Settling on the score is always the hardest part of writing a review, for me. In my NZXT Relay review earlier this year, (spoiler alert) I gave the speaker set a 75, as you pretty much have to buy all the extra accessories for the thing to work properly. However, with the whole set, this has become my daily audio driver and I don't see that changing any time soon.

With the NZXT Relay, you are effectively buying into an audio ecosystem. If you are big into mobile phones, there's a good chance this phrase has set off alarm bells but it's not as restrictive as that may lead you to believe.

Starting out with the Relay speakers, they are a compact set of 80-watt desktop speakers that can easily fit onto a table. Their relatively small stature belies a strong mid and high sound, though it lacks in bass.

Having tested out a much more competent set in my Kanto Ora reference speakers review, the Relay feels comparatively lacking in the low end. By themselves, they are a passable way to listen to games and music, though nothing special.

It's when you start adding accessories that this audio beast truly comes to life. The NZXT SwitchMix is a dedicated headset stand with a sound mixer. You pop any set on there (though the Relay headset suits the aesthetic) and you can change the mix between game sound and game chat with just a quick flick of the mixer.

Next to that is a wheel that can be turned up and down to change volume, or pressed down to mute the whole thing. However, it's the pressure plate at the very top that makes this thing sing.

When you pop a pair of headphones on top of the SwitchMix, the sound automatically goes to the set of speakers. Take it off and they are in the headphones now. This means you can swap from listening to music on the speakers to talking to your friends on the headset in about as quick as it takes you to grab the thing.

The swap is nearly instantaneous and the only thing you will ever find yourself waiting for is the speakers to wake up if they haven't been active in a while.

The Relay headset is cheap and cheerful, but fits the look and comes with standard physical controls on the aux cable to easily customize your sound while playing games. It's nothing special but, luckily, if your current gaming headset has a 3.5 mm headphone jack, you can plug that into the stand instead and it will work just fine.

Finally, finishing off the full NZXT set is the subwoofer. This is almost as necessary of an accessory as the SwitchMix, due to the lack of bass from the central speakers. It adds that much-needed low-end to everything that makes the sound much fuller.

It's not a hugely bassy subwoofer, though, and won't rumble the floor like the subwoofer found in the Razer Nommo V2 Pro. However, it's just the right amount to add some depth to a battlefield as your soldier's legs carry you across or the rumble of a car engine flying above you in Rocket League.

I did notice a little bit of fiddliness at one point with this set, where I had to unplug it and plug it back in again to work as intended, but that's only popped up one time in nine months and could be down to user error in some form.

I've tested better speakers this year in a technical sense but what made me settle on the NZXT, other than the convenience of leaving them on my desk, is that everything about it just works so well. Setting up with a coffee in the morning and playing some songs has never quite been as easy as this, and being able to quickly swap to the headphones for a Discord call or a check-in from my partner is just the cherry on top. There are better dedicated gaming speakers but these are an everyday set in the truest sense, offering a decently dynamic set of cans and speakers for games, and a laid-back ecosystem for very casual use.

The SwitchMix felt like a gimmick on first use but that's because of how easy it all is and how much it wows people when I show them. However, with time, my view has shifted from thinking it's a gimmick to an out-and-out selling point. Just pick it all up in a set to get the most out of it.

It's been one more full revolution around the sun and—guess what—we're back here again. As we survey a year of ups and downs, it'd be impossible to recount every beat. Instead, we've let you call the shots. Below, we take a look back at the stories that piqued your interest, the headlines you just had to share, and wonder just where the time went over the last 12 months.

While I try in vain to avoid confronting the merciless passage of time, take a peep below at the biggest hardware stories of 2024.

News from January to March

The top stories:

• Elon Musk claims Tesla could build a silicon foundry and make its own chips, but says 'I sure hope we don’t have to'
• Microsoft's current OS has been shrunk to a ridiculous 100MB in size, but only by getting rid of windows from Windows
• Researchers have developed a Very Big Disc™ that can store up to 200 terabytes of data and may represent a return to optical media for long term storage
• The Chinese government is phasing out Intel and AMD CPUs and Microsoft's Windows OS because they don't fit its new 'safe and reliable' guidelines
• Valve explains how it built an orb out of Steam Deck OLED prototypes rather than making Half-Life 3, vowing 'we will construct an orb at any opportunity'
• The president of Sony Honda is allowed to drive an electric car on-stage with a DualSense yet I'm not allowed to play games while I drive. Typical
• Intel CEO admits 'I've bet the whole company on 18A'
• Meta's experimental 'neural' wristband controller will be a real product that lets you type just by thinking because Zuck doesn't want 'a chip that you jack into your brain'
• Sony's reportedly stopped making any more PS VR2 headsets until it can figure out a way of shifting a pile of unsold VR goggles

Pursuing self-improvement is such a January cliche; you don't need a new year to herald a whole new you. Still, that didn't stop NTDEV from shrinking down Windows 11 to the slimmer, trimmer tune of 100 MB. Granted, as Nick notes in his piece, such a light install package means it's basically Windows without the all important windows, making one wonder if this isn't a simple case of 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should.' Along similar lines, Sony capped off their CES 2024 presentation by steering a car on stage with a DualSense controller, or at least conjured the illusion.

Talking about turning circles, February brought us big discs—specifically, the news that researchers at the University of Shanghai had crafted optical media that can store a whopping 200 TB. When it comes to the file storage wars, these surprisingly stable, long-lasting discs spin to win.

Alright, to save us going around in circles, I'll dispense with the puns. February also saw a surprising amount of candor from big tech CEOs. First, Mark Zuckerberg threw Meta's wristband into the neural interface ring, alongside the two cents that the company is exploring this route because he "wouldn't want to use version one of [a chip you jack into your brain.]" On that point at least, we can agree.

Then, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger came right out and said, "I’ve bet the whole company on 18A." It's arguably not been Intel's year, and though the company more recently stated, "18A is powered on, healthy and yielding well," a piece from South Korean outlet Chosun Daily suggests the bigger picture may not be so straightforward, claiming the yields are only 10%. Though Gelsinger has since departed the company, he took to X to argue this wasn't an appropriate way to frame the subject, writing, "Anyone using % yield as a metric for semiconductor health [...] doesn't understand semiconductor yield."

Putting a dampener on such fighting spirit, in March the Chinese government announced plans to ban the use of both Intel and AMD chips in computers used by "State-owned enterprises" amid safety and privacy concerns. Talk about never catching a break.

Now, must we discuss Musk? As far as March is concerned, we must. After literally just covering how hard the chip game is, it's perhaps understandable why the Tesla CEO is reluctant to wade in—though he was quick to assure that Tesla could totally do it, guys. Tesla, the company promising big with self-driving cars that may never materialise, that Tesla? Uh-huh. The year's pendulum will swing back to Musk in due time, so let's get on with the rest of March.

Valve's contemplation of the Steam Deck OLED orb was a brief bright spot (never believe me when I say I'm done with puns). But another story that turned heads in March was the broken promise of Sony's PS VR2. An expensive niche on top of an already pricey console, it's perhaps no wonder Sony has struggled to shift their VR headsets. As you saw, they're not the only ones, ahem, taking stock either.

News from April to June

The top stories:

• An AI-controlled F16 has performed its first ever dogfight with a human pilot, coming within 2,000 feet of each other at 1,200 miles per hour
• Is Apple feeling OK? Reports indicate it's suspending work on the Vision Pro 2 to focus on making—wait for it—a cheaper version
• Having built 500+ PCs in my time I can say this with confidence: Building is fun and rewarding but ironing out those inevitable BIOS, CPU, memory kinks is unbearable
• Apple reportedly slashes Vision Pro headset production and cancels updated headset as sales tank in the US
• Self-taught hardware engineer discovers that GPUs really are ridiculously complex and hard to design after all
• US Commerce Secretary says if China seized TSMC it would be 'absolutely devastating' to the US economy, as it buys 92% of its cutting-edge chips from the Taiwanese manufacturer
• Intel claims its optical interconnect chiplet technology is 'like going from using horse-drawn carriages to using cars and trucks'
• Avengers, assemble—Google, Intel, Microsoft, AMD and more team up to develop an interconnect standard to rival Nvidia's NVLink
• A Windows XP machine's life expectancy in 2024 seems to be about 10 minutes before even just an idle net connection renders it a trojan-riddled zombie PC

Case in point as we get to April, Apple pumped the brakes on all things Vision Pro in an alleged bid to course correct from overprojected demand. I can't imagine reports about the $3,500 headset's lacking build quality helped either. Pressing the pause button on production sounds almost sensible—psyche! In June, rumours began to surface that Apple were actually instead shifting gears to create a cheaper version of the mixed reality goggles. Doesn't that just make your head spin?

Also making me queasy in April was the news of AI's potential military applications—not so much gently dizzying as violent whiplash, I know. In a 'test' dogfight, an AI-controlled F16 fighter jet went head to head with a human and, regardless of the actual victor in this demonstration, it doesn't feel like there are any winners here.

Right, let me get off my soapbox, and instead dive into some PC guts. Building your own desktop tower offers many trials and tribulations, as Nick's in-depth feature goes to show. Picked up two fans because you thought they'd fit in your case, only to realise you forgot to factor in the radiator? Mate, we've all been there, and there's no shame in a bit of on-the-fly problem solving as even the most experienced PC tinkerer will tell you.

You know what else is tricky? Building a GPU from scratch—the more you know. As interesting as self-taught hardware engineer Adam Majmudar's pursuit of hardware knowledge is, this is a back-to-basics approach that's definitely not for the faint of heart.

Later that same month, there was also the pulse-dropping claim from US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo that it would be "absolutely devastating" if, hypothetically speaking, TSMC semiconductor foundry was to be seized by antagonistic forces. She elaborates, "Right now, the United States buys 92% of its leading edge chips from TSMC in Taiwan." As if I didn't need another dreaded hypothetical to keep me up at night.

From worst case scenarios to straight up facts, no hardware is safe from hackers—least of all a virtual machine instance of Windows XP in this here year of our gourd, 2024. Without even clicking on an ill-advised link, a YouTuber merely left the internet-connected virtual machine unattended for 10 minutes, only to find a suspicious process running in Task Manager. After catching a whiff of Windows XP's blood in the water, the virtual machine became a feeding frenzy for hackers.

Anyway, speaking of mosh pits I wouldn't want to be caught in the middle of, big tech is forming a megazord to beat Nvidia at its own AI game. AMD, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, and Broadcom are joining forces to forge a new interconnect standard that can compete with Nvidia's NVLink interconnect tech for AI accelerator chips. What I wouldn't give for some mighty morphin' folks with attitude right about now…however, we've got a fair few AI stories to get through still, so I'll check mine for the time being.

To badly paraphrase a certain memeified boyband song, that was definitely May. The hits continued into June, with Intel coming in swinging with the claim that their optical interconnect chiplet technology is such a leap that it's like going from horse-drawn carriages to cars and trucks. It's not been the company's year, but you could say that Intel is very much still in the running.

News from July to September

The top stories:

• 8 years after declaring it took 'courage' to remove the iPhone's headphone jack, Apple has finally decided buttons and ports are cool again
• Internet speed record of 402,000,000 Mbps achieved using standard optic fibre cabling, fast enough to download Baldur's Gate 3 in less than four milliseconds
• 'I'm still amazed that it all came together and actually works': YouTuber spends 14 months building a glorious gaming laptop from desktop parts
• Las Vegas' dystopia-sphere, powered by 150 Nvidia GPUs and drawing up to 28,000,000 watts, is both a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat
• This 3D printed laser chip-hacking device uses a $20 laser pointer, costs $500 to build, and was developed so that 'people can do this in their homes'
• Logitech's 'forever mouse' could mean peripherals go the way of coffee beans, TVs, and printer ink by pushing a subscription
• 'We can't do computer graphics anymore without artificial intelligence. We compute one pixel, we infer the other 32': Jensen thinks AI is integral to next-gen graphics tech
• If you put hot dogs and pickles against an AM radio tower, they act as speakers. Also, don't do that
• Can my 14-year-old gaming PC, loaded with the one-time most powerful graphics card in the world, still deliver a good PC gaming experience in 2024?

July began with a hopeful vision of the future for anyone who has ever had to contend with a miserable download speed. Engineers at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology achieved a data transmission speed of 402 TBps. That's like downloading Baldur's Gate 3 quicker than you can mentally conjure that pale elf's visage.

Don't jump for joy just yet, Astarion fans though; while the test didn't use much specialised equipment—the researchers were able to achieve that impressive speed over 50 km of the same optical fibre you could pick up yourself—even a top of the line rig would still present a serious hardware bottleneck. Guess we'll just have to make do with pondering Las Vegas' massive Nvidia-powered orb instead.

The orb alongside the ever encroaching threat of subscription-based hardware hardly leaves one glowingly optimistic about the future. But it wasn't all dystopic deployment of tech this year. For instance, our readers loved this story about an open source, 3D printable laser-hacking tool, with August offering plenty more weird and wonderful builds to boot.

You know me, I love a questionable laptop build, and judging by the attention this YouTuber's attempt to forge one from desktop parts got, so do you. The 14-month endeavour proved a project absolutely not for less-than-confident tinkerers, requiring motherboard desoldering to save space. Still, one can't help but be a little inspired by such determination. Inspiration can take many forms, though I feel like the idea to use hot dogs and pickles as flaming speakers is a fairly singular vision, to say nothing of actually putting that incendiary idea to the test.

From small creator creativity, to big tech backtracking, remember when Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7? Remember those ridiculous USB-C to aux adapters? Well, after eight years, the jack is back for the iPhone 16—and our most widely read hardware story from September.

Perhaps pointedly, I'm following up with another head-turning headline from when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claimed, "We can't do computer graphics anymore without artificial intelligence." Okay, in the context of graphical gains, perhaps I'm being needlessly grumpy about AI—computing one pixel and inferring the other 32 with AI upscaling is definitely a big win when it comes to limiting the load on your GPU.

This wasn't the only September story that made us all think about how far PC gaming has come either. Case in point, the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5970 4GB dual-GPU graphics card was an impressive bit of kit once upon a time in the distant realm of 2009. It would appear yesteryear's hardware still has a surprising amount to offer now in 2024 if our reader's response to Rob's feature is anything to go by.

News from October to December

The top stories:

• Elon Musk shows off bartending robots at a recent Tesla event, but some attendees say the automatons were being controlled by people
• Google to sell Chrome AND be banned from re-entering the browser market for five years, recommends US Department of Justice
• 'I was hopeful': one lucky shopper ordered an RTX 4070 Super from Amazon for $40 and it wasn't just a rock in a box
• Couple spends almost $1,000,000 building a family home 'optimized for LAN parties,' and the result is definitely living that dream
• 'We had a very big debate, and I showed him. He was silent. He doesn't know how to make a battery': The founder of the world's biggest battery company apparently had a lesson or two to give Elon Musk
• The official Nintendo Museum appears to be emulating SNES games on a Windows PC, which is slightly embarrassing
• Windows 11 24H2 is finally here and Microsoft's calling it a 'full OS swap', it's just a shame the new Windows update still has Recall
• Break out the world's tiniest violin: PS5 Pro scalpers are having a tough time reselling units because it's in stock basically everywhere
• As Microsoft rolls out its Windows 11 24H2 update, owners of certain Western Digital SSDs have been greeted with constant Blue Screens of Death

October offered plenty more servings of humble pie. First, eagle-eyed visitors to the official Nintendo museum noted that interactive SNES game exhibits may be being emulated on PC. Considering how hard Nintendo tends to go after developers that try to emulate their hardware, this was at best a hypocritical look.

Then, it was Microsoft's turn. When the Windows 11 24H2 update rolled out earlier this year, Jacob was far from a fan of Recall's inclusion just for a start. Then, the blue screens began for those using certain Western Digital SSDs, and I also wrote about a startling audio bug resulting from the update. The issues continued past October, with Microsoft electing to halt the update's rollout on machines with certain Ubisoft titles installed. As of December, Ubisoft has since fixed some of the issues affecting players of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws—though problems may still persist if you have either Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Valhalla, or Origins installed.

Our most read story in October by far was about Elon Musk and his really not that impressive robots. The hardware horde was unveiled at Tesla's We, Robot event, though even at the time these robos were widely suspected to in fact be controlled by boring old humans—how very Wizard of Oz. Speaking of men behind the curtain, November offered another exposing story when Elon Musk got into it with Robin Zeng, the founder of the biggest EV battery manufacturer in the world CATL. Reflecting on an earlier conversation about the Cybertruck's cylindrical battery, Zeng said, "We had a very big debate, and I showed him. He was silent. He doesn't know how to make a battery." 'Humbling,' perhaps doesn't even begin to cover it.

But the year wasn't yet done cutting giants of tech down to size, with the US Department of Justice filing a number of recommendations for remedying Google's monopoly over search. These included but were not limited to the proposed selling off of Chrome and a five year ban from re-entering the browser arena. These suggested remedies could have far-reaching repercussions, but until a judge rules on which courses of action to take some time next year, we can't yet say for certain how the chips will fall.

But don't you worry—there was still plenty of room for a little schadenfreude in November, as it turns out PS5 Pro scalpers are struggling to shift their hastily bought hardware. Hear that? It's the tiniest violin you ever did hear.

Alright, let's end this retrospective on the stories we can all agree are wins, like this amazing family home "optimized for LAN parties." Costing in the region of a seven-figure sum, Kenton Varda and Jade Wang "built the house from scratch starting from an empty lot," and the project's final form really is a thing to behold (in fact, hundreds of thousands of readers did just that).

With the pipedream of one's perfect PC gaming paradise in our rearview mirror, let's close out our look-back on something a little more achievable: a good deal on a graphics card. On very rare occasions, a cheap card on Amazon isn't too good to be true as this lucky Reddit user picked up a RTX 4070 Super for $40. Unlike the contents of that box, we can all agree this story rocks.

You don't tend to buy a gaming mouse every year (unless you're particularly clumsy) so it can be easy to ignore the miasma of tech coming out. Yet this year has produced some of the best gaming mice on the market, and unpredictably, two of those are from Turtle Beach and none are from Logitech (last year's big winner). Not being nominated in the last two years, this is already a win in spirit for Turtle Beach.

There are plenty of good mice from many different brands every year, but in 2024, three particular mice stand out for many reasons. It's worth noting that raw performance isn't everything here. We don't just pick the mouse with the highest DPI or lightest weight, we get hands-on and really test how it functions on real gaming rigs in real games. We all want a mouse that accurately reflects exactly what we're doing on the mousepad (or table if you're a hardware goblin like myself).

A mainstay of the best gaming mice every year, Razer has pulled through with its DeathAdder V3 HyperSpeed, a super responsive and budget-friendly beast. Though the plastic top is conducive to grease, this is one of the very few criticisms we can point at a mouse that swings well above its price tag.

As well as this, Turtle Beach's Kone II Air and Burst II Air get a nom for their excellent design. Though they all deserve recognition, only one can be named the best gaming mouse of 2024.

Best gaming mouse 2024: the nominees

The best gaming mouse of 2024 will be officially crowned on New Year's Eve so jot the date down in your calendar and make sure to come back for the big moment.

IKEA’s Utespelare gaming desk absolutely nails that brief, but adds a few extra features that I’d argue are more battle worthy than an inbuilt rave experience.

The Utespelare comes in two colour options, an all black which feels very gamer chic, or a breezier grey with light wood look top. Both are otherwise identical so i grabbed the lighter colour way to match my setup. Unsurprisingly it arrived as a flat packed box ready to end relationships in its assembly.

Because the table top is largely one piece, it’s quite a large unwieldy box and you need a bit of room to set it up. This includes flipping the desk after installing the table top which was a mighty effort, but that’s to be expected for a desk this size.

That’s the first thing to hit me about the Utespelare gaming desk, it’s really pretty big. Coming from standing desks, having a 160 cm by 80 cm workspace is actually huge.

You can easily fit a full sized PC, a couple of monitors, routers, your mug printing gear, and that old iMac you rescued out of the rubbish and have been working on getting up and running for fun without any trouble. Plus there’s a decent amount of space under it for more stuff thanks to the relatively small space taken by the legs.

The official site says it has a 50 kg max tolerance but I’m a mystery number over that and have sat on it for science while feeling pretty safe. I can even lay on it if I’m a bit curled up. I could probably put curtains around the bottom and rent it in this dystopia.

There is just so much room for activities on this flat surface of opportunity.

While putting the desk together there are a couple of choices to make. One is how tall you’re looking to have your desk—which is decided by the leg height. This can be adjusted from 66 cm to 78 cm which is an important feature for ergonomics.

You’ll want to choose your height fast though, because it’s not so easy to adjust once everything is all set up. It’s a little weird if you’ve come from the flexibility of a sit stand setup, but with all the space on this desk it would be perfect for one of those desktop raisers added later down the line.

The other choice is where to place the metal mesh portion of the desktop and how that relates to the cut out in the wooden piece. After consulting the ancient Swedish hieroglyphics, I went with having the cut out backing onto the metal, giving me a really tidy way to hide my cables when pared with the hammock solution included.

It’s one of the easier cable management options to actually use I’ve seen built into a desk as I can keep a power board there, that’s easily accessible for swapping things while still hiding all of my mess.

While being a helpful cable tidy, the metal portion of the desktop is also perfect for all my hot running gamer stuff. It’s a great place to put your PC knowing it’ll have all the airflow it could possibly want accessible to it. I’ve also used it as a place to stick things like routers and other hot-running electronics. It’s great because they’re out of the way at the back of my deep desk but I don’t worry about them overheating or being covered in dust.

While the Utespelare is billed as a gaming desk it feels like a much more sensible product made with gamers in mind than the usual affair. It’s simple, smart, sturdy, and clean. When I walk past it sometimes I just look at it and smile, thinking to myself what a decent desk that is for AUD$199 and how useful it is while still looking quite good in my home.

I know that means I’m getting old, but it’s also a pretty clear sign that IKEA has delivered with this stealth battle station.

Mystery has been in the air throughout the PC Gamer offices. Amid a sea of hardware hits, the bizarre case of the disappearing keycaps has put a bit of a dampener on the festive season. For you see, when mechanical keyboards stop a-clacking for a keycap upgrade, all too often members of the team turn around to discover that their just removed, loose keycaps have vanished.

The team were able to rule out typical end of year forgetfulness and messy desks absorbing detritus pretty quickly, because the first thing they did was ask if I knew anything about the disappearing keycaps. Through stuffed hamster cheeks, I mumbled something to the effect of, "Not a clue, sorry."

I still protest my innocence; I don't have a keycap problem, loose keycaps have a me problem. Besides all of that, when I looked at my to-do list of assigned work, how was I expected to interpret 'best keyb noms'? Regardless, I've been tasked with touring you through a tasty selection of keyboards—from an enforced distance. Rest assured, no keyboards were harmed during the writing of this award nomination list (and I wasn't happy about it).

My colleagues are giving me a horrified look that I can only assume means, 'stop confessing your keyboard crimes and get on with it.' So, without thinking too much more about how delicious Cherry switches sound, here are the three nominees for best gaming keyboard.

Best gaming keyboard 2024: the nominees

And those are our three tasty, tasty nominees. My colleagues are shaking a handful of keycaps at me like a bag of treats, so I assume that means all has been forgiven. Before I go though, there's just one last thing to say: Stay tuned, because the winner of the PC Gamer Hardware Award for the best gaming keyboard will be crowned on New Year's Eve.

Alan Wake 2 appeared so late last year that you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was a 2024 launch. You'd also be forgiven for believing that its outstanding visual design and use of ray tracing would be a standard consistently achieved this year. Alas, for everything that I've seen and analysed these past 12 months, Remedy's masterpiece is still the bar that others have failed to reach.

That isn't to say that there haven't been some fantastic technical achievements this year. Dragon's Dogma 2 launched in March but despite being a great game, its excessive hardware requirements, inconsistent performance, and last-gen graphics didn't exactly kick things off with a bang. Fortunately, that disappointment in that game was countered by Nixxes Software's port of Horizon Forbidden West.

As the original game never used ray tracing, the developers sensibly chose to not make any attempt to integrate it in the conversion. Instead, it focused on improving the fundamental assets, as well as implementing upscaling and frame generation to boost performance, rather than offset any heavy-handed rendering technology.

The game might not be to everyone's taste and it's not as good as the first Horizon Zero Dawn, but in terms of technical achievement, Nixxes knocked it out of the park.

The same was true of another PlayStation port, Ghost of Tsushima in May, which—surprise, surprise—was another Nixxes project. No ray tracing, just good ol' traditional rendering done well. Admittedly, when it comes to surface reflections, once you've seen what ray tracing can do in this aspect, going back to screen space reflections just feels yuck.

By June, I was beginning to wish that Nixxes was responsible for every console-to-PC port because we were 'treated' to Shadow of the Erdtree, Elden Ring's first expansion. Having only briefly played the first game I'd completely forgotten what a mess it was on the PC and had even assumed that the new content would include an update to the engine. That wasn't the case and once again, stutters and an ever-present lag would be there for PC gamers to enjoy.

The first 2024 games to heavily feature ray tracing took a while to make an appearance, but in August, Black Myth: Wukong and Star Wars Outlaws were the first big releases to be ray-traced only. Not the first games ever, mind, but you get what I mean.

Wukong uses Unreal Engine 5, whereas Outlaws runs on the same engine as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, but both exhibited the most common traits of the year: Variable performance, traversal stutter, interminable shader compilation, and an almost necessary use of upscaling to achieve any semblance of a decent frame rate.

At least one could say that on maximum settings with Full Ray Tracing (aka path tracing) enabled, Wukong's visuals justified the performance. That's not something that could be said for Outlaws, though it does run a lot better now after several patches.

While it is simpler for developers to just focus on one rendering pipeline, I feel that we're still at least one generation of GPUs away from ray tracing being the acceptable norm for games to use exclusively.

Not everything this year has been a janky mess. In September, PC gamers could enjoy an incredible port of God of War Ragnarök (and by the original developers, no less) and Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 ran very well for a game with hundreds of enemies to battle against. Neither were a tour-de-force in terms of graphics but they were good enough.

'Good enough' is probably the phrase that the developers of the Silent Hill 2 remake sarcastically said after finishing its PC version because while that's been one of my favourite games of 2024, it's a shocking mess on the humble PC.

For example, I had to copy one file from a folder in the game's installation and paste it into the main folder just so it would start. Then I had to deal with so many visual glitches and frame rate jank that I genuinely thought I was playing a beta release. It's a superb remake and worthy of all its acclaim, but I have little praise for the PC conversion.

The technical terrors continued as the weeks rolled on: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 refused to work for over a week after launch and Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl looked great, and played great, but ran like it had a chronic case of hiccups (Unreal Engine 5 strikes again).

Cue patches, more patches, and even more patches. In the case of Stalker 2, you're looking at over half a terabyte's worth of downloads, just in the form of patches. Maybe I should be writing about the Best Patch of 2024.

Anyway, to be fair, both games aren't too bad on a high-end gaming PC but anything sporting hardware at the bottom end of the system requirements is going to require every ounce of upscaling and frame generation to run smoothly.

Given all that had transpired, I had few hopes for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, especially when I learned that it would always be using ray tracing, as well as having a path tracing mode. Sorry, Full Ray Tracing. Well, glaze me in honey and call me Susan, how wrong I was.

Well, mostly wrong. Great Circle runs pretty well, even on low-end hardware (though the GPU must have ray tracing hardware), and if you can get the Full Path Tracing mode to run nicely, then it's almost as impressive as Alan Wake 2. And it's packed with lots of nice touches, such as the way the game loads a previous save as the main menu. Sadly, it is pretty glitchy and it's taken a few patches to make frame generation work as intended.

At least it wasn't another Unreal Engine 5 game but anyone expecting Doom Eternal levels of performance just because it uses the ID Tech 7 engine is in for a shock. The game itself is a huge amount of fun, at least, and looks pretty darn nice.

Looking ahead to the first half of 2025, we've got some big games incoming that are going to sport cutting-edge graphics: Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Civilization 7, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Assassin's Creed: Shadows, The Last of Us Part 2, to mention but a few.

If any of them are going to do really well on PC, I hope the developers have looked carefully at what's gone right and what's gone poorly with this year's releases.

Always-on ray tracing isn't necessarily a bad thing but shoehorning in an all-singing path tracing mode just seems to be a recipe for disaster at the moment, as so few GPUs can really handle it. But even with traditional rendering techniques, it's still possible to end up with a stuttery, unplayable mess and relying on upscaling and frame generation to mask such issues isn't acceptable.

Alan Wake 2 gave me such hope for 2024 that I feel somewhat cheated by what I actually got this year, but a few gems did show up. And if those developers could do it, I'm sure others can too. Here's to 2025 and let's hope it's a good one.

I, like many of you, have used the bog-standard Xbox Wireless Controller for many moons. And I, like many of you, have realised that it's practically perfect as far as $50 worth of controller-based fun goes.

However, there's a wealth of controller options available these days, from the very cheap and very cheerful to the ultra premium. And while the Xbox Wireless remains the gold standard for the value proposition it provides, it's now got some serious competition once you start raising the budget. The Razer Wolverine V3 Pro is just such a competitor, a wireless, luxury device with its eyes firmly set on the best controller spot.

Our reviewer Kizito Katawonga gave it a score of 92%, a truly spectacular result for any piece of hardware. By our scoring system, that means it's an outstanding product worthy of any gamer's rig. And I'm pleased to say, after spending many hours with one myself—I couldn't agree more.

Let's start with the bad: It's $200. That's a lot of money for a controller, especially when the Xbox Elite Series 2 costs $180. Microsoft's high end device has long reigned supreme as the top premium pick in our best PC controller guide, and releasing a controller for $20 more was a bold move on Razer's part.

The thing is though, it feels every inch of it. I'm a sucker for a good mechanism, and the Razer is absolutely covered in them. The triggers have a swishy, sculpted "sweep" that takes a little getting used to, but the spring action underneath is smooth and responsive. Two little switches on the back can be engaged with a clunk, sending a spring-based shiver through the frame and locking them into a clicky button mode with a cushioned, yet distinctly positive action.

The shoulder buttons feel similarly great. But the real award here has to go to the mecha-tactile face buttons, a term so ridiculous it made our Nick apoplectic with rage in the hardware team chat when he noticed it in the marketing copy.

Silly name aside, I can report that they're both squishy yet clicky in an immensely pleasing way. Still, while I was happily squeezing triggers and clicking buttons straight from the box, I honestly didn't think I'd notice the Razer under gaming duress. After all, when you're deep in combat your brain is working on so many different things at once, sensation becomes an afterthought.

Not with the Wolverine V3 Pro though. I find myself grinning like an idiot every time I start gaming with it, and that's always a good sign when testing a peripheral.

It's all the resistance you see, from those excellent face buttons, to the Hall effect thumbsticks, to the triggers. There's a sense of weight to almost everything the Razer does, and that little bit of extra feel really does make gaming with this controller a pleasant, hand-tingly delight.

So much so, every time I go back to the Xbox Wireless controller, I miss it. That's such a strange thing to type, but it's true. It's a bit like the difference between a cheap-but-fantastic fast food burger, and one of those modern joints that loads you up with pickles, cheese, and sharp onions. Both are great, but if you had the option you'd go for the latter, wouldn't you?

So none of this really changes my opinion of the standard Xbox Wireless controller overall. It's still a brilliant gaming device, and for $50 you won't find any better. I've owned three of them, and I still use them regularly for local co-op sessions with my partner.

But since the arrival of the Razer, if it's solo gaming time, this is the controller I go to without thinking twice. It's my personal pick for the best piece of hardware I've used in 2024, and given just how much great kit I've used this year, that's saying something. Well played, Razer. You've ruined other controllers for me, and now I'm locked in to using premium devices until my dying days.

It's been a busy year for motherboard vendors, thanks to new AM5 socket chipsets from AMD and a completely new platform (LGA1851 and Z890) from Intel. In many cases, manufacturers just took a previous design and tweaked it for 2024, but some took the opportunity to improve all kinds of different aspects such as the BIOS interface, and PCIe and M.2 slot latches.

With Intel's Core Ultra 200S series of processors being rather underwhelming in terms of gaming chops, last-gen Raptor Lake chips are still very popular but what motherboard to pick? Well, the ASRock B760I Lighting should be seriously considered, despite its diminutive size. It'll handle any 14th Gen Core processor and highly overclocked RAM. It's a bit short on rear IO ports, though.

For AMD enthusiasts, you could choose a last-gen chipset or something with the latest X870. For the former, the Asus ROG Strix X670E-I Gaming WiFi is an exceptional motherboard, jammed with USB ports and Gen5 slots for graphics cards and SSDs. The price tag is steep though and that's where the newer MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi come in.

It's a good deal cheaper than the Asus board and sports more USB ports than you could ever possibly want. There are plenty of M.2 slots too, though the available configurations are complicated, to say the least.

Out of everything we've tested this year, these models are the ones we've nominated for gaming motherboards of 2024. Now you just have to wait until New Year's Eve to see which one is the winner!

Best gaming motherboard 2024: the nominees

The winner of the PC Gamer Hardware Award for the best gaming motherboard on New Year's Eve. Three different boards but only one can be a winner.

Marketed toward pro FPS players, and anyone who needs absolute pinpoint accuracy in the games they play, the Harp Ace Mini uses the same immense 42,000 DPI ROG AimPoint Pro sensor, to prove without any question that your mouse isn't the thing making you miss all those headshots.

In hand, the Harpe Ace Mini feels almost nonexistent compared to the more MMO focussed mice I'm used to. Next to the Razer Naga Pro this thing feels like it's filled with helium. That's partially thanks to the miniscule size, but also the lack of buttons. Where an MMO mouse might have buttons in the double digits, the Harpe Ace Mini packs just seven.

That's your standard two left and right clickers, a clickable scroll wheel, plus two buttons on the right side, and two on the underside. All have a satisfying click and most don't sound too hollow, bar the one on the back left side which resonates a bit within the body. It's to be expected on a mouse this light, since there's next to nothing absorbing sound on the inside. And while it can make a mouse feel cheap, the Harpe Ace Mini manages to come off as sturdy. Pair it with the lovely finish and it's certainly a quality-built little rodent.

The Harpe Ace Mini is mostly ambidextrous, in so much as it's semi-symmetrical. The side buttons still live on the left, so lefties will have to use their pinkie or whatever wizardry they perform to deal with our righty-dominated world.

There's definitely some thought that's gone into keeping the shape less curved to one side, at least. That may be better for lefties, but it means there's less ergonomic specificity for either. Pit it against something like the Logitech G502 X and its superior ergonomics and it comes up a little short, but then some will prefer a less curvy mouse design.

This thing is inoffensively small, which makes it great for my little hands, though I imagine players with bigger grippers would struggle a little with it. Not greatly, but if you're a palm grip user with large hands you might want to think twice before buying something so itty-bitty. That said, the size does go toward making this mouse all the more portable.

Speaking of portability, I've been really impressed with the Harpe Ace Mini's battery life. Using it for 12 hours on the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi without charging or letting it go to sleep the charge indicator still showed green.

Above: Tested at 1,000 Hz — The more erratic the dots are, the worse the tracking on the mouse.

A week of 3-4 hour gaming sessions a day later and it was still at more than half charge, even with the RGB lighting on. I don't have enough time to drain the battery but, by my calculations, it would take me four weeks at this pace to fully drain it, minimum.

As for the software needed, it requires Armoury Crate Gear to play with button assignments, performance and power settings, but if you want to get going with scenario profiles and design your own macro settings you'll have to download the full Armoury Crate & Aura Sync.

Frankly the latter is a little much just to access macro options. Even the lite Gear version is quite a large file to download and install which is a shame, and I've had a couple of issues with connection and setting changes being met with errors. Having to restart my machine at several junctures just to get the software to work isn't a good look, though when it does work it does all the basics well and the interface is nice and clean.

Performance-wise, the ROG Harpe Ace Mini is a stellar mouse. Hardly a waver when it comes to accuracy, and consistent tracking points all across the board show that this is one accurate rodent. Does it need to be this accurate for everyday use? Probably not, but with no tradeoff in terms of weight for a more impressive sensor, it's easy to appreciate the effort in this department.

The Harpe Ace Mini goes hard where accuracy is concerned, and while its attempts to stay ambidextrous cost it the more specific ergonomics of a right-handed mouse, I can really see it taking off for pro gamers and claw grippers who prefer light mice, as long as they don't mind downloading the huge Armory Crate software just to mess with macros. With impressive battery life, anyone wanting to take the Harpe Ace Mini on the go will be best pleased they won't have to charge it for ages. Sure there are cheaper wireless gaming mice out there with similar battery lives, but not many that also match the Harpe Ace Mini's impressive accuracy and weightlessness.

This year, there has been a glut of fresh CPUs from AMD and Intel for desktop PCs, with both vendors launching new processor architectures and model variants of older designs.

Over in the Team Red corner, 2024 started with a Zen 3 chip, in the form of the Ryzen 7 5700X3D. Essentially nothing more than a processor not quite good enough to be sold as a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, it's arguably better because it's a lot cheaper but not much slower.

Zen 5 made an official appearance in August, to a somewhat muted reception. That's because despite being a complete architectural overhaul, it isn't that much faster than Zen 4. But for sheer processing power, the Ryzen 9 9950X is hard to beat. Particularly when it uses less power than the competition.

We all had high hopes for Intel's Core Ultra 200S chips but it's fair to say that they missed the mark. Truth be told, most PC gaming enthusiasts were really only interested in one CPU and when the Ryzen 7 9800X3D finally appeared, we weren't disappointed. AMD's third generation of 3D V-Cache is just as magic as ever.

I've specifically mentioned these three processors because those are the nominees for best gaming CPU of 2024. We'll announce the winner on New Year's Eve but for now, let's see why they were chosen.

Best gaming CPU 2024: the nominees

The winner of the PC Gamer Hardware Award for the best gaming CPU will be announced on New Year's Eve. AMD wins no matter what but only one of its 2024 CPUs can be crowned best.

I may not have mentioned this yet (I'm pretty sure I mentioned it in one of my first PC Gamer articles) but I have a law degree. That has made me love the minutia of the legal system but also keenly aware of how complicated and drawn out it can all get. Though the United States' enforcement of anti-trust principles as of late is likely better for the consumer and broader market, the latest hearing isn't the end of the case.

United States v. Google LLC (1:20-cv-03010) began proceedings in October 2020 and was decided in August of this year. This is a different case from the confusingly titled United States v. Google LLC (1:23-cv-00108), which started in 2023, and had its closing arguments in November 2024.

The latter case is specifically about Google's control and alleged monopoly over its advertising, whereas the former is about its search engine. Through deals with companies like Apple to be the default search engine on the iPhone and Google's ownership of the popular mobile OS Android, Google has become the search engine giant it is today.

There's a reason why it's a popular joke to jokingly insult the 'five users of Bing' or how behind the market Microsoft's Edge is. That browser is known as the app you use to get Chrome, then never touch it again. In fact, Windows periodically sends reminders that 'you can just use Edge, you know?' and yet many don't. I write this typing on Google Docs, through Google Chrome, so maybe I'm part of the problem.

Fundamentally, most browsers aren't too dissimilar from each other—yet Chrome holds almost 70% of the market share on a consistent basis. This lawsuit took aim at the browser, and after years of deliberation, the DOJ has proposed that Google be forced to sell Chrome, alongside a few other efforts to stop Google from further monopolising the market.

Judge Amit Mehta, who presides over the case, has ruled that Google acted illegally to develop and maintain its monopoly. As well as advising that Google sell Chrome, the DOJ proposed it be barred from reentering agreements like those that made it the default web browser, whilst also recommending it share its data with rivals.

It's also been recommended that Google either sell off Android or avoid making Google the default option on Android devices. The DOJ makes these recommendations to Judge Mehta, where Judge Mehta can mediate and come to an agreement.

This all seems like great advice to stop a company that has acted in a way that the court deems to be monopolistic. Controlling such a huge part of the market not only discourages others from entering but can push those in the market out. Once a company has a big enough control over a resource, like all the digital real estate Chrome has, it can essentially make its own rules.

Outside of court orders like this, there aren't ways to hold huge corporate entities accountable when they are acting against the interests of their users. If Chrome, Edge, Opera, and more were equally viable choices, you could afford to swap from one to the other if you didn't like any decisions made.

Of course, selling Chrome won't shrink its user base overnight. Though the other actions recommended by the DOJ would help with that too, it's important to note that the litigation against Google is more than just a singular case, it's one of multiple antitrust suits levelled against the company in the last few years.

The worry isn't specifically and exclusively about Chrome, but all the actions made to keep it where it is today. Google as a company doesn't appear to be trusted to handle something like Chrome in legal ways.

Published on November 21, just a single day after the DOJ proposed Google sell Chrome, Kent Walker, the global affairs and chief legal officers of Google and Alphabet (Google's parent company), took to the Google Blog to declare that this decision "would hurt consumers".This piece makes the argument that the proposal would endanger the security of users by undermining the quality of the services and disclosing Google's research to "foreign and domestic companies".

It also argued that Google's investment into AI would be chilled by this decision, effectively warning that Google's own advancement of AI would be held back as a result.

The blog also argues that it would not only hurt casual consumers' access to Google search but would hurt companies reliant on Google, like Firefox. Finally, it argues this is a slippery slope and an overreach of the government on "your online experience".

None of these arguments, on their face, are necessarily wrong—but I'd argue they're lacking a little in nuance. Selling off such a huge entity could indeed leave consumers open to bad practices, both technically and ethically, from the potential buyer. It is also true that Google's research into the likes of Google Gemini would make less sense without owning the broader ecosystem. Also, with so many browsers being based on Chromium, Google's open-source web browsing project, there's a chance for security or quality problems as a result.

However, that's also part of what the current process in the lawsuit is for. Judge Mehta has argued Google acted illegally and Google does have the chance to appeal, which it has been suggested it will do. If it fails to file as such, a further trial will be held in April next year to come up with an answer to remedy the alleged wrongdoing.

In this case, Google's arguments will be heard and an answer will be found. Many of the arguments brought forward by Google could be remedied through further litigation and aren't themselves arguments against the suit. It's important to remember that the DOJ's recommendation isn't law, it's merely a suggestion based on the facts of the case, and other remedies can be found.

Though we have many arguments and a decision, this case is anything but final and it's hard to have too concrete an understanding until a later date. Though the breaking up of parts of Google seems to have been necessary for some time as argued by Judge Mehta, the specifics of how that will happen will dictate how successful the potential selling would be.

Chrome is a major part of much of how Google currently operates and measures will need to be taken to not lose many fundamental parts of the internet seemingly overnight. A heavy-handed approach was needed for much of the court case to even bring this suit against Google but a finer touch is needed for those specifics. Though we won't understand how fine that is for some time.

I think it's fair to say that we've been spoilt for choice when it comes to PC hardware in 2024. Processors, graphics cards, RAM, motherboards, cases, laptops, monitors, handhelds—the list is huge and picking just one for my personal pick from that lot has been quite hard. But then I remembered something that I've been using a lot this year and how impressed I've been with its stellar gaming performance.

So here it is, then. My personal pick of 2024 is the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D. Launched in January for $249, it's the very epitome of old-new... or should that be new-old? It's an AM4-socket CPU, which I'm pretty sure has been around since the dinosaurs and regularly confuses palaeontologists when they're rooting around for fossils.

It uses the Zen 3 architecture, which first launched in November 2020, so that's pretty old too. And then there's the fact that the Ryzen 7 5700X3D is really just a Ryzen 7 5800X3D with lower clocks, and that chip first appeared in April 2022.

So why would I pick something that's clearly old tech as being the best tech of this year? It's all about AMD's gaming wizardry in the form of 3D V-Cache.

System memory is just too slow for modern processors; even the fastest DDR5 money can buy doesn't cut the mustard. So, to make sure CPUs are never left waiting for data and instructions, they all have multiple tiers of high-speed cache built into them.

The so-called last level cache (usually classed as Level 3 or L3) is the largest but slowest of the tiers but it's still crucial to how fast a processor can run programs such as games. A standard desktop Ryzen 7 chip usually has 32 MB of L3 cache, shared across its eight cores.

What makes the X3D variants special is that AMD developed a way to add more L3 cache but without making the die bigger. In short, the engineers went vertical, adding a slice of cache to the chiplet housing the cores. In the case of the Ryzen 7 5700X3D, the total L3 cache is a frankly ridiculous 96 MB, even by today's standards.

AMD's last level cache works as a victim cache. Instead of holding any data from anywhere, it just stores stuff that's been pushed out of the L2 cache to make room for new data. With 96 MB on tap, it saves a huge amount of valuable time being otherwise lost waiting for information to be read from the computer's RAM.

Games churn through all kinds of different data so the 3D V-Cache can make a big difference to how well they run, especially once they're CPU- or system-limited. You can see this clearly in the gaming benchmarks from when I reviewed the Ryzen 7 5700X3D:

But it's not just about average frame rates or even the 1% low figures. 3D V-Cache can help reduce micro-stutters, those fleeting brief moments when the frame rate crashes right down, but not frequently enough to register in the 1% low data.

As fantastic as the extra cache is, it's not real magic, of course, and it can't solve problems caused by a game's engine or hardware-related issues. But for anyone with an AM4 gaming PC looking for an affordable drop-in upgrade that will keep the rig going for many more years to come, then the Ryzen 7 5700X3D can't be beat.

Let's say you currently have a Ryzen 5 5600X. You could pick up a 5700X3D for $220 at Amazon and, if have a decent enough graphics card, enjoy the same kind of performance uplift that you can see in the above charts.

It does use quite a bit more power than a 5600X but you don't need to spend a fortune on cooling to keep the 5700X3D's thermals in check. Thermalright's PA120SE might not look anything special but it's a brilliant cooler and costs $35 at Amazon.

That's $255 all-in for an outstanding upgrade. We'd all love to have an ultra-powerful gaming PC, sporting a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and an RTX 4090, but that's many thousands of dollars, just for those two components.

In a tech world that often doesn't make an awful lot of sense at times, the Ryzen 7 5700X3D ticks all the right boxes for me. It's old tech but that's irrelevant when you look at just how good it is. We may never see the likes of it again, or at least not for a good few years. Well done AMD, you didn't get everything right this year, but you absolutely did with the 57003XD.

If you want to find out who won the PC Gamer Hardware Awards, we'll be publishing the winners on New Year's Day.

The promise-happy billionaire has not only declared that Neuralink is going to be full steam ahead, but that patients will be outperforming pro gamers within two years: And that's not even his wildest claim. Musk reckons Neuralink is going to have to speed up human brains so that AI doesn't get "bored."

Musk says our "low data rate" is too slow, you see, and this is a barrier to positive human-AI convergence. "Our slow output rate would diminish the link between humans and computers," says Musk, adding a helpful comparison to plants: "Let's say you look at this plant or whatever, and hey, I’d really like to make that plant happy, but it’s not saying a lot."

To be clear: The human brain is a computer that no Silicon Valley firm is even close to outperforming. But that's not going to stop our boy, who reckons Neuralink can increase our brain's output rate (how fast our brain is sending signals to the chip) by  "three, maybe six, maybe more orders of magnitude."

Some of these scenarios sound like hell. "Let's say you can upload your memories, so you wouldn't lose memories," says Musk, adding that this would fundamentally change the experience of being human: "yeah we would be something different. Some sort of futuristic cyborg… it's not super far away, but 10-15 years, that kind of thing."

The above was Musk in August this year, but it's a drum he keeps beating. A recent tweet by tech investor Apoorv Agrawal called Neuralink the "most important company of the decade", an assertion Musk leaped upon to make further claims:

"Bit rate and patient number will increase hyperexponentially over the next 5+ years. My guess is combined I/O bit rate >1Mbs and augmented humans >1M by 2030."

So over a million augmented humans in five years' time. But even that prediction looks positively tame next to Musk's previous notion that hundreds of millions will have Neuralinks within "the next couple of decades." Add to which Musk’s comments about the Input/Output rate of over one million bits per second, basically the speed of thought, and we are leaving "normal" brain function far behind for something that we don't really have a name for yet. Master?

I jest of course, and we'll get to why Neuralink is unquestionably A Good Thing and will almost certainly improve the quality of life for some individuals (it has already done this on a small scale). But there's a real distinction between the reality of Neuralink and the medical goals versus Musk's rhetoric, which essentially starts at predicting millions of people having the devices implanted and ends up with creating a race of supermen.

Some would call this visionary, the very reason that much is such a heralded individual for some. Others might point out just how far this thing is from non-medical applications as it stands, and the speed of that five year timeframe for getting a million people chipped.

To be clear: I'm not pretending to have any special knowledge of this. But what is abundantly clear is that, if Musk's wilder claims are even approximately close to reality, this would mark a social-technological revolution the likes of which we've never seen, and overnight create a two-tier species where a small percentage of the population is thinking six times faster than the rest. That seems a long way from a utopian prospect, and something that at the very least requires the kind of ethical and regulatory scrutiny that Musk recoils from (indeed, the SEC is sniffing around and not before time).

The thing is, of course, this feels unlikely to come to pass on Musk's timeframe. It is well to remember that, as well as the man's many outstanding achievements, there are a whole lot of unfulfilled promises, many of which are nowhere near as pie-in-the-sky as brain chips in hundreds of millions of people. Remember the network of one-car tubes? 

Musk has been promising that Tesla will have self-driving cars "next year" since 2014: Next year has yet to arrive. In 2019 he said there would be a million Tesla robo-taxis on the road by 2020: In 2024, they're still not here. As Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the WHO, Musk declared there was nothing to worry about and predicted no new cases in the US: Tens of thousands would die. 

There's the Tesla bots, which he reckons will soon be bigger business for the company than its cars, except… when they were rolled out to do some bartending, it turned out that us fleshbags were still in control. And then perhaps my favourite claim of all: Musk says we won't just get to Mars by 2050, but on that date there will be a million people on the red planet. 

Neuralink itself has been the subject of other claims. The first trial was supposed to start four years before it did, and some of Musk's wilder claims about the technology include that it will somehow be able to "cure" autism and schizophrenia, which are not diseases, as well as give you super-sharp "eagle eyes."

In this context it's hard to parse the visionary, which Musk undoubtedly is in some ways, from the vaudeville hype-man. It is undeniable that advances are being made in brain-computer interfaces, and not just by Neuralink, that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago: And that we live in an age of breakneck technological progress such that no one has any real idea what things will look like in 2030, never mind 2050. 

What can and should be acknowledged is that Neuralink has successfully implanted devices in human patients, and those patients are able to interface with computers in a way that would have previously been impossible. Neuralink's first patient, Noland Arbaugh, likened the device to using the Force (as in Star Wars) and can now control a computer, play videogames, and talk to friends without any physical input. 

This is the tech story that has the biggest chance of either changing the world, or sputtering down all sorts of half-realised alleyways. Because it is a story about the human race, our capabilities and evolution and what might be next, as much as it is about silicon. If we live in a world with a million Neuralink-enabled humans, is that going to amplify the empathetic and social side of humans: Or one of the many others? 

Neuralink is one part of what could be the biggest shift in human society since the Industrial Revolution. "We're not just aiming to give people the communication data rate equivalent to normal humans," says Musk. "We're aiming to give people who [are] quadriplegic, or maybe have complete loss of the connection to the brain and body, a communication data rate that exceeds normal humans. While we're in there, why not? Let's give people superpowers."

Elon Musk is a busy man. Aside from Neuralink there's the AI wars, in which he's currently embroiled in a huge legal spat with OpenAI, as well as SpaceX, Starlink, the Tesla bots and cabs, and of course his obsession with trolling on X. This is the technology that has the potential to truly reshape things. Whether it does remains to be seen: But I'm making a note to check back in five years, and see whether a million of us really are rocking brain chips.

It would be tempting to assume that, massive PC gaming corp. that it is, Valve would have the entire handheld gaming PC market sewn up. It's got the affordable end dealt with by the older LCD-screened Steam Deck and the more recent Steam Deck OLED version is getting new colourways to make it ever more desirous without being too much more expensive.

But I've been hugely impressed with the level of innovation that we've seen around the still burgeoning handheld market, with Ayaneo arguably the kings and queens of wrapping essentially the same hardware as everyone else up in fascinating new ways. I would also suggest it's managed to make the best of the struggles with Windows 11 as the de facto operating system for most non-Valve handhelds, too.

With the little and large of handhelds, in the Flip DS and Kun, Ayaneo has certainly been a busy ol' bee this year.

Asus has been the comeback kid, however, rejuvenating its ROG Ally console with a mid-season ROG Ally X refresh which fixed all the old problems and gave it a battery life that is the envy of every other handheld around. And it looks damned good in black, too.

A host of other companies have tried to get into the market, to greater or lesser success, with the likes of Lenovo and Zotac being two of the most prominent new entries. Though MSI has come through, too, attempting to fly the flag for Intel. Poor, poor Intel. Though we are more excited about a potential Lunar Lake handheld in the coming year.

But, right at the tail end of the year we've had our hands on the most powerful handheld PC we've ever tested, the OneXFly F1 Pro with its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip. That's been a big of a game-changer in terms of gaming frame rates on the go, though it's not without its flaws, too.

So, here are the nominees. We'll announce the winner on New Year's Eve.

Best gaming handheld 2024: the nominees

The winner of the PC Gamer Hardware Award for the best gaming handheld will be announced on New Year's Eve. It's all to play for, and any one of these three is completely deserving of the crown.

Lucky, then, that Corsair has been thinking a lot about keyboard switches recently. Exhibit A in this investigation are the Hall effect magnetic switches in the K70 Max, which went down quite well in the PC Gamer review. In the K70 Core you’ll find something slightly different, pre-lubed Corsair MLX Red linear mechanical switches, which are making their debut here, but still with a whole lot of sound-damping foam, just like the K70 Max.

Core keyboards are a step down from the top-of-the-line Pro boards in Corsair’s range. This doesn’t exactly make them budget models, as the price is still higher than that of truly cheap examples, but like a politician desperate for re-election they focus on the core values that make a keyboard great.

These are: having keys? Check. Flippy feet at the back? Rubber pads at the front? Check and check. USB connection? Check (though a wireless version is also available for the profane and corrupt). Absolute dust and fingerprint magnet? Check. Little dial in the top corner that looks neat but you’ll probably never use? Check... though we’re diverging from core values and into oppugnant morality here.

Otherwise, it’s the usual mix of aluminium and plastic, RGB LEDs and a smidge of flash memory (enough for five profiles). It also uses a USB wired connection that sees a rubber-coated cable emerge from the rear-left of the chassis and make its way round to the back of your PC. A USB hub would have been nice here, but we don’t get one. The cable has a plug on the end that looks for all the world like a USB-C plugged into a USB-A adapter, with a grippy bit to allow easy pulling off. However, after a heavy session of vigorous tugging it remained stubbornly attached. It seemed a bit extreme to get the pliers out, so we’re just going to have to accept that Corsair made it look like that on purpose.

But there's also foam, and it goes a long way to soundproofing the board. You’ll still get a clicky sound if you bottom-out the keys, but there's no case ping (probably thanks to the foam) and lubed switches mean actuations are silent too - though it does still make a sound as the key returns to its resting position following a press. While it’s never going to be as silent as a membrane keyboard, if you really try you can switch between a glorious mechanical noise and a reasonably quiet typing action.

Performance is excellent, with a 1,000 Hz report rate and full anti-ghosting rollover. The important thing here is the feel of the keys, and they are superb. They sit fairly high, mushrooming out of the deck as if left behind by frolicing fairies in the night, their stems clearly visible if you hold the board up and peer into the edge. Push down on them and you experience a smooth descent to the baseplate, with 45g actuation force and a pre-travel distance of 1.9 mm, before bottoming out at 4 mm. There's a degree of adjustability in this too, if you’re the sort to half-press a key while lining up a shot.

There are no clever optical or adjustable actuation systems here, and you can’t hot-swap anything, but there is a magnetic wrist rest in the box with a strange rough texture that makes you glad you’re not touching it with your fingers.

By default, the dial adjusts your PC’s volume, and there's an iCUE button next to it that maps to play/pause as there are no dedicated media keys. Much of the functionality can be customised in the iCUE software, which as well as remapping keys and cycling through RGB lighting schemes (there’s a keyboard shortcut for dimming which is much faster than opening up an extra app) can also record macros and change between presets for the control dial.

That dial is an exception to the ‘everything is customisable’ rule, but you can use it for brightness, scrolling and zooming as well as volume. It’s also an exception to the slippery lubed feel of the board, as not only does it have a textured surface and yellow highlight paint that’s not found anywhere else, but it jerks around with a tinny click that’s so different from the rest of the keys it’s almost as if it came from another keyboard entirely.

The iCUE button next to it is also the only key on the board not balanced on a high switch, so you have to dive over the surrounding keys to find it, and don’t get satisfying feedback from pressing it.

With storage for five profiles onboard the board, FN+ F2 can be used to switch between them, but if you’ve got a load of iCUE devices flashing away on your desktop it won’t communicate with them, forcing you to use software profiles.

Fire up the app and you get access to Corsair’s Mosaics, which are pre-set lighting patterns that are simple to activate. Community-created Mosaics can be found on a digital store, which thankfully has a degree of curation as even the Romans knew the levels of detail and lewdness that could be contained in a simple arrangement of square blocks.

The lighting patterns and customisability are nice to have, but the reason you’ll buy the K70 Core sits between the keycaps and the baseplate. These silky-smooth switches are a big draw for the board, and despite having a limited feature-set in a competitive market segment (and with it being possible to pick up a mechanical gaming keyboard for much less) its quietness and efficiency of operation mean the K70 Core is still able to stand out.

Even though there haven't been any major advances in solid state storage this year, it's still been a great 12 months for SSDs. The days of the market being dominated by just one vendor are long gone and the fierce competition, especially from newer companies, has meant getting a fast, spacious SSD has never been easier.

The rise of handheld gaming PCs has meant that 2230 form factor drives have been in high demand, with gamers wanting lots of space for games but without sacrificing performance. Lexar met that challenge head-on with its Play 2230 model and it's by far the best way to improve the storage of your Steam Deck.

Most other handhelds sport at least one fast USB Type-C port, which offers another way of adding more game space to your device, without having to prise the back off. Adata's SD810 is simple, robust, and as speedy as you're going to get for a USB drive.

Of course, traditional M.2 SSDs weren't ignored and over the year, we began to realise that 1 TB drives were rapidly giving way to 2 TB and larger SSDs. So much so, that 4 TB drives are far more affordable than they were just a few years ago and Team Group's MP44 is a great example of such a drive: masses of storage, great performance, and a tempting price to boot.

Those are the models that we've nominated for gaming SSD of 2024 but you'll have to wait until New Year's Eve to see which one is the winner!

Best gaming SSD 2024: the nominees

The winner of the PC Gamer Hardware Award for the best gaming SSD on New Year's Eve. Three very different drives but which one will grab the 2024 crown?

Santa's been, the turkey's decimated, the drinks have been drunk, and the hangover's starting to abate. So, now what to do with that Christmas money your great aunt stuffed into a weirdly archaic card? And if your great aunt didn't hand over any cash, what should you be spending your own money on because you didn't get what you really wanted for Christmas?

This is what we're here for, to give you great buying advice and tickle your consumerist fancy with tempting deals from a host of different manufacturers that we genuinely believe are great ways to spend your money.

The end of the year/January sales ought to be a good place to bag a bargain given that we're expecting a slew of new product, from new graphics cards to gaming laptops, in the coming weeks and months. So, the last-gen stuff still on sale ought to be a good price.

The counter to that is, should you find the deals on the goodies you're after to be particularly tantalising, then save your money. Because if you are looking at getting yourself a new GPU or laptop, it's entirely possible that—especially at the high-end—you're going to be better off waiting for the new generation to drop at the start of the year.

But for peripherals and gaming monitors, we're not expecting a lot of movement in the coming months, so this may well be a great chance to get yourself a new screen to make the most of your current gaming PC setup.

Quick links

• Amazon: big deals energy on everything
• Newegg: all of Newegg's After Christmas tech deals
• Best Buy: every Best Buy holiday deal going
• Secretlab: just the best gaming chairs
• Dell: save up to $1,000 on Alienware PCs and laptops
• iBuyPower: save up to $400 on quick-shipping gaming PCs
• Walmart: big discounts on PC gaming tech
• B&H Photo: save up to $800 on RTX 4080 gaming laptops and more
• Target: savings on low-end gaming laptops
• Staples: save on gaming chairs and peripherals
• Lenovo: savings of up to 25% on Legion laptops and desktops
• Razer: save up to $800 on Razer Blade gaming laptops
• Microsoft: save on Xbox Wireless Controllers and more
• HP: savings on Omen gaming laptops
• Corsair: save on PSUs, headsets, gaming chairs, and more

Nvidia Gaming PCs

• RTX 4060 - MSI Codex R2 | $779 @ Newegg
• RTX 4060 Ti - Yeyian Tanto | $1,000 @ Newegg
• RTX 4070 - Skytech Nebula | $1,100 @ Newegg
• RTX 4070 Super - Yeyian Tanto | $1,200 @ Newegg
• RTX 4070 Ti Super - HP Omen 35L | $1,750 @ HP
• RTX 4080 Super - ABS Kaze Ruby | $1,900 @ Newegg
• RTX 4090 - iBuyPower RDY Y70 004 | $3,299 @ iBuyPower

AMD Radeon-powered gaming PCs

• RX 7800 XT - CyberPowerPC | $1,399 @ Walmart
• RX 7900 XT - Centaurus Andromeda | $1,888 @ Amazon
• RX 7900 XTX - Yeyian gaming PC| $2,200 @ Newegg

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Gaming laptop deals

• RTX 4060 - Lenovo LOQ | $840 @ Newegg
• RTX 4070 - Lenovo LOQ | $880 @ Walmart
• RTX 4080 - Lenovo Legion Pro 7i | $2,000 @ B&H Photo

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Graphics card deals

• RTX 4080 Super: $1,000 @ Amazon
• RTX 4070 Ti Super: $800 @ Amazon
• RTX 4070 Super: $600 @ Best Buy
• RTX 4070: $520 @ Newegg
• RTX 4060 Ti: $360 @ Best Buy
• RTX 4060: $299 @ Walmart
  
  
• RX 7900 XTX: $870 @ Walmart
• RX 7900 XT: $685 @ Amazon
• RX 7900 GRE: $540 @ Newegg
• RX 7800 XT: $480 @ Amazon
• RX 7700 XT: $410 @ Amazon
• RX 7600: $250 @ Walmart

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Gaming monitor deals

• 1080p: Acer Nitro XZ270 | $150 @ Amazon
• 1440p: Acer KA272U | $140 @ Best Buy
• 4K 144 Hz: Gigabyte M28U-AE 28 inch | $400 at Amazon
• Ultrawide: LG UltraGear 34GP63A-B | $307 @ Amazon
• OLED: MSI MAG 341CQP | $600 at Amazon

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PC Gamer's favorite products

• Best gaming laptop: Asus Zephyrus G16 (2024) | $1,800
• Best gaming monitor: MSI MPG 321URX | $900
• Best gaming chair: Secretlab Titan Evo | $519
• Best wireless gaming headset: HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless | $143
• Best gaming headset: HyperX Cloud Alpha | $79
• Best gaming mouse: Razer DeathAdder V3 Hyperspeed | $100
• Best gaming keyboard: Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 | $150
• Best PC controller: Microsoft Xbox Core Wireless | $45
• Best SSD: WD Black SN850X | $85

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Today's top deals

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Deal hubs

• Gaming laptop deals
• Gaming PC deals
• Gaming monitor deals
• Graphics card deals
• SSD deals

Live

Happy festivities time, people. Hope you all had a great Christmas, if that's your jam. If you have some present money burning a hole in your pockets there are some good deals coming out in the after Christmas sales, and I'm checking out the best ones.

Despite there being a bunch of new graphics cards on the horizon for 2025, the actual mid- and lower-end GPUs are unlikely to launch until the middle of next year. So, if you're after a good, affordable gaming PC today, the RTX 4060 is still going to be about your best bet.

The Superlight 2 Lightspeed scored a pretty healthy 88% when it first launched, and there haven't been any of the most recent Logitech G releases which have changed that impression. It's still a fantastic gaming mouse that delivers all that you could want from a speedy rodent.

The Hero 2 sensor is still great, with outstanding acceleration, and gaming response. And at just $80 it's a bit of a bargain.

Back down to its pre-Black Friday price, this last-gen Zephyrus G16 is stil a great laptop, even if it doesn't have the latest Asus ROG all-metal chassis. It's still an impressively thin device, and copes well with the RTX 4070 GPU inside it. If you're after a skinny gaming laptop, then the old Zephyrus G16 still fits the bill.

But yes, it could absolutely do with a little extra storage, and the Lexar NM790 is a great price once again, at $70 for a 1 TB.

The Zephyrus G16 with an RTX 4070 I reckon is still a great laptop, but it's not the cheapest RTX 4070 gaming laptop on sale today. Matching its Cyber Monday price, this Lenovo LOQ machine is packing a 115 W RTX 4070 and an octo-core AMD CPU, and will make for a quality device if you can cope with its chonky looks.

• GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 mobile (115 W)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7435HS (8c/16t)
• RAM: 2x 8 GB DDR5-4800
• SSD: 512 GB PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD (2x NVMe slots total—1x 2242, 1x 2280)
• Screen: 15.6-inch, 144 Hz, 1080p IPS
• USB ports: 1x USB Type-C (10 Gbps) + 3x USB Type-A (5 Gbps)

On offer for the same price it was around Cyber Monday, this 1440p gaming monitor is serving the sort of specs that just a few short years back would have been considered cutting edge for a top-end screen. Today it's well under $150 and will deliver a great gaming experience for your new rig or new GPU.

This is a ludicrous price for my absolute favorite gaming keyboard, the Mountain Everest 60. It was a great price around Black Friday when it was $40, but now it's even cheaper down at just $30 it's an total steal for a hot-swappable, lubed, stabalised, dampened gaming keeb.

Buy it, you won't regret it. But I'd suggest also picking up the hot-swappable numpad, too. That's just $15 at Mountain right now.

Just a quick reminder that Corsair's excellent budget gaming chair is still available for a bargain $180 all over the place. We gave it a heady 86% when we first reviewed it at $250, and at this price it's an ace deal you will find hard to better when it comes to gaming chairs at this price.

I have just bought (or more accurately, my partner has allowed me to buy) a Meta Quest 3. That's because after playing Asgard's Wrath during the holidays last year I'd wanted to make the upgrade to play its sequel in all its glory. Despite all these good games, my VR headset has proven to be a surprisingly good tool for developing some sense of mindfulness.

By May this year, I noticed it wasn't the huge experiences and grand adventures that kept me coming back to my little headset. Instead, it was methodical rhythm games like Beat Saber and Synth Riders. Even when I got the chance to test out the Pico 4 Ultra this year, which is a competent Meta Quest competitor, one of the things that most intrigued me was the included ankle trackers for their rhythm game compatibility.

As a hardware lover, but also a chronic overthinker, I've become too fond of having an extra screen to watch a video or listen to music from. Even now, writing on just a single monitor, I lament the fact I haven't bought a second by now.

If you were to check my VR playtime this year, I think Beat Saber would sit near the very top, and it's not necessarily because it's the VR game I enjoyed the most. I've found Batman: Arkham Shadow to be great fun and have played the first hour or so of Behemoth. Though I haven't yet got the courage to start something as big as Asgard's Wrath 2, I expect myself to get there in the next 2-5 business weeks.

However, I realised after quite some time with it that I use Beat Saber in a way akin to mediation. I'll look at the exercise ring on my Apple Watch and think I can close it with a few minutes of exercising in VR but, actually, I've realised it's just an excellent way to clear my head.

Beat Saber is quite a tactile game, with controls that vibrate as you swing at blocks coming towards you, but it's not filled with things to pay attention to. There's no story to speak of, no hidden message that you have to decipher. It's just you, music, and your sabres.

As someone who likes to have two or three screens on the go at one time, I've found myself 'cutting back' on screen time by slapping just one big one (the Meta Quest) to my face. I know that sounds counterintuitive but it's true. I've noticed myself decompressing from a hard day or popping the headset on when I have to think something through.

I've always enjoyed taking a shower when I want to think something over because it's an intentional pause in everything else going on in my life to take stock, but there's only so many you can take before you perhaps need a better coping mechanism.

Under the guise of being able to do some light exercise in my home, I've often found myself putting on the headset just to get a moment to think. The music of Beat Saber, being predominantly EDM, isn't quite to my usual taste but it's the the perfect backdrop to a contemplative moment. Instead of looking at its music as a traditional soundtrack or grouping of challenges, I've been flitting through songs as you might choose a form of white noise before yoga.

This is where the Meta Quest 3 comes in. With new and improved controls, a better chip, and most importantly, greater passthrough, I've been able to more casually keep myself hydrated in the headset or get a good sense of my surroundings. You still can't really look at a phone in there but I'm kind of glad you can't. The limits of this technology have been a boon to my own mental health and sense of space in a way I didn't quite think was possible.

VR has proven to be very good at providing a space for me to think at multiple points in my life and I think that's part of why I like it so much now. At the start of the lockdowns in 2020, I spent quite a lot of time caring for my sick nan and being very cautious about leaving the house for fear of bringing anything life-threatening back with me. That was when I bought the very first Quest, which was also my first time trying VR.

I didn't have a PC capable of running VR so being able to play games natively without the costly expense of upgrading my rig felt like a game changer. Then, I bought the Quest 2 soon after its release and only liked the shape and processor of that headset even more.

In the last year, I haven't newly found this meditative space in VR, instead, I've just realised it exists. I've found the comfort of a headset multiple times to think things through over the last few years but, now, it's all a bit more intentional.

I suppose it's time I get a few more song packs then, to go with this shiny new headset.

Earlier in the year, PC Gamer packed me up and shipped me off to Denmark to take a look at some new SteelSeries gear. After filing into a SteelSeries office with a handful of other journos and SteelSeries PRs, it was revealed that The Big News were these new tiny earbuds. And my heart sank. I can't stand earbuds, I thought. They really picked the wrong person to bring out here.

How wrong I was, though. Perhaps by some premonitory magic, the SteelSeries folks happened to pick the one person who could be brought not just on-side but yanked out of the depths of anti-earbud abyss, and on-side.

This wouldn't have been possible if the Arctis GameBuds weren't damn solid, though.

No, SteelSeries isn't twisting my arm to write this, I've just been genuinely blown away by these buds. I'm sure that's in part because I'm surprised to be giving any earphones at all the time of day again, but it's also because these ones in particular genuinely impressed me.

Why's that? Well, for one, they actually fit my weird little ears…

Anyway, moving on.

I actually ended up using the GameBuds in different ways than I thought I would. For instance, they've got me listening to audiobooks while tootling around the house doing chores, and they've even got me running to pick them up when I receive a phonecall. I shudder to think of the number of times my friends must have heard me say "call you back in a second, I'm just grabbing my earphones." There's just something about chatting hands-free, you know?

Maybe this is old news to everyone who didn't write off earbuds for the last decade. But part of the reason for me writing them off—apart from most earbuds not comfortably fitting my ears—is that there's rarely enough benefit to weigh against the dreadful feeling of having your ears clogged.

But wait, what's that, Transparency Mode (think the inverse of ANC) works a charm and makes your ears feel positively de-clogged? Yep, the GameBuds shine in that regard, too.

In fact, every barrier that I wanted to put up, the GameBuds smashed them down. Like a pushy but loveable puppy, they clawed their way through my protective barriers and made me admit: Okay, I'll give you a shot.

And that's why I gave them such a high score in my Arctis GameBuds review: because there's not a single area in which I feel they should be improved. (Okay, that's a slight exaggeration because I later found out some third-party tips prevent them from fitting in their charging case, but that's a small gripe.)

Audio quality's the obvious area to start with, and in this department they've been a blast. I'm used to my open-back Sennheiser HD 599 headphones, and while the earbuds don't quite get there—and it'd be a miracle if any 6 mm drivers did—they get close. This has made my train journeys 100x more pleasant than before, especially given I was previously using bone conduction earphones (ie, not earbuds, but over-ear earphones).

The GameBuds have been the perfect little guides back into the world of in-ear monitors not just because of this but because they're so versatile and easy to use. I just take them out of their case and they connect to Bluetooth, and then if I want to do some handheld gaming I can switch over to 2.4 GHz with a quick toggle. They charge as soon as I put them back into their cosy little pod, too, and I can charge that pod by simply placing it on top of my Qi charger.

After spending just a day or two with them, I no longer had to think about it. They simply work, in pretty much any circumstance I've put them in—any time, any place.

And they fit my weird little ears. There's that, too. That makes the Arctis GameBuds a 2024 champion in my ears… I mean eyes. I didn't expect to consider a pair of earbuds to be my fave tech of 2024, either, but here we are.

Use a 32-inch monitor every day and you’ll soon forget that it’s the sort of size that would have been considered excessive in a living room TV not so long ago. Stepping down to a 27-inch monitor after getting used to a 32-inch feels like going back to that 14-inch that buzzed and needed to be degaussed once in a while all over again.

And then you remember that this screen only costs £300/$350, and suddenly any sense of lingering disagreeableness passes. A mini-LED monitor for this kind of money is remarkable enough, with comparable models from Cooler Master or AOC going for twice the price, but the G Pro 27i also sports Quantum Dots, a fast 180 Hz refresh rate (with FreeSync), and a veritable plethora of inputs too.

For UK readers, there's also a three-pin plug on the power adapter. Previous Xiaomi screens have been sent out for review with US-style two-pin plugs that require an adapter, though work perfectly well on UK voltage, and it’s nice to see that this practice has stopped. Though as the screen requires its own power brick and the cable on it isn’t spectacularly long, you’ll need to keep it reasonably close to a power socket.

The mini-LED backlight is split into 1,152 local dimming zones, each made up of four mini-LED beads which means it’s mostly free of the haloes you can get from screens with larger zones. You’ll instantly realise that this means 3,200 pixels per zone, which at a pixel density of 109 ppi isn’t a large area—assuming the zones use the same 16:9 ratio as the screen itself you’re looking at each one being around 75x42 px. This is still much larger than the individually lit pixels of an OLED, but much better than traditional backlights.

There's still a little bit of bloom, though, especially around bright objects set against a dark backdrop. It’s very bright, unnecessarily so in fact, and most of the time you’ll want to turn the brightness down, something easy to achieve thanks to Xiaomi’s sensible implementation of the OSD controls. Place it next to a standard IPS panel and the difference is clear, with increased brightness and contrast.

It also has excellent colour reproduction, claiming to display 99% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut that can display 25% more colours than the more common sRGB. Combined with the HDR-1000 certification, this should lead to an extremely vibrant result if you’re keen on playing games that have colours in them. Tests with a colourimeter bear this out, showing a 98% response to P3, and a maximum brightness of 690 nits. That’s better than many OLEDs and a heck of a lot better than the usual figures we see at this price point.

The panel is the headline feature, but there's plenty else to like here. The G Pro 27i is a screen that’s meant to be admired from all sides. As a result, there's a lighting ring around the point at which the stand clips into the back of the screen itself (its colour controlled from the OSD), and a cover that will hide the bit where the input cables plug into their sockets (though you’ll still be able to see the cables themselves snaking away).

The foot, unusually, attaches to the vertical part of the stand with four screws (a driver is provided) instead of a single thumb-turned attachment, which feels rather old-fashioned, but it’s not the sort of thing you’re likely to do more than once or twice in the monitor’s lifetime and leads to a very stable configuration.

Having four video inputs is very nice to see on a gaming monitor, and the sort of setup that uses all of them is probably somewhere in our dreams. Desktop and laptop PCs, games console and streaming stick, perhaps? As the only screen in a dedicated gaming room or bedroom it’s good to be able to hook up multiple devices without needing to rely on switchers, though you will need to connect something to the audio socket as there are no built-in speakers on the Xiaomi screen.

The HDMI ports hit version 2.0, so are limited to 144 Hz at 1440p, but the DP 1.4 connectors can really let the pixels flow. The only thing that’s missing is a USB-C connection, and if you’ve become used to switching a USB hub between a couple of PCs, then it can be a wrench to go back to doing things the old-fashioned way.

And that’s one of the big things about the G Pro 27i. In a world of OLEDs, it uses mini-LED. Where USB-C is the up-and-coming video connector, it sticks with DisplayPort, and uses HDMI sockets that can’t feed it the max refresh rate. It doesn’t have anything like a built-in webcam or even speakers.

While other monitors have become hubs around which to organise your PCs and other devices, this is something more pure: a display, and nothing else. Happily, displaying things is something it’s good at, and as it’s available at a low price for a mini-LED panel we perhaps shouldn’t be too dismissive of its more focused approach. Stick one (or a pair!) of these on your desk, hook it up over DisplayPort, and you’ll have a fast, bright, colourful PC gaming experience. And isn’t that really all we want?

If there's one thing that stands out about 2024, at least as far as gaming monitors are concerned, it's that this year has without a doubt been the year of the OLED monitor. We've been hit with them left, right, and centre. And sure, these monitors mostly feature the same 32-inch Samsung or LG panels, but those are great panels.

Whether we're talking about the MSI MPG 321URX, LG UltraGear 32GS95UE, or any number of other 2024 OLED releases, you're getting a high refresh rate, low latency, and stunning 4K visuals. But while we've seen a bunch of these entering the market, none of them are cheap.

We've also seen some manufacturers start to experiment with Mini LED tech. This technology uses backlighting arrays and could eventually be an alternative to OLED tech that offers brighter screens with less text fringing and no risk of burn-in. Unfortunately, though, there are still problems with Mini LED tech, as we discovered when we looked at the BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX, for instance.

At the other end of the pricing scale, 2024 has shown us what can really be achieved for a more moderate number of pennies. The Xiaomi G27i, for instance, showed just how high of a refresh rate and how low latency you can get for a mainstream price these days.

Speaking of refresh rates, one trend we saw this year was the introduction of dual-mode refresh rate technology. We first saw this with the LG UltraGear 32GS95UE which had its debut at CES. This tech allows for an ultra-high refresh rate at 1080p and then a lower (but still high) refresh rate at 4K, thanks to pixel doubling. We already saw it in laptops in 2023 such as the Razer Blade 16, but the tech is now officially featuring in standalone monitors.

Best gaming monitor 2024: the nominees 

The winner of the Best Gaming Monitor 2024 PC Gamer Hardware Award will be announced on New Year's Eve. So keep your eyes peeled for our pick of the best panel for this year.

One of the clichés you learn to avoid as a writer is starting a piece with "when I was younger." However, I am nothing if not contrarian, so without further ado—when I was younger, gaming laptops were rubbish.

From tank-like chassis designs, to scratchy plastics, to keyboards that felt like typing on bubble wrap, there was something majorly wrong with almost all of them. The long-held advice was: if you're looking for a gaming machine, don't buy a laptop. Proper gaming PCs were for play, mobile machines were for work, and buying a gaming laptop was an easy way to waste your money.

Over the years, that perception has changed. Certainly, it's been possible to buy a properly powerful gaming laptop for a while now for a reasonable price, and we at PC Gamer spend our days hunting down the best gaming laptop deals for that very reason.

Portability, too, has come a long way. Slim, svelte machines that can slip into your backpack without issue while still allowing some gaming on your next flight are now much more commonplace, and the world is better for it.

But 2024 felt like a sea change moment for me. Despite recent advances, I started the year still of the opinion that, while gaming laptops were much better than they once were, they were still a step or two away from being the ultra-flexible, futuristic machines we all desire in our heads.

And then I got my hands on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16. I still remember the moment I pulled it from its box, and literally laughed out loud. It's absurdly thin, with a milled aluminium chassis that's part MacBook (boo, hiss), part sci-fi (yay). The glittering slashed rear lid design is pin-sharp in person, the form factor discreet. You could easily bring this to a meeting and never raise an eyebrow, except for perhaps from some uninformed soul wondering whether they missed the latest Apple announcement.

Except my review model had a mobile RTX 4090 inside it. And that, if you ever get the chance to hold a G16, is absurd. I remember flipping it around in my hands. Where exactly had it gone? How on earth is it going to keep it cool?

Well, the short answer is, it doesn't. The G16 is yet another laptop where shoving Nvidia's top-spec mobile GPU into the frame is a bad idea. And yet, it was better than I thought it would be when it came to performance. Yes, that GPU is heavily thermally throttled, and yes, the fans spin up a treat, but it was better. Not good enough to justify buying one with this particular graphics chip onboard, but still mightily impressive in a laptop this sleek and desirable.

As a result of this mismatched GPU and chassis combo, I had to take a sizable amount off the score in my review of the G16. Thanks to the presence of the RTX 4090, it was too expensive, and it simply didn't make sense to buy the particular model I had in my hands.

Gosh it was nice, though. So I was very pleased to see that my dear colleague Jacob, in his review of a Strix Point and RTX 4070-equipped version, fell in love with it as much as I did. This was very similar to my review unit, with the mega-GPU caveat removed. And what a fantastic laptop it is.

Jacob also reviewed its smaller sibling, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, and gushed about its virtues to all who would listen. Both the G16 and the G14 have OLED screens, nice keyboards, excellent speakers, good battery life, and that cant-put-your-finger-on-it feeling of premium. Not only that, but we've been finding them on discount all year, making both of these laptops even better value than they are at MSRP.

It's not just Asus that's been having a year of it, either. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 impressed our Katie immensely, thanks to its fantastic speed, impressive Thermal Mode, and thick-yet-understated chassis.

This is a mean machine, and while not as portable as the Zephyrus models, certainly makes a case for itself as a grown up, powerful gaming laptop for those of us that don't spend all of our waking lives bathing in RGB.

Want another? How about the Razer Blade 14, a perfectly portable little machine with an all-metal chassis, a great trackpad, and a long battery life. It's not massively different to the Razer Blade models before it, but looks and feels like a refinement of a formula long iterated on in the Razer labs. Gaming laptops are getting better, it seems, and all of a sudden the portable gaming machine future starts to look very bright indeed.

Of course, there are exceptions. The MSI Titan 18 HX A14V feels like it comes from a different era entirely, and the Asus Strix Scar 18 is still a bit of a dinosaur despite having some redeeming features. But overall? 2024 to me felt like the year gaming laptops started to ditch their cantankerous roots, and began blossoming into something altogether more refined.

Which makes me very excited for 2025. When it comes to components, we've only just started seeing the latest Strix Point and Lunar Lake laptops hitting the market, and we've been impressed in our early testing with what the new mobile CPUs can provide. CES 2025 is usually the venue for major laptop releases, and I can't wait to get my hands on the latest models when I fly out to Vegas at the start of next year.

And as for GPUs? Well, who knows at this point. While we're expecting to see a range of new Nvidia graphics cards releasing next year, how long it'll be before mobile versions appear in new machines is anyone's guess. Although, given that CES has always been about laptops, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mobile GPU launch or two thrown in the mix. Regardless, whatever the new mobile chips end up being, I imagine they'll still pump out heat in a way that gives manufacturers headaches.

But with everything else about gaming laptops seemingly improving, I'm very curious to see what the next generation looks like when manufacturers start churning out new models with the latest components. 2024 may be the year when gaming laptops grew up, but as for what they might look like in 2025? I think we should all be very excited to find out.

I could reel off a list of products all deserving of a nod in this year's hardware awards. The ROG Strix X870-I Gaming Wifi and Ayaneo Flip DS, to name just two, are easy recommendations. But neither could have earned my recommendation come September. That was when I first got my hands on the Havn HS 420.

Choosing the right chassis is a crucial part of PC building. Choose the wrong one and prepare to come away from the experience with bleeding hands and a vow to buy a prebuilt next time. But make the right call, and you'll want to stare at the majesty of your PC for hours.

The Havn HS 420 is the right call.

Havn is a new name in the space—the HS 420 is the first product released by the brand—but it's born out of Pro Gamers Group, who also own a few of the big european tech retailers and keyboard manufacturer Ducky.

Bro, this chassis is fire—is what I imagine someone on TikTok has said about the HS 420 at some point. It's inarguably eye-catching, too. I caught sight of it from across the showfloor at Computex, where it was first unveiled, and immediately bolted over to see it. It was on a gradually rotating plinth, and I took a good few snaps of it and made a note to return for a chat about it before scuttling off to my next appointment.

Let's talk about the chassis itself, then.

The vented side and top panels are a particular highlight. They look stunning but they serve a purpose—this chassis offers a variety of ways to install fans and/or radiators. That includes down the side of the motherboard tray, above the motherboard, beneath the motherboard, to the other side of the motherboard—all around the motherboard, really.

The HS 420 aims to keep airflow moving across your CPU and motherboard and keep hot air erupting from your GPU from sticking around too long. To that end, the VGPU version—which includes a PCIe 5.0 riser and bracket for mounting your graphics card on its side—also includes a glass separator to help ease the airflow within the case. I didn't find it made much of a difference to be honest, but it looks good, and my temps were decent in testing.

I do have a few problems with it that it's only fair to note here. Firstly, it doesn't come with any fans, which on top of the cost of the chassis itself, starting at $199 for the non-VGPU version, means it won't be winning any awards for being affordable. Though I'd argue it's still a great investment if you plan to keep this chassis for any considerable length of time.

It also weighs 19 kg. With a side panel that wraps around the front and is made entirely of glass, I can see why. But that weight does make it unwieldly. What you don't want to happen is unkowingly pick it up by the dust filter and have said dust filter pull away from the case, sending the chassis into a rapid descent towards the concrete floor. And all happening just moments before you're supposed to shoot it for a feature your popular magazine, which is on deadline. Not that this exact thing ever happened to me, but if it did I would have caught it with the help of our photographer and only slightly injured myself in the process.

You might still be thinking 'a case is a case is a case'. I strongly disagree. The HS 420 might look like an empty vessel that serves no purpose until it's filled with a multitude of other components, but it's the cleanest, most builder-friendly chassis I've used in quite some time. Heck, maybe ever.

The wide and deep cable management on the rear of the motherboard tray is a good example of its excellence, which makes for easy work of genuinely good-looking cable management without a degree from cable management school (which I don't have). All over the case there are signs of design for convenience—the way the intake and exhaust fan mounts remove, or the dust filters, or the single screw that holds the lower fan mount in place… each little piece removes some small hassle or inconvenience from the building process.

What's most surprising, however, is just how expertly designed this chassis is considering it's the first ever product from Havn. Sure, the people behind it aren't complete newbs [sic], but to nail a design that works for both beginners and experienced builders alike—well, it's just darned impressive.

I came away from building in the Havn HS 420 feeling like I'd nailed it. Realistically, I had only put a few white parts together and called it a PC build. The Havn HS 420 was, and continues to be, the true star of the show.

If you want to find out who won the PC Gamer Hardware Awards, we'll be publishing the winners on New Year's Day.

A lot's changed since then, and we've seen a whole host of non-fan-cooled PCIe 5.0 solutions arrive with us. However, heat has still always been a major concern.

That is what the MP700 Elite looks to rectify in its bold and brave quest to become one of the best SSDs out there today. In short, this is an exceptionally cool PCIe 5.0 drive that not only delivers relatively comfortable performance on the sequential front but does so with both a low power draw and radically lower temperatures as a result. I'm not saying you can run this without a dedicated heatsink just yet, but we're getting close. That does however come with some drawbacks.

As for the hardware, Corsair's built the MP700 Elite around Kioxia's latest 218-layer BiCS8 TLC NAND, combined with Phison's E321T controller. That does mean it comes without any DRAM cache or buffers, but honestly, that's not a huge concern given the raw throughput that Kioxia's NAND can deliver.

It's also worth mentioning that this is a single-sided M.2-2280 design, making it pretty ideal for laptops and other consoles, although if you do get the heatsink variant, please do note that it's too large to fit into something like a PS5 Pro (although you can easily disassemble it if you do).

On launch, it's a somewhat limited choice for capacity, sadly. You can grab one of these either as a 1 TB or a 2 TB configuration, and that's it. For this specific 2 TB model I've got on test here, it retails relatively respectable at $260 ($265 with the heatsink), or £235 in the UK (£240 with heatsink). Unfortunately, no AUD availability just yet.

Right, the big thing I need to cover first is temperatures, because boy, is this quite literally a cool drive. At least compared to other PCIe 5.0 offerings. To be clear, almost always, I try to test all of the SSDs I get in for review underneath the exact same heatsink with the same thermal pads. That's done on an Asus ROG Strix X870E-E motherboard. If the drive comes with a heatsink, if possible, I strip it off and chuck it in the board for the full testing suite.

So, for comparison, the Seagate FireCuda 540, a relatively early PCIe 5.0 drive, during its benchmark run, topped out at 83 C. The Crucial T700, which did use its own integrated heatsink, landed at 87°C. The MP700 Elite? 55°C. Ambient room temperature at the time of those tests was 24°C across all three SSDs. That is just a staggering drop in overall heat, and if we're generous and compare it only to the FireCuda 540, there's a 33.7% difference between them.

This is all thanks to Phison's latest E31T controller. In short, it's basically a pseudo-evolution of the E26 found in the bulk of most 5.0 drives to date (Teamgroup's Z540 a good example of that). Although it lacks any DRAM and features half the channels and bandwidth, it's wildly more efficient than the original controllers. That's thanks to Phison moving the manufacturing process from a 12nm FinFET solution to TSMC's 7 nm N7 process instead. It also has half the number of channels, and because of that power draw, equally has been cut significantly as well. What that leads to is a significant drop in overall temps as a result. Certainly compared to drives like Crucial's T700 or Gigabyte's Aorus Gen5 12000.

As for the numbers game, general sequential speeds are about what we saw with the initial PCIe 5.0 launch, albeit with one exception. Crystal Disk manages 10,197 MB/s, respectively, on the read, but 8,608 on the write (the latter quite a bit slower than the FireCuda 540 and Crucial's T700).

Where the MP700 Elite picks its head up, however, is in the random 4Ks. It dominates that field, with 88 MB/s on the read and a whopping 336 MB/s on the write, pipping both of our other PCIe 5.0 drives to the post. As for in-game performance, it basically sat in the middle of the pack, landing a load time of 7.426 seconds in Final Fantasy's Shadowbringers benchmark.

PC Gamer test bench
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | RAM: 64 GB (2x32GB) Team Group T-Create Expert DDR5 @ 6000 C34 | GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super | Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi | CPU Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | PSU: 1200W NZXT C1200 (2024) 80+ Gold | Chassis: Geometric Future Model 5

The real kicker is the price. There's a lot of tech and hardware featured here that's relatively new to the playing field. Whether that's Phison's E31T controller, which landed with us in September 2024, or Kioxia's latest 218-layer BiCS8 NAND, it all costs money up front to bring this together to the table, and despite this drive being pitched as sort of a "mid-range" entry-level option, it's got some tough competition from older hardware that right now, just kind of works.

Crucial's T700 is a fine example of this (and it's not alone either). If you go for the non-heatsinked variant, at time of writing, you can pick up 2 TB for just $210, and it's consistently been that price for the last four months (even lower during Black Friday). Corsair's MP700 Elite, on offer right now, is still slightly more expensive, despite dropping in price to $215. And to be fair, you can only grab that deal directly from its webstore. Admittedly, you can get the MP700 Elite with a heatsink for just $5 extra versus the $50 investment needed for the T700 heatsinked, but, in reality, most folk buying this are likely just going to chuck it behind a motherboard M.2 heatsink anyway, negating the issue.

Then there's the performance delta between those two drives. Although the random 4K numbers are higher for the MP700 Elite, those sequential numbers, particularly on write performance, are awkwardly lower by contrast. Depending on your workloads, that could be a real deal breaker.

Similar to graphics cards and CPUs, it feels like at this point that excess heat generated by most modern, less-efficient PCIe 5.0 drives has already been accounted for and designed around. Whether that's through better motherboard heatsinks or standard ones included with the drives themselves, it's no longer an issue. Although Phison's latest controller is impressive, it's technology that really should be utilized to better improve the performance of the next generation of PCIe 6.0 SSDs instead. Combine those facts with just how limited that extra performance is for gamers, and well it's a real tough sell.

Still, the MP700 Elite is a solid all-round performer. If you're looking for something a little cheaper and budget is a factor, if you can get this thing on offer, it'll deliver on its promise, and then some, all without breaking the bank.

A gaming laptop must be the complete package. The screen, GPU, CPU, memory, cooling, keyboard, and trackpad are all important. So, when we're talking about the best gaming laptop in any given year, it has to be a device that offers an extraordinary package, done extraordinarily well.

We're not short of options for this prestigious award in 2024. New designs were plentiful despite the lack of any new mobile GPUs this year. In their place, new CPU generations from Intel and AMD, Lunar Lake and Strix Point, gave manufacturers abundant opportunities to redesign their machines. Many took advantage of low-power parts to make slimmer, more portable gaming laptops.

It's these sorts of slimline gaming laptops that have largely won a nomination for entry into our hallowed hall of fame. The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 is one such thin machine that impressed us not only for its all-aluminium (aluminum, whatever) shell, but its fantastic speaker system, trackpad, and gorgeous screen. Then there's the Asus TUF A14, which brings AMD's superb Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 to bear in a more affordable compact chassis.

Then, the odd one out, the Gigabyte G6X. It's nowhere near as sleek, nor as slim, as the two others, but it's good on a budget. When a manufacturer makes an effort to keep costs down and improve the user experience, we take note. That's exactly what Gigabyte has done here, and without cutting any important specifications, like memory or storage size.

So, here are the nominees. We'll announce the winner on New Year's Eve.

Best gaming laptop 2024: the nominees

The winner of the PC Gamer Hardware Award for the best gaming laptop will be announced on New Year's Eve. It's all to play for, and any one of these three is completely deserving of the crown.

"In 2023, North Korea-affiliated hackers stole approximately $660.50 million across 20 incidents; in 2024, this number increased to $1.34 billion stolen across 47 incidents—a 102.88% increase in value stolen" says the report (via Bleeping Computer).

A number of large scale hacks are primarily to blame, according to the report, although small scale attacks appear to also be on the rise.

Notable high-profile incidents in 2024 attributed to North Korean-sponsored hackers include a $50 million heist of Radiant Capital, "a cryptocurrency that operates on an omnichain money market, aiming to consolidate fragmented liquidity across various blockchain protocols."

Yep. Anyway, Chainalysis says that while the number of crypto thefts overall is the highest its ever been this year, with 303 major incidents reported, 2022 still remains supreme when it comes to most money stolen, with a staggering $3.7 billion in crypto estimated to have been lost.

Regardless, that $1.3 billion figure accounts for 61% of the $2.2 billion total of funds stolen from crypto platforms in 2024, according to the report.

Most of the incidents were said to occur between January and July, when 72% of the total yearly value was pilfered. The analysts noted that DPRK-associated hackers conducted more frequent attacks than average over the year as a whole, which may indicate more capacity to execute large-scale attacks than years previous.

Earlier this year, it was reported that CoinStats, a cryptocurrency portfolio management app with over 1.5 million users, suffered a security breach that compromised 1,590 crypto wallets. The attack was blamed on North Korean hackers, specifically the Lazarus hacking group, a shadowy organisation said to be made up of an unknown number of individuals allegedly working for the government of North Korea.

The group has previously been blamed for multiple online crimes, including a $12 million cyber heist from the Bandcom Del Austro in Ecuador, and an attack on the Bangladesh Bank in which 35 fraudulent transactions were issued via the SWIFT network to transfer close to $1 billion in funds.

Only five of the transactions were successful, but it still amounted to $101 million being transferred to accounts traced to the Phillipines and Sri Lanka.

Still, it seems that groups like Lazerus are zeroing in on the once-again-booming cryptocurrency market. Is this the point where I remind you that crypto is still the wild west, and your money is better kept in... ah forget it. If the headline hasn't convinced you by now, not much else will. Happy holidays, everyone. Stay safe out there.

With only a few weeks until the incoming Trump administration takes over, US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo has given an interview (via The Wall Street Journal) in which she discusses her belief that export controls matter far less than infrastructure investment in the global race for chip domination.

Raimondo refers to holding back China by the use of sanctions as "a fool's errand", and that the CHIPS act, in which the US government poured billions of dollars of investment into US semiconductor manufacturing, "matters more than export controls."

"The only way to beat China is to stay ahead of them", she said. "We have to run faster, out innovate them. That's the way to win."

Despite Raimondo's beliefs, the Biden administration has continued to enforce tough trade restrictions on China throughout its time in office, including a ban on US semiconductor equipment suppliers from exporting to China, and the prohibition of the sale of advanced, high performance chips to the country, citing national security reasons.

In the meantime, the CHIPS act has been pouring billions of dollars of federal funding into companies like Samsung, Intel and TSMC in order to woo chipmakers into building fabs on US soil.

Whether the CHIPS act continues under the Trump administration is a question mark for now, although president-elect Trump is not believed to be a fan.

Despite the bill initially receiving bipartisan support, Trump was quoted in October as saying "that chip deal is so bad", and has plans of his own to enact huge tariffs on multiple countries, including China—citing the country's perceived failure to crack down on fentanyl smuggling as the reason for an extra 10% tariff on top of a planned 25% tariff on incoming goods.

Kush Desai, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, said that the incoming administration's plans include "enacting tariffs, cutting taxes, slashing regulations, and unleashing American energy." In regards to foreign chips, Trump was quoted as saying that the CHIPS act had provided "billions of dollars for rich companies" and that his plan would be to "tariff it so high that they will come and build their chip companies for nothing."

So, given that Raimondo has played a role as a key part of the outgoing administrations international economic policy, it's perhaps no surprise that she's throwing out cautionary rhetoric given Trump's recent comments. The inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States is scheduled to take place on January 20, 2025, and by the sounds of it we won't be seeing the ongoing trade disputes between US and China soften once his administration takes charge, although they may take a different form.

What this means for chip manufacturing in the US moving forwards, and the global flow of chips in general, is unclear. While Trump has not yet stated whether he will abolish the CHIPS act entirely, that hasn't stopped companies from rushing to finalise agreements in case of a sharp turnaround when the new government comes into power next January.

No, the real kicker is that this is the first gaming handheld PC I've used, held, or tested that sports AMD's latest APU, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370—the chip whose name I can rarely get right on the first try. Seriously, it's a curse, and I only ever remember the first bit because I know it's AMD desperately trying to make 'Ryzen AI' happen. Stop trying to make Ryzen AI happen.

The Strix Point silicon is a bit of a game-changer for handhelds, especially when you start to factor in all the other extras AMD has crafted that really play into the literal hands of PC gamers. Radeon Anti-Lag and Fluid Motion Frames 2 really are the key ones for handheld gaming, but also any game which sports FSR3 and its own per-game frame generation implementations, too.

Those are what sets the OneXFly F1 Pro apart from any other gaming handheld you could care to mention, because of how the HX 370 extends performance over the competition. Mind you, the $1,339 price tag will also set it apart. That's the sort of money that will get you a full RTX 4070 Super gaming PC and still leave you change enough to buy yourself a decent 1080p gaming monitor, too. So yeah, you've got to really want the form factor and performance to consider dropping that sort of cash on a handheld.

But mobile gaming is expensive; high-end handheld PCs doubly so. That's where Valve came in and played a blinder with the Steam Deck; it took Nintendo's Switch smarts, picked a lower spec chip, and stuck to a price point. Asus and Lenovo, with their own manufacturing might, have managed to bring prices down for their own performance devices, but smaller scale manufacturers, such as OneXPlayer and Ayaneo, seemingly cannot compete on that front and so you get pricing that feels way beyond acceptable.

What you are getting in the OneXFly F1 Pro, however, is a stellar little gaming device with performance to match its aesthetics. Though it is worth saying these are the same aesthetics with which the original OneXFly F1 was adorned.

That is no bad thing, because the slightly rubberised texture and smooth curves of the chassis feel great in the hands. And, while it is relatively weighty—coming in around the 600 g mark—its ergonomics and balance make it feel like one of the best designed handhelds I've used. It's created for the gaming long-haul and I've not had any of the hand cramping I get with the Steam Deck or other larger devices.

Okay, I say it's created for the long-haul, but that sadly does not extend to the OneXFly's battery. I want to get it out of the way up front, this is the biggest issue with an otherwise beautiful little gaming handheld: the battery life. Outside of the upgraded APU, the 48.5 Wh battery was the only thing that I really wanted to change from the original design. It's far too small to deliver a convincing long-term gaming experience with the OneXFly.

Basically, you are absolutely going to need to get yourself an external power pack to be able to enjoy this thing for more than an hour and forty reliably. I wish there had been a way to fit a higher capacity battery in that chassis, but it's so tightly packed in there that ain't going to happen.

The good news is that the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (oof, nailed it first time) absolutely slaps inside a handheld gaming PC. From our time testing it in laptop form, that's come as no surprise, but I will say the level of gaming performance you can get out of it running at just 15 W is pretty jaw-dropping. Sure, that's only made real by the twin pillars of upscaling and frame generation, but being able to hit between 43 and 52 fps in Star Wars: Outlaws at an upscaled 1080p resolution feels great.

Especially when, running at the same 15 W level with the same settings, the original OneXFly F1—with its Ryzen 7 7840U APU—is only capable of knocking around the low 20s in the fps stakes.

That sort of performance delta looked unlikely, however, when I was first doing my comparative testing against the older Ryzen APU. Looking at most of our gaming performance numbers and you'll see that in general you're only getting a handful of fps between them, the same is true even when you start throwing in upscaling, too.

There's the odd outlier, such as F1 24 and Hitman, where you're looking at around a 10 fps margin in favour of the Strix Point handheld, which is definitely more significant. But otherwise the 16 compute units of the Radeon 890M inside the HX 370 APU, compared with the 12 compute units of the Radeon 780M GPU of the Ryzen 7 7840U (and 8840U), don't seem to amount to a hill of beans/frames in most games.

Where that changes is when you enable frame generation in any form. Instantly there's a bigger performance delta, and especially so when you start to pull back on the power you let the APU draw in the first place. I feel that's largely because the CPU cores in the F1 Pro are running pretty slowly in the grand scheme of things; where it's capable of 5.3 GHz boost clocks, when pushed the F1 Pro is mostly just running around the 3.3 GHz mark and below.

It's not like the games are going to be CPU-limited on the new OneXFly, but the use of frame generation helps take the load off the CPU a little and lets those extra compute units make more of a difference when it comes to gaming performance.

The main takeaway, though, is that you can be running most games at 15 W, with either per-game frame generation or Fluid Motion Frame 2, and see great gaming performance that is both smooth and responsive.

However, even at 15 W in Star Wars: Outlaws I was seeing the battery drain at almost exactly 1% per minute. That's going to get me more game time than the PCMark gaming benchmark delivers at 30 W—in testing that's just 68 mins—but crucially not twice as much.

It's worth saying that not every game is going to be as intensive as Star Wars: Outlaws or a modern 3D title, such as Elden Ring. Throw something more lightweight, such as OlliOlli World or Lonely Mountains Downhill, into the mix and you're going to see that battery life stretch much farther.

The new AMD APU is one of the main reasons I'm so smitten with the OneXPlayer F1 Pro, but not the only one. That 7-inch 144 Hz OLED panel has also got my attention. Running at 50 % brightness it's still got plenty about it, and throwing it all the way up makes it look just stunning because of that 800 cd/m² peak luminance. The contrast is obviously exquisite, but the colours also sing, and both the refresh and OLED response time make gaming feel great, too.

I've also got the 32 GB RAM / 1 TB SSD version of the F1 Pro in for testing, which makes it a very good PC, too. Combined with the fact that the Acer SSD in question is pretty rapid (7,300 MB/s and 6,600 MB/s for sequential read/write performance) and that you get two USB4 Type-C connections and a full-size USB 3.0 Type-A port on top, you could happily dock this bad boi to a monitor and have a fully functional PC without much messing around at all.

People will keep saying what a mess Windows 11 is on a handheld, and while yeah, it's not a touchscreen OS—especially not on a small-screen—set the thing up to boot directly into Steam's Big Picture mode and you're not a million miles off SteamOS functionally.

The F1 Pro has all the extra configurable physical buttons you could want, the OneXConsole application has matured a lot and, while it's still not as user-friendly as the excellent Ayaneo software, it's got all the functionality, especially now there are performance profiles you can make and switch to on the fly.

It's also a size that delights, too. I liked the Ayaneo Kun for its big screen and extra touchpads, but it's a lump to lug about. With the OneXFly it's just the size of that 7-inch OLED screen and the pads either side. The bezels are slim and the device relatively diminutive, if a little chunky. But, y'know, reassuringly chunky.

So yes, you can colour me a big fan of the new OneXFly F1 Pro. For me it's one of the best handheld gaming PCs I've used, combining functionality with form and performance. I love the fact I can scale back the APU to such an extent and still get great gaming performance out of the device, and it is absolutely my favourite aesthetic of all the handhelds I've used. Though, to be fair, the gorgeous Ayaneo Flip DS has a lot of appeal, too.

But there are still two big things letting the OneXFly F1 Pro down: the sky-high price and the weak, weak battery. With an external power pack you can combat one of those, but there's nothing anyone but OneXPlayer can do about the other.

X user momomo_us posted a screenshot of what looks to be retailer GPU listings, and sitting almost at the tippy top are two GPUs called the RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT (via Tom's Hardware). Both new GPUs sit above AMD's current fastest graphics card in the listing, the RX 7900 XTX.

This new X0X0 naming convention seems to be confirmed by fellow leaker All The Watts!, who's posted a list of card groupings from the RX 9070-series down to the RX 8040-series.

And wouldn't you know it, there's a third. According to X user and known leaker HXL, the 8000-series nomenclature refers to RDNA 3.5 GPUs like Strix Halo, while the 9000-series naming scheme is supposedly for fully-fledged RDNA 4 GPUs.

All three leakers posted this new info within an hour of each other, so that could mean it's all a big game of telephone—or that they're all relying on the same leaked info at once.

The past three generations of desktop AMD cards have been known as the RX 5000, RX 6000, and RX 7000-series respectively, with the second digit used as the primary model differentiator. So this new skip-a-digit system would be a break from recent tradition, although it'd make a lot of sense.

AMD's latest Zen 5 CPUs are also called the 9000-series, although they use second digit identifiers like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Lining up the latest AMD GPUs and CPUs with a 9000 number each makes things relatively neat and tidy at least, with the change in identifier number hopefully meaning we don't have to break out a decoder wheel, as has been provided by AMD in the past.

Not only that, but it looks like an eagle-eyed redditor may have spotted images of at least one of these new cards displayed prominently in a recent advertising banner:

Are these reference 8000 series card? from r/Amd

Reddit user SubtleSerenity spotted a black and silver cooler design in several AMD ads on the platform, which looks distinctly different from AMD reference card designs previous. Hoang Anh Phu, another trusted AMD leaker, has since stated that they believe the card to be the RX 9070 XT—although as with all leak confirmations, pinches of salt all round are probably still a good idea.

Not that there's anything particularly exciting or revolutionary about what looks like a standard three-fan cooler design, but it still seems that AMD's marketing department may have let an ad loose too early. The card is shown in conjunction with a Ryzen 9 CPU, so the image has possibly been made for use with bundle deals yet to come.

With rumours abound that the top RDNA 4 card may be 45% faster in ray tracing than the RX 7900 XTX (and deliver raster performance equivalent to an RTX 4080), what we're now assuming is the RX 9070 XT might be a bit of a killer card. It's still not likely to compete with anything at the top of Nvidia's next-generation graphics cards, as AMD's Jack Huyhn has already stated it's not aiming for the high-end market with the new generation of GPUs.

Still, at the right price? It could still be a great card if these numbers prove out, and perhaps FSR 4 might even the playing field a bit more now it's rumoured to be getting a dose of AI, like Nvidia's DLSS. Still, it's all speculation for now, so we'll have to wait until CES 2025 to officially find out.

Let's clarify that, though. While modular, the Pivot isn't coming for the Scuf Instinct Pro's lunch, nor does it have the versatility of something like the Victrix Pro BFG, which boasts unscrewable swappable pieces. No, the Pivot is really just two things: It's a conventional gamepad out of the box, but literally hiding underneath its default configuration is a gamepad made for fighting games, or arcade games, or any other kind of controller-centric game that doesn't require analog sticks.

In other words, the analog sticks, d-pad and face buttons can be "pivoted" to reveal an alternate pad configuration hidden within the controller itself. It's a neat set up.

Once you've lightly twisted down the analog sticks and toggled a lock switch at the rear, it's just a matter of giving either module a little push, revealing its fighter-friendly cousin beneath. It's reminiscent of gamepads like the aforementioned Victrix Pro BFG Controller, but since the Pivot forgoes screws it arguably takes a less fussy approach (though it does lack the freedom of, say, adjusting the analog sticks between symmetrical and asymmetrical placement).

Perhaps it's better to think of the Pivot less as a customisable gamepad than a hybrid one, and this blurry identity extends to its "pro controller" chops. The analog sticks use drift-free hall effect tech, which you should consider essential in any modern controller, and the trigger buttons have adjustable stops, meaning you can change the depth of their presses. It comes with a 2.4 GHz wireless dongle and also supports Bluetooth connectivity. If you have an Xbox, the Pivot needs to be wired with the included USB-C to A cord.

But where pro features are concerned, the P or “paddle” buttons are where that aforementioned blurriness comes in. There are four in total but only two on the rear. The other two P buttons are face buttons, contributing to the six button layout of the right pivoting module. I've never really used all four rear P buttons on a controller at once, but if you do, and you need them all on the rear, the Pivot won't do that. Up to five profiles for these P buttons can be stored locally and changed on the fly either with the lil' screen on the gamepad itself, or using Turtle Beach's Control Center app. Each of these profiles can also store different configurations for analog stick deadzones and trigger sensitivity.

Based on this, you can probably already see that the Pivot has a fairly niche use case, but if you happen to lie within that niche it may be a godsend. Rather than forking out for a premium gamepad and a fight stick, you can buy this and effectively get both. If you happen to play a lot of arcade and retro games, but also like your analog sticks for modern blockbusters, the Pivot is perfect. If you aren't either of these people, though? You may be better off with something else.

For all its fight stick credentials the Pivot does have one drawback: it doesn't have tactile microswitches. To be clear, all P buttons here are microswitches, but compared to the eminently clicky buttons on the Stealth Ultra—which feel more like mouse clicks than gamepad presses—all buttons on the Pivot have the same slightly mushy feel of a normal Xbox controller. Foregoing tactile switches is an odd choice; In my opinion their audible precision is perfect for fighting and arcade games, and while that's a matter for debate, the tactile switches on the Stealth Ultra were one of my favourite qualities of that pad.

Another of the Pivot's nice 'n' niche features is the ability to assign the analog stick functions to either of the D-pads, lest you prefer the exactness of digital inputs. Oh, and there's a slider beneath the Xbox button, which makes sense as a volume wheel, but can also be reassigned to be, for example, a mic volume wheel. The onboard screen lacks some of the functionality seen in the Stealth Ultra, such as the ability to tweak the sensitivity of the trigger buttons and analog sticks, but that can still be adjusted in Turtle Beach's Control Center desktop app where vibration settings and RGB lighting can also be tweaked. Another feature of marginal use is the social media notifications, which works via a separate app on your smartphone and is compatible with Discord and a bunch of other social media platforms. Like it did on the Stealth Ultra, it feels like a superfluous feature that only sounds good in theory, but you may come to love it.

I had no trouble at all with connectivity, even when I had a handful of pads connected via Bluetooth to a Steam Deck. Battery life is a chill 20 hours, but if that's not enough for you rest assured it charges to 100% in under half-and-hour. The RGB implementation is minimal—not as weirdly excessive as its predecessor—with just two colourful bars on either side of the volume slider. And overall, the Pivot feels great in the hand: I like a heavy controller so its 300 grams felt good to me.

I really liked using the Pivot, and if you're going to make use of the swappable face buttons it's a brilliant pad. It's undeniably better than the vanilla Xbox controller—hall effect sticks, rebindable P buttons, adjustable trigger stops—but it's also double the price. Keeping that in mind, the Pivot is really for the folk out there for whom it will really feel like two controllers in one, and on those terms it succeeds. For everyone else, its older sibling the Stealth Ultra can usually be had for around the same price on sale.

It's possible to get the most luxurious gaming chair for as little as AU$729 if you're willing (or happy!) to buy a limited edition branded variety. For example, this model with the Superman logo emblazoned on its backrest is going for the special price of AU$729, and so is this Game of Thrones inspired take bearing the logo of the Starks (if you embrace chaos and prefer the Lannisters, they're accounted for too). There are also a handful of esports-centric models ranging Horde, Team Liquid and Cloud9. Of the options on sale, the Horde model is probably the least conspicuously branded, though you'll need to like that particular shade of red.

Of course, the Titan Evo's standard model, the one without the branding and fancy colourways, is also on sale for the aforementioned AU$764. That's pretty much what you can expect to pay for the Titan Evo during a sales event, but as always the price is worth it.

While the Titan Evo is brilliant, I'm personally more interested in Secretlab's gaming desks, especially since my desk is over 40 years old (I ate breakfast at it as a child). The Secretlab Magnus Pro XL is our favourite gaming desk, and it's currently going for AU$1,269, down from the usual AU$1,408 (the non-XL version is going for AU$1,099, down from AU$1,218). That's a pretty normal saving for this desk whenever Secretlab has seasonal sales, but it's a generous discount on a weapons grade desk with brilliant cable management thanks to its onboard power supply column.

These two products—the Titan Evo and the Magnus Pro XL—are best-of-class in their respective categories, but Secretlab also makes a bunch of other stuff as well: it's well worth checking out the brand’s Christmas Sale if you're looking to upgrade your gaming space.

This sucks, especially given most people who most need them have probably spent a lot of their cash on things like medicine, and doctors. Reckless fools.

While it's not groundbreaking for ergonomics, Ikea's Matchspel gaming chair is a PC throne that offers a fair amount of customisation at a very friendly price.

Honouring Swedish tradition, the Matchspel arrived at my door, flat-packed in a cardboard box ready to be assembled. It's a fairly easy setup, and like most modern gas lift chairs relies mostly on gravity and your juicy behind to keep itself on its feet. I didn't have any trouble putting this chair together almost entirely by myself.

There's a choice between a black or grey colourway on these. The black sports a red trim which is very ROG gamer, but I went with the light grey to match my desk.

I also wanted to see if it gathered dirt or discoloured with sweat or just contact. Thankfully, I am happy to report both the mesh backing and leatherette seat still look as grey as the day they arrived, despite much use, including a little sweating during heated gaming moments.

For a seat this affordable, there are a fair few settings to play with to get your own individual comfort.

When setting it up the instructions tell you to leave some screws a bit loose so the back of the chair can move a bit with your body and the lumbar support on this stretched fabric is pretty decent.

The downside is it's a little rickety feeling and noisy when parts move but not obnoxiously so. The headrest also has this mesh fabric backing and can have its height and angle adjusted quite dramatically to suit different heights.

There's one lever under the seat that lets you adjust the height via gaslift, and also the tilt of the back portion of the chair. Adjusting vertically is fairly standard and quite granular, but the tilt locks in at different set points. The recline isn't all the way back either but does let you lean a fair way for a quick relax.

When pushed in, that under seat lever locks the adjustments so you don't accidentally change your comfortable seat in a heated gaming moment. The armrests are pretty standard plastic but can also be pulled up and be pushed forward and back for further personalised comfort.

Despite a fair amount of customisation, especially for the price point, my biggest complaint with the Matchspel is still about ergonomics, and it's that there's no tilt for the bum cushion. To be fair, being able to tilt this forward and back would have made this chair a bit of a holy grail as it's not the most common adjustment you find in computer chairs.

If a chair this cheap had it I would be shocked, but given all the other options I was a little hopeful.

Unfortunately, for a lot of people, especially women or other folks with pelvic pain problems or similar issues this is a big deal and arguably is the most important part of a chair to adjust.

It also might have helped make up for the seat being quite firm under the buns, by being able to adjust it on the fly, especially on long sessions. As it stands I do notice that pressure starts to seep into slight discomfort after a little while seated.

That slightly personal (50% of the population) complaint aside, the Matchspel sports a fair few customisation options, and is reasonably comfy, especially for a chair that only costs $290 / £129. It's on the lower effort end when it comes to hefty computer chairs to set up, and looks business-appropriate in an understated way, especially with the light grey colour options.

It's gamer stealth, so you can pretend you're a professional who didn't totally just alt-tab out of Steam while on Zoom calls.

As reported on by Ars Technica, a handful of YouTubers in the fighting game community have been hacked, deleting all previous videos and replacing them with a livestream impersonating Ripple, a blockchain payment company. The livestreams in question are making predictions on cryptocurrency and using the platform of that Youtuber (with all its subscribers) to encourage people to send money to their crypto wallet.

The hack in question impersonated brands looking to 'sponsor' YouTubers, which would then expose them to a link, that would then grant them access to their accounts. Rooflemonger released a video detailing their correspondence with YouTube and what it's like to get the channel back. However, not all affected were so lucky.

Shyway, otherwise known as Alex, recently fell for the same scam and lost his channel for a few days. The channel was then taken down due to 'trademarks'. Though we don't know exactly what that means, it could have something to do with the scammers pretending to be Ripple. Even after clearing up the problem with YouTube support, Alex's channel has remained deleted and supposedly cannot be retrieved.

He was given access again to his Google account, but the YouTube account associated with it remains deleted. The YouTube X account confirmed the channel will stay deleted due to its violation of "community guidelines"

Without access to his YouTube channel to air why this happened, Alex posted a video on X, explaining it all. He claims he was reached out to by a scammer pretending to be SteelSeries. When he clicked on the NDA to check the details of this deal, he "lost everything in 30 seconds".

Surprisingly, he claims that this method also managed to entirely bypass two-factor authentication, though we don't quite know how. If everything here is as is remembered, this suggests 2FA is no longer the last bastion of security for people's accounts and is probably a good reminder to keep up-to-date with the latest internet security advice.

Being sceptical of things sent to you is very important and vetting links is perhaps the most vital part. Hopefully, there's some recourse here around these big channels but, as a viewer, it's also important to stay vigilant of what's on your YouTube feed. Now is as good a time as any to brush up on your cybersecurity skills.

This is one of those times, with 'better judgment' found dead in a ditch somewhere. The offending keeb in question is Dry Studio's Petbrick 65 model, featuring a fluffy outer frame that's not only pettable but also a darn sight easier to wash than an actual animal companion (via The Verge). Handmade and washable preferably by hand, the soft outer shell can be easily popped off in the event of a messy lunch at your desk.

The fluffy outer frame promises to be as plush as it looks, as Dry Studio claims it's a comparable texture to Jelly Cat's toys, saying that they've teamed up with a toy factory boasting two decades of experience to get it just right. The frame and keyboard come in two adorable colourways: 'Calico' with toebean-inspired design flourishes on the keys, and 'Odd-eye' which brings a more 'mysterious black cat with heterochromia' vibe to the function. Now, that's totally non-heinous.

But as much as I love them both (with more fluffy, less feline-inspired designs apparently on the way too), I can't justify scooping up both with a price tag of $239 per keyboard. Cost aside, furry tech threatens the worst kind of conversation starter, though at least these come with detailed wash care guidelines—though rattling all of those off may just beg further questioning. To add to my ill-advised spending decisions, there are yet more cat-themed keebs afoot… a-paw?

I never saw the appeal of a screen on my keyboard of all places, but James' review of the SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL Gen 3 gave me one reason to reconsider. QwertyKeys' QK80 MK2 gave me another. The QK80 Mark 2 is a wireless mechanical keyboard with RGB lighting and a leaf spring mount. It comes in a variety of colourways, but I'm personally pining after this long-since sold-out Neon Genesis Evangelion limited edition. So, what's the cat connection?

Wheeling back around to that little onboard screen, what caught my eye wasn't just the possibility of loading up that bad boy with cat GIFs. Instead, enter Bongo Cat mode. As this TikTok demonstrates, one screen theme gives you a kitty companion that tap-a-taps in time with your own keystrokes.

@ty_cottle

♬ original sound - Ty Cottle

Accessed via the buttons directly under the screen, the Meow theme offers playful though limited reactivity. For just two examples, rapid typing makes the keyboard cat quickly smack his paws with a determined expression, while stepping AFK for long enough sends your feline friend off to sleep.

While not exactly reinventing the keyboard wheel (cuboid?), cat cliches are unfortunately a reliable tactic for parting me from my hard-earned money. The base QK80 MK2 directly from QwertyKeys is technically available from $134, though the price varies depending on which of the robust roster of colourways you pick, and what other build features you opt for. It's just as well the Neon Genesis Evangelion edition is sold out, as that would've cost more than twice as much. Talk about saving me from myself.

Some mind-bending facts to kick off with: The Parker Solar Probe is the fastest moving object that humans have ever built, reaching a top speed of 430,000 miles an hour thanks to the Sun's gravitational pull (via Ars Technica). It weighs less than a ton, and its scientific payload is a mere 110 lbs (50 kg), but its heat shield will have to withstand temperatures in excess of 2,500° Fahrenheit (1,371° C) as it plunges ever deeper into the Sun's outermost layer.

But why's it there in the first place? Well, scientists have been keen to study the origins of solar wind, the stream of protons and electrons emanating from the Sun's outermost layer. While we can view the secondary effects of this phenomenon with the naked eye in the form of an Aurora, apparently you really need to be there for yourself to understand its origins properly.

Or by proxy, I guess. Anyway, the probe made its first contact with the solar atmosphere back in 2021, although the stakes seem a fair bit higher this time.

The Parker Solar Probe's mission is to plunge deeper than ever before into the Sun's corona, collect readings from a Faraday cup made out of Titanium-Zirconium-Molybdenum (no I'm not making that up), and then orient itself back into the harsh coldness of space.

More than once, in fact, meaning that it's been built out of exotic materials that scientists hope will withstand being repeatedly dunked in and out of the outer layer of our ever-terrifying star at ever deeper levels.

Normal cables would melt under such conditions, so NASA and the team from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics laboratory grew sapphire crystal tubes to protect them and made the wires themselves from niobium, a chemical element with the highest critical temperature of the elemental superconductors.

I say that like I always knew it, but I just looked it up. If you'd asked me what niobium was before researching this story, I would have guessed it was the counterpoint to vibranium used by Doctor Doom in issue #342 of The Adventures of... you get the idea.

Anyway, that's the plan. While I wish the team and their endeavours the best of luck, part of me thinks that the hubris of chucking a spacecraft at the most powerful thing in our solar system—upon which all life on this planet depends—is tempting fate somewhat, given the state of the world these days.

Still, the march of progress must continue. I still occasionally wake up with cold sweats in memory of my first close encounter with a star in Elite Dangerous, in which I found myself pulled helplessly towards a fiery death as my ship cooked itself to pieces around me. Just for good measure, I'll avoid playing it again until the holidays have well and truly passed. No point jinxing this sort of thing now, is there?

The GPU in the hot new PlayStation 5 Pro is mostly pretty old tech. But it does preview the ray-tracing upgrades that are coming with AMD's new RDNA 4 graphics chips for PC gamers.

That's the low down from the same PS5 Pro deep dive that also revealed Sony went its own way with AI hardware in the console rather than using AMD technology.

Sony's lead architect for its PlayStation consoles, Mark Cerny, has explained that the GPU in the PS5 Pro is still RDNA 2-based at its core, just like the original PS5. The reason for that is straightforward, compatibility.

By largely carrying over RDNA 2 technology for the shaders in the PS5 Pro's GPU, game developers can compile a single code path and have it run on both the PS5 and the PS5 Pro.

However, the PS5 Pro is not identical. "The base technology for PS5 Pro is somewhere between RDNA 2 and RDNA 3," Cerny says. For starters, while the shaders are RDNA 2, parts of the geometry pipeline are from RDNA 3.

Those geometry pipeline elements are faster but essentially invisible to a game engine. You can use the same code on both consoles, it will simply run better on the PS5 Pro.

However, had Sony gone for, say, the doubled-up floating point math capability from RDNA 3, that would require two code paths to be compiled, one for PS5 and one for PS5 Pro. That wasn't a burden Sony wanted to put onto game devs for what is a mid-life refresh rather than a properly new console generation.

But from a PC gaming perspective, easily the most intriguing aspect of the PS5 Pro's GPU involves ray tracing. Cerny says the upgraded ray-tracing hardware is sourced from a "future RDNA" generation.

Cerny is non-specific, but he is clear that this technology is "showing up first" in the PS5 Pro and is not currently available in any other AMD chip. Given we're expecting RDNA 4 to be replaced by an architecture-branded CDNA, that really only leaves RDNA 4.

Whatever, Cerny goes into some detail regarding the upgrades. You can watch the video for the full details. But the short version involves doubling up the BVH performance and adding new stack management hardware.

The BVH performance boost gives broad-based improvements in ray-tracing performance, while the new stack management engine particularly helps with complex reflections.

So what impact does that have on performance? "It's difficult to quote an exact speed up because it's very dependent on specifics of usage. But we commonly see the calculation of the rays occurring at double or triple the speed of Playstation 5," Cerny says.

However, that performance boost includes the simple impact of having a 67% larger and more complex GPU in PS5 Pro versus PS5. Cerny reckons that alone tends to translate into a real-world performance boost of around 45%.

So, bearing in mind Sony is claiming ray tracing is typically around 100% to 200% faster on the PS5 Pro, it's clear that the bulk of that improvement is architectural rather than simply a consequence of adding 67% more functional units.

That bodes pretty well for RDNA 4 GPUs. Currently, AMD has comfortably the weakest Ray-tracing performance of the three main GPU vendors for the PC.

Intel's new B580 GPU has pretty decent ray tracing throughput, but it's Nvidia that's in the lead. Based on the improved ray tracing in the PS5 Pro, we'd expect AMD to close most if perhaps not all of the gap to Nvidia.

Of course, Nvidia will have its own new GPU architecture arriving early in the new year alongside AMD's RDNA 4. Known as Blackwell and likely to be branded RTX 50 series, it will no doubt bring its own ray tracing boost. Odds are, then, that AMD will remain at a clear disadvantage.

But hopefully, RDNA 4's ray tracing will have improved sufficiently to make it more usable than that of existing RDNA 2 and RDNA graphics cards for the PC, where enabling high-quality ray tracing in games like Cyberpunk 2077 can really hammer frame rates. Watch this space...

You'll also need one with integrated graphics and, assuming you'll be using the X600 for some level of gaming, you'll want the best, namely the Radeon 780M. With those thoughts in mind, we decided to test-drive the DeskMini with the Ryzen 7 8700G (4.2 - 5.1 GHz, 8 cores, Radeon 780M graphics, 65 W TDP, 95 °C TJMax) and the Ryzen 5 8600G (4.3 - 5 GHz, 6 cores, Radeon 760M graphics, also 65 W TDP and 95 °C TJMax).

The chassis is a breeze to work with. Undo the four screws on the rear and the internal tray slides out to reveal the motherboard. Within minutes we had the CPU, the bundled cooler, RAM and M.2 storage secured, ready to do the Windows installation dance.

The specs are a curious mix of the cutting edge and the weirdly legacy. It has support for current AM5 CPUs, DDR5 up to 96 GB @ 6400MHz (we installed 32 GB @ 5600MHz), and it can take a fast, PCIe 5.0 M.2 drive plus a second PCIe 4.0 drive. And yet, round the back, I was bemused to find... a VGA port? Perfect for playing Leisure Suit Larry on your CRT monitor, but thankfully, you get DisplayPort and HDMI as well. There's no WLAN/BT card out of the box though; you get an E-Key M.2 socket to install one, but you'll need to provide your own or dongle up.

I/O options are spartan, with a single USB 3.2 type-C, a USB 3.2 type-A and an audio jack up front. Round the back, there are just two more USB 3.2 type-A ports, a 2.5G LAN port, plus the aforementioned AV slots. Without a USB hub, you may find yourself juggling devices in and out.

The kit also comes with cabling to snug a pair of 2.5” SSDs to the underside of the mobo tray, but frankly, two M.2 drive slots seems ample; I'd much rather ASRock forewent the SATA option and made space for a low-profile 120 mm fan somewhere. Because as it stands, there is no provision whatsoever for active case-cooling in the X600. Weirdly there are two fan headers, but that's a moot point; there's just no spare volume, or indeed mounting points, for a case fan.

The kit ships with a CPU cooler, but it's tiny. The fan is a mere 65 mm and it has a big job to do, both in cooling the heatsink on a 65 W CPU and exhausting the resultant hot air out of the case. It doesn't bode well for your ears either; when fans of this size get busy, they make like tiny, angry server-farms.

However, there's space enough to fit an aftermarket cooler up to 47 mm inheight instead. We tested the bundled cooler against Thermalright's AXP90-X47, a unit capable of handling higher-TDP chips and a popular choice with small form-factor builders, though we swapped the stock fan out for a Noctua NFA9-X14 to keep things civil.

Like many aftermarket coolers, the AXP90-X47 has a custom mounting system and CPU backplate, which means removing the stock AM5 heatsink-mounts from the business side of the mobo and unbolting the board from its mounting tray in order to remove the stock CPU backplate from its underbelly.

And let me tell you, that thing is not designed to be removed.

The backplate was glued on so hard, I simply couldn't pry it off without risking damage to the motherboard, either from my pry-tool skipping, or the amount of flexure the board was going through as I tried to lever the backplate up and loosen the glue. Admitting defeat, I found that I could bolt the Thermalright cooler onto the existing backplate, but thanks to a curved metal lip running around the backplate's outer edge, it was extremely fiddly to grip and tighten the four hex-nuts which tension the cooler onto the CPU.

Got there in the end with a nice tight fit but, I won't lie, it was a royal, finger-numbing pain in the ass. So caveat emptor: while ASRock states you can fit an aftermarket cooler—and this box absolutely demands one—it's not necessarily a straightforward job. Closing the case up afterward, I also found it a very squeaky fit, with the fan-frame pushed flush against the intake grill of the case panel, which is a perfect recipe for noisy air turbulence.

So with all our parts in place, let's get into it. Paired with the Radeon 760M and Radeon 780M respectively, the 8600G and 8700G offer comparable levels of gaming performance to AMD's mobile APUs in our 1080p, medium-settings, AAA game-tests. While the 8700G outmatched it's sibling and mobile peers in most cases, neither offered significantly better performance than, say, the Ryzen 7 7840HS and Radeon 780M combo running at a full 54 W, and the 8600G often fell below that.

Most of what we threw at each CPU saw 30 fps+, except for Total War: Warhammer 3's intensive campaign benchmark, which left the 8600G panting to make 25 fps, and Forza, which only saw 27 fps in contrast to the 8700G's 44 fps. With a negligible core clockspeed difference between the two chips and both having ample cores for gaming, It's clear that the Radeon 780M enjoys a tangible performance advantage over the 760M.

Both CPUs ran indies and less-demanding titles very nicely, with the 8700G predictably ahead. The 8600G made 45-55 fps in Stray, to the 8700G's 50-70 fps. In Subnautica, the difference was 45-60 fps to 55-75 fps; in Soulstone Survivors and Bioshock Remastered however, both chips performed similarly, at around 45-75 fps and 140-200+ fps respectively. While the 8700G is more costly, it's the clear choice if you're looking to build a compact 1080p gaming system in the ASRock DeskMini X600.

But should you? Because without any active cooling in the case, which equates to completely unmanaged airflow, it's hard to keep the temperature down on these chips without running the CPU fan pretty hard.

Predictably, the bundled CPU cooler performs dreadfully under load. It'll stop a CPU hitting its TJMax, but DEAR LORD does it sing. At idle it's virtually inaudible, but the second it starts spinning up, it emits a high-frequency whine that only increases in pitch with the RPM until you're at risk of defenestrating your lovely new build.

This is exacerbated by the CPU fan's speed-stepping. It's an absolute sluggard in responding to temperature change. Given multicore torture-test loads, both CPUs jump straight to 90 °C, but incredibly, the 65 mm fan takes 4-5 minutes to slowly accelerate to its highest, most irritating pitch-intensity. Upon killing the load, we then measured a twelve minute interval until the fan wound down to blessed silence, with the temperature inching slowly down all the way. The fan and cooler combo just cannot dissipate heat well, and with no case fans to shove it out the door, that's what you get.

The Thermalright AXP90-X47 shows a marked improvement, both in noise levels and heat displacement, but it still steps too slowly by default. We avoided the hassle of jumping in and out of the BIOS to remedy this, and installed the free and excellent Fan Control app to experiment with custom curves and reduce the speed-step interval to 1 second. This resulted in a near-instant RPM response to temperature change.

With a custom curve applied to the Noctua fan, we achieved a decent noise-to-cooling balance, where intensive gaming had the CPU hovering inthe 80-85 °C range with the fan capped at a palatable 55% of its max RPM, albeit with noticeable turbulence thanks to the fan's proximity to the inlet grill. We simply couldn't achieve the same results with the bundled cooler, which squeals disagreeably all throughout its rev-range.

All of which leaves the DeskMini X600 rather in limbo. You can pack in a cutting-edge CPU and RAM, but there are no active cooling capabilities to compensate. You can achieve a performant and moderately quiet (though by no means silent) build using the Ryzen 7 8700G and an aftermarket cooler, but the costs soon stack up. There's the price of the chip itself, some RAM, some WiFi provision, and we'd class an aftermarket 47 mm cooler plus a top-tier quiet fan as requirements rather than options.

Add those components to the cost of the box itself and you‘re blasting past the price of a quality, APU-armed mini-PC with broadly similar performance, a cooling solution to escort heat from the case, and quiet operation. With two M.2 storage slots and provision for a further two SATA drives, the X600 would make a neat media server, though we'd opt for a lower-TDP CPU, and you'd still want a superior cooler to eliminate the audio horror-show.

In short, if you're looking for a side-rig for 1080p gaming, this is not the droid you're looking for.

A recent series of photos on X attracted a lot of attention this week, as it showed staff at the Hilligoss Bakery apparently processing orders on a Commodore 64-based register system. Commenters pointed out that the last publicly posted picture of the register was taken in 2021, so Tom's Hardware decided to give them a call—and staff duly verified that the systems were still in use.

Our American friends love to point and laugh at a British-ism, so I'll duly point out that I am well aware our spelling of doughnut looks ridiculous, and that donut is better. However, the hardware team informs me that as a tea-drinking, yellow-toothed Brit, doughnut is what I should be going with.

Anyway, it's genuinely impressive that these 42-year-old machines are still trucking away in the front of what looks like a busy bakery, having presumably spent their lives being covered in sugar, flour, and probably a fair amount of sweat.

The shop's been open since 1974, while the earliest Commodore 64s were released in 1982—meaning there was at least an eight year gap when the bakery used something else to handle transactions, presumably Charles Babbage's difference engine or an Antikythera mechanism.

Even at release, the Commodore 64 wasn't known for being particularly powerful. Featuring either a 1.023 or 0.985 MHz CPU, 64 kB of RAM (hence the name) and capable of a 320 x 200 display resolution, it's now the sort of machine that hobbyists go to great lengths to acquire and repurpose.

It's a piece of history after all, and thereby has become a go-to for those looking for retro-based project ideas.

Like this man who turned his into a theremin, and later joined two of them together to make an accordion. Or this ambitious project to force one into AI image generation duties, despite the fact that most of them have been retired to museum-piece duty.

So the C64 lives on and seems to be a vital piece of infrastructure keeping the small town of Brownsburg supplied with delicious sugary treats. My local bakery uses an iPad-based system that constantly breaks, so perhaps there's something in relying on the old-school stalwarts of computers past to ensure that fresh baked goods remain readily available at all times.

AMD, of course, is responsible for both the CPU cores and the bulk of the GPU technology in PS5 Pro. But when it comes to AI acceleration for upscaling, Sony decided to very much do its own thing.

For clarity, what we're talking about here when we refer to "AI acceleration" is the matrix math hardware used to power neural networks, otherwise known as machine learning or ML. Currently, both Nvidia and Intel have dedicated matrix math acceleration hardware in their graphics chips for PCs. But AMD does not. Indeed, the existing AMD-based PS5 non-Pro has no dedicated matrix math hardware.

In Nvidia and Intel GPUs, that matrix math hardware is primarily used for various upscaling technologies, including DLSS and XeSS. The lack of matrix math hardware in AMD GPUs is why AMD's FSR upscaling is based on hand-coded algorithms rather than ML. And that, in turn, is a big part of the reason why FSR isn't as good even as XeSS by many measures and is certainly behind DLSS.

According to Cerny, Sony had two critical decisions to make for PS5 Pro and ML acceleration. First, it had to decide whether to have a dedicated NPU or Neural Processing Unit or to use an enhanced GPU. Sony chose the latter.

Then it had to decide whether to license that technology or build its own. Cerny says the PS5 Pro project started way back in 2020 and from the get go it was decided that Sony didn't want generic ML hardware, but something specific to PS5 Pro's workloads.

"Once you're licensing technology, that's what you're doing forever. So, in 2020, despite the degree of effort required, we decided to build our own hardware and software technology," Cerny says.

The target was 300 TOPS of ML performance. That's 300 trillion operations per second, or roughly on par with the raw ML performance of an Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti.

To achieve that, Sony modified AMD's RDNA 2 GPU architecture. "We made a set of targeted enhancements to the RDNA shader core and the surrounding memory systems. We're calling it custom RDNA," Cerny says.

The problem for Sony was that adding matrix math capability to the RDNA 2 shader core as used in the plain old PS5 wasn't going to be enough. Matrix math is incredibly bandwidth hungry to the extent that, without enhancements to the memory system, the new ML hardware would only achieve 3% of its full potential in a worst-case scenario. Yikes.

So, Sony came up with a custom on-chip memory solution, plus tiling algorithms, that allow the matrix math to be done entirely on the GPU and without having to access system memory.

Designing all this was a "four-year journey" according to Cerny. The result uses the vector registers in the RDNA 2 shaders as RAM. That provides 15 MB of memory at a combined bandwidth of 200 TB/s. That compares with the "mere" 576 GB/s of bandwidth of the PS5 Pros GDDR6 memory. Meanwhile, the tiling algorithms allows the matrix math to be split up into pieces small enough to fit inside that 15 MB.

Anyway, it's that new ML hardware that powers Sony's new Playstation Spectral Super Resolution or PSSR upscaling software, which is essentially Sony's answer to Nvidia DLSS and Intel XeSS. Oh and AMD FSR, albeit as explained above FSR is not based on machine learning.

"Looking back at the four years since we started this project, I'm so glad that we made the time-intensive decision to build our own technology. Results are good and just as importantly, we've learned so much about how AI can improve game graphics. It can only make our future brighter, say Cerny."

So, the big question that follows out of this is why Sony felt the need to do its own ML hardware. Cerny says Sony didn't want to be tied into a permanent licensing arrangement, which implies that Sony views ML upscaling as even more important than GPU architecture. After all, Sony is willing to license AMD's broader GPU architectures.

Then again, back in 2020 did AMD even have ML hardware to offer? It's worth noting that AMD's current RDNA 3 based GPUs still lack ML hardware. And some rumors suggest its upcoming RDNA 4 GPUs may not have ML hardware, either. So, maybe the only way Sony could get ML hardware into the PS5 Pro was to do its own thing.

If true, it would also mean that we likely won't see an AMD graphics chip with ML hardware until about 2027 when the upcoming RDAN4 chips are replaced with something based on AMD's new CDNA unified architecture.

Given even Intel's first-gen Arc GPUs had ML hardware and Nvidia is about to launch its fourth generation of GPUs with ML hardware, that really is a damning indictment of AMD's GPU technology and leaves the company nowhere in the AI upscaling race.

Here's hoping that rumors are incorrect and AMD has some GPUs with ML hardware coming soon.

Generally, when SKU listings for new products hit the databases, that's sometimes a sign that some of those entries might be available in the near future. That being said, companies put placeholder listings for non-existent products up all the time, and that's exactly what I think these latest ECC database listings are.

So as a result, you get something like Palit's entries, which include an RTX 5050, RTX 5060, RTX 5080 Super, and RTX 5090 Ti Super (via Wccftech). The current rumours suggest that we'll be seeing the launch of the RTX 5080, RTX 5090, and possibly the RTX 5070 at CES in January, with no official mention of those hypothetical cards thus far.

While it's possible that Nvidia has managed to swerve the rumour mill and ends up launching cards we previously hadn't heard of, Ti and Super variants of previous generation cards have traditionally been released much further in the lifecycle. And it's highly debatable which, if any, of these listed GPUs will eventually appear.

Although it is worth mentioning that there is some speculation about an RTX 5070 Ti being launched either alongside its non-Ti sibling or before it, which would be a change from the norm of recent years.

Here we see ourselves entering the thorny phase of a GPU pre-release, where anything is potentially possible but the rumours begin to swirl, cross streams, and become tangled upon each other to create a confusing mess of possibilities.

So let's see where everything stands currently: We know that Jensen Huang will be delivering the keynote at CES 2025 on January 6, and we're expecting him to reveal some tasty graphics cards of the Blackwell generation. We're expecting those cards to be the RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and possibly the RTX 5070 as well, although we're prepared to be surprised.

Not this surprised, though. What would an RTX 5090 Ti Super even look like, anyway? Rumours suggest that the RTX 5090 will be an absolute monster, with 32 GB of VRAM, 21,760 CUDA cores, and a 600 W TDP.

A Ti Super variant? I can only imagine that it would be six slots deep, inhale small birds from mid-air, and glow brightly enough that you wouldn't need in-case RGB.

Still, speculation is fun I guess. Regardless, these SKUs do tell us that a launch of new Nvidia GPUs is likely imminent (not that the rumours and the keynote announcement didn't suggest that already) and that manufacturers are sowing the seeds for hypothetical new graphics cards that may not ever appear. That's less fun, I admit, but those are the facts, folks.

As reported by The Verge, according to an email sent to tech writer Sean Hollister, Lenovo promises its CES 2025 event on January 7 will show the "future of handheld gaming firsthand". In that same email, Valve is reported to be a special guest, which isn't inherently interesting until you pair it with news from last week.

Earlier this month, we got renders of a white Lenovo Legion Go S and, soon after, leaks appeared of a black model, complete with a Steam button. The Twitter account (owned by a prominent leaker named Evan Blass) has seemingly disappeared and, being a rumour, we have to take this information with a grain of salt but the account has previously been seen as reputable.

Back in August, a SteamOS beta suggested a potential launch on the best handheld gaming PCs like the ROG Ally so all this information compiled together suggests we might finally see a SteamOS-supported Lenovo Legion at CES early next year.

CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is a yearly event in Las Vegas where tonnes of tech companies show off what they're working on. Think of it like the E3 (or Summer Games Fest now) of the tech world.

Generally speaking, we expect to see lots of teases over the coming weeks as companies prepare to unveil whatever big announcement they have coming. The information here was from an email so it's not a direct press release but the promises made are an attempt to build up hype for those attending the show.

We rather liked the original handheld in our Lenovo Legion Go review, praising its fantastic screen and intuitive detachable Switch-like controllers. SteamOS support would only make a device like this easier to use as Windows can be a bit cumbersome on a device you simply boot up to play a game with.

On a dedicated desktop, your PC often often has more than one function but, on Steam Deck, I'd be surprised if less than 90% of my time with the device was spent in game (or maybe browsing through the endless amount of sales).

Maybe giving me even quicker access to Steam sales isn't always a great thing actually.

Microsoft has been logging many of the various known issues on its Windows release health page, and the most recent entry relates to Auto HDR. Some users have been experiencing incorrect game colours with "certain display configurations" and even full-on crashes in some games.

Microsoft has applied a compatibility hold on devices with Auto HDR enabled, meaning that these devices will not be offered the option to install 24H2 via the Windows Update release channel if they haven't installed it already.

However, that's far from the only 24H2 bug doing the rounds this holiday season. Second on the list is an entry mentioning audio issues with a "limited set of devices from one manufacturer" namely devices using Dirac Audio with cridspapo.dll.

Again, Microsoft says it's put a compatibility hold on affected PCs—but both myself and my colleague, Nick Evanson, have had audio device issues since installing the update, and neither of us uses Dirac Audio. In my case I've had audio devices disappear, refuse to switch over (which is fun for meetings!) and odd crackling.

All of this is directly post-update, which for me also broke many of my drivers and required me to reinstall them manually. Oh, and my Windows notifications keep disappearing and reappearing en masse, too.

Polling the hardware team for odd PC experiences since installing the update reveals yet more strange behaviour. Our Jacob Fox has experienced animation glitching when minimising and maximising individual windows, which a quick Google search reveals seems to be an ongoing issue for many users.

He's disabled animations entirely to fix it, so spare a thought for poor Mr Fox this holiday season with his barebones Windows experience.

Nick has ongoing issues with Chrome, which (directly after the installation of 24H2) occasionally freezes page rendering halfway through, leaving the bottom half stuck in place but the top half still active. And as for myself, it's not just audio and notification issues that have me scratching my head.

I noticed odd stuttering and hangs in games that ran smoothly pre-update, including Diablo 4 and No Mans Sky, both of which usually run consistently at over 100 fps on my machine. Spending an evening scouring forums for a fix (not exactly my favourite way to spend a night off), I noticed that some people were recommending turning off fast startup and disabling hibernation to solve the issue in certain games.

And wouldn't you know it, that's worked for me too. These are anecdotal experiences of course, but I'd say it was worth a try if you've experienced odd hitching and micro stutter issues since installing the update yourself.

All this, and I haven't even got to the Ubisoft debacle, in which 24H2 was prevented from being sent out to machines with certain Ubisoft games installed on them, like Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, in order to prevent crashing. Ubisoft has been releasing hotfixes to solve the problem, but certain games are still yet to receive a fix.

Previous issues have included the 24H2 audio jump scare bug, the Western Digital SSD BSOD bug, and a borknado of other pre-public launch problems.

So, it seems 24H2 continues to cause headaches for many. I can't remember a time a major Windows update didn't cause widespread issues, but even so. this latest patch seems to cause more than most.

So here's hoping Microsoft squashes these bugs sooner rather than later. I have games to play over the holidays, you see, and I'd rather not spend my time off scouring the forums for yet more hackaround fixes.

I don't know about you, but I'm starting to think 2025 might be the year of the handheld gaming PC. This recently teased OneXPlayer G1 handheld with a removeable keyboard is a good sign of things to come, anyways.

We'll be embarking fully into the second generation of handheld tech in 2025, and that means companies can hopefully start experimenting a little more now they've got a more mature foundation on which to do so.

We're certainly seeing such experimentation from OneXPlayer's latest announcement. It "combines a sleek, compact design with a detachable keyboard and built-in controls for ultimate versatility".

It also comes with the same HX 370 processor that you'll find in the top-end version of the new OneXFly F1 Pro which our Dave's been testing. He's been genuinely impressed with the level of performance you can get out of it at 1080p, especially with the help of FSR 3 and frame gen.

But if you want to hear about all that you can wait for Dave's review. With this OneXPlayer G1, the main thing is that laptop/handheld design. It can be hard to make out in the YouTube video—it's a teaser that actually teases—but on its Indiegogo page things are laid out very clearly.

It's a GPD-looking thing, reminding me of the GPD Win Max 2 in shape and stature, at least—its screen is a little smaller than the Max 2, but significantly bigger than the Mini. The difference is, the G1 has a detachable keyboard, meaning you can "switch seamlessly between laptop, console, and tablet modes for any task."

Once that keyboard (and trackpad) is peeled, you have access to a controller layout, along with what looks to be a smaller touch keyboard underneath, in the same kind of split layout as the GPD.

This is exactly the kind of experimentation I like to see in the handheld sphere, now that many handhelds have nailed the basics. New form factors are always fun.

We've already seen some Acer experimenting in a similar fashion with its Project DualPlay concept. Except that's more decidedly a laptop—it just has a pop-out gamepad on the underside of the trackpad. And we've seen dual-screen innovation in the form of the Ayaneo Flip DS, which our Jacob Ridley really loves.

So yeah, I'm excited not just for this particular handheld, if and when it comes to market, but for what kinds of mainstream form factor adjustments it might lead to in the handheld market in general. And to be honest, it's probably best I don't get my sights honed in on the OneXPlayer G1 in particular, given it'll probably be incredibly expensive. That is, assuming the F1 Pro is anything to go by.

Today, for day 10 of its "12 days of OpenAI" Christmas lead-up event, OpenAI has gone further than I expected by unleashing its chatbot from the tethers of the internet and into the telecom airwaves. Yes, you can now call ChatGPT or WhatsApp message it. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) you can only do the former if you live in the US, but if you live elsewhere you can still do the latter.

The number is 1-800-CHATGPT, and yes, it's toll-free. Which is how OpenAI is marketing it, by the way: "Call toll free, 1-800-ChatGPT." Nice. That's 1-800-2428478 for those unfamiliar with traditional keypad texting.

OpenAI's Keven Weil says that this is all about "making it [AI] as accessible as possible to as many people as we can."

As you can see from the image below, I found ChatGPT WhatsApp to work just fine. The QR code I've slapped on to the right-hand side is taken from OpenAI's video. If you scan it, it opens up the WhatsApp app and takes you to a conversation with ChatGPT.

I can't test the phone calls as I'm not based in the US, but judging from the phone calls the OpenAI reps make in the video, that seems to work just fine.

I'm slightly jealous of those of you living across the pond after watching that video, too. If I could get over the initial embarrassment of doing so, I reckon being able to speed-dial ChatGPT could come in quite useful. A bit like using Siri, but... well, more conversational and better (sorry, Apple). Plus, you could even do so on a dumbphone.

Just don't go using it as replacement for, you know, actual human contact. It's not a conscious human being. Maybe try hanging up on it a few times to get your mind used to that fact. It's not rude, it doesn't feel anything. Don't believe me? It even says so, unprompted, in our chat above.

So there you go, that's day 10 from OpenAI for you. There've been some smaller announcements from OpenAI over this 12-day bonanza, but some bigger ones, too. On day three, for instance, the AI company unleashed Sora, its video generation model. And now we have this: ChatGPT phone calls and ChatGPT on WhatsApp.

I wonder what the last couple of days will bring. I'm not sure much could top this, to be honest. Well, not much that doesn't have me breaking open the Skynet Defence Manual. And that wouldn't be very Christmassy, would it?

The new Core 200H-series has just hit the Intel website. These new product listings give us all the information we could need about the new mobile processors, which will make up the mainstream of the laptop market.

The Core 200H-series chips include up to 14 Performance-cores (Raptor Cove) and 8 Efficient-cores (Gracemont). That's more than what's available in the socketed 100-series (up to 2 P-cores and 8 E-cores) but a match for the 100-series embedded processors (up to 6 P-cores and 8 E-cores).

The top 200H-series chip, the Core 9 270H, is rated to a significantly higher clock speed than any 100H-series chip at 5.8 GHz.

You can see some of the differences between the mobile (socketed) 200-series and 100-series chips in this table, spotted by momomo_us on X (via Videocardz).

So, why does the Core 200H-series exist? In some ways it's set to be the replacement to some of the 14th Gen mobile processors. It's tough to say exactly how laptop manufacturers will position the 200H-series but there are a few worthy replacements in the lineup. Take the Core 9 270H. This chip offers a decent improvement over the Core i5 14500HX, which the same number of cores but a much higher clock speed and a lower TDP.

The problem is the Series 2 chip is billed with a recommended customer price of $697, while the 14th Gen chip is $337. That doesn't quite add up to me considering both use the same, now-outdated architecture.

What makes things more complicated is that these aren't the only 200H-series processors we're expecting to hit the market. The Core 200H-series Raptor Lake chips are here first, but Intel has already confirmed that Core Ultra 200H-series and 200HX-series chips are on the way next year. These are built around the newer Arrow Lake architecture, which is hybrid of its Meteor Lake (Series 1) and Lunar Lake (Series 2) chips.

If you find these codenames, architectures, and generations confusing, I dare say you wouldn't be the only one. Intel has really made a meal of it. These latest launches are only going to confuse matters for customers.

Here's a table of the most prevalent mobile series, to help clear things up:

There are actually more processors than those noted above, including the UL and HL embedded chips, but I've stuck to what you might feasible run into as someone looking to buy a gaming laptop.

Check your CPU spec before you head to the checkout—that's what I'd recommend from here on out. We might see a few more mainstream laptops take advantage of these socketed Core chips than we have seen to date, as the 14th Gen is generally pushed out of the market. Nevertheless, we're most likely to run into a Core Ultra 200H or 200HX chip inside a gaming laptop and those should be just fine for our frame rate requirements.

For a quick recap, Arrow Lake H/HX includes the same core architecture as Lunar Lake (Lion Cove and Skymont). They'll include up to 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores. However, these chips skip over the new Xe2 GPU found in Lunar Lake and feature an older Xe GPU with some AI acceleration thrown in for good measure.

Stay tuned for CES 2025 at the start of January if you're eyeing up a new gaming laptop. That's when we'll know more about the many models hitting the market.

According to Reuters, in court on Monday, Qualcomm's legal team argued that part of the reason for the dispute is that Arm desires to design its own chips and Qualcomm would therefore be a competitor.

Arm CEO Rene Haas was apparently dismissive of the documents presented supporting this. He said that while Arm doesn't build chips, it is always considering different possible strategies, stating: "That’s all I think about, is the future."

The dispute all started in 2022 when Arm filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm, claiming the chip company didn't have the proper licence to use some of the Arm designs it was using. These designs came from a company Qualcomm had acquired in 2021 called Nuvia. Arm thinks that, given this, all chips made using these designs should be destroyed.

Over the course of the dispute, however, Qualcomm has argued that it already had its own broad-ranging licencing rights that should cover chip production based on such designs.

Arm argues that some Qualcomm devices, such as the Snapdragon X processors, use designs that Nuvia had the licence for before it was bought by Qualcomm, but once it was bought that licence expired. Perhaps crucially, Nuvia's original licence was meant to be for server chips, not consumer ones that the designs have ended up making.

Because of this, Arm believes that Qualcomm isn't paying for the designs, despite Qualcomm's protestations that its own licencing should cover it.

The documents shown at court this week apparently showed or attempted to show that Arm has lost about $50 million of revenue because of Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia. That's $50 million that Arm could (so the argument goes) be getting in addition to what Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon (via Reuters) says is $300 million that Qualcomm already pays the company.

Both companies obviously have lots of incentive to win this court case, and I for one can see the argument on both sides. On the one hand, Qualcomm already had a licence and it now owns Nuvia, so one could argue these designs should fall under Qualcomm's pre-existing licencing. On the other hand, Qualcomm isn't paying what Arm seems to have originally intended these Nuvia-bought designs to be worth and what it originally agreed to sell them for.

Licencing is a complicated thing, and I'm glad I'm not the judge and jury presiding over this case. Especially $50 million truly is the stake at the heart of the matter.

Acer Nitro ED306C | 29.5-inch | 2560 x 1080 | 200 Hz | VA panel | 1500R curved | $199.99 $169.99 at Newegg (save $30, with promo code EPDZA727)
It's only 1080p in vertical resolution but the pixel density isn't as low as you might think. If you want to get into ultrawide gaming then this is the cheapest way to do it. With a 1500R curvature, it'll feel like the monitor is wrapped around your head. Make sure to use promo code EPDZA727 to get the full discount.

Price check: Amazon $189.99 | Acer Store $189.99View Deal

Ultrawide monitors—displays that have an aspect ratio of 21:9 or greater—are a great way to make your gaming experience more immersive. Having more screen in your peripheral vision really does pull you into a game's world. Some of these monitors can be really pricey, but you don't have to splash the cash to join the ultrawide club.

With a price of $170 at Newegg, this Acer Nitro ED306C (specifically, the Xbmiippx variant) is a lot more expensive than a typical 27-inch 1080p gaming monitor, but it makes up for this with a huge amount of real estate. Boasting a 29.5-inch (shall we just call it 30-inches?) VA panel, it'll feel like you're sitting in a monitor.

A normal 27-inch 1080p, with the usual 16:9 aspect ratio, will have a pixel density of around 82 PPI (pixels per square inch). This ultrawide Acer is actually better, despite being larger in size, with a density of 94 PPI. That will help to ensure desktop icons remain crisp, even while sitting close.

This is handy because the reasonably tight curvature (1500R) somewhat demands that you need to be close to the screen.

The rest of the package is pretty decent, too. You're getting a refresh rate of up to 200 Hz, with AMD FreeSync Premium support for tear-free gaming. However, the panel's lowest refresh rate is 48 Hz so if a game's frame rate drops below that value while using FreeSync, the monitor will do frame doubling to keep things in sync. It's not a major issue but it can make the game a little choppier in such cases.

Stand-wise, you're not getting anything special at this price, as there's no height adjustment (though it can be tilted). That's countered by the unusually high number of input sockets: two HDMI 2.0 and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports. Most monitors at this level only offer one DP input.

Although I'd personally prefer a 1440p ultrawide monitor, they're at least $130 more expensive than this Acer model, so you're saving a fair chunk of money. And in terms of total pixel count, this screen has 25% fewer pixels than that in a 16:9 1440p screen, so you won't need a really powerful GPU to get the best from it.

Machines which fold discrete GPUs into their design are both rarer and pricier, but they enable you to crank things up in terms of the resolutions, frame rates and graphics settings they can achieve. Pairing a 13^th-gen Intel i7 mobile CPU with a laptop-grade RTX 4070, the Zotac Zbox Magnus EN does just this, and brings the fight to Asus' ROG NUC 970 and the Minisforum AtomMan G7 Ti in terms of 1440p games performance.

The Magnus is barebones from the get-go, though some suppliers offer RAM and storage pre-installed for a fee. There are several CPU and GPU variant configurations to choose from, but Intel's penultimate mobile i7 chip, the Core i7 13700HX, features in our test unit. With eight efficiency cores and eight performance cores running at 3.7 GHz to 5 GHz on the turbo, It's a powerful chip capable of desktop levels of performance, and is also a product of Intel's last-gen philosophy: power at all costs, basically.

That's reflected in Intel's stated maximum draw of 157 W, though we suspect that Zotac have chosen to tune this at the hardware level, and wisely so given the limited volume for cooling in this box. With Cinebench 2024's render-test pushing all cores to the max, the chip settles in for the long haul at around the rather more sensible 60 W mark.

Where the chip shows its age is in RAM compatibility, tapping out at DDR5-4800. Low-latency RAM at this speed can still deliver greater throughput than higher-latency sticks at faster-rated speeds, but you'll absolutely pay for that privilege.

Like the ROG NUC 970, the Zbox Magnus sports the mobile RTX 4070 GPU, which differs from the desktop variant of the GPU. It has with 8 GB of dedicated VRAM rather than 12 GB, slightly lower clockspeeds, and a narrower, 128-bit memory bus. However, it can still pull its weight admirably at 1440p, as we'll see.

Design-wise, the case is all grills, no frills: a simple black box where every surface, save for the front fascia, features some form of intake or exhaust. The top is basically one big dust-meshed intake for the CPU and GPU cooling system. And while this means plenty of fresh air for panting processors, it also means you're intimately exposed to the full range of sounds that the Zbox's cooling emits.

From idle to full load, you're treated to a constantly modulating wind-scape as fans step up and down to counter heat, and air is sucked or pushed at varying speeds through various grills and mesh panels. Tucked under your desk or behind a TV, that's kind of fine, but we wouldn't recommend having the Magnus right near you on your desk, if you're not using a headset—it's not super-loud, but the constant variable frequency-changes start to wear thin pretty quick.

While the CPU and GPU are soldered in place, the SODIMM RAM and M.2 storage (there's space enough for two drives) are interchangeable. As is the wireless card, but as the Magnus ships with a Killer WiFi 6/Bluetooth 5.3 card, there's really no need.

If you go thrifty with the barebones option and choose to install your own M.2 drive and RAM, Zotac makes it super-easy to do so. Flip the unit on its back, undo two thumbscrews, and the bottom of the case slides off, laying bare all the slots you need to work with. No fussy mechanisms, no fiddly component-stacking, it's just the most straightforward and user-friendly design possible, and that's great.

I/O-wise, the front panel bears a type-C Thunderbolt port, a Type-A USB 3.1, SD card reader, and separate 3.5 mm headphone and mic jacks. At the rear you get dual 2.5G Killer Lan ports, an HDMI 2.1, twin DisplayPort 1.4 ports, and a further four Type-A USB 3.1s. Comprehensive to be sure, though I'd happily trade one of those five USB 3.1 slots for another Thunderbolt, or even a bog-standard Type-C USB.

Down to business then, and as expected from a machine with zesty silicon, the Magnus runs games very nicely. At 1080p, it blazes through everything you throw at it—173 fps in Total War: Warhammer 3's battle engine is crazy-smooth, and 154 fps in Cyberpunk using the Ray Tracing Ultra preset looks and feels just fab.

Moving up to 1440p and ultra settings, things are still very rosy, with everything moving at 60 fps or better. Cyberpunk with RT ultra on still nets a healthy 79 fps, Forza with full RT glides along smooth and stutter-free at 60 fps, and Warhammer 3's more demanding campaign-engine hits the same frame rate.

We also ran a bunch of other games without built-in benchmarks to get a general feel for ultra-settings 1440p performance across the board, and found similarly cheering results. Helldivers runs at a barely-variable 68-72 fps in every environment and combat situation we tried. Motive Studios' awesome Dead Space remake is a revenant meat-treat, enjoying a range of 94-125 fps in the final boss battle at 1440p/Ultra/DLSS Balanced. And A Plague Tale: Requiem's stunning Hives level looks and feels fabulous at 90-120 fps. In short, I have no doubt that the Magnus would see you right with any title at 1440p.

The machine absolutely trades blows with Asus' ROG NUC 970, and does so at a lower price (a quick squirrel around the web reveals a number of sites supplying the Magnus at appreciably under the RRP, so shop around). One of the key differences between the two machines is the choice of processor; the NUC 970's Intel Ultra 9 185H CPU is newer and more efficient than the Magnus' 13th Gen Core i7; it can employ faster DDR5 speeds, and likely adds a premium to the build-price of the machine. But the truth is, they perform at a very similar level when paired with the RTX 4070 mobile; you just don't really feel the difference when the game's afoot.

In price/performance terms, if it came down to a choice between the two machines, the Magnus would be our recommendation. But there's another factor to consider here which we've touched on already, and that's noise.

Setting the ROG NUC 970 to Silent Mode almost eliminates fan noise, for no appreciable loss of performance. With the Magnus, you're stuck with what you get—an admittedly capable cooling solution, but one that cannot be adjusted, with a noise output that's very hard to ignore. Even light tasks can set the fans off, and you can't help but notice every change in pitch and frequency. It's possible to zone out constant frequencies, but variable ones—not so much.

I enjoy much of my gaming-audio using hi-fi speakers, reserving the headset for multiplayer and nighthawk sessions. For my use-case, the Magnus is just too chatty, but your mileage may vary; If you only ever take your headset off to sleep, eat or interface with fellow earthlings, I doubt you'll be so bothered.

Like the ROG NUC 970, this machine isn't for those who envisage future CPU or GPU upgrades. It's for someone who wants solid off-the-peg gaming performance at 1440p, and for whom footprint is a key factor. If you can live with its 'lively' sound-profile, the Zotac Zbox Magnus EN is a solid performer at 1440p.

Arrow Lake's gaming performance was known to be lower than last-gen Raptor Lake's before the testing even commenced because Intel openly said that this would be the case when it launched its new CPU architecture in October. The primary goal for multi-tiled processors was lower power consumption in games, while still offering generational performance gains in multithreaded workloads.

The latter was certainly achieved but once we all got our hands on the Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 5 245K (replacements for the Core i9 14900K and Core i5 14600K), it was clear that Intel was experiencing very different gaming performance to reviewers. After a while, though, and after I had spoken with Intel about my results, the truth of the matter came to light: Arrow Lake wasn't as good as expected and something was obviously amiss.

In the update, Intel notes that its engineers have identified four specific issues that were causing significant problems with gaming performance.

Missing Performance & Power Management (PPM) package

Modern CPUs can operate in all kinds of performance states but they require active support by the operating system in order to function properly. This is done via a PPM package—think of it as a driver that controls clock speeds and other timings, depending on what power settings the OS is using.

Intel didn't schedule the PPM for Arrow Lake to appear in a Windows Update, in time for reviews and retail availability of the Core Ultra 200S chips. The results? In Intel's words, "Unusual CPU scheduling behaviour; artificial performance increases when cores are disabled or affinitized; high run-to-run variation in benchmarks; reduced single-threaded performance; intermittent DRAM latency spikes; unexpected performance differences between Windows 11 23H2 and 24H2."

All of these problems from a 'simple' power profile just go to show just how complex today's CPUs really are but the fact that Intel didn't schedule the profile to appear in a Windows update in time for launch is somewhat annoying to read.

At least these all should be a thing of the past now, as the Windows 11 update KB5044384 apparently contains the profile and Intel says that alone can address up to 30% of performance loss against expectations.

Intel Application Performance Optimizer could not take effect

Intel's processors have been using a hybrid architecture (aka full performance, high power P-cores and lower performance, lower power E-cores) for four generations of processors, including Arrow Lake, and they all require a bespoke thread scheduler to ensure that the correct cores are handling a game's threads, to ensure best performance.

Application Performance Optimizer (APO) is a tool that manages that process for specific games and Intel was using it for its pre-launch performance data. However, the missing PPM meant that APO just wouldn't do anything, leaving up to 14% of game speed off the table.

With the PPM now in the KB5044384 update it should work but it's worth noting that few reviewers, myself included, ever use APO when first testing an Intel CPU. Oddly enough, when I did try APO on a 285K, it did work so I can only assume I had the Windows update by then.

For actual gaming, though, it does make sense to install APO and have it optimise thread scheduling in the games it supports. You're getting a free performance boost, after all.

BSODs when launching games using Easy Anti-Cheat service

I didn't experience this issue while reviewing the Core Ultra 9 285K and Ultra 5 245K but that's simply because no games in our CPU benchmark suite use Epic's Easy Anti-Cheat service. However, it turns out that there's a conflict between Windows 11 24H2 and older versions of EAC, which Epic has now addressed and is pushing the update out to developers.

That's good news for fans of Fortnite, for example, but this doesn't seem to be something that's symptomatic of Arrow Lake, just Windows. It may well be a case that it is but only with the 24H2 update, but for anyone using 23H2, the EAC fix won't change any game's actual performance.

Performance settings misconfigured on reviewer/early BIOSes

Testing Arrow Lake was an exercise in frustration, as motherboard vendors kept releasing new BIOS updates throughout the pre-review period. I noticed multiple differences between how motherboards were configured to run Core Ultra 200S chips—for example, the ring bus clock is meant to be constant but one manufacturer set it to scale down, as required with Raptor Lake.

Intel says it had noticed that so-called 'very important settings' were inconsistently being applied, such as resizeable BAR, Intel APO, compute tile ring clock, memory controller ratio (aka gear), and sustained and transient power limits.

That's no small list and together they account for issues like aberrantly high memory latency (up to two times expected values), erratic ring clocks, high run-to-run deviation for dynamic or unpredictable workloads, and no performance uplift from BAR or APO.

Apparently, this has also been resolved and "current BIOS releases for Intel Z890 motherboards have harmonized these settings." However, I'm currently using an MSI MEG Z780 Hero motherboard with its latest BIOS, but it's still letting the ring clock vary. Whether this is an Intel or MSI problem, I can't tell at this point because I only have MSI boards to hand.

More to come

Intel rounds off its blog by saying that it has identified further BIOS improvements that it's currently in the process of validating and is targeting a firmware release, with all these updates and microcode 0x114, sometime in late January. It plans on presenting all of these findings in detail at CES 2025.

Once all of that takes place, I will retest the Core Ultra 9 285K's gaming performance, just to see how much better it is after all this work. Whether it's enough for me to be able to recommend an Arrow Lake chip over the likes of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D for gaming or the Ryzen 9 9950X for content creation is another matter entirely.

I'm genuinely pleased that Intel has worked on resolving Arrow Lake's problems but time will tell if it's a case of too little, too late.

As reported by the Financial Times, the tech consultancy Omdia estimates that Nvidia's biggest purchaser of Hopper chips in 2024 was Microsoft, who bought 485,000 of them, this being over twice as many as any other company. Meta, for example, bought 224,000 of them, Amazon bought 196,000, and Google bought 'just' 169,000.

Surprisingly, though, two of Nvidia's biggest customers were Chinese ones, these being ByteDance (of TikTok fame) and Tencent (of numerous videogames fame). According to Omdia, these each ordered about 230,000 Hopper chips. These won't have been the most powerful ones Nvidia has at its disposal, though, given US-China export restrictions.

In other words, despite export controls, Chinese companies received more Nvidia chips than companies such as Meta, Amazon, and Google this year.

Apart from all the China biz, there are two other things that strike me about these numbers. First, and very simply: Holy moly does Nvidia churn out a lot of a AI chips. Second: Holy moly does Microsoft buy a lot of them.

Nvidia's part kind of goes without saying. The company is firmly cemented as the king of the ever-expanding AI infrastructure castle. So much so, in fact, that the company's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, has the chutzpah to claim that "just like we generate electricity, we're now going to be generating AI" in "AI factories".

As far as Microsoft's concerned, while I'm a little surprised to find the company more than doubling the purchases of any other, it also makes sense, especially given the partnership with OpenAI.

The AI industry can seem a little confusing when you start to look into how all these different companies relate to each other. But we shouldn't forget that while OpenAI technically isn't the biggest company in the AI space, most of the companies that are bigger actually rely on OpenAI's software and models and have partnerships with the company. So much is true for now, at least—although newer entrants such as Anthropic and Musk's xAI could make inroads.

And if we're talking OpenAI partnerships, Microsoft's is the one. To date, Microsoft has apparently invested $13 billion into OpenAI and is the exclusive provider of the company's cloud computing services. This partnership grants Microsoft all kinds of benefits, such as OpenAI model integration with Bing, Microsoft 365, Copilot, and so on, not to mention the ability to rent OpenAI-clad Azure servers out to customers for private or bespoke AI research or services.

Oh, and there's the simple matter of monetary ROI. But it's surely crude to speak of such things (profit motives in such a civil society? I think not).

People want AI and OpenAI is the biggest software-level solution, so Microsoft heavily invests in and partners with OpenAI, and Nvidia sells Microsoft a sweet, sweet stack of silicone to get the job done. Simple.

But who's the real winner? The end-user, of course!

Just kidding, the real winner's Nvidia, of course and as always. As Baron Harkonnen of Frank Herbert's Dune tells us: "He who controls the spice controls the universe." And Hopper's the spiciest spice in town, right now.

Well, it'll be Blackwell, soon, but that's Nvidia, too. Huang probably made the right choice going into tech and ditching a promising table-tennis career.