Latest News - Page 215

Alienware is flexing a little more into custom LEGO sets, with the introduction of its new Alienware Brick Kit Desk... a small gaming desk with Alienware's latest hardware including peripherals and a monitor, for the best LEGO full battle station gaming PC in the world.

The company released its super-popular Alienware Area-51 Desktop Brick kit made with Authentic LEGO bricks, but now it's back with the Brick Kit Desk that features a desk with an Alienware Pro Mouse, headset and keyboard, all in a brick build, with the keyboard profiled to mirror Alienware's recently released Aurora FX package.

Each of the kits will feature a sticker pack that features some of Alienware's newly-released wallpapers (which you can download here). The Alienware technology sits on a custom brick desk... that get this... has height-adjustable legs, which the company says "should allow you to fit the kit in places with varying heights" like shelving, etc.

Intel will only be detailing its next-gen Panther Lake CPU architecture at its big October 9 reveal event, with no detailed specifications being released, and we won't see reviews until after CES 2026 in over three months' time.

That's right... we won't be seeing anything really juicy about Panther Lake until 2026, according to Chinese leaker "Golden Pig Upgrade" who said that the release of Panther Lake on October 9 is "only related to the architecture analysis, the detailed specifications and reviews will have to wait until after CES next year. Good things come to those who wait, so wait patiently, 18A".

18A is in reference to Intel's new 18A process node built in-house at its semiconductor fab, compared to its previous generation CPUs being fabbed in Taiwan at TSMC. The embargo lift on October 9 will see tech media, YouTubers, and influencers discuss the Panther Lake CPU architecture. This means we'll get the nitty-gritty on the new Cougar Cove Performance and Darkmont Efficiency cores, as well as some details for its next-gen Xe3 "Celestial" GPU for the first time, as Xe3 debuts in Panther Lake.

A user on Reddit has posted about his 9800X3D processor dying for the SECOND time, installed into an ASRock motherboard, a brand he says will not recommend to people, and will never use another ASRock motherboard ever again.

In the post on Reddit, user "ShendonZ" said his first AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor died earlier this year in June, that AMD gave him another CPU but he RMA'd the motherboard back to ASRock for them to say the motherboard would be fine with the latest BIOS update. But two and a half months later, and the same thing has happened in about the same amount of time it was used.

ASRock's recommendation of updating the BIOS is something that happened over burned AMD processors on their motherboards, but it seems that didn't help... let's hope this isn't a (new) sign of things to come with dying Ryzen CPUs installed into ASRock's motherboards.

Intel and NVIDIA announced a partnership not too long ago, which would see GeForce RTX GPU chiplets installed onto future Intel processors, and AMD is unfazed by it, at least according to an executive who says the company's roadmap will remain "disruptive".

In a new chat with CRN and AMD corporate vice president and general manager of client OEM, Jason Banta, said AMD is "very confident" in its ability to compete with two massive rivals, pointing to one product in particular. Banta said: "we're very confident in our road map. We've done some very exciting things. You've seen 'Strix Halo' products that are really category-defining products. We want to continue to provide disruptive technology".

Strix Halo is the codename for its powerful new APU, which AMD unveiled earlier this year in January as the "most advanced mobile x86 processor ever created". AMD said at the time that its Strix Halo APU with its fast 16C/32T CPU, RDNA 3.5-powered GPU, and NPU, as well as its ability to allocate 96GB of system memory to the GPU alone, allowed AMD to compete against the best chips from its competitors like Intel, Apple, and NVIDIA in areas like 3D rendering and AI inferencing.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 early access multiplayer beta has gone live, and I have put it to the test across a range of graphics cards to evaluate in-game performance.

We have managed to gain early access to the multiplayer thanks to Activision, and have decided to see what kind of performance players will be getting at 4K and 1440p at native, with DLSS on no Frame Generation (FG), and with FG x 2 enabled. I tested the GeForce RTX 5070, 5070 Ti, and 5080 across 4K and 1440p, each test ran for 3 minutes and was done with the Extreme graphics preset enabled. Notably, all these tests were conducted using an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

If you don't want to dive through the charts below, here's what we got in a nutshell. A GeForce RTX 5080 averaged 124FPS at 4K native, with impressively high minimums at 80FPS. By comparison, toggling on DLSS and keeping the same Extreme preset enabled, the RTX 5080 pushed up to 153FPS average, but strangely, minimums dropped down to 74FPS. With Frame Generation x 2 enabled, the RTX 5080 hit an average of 214FPS, but minimums were drastically reduced, down to just 23FPS.

The high-end NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series cards like the flagship RTX 5090 push that new 12V-2x6 power connector to its limit, flowing 575W+ of power through it, so adding an additional layer of protection could be a good move, and that's why this new $79 device can do.

Aqua Computer has introduced the new AMPINEL, a small dedicated hardware device for the 12V-2x6 power connector that both measures power, but also balances current flow and is capable of shutting down the GPU if those limits are exceeded. AMPINEL will continuously monitor all 6 lines of the connector, so that if the current rises on a single pin by above 7.5A, the device kicks in, redistributing load in real-time using a hybrid analog/digital control system (this is the hardware solution itself).

The new AMPINEL uses a six-layer PCB with thick copper traces for minimal loss, paired with black-anodized aluminum housing that double as a heatsink, while the connector itself is encapsulated for a stronger mechanical fit on your high-end GPU.

China has some very interesting custom and modded graphics cards, with a new one appearing: an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER graphics card with 32GB of GDDR6X, double the VRAM as the RTX 4080 SUPER ships with 16GB of VRAM.

These custom graphics cards are not official in any form, and they're not even made by legitimate manufacturers, with the sole purpose of their creation to unlock additional memory on graphics cards, when they're not used for gaming. This expanded VRAM capacity allows Chinese "startups" and AI farms to make cheaper RTX series GPUs for AI training, with more VRAM than their gaming counterparts.

NVIDIA released the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER in January 2024 launching with 16GB of GDDR6X memory, the same VRAM capacity as the RTX 4080 non-SUPER, but the newer RTX 4080 SUPER uses faster GDDR6X memory chips with 23Gbps on the RTX 4080 SUPER and slightly slower 22.4Gbps G6X chips on the RTX 4080 non-SUPER. However, the new SUPER card has more CUDA cores and an increased TDP over the non-SUPER card.

Jefferies analyst Edison Lee says that Apple's much-hyped foldable iPhone could disappoint, with all of the hype leading to excessive expectations.

The Wall Street analyst said that Apple's new foldable iPhone will probably fail to meet the current hype, saying "the better performance of the base iPhone 17 has led to excessive expectations on 18 Fold" where he expects to see around 12.5 million foldable iPhones sold in 2026.

In previous reports from June 2025, we've heard that Apple was planning to produce a much smaller amount of foldable iPhones than any of the iPhone 17 family: iPhone 17, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max. Apple's move is to challenge the foldable dominance away from its main US and global competitor -- Samsung -- while flicking shade at Huawei and its Mate XT foldable smartphone.

Samsung will be releasing its new Galaxy XR headset on October 22, but the company is reportedly so confident in its new XR headset that it will be showcasing it in Korea ahead of its launch.

In new reports from FNNnews picked up by @Jukanrosleve on X, Samsung will be unveiling the new Galaxy XR headset ahead of its launch in Korea, signaling confidence in its completeness of the XR headset. According to industry sources, Samsung will accept pre-purchase notifications from October 15-21, with the official launch of the new Galaxy XR headset taking place on October 22.

Before the launch, Samsung will be exhibiting its new XR headset, where starting on October 20 the company will have its new Galaxy XR headset on display at seven Samsung Stores across South Korea. Until now, the company has displayed its Galaxy XR at overseas events including Galaxy Unpacked and Mobile World Congress (MWC), but it hasn't been publicly displayed on Samsung's home turf.

Microsoft's choice to put Call of Duty on Xbox Game Pass has come at a detriment in potential sales.

It was always expected that Call of Duty would sell less copies once it was put on the Xbox Game Pass subscription service, but it was always hard to make an estimate of impact. Now reports indicate that Microsoft could have lost up to $300 million in Call of Duty game sales on console and PC in 2024 by including the franchise in Game Pass, most of which would likely be weighted by Black Ops 6's launch onto the service.

Sources tell Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio that Call of Duty made $300 million less in 2024 than it did with 2023, potentially indicating that Black Ops 6 was not as successful as the Xbox division hoped it'd be. To be clear, that's a substantial sum for any video game, and the potential lost sales represents 1/3rd of Modern Warfare II's astronomical $1 billion sales that the game made at release.

Microsoft is internally testing an ad-supported version of Xbox Cloud Gaming and a widespread public beta for free streaming is coming soon, sources tell The Verge's Tom Warren.

Xbox Cloud Gaming will soon be free with ads, allowing users to stream a selection of games without being tied to a paid subscription. The move comes as Microsoft officially launches its Xbox cloud product onto the market, and now we're seeing how it will make money on its own: With advertisements.

According to the report, Microsoft's free Xbox Cloud Gaming offering will let gamers stream a selection of titles that they have purchased across PC, console, handhelds, and on the web. To keep content rolling, and to entice people to play and watch ads, users can also stream the current Xbox Free Play Days titles, which includes a rotating lineup of games that can be sampled for free over a weekend, as well as a bunch of retro games. The current test phase has 2 minutes of ads per every 1 hour session, with 5 free sessions, or 5 free hours, per month. Bear in mind this is testing and the official launch hasn't been confirmed or announced, so we don't know these critical specifics just yet.

Every day, inboxes around the world are flooded with unsolicited emails that range from pushy marketing to malicious scams, and according to cybersecurity experts, spam costs businesses and individuals billions annually, not to mention the wasted time, productivity, and increased risks of fraud.

In order to prevent this annoyance from occurring, or worse, fraud from happening to you, users should know how to stop these spam emails from hitting their inboxes. Notably, since the COVID-19 pandemic, spam emails have skyrocketed in frequency, and while many email services already filter many types of spam emails into a spam folder, there are still hundreds, and even thousands in some cases, that manage to slip through into the main inbox.

Before we get into how to stop these spam emails from happening, we should outline the different types of spam emails so you can easily identify them.

A new blog post from Microsoft talks about the NPU and how it's vital to the future of Windows, driving one of the key elements in the OS, namely AI agents.

The post from Athima Chansanchai (spotted by Ghacks), who's a corporate news reporter on the Microsoft Stories team, is mostly about recapping what we already know about NPUs and accelerating local AI workloads (and a vehicle for plugging Copilot+ PCs, naturally).

However, it contains some interesting quotes giving us another strong hint of how important AI will be for next-gen Windows, from corporate VP Steven Bathiche, one of the co-founders of the Applied Sciences team at Microsoft.

Unity has issued a patch to fix a high-level vulnerability and is advising all game developers to update their games with the latest solution.

Back in June, a severe-level security vulnerability was found in older versions of Unity. Games that were made in Unity 2017.1 or below are affected by the weak spot and Unity is advising all devs update their applications with the latest patch fix. The vulnerability affected Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. Unity is one of the most popular video games engines, and a sizable portion of the top mobile games--including Call of Duty Mobile and Pokemon Go--are built on Unity.

"Applications that were built using affected versions of the Unity Editor are susceptible to an unsafe file loading and local file inclusion attack depending on the operating system, which could enable local code execution or information disclosure at the privilege level of the vulnerable application," the company wrote in its advisory post.

In the last week, we were hit with some incorrect leaks regarding AMD's next-gen Zen 6 die-to-die interconnect -- the "Sea of Wires" upgrade -- both those leaks were wrong says the most well-known Zen 6 leaker.

These leaks were wrong, with Moore's Law is Dead correcting the new speculations stating that AMD would be nerfing 3D V-Cache, or Zen 6 would be costing something like twice as much as Zen 5. MLID states Zen 6 will NOT have nerfed V-Cache, and it will NOT have some ridiculous cost over Zen 5.

MLID goes over his previous Zen 6 leaks from February 2025, where he said that both the CCD and IOD would be fabbed at TSMC on what he suspects to be its next-gen 2nm process node for the Zen 6 CCD cores. The leaker reiterated that Zen 6 would feature a bridge die beneath the CCD and IOD, which sees AMD fundamentally changing how the CCD and IOD communicates, massively reducing latency.

Fengpo is a brand you've probably never heard of, but the Chinese company has just released a new GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card that rocks a larger 20GB of VRAM (RTX 3080 has 10GB) using a cooler from PNY's higher-end GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card. Check it out:

We reported all the way back in January 2021 that GeForce RTX 3080 engineering samples were discovered with 20GB of VRAM, and since then we've seen reports of RTX 3080 cards with 20GB surfacing... and now, Fengpo has officially launched a GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card with 20GB of VRAM.

In a new post on X by Uniko's Hardware, we're learning that Chinese content creator "GPU Girl" has benchmarked the RTX 3080 20GB graphics card, comparing it against the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB card in LM Studio.

Razer's new Core X V2 external Thunderbolt 5-powered GPU enclosure is now available on Amazon for $349.99, with a full Thunderbolt 5 port offering up to 64Gbps of bandwidth, all through a single cable into your laptop.

The new Razer Core X V2 external GPU enclosure might have a Thunderbolt 5 port, but you're limited to just PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds that are capped to 64Gbps, while the full bandwidth sits at 120Gbps in one direction, and 80Gbps bidirectionally.

But there are other improvements that Thunderbolt 5 delivers on this external GPU enclosure, like delivering up to 140W of power to the connected device that sees the data transfer handled, as well as charging for laptops, smartphones, and gaming handhelds.

A criminal investigation that saw raids of a European AI cloud company is focusing on whether the company used its $586 million worth of NVIDIA AI GPUs for crypto mining, after getting massive tax breaks on the funds to buy those AI chips.

In a new report from Bloomberg, the report says that European prosecutors are looking into Northern Data and its purchase of GPUs for its site in northern Sweden. Authorities are investigating whether Northern Data, which is backed by stablecoin issuer Tether Holdings SA, obtained a tax break by claiming that the AI chips were being used for AI, when instead they were being used for cryptocurrency mining.

A few years ago, Sweden embraced the idea of cryptocurrency mining, but turned that idea around in 2023 and removed tax incentives for companies that were establishing mining operations, leaving them in place for data centers. After that, Swedish tax authorities have been investigating several crypto miners for allegedly providing misleading information to benefit from tax incentives, according to sources of Bloomberg.

Instagram's CEO Adam Mosseri has posted a video allegedly "debunking" the myth that Instagram uses smartphone microphones to listen to user conversations, and then serve advertisements based on what it hears.

Many people, including myself, have experienced having a conversation with someone, say about blue drink bottles, and then the next time they open up their Instagram timeline they see an advertisement for a blue drink bottle. While many tech companies have rigorously denied they use smartphone microphones to collect data that is then used to curate advertisements that appear on social media timelines, this phenomenon still appears to be happening. But is it a phenomenon? Or is it just coincidence?

SCUF Gaming, which is a part of Corsair, has just launched its latest premium wireless controller for PC and Xbox gamers. The new SCUF Valor Pro Wireless Performance Controller not only arrives with a premium build that includes adjustable triggers, rubberized grips for comfort, and 'Endurance TMR Thumbsticks' designed for durability and 'wear and tear' resistance, but on the rear, you'll find four customizable paddles.

The SCUF Valor Pro Wireless is designed for customization (via a dedicated app for both Xbox consoles and PC), supporting tri-mode connectivity that covers PC, Xbox consoles, and Bluetooth devices. There's also fast, low-latency 1,000 Hz polling when used in wired mode, as well as a built-in fast-charging battery that offers up to 17 hours of gaming.

At a glance, the shape will be familiar to those who have used an Xbox pad; however, SCUF's take is a little more compact, with button placement and curves designed for comfort and natural finger movement and placement. In addition to the customizable back paddles, one of the cool touches for those who love multiplayer games or chatting with friends is dedicated audio controls for headset volume as well as game/chat mix.