Xbox consoles recently experienced a worldwide outage, during which people were unable to access even disc-based games that should have been playable offline. Service was restored within a day but the impact of this discovery could be significant as tensions run high surrounding the crumbling state of physical media. Microsoft, however, was quick to suppress the negative PR, telling The Verge that discs should have never been affected by the outage in the first place.

"Disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games and this is by design," said Microsoft tech chief Scott Van Vliet. He went on to confirm that discs go through license checks in the form of verifying entitlements. These entitlements determine what content a user is entitled to access, including when said user is offline, since they're saved directly on the console. Van Vliet clarified that the team caught an issue that stopped the consoles "from correctly using saved entitlements during the outage."

Xbox uses the Smart Delivery system for distributing games that automatically installs the best version of the title for your hardware. Smart Delivery has an alternative implementation called full-disc support, where developers can choose to put all executables of their game on the disc instead of relying on a license to digitally download content. That means when you insert the disc, there's no need to even connect to the internet as the file should be ready to run out of the box. That's precisely what failed to occur yesterday.

The outage itself affected everything from log-ins to application launches, and from online play to this strange issue of discs not running as intended. It was tied to an external service provider suddenly going down, and remaining down, for 16 hours. Xbox relied on that external provider for license and entitlement checks, so when a console failed to connect to those servers, it simply locked out players from accessing the game. It worked as fail-close mechanism instead of the fail-open it should have been, at least for discs.

If you're even a little bit tech-savvy, this probably sounds familiar to you as DRM checks have been a part of gaming for a long time. It used to be limited to just digital releases, but disc-based media has evidently fallen to the same problems as of late. The 100GB storage capacity of Blu-ray discs is a genuine limitation, but that's rarely the cause behind stories like this. Microsoft says it's already working on releasing an update to address this issue, but has not provided a timeline.

Sony faced similar vitriol earlier when the community discovered mandatory 30-day online check-ins had been added to PlayStation 5 and 4 consoles, but that claim was later refuted. In 2024 , Steam came under fire for ambiguity over perpetual licenses as well, which just goes to show that even the Valve isn't safe from this great evil. Now that PlayStation discs will cease to exist by 2028, concerns over ownership tied to physical media are growing every day.

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%.

An Nvidia employee has been detained in Taiwan over allegations of forgery and breach of trust, in relation to the Supermicro smuggling scandal, that saw servers ostensibly sold to companies in Southeast Asia routed to China instead. Nvidia itself hasn't been accused of wrongdoing, and it published a statement calling smuggling a "nonstarter," saying that any GPUs sold through such a system would have no "service, support, or updates."

But that hasn't stopped Nvidia from taking its own measures to reduce its exposure to potential future smuggling efforts. Earlier this month, it created a form of "whitelist" for companies it sells to. It also investigated the firms it will continue to do business with, even sending staff members to customer data centers at the urging of the White House for verification.

Prosecutors have made it clear from the start that Supermicro isn't under investigation, merely its employees. The same is true of Nvidia. But as the AI frontier model race heats up and the White House floats banning Chinese models outright, Nvidia could face further restrictions on its hardware sales and greater scrutiny of its international actions.

Investigation escalation

The Supermicro smuggling scandal first came to light in March, when a trio of individuals were detained for deliberately mislabelling servers planned for sale to Southeast Asian countries. Instead, though, they sold them to China, getting around US export controls. The detentions included Supermicro co-founder, Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw, as well as a Supermicro sales manager in Taiwan, and a third-party broker who previously worked at Supermicro.

Where those detentions happened on U.S. soil, though, the investigations went international in May, when the Taiwan Keelung District Prosecutors' Office executed search warrants against three individuals it claimed were involved in illicit smuggling efforts. Although it was said to be independent of the U.S.-led investigation, it involved the same companies and was part of the same overall scheme designed to smuggle Nvidia hardware into China.

In Taiwanese law, selling GPUs to China — even the U.S.-restricted kind — isn't strictly a crime, but filing fraudulent paperwork and falsifying documentation absolutely is. That's why Taiwanese authorities have leaned on local fraud laws to tackle this increasingly international case.

Although the authorities were clear that Supermicro as a company wasn't being investigated, a number of high-level employees were. That continued in June when Taiwanese officials raided the Supermicro offices in Taiwan, as well as the homes of six individuals and three company sites, all said to be involved in the smuggling scheme.

The widening scope of the investigation ultimately pulled in workers from Supermicro distributor Albatron Technology and data center operator Chief Telecom. Taiwan has since said it is considering placing a criminal ban on all AI chip exports to China, locking down smuggling routes that have been actively exploited for several years.

But now the investigation is escalating up the supply chain and has now reached Nvidia itself. Although the company isn't under investigation, Nvidia's culling of potentially problematic suppliers and buyers might not do much if its own workers are facilitating the smuggling actions.

This is serious

The Nvidia employee in question has the surname Chang, but has remained otherwise unnamed. He was detained on suspicion of falsifying business documents, with authorities searching his home and workplace on July 24, marking the first time that Nvidia's premises have been investigated in this manner since the start of the smuggling scandal.

Prosecutors consider him strongly suspected of the charges, with a very real risk for attempted flight, destruction of evidence, and collusion with witnesses.

"Smuggling is a nonstarter," an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "We primarily sell our products to well-known partners, including OEMs, who help us ensure that all sales comply with U.S. export control rules. Even relatively small exporters and shipments are subject to thorough review and scrutiny on both sides of the globe, and any diverted products would have no service, support, or updates."

Although authorities are clear that they are not investigating Nvidia as a company, an employee's involvement in the scheme will put a spotlight on Nvidia's actions and raise further questions about any additional involvement it or its employees may have had.

CEO Jensen Huang said in May that there was "no evidence of any AI chip diversion," but the situation has obviously changed since then. At the beginning of June, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to Nvidia general counsel Tim Ter, asking for evidence that supported Huang's claims.

Supply and demand

At the time of writing, there is a legitimate channel for Chinese firms to purchase Nvidia GPUs, but they're not the most cutting-edge Blackwell chips. There are older Nvidia GPUs granted licenses that are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, with the U.S. government taking a 25% revenue share cut of the sales. This reportedly adds up to just 75,000 units for 10 different Chinese companies - a relatively trivial amount of GPUs for Nvidia.

This is for the China-only, neutered Nvidia GPUs like H20 and H100s — not the cutting-edge GB200 and GB300 Blackwell-based stacks available to Western AI developers.

But this legal demand comes despite the lack of cutting-edge hardware options, the regulatory hoops that those involved need to jump through, and the Chinese government using carrots and sticks to encourage the use of domestic chip options.

That's because for certain tasks, Nvidia GPUs remain the best. For training, there's nothing that can compete with Nvidia's options. Chinese firms like Deepseek have tried previously, but they had to switch back to Nvidia when Chinese alternatives didn't measure up. Although some post-training fine-tuning is now possible on Chinese hardware, the Moonshot's headline-grabbing Kimi K3 was trained on potentially smuggled Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.

Considering the impact that Kimi K3 has had on the AI industry, it's hard not to imagine other Chinese AI developers looking to have their own "Deepseek moment" wouldn't search out access to Blackwell GPUs themselves.

The net may be closing on the Supermicro smuggling scheme, but the incentive is there for others to take its place, if they haven't already.

Steam Machine fans who weren’t lucky enough to get a chance to buy the console on its first drop will have to wait until as late as December 2026 to get it. Valve said in its update that the reservation queue varies between products and regions, meaning Valve is already going through the waitlist for some versions of the consoles in select areas. However, it seems that others would have to wait longer if they chose a particularly popular trim of the Steam Machine in a region where there are many buyers, too.

“We’re fulfilling orders on a daily basis, sending out emails to reservation holders with the option to purchase in the order in which they landed on the list post-randomization. We expect everyone in the reservation queue will have the option to purchase by the end of this year,” Valve said in its update. It also added, “With each reservation queue and corresponding waitlist being per-product, per-region, they can move at different speeds based on demand. This means for some products in some regions, we've reached the end of the reservation queue and have started inviting folks from the waitlist.”

That means users who reserved the Steam Machine but haven’t had the chance to buy them yet can expect to get their hands on one before the new year. While this means that all the original reservations will finally be fulfilled in 2026, it doesn’t offer much comfort for those who want to have a new gaming PC console just in time for the holiday season.

Valve lets you 3D-print your own Steam Machine case, face plates

Users who haven’t received their Steam Machine yet (or even those who didn’t order one) could 3D-print their own shell for the console in the meantime. That’s because the company just released the CAD files for the “Gabe Cube” on GitHub in STP format. This lets you create your own face plates and case based on Valve’s own designs, ensuring that the cases or skins you create yourself will exactly match the PC console.

We’ve already seen some manufacturers offer custom plates and skins for the Steam Machine, although Dbrand had to drop the Portal 2-inspired Companion Cube after Valve threatened to sue the company for copyright infringement. With the release of these files, you can 3D-print or create your own skin (even your own Companion Cube skin) without worrying about getting sued as long as you follow the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license that Valve put on the PC console. ‘

If you’re brave enough, you can even make your own case for the Steam Machine and transfer the innards to that custom one you build. Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the Valve engineers who gave us in-depth details on the Steam Machine, warned that doing so might void your warranty, though.

“Your Steam Machine is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you want,” Griffais said on the GitHub post. “That said, we highly recommend you leave it to professionals. Any damage you do will not be covered by your warranty – but more importantly, you might break your Steam Machine, or even get hurt! Be careful, and have fun.”

We recently toured China-based Lenovo’s new production facilities here in the US. Lenovo is the number one player in the global PC market (by shipments), with products spanning consumer, business, and enterprise sectors. But while Lenovo is a Chinese-based company, it has a significant business presence in the United States. Its U.S. headquarters, which opened in 2005, is in Morrisville, NC, right in the heart of the Research Triangle Park. The company also opened its first PC manufacturing line, a short drive away in Whitsett, NC, shortly after.

This past Friday, Lenovo took the latest step in its efforts to expand its U.S. manufacturing presence with a symbolic ribbon-cutting for the expansion of manufacturing at its Whitsett facility. The company invested millions of dollars into the facility, doubling its footprint to 890,000 square feet. There are currently 400 line workers, with the capacity to expand that number to 1,000 in the near future.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why Lenovo is making this investment, as it comes down to two words: artificial intelligence.

Lenovo in Whitsett

As Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, Executive VP and President for the Infrastructure Solutions Group, explained, for many of Lenovo’s customers, “AI is moving from the hype cycle now into the hero cycle.” With many of its customers looking to increase reliance on U.S.-produced hardware, an “infrastructure they can trust is going to be the catalyst for that.” So, it only made sense to tap into resources and the local community it has fostered over the past two decades

“Because behind every AI breakthrough, it's powerful, powerful infrastructure,” Gorakhpurwalla continued. “As technology becomes more advanced, I think that building high-quality infrastructure closer to our customers is becoming more important than ever.”

North Carolina might not always have been at the forefront of people’s minds when it comes to technological leadership, and it’s a question that Ben Massey, VP Supply Chain for Lenovo, has often fielded. “You know, people ask me all the time, how are you going to make that work in North Carolina?” Massey explained. “The way it's going to work is that we've got an arc from the Triangle to the Triad with thousands of engineers, thousands of manufacturing people in R&D who can work in supply chain, people who can all work together to bring this technology together with speed. Faster product development to mass production, shorter customer lead times, and greater end-to-end cost efficiency.”

Lenovo’s main U.S. R&D hub in Morrisville is just over an hour's drive away from the Whitsett facility along Interstate 40. In addition, the company can pull young talent from nearby universities like NC State, Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Wake Forest, along with the state’s robust community college system.

Lenovo and its local contractors were able to take the facility from an empty warehouse to a fully functioning server production line in nine months. That included the necessary electricity capacity (up to 20 MW) from Duke Energy.

By the Numbers

I was given a full tour of the Whisett manufacturing facility (along with other members of the press, Lenovo dignitaries, and local lawmakers), from start to finish. It was an impressive operation; one that I wish I could express to you in photos. However, photos and videos were strictly forbidden due to the proprietary nature of the hardware and testing equipment, and to protect Lenovo's customers' privacy.

The kitting area, where the components like processors, memory, and storage are assembled, encompasses 26,000 square feet. There are 10 kitting lines, where workers currently assemble 200 racks per week, with the capability to double that number to 400. The 50 team members in this area process over 150,000 parts per day.

There are currently seven assembly lines, residing in a space roughly double the size of the kitting area (53,000 square feet). Lenovo has the capacity to produce 1,400 server nodes per day across 28 assembly stations (one server is produced every 60 seconds).

At full tilt, Lenovo says that it will have 1,000 operators running three shifts. However, there are currently around 380. Employees get roughly 1,000 hours of training, and they rotate throughout different phases of the building process to hone their skills.

After touring the kitting and assembly lines, we moved into the testing areas, where L10 testing takes place. There are 10 thermally controlled testing pods, with 16 test racks per pod. The room is chilled using massive Computer Room Air Handlers (CRAH), each with 1 MW of cooling capacity.

In addition, there are 30 Vertiv Liebert XDU direct liquid cooling units (expandable to 50), each with a capacity of up to 300 kW, to aid with testing finished packages for customers. Lenovo explained that Nvidia GB300 racks consume 140 kW, while Vera Rubin will consume 230 kW at peak load. For comparison, the average U.S. household consumes between 1 and 1.5 kW per day. That's a lot of power coming from a rack measuring 18 inches across and seven feet tall. Lenovo’s first taste of Vera Rubin is said to be making its way to the Whitsett facility by the end of August.

We also toured where the massive freshwater pipes enter the building to fuel the cooling operations, along with the utility room, where the impressive overhead electrical conduits feed power into the site from a nearby substation. Working with Duke Energy, Lenovo was able to go from temporary power at the site to full power within 7 months.

Closing Thoughts

I’m not a native to this state; however, I’ve lived in central NC for 40 of my 46 years on this earth. So it was rather impressive to see the Whitsett facility taking shape roughly 20 minutes from my childhood home. However, the sense of pride was also clouded by the realities of the times that we live in. The proliferation of AI in nearly every facet of our lives is the entire impetus behind the need to expand server manufacturing capacity for the homeland. Companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others crave the computing hardware necessary to feed AI demands, which in turn is driving a wedge between big tech and local communities. From strains on local water supplies and power grids to the acquisition of land to build new data centers, we’re at a real crossroads where local communities, local governments, and big tech companies are each looking to have a say in how our future plays out.

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.

When you use a laptop, you might assume that it will always perform the same, whether you use it while plugged in or unplugged. After all, these systems are designed to be used on the go. But for a long time, that hasn't been the case.

More recently, some silicon vendors have been boasting about closer parity in plugged and unplugged performance, offering you similar power whether you're working at your desk or anywhere else. To see the current state of this, we've taken samples of the latest laptop from each major CPU manufacturer: Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple, and run a few tests to see how they compare.

For the Windows systems, we used the balanced power profile, which was already the default on the majority of these laptops, while the MacBook Pro has an "automatic" power management profile out of the box.

Where we could, we went for top-end processors, including the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H, Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, and Apple's M5 Max. In AMD's case, we had two Gorgon Point processors, a Ryzen AI 9 465 and a Ryzen AI 7 445. To see some generational gains, we also included an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V "Lunar Lake" chip.

We tested three ways: in Cinebench 2026 single-core and multi-core workloads, as well as using Handbrake, an open source video conversion tool, to transcode a 4K video to 1080p.

Note that we're not comparing the scores of the systems to each other. We're comparing the systems to themselves, to see how performance changes on the battery.

With those tests run, we can calculate percentage differences to see percentage changes. Notably, a number of systems actually increased performance ever so slightly on battery. This occurred the most on multi-threaded Cinebench, where the Zenbook A16 with Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme increased by 13.06%, while the ThinkPad X9 bumped up by 4.98%.

Qualcomm's chip was by far the most variable. While it dramatically increased in performance on battery for Cinebench nT, it dropped a similar amount for Handbrake.

But it was Apple and Intel that led the pack. While the Core Ultra X9 388H had the most consistent score on average, it did show 3% swings in multi-threaded Cinebench and on Handbrake. Apple's M5 Max results were the most consistent throughout, never swaying even a full percentage point on battery.

The least consistent system on battery power was the Acer Swift Go 16 AI, running on an AMD Ryzen AI 7 445. That system lost a ton of performance when unplugged from the wall, dropping as much as 56.25% performance off the wall. On average, benchmark scores were 50% lower on that system. On the HP OmniBook X Flip 14, Ryzen AI 9 465, it still dropped, but far less, losing an average of 5.45% performance on power based on these tests.

On the bright side, things are going in the right direction. Intel and Apple's most advanced systems give you very similar experiences on battery and power — at least in these tests. Snapdragon can, but sometimes it swings a bit. It's really AMD that needs to catch up in this regard. And we know that can be done. The Steam Deck, which was released in 2022, was specifically designed to have similar performance on and off the charger, and it uses a semi-custom AMD SoC. Its AMD-based opponents, however, still get better performance on a charge. You not only have to have your chip designed around battery and performance. You also need to make sure that the system around it is optimized for that.

The other side of this coin is efficiency. If you're able to perform heavy tasks on battery without losing performance, you're likely going to do it. That's especially the case if you do field work in creative or industrial fields. That means ensuring that your system can handle your workload long enough to get it done. But hey, there's always an external battery, right?

Police from Emporia, Kansas, arrested a teacher for applauding a speaker who was speaking out against a proposed zoning change to accommodate a planned data center in the area. According to 12 News, the police dragged 37-year-old Lux Claridge from the community meeting and charged him with disorderly conduct and interference with law enforcement. The commissioners had reportedly repeatedly warned against clapping and making other reactions while someone was speaking.

A video circulating on the internet shows Claridge clapping five times after a speaker closed their statement. We can hear in the clip below someone saying, “Ask him to leave,” followed by a second voice confirming, “Can I?” The voice then asked a police officer, “Chief? Will you ask-will you take the next person out that claps or anything, please? Thank you.”

The cops then approached Claridge, who said, “I have a right to speak.” The police were nonetheless insistent, which is when he said, “Drag me out.” Four officers then proceeded to cuff the teacher and hoisted him off to Lyon County Jail.

The data center’s critics warned against the project, saying that it could strain the local power supply and negatively impact the residents’ water quality. Their concerns are not without merit, as AI data centers have caused a massive 76% increase in electricity costs in the U.S.’s largest power region, while a Meta site is accused of muddying an entire town’s water supply.

Despite that, Emporia, located about 100 miles Southwest of Kansas City, approved the zoning changes needed for the Flint Hills Digital Campus project to move forward with the permitting process. This does not mean that the data center will immediately start construction, though, as it probably still needs to go through several more steps before it can break ground.

This isn’t the first time that a data center dissenter was hauled off to jail for reasonably pushing back against the said project. An Oklahoma farmer was arrested back in April for trespassing after going a few seconds over his allotted time and handing paperwork to the commissioners. Pushback against projects like these have been happening across the country, with several jurisdictions like Seattle and New York State enacting one-year moratoriums to study the potential effects of these infrastructure projects and how they could be mitigated.

President Donald Trump created the “ratepayer protection pledge” to force AI hyperscalers to “pay their own way” when it comes to electricity costs. He has even expanded this recently to include states and utility companies, with 23 governors and 187 firms signing up on the promise. Unfortunately, this is just a piece of paper and has no legal or regulatory power over the signees, with tech companies pushing back against a California bill that wants to turn this into law.

At the moment, Oregon is the only state that has passed and enacted a law that forces electricity consumers that used 20 MW or more to cover their fair share. Because of this, Portland General Electric, the state’s biggest power generator, has increased data center bills by 30% while cutting residential electricity costs by 1.3%.

Claridge is currently out on bail and is awaiting his hearing in September. "I'm glad to be out, but this is an inconvenience, really," Claridge said to local media. "It's not really deterring me from speaking out or, I guess, clapping."

Intel’s codename "Panther Lake" Core Ultra Series 3 mobile processors were designed for laptops, but now we are starting to see them trickle over into mini PCs. That includes the recently launched MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG (starting from $569, $1,999 as tested). This particular design is pleasingly compact and low-key in a traditional NUC manner, but can this matte black panther roar?

Design of the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

Simply put, the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG is a very compact roughly 4.5 x 4.5 x 1.5-inch design with an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H chip inside.

The Core Ultra 9 386H delivers 16 cores and threads of processing power (6P + 8E + 2LPE) running at up to 4.9 GHz. MSI is also selling models with the Ultra 7 355, and Ultra 5 322 processors.

The Cubi’s shell is sturdy and pleasant enough in a matte black finish, made from recycled plastics. Inside, the motherboard is held firm inside what looks like a folded sheet aluminum frame.

Another welcome feature is the external power switch. This is a small power button puck on a slim connector that is 18 inches (45 cm) long. There’s a dedicated port for this on the left side of the Cubi, and the end of the puck is mounts with a little double-sided foam tape..

The power button dongle is a nice touch for those who might mount the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG somewhere out of view, like behind a monitor or under a desk. Those who keep the Cubi in reach can benefit from the fact that the power button on the unit has an embedded fingerprint reader. I found the biometric unlocking here to be hit and miss, however, and it often didn’t recognize my thumb.

MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG Mini PC Specifications

Ports and Upgradeability

MSI has implemented a couple of physical convenience features in the build, starting with the three-step toolless access system.

All you have to do to pop the metal bottom off is turn a slotted screw, push a metal latch, and pull a ring. The trouble is I did need a tool to turn the first slotted screw, I fear my fingernail would have split if I hadn't grabbed a screwdriver. The force of pulling a tiny ring attached to the latch was also slightly concerning.

Beyond the Core Ultra 9 386H processor, our sample came loaded with 32GB of DDR5 (2x 16GB DDR5-5600 SODIMMs made by Samsung) and a removable 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe 2280 DRAM-less SSD from Phison. With these inserted, the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG was fully populated. \The Wi-Fi card is also removable from its M.2 2230 slot.

On the front of the unit, there are three ports: USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 and USB 2.0 ports, and a 10 GBps USB-C port. On the back, there are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two HDMI 2.1 ports (one with MSI PowerLink, which turns the PC on with a monitor), and a pair of 2.5G Ethernet jacks. Finally, on the side of the system, there's a Kensington lock slot.

I feel that the MSI is slightly stingy with ports here. Most notably, there is not even a single USB Type-A port in the rear. So I had to use a USB-C dongle to keep my wired keyboard connected at the back for the tidiest possible setup.

It is good to see various USB ports on the front, however. And I appreciate that this small device allows up to four displays at once (2x HDMI, 2x USB-C DP-Alt).

For wireless networking, there is Wi-Fi 7 on board and Bluetooth 5.4 is also built-in.

There is no 3.5mm audio jack here, which would have been welcome on the front. You'll need Bluetooth, or to use audio out through HDMI or USB Type-C ports.

Test System Setup

Productivity Performance on the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

The MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG was built to be an office workhorse, so there won’t be many complaints about performance. It comes wielding Intel’s latest silicon, with 16 cores to take CPU-demanding tasks and multitasking in its stride. And the system does its job while sipping very low amounts of power, and rather quietly.

In Cinebench 2026, Maxon’s current-gen CPU rendering benchmark, the little MSI Cubi comes last in the rankings of our recent crop of mini PCs. Though low in comparison to its peers, its score isn’t disastrous here, as this is testing the kind of CPU muscle that won’t be called upon by a typical home or office user of a mini PC like this.

Similarly, in CPU-heavy benchmarks like Blender and Handbrake, the MSI Cubi lags behind the crowd. Even against the GMKtec EVO-T2, which also uses Panther Lake silicon and has fewer P-cores, the MSI still lags here. We are certain this is due to MSI’s default configuration maxing out at around 55W. The GMKtec machine was seen pulling over 70W at the wall.

On a more positive note, during our demanding tests, the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG stayed admirably cool and quiet. This feat was clearly aided by the chosen lower power limits and use of Intel’s newest energy-sipping mobile silicon in this form factor.

Gaming and Graphics on the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

Unlike some mini PCs, this one isn't squarely targeted at gamers. Still, with a mere quartet of Xe3 cores pushing the 3D visuals along, this compact and quiet mini PC can do some gaming.

I fired up Forza Horizon 5 for a bit of racing down in Mexico. I liked the High and 1080p settings, and the game managed 45-40 frames per second. The frame rate felt like it dropped precipitously every few minutes as I was driving around, though. This indicates that the game's suggested Low or even Medium settings would be a better choice for consistency.

Our benchmarks included a trio of 3DMark synthetics and two PC gaming standards. 3DMark Solar Bay is a great way to frame and compare cross-platform iGPU performance. Meanwhile, Steel Nomad turns to screws on raw graphics performance with its heavy modern GPU load, and will be better for comparisons when we start testing the higher-end mini PCs, some with dGPUs. Last and definitely not least, Speed Way is a 2025 benchmark from UL that uses DirectX Raytracing tier 1.1 for real-time global illumination and real-time ray-traced reflections.

Next up, some real gaming courtesy of Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Cyberpunk 2077. The former scales well with processor resources and can still look and run great on humble iGPUs. As for Cyberpunk 2077, it can really push and tax even the strongest modern GPUs, so here we've used two settings to show how the little MSI Cubi can - and can't - play this game.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider performed quite nicely on the Intel Graphics (four Xe3 cores) fed by the dual-channel DDR5-5600 memory configuration we had. Using the High settings at 1080p makes for pleasing visuals, and I would argue the 37 FPS average was perfectly adequate for this solo-play atmospheric adventure.

Cyberpunk achieved a similarly playable frame rate using the Steam Deck preset at 1080p. On a big screen this is a little bit blurry / smeary. Moving up to the High preset at 1080p (with upscaling and frame gen turned off) dropped the frame rate below the magic 30 FPS, though, and below most folks' tolerance. If you had no other avenue to enjoy this demanding title, there could still be a spot in between these settings that would work for you.

In comparison to the other devices we have recently tested, the MSI NUC sat near the bottom of the pile. It only undercut the Geekom A9 Max 2026, which should have benefited from a great performing Radeon 890M iGPU but was kneecapped due to its single-channel memory configuration. This system is really made for work, and while you can technically play on it, you'll want something stronger for a good experience.

Power, Heat, and Noise when using the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

According to system tools like HWiNFO, the Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor inside this MSI Cubi has a TDP of 25W, with PL1 30W and PL2 65W. During testing, I measured total system power consumption with a plug-in power meter, as well as reading CPU temperature using a Windows tool.

In an idling state on the desktop, the system pulled around 17W consistently. At the same time, the CPU temperature would stick around 40 degrees Celsius.

During prolonged stress testing of the MSI Cubi, the highest consistent wattage consumed was around 55W. It seemed to stabilize at approximately the 75 degrees Celsius level.

I would characterize this as a quiet mini PC. Its MSI Frozr AI Pro fans were more or less unnoticeable in idle and light loads. My meter showed 30.8dB, and the meter doesn't measure below 30, so there's a possibility it may be even quieter. Meanwhile, the 37.3dB at max fans wasn't horrible, and it takes effort to tease this much noise out of the MSI.

Software and Warranty on the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

MSI’s latest NUC comes with MSI Center pre-installed. This is a suite of controls and extras wrapped up in a tabbed Windows interface. The main tab is packed with system monitoring information, but this new version of the tool offers to leverage AI to “automatically recognize various user scenarios, triggering appropriate adjustments in performance, sound effects, display mode,” and more. Elsewhere, MSI’s NUC was pleasingly free of bloat and third-party clutter, including a wonderful lack of short-lived free trials. Businesses really don't want to deal with that.

MSI sells the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG with a 1-year warranty as standard, but opting for a pre-built configuration with Windows 11 Pro on Amazon will also boost your warranty to 3 years of advanced tier coverage.

Configurations of the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

Nosing around online retailers in the U.S. today didn’t uncover the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG with the exact configuration, as tested. We got in touch with MSI about the 32GB RAM model, as tested, and were informed that it was only available business-to-business and its MSRP was $1,999 but that depends on factors such as order size.

On Amazon we saw a barebones version with the same Core Ultra 9 386H for $809. Upgrading to 16GB of RAM (single-SODIMM, single-channel) and a 1TB SSD, with Windows 11 pre-installed skyrockets the price to $1,661 (with Win 11 Home) and $1,767 (with Win 11 Pro), respectively.

MSI is also marketing Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG mini PCs with Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor 355 and Ultra 5 Processor 322 configurations. You can find these on Amazon, both in 16GB/1TB/ configurations for $1,549 and $1,079, respectively.

Bottom Line

Though the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG is clearly aimed at businesses with its productivity focus and vPro remote management features. Its understated looks and quiet operation may attract those who want a small-form-factor productivity PC at home, especially if they intend on putting together a minimum-fuss multi-monitor setup.

If the MSI’s quiet, efficient, and compact form isn’t a killer combination for you, and you are open to less established brands, we have recently tested several other mini PCs from companies like Arctic, Beelink, GMKtec, and Geekom.

These less established brands definitely offer better value with more potent processors, and more generous memory/storage configurations, at better or similar pricing to the MSI. In the MSI’s favor, I’d say it quietly satisfies its target market more than adequately, and sprinkles attractive bonuses like fingerprint security, the remote power button, MSI Power Link, vPro remote management, the touted ‘tool-less’ component access, and 3-years of advanced warranty coverage when you choose a Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG with Win 11 Pro.

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.

SK hynix reported second-quarter revenue of 79.32 trillion won and operating profit of 60.54 trillion won on Wednesday, the latter up 557% year over year at a record 76% operating margin, and used the same Seoul earnings call to lift its 2026 capital spending guidance to the high 40 trillion won range as AI server demand keeps outrunning what the company can produce. Third-quarter DRAM bit shipments are guided up around 10% sequentially, following a quarter in which DRAM average selling prices rose roughly 30%, and NAND prices rose in the mid-50% range.

SK priced 177.9 million American depositary receipts at $149 each earlier this month, raising $26.51 billion in the largest share sale by a non-U.S. company on record, with the SEC filing earmarking proceeds for Korean manufacturing facilities and equipment, including EUV scanners.

Wednesday's capex number is roughly the same size and funds an accelerated mass production schedule at the M15X fab in Cheongju, the Yongin Phase 1 cleanroom that opens in early 2027, and the previously announced P&T7 advanced packaging plant and M17 NAND base, which SK hynix said will be built in phases according to customer demand. Cash and short-term investments hit 88 trillion won at the quarter's end, up 33.6 trillion won in three months, against interest-bearing debt of 18.6 trillion won and a debt-to-equity ratio of 7%.

CEO Kwak Noh-jung called 2027 the worst year of the shortage on the day of the Nasdaq listing and put the end of the crunch beyond 2030. Full-year DRAM demand is growing at a mid-20% rate by the company's own estimate, against bit shipments guided up around 10% next quarter. None of the capacity now being funded will produce wafers before 2027.

Operating profit landed below the 64.1 trillion won that brokerages surveyed by Yonhap Infomax had modeled. Executives attributed the softer blended DRAM ASP to product mix and to high-value shipments pushed into the second half, and said the gap should close as HBM4 and 1c-node conventional DRAM ramp up. HBM4 entered mass production during the quarter, and HBM4E samples have shipped, with volume production targeted for 2027.

Triggered by global selloffs, SK hynix closed down around 10% in Seoul on Wednesday, and Samsung Electronics fell 5%, with the KOSPI ending the session 6% lower and below 6,000 for the first time since April 14. The index touched 5,262 at one point, down almost 13%, taking its five-session decline to 17% and cutting a year-to-date gain that had reached 116% in June to 34%. Over the past month, SK hynix has lost 47% of its value and Samsung 37%. The KOSPI fell 10.84% on Tuesday and triggered a marketwide circuit breaker after SK hynix's American depositary receipts dropped below the $149 price at which they listed on Nasdaq on July 10.

Weaker shareholder-return expectations compounded the earnings miss, with SK hynix telling analysts only that additional returns remain under evaluation and would be disclosed within the year. Josh Gilbert, eToro's lead analyst for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, told Bloomberg that "expectations had simply moved ahead of what even another record quarter could deliver."

CXMT closed its Shanghai debut up 466% on Monday after raising 57.92 billion yuan for DRAM wafer lines, and a report last week put China at low-volume production of domestic immersion DUV scanners running to around five units this year. TrendForce still has conventional DRAM contract prices rising 13% to 18% in the third quarter, with NAND up 10% to 15%.

The drone arms race is set to enter U.S. schools with Mithril Defense’s Campus Guardian Angel drones in at least nine schools across three states before the year is out. The Washington Post reports that the pilot program will be tested in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado schools with and without resource officers on campus. Securely siloed drones will be situated in key areas around campus, triggered by teachers via app or panic button, then fly to combat gun-toting attackers with a mix of strobes, sirens, pepper spray, and a 60 mph attacker-ramming capability.

If this is a successful initiative, it could go some way to lift the terrible specter of gun violence overshadowing U.S. students. The Washington Post notes that since Columbine in 1999, almost 400,000 students have experienced gun violence at school.

The Campus Guardian Angel drone rollout will be quite expensive. For example, the five schools in Georgia set to adopt drone defense will get $500,000 in backing to run the pilot program. However, politicians and legislators in that state appear to have passed the budget with ease.

This is how the Campus Guardian Angel drone system is designed to work:

• Drones are sited at secure locations around the campus,
• A teacher will trigger the drone deployment using an app or panic button,
• Remote pilots take control and distract, deter, and disable aggressors using a mix of strobes, sirens, pepper gel, and 60‑mph impacts,
• Drone system reaction speed is crucial.

Mithril Defense says that the Campus Guardian Angel drones can react and reach a shooter as quickly as 15 seconds. Justin Marston, Mithril’s founder and CEO, made a few other bold claims regarding his drone system’s reaction speed. For example, Marston said a drone like the Guardian Angel ‘might’ve saved lives in Uvalde.’ That’s a direct reference to the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed in 2022.

The drone defense firm's CEO underlined that “the first 120 seconds are incredibly critical, because that’s when most of the shooting happens.” That implies that he thinks Campus Guardian Angel drones could be successfully deployed within that very narrow time window. But Uvalde was quite unusual, as responding law enforcement seemed paralyzed, waiting over an hour to enter the classroom.

These school-based drone systems are not without their critics. Some say that the funds may be better spent on prevention than cure. Even Mithril’s founder and CEO’s opinion seems to be that if these drones aren’t prompted into action within two minutes, they aren’t living up to their promise.

There is also the concern that drones could misidentify students or protection officers when controllers are under pressure. Others say that military-style drone systems aren’t appropriate for schools, and will cost a lot more than simple measures and routines regarding locked doors.

With the three states proceeding with pilot programs this year, we may see the true value and capabilities of the Campus Guardian Angel drones. If these drone-protected schools don’t suffer any terrible shooting incidents, then it may be claimed that the drones are at least a deterrent.

You don't need a professional streaming setup to take work video calls and chat with friends and family — and, honestly, you don't want one. And webcams have a lot of limitations (most professional streamers use DSLRs to shoot content, not webcams), so there's only so much you can do. But it's not nothing.

Here are several things the average person can do to make their webcam streams look better.

Webcam

First of all, let me point out that the webcams on our list of best webcams are, for the most part, not 4K webcams. That's because you don't need a fancy, expensive 4K webcam to look good — and, in fact, a 4K webcam might end up working against you. Most video conferencing platforms, including Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, limit your outgoing stream to 1080p or 720p, depending on the type of account you have. So you basically can't stream in 4K even if you want to (and you probably don't want to). Plus, higher-resolution webcams often require more power and bandwidth, which can result in freezing, lagging, and choppiness (none of which are flattering) if your PC or your internet connection isn't up to speed.

Instead of looking for a high-res webcam, look for one with a relatively narrow field of view and/or digital zoom (which narrows the field of view). One of the reasons we love the Logitech Brio 500 is that it has the option for narrowing the field of view to 65 degrees, and a narrower field of view is more flattering to your face. Wide-angle lenses tend to distort the picture subtly, warping objects at the edges and making whatever's in the center look larger than it is.

Larger sensors and lenses can also help, but what you'll find is pretty limited in the webcam market (they are, after all, webcams) — so instead of worrying too much about the hardware, look for a webcam with robust software support. I'm a big fan of Elgato's Camera Hub (which supports Elgato webcams, such as the Elgato Facecam MK.2 and the Elgato Facecam Neo), which gives you a lot of control over exposure, white balance, and picture adjustments, and also lets you zoom in and save presets so you can quickly switch between angles while you're streaming.

Needless to say, part of the reason you're looking for a webcam with good software is that you should be changing the settings in the software — webcam auto-exposure and auto-white balancing are notoriously terrible and should almost always be manually adjusted. But if you're the type of person who can't be bothered to go in and tweak software settings, you should pick up a webcam with decent auto-exposure and auto-white balancing — the Logitech MX Brio has excellent auto settings (though, at $200, you are paying for them).

Lighting

Lights shining down on you from above, such as those found in a typical office setup or, I don't know, in your kitchen, are designed to help you work more efficiently. They're not designed to flatter your face. In fact, this is probably some of the least flattering lighting around, thanks to the harsh shadows it creates. That said, you generally won't find a "naturally occurring" ideal webcam lighting setup, because most people do not place bright lights behind their already-bright, backlit monitors. But lighting is one of the most important elements when it comes to looking good on webcam, and it definitely makes a difference.

While there are some webcams that handle poor lighting situations slightly better than others, the difference is pretty minor. So instead of looking for a webcam that performs like a beast in the dark, just grab some lights.

You don't need to go overboard with a full studio setup, but basic three-point lighting is a classic for a reason. This consists of two lights on either side of you (at 45-degree angles) and one light behind you. At the very least, you should try to have two lights on either side of your face, and some sort of lighting (even overhead lighting) in the background so it doesn't look like you're sitting around in the dark. You can, of course, buy lights specifically for your webcam streaming setup — Elgato's Key Light is slim and comes with a desktop clamp mount designed to fit sleekly into your setup, while the brand's cheaper Key Light Neo features a monitor mount. Logitech sells the Litra Beam LX, which is dual-sided (colorful on one side, white on the other), as well as a monitor-mounted option, the Litra Glow.

But you don't need a fancy, wirelessly-controlled webcam-specific streaming light — you can use a lamp, or even the sun. You just need two light sources, of which one is (ideally) dimmable. If you happen to have a multi-monitor setup, you can even use your monitor (or monitors, depending on how many you have). I use this whitescreen website to switch two of my monitors into lights when I'm taking pictures for webcam reviews. Just make sure the lights are off to the side of your face — straight-on lighting is more flattering than top-down lighting, but it does make your features look a little flat.

When you do have at least two lights in front of you, you'll want to make sure you turn off your webcam's auto-exposure and tune the exposure to work with the lights.

Height

Most webcams come with some sort of monitor mount for convenience. But your monitor — especially the top of your monitor — basically never sits at a height that makes for a flattering camera angle. If you've got a laptop, it's too low (even if it's not on your lap), and if you have a desktop monitor, it's probably too high. The best place for your webcam to be is at eye-level — not only does this give the most flattering, accurate view of your face, it also makes it easier for you to look into the camera (and making eye contact with the camera, not your screen, goes a long way in making you look good — or at least like you're paying attention).

There are a few ways to get your webcam to eye-level height:

✔️ Get a separate camera mount

You don't have to mount your webcam on your monitor! Most webcams either have tripod attachment points built in or come with a monitor mount that has a tripod attachment point built in. This lets you mount your webcam on any standard camera mount, such as a tripod, a desktop tripod, or some other sort of desktop camera mount. A desktop tripod is probably the easiest way to get your webcam to an acceptable height, although it's perhaps not the most elegant, as you'll have to move it around when you're not using it. For a more permanent solution, I recommend a desktop clamp mount if you have somewhere to mount it — just make sure that the one you buy has enough adjustment options to get your webcam to where you want it to be.

✔️ Lift your laptop

If you're on a laptop and you happen to be using the built-in webcam, you can't exactly mount it separately, so you'll need to figure out how to get your laptop to eye-level height. The easiest way to do this is to just put your laptop on something: a box, a stack of books, or, if you're feeling fancy, a laptop mount. You'll also need to make sure that the screen is angled correctly — either straight on (90 degrees) or tilted slightly down.

✔️ Mount your webcam in the middle of your screen

Look, your webcam is probably going to end up in the middle of your screen in an ideal scenario anyway, so why not just... put it there to begin with? There are a couple of ways to do this — you can buy a webcam specifically designed to be mounted this way, such as the Center Cam, or you can get a mount that sits in the middle of your screen, such as the PlexiCam Pro V2, which is a clear, acrylic webcam mount that hangs on your monitor and puts the camera right in the center of your screen.

Background

This might seem obvious, but it's not just about how you look... it's about what people can see in the background. I know that not everyone has the space, resources, or willpower to set up some sort of perfectly curated streamer-ready background, and that's understandable. But there's probably some middle ground between showing off piles of laundry and unsuspecting roommates, and looking like you're ready to launch a Twitch partnership.

✔️ Less is more

If you can't clean up your background before you get on a call, use the power of zoom and crop. Try to make the area directly behind you as neat and camera-ready as possible, and then use your webcam's software to zoom in and crop so that people just can't see what's just outside the frame.

✔️ But not... nothing

While you don't want everyone to see a pile of junk behind you, you also don't want to look like you live in an asylum. And that's what you look like when you just have a blank white wall behind you. If you have to be tucked up against a wall (and, turning your desk around to hide the mess is a completely valid strategy), just... put something on the wall. A picture, a painting, a sign, some of that stick-and-peel wallpaper, anything. It doesn't have to be fancy; it just has to look like you're anywhere that's not an endless void.

✔️ Use a greenscreen

Most video conferencing apps have an option to blur your background and/or replace it. I'll just come right out and say it: Blurring your background looks terrible. Yes, I know everyone does it, and it's generally accepted in workplace video calls, but that doesn't mean it looks good — that just means we're all willing to overlook how bad it looks. And replacing your background rarely works well, unless you're against a blank white wall (in which case you should just throw up some art and go with it). If you really can't make a real background work, consider a pop-up greenscreen for a more seamless background-replacing experience. And if you must blur your background, make sure you at least zoom in and crop so that people focus on you, and not whatever you're mysteriously hiding behind you.

This is not an exhaustive guide to how to look good on a webcam, but it's a start.

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.

3D printing is a fantastic hobby to have. The amount of creativity you can explore is only confined to your imagination, and of course, the amount of filament you have. Once you are the owner of a 3D printer, the main ongoing cost of enjoying it is the expense of constantly refilling your printer's spool with a roll of filament. Today's deal is here to help you continue to bring your printed creations to life, but highlighting an almost too good to be true deal on 10 spools of Creality's Hyper PLA filament for just $86.32. That's just $8.63 a spool, which is insane, considering they cost $17.99 each from eBay and $19.99 each, direct from the Creality store.

● Check out this deal at eBay

If you click on one of our links to this fantastic deal, you will find that you can mix and match a selection of colors to complete this deal. The colors available are white, black, red, blue, gray, skin, yellow, green, orange, brown, gold, purple, multicolor, multicolor-short gradient, multicolor-long gradient, strawberry red, peach powder, and peri blue. It doesn't change the price if you select different colors, but you must pick 10 spools in total.

Creality's Hyper PLA filament is designed to be used with 3D printers that have high printing speeds up to 600mm/s. The filament will be less likely to warp, will have better fluidity at higher temps, and will also cool faster. Giving you a better overall finish on your 3D-printed creations. Each spool contains 1KG of 1.75mm Hyper PLA filament.

Now, to be able to buy these 10 spools of Creality Hyper PLA filament for just $86.32, you first have to choose 10 spools of filament and add them to your eBay cart. This will automatically enable a "buy 6, get 4 free" deal, bringing the initial $179.90 total down to $107.90. Now go to the checkout and add code NEWFINDS20 in the coupon box, and watch the price drop a further 20% to just $86.32. This is the perfect deal for stacking up on your filament stockpile, or for filling up a multicolor feeder system on your printer.

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.

With PC hardware prices going up and up, thanks to the AI boom, you'll need to score a bargain where you can. Luckily, Walmart has slashed the cost of two different versions of this iBuyPower Y40 gaming PC, both fitted with an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, with the 9800X3D model costing you $2,099 right now.

● Check out this deal at Walmart

iBuyPower builds custom and pre-built gaming rigs that are both powerful and gorgeous to look at. This Y40 rig is no different, using a black Hyte Y40 case with a wrap-around glass panel to give you full exposure of the powerhouse components within. This is an all-AMD affair, with the top spec build combining an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT.

These aren't mid-tier components. The 9800X3D is our top choice as the best gaming CPU on the market right now, fitted with eight cores, 16 threads, and boost clock speeds up to 5.2 GHz, but it's the 3D V-Cache that steals the attention here. This X3D chip comes with a boosted 96MB of L3 cache, ensuring that the CPU doesn't need to fall back on slower system RAM, boosting frame rates and performance as a result. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is no slouch, either, as it's currently AMD's top GPU, and one of the best value choices for a gamer, with performance rivalling the RTX 5070 Ti for a lot less cash.

The CPU benchmark data below is clear: the 9800X3D is a performance beast for gaming, and without massive power demands. It offers the best performance per watt compared to its rivals, including over the newer AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D. In fact, our data shows that the difference in FPS between the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 7 9850X3D is just 3%, and that's at 1080p. The gap is closed even further at 1440p and 4K, which we'd expect you to be playing at with a rig like this.

You can expect this X3D chip to continue to dominate charts like this for some time, giving this iBuyPower PC longevity for gaming well into the future.

The 9800X3D is paired well with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, as you won't be facing bottlenecks to hit high frame rates with decent graphics settings at 1440p. 4K is a possibility here, too, but you may need to adjust your graphics settings to cope if you see frame rates drop in any seriously intensive games. Luckily, the RX 9070 XT's 16GB of VRAM means you have more breathing room at the higher resolutions for more stable frame rates, especially versus cheaper GPUs with 8GB VRAM.

Other parts used in this build include 32GB of DDR5 memory, rated at 5,200 MT/s. That isn't the fastest RAM out there, but it's still faster than older DDR4, which would typically max out at 3,600 MT/s. You've also got a 1TB SSD for storage, enough for a couple of big game installations, and to keep the rig cool, you've got a 360mm AIO liquid cooler, along with several 120mm ARGB case fans. There's even a keyboard and mouse thrown in for free to get you started.

While we've seen this rig cheaper in the past, it's still a lot of spec for the $2,099 sale price, especially compared to rival builds on sale right now. That said, if you're happy to compromise on that X3D chip, you can go for a cheaper alternative. The same iBuyPower Y40 rig, but with the 9800X3D swapped out for a 12-core 9900X instead, is just $1,799 right now. That's $300 cheaper than the 9800X3D model, and a big $700 discount on its usual price.

The build, including GPU and case, is almost exactly the same otherwise, although this is an all-white build versus the black colorway for the 9800X3D model. The AMD Ryzen 7 9900X is a downgrade compared to the 9800X3D, as it loses the huge advantage offered by the 96MB L3 cache capacity, but it's no slouch. It can still deliver impressive gaming performance, however, sitting between the Intel Core i7-14700K and beating the newer Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus in our CPU benchmark results at 1080p. You'll see boosted performance if you decide to overclock it using AMD's built-in Precision Boost Overdrive on supported motherboards, too.

These are two powerful gaming PCs for 1440p and 4K gaming at prices that won't be around for long. You can pick up the all-black iBuyPower Y40 with the 9800X3D for $2,099 right now or, if you want an even cheaper bargain, the white iBuyPower Y40 with the 9900X is $1,799 instead.

Keeping the upper hand in the AI arms race has become a vital goal for both the U.S. and China, and Nvidia's Blackwell AI chips are one of many flashpoints in that fight. The US government bars their sale to Chinese firms, while Chinese policies block their import as the country tries to spin up an advanced AI chip industry of its own.

But as we've discussed multiple times and then some more, Chinese AI firms are quite creative with workarounds for these restrictive policies. That's the case of Moonshot AI, which has reportedly made good use of Blackwell for training the recently released Kimi K3 frontier-level model, and is seemingly looking to obtain additional access in preparation for Kimi K4.

The Information says "people with knowledge of the matter" told it that Moonshot employed two Chinese firms that have Blackwell chips in their respective datacenters despite the bilateral restrictions we mentioned. Given that those chips are scarce enough right now even when obtained legitimately, it's unsurprising that neither firm had enough of them on hand to let Moonshot train K3. This reportedly forced Moonshot to figure out how to join multiple eight-chip Blackwell servers together and across datacenters in order to harness the necessary computing power.

The report also mentions "a researcher at a major Chinese tech firm who works on model training" as stating that Kimi K3 has "started a new round of arms race" in the country's AI industry. They further added that training frontier models is difficult or impossible with the promising but slowly developed homegrown chips. By that source's account, Chinese AI accelerators remain a generation or two behind Nvidia's current offerings and are reportedly several months in backorder.

For inference work, Moonshot reportedly relies on Nvidia's China-market HGX H20, a last-gen chip that isn't blocked by trade laws on either side of the Pacific. The firm recomends setups with at least 64 H20 GPUs for running Kimi K3. Those requirements, combined with that frontier model's desirability, meant that Moonshot quickly ran out of computing capacity to run K3 and currently has subscriptions on a waiting list. Given it's an open-weight model, and that its weights were released this week, many other inference providers are serving it, perhaps alleviating that bottleneck.

Meanwhile, White House Director Michael Kratsios claimed last week in a tweet that that Moonshot AI both "acquired GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand." While buying Blackwell chips is illegal, renting them is apparently fair game, at least until the proposed Remote Access Security Act takes effect. That law is designed to prevent the rental loophole by treating remote access as an export event. There's no telling exactly how the U.S. would enforce this law across other jurisdictions, though.

At any rate, the Department of Commerce is formally investigating if Chinese firms are accessing advanced U.S. chips like Blackwell GPUs, and that's likely to be an ongoing point of contention as the war for frontier model supremacy continues.

In China, it's an open secret that many of the country's high-level own or have access to Blackwell and other advanced chips, but despite all the trade restrictions and pushing the usage of local-made chips, the CCP has seemingly yet to crack down on said AI players. Some have theorized that the turning of this blind eye is intentional so Chinese firms like Moonshot can catch up to the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI.

Intel Foundry says that it has completed RAMP-C, the United States government program awarded to the company in 2021 to stand up a secure, domestic leading-edge chip ecosystem on its 18A process. The program funneled money to commercial and defense partners to run test chips on a design kit that wasn't finished yet, and its conclusion marks readiness for external customers who will pay full price to fabricate real products, including those who might use the Intel Secure Enclave manufacturing flow that RAMP-C helped to shape.

The announcement doesn't name any customers that Intel may have secured as a result of RAMP-C, although the program roster has been public for years and includes Nvidia, Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman. That may be down to the sensitive nature of any actual defense industrial base (DIB) products that are likely to be produced with the Secure Enclave defense-focused manufacturing flow for those products, which spans project stages from design to chip fabrication to advanced packaging.

Intel says RAMP-C was one of the programs that influenced Secure Enclave, and having a number of potential DIB customers run and test prototypes on 18A through likely generated valuable knowledge for Intel, the U.S. government, and its partners as those stakeholders work together to create a defense-ready domestic chip source.

Stu Pann, then SVP and GM of Intel Foundry Services, told Tom's Hardware back in February 2024 that the program's announced partners were IBM, Microsoft, and Nvidia, and that all three were running test chips paid for by RAMP-C. The funding let them "operate with immature PDKs, which normally they wouldn't do," Pann said, and covered their associated costs. Intel got PPAC data in return: how prospective customers rated 18A on power, performance, area, and cost.

Intel disclosed the roster in stages rather than all at once. Nvidia, Qualcomm, Microsoft, and IBM were named across the first two phases, Boeing and Northrop Grumman joined in July 2023, and Trusted Semiconductor Solutions and Reliable MicroSystems came in under a third phase that Intel says was awarded in April 2024.

Nvidia's participation runs back to the program's early phases, four years before it agreed to buy $5 billion of Intel common stock in September 2025, a deal that closed in December at $23.28 per share for more than 217.4 million shares. That agreement covers custom x86 CPUs and RTX SoCs, and carries no commitment to manufacture Nvidia silicon at Intel.

Secure Enclave, the follow-on program Intel references, is worth up to $3 billion and was finalized alongside the company's $7.86 billion CHIPS Act award in November 2024. Congress required that CHIPS money pay for it, which is why the commercial grant is smaller than the $8.5 billion originally proposed.

Intel Foundry booked $293 million in external revenue last quarter against $5.8 billion in total segment revenue and a $2.1 billion operating loss, according to the company's Q2 2026 financial results. Fortinet, named last week as the first publicly disclosed external foundry customer under CEO Lip-Bu Tan, is building its security processor on Intel 4 rather than 18A. On the same earnings call, Intel committed to 14A high-volume manufacturing in 2028.