simple instructions are attached to the glass case, while another sticker covers the motherboard ports, including a helpful hint to use the GPU's video-out ports rather than the integrated option — a common mistake. Otherwise, a checklist from the assembly team claims that RAM profiles are already active in the BIOS and temperature stress tests have been performed. Ball studs hold the rear panel in place, while the glass front slides off for closer inspection.

Zip-tied PCIe power cables for the GPU hang inside the case, ready for the Radeon card, which installs much like an old-school SEGA or Nintendo game cartridge might (showing my age there). After that, a couple of case screws hold it in place, and the twin PSU cables connect with a "click", letting you know they're safely flush. After this, the rest is all software-related setup, as the PC turns on using the power cable provided in the accessory bag.

I'm not a huge fan of the case fan orientations, which are all set up for intake, leaving any internal hot air to vent through the remaining spaces. It's a "positive pressure" method, essentially forcing heat out of those gaps in the PC case. If I wanted to tinker, I'd probably reverse the rear case fan and the furthest-rear ceiling fan for some exhaust, but this is technically fine for anyone who just wants to play some games.

How do games run on the RDY Trace X R01?

Any gaming PC asking over $2,000 should be capable of pushing modern AAA games to the higher end of their graphical settings, and it should be able to do so at 1440p (2560x1440). Running benchmarks at 1080p (1920x1080) is a common standard, but I'm not particularly interested in the lofty numbers that would come of that. I'm looking for an average of 144 FPS, and what it takes to get there — FSR upscaling or otherwise.

I tested Cyberpunk 2077 since it feels like the new face of "Can it run Crysis?" and any review would feel strange without it. It's an interesting result, particularly as I've had no previous experience with AMD's Radeon 9070 XT GPU, and was half-expecting something worse. At 1440p with no FSR upscaling or frame generation on "High" settings, Cyberpunk 2077 hit an average of 146 FPS. That's a good start for native rendering.

There was some obvious performance headroom in Cyberpunk, so I pushed it further with a leg up from AMD's FSR tech. Sure enough, switching to the Ray Tracing Ultra profile with FSR 2.1 Super Resolution set to Auto and FSR 3.1 Frame Generation on gave an average of 196 FPS. So, you can play Cyberpunk 2077 in its highest fidelity on the RDY Trace X R01 with minimal effort.

Stepping back into the real world for a moment offers some clarity: this PC is running one of AMD's all-time best gaming CPUs, paired with its highest-tier Radeon GPUs — it shouldn't be surprising that it runs games well.

Still, hands-on testing is better than marketing fluff, so I booted up Black Myth: Wukong's benchmark app. Its default settings push for 1440p with FSR Super Resolution upscaling from 75%, with ray tracing disabled and frame generation enabled, for another average of 196 FPS. Activating Full Ray Tracing with the Very High subsetting drops that to 67 FPS. There's room for tweaks here.

Counter-Strike 2 runs miles above 144 FPS at either High or Very High settings, with the former averaging 320 FPS while the latter hit around 250 FPS while spectating a Deathmatch on the Inferno map at 1440p. With that, you could push closer to 4K (3840x2160) and still expect a smooth framerate, with a potential helping hand from FSR upscaling.

Marvel Rivals averages 133 FPS at 1440p with High settings and FSR4 Super Resolution set to Quality, but it can push to 234 FPS with FSR3 Frame Generation enabled. It's a testament to the raw ability of the Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU and a hint of how AMD's improved FSR tech can help deliver a generous number of extra frames. I prefer to avoid "fake frames" where possible, but the RDY Trace X R01 seems comfortable in this 1440p @ 144Hz sweet spot without them.

Should you buy an iBUYPOWER RDY Trace X R01?

You should buy this if ...

✅ You want an easy approach to high-end PC gaming

✅ You're open to future customization and light tinkering

You should not buy this if ...

❌ You want a silent gaming PC in a quiet room

❌ You're uncomfortable with self-installing components

After getting my hands on one of iBUYPOWER's pre-built gaming PCs, I don't have qualms about its build quality or quality control. The only real downsides are its remarkably loud fans under load and the usual gripes a complete novice will encounter when setting up a brand-new Windows 11 PC. The software pains are Microsoft's fault, but the hardware is nevertheless good for the price.

Personally, I'd opt for a different case fan layout to give the RDY Trace X R01 a more traditional way to exhaust hot air. Still, the maximum temperatures it reaches are technically within sensible limits. Installing your own graphics card is also relatively straightforward, especially with the included instructions, so the entire experience is a great shortcut for gamers.

AMD has officially revealed its new Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition desktop processor, and you'll be able to get your hands on it on April 22.

This is AMD's (and indeed the world's) first desktop processor where both chiplets are equipped with the proprietary 3D V-Cache technology that is so coveted by PC gamers. With 104MB of cache underlying each chiplet, it offers a whopping 208MB total on-chip cache.

What does that mean for you? Well, with more cache, the CPU has more space to store the data it needs to perform as efficiently as possible. As AMD's Senior VP and GM of Computing and Graphics, Jack Huynh, explains in the announcement video, "208MB of cache means more game data, more assets, and more working data sitting right next to the CPU cores."

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition remains a 16-core processor based on the Zen 5 architecture and using the AM5 socket, just like its Ryzen 9 9950X3D sibling that we reviewed favorably here at Windows Central. However, it has jumped up to a 200W TDP compared to the 170W TDP of its sibling.

I don't doubt that this CPU is going to be a monster chip for PC gaming, but AMD isn't hiding the fact that it's also exceptional for demanding workloads that require speedy data access.

AMD claims that compared to the 9950X3D, the 9950X3D2 Dual Edition can deliver between 5% and 10% better performance in creative workloads like DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Unreal Engine, and Chromium.

While the original Ryzen 9 9950X3D was undoubtedly a capable CPU for gaming and for creative workloads, AMD is positioning the 9950X3D2 Dual Edition as the new ultimate choice.

There's not yet any word on the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition's pricing, but the standard Ryzen 9 9950X3D currently sits at around $675.

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If you're a newbie getting into the complicated yet magical world of PC-building, it can be terrifying to decide which parts to buy for your first, custom-made rig.

One of the best, budget-friendly PC components to start testing your skills with is the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, a CPU that's perfect for augmenting older PC hardware or building a new PC from scratch that's meant for casual purposes.

If that sounds enticing to you, then you're in luck as the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X is on a 34% discount for $184.00 at Amazon.

What makes the AMD Ryzen 9600X processor a worthwhile purchase?

The AMD Ryzen 5 9600X comes CPU packed with a ton of advanced tech that fairly punches above its low-end price field.

These specs range from 6 Cores and 12 processing threads based on AMD's "Zen 5" architecture, a base TDP of 65W, a base processor speed of 3.9GHz, 5.4GHz Max Boost, L3 cache with 32MB, and

As a result, this CPU offers single-core performance rates that rival Intel's 13th Gen Core i5-13600K CPU, so you can browse the World Wide Web, complete work assignments with Microsoft Office, or chill out watching streams with no slowdown or bottleneck.

The AMD Ryzen 5 9600X is also valuable for PC gaming, as it can help a PC rig reach 1080p or even 1440p resolutions with 60fps when paired with the right GPU.

In fact, the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X's gaming performance is so good that it's even on par with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, which was designed purely for gaming.

Although the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X's performance when used for AI-specific tasks is woefully lacking, as it doesn't feature a neural processing unit to help AI PC process Copilot+ features like Cocreator or Recall properly.

Another drawback of this CPU is that its multi-core performance is worse compared to that of its predecessor, the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X. Meaning that the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X will start struggling when it is multitasking many apps/programs at once.

Despite those flaws, the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X is a must-have PC component that we consider one of the best PC CPUs for PCs with RTX 4080 GPUs. Plus, thanks to Amazon's 34% discount, this $184.00 deal is practically a steal for budding PC-builders or folks looking to keep their oldie-but-goodie rigs alive and well.

FAQ

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AMD is in good company at MWC Barcelona (formerly Mobile World Congress) this year, even if that company is mostly focusing on the enterprise scene rather than average consumers like me. Just like its Ryzen PRO 8000/8040 Series desktop processors from 2024, and the Ryzen AI PRO 300 mobile chips that followed later that year, it's announcing another AI PRO range for 2026.

Unsurprisingly, it's moving into "the AI PC era for business" with a bump up to AMD Ryzen AI PRO 400 Series mobile and desktop processors, including a new Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 475 mobile workstation chip with an XDNA 2 NPU handling AI tasks on Windows with up to 60 TOPS of local processing power.

That's far above the 40 TOPS requirement for a Copilot+ PC certification. On the desktop side, businesses will be able to get their hands on a new range of Zen 5 processors that hit a slightly lower 50 TOPS with their own NPU chiplet, which is still much higher than its previous-gen, consumer-grade Ryzen 8000G desktop APUs, which ran at around 16 TOPS.

If this all sounds familiar to those waiting for AMD's Ryzen AI 400 Series, codenamed 'Gorgon Point', that's for a good reason. These are essentially the same chips as the consumer side, but with an added layer of enterprise-grade security, remote management add-ons, and stability guarantees. So, regular folk will still get the 60 TOPS XDNA 2-based NPU on consumer-grade laptops this year with current-gen, RDNA 3.5-based Radeon 800M Series graphics chiplets.

What exactly is AMD launching?

Again, these processors are built for AMD's commercial audience, but it's always interesting to see what it's doing with its Zen 5 architecture — now delivering 6 mobile chips and 3 desktop chips (technically 6 if you count the energy-efficient 'GE' variants). It's the mobile workstation (laptop) side that earns the 60 TOPS NPU for local AI work, paired with LPDDR5X memory clocked up to 8355 MT/s.

The Ryzen AI PRO desktop chips stick with AMD's '5 PRO' and '7 PRO' rankings, leaving the '9 PRO' and '9 HX PRO' to the mobile side. That, and the trio of APUs comes with 65W TDP as standard, while the lower-power 'GE' models stick to 35W. Each processor uses the same 50 TOPS NPU, which is a big jump from previous-generation desktop chips like the Ryzen 7 8700G I tested in 2024.

🗨️ Anyone out there using these chips?

On the bright side, it's not like I'll never see these chips in real life, as enterprise-grade PCs from the likes of Lenovo, HP, Dell, ASUS, and Acer will start appearing in Q2 2026. Realistically, they'll only get a passing glance from me at trade shows, but again, it's interesting to see what AMD does on both the consumer and commercial sides.

That, and local AI is more interesting to me than anything in the cloud — shout out to Blender, Audacity, and Davinci Resolve for actually making practical use out of NPUs. The good news is that Ryzen AI 400 Series consumer laptops (and mini PCs) are set to launch earlier in Q1 2026, and you can believe I'll be putting on my polite email-writing hat when those samples start appearing.

I'm wondering if any of our readers use processors like these in their professional lives. And if not, would you like to?

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Thanks to reporting from DCInside, we may have just received confirmation that AMD is stopping updates for the Z1 Extreme chipset. The chip powers devices such as the Lenovo Legion Go, Legion Go S, ASUS ROG Ally, and ROG Ally X.

Perhaps more notably, the Legion Go S only debuted last year (see our non-Extreme review). If support is indeed winding down, that could leave many owners disappointed, especially those who invested in the device expecting longer-term driver updates.

For now, it remains uncertain as AMD has seemingly only named the Lenovo Legion Go; it does raise the question of how much longer other Z1 Extreme devices will be supported.

Is AMD ending support, or is this an OEM decision?

Lenovo Korea has reportedly stated that no further driver updates are planned for the original Legion Go. The support response specifically claims that AMD has ended driver support for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, with some users even reporting they are stuck on older drivers.

Typically, AMD provides drivers to OEMs such as Lenovo or ASUS for validation and release. Without an official statement from AMD, it remains unclear whether this situation extends beyond Lenovo devices, though it is a reasonable concern.

Lenovo has also advised against installing Legion Go S drivers on the original Legion Go, even if the newer device continues to receive updates. Cross-installing drivers is not supported.

For users who want to stay updated, Lenovo recommends using Windows Update or AMD’s universal graphics drivers, where compatible.

ASUS has not commented on the situation, which is to be expected as this pertains to Lenovo.

Users who have Z2-based devices should not have to worry yet either, as they will continue to receive updates.

It does not sit well to see a device potentially reaching the end of support this quickly, especially when the Z1 Extreme remains a capable chipset. Legion Go owners have already raised concerns about slow driver rollouts, and if updates are truly ending, that frustration is unlikely to ease.

Whilst they are specifically discussing the Lenovo Legion Go here, which is only two and a half years old, mind you, it doesn’t give much confidence in support for other Z1 Extreme devices and even Z2 Extreme in the long term.

How do you feel about Z1 Extreme possibly nearing end of life support?

Are you using a Legion Go or another Ryzen Z1 Extreme device? Let us know your thoughts in the comments and make sure you take part in our poll below:

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AMD’s GPU roadmap chatter just took an interesting turn, with early RDNA 3.5 being used up to 2028 and beyond. None of this is locked in — and the details are still foggy at best, but the leaks line up with AMD’s slower, more deliberate cadence in recent years.

Recently, AMD has had a lot of success in the gaming market thanks to the rather wide adoption of its RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture. Laptops, sure, but the gaming handheld sector is where it's really noticeable. From the ROG Xbox Ally to the Legion Go 2 to the MSI Claw A8, an AMD Ryzen CPU and RDNA 3.5 integrated GPU are working behind the scenes to deliver solid performance.

RDNA 3.5 graphics arrived with Strix Point and Strix Halo in 2024, and it's going forward with the upcoming Gorgon Point Ryzen AI 400 series of chips revealed at CES 2026. As with any chip, GPU included, you can usually expect at least plans for an upgrade in the near future.

That might not be the case for AMD if a recent leak turns out to be true, and the AMD laptop or gaming handheld you buy a few years down the line could have the same graphics as one you purchased in 2024.

The rumor stems from known leaker Golden Pig Upgrade and was picked up by @Kepler_L2 on X, who added some extra information. As always, treat this information with caution.

An unofficial, AI-generated chart shows that AMD plans to keep RDNA 3.5 going beyond 2028. In contrast, the chart shows how much progress Intel is making with its Xe integrated graphics, eventually ending in an NVIDIA collaboration that is the result of a partnership announced in 2025 to build x86 CPUs fused with RTX GPUs.

Kepler_L2 adds that AMD plans to divide its APUs into two forks. One fork will continue to use RDNA 3.5 for the next few years in products that don't require high-performance integrated graphics. Think regular consumer laptops where the iGPU isn't doing much more than power a display, or gaming laptops that have a separate and discrete GPU.

The other fork involves "premium" iGPU products that will get the new RDNA 5 architecture. What exactly those "premium" products entail remains unclear. They could be AMD's rumored Medusa Halo platform expected in 2027, or they could be something else entirely.

Keep in mind that the next Xbox platform is said to be a "premium" experience running Windows, albeit with the feel of a console, thanks to features like Xbox Full Screen Experience. It's hard to imagine the next Xbox not arriving with FSR 4, AMD's upscaling equivalent to NVIDIA DLSS and Intel XeSS, which is so far only available on RDNA 4 hardware but will continue with RDNA 5.

On another note, seeing the word "premium" and thinking "gaming handheld" doesn't really sit right, especially when Intel just blew everyone away with graphics performance in its Panther Lake mobile chips.

As I've suggested in the past, gaming handhelds are quickly going the way of netbooks in that they're climbing in price to the point that you're almost better off buying a gaming laptop instead. If AMD is indeed reserving RDNA 5 for more expensive products, Intel has a major opportunity to nab the handheld market.

It’s still far too early to treat any of this as more than directional noise, but the emerging picture suggests AMD is thinking well beyond its current lineup. The rumors offer a glimpse at how long and complex the GPU development cycle has become. As always, the real story will unfold in the gaps between these leaks — and AMD’s next official roadmap update

(via 128KB)

Do you think these leaks will turn out to be true? If so, how will AMD's decision affect the handheld and laptop markets? Let me know in the comments section!

Processors like AMD's new Ryzen 7 9850X3D spark up conversations about binning and the broader concepts of silicon manufacturing that essentially make this a "super" 9800X3D, but most gamers don't care about the specifics. For most, they want to know why the "50" in its name means it costs $30-40 more.

But that's really what this is. It's the tuned-up version, or the "shiny" edition, if we borrow some gaming verbiage. Before we ever had a sneak peek into its specs, I knew this was never going to appeal to people who already bought a 9800X3D, but it's going to change the conversation for people who were considering one. Let's see where it lands in my testing.

How much does the Ryzen 7 9850X3D cost?

This review was made possible thanks to review samples provided by AMD. The companies had no input nor saw the contents of this review prior to publication.

The 9850X3D now stands as the fourth chip of its kind in AMD's Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 Series, alongside the 9800X3D, 9900X3D, and 9950X3D.

AMD's Ryzen 7 9850X3D specs are almost identical to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D APU (SoC), with the same core/thread count, L3 cache size, and 120W TDP.

It's launching at $499 MSRP, which is $20 higher than the 9800X3D started at, for a 400 MHz bump to its maximum clock speed.

However, the 9800X3D has dropped to $469 since its November 2024 launch, widening the gap with the 9850X3D's launch price to $30.

Surging component prices driven by AI demand might prevent the gap from widening further, as the 9800X3D has recently only seen increased value when retailers bundled it with compatible motherboards and RAM.

How fast is the Ryzen 7 9850X3D?

Besides its impressive single-core performance, there weren't any other surprises from the Ryzen 7 9850X3D in my usual testing gauntlet, and it placed about 5% higher than the 9800X3D in synthetic productivity benchmarks. The creator-centric Ryzen 9 9900X still pulls ahead, currently selling for $382 at Newegg, proving the 9900X is a bargain for anyone who isn't explicitly interested in building a gaming rig first.

My results show a nice 25-30% lead for the Ryzen 7 9850X3D over the last-gen gaming hero, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which still sells for $399 at Newegg when the 7800X3D is discounted. If you're already bored with that chip, you could sell it and upgrade to the 9850X3D if you really wanted to, but Ryzen 5000 Series enthusiast owners will see the best gaming upgrades by jumping "two" generations (never mind the 8000G).

Is the Ryzen 7 9850X3D good for gaming?

AMD still officially pits the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 9850X3D against Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K, which is an absolute productivity monster with a price hovering around $579.98 at Newegg right now, but the 285K disappoints in gaming tests. To that end, it almost feels cruel to compare when Intel doesn't necessarily have a modern horse in the desktop gaming race, and the 13th/14th Gen Core i9 crashes soured its previous generations.

As for the 9800X3D vs. 9850X3D conversation, AMD's in-house tests show a 3% average uplift, with Baldur's Gate 3 and Counter-Strike 2 enjoying the best improvements while Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 are barely noticeable. Given the productivity scores I collected a couple of days before the 9850X3D's release slightly exceeded AMD's reference scores, there's no reason for me to doubt its gaming charts, but future testing can clarify.

So yes, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is great for gaming. In fact, it's basically trying to usurp its binned sibling's throne as the new best gaming CPU, but that position will be decided by ongoing pricing between it and the 9800X3D. These chip refreshes are always strange to explain to newcomers, and the 9850X3D especially so, since you're only really getting a 400MHz bump over the 9800X3D, but the price is right (for now).

Should you buy the Ryzen 7 9850X3D?

You should buy this if ...

✅ You're building a high-end gaming PC

✅ You're upgrading from an older AM4 build

You should not buy this if ...

❌ You already have a Ryzen 7 9800X3D

❌ You're still on a high-end 7000 Series CPU

AMD's Ryzen 7 9850X3D is almost a 9800X3D 2.0, a special edition of sorts that gives you slightly better performance at a modest price. I predict the gap will remain worth it for a while, but the later months of 2026 might see that change, especially if enterprise AI continues to gouge prices for the everyday PC gamer. For now, it's easy to recommend over the 9800X3D, because I doubt anyone building a system around this chip is worried about spending an extra $30.

However, I tentatively stand by my darling 9800X3D as my editor's choice, keeping all my fingers crossed for some genuine price drops as the 9850X3D slides in to try and take its place. More choices are great for us builders; it's just that these two are so close that it's hard to separate them. If you're upgrading from a Ryzen 7 5800X3D or an Intel Core i5-13/14600K, then go for the 9850X3D — just prepare for a shock when you need a new motherboard and RAM.

As part of AMD's CES 2026 presentation, a new Ryzen 7 9850X3D processor was revealed. Just a couple of weeks after its initial unveiling, AMD has shared pricing and launch date info.

The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is officially expected to launch at $499, and you'll be able to buy it starting on January 29. It's well worth noting that the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is still widely available at $469 and is extremely popular.

I'm expecting there to be quite a bit of noise surrounding the new chip's launch, and not just because 42% of polled Windows Central readers said — at the time of the initial CES unveiling, when pricing wasn't yet known — they're interested enough in the new chip to buy it instead of the 9800X3D.

The 9850X3D looks a lot like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The new CPU is thus being likened by some to a "binned" 9800X3D, which essentially means that it's the older chip with slightly superior tuning.

It's hard to argue with that sentiment when the specs are so similar. Like the 9800X3D, the 9850X3D has eight Zen 5 cores, 16 threads, a 104MB cache, and a 120W TDP. The only major difference is a buff to the chip's boost clock from 5.2GHz to 5.6GHz, which allows AMD to call it the new fastest gaming CPU on the market.

According to AMD's own performance charts, the 9850X3D will push average performance to 27% above the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K when playing at 1080p. The older 9800X3D in the same scenario hits a 24% average, a difference of only 3%. It will be very interesting to see how actual performance differs once reviewers get their hands on the product.

The new 9850X3D arrives using the same AM5 socket as the 9800X3D, making it easy to upgrade. However, the mild performance increase suggests AMD isn't targeting users who already have a 9800X3D.

Regardless, I'm curious to see how the 9850X3D affects the 9800X3D's future. A price difference of $31 isn't a lot, especially if the real-world performance gap proves to be wider than expected.

AMD extends an olive branch for those struggling to find affordable RAM

Part of the magic of AMD's second-gen 3D V-Cache setup — the engineering that delivers such a huge boost when gaming — is that it relies less on high-performance RAM to deliver high frame rates.

AMD reminds us in its press release that the performance difference between DDR5-4800 RAM and DDR5-6000 RAM is less than 1%, tested in more than 30 games. With high-end DDR5 RAM now costing more than most of us are willing to pay, it's just another reason why the 9850X3D (and its other modern X3D siblings) are generally so coveted by enthusiasts.

Assuming we can get our hands on the 9850X3D when it launches, we'll be sure to compare its direct gaming performance with the 9800X3D. I wouldn't mind poking around with the RAM speed claims, either.

Are you happy with the $499 price AMD has set for the Ryzen 7 9850X3D? Let us know in the comments below!

PC building has been all but ruined by sky-high memory and storage prices, but there are still some bundled gems to be had that won't break the bank.

The latest I've spotted includes an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, an ASUS TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi motherboard, and 32GB (2x16GB) of Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5-6000 RAM.

If you were to buy these parts separately, you'd realistically be looking at a total cost of $1,118.99, and that's with other ongoing discounts. Newegg puts the bundle's regular value at $1,208.98, but it has dropped the price to just $938.99. That's a total savings of about $270.

As an added bonus, Newegg is throwing in a free Corsair M75 wireless RGB gaming mouse, which regularly costs $129.99.

This is one great bundle for PC builders

The discounted bundle price effectively removes most of the bloated cost of the RAM. Corsair's Vengeance RGB kit is one of the best you can buy, especially if you're a fan of customizable lighting, so it's not like Newegg is just throwing in any memory it can find.

The ASUS TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi motherboard is no slouch, either. It's a great choice for high-performance builds thanks to a sturdy 16+2+1 power stage setup, easy overclocking tools, USB4 and Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, dual PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, and much more.

The bundle also, of course, delivers to you what I (and many others) consider to be the absolute best CPU for PC gaming. AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D is what I have in my system, and I have absolutely no regrets. My colleague, Senior Editor Ben Wilson, sums it up quite well in his 9800X3D review:

"AMD continues the theme with its second generation of 3D V-Cache to deliver unparalleled gaming performance and middling productivity. Thankfully, most gamers do not care about the benchmark-breaking number crunching as long as they get their framerate boosts, and the Ryzen 7 9800X3D delivers that sweet extra FPS."

With RAM, motherboard, and CPU handled, all you really need to do is add a graphics card, some storage, a power supply, and a case to complete your build. Although SSD prices are also on the rise, it's not too late to find a decent deal, and I've put together a quick guide with recommended storage starting at $0.08/GB.

And if you'd rather splurge on a complete gaming system, Newegg is also currently home to some deep discounts on pre-built gaming PCs.

FAQ

AMD launched its FSR "Redstone" update in December 2025 as part of the AMD Adrenalin 25.12.1 driver package, bringing to a close months of speculation after the upgraded upscaling tech was first revealed at Computex 2025.

As expected, AMD's ML-powered FSR Redstone update launched with availability only for its latest Radeon RX 9000 graphics cards using the RDNA 4 architecture. PC gamers using AMD's older RDNA 3 GPUs were largely left out in the cold, watching as adopters of the newer hardware got to test out new FSR Upscaling, Frame Generation, Ray Regeneration, and Radiance Caching techniques.

Why didn't AMD launch Redstone on its older hardware? It all comes down to performance. The new ML-powered techniques are designed specifically for RDNA 4's newfound AI performance, just like NVIDIA's latest AI-powered DLSS 4.5 improvements are largely reserved for its latest RTX 5000 Blackwell GPUs.

In a recent interview at CES 2026 with PC World, AMD's Senior VP of GPU Technologies and Engineering, Andrej Zdravkovic, reiterated that the full set of Redstone features will remain closely linked to RDNA 4.

Zdravkovic explains that the latest Redstone features simply don't perform as they should on older AMD GPUs. Subext? It's not a case of barring older hardware to drive sales of the latest Radeon RX 9000 cards.

Zdravkovic adds that while some of the Redstone features are useful and can actually be performed on some of AMD's older cards, internal testing reveals that "the net result is not going to improve the experience."

When pressed about PC enthusiasts forcing the latest FSR updates onto unsupported GPUs, Zdravkovic has a very reasonable response.

Zdravkovic is then asked about AMD releasing a Redstone "Beta" that works on older AMD RDNA 3 GPUs, which would give gamers more control over their system. He responds, "That's currently not in the plan, but thanks for the hint. We may want to think about something like that, provide that to people who want to play with that."

That doesn't sound much like a door slamming shut, does it?

(via Tom's Hardware)

Do you think AMD will ever release an official FSR Redstone update for RDNA 3 GPUs? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments section below!

At CES 2026, Intel showed off its next-gen Core Ultra Series 3 chips (Panther Lake) and explained that these latest AI chips will be the company's platform of choice for laptops, tablets, mini PCs, and handheld gaming PCs going forward.

Of course, Intel plans on challenging AMD's dominance in the handheld gaming space with its newer SoCs (system on a chip) integrated with Intel ARC B390, which the company says offer better performance and features than its rival's; some are referring to this competition as the handheld war.

In an interview, Nish Neelalojanan, senior director of product management client for Intel, reportedly stated that AMD is "selling ancient silicon, while we’re selling up-to-date processors specifically designed for this market" (thanks, PC World). Apparently, the company is returning to low-power E-cores that are "particularly appropriate for gaming."

In other words, we can expect Intel to have a larger and louder presence in premium handhelds this year and next.

RELATED: Here's how to understand Intel Core Ultra Series 3 models

As part of Intel's plan to steal AMD's handheld crown, Team Blue is working with several other companies to create new handhelds. After all, you can't fully challenge the market king if it doesn't have consumer products for people to choose from.

Some of those companies include Acer, MSI, Compal, Pegatron, GPD, Quanta Computer, H Foxconn, Wistron, NexPlayer, and Microsoft.

As a reminder, AMD Ryzen Z1 and Z2 chips power most mainstream handhelds, including ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X, Legion Go 2, and many more devices. Even the Steam Deck has a custom AMD APU (accelerated processing unit), basically an AMD SoC.

Meanwhile, the only major OEM to have Intel-powered handhelds is MSI with its Claw lineup. I've personally been able to get my hands on one of these devices, as seen in my MSI Claw 8 AI+ review, and it truly impressed me with its impressive performance.

If Intel wants to get consumer attention as the best handheld chip manufacturer, it first needs to get its SoCs into more devices. I guess that means we'll be hearing about some new handhelds in the coming months.

It seems the handheld war is ramping up between Intel and AMD this year. Are you more interested in getting an Intel or AMD-powered handheld, and why? Tell us in the comments.

There's no other way to say it: AMD had a great year in 2025. With record-setting revenue, multi-billion dollar AI compute deals, and the launch of FSR Redstone as better competition for NVIDIA's DLSS, AMD padded its CPU supremacy by launching the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D.

These chips were more powerful follow-ups to the processor that every PC gamer wants, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which launched late-2024.

Although the Ryzen 9000 X3D lineup seemed complete, AMD has now unveiled the Ryzen 7 9850X3D at CES 2026. It slots into the lineup between the aforementioned Ryzen 7 9800X3D and the Ryzen 9 9900X, featuring 8 cores, 16 threads, a 5.6GHz boost clock, 104MB of combined L2 and L3 cache, and a 120W TDP.

Yes, it's nearly identical to the 9800X3D — AMD says it's essentially a fine-tuned 9800X3D, and only the boost clock is slightly (0.4GHz) higher. According to AMD's own benchmarks, you can expect roughly a 3% average boost in performance from the 9850X3D compared to the 9800X3D.

AMD plans to launch the chip in Q1 2026, but there's not yet any pricing info. Considering the 9800X3D currently costs about $469 ($10 below MSRP), I can't see the new 9850X3D costing much more when the performance difference is so small.

AMD's new "Gorgon Point" processors aren't just for laptops

AMD's Ryzen AI 400 series chips, otherwise known as "Gorgon Point," have officially been revealed.

There are seven new chips in total, starting with the Ryzen AI 5 430 and climbing all the way to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 475 with 12 Zen 5 cores, 24 threads, 5.2GHz boost clock, 16 RDNA 3.5 graphics CUs, and an XDNA 2 NPU with 60 TOPS of power.

Rather than being restricted to laptops, AMD says these chips are also arriving as socketable desktop CPUs in consumer and commercial Copilot+ PCs. The chips are expected to arrive in laptops, desktops, and other form factors in Q1 2026.

New Ryzen AI Max+ chips have the coveted Radeon 8060S GPU

AMD has also padded its Ryzen AI Max+ series of mobile processors, which was first introduced last year at CES 2025.

The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ and Max+ Pro were touted as being "faster than an RTX 4090" thanks to their dedicated memory architecture that allows up to 96GB of system RAM to be used on the integrated GPU, all with a 256GB/s bandwidth. We tested the Pro version of the chip to great effect in our HP Z2 Mini (G1a) review.

One issue with the lineup was that you needed to splurge on the 16-core chip if you wanted to land the powerful integrated Radeon 8060S GPU with 60 TFLOPS of power and 40 graphics CUs.

That's now changed with the introduction of the Ryzen AI Max+ 392 and Ryzen AI Max+ 388. Both chips feature the same Radeon 8060S GPU, albeit with fewer cores (12 and 8, respectively).

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D is still readily available for less than MSRP (about $469), potentially putting the Ryzen 7 9850X3D in a tough spot at launch. At what price would the new chip have to launch to attract buyers? Let us know in the comments below!

This has to make for some awkward reading at the Microsoft coffee table.

Recently, Time Magazine debuted its annual "Person of the Year" cover story. The tradition began in 1927, and has since depicted individuals that have made the biggest impact on world events throughout the year — for better or worse.

Previous winners of Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" cover story include the likes of world leaders, including Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, activists like Greta Thunberg and Nelson Mandela, and often times scientists and technologists, like Elon Musk and former Intel CEO and chip architect Andrew Grove.

This year's Time "Person of the Year" edition features a group of people, titled "The Architects of AI." It's a recreation of the famous "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper" photograph that showcases New York construction workers working on the city's iconic skyline — dangerously perched on a steel girder without safety equipment. Let's put the metaphor for the dangers of AI and gaping pitfall of a potential stock market "bubble" to one side for a moment, because there's an interesting omission here that underpins how Microsoft is falling behind in the race for relevancy.

The photograph features eight world leaders in technology, server infrastructure, and AI science. From left to right, we have Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame, Lisa Su of AMD, Elon Musk of xAI and Grok, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Sam Altman of OpenAI and ChatGPT, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Claude, and pioneering AI researcher Fei-Fei Li.

Notice any particular absences?

All of the people depicted here are directly responsible for funding and building frontier AI models, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Grok, or Google Gemini. The lack of inclusion for Microsoft AI, run by Mustafa Suleyman and brokered by CEO Satya Nadella, showcases how far behind the frontier of AI research Microsoft actually is.

Microsoft is functioning as an investment bank in existing AI products, re-selling NVIDIA GPUs as part of Microsoft Azure and re-selling ChatGPT as part of Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft's home-grown AI models, including MAI, aren't generally used and sport limited public API access, and its benchmarks aren't public either.

The lack of representation for Microsoft really underlines the company's status as a background player in artificial intelligence, nowhere near the forefront of the race.

Forced integrations and investments aside, is Microsoft actually serious about AI?

I've written recently about how Microsoft's fumbling and panicked behavior over artificial intelligence risks undermining its customer's needs. It's certainly undermining Windows' reputation.

Windows 11 hate is going utterly mainstream, with weak and forced Copilot features in everything from Microsoft Word to Notepad tears into the company's public image, but for me, it goes beyond social media "haters" simply disliking AI — Microsoft's AI products simply aren't good.

I'm not sure exactly what Microsoft did to make its version of ChatGPT dumber, but Copilot returns weaker results than ChatGPT generally speaking. AI imaging features in Microsoft Photos are absolutely pathetic compared to Google or even Samsung's photo editing tools on Android.

Integrations in Outlook and Microsoft Edge are invariably useless compared to integrations in Gmail and Chrome, and Xbox's "Gaming Copilot" tries to make up solutions out of thin air if it doesn't have a gaming website to steal information from.

CEO Satya Nadella has previously spoken about how he wants Microsoft to be an AI-first company, while declining to provide any innovative, or perhaps more crucially, useful AI products of its own. Windows Recall was called a privacy nightmare when it was announced, and other features like Click-To-Do haven't exactly ignited a rush on Microsoft AI products.

The whole situation is eerily similar to Microsoft's haunted Windows Phone project. Microsoft partnered with Nokia, creating friction at a time where competitors were moving far faster — similar to Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, which has been reportedly fractious. Microsoft's short-term thinking and half-hearted execution led to Windows Phone eventually being mothballed, and that same lack of passion and cadence for releasing half-baked products seems to be typifying Microsoft's AI products as well.

Users are making use of products like Github Copilot and Microsoft Copilot, but much like products like Outlook and Microsoft Teams, Microsoft's strategy seems to revolve around offering a weaker, cheaper alternative — rather than be at the cutting edge for quality. Given how expensive AI actually is to run, it's unclear if this can be a winning strategy for artificial intelligence.

In any case, they say photographs are worth a thousand words, and the above photo is symbolic of various things. From the arguably tone deaf nature of multi-millionaires and billionaires being depicted as construction workers literally risking their lives to build New York's skyline, to the lack of guardrails building what could end up being a superior intelligence. For better or worse, Microsoft's role in the future depicted here is one of absentia, echoing other computing revolutions the company failed to capitalize on.

True to its word, AMD has deployed its FSR "Redstone" update to the public in the second half of 2025, with just a couple of weeks left in the year. It arrives as part of the AMD Adrenalin 25.12.1 driver package, and it's also available for developers in a new Redstone SDK.

AMD first mentioned "Redstone" as an upgrade to FSR 4 at Computex 2025, promising major machine learning upgrades to Super Resolution and Frame Generation.

Now that it's here, I must admit that it's a tad confusing. Along with the major Redstone updates (which only work on certain AMD GPUs), AMD has also rebranded some of its technologies. Here's what you need to know.

What is AMD FSR Redstone?

FSR is essentially AMD's answer to NVIDIA DLSS. They're both upscaling technologies that rely on AI to make your games run smoother, look better, and hit higher frame rates. Whereas NVIDIA has stuck with DLSS over the years, AMD is still organizing its naming conventions.

With this update, Redstone has become the umbrella term for all of AMD's ML-powered upscaling techniques. That means FSR 4 has been renamed as "FSR Upscaling," falling under the Redstone name as just another technique.

AMD has also cut the official "FidelityFX Super Resolution" moniker down to simply "FSR," bringing it in line with what we've all been calling it all along anyway.

With the Redstone launch, AMD says that more than 200 games now support "one or more" Redstone features. These include FSR Upscaling, FSR Frame Generation, FSR Ray Regeneration, or FSR Radiance Caching. Beyond that, there are 32 games — including Arc Raiders, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, and Cyberpunk 2077 — confirmed to support FSR Frame Generation.

What about FSR Ray Regeneration? As far as I can tell, only Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 supports the feature. AMD's FSR Radiance Caching is still in its infancy, with AMD noting that it will come to developers sometime in 2026.

Unfortunately, this update is only available for owners of AMD's latest Radeon RX 9000 graphics cards that use the RDNA 4 architecture. There are some inferior FSR 3.1 fallbacks for Upscaling and Frame Generation on older hardware, but Ray Regeneration and Radiance Caching are strictly reserved for the latest AMD GPUs.

How does AMD FSR Redstone perform?

Our friends at PC Gamer were quick to test out AMD's Redstone update first-hand on a Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU.

The TL;DR? AMD's new Frame Generation is a big upgrade, pushing it up to compete with NVIDIA's DLSS. It still lacks 3x and 4x generation ala DLSS, but it's certainly better than it used to be. And although Ray Regeneration is only available in one game, it also seems to be a win.

AMD still has a long way to go if it wants to surpass NVIDIA's DLSS tech, but this seems like a solid step in the right direction for Radeon. I just wish it were all available on older AMD GPUs.

If you're in the market for a new GPU and you happen to be a Call of Duty fan, then this Radeon RX 9070 XT would probably pique your interest. It's a limited edition version of the latest offering from AMD with 16GB of VRAM, built by ASUS in its TUF Gaming subbrand, and wrapped with Black Ops 7 stylings.

Indeed, it's a fancy version of a high-end desktop graphics card that isn't from NVIDIA, for a change. The Radeon RX 9070 XT sits somewhere above the RTX 5070 and just below the 5070 Ti in terms of gaming performance, but leans on AMD's FSR 4 (now Redstone) tech for upscaling images and increasing framerates rather than NVIDIA's DLSS suite.

Essentially, what you're physically getting is a variant of AMD's GPU with some fancy stickers over the top, but it's bundled with a digital copy of the standard PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. So, it's sort of strangely aimed at gamers who aren't already playing the latest CoD entry, but who are fairly confident they'll want branded components.

Where can you buy it?

The only problem with this limited edition GPU is that it's supposedly limited to 1,000 units, and even those will be restricted to "select retailers around the world." Obviously, the next question would be "which retailers?", but therein lies the real mystery — I can't find this thing at any of my usual haunts.

Best Buy? Nope. Newegg? Nada. Surely, Micro Center? Negative.

If nothing else, you can enter a sweepstakes giveaway event themed around The Game Awards for a slim chance at winning the thing for free. It ends today, though, so if you're going to throw your hat in the proverbial ring, then now's the time to do it.

To make up for it, you do have a chance to win AMD's monstrous Ryzen 9 9950X3D gaming desktop processor, so at least that's something. You'll be responsible for any taxes due if you win, and AMD clarifies that "some items may have been opened and repackaged by vendor for photography purposes", so don't hold onto the notion that you could keep these things sealed and make a mint 10-20 years down the line.

Are you going to enter the sweepstakes? Do you even care about Black Ops 7 at all? Let me know in the comments. I'm half tempted just to have a Radeon card for a change, since I usually stick with NVIDIA and Intel Arc.

As AMD rolls out a new driver for FSR Redstone — a collection of machine learning technologies to improve frame rates and ray tracing performance on PC — Microsoft president of game content and studios Matt Booty shared that part of Microsoft's ongoing collaboration with AMD includes co-developing Ray Regeneration.

In a video update on Wednesday, Booty showed up to talk about Microsoft's role in the partnership, noting that the recently-launched Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is the first game to use Ray Regeneration, and also now supports FSR Frame Generation for any players using AMD's 9000-series graphics cards.

"We've been working very closely with AMD to co-develop FSR Ray Regeneration to achieve a material improvement in real-time ray tracing," Booty says.

"Our work on FSR Redstone is just one example of what this partnership is unlocking today, and our teams can't wait to share more of what our collaboration with AMD will unlock in the future across games and our next-generation hardware."

AMD and Microsoft have a partnership for the next Xbox console hardware

Earlier in 2025, Xbox president Sarah Bond announced that AMD and Microsoft have a multi-year partnership to develop the next Xbox console hardware. There's still quite a bit that isn't known, but Bond has stated that future Xbox hardware will support the existing library of games Xbox Series X|S players are enjoying today.

It's also quite interesting to see that Microsoft worked with AMD on Ray Regeneration. Ray tracing can be used to make games even more graphically impressive and can even help developers save time in certain scenarios.

That said, it can be extremely difficult for some hardware to run, so any improvements to performance that can aid ray tracing without sacrificing overall image quality are well worth keeping an eye on.

AMD's specialized Ryzen processors (CPU) with a unique 3D V-Cache design are considered the pinnacle of hardware for PC gamers. The latest flagship Zen 5 chip, known as the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, is considered the top option right now, having succeeded the previous top option, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Although AMD offers more powerful variants — including the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and 9950X3D — the combination of stellar performance and a very competitive price pushes the 9800X3D to the forefront for most gamers.

Now, it seems like AMD plans to usurp its most popular gaming chip with a new version that's clocked slightly higher than its sibling. AMD actually leaked this revelation itself when it posted a Ryzen 7 9850X3D listing on its official driver website, which was spotted by X user Olrak29_ on November 29, 2025.

Although the AMD site listing has been taken down — the URL now simply shows a 404 error — some info was gleaned with the help of another leaker on X, g01d3nm4ng0.

It appears that the 9850X3D chip will have the same 8 cores and 16 threads as the 9800X3D, but it will push its boost clock up to 5.6GHz (compared to 5.2GHz in the 9800X3D). It's alleged that it will run at a similar 120W TDP.

Of course, the second leak also mentions a Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 chip, something that's been rumored for a few months without official confirmation from AMD. The "X3D2" portion of the name suggests that it could have dual X3D tiles, expanding the chip's V-Cache — the part that makes such a huge difference in PC gaming performance — to proportions yet unseen.

Turning back to the chip that was accidentally mentioned on AMD's website, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D curiously seems to only represent a slightly higher boost clock without other improvements.

It's unclear for exactly who this chip is intended, especially when there's already the Ryzen 9 9900X3D available for those who need more cores and a higher boost clock.

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D currently retails for about $479 (less if you can find it on sale), while the 9900X3D usually sits at about $599 before discounts. There's definitely room to squeeze in another chip between the two, but with the 9800X3D so readily available at an (assumedly) lower price, AMD will have to work some magic positioning its "upgrade" as a meaningful improvement over the flagship chip.

It could also instead completely replace the 9800X3D over time; I'm hoping to hear more details from AMD at CES 2026.

(via Videocardz, PC Gamer)

Another day, AI-driven demand continues to affect hardware pricing. AMD has reportedly informed its partners that GPU costs are set to rise due to higher DRAM prices, with increases expected to be at least 10 percent. The shift is linked to memory supply being redirected toward AI datacenters, which is putting pressure on component availability and pushing costs upward.

RAM pricing is already climbing, and that impact is now moving into the consumer graphics card market. There are still some solid GPU deals available during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so it may be worth watching current discounts before pricing adjustments reach retail.

Why the price hike?

AMD cards rely on GDDR6 memory, and that memory is becoming more expensive due to demand from large AI datacenters. It is reasonable to expect NVIDIA and Intel to face similar pressures, which could lead to comparable pricing changes across the board. Console hardware is also being speculated as a possible area of impact, with Xbox pricing potentially increasing according to Moore's Law Is Dead, which could mean Sony could face similar conditions next year if current reports prove accurate.

Right now, it could be a sensible moment to upgrade a GPU, whether you favour AMD or NVIDIA, since current pricing may not last once the next wave of stock arrives at a higher cost.

With pricing expected to rise once current batches sell through, it puts many PC gamers in a tough spot, myself included. Deciding whether to upgrade now or hold out and hope for better conditions later. If you were already shopping for a new card, the deals available today might be the safest window before adjusted pricing lands.

Some people will wait to see how far prices climb or whether competition helps steady the market. Others will grab something now to avoid paying more for the same level of performance in a few weeks.

More Black Friday 2025 - quick links

• The very best Black Friday deals from all categories
• Mini PC deals: up to 47% off tiny PCs
• GPU deals: early price drops on NVIDIA RTX before they go up
• Microsoft Surface deals: save up to $500 on premium PCs
• Xbox accessories: best deals on gadgets for your Xbox Series X|S and PC
• Gaming laptop deals: the best laptops for the best price
• Xbox controllers: our top picks for best controller deals
• Samsung monitors: the best Samsung display deals we've found

MSI's Raider A18 HX joins a fairly exclusive club of 18-inch powerhouse gaming laptops, competing directly with the likes of the Razer Blade 18 and ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18, two laptops we also reviewed this year at Windows Central.

Equipped with up to an NVIDIA RTX 5090 Laptop GPU and an AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D CPU, MSI's Raider hits the upper limits of power available in a gaming laptop. It's not all about power, though, as MSI has included quite a few premium features to keep you happy while you game or work.

Is this the right 18-inch laptop for you? Let's find out.

MSI Raider A18 HX (2025) review

MSI's Raider A18 HX is not an affordable laptop, but that's expected for a device with so much power.

The most affordable price I found while reviewing the PC is $2,799 at B&H (after a $500 discount) for a model with an AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, 2TB SSD, NVIDIA RTX 5080 Laptop GPU, and a UHD+ mini-LED display at 120Hz.

You can also find the same configuration available at Amazon for $3,399, at Newegg for $3,299, or at Walmart for $3,799.

Models with an RTX 5090 are not recommended due to price and meager performance gains over the RTX 5080. The exception is users who plan to use the Raider A18 HX for creative or AI work, in which case a 5090 might be necessary.

👉 NVIDIA's most expensive laptops are a terrible value — Here's what you should buy instead

This review was made possible thanks to a loaned review unit provided by MSI. The company did not see the contents of this review before publishing.

Design ⭐⭐⭐⭐

As with any 18-inch gaming laptop designed to accommodate the latest and greatest mobile performance hardware, there's a decent amount of bulk involved. Models with all the best internals weigh in at about 7.94 pounds (3.6kg) with about 1.26 inches (32mm) of thickness.

A lot of the chassis is plastic, although MSI uses aluminum for some of the larger panels to add strength. The PC feels sturdy and doesn't have much bend.

The back edge has stylized red and black vent covers, with some space at the center for 2.5Gb Ethernet, HDMI 2.1, and a proprietary charging port. This positioning helps improve cable management. The plastic venting extends to the sides to cover additional exhausting.

On the left, you'll find dual USB-A 3.2 (Gen 2) and a UHS-III SD card reader. On the right are dual USB4 ports, a third USB-A 3.2 (Gen 2), and a 3.5mm audio jack.

It's a decent mix of modern and legacy ports, even if it doesn't officially support Intel's branded Thunderbolt tech (as some of MSI's product notes suggest). Wireless is also as modern as can be, with Wi-Fi 7 support and Bluetooth 5.4.

The gem-cut front corners and display bezels add some distinct flair to the PC, and a customizable LED light bar along the front edge is a nice addition that users can choose to disable in more professional settings.

Above the display, there's a 1080p webcam with an IR sensor for Windows Hello facial recognition. A physical shutter adds some privacy. Overall, picture quality is just OK; if you plan to stream your games, a great standalone webcam will do a lot better.

The top-firing speakers remain unmuffled, and they get plenty loud without distorting. The downside is that there's not a whole lot of body to the audio. I do love the manual shutter on the webcam and the fingerprint reader below the keyboard; many gaming laptops ignore these features.

Getting inside the PC requires the removal of 12 screws on the vented bottom panel. Once removed, you have access to RAM, storage, and the Wi-Fi card for quick and easy upgrades/replacements after purchase.

Display ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Raider A18 HX's 18-inch display hits a 3840x2400 (UHD+) resolution, making for an ultra-crisp look whether you're gaming or working. The use of a mini-LED panel provides deeper blacks, brighter whites, and improved contrast when compared to a standard LCD screen. The difference is immediately noticeable.

Compared to OLED, mini-LED is better suited for HDR content thanks to its higher brightness. Indeed, the display here is certified for VESA DisplayHDR 1000, and I tested for 558 nits of brightness without HDR using my colorimeter.

Also tested was color accuracy, for which the Raider A18 HX scored quite well, hitting 100% sRGB, 94% AdobeRGB, and 100% DCI-P3. These results are crucial for creative work.

Combine all of this with a 120Hz refresh rate (quite fast for a 4K display), and you have an impressive screen to work or play with at any time. I also appreciate the matte finish that reduces glare.

Performance ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Running through our standard set of benchmarks, the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D CPU unsurprisingly falls behind Intel's flagship mobile chip for productivity tasks. AMD designed its CPUs to boost gaming performance, and that's evident as soon as you start playing.

Paired with a 3840x2400 (UHD+) display, the performance hardware doesn't have an easy job. However, I clocked a 148.7 FPS average in Cyberpunk 2077 using Multi Frame Gen 4x, high overall settings, and ray tracing lighting set to high.

In Far Cry 6 with Ultra settings and no DLSS, I got back a 100 FPS average. And in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, with highest settings and DLSS enabled, I saw a 170 FPS average.

DLSS is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but that's no different in any other powerhouse gaming laptop. The fact that you can still max out the UHD+ display's 120Hz refresh rate with these demanding titles is mighty impressive.

MSI has also included the fastest M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSD we've ever tested in the new Raider. Thanks to its own heat pipe connected to the full cooling system, I didn't find it overheated.

Thermals & fan noise ⭐⭐⭐

I kicked off performance testing with a full-system stress test. The Raider A18 HX showed no signs of throttling under these conditions, and you should find that working normally at the PC won't create a ton of fan noise or heat.

MSI's included control app allows for intelligent balancing of power using AI, but you can also force it into specific performance categories. The GPU is overclockable, though I'm not sure the added fan noise is worth it.

The laptop's fans are not quiet when under gaming duress. I tested about 52 decibels when pushing the system with Cyberpunk 2077. Less demanding titles don't create nearly as much ruckus, but you'll still hear fan noise practically any time you're at the PC.

Battery life ⭐⭐⭐

MSI's Raider A18 HX was not built to be an efficiency superstar. Sporting the most powerful mobile CPU and GPU combo for gaming in the world, it focuses on raw power rather than long runtimes.

A Windows battery report shows that standby lasting power is excellent (lasting a couple of days), but active power is not the same story. You should not attempt to game on this laptop without it being plugged into an AC adapter unless it's a light title and you have a bunch of the Raider's power settings turned down.

Leaving the laptop at full power and going about regular, non-gaming tasks will get you about two or three hours of life, more if you tune the system down. It's the same story for practically any gaming laptop with this much power inside.

Keyboard & touchpad ⭐⭐⭐½

A colorful keyboard isn't exactly a rare sight in the gaming laptop world, but MSI's option isn't just flashy.

It's a SteelSeries board boasting 99 keys thanks to the full number pad, each with separate and customizable RGB lighting. Key travel is deep enough that I didn't experience any discomfort when typing or gaming, and although it's not a mechanical board, it feels snappy and responsive.

I dislike the translucent keycaps on the WASD and arrow keys, but it's overall a quality keyboard.

I'm not as impressed with the mechanical touchpad. There's a lot of movement on the surface that makes some clicks feel spongy, and it seems like MSI could have used up more space on the deck for wider and taller dimensions.

The plastic pad is smooth and tracks well, and in the end, that's what matters most. You might wish it were a glass touchpad if you were using the built-in pointer full-time, but I suspect most gamers are switching to a controller or an external mouse anyway.

MSI Raider A18 HX (2025): Should you buy it?

✅ You should buy this if ...

• You want one of the most powerful gaming laptops on the market today.
• You love a gaming laptop with customizable RGB lighting.
• You want to experience the very best of what AMD and NVIDIA can deliver.

❌ You should not buy this if ...

• You require long battery life to get you from one AC outlet to the other.
• You want a laptop that's easy to carry around.
• You don't plan on tackling demanding local AI tasks or hardware-intensive games.

MSI's Raider A18 HX should be a top choice for anyone who wants the best mobile gaming CPU in the world and a choice of NVIDIA's latest laptop GPUs, including up to an RTX 5090.

Battery life isn't great, and the fans aren't exactly quiet, but these are downsides found in practically any high-performance gaming laptop.

Considering the Raider A18 HX is competitively priced against similar laptops, there's no reason not to consider it unless you particularly value audio and touchpad quality.

• Back to the top ⤴

AMD's third-quarter financial results for 2025 are in, and they're looking good for the NVIDIA and Intel competitor almost entirely across the board. In the age of astronomical AI-related spending, it's great to see Team Red making headway with its consumer graphics card and processor business, and not just AI chips.

Not only did AMD's revenue grow in the third quarter, but it broke a record at $9.2 billion with a gross margin of 52%. That revenue represents a 36% year-over-year increase, which AMD Executive Vice President Jean Hu says "generated record free cash flow."

With $1.3 billion in operating income and $2 billion of net revenue, diluted earnings per share work out to $0.75. Looking at the results with a non-GAAP eye — which can often give a better picture of core operations — AMD says its gross margin was 54% and diluted earnings per share were $1.20.

Before these earnings were made public, I probably would have placed my bet on AMD's specialized AI chips — known as Instinct — making the most money for the company. That is, however, not the case at all.

AMD says its data center segment's revenue was $4.3 billion, a 22% increase compared to the third quarter of 2024. The company says this growth was, unsurprisingly, driven by its specialized EPYC CPUs and Instinct MI350 GPUs.

It's the client and gaming segment that shows the most growth, and it's not close at all. Third-quarter revenue from this segment was $4 billion, which is an increase of 73% compared to the previous year.

Client revenue alone broke an AMD record at $2.8 billion, an increase of 46% year-over-year. AMD says these record sales were driven by its consumer Ryzen CPUs and "a richer product mix."

Considering the almighty AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D — widely considered the best CPU for PC gaming and a nice upgrade over its predecessor, the 7800X3D — and its other new X3D siblings launched at the end of 2024, it's pretty clear that the demand for AMD's coveted CPUs is only climbing.

Ryzen is undoubtedly a hot buy, but it was AMD's Radeon gaming GPUs that grew the most in the third quarter. Gaming revenue hit $1.3 billion in the third quarter, which was a 181% year-over-year increase.

AMD has positioned itself on the launch pad ... will it take off?

AMD's third-quarter 2025 results are impressive, but, of course, it's not always easy to maintain such a performance.

"Our record third quarter performance and strong fourth quarter guidance marks a clear step up in our growth trajectory as our expanding compute franchise and rapidly scaling data center AI business drive significant revenue and earnings growth," said Dr. Lisa Su, alluding to some of the deals AI has coming its way in the next few years.

NVIDIA has propelled itself to the top of the world market charts with its specialized AI GPUs, recently blowing past a $5 trillion valuation as the first ever company to do so. AMD undoubtedly wants some of the action.

AMD notes that its AMD AI platform is gaining interest, alluding to the massive OpenAI partnership worth tens of billions of dollars announced in early October 2025. It involves 6 gigawatts of AMD's Instinct AI GPUs powering OpenAI's next-gen infrastructure; the first gigawatt is set to deploy in the second half of 2026.

Of course, the current tensions between the US and China are getting in the way of Instinct AI GPU sales to one of the largest AI markets in the world, but AMD has priced that into its expectations.

AMD expects that fourth-quarter revenue will be somewhere around $9.6 billion, another increase compared to the third quarter, and that "does not include any revenue from AMD Instinct MI308 shipments to China."

Business is indeed taking off for AMD, and it's great to see that it's not just all AI-related revenue. There are serious concerns about a growing AI bubble that wants to wipe out the stock market should it ever burst, but it looks like AMD's more traditional money makers — GPUs and CPUs — would act as great insulators against the storm.

(via PC Gamer)

FAQ

AMD's Adrenalin software support center for its Radeon graphics received a significant update on October 29 as part of its regular release schedule.

The 25.10.2 update appears to be rather standard at first glance, with newfound support for Battlefield 6 (DX12) and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 (DX12), new support for the AMD Ryzen AI 5 330's integrated Radeon 820M graphics, expanded Vulkan support, several bug fixes, and more.

What makes this update stand out is tucked away at the bottom of AMD's Adrenalin update notes. It's the first update to arrive with no listed support for Windows 10 systems.

According to AMD, this update is only designed to work with Windows 11 version 21H2 or later. For the record, 21H2 was Windows 11's first official release in 2021, so it's not exactly a matter of age. Regardless, we all knew this type of thing was coming after Microsoft sent Windows 10 to an early grave on October 14, but it's still a bit jarring to see.

The previous AMD Adrenalin update, version 25.10.1, launched on October 9, 2025, with full Windows 10 and Windows 11 support. It's amazing what just a couple of weeks can do.

AMD's older RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 graphics cards are also being dropped

As mentioned, AMD's Adrenalin 25.10.2 update has added game support for Battlefield 6 and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. However, the new game support only extends to AMD's Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 GPUs.

That means that AMD's RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 graphics cards — including the likes of the RX 6800 and RX 5700 XT — won't have access to the new game support despite the overall Adrenalin update applying to those generations.

AMD also states that its expanded Vulkan extension support is now being limited to RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs. If I were planning to retire support for my older GPUs, this is how I'd do it — one step at a time.

Also included in the package is the "initial introduction" of Work Graphs support for AMD's Radeon RX 9000 GPUs. Work Graphs are a relatively recent feature for graphics APIs that can help with GPU autonomy, essentially removing a huge burden from the CPU.

AMD's Adrenalin 25.10.2 update squashes a lot of bugs, but several remain

It wouldn't be a driver update without some bug fixes, and AMD has a number of notes regarding specific game and hardware issues. Here's a full list of the fixed issues from AMD's notes:

• Intermittent application crash may be observed while playing The Last of Us Part II on Radeon™ RX 7900 series graphics products. 
• Intermittent application crash may be observed while playing FBC: Firebreak on some AMD Ryzen™ processors such as the Ryzen™ AI 300 series and the Ryzen™ 8000 series. 
• Corruption (missing scan travel lines) may be observed while playing GTFO™ on Radeon™ RX 7000 series graphics products. 
• Stutter may be observed while playing games with some VR headsets at 80Hz or 90Hz refresh rate on some AMD Radeon™ Graphics Products such as the Radeon™ RX 7000 series. Users experiencing this issue are recommended to change the refresh rate as a temporary workaround.
• Intermittent application crash may be observed while playing NBA 2K25 in MyCareer mode on Radeon™ RX 9070 series graphics products. AMD is actively working on a resolution to be released as soon as possible.
• Stutter may be observed While playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on some AMD Radeon Graphics™ Products such as the Radeon™ RX 9000 and 7000 series. 
• Texture flickering or corruption may appear while playing Serious Sam 4 on Radeon™ RX 6000 series graphics products.
• Shadow corruption on left eye is seen while playing VTOL VR on Radeon™ RX 7000 series and Radeon™ RX 9000 series graphics products.
• CVE-2023-4969 (RDNA only), CVE-2024-21969 (RDNA only), CVE-2024-36323, CVE-2024-36325, CVE-2024-36333, CVE-2025-61964, CVE-2025-61965, CVE-2025-61966, CVE-2025-61967, CVE-2025-61968

Some bugs are still present in the update, but AMD is aware.

To do with Battlefield 6, there remains a nasty issue with "intermittent application crash or driver timeout" when playing on an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 mobile CPU, and there's another bug causing "texture flickering or corruption" that may appear when playing the game with AMD's Record and Stream features enabled.

Here's a full list of the known issues still plaguing AMD's software:

• Intermittent application crash or driver timeout may be observed while loading a saved game in Cyberpunk 2077 with Path Tracing enabled. AMD is actively working on a resolution with the developer to be released as soon as possible.
• Intermittent application crash or driver timeout may be observed while playing Battlefield™ 6 on AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.
• Intermittent application crash or driver timeout may be observed while playing Roblox Player (Car Zone Racing & Drifting) when task switching between media on Radeon™ RX 7000 series products. 
• Texture flickering or corruption may appear while playing Battlefield™ 6 with AMD Record and Stream on some AMD Graphics Products.
• Radeon Anti-Lag 2 option may not be available while playing Counter-Strike 2 (DX11) with Radeon Anti-Lag 2 enabled on some AMD Graphics Products, such as the Radeon™ RX 9070 XT. Users experiencing this issue are recommended to use the Vulkan API as a temporary workaround.

You can download the AMD Adrenalin 25.10.2 driver for Windows 11 directly from the AMD website.

(via Neowin)

Windows 10 End-of-Life: FAQ

If you buy a laptop powered by an AMD processor (CPU) in 2025, there's a good chance it's running Strix Point hardware based on the company's Zen 5 architecture.

AMD Ryzen AI 300 silicon (aka Strix Point) was unveiled at Computex 2024, heralding a new era of mobile AI performance for AMD, and the chips have made their way into quite a few Windows laptops. In the Strix Point family are also AMD's Z2 Extreme chips designed for gaming handhelds, including the Lenovo Legion Go 2 and the Xbox Ally X.

AMD's subsequent Computex 2025 presentation was mostly filled with its new Radeon graphics cards and Ryzen Threadripper chips, leaving its mainstream mobile CPU segment to coast along for another year.

That's expected to change in 2026, although I can't say for sure when and where AMD will be unveiling its next generation of mobile CPUs. As it stands now, I'm still working with leaks and rumors, so take all information herein with some caution.

Here's everything I know about AMD's upcoming Gorgon Point mobile APUs.

AMD's Gorgon Point lineup leaked in 2025

The biggest source of information regarding AMD's upcoming Gorgon Point mobile CPUs comes from a leaker (via PCGamer), who exposed some internal slides from a closed partner meeting in March 2025.

X user harukaze5719 is who originally posted the captured slides; the X post was removed not long after. However, the slides were picked up by many outlets and reported on before being deleted.

The biggest news is likely to be that AMD Gorgon Point is slated for a 2026 launch. However, those who were expecting a big change might be let down by the leaked information.

AMD's Gorgon Point chips look a lot like Strix Point. Here's a comparison between the top AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX chips from both generations, based on the info from the leak.

Gorgon Point appears to be using the same 12 cores split up between Zen 5 and Zen 5c, as well as the same RDNA 3.5 GPU and XDNA 2 Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI tasks.

AMD does seem to deliver gains in the max boost clock and NPU TOPS areas based on this information, but I wouldn't expect any major changes in any chip in terms of integrated GPU power.

Roughly three months after the initial Gorgon Point leak, Videocardz reported on information from a shipping manifest website that showed some of AMD's next-gen chips.

The leaked manifests seem to confirm that new 10-core and 12-core Ryzen CPUs are in the works, and they're expected to launch at a 28W TDP.

It also appears that AMD wants to add some extra chips on the lower end of the lineup. A Gorgon Point Ryzen 3 option is listed on the leaked slide.

AMD Gorgon Point: FAQ

AMD has cornered the PC gaming market with its Ryzen X3D processors (CPU), and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D remains one of the most popular chips around thanks to awesome performance and a modest price.

Performance hasn't changed (that's a good thing), but the price has come down significantly at Amazon. With a massive 29% discount and a $319.99 price that's as low as it's been since May 2024, it's a perfect time to give your PC the gaming CPU it craves.

AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D is a good buy at full price, never mind at 29% off

Whenever I see the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU on sale, I get a warm feeling inside knowing that more gamers are going to experience the magic of 3D V-Cache.

3D V-Cache is a proprietary AMD technology that changes the design of the CPU's L3 cache, stacking it vertically rather than horizontally. This allows the CPU to access data stored in the cache quickly and more efficiently.

And because there's so much extra L3 cache compared to normal — the 7800X3D has 96MB, whereas something like the Core Ultra 7 265K has just 30MB — the CPU doesn't have to lean on slow system memory nearly as much as usual.

These two benefits of AMD's 3D V-Cache directly boost PC gaming performance to the point that I've sworn off any other types of CPUs for personal use, barring a miraculous breakthrough elsewhere.

I use the newer Ryzen 7 9800X3D in my personal gaming PC to great effect, but at $120 more than the 7800X3D, AMD's slightly older chip is a way better deal that can land you average gaming performance within about 10% of the newer CPU.

For more information, including performance charts and further buying advice, I recommend checking out my AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D vs. 7800X3D comparison.

The 7800X3D that's so cheap right now is built on AMD's Zen 4 architecture, which offers modern DDR5 RAM and PCIe 5.0 support. Motherboards supporting the 7800X3D include A620, X670, B840, B850, B650, and X870, giving you plenty of options from which to choose.

The 7800X3D's 8 cores, 16 threads, and 5GHz boost clock aren't just for gaming, either. While you can certainly find a CPU that's better tuned for a life of productivity — something like the Ryzen 7 9700X we reviewed is a solid choice — the 7800X3D will certainly do a great job outside of gaming.

I'll wrap up this awesome deal highlight with a quote from our AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D review:

I have no idea how long the 7800X3D will remain at its $319 sale price, which is only the second time in its history that it's dropped so low at Amazon. If you're looking to upgrade your PC with a powerful CPU, I wouldn't wait too much longer, as pricing history suggests the chip doesn't usually remain this affordable for long.

Earlier this week, AMD and OpenAI announced a bombshell partnership worth tens of billions of dollars, which will see AMD provide 6 gigawatts of computing power — via its Instinct AI GPUs — for the ChatGPT creator's next-gen AI infrastructure.

As part of the terms of the contract, OpenAI will buy the specialized Instinct chips and will have the opportunity to receive up to a 10% stake in AMD.

This news arrived roughly two weeks after NVIDIA announced it was investing $100 billion in OpenAI, which will see 10 gigawatts or more of NVIDIA AI GPUs head to the AI firm to help with the same AI infrastructure buildup.

These two major announcements, which see traditional rivals both funding the same AI company, have raised serious questions about the circular economy that is forming around the AI boom.

As Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and AI expert, wrote in a recent newsletter, "the total value of the tech market as a whole, which is supposed to reflect the future value of the companies within it, far exceeds what is likely ever to be delivered."

Marcus adds, regarding the recent OpenAI and Oracle $300 billion cloud deal, that OpenAI doesn't have anywhere near $300 billion to spend, nor does Oracle have the ability to provide the contracted chips or the capital to buy them.

To say that there are growing fears of an impending AI bubble crash would be an understatement, but NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang remains as upbeat as ever. He sat down with CNBC's Squawk Box on Wednesday, where he was asked about his thoughts regarding the industry's circular funding approach.

Pressed about the fact that OpenAI doesn't have the money to pay for its side of the partnership, Huang says:

The topic then shifted to focus more on the circular economy, which has so many analysts worried about a bubble pop. Reviving the market horrors of Canadian telecom Nortel and American tech company Lucent in the early 2000s, host Rebecca Quick asks how the AI market is different.

Huang replies:

NVIDIA's CEO also notes that the modern AI infrastructure buildout is only getting started in 2025, and it's still in the transition stage from "classical CPU-based computing" to "generative AI computing powered by GPUs." Huang adds, "So far, we're a couple hundred billion dollars into a multi-trillion-dollar buildout."

There's another aspect of the AI economy that has Huang sitting comfortably: Tokens.

Tokens are essentially the foundation of Large Language Model (LLM) computing. They're how AI interprets commands and questions that arrive in natural language, and they're helpful in gauging how much it costs to run AI.

Huang explains that there has been a recent transition that "is really, really important." Whereas early AI models "weren't useful enough to pay for," Huang posits that the new AI technology of recent months is different.

Compute constraints, energy demands, and the search for AGI

It's no longer much of a secret that generative AI is a power-hungry beast that requires an unbelievable amount of hardware (and energy) to meet its computing demands.

Most major AI firms have discussed the problem in detail, including OpenAI's Sam Altman, who said earlier this year that his company no longer had compute constraints following Microsoft's loss of exclusive cloud provider status.

Altman's opinion seemed to change following the recent NVIDIA and OpenAI partnership announcement and before the AMD deal's reveal.

With such a high requirement for computing power for AI alone, it does seem like the trend of multi-billion (or trillion) dollar companies all shuttling money back and forth and receiving stakes in each other's worth could go on for quite a while.

The ultimate goal of most major AI firms is to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), aka intelligence surpassing human abilities, which is a frightening rabbit hole in its own respect. There are a lot of different opinions regarding when exactly AGI will arrive, but one thing is clear: AGI is where the real money will be made.

What happens if AGI doesn't arrive before investments dry up?

As has become tradition in recent years, Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days has been out-dealed by a competing retailer. This time it's HP with what I believe is the best gaming laptop deal of the week.

The HP OMEN MAX 16, released in 2025 and sporting NVIDIA's newest RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU, is now down to $1,500 after a massive $600 discount.

I'll give it to you straight — the OMEN MAX 16 for 2025 isn't perfect, but it's a lot closer than many other gaming laptops.

Windows Central laptop expert Zachary Boddy performed in-depth testing on the OMEN MAX 16 for their review, making it easy to see where the laptop excels and where it falters.

Let me get the cons out of the way first. Like most gaming laptops, you'll want to keep it plugged in to avoid throttling the beastly RTX 5070 Ti and the 8-core AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU. Not a huge deal.

👉 Related: We’ve tested plenty of laptops — these Techtober standouts deliver the best mix of performance and value

Boddy also found that the fans can get loud when the system is under load, but they tested a model with NVIDIA's most powerful RTX 5090 card that produces a lot more heat. With the RTX 5070 Ti inside, fan noise should be much less of a problem.

The final nitpick in Boddy's review has to do with the keyboard. The lattice-free design with translucent keycap edges and RGB backlighting might be an acquired taste, but "the layout is solid," and the touchpad is "equally decent" with smooth and precise inputs.

Now, let's get into what the laptop does particularly well. HP designed the OMEN MAX 16 to be as sleek as possible, resulting in a truly premium appearance without a ton of bulk or baggage.

The OMEN Max 16 runs Windows 11, which could solve your Windows 10 End-of-Life issues, and it's loaded with a bunch of HP's custom apps that allow for easy custom or automatic tuning. If you want to overclock your system, you don't have to be an expert.

At stock tuning, the RTX 5070 Ti GPU with 12GB of VRAM and Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU are going to make demanding modern titles look incredible, especially if you enable DLSS 4 features in your favorite games.

The FHD+ display might irk some gamers who'd rather have QHD+, but at 16 inches, everything is going to look plenty crisp, and you'll have a ton of headroom for high frame rates thanks to the 165Hz variable refresh rate.

This model that's discounted by $600 comes with 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 512GB M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. If you find that's not enough, you can always upgrade yourself after purchase with relative ease.

FAQ

Is there anything that can topple NVIDIA's dominance in the AI market? Judging by this morning's announcement, AMD is hoping to be that company with the help of OpenAI.

AMD, one of the world's largest CPU and GPU makers, and OpenAI — the firm behind the creation of ChatGPT — today jointly announced a new partnership that will see AMD's Instinct AI GPUs power next-gen OpenAI infrastructure to the tune of 6 gigawatts.

The new agreement is said to cover "multiple generations of AMD Instinct GPUs," and the initial one-gigawatt deployment is expected to begin in the second half of 2026, specifically using AMD's Instinct MI450 AI chips.

At the time of writing, AMD's pre-market stock price is up roughly 25% compared to Friday evening when markets closed.

As part of this agreement, AMD says that it will work with OpenAI as a "core strategic compute partner" and that the companies will share "technical expertise" in order to optimize product roadmaps.

Dr. Lisa Su, AMD's CEO and full-time upbeat figure, had this to say about the partnership:

Further marrying the two companies is a warrant for 160 million shares of common stock issued by AMD to OpenAI, which are "structured to vest as specific milestones are achieved."

As is laid out in the AMD and OpenAI press releases, the first vestment will arrive once AMD's initial one-gigawatt deployment is completed. Further vestments depend on the price of AMD stock as well as OpenAI's "technical and commercial milestones" surrounding the new AMD deployments.

According to AMD's Executive VP, CFO, and treasurer, Jean Hu, the OpenAI partnership "is expected to deliver tens of billions of dollars in revenue for AMD while accelerating OpenAI's AI infrastructure buildout." Hu adds that the agreement "creates significant strategic alignment and shareholder value for both AMD and OpenAI."

OpenAI is also working with NVIDIA to build data centers

The massive new partnership between AMD and OpenAI won't likely cause NVIDIA to lose much sleep, but it is great to see some competition from Team Red.

On September 22, 2025, NVIDIA and OpenAI jointly announced something quite similar to the new AMD deal. The partnership involves the deployment of "at least" 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA AI GPUs to help run OpenAI's next-generation infrastructure.

As part of NVIDIA and OpenAI's deal, NVIDIA says it "intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI" over the course of the deployment. Like the plans with AMD, the initial one-megawatt phase of the NVIDIA deal is expected to be functional by the second half of 2026.

NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform, which NVIDIA believes will "mark another leap in the frontier of AI computing," is a superchip built on a next-gen architecture, also expected to arrive in the second half of 2026. Good timing.

OpenAI's compute problem ... solved?

OpenAI's new deals with NVIDIA and AMD arrive at a time when the AI firm is experiencing cloud compute issues.

For a bit of backstory, computing power is one of the largest obstacles for AI firms looking to scale their creations. OpenAI's multi-billion-dollar partnership with Microsoft, which granted the AI firm exclusive access to vast resources of cloud computing power, was seemingly not enough to meet OpenAI's demands.

OpenAI announced the "Stargate" project in January 2025, a $500-billion iniative to build data centers in the US. This project fundamentally changed the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft.

While Microsoft is no longer the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI, it retains "right of first refusal," which allows Microsoft to take the first crack at providing enough compute power. If it can't keep up, OpenAI is free to seek other sources of power.

This led OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman to claim earlier this year that the company was no longer "compute-constrained." However, it didn't take long for Altman to change his tune with this remark from the OpenAI/NVIDIA partnership announcement:

Altman went so far as to suggest that OpenAI could be forced to choose between curing cancer or providing free education to everyone on earth using 5-10 gigawatts of AI computing power.

Does that mean that the planned 16 gigawatts of combined compute power from AMD and NVIDIA will eventually allow OpenAI to perform miracles? Probably not ... but one can hope.

For the best part of a decade, Windows 10 stood as the world's most popular operating system, at least until Windows 11 surpassed its traffic earlier this year. Ten years is a relatively standard time span for OS support, but this end-of-life scenario is particularly unique, given how many PCs might not meet Microsoft's minimum requirements for an upgrade.

This page will be updated as frequently as necessary, leading up to the cutoff date on October 14, 2025, and in the following days where appropriate. Changes to Microsoft's policies aren't expected, and the ESU program will likely remain as the best option for those who would prefer to stay on Windows 10.

When it comes to running Large Language Models (LLMs) and other intense artificial intelligence workflows locally, colossal desktop PCs powered by hyper-expensive NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs tend to reign supreme.

Even the best discrete GPU quickly runs out of VRAM under these conditions, though, and that's where AMD's poorly named Ryzen AI MAX platform comes in. This all-in-one platform fulfils a very specific niche and does so in devices barely larger than just an NVIDIA GPU by itself, and it's this platform that HP selected for its flagship Z2 Mini (G1a) PC.

I've been using this compact mini PC and putting its insane hardware to the test, and reaffirmed that 1) HP knows how to make stellar enterprise-ready devices and 2) AMD Ryzen AI MAX should be the go-to for anyone who wants to meet their AI demands without sacrificing all their desk space.

This review was made possible thanks to a review sample provided by HP. HP had no input nor saw the contents of this review prior to publication.

A beautiful design that nails the fundamentals

The HP Z2 Mini (G1a) is definitely a "mini" PC, although it's still beefier than the most compact options from companies like Geekom. That makes sense — there's a lot of power under this hood, and at 20cm x 16.8 x 8.55cm and around 2.3kg, it's still around the same size as an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 by itself.

Many enterprise products clearly prioritize function over form, but the Z2 Mini manages to offer top-notch practicality in addition to elegant design. It's all matte black, with an interesting front grille design that allows for maximum airflow through the unit.

It looks awesome, but it does attract a lot of fingerprint smudges, so be careful when handling it. The Z2 Mini (G1a) is designed to operate vertically, horizontally, or even mounted on a rack, to the wall, on the back of your monitor, or wherever else you want it. The HP logo on the front also rotates to match the orientation of the PC, which I always love to see.

You get lots of ports on the rear and a few on the side (or top, depending on your orientation), and the Z2 Mini also supports HP's "Flex I/O" with two expansion slots for enterprises to customize their units. Even without expanding, though, you still get five USB Type-A ports, three USB Type-C ports (two of which are full USB4/Thunderbolt 4 ports), two Mini DisplayPorts, Ethernet, a Kensington Nano Security Slot, and a 3.5mm audio jack.

Mini DisplayPort is a bit odd and will likely require an adapter, but you can't deny the Z2 Mini is loaded with ports, and it's on the cutting edge of wireless connectivity with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, too. There's even a single, 2W internal mono speaker, since that's apparently important to enterprise customers (yes, the audio quality is terrible, tinny, and muted, but it's not meant for entertainment).

Like the other best mini PCs, the Z2 Mini allows for toolless access to its internals, including the two M.2 expansion slots. A simple switch lets you slide off half the main body, providing much more comfortable access than most mini PCs can manage... but that switch doesn't feel secure at all; there's a lot of give in the removable panel even when the switch is fully engaged. It's the one place the Z2 Mini (G1a) doesn't feel as high quality.

Ridiculous performance — exactly what you paid for

Depending on your configuration, your HP Z2 Mini (G1a) could have anywhere from 6-16 CPU cores and 16-40 GPU cores, but it's all under the AMD Ryzen AI MAX umbrella, and it's all with an industry-leading Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that enables Copilot+ PC AI features.

The model I reviewed sits near the top with the 16-core Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395, 40-core Radeon 8060S, and 128GB of shared memory. Like other devices built on this platform, you can allocate up to 96GB of VRAM to the GPU. The Z2 Mini (G1a) supports many of HP's enterprise-focused apps and features, too, including the Performance Advisor app that lets you tweak every element of your PC (such as VRAM allocation) without needing to dive into the BIOS.

All that VRAM means the Z2 Mini can run massive LLMs entirely locally and entirely on the GPU, leading to drastically improved performance that can genuinely best the flagship NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. It helps that the Radeon 8060S is actually quite impressive for an integrated GPU, competing with laptop-grade RTX 4070s in overall performance.

This is my third experience with AMD Ryzen AI MAX, following my HP ZBook Ultra 14 (G1a) review and ASUS ROG Flow Z13 (2025) review, and I've been impressed each time. While true desktop-grade hardware will absolutely outperform this mini PC in most tasks, you won't find such a capable compact PC anywhere else.

As expected, the HP Z2 Mini (G1a) performs better on average than the two laptops I've reviewed using the same platform, thanks to a beefier thermal system. Speaking of, the Z2 Mini does an excellent job cooling itself under sustained loads, but the fans do get loud — certainly more than your average mini PC.

At the end of the day, this mini PC excels at creative and AI workflows, exactly as HP designed it to do. This is a heavy-duty enterprise workstation meant for the most demanding users, and it delivers on that front while being backed by HP's impressive enterprise suite, like the HP Wolf Security Pro platform. Yes, you can also play games on it (I enjoyed some Forza Horizon 5), but those considering this mini PC will be doing so with a job in mind.

HP Z2 Mini (G1a) review: My final thoughts

✅You should buy this if ...

• You want the most powerful mini PC you can get your hands on.
• You want a compact workstation for heavy-duty AI workloads.
• You highly value HP's added enterprise features and programs.

❌You should not buy this if ...

• You won't take advantage of the shared system and GPU memory.
• You're looking for a capable but affordable mini PC for the home.

The HP Z2 Mini (G1a) is an absurdly good bit of kit — I'll just put that out there. AMD knocked it out of the park with its Ryzen AI MAX platform, and HP kept that momentum up with its practical design and bevy of useful features.

When it's on sale, the Z2 Mini (G1a) also isn't a terrible value considering all the capabilities packed into its compact chassis, but that's if it's on sale. Like all HP Z-series devices, this mini PC can be incredibly expensive, which makes it even more important that you're certain this is the PC you actually want.

Yes, it's far more powerful than your average mini PC, enough that it can play all the latest and greatest PC games in a form factor not much larger than your average desktop GPU, but it's designed with very specific and very demanding workloads in mind. It's a specialized tool targeting AI-focused enterprises, and you see that in every part of this mini PC — all the way to its mounting support.

In that niche, though, the HP Z2 Mini (G1a) simply can't be beat, and you can configure your own from $2,480 at HP.com... or peruse HP Z2 Mini (G1a) configurations at HP.com for potential discounts.

The combination of an AMD processor and an NVIDIA graphics card is currently the best option for PC gamers, and Best Buy is making it easy to shop for new hardware without paying full price.

There's a wide range of AMD-powered laptops and desktop PCs currently on sale, and while there's one model that stands out — the Gigabyte AERO X16 on sale for $1,349 — I highly recommend having a look at my alternative options, especially if you're shopping for a pre-built desktop.

My favorite AMD gaming laptop deal

This AERO X16 model that I'm highlighting is not only great for gaming. The powerful AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU and the NVIDIA RTX 5070 Laptop GPU will do a bang-up job of editing, designing, and any other creative tasks, and with 32GB of upgradeable RAM, you shouldn't run into any memory problems.

Yes, RAM is accessible (an increasingly rare feature in laptops), and so is the 1TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. The laptop actually has two M.2 slots for storage, so you can immediately pop in a second drive for bulk storage of your games and files.

The Ryzen CPU has a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) capable of up to 50 TOPS of local AI power. That makes this a Copilot+ PC with full access to all of the AI tools now built into Windows 11.

Turning back to gaming, the laptop's RTX 5070 Laptop GPU will handle even the most demanding titles thanks to DLSS 4 and its Multi Frame Generation magic. You might not be able to max out some in-game settings, but you'll still get a very enjoyable experience.

The PC comes with the right ports to connect to an external display, but the built-in 16-inch QHD+ screen with a 165Hz refresh rate will deliver a great picture on the go.

Although I haven't personally tested Gigabyte's AERO X16, Best Buy's 55 customer reviews have it sitting at a 4.7-star rating. That's not bad at all, and the $300 discount makes it look even better.

If you'd like to spend less, Gigabyte's AERO X16 with similar specs, save for a bump down to an RTX 5060 Laptop GPU, is also $300 off. That drops the price to $1,199 for a limited time.

More great AMD gaming deals live now at Best Buy

If Gigabyte's AERO X16 isn't quite what you're looking for, I've rounded up a couple of additional AMD gaming laptops as well as two AMD-powered gaming desktops that are on sale at Best Buy.

Why shop at Best Buy?

Best Buy is one of the largest electronics retailers around, and like its competitors, it too has a membership program that grants subscribers some nice perks.

While the gaming PCs I've rounded up above do not require any sort of extra membership to receive the discount, signing up for a free My Best Buy plan can get you free standard shipping where it would otherwise not be available.

The My Best Buy Plus plan costs $49.99 per year, but it adds free two-day shipping, exclusive member pricing on select items, exclusive access to certain deals and promos, and an extended 60-day return window.

If you're a real fan of Best Buy, there's also a Total membership that costs $179.99 per year. The Total membership gets you everything from the Plus tier, and it adds additional protection plans, 24/7 tech support, VIP member support, and discounted tech repair prices.

AMD's Ryzen 9000 series of desktop processors was officially revealed in June 2024, with the company offering an initial collection of four flagship chips on the Zen 5 architecture.

AMD then added new Ryzen 9000 X3D CPUs with the unique 3D V-Cache — including the awesome Ryzen 7 9800X3D that's immensely popular amongst PC gamers — in early 2025, but it's been about six months since the chips found any new company.

That changes with AMD's recent and quiet release of two new Ryzen 9000 desktop processors (via Tom's Hardware).

The new CPUs, named AMD Ryzen 5 9500F and Ryzen 7 9700F, notably have the "F" designator. That's unlike any other chips so far included in the Ryzen 9000 series.

Whereas even AMD's X3D processors include integrated Radeon graphics, these new F-class chips do without. That means they must be paired with a discrete graphics card to function.

The Ryzen 7 9700F comes with 8 cores, 16 threads, and a boost clock up to 5.5GHz, all while running at a base TDP of 65W.

Comparing the 9700F to AMD's Ryzen 7 9700X, it seems like they're the same, other than the lack of discrete graphics in the former. Clock speeds are the same, cache is the same, and they're both unlocked for overclocking.

The Ryzen 5 9500F is slightly different than its Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 5 9600 siblings. While it has the same 6 cores and 12 threads, it has lower maximum base and boost clocks than the 9600X. It also falls behind the 9600 with its 5GHz max boost (compared to 5.2GHz).

The new Ryzen 5 9500F comes packaged with one of AMD's Wraith Stealth air coolers, which is only otherwise available with the Ryzen 5 9600.

Both new CPUs understandably use AMD's latest Zen 5 architecture and fit into an AM5 motherboard socket. It appears that the Ryzen 7 9700F will be available in North America, while the Ryzen 5 9500F will see a global release.

AMD continues to produce Zen 3 and 4 chips for OEMs

The new Ryzen 5 9500F and Ryzen 7 9700F aren't the only new chips that AMD has recently added to its repertoire. The older Zen 3 and Zen 4 platforms are also getting some love with quiet additions.

X user @harukaze5719 recently spotted listings on Danawa — a Seoul-based comparison and shopping site — with some other new AMD info regarding South Korean availability.

Listed are the Ryzen 5 7400F, Ryzen 5 7400, and the aforementioned Ryzen 5 9500F.

Focusing on the Ryzen 5 7400, it's worth pointing out that this might be the only time AMD has launched an F-series chip after its standard counterpart. The Ryzen 5 7400F launched earlier this year.

Perhaps most interesting is the Ryzen 5 7400's 22MB of combined L2 and L3 cache. That falls out into 16MB of L3 and the usual 6MB of L2.

Compare that to the Ryzen 5 7400F's 32MB of L3 and 6MB of L2 (for a total of 38MB), and it seems like AMD has decided to cut the biggest chunk of cache in half for the new 7400 chip.

With the already released Ryzen 5 7400F seeing availability only in the Asia Pacific, Japan, and China regions, it makes sense that the Ryzen 5 7400 will follow suit.

AMD wasn't satisfied with only adding new Zen 4 and Zen 5 chips. It's been about nine years since AMD introduced Zen 3, and the architecture that simply won't quit also just received a new chip in 2025.

Spotted by X user @momomo_us, the Ryzen 5 5600F is headed to the Asia Pacific and Japan region. It joins its global sibling, the Ryzen 5 5600, which launched in 2022.

The Ryzen 5 5600F features 6 cores, 12 threads, a boost clock up to 4GHz, and a 3GHz base clock. Its L2 and L3 caches combine for 35MB, and it runs at a 65W TDP.

It's essentially a nerfed version of the Ryzen 5 5600, coming in with lower max and base boost clocks. Interestingly, both the 5600F and 5600 lack integrated graphics; talk about a confusing naming scheme.

In any case, AMD's refusal to let its older generations wither is notable. AMD's Ryzen 5000 series now has more than 20 different CPUs using a mix of Vermeer and Cezanne silicon, and Zen 3 has been on the go for nine years.

When NVIDIA and AMD launched their most recent graphics cards, they both came with features only available with the latest hardware.

In NVIDIA's case, that meant that DLSS 4's Multi Frame Generation was only available on RTX 5000 cards, while Enhanced Frame Generation only made it back to 40-series hardware.

For AMD, it meant that FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4.0 was only available for RDNA 4 GPUs, including the flagship Radeon RX 9070 XT. Those with an RDNA 3 GPU or older were out of luck.

Well, that just changed thanks to the hard work of some enthusiastic Radeon owners and a leaked set of Int8 files used for FSR (via Wccftech).

This all began when AMD accidentally released the entire source code for FSR 4 on GitHub last month. The blunder was quickly discovered and nabbed by savvy users, and until now, the story has mostly been cold.

That is, until posts recently began popping up on the Radeon subreddit containing proof that FSR 4 was running on GPUs that it technically shouldn't run on.

Reddit user AthleteDependent926 created the post that kicked off a lot of experimentation, and it's causing a lot of excitement amongst AMD Radeon GPU owners.

How is AMD's FSR 4 running on old GPUs that don't technically support it?

AMD's FSR 4 is currently officially limited to the latest RDNA 4 GPUs due to their FP8 support. The lack of FP8 support on RDNA 3 (and older) cards was a major block unless a user was running Linux, where it could be forced; Windows users were left out completely.

AMD's accidental GitHub leak contained files that allowed savvy users to compile their own DLL for FSR 4.

Rather than using FP8, a custom FSR 4 DLL using Int8 files was produced, making it compatible with RDNA 2 and 3 GPUs as well as some NVIDIA RTX 30-series cards. Windows users, by employing Optiscaler (which is a handy way to replace upscalers in games), have reported success in replacing FSR 3.1 with FSR 4.

The results I've found on Reddit are quite impressive, although running FSR 4 on older cards isn't perfect. As AthleteDependent926 explains:

Reddit user nuubcake11 followed up the original post with some testing in Cyberpunk 2077.

Running the game on an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX of the RDNA 3 generation with FSR 4 enabled "is working via Optiscaler."

With FSR 3.1.5 enabled, the user saw roughly 84 FPS at 1440p with all settings maxed and ray tracing enabled. Switching to the custom version of FSR 4, frame rates dropped to about 79 FPS.

Losing single-digit frames seems to be a common experience, but users seem to be happy with the tradeoff. FSR 4 removes most of the shimmering in small details.

Another gamer tried Cyberpunk 2077 on an RX 6800 XT from the RDNA 2 generation using CachyOS and FSR 4. As they noted, FSR 4 was able to "come out superior" with sharper images, although performance was a bit weird.

RDNA 2 hardware seems to add some ghosting issues when running on Windows, so it seems like RDNA 3 is still the best way to go if you don't have one of the latest RDNA 4 cards.

What exactly is AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution?

FSR is AMD's answer to NVIDIA's DLSS, in that it upscales graphics and adds frame generation capabilities.

While AMD relied on advanced spatial upscaling algorithms for versions up to FSR 3, FSR 4 made the jump to machine learning.

This change has contributed greatly to FSR's abilities, and FSR 4 is indeed a big improvement compared to FSR 3. You can see in the video below how much of a difference there is.

AMD has not officially announced that it's bringing FSR 4 to its older AMD Radeon hardware, and that makes sense considering the performance tradeoffs that most users are seeing with this unofficial port.

Whether or not AMD takes a different stance now that this unofficial FSR 4 workaround is out in the wild, I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Borderlands 4, the latest looter-shooter in the beloved series from Gearbox Software, launched on September 11, 2025. Less than a week later, it's sitting at a "Mixed" review score on Steam with more than 16,500 entries. The prevailing issue forcing the review score down? Dreadful PC optimization.

The game's developer has now released a couple of lengthy PC optimization guides for both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs (via Videocardz). There are 68 different GPUs listed, with optimal settings for 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions. NVIDIA's cards range from the RTX 2070 to the mighty RTX 5090, while AMD's cards range from the RX 5700 XT to the RX 9070 XT.

Unless you're using an RTX 3060 Ti or newer, you can expect about 30 FPS at 1080p. For 1440p, you'll want at least an RTX 3070 Ti to run the game at 30 FPS. Want to play at 4K? You'll want at least an RTX 3090 Ti to hit 60 FPS.

Borderlands 4's poor PC performance doesn't sit well with gamers

My current GPU, NVIDIA's RTX 5070 Ti, is listed under the 4K section. In order to achieve 60+ FPS, I'll need DLSS 4's Multi Frame Generation cranked up to 4x with texture quality set to Medium (and many other settings dropped to Low).

If I want to hit 60+ FPS at 1440p, I'll still need DLSS MFG 4x, though textures and other quality can be cranked up a bit. I think perhaps I'll wait a bit longer before trying the game to see if any more performance updates are released.

Despite knowing months ahead of launch that Borderlands 4's PC specs were very demanding — more than 50% of Steam users may need an upgrade to play the game, at least judging by Steam's frequent hardware surveys — players are trashing the game for its brutal performance.

Poor optimization and PC performance were topics of our Borderlands 4 review.

Despite playing the game on an NVIDIA RTX 3080 and AMD Ryzen 9 5900X — older hardware that should nevertheless be relevant today — our reviewer experienced some brutal performance woes that mostly continued after a patch.

Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software, hasn't been shy about stating his case for Borderlands 4's performance. The game, which runs on the controversial Unreal Engine 5, is demanding, and Pitchford says gamers need to come to terms with lowering the resolution or in-game settings to achieve stability.

"Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers," said Pitchford in an X reply to a gamer struggling to play on older hardware.

Considering NVIDIA's RTX 3060 and RTX 4060 GPUs continue to hold the top spots on Steam's GPU survey list, many players are struggling to come to terms with how a AAA game can launch at a $70 price tag and run so poorly.

On the other side of the hardware fence, console players have bemoaned the lack of an FOV slider and a motion blur toggle. Considering that both of these common settings can directly contribute to motion sickness, it's not a good look for Gearbox.

If you are indeed one of Borderlands 4's launch adopters, I recommend giving the recommended GPU specs laid out by Gearbox a shot. At this point, any extra frames are appreciated.

Not every piece of technology can be bold or exciting. Sometimes, tech is boring; boring can be good, and boring can be cheap. That's exactly what a lot of people want, and you'll find a whole lot of "boring" in budget and mid-range Windows laptops.

Out of all the laptops I've used recently, the Dell 14 Plus (DB14255) is one of the best... at being boring — the design, the display, the features, even the boring name that has spread across Dell's entire portfolio to simplify (overly so, in my opinion) branding.

Dell famously plays it safe with a lot of its hardware, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The Dell 14 Plus gets the job done without fuss or flair, and its reasonable pricing makes it a solid choice for those who just need a tool (or for those who want to equip a fleet with an army of indistinguishable gray laptops).

My Dell 14 Plus (DB14255) review

Design ⭐⭐⭐½

At a glance, the Dell 14 Plus meets the minimum for a mid-range Windows laptop with its metal-clad design, but it only takes a second to see that it doesn't do much more. This aluminum chassis is just a little on the thick side (around 17mm), a little on the heavy side (around 1.52kg), and definitely sticks with the basics design-wise.

Build quality is also average. There's a decent amount of flex in the panels and the laptop itself, but I still have confidence it could take a beating and withstand years of use.

For I/O, you're looking at one HDMI 1.4 port, two USB Type-C (10GBps with DisplayPort/Power Delivery) ports, one USB Type-A (5GBps) port, and one 3.5mm audio jack. There's no USB4 or HDMI 2.0/2.1, but the basics are (once again) covered.

Display ⭐⭐⭐

The biggest disappointment with the Dell Plus 14 is easily its display. It's not because it's IPS LCD instead of OLED (there are some really nice IPS LCD displays). It's not because it's only 60Hz. It's not because it's just 1200p (although text can still be pretty choppy on this 14-inch panel).

The Dell Plus 14's screen just doesn't look good. Contrast is average, brightness is low, colors are inaccurate and washed out, and the backlight bleed is egregious — unless you're browsing the web, checking your email, or writing in documents, you probably won't want to use this display.

This feels like the screen of a sub-$500 laptop, not something that starts from $799.99 at Dell.com.

Performance ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Dell 14 Plus comes in Intel and AMD variants, but I chose to review the model powered by the 6-core AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 and its integrated AMD Radeon 840M graphics.

You can upgrade that chipset or increase the RAM and storage, but this laptop will never be the powerhouse — and it doesn't need to be. For casual computing (lots of web browsing, email, Microsoft Office, light photo editing, etc.), performance was always consistent and smooth for me.

Try to go beyond the casual workload, though, and you'll quickly find the limits — especially with graphics. Anything but the lightest games aren't likely to run well on the Dell Plus 14, but I honestly expected that. This laptop runs as well as it needs to.

Battery life ⭐⭐⭐⭐½

A low-resolution/refresh rate display, a medium-sized battery, and a high-efficiency chipset are a recipe for fantastic battery life, and the Dell Plus 14 does deliver here. A full day of work isn't cause for concern, especially since the display physically can't get bright enough to properly stress the battery.

I drained 6% of the battery after looping a generic Microsoft Office workload, and another 6% after looping an HD video at 50% volume. Running a Windows Battery Report showed me hitting around 7 hours of screen-on usage even with performance cranked up to the highest settings for my testing.

Charging is easy through either of the USB Type-C ports, but both ports are aligned on the left side.

Keyboard & touchpad ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Continuing with the positives, I actually really like the Dell Plus 14's keyboard. The individual keys are on the small side, but the layout itself is spacious and intuitive, the key action is consistently tactile, and the keycaps are textured nicely. You also get backlighting, which isn't always a given at this price point and below.

The touchpad is less impressive. Its size is fine, the button action is clicky, and you do get Microsoft Precision drivers, but the rough texture and shallow buttons knock a few points off. It gets the job done, but it's no comparison to a premium laptop touchpad.

Software & AI ⭐⭐⭐⭐

"AI PC" is thrown around a lot these days, but the Dell 14 Plus is actually a full-fledged Copilot+ PC thanks to the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) attached to its AMD chipset. That means all the latest and greatest Windows 11 features, and futureproofing for any updates released down the line.

Windows is slowly adding more useful artificial intelligence features, so even if there's nothing you care about right now (that's mostly true for me), the Dell 14 Plus is set up to get even better down the line. There's no Human Presence Detection (HPD) feature, though.

Dell didn't bury this laptop in its own bloatware, either, although the Dell Optimizer app for managing your PC settings is a little on the slow and useless side.

Everything else ⭐⭐⭐½

As expected for a laptop of this caliber, everything else about the Dell 14 Plus is perfectly average at best. The webcam and microphones will get you through video calls, there's a fingerprint sensor for Windows Hello biometric authentication that works most of the time, and you get Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth wireless connectivity on board with solid stability and performance.

The one area that somehow manages to fall below average? The speakers. Windows laptops aren't known for great audio experiences anyway, but these recessed, bottom-firing speakers are metallic and hollow-sounding, only suitable for casual listening. I like to have music playing while I work, but I did not do that with this laptop's speakers.

Dell 14 Plus review: My final thoughts

✅You should buy this if ...

• You want a simple, no-frills work laptop with good performance.
• You want a more affordable PC that still supports Windows AI features.
• You find it on sale and want to save some cash.

❌You should not buy this if ...

• You plan to do more than work, like play games or watch movies.
• You care a lot about having a bright, colorful display.

With all that said, the Dell 14 Plus (DB14255) is a boring laptop — but that's largely okay. Plenty of people want a boring laptop, and this PC is bound to attract a whole lot of tasty sales to make it an easier pill to swallow than it is at full price.

This is a workhorse, so it drops the frills and extraneous features to deliver good performance, solid battery life, enough ports, and a comfortable keyboard. Sure, the display is dim and washed out, and the speakers are tinny, but that won't prevent you from getting the job done.

You can configure your own Dell 14 Plus (DB14255) from $799.99 at Dell.com. This one won't be landing on our list of best Windows laptops any time soon, but the Dell 14 Plus is a decent machine.

Mini PCs have come a long way in the last few years. That's partly down to some serious advances in tech from Intel and AMD. The latest generations of mobile chips from both brands are now serious alternatives to using what we put inside desktop rigs. All while using a fraction of the power.

Compromises are minimal, and that's exactly the case with the new Geekom A9 Max, a mini PC that's truly captured a place on my desk in the last couple of weeks of use.

With an incredible AMD APU (processor) inside, stacks of storage, plenty of RAM, and better connectivity options than my gaming PC, this tiny little box punches far above its diminutive form.

Right now the Geekom A9 Max is available at a discounted price, too. On Amazon in the U.S. it's just $999, while in the UK you can pick one up for £999 if you have an Amazon Prime subscription.

As an additional bonus for Windows Central readers, if you buy the A9 Max from the Geekom store and enter the code WINDSA9MAX you can take an additional 6% off the price.

This review was made possible thanks to a review sample provided by Geekom. The company had no input nor saw the contents of this review prior to publication.

The Geekom A9 Max is a tiny box full of tricks

Right from the unboxing experience, there's a whiff of the Mac Mini about the Geekom A9 Max. The simple white packaging with silver accents reveals inside a similarly sleek silver box. Give or take a few millimeters and grams here and there, it's about the size of the latest Mac Mini, too.

That means even the smallest, most cramped setups can find a home for the A9 Max. Made even more convenient with the included VESA mount, so you can hide it from view and attach it to the back of your monitor. I'm not going to do that, though. I like looking at this little thing.

It's constantly amazing to me that something so small can offer so much. And I'm someone who used a Mac Mini for the first time about 14 years ago. I'm back with the same feeling of wonderment with the Geekom A9 Max.

Where it pulls ahead of, well, Apple, especially, is that it's not all form over function. The front of the A9 Max is packed with FOUR USB 3.2 ports, including one that's always powered. Then you go round the back, and business really picks up. Dual HDMI 2.1, dual 2.5G Ethernet, dual USB-C 4.0, another USB 3.2, and a basic USB 2.0 port. Oh, and a full-sized SD card slot on the side.

I'm not joking when I say the connectivity here is better than on my gaming PC. And it's smaller than my power supply.

How do they cram so much hardware inside?

The Geekom A9 Max is the first time I've used one of AMD's more recent Ryzen AI APUs. There's no going back. This isn't a Strix Halo mini PC — and it doesn't have the price of one either, thank goodness — instead using Strix Point. Or, to give its full name, the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370.

That means 12 cores (made up of 4 x Zen 5 cores and 8 x Zen 5c cores) with 24 threads and Radeon 890M graphics, with a 50 TOPS NPU. That NPU also means this is a Copilot+ PC, albeit, for whatever reason, with no sign of Recall.

This review unit comes with 32GB DDR5 5600MHz RAM, but that can be expanded up to 128GB because it's regular old SODIMMs, not soldered. Storage-wise, it comes out of the box with a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, with space for another in the m.2 2230 form factor (best known as the form factor used on handheld gaming PCs).

It uses a 120W power brick, so no internal power supply gives Geekom more space to play with. It's configured for 54W on the APU, but realistically, you're only pushing this when you're gaming or doing some local AI. The highest I've seen it spike is 58W.

Most of the time it's very quiet, and all of the time very efficient. Geekom's cooling solution does the job, and even under extended load in my warm office, CPU temperatures haven't exceeded 87C (188F), while reaching 71C (160F) in gaming. GPU temperatures top out at 70C (158F).

The only thing really missing is an Oculink port. If you have an external GPU that uses this connection, you can't use it with the A9 Max. You can use an eGPU over USB 4, but that doesn't help if you already have one with Oculink.

"Crowned for AI, built to game"

The heading above is the exact tag line Geekom uses for the A9 Max. I rarely buy into marketing, but they're on the money with this one. The key is the Radeon 890M integrated GPU. It's built on RDNA 3.5, has 16 cores, and thanks to the ability to dedicate a chunk of the overall system memory for it, up to 24GB of VRAM in this spec.

You don't need that for gaming; in fact, for gaming, you don't need more than 8GB. It's configured out of the box with 2GB, but you can change this in the AMD software, reboot, and you're good to go. For gaming, I've been using 8GB, leaving 24GB as RAM. For AI testing, I've split it right down the middle at 16GB/16GB.

Doing this means that this tiny PC can even run gpt-oss:20b, a 20-billion-parameter LLM, with ease. Using LM Studio to leverage the Radeon 890M, I'm able to return 25 tokens per second on gpt-oss:20b with a 4k context window. The model easily fits inside the 16GB dedicated GPU memory, and the Radeon 890M has sufficient compute power to perform well.

Other similarly large models don't perform quite so well, but AMD worked with OpenAI on gpt-oss:20b, so it's understandable. But this is a perfectly usable little AI workstation, even more so if you go up to 64GB or 128GB of RAM. With Stable Diffusion, you can leverage the NPU for graphics work, aside from the Copilot+ features that tap into it. It's pretty slow, though, and I'd recommend just using the GPU.

It's a brilliant gaming box, too. While it's on the pricier side as something to dedicate as a small living room gaming PC, it's certainly got the horsepower for it.

In Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p, medium settings with FSR balanced, we see an average of 61 FPS. Turn on frame generation, and you can add another 30 FPS to that. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, set to balanced at 1080p, with the balanced FSR preset, delivers a 77 FPS average.

Forza Horizon 5 on high settings at 1080p hits 66 FPS average, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p with medium settings and using Intel's XeSS on balanced returns 61 FPS.

Naturally, you can tweak all the settings you want, but it's perfectly possible to game at 60 FPS and above at 1080p on the Geekom A9 Max at medium to high graphics.

Not forgetting the CPU, either. That 12-core Ryzen AI 9 HX370 does well. Its Cinebench scores are on par with other tests we've done with this chip, likewise in other synthetic benchmarks. Grabbing some comparison data from our buddies at Techradar also shows that it outperforms the standard Apple M4 in the Mac Mini in these same tests.

I should point out one thing, though. The BIOS on the Geekom A9 Max is fairly limited, but there's one thing in there I changed that impacted performance, at least in the benchmarks. There's not much in the way of tweaks you can make, but by setting the fans to performance, you trade a little extra noise for a little extra performance. It bumped the Cinebench score by 30 points, which isn't insignificant.

All the PC most people will ever need

You should buy this if ...

✅ You want an efficient, yet powerful desktop PC.

✅ Connectivity is important.

✅ You'd like to be able to game and handle local AI workloads.

You shouldn't buy this if ...

❌ You need to process massive GPU workloads, such as larger AI models or high resolution gaming.

❌ You're shopping on a budget.

I've toyed with the idea for years of ditching my much-loved desktop gaming PC. It's my baby, and I adore it, but it's overkill for almost everything. That even includes gaming. Time spent with the Geekom A9 Max is the first time that has made me think that I can truly do it.

For most people, most of the time, this little box is all the PC they would ever need. It can game, it can tackle AI workloads, it's packed with enough of the latest tech that it won't be outdated for a long time to come.

AMD deserves its flowers, too. While the Ryzen AI 9 HX370 has now been succeeded by the ridiculous (and expensive) AI Max+ 395, this chip is no joke.

The CPU is incredible, the integrated GPU equally so, and mini PCs like the A9 Max are, I believe, the future of desktop computing.

For around $1,200, you get a high-performance PC that's also efficient enough to be run all day, every day, and not cripple your electricity bill. I did some basic calculations, and switching to the Geekom A9 Max over my gaming PC could save me as much as £200 a year in electricity alone.

I'll sacrifice some settings and frame rate in games, but then, with the new NVIDIA GeForce Now top-tier offering an RTX 5080, even that's not really an issue.

Should you buy one? Absolutely, if it's in your budget. This is one of the best mini PCs that can do it all.

In terms of portable gaming laptops, the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 has been our favorite for a few years running. In 2024, it received a massive overhaul that ushered in a new design, new performance hardware, and a competitive price that made it too good to ignore.

ASUS is back at it for 2025, adding the latest NVIDIA and AMD components and a slightly larger frame to handle the newfound power. With these changes came a price bump, but that's easily negated (and more) by a great limited-time deal.

The ROG Zephyrus G14 with AMD Ryzen 9 270 CPU, NVIDIA RTX 5060 Laptop GPU, and 2.8K OLED display is now down to $1,349.99 at Best Buy. That's a $450 discount on one of the best gaming laptops you can buy today.

Why I can so easily recommend the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025)

The 2024 ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 was a massive hit, earning a spot in our best gaming laptop rankings. As Windows Central laptop expert Zachary Boddy mentioned in their ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025) review, "So much of what made this laptop so amazing last year is still here, only now it's smarter and more powerful."

Some of that extra power has a tradeoff; the 2025 model is slightly thicker and heavier than its predecessor. Don't get me wrong — this is still one of the most portable gaming laptops out there, weighing in at 3.31 pounds (1.5kg) and measuring 0.64 inches at its thickest point.

As Boddy points out, "This is still one of the best Windows laptops of the year, especially if you want a sleek 14-inch machine with some monstrous power under the hood."

The discounted model I'm highlighting here features an AMD Ryzen 9 270 processor with 8 cores and a boost clock up to 5.2GHz. It's not as powerful as the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 available in pricier models, but it'll still handle any modern games.

👉 Related: ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025) vs. Razer Blade 14 (2025)

The CPU is paired up with an NVIDIA RTX 5060 Laptop GPU, granting access to NVIDIA's latest DLSS 4 features, including Multi Frame Generation. ASUS designed the G14 to handle up to 110W of GPU power, providing more than enough thermal space for the 5060 to hit its potential.

The G14's display is arguably its best feature. It measures 14 inches with a crisp 2880x1800 (2.8K) resolution, and its 120Hz refresh rate is an excellent pairing for the RTX 5060. Better yet, it uses an OLED panel with deep color and perfect contrast.

As Boddy explains, "it's vibrant, responsive, color accurate, and supports Dolby Vision HDR — perfect for working, creating, playing, and watching."

Testing a model with a more power-hungry RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, Boddy saw, on average, about 5-6 hours of real-world battery life. That should only improve with the hardware in the discounted G14.

If you'd like something with a more powerful GPU and a larger 16-inch OLED display, Best Buy has also discounted the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025). A model with an RTX 5070 Laptop GPU and Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU is now down to $1,699.99 from the regular $2,149.99.

There has been much talk recently about the sale of NVIDIA's specialized AI GPUs to China. The US government only recently rescinded the ban on NVIDIA selling H20 chips on July 14, 2025, roughly four months after slapping the regulation in place due to what it called national security concerns.

On Sunday, August 10, it was reported (via Financial Times) that both NVIDIA and AMD have agreed to pay the US government 15% of the revenue garnered from the sales of specific AI accelerators — the NVIDIA H20 and the AMD MI308 — to China.

You're not wrong in thinking that this agreement is entirely unprecedented and even quite unusual. It all comes down to NVIDIA and AMD's quest to receive export licenses for these chips, which, of course, come from the US government.

NVIDIA and AMD both see an extremely lucrative opportunity in China, and not being able to sell their AI chips to such a large market is a prospect that wipes billions off of profit margins.

As stated in the FT article, these specific export licenses were "granted last week" and began issuance on Friday, just a couple of days after NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, personally met with President Trump.

It appears that the 15% impost was a final piece of the negotiation between the two major firms and US government officials.

US President Trump makes statements about the new AMD/NVIDIA AI chip deal

US President Trump held a press conference Monday to confirm the new deal with NVIDIA and AMD. As reported by Reuters, Trump doubled down on his assumption that the H20 is not powerful enough to make a significant difference:

Of course, it seems that the final deal whittled the number that NVIDIA and AMD will pay down to 15%. This statement also ignores the fact that the NVIDIA H20 AI GPU, which is essentially a nerfed version of the Hopper-based H200 AI chips, is still an extremely potent piece of hardware.

Why else would Chinese customers be clamoring to put in orders? On July 30, I wrote about how NVIDIA needs 300,000 more H20 AI chips from TSMC to meet China's demand, and that was on top of the 600,000 to 700,000 H20 chips already stockpiled and awaiting customers.

At the press conference, Trump also commented on the new NVIDIA B200 chip based on the latest Blackwell architecture:

"Jensen also has the new chip, the Blackwell. A somewhat enhanced-in-a-negative-way Blackwell. In other words, take 30% to 50% off of it. [...] I think he's coming to see me again about that, but that will be an unenhanced version of the big one."

So, it seems that the precedent set by this deal may not be a one-time thing. NVIDIA has been responding to requests for comment with the same standard lines that don't really give us any extra information.

It's important to point out that this type of deal has never happened before. But viewed through the scope of President Trump's recent efforts to revitalize domestic investments from massive tech firms, whether via tariffs or production agreements, it makes more sense.

US officials are concerned about the new deal

Is this deal legal? I'm not entirely sure. The US Constitution forbids Congress from imposing taxes and duties on goods exported from any state. However, I'm sure there's a loophole somewhere through which the US government is happy to jump.

There are also the national security implications, which seem not to matter as much now that the US government is receiving a kickback from the sales.

US Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, released a statement responding to the 15% trade deal:

"The reported agreement to have Nvidia and AMD pay 15% of their China chip sales revenues in exchange for export licenses from the U.S. government represents a dangerous misuse of export controls that undermines our national security. Export controls exist to protect America, not to generate revenue. If advanced semiconductor sales to China pose the national security risks we've repeatedly cited, they should be prohibited, not monetized through an unaccountable profit-sharing scheme with the federal government.

"This arrangement raises critical questions the administration must answer immediately, including what legal authority it has for extracting revenue-sharing as a condition for export licenses, how such funds will be used, whether the interagency referral process established by Congress was followed, and whether Congress was consulted at any point in the development of this scheme.

"Most troubling is the contradiction at the heart of this potential policy. The administration cannot simultaneously treat semiconductor exports as both a national security threat and a revenue opportunity. By putting a price on our security concerns, we signal to China and our allies that American national security principles are negotiable for the right fee."

It will indeed be interesting to see how this all plays out and whether the newfound 15% kickback on select NVIDIA and AMD AI chips will be something that remains in place for long.

It's no secret that Windows 10 is set to reach end-of-life support on October 14, 2025. That doesn't mean that your Windows 10 PC will suddenly stop working; it just means that it will no longer receive security and feature updates that improve the operating system.

While you can continue using Windows 10 after October 14 — I outline some methods at the end of this article — the general advice is to make the switch to Windows 11 sooner rather than later.

I've personally been dragging my feet with the Windows 11 upgrade on my home gaming PC, which has only ever known Windows 10. It works fine, and I wouldn't be making a change if Microsoft weren't forcing it. How much of a difference is there, if at all, in Windows 11 when compared to gaming performance on Windows 10? I decided to find out.

Windows 10 vs. Windows 11: Which OS delivers superior gaming performance?

When Windows 11 launched in 2021, it didn't take long for users to discover that games weren't performing as well as they should. Pulling just one example, a major bug arrived with Windows 11 version 22H2 in 2022, resulting in stuttering and poor performance while gaming.

Gaming performance in Windows 11 has improved over the years — there are plenty of manual tweaks available in Windows 11 to maximize frame rates — but many gamers swear that they won't make the change to the new OS.

Windows 11 now has a larger share of gamers than Windows 10, at least according to a Steam hardware survey from June, but that still leaves roughly 40% of other gamers using different operating systems.

SteamOS, a fork of a Linux distro built by Valve, has been making waves, especially in the gaming handheld world, as it destroys Windows 11 when it comes to performance and battery life.

Nevertheless, I decided to upgrade to Windows 11 on my gaming PC. Before making the change, however, I performed benchmark tests in seven demanding games, with a mix of older and newer titles, on Windows 10.

I then upgraded my PC to Windows 11 and redid the same benchmarks with the same in-game settings and with the stock Windows 11 setup you get when you download version 24H2.

I've collected all the data in the table below.

As you can see from the results in the table, gaming performance on Windows 11 is practically identical to the performance I had with Windows 10. I gained or lost a frame in the averages in some instances, but that's well within the margin of benchmarking differences.

The biggest takeaway here is likely the drop in FPS minimums seen in some games. GTA V Enhanced fell from an 88.9 FPS minimum to 51.6 FPS, while DOOM: The Dark Ages dropped from 91.75 FPS minimum to 70.99 FPS.

Black Myth: Wukong saw the largest drop of all, from a 71 FPS minimum to a 29 FPS minimum. I'll have to investigate why that number dropped so much. For reference, FPS lows, if too low, can seriously affect your gaming experience. You generally want FPS rates to be as tight as possible.

I've only had Windows 11 installed for a few hours, so there's plenty more testing I'd like to do. I've heard of issues with multi-monitor gaming setups, and continued issues with Windows 11 updates wrecking performance, at least until a fix is issued.

However, I think I can generally say that updating your Windows 10 gaming PC to Windows 11 won't destroy the performance you're used to seeing. Sure, there are some differences, but not enough to make me figure out how to continue using Windows 10 after it hits end-of-life.

What can I do instead of updating to Windows 11?

Come October 14, you won't see your Windows 10 PC suddenly refuse to operate. According to a recent study, half of Windows PCs out there have not yet upgraded to Windows 11, and Microsoft isn't about to leave them behind.

In June, Microsoft announced that it was making Windows 10 security updates free for an extra year. The Extended Security Updates (ESU) program, however, comes with a caveat. To receive the free updates, you must sync your PC to the cloud.

If not, you can instead pay $30 or hand over 1,000 Microsoft Reward points. It was also clarified more recently that spending money on the ESU program will get you security updates for up to 10 devices running Windows 10.

Despite Microsoft's bending, the bottom line hasn't changed: you will need to upgrade from your Windows 10 PC at some point, at least unless you're happy using an outdated and unsecured OS.

Our guide on how to upgrade a compatible Windows 10 PC to Windows 11 can walk you through the process. If your PC isn't eligible for the Windows 11 update, I recommend checking out some top-rated 2025 laptops that will make a great replacement for your aging Windows 10 device.

Have you made the change to Windows 11 on your gaming PC? Why or why not? Be sure to let me know in the comments section below.

AMD's Z1 Extreme APU has been a massive boon to the handheld gaming world, offering up impressive performance in hardware like the ASUS ROG Ally, ROG Ally X, and Lenovo Legion Go.

But AMD did not just create one Extreme chip before exiting the market. As revealed at IFA 2024, AMD was already working on the Z2 Extreme as a successor, with AMD's Senior VP, Jack Huynh, suggesting that it would improve battery life in performance mode from approximately 45 minutes to 3 hours.

CES 2025 is where AMD officially took the wraps off the Ryzen Z2 Extreme, Z2, and Z2 Go, with MSI specifically announcing its Claw A8 gaming handheld with the Z2 Extreme inside a few months later at Computex 2025.

Considering how potent an APU the Z1 Extreme continues to be today in the best gaming handhelds on the market, the Z2 Extreme has a lot of people excited.

Unfortunately, some of the hype appears to be overblown, at least according to an excellent hands-on comparison between the Z1 Extreme and the Z2 Extreme from the YouTube channel ETA PRIME.

How does Z2 Extreme performance compare to the Z1 Extreme?

ETA PRIME was able to get its hands on an early model of the MSI Claw A8, which, so far, has only been sold in China. Preorders for the Claw A8 have kicked off in Europe, but other regions are still tapping their toes, awaiting the handheld.

With the ASUS ROG Ally X featuring the AMD Z1 Extreme chip also in hand, ETA PRIME is able to give a detailed breakdown of the performance from both chips.

As mentioned in the video, these results do come with some caveats. It's still the early days for driver support for the newer hardware, and, as with previous handhelds, the right updates can boost frame rates.

The Z2 Extreme runs 8 cores — split into three Zen 5 and five Zen 5c — and 16 threads, with 16 RDNA 3.5 integrated GPU cores in tow. It runs between a 15W and 30W TDP.

The Z1 Extreme has the same core and thread count, though it uses the older Zen 4 architecture. The RDNA 3 integrated GPU boasts 12 cores, and the whole chip operates between a 15W and 30W TDP.

Comparing the handheld memory, both units have 24GB of LPDDR5x RAM (the ROG Ally X hits 7,500MT/s while the Claw A8 hits 8,000MT/s), and both run Windows 11.

In Geekbench, with the handhelds running at 17W, the Z2 Extreme bests the Z1 Extreme with a 2,325 single-core score (compared to 1,795), though it falls behind the multi-core performance with a 7,892 score (compared to 7,922). Bumping the chips up to a 25W TDP has the Z2 Extreme come out ahead in both categories.

The OpenCL Geekbench scores at 25W again fall in favor of the Z2 Extreme. It hits a 33,488 score while the Z1 Extreme hits 27,807.

Moving to 3DMark, the Z2 Extreme continues to come out ahead of the Z1 Extreme, besting it in Time Spy and Steel Nomad.

Synthetic benchmarks are one thing; they certainly have their value, but I prefer seeing real-world results in games. ETA PRIME delivers.

Running Cyberpunk 2077 with the Steam Deck preset at a 25W TDP reveals only a 4FPS difference. That's not a typo — the Z1 Extreme averages 42.66 FPS, with the Z2 Extreme averaging 46.65 FPS.

At a 17W TDP, the Z1 Extreme averaged 32 FPS while the Z2 Extreme averaged 39 FPS. ETA PRIME also dropped the resolution to 900p with the same 17W TDP, and that's where the Z2 Extreme saw the most improvement. It hit 45.56 FPS while the Z1 Extreme averaged 35.47 FPS.

Moving to Shadow of the Tomb Raider, at 1080p with a 25W TDP, the Z2 Extreme averaged 64 FPS. The Z1 Extreme averaged 59 FPS, so not a big difference again.

Forza Horizon 5 is a similar story, averaging 80 FPS on the Z2 Extreme and 76 FPS on the Z1 Extreme. Both chips were running at a 25W TDP.

Black Myth: Wukong running at 1080p with a 25W TDP saw the Z1 Extreme average 44 FPS and the Z2 Extreme 49 FPS.

Finally, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered at 1080p with a 25W TDP saw the Z1 Extreme average 30 FPS and the Z2 Extreme average 31 FPS.

Can the Z2 Extreme catch up with the Z1 Extreme after driver updates?

As ETA PRIME points out in the conclusion of their video:

"At the time of making this video with the drivers we have for that Z2 Extreme, I wouldn't run out and upgrade from the Z1 just yet. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the video, I do expect we'll see better performance in a lot of these games; just like the Steam Deck and the Ally when it was released, there were games that just didn't run. Now, we're seeing pretty good frame rates across the board."

It's not a bad thing to remain optimistic about the Z2 Extreme's potential, but those drivers will have to do a lot of heavy lifting to arrive at a performance gap large enough to convince gamers to upgrade.

It's worth pointing out that the upcoming Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, built in partnership between Microsoft and ASUS, come with the Ryzen Z2 A and Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme chips, respectively.

In the hierarchy of all of AMD's Ryzen Z1 and Z2 chips, the AI Z2 Extreme sits at the very top, while the Z2 A comes in just ahead of the standard Ryzen Z1. It will be very interesting to see how these chips perform when the Xbox hardware finally arrives.

Interested in creating realistic AI images locally, all without relying on an internet connection? If you have a laptop with an AMD Ryzen AI 300 or AI MAX+ CPU inside, you're in luck.

The announcement from the AMD blog highlights the fact that this is the "world's first block FP16 SD 3.0 Medium model" created in collaboration with Stability AI.

The new model is optimized for AMD's latest chips, and it comes with several enhancements compared to a previous similar image generator.

Here's what you need to know about the new AMD AI image generator, as well as how to test it out today.

AMD and Stability AI team up again to deliver another world's first

Last year at Computex 2024, AMD unveiled its new Ryzen AI 300 mobile processors with an XDNA 2 Neural Processing Unit (NPU) capable of 50 TOPS of AI performance.

The NPU inside also came with the "world's first" block FP16 design. Without getting into too much detail, the block Floating Point approach enables 8-bit performance with 16-bit accuracy. It's the best of both sides for a mobile NPU like the XDNA 2.

These Zen 5 chips have now become commonplace in new laptops, and, yes, they are compatible with Copilot+ AI tools in Windows 11.

👉 Related: Best Copilot+ PCs in 2025

Alongside the new Ryzen AI 300 chips, AMD also introduced at Computex 2024 its SDXL Turbo image generator, at the time called the "world's first block FP16 stable diffusion model."

SDXL Turbo has now been usurped by the new SD 3.0 Medium model just announced on July 21, 2025. Not only does it improve the created image quality, but it's also better optimized for the XDNA 2 NPU inside the Ryzen AI CPUs.

AMD shares a few slides in its blog post, highlighting the upgrades you can expect in the new SD 3.0 Medium model.

The image on the left, created using the SDXL Turbo model, is clearly AI-generated. Eyeballs look like they're melting, teeth are only roughly human, and the background is blurry.

The image on the right, created using the new SD 3.0 Medium model, looks shockingly real. Eyes, teeth, background, clothing — it all checks out unless you're analyzing it with a loupe.

Beyond that, AMD also says its XDNA 2 NPU will upscale the 2MP output of the SD 3 Medium model to 4MP (2048x2048), creating a much larger image.

Both images were created, of course, using an XDNA 2 NPU as found in AMD's Ryzen AI 300 chips.

AMD claims that the new SD 3.0 Medium model soaks up a lot less memory than SDXL Turbo, soaking up just 9GB of memory from a 24GB pool. That's rather impressive, and anyone with 24GB or more RAM in their laptop shouldn't have any issues.

What is SD 3.0 Medium?

There's a lot of jargon going on here, and I won't pretend like I'm an expert on everything. However, I can explain the Stable Diffusion 3.0 Medium model, also known as SD 3.0 Medium or SD3M.

Stable Diffusion — the popular image generator created by Stability AI — runs best on computers far out of a regular price range. That's where SD Medium comes in.

SD3M is made to run on consumer PCs rather than supercomputers, which is why you can run it locally on an XDNA 2 NPU without an internet connection.

As AMD puts it, "Stable Diffusion 3.0 Medium is an extremely capable model that is very sensitive to the prompt content, structure, and order."

AMD shares a few sample prompts in its blog post, and indeed, it looks like you'll want to be extremely specific when attempting to create images with the help of AI.

How to test out AMD's new image generator now

Most importantly, you need a laptop with an AMD Ryzen AI 300 or Ryzen AI MAX+ CPU inside to use the new SD 3.0 Medium image generator model.

These PCs have been on the market since 2024, and I can point to models like the ASUS Zenbook S 16, Razer Blade 14, ZBook Ultra 14, and ASUS ROG Flow Z13 as standout options from our list of the best AI laptops.

Next, you'll need to ensure that your laptop has at least 24GB of RAM.

With that out of the way, you'll want to download the latest AMD Adrenalin Edition drivers, as well as the Amuse 3.1 Beta software (which is used to bridge support for all these different technologies and to create the images).

Once you've downloaded and launched the Amuse software, AMD says to select EZ Mode and push the slider over to HQ. You'll also want to toggle the option for XDNA 2 Stable Diffusion Offload before beginning.

Last year, AMD announced its Ryzen AI 300 mobile processors with reasonable fanfare during Computex in Taiwan, or at least, more fanfare than its most recent Ryzen AI 5 330 chip has received. Adding an entry-level option with the bare minimum specifications wouldn't normally be that interesting, which tracks with the quiet addition, but there's an interesting aspect to this little budget APU.

All six of the Ryzen AI 300 Series mobile chips feature an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) designed for local AI processing that's rated at 50 TOPS (Tera Operations per Second), which is above the 40 TOPS requirement for Copilot+ PC certification.

So, some jargon aside, the interesting part here is how upcoming AMD-based Copilot+ PCs could, potentially, be even cheaper (or match) the offerings featuring Qualcomm's ARM64-based Snapdragon X chip designed for ~$600 laptops. However, the silent drop might have something to do with some unusual spec counts that have enthusiasts debating its naming scheme.

Previous generations of AMD's Ryzen mobile processors, such as the "Phoenix" 7000 Series, had denominations of Ryzen 3, 5, 7, and 9. The former, Ryzen 3, would traditionally feature a quad-core CPU, whereas the latest Ryzen AI 5 330 that just surfaced is, clearly, listed as a Ryzen 5 chip despite using the very same.

It was the same deal in "Hawk Point" 8040 Series with 4-core CPUs (Zen 4) sticking in the Ryzen 3 subcategory, so it's an unusual switch for this new budget Ryzen AI 300 Series processor, which remains unconfirmed as to whether it uses a "Strix Point" or "Krackan Point" (Zen 5) CPU chiplet (via Tom's Hardware).

Either way, the intention is for these mobile processors to feature in entry-level Copilot+ PCs, in line with how I suspect AI PCs will quietly become the standard for laptops, rather than an extraordinary variant — part of a "great PC reset" that we've been expecting since the dawn of Qualcomm's aggressive entry as an afordable AI PC provider with the announcement of Snapdragon X.

There haven't been any models confirmed to use the Ryzen AI 5 330 just yet, but I'd wager that we'll see the usual suspects in Acer, Lenovo, HP, and many more who have a broad collection of entry-level laptops, announcing some budget x86-64 (instead of ARM64) Copilot+ PCs in the next few months.

Naturally, power efficiency will likely be the all-encompassing theme of advertising for these theoretical AI laptops, particularly because the relatively weak integrated Radeon 820M GPU won't be up to much gaming outside of ultra-lightweight titles.

Otherwise, Microsoft's modern Copilot features like Windows Recall, Click to Do, and AI Search will run locally on AMD's 50 TOPS NPU within a (presumably) cheap range of new AI laptops that's still to surface. I'll keep my eyes peeled.

This year's Amazon Prime Day is delivering some of our highest-rated processors at record-low prices, and anyone planning to upgrade their PC should find something that perfectly suits their build.

AMD's Ryzen processors dominate the PC gaming world. It's what I use in my PC, and it's what I recommend to everyone I know. Not only are they always competitively priced, but they also deliver some of the best performance possible.

👉 Related: Prime Day PC hardware deals are here — These are the GPUs, CPUs, SSDs, and RAM that I'd buy as a PC build expert

AMD Ryzen CPUs with the proprietary 3D V-Cache, like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D down to its lowest price of the year, are particularly good at boosting gaming performance, but any of these chips I've handpicked will do a great job with modern titles.

Beyond gaming, AMD's Ryzen CPUs can also deliver stellar productivity performance, especially those with 16 cores like the discounted Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 9950X.

I pulled the 7 best AMD Ryzen Prime Day deals I could find based on our own in-house reviews as well as my decades of PC building experience.

AMD Ryzen CPU deals quick list

• AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D: was $449 now $341 at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X: was $649 now $434 at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 9 7950X: was $699 now $450 at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 5 9600X: was $279 now $165 at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 9 7900X: was $549 now $303 at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 7 7700X: was $399 now $227 at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 9 5900XT: was $349 now $218 at Amazon

Which AMD Ryzen CPU do I recommend for most people?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D is my top pick when it comes to discounted CPUs during Prime Day.

It comes from AMD's previous Zen 4 generation that uses the AM5 socket (which is still in use today), and it's widely regarded as one of the best gaming CPUs in the world. It's only been usurped by the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which isn't currently on sale.

👉 Related: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D vs. Ryzen 7 9800X3D

The secret to the 7800X3D's success is its proprietary AMD 3D V-Cache, which adds extra L3 cache that's stacked vertically on the die. This allows for quicker access by the CPU, directly benefiting gaming performance.

Although the newer 9800X3D is now on the market, the 7800X3D isn't going anywhere soon, and it's expected to remain relevant for years to come.

Access to the deal does require an Amazon Prime membership, though you can find a competing deal at Newegg for $370 with a free 1TB SSD thrown in; no membership required.

If you are shopping at Amazon, you can grab the Ryzen 7 7800X3D for only $341. To be completely transparent, this CPU did fall to $320 last year, but the fresh $341 price is by far the best deal in 2025.

What's the best AMD Ryzen CPU deal for general productivity work?

Not everyone needs a Ryzen CPU with 3D V-Cache. Those who don't plan on using their PC for gaming won't see much benefit from the additional tech, and you'll do a lot better with something like the Ryzen 9 9950X.

It's currently enjoying the lowest price it's ever been since launch, sitting at $434 at Amazon. That's 33% off the regular $649 price.

In his Ryzen 9 9950X review, Windows Central Senior Editor Ben Wilson remarked:

"They're excessive and powerful, needing capable CPU coolers to prevent throttling from overheating, especially with the 170W powerhouse 9950X, but both Ryzen 9 chips deliver what AMD promises: high-end performance for creators."

The 9950X remains one of the most powerful consumer CPUs you can buy today, and the fact that it's such a great price means you should have some budget room left over for an upgraded cooler.

While a high-end air cooler can get the job done, I recommend splurging for an AiO water cooler for quieter running. Arctic's Liquid Freezer III Pro 360 is currently 30% off at Amazon, dropping the price to $86.99 for a limited time.

AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D is a CPU that I always recommend for PC gamers looking for a stellar upgrade, and it continues to drop in price in 2025.

Last week, Newegg's 4th of July sale had it down to a $369.99 sale price, which at the time was the lowest of the year.

Amazon has gone ahead and one-upped Newegg one day ahead of Prime Day, dropping the 7800X3D price to just $341.

Why I can easily recommend the Ryzen 7 7800X3D to PC gamers

It's a true testament to AMD's Ryzen prowess that the 7800X3D is still such a hot item. Despite being "replaced" by the newer Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the 7800X3D is still holding strong when paired with even the most powerful NVIDIA RTX 5000 and AMD Radeon 9000 GPUs.

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D has 8 cores and 16 threads, a 5.0GHz max boost clock speed, and a 120W TDP.

The secret to the 7800X3D's success lies in its 3D V-Cache, a feature that's unique to AMD's X3D hardware. It works by stacking additional L3 cache on the CPU die, allowing the CPU to benefit from 96MB of cache that's quickly accessible.

👉 Related: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D vs. Ryzen 7 7800X3D

While 3D V-Cache doesn't do much for productivity work, it directly benefits gaming performance. I have an X3D chip in my gaming PC, and there's no way I'm switching anytime soon.

While the newer 9800X3D does offer between 8% and 22% performance uplifts compared to the 7800X3D, based on our in-house testing, you'll pay about $470 for the newer chip.

That's roughly $130 more than the discount price of the 7800X3D, which makes it very easy for me to recommend the older CPU, especially when it remains so potent for gaming.

Senior Editor Ben Wilson reviewed the Ryzen 7 7800X3D when it launched in 2023, remarking:

"True to its word, the average temperature of the 7800X3D seems to hover around the low-to-mid 80°C region when it's under stress, but my radiator fans were barely doing any work. The talk about power management holds true; AMD is squeezing every bit of power out of this CPU like diamonds out of coal."

The current $341 sale price at Amazon is outstanding, and I don't know if it will get any cheaper during the rest of the week.

When is Amazon Prime Day?

Amazon's Prime Day 2025 runs from July 8 until July 11, making it a full four-day event.

Major competing retailers, including Newegg, are hosting their own sales events to draw attention away from Amazon, and I urge everyone to shop around before checking out.

👉 Related: Early Prime Day PC build deals are live — Major savings on NVIDIA RTX GPUs, AMD Ryzen CPUs, fast storage, and more

Newegg currently has a FantasTech Sale running until July 13, while Best Buy is hosting a Black Friday in July event that also runs until July 13.

Amazon Prime Day has arrived, and with it comes competing sales from other major retailers like Best Buy and Newegg.

That's great news for anyone who wants to upgrade their PC with a new graphics card, processor, SSD, or memory, as I'm seeing some deep discounts from all categories.

While some deals do require an Amazon Prime membership, there are plenty of deals available for all, membership or not (especially if you're shopping at Newegg or Best Buy).

I'm using my nine years of experience covering Prime Day and two decades of PC building expertise to bring you only the deals that are actually worth your time and money.

Quick links

• Prime Day deals from all categories at Amazon
• Top deals on PC and gaming hardware at Best Buy
• Best tech deals so far at Walmart
• Deep tech discounts available at Target
• Best FantasTech PC hardware deals at Newegg
• Countless PC build and laptop discounts live now at B&H

🔥 Best Prime Day PC build deal so far 🔥

Best Prime Day GPU deals

Best early Prime Day CPU deals

Best early Prime Day PC storage & RAM deals

Amazon Prime Day 2025: Frequently Asked Questions

The original Amazon Prime Day kicked off on July 15, 2015, and it has since grown to massive proportions. This year's event runs officially for four days, but the deals have already started.

Have some questions about the upcoming summer sales event? Here are some answers to common Prime Day questions.

When is Amazon Prime Day 2025?

Amazon's Prime Day was originally just one day long, but it soon grew to two days. For 2025, it has once again doubled from 48 hours to 96 hours, meaning it runs from July 8 until July 11.

It officially begins on July 8 at 12:01 AM PDT and ends at midnight PDT on July 11, but you can expect to see plenty of deals in the lead-up to the main event.

Which countries are taking part in Prime Day 2025?

Amazon Prime Day 2025 arrives on July 8 in 20 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

Other participating countries include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Colombia, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and Türkiye.

Do I need an Amazon Prime membership?

If you're shopping at Amazon during Prime Day 2025, you will certainly want a Prime membership in order to take full advantage of all of the best deals.

Not already a member? You can quickly sign up for Amazon Prime for $14.99 per month or $139 annually (taxes not included).

Keep in mind that Amazon offers a 30-day trial of its Prime membership program, which is an ideal way to cash in on big savings without having to make as big of a commitment.

Prime members receive perks beyond discount prices, like fast and free shipping, video and music streaming access, games and streaming perks, grocery discounts, and more.

👉 Amazon Prime memberships explained: Benefits, costs, exclusive deals, and other FAQs

Do other retailers host competing sales during Prime Day?

Absolutely — other major retailers almost always take advantage of the extra attention to online deals spurred by Amazon Prime Day to host their own competing sales events.

For example, Newegg is advertising its "FantasTech Sale" that is expected to run from July 7 until July 13, eclipsing Prime Day.

Best Buy is currently hosting a "Member Deals Days" event to which Best Buy Plus and Total members can take advantage.

As always, I'm constantly on the lookout for better competing deals than what Amazon has to offer. Traditionally, it hasn't been Amazon offering the best laptop deals, with retailers like Best Buy and Walmart often having deeper savings on our favorite PCs.

I come bearing good news for PC builders who hate spending big money; signs are pointing to AMD launching a new Ryzen 5 9600X3D processor this year.

The information comes from X user MelodicWarrior, who found the 9600X3D chip listed in AMD's latest "SI Driver for Radeon" update notes.

AMD really didn't try to hide the 9600X3D at all. The link to the update notes has the CPU clearly listed alongside Zen 5 X3D chips already on the market, including the 9950X3D, 9900X3D, and 9800X3D.

This could be a soft leak to begin building anticipation among PC enthusiasts, but it's more likely a lapse in documentation information.

MelodicWarrior follows up the initial leak post with speculation about a potential release date for the new Ryzen 5 9600X3D. With AMD's previous scheduling in mind, the new chip could arrive for DIY builders sometime toward the end of Q3 or the start of Q4.

As is always the case with these types of leaks, the information isn't concrete, especially the speculated launch date. There's also no indication of whether or not this chip will see a global release or if it will be available to anyone but system integrators.

But the fact that AMD has listed the chip for the first time in official documentation should be great news for system builders who don't want to spend big bucks on the Ryzen 7 9800X3D or its more powerful Ryzen 9 X3D siblings.

What is 'X3D' and why does it matter for PC gamers?

AMD's proprietary 3D V-Cache technology is only found in its X3D-class processors for desktop and laptop PCs. What makes them so coveted by PC gamers is their additional L3 cache that's stacked vertically on the CPU die.

This design allows for the chip to access cached data much faster than usual, and the larger cache size allows it to load up on more bytes. While 3D V-Cache isn't likely going to make a splash for general computing, it's particularly potent when gaming.

This leak, which is the first time the 9600X3D has been spotted, has no specific info regarding core counts and clock speeds, but some assumptions can be made based on how AMD has handled the split between X3D and non-X3D chips so far available from the Zen 5 era.

Using the Ryzen 9 9950X and 9950X3D chips (which we've tested and reviewed favorably) as an example, there's not a huge difference in specs beyond the inclusion of AMD's boosted 3D V-Cache.

Using the above model as an example, we can look at the standard Ryzen 5 9600X and make assumptions as to what the Ryzen 5 9600X3D with 3D V-Cache will look like: the same 6 cores, 12 threads, 3.9GHz base clock, and 5.4GHz boost clock, all running at a 65W default TDP.

AMD's X3D chips are always more expensive compared to their standard siblings, but considering the Ryzen 5 9600X is currently selling for about $178 at Amazon — it launched at a $279 MSRP — we could get a 9600X3D chip for $350 or less.

The cheapest way to currently buy one of AMD's latest Zen 5 X3D chips is via the awesome Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but it's currently selling for about $472.

That's certainly not cheap, and I know that many PC gamers are turning to the older X3D stock, including the Zen 4 Ryzen 7 7800X3D at about $359 and the Zen 3 Ryzen 7 5700X3D at about $251, to fill the gap.

That's a testament to how long these chips remain relevant, especially in the PC gaming world.

I wouldn't be surprised to see AMD officially acknowledge the leaked Ryzen 5 9600X3D CPU in the coming months, and those who are considering a system upgrade should probably wait to see what AMD's next X3D CPU has to offer.