Latest News - Page 183

Noctua is widely known as a luxury brand for creating stylish, powerful, and silent fans and coolers that have won awards, received accolades, and are generally viewed as the sort of boutique brand commonly associated with sports cars or fashion. As strange as that may sound for a company that creates fans for PC cases, one of Noctua's hallmarks is its unique brown-and-tan colorway across its lineup.

It's both an unusual choice and something that helps Noctua products immediately stand out, which is why the company's latest announcement is more of a stealth release as it presents two products in its new G2 lineup in an all-black "chromax" colorway.

This includes the NH-D15 G2 CPU air cooler and the company's NF-A14x25 G2 140mm (and round-frame NF-A14x25r G2) fans, designed for those who "prefer a stealthy, unobtrusive look." The only real difference here is the colorway, as you're still getting the same premium build quality and technical features of the line-up. Plus, the high prices, with the NH-D15 G2 chromax.black CPU cooler set to sell for around $189.90 USD (or 159.90 EUR), depending on US trade conditions.

AMD has just unveiled one of the first models in its next-gen Instinct MI400 AI GPU family with the introduction of the Instinct MI430X, which was specifically created for HPC system buildouts, based on the new CDNA 5 architecture and using next-gen HBM4 memory.

In a new blog post, the company teased its new Instinct MI430X AI chip which was designed for large-scale AI environments, with some of the details unveiled on the new MI430X accelerator. AMD's new Instinct MI430X will feature the next-generation CDNA 5 architecture, and a huge 432GB of next-gen HBM4 memory with up to 19.6TB/sec of memory bandwidth.

AMD says its new MI430X is a "true successor" to the MI300A, with improvements on paper between both the chips -- the new CDNA 5 architecture, more VRAM and next-gen HBM4 with huge amounts more memory bandwidth -- making the MI430X ready for next-gen AI workloads.

If you have been following PC hardware news, you've probably heard about the unprecedented memory shortages affecting all corners of the industry, leading to skyrocketing prices and uncertainty about where this leaves consumer-facing products like graphics cards in 2026. Basically, the AI and Data Center boom is causing manufacturers to focus on high-performance products that sell, and AI customers who buy in bulk.

And with that, we've heard from multiple sources that prices for gaming-focused GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA will rise considerably in early 2026. Not only that, but AMD and NVIDIA could scrap or even halt production of entry-level graphics cards because they're no longer profitable, with NVIDIA pausing its upcoming GeForce RTX 50 SUPER Series, since the big thing there was 50% more VRAM across every model.

Anyway, this brings us to a new Reddit post (via VideoCardz) from one of PowerColor's representatives. They're saying that if you're in the market for a brand-new GPU, now's the time to buy. Not only because Black Friday Deals are seeing prices for new GPUs drop below MSRP for the first time, but also because once this year ends, prices are going to increase.

Qualcomm recently held a deep-dive event on its upcoming release of Arm-based Snapdragon X2 Elite processors for Windows devices, set to launch in 2026. The APU includes the company's new Adreno X2 GPU, which it says will unlock a new level of performance, directly competing with and outperforming its Intel and AMD x86 counterparts.

With performance that is reportedly 2.3X faster than its predecessor, PC gaming fans will be pleased to learn that when the Snapdragon X2 Elite arrives, over 90% of the most played games will be playable at launch. This includes native driver support for DirectX 12.2 Ultimate and Vulkan 1.4, so the Arm-based APU won't have to rely entirely on emulation for PC gaming.

The 2.3X figure refers to the gaming performance of the flagship Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme compared to the first-generation Snapdragon X Elite, and it's impressive when you see Forza Horizon 5 go from 32 FPS to 71 FPS, DOOM Eternal go from 42 FPS to 107 FPS, and Counter-Strike 2 go from 49 FPS to 103 FPS.

NVIDIA has announced its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2026, reporting record revenue of $57 billion, up 62% year over year. Naturally, the largest slice of this can be attributed to NVIDIA's Data Center revenue, which hit $51.2 billion for Q3, up 25% from Q2 and 66% from a year ago.

"Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out," NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang said. "Compute demand keeps accelerating and compounding across training and inference - each growing exponentially. Adding, "The AI ecosystem is scaling fast - with more new foundation model makers, more AI startups, across more industries, and in more countries. AI is going everywhere, doing everything, all at once."

When it comes to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX and consumer-class product revenue, which falls under the Gaming and AI PC banner, it hit $4.3 billion for Q3, which is up 30% from a year ago, but down 1% from Q2. Basically, any laptop with a GeForce RTX GPU is an AI PC, so this covers revenue from GeForce RTX 50 Series desktop graphics cards and systems, as well as laptops, notebooks, and off-the-shelf workstation products.

New tax filings for Ubisoft's overseas publishing division reveals key stats on game sales in the region.

Ubisoft Limited, the company's publishing group in the UK, gives a dour update on the state of physical game sales in the UK. According to the company's full-year earnings records, the physical games market in the United Kingdom has dropped heavily, with sales plummeting by -35% in FY25 compared to the year prior.

The group also says that console sales slid by -25% in FY25 (April 2024 - March 2025), indicating that Sony's expensive PlayStation 5 Pro, which was released in November 2024, may not have moved the needle much in the UK. It's also worth noting that this was before the release of the Nintendo Switch 2, which launched in June 2025, months after the document's cut-off date.

Now that console gaming is pretty much saturated, major businesses are now targeting PC in an attempt to grow the industry. Executives like Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick are taking notice and commenting on the new trends.

Microsoft's new Xbox console will reportedly be a merged PC hybrid. Sony is releasing games on PlayStation. Steam continues to grow, breaking concurrent player records with 41 million players while earning over $16 billion this year. PC gaming is growing, partly because of all the accelerated effort to make it grow, particularly because it represents a new frontier of focus for companies.

The games business is expanding and evolving, and in a recent interview with CNBC's Squawk Box, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick highlights his thoughts on the industry's new push towards PC and open platforms--the latter might be a nod to the new Xbox PC.

The hype for Half-Life 3 has been going from rocket-powered stride to rocket-powered stride, where it feels like we're closer than ever to Valve's industry-changing announcement of HL3... and we're nowhere near April Fool's Day.

Valve recently announced its new hardware in the Steam Machine, Steam Frame VR headset, and new Steam Controller ready for early 2026... but no system-seller like Half-Life 3 will be. But today, today is the 27th anniversary of Half-Life as it dropped on November 19, 1998 on the PC and changed everything.

We've had insiders and rumors that Half-Life 3 has been in development for years and that a reveal was really, really close... and today would have been the perfect day to celebrate Half-Life with the announcement of Half-Life 3.

Intel has said that it's making great progress on its next-gen Intel 14A node, as well as talking about its recent partnership with NVIDIA, and what we'll see in the future regarding CPUs and GPUs.

At the recent 2025 RBC Capital Markets Global Technology, Internet, Media and Telecommunications Conference, Intel VP John Pitzer discussed the upcoming Intel 14A process node, and how it will be an important milestone for the company, as well as its NVIDIA partnership, and more.

Intel 18A will be found inside of chips later this year with Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 300 "Panther Lake" CPUs with ramping in early 2026, but after that we'll see Intel 14A which will feature two huge innovations: second-gen GAA (Gate-All-Around) transistor design, and the second is optimized backside power delivery.

Rockstar delayed Grand Theft Auto 6 (again) not too long ago, with a new release window of November 2026, but that delay could see the next-gen PlayStation 6 and Xbox consoles delayed as well, says an analyst.

In a recent article from GamesIndustry, Ampere Analysis research director, games, Piers Harding-Rolls, pondered if the late release of GTA 6 will have an impact on next-gen console releases. The analyst firm says they're forecasting a next-gen PlayStation 6 and Xbox to arrive in late 2027, lining up with rumors from the last year or so.

However, Sony and Microsoft could be "tempted" to get more from the current-gen consoles riding the GTA 6 wave and then waiting until 2028 for the new PS6 and Xbox consoles.

For those running Linux or SteamOS, Valve's Proton compatibility layer for DirectX 12 translation (that is, to get Windows games and APIs to run without issue) has just received a significant update. VKD3D-Proton version 3.0, check out the GitHub page here, features several changes, but the ones that caught our attention were the addition of AMD FSR 4 support and Anti-Lag.

"We added support for AGS WMMA intrinsics through VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix and VK_KHR_shader_float8, which is enough to support FSR 4," the update writes. Like the Windows-based version of FSR 4, support is officially limited to RDNA 4 GPUs and the Radeon RX 9000 Series, but the update also includes a fallback mode that makes FSR 4 work on older RDNA 3 and even RDNA 2 GPUs that use int8 and float16.

However, per the release notes, running FSR 4 on previous-generation Radeon hardware results in a "significant performance cost" and a reduction in overall image fidelity. This emulation path won't be included in the official Proton build, but it does pave the way for the technology to arrive in time for the launch of Valve's new Steam Machine in early 2026.

AMD's SVP and General Manager of the Computing and Graphics Group, Jack Huynh, has taken to social media to confirm that the company's big FSR Redstone update for the RDNA 4 generation of Radeon RX 9000 Series graphics cards is set to premiere on December 10.

FSR Redstone consists of four separate AI technologies that will see the company's FSR 4 suite effectively catch up to NVIDIA DLSS in terms of functionality. One of these technologies, Ray Regeneration, is akin to NVIDIA's DLSS Ray Reconstruction, an AI-powered denoiser that dramatically improves the fidelity of ray-traced effects in games.

A special preview of FSR Redstone's Ray Regeneration is currently available to experience in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 on PC, where it pairs with the game's ray-traced reflections to improve the image quality for Radeon RX 9000 Series owners. Based on this December 10 announcement, all four FSR 'Redstone' features could potentially go live that day. Either that or we'll get information on which games will support the new technology and when gamers can expect updates.

It's been one of the most talked-about topics in recent weeks: an unprecedented shortage and supply of DRAM and flash memory for technology, driven by unrelenting demand from the data center, AI, and cloud sectors. With industry and financial analysts sounding the alarm, the price of 16 Gigabits of DDR5 has more than doubled in the past month, rising to $24.80 per unit on November 17.

And that's Gb, not GB, which would make it 2GB of DDR5 memory that's 130% more expensive now than it was a month ago. As detailed in a new report over at Hankyung, memory can account for anywhere between 20 to 50% of the cost of devices like smartphones or PCs, so a price increase of this magnitude will have a massive impact on the profitability of countless products.

The analysts at TrendForce predict that fixed or contract pricing for DRAM in the fourth quarter will increase by 75% year over year. Unfortunately, this means that the global smartphone, laptop, and PC markets will most likely shrink in 2026. TrendForce has lowered its growth rate prediction for PC production from +0.1% to -2.0% for 2026, while the smartphone market is expected to be hit even harder, with its growth rate dropping from +1.7% to -2.4%.

We've got a new DDR5 memory frequency world record courtesy of German extreme overclocker CENS, who set a new speed of DDR5-13322 (13,322 MT/s). CENS partnered with G.SKILL and ASUS for this achievement, with the new world record achieved using a 24Gb module of G.SKILL's popular Trident Z5 DDR5 memory, ASUS's flagship ROG Maximus Z890 Apex motherboard, and the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor. Plus, plenty of liquid nitrogen.

It feels like we're in the middle of OC season, as the DDR5 memory frequency record has been broken a few times over the past few weeks. A couple of weeks ago, we saw GIGABYTE's in-house overclocker HiCookie set a record of 13,034 MT/s, and last week, overclocker AiMax broke the 13,200 MT/s barrier with a speed of DDR5-13211.

This is a roundabout way of saying that we're not sure how long this new record by CENS will stand.

Rockstar Games is reportedly testing in-house if Grand Theft Auto 6 can be developed for the Nintendo Switch 2 according to new rumors.

In a new post by leaker @NateTheHate2 on X who has been reliable previously, there are rumors that GTA 6 could come to the Nintendo Switch 2 handheld, and that Rockstar has "made an effort" to see if they can bring Grand Theft Auto 6 to the platform.

In previous posts, Nate said: "I said a while ago that Rockstar was doing tests to bring it to the Switch 2, but tests don't always equal release. I know an effort has been made to see if they can bring it to the platform, I don't know the current state of that". He added in a follow-up post: "experimenting doesn't equal 'in development' and companies often test to see if a game is possible on hardware".

Elon Musk has recently said that Tesla will need between 100 billion and 200 billion AI chips per year, and that both TSMC and Samsung can't meet that demand in the timeline he wants. Elon doubled-down on his plans for Tesla to build its own massive semiconductor fab.

The comments from the SpaceX and Tesla founder were made during the Baron Investment Conference, where he said that chip giant partners like TSMC and Samsung Foundry he has "tremendous respect for" but they need 5 years to get a new chip fab plant up and running, and he added that those 5 years are "an eternity".

Elon continued, explaining: "The production speed doesn't seem fast enough. When I asked them how long it would take from groundbreaking to completion of a new chip factory, they told me it would take five years to start production. I felt that five years was an endless wait for me".

On October 24, 2025, the largest DDoS attack "ever observed in the cloud" on a single endpoint of Microsoft's Azure services in Australia was recorded. Measuring 3.64 billion packets per second or 15.72 Tbps, enough data to stream millions of movies, the good news is that Microsoft's Azure DDOS Protection automatically detected and mitigated the attack before it caused any harm.

With DDoS attacks and recorded instances on the rise, this particular record-breaking attempt was carried out by the Aisuru botnet. Botnets and DDoS attacks are fundamentally straightforward: multiple IP addresses and devices target specific IP addresses and attempt to flood them, aiming to overwhelm them and take them offline.

According to Microsoft's Sean Whalen, this attack originated from over 500,000 source IPs across various regions, indicating it was a global attack targeting a single point in Australia. Aisuru is a Turbo Mirai-class IoT botnet behind many recent record-breaking DDoS attacks, exploiting devices such as home routers, cameras, and other smart devices, mainly located in residential homes.

Sony has revealed its Black Friday deals for PlayStation 5 consoles, accessories and games, with the headline discount being $100 off all PS5 models in the US.

That means the base PS5 and PS5 Digital Edition consoles, and the PS5 Pro, are all knocked down by $100 from November 21 next week, when Sony's sale kicks off.

So, instead of paying $750 for a PS5 Pro, you'll be looking at an outlay of $650. The base PS5 price is reduced from $550 to $450, and the PS5 Digital Edition is reduced from $500 to $400 (yes, we're rounding up the cent here).

Xbox president Sarah Bond comments further on Microsoft's next-gen hardware plans, reiterating previous statements about openness of games libraries and storefronts.

Microsoft isn't giving up on consoles...but the new Xbox will break the mold. Reports indicate that the next Microsoft gaming hardware will essentially be an Xbox PC hybrid, with the device running Windows 11 and containing an "Xbox experience." In theory, the new melded system should be a major evolution of the Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) on the Xbox Ally and Ally X handhelds.

While Microsoft won't officially confirm or deny the rumors, the public comments from top executive management, including those from CEO Satya Nadella, seem to align with the Xbox PC reports. Now in a recent interview with Fortune, Xbox president Sarah Bond reiterates some of her previous assertions about new hardware.

If you think that your internet is playing up because you can't load your favorite website, or even a multiplayer game, don't worry, it likely isn't your home internet that is playing up; it's Cloudflare, the internet hosting service that is responsible for keeping up approximately 20% of all internet traffic.

Cloudflare has taken to its status website to issue several updates, with the first being on Nov 18, 2025, 11:48 UTC, where the hosting service stated its "experiencing an internal service degradation" and that "some services may be intermittently impacted."

Additionally, Cloudflare wrote in that update, its focus is on restoring service. Approximately 15 minutes later, it issued another update where it said it's continuing to investigate the issue, and then 20 minutes after that update at 12:03 UTC, it stated it's "still investigating."