Gen5 SSDs listings are finally showing up

From: PC Gamer - Sunday Mar 05,2023 02:01 pm

Created for | Web Version

March 5, 2023

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First up

Here's Katie with the hardware scoop.

(Future)

Discord streamers, rejoice. AV1 GPU support for Nvidia's 40-series graphics cards is here, and it's going to make your life so much easier. Though if you're more of a content consumer than a content creator, I would recommend feasting your eyes on Jorge's recent run in with Crypto energy drinks. He ingested the stuff, so you don't have to.

And while some of the PCG hardware team's insides are getting berry minted by "FOMO Fuel", the rest of us in jolly old England have been giggling at these gloriously atrocious volume control designs. All as we gawp at the fact Intel is now coming up the rear in the GPU race. Even after a rocky launch of its Arc GPUs, the blue team is now nipping at AMD's heels in an interesting turn of events.

The Big Story

(Pierre-Loup Griffais | Valve)

Valve just enabled native ray tracing on the Steam Deck and it actually looks pretty wild

So yeah, ray tracing on the Steam Deck is now properly a thing. It's been do-able if you wanted to dig in and do some Linux-y tweaking before, but with the latest beta OS Valve is starting to go native.

Gabe tracing

Your Say

POLL QUESTION:

Wood you chuck a wood panel on your gaming PC?

Heck no gimme sparkling RGB

I'm not sure

The refined wooden look suits me

JUST GIMME THAT NOCTUA BROWN

Pretty big deals

MSI Katana 15 gaming laptop | RTX 4070 | Core i7 12650H | 15-inch | 144Hz | 1080p | 16GB RAM | 1TB SSD | $1,499

(MSI)

Proof that Nvidia's new RTX 40-series graphics tech doesn't always come at a crazy price. This RTX 4070 laptop is relatively affordable and comes ready to roll with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The 15.6-inch screen rocks IPS tech and 144Hz, too. OK, it runs last-gen Intel CPU tech, but with six performance cores it has all the processing grunt you need for gaming.

Alienware 34 QD-OLED gaming monitor | 34-inch | 165Hz | FreeSync | $989.99 (save $109.99 with code 'MONITORS10')

(Alienware)

This is the cheaper version of the Alienware 34 QD-OLED we rank as the best gaming monitor to buy right now. This version is built for FreeSync, rather than G-Sync, and runs 10Hz slower at 165Hz, but it's $200 cheaper for those changes. With the MONITORS10 code knocking another 10% off this panel, it's a great buy under $1,000.

Intel Arc A750 graphics card | 8GB | 28 Xe Cores | 2,050MHz | $249.99 (save $40)

(Intel)

The Intel discrete graphics cards have only gotten more relevant since their inauspicious launch. With successive driver releases increasing performance and now a significant price drop, the A750 is now one of the most tempting budget GPUs around. It's a bit more power hungry than AMD's RX 6600 but is a super capable 1080p card knocking both RTX 3050 and RTX 3060 out of the value GPU stakes.

Hot in Hardware

(Future)

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D CPU Review

AMD has shown again the gaming prowess of its stacked cache design, and for now this is the processor I'd want to be pairing with a high-end graphics card purchase.

Damn, son

(Corsair)

These new wooden panels give Corsair's PC cases a retro makeover

In my experience, we all have two PC gamer wolves raging inside of us. One of them loves RGB lighting; the other wants is eyeing up a cosy-core handmade mouse mat and Noctua beige keycaps. This it a story for the latter wolf.

Got wood?