PC Gamer's Tech Update: Cheaper GPUs, 'undershipping' chips, and chicken giblets

A totally non-synthetic Katie Wickens here, sliding a somewhat meaty special edition hardware newsletter into your inbox. Don't get excited just yet—it's not all fun and games. This week has been something of a shambles for hardware, or maybe actually a freakish hellscape.

While we're over here giggling at Razer's tiniest mouse yet, the Razer Viper Mini Signature Edition, which is meant to be "a magnesium alloy gaming masterpiece" at $280, someone's been off inventing the "lol Verifier" to check that our typed sentiments of hilarity are sincere. That's nothing too out of the ordinary, just PR's and Raspberry Pi enthusiasts being eccentric. Meanwhile, Intel's been having a very bad time, and NVMe SSDs have been dropping like flies due to an issue with Samsung's 980 Pro firmware. Topping it off, Open AI's CEO gave us the fear over the potential misuse of artificial intelligence meaning 'lights out for all', while the true torment nexus territory comes in the form of tiny meltable T-1000 bots, and chicken-like meat monstrosities.

Since I had to deal with nightmares over the latter, so must you. I apologise. Get into hardware, they said. It'll be fun, they said.

I was ready to take on the day, until my friend sent me a video of a fleshy, Cronenberg-esque ensemble of walking chicken giblets. The story comes from the Bodification exhibit at MOD Museum, which looks at the idea of health, Dues Ex-style augmentations, the Biomutant-like mixing of human and animal DNA, and heaps more.

The 2TB version is the version to go for; it gives you the highest straight performance and an astounding endurance level. This is the version with the gorgeous EKWB heatsink for just $10 more than the sans-heatsink sale price.

This speedy gaming monitor, with impressive contrast and great colour handling, is finally at a price we can recommend it for. It comes with USB hubs, USB Type-C downstream charging and is well calibrated out of the box. That price is sans-stand, so if you don't already have a monitor mount you'll have to find an extra $99 somewhere.

It's tempting to ignore AMD GPUs when you're looking for a new gaming PC, but the last generation of Radeon cards are better value than Nvidia right now. The RX 6700 XT here is as good, sometimes faster, than the RTX 3060 Ti it competes with. The rest of the spec on this MSI-built machine also backs it up, too.

Intel's budget Arc A750 first launched for $289 last year and now, just four months later, it's getting a new low price of $249. The Arc A750's price cut went live on February 1, and applies to Intel's own-brand Limited Edition model. That price cut is specifically for the US market, but Intel's Tom Peterson confirms that approximately the same price cut will come into place elsewhere around the globe in due time.

If you thought the ongoing dip in PC sales that AMD is predicting will last into 2023 could mean falling prices of CPUs and particularly GPUs, we have some bad news. Turns out AMD has been intentionally limiting supply of its chips and plans to continue to do so.

If you're rocking a Samsung 980 Pro in your gaming PC, it's time to update or it might die in front of your eyes. Even worse, if that's your Windows boot drive, your entire system may just one day soon refuse to start.