PC Gamer's Tech Update: Next-gen rumours, RTX 4090 laptop benchmarks, and some delicious hardware deals

A hopeful Katie Wickens here, with the latest in PC hardware. It's been difficult to get excited about tech in light of more incoming layoffs—this time as Dell plans to fire 6,650 employees. Still, there's plenty of hardware heroes arising this week to lift our spirits, amid next-gen CPU rumours.

While we've been walking on eggshells through the fascinating realm of AI generated art, what with the ongoing copyright conundrum, it's reassuring to see Stable Attribution putting names to the art.

Championing passive cooling mods, too, one r/hardwaregore frequenter decided to slap an 8lb chunk of copper onto an Intel Core i9 CPU, with great results. Meanwhile some badass has ramped up the nostalgia, reviving a quartet of beautifully beige Intel Pentium 4 machines to get multi-monitor Doom v1.1 running across four screens. Oh, and servants of Lord Sauron have been graced with Drop's Black Speech keyboard. A good week for us metalheads, then.

All the while, our hardware Dark Lord, Dave, has been shouting (mostly positive) profanities in the office, over the noise of some beastly RTX 4090-powered gaming laptops. The next-gen benchmarks are looking juicy, if a little deafening.

The Witcher 3 looks absolutely stunning running on this gorgeous 4K Mini LED screen. And the latent power of both the new RTX 4090 and Core i9 13950HX hardware means I can slap everything up to max and still top 60 fps. I'm beating the scat out of this werewolf and in turn telling his would-be missus that she can honestly just do one (Witching, amirite?) and it's a fantastic, fluid, high-res mobile gaming experience. Except for one thing. I can barely hear what the hell is going on.

This is a great deal for a mid-tier gaming PC, especially when a lot of rigs around this price are delivering you an RTX 3060. The Core i5 is still a real solid CPU today, and that RTX 3060 Ti is probably the best mainstream GPU of Nvidia's last generation of cards. You also get a full 16GB RAM and a 500GB NVMe SSD... to which you'll probably want to add a little more storage down the line.

With a $699 MSRP, this is the highest capacity version of our most beloved SSD for gaming right now. Sadly it doesn't come with a heatsink for the price, but it's still a great deal for zippy read/writes and uber high-capacity storage.

For the discerning competitive gamer on a budget, this Lenovo IPS will deliver all the crisp color reproduction of the classic panel tech but with the modern twist of a 240Hz refresh rate. At under $200, that makes this a reasonable price for such a high-refresh FHD screen.

Dell announced in a regulatory filing Monday that it is cutting the jobs of 6,650 employees. The news comes after PC sales for the Texas-based computer maker saw a massive drop at the end of 2022.

When it comes to PC gaming one of the biggest trials is keeping things cool. You can have all the power in the world packed into your case, but it's for naught without cooling. More power often means more heat thanks to that big jerk physics, and plenty of builds bottleneck due to temps, rather than capabilities. This is why we see overclockers do wild things like douse their CPUs in liquid nitrogen or use about 8 lbs (nearly 4 kgs) of solid copper.

We know Nvidia has an RTX 4060 GPU in the works. We already have an idea of the specifications. But exactly how fast will it be? According to some detailed leaked benchmarks, the answer is pretty much as fast as an RTX 3070 Ti.