The FBI has recently issued a warning about off-brand devices typically found beneath TVs, as they have been discovered to be used by cybercriminals.

The FBI posted a warning on March 12, 2026, about cheap off-brand streaming devices, such as Android-based devices that offer "free" movies, TV shows, sports channels, and more. These devices are becoming increasingly popular as streaming services raise the minimum cost of access to platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+. The FBI warns that while users may be saving hundreds of dollars per month, they could have given cybercriminals access, who could use the device to create a residential proxy network.

Hackers using residential proxy networks are looking to route illegal internet traffic, such as bots, through real home IP addresses, effectively disguising the hacker's activity as if it's coming from a legitimate user. Typically, websites can detect or even block suspicious internet traffic, but residential proxy networks are much harder to detect, as hackers use real devices connected to real households.

Elon Musk is looking to bring high-tech underground transportation to at least three states, with the company announcing that an underground loop connecting a University and a recreational area is currently being discussed.

The project aims to reduce congestion by creating a direct, high-speed underground route between two high-traffic locations, allowing passengers to travel in Tesla vehicles through a dedicated tunnel, bypassing surface roads entirely. The Loop would be similar to the system already in place in Las Vegas, specifically the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, which transports thousands of passengers daily between convention centers, reducing a 25-minute walk to just a few minutes.

The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop can transport 4,000 passengers per hour, while the greater Vegas Loop can support 90,000 passengers. The Boring Company, founded by Elon Musk in 2016, is looking to link the University of North Texas in Dallas and a recreational space in University Hills, which would significantly reduce travel time between the two locations, while simultaneously reducing roadway traffic.

Dead CPUs are no longer headline news. While they don't fail every other day, we have seen enough cases to know it's a real issue. In many of those situations, the motherboard is often the prime suspect because of its role in power delivery. That part isn't new. The unusual part would be seeing a single motherboard kill three CPUs, one after another, and that is exactly what this Reddit user claims to have experienced.

Reddit user u/notmemeber posted that their ASRock B850M Pro RS WiFi motherboard has killed three Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPUs over roughly 4 months. The user built the PC in January 2025, with the first CPU dying around November. The next died just a couple of months later, followed by a third going down within a month of the replacement arriving.

Whether coincidence or not, the board killed each CPU faster than the last, and it's hard to write this off as just bad luck. The user also noted that the first two deaths came with the same CPU and DRAM lights on the motherboard, but the third was different, showing a solid green BOOT light with no display at all. Same result, but different warning signs each time. Perhaps something was progressively getting worse with each replacement. It's also worth pointing out that the third CPU died on the latest 4.X BIOS versions, meaning the updates ASRock had been pushing out did nothing to stop it.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach launched on PC on March 19, 2026, and according to new statistics provided by Alinea Analytics, the sequel has now passed a new sales milestone.

The new stats claim that Death Stranding 2: On the Beach has now sold 2 million units, generating an estimated $110 million on PS5 and $32.6 million on PC. The release on PC boosted Death Stranding 2 sales by approximately 20%, and what is interesting is that it also caused a spike in PS5 sales, which analysts are describing as an "effective re-marketing tool for PS5, too."

Not only was Death Stranding 2 re-marketed to consumers through user-generated content such as gameplay videos and commentary, but it also received a sizable price cut to assist in sales conversion. Furthermore, PC players aren't just buying the game and not playing; the analytics firm reports that PC players have an average playtime of 18 hours in Death Stranding 2, with over a third of the player base having already played 20 hours or more. These sales figures come after the title leaked in full two days before the launch.

A renowned hardware leaker in the PC tech space, known for leaking GPU architecture details and being quite spot-on about them, has revealed the cost of materials for Sony's upcoming PlayStation 6.

KeplerL2 took to the NeoGAF forums to share their estimate of the BOM, or Bill of Materials, for the PlayStation 6, and according to the leaker, that figure is currently $760. While the estimated cost of each PS6 is $760, Kepler writes that it is "still possible" for Sony to sell the console at $699. Those figures may be confusing to some, but they do make sense. The last console Sony released that made a profit on each unit was the PS4, with the PS3 famously launching at a loss, and the PS5's price was lower than manufacturing costs.

Sony makes up for this loss with other revenue streams generated by the platform, such as PS Store cuts, subscriptions, and game sales. Microsoft isn't any different either: the Xbox 360 initially sold at a loss, the Xbox One was near break-even or even slightly loss-making, and the Xbox Series X didn't make a profit on a per-console basis. Nintendo takes a very different approach; the Nintendo Switch made a profit per unit at launch in 2017, along with the Wii and DS.

The two biggest questions with Grand Theft Auto 6 are the price and whether Rockstar is going to delay the release again for further polishing, and the price aspect was recently discussed in an interview with TheGameBusiness, as Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick answered a question from Christopher Dring that suggests GTA 6 won't be slapped with the dreaded $100 price tag.

The Take-Two Interactive CEO was asked about his thoughts on in-game advertising in PC and console releases, as fans have suspected that Rockstar may take this route with Grand Theft Auto 6 to earn more money from the title. Zelnick responded by saying that he believes it's unfair for a gamer who spends "$70 or $80 bucks" on a game to have "interstitial advertising," which, in this case, would be ads appearing on assets within the GTA 6 world.

A man in the United Kingdom purchased an old Xbox 360 for £5 ($6.64) from a car boot sale in Edinburgh, and within it was a Rockstar North development kit for Grand Theft Auto 4.

The development kit had a stunningly big prototype of the classic Grand Theft Auto 4, which debuted on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on April 29, 2008. The buyer took to the GTAForums to share a link to the extracted development kit, which revealed a ton of previously unseen assets, character models, missions, and other aspects of the game.

For those wondering what a development kit for GTA 4 actually is, it's essentially a pre-release version of the game that includes extra tools that give developers deeper access to the system.

An official document from Rockstar North has revealed the studio has spent over $2.1 billion on salaries since 2019, which will make the production costs for Grand Theft Auto far higher than previously expected.

Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 6 has been in pre-production since around 2018, shortly after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, and "in earnest" development began in 2020, according to Take-Two Interactive, the publisher of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

According to official government documentation pulled from Rockstar's financial statements, Rockstar North has spent over $2.1 billion on salaries and wages since 2019, and by the time that Grand Theft Auto 6 releases in November this year, the studio will have spent an estimated $3 billion in total.

According to new information from two credible sources on Nintendo, Nate the Hate and VGC, the company is planning to bring back a few iconic games from the Nintendo 64 era later this year. The first game set to hit the Nintendo Switch 2 is expected to arrive as early as this summer, with Nintendo reportedly putting the final touches on a brand-new game in the Star Fox series.

Star Fox from the SNES and Star Fox 64 for the N64 are considered classics for their focus on arcade-style action and on-rails shooting, featuring a colorful cast of anthropomorphic characters. The last proper entry in the series, Star Fox Zero, saw Nintendo collaborate with PlatinumGames to deliver a game that received a relatively disappointing Metacritic score of 69 out of 100.

According to Nate the Hate, the new Star Fox game coming in 2026 will be more like the SNES and N64 games, with modern visuals and online multiplayer. As for the second iconic return, with The Legend of Zelda series celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, Nintendo is reportedly prepping to release a full, built-from-the-ground-up remake of one of the N64's most beloved games.

Meta is currently building a new $27 billion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, the company's biggest to date. Naturally, it's all about AI, with Meta noting that this 4 million-square-foot Richland Parish Data Center will play a "vital role in accelerating our AI progress, delivering over two gigawatts of compute capacity to train future open-source large language models."

With the energy requirements of these new data centers straining local grids and energy supplies, Meta has reportedly struck a deal with Entergy Louisiana to fund and help build seven new natural gas power plants in the region. With a combined power output of 5,200 megawatts, this is enough to cover "two gigawatts of compute" of the data center and then some.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the energy deal also includes 240 miles of 500-kilovolt transmission or power lines and battery storage. Now, although "natural gas" might sound good on paper, it's not exactly clean - it's still a fossil fuel. Albeit one with fewer emissions than coal-fired plants.

Razer has lifted the lid on its new ultra-thin 2026 Blade 16 gaming laptop, and this refresh is set to push laptop performance to new heights. In addition to supporting the Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor, which features 33% more cores than the previous Blade 16, it's also set to ship with up to 64GB of LPDDR5-9600 MHz memory, which Razer says is the fastest available memory for a laptop.

The 16-core Intel Core Ultra 9 386H features a max boost frequency of 4.9 GHz, which should make a notable difference to CPU-heavy gaming, creative, and productivity workloads. It also features an integrated NPU with up to 50 TOPS of AI performance for local AI workloads. And when paired with the Razer Laptop Cooling Pad, the 2026 Blade 16 can be overclocked and boosted by up to 175W for even more performance when plugged in.

On the GPU side, the Razer's 2026 Blade 16 will once again leverage NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, with full support for DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation for high-end cinematic gaming. And although the 16-inch QHD+ (2560 x 1600) OLED panel sports the same 240 Hz refresh rate as last year's model, the 2026 edition does include one notable upgrade.

ASUS's ROG X870E APEX motherboard is the company's AM5 flagship for the current generation of Ryzen desktop processors. It's built for extreme CPU and memory overclocking thanks to premium power delivery, advanced memory technology, and a ROG Memory Fan Kit cooler to support OC action.

According to new screenshots showcasing the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU in a system with the ROG Crosshair X870E APEX motherboard and 32GB of G.Skill Trident Z5 NEO DDR5 memory, ASUS's engineers were able to push DDR5-8800 memory speeds with low-latency CL32 timings. That last bit is particularly impressive because DDR5-8000+ speeds with Ryzen 9000 Series CPUs often come with much higher latency.

According to the source of the screenshot of ASUS's testing (Wccftech), the G.Skill memory appears to be a low-latency model with DDR5-6000 (6,000 MT/s) speeds. This means DDR8800 is effectively a 46.6% memory frequency overclock while maintaining similarly tight timings.

AMD recently announced the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor, the company's first desktop CPU with dual second-generation 3D V-Cache technology. This chiplet processor is powered by an impressive 16 Zen 5 cores and features 208MB of total cache. This is the "most ever built into a Ryzen processor," with the company saying that it's built for developers and creators.

Of course, as CPUs with 3D V-Cache technology are fantastic for PC gaming, we can probably throw that into the mix too. With a power rating of 200W, AMD notes that the new CPU delivers 5-10% performance improvements over the current Ryzen 9 9950X3D flagship in popular creative apps and workloads like DaVinci Resolve, Blender, and Unreal Engine.

And as the latest AM5 CPU, the good news is that the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition works with existing motherboards. In fact, ASRock has confirmed that its entire lineup of X870E, X870, B850, B850M, X670E, B650, B650M, and A620 motherboards is ready to pair with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, for a total of 90 motherboards.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney will step in and help a distinctly tragic situation affecting a laid off employee who has terminal brain cancer and no life insurance after the company eliminated his role at the group.

Epic Games recently laid off 1,000 workers, earning the ire from industry developers and gamers alike. One of the people affected by the recent layoffs was Mike Prinke, a terminal cancer patient whose life insurance policy was in dangerous jeopardy. Jenni Griffin, Mike's wife, shared the tragic story on Facebook, outlining the stress and fear that their family now faces as a result of the layoff.

"Because of the layoff, we didn't just lose income-we lost his life insurance. And because his condition is now considered a pre-existing condition, he can't get new coverage," Griffin said.

A series of new next-gen Zen 6 server EPYC processors from AMD have debuted on the open-source benchmarking platform OpenBenchmarking, thanks to Olrak29_ at X (formerly Twitter). These appear to be the first public sightings of the upcoming silicon, though performance is not indicative of the final result, as we're still dealing with early silicon. Codenamed 'Venice', AMD is on track to launch these 6th Gen EPYC processors in the second half of 2026.

Last April, AMD officially unveiled the codename and some architectural details for its next-generation EPYC family. The EPYC 9006 family is designed with the Zen 6 architecture and fabricated using TSMC's 2nm process. Current leaks underpin improved core counts, greater cache, and enhanced I/O capabilities, thanks to the new design and the higher density offered by the updated process node.

If we're to believe leaks, each Zen 6 CCD is moving from the standard 8-core structure to 12 cores, with 48MB of L3 cache, up from 32MB. The dense Zen 6c variant sees an even bigger jump from 16 cores to 32 cores per CCD, accompanied by 128MB of L3 cache (up from 32MB). This means that for a fully decked-out chip with eight Zen 6c CCDs, we're looking at 256 cores and 1GB of L3 cache. While industry insiders have teased this flagship spec, current data suggests the standard Zen 6 counterpart may top out at 96 cores with a similar eight CCD layout, unlike sixteen CCDs with Turin.

Japanese games-maker Square Enix has announced a dynamic duo team up with Google's AI division, Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun reports.

Square Enix is teaming up with Google to add a new AI companion into Dragon Quest X, allowing real-time hints, tips, and tricks for users.

The publisher will add a special new conversational AI companion into its popular MMORPG Dragon Quest X that's powered by Google's Gemini AI chatbot. It'll take the form of an in-game slime character, aka a special "Chatty Slimey" NPC, and players can ask it questions to get glean valuable info and help. The AI-powered slime will also have voiced dialog, and may be able to contextually speak on its own based on what's happening.

CD Projekt saw a record-breaking 60% profit margin throughout 2025, driven by full game sales and high-margin subscription deals.

It's not easy making continued profits in the video games industry, but CD Projekt has managed to pull off an astronomically high 60% profit margin for the full year of 2025.

In a new earnings report, company management highlights the numbers, with management explaining that the results were mostly due to the lucrative royalties from The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 being included on PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass.

New reports say that the anticipated Final Fantasy 9 Remake remains shelved for the time being as Square Enix focuses on other projects, including the third FF7 Remake chapter 3 as well as Dragon Quest XII and Kingdom Hearts IV.

Originally unearthed in the GeForce Now leak of 2021, Square Enix's FF9 Remake has remained shrouded in mystery. Last year was a good opportunity to reveal the project, as 2025 marked the 25th anniversary of the original game.

New reports say that the project has been put in cold storage, potentially to be resurrected for later use. Sources have told gaming YouTuber NateTheHate that the Final Fantasy 9 Remake is "on ice" for now.

Apple's MacBook Neo is a raging success and has helped the company bring in a record number of new users into the Apple ecosystem. However, one area where the Neo's designers cut corners is with the cooling solution, which allows the A18 Pro inside to thermal throttle under heavy workloads. YouTuber ETA Prime modded a MacBook Neo with a Peltier-based liquid cooling solution and found the chip performs significantly better without thermal throttling, especially in games.

The YouTuber used multiple cooling mods to make the liquid cooling mod possible. First, he applied a copper cooling mod to the Neo's A18 Pro inside, replacing the stock graphene pad with a copper shim sandwiched between the A18 Pro and thermal paste on the bottom and a thermal pad on top, connecting the copper pad to the bottom cover of the Neo. We will explain why this mod was necessary further below.

The liquid cooling system ETA Prime is using is designed for smartphones and uses a combination of electricity and coolant to cool the temperature of whatever device the system is connected to. The cooler uses a magnetic puck to attach itself to a smartphone and cool the internal components from the device's back cover. In the Neo's case, the YouTuber attached the puck right over the SoC and the copper shim above it. Using the liquid cooler this way likely wouldn't have been possible without the copper shim mod, the MacBook Neo's stock graphene pad doesn't connect to anything but the A18 Pro itself; which is why the chip thermal throttles.

A new leak points to a cheaper Game Pass option that could be a ray of hope for Xbox gamers amid rising gaming costs. The possible new tier would focus exclusively on first-party titles, with games such as Halo 5, Fallout 76, and DOOM Eternal potentially included. This comes on the heels of recent price hikes on the existing Game Pass tiers, which have pushed many users away from the subscription. Microsoft may be looking to change that.

According to a data mining leak from @redphx on X, Microsoft is reportedly working on a new program codenamed "TRION" or "TRITON." What sets it apart from existing tiers is that it would include only games from Xbox Game Studios, rather than the mixed catalog available now. Here's the full list of titles in the leaked Game Pass tier:

The new tier is likely targeting Xbox gamers who are only interested in its first-party titles, since many have been asking for such a program for a long time. The exact pricing for this leaked Game Pass tier also remains unknown, but many believe Microsoft could introduce it as an ad-supported or low-cost subscription. Since a first-party only approach theoretically eliminates licensing costs, it could allow Microsoft to offer the tier at a price point that works for casual players.