Things get political this week on The TT Show when Jak and Kosta dig into the recent controversy surrounding Elon Musk, X, and the Australian government's attempt to censor specific content. Then, it gets even more political when the topic switches to the US government deeming Microsoft a security risk because all agencies depend on its software.

Plus, Intel partners with the Pentagon to develop microchips for what we can only assume is stuff you'd consider "not good." But hey, that's just the show's second half, as the first half is full of in-depth impressions for No Rest From the Wicked. Thel attest game from the studio behind the excellent Ori series blends Diablo with Dark Souls to deliver something special.

Jak and Kosta also talk about the upcoming rumors surrounding Ubisoft's Far Cry 7, which will feature Mr. Oppenheimer himself, Cillian Murphy, as the villain. Plus, Sony has announced a new PlayStation overlay with PSN Friends and Trophies for its PC games.

Intel 13th and 14th Gen Raptor Lake Core i9 processors have been making headlines recently due to widespread reports of crashing and instability, often while gaming. With CPUs drawing more and more power on the high-end, the issues are most likely related to thermal and power delivery on certain 600/700 Series motherboards - and the push to boost clock speeds, benchmark scores, and performance over stability.

ASUS has already addressed the issue with a BIOS update introducing a more sensible 'Intel Baseline Profile' for power limits using Intel's recommended settings. Other big board makers like MSI and GIGABYTE have followed suit with their own BIOS updates and revisions.

In a statement supplied to Igor's Lab, Intel blames motherboard manufacturers for disabling "thermal and power delivery safeguards designed to limit processor exposure to sustained periods of high voltage and frequency." It's a strange stance when the instability lies with the CPU.

AMD is reportedly not going to have any high-end RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 8000 series GPUs when they launch later this year, with news that the high-end Navi 4X GPU coming out recently... and it would've been great to see: with 50% more shader engines than the Navi 31 GPU inside of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

In some new patches for AMD's GFX12, leaker "Kepler_L2" spotted some of the upgrades we are missing out on with the flagship RDNA 4-based Navi 4X GPU, which would've been the successor to the Navi 31 GPU that powers the fastest Radeon GPU for gamers: the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

In the patches, Kepler_L2 noticed that the GFX12 family is the codename for the RDNA 4 GPU family. The flagship Navi 4X or Navi 4C SKUs reportedly would've featured 9 Shader Engines, which would've been a 50% increase over the Navi 31 GPU, which features 6 Shader Engines.

With a steady stream of driver updates, bug fixes, and day-one game support, Intel's Arc graphics cards continue to improve. In our review of the SPARKLE Intel Arc A770 TITAN OC Edition from earlier this year, we said it was a decent mainstream option for 1080p and even 1440p gaming thanks to the top Intel Arc A770 GPU featuring 16GB of VRAM.

Regarding Intel Arc GPUs, SPARKLE is right up there regarding build quality, style, and thermal performance. Until now, each model has had a distinct look thanks to bright 'Intel blue' for the shrouds and blue-colored PCBs.

SPARKLE's latest addition to its Intel Arc lineup is the SPARKLE Intel Arc A770 ROC OC Edition 16GB, available in Black and LUNA White. Sporting a more compact twin-fan design with a 2.5-slot thickness, the new ROC OC Edition features the same out-of-the-box overclock as the triple-fan TITAN OC Edition.

Corsair has officially teased its new One i500 compact gaming PC, which will be revealed on May 5 sporting "next-gen components". The official tease was posted on X by Corsair; check it out:

The company will be showing off a brand-new design with a tease of a sleeker chassis with beautiful LED lighting on the sides and bottom, but it's the next-gen component that I want to see. Hopefully we'll get some next-gen AMD Zen 5-based CPU goodness, alongside what I'm sure will be an interesting choice in GPU... Radeon, or GeForce?

Capcom's Dragon's Dogma 2, a massive open-world RPG, has been one of the years talked about and played games. On PC, the gameplay has been generally well received; however, poor performance and optimization for Capcom's impressive RE Engine going 'open-world' for the first time is one of the main reasons it's currently sitting on a "Mixed" user rating on Steam.

That said, if you're looking for a mod that takes the game visuals to the next level, the Graphics Suite ALPHA mod from EXXXcellent (download it at Nexus Mods) unlocks a hidden developer menu for the game that includes a path-tracing renderer for the game that is not available in the retail version.

Path tracing (also called full ray tracing) covers indirect lighting, global illumination, shadows, and reflections - where anything related to light is ray-traced. Dragon's Dogma already includes RTGI or ray-traced global illumination, but as we can see in Digital Foundry's video on the path tracing mod, the difference is night and day.

NVIDIA is expected to generate $40 billion of revenue from AI GPU sales this year according to Bloomberg analysts, with competitors AMD and Intel in their dust.

AMD is estimated to generate around $3.5 billion in revenue from its new Instinct MI300X AI accelerator, while Intel will enjoy some loose change with its Gaudi AI accelerator, with analysts estimating just $500 million in sales. Both pale in comparison to $40 billion from NVIDIA, which is 80x more than Intel's estimated $500 million.

We all know that applying thermal paste to CPUs isn't the easiest thing to do, squirt a little on... move it around, make it kinda even... but now there's an idiot-proof method of applying the perfect layer thermal paste with X-Apply... check it out:

Igor's Lab worked with DigitalBlizzard, who "came up with the whole thing" explains Igor, and with a little help from an "industrial partner" and a few suggestions from Igor, X-Apply was born. The new X-Apply stencil allows the formation of the absolutely ideal pattern of thermal paste, with a perfectly even distribution across your CPU.

MSI seems to have fully pulled back from making AMD Radeon GPUs, with the company confirming with HardwareLuxx that it is solely concentrating on making custom NVIDIA GeForce RTX series GPUs.

Hardware Unboxed posted on X saying: "Did I miss this story? MSI has been completely removed from AMD's Radeon 7000 series, all existing products have been discontinued and they never released a 7700 XT / 7800 XT. This all seems to have happened very quietly". HBU isn't wrong, this has happened very quietly indeed.

Super Display Co (SDC) has just released its new SDC 27X1U monitor, featuring a 27-inch 4K Nano-IPS panel with a super-smooth 165Hz refresh rate and the latest DisplayPort 2.0 and HDMI 2.1 connectivity.

The new SDC 27X1U monitor costs just $415, but it features DP2.0 and HDMI 2.1, as well as a 4K 165Hz panel for that price, which isn't too damn bad at all. It's also another DisplayPort 2.0 monitor to add to the pile, which will only work on AMD Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs and Intel Arc GPUs... NVIDIA GeForce RTX series GPU owners miss out on DP2.0 fun.

SDC uses a flat 27-inch 4K Nano-IPS panel from LG (model LM270WR8), which is used in some of LG's in-house gaming monitors, with the SDC 27X1U supporting 10-bit color, HDR600 with a measured brightness of around 680 nits in HDR mode. There's also support for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), it's compatible with VESA VRR, and AMD FreeSync, NVIDIA G-SYNC, and VRR functionality works on the PlayStation 5 (48 to 120Hz).

Sabrent has just kicked off a new build/upgrade bundle that gives you 20% off when you order a new Rocket 4 SSD, a Rocket DDR5 RAM module, and an SSD enclosure. You can save 20% with Sabrent's new Build/Upgrade bundle here.

The Sabrent bundle includes their Rocket 4 1TB and 2TB SSDs, Rocket DDR5 16GB SO-DIMM and U-DIMM memory modules (both at $39.99 each), and their USB 3.2 Type-C tool-free enclosure for M.2 PCIe NVMe and SATA SSDs. If you purchase at least one of each, you'll get 20% off at the end.

Sabrent's Rocket 4 2TB SSD, Rocket DDR5-4800 16GB U-DIMM, and a USB 3.2 Type-C SSD enclosure come to $279.97, but with 20% off, you're reducing that to $223.97. That's not bad at all, a savings of $50 on that bundle alone.