Seagate is on track to start qualification of its hard disk drives featuring 50TB-class capacities in late calendar 2027, with shipments to follow in 2028, the company announced this week. Demand for HDDs is so strong because of the rise of AI and continued strength of the cloud computing business that most drives are sold out through 2028 and negotiations about allocations for 2029 are ongoing.

"Mozaic 5, our 5+ terabyte per disk platform, remains on track for qualification shipments in late calendar 2027," said Dave Mosley, chief executive officer of Seagate, during the company's earnings call with financial analysts and investors.

Mozaic 5 is the company's 3^rd generation platform for commercial hard drives based on Seagate's heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology that succeeds Mozaic 3 and Mozaic 4. The Mozaic 5 platform enables the company to build platters with over 5TB capacity and consequently build 10-platter HDDs with over 50TB capacity featuring conventional magnetic recording (CMR) for clients seeking performance and versatility or shingled magnetic recording (SMR) for clients that need maximum capacity to maximize their storage density.

If Seagate preps to initiate 'qualification shipments' of its 50TB-class hard drives in late calendar 2027, then it means that by the time the HDDs have passed all the manufacturer's internal validations, including reliability and durability of heads and media, shock and vibration tests, and longevity tests among many others. It typically takes server OEMs about two to six months to qualify new HDDs for their offerings, whereas hyperscale cloud service providers usually qualify them for six to 12 months. In any case, it is safe to say that Seagate is on track to ship 50TB-class hard drives in calendar 2028 with significant volume ramp in 2029.

These 50TB-class HDDs will come to market just in time to meet exabyte demand from the AI and cloud sectors. Most of Seagate's nearline HDDs have been allocated for 2027 and 2029 under long-term supply agreements (LTAs), with some customers looking to secure supply in 2029.

"Based on the long-term supply agreements in place today, the vast majority of our nearline exabytes are now allocated into calendar 2028," Mosley said. "[…] As our strategic relationships deepen, many are actively seeking to extend planning horizons through 2029 and beyond, which we believe reflects growing confidence in their own long-term infrastructure needs."

Seagate's LTAs not only define exabytes, but also product configuration and prices. As it turns out, both are set for the 'entirety of calendar 2027.' Meanwhile, Seagate is flexible on pricing of drives that are not covered by LTAs as well as newly signed LTAs, so the company is implying price increases, following makers of 3D NAND and SSDs.

"We continue to execute our value-based pricing strategy, balancing a stronger demand environment with our objective of supporting sustainable, profitable growth over the long term," Mosley said.

"Our volume was a little bit higher in fiscal Q4," said Gianluca Romano, chief financial officer of Seagate, during the call. "We think can be maybe a little bit of output available in fiscal Q1. Of course, we are pricing that increased output at a very good price right now."

The key advantage of Seagate's high-capacity drives based on the company's Mozaic platforms is, of course, its HAMR technology, which is gradually increasing its share within the company's nearline HDD shipments. HAMR-based products accounted for a 40% exabyte share of Seagate's nearline HDDs as of early July and are on track to account for 70% of the company's nearline exabytes shipments by early July 2027. Moreover, nearly half of Seagate's nearline capacity will rely on its 40TB-class HDDs featuring its Mozaic 4 platform.

"We expect to achieve our next ramp milestone by exiting calendar 2026 with 50% of our HAMR exabytes on our Mozaic 4 platform," Mosley said.

For the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2026 ended on July 3, Seagate earned $3.629 billion, up from $2.444 billion it earned in the same quarter a year ago. The company's gross margin totaled 52.3%, up from 37.4% in Q4 FY2025, and its net income reached $1.294 billion. The company's FY2026 revenue was $12.195 billion, up from $9.097 billion in the prior year. The net income increased more than twice year-over-year to $3.184 billion, with gross margin reaching 45.6%.

Limits on the amount of VRAM on Nvidia's consumer GPUs have forced the modding community to take matters into their own hands. Time and again we've seen various DIY memory upgrades being performed, and it's even offered as a proper repair service in underground markets, but rarely is it done openly. As such, we've just spotted a vendor that will upgrade the 11GB of VRAM on an RTX 2080 Ti to 22GB and provide the BIOS for it upfront — no shady back-alley deals required.

The name of the shop is GPU Solutions (very creative, we know), and it's based in the UAE, though they say they serve customers around the world. On their website, you can select the "Graphics Card Memory Upgrade" service for both the RTX 2080 Ti and the RTX 3070, though the former has more details. These guys also have a YouTube channel where they've already performed the upgrade on an Asus Strix variant before.

The upgrade works just like any other you might've already seen. The card is disassembled to reach the PCB and remove the preexisting VRAM modules. The RTX 2080 Ti uses 11x 1GB GDDR6 chips, so replacing them with the same amount of 2GB GDDR6 doubles the memory capacity instantly. This is a rather straightforward way of going about a VRAM upgrade, because oftentimes it actually requires a custom PCB.

Once the hardware part of the job is done, the VBIOS is then manually edited to support the new memory pool. This can either be an easy tweak or a lot of work just to get the BIOS to recognize the card, depending on how that specific GPU was built by the manufacturer. For instance, Nvidia was once said to include 16GB of memory with the RTX 3070, but it ended up shipping with 8GB instead, so customizing the BIOS is as simple as unlocking its full potential.

In this case, there wasn't any software tweaking; the core supports multiple memory configs, so the repairperson physically modified the memory strap resistors on the PCB. The original config for the 11GB modules was set to low, low, low. They desoldered and moved the resistors to a new configuration: high, high, and low, which made the GPU recognize and report 22GB of VRAM inside GPU-Z.

The fact that you get not only double the VRAM on your RTX 2080 Ti but a working, stable BIOS out of the box adds to the overall package significantly. These kinds of mods are usually very hands-on, which means limited to just enthusiasts and tinkerers, but the factory-like service GPU Solution is providing means pretty much anyone can get it done without a hassle.

Their website doesn't mention the charges for an upgrade like this, but considering the ongoing component crisis, the memory modules won't be cheap. They also clarify that the upgrade can only be performed on a card with "compatible PCB layouts." If yours qualifies, they'll also replace the thermal pads and thermal paste accordingly, plus provide substantial benchmarking data to prove the modded card is stable.

Doubling the VRAM should allow you to squeeze a lot more performance out of your 2080 Ti in AI workloads and creative applications such as video editing. It's also helpful in gaming but not to a significant degree since the GPU itself isn't as powerful as modern offerings that are otherwise bottlenecked by memory capacity. Ultimately, this remains a pretty reasonable upgrade because the true, full potential of this GPU was achieved three years ago when someone modded it with an insane 44GB of VRAM.

In one year, the entire market for owning or building a PC has changed considerably. The AI boom has caused prices for brand-new GPUs, SSDs, and RAM to skyrocket. The demand by consumers, however, hasn’t just disappeared overnight, but in a market where even entry-level products are no longer budget-friendly, buying second-hand may suddenly be your only or best option.

That’s not to say that second-hand pricing is always the better value, but if you’re savvy, you can find diamonds in the rough. Unfortunately, buying anything online can be a minefield. From a misleading description to a full-blown scam in progress, online marketplaces provide plenty of opportunities to lose your cash on parts that aren’t suitable. To stay ahead of the risk, you’ll want to keep these key points in mind when you’re shopping online for second-hand PCs, laptops, or parts.

Understand the rules and protection offered by online marketplaces

Nobody sets out to be scammed, but it doesn’t mean it won’t happen. If you’re using online marketplaces like eBay or Facebook Marketplace, you’ll want to understand what (if any) protection exists to try to prevent that from happening. Likewise, understanding the rules of engagement on a platform can help you to fight back if you think there’s a bad ad in place.

eBay’s Money Back Guarantee, for example, protects a buyer if the item they’ve bought doesn’t arrive. It also protects you if it arrives broken, damaged in some way, or faulty. More importantly, from a scam-avoidance point of view, however, is that eBay will also refund the buyer if it doesn’t match the listing.

How you pay is also one of the biggest and weakest links in the chain. It’s up to you if you pay by cash, but if you’re purchasing with a credit card, depending on where you’re from, you may have additional retail protection to fall back on in a crisis. If crypto, bank transfers, or gift cards are mentioned, walk away: fast.

I always like to take a screenshot of the item I’m buying before I make any offers. Listings can easily be removed or edited without warning, so it’s a good way to start a chain of evidence in case you run into issues. The information in the listing, as well as on the user’s profile, can also help you decide how much risk you’re taking, especially if you’re buying from an established seller with a lot of feedback.

Ask for proof of ownership as soon as possible

When you buy from a reputable store, you’re not likely to worry about the provenance of the item you’re buying. That changes when you’re buying second-hand from mysteryseller4201. When a seller offers a shiny bit of kit at a good price, it’s fair to ask for proof of ownership (or proof that it’s even real).

That doesn’t mean the risk is eliminated entirely, but if there’s a backstory, and even a receipt or order confirmation to go with it, you’re walking on steadier ground. A legitimate seller won’t mind you asking these kinds of questions, especially if the item is fairly sought after. You don’t need their personal details, but if you can spot where they bought it from and when, that can help to filter out the problem sellers.

You’ll also need to make sure that any products you buy aren’t still linked to the user’s accounts. This is tricky to verify remotely, but easy to do if you’re picking up an item in-person from a safe location. Apple products, for instance, are typically tied to a person’s Apple ID, and the seller will need to remove it from their account for you to use it.

Treat everything as if it’s broken until you see physical proof to change your mind

Here’s a picture of my Intel-powered Apple MacBook Pro, which I bought back in 2018. It still works: take my word for it. You can see it; it’s intact, it has a screen, a keyboard, and it has a charger (which you can’t see, but you can trust me). All good, right?

There’s nothing here to prove that the laptop works. It looks intact, but does it boot? Does it work under load without shutting off? Does the keyboard still work? There are an endless number of issues that could be lurking that a picture, or several pictures, wouldn’t prove. When I buy online, I treat everything I buy as if it’s broken unless there’s undeniable proof. Be wary if the description is clear that it’s sold without guarantees, unless you’re happy with that level of risk.

There’s nothing wrong with asking for further proof. A video, with a clear date and time (preferably handwritten), that shows the item in use, or at least fully intact. If you’re buying in-person, you can also ask for a clear demonstration that the item is working before you complete the purchase.

Shop around before you buy and look for the gems

You’re not always going to find the best deal at the top of the search results. The most popular items right now, especially SSDs and RAM, are going to attract more interest. More interest means more buyers, more resellers with inflated prices, and more scammers, all fighting for the top spots in the results.

Look a bit deeper and tailor your search accordingly. You might, for instance, want to look for specific model numbers. A good technique I’ve always liked to try is to use alternative spellings, or plain misspellings, to find the same items hidden from the more common searches.

You could also think about what you’re looking for and how to get it. Do you want some parts to upgrade your PC? You might want to look for a rig being sold that you can scavenge for parts. Given the cost of hardware these days, you might find a capable processor, spare RAM, or an extra SSD or hard drive for cheaper than the individual parts themselves.

Local items, especially on marketplaces like Facebook or Craigslist, will attract a smaller audience, but the risk remains. You may want to set alerts for common keywords and keep tracking newly listed items regularly so you don’t miss out on a bargain. Good deals will sell quickly, but don’t let urgency override your judgment: always think about the price, the quality of the product, and whether the seller is reputable enough before you complete.

Some parts are riskier to buy second-hand than others

There are some components that are simply harder to buy second-hand. It’s not necessarily because of their size or weight, but their fragility. A CPU or motherboard, for instance, can be pretty robust, and a physical inspection to check for damage or bent pins can be helpful. RAM, too, is pretty easy to transport. You would still need to test these parts thoroughly for stability’s sake, but buying them used isn’t as huge a risk from a degradation point of view.

Graphics cards require a little more caution, especially modern Nvidia GPUs. I like to think of these a bit like a used car. If you buy a car with a full service history, well looked after, and with relatively decent mileage, you’re carrying less risk than a car that’s been run hard, without being serviced, and without being looked after.

GPUs are the same. Heavy gaming, cryptocurrency mining, poor cooling, or just bad maintenance can leave a used GPU feeling a bit like an old banger. That’s before we consider bad power pins, which, in the worst case, could lead to power connectors melting. A physical inspection is always a good idea, but a stability test is important here, too. If you can, ask for benchmark proof, or run the benchmark yourself as soon as you buy it (as long as you’re able to return it, that is).

Storage devices are another high-risk purchase, because flash memory and mechanical hard drives have a finite lifespan. Cheap SSDs might have already been heavily used, with only limited write endurance left. Checking the SMART data for drives can help here, using tools like PassMark to give you a clear idea of the health of a drive.

There are some items I’d nearly always avoid buying second-hand. Power supplies are one of them, unless they’re very new or come from a reputable, trusted source. Given that a bad power supply can destroy your entire PC, it’s not worth the risk. The same is true for old, modular power cables, especially those you use with high-power components like GPUs, because each time you plug and unplug them, you’re adding wear to the pins, which could cause an unexpected failure.

Understand the risks and advantages of buying in-person and prepare accordingly

If you decide to buy in person, there are a whole series of additional risks to factor in, but also one or two advantages. Before anything, however, is the risk: you’re going to need to be savvy with your personal safety and not get sucked into too big a bargain.

Fancy 64GB of DDR5 for $100 in 2026? All you need is your wallet and to meet me in that sketchy dark spot that no camera is focused on. There are two things wrong with that sentence. The obvious point is that it’s never a good idea to complete a purchase in person, in an area that is unlit and unsafe. The less obvious point, however, is the price.

If you’re not an enthusiast, you might not know the best price for RAM these days. The AI boom has happened around you, but you might not realize just how badly it’s affected the PC hardware market. That RAM or GPU you’re looking for, well, that price might seem fine for you if you’re used to 2025, 2024, or earlier pricing.

The perennial advice here is to always be a little suspicious and to complete the right due diligence. Check those prices, check your surroundings, and don’t go alone.

Aside from the risk, however, you do have a few opportunities that buying remotely won’t offer you. The biggest one is that an in-person purchase lets you judge the seller. You can look at their actions, their surroundings, and make a judgement. Gut instinct isn’t a strict science, but if something feels sketchy, it probably is.

You can also use it as an opportunity for a clear inspection of the product. Look closely at those CPU pins, check for damage, and look for cleanliness. Has it been opened up or repaired? Does it look legitimate, or is it a fake? You might want to think about taking a checklist that you can check off in real time while you’re there. Being thorough isn’t a bad thing, and a legitimate seller shouldn’t be put off by careful due diligence before a purchase.

There’s also a big, obvious advantage: you can see whether the item actually works. Hitting that power button and seeing everything light up, with no error codes or issues, physically in front of you, is a strong selling point. While a seller probably won’t let you run a long benchmark test, a legitimate seller shouldn’t object to you turning a laptop or PC on and checking it works as described. If you’ve got your own tools, like a laptop with an SSD enclosure, you can even test components quickly to see if they’re working (so long as the seller doesn’t mind).

You probably won’t have a lot of time for this, so you’ll need to make it count by knowing how you want to test the item in the time you do have, and to make it clear before arrival that you’d like to see it working. That said, don’t feel rushed to complete the transaction: it’s always better to walk away if you’re unsure.

Take a video when you open a high-value parcel for proof

I’ve seen far too many reports in recent years of high-value items being swapped out before delivery. You buy a new laptop or GPU, and all you get is a brick or several bags of sugar, and no refund forthcoming from the seller, who supposedly sent it as-is.

When you receive a parcel, video it. Video it as soon as you get your eyes on it, and keep videoing it until you open it. Make sure the video has a clear, defined shot of the packaging label. That provides you with undeniable proof of the parcel upon arrival and as it’s been opened.

This is not a get out of jail free card, but it does give you a much stronger chain of evidence to complain if you’re scammed. You’ll need that evidence, too, as retailers will resist refunding you if there isn’t enough proof.

Think about certified refurbished items instead

Buying secondhand doesn’t always have to mean buying from a seller on eBay or Facebook Marketplace. Certified refurbished items are items that have been professionally restored, often by the manufacturer, and sold at a discount. These can also be called factory reconditioned, but they mean the same thing.

These items often come with new packaging and have been fully tested. I’ve been seeing a lot of certified refurbished items appear for sale on Woot, Amazon’s separate website for bargain products, from Dell workstations to MSI gaming PCs. In MSI’s case, these factory reconditioned PCs have been returned, inspected, and restored, and come with a warranty, with Woot claiming that they are “as close to new as you can get without technically being new.”

Apple has also run a long-standing store for certified refurbished products. I’ve taken advantage of this in the past, several times, buying iPod Touches and iPads using its program for second-hand products, with up to 15% off the original price. Apple guarantees that all its certified refurbished items are cleaned, inspected, and tested, and are sent out in fresh packaging with a new one-year warranty.

Retailers like Newegg will often sell refurbished items in the same way. You’re getting the benefit of a price reduction for a second-hand product, with almost-new quality, but with fewer risks than buying from an unknown seller.

The exception to this, however, is from retailers’ third-party sellers. Amazon, Newegg, and Walmart all allow third-party listings that could come from less-than-reputable sources. In those cases, make sure to thoroughly investigate the source, including reviews and how recently they began selling, to make sure you’re not facing greater risk.

Finding the right bargains in the second-hand hardware world

Just because it’s used doesn’t mean it’s broken or bad, but the used PC hardware market is murky. The rules above aren’t foolproof, and they aren’t exhaustive, but they’re a good reminder of some of the do's and don’ts to follow if you’re thinking about buying your kit second-hand.

Of course, once you get your hands on the goods, give it a test. Test it hard. Benchmark tools, like the ones we conduct in our reviews, can give you an idea of the stability of that CPU, GPU, or RAM, or the health of that SSD. It can also test some of the other components in your machine, too, from the power supply to the cooling.

Vigilance is your biggest defense if you’re trying to avoid being scammed. You’ll want to avoid jumping in with the first listing you see. Slow and steady, combined with a bit of luck, can sometimes win you the bargain of the day.

Intel's next-gen Nova Lake family of desktop CPUs is shaping up to be the company's most exciting launch in years, with a major performance leap expected across the board. A new leak from Jaykihn now claims that one of the SKUs from this lineup will have an iGPU so strong that it will require 65W of power delivery to achieve full performance. It will also apparently need two VCCGT phases to handle said power.

The SKU in question is a 16-core part composed of 8 P-cores, 4 E-cores, and 4 LP-E cores, while the iGPU is said to have 12 Xe3P cores. Just as a reminder, Xe3, also known as "Celestial," is an enhanced, optimized version of the Xe3 (Battlemage) graphics architecture that already debuted on Panther Lake. Similarly, Nova Lake is expected to use Coyote Cove P-cores and Arctic Wolf E-cores (and LP-E cores).

Top-end Panther Lake SKUs come equipped with the Arc B390 iGPU, which also has 12 Xe3 cores, so this Nova Lake SKU with 12 Xe3P cores should perform even better. Especially when you consider the thermal and power headroom at its disposal. AMD's desktop APUs, the Ryzen G-series, are usually 65W parts as well, but that's the TDP for the entire chip, not just the integrated graphics.

Requiring 65W of dedicated power delivery via two VCCGT phases would constitute a kind of top-end iGPU performance we haven't seen before. In fact, this rumored Nova Lake chip is arguably veering into Strix Halo territory where the up to 40 Compute Units on flagship SKUs can sip around 70W-80W of power. However, that's still a mobile part with an integrated SMU that can dynamically allocate power between the CCD and iGPU.

Nova Lake-S would likely use a traditional desktop rail split where the motherboard's VRMs must deliver up to 65W via two separate dedicated VCCGT phases (since one wouldn't be sufficient) to power the integrated graphics tile independently from the VCCCore CPU phases. That's unprecedented territory, and it serves as just one of many rumors from the Nova Lake launch that have us excited for the competition that's brewing for next year.

Current reports pin both AMD and Intel's next-gen releases to show up at CES 2027 instead of later this year. Therefore, take everything with a grain of salt; a lot could change between now and then, and we don't have confirmation on any SKU from Intel. The last time we saw Intel put out a strong desktop APU was 2015's Core i7-5775C, so a product like this has been a long time coming.

Following our brief tour around the state of RAM pricing in 2026, it seemed only fair to extend our ‘State of the Union’ look at PC component pricing to another market that has taken an absolute beating in the AI crunch: SSDs.

It’s a sadly familiar tale. Like RAM, SSDs were once an afterthought when it came to PC building — you always knew you could find a ton of capacity, decent speeds, and a reputable brand at a reasonable price. Like RAM, SSD shortages have driven absolutely insane price rises across the board, and like RAM, the death of Micron’s Crucial has seen a major player leave the scene.

As you can imagine, the SSD market is decidedly more complex and fragmented than the RAM market, for obvious reasons. Whereas your principal choice of RAM boils down to DDR4 vs DDR5, and then capacity, there are a plethora of SSD solutions for PC. There are M.2 drives for performance, or larger SATA SSDs for volume or even external storage. The former also sees vast performance differences between Gen 5 and Gen 4 options, adding another dimension.

Sadly, prices on SSDs generally have skyrocketed. This uncomplicates the picture slightly. But just how badly have SSD prices changed in the last year, and can you buy an affordable SSD these days?

12 months on

We’re fortunate to be carrying out this look 12 months removed from the 2025 Amazon Prime Day event, which means we have a plethora of pricing and sales data from exactly a year ago that we can use to pinpoint just how badly the SSD market has tanked. As we did with RAM, we’ll start with our fabled 2025 Amazon Prime Day build, in which we recommended users kit out our 1440p, 7800X3D gaming rig with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 2TB SSD. The deal at the time was a hefty discount, bringing the price to $113, down from $176. That same drive is on sale right now, discounted by 36%, to an eye-watering $363, triple the price. The list price of that drive is $579.99, and the highest actual price we’ve seen on it is $465 in May this year, more than four times what it cost a year ago.

Famously, buying a 4TB SSD could net you M.2 storage for your PC for as little as $0.05 per GB just over a year ago, with devices like the WD Blue SN5000 and Silicon Power UD90 costing just $214 and $209, respectively. The SN5000 has doubled in price to $449.99, with the cost per GB at 11.2 cents.

SATA: No less painful

You’d be forgiven for thinking that toning down your storage for a less potent SATA III drive would be a great way to save some money over an M.2 drive, but you’d be wrong. Case in point is a drive we've been watching on Amazon for some time, the Samsung 870 Evo. This 2 TB drive was once just $80, and no more than $150 a year ago. Now, Amazon is selling it discounted by 62% at a cost of $399, with a list price of an eye-watering $1,039. That’s not a typo; that’s a 2021 hard drive with 2TB of storage now listed at a price of over $1,000. Of course, much like RAM, these numbers and prices aren’t really real, which makes it absolutely impossible to try and pin down the reasonable price of SSD storage in 2026.

A crucial factor

Micron announced in December that it was shuttering its consumer outfit Crucial in favor of enterprise. With so many SSD vendors and solutions, it’s arguable that Crucial’s absence in the SSD sector will be a little less keenly felt than it will in the RAM industry — after all, Micron is one of only three memory makers in the industry. Still, Crucial’s T-series and P-series drives are capable and performant offerings that will be missed once they disappear from the market completely. Of course, any reduction in competition is going to have an impact on pricing, but Crucial’s loss certainly seems like it will be more felt when it comes to RAM, rather than SSDs.

If you actually need to buy SSD storage

If we discount Gen 3 drives, which you shouldn’t be settling for in 2026, the cheapest you can grab an M.2 SSD these days is 11 cents per GB; specifically, this Silicon Power UD90 is one of the best value drives right now, at $439. SP’s UD90 is also one of the cheapest 1TB options on the market at around $150, and its 2TB option is $244. Of course, the larger the drive, generally, the less you’ll pay per GB when it comes to storage. Simply put, these are the baseline prices for 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB SSDs, respectively, in 2026.

If you want a snappier Gen 5 option, Crucial’s 1TB P510 is $180 dollars right now, while the 2TB version is $340.The popular Samsung 9100 Pro’s 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB drives will set you back $250, $400, and $900, respectively, a truly tragic state of affairs.

Pre-build your way out of the crisis

As with RAM, a pre-built PC is one of the best ways to secure a decent amount of SSD storage. However, unlike RAM, the vendors can more easily obfuscate SSD performance. I’ve been covering PC sales and deals for months since the crisis hit, and it’s clear that vendors find it much easier to hide poor SSD storage inside a pre-built than RAM. The reasons are obvious: it’s very difficult to sugarcoat a PC having 16GB of DDR5 RAM, as opposed to 32GB; however, you can quite easily bury a slower Gen 4 SSD or a less spacious drive inside a pre-built spec sheet.

Generally, I’d recommend pushing towards a build with 32GB of RAM, even if it means compromising on storage. You can always add more SSD space down the line, and while you’d obviously rather have a blistering Gen 5 drive with those 14,000MB/s speeds, Gen 4 will do you just fine for gaming, and likely will for years to come.

Memory supply from major DRAM manufacturers to independent module makers could drop to just 30% of the amount supplied in 2026 next year, according to C.K. Chang, CEO of Taiwanese memory vendor Apacer, further tightening an already squeezed supply chain.

Chang made the comments during the company's 1H 2026 investor conference on July 24, and in subsequent media interviews after the conference. Although memory price increases are expected to slow during the second half of 2026 — reportedly due to consumers deciding that RAM is too expensive — he believes severe shortages will persist into at least the middle of 2027, and that DRAM will remain the most constrained segment.

According to Chang, the greatest risk facing Apacer, which buys memory wafers from manufacturers such as SK Hynix and Samsung and turns them into finished memory products, is no longer overpaying for the chips, but failing to obtain any supply at all.

In preparation for growing shortages and to prevent a wider shortfall next year, the company says it grew its inventory to NT$12.4 billion ($383.2 million USD) at the end of June, up from NT$8.38 billion ($259 million USD) one quarter earlier, representing an increase of approximately 48%. The company is also arranging a five-year syndicated loan of up to NT$4 billion ($123.6 million USD) to purchase additional chips whenever manufacturers make them available, among other needs.

Chang’s projection does not mean worldwide DRAM production will fall by more than 70%. His statement specifically refers to the volume major chip manufacturers may allocate to downstream module companies such as Apacer, which purchases memory chips and packages them into DIMMs, SSDs and embedded storage products. DRAM manufacturers are increasingly reserving their output for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), server memory, and other products purchased directly by large AI and cloud customers.

Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron — the world's biggest memory chip makers — are prioritizing higher-margin HBM and advanced server memory as AI infrastructure spending consumes an increasing share of available manufacturing capacity. Chang estimates that approximately 60% of DRAM capacity is now directed toward server-related applications, leaving conventional DDR4 and DDR5 products competing for a shrinking portion of the market.

DDR5 RDIMM server modules have received some of the most aggressive price increases and retain the greatest potential for future mark-ups, according to Chang. Demand from AI servers, enterprise storage, industrial computers and edge AI systems remains strong, while consumer PC and smartphone demand is considerably weaker and more sensitive to rising component costs. That weaker demand is, of course, mostly in comparison to the AI industry. Consumer demand remains strong enough to mop up the shrinking supply. The RAM shortage is now reportedly affecting the price of cars, far beyond consumer electronics.

NAND flash is also being pulled into the AI boom. High-capacity enterprise SSDs are increasingly being used for model storage, data staging and key-value cache offloading, allowing colder portions of AI workloads to spill out of expensive DRAM. Flash cannot replace DRAM outright because it offers considerably lower bandwidth, but it can still serve as a tier within AI memory systems, increasing demand for enterprise SSDs and NAND alongside server memory.

Chang expects DRAM contract prices to rise by approximately 30% during the third quarter of 2026 and NAND flash to increase by more than 20%. He expects price growth to moderate again during the fourth quarter.

Elsewhere, analysts project a 40% increase in DRAM prices in Q3 2026, even as demand extends to the oldest standards still in production. Samsung and SK Hynix, both South Korean companies — who together with US-based Micron Technologies control over 90% of the global DRAM market — had earlier warned that shortages could last beyond 2027. And the CEO of Adata projects that the global DRAM shortage will run for another 10 years.

Chinese manufacturers are not expected to provide immediate relief. Chang said Chinese memory maker CXMT’s DDR5 products had become competitive and that both CXMT and Chinese NAND producer YMTC had narrowed their pricing gaps with established international suppliers. However, domestic demand in China already exceeds available supply, while capacity expansion, manufacturing yields, product validation and platform compatibility continue to limit their ability to change the global balance. Furthermore, the prices of new DRAM modules from CXMT are reportedly similar to those of the big three.

Stockpiling memory inventory at historically high prices carries the risk of substantial losses if the market suddenly reverses. Apacer, however, says it has seen no evidence of an approaching collapse. For now, the company is betting that possessing expensive memory in 2027 will be considerably better than having no memory to sell at all.

On the eve of August, 2026, the DIY PC building market looks bleaker than ever. Over the last 12 months, enthusiasts have endured spiralling prices on DDR4 and DDR5, as well as hard drives and SSDs, driven by shortages induced by massive AI buildouts. But just how bad is the RAM market in 2026, and is it at all possible to buy cheap RAM these days? The short answers are “bad” and “not really, no.” In this brief 2026 ‘State of the Union’ on the RAM market, we observe just how much prices have changed in the last 12 months, and examine whether there really is any hope for PC builders at all.

It was around July last year that the alarm bells really started ringing when it came to RAM pricing, with TrendForce warning of 45% increases in the second half of the year. Until then, both RAM and SSDs had been something of an afterthought when it came to PC building. Not that those components weren’t important, but rather that you knew you could always find a cheap 32GB DDR5 kit and a decent SSD for whichever build you were planning. The tough decisions were choosing between AMD and Intel’s respective platforms, and trying to find a decent graphics card.

So what has happened since?

What a difference a year makes

To see the impact of the AI crunch on RAM pricing, I had a bit of a dig through the Tom’s Hardware archives, but I should warn you: It’s not pleasant reading. This time last year, we had just come through the throes of Amazon’s 2025 Prime Day event, held in July as opposed to this year’s June offering. As is customary, we offered our thoughts on a great PC build using Prime Day discount parts featuring a Crucial Pro 32GB DDR5 6000 memory kit, reduced from $119 to just $90. One year later, that very same kit now costs $459. That’s if you can even buy one, of course, as there was only one left in stock when I wrote this. Oh, also, Crucial no longer exists. Feeding the AI machine is proving so lucrative that Micron literally wound up its consumer memory and SSD offering so that it could put all of its efforts into HBM and enterprise.

The story is similar wherever you look. Our pick for the best RAM for gaming in 2026 remains G.Skill’s Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000. When we reviewed this kit back in 2023, we bemoaned that users were paying the early adopter DDR5 tax. The price? A paltry $179. You now can’t buy 32GB of DDR5 for less than $379. G.SKill’s kit subsequently sank in price to an even $100; in August 2026 it’ll cost you $599.99. I guess you could call that a late adopter tax.

Even 16GB of DDR5 6000 will set you back more than $200 these days, which is double the price for half the capacity you could buy a year ago. Large kits, like Corsair’s Vengeance 192GB (4x48GB) offering, now cost upwards of $2,600, more than most pre-built PCs.

The death of Crucial

As mentioned, one of the most pertinent death knells of the RAM market in the last 12 months was the end of Crucial. In December, Micron announced that it was winding up its entire consumer offering, reallocating all of its resources to enterprise DRAM and SSDs. Crucial products have slowly died off since, and the very few kits and drives that remain are extremely expensive to buy. The company is continuing to honor warranty and technical support obligations, at least, but that will be of little comfort to PC builders left out in the cold. “Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” Micron admitted bluntly at the time.

The return of DDR4

Not totally oblivious to the plight of gamers, a few vendors are at least trying to assuage gamers and the DIY market, notably with the return of DDR4. Admittedly, this isn’t super comforting — I can’t imagine many console gamers would be thrilled about Sony solving PlayStation 5 shortages by bringing back the PS4 — but the gulf between DDR4 and DDR5 isn’t so bad that it’s not a viable option for some in 2026. We’ve heard rumblings that Intel is preparing a surprise Raptor Lake Next return for 2027, and AMD recently rolled out its 10th anniversary edition of its 5800X3D gaming CPU. Still, the best gaming CPU for DDR4 that money can buy still costs $350, and the gulf between DDR4 and DDR5 is widening, in our testing. As our resident CPU analyst Jake Roach noted at the time, buying a Ryzen 5 7600X3D and 16GB of DDR5-6000 is only $80 more expensive than buying a DDR4-based 5800X3D.

The problem lies therein: DDR4 memory prices have also skyrocketed. A 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200 kit from 2019 would have set you back 48 bucks last year. Now, you’ll be lucky to find it on sale for $200.

Prebuilt your way out of this mess

Pre-built PCs from OEM vendors like HP, as well as bespoke offerings from CyberPower and the like, are not immune to rising prices, nor are gaming laptops. To return to our one-year flashback, an Intel Core 7 Alienware Aurora 16 we recommended to users at $1,099 during July 2025 will now set you back $1,999, and we’ve seen price increases on Alienware desktops of up to $2,000 in recent months. In fact, Maingear started offering “Bring Your Own RAM” builds late last year, rather than absorbing the cost of price rises.

With that being said, if you have given up hope of getting RAM and doing a DIY build in 2026, there are still pre-built gaming PCs on sale that get you a lot of PC for your money. Perhaps more money than you might have paid last year, but in reality it's a simple math problem. RAM prices have risen by 400, 500, or even 600% in some cases in recent months, while PC builds as a whole have increased, but not by nearly as much. When you factor in the increased cost of SSDs and GPUs, pre-builts in 2026 tend to represent much better value than they generally would have a year ago.

If you’re set on buying RAM?

If you are set on building a PC right now and buying RAM to put inside it, what’s the state of play? The going rate for 16GB of DDR5 RAM is $209, the lowest amount of money you can expect to pay for a 16GB kit. For 32GB, the going rate is $379. Per GB, 32GB remains better value, at around $12 rather than $13. 64GB of DDR5 from Corsair is $699, ironically the best price per GB, but ludicrously expensive.

We’ve been touting Newegg RAM bundles at Tom’s Hardware for months, and they remain a stalwart way to save at least something on RAM if you’re building a PC. Generally, you can expect to find a bundle that will get you the RAM for around $200 if you buy it alongside a motherboard and a CPU. Remember, the value in a RAM bundle is pairing RAM with other parts, the prices of which are not inflated in the current market. With CPU, motherboard, and cooling prices holding steady or falling, buying components together gives you a clear picture of the actual value proposition. The RAM in this Newegg bundle, for instance, costs $236, thanks to the price of the 9800X3D and the X870E.

The future of the RAM market

Sadly, if you’re in the market for RAM, even at these exorbitant prices, we’re still firmly in the bite-the-bullet phase. Manufacturers like SK hynix are working to add capacity to their roster, and the advent of China’s CXMT could provide some relief. But industry figures warn that 2027 could actually be even worse for memory shortages than 2026. By extension, that presumably means pricing will also get worse. In truth, the best solution right now is probably not to buy RAM, but if you’re in desperate need, you’re going to have to pay high prices in some way, shape, or form.

Waiting it out is always an option if you can do so, but Adata’s chairman recently said you might be waiting a decade or more. The latter prognostication sounds a little extreme, but one year into the RAMapocalypse, more than a few indications point to things getting worse rather than better.

If you’re a PC enthusiast, chances are you’ve bought or at least looked into picking a motherboard, and it can be daunting. The list of specifications is long and includes (but is not limited to) CPU support/compatibility, port count and type (think USB, networking, etc.), storage options, audio solutions, slot count and speed, aesthetics, and last but not least, power delivery, which is critical to ensuring you get everything out of your processor.

Should you buy a board with more phases or more powerful MOSFETs? What’s good enough? Using data from our motherboard reviews, we’ll examine details such as temperature and performance to assess the magnitude of the differences and whether power delivery should be a key factor when choosing a motherboard.

What are VRMs?

Some may be reading this and asking, "What are VRMs?" VRM stands for Voltage Regulation Modules. Their primary function is to take the 12V power from your power supply and reduce it to a lower, stable voltage (around 1-1.5V) that your CPU and other components need to function. Or, in electrical terms, they are advanced DC-to-DC step-down converters tasked with smoothing out electrical noise and voltage spikes, which could crash your CPU. If they seem important based on that description, congratulations, you are paying attention.

VRMs are not a single component but a group of parts working together as a “power phase,” and a typical motherboard has multiple phases to share the electrical and thermal workload. The PWM controller is the brain of the whole system, telling the components how much voltage is needed at any given millisecond. The MOSFETs are the switches that rapidly turn the 12V power on and off to regulate the current. The chokes are coils that smooth the pulsating current from the MOSFETs into a steady current, while the capacitors store and release energy to maintain a stable voltage. The controller, MOSFETs, Chokes, and Capacitors all work together and make up your VRMs.

VRM quality is important because, when dealing with significant voltage fluctuations and output (its job), a lot of heat is generated. And if you have a power-hungry processor like a flagship-class Intel Core Ultra or AMD Ryzen 9, the chips require a lot of power and places a lot of stress on the VRMs. Most motherboards have metal heatsinks on top to help remove the heat generated. If it gets too hot (the exact temperature varies by MOSFET, but is generally around 100 degrees Celsius), the CPU then automatically throttles to prevent damage, which can hurt your performance, and that's what we’re here to shed some light on.

What makes VRMs better (or worse)?

VRM quality varies widely by motherboard. Typically, your enthusiast-class chipsets (Z890, X870E) have the most capable power delivery components, followed by the mainstream chipsets (B860, B850) and budget-class (A620 for AMD, “H” series for Intel). On most enthusiast-class boards, you’ll see 80-110A MOSFETs, more phases, and robust heatsinks, while mainstream and budget boards typically have 50-80A MOSFETs, fewer phases, and smaller heatsinks.

Entry-level motherboards, although they list support for flagship-class processors, are designed for low-power CPUs and may throttle under heavy workloads if you overbuy on the processor or don’t have adequate case cooling. These basic boards often come with minimal heatsinks (or none at all), a low phase count, and lower output capability, and are designed for simple tasks and office use. Mid-range motherboards offer a better balance of price and performance and can handle most any processor, even with some overclocking. These are better suited to gaming and productivity builds, where sustained performance needs are more common. High-end boards can support any processor and any type of overclocking (ambient, extreme/sub-ambient).

A ‘better’ VRM has more power stages with higher current capacity. At a high level, 20-phase VRMs with 110A MOSFETs, as you’d see on high-end enthusiast-class boards, are better than a 12-phase VRM with 60A MOSFETs, as is common on budget-class offerings. More details matter, such as whether the phases are ‘teamed’ (as most are today) or the type of MOSFETs used (DrMOS or SPS - the latter relays real-time telemetry), but for the purposes of this article, we’ll stick with count and type and try to stay out of the minutiae.

To understand what a board can handle, you need to know the phase count as well as the output of the MOSFETs. For example, a 12-phase VRM with 80A MOSFETs outputs up to 960A, and a 20-phase VRM with 110A MOSFETs outputs up to 2,200A. The higher the amperage/output, the more it can handle from your processor. In general, for flagship-class processors, I like to have at least 900A available, as this provides enough headroom to avoid stressing the chips too much.

Cooling can also make a big difference. From no heatsinks on the extreme budget and business-class boards to massive, actively cooled hunks of metal on high-end boards, keeping the VRMs cool prevents throttling, ensures sustained performance, and helps prolong their lifespan. Heatsinks come in all shapes and sizes, and some even include fins and heat pipes, along with improved thermal pads to help transfer and dissipate heat. The more power phases and output, the larger and more capable the cooling tends to be. At a high level, unless you’re using a low-power processor (think ~65W TDP), stay away from any boards without heatsinks on the VRMs. And even then, make sure you have good airflow to keep the temperatures in check.

Real-world Results

Our first set of charts shows VRM temperatures for our Intel- and AMD-based systems. We have a lot of data for the AMD X870/X870E/B850 data sets, but less for Intel (Z890/B860). Still, the data we have gives us a good idea of the differences (or lack thereof) between the enthusiast-class and mainstream chipsets. It has been a generation or two since we covered the budget and business-class chipsets and motherboards, so we don’t have information on the latest platforms using the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel motherboards (where you typically see performance/throttling issues due to VRMs).

CHARTS - VRM test result charts (3x - X870, B850, Intel)

As you can glean from the charts above, all of the results are generally close together, a range of around 15 degrees Celsius, for this set of mainstream and enthusiast-class motherboards. Even the hottest board is still 10s of degrees away (think 30 degrees or more) from running ‘too hot’ and potentially throttling.

The next set of charts hails from our motherboard reviews and shows the performance of all the boards across a wide variety of tests, including gaming, productivity, and creative workflows. As you can see, none of the boards, ranging from $179.99 to over $1,000 (new/MSRP), throttled with our flagship Intel Core Ultra 285K, nor did any using the Ryzen 9 9900X.

While we know the 9900X isn’t AMD’s current flagship, it still produces a fair amount of heat (~150W in our testing) for an upper-midrange processor. Even if we had used a high-power Ryzen 9 9950X, it wouldn’t have changed things much.

On the Intel side, we don’t have many datasets as we haven’t reviewed as many of the company’s Z890 motherboards at the time of this writing (we’re covering more now with the release of the new Intel Core Ultra 270K Plus and 250K Plus processors). That said, we’re confident the story remains the same, and you’ll get everything out of your processor on this and the B860 chipset-based boards. But if you plan on extended periods of high CPU use, you should always get more than you need, if only for longevity.

The last set of charts covers previous-gen Intel and AMD, including Z790, B760, and H770 for Intel and X670E and B650 for AMD (though still AM5, like 800-series). In the following multi-threaded tests, you can see a significant difference in performance between budget-class boards and mainstream and enthusiast boards.

Intel budget boards tend to take a bigger hit, as their CPUs use more power than AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X. On the AMD side, we still saw performance differences, but overall not extreme when looking at these data sets, even in some of the cheapest mainstream boards we tested. This could also be due to throttling or BIOS settings, as some budget/business-class boards strictly limit the processor to its baseline specification. In contrast, others take liberties with settings, especially with Intel processors.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, a vast majority of the boards we've tested were able to get the most out of the processor we use for testing. It’s typically only the absolute entry-level offerings, most in the budget/business class, that notably hinder performance. Sadly, there isn’t a smoking gun of ‘...if you’re using this processor, then you want this many phases/amps.’ But at a high level, the more phases and the higher the amperage rating, the better off you are.

Whether you can utilize a budget-tier board depends on several factors. If your primary use cases are office productivity and gaming with a mid-range or budget CPU, you’ll likely encounter few issues. However, if your workflows consist of sustained, heavily multi-threaded workloads, investing in a more capable board is advisable. On top of having paltry power delivery, the cheap boards tend to have fewer ports, slower overall connectivity (think USB and networking), a basic audio solution, and they just don’t look as good as mid-range to high-end boards that offer more and faster connectivity.

Does this mean a flagship motherboard is the only solution? Simply put, no. The vast majority of users don’t require extreme-class VRMs and would do fine with any motherboard from the mainstream or enthusiast chipsets. Your goal should be to find a balance that provides sufficient power headroom for your CPU and usage patterns.

However, if you intend to push high-TDP processors to their limits or want to overclock, VRM quality should be one of your top priorities, aside from the connectivity you need. Now that we have a better idea of what you may need, check out our curated best motherboards article or best motherboard deals to find a board that’s right for you.

AI-driven demand has pushed prices to insanely high levels for the best external SSDs and the best flash drives — if you can find those sought-after models in stock at all these days. But if you’re a long-time PC builder or you've upgraded your laptop's boot drive in the last decade, there’s a good chance you have an older drive of some kind sitting in a drawer or in a closet, doing nothing more useful than collecting dust.

Whether it's a SATA SSD, an OEM M.2 from an older laptop, or even a spinning hard drive, you can turn any of these into handy external storage by picking up one of the best SSD and hard drive enclosures, with some options selling for less than $10 when on sale. In most cases, you won't even have to mess with a screwdriver. Just open the enclosure, drop in your old drive, and you're good to go.

Of course, the drive you have and the enclosure you choose will dictate how fast your DIY external drive will be. But speed doesn't matter much if you're just doing simple backups or transferring a few files. And even a SATA SSD is pretty speedy for most mainstream tasks. If you're using the drive to edit lots of 4K video, doing animation work, or running local LLMs, you'll need a faster, newer PCIe 4 or 5 M.2 SSD and an enclosure that can deliver as much bandwidth as your fastest USB-C port can handle.

To break down the kind of speed you can expect from digging out an older hard drive or SSD and putting it to work as external storage, we installed several older drives (and even a speedy recent PCIe 5 model) into various enclosures and put them through some of the same tests we use for testing brand-new drives. And we'll compare those results to speedy dedicated external SSDs and flash drives, to see what, if any, speed you might lose.

Of course, every individual drive model will have its own performance variances, as we see when testing internal SSDs, but the results and charts below will give you a sense of what to expect, generally, from whatever class or type of drive you happen to have at your disposal, and whether it's speedy enough for your needs.

I grabbed four different drives, three of which were older drives of various types that I found in my storage drawer or in older enclosures, and ran some of the tests that we typically run for external storage reviews, to see how they perform compared to a high-end flash drive and a fast external SSD.

Drives

▶️ Western Digital WD5000BPVT 2.5-inch hard drive (500GB)

This 2011-era 2.5-inch hard drive either came from an old laptop or was something left over from testing in a previous job. I've held onto it, in part, as a photography prop to show storage options in PC cases. It's clearly not a fast drive, but a good representation of the lowest-tier option to build your own portable storage drive.

▶️ Samsung 850 Pro 2.5-inch SATA SSD (512GB)

I originally intended to use my old Crucial MX100 2.5-inch SATA drive for this test (as seen in the main image, above), but when I plugged it in (for the first time in at least five years), it was effectively dead, as it wasn't recognized by any PC I connected it to. So I pivoted to a Samsung 850 Pro, a slightly higher-end drive from the same year (2014). It's sure to be much faster than the spinning-platter hard drive, but as a SATA drive, it's going to top out around 550 Mb/s.

▶️ Intel 660p PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD (2TB)

I picked up a 2TB Intel 660p back in 2019 for $109 (the first time SSDs got really cheap), to use as an external drive. I eventually replaced it with a 4TB Samsung 990 Evo Plus that I bought for $199 about a year ago (the last time storage was cheap). It's rated to 1,800 MB/s read and write at that capacity, so it's good for any 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps enclosures, which is why we tested it in both. But if you're after USB4 or Thunderbolt 3+ speeds, you'll want something faster.

▶️ Gigabyte Aorus 12000 PCIe 5.0 SSD (1TB)

If you want to put together an external drive that's as fast as reasonably possible with a single M.2, you're probably not going to have a drive like that sitting unused in a drawer. So to see what is possible with an SSD that you might pay for, specifically to build an external drive with the fastest possible speeds, I grabbed the Aorus 12000 PCIe 5.0 SSD from Gigabyte. At the 1TB capacity I tested, its rated sequential read (11,700 MB/s) and write (9,500 MB/s) speeds aren't going to be a significant bottleneck, even if you opt for a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure.

Enclosures

▶️ Orico 2139U3-V1 Clear HDD/SSD enclosure (5 Gbps)

There are loads of affordable enclosures for 2.5-inch SATA hard drives and SSDs. You'll want one with UASP support for faster transfers if you are or plan to ever install an SSD, and most are plastic these days. I opted for this one both because I like its transparent shell (so I can see what drive is housed inside) and because it often goes on sale for less than $10. It's $10.99 at full price, but I paid around $8 for it. It snaps together without the need for any screws, which is convenient. But if you're carrying the drive around regularly, I could see the cover falling off now and then.

$8.99 at Amazon

▶️ Lemorele SD3L NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure (10 Gbps)

Affordable M.2 SSD enclosures are also easy to find online. I chose this one, because, again, it sells for around $10. Plus it has a built-in USB-C and USB-A port (one on each end), so you'll never need to fish for a cable, making it kind of like a large flash drive. It also lets you drop in a drive without a screwdriver or other tools. Its main downside is that it doesn't support older SATA M.2 drives, so it's only good for NVMe models.

$9.49 at Amazon

▶️ Asus ROG Strix Aiolos NMVe/SATA M.2 SSD enclosure (20 Gbps)

This premium metal enclosure is also tool-free, and helpfully supports both NVMe and SATA M.2 drives – the former at speeds up to 20 Gbps so long as you have a system with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 port. It also has some flashy RGB and includes a carrying strap that can make fishing it out of your bag a little easier.

$65.22 at Amazon

▶️ OWC Express 1M2 USB4 / 40Gbps enclosure

An enclosure meant for fast PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 SSDs, this premium model is effectively a large hunk of aluminum with fins for heat dissipation. And when your drive could be slinging data at up to 5,000 MB/s, you'll need that kind of cooling to keep speeds from dropping due to heat. It's far from the cheapest or the smallest, but if you're after some of the fastest external speeds possible from a single drive, you don't want to skimp on something smaller and cheaper. And I prefer this kind of larger, passive cooling over something with a tiny, whiny fan.

$78.99 at Amazon

Comparison of external SSDs and flash drives

To get a sense of how our DIY external drives compare to retail external storage, we will include results in our charts from a trio of current options. On the 10 Gbps front, there's the 1TB Kingston Dual Portable SSD (in a flash drive form factor with USB-C and USB-A ports) that was selling for $226 when this was written.

Stepping things up to 20 Gbps, we have the Crucial X10, a compact drive that we tested in 4TB trim. That capacity doesn't currently appear to be available, but the 2TB option was $304 at Amazon. The key consideration with this (and any 20 Gbps drive or enclosure) is that you'll need a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 port to achieve top speeds. Even if your system has a technically faster USB4 or Thunderbolt port, there's a good chance your drive will be capped at 10 Gbps, because the two-lane 10 Gbps configuration in Gen 2 2x2 differs electrically from USB4 (which is itself built around Thunderbolt 3). Unless you have a specific need, it's smarter to opt for a USB4 or Thunderbolt drive or enclosure at this point.

Speaking of USB4, we also included our favorite drive of that flavor, Corsair's EX400U. It sports a magnetic back for attaching to some phones (and various other things with iron in them), and was selling for over $600 in the 2TB capacity we tested when this was written. Naturally, storage prices are in flux right now, so prices may be different.

Enclosure and drive testing

We tested our drives and enclosures on our USB4-equipped storage test PC, running a Ryzen 5 7600X CPU and Asus' ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard.

▶️ Synthetic Testing: CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings. The sequential read and write test effectively amounts to a best-case scenario, which often closely aligns with the read /write specs that drive makers put in their specs and on the product box.

Unsurprisingly, the 2.5-inch hard drive in our Orico enclosure lands last here, putting up reads and writes a bit below 90 MB/s. That's OK for incremental backups and if you only occasionally need to carry around files. But the Samsung 850 Pro is 4-5 times faster in the same enclosure. Speeds below 500 MB/s might seem slow compared to modern SSDs, but it's perfectly serviceable for most tasks, and even running programs.

If you are regularly moving around terabytes of data, though, you'll want something faster. Intel's 660p passed 1,000 MB/s on this test in reads and writes. That's a little slower than our 10 Gbps flash drive, especially on reads, but close enough that you wouldn't notice the difference between the two without running benchmarks.

Dropping that same 660p SSD into the 20 Gbps Asus ROG enclosure, it got close to, but not quite over 2,000 MB/s. The Crucial X10 was about 100 MB faster, but again that's about a 5% difference. So if you have a decent PCIe 3.0 drive sitting around that you can drop into an enclosure, you can get performance that's very close to the much costlier competition.

Stepping up to our PCIe 5.0 Aorus SSD in the large aluminum OWC enclosure, reads and writes topped 3,700 MB/s. On writes, that actually beat Corsair's excellent EX400U, although the OWC-enclosed Aorus did lag about 10% behind on reads. And even if you're buying a bare 2TB PCIe 5 drive and the OWC enclosure, it will cost much less than the Corsair's current $600-plus for the same capacity. A 10% performance difference isn't bad, considering.

The CrystalDiskMark 4K read / write test is more of a measure of how well a drive handles a plethora of small files, the kind of workload you might encounter when running a program, an OS, or a game directly from the drive.

On this test, we see the flash drives are poor choices for running programs or an OS directly from the drive – the 850 Pro doesn't look great on writes, either, although it's a drive that I’ve used as a boot SSD in the past. But the Intel drive in the 10 and 20 Gbps enclosure did better here than the Crucial X10 drive.

On the fast 40 Gbps front, our Aorus test drive and OWC's enclosure did better on reads, but the Corsair EX400U was much faster with small file writes. In reality though, everything but the sub-10 Gbps drives and the Kingston Dual drive should handle small file performance well in most use cases.

▶️ Transfer Rates: DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50 GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive. This is a separate drive from our boot drive to avoid slowdowns due to the operating system background tasks that can be difficult to control.

In this real-world file transfer test, we see somewhat similar, though slower results as we saw with the synthetic sequential test above. Things look better for the Kingston flash drive here, but our 660p Intel drive in the 10 Gbps enclosure is still faster (it jas a thermal advantage being a much larger drive, physically). And the same drive in the 20 Gbps Asus enclosure again beats the 20 Gbps Crucial drive — and significantly when it comes to reads.

Looking at our USB4 OWC enclosure with the Aorus PCIe Gen 5 drive, it impressively blows away the Corsair EX400U. Both drives are fast, but our DIY USB4 drive is nearly 38% faster on reads and almost 70% faster on writes. I suspect some of the advantage comes from the fact that the OWC enclosure is about 5x larger and entirely made out of aluminum, while the Corsair drive has a metal top, but otherwise the shell is mostly plastic.

Final Thoughts

Older drives don’t lose much speed in the right enclosure

We could do a few more tests, but one thing is clear. Depending on what spare drive you have on hand and the enclosure you use, you don't necessarily have to lose any speed if you opt for building your own external storage enclosure rather than buying a retail external drive. Of course, if all you have is a hard drive, you're going to get external hard drive speeds, which are mostly good for basic backup and / or moving a few files between devices. If you have an old SATA SSD, dropping it into the same 2.5-inch enclosure should give you speeds 3-5 times faster than a portable hard drive, which is plenty fast enough to be useful for mainstream tasks. And if all you need to do is buy an enclosure for $8-$15 and drop in an old drive, that's easily the best value in external storage these days. If you have an old SATA M.2 SSD, getting an enclosure for it for less than $20 is a similarly excellent money-saving option.

If you're lucky enough to have an old PCIe 3 NVMe M.2 drive hanging around that you can drop into a 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps enclosure, you can get speeds nearly as fast and, in some cases faster, than competing drives that cost hundreds of dollars.

And if you truly need the fastest external storage speeds, even if you have to buy a 1TB or 2TB PCIe 4 or PCIe 5 drive and a sub-$100 enclosure, you can still achieve comparable or better speed than some of the fastest USB4 options, for hundreds less – although you'll still likely have to spend a few hundred dollars to get there.

In short, we may lament the fact that component price hikes have driven up the cost of components to the point that it's usually cheaper to buy one of the best prebuilt PCs these days than building one yourself. But it's still often cheaper to build your own external SSD than to buy one at today's inflated prices. And if you happen to have a suitable drive sitting around that you aren't using, one you can insert into an enclosure, you could easily save hundreds of dollars. Just remember to check the drive's health before using it to store any irreplaceable data. Because if your old drive had an active life as a boot drive in years past before you replaced it, it could be on its last legs, and no one wants to piece together an external drive only to have it fail after a few weeks or months of use.

A few months ago, reports of AMD working on a new entry-level GPU began making the rounds, and today we've just got our clearest look yet at the rumored cards. ASRock has just listed the rumored Radeon RX 9050 on its website in two different configurations, 4GB and 8GB, but we have no word on pricing or availability. AMD hasn't made any official announcements yet, so we only have a limited amount of info to dissect, and it should naturally be taken with a grain of salt. However, the leaked specs from an official vendor, which have since been taken down, would herald the return of 4GB VRAM GPUs in 2026, not seen since 2022.

The RX 9050 seems to be using a cut-down Navi 44 GPU from the RX 9060 series, with 1,024 cores spread across 16 Compute Units. The leak from May claimed it had 32 CUs instead. ASRock's Challenger variant lists a 1,920 MHz base clock and a 2,600 MHz boost clock. The listing also recommends a 450W power supply, which is 50W less than the RX 9060's 500W recommendation, though we don't know the board power for the RX 9050 yet.

Those were the mutual specs between both variants — the only difference lies in the memory config. The 4GB variant listing notes 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM operating over a 64-bit bus, giving us a bandwidth of 144 GB/s. We haven't seen a 4GB memory pool in GPUs since 2022, when Intel's Arc A310 and Nvidia's GTX 1630 came out. All current-gen cards have adopted 8GB as a baseline, which already gets criticized for not being future-proof.

The 8GB variant specs listed would double the bandwidth to 288 GB/s thanks to its 128-bit-wide bus. There's a chance AMD is planning to sell the 8GB to consumers directly while keeping the 4GB variant limited to OEMs. We can't say for sure since ASRock is listing it as a Challenger card on its website, but things could always change. We did find the 4GB RX 9050 already included in a CyberPower prebuilt on Best Buy, though, currently listed for $900.

The design in the leaked images appears rather generic: a black shroud with silver accents and some RGB lighting. They show two DisplayPort 2.1a and one HDMI 2.1b ports, and the card is powered via a single 8-pin PCIe connector. In terms of performance, the 8GB model should cruise through 1080p gaming, especially with the help of FSR 4. Since this is an RDNA 4 GPU, you get the full benefits of the architecture, including better ray tracing and upscaling tech.

As mentioned earlier, the last GPUs to ship with 4GB of VRAM were released four years ago. The industry is going through a turbulent period given the ongoing component crisis and memory shortage, but this would be another level of desperation.

Unless you already have a kit of DDR5, or deep pockets for PC hardware, you’re stuck right now. Despite seeing some of the best CPUs for gaming released just in the past year, the DDR5 tax represents a major hurdle to building or upgrading your PC. Intel’s LGA 1700 CPUs hold an unintended solution, offering support for both DDR4 and DDR5. We wanted to see if this on-ramp to a next-gen platform was really as smooth as it looks at first glance.

The idea is simple. If you already have a DDR4 kit, you can upgrade to a relatively new CPU while keeping the door open for a transition to DDR5 without buying a new chip. It’s inexpensive, and a bit more of a practical solution than upgrading to DDR5 with a single DIMM and worrying about pairing it with another later.

Our testing shows how much of a performance difference there is with DDR4 in games. We’re focused on games here for a few reasons. First, in non-gaming applications, memory speed is highly dependent on the specific workload you’re running. Games, despite using different engines, are largely similar workloads that stress the hardware in similar ways. Further, those workloads are continually evolving as new games, new technologies, and new hardware targets are released.

We kept our testing focused on Intel’s LGA 1700 CPUs because they’re the only options that give us a true apples-to-apples comparison between DDR4 and DDR5. We don’t have any AMD CPUs in our test pool because there aren’t any chips that support both DDR4 and DDR5. This isn’t intended to be a competitive analysis between AMD and Intel. That conversation opens up a much broader conversation about total platform cost.

Testing DDR4 vs. DDR5 on Intel’s LGA 1700 CPUs

To test DDR4 and DDR5’s gaming performance, we ran Intel’s main LGA 1700 stack through a 15-game gauntlet of benchmarks. Notably, we don’t have results for the Core i9-12900K, as our sample has a janky memory controller that won’t boot on DDR5 systems. You can read a full breakdown of how (and why) we tested in the way we did in the section below.

We ran all of the games through our 16-game benchmark suite, though we cut Doom: The Dark Ages from the results here. An update for the game rolled out mid-way through testing and skewed our results, so we’re omitting it. The 15 remaining games still paint a clear picture of the performance difference between DDR4 and DDR5.

As usual, we tested with the RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition at 1080p with a mixture of High and Ultra settings. We test at 1080p to maximize the differences between CPUs, and it remains the most widely-used resolution for gaming. Deltas between CPUs will decrease as the resolution climbs and the GPU becomes a larger influence in performance.

Below is our geomean from testing across the suite. Given that we’re looking to compare a single CPU’s performance with DDR4 and DDR5, we’ve highlighted some CPUs with the same color (13700K is always dark red, for instance, while 14700K is always dark blue).

The chart above is a bit difficult to parse, mainly because we’re often jumping several entries to get to a comparison point. For the stack of chips we tested, here’s a clearer overview of the performance difference with DDR4:

As we’ll get into with the individual game tests below, the drop in performance between DDR4 and DDR5 can be much larger than the comparison in our geomean (and, in turn, smaller in other games). What’s important for the overall performance drop is the trend as we move to newer chips. You can see a 9% drop grow to 14%, as DDR4 becomes a more significant bottleneck when the processor it’s feeding becomes more powerful.

That trend is one of the main driving forces behind our look at DDR4 and DDR5 gaming performance today. We looked at DDR4 and DDR5 performance extensively near the Alder Lake launch, and even more recently last year, evaluating performance across a wide range of applications. The testing here is focused solely on gaming to answer a critical question of building a PC today: Are you really giving up that much gaming performance with DDR4?

The answer is, yes, you’re giving up around 11% to 14% of your gaming performance overall when the memory is the only variable that changes. That’s a consistent drop, as well. Older titles care see less of a benefit from DDR5 generally, but we saw a steady decrease of around 11-14% across the games we tested, with some titles pushing above a 20% drop.

007 First Light is the newest game we tested, and it outpaces our averages. The 14900K sees a 16.5% drop with DDR4, while the 13600K drops 12.7% of its performance. Especially among the most powerful CPUs here, you can see DDR4 level off performance in a way that’s undesirable. The 14900K, for instance, is just 1.7% faster than the 13900K with DDR4, but it’s 4.6% faster with DDR5.

Similarly, in Crimson Desert, you can see the 13700K lose 13.7% of its performance with DDR4, and the 14600K drop 13.2% of its performance. It’s worth noting that neither of these games are particularly sensitive to memory speed. You can see in our recent Ryzen 7 5800X3D re-review that even a boost from 3D V-Cache doesn’t give CPUs with a robust memory chain an automatic advantage.

Perhaps the most consequential of the newer games we tested is Marvel Rivals, not only because it shows a much larger gap between DDR4 and DDR5, but also because it’s the most-played game in our test suite by a long shot (short of Counter-Strike 2). For weaker chips like the 12600K, the gap is 13.9%, just slightly above our geomean. For the more powerful 14700K, however, it shows a gap of 25.3%. Even the 14600K drops 17.4% of its performance with DDR4.

Counter-Strike 2 is less extreme, perhaps as a consequence of having such a high floor for average frame rates. You can see that the Alder Lake chips don’t care much about DDR4, with the Core i7-12700K performing identically across both memory standards. That gap grows with more powerful CPUs, however, with the 14700K creeping up toward a 10% delta.

In Spider-Man 2, we can see more consistent drops across the stack of chips we tested, with most CPUs dropping around 18% of their average performance with DDR4. That’s true even on the weaker 12700K, which lost 15% of its performance. The 14900K, meanwhile, was 18.7% slower with DDR4.

Even in an older, GPU-heavy title like Cyberpunk 2077, we can see a consistent drop. You can see in this game that we become completely bound by the GPU at the top of the rankings, but that’s a level these chips can’t hit when paired with DDR4. The 14700K drops about 14% of its performance, and the 13600K, about 13% of its performance.

You can browse through our remaining benchmarks using the gallery above, but most games tell a similar story. The gap between DDR4 and DDR5 persists, of course, but there’s another angle to look at the data. DDR4 flattens off performance, creating a bottleneck with faster CPUs. That could be justification for buying a weaker chip if you can only afford DDR4 memory right now.

Outside of performance, one important aspect of using a DDR4 system compared to DDR5 is power consumption. With DDR4, power consumption of the CPU increases, as you can see in the chart above. The jump is generally only a few watts, but it’s worth noting nonetheless. In games, we’re well below the operating temperature of all the chips in our test pool, but when pushing toward maximum power draw, DDR4 will post yet another limitation.

How (and why) we tested DDR4 vs. DDR5 now

DDR5 is way too expensive, and Intel’s LGA 1700 CPUs represent a unique value proposition given the unprecedented increases in memory prices over the past several months. The idea is that you can upgrade to a newer platform while sticking with DDR4, giving you a stopgap for an eventual DDR5 upgrade. It seems Intel recognizes this value proposition, as well, as it’s reportedly slated to launch Raptor Lake Next CPUs on the LGA 1700 socket.

We tested the main stack of chips, short of the Core i9-12900K, as described above. We didn’t test variants like KS releases to keep our testing focused, as well as lower-end SKUs like the 12100F or 14400. The memory controllers in these lower-end chips are weaker, sustaining lower DDR5 speeds, so expect less of a difference in performance with them.

Below, you can see the test benches we used. In addition to keeping hardware consistent, we use a frozen OS image with an identical software stack. We’re running the same version of the same apps on the same OS update, with identical drivers.

In the BIOS, we enabled XMP for both kits of memory. We also tested with Resizeable BAR turned on, and Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) turned off. Most motherboard vendors off a profile with the power limits removed on Intel CPUs, which can push the processor outside of warrantied specifications. We stuck with the default “Performance” profile for our testing here.

Is DDR4 still worth it?

It makes sense that we’ve seen a shift back toward DDR4. Although DDR4 prices have risen in lockstep with DDR5 prices, they started from a much lower base. A kit of DDR4 today is not much more expensive than a DDR5 kit of similar capacity a year ago. And, with estimates that the memory shortage could persist through 2030, there’s a strong argument for going with a DDR4 system if you’re in need of an upgrade.

The performance trade-off alone isn’t as big of a problem as it appears at first glance. You’re going to lose about 15% of your average gaming performance with Intel’s LGA 1700 CPUs (particularly Raptor Lake chips). You’ll spend more than twice as much on a 32GB kit of DDR5-6000 as you will on a 32GB kit of DDR4-3200, as you can see in our RAM price tracker. And, you might already have a DDR4 kit, cutting that cost completely out of an upgrade. Dollars spent for performance gained, DDR4 makes complete sense.

However, performance isn’t the only factor at play, and that’s the unfortunate reality of using a DDR4 platform right now. It’s a dead end, both for performance and upgrade potential. As we saw in our recent testing of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, there’s a performance wall in games with DDR4, one which the 5800X3D often runs up against. The memory is a bottleneck, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a way around that problem without upgrading to DDR5.

We also aren’t seeing any new DDR4 CPUs, at least right now. AMD re-released the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and there are murmurs of Raptor Lake Next. But given the current landscape, we don’t expect a CPU that will radically change the performance you can get out of a DDR4 platform.

Instead of sticking with DDR4 for a better CPU, the best course of action right now is to bite the bullet on DDR5 and buy a weaker CPU, particularly if gaming performance is your main concern. Given that memory prices are out of control, there are excellent deals on DDR5 CPUs right now, allowing you to offset the cost of an upgrade and giving you a kit of DDR5 to carry forward in future builds.

As an example, AMD’s recently-released Ryzen 7 7700X3D is $80 cheaper than the re-released Ryzen 7 5800X3D, despite coming in nearly 20% faster in average gaming performance. The $230 Ryzen 5 7600X3D shows similar gains, and it’s even more affordable.

In Intel’s camp, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus represent some of the best all-around value in the CPU world right now, with compelling gaming performance and chart-topping application performance, all for around $300.

You will spend more on a cheaper CPU and a kit of DDR5. There’s no indication that the memory shortage is ending soon, however. We’ve actually seen prices continue to increase despite the surge leveling off. Opting for DDR5 today buys you better gaming performance, but more importantly, it gives you a kit of memory that you can continue to use as new CPUs and platforms are released.

The ongoing component crisis has forced manufacturers to raise product prices around the world, which includes the best GPUs. MSI and PNY have just announced new prices for all RTX 50-series graphics cards for China, representing up to a 59% hike compared to MSRP. While Nvidia GPUs have been the most affected, offerings from Intel and AMD are also experiencing a similar predicament, according to Wccftech.

MSI's price list actually shows the old prices (from a week ago) as well as the new ones, giving us an official percentage difference of 10-20%. Keep in mind the old prices still weren't at MSRP. The RTX 5080 Shadow 3X OC/Ventus sees the biggest change, going from 10,000 Yuan ($1,477) to 12,000 Yuan ($1,773), constituting a 20% hike. Other RTX 5080 variants received a pretty similar 18% hike, while the RTX 5070 Ti Shadow 3X OC now costs 19.5% more.

The highest-end Blackwell GPU available in China, the RTX 5090 D V2 is a cut-down version of the RTX 5090, featuring 24GB of VRAM instead of 32GB. MSI raised its price by 13%, which is less than every RTX 5060 and RTX 5050 variant — those were around 14-15%. The RTX 5060 Ti (8GB and 16GB) and RTX 5070 both received price hikes under 10% compared to their old prices.

If you put these numbers up against these GPUs' MSRPs then the picture becomes a lot grimmer. The RTX 5070 Ti Gaming Trio OC is now priced 76% above MSRP, while its cheaper Shadow 3X OC variant is still 67% more expensive than the suggested retail price. The prices for the RTX 5090 D V2 are 57.5% higher, the RTX 5080 and 5060 Ti up to 56% higher, the RTX 5060 up to 45% higher, and the RTX 5070 up to 42% higher.

Moving onto Colorful's list, the company doesn't provide old prices to compare against, so we can only reference them against the MSRPs. The top-end offering, the RTX 5080 Vulcan W OC is now priced 59% above MSRP, while the 5070 Ti Vulcan W OC is 58.5% higher. The RTX 5070 and 5060 Ti 16GB models were largely under the 50% threshold, while price hikes for the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB and RTX 5060 variants were under 30% compared to MSRP.

Both of these lists came directly from the distributors but marketplaces online show that AMD and Intel GPUs are also more expensive now, as well. AMD's cards are selling for 14% to 29% higher prices, and Blue Team's cards are seeing $200 to almost $300 bumps, according to Wccftech. The RX 9060 XT 16GB is the worst offender among the two lineups, being hiked up by 28.8% compared to its MSRP.

All of this is happening because VRAM prices have skyrocketed over the past year, with reports highlighting a $20 price increase per module. That means an 8GB card, with taxes included, should cost almost $100 more now, a 12GB card about $130 more, and a 16GB card roughly $180 more, and that's just accounting for VRAM price changes. With prices going up, there's an additional element of supply and demand that is pushing prices higher.

There are no signs of the component crisis slowing down; in fact, we only see more fearmongering from major companies, persuading them to buy whatever they want now instead of waiting for some miracle market crash. With the way things are looking right now, prices don't seem to be coming down anytime soon, that much is clear.

Today marks 20 years since the first raft of Intel Core 2 Duo processors, codename Conroe, was launched. Ten Intel Core 2 Duo and Intel Core 2 Extreme processors were unveiled for consumer and business desktop and laptop PCs and workstations on July 27, 2006. We were lucky enough to test Intel’s now legendary new desktop processors earlier in the month, and our reviewer anointed the Core 2 Duo “the new king.” Our early hands-on review underlined that “as soon as Core 2 Duo hits the market, it will outperform the complete Athlon 64 family (X2 and FX) in all areas, including gaming, where AMD has traditionally been very strong.”

The GHz race ends with an architectural revolution

One of the defining characteristics of the first Intel Core 2 Duo chips was that they kicked the GHz race to the periphery of the battlefield. After years of chips being sold with this performance statistic placed most prominently, Intel and the tech media had to educate the wider public that higher GHz numbers didn’t define performance.

Intel Conroe desktop chips came with a generational performance uplift we don’t see often. These third-generation dual-core processors from Team Blue would “provide up to a 40 percent increase in performance and are more than 40 percent more energy efficient versus Intel's previous best processor,” according to launch-day PR. Testers also observed that even the entry-level new Conroe chips could outpace the mighty flagship desktop Pentium Extreme Editions, despite running at nearly half the clock speed.

Behind the real-world performance successes Intel eagerly highlighted, and reviewers seemed genuinely excited by, there were a number of architectural innovations and refinements. Intel boasted that the Core 2 Duo contained “a whopping 291 million transistors” and had achieved many benchmark firsts in internal tests. Conroe arrived with higher efficiency, shorter pipelines, improved branch predictions, new shared Smart Cache, and substantially higher IPC, all built upon Intel’s newest 65nm process technology. With this attractive new price, it wasn’t difficult for Intel to retire its former king, with its hot, power-hungry, and big GHz Netburst architecture.

Defining the next decade+

With the Core 2 Duo, Intel regained its performance leadership from AMD and its Athlon parts. Conroe, the desktop Core 2 architecture, didn’t get singled out in our five best Intel CPUs of all time article (2024), but it was the direct ancestor of the legendary Core 2 Quad CPUs. These quad-core CPUs would take the Gillette-like next logical step with four cores on a chip, combining two Conroe dies in a single package, and launching in January 2007.

Moreover, from the mid 2000s onwards, multi-core became mainstream and developers seriously began to optimize applications and games for processors boasting more than just Core 0. Admittedly, single-threaded performance can still be important in Windows/apps/games in 2026.

To conclude, Intel’s Conroe would set the foundations for the firm’s CPU market dominance for more than a decade. Most would argue this successful run lasted all the way until the AMD Ryzen family matured and hit full stride with the Ryzen 3000 series.

AMD used its recent Advancing AI 2026 event in San Francisco to launch sixth-gen EPYC "Venice" processors, Instinct MI400 Series GPUs, and Helios rack-scale systems, and to confirm that the Zen 7 generation arriving in 2028 will launch as three separate EPYC families rather than one.

The company named Florence, Ferrara, and Fidenza in its launch release, extended its annual CPU, GPU, networking, and rack cadence out to 2030, and put its total addressable market at roughly $2 trillion in 2030. It also introduced a competitive yardstick it hasn't used before, claiming the most AI agents per watt, per dollar, and per rack, though its own endnotes state those agent counts are estimated from CPU thread resources used as a proxy.

Three Zen 7 CPUs

Florence carries fresh Zen 7 cores, a new set of AI compute extensions, and support for newer memory technologies, AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su said during the keynote. Ferrara is the AI host node portion, and it appears a second time further along the roadmap as the CPU inside the Helios 600 rack alongside MI600 Series GPUs and Pensando "Palma" and "Levanzo" networking. Fidenza, meanwhile, is the agentic sandbox product. AMD disclosed no core counts, no process node, and no socket for any of the three, and said only that Zen 7 uses leading-edge process technology.

The fourth-gen EPYC generation, built on Zen 4, spanned Genoa, Bergamo, Genoa-X, and Siena across two sockets. The fifth-gen "Turin" generation then went the other way, folding Zen 5 and Zen 5c parts into a single 27-SKU stack on one socket with no separate cache-stacked or edge line at launch. Venice restarts the fan-out, with the 9006 series on the new SP7 socket now, and Venice-X arriving in 2027 with 1,152MB of 3D V-Cache, 96 cores, and a 5.15 GHz boost clock. Three named Zen 7 families at announcement, two years out, is a wider spread than AMD has ever opened a generation with.

AMD's own portfolio endnote describes the EPYC range as covering general-purpose enterprise, cloud, telecom, SMB, and HPC systems, plus, as a distinct category, sandboxed agentic AI deployments and GPU head node servers. Su told analysts in May that AMD was already working with customers on architectures beyond Venice, without naming categories at the time. The Zen 7 lineup puts a name to those two AI-specific segments for the first time.

Agents per rack

AMD's main server CPU claim at the event is that sixth-gen EPYC enables the most agents per watt, per dollar, and per rack. Endnote 9xx6-012 in the launch release states that agent counts are estimates derived from available CPU thread resources used as a proxy under a consistent theoretical workload, and that real capacity varies with workload, model, memory, software, orchestration, and system configuration. The per-rack comparison behind it is core count at a 100 kW rack power envelope, pitting the 256-core EPYC 9996 against an 88-core Nvidia Vera, AMD's own 192-core EPYC 9965, and Intel's 128-core Xeon 6980P. The per-dollar metric is based on top-of-stack thread count divided by the 1,000-unit list pricing.

The per-watt comparison in that endnote lists Nvidia Vera at 450W and Arm's AGI CPU at 300W with one thread per core, alongside Intel's Xeon 6980P at 500W and AMD's EPYC 9965 at 500W. AMD had already claimed a 3.3 times rack-level advantage over Vera in June. Mercury Research put AMD at a record 46.2% of x86 server CPU revenue in Q1 2026, against 33.2% of units, and Arm-based designs took roughly 17.7% of server shipments in the same quarter, so the widening comparison shows where these units are going.

Starting with sixth-gen EPYC, AMD has replaced TDP with a figure it calls Default CPU Power, defined as total power consumed across the processor's compute and I/O dies at a stated performance target. AMD says both references can serve for product comparison and performance-per-watt analysis, and the endnote itself mixes the two conventions, quoting the EPYC 9956 at 400W Default CPU Power against TDP figures for the Nvidia, Intel, and Arm parts.

2030 cadence

Helios racks pair 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs with 18 Venice CPUs, 31TB of HBM4, and 1.4 PB/s of aggregate memory bandwidth, and are in production now. AMD claims up to 30% more inference tokens per dollar than Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72, based on AMD Performance Labs estimates from July 2026 using a Kimi K2 Thinking workload at 32K input and 8K output, with hourly GPU pricing projections. The 34-times token throughput gain AMD quotes for MI455X over MI355X comes from AMD's own measurements on DeepSeek V4 Flash at FP4. Both, however, are vendor-provided benchmarks with no independent verification yet.

The forward roadmap runs MI500 Series GPUs in 2027 inside a Helios 500 rack built on EPYC "Verano" and Pensando "Como" and "Monza" networking, MI600 Series in 2028 inside Helios 600 on Ferrara, and Ravenna on Zen 8 in 2030.

OpenAI expects to bring Helios online from the fourth quarter of 2026, with deployments accelerating through 2027, while Meta is validating sixth-gen EPYC platforms in its labs and has begun testing Helios racks. Anthropic committed the day before the keynote to up to 2GW of MI455X GPUs in Helios systems, with the first gigawatt due in the first half of 2027. SemiAnalysis reported in February that manufacturing delays would push mass production and first production tokens on an MI455X UALoE72 system to Q2 2027; AMD software chief Anush Elangovan publicly rejected that assessment and said Helios remained on target for 2H 2026.

AMD's cautionary statement in the launch release lists the availability of essential components, naming memory supply specifically, among the risk factors that could cause results to differ from its projections. A Helios rack carries 31 TB of HBM4, and DRAM contract prices roughly doubled quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2026 before rising again in Q2.

The AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D is AMD's brand-new Ryzen 7 CPU, designed to slot neatly between the 7800X3D and the 7600X3D. While it's not a stellar offering as a standalone CPU upgrade, in this bundle featuring 16GB of DDR5 RAM for $16, it's a no-brainer as the perfect start to an AM5 gaming build.

Right now, you can get the 7700X3D at Newegg with an MSI Pro X870-P motherboard, 16GB of DDR5 G.Skill Ripjaws M5 (1x16GB), and a free Cooler Master Elite Liquid 240 CPU AIO for just $588, a $233 saving that gets you the RAM for basically nothing.

• Check out this deal on Newegg

While this bundle does limit you to single-channel RAM for the time being — it's just a single stick of 16GB DDR5 — it's an ample start for a mid-range gaming build in the current economy. If you really wanted, you could buy a second stick for the list price of $249, and get yourself 32GB of DDR5 for $265, which is much cheaper than the current going rate for RAM. If you factor in the free cooler, you're also saving another $80.

The 7700X3D can't match the more expensive 7800X3D or the hallowed 9800X3D, but as you can see from our testing, it can sustain average frames of 164fps in our 1080p gaming test suite, making it a great option for 1080p and 1440p gaming. This Zen 4 chip has 8 cores and 16 threads, and features 104MB of Cache.

That this bundle comes with a single stick of 16GB DDR5 6000 RAM is a small downside. It won't be as performant as two 8GB sticks, but it does leave you the option to upgrade to 32GB in the future, with timings of 36-36-36-76 and a black aluminum heat spreader. The M5 comes with addressable RGB lighting and support for both AMD EXPO and Intel XMP 3.0, the former being the pertinent one in this AM5 build. It's a small compromise that allows you to save a ton of money and get your hands on one of AMD's latest X3D processors for less.

The motherboard is MSI's Pro X870-P Wi-Fi board, which has a sleek aluminum look. The board supports up to 256GB of DDR5 RAM (four DIMM slots) for that aforementioned future upgrade, as well as Wi-Fi 7. It also has support for both PCIe 5.0 and 4.0 for M.2 SSD storage, and 5G LAN for super-fast networking.

The final cherry on top is Cooler Master's Elite Liquid 240 CPU AIO Cooler, a 240mm cooler that will keep your CPU temperatures down, giving you plenty of headroom for gaming. If you're looking to start a mid-range AM5 gaming build in 2026, you could do a lot worse than this bundle, which is one of the best we've seen in terms of RAM pricing in recent weeks.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.

One of the common misconceptions in today's memory market is that once memory modules based on chips from CXMT enter the consumer market, there will be cheaper alternatives to memory sticks running DRAM from the Big Three. While availability of CXMT-powered modules certainly impacts average selling prices, these products are not cheaper than those based on ICs from Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix even in China, as noticed by @harukaze5719.

A 64GB DDR5-5600 RDIMM based on memory from Samsung or SK hynix costs 18,595 CNY ($2,745) at JD.com, whereas a module featuring the same capacity and specification, but using DRAMs from CXMT is priced at 18,999 CNY ($2,805), according to observations by @harukaze5719. It is noteworthy that a Samsung 64GB DDR5-5600 RDIMM made by Samsung and sold by Samsung costs $2,425 at Amazon.com in the U.S.

While the $60 difference seems significant, it is really just 2.2%, which can be considered negligible at these sky-high prices. Nonetheless, many expect CXMT-based memory modules to be cheaper than those carrying chips from Micron, Samsung, or SK hynix, so observing that they are even a bit more expensive than offerings with ICs from renowned manufacturers may be a bit surprising.

Indeed, because CXMT produces memory chips using an outdated fabrication technology, its DRAM ICs consume more power than those made using the latest manufacturing processes, have lower performance potential, and mediocre overclockability. Furthermore, the Chinese government heavily subsidizes both ChangXin Memory Technologies and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), which enables both to sell their memory at lower prices although their actual costs may be higher compared to those of the Big Three.

As a result, it is reasonable to expect CXMT to charge less for its chips compared to chips from renowned producers. Truth to be told, we do not know CXMT's quotes, they may be as high as those from other manufacturers and the only reason why module producers buy them is that they are the only chips available. Furthermore, companies tend to price products based on what the market will bear, not strictly on production cost or their characteristics. In fact, as everyone is capacity constrained these days, there is little incentive for CXMT to price its DRAMs significantly below those from renowned makers. However, while CXMT may indeed charge less for chips (e.g., because the Chinese government issues an appropriate directive), this lowers costs for module makers, but has a limited effect on retail prices of actual DIMMs or RDIMMs.

Whether potential savings reach end customers depends on market competition, supply-demand conditions, and the pricing strategies of module makers, distributors, and retailers. Furthermore, when prominent companies like Apple, Dell, or Corsair use a memory chip SKU, this one must pass rigorous validation processes and is usually tested in-house, or by contract manufacturers, which adds to costs and somewhat erases the price difference between suppliers.

As a result, CXMT memory chips may make the lives of hardware makers easier, but are not expected to impact the retail prices you pay.

In addition to memory and storage, graphics cards continue to command a premium in the PC components market. While discounts are hard to come by, the XFX Quicksilver AMD Radeon RX 9070XT Gaming Edition is currently available at Newegg for $699.99, down from its regular listed price of $789.99. At $90 off, this is one of the better prices we've seen for an RX 9070 XT in recent months.

• Check out this deal on Newegg

The XFX Quicksilver RX 9070XT OC Gaming Edition features a minimalist all-black design which makes it perfect for black-themed PC builds. The cooling system on this GPU includes a nickel-plated copper cold plate, 3x double ball bearing fans, and 6mm heatpipes to offer the best thermal dissipation. Overall, it is quite beefy with its 3.5-slot design and includes a backplate for both improved rigidity and cooling.

The RX 9070 XT stands as AMD’s current-gen flagship GPU based on the RDNA 4 architecture. An excellent card for 1440p gaming, it is also capable of handling 4K gaming once you dial in the right settings. It features 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit memory bus along with 4,906 stream processors, 64 compute units, and boost clock speeds of up to 2,970 MHz. It definitely has a place among the best graphics cards for gaming in 2026.

In our RX 9070 XT review, we found that the card delivered a solid generational uplift over AMD's previous-generation GPUs. While it may trail Nvidia in ray tracing tech, it manages to offer strong rasterization performance and a lower price than the RTX 5070 Ti making it one of the best value GPUs in its class.

At $699.99, the XFX Quicksilver RX 9070 XT Gaming Edition offers a meaningful discount over its regular asking price, and a highly recommended graphics card for anyone planning an upgrade. While it's still above AMD's original launch MSRP of $599, it is a notable improvement over the card's current typical street price.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.

FPGA and embedded systems expert Adam Taylor has recreated the U.S. Navy’s F-14 Tomcat’s Central Air Data Computer (CADC) in an FPGA. The CADC is famous for being the brains behind the F14’s advanced fighter capabilities including the control of the aircraft’s signature articulated sweep-wing system. So, what better way to test the new FPGA than in a 3D printed scale model of the F-14 Tomcat? Check out the video embedded below.

We wrote about the F-14 Tomcat’s CADC last year after discussions erupted on social media about whether this flight computer was actually powered by the "world’s first microprocessor." The brains behind the CADC were provided by the MP944. This chip lived in the shadows for quite some time, though. Despite the MP944 microprocessor beginning service in June 1970, over a year before Intel’s legendary 4004 would become available (November 1971) it was an official secret until 1998. Thus, the Intel 4004 managed to steal the limelight from the true first microprocessor, say those in the MP944 camp.

To recap, the MP944 was a 20-bit, pipelined, parallel multi-microprocessor melded with state-of-the-art MOS technology and ran at 375 kHz, executing 9,375 instructions per second. The flight-system powering chip, designed by Steve Geller and Ray Holt and a 25-strong team, also passed stringent ruggedness tests and was capable of running in temperatures spanning -55 to +125 degrees Celsius.

The MP944 worked as part of a six-chip system in the CADC, for the real-time calculation of flight parameters such as altitude, airspeed, and Mach number – and was a key innovation to enable the Tomcat’s articulated sweep-wing system. So it had to be performant, and some chip architecture enthusiasts assert that the MP944 was actually “8x faster than the Intel 4004.” Remember though, the Intel chip was originally designed for a far more humble desktop calculator.

3D printed F14 swing wing test

Getting back to Adam Taylor’s recent achievement, and we now have a full open source set of VHDL source code, documentation, and testbenches for an FPGA recreation of the F‑14’s CADC. The GitHub repo says the FPGA used was a Spartan-7 based SoM, part of the Adiuvo Embedded System Tile. The resource isn’t just the MP944 logic, Taylor includes complete synthesizable VHDL implementations for all six original CADC chips.

A computing enthusiast has repurposed a very noisy and largely obsolete enterprise GPU (with lots of VRAM) for local LLM inference purposes. They are now enjoying a system that has doubled its total VRAM quota to 32GB for just a $266 (£200) outlay. That’s a good result, especially in the midst of a RAMpocalypse.

Oscar Molnar explains that a cheap Tesla V100 SXM2 with 16GB HBM2 was sourced, as was an SXM2-to-PCIe adapter, and a PWM mod for the loud-as-a-lawnmower cooler, to complete this VRAM expansion for the hefty local LLMs project. Indeed, these GPUs do look cheap right now, as I can see them listed on eBay US for under $140 each, if you don’t mind buying from China.

As mentioned above, you can’t just get one of these Tesla V100 SXM2 cards with abundant VRAM and plug it into your PC. Molnar says they spent about $66 on an SXM2-to-PCIe adapter, also on eBay.

You might think that was enough. However, the PC and local LLMs enthusiast baulked at the noise of “the fan from hell,” which came as standard with the Tesla V100 SXM2. That shrieking cooler was measured outputting 82dB of noise. Molnar described it as “somewhere between a garbage disposal and a lawnmower.” This may be the most complicated tweak yet, but basically the existing fan wires just needed rerouting and plugging into the motherboard PWM fan header. You could also simply purchase a “2.54mm male to PH2.0 female jumper cable” for the task. Apparently, the fan only needs to run at 10% to keep the Tesla V100 under 50C at full load.

27 billion parameter LLM runs at 32 tokens per second

With the hardware all now fitted and finessed, Molnar had a 32GB VRAM system at their disposal – that’s a PC with RTX 4080: 16GB VRAM, Ada architecture and Tesla V100: 16GB VRAM, Volta architecture. They note you can get Tesla V100s with 32GB of VRAM, but they are double the price.

Getting the system to make use of this 32GB of total VRAM for LLMs wasn’t tricky, says the DIYer. They used NixOS with a legacy Nvidia driver that overlapped support for both Volta and Ada architectures. Testing a local LLM, they got a 27 billion parameter model running at 32 tokens per second, which they say is “fast enough for interactive use” and faster than most cloud API alternatives.

With the state of the computer hardware industry in shambles, it's difficult to build a gaming PC with brand new parts today. Consoles that traditionally used to counter these dilemmas have fallen victim to the same crisis. In times like these, we have to look toward opportune deals, and we've found one you'll love — Thermaltake's View u2660T-170 prebuilt is on sale for just $1,177.99 on Woot right now if you use the code BESTOFPC at checkout. That's $622 off the list price for an RTX 5060 Ti-equipped rig.

• Check out this deal on Woot

When you click the link, the listing will be only $1,199 because you have to enter the code "BESTOFPC" at checkout to get an additional $22 off. As for the PC itself, it's a prebuilt but uses completely standard, off-the-shelf parts, starting with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF CPU. It's a 20-core processor that can boost up to 5.5 GHz, and it's a solid midrange performer across gaming and productivity.

For the GPU, you're getting Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti, which is perfect for 1440p gaming across all sorts of titles. It's the base 8GB variant so it's not exactly the most future-proof thing, but with the help of DLSS and Nvidia's driver suite at large, you're going to get a lot of mileage out of this card. The card is fueled by a 650W 80+ Gold power supply, and Thermaltake is explicitly advertising clean cable management, too.

Paired with that hardware is 32GB of DDR5-6000 RGB RAM, which alone costs $400 in this economy. You also get a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD mounted on a standard B860 motherboard with Wi-Fi. The CPU is cooled down by a 240mm Thermtake AIO, and it's all enclosed in the company's View 170 case that comes with a bunch of ARGB fans.

We put as close of a configuration as possible to this inside PCParkPicker, and the resulting build cost $1,800, and that's without a Windows 11 copy that's included in this. Thermaltake is offering its View u2660T-170 prebuilt for as low as $1,179 on Woot right now, making it a no-brainer. Deals like this serve as an antidote to the component crisis, so grab it before it's out of stock!

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.