This week on the TT Show, Jak and Kosta finally discuss their recent trip to MSI's factory in Shenzhen, China. There, they saw MSI's new Z890 boards up close, Intel's latest Core Ultra 200 Series CPUs, and even watched as thousands of MAG Z890 TOMAHAWK WIFI boards were being made.

With new motherboards and chipset technology, a lot of cool new tech will make you want to upgrade - especially when it comes to flagship motherboards like the new MSI MEG Z890 ACE. With Arrow Lake and Intel Core Ultra 200 Series CPU benchmarks starting to show up and full reviews and availability coming later this month, it won't be long before the complete picture is known.

With the new Z890 motherboards also ready for the next generation of graphics cards, this week we learned that NVIDIA could be announcing three GeForce RTX 50 desktop graphics cards at CES 2025: the GeForce RTX 5090, GeForce RTX 5080, and GeForce RTX 5070.

NVIDIA's ramp into Blackwell appears to be "quite strong" with issues with initial Blackwell silicon are "totally behind us" says analyst firm Morgan Stanley.

Morgan Stanley analysts posted a note recently, upbeat on Blackwell's potential impact on NVIDIA's top line heading into the final months of 2025. The firm explains: "According to our checks of the GPU-testing supply chain, Blackwell chip output should be around 250,000-300,000 in [the fourth quarter], contributing $5 billion to $10 billion in revenue, which is still tracking [Morgan Stanley lead analyst] Joe Moore's bullish forecast".

The investment firm said that Blackwell chip volume could reach 750,000 to 800,000 units -- which is a huge 3x increase -- from Q4 2024. The firm also expects Hopper volume (including H200 and H20) to be around 1.5M units in Q4 2024, gradually ramping down to 1M units in Q1 2025. The firm added that B200 chip prices are around 60-70% higher than H200, Blackwell revenue should surpass Hopper by Q1 2025.

PAX Australia returned to Melbourne this past weekend to celebrate everything from competitive esports and indie games to new tech, gear, tabletop gaming, and jumping on a Nintendo 64 to play some multiplayer Mario Kart with like-minded individuals.

Even though companies like SEGA and Ubisoft were on hand with titles like Star Wars Outlaws and Sonic X Shadow Generations running on console hardware, as seen in previous years, PC gaming was just about everywhere at PAX. From MSI and ASUS rekindling their Computex 2024 rivalry with big booths showcasing their latest hardware to local PC hardware gurus Aftershock showcasing some truly stunning one-of-a-kind builds.

Outside of the surprise appearance of Valve announcing that it was finally bringing the Steam Deck to Australia, the other big thing this weekend was the debut of Intel's new core Ultra 200 Series, with actual builds from companies like MSI running the latest games on brand-new Z890 rigs playing games like Black Myth: Wukong. Here's a list of the coolest tech we saw at the show, starting with Aftershock's incredible custom Alien PC.

Apple is reportedly set to release smart glasses with AirPods packing cameras, in a bid to compete with the runaway success of Meta and its Quest 3 headset.

In a new post on Bloomberg, analyst and insider Mark Gurman said: "Into 2027, the team is considering launching smart glasses on par with the Meta Ray-Bans, as well as AirPods with cameras. The idea is to salvage the billions of dollars spent on the Vision Pro's visual intelligence technology, which can scan the environment around a user and supply useful data".

He continued: "We'll get a taste of this with an upcoming visual intelligence feature on the iPhone 16, but the plan is to bring the Vision Pro's ability to understand its surroundings to more products".

Apple is rumored to be working on a cheaper version of its higher-end, expensive (and not-so-great selling) Vision Pro headset, which would cost around $2000 with a slower chip, and made from cheaper materials.

The news on the cheaper Apple Vision Pro headset is coming from industry insider Mark Gurman, in a new post on Bloomberg, where he said that he expects Apple to release a lower-end Vision Pro headset to arrive as "early as next year" with a second-generation Vision Pro (with a faster chip inside) following in 2026.

Apple's new lower-end Vision Pro headset will cost "about $2000" and probably use an "inferior processor" and made from "cheaper materials" says Gurman. The new Vision Pro could lack EyeSight, which he said is the "gee-whiz feature that shows a user's eyes on the outside of the headset". Gurman continues, adding that with the lower price, Apple is expecting sales of the device to "be at least double the level of the Vision Pro" with Gurman adding "but that's not saying much" and he's right... the Vision Pro isn't selling well, at all.

Tesla held its recent "We Robot" special event in California, unveiling its new Optimus Gen 2 humanoid robot that will cost $20K to $30K and help you around your house, and so much more.

First, these robots weren't running autonomously like some people think... they were walking on their own, but being controlled by a human operator through a VR headset, microphone, and headset. This means you're virtually operating an Optimus robot, with the robot being the physical avatar in your virtual world.

The possibilities of this and the future of employment are huge, as robots aren't replacing jobs -- yet -- but rather, human operators will "use" the robot and have it perform functions that they otherwise couldn't. Think of heavy lifting, dangerous environments, etc where humans can't do those jobs (or not as good as an infinitely strong, never-tired robot). This will eventually all be done over Starlink, connecting human operators to Optimus robots.

For hardcore gamers, putting over 1000 hours into a single game is not uncommon; it usually signals that you're not interested in playing every new blockbuster release and are perfectly happy to stick with one piece of interactive entertainment for years. Whether that's jumping into Counter-Strike, Apex Legends, or Overwatch every weekend or firing up World of Warcraft to play the latest expansion 20 years after the game debuted.

Regarding the gaming tastes of tech billionaires, we've heard stories of Bill Gates getting addicted to Minesweeper to the point where Microsoft employees had to intervene. More recently, Elon Musk has been sharing his impressive builds and high-level dungeon runs in Diablo 4 on X.

And now it's Mark Zuckerberg's turn. We now know the PC game he simply can't get enough of - Sid Meier's Civilization.

After waiting 14 years, PC gamers finally get to play Rockstar's Western epic, the original Red Dead Redemption, later this month. The long-awaited port and remastered release includes support for higher resolutions, ultrawide displays, uncapped frame rates, and DLSS, FSR, and Frame Generation technologies.

When Rockstar made the surprise announcement last week, it didn't include the price - instead, it informed those interested that pre-purchasing or pre-orders would be opening up soon on platforms like Steam and the Epic Games Store. It only took a day or so for these storefronts to list the price for Red Dead Redemption's long-awaited PC debut, upsetting many fans in the process.

The PC release includes the base game and the Undead Nightmare expansion but does not include the game's popular multiplayer modes. As for the price, get ready: Red Dead Redemption on PC is being sold for $49.99 USD.

Thanks to developers CD Projekt Red's ongoing support, the Phantom Liberty expansion, and tech like Path Tracing and DLSS, Cyberpunk 2077 is still one of the most visually impressive games you can play on a modern PC. Running on the company's internal Red Engine, it's a technical marvel open to modders to tweak and tune to their liking.

NextGen Dreams, the creators of the hyper-realistic DreamPunk mod that aims to give the game a photorealistic look, have dropped a new video showcasing the latest version of the impressive mod. Unfortunately, access to the mod sits behind a paywall, but DreamPunk 2.1 overhauls how it handles various graphics and lighting effects, from Indirect Lighting, Light Diffusion, LUT saturation, and more.

The mod and footage we see above look incredible, and yes, some of the shots are indeed photorealistic or movie-like in terms of how "real" they look. The mod sits on top of the game's impressive Path Traced lighting mode, RT Overdrive, with DLSS 3.7.10 enabled on a GeForce RTX 4090 - running in 8K.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is out October 25, and Corsair has collaborated with Activision to release new CoD-themed gaming gear across its various brands: Corsair, Drop, Elgato, ORIGIN PC, and SCUF Gaming.

On the PC gaming peripheral front, there's a Black Ops 6-themed CORSAIR K65 PLUS WIRELESS keyboard, a fantastic 75% mechanical offering that earned an Editor's Choice Award when we reviewed it earlier this year. There's also a Call of Duty-themed M75 WIRELESS mouse and HS80 RGB WIRELESS gaming headset.

For the content creators out there, you've got Black Ops 6-themed Elgato products - including the popular STREAM DECK MK.2 and WAVE:3 USB MICROPHONE. And for those looking for a new PC or gaming laptop, there are custom Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 rigs from Origin PC.

Phison is promising that $1 million to $1.5 million AI workstations are a thing of the past, promising a new $50,000 workstation that's perfect for AI training and AI tuning.

In a recent chat with CRN, Phison General Manager and President Michael Wu explained: "We've changed that $1 million or $1.5 million investment, the minimum requirement to have a fine-tuning machine to create ChatGPT, to $50,000. You no longer need three DGX GPUs anymore. You can do it with a single workstation with four workstation GPUs and with two of our aiDAPTIV+ SSDs that are treated as virtual memory for the GPU".

He continued: "Furthermore, when we demonstrated a 70-billion parameter machine at NVIDIA's GTC, people didn't know how to use it. Nobody has an AI engineer. So we created a software tool called aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite that lets you go from putting a PDF of your proprietary document to the system to fine tune the 70-billion parameter model to building a chatbot like ChatGPT. We are taking advantage of all the big investment that Meta has made on the open source Llama 3 to create a custom AI for you".