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Nintendo has finally confirmed the last missing piece of its Switch 2 price hike. Starting September 1, the console will cost £419.99 in the UK, up from its current £395.99 price, a £24 increase confirmed by the official Nintendo Store UK account on X.

The UK figure had been the one gap left over from Nintendo's original announcement in May, when the company confirmed it would raise Switch 2 prices across the US, Canada, and Europe but didn't give a UK number at the time. That gap is now filled in. In the US, the console rises from $449.99 to $499.99, and in Canada, it rises from $629.99 to $679.99. Europe increases from €469.99 to €499.99, and Ireland follows the same euro pricing. Japan already went through its own increase back in May.

Of the regions affected, the UK is getting the smallest bump in both cash and percentage terms, roughly 6%, compared to the US increase, which works out closer to 11%. Nintendo has pointed to "changes in market conditions" as the reason behind the revision, language that suggests this is meant to be a lasting adjustment rather than a short-term bump. It lines up with our previous coverage, as Nintendo is reportedly paying significantly more for the RAM that goes into every Switch 2 unit.

Trying to buy DDR5 memory right now apparently means competing with an army of bots, not actual people. According to bot-mitigation firm DataDome, 91% of the traffic hitting one retailer's DDR5 product pages is now coming from automated scraping tools rather than real shoppers, which is roughly ten bot requests for every one legitimate visit.

The figure comes from a post by Jérôme Segura, DataDome's VP of threat research, and builds on a bigger report the company published earlier this year. In a one-hour sample, DataDome found 91 unique DDR5 listings being scraped an average of 551 times each, which works out to a stock check on a given kit roughly every 6.5 seconds. One operation alone reportedly generated over 50,000 requests per hour before DataDome blocked it, and more than 10 million scraping attempts have been blocked in total.

It's worth noting the 91% figure comes from a single unnamed retailer, and DataDome hasn't shared its sample window or full methodology. Page requests also aren't purchases, so the number is really how hard bots are watching listings rather than how much stock they're actually grabbing. Still, DataDome says the bots aren't limiting themselves to consumer kits either, with scraping activity also hitting industrial memory suppliers and component makers like Amphenol and TE Connectivity.

Someone won a free NVIDIA GPU at a raffle, then turned it into a $57,450 payday. An NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition, signed twice by Jensen Huang, sold at RR Auction this week as part of the "Steve Jobs & the Computer Revolution" sale. The card carried an estimate of just $6,000, so the final price landed almost ten times higher.

According to the listing, the original owner picked up the card as a raffle prize at NVIDIA's GTC 2026 Physical AI Developer Meetup back in March. Per the consignor's own account, it was the only unit of its kind given away that night in front of roughly 500 attendees. Huang later signed the card twice, once on the metal housing and once inside the box, both in gold ink.

The RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition is NVIDIA's flagship workstation card, built around the Blackwell architecture with 96GB of GDDR7 memory. It normally sells for somewhere between $12,000 and $16,000 depending on the retailer, so even the unsigned card is already a serious purchase before autographs get involved. Two signatures apparently added over $40,000 on top of that.

GTA 6's ongoing leaks have reportedly hit morale hard inside Rockstar Games, according to a new report from gaming insider Jason Schreier. Schreier says he spoke with several Rockstar employees after the leaks and found the mood inside the studio has dropped sharply, with management staying largely quiet on the matter.

The leaks come at a rough time for the team. Rockstar is apparently deep into the final stretch of GTA 6's development, and the leaks seem to have added extra strain. According to Schreier, staff are mostly feeling exhausted rather than angry at this point.

Part of the frustration reportedly comes from the fact that Rockstar tightened security significantly after the 2022 leaks, requiring staff to work on-site five days a week with limited remote access to internal tools. Despite those changes, the game still leaked again, which has apparently left some employees questioning whether the added restrictions were worth it.

The Blood of Dawnwalker won't hit 60 FPS on any console at launch, and even the PlayStation 5 Pro tops out at 40 FPS. Bandai Namco and developer Rebel Wolves shared new console footage confirming the display modes for the upcoming dark fantasy RPG, and it looks like 60 FPS is reserved for PC.

On PlayStation 5 Pro, players get two options: a Quality mode running dynamic 4K targeting 30 FPS, and a Balanced mode also at dynamic 4K but targeting 40 FPS. The base PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X get the same two modes, though the dynamic resolution scaling looks more aggressive on base PS5 in Quality mode based on the footage. Xbox Series S wasn't shown running the game at all, which raises some questions about how it will perform on the least powerful console in the lineup.

The framerate ceiling isn't surprising given the circumstances. The Blood of Dawnwalker runs on Unreal Engine 5, and Rebel Wolves is a smaller studio compared to teams with more resources to fully optimize for consoles. The game also carries steep PC system requirements, which points to a demanding engine overall.

AMD picked up more desktop CPU market share in Q2 2026, according to new data from Mercury Research. The firm's numbers put AMD at 34.9% of desktop x86 CPU unit share, up 1.8 percentage points from the previous quarter, even as the overall desktop market shrank.

The gain came despite a rough quarter for desktop CPUs industry-wide. Total desktop shipments fell more than 20% year over year, with Mercury Research pointing to higher PC prices, tight GPU supply, and normal seasonal weakness as the main causes. AMD's desktop shipments dropped too, but by less than Intel's, which is how the company still came out ahead on share.

The bigger picture looks strong for AMD across the board. Combined desktop and mobile client share crossed 30% for the first time in the company's history, landing at 30.3% against Intel's 69.7%. Total x86 share, which folds in IoT and embedded chips, hit 34.1%, up from 32.6% the prior quarter. AMD's server CPU share also climbed to 34.5%, with Mercury Research noting that a Xeon-vs-EPYC comparison would put AMD closer to 46%.

A Redditor says Amazon shipped him an empty Ryzen 5 9600X box, twice in a row! The user, posting as u/No-Yak9776 in r/PcBuild, works at a PC shop that orders parts through Amazon Business, and says the process has worked fine for them until now.

The first order arrived with the CPU packaging intact but no processor inside. He filed for a refund, got it, and reordered the same chip. The second box, surprisingly, also showed up empty. He filmed both unboxings, which he says made the refund process go smoothly each time.

The listing was fulfilled by a third-party seller called "The Tech Group," not sold directly by Amazon. The seller reportedly carries decent reviews, though the Redditor suspects many of them may not be genuine. He says he won't order CPUs through third-party Amazon listings again and now sticks to filming every unboxing as backup evidence.

Microsoft's translucent green anniversary Xbox is reportedly landing with a $900 price tag when it launches in November 2026. The figure comes from French leaker Billbil-kun at Dealabs, who has a solid track record on Xbox pricing leaks.

The Xbox Series X25 is a see-through green edition of the standard Series X, built to mark the console's fifth anniversary. According to the report, it will cost €899.99 in Europe, and the same $900 in the US. The matching translucent green controller, which the same leaker revealed earlier, is expected to ship separately in October ahead of the console's November arrival.

That price is $100 more than Microsoft's current $800 1TB Series X with a disc drive. The X25 is apparently running the same hardware under a new shell. It also matches what Sony charges for the 2TB PlayStation 5 Pro. Buyers looking for a premium-looking Xbox this holiday season will be paying premium-console money for hardware that performs the same as it did in 2020.

Amazon has officially confirmed its new Kratos. Former WWE superstar Dave Bautista is taking over the lead role in the God of War TV series, replacing Ryan Hurst after Hurst tore a bicep on set and needed surgery, according to a report from Variety.

Bautista had been rumored for the part for a few weeks, and the switch means production has to reshoot the four episodes already completed with Hurst in the role. Filming had been underway in Vancouver since February, and it'll continue there with Bautista stepping in as the lead.

Hurst had reportedly put on 40 pounds of muscle to fill out the part, and there aren't many actors who can walk onto a set with that kind of physical presence already built in. Bautista, a former WWE wrestler known for playing Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, seems like a natural fit for the same reason, even after slimming down for other recent roles.

Take-Two Interactive has moved from DMCA takedowns to federal court in its hunt for the person behind the GTA 6 leaks. The company filed subpoenas against Microsoft and Discord on August 20, demanding user data tied to the leaker known as Cyberleek.

The filing states:

A $600 PlayStation 6 handheld looks off the table. Notable AMD leaker Kepler_L2, posting on NeoGAF forums, said that price point "is definitely not possible right now," pointing to how expensive LPDDR memory has gotten.

The handheld was supposed to be Sony's more affordable entry point into the next generation, sitting below a pricier PS6 console. Kepler_L2 flagged LPDDR5X, the memory standard most consumer devices rely on, as the real issue. He said LPDDR is seeing some of the steepest price increases right now because it's also in heavy demand from AI data center hardware.

Of course, it is no surprise that gaming hardware is getting squeezed by the same memory shortage that's been driving up RAM and GPU prices all year. Moreover, that squeeze doesn't look like it's easing anytime soon.

AMD has now confirmed the full specs for the Radeon RX 9050 4GB, and it's looking rough. The OEM-only card ships with a 64-bit memory bus and just 16MB of Infinity Cache, half of what the standard 8GB model gets on both fronts.

AMD's own product page lists a 64-bit interface running 18 Gbps GDDR6, working out to 144GB/s of bandwidth. The regular Radeon RX 9050 8GB uses a 128-bit bus and hits 288GB/s, so AMD cut both VRAM capacity and bandwidth exactly in half for this variant. Infinity Cache took the same hit, dropping from 32MB to 16MB.

That's a lot of bottlenecks stacked on top of an already small 4GB frame buffer. Both cards share the same Navi 44 silicon, 16 compute units, and 1,024 stream processors, so the compute side is untouched. The memory subsystem is what got gutted here, and that's usually what decides how a budget GPU performs once VRAM fills up in a modern game.

Intel's upcoming 28-core Nova Lake-S chip with bLLC cache might pull a lot more power than its rated TDP suggests. Leaker Golden Pig Upgrade posted on Weibo that the chip's PL2 power limit sits at 296W, which is well above what was expected for this SKU.

The chip uses an 8P+16E+4LPE core layout, 28 cores total, paired with 144MB of Intel's new bLLC, or Big Last-Level Cache. It's Intel's answer to AMD's 3D V-Cache, built for gamers who want extra cache without giving up core count. Earlier leaks put this same configuration at a 125W TDP, so a 296W PL2 number is a pretty wild gap.

There's also some back and forth on whether 296W applies to PL1 or PL2. The original post framed it as PL1 equal to PL2, but leaker jaykihn0 pushed back, saying the figure is technically a PL2 reading. If that holds up, the chip probably only hits 296W in short bursts, with sustained draw sitting lower.

New evidence has exposed serious frame pacing issues with FSR 4 frame generation, and it is so bad that the technology is almost entirely unusable. Hardware Unboxed on YouTube published a video benchmarking FSR 4 frame generation frame pacing with slow-motion cameras, revealing that the generated frames from FSR barely have any time on screen in most of the games they tested, making them nearly invisible to the viewer.

Specifically, Hardware Unboxed saw their RX 9070 XT displaying one frame around roughly four times longer than the next consecutive frame. The result was massive jittering on-screen, with real-world usability reportedly feeling like a 60FPS experience in a situation where FSR 4 Frame Generation is outputting a 120FPS experience with a 60FPS base frame rate.

This issue was prevalent in the vast majority of games Hardware Unboxed tested, with none of the games the channel tested exhibiting perfect frame pacing. God of War Ragnarok, Cyberpunk 2077, Mafia: The Old Country, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, Resident Evil Requiem, Alan Wake 2 and Crimson Desert exhibited the issue the worst. Borderlands 4 and Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight exhibited the issue less (but the problem is still there in the right situations).

STALKER 2 just received its largest patch to date with a boatload of changes improving the game's performance, including a switch to a newer version of Unreal Engine 5, version 5.5.4. Rock Paper Shotgun reports that the improvements made in patch 2.0 have improved the game's performance by over 30% in demanding areas.

The outlet tested the game on an RTX 5080, Steam Deck, and Steam Machine in Rostok town and the Zalissya woods. In Rostok, the RTX 5080 saw a massive 33% performance uplift from patch 1.7 to patch 2.0, jumping from an 83 FPS average to 110 FPS average. In the Zalissya woods, performance improved by 8% from 106 FPS to 114 FPS with patch 2.0.

On the Steam Machine, performance improved by 28% in Rostok with patch 2.0, but in the Zalissya woods performance was within the margin of error between the two patches. The Steam Deck reportedly saw a massive improvement with patch 2.0, moving from unplayable performance to a roughly 30 FPS average with aggressive FSR upscaling, though Rock Paper Shotgun reports that the game won't provide a minimum 30 FPS experience on the Deck.

Sandisk has announced a new lineup of storage solutions purpose-built for modern NAS environments, including the Sandisk NAS 800 NVMe SSD, which delivers PCIe Gen5 sequential read/write speeds of 14,900/13,200MB/s. Impressive as that performance is, what makes the Sandisk NAS 800 NVMe SSD stand out is its endurance rating of up to 14 PBW (for the 7.68TB model), making it the sort of SSD that can handle 24/7 operation and performance-intensive workloads.

Rounding out the Sandisk NAS 800 NVMe SSD's performance, you've also got up to 2.3M/2M IOPS random read/write speeds (for the 3.84TB model), with the physical design engineered for extended operation even with up to 85°C temperatures. Built with Sandisk's TLC 3D NAND technology, capacities range from 960GB to 7.68TB, and the company notes the lineup has been extensively tested in leading NAS systems with M.2 2280 compatibility.

For more traditional NAS systems with HDD support, there's the Sandisk NAS 600 SATA SSDs. Sandisk notes that this offers a seamless solid-state upgrade path for existing prosumer NAS setups. Available in the standard 2.5-inch SATA form factor, these high-endurance SSDs come in capacities from 500GB to 4TB.

RayNeo has announced its next-generation AR lineup of consumer smart glasses: the RayNeo iO Smart Glasses and RayNeo GT Series. The former is designed for all-day use and productivity, weighing only 33 grams, with AI capabilities that include live translation, an auto-teleprompter, and the ability to summarize meetings and conversations.

Meanwhile, the new RayNeo GT Series (available in GT and GT Max models) is designed to deliver a cinema-grade experience. The flagship GT Max model offers a wide 59-degree field of view (FOV), with its 5.5th-gen Tandem MicroOLED display delivering a dynamically scaling virtual screen up to 307 inches. The GT Series can also be paired with RayNeo Pocket TV Pro to create the world's first AR glasses system with Dolby Vision playback, including AI-powered SDR-to-HDR.

The new RayNeo GT Series is also designed for an at-home or on-the-go cinematic experience for watching movies and playing games, with modes that include anchoring the virtual screen in a 3D space as well as a Steady Mode designed to filter travel bumps and movement while traveling. Audio-wise, there's also a quad-speaker system with head-tracking and Bang & Olufsen Spatial Audio.

IQUNIX has quickly earned a reputation for creating impressively well-made keyboards, largely because it uses CNC anodized aluminum cases to deliver a rigid, weighty, durable feel across its lineup. This is evident in the IQUNIX Magi96 Pro Aluminum Low Profile Mechanical Keyboard we recently reviewed, and in the new IQUNIX EC75 Hall Effect Gaming Keyboard 75%, now available.

Built for performance, in addition to its aluminum top case, the IQUNIX EC75 is powered by 'Diamond Pro' Hall Effect magnetic switches built for both gaming and smooth everyday typing. The switch design combines a light 35±5gf initial force with a 50±5gf bottom-out force, plus a 750GS max magnetic flux for precise magnetic sensing. The direct result is 0.01mm Rapid Trigger alongside a 0.01 - 3.1mm adjustable actuation range.

Yes, 0.01mm actuation is not something you see every day, and it's a feature that makes the IQUNIX EC75 and its custom switches stand out from the pack. As a wired gaming keyboard, the IQUNIX EC75 also supports 8,000Hz polling for low-latency input, with an 80-key 75% form factor that includes a full function row and arrow keys.

AVerMedia is expanding its diverse lineup of capture devices with the new GC531 Streamer Ultra (Black) and GC535 Streamer ULTRA 2.1 (White), two professional-grade external HDMI capture cards designed to be paired with DSLR or mirrorless cameras. These portable devices are built to slot seamlessly into existing video workflows, supporting streaming and capture with a focus on high-quality, reliable output.

Both models support RGB24 True Color Capture to deliver improved color accuracy and image fidelity when compared to traditional compressed capture formats. AVerMedia notes that this makes them suitable for product and other commerce-like showcases, ensuring that everything appears as intended. As for the differences between the two models, the GC535 supports capture of up to 4K30 with RGB24, while the GC531 supports capture of up to 2K30 with RGB24.

As the flagship model, the GC535 Streamer ULTRA 2.1 also supports 4K144 HDR/VRR pass-through in HDMI 2.1 mode while capturing up to 4K60. The pro-grade GC531 and GC535 capture devices also include enhanced EMC/EMI shielding and ESD protection to maintain signal integrity and deliver reliable performance even during 24/7 broadcasts.

The German engineers at Beyerdynamic have delivered audio solutions for 100+ years, and the company has announced two new additions to its gaming headset lineup: the MMX 100 wireless and MMX 130 wireless. Built on the company's long-standing tradition of delivering studio-grade sound, these new additions offer gamers a more affordable entry point to immersive audio without sacrificing comfort or reliability.

The difference between the MMX 100 wireless and MMX 130 wireless comes down to design: the MMX 100 features a closed-back design that offers passive noise cancellation while minimizing sound leakage. In contrast, the MMX 130 features an open-back design for a wider, more spacious soundstage for cinematic games.

Both the MMX 100 wireless and MMX 130 wireless feature a custom-tuned 40mm driver, with the MMX 130 adding a titanium coating for enhanced spatial audio performance. Both headsets support tri-mode connectivity, including low-latency 2.4GHz wireless, Bluetooth 6.0, and analog options, plus up to 80 hours of battery life for PC, console, smartphone, and handheld devices.