Toms Hardware

AMD on Tuesday launched its new campaign to make its gaming-oriented CPUs and GPUs more attractive to the target audience. From now through the first half of next year, AMD will provide a free subscription to Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass for PC with a purchase of qualified hardware.  Gamers who purchase a Radeon RX 6000-series graphics card or Ryzen 5000X/3000X/XT processor from a participating retailer will get a free one-month subscription to Microsoft Xbox Game Pass for PC as part of AMD’s Equipped for Battle game bundle. Typically, Microsoft charges $1 for the first month and then $9.99 per month.   While the bundle’s…

Asus is delivering an excellent quality of life improvement with its upcoming Z690 motherboards with what it calls PCIe Slot Q-Release. As spotted by @momomo_us, this feature will allow users to easily remove a graphics card installed in the primary PCIe 5.0 slot on a Z690-based motherboard.  Removing a modern graphics card from a motherboard shouldn’t be too much of a hassle in most cases. However, the heatsink design of some cards coupled with motherboards becoming increasingly crammed with components around the PCIe slot, can sometimes make removal a bit more cumbersome. The Q-Release aims to alleviate this by pressing…

There are plenty of USB-C hubs and enclosures for M.2 SSDs on the market. Yet, there are not many USB-C hubs that can add the extra ports and storage we need, all in a single device. Satechi has just introduced one, as noticed by NotebookCheck. The Satechi USB-C hybrid multiport adapter connects to the host using a USB 3.0 Gen 1 Type-C interface and adds two USB 3.0 ports (that do not support charging), an HDMI 2.0 display output good for 4k60, a USB-C port for charging, and an M.2-2280 slot for SATA SSDs. The hub can deliver up to 100 Watts of power…

Micro Center has partnered up with Asus to provide a new PC Builder Tool that gives novice PC builders an easy way to assemble the parts for a new gaming PC by doing most of the part selection for you. More importantly, it’s a way to guarantee getting an RTX 30-series graphics card, one of the best graphics cards, though at a rather high price. Think of it as another form of bundling, similar to the Newegg Shuffle, but without the lottery aspect. You have the option of choosing one of three tiers: Value, Performance, and Ultimate. There are options…

Are you worried that your M.2 SSD is running too hot? Well, RaidSonic (via momomo_us) has released the Icy Box IB-M2HSF-705, a new cooler that’s designed to keep even the best SSDs in check. The IB-M2HSF-705 is RaidSonic’s second M.2 SSD cooler under the Icy Box brand. The IB-M2HSF-702 may be too thick for many users’ needs, so the new IB-M2HSF-705 could be a more appealing and less invasive option. Like its predecessor, the IB-M2HSF-705 is tailored toward M.2 SSDs with a length of 80mm. The cooler has a cooling capacity of 23W, which is overkill for most M.2 SSDs….

Intel’s highly anticipated 12th generation Alder Lake launch is happening this week, and the chip giant is hoping to make a big splash in the desktop processor market. However, it appears that Newegg didn’t get the memo to keep Alder Lake-related products under wraps until launch. The company’s Canadian subsidiary is already listing the MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 motherboard for sale, pre-announcement, priced at $279.99. This early listing by Newegg Canada doesn’t come as too much of a surprise considering that one unnamed U.S. retailer has been shipping flagship Core i9-12900K processors to customers ahead of schedule. The Z690-A Pro…

NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 is one of the best graphics cards for mid-range performance — armed with 3,840 CUDA cores, 6GB GDDR6 video memory and a boost clock speed up to 1,703 MHz. And buying it in a laptop is one of the best ways to actually get your hands on one right now. RTX 3060 laptop availability is becoming more and more widespread, but getting the good ones is still quite a challenge. That’s why we’re doing this big round up of all the major-brand RTX 3060 laptops you can buy (in the U.S.), plus links to where you can…

Halloween is upon us, and this year I’m building a series of smart Halloween decorations that are also Raspberry Pi projects.  So far, I’ve created a Raspberry Pi-powered zombie arm that slaps guests and a person-following creepy head. However, one of my all time favourite decorations is a fog machine. The only unfortunate thing about them is that they’re analog. Now, with a bit of hacking, we’re going to be connecting a fog machine to a Raspberry Pi, and activating it with person detection. This way, we only use fog juice when there are people close by. Here’s how to…

Windows 11 has some interesting new features, but its UI is polarizing. If you’re like me, you downloaded a Windows 11 ISO and did a clean install on a test machine, but don’t like the new version of the Start menu because it takes up more screen real estate and makes you click to see a button to see a complete, alphabetical list of all your apps.  Fortunately, with a third-party app and possibly a registry tweak, you can get a different style of Start menu that’s closer to the look and feel of Windows 7 than Windows 10 and…

Immunefi announced that a researcher named Gerhard Wagner was paid $2 million for a vulnerability affecting the Polygon Technology decentralized finance platform. This is believed to be the highest bug bounty ever paid, Immunefi said, and that’s because the flaw put an estimated $850 million worth of cryptocurrency at risk. The vulnerability was found in one of the bridges between the Polygon and Ethereum blockchains. “A bridge is basically a set of contracts that help in moving assets from the root chain to the child chain,” Polygon explains in its docs, and users can tap either the Plasma Bridge or…

G.Skill today announced the The Ripjaws S5 Series Low-Profile Performance series, extending its DDR5 portfolio with a new low profile DRAM kit. The Ripjaws S5 is only 33 mm tall, and designed for small form factor builds where space is at a premium, such as Mini-ITX systems. These new DRAM modules join the more performance-focused Trident Z 5, which scales up to DDR5-6400.  At this time G.Skill is only launching one capacity for the Ripjaws S5: a dual-channel, 2x 16 GB kit (32 GB total). Frequencies start at DDR5-4800, scaling through to DDR5-6000. Interestingly, G.Skill lists the exact same CL…

BrainChip, the neuromorphic AI specialist, has announced on Twitter that it is now taking orders for two new development kits for its Akida advanced neural networking processor, as spotted by CNX Software. One of the development kits comes with a Raspberry Pi 4, and the other, which is twice the price, comes with a barebones X86 mini PC. Image 1 of 2 (Image credit: BrainChip)Image 2 of 2 (Image credit: BrainChip)The Raspberry Pi in question is the Compute Module 4, with up to 8GB of RAM and up to 32GB flash-based storage (or an external Micro SD card if you…

Razer is releasing its Zephyr face mask today, following months of memes after its CES 2021 debut as Project Hazel. But Zephyr is no prototype – it’s $99.99 and on sale now. The facemask uses what Razer refers to as “N95 grade” filters, which it claims can block up to 99% of air particles up to 0.3 microns, and that the filtration occurs both when you inhale and exhale. Razer’s other big claim is that these filters last three times as long as disposable masks. The filters include one for each side nozzle and one for the bottom of the…

Nvidia has provided a new GPU firmware update for the RTX 3060 and RTX 3080 TI that fixes black screens on boot with DisplayID monitors running on a DisplayPort connection. Nvidia’s GPU Firmware Update Tool can be found here. DisplayID is a relatively old technology, first introduced in 2009, that allows a computer’s GPU to see all the capabilities of the display device, like G-Sync support or FreeSync support, for instance. The latest version of Display ID, version 2.0, came out in 2017 and added support for 4k and higher resolutions, HDR, VR, and 120Hz support and above. If you…

As retailers begin to receive the first commercial 12th Generation Core ‘Alder Lake’ processors, images of the CPUs ready for retail begin to emerge on social media. Such photographs reveal S-Specs of the CPUs as well as confirming their specifications just in case someone expected Intel to change them in the last minute. We already know how the packaging of Intel’s 12th Generation Core processors looks like, so hardware bloggers DDAA117 (via @9550Pro) and @momomo_us concentrated on the contents instead.  Image 1 of 2(Image credit: DDAA117)Image 2 of 2 (Image credit: DDAA117)Retail versions of Intel’s Core i9-12900K and Core i5-12600K CPUs look exactly as we expected LGA1700 processors…

When Windows 11 launched on October 5th, it lacked Android app support, one of its most highly-touted new features. However, as of now, Windows Insiders in the beta channel, who have build 22000.282 or higher, can set up Windows Subsystem for Android and install a select group of apps from the Amazon app store.  We the Windows Subsystem for Android on a laptop with a Core i7-8550U processor and found that performance was decent if and when apps loaded. Some apps would take a really long time to open while others failed to open the first time I tried them,…

Bitcoin set a new record price this morning by rising above $66,000 per BTC. Coinbase put Bitcoin’s price at $66,102 at the time of writing; CoinDesk had it at $66,444. Both price trackers say that’s a roughly 7 percent increase—7.19 for Coinbase and 7.53 for CoinDesk—to the cryptocurrency’s value over the previous 24 hours. CoinDesk reported that BTC’s rising price likely had something to do with ProShares introducing the first Bitcoin-linked exchange-traded fund (ETF) to receive the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval to the New York Stock Exchange. The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF trades on the NYSE under the…

Just when you think there’s nowhere else for Doom to be played, a developer known as Foone manages to run Doom in the eye of a skeleton—all with the help of our favorite SBC, the Raspberry Pi. You may already know the name Foone, they have a history of running Doom on unusual devices, including running the retro classic on a pregnancy test. For Foone’s next project they have chosen to create what could be one of the best Raspberry Pi projects ever. Inside the skull of a larger than life plastic skeleton there is a Raspberry Pi and a…

If shopping for PC components is too complicated for you, NZXT might have your back. NZXT is introducing BLD kits to its store that will include all the parts necessary to build your own PC. This gives users an easy way to get into the world of DIY PC building without the worry or hassle of shopping for individual components. The BLD kits start at $1,399. NZXT designs each BLD kit to be as user-friendly as possible. Each kit will come with all the necessary tools, hardware, and documentation to build a PC. There’s also the bonus of full customer…

Razer’s updating its desktop microphone lineup again this year, this time focusing on its higher-end devices now that the Razer Seiren Mini has the cheaper and more portable end of the spectrum covered. That means a new V2 model for the Razer Seiren X, which has been carrying the torch of the original Razer Seiren since it launched in 2019, plus a cheaper version of the Razer Seiren Elite called the Razer V2 Seiren Pro. Since our main complaint about the Elite when we reviewed it was its $200 MSRP, a price cut puts it in easy contention for the…