I'm a thoroughly average gamer. And in first-person shooters, I reckon I am ever so slightly above average at aiming—If aim-tester software, Aimlabs, is anything to go by, at least (top 38%, baby). But as a hardware tester, I have access to all kinds of gaming gear, and that includes competitive-level specs.

I wanted to see if the average gamer would benefit from a better polling rate and, as the average gamer, I thought I was the perfect guinea pig. So, grabbing my Asus Rog Harpe II Extreme Edition 20, a mouse with a max DPI of 65,000 and a max polling rate of 8,000 Hz, I went through the training software at different polling rates multiple times to see if it would improve my aim.

If you are unaware of what exactly a polling rate is, it is the rate at which your gaming mouse communicates with your rig. A 125 Hz polling rate gives feedback to your PC every 8 milliseconds, whereas 8,000 Hz gives feedback every 0.125 milliseconds. Generally speaking, the advice for most gamers is to linger at around 1,000 Hz, as responding every millisecond is plenty fast but not so fast that it drains the battery life of your squeaker.

Aimlabs is a free bit of software that tests your shooting across a series of firing ranges. It then ranks your accuracy and speed before putting it all together for a final score. A flat score of 50,000 tends to put you just around the middle of the pack worldwide. Considering this sample set consists of people who specifically seek out software to get better at shooting, I'd imagine the top 50% of Aimlabs is better at aiming than the top 50% of gamers overall.

First, my methodology. I booted up the Aimlabs software and picked Gridshot (Ultimate), a firing range where blue orbs pop up on screen, and you have to fire at them with a pistol. You have unlimited ammo, so you don't have to concern yourself with conserving it, and you don't need to move, either. Through minor adjustments and flicks, you simply have to hit the bubbles as quickly as you can whilst receiving score penalties for missing. That means it's a test of both accuracy and speed. I went through the map at every polling rate once or twice (between seven and fourteen runs), before doing a final run, and those scores are the ones you see below.

After those warm-up rounds, I decided my first test would be on 1600 DPI, which is what feels most natural for me. You can see my results below

Uhhh yeah, that is all over the place. But I can say it felt most comfortable at 1,000 Hz, mostly because I aim based on feel. I don't usually pay all that much attention to the cursor as it moves. As such, I would say 125 Hz feels awkward but played fine, and 2,000 Hz is where I stop noticing much of a difference.

4000 DPI felt significantly worse, but it was where I noticed the polling rate making the biggest difference. I consistently lost track of the cursor at 125 Hz thanks to the speed of the mouse, but could fairly confidently read the position of the mouse at 8,000 Hz. You can see my results for that below

As you can see, the lower polling rate equates to lower scores at 4,000 DPI, but it varies a good bit past 1,000 Hz. My best score is at 4,000 Hz, but 8,000 Hz and 1000 Hz are close enough in score for me to say I don't think I'm better at significantly higher polling rates. I did feel the difference all the way up to 4,000 Hz, though.

However, many pro players use a low DPI, ranging from 600 to 800 DPI, so I thought I'd test that and got by far my best scores

Who knew that the pro players who spend multiple hours a day firing digital guns would be right about the best settings to fire those fake firearms? For me, I find 1,000 Hz is my sweet spot for performance and feel. Considering a slower DPI got me better scores, 800 DPI will become part of my regular rotation too. I'm a tad too impatient for lower than 1600 DPI whilst scrolling my desktop (especially with two monitors), but when it comes to aim, slower can be better. Or it can if you're about average like me.

For 'fun', I tried it on the highest DPI I have available to me, 65000. I got a miserable score of 10,294, and even that was a huge struggle. So there you go. If you're average at shooting (sorry to hear that), consider giving a low DPI a go. It might not feel as snappy, but it's plenty quick after some getting used to and accurate to boot.

AMD's market cap, the measure of the company's total worth according to its share price, breached $1 trillion on Monday. That's $1,000 billion, to you and me.

AMD's stock valuation has been on a roll recently. CNBC reports that AMD's price jumped 10% on Monday, making for a grand total of 25% appreciation in just five days. Overall, AMD shares are up 180% this year. Not bad.

The gains are thanks to AMD increasingly raking it in from, yup, you guessed it, AI. It reported revenue of $11.54 billion during Q2, up 50% from the $7.69 billion recorded in the same quarter last year. AMD’s Data Center business, which includes AI chips, reported sales of $6.7 billion, up 107% from a year ago.

CNBC also reports that AMD CEO Lisa Su is predicting another doubling from its Data Center business in 2027. So, it's all going pretty well for AMD shareholders, at least.

Of course, it says something about the extraordinary times we live in that despite AMD's epic new valuation of $1 trillion, it's still worth less than one-fifth of arch-rival Nvidia. As I type these words, Nvidia's market cap clocks in at $5.4 trillion.

As it happens, CEO Jensen Huang last week also predicted that Nvidia will sell twice as many chips in 2027 as in 2026. So, there's apparently no immediate prospect for a return to normality in the chip market.

Indeed, as much money as AMD is making from AI chips, it's still well behind Nvidia. So, if AMD can increase its market share, who knows where that market cap might go. Honestly, it's hard to keep up with, much less take seriously these kinds of numbers.

Memories of Nvidia becoming the world's first $4 trillion company way back in the mists of July 2025 almost seem quaint. It's all gotten right out of control.

Reviews of Apple's latest M6 SoC are out, and the new chip looks hella impressive. Sadly, that probably won't be a huge direct benefit to PC gamers, what with the Mac's limited library of titles and patchy game optimisation.

But wait, because there's one really important detail regarding the M6 that is highly PC relevant. It uses TSMC's latest N2 silicon node.

Historically, of course, a new node was pretty much a nailed-down certainty in terms of the benefits it would bring. You could expect improved transistor density, better power efficiency and even lower cost.

More recently, ye olde Moore's Law that pertained to such matters has been looking a bit patchy. Intel famously got stuck on 14 nm for about a decade instead of the usual two-year cadence, a problem so serious the company's future was in doubt.

Anyway, the point is that you can no longer safely assume a new node is going to bring killer benefits. So, the fact that TSMC's new N2 node, which is basically its take on a 2 nm class of silicon, looks healthy and then some in the new Apple M6 chip is very good news for the PC.

Just to put a few numbers on this, according to Notebookcheck, the M6 clocks in at 4,698 single-core points in Geekbench 6.7. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 470, which is very, very nearly AMD's fastest laptop CPU, returns just 2,872 points. The M6 is also around 10% faster than the old Apple M5 chip in that benchmark. The M6 has a similar advantage over the AMD CPU and the old M5 chip in Cinebench.

For the record, the M6 has a much bigger advantage over the old M5 chip in multi-threaded workloads thanks to also having 12 CPU cores where the M5 has 10. You're looking at about 50% more overall CPU performance. And that's in a single generation jump.

Meanwhile, Notebookcheck also has the new M6 chip running at nearly 20% better performance per watt than the old M5 chip. Oh, and it's twice as power efficient as that AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470. Yikes.

Long story short, then, TSMC's N2 silicon has allowed Apple to make some very, very solid gains with the M6. Of course, it won't all be done to the new silicon. But however you slice it, TSMC N2 is looking very healthy indeed.

The follow up question is obviously when the PC might benefit from TSMC N2. CPUs and GPUs on N2? Yes please. The short answer is that we don't know for sure. The ongoing AI-fuelled Rampocalypse obviously colours everything. It's hard to imagine AMD and Nvidia prioritising scarce access to the N2 node on mere PC chips.

That said, AMD has announced that its next-gen Zen 6 CPUs, at least the variants for servers, are already in production on N2. If Zen 6 for PCs is also on N2, that would mean AMD has largely skipped TSMC's N3 node.

As for Nvidia, its current Blackwell graphics chips are built on N4, while its next-gen Rubin GPUs are being built on N3. Some rumours suggest Rubin may not arrive before 2028. So, an N2 Nvidia GPU may not appear before 2030.

Intel, meanwhile, has been a bit more aggressive and has been using TSMC's N3 silicon since the launch of Lunar Lake in late 2024. The company may be using N2 for some variants of its upcoming Nova Lake family of CPUs, which will probably launch early next year.

All of which means the PC is unlikely to be swimming in N2 silicon any time soon. But it is coming. And it does look very promising. Indeed, a bit of a wait probably wouldn't be a bad thing. It might just allow time for chip prices to return to something resembling sanity.

I'm of the opinion that your desk space says a lot about you. Be it that you care more about function than style, or you like Hatsune Miku just a tad too much.

I'm also of the opinion that someone's desk space speaks volumes about their real life, like one person may be efficient in other areas, or another must just really, really like Hatsune Miku.

As such, I tasked the bravest of my coworkers with sharing photos of their desk spaces, alongside some fun facts, because I'm nosy like that.

If you are as nosy as I am, here's what some of the PC Gamer team have on their desks. And you can even vote on your favourite desk below.

Evan Lahti, Strategic Director

Rig details: RTX 3080, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, curved ultrawide 3440x1440p monitor, an Uplift standing desk, use two mice, split gaming keyboard, Bose SoundLink Mini speaker, have had the same Corsair cube case for 11 years

• I need to replace my 650W power supply with a 750W+, which has been causing some first-person games to hard crash when there are power spikes
• I sometimes use a balance board at my standing desk to recreate my San Francisco skateboarding days
• I am a big fan of Speks' line of fidget equipment

Mollie Taylor, Features Producer

Rig details: Nvidia GeForce RTX3070, AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT, 32 GB RAM.

• Fun facts: Vertical monitor is exclusively to service my crippling rhythm game addiction (Sound Voltex)
• I'm a two-mouse gal (one for MMOs, one for FPS of course)
• This is probably the least tchotchke'd out the wazoo my desk has been in months

Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware

Rig details: RTX 5080, Ryzen 7 7900X, Wooting 80HE, Noctua desk fan, Schiit DAC/amp w/ Audeze LCD-S20, an incredibly fashionable light-up mouse pad, Razer Ergo mouse/Viper V4 Pro.

• No amount of regular cleaning can contain the quantity of cat hair on my desk
• I once used a sensor that told me how many times I used my standing desk to actually stand during the day but I unplugged it because I didn't like the results
• I have a timer on my desk to try and maintain my focus for longer but my internet-addled brain might be too gone to save at this point
• I also have two mice, which from the looks of this list, is not a fun fact at all. It's 100% expected behaviour

Issy van der Velde, PC Gaming Show deputy editor

Rig details: Work-provided ThinkPad, a mouse I "borrowed" from a friend many years ago, mouse pad my girlfriend had spare.

• I like to keep things minimal

Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Rig details: RTX 4080, 5800X3D, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, mechanical keyboard I got from eBay sometime around the Teapot Dome scandal, one (1) mouse.

• I only have one mouse, which did not heretofore feel like a thing worth pointing out but apparently marks me as a freak
• I actually much prefer to do work on my Mac (pictured) while sprawled on the settee—and I prefer to play games that way too; my PC is hooked up to my TV—so I don't actually spend all that much time here outside of meetings
• Important: I have a bronze Soviet bust of Marx and Lenin that I got at Izmailovsky Market that would be here if my desk weren't colonised by stupid devices that require charging. Imagine they're there for me. Thank you
• Speaking of which, moving my charging gear out of my bedroom and onto my desk was the best choice I ever made, as it meant I stopped taking my phone to bed and now actually get to sleep on time. Recommended!

Dave James, EIC hardware

Rig details: Hyte Y70 Touch, RTX 5090, AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, 64 GB RAM, Gigabyte Aorus 32-inch OLED, Dough Spectrum 27-inch IPS (portrait, important), Mountain Everest 60 keyboard, Razer DeathAdder V3 Pro, Steam Controller (the good one), Kanto Ora speakers, Dezctop standing desk.

• My fishtank PC is filled with the D&D Lego minifigs collection
• I recently replaced my motherboard because the ASRock board was doing weird things. And it booted first time afterwards. Weird
• I'm really bad at cooling my PC, and my CPU has to be actively screaming for me to up the fan speed from 'Quiet'. I think some of the Lego minifigs have started to melt

Midas, Video Producer

Rig details: RTX 5070ti, 32 GB RAM, AMD AM5 Ryzen 7 9800X3D - Tryx Panorama SE 360MM ARGB AIO Liquid Cooler.

• I have the coolest RGB set-up, but my wire management is beyond trash—no peeking behind the desk
• I’m a PC Gamer, but I don’t W,A,S,D—I have a drawer full of controllers. My keyboard and mouse are just for editing
• Widescreen monitor only! Sorry, not sorry

Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Rig details: RTX 4090, Intel i9-13900k, 32 GB RAM.

Also on my desk:

• A bust of a cockapoo, which I use to hold my sunglasses
• A medieval helmet, which I put my hats on
• Assorted Lego
• Pins
• Junk

Jake Tucker, Editorial Director, PC Gaming Show

Rig details: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, RXT 4080, 32 GB memory.

• Half of my desk is taken up by my FLX4 DJ controller, because apparently I'm having a midlife crisis after I picked one up as a hobby a year ago. I'm about to upgrade to an all-in-one unit, and I'm scared of how much of my desk that will colonise
• I was given the mousemat as a gift and after declaring a glass mousemat too fancy to use, I now can't use anything else
• I've spent the last five years trying to find a sound setup I like, even moving to in-ear monitors for a bit. The SteelSeries Nova Pro headset has finally won out because charging batteries is easy to do with the on-desk control station. I need a wireless headset too because my ADHD brain makes me get up and walk off from my desk when I'm loading into games or matching and I keep garroting myself with the headphone wires
• I, too, am just now learning that everyone I work with uses a collection of mice for different tasks and I do not like it

Andy Edser, Hardware Writer

Rig details: RTX 5070 Ti, AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, 32 GB DDR5, custom Glorious GMMK 3 keyboard, Logitech MX Master 4, Fractal Design Scape, Audeze Maxwell 2, Razer Wolverine V3 controller, Razer Cobra HyperSpeed, 32-inch 4K BenQ Mini-LED monitor.

• See that little doohickey behind my mouse? It's a cooling gel wrist rest I've cut out of a lesser mouse pad so I can move it around my desk
• I use a single 32-inch 4K monitor, as the good lord intended
• I have two gaming headsets, and two mice. The Logitech MX Master 4 and Fractal Design Scape are my daily drivers, while the Razer squeaker and the Audeze Maxwell 2 are for serious business gaming
• The most useful things on my desk are the little block of neon green post-it notes and the Sharpie pen. I write things down because I'm getting old now and my brain looks like a block of Swiss cheese
• Oh yeah, that speaker placement—I use headphones when I'm in front of the PC, while the speakers are for playing loud music across the rest of the room. I am wonderful to live with, and my neighbours are big fans

Tim Clark, Group Editorial Director, Games

Rig details: iBUYPOWER HYTE Y70 RGB, Intel Core i9-14900KF, 32.0 GB memory, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, 2 TB storage. Alienware 34 240Hz QD-OLED, NuPhy Air96 Wireless Mechanical Keyboard, G903 Lightspeed wireless mouse, Xbox Elite Series 2 Controller, Ora by Kanto, Razer Seiren mini.

• The two rectangular lights on my desk use dimmable Hue bulbs, which are great for making you look less dug up on calls
• Though I don't stand that much these days, the Uplift Standing desk was a huge upgrade to the office
• I have an enormous digital clock right in my eyeline because I am a fiend for losing track of time
• I also have a couple of scented candles because I am bougie and confident in my masculinity

Jess Kinghorn, Hardware Writer

Rig details: iBuyPower RDY Y40 Valorant VCTA R003, AMD Ryzen 7 7700X 8-Core Processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, 32.0 GB memory, 1 TB storage.

• I really wasn't joking about my army of Miku Hatsune figurines
• Believe it or not, I actually tidied up for this photo. This is what I mean when I describe my desk as 'cluttered'
• I did have the Creative Stage Pro for sound, but that's been commandeered for the living room. That leaves me with only headphones, jumping out of my skin every time someone tries to get my attention
• I also bought one of the Govee x Evangelion gaming light kits based on our review, but I've not set it up yet. I think the best gaming set ups ought to feel a bit like you're piloting a giant robot
• You can't see it on account of the Be Quiet! Light Mount TKL, but my mouse pad features cool art from 2019's Control—specifically this image

James Bentley, Hardware Writer (that's me!)

Rig details: Ryzen 7 7800X3D, RTX 4070 Super, 32 GB memory, Turtle Beach Stealth Pro II, Audeze LCD-S20, 8BitDo Retro R8, GameSir G7 Pro 8K, one 1440p OLED monitor and one 1080p IPS monitor. Creative XF1. Epomaker HE75 V2 TMR.

• Yes, I am hoisting one monitor on the Creative speakers, and I only feel a little bad
• That red block is from Naraka: Bladepoint, a game I quite enjoyed for about two weeks, and then decided never to go back to
• Though I no longer use the NZXT speakers, I do still use the NZXT Switch Mix, hence the two pairs of headphones.
• I love charging docks
• I only use one mouse, but now I'm wondering if I should use two

Show of hands, who is sick of the memory crisis? One, two… ah, all of you. We've been dealing with it for pretty much a year now and it's showing no signs of it stopping soon. Some even suggest the supply shortage won't work its way out of the system until 2030. Except for Acer CEO Jason Chen.

I prefer Chen's take on the whole situation. In the Economic Daily, he reportedly said DDR4 and some DDR5 chips aren't actually in short supply. Neither are CPUs, for that matter. Though I don't think we've been worrying about those as much. In regard to the whole affair, Chen is reported to have said (machine translated): "It's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030!"

According to DigiTimes and Tom's Hardware, it's high-speed DDR5 chips that Chen says are in short supply. That's more like the sorta memory we see packaged alongside Intel's Panther Lake chips than desktop PCs.

"So they keep putting out the message: 'let me tell you, prices won’t come down until the year 20-whatever.' ”. Chen reportedly said of the memory manufacturers, whose margins and share prices are on the line.

Chen doesn't expect all this to blow over in a couple of months, mind you. He reckons that PC prices will continue to rise through the final few months of 2026, with an average price increase between 5-20%. That's on top of the already gargantuan price hikes we've seen all year—gaming PC deals are few and far between these days.

It is said that Chen expects a drop in prices to occur around the middle of 2027. Further to that, a proper price drop towards the end of next year. That does mean a lot of turmoil yet to come for PC gamers, but it's also a whole lot sooner than many others.

I'd love to take Chen's word on this one, but we do have a pile of forecasts to the contrary on this one. DRAM demand has been expected to outstrip supply by double-digit exabytes in 2030; SK hynix's CEO predicts it may go beyond 2030, though as the leader of a major memory manufacturer, it's tough to know what to make of that; Micron has previously guessed that demand will outstrip its own supply through the foreseeable future; and while all memory companies have expansion plans, fabs take a very long time to build.

On the flipside, Chinese DRAM manufacturers are closing the gap on Korean and American competition. CXMT has reportedly snapped up 7% of the market, according to Counterpoint Research. That puts pressure on those companies to act outside of their pre-defined plans for maximum profitability. New production capacity, especially in China, is one of the things that Chen suggests could see the shortage ending earlier than expected.

I'd love to take Chen at face value here, but in all honesty, I'm still not convinced we'll see this one sorted for a while. Power of positive thinking?

Motion blur, chromatic aberration, bloom… we've discussed many times whether these effects deserve a spot in a game's settings menu or are the hellspawn of satan's computer graphics division. Now it's time for you to chime in. One final reckoning; until I have the same idea again in five years' time. I am nothing if not returning to this well over and over again.

It's your classic knockout format: Two effects go head-to-head and only one makes it through to the next round. There are four initial rounds, then we'll move onto semis, then regional semis, regional quarter semis, semi regionals… nah, we'll make it quick. There are three rounds total.

Here are the initial head-to-head rounds:

• Depth of field vs vignette
• Chromatic aberration vs dirt
• Motion blur vs lens flare
• Film grain vs bloom

Got it? Get your votes in below. Then y'all can argue about it in the comments, and say stuff like, "well, actually, motion blur serves a very important purpose." Yeah, whatever.

Examples

Depth of field

Here's a good example depth of field in Gray Zone warfare. Depth of field is most visible in FPS games when aiming down sights.

On

Off

Vignette

You can see a vignette clearly here in Cyberpunk 2077. It's the dark border—a way to draw player focus into the middle of the frame.

On

Off

Most display experts agree that microLED is the ultimate flat panel display tech. There's just one problem. It's hella expensive. Could Intel be the surprising solution to that?

According to a new report, it might just be part of the solution, at least. According to Taiwanese outlet Economic Daily, Intel is partnering with display specialist AU Optronics on a new approach to embedding electronics into microLED glass substrates.

The report says that has obtained a US patent for "IC Package with Micro LEDs" which involves, "embedding at least part of a semiconductor chip within a glass substrate." The implication of this is that the display control chip would be integrated into the microLED panel itself, which could have have both packaging and cost advantages.

More broadly, Intel probably wouldn't be pushing into a new display technology unless it foresaw the sort of large volumes that come with mainstream adoption, which again implies a more affordable price point. Currently microLED displays cost tens of thousands of dollars and upwards, preventing them from entering the consumer market.

Economic Daily also says that AUO's chairman Peng Shuanglang has indicated that the company is increasing its range of microLED products this year as it pushes to make the technology more accessible.

As for why you should care about any of this, well, microLED is widely expected to be both the next big thing in display tech and, just maybe, the actual end game in display tech. In many ways, microLED is a lot like OLED. In both cases, each pixel and indeed each subpixel is an individual addressable light source, making for perfect lighting control.

Like OLED, microLED is super fast, too. It differs from OLED in a few key areas. First, it's less prone to degradation, so the whole OLED burn-in thing would be a thing of the past. MicroLED is also much brighter and capable of producing a wider range of colours.

Put those factors together and you have a flat panel tech that solves all the problems of OLED and promises pretty much the perfect flat-panel solution. As for why it has yet to take over from OLED, there are two main issues. The first is the cost issue mentioned above. It's super expensive.

The other problem is pixel density. Right now, the smallest 4K microLED panels are about 100 inches across. Not exactly ideal for PC monitors.

Anyway, it's worth noting that we have somewhat been here before. Years ago, Intel dabbled with LCOS or liquid crystal on silicon tech, creating a line of LCOS chips for projectors. That experiment got cancelled pretty quickly.

Moreover, Intel's track record for product lines that are outside its CPU wheelhouse isn't great. Whether it health diagnostic chips or GPUs, when Intel does something other than a CPU, it doesn't tend to go well. But here's hoping its foray into microLED goes better. We'd certainly love to see microLED in affordable PC monitors, that's for sure.

Until now, every OLED gaming monitor we've reviewed has been rated at 0.03 ms for pixel response. Well, not any more ladies and germs. Give it up for the new Sony Inzone M10S II, which clocks in at a mere 0.02 ms.

Is it a bit of a stretch to think the human eye can tell the difference between three one-hundred-thousandths of a second and two one-hundred-thousandths—or 30 microseconds and 20 microseconds, if you prefer. But the point here is what that pixel response spec hints at.

The Sony Inzone M10S II is unambiguously, unashamedly, unapologetically aimed at fast-paced gaming and esports. Indeed, this monitor has been developed with the help of pro esports outfit, Fnatic.

Along with the almost pointlessly fast pixel response, you get a 1440p native resolution and 540 Hz refresh. Oh, and we're talking 27 inches and an LG WOLED panel. That basic recipe of 27-inch 1440p OLED is carried over from the first generation Sony Inzone M10S, but this time Sony is using the latest LG Tandem WOLED panel generation.

The most obvious upside of that panel involves brightness. Sony has this model pegged at 1,500 nits peak HDR and 335 nits full-screen brightness. Those numbers are about as good as gaming OLEDs get, today.

They also indicate that this is an RGWB panel rather than one with the so-called pure RGB-stripe subpixel structure we've seen monitors like the Alienware AW3926QW and Asus ROG Swift PG32UCWM. We'll come back to the implications of that in a bit.

Further gaming centric features include the image processing trifecta of dual-mode support, motion blur reduction and anti VRR flicker tech. The dual-mode options include both 24.5-inch modes and a 720 Hz 720p mode.

Actually, even the stand has been optimised for gaming. For starters, the round base is absolutely tiny. You might think that makes for an unstable monitor. But provided you place it on a flat, hard surface, it's rock solid, while leaving minimising intrusion into your desk space. In classic Sony style, it also looks and feels expensive in a way that very few monitors manage.

What's more, the tilt adjustment allows for 35 degrees of upwards movement. Some pro gamers like to tilt their monitors aggressively and then shove their faces right into the panel. If that's something you want to emulate, well, the Sony Inzone M10S II will cater for that right out of the box. You won't need to buy an aftermarket VESA stand.

Connectivity, meanwhile, includes HDMI and DisplayPort, but there's no USB-C for single-cable connectivity to a laptop. Obviously, this is an out-and-out gaming panel, so USB-C connectivity isn't automatically a high priority. But at this price point, it seems like something of an omission.

Oh, yeah, I hadn't mentioned the price, had I? The Sony Inzone M10S II weighs in at $1,099 in the USA and £1,199 in the UK. Yup, that's mega money and it emphasises just what a premium has been placed on achieving the 540 Hz and 0.02 ms speed.

Both of those fancy RGB-stripe OLEDs I mentioned earlier from Alienware and Asus can be had for similar money. One is a 39-inch 5K2K panel, the other a 32-inch 4K model. In short, you are paying dearly for the Sony Inzone M10S II's refresh rate and response performance.

Just to round everything out before we get to what this thing actually looks like, Sony has gone for a matte anti-glare coating as opposed to glossy. Again, this arguably squares with the tight focus on esports over optimising for the last word in contrast and HDR image quality. Finally, the panel is covered by a three-year warranty, including OLED burn-in.

On, then, to the actual performance. Out of the box and the first thing you notice is that matte anti-glare coating. By today's standards, it's properly matte as opposed to the semi-glossy coating that most "matte" panels have these days.

That has an immediate impact on the look of the display. Subjectively, it's not as contrasty and saturated as most OLED monitors. The upside is that reflections are suppressed really well, especially in bright ambient light. But it does slightly undermine the immediate impact of an OLED monitor.

The RGWB subpixel structure feeds into that somewhat. This is certainly a very bright monitor for an OLED as the specs imply. But as with all RGWB panels, the colour saturation isn't all that great, so it doesn't seem quite as vibrant as a monitor using Samsung's QD-OLED tech or arguably even the technically less-bright alternative LG Tandem WOLED panel tech with the RGB-stripe structure.

But the speed, there's absolutely no problem with the speed. I recently reviewed LG's new 1,000 Hz IPS monitor, the 1080p one with the clunky pixel density but mega low latency. For motion sharpness, this 540 Hz OLED frankly tears it a new one. This monitor has the best motion clarity I have ever seen, it's absolutely fantastic.

What's more, as I found with that LG monitor, actually achieving the in-game frame rates required to saturate 1,000 Hz refresh isn't easy. I couldn't get near that in Counter-Strike 2, for instance. So, in terms of latency, you could argue that going beyond the 540 Hz offered by this Sony panel is pretty pointless. Well, it is until AMD or Intel release a CPU that'll do 1,000 Hz in most esports titles without the need for liquid nitrogen cooling.

Anywho, the Sony Inzone M10S II is just lightning quick, both in terms of pixel response and latency. It also offers 24.5-inch modes in both native 2,368-by-1,332 pixel and 1080p resolutions. And because this is an OLED, the unused area of the panel around the 24.5-inch image is completely off, not bleeding light in a distracting fashion.

All of that means I'd take this 540 Hz Sony over the 1,000 Hz LG all day long for esports, it's absolutely fantastic for my esports distraction of choice, Counter-Strike 2, let alone general gaming and computing. And I think even pro gamers would, too. Partly that's because of the real-world limitations around frame rates I just mentioned. But it's also because the image quality on offer here is so much better.

When it comes to spotting enemies, motion clarity and contrast matter and this Sony absolutely owns the LG IPS monitor. The inclusion of the 24.5-inch dual-mode options only makes the serious esports proposition even stronger.

On that note, Sony has included a couple of FPS Pro presets which accentuate the contrast even further and make red tones more vibrant. The latter is handy in games like Valorant where enemies are outlined with a bright red border.

To cover off a few of the other gaming-centric features, what about the Motion Blur Reduction and anti-VRR Flicker modes? The former does an impressive job of effectively making 270 Hz look about as clear as 540 Hz.

It basically works by inserting a black frame in between each rendered frame, effectively halving the refresh rate from 540 Hz to 270 Hz. It does reduce brightness noticeably, but not catastrophically. I think for esports titles where you're not getting anywhere near 500-plus fps, it could come in handy for maximising motion clarity.

As for the anti-VRR Flicker tech, well, that was a bit of an odd one, albeit in a positive way. No matter what game I loaded and regardless of both in-game and monitor settings, I couldn't detect any VRR flicker at all on this monitor. Where it gets odd is that this was true whether or not I had the anti-VRR Flicker feature enabled or not.

Whatever, the Sony Inzone M10S II is unquestionably an outstanding gaming monitor. Not only is it dramatically more versatile for all kinds of gaming than a 25-inch 1080p monitor thanks to its larger 27-inch panel and half-decent 1440p pixel density. I think it's actually preferable for the ultra-narrow remit of really serious esports, too. It has better motion clarity, far superior contrast and the real-world latency gap is probably negligible.

Of course, in a broader gaming and computing remit, the Sony Inzone M10S II doesn't look like a great deal. Not when you can get a really nice 32-inch 4K OLED for far less money and a fabulous 39-inch 5K2K for the same investment. But that obvious caveat aside, and assuming you are okay with a matte as opposed to glossy OLED, this is one of if not the best ultra-high-refresh gaming monitors currently available. It's really, really, super.

If you have a Gigabyte motherboard and use the Gigabyte Control Center (GCC) software, you'd better download the latest version of the software. While the risk of a local attacker hacking into your PC is pretty slim, it's best practice to just cover your butt before anything bad happens.

Gigabyte has listed a new vulnerability on its website that affects a pair of kernel drivers, GVCIDrv64.sys and gdrv3.sys. It says the drivers are components of the GCC software, which is widely recommended alongside the company's motherboards.

"The vulnerabilities exist in the kernel drivers' IOCTL interfaces." Gigabyte says of the cause of the vulnerability. "Due to insufficient access control and improper validation of input parameters, authenticated local attackers can perform unauthorized operations, including arbitrary physical memory mapping and direct hardware access.

An attacker can wield those vulnerable drivers through a "specially crafted" IOCTL request. In doing so, bypassing important memory protections and allowing them to elevate themselves to the most trusted level of your PC, the kernel.

Gigabyte thanks Mohamed Alzhrani (0xMaz) and Subhan Sultanov (me1n) for discovering the vulnerability and helping the patching effort. This comes at a time when Intel is said to be ending its lucrative bug bounty program.

There is a fix available. Any version of GCC from 26.08.28.01, GBT_VGA_26.08.24.01 or later has the mitigation in place. Looks like the current GCC version is 26.09.10.01. The mitigation includes the following:

• Enhanced Access Control: Implemented strict security descriptors to ensure that the driver device objects are only accessible to authorized system accounts, preventing unprivileged users from interacting with the driver.
• Interface Hardening: Removed unnecessary and high-risk interfaces that allowed direct physical memory mapping.
• Privilege Validation: Integrated mandatory privilege checks for all hardware-access functions to ensure only requests with appropriate administrative rights are processed.
• Input Validation: Implemented rigorous validation for all IOCTL input parameters to block access to restricted hardware registers and configuration spaces.

So, get that software updated. And if you're keen to stay on top of these things, here's the Gigabyte page with all its security disclosures.

As someone who spent a lot of their childhood talking to trees, I'm of the opinion that videogame forestry doesn't need to look any better than Alan Wake 2's Pacific Northwest woodlands. That hasn't stopped AMD from innovating though; by leveraging 'tetrahedral cages' to help render a vast scene of greenery, researchers at the company say they've managed to cut the potential ray tracing memory usage by 98%.

Typically, a scene of around 25,000 independently animated plants made of hundreds of thousands of triangles could hoover up 80 GB of GPU memory. Not only that, but it would take a Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU 300 ms per frame to check which surfaces within a scene are intersecting with a ray (the data structure that organises this information is called a Bounding Volume Hierarchy). In short, using traditional tech to render such a densely populated scene would be slow and choppy.

Holger Gruen, a Fellow of AMD's Advanced Graphics Program, recently shared on GPUOpen that the team's tetrahedral cage demos only use "1.7 GB of BVH memory and approximately 3.3 ms for all BVH updates per frame" in comparison. Touch grass? Not when we've got trees like these.

Anyway, let me break down how this tech works: a tetrahedral cage essentially wraps around the dense mesh of all that plant matter. Rather than many polygonal leaves bobbing in the simulated breeze, only the simplified cage deforms instead. So, rather than looking straight at the many wibbly-wobbly vertices of a virtual tree, rays are instead traced along the simplified surface structure of the tetrahedral cage around it.

At the risk of really oversimplifying, I think of this tech a bit like those 3D models or laser-engravings you sometimes see inside cubes of crystal—but maybe that's just me.

"The dense geometry of an animated object and its BVH structures remain static and reusable. During runtime, only the cage deforms. Rays are transformed back into a static reference frame before intersecting them with the dense set of triangles," Gruen explains. "This means animation cost only scales with cage complexity, not with triangle count. This comes at the expense of losing animation control over every vertex, but this is fine for many animations."

In other words, for a scene where the focus is less on the luscious fronds of a single plant and more on a field of foliage, devs likely won't miss the ability to finetune individual animations. But for 3D trees with personality, tetrahedral cages won't be as useful.

It's also important to note that the tech is still a research demonstration, rather than a fully fledged feature coming to a game near you soon. That said, the team is already "hard at work" on making "DXR samples and a header-only C++ library that allows building high-quality tetrahedral cages for skinned objects, keyframe-animated objects, and static objects." You can also read more about the team's research in the open access paper 'Ray Tracing Massive Amounts of Animated Geometry'.

This appeared on my X feed this morning and it's been bouncing around in my brain since I saw it. Titled as the "first $100,000 RAM kit" it caught my eye. The first thing to note is that this is, inevitably, server grade memory, and 2 TB of the stuff as well.

It's DDR5-5600 of ECC RDIMM in a 16-pack kit for precisely $101,451.99 at Amazon, for all you server engineers out there. But the question that has been burning my bonce is who is buying their server farm memory directly from Amazon? But hey, Nemix RAM has been around a while now, and if it really is offering lifetime warranty on your $100k+ purchase that ain't bad. But surely, surely, you're getting a better deal from whoever you deal with, because if you're looking after datacenter hardware you must have been getting your kit from somewhere else originally, right?

But then, I think we're probably at the point in the memory crisis where it really is any port in a storm, and people are getting memory wherever they can find it. So I guess this is just a sign of where we're at right now.

The hardware landscape of 2021 feels like a distant world. Case in point this past week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that talk of an AI-induced extinction event for humanity is overblown and "not grounded in science." Huang's comments were in part responding to claims made earlier this month by ex-Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, saying that AI progress 'could kill us all by the end of the decade'.

"2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is 0% chance that's going to be the end of the world," Huang told CBS News on Friday. "Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible."

Compare and contrast this state of affairs to five years ago, when the keynote for GTC 2021 came to you predominantly from Huang's own kitchen, and the month before Nvidia spent a decent chunk of change on a tiny leather jacket emoji to poke fun at its CEO. Ah, simpler times; the leather jackets persist, but now Huang is fielding calls on-stage from the US president, offering assurances to Trump that he "saw through" all of the AI doomsaying.

As I've said before, I barely remember the last time Nvidia mentioned gaming at all in an earnings call, with the company being all-in on AI for some time now. As such, Huang told CBS News last week, "Our company's success is directly connected to the safe deployment of [AI] products and services. If we don't continue to do that, our value would be diminished."

Still, it's a strange state of affairs when the guy who used to primarily sell us PC gamers GPUs is having to offer assurances that the world isn't ending. That's all without saying anything about the CEO rocking up to the White House in a leather jacket and joining the US president on his expedition to convince China to 'open up'.

Mind you, the more things change, the more they stay the same, as one of our Dave's big questions for Nvidia back in 2021 was 'Can Nvidia actually build enough GPUs to please gamers?' Obviously, the reasons for GPU scarcity are different now, but it remains a mission to track down a 50-series GPU at MSRP.

A new version of SteamOS for Steam Frame has just landed. The company has fixed a few issues with the VR headset following its launch last week, which I'll get to in a bit, but one change stood out to me in the patch notes: Valve has added "substantially faster charging while unit is off / sleeping."

I found the Steam Frame to be slow to charge during my time testing it ahead of my review. It took over two hours to go from totally depleted to fully charged (you can see the full timings in the battery section of my Steam Frame review). When I installed a power meter between the charger and the outlet, it read just 11 W, which is much lower than the maximum output that could be delivered by the official power adapter, which is 45 W.

So, I reached out to Valve with my findings. Mostly to see if this was some sort of protection measure for the battery's long-term health.

Valve responded: "An empty battery takes around two hours to charge to full capacity. However, the charging is not linear. There is fast charging from 0 to 65%, and regular charging from 65% and up. Charging to 65% is expected to take less than 40 minutes. (Note: these values may be optimized over time, and are therefore subject to change.)"

I hadn't noticed any fast charging myself—it was always 11 W or thereabouts on my power meter throughout a full charge cycle—so this led to further experimentation. It might seem normal for most users, but when you're actively trying to test charging times, you tend to let the device run flat first. This time I didn't.

I ran the battery on the Frame down to around 4%, then started charging it. Lo and behold, the power meter read roughly 31 W, and the Steam Frame went from 4% to 65% in 35 minutes. Valve's timing was pretty spot-on. After that, it dropped to 18 W for the final charge to 100%, with a total charge time of just 75 minutes.

I thought I was doing the right thing by leaving the Frame switched off during charging to save power and charge it faster. Turns out, I was doing the exact opposite, and I'm sure others would've fallen foul of this too once the headset was in the hands of thousands of customers.

Thankfully, this is one of the first things to be addressed in the latest version of SteamOS for Steam Frame, version 0.3.0. I've had a quick test with the update installed, and my power meter now reads 27 W with the Frame switched off. That's much higher.

This makes way more sense to me; I can now enjoy the headset until the final juice leaves the cell, and not have to worry about needlessly doubling the charging time in doing so.

Here are the other changes in the update:

General

• Substantially faster charging while unit is off / sleeping
• Improved controller tracking while haptics are active
• Improved system stability and reliability under high load
• Fixed "garbled audio" microphone bug

UX

• Fixed per-app Motion Smoothing -> "Force Always-On" setting (was getting ignored)
• Improved motion smoothing behavior in Alyx
• Added VR Settings control for "Game dimming when dashboard is visible"
• VR Settings -> Play Area no longer auto-shows bounds

Developer

• Change Playable performance criteria to allow any resolution (was: 1440p)
• Vulkan layer fixes for increased game compatibility
• Multiple improvements to overall system / OS performance
• Multiple improvements to graphics performance (Mesa)

Valve is still building out the library of games that are officially certified to run on Steam Frame via Proton and FEX layers, but it looks like that's one area of focus for the company as units start to arrive with customers.

Did you get a Steam Frame reservation? You can do your bit and help shape our understanding of availability by logging your answer on this community website.

Take a look at most modern PC gaming setups, and you'll find some RGB lighting somewhere. Blazing LEDs and PC gaming have gone hand in hand for what feels like generations now, but I want to know where you stand—are you down with the RGB clown, or does the whole neon-lit endeavour make your stomach turn?

Or perhaps your preferences sit somewhere in between? Whatever the case, I'd be grateful if you'd answer the poll below and tell me how much RGB currently festoons your personal PC gaming setup.

Did I miss something? There's no accounting for taste, as the old saying goes, so feel free to tell me in the comments what particular flavour of arr-gee-bee setup you're running. If any at all, of course.

Personally, I like a good dose of solid-colour lighting to bathe me in neon while I game, but I'm not sold on the full unicorn vomit rainbow display. My first port of call when testing an RGB-lit gaming keyboard is normally the lighting section of the software, as most of the models I test are set to some sort of eye-searing wave pattern straight from the box.

And there are enough distractions in modern life without my peripherals winking at me all day long. The exception, however, is my Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 kit, which has been softly glowing in rainbow tones since the day I first installed it three years ago.

Occasionally I stare at those modules, nestled in my otherwise all-red PC, and wonder whether I should change the settings. Yet they've been there long enough to be oddly comforting, creating a dash of contrast in what otherwise might be a rather dull, one-colour lighting setup.

And now I look at the photos, I've realised the topside of my graphics card is pumping a little bit of extra colour into the whole affair. I sit next to this rig all day long and I've never really noticed.

Perhaps I find a bit of rainbow RGB soothing after all? Anyway, the question is this: Full RGB, not for me, or something in between? Get thee to the polling booth, PC gamers. Please and thank you, and all that.

We recently had a full archive of PC Gamer magazines digitised for us, covering the very inception of our illustrious 33 year-old publication right up to 2008. Some lucky human had to dig into the archive in the regularly flooded basement of PC Gamer towers and scan each and every page.

I've been noodling around with different ways to use these funky little assets of ours in interesting ways, and Jacob suggested why not use them to create photo mosaics, with the individual pages working effectively as pixels for an image.

So, that's exactly what I am presenting to you here, below. This is at over 6000% zoom into the overall image, and it will go up to 11000% zoom but the resolution in the individual jpgs break down zoomed that tightly in. Still, start slowly zooming out and let me know how quickly you guess what the overall image is, I would definitely recommend hitting the fullscreen button, btw. The year was 2004, if you want a hint.

Zoom out and see how quickly you guess the image

So, how quickly did you guess? Of course I picked the year 2004 specifically, and this image is built from every issue of PC Gamer, including specials, to build out the full picture.

I should get out of the way right up front that this is not an AI generated image. Though I did use Google's AI Studio to help me create a Python script to analyse the original image using Pillow (PIL) and then manage, crop, and rasterise using pypdfium2. That script then uses further libraries to run colour matching and image stitching to create the final mosaic to match the target image, again using PIL and also numpy.

So the actual process of parsing the pages and creating the image is all done via a Python script, on my home PC, with no AI processing baked in.

I have also used AI Studio to help get the viewer above to actually embed on the site, because I don't think anyone would thank me for dropping an 800 MB image onto this page for you guys to wait to render. It primarily relies on the open-source OpenSeadragon viewer to access the image and provide the fully zoomable experience, with the Deep Zoom (DZI) API doing the pyramid rendering grunt work.

And I learned a lot in the process. Primarily that there are very specific mathematical limits to how big a jpg you can create. I learned that the hard way by trying to create an image that exceeded the absolute mathematical limits of the jpg standard. The hard jpg limit is 65,535 px and I had was trying to get the Python script to generate an 81,920 x 109,568 image.

So, I had to scale back my ambitions.

There's no such limit to pngs, however, so I could potentially flip to that file format, but I fear straying into multi-gigabtyte sized image files. Though at least you'd be able to read the actual magazine pages more easily.

I also discovered a way to absolutely max out the 64 GB memory capacity of my home PC, too. The python script that runs through the whole mosaic creation process slams the memory, to the point where at times it was chowing down on 52 GB of the expensive stuff. I was watching on Task Manager in case it did bad things, and the system as a whole slowed to a crawl at points.

Let me know in the comments if there are other PC Gaming classics you would like to see rendered using the pages of this fine publication, and I'll put some more together.

If you're like me, you've probably become increasingly disheartened almost by the day at just how hard it's becoming to distinguish real photos from fake, AI-generated ones. It does not bode well for the future. There are plenty of suggested solutions, but I like one I just learnt about in particular, in the form of the upcoming CAIM1 camera.

The company, Caim, says it "is the world's first camera that attests human origin of your moments the second you press record and gives physical and open verifiable proof."

Even more surprising than this, though, is where I heard about the camera: Noctua's X page. Yes, the maker of the absolute best fans for your gaming PC apparently also makes the little fan that goes inside this camera. I suppose that explains the colour scheme.

The photo on Noctua's X post shows the little fan inside—the sensor that sits in front of it has been removed. It seems the camera itself doesn't come with a lens, either. The company says it's a "BYOL: bring your own lens" kind of deal.

Noctua has a separate page explaining how it keeps the camera cool and why it went with the specifc fan it did. The fan in question is the NF-A4x10 5V PWM, which Noctua says "provides a combination of compact dimensions, strong airflow and pressure performance, low-noise operation and precise PWM speed control."

"Using a conventional 12 V fan," the company says, "would have required an additional step-up converter." But this would of course take up more room and chew through more of the battery life, plus create more "electrical switching noise and ripple."

Noctua also explains that the fan's bearing system and motor drive helps prevent vibrations and "tonal noises" which do, indeed, seem very important to keep quiet in something like a camera, given the sensitive nature of the sensor and optics.

Given Noctua has consistently impressed us here at PC Gamer by how quiet its fans are despite pushing through plenty of air, it makes sense that its fans are being sought by other kinds of manufacturer than PC ones. Heck, we've seen a Noctua fan in a gaming mouse, so I suppose a camera shouldn't really be that surprising.

The specific camera here seems like a particularly useful one to lend a hand towards, though. Combatting AI fakery will surely be an ongoing battle over the coming years; it'll be interesting to see which methods for doing so will stick around.

The camera company says, "We've partnered with leading security hardware innovators Tropic Square to integrate TROPIC01. From the moment you hit record, your sessions are locked behind an auditable hardware-encrypted pipeline, ensuring that what you capture belongs exclusively to you."

Apparently the verification—the crypto proof—is stored on an "immutable decentralised infrastructure." The proof is open and accessible for anyone to verify, too.

I'll admit it, I'm normally a bit of a graphics settings snob. 25+ years of PC gaming has conditioned me to think that "Low" is an option to be avoided on everything but the most budget of rigs, or the most demanding of games.

But I've just finished my early performance and image quality testing of Control Resonant, and it's remarkable how good the open world looks in motion with everything turned down to the minimum. The clip below was recorded at 1080p, Low graphics preset, with ray tracing turned off:

I appreciate you're likely viewing this on a phone screen, so it's difficult to get a bead on the details. And the video compression does the clip no favours once you fullscreen it. But those Manhattan streets still look pretty good with all the options cranked down.

I think what we're looking at here, more than anything else, is a very strong art style. The details of the buildings remain distinct, the contrast between light and shade as I wind my way around the corners is prominent, and the non-ray traced shimmering puddles still look good.

There's a real sense of scale here, too. While the buildings in the background are shrouded in haze to obscure any uglies, they work with the lighting to create a very evocative, atmospheric effect. Here's an image taken at 1440p Low (again, with ray tracing off), to show how the graphics scale with the resolution at these settings.

And my eye is continually drawn towards the reactivity of the environment. Control Resonant likes to play with its semi-destructible world elements, pulling broken fragments of them into Dylan's wake when he sprints, and throwing them all over the shop mid-combat. There's a lot going on here, but most of it still looks more than acceptable with the options turned down.

Which is good news for those of you with less-than-top-tier rigs, as there's some performance to be found when you drop the settings. Yes, you'll notice some plastic-looking faces in the cutscenes with everything set this low, and the odd shopfront sign suffers from low-res textures. But overall, the effect in motion (while you're actually playing the game) is still remarkably good.

In fact, I struggle to think of a better-looking big-budget game with all the options dropped. Halo: Campaign Evolved, perhaps? It's a close run thing, but I'd still pick Control Resonant out of the two. Perhaps we're entering an era of reasonable low settings becoming the norm, rather than the exception?

Given the price of graphics cards right now, one can only hope.

Gears of War: E-Day is set to launch on October 6, though there's early access available before then. In the lead up to launch, The Coalition has posted expanded system requirements for the upcoming bug blast. These include what the game asks of your rig for top performance on the top settings—it's not easygoing, to say the least—but providing your GPU is at least capable of ray tracing, most should get by fine on medium settings.

An RTX 5070 Ti or RX 7900 XT will be required in order to run the game at 4K with the Ultra preset enabled. This is targeting a steady 60 fps, and I would assume, from the 12 GB of VRAM noted in the table below, that one should be able to swing it on a lower-end card with some assistance from upscaling.

Gears of War: E-Day supports DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4, and Intel XeSS 3.0 at launch, so we're not short of options there.

Otherwise, GPU demands are similar to those we saw back in June: an RTX 2060 or RX 6600 at a minimum, or an RTX 3060 Ti/6700 XT as recommended. It's only at 4K Ultra that demands seem to really ramp up. Though there is a blanket requirement for a ray tracing-capable graphics card to play Gears of War: E-Day. The devs explicitly say so on the new system requirements table:

"A hardware ray tracing capable graphics card is required. Graphics cards without dedicated hardware ray tracing support are not support."

You can't ask for it to be clearer than that. The game comes with ray-traced reflections, shadows, and global illumination.

CPU demands are pretty wide-ranging: from a mere Ryzen 5 2600X at a minimum, to a Ryzen 5 5600 as recommended. For 4K Ultra, it looks like eight cores or more are best; furthermore, a 3D V-Cache chip is recommend: the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The studio also suggests an Intel Core i7 14700K. I'd assume newer Arrow Lake chips would suffice, too, despite their slightly weaker performance at times.

RAM requirements are modest enough, even at 4K, at a mere 16 GB. Though only 12 GB are required to play the game. You'll have to make way for the game on an SSD, however, as 115 GB of storage space is required. That does actually need to be a solid state drive, so sayeth the devs.

I've spent the past couple of days tinkering with Remedy's latest supernatural action-a-thon, Control Resonant. I've been testing it on my home PC, a fairly powerful (but not outrageous) rig, and I've got some good news: when it comes to balancing image quality with performance, I reckon there's very little reason to stress your own machine out with the top whack settings.

My PC is an RTX 5070 Ti-equipped, AMD Ryzen 7 7700X-toting rig with 32 GB of DDR5. It's no slouch, that's for sure—but neither is it a $3,000+ firebreather. And at 1440p, Control Resonant runs smoothly on this machine at nearly every setting, with zero stutters and decent frame rates even with frame generation turned off.

You should still prepare your graphics card for a workout if you use the Ultra presets, as Control Resonant features full path tracing at the very tippy top. I've got some image comparisons below, but for now I'll say this: I'm really not going to bother with maximum settings for the rest of my playthrough.

This game still looks grand with the graphics options pared back, and when it comes to the ray tracing, you can gain a decent amount of performance by dropping things down.

In terms of those graphics options, my goodness do you get a lot of them. The ray tracing can be adjusted independently of the regular graphics presets, which in turn have a full-featured whack of settings to tweak to your hearts content. There's also a choice between DLSS 4.5 and an older, CNN-based model for upscaling duties, or FSR (including FSR 4) for AMD users.

Despite all these potential setting tweaks, it'll be no surprise to learn that ray tracing provides the biggest performance hit, so I grabbed some figures with Ultra graphics settings enabled at the various different RT presets.

Control Resonant - RTX 5070 Ti - 1440p Ray Tracing Performance

Results recorded during gameplay at 1440p resolution, Ultra settings, DLSS set to Quality, Frame Generation off.

Control Resonant - 1440p, Ultra settings, DLSS Quality, FG off

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RT Ultra

62

44

RT High

71

50

RT Medium

76

54

RT Low

84

60

RT off

105

73

037.575112.5150

Control Resonant - 1440p, Ultra settings, DLSS Quality, FG off Data

Product	Value
RT Ultra	62 Avg FPS, 44 1% Low FPS
RT High	71 Avg FPS, 50 1% Low FPS
RT Medium	76 Avg FPS, 54 1% Low FPS
RT Low	84 Avg FPS, 60 1% Low FPS
RT off	105 Avg FPS, 73 1% Low FPS

The impact of ray tracing on the frame rate is clear to see, although it's the RT Ultra path tracing setting that does the most damage. The difference between RT Medium and RT High is a mere five frames on average, though.

As you can see, the difference between ray tracing at Low and off entirely is fairly significant, amounting to an extra 21 frames in the averages. However, Control Resonant is full of stark shadows, reflective puddles in streets, and shiny office block windows.

Personally, I like to enable some ray tracing goodness if my graphics card can handle it, and there's a mere five fps average difference between the Medium and High presets on my machine. The RT Ultra preset, however, provides a significant plummet in average frames—and looking at my image comparisons, I really don't think it's worth it.

Sure, you can spot some differences between Ultra RT and High if you really hunt for them. The lighting on the parking lot ceiling above the central lamp, for example, looks a lot more realistic with the ray tracing maxed out. But switching back between this and the High setting during actual gameplay, you'll really struggle to tell.

In fact, the Medium RT preset looks pretty darn good as well, although the ceiling darkens up considerably. If you switch to Low, shadows lose their definition fairly quickly, as evidenced by the truck in the background and Dylan's legs.

Given that Control Resonant likes to play with light and shade in its environments, I think that RT High is probably the best compromise between image quality and performance. Still, all these screenshots look grand to my eyes.

Control Resonant - Ray Tracing Image Quality

A comparison between RT High settings, and RT Low. Notice the sharper shadow Dylan casts on the left, and the more realistic reflections on the wet road.

RT High

RT Low

There are some appreciable differences with High ray tracing enabled. In the brightly lit Manhattan street above, the Low ray tracing reflections in the road become a little blocky, while High gives them a hazy quality that feels more appropriate for the scene.

And again, check out Dylan's shadow. It's crisp and well-defined with ray tracing set to High, and quite fuzzy at Low. As is the lighting on Dylan himself, now I come to notice it. Still, I think both of these presets make the game look great, especially once you stop pixel hunting and start stalking the streets.

Keeping ray tracing set to High for consistencies sake, I thought I'd see if I could gain some extra performance by adjusting the regular graphics presets. It's a similar story, though: Ultra settings provide the most significant performance drop, while High and Medium are so close as to be within margins of error.

Control Resonant - RTX 5070 Ti - 1440p performance

Results recorded during gameplay at 1440p, RT High, DLSS set to Quality, Frame Generation off.

Control Resonant - 1440p, RT High, DLSS Quality, FG off

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Ultra

71

50

High

80

57

Medium

81

60

Low

86

62

0255075100

Control Resonant - 1440p, RT High, DLSS Quality, FG off Data

Product	Value
Ultra	71 Avg FPS, 50 1% Low FPS
High	80 Avg FPS, 57 1% Low FPS
Medium	81 Avg FPS, 60 1% Low FPS
Low	86 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS

Once the ray tracing has been set, there's not a huge amount of performance to be gained by adjusting the regular graphics settings. High and Medium frame rates are near identical, and there's only a 15 fps difference between Low and Ultra in terms of average fps.

There's a sweet spot here if you're trying to min/max image quality with performance, and it's setting both the regular graphics preset and the ray tracing settings to High, with the upscaler of your choice set to Quality. The game looks downright excellent at these settings, and on this machine results in some very smooth, great-looking gameplay.

Observe, as I button mash my way through some combat in clip below with both set to High. Also notice how the environment is extremely reactive to my ham-fisted attempts to hit something, anything, with my supernaturally enhanced weapons, all without a hint of hitching or stuttering.

This game is very impressive in motion, and given that I haven't even touched the frame generation to get a smooth frame rate with ray tracing turned up, it seems reasonably well optimised as well.

However, I appreciate that not everyone can afford a PC with this sort of grunt, even if it's not the latest and greatest. The good news, though, is that Control Resonant actually looks pretty good with everything set to its lowest. The screenshot below was taken at the Low preset, with ray tracing disabled entirely.

Not exactly ugly, is it? The restaurant signage is a little blurry, but check out how much detail is still kept within the scene even with everything turned down to the very, very bottom.

Remedy says the minimum required GPU is a GTX 1070 (for 1080p/30 fps at Low), and while I don't have one of those on hand to test with, I'd still happily play Control Resonant at the lowest settings if I needed to. It preserves a remarkable amount of detail with everything turned down, with a decent boost in performance.

The clip above was recorded at 1080p Low with DLSS set to Quality, and with ray tracing and frame generation turned off. It's Control Resonant's art style that really makes the difference here.

The world itself is clearly defined and beautifully put together, and while I'd still enable ray tracing in some fashion if you can afford the frame rate hit, it's simply a good-looking game no matter the settings.

The reactivity of the environment (and a fair few spooky-dooky, yet lightweight effects) are really what you're paying the price of entry for, so don't feel too obliged to turn up the pretties for the sake of it. There's performance to be found in them thar hills, and I certainly wouldn't spoil a good time by cranking things up to the max.

If you signed up for a Steam Frame, it's time to check your inbox for an email from Valve. The company has run its 'one-time randomisation' to decide who gets a unit from the first batch and who is left on the waitlist. Once you know where you land, head over to this community reporting website; we're already getting a good idea of the odds of buying a Steam Frame from the results so far.

The odds were stacked against us. That's the picture I get from this tremendous website by coah80 that asks the community, 'Did you get a reservation?' Users can respond with: waitlisted, reserved, or no email yet.

With 35,000 (and counting) results so far, it looks like around 44.7% of respondents were lucky enough to get a reservation, and 51.6% are on the waitlist. 3.8% say they haven't received an email yet.

A quick reminder of how this works: those of us who signed up for a Steam Frame via the Store page were entered into a one-time raffle that took place on September 17. This determines who has a unit reserved for them and who was added to the waitlist. The reserved units are offered up first, and if someone doesn't buy theirs, the unit moves to the next person on the list. Once those reservations are sorted, Valve will start working through the waitlist.

If you sign up for a Steam Frame today, you'll join the back of the waitlist. That's at least 18,254 customers long, at time of writing, though you have to assume that many of the people who signed up for a Steam Frame have no idea this website even exists. There's a good chance it's a lot higher than this site suggests.

The Steam Frame comes in two capacities: 256 GB and 1 TB. As I wrote in my Steam Frame review, I'd rather the 256 GB model. It's considerably cheaper and while you can't upgrade the internal storage, you can slot in a microSD card to expand your library further. If you're mostly going to use the Frame for game streaming, you don't need a huge amount of space on the device anyways.

Good news, looks like a majority of users also agree on storage sizes. The community site also asks which model a user signed up for and offers the option to share their location, which many have, giving us even more data to go on. The 256 GB model is the more popular option country-by-country. It only takes $240 to change hearts and minds, as I think with a smaller premium in pre-memory crisis times, we may have seen those stats reverse. The 512 GB Steam Deck was a popular choice when it first launched.

If you remember a very cool project we reported on a few months ago that got Ubuntu Linux up and running on PlayStation 5 consoles, I have some bad news: the lead developer of the open-source project, Andy Nguyen, has stepped away:

"I am stepping away from the PS5 scene and stopping all my work on PS5 Linux," Nguyen posted on X. "After pouring my heart and months of my life into it, including plans to finish PS5 Pro support and release in 2027, it's all down the sink."

"The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony."

The project, which was run by Nguyen, used hypervisor bugs to get Ubuntu Linux working on the PS5. Once past Sony's barriers, open-source Mesa drivers were tweaked to get everything working as it should, but you had to stay on older firmware to prevent Sony's patches "fixing" the hypervisor bugs that permitted the project to work.

Nguyen was working on getting Ubuntu working with the PS5 Pro, but that relied on the "only hypervisor bug left", which has now been reported to Sony by the "slop kiddies." Which will presumably mean a patch from Sony and goodbye to the project.

"I asked them [the people who found the hypervisor bug]," Nguyen says, "to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy Linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead."

I'm unsure how much of Nguyen stepping away has to do with this happening to the Pro project, and how much is the prevalence of "noobs." It seems like perhaps a little of column A and a little of column B. I'm not a dev so I can't say whether this kind of negative environment is encouraged by 'easier' development using AI, but it wouldn't surprise me.

I've got to the point where I grimace when I see a listing for a gaming PC. The memory crisis has so severely gutted pricing and availability that I've found my eyes glazing over PCs whenever they're on the screen in front of me.

One glance at our roundup of the best gaming PC deals shows that even getting a rig under $1,000 with a discrete graphics card is a bit of a struggle, and you are making significant compromises to get the price that… low. Okay, yes, it doesn't feel low, but that's the new normal. All praise our new AI overlords.

And iBuyPower routinely features among the most budget rigs. That's because, be it smart compromises, the ability to buy in bulk, or a prayer to some sort of hardware god, its rigs are somewhat reasonable for prebuilds.

The RDY Scale B06 I've had across my desk shoves a budget Intel CPU and budget Nvidia GPU into its surprisingly large case, alongside a pretty small SSD and single-channel memory.

Features

RDY is iBuyPower's preconfigured range, which means they are ready to ship pretty much the moment you hit 'buy'. As such, the RTX 5060 / Intel Core Ultra 5 225F model I've got my hands on is the only version of the B06 you can currently buy.

For its relatively budget-friendly price, it makes some compromises, the biggest of which you will find in its memory and storage.

The memory is DDR5, but with a CAS latency of 40 and overall speed of 5200 MT/s, it's not super fast. There's also only one stick, so you are taking a hit to performance over dual-channel memory of the same capacity. How much depends on the game or workload, but there will be a hit.

Should you have the funds and the patience, you could technically track down a second module matching this same stick and bump your capacity up to 32 GB, but that's a hard sell, and was even before the memory crisis. Most of the time, you are better off selling a single stick and buying two (at a loss) if you're looking to upgrade, as it can be tough to track down the exact stick you need and even that doesn't guarantee compatibility.

There's just 1 TB of storage in this machine. That is pretty much the minimum I would want in a gaming rig right now, especially when you consider the actual storage available to you will likely be 50-100 GB lower than 1 TB.

The 1 TB in my rig translates to 952 GB. That doesn't include browsers and any other Windows apps. Then, you might have Steam, Epic Games, likely the Nvidia app, plus any drivers, and any other media apps like Spotify. By only downloading the games I used for the benchmarks below, I was left with around 300 GB on the drive.

Now, we would have received twice the memory capacity for the price if it weren't for the memory crisis, but you have to expect to pay more for gaming PCs right now, and those compromises make some sense from iBuyPower.

Performance

This rig is a sign of how bad the memory crisis has gotten. Late last year, we checked out the Acer Predator Orion 3000, which was just $20 more, came with a full-fat RTX 5070, a better Intel chip for multithreaded workloads, and even came in a cute compact case.

Because of that higher-tier GPU, the Orion outpaces this iBuyPower rig in every gaming test I conducted. Some by just a few frames, and some more convincingly so. Acer did make compromises here with PCIe 3.0 storage speed and 16 GB DDR4 memory, but it's still all in all a better rig, and a much more compact one. The caveat, though, is that while you can find RTX 5070 PCs at this price on occasion, they are becoming ever more rare, and this SKU of the Orion 3000 is nowhere to be seen these days.

1440p gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1440p resolution

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra)Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium)Cyberpunk 2077 (upscaling) (1440p RT Medium)Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High)Black Myth: Wukong (upscaling) (1440p Very High)Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

42

33

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

88

43

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

44

38

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

68

27

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

36

24

0255075100

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	42 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	88 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	44 Avg FPS, 38 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	68 Avg FPS, 27 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	36 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

32

25

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

57

40

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

32

26

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

66

55

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

35

28

020406080

Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	32 Avg FPS, 25 1% Low FPS
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	57 Avg FPS, 40 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	32 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	66 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	35 Avg FPS, 28 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

50

42

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

139

49

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

86

69

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

184

102

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

90

67

050100150200

Cyberpunk 2077 (upscaling) (1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	50 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	139 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	86 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	184 Avg FPS, 102 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	90 Avg FPS, 67 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

90

58

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

73

38

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

59

42

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

71

43

0255075100

Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	90 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	73 Avg FPS, 38 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	59 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	N/A
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	71 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

29

24

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

46

31

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

26

20

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

56

49

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

30

23

015304560

Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	29 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	46 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	26 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	56 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	30 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

49

41

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

70

48

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

37

33

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

83

51

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

47

39

0255075100

Black Myth: Wukong (upscaling) (1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	49 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	70 Avg FPS, 48 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	37 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	83 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	47 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

61

42

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

97

27

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

52

36

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

115

42

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

65

45

037.575112.5150

Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	61 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	97 Avg FPS, 27 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	52 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	115 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	65 Avg FPS, 45 1% Low FPS

The RTX 5060 is a solid 1080p card that becomes a decent 1440p one if you are willing to stomach a bit of frame generation or upscaling. Still, it's one of the weakest offerings of the RTX Blackwell generation.

In our tests, I spotted similar scores to RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti rigs, and that's partly because this same price point would have gotten you better CPUs a few years ago to throw alongside it, but also because the generational leap between the RTX 40- and RTX 50-series isn't monumental.

The RTX 5060 / Intel Core Ultra 5 225 F combo is decidedly budget, as far as modern offerings are concerned, and you will spot that in our gaming tests. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora at Ultra on 1440p barely cracks 30 fps, and the same is true for Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong. Upscaling makes these games much more playable, and the older Metro Exodus can stay around 60 fps.

The AtomMan G1 Pro, with its low-profile RTX 5060 and AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX, outperforms it in Avatar, but the Scale B06 takes the win in everything else. The G1 Pro is kitted out with 32 GB of DDR5 5200 memory. That is double the capacity of the Scale B06, and dual-channel. That means it has not only twice the capacity but twice the available bandwidth, too. But the Intel chip helps the iBuyPower PC pull through for the win.

Notably, the 1% lows are almost the same for both rigs in Baldur's Gate 3, despite the Scale B06 easily outpacing the G1 Pro in average fps. That's likely down to the memory. Baldur's Gate 3 is quite a CPU-heavy game, and the slower, lower-capacity RAM is hindering what should be a much faster chip in the Scale B06.

The Intel CPU in the Scale B06 has fewer physical cores and a lower boost clock than the 8645HX, but higher base clock speeds and a great L1 and L2 cache. In Cinebench, I saw a slightly higher single-core index for the Intel chip, but a significantly better multithread index for the AMD one. The Atomman G1 Pro has, however, gone up significantly in price even since our review in April.

The RTX 4060 Ti ABS Cyclone Aqua we reviewed last year seems to outpace or match this 5060 rig in most tests, only firmly losing in the Black Myth: Wukong upscaling benchmark. And with the RTX 5060, you pretty much need to get used to some level of upscaling if you want a smooth experience in modern games. Upscaling technology has gotten much better over time, and so has frame generation, but it's still a pretty weak card as far as pure rasterisation is concerned.

System performance

The laptops are here tested against intensive benchmarks that mostly test the CPU, but also the GPU, for productivity tasks.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme3DMark StorageCinebench 2024Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop)7zip 24.07Handbrake UHD to 1080p conversion

CPU index

GPU index

Overall index

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

10593

6124

6555

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

7307

10663

9975

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

9435

6380

6705

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

6031

14162

11779

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

6051

6536

6458

03,7507,50011,25015,000

3DMark Time Spy Extreme Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	10593 CPU index, 6124 GPU index, 6555 Overall index
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	7307 CPU index, 10663 GPU index, 9975 Overall index
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	9435 CPU index, 6380 GPU index, 6705 Overall index
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	6031 CPU index, 14162 GPU index, 11779 Overall index
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	6051 CPU index, 6536 GPU index, 6458 Overall index

Overall index

Avg bandwidth (MB/s)

Access time (us)

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

2155

381.13

86

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

1525

261.85

118

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

1493

259.42

122

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

2343

403.37

77

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

2152

371.21

84

07501,5002,2503,000

3DMark Storage Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	2155 Overall index, 381.13 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 86 Access time (us)
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	1525 Overall index, 261.85 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 118 Access time (us)
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	1493 Overall index, 259.42 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 122 Access time (us)
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	2343 Overall index, 403.37 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 77 Access time (us)
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	2152 Overall index, 371.21 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 84 Access time (us)

Single core index

Multi thread index

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

124

1668

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

114

1024

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

111

1323

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

110

1046

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

119

802

05001,0001,5002,000

Cinebench 2024 Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	124 Single core index, 1668 Multi thread index
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	114 Single core index, 1024 Multi thread index
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	111 Single core index, 1323 Multi thread index
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	110 Single core index, 1046 Multi thread index
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	119 Single core index, 802 Multi thread index

CPU (samples)

GPU (samples)

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

130

920

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

72

1642

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

132

953

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

83

918

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

64

931

05001,0001,5002,000

Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop) Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	130 CPU (samples), 920 GPU (samples)
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	72 CPU (samples), 1642 GPU (samples)
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	132 CPU (samples), 953 GPU (samples)
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	83 CPU (samples), 918 GPU (samples)
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	64 CPU (samples), 931 GPU (samples)

Compressing (GIPS)

Decompressing (GIPS)

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

164

182

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

84

119

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

87

199

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

115

131

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

70

78

050100150200

7zip 24.07 Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	164 Compressing (GIPS), 182 Decompressing (GIPS)
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	84 Compressing (GIPS), 119 Decompressing (GIPS)
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	87 Compressing (GIPS), 199 Decompressing (GIPS)
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	115 Compressing (GIPS), 131 Decompressing (GIPS)
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	70 Compressing (GIPS), 78 Decompressing (GIPS)

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

88

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

42

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

80

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

75

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

57

0255075100

Handbrake UHD to 1080p conversion Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	88
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	42
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	80
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	75
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	57

Outside of gaming, the Team Group T-Force G50 SSD is decently performant and speedy, clocking in an overall index score of well over 2,000 in 3DMark's storage test. Other creator tests don't perform quite as well, with the CPU at this machine's heart being fairly slow to handle a Handbrake video conversion, and sitting well behind the likes of the Aqua and G1 Pro in Time Spy Extreme and 7zip.

Though single-core Cinebench scores are solid, multithread scores are lacking. This all means that if you're looking for a heavy-duty content creator machine, you'd best be looking elsewhere. In fairness, the single-channel memory should have already put you off, anyways.

Thermals

Real-world temperatures

temperature results recorded in different testing suites

Gaming TempsCreator tempsIdle temps

Avg CPU Temp (°C)

Max CPU Temp (°C)

Avg GPU Temp (°C)

Max GPU Temp (°C)

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

62

79

64

40

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

63

92

65

45

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

89

91

77

67

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

63

71

60

43

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

53

59

65

67

0255075100

Gaming Temps Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	62 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 79 Max CPU Temp (°C), 64 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 40 Max GPU Temp (°C)
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	63 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 92 Max CPU Temp (°C), 65 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 45 Max GPU Temp (°C)
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	89 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 91 Max CPU Temp (°C), 77 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 67 Max GPU Temp (°C)
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	63 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 71 Max CPU Temp (°C), 60 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 43 Max GPU Temp (°C)
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	53 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 59 Max CPU Temp (°C), 65 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 67 Max GPU Temp (°C)

Max CPU temp (°C)

Max SSD temp (°C)

Max VRM temp (°C)

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

91

67

70

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

69

27

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

93

58

71

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

80

46

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

67

53

0255075100

Creator temps Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	91 Max CPU temp (°C), 67 Max VRM temp (°C), 70 Max SSD temp (°C)
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	69 Max CPU temp (°C), 27 Max SSD temp (°C)
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	93 Max CPU temp (°C), 58 Max VRM temp (°C), 71 Max SSD temp (°C)
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	80 Max CPU temp (°C), 46 Max SSD temp (°C)
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	67 Max CPU temp (°C), 53 Max SSD temp (°C)

CPU (°C)

GPU (°C)

ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D

27

35

Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F

33

22

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX

51

38

iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D

42

37

iBuyPower RDY Scale B06

33

43

015304560

Idle temps Data

Product	Value
ABS Cyclone Aqua | RTX 4060 Ti | 7800X3D	27 CPU (°C), 35 GPU (°C)
Acer Predator Orion 3000 I RTX 5070 I 14700F	33 CPU (°C), 22 GPU (°C)
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | 8945HX	51 CPU (°C), 38 GPU (°C)
iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07 | RX 9070 XT | 7800X3D	42 CPU (°C), 37 GPU (°C)
iBuyPower RDY Scale B06	33 CPU (°C), 43 GPU (°C)

Perhaps owing to the large capacity of the case allowing smooth, unblocked airflow, or partly due to the large fan on the CPU, or maybe because both the CPU and GPU are fairly low wattage, this rig is positively frosty. Measuring temperatures during our range of creator applications, it is among the coolest we've tried in recent times, sitting well below the iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07. Admittedly, the latter iBuyPower machine is much more powerful, but its max CPU temps are significantly under the RTX 4060-equipped Lenovo Legion Tower 5i (Gen 8), the RTX 4060 Ti ABS Cyclone Aqua, and the RTX 5060 AtomMan G1 Pro. In fairness, the AtomMan is a very compact build, so you would expect higher thermals.

Still, the point stands that this iBuyPower handles its heat in a particularly cool fashion. Unfortunately, my model's motherboard doesn't appear to have a VRM temp sensor, so I couldn't grab those temperatures, but the CPU and SSD heats were very manageable in the creator suite.

For gaming, it's much the same story, with the GPU only maxing out at 67 °C. This is particularly impressive because it averaged 65 °C. It's a similar story with the CPU, with both average and max sitting in the 50s.

Aesthetics

The Scale B06 feels like an oddly large PC for what inside is a fairly compact build. You don't have extra coolers hogging up space here, and the Asus RTX 5060 is a fairly small card, too. That means there is tons of empty space in the case. Its dimensions make it fairly similar to the Maingear MG-1 MK.II, but at least the Maingear with its overhead cooling and large RTX 5090 fits the space a bit better. Still, I suppose that means you can throw a few Hatsune Miku figures in the RDY Scale B06 and I'd be confident they won't melt.

Other than the RGB fans and the iBuyPower logo slapped on the bottom of the front panel, the Scale B06 is fairly plain. It's just a big black case with a clear side panel. Though the RGB in the fans do give it a bit of a gamer look. My model has pretty great wiring, all funnelling through the back of the rig tidily, so it's super clean.

The first time I unboxed it, the Scale B06 was a bit of a task to get on the PC Gamer test bench table. It's not only bulky, but quite heavy at 16 kg too. You are going to need quite a bit of space (and a few muscles) to fit it into your gaming den.

One thing that surprised me when taking the panels of this PC off is that they aren't held in with screws. They are simply wedged into the side, but they require a bit of a yank to come out, which makes me feel comfortable that they won't just pop off and spread broken tempered glass all over the floor when a breeze comes through the office.

Sound

As far as sound is concerned, the B06 offers a downright pleasant experience, only ever rising to a light hum at its most intensive. That translates to around 40 decibels, which is light enough that even a relatively quiet office will drown it out. In a totally silent environment, you will definitely hear the Scale B06, but you have to accept that with pretty much any bit of hardware, especially one with so many parts.

Even when I put my ear directly against the tempered glass while the rig was working its hardest, I could only make out a soft hum from the fans.

Software

My review rig showed up with a fresh Windows install, and the only other preinstalled software was Realtek audio drivers, Intel drivers, and the Nvidia app. iBuyPower doesn't appear to load the Scale B06 with its own software, and that's a boon given the size of modern PC games and the capacity left in the 1 TB drive that comes with it. It was easy to set up otherwise, and it took me mere minutes to get rid of Copilot and install Google Chrome.

Value

Though the iBuyPower RDY Scale B06 retails at $1,479, it is currently available for $1,379 (and it was $100 less than that last week with a code). That puts it much closer to the rigs we tend to see in our roundup of the best gaming PC deals every week. But even then, it is outpaced by the iBuyPower Element SE, which is $80 less and comes with a better graphics card (RTX 5060 Ti) and a better gaming CPU (AMD Ryzen 7 9700F).

Then, if you simply want an RTX 5060 rig, the ABS Cyclone Aqua offers that, plus 32 GB of DDR4 memory (more of it, but worse speed) and an Intel Core i5 14400F (another 10-core chip but with less cache) for $230 less. There are some compromises with this ABS build (as you will be making with pretty much any build right now), but its compromises are in good places.

As you might expect from iBuyPower, it has thrown a gaming keyboard and mouse into the box, and you get a month of Xbox Game Pass with it too. I'd say the peripherals are decidedly meh, with the Chimera KM7 membrane keyboard feeling a bit too squishy and weak under the fingers, and the wired mouse being rather slow. But for something free in the box, that's slightly above what I was expecting. And the keyboard even comes with a media dial, which is a slight plus. If I spent my entire budget on the PC, I'd be happy enough using the mouse and keyboard until I got together the budget for something better.

This is one of the hardest reviews I've ever written, because the market is ever-changing (for the worse), and this flux state means we have to accept less for more until at least 2027, and likely longer.

So, to simplify things, I thought I'd ask myself, 'Would you buy this rig today if you absolutely had to get one?' and my answer would be 'definitely not for its full price'. However, I have seen this rig go as low as $1,280, and for that price, it does put up a fight among the most budget rigs. In fact, it could even eke out the Element SE and its RTX 5060 Ti at the right time.

The only problem is that iBuyPower only seems to sell the RDY models via its own website, so you have less of a chance of picking one up at a big discount at Walmart or Best Buy. But giving more options for relatively reasonable prices is only a good thing in my book, and if it gives a potential buyer slightly more choice at the $1,000-$1,500 range, it's a solid enough addition to the market. iBuyPower has made some decent concessions for that price point; it's just a shame it has to do that in the first place