The Gigabyte X870E Aorus Pro retails for just $350—still not cheap, but then the X870E option with AMD’s new 800-series chipsets is the flagship choice.

This gets you Wi-Fi 7, full PCIe 5.0 support across both graphics and some of the M.2 storage ports, USB 4 Type-C ports and the latest features too that are designed to make the building process as hassle-free as possible as well as dealing with hot-running PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The latter are what ultimately make the difference here given the older X670E chipset offers the majority if not all of the same features under the hood in terms of ports and bandwidth.

At this price you’re also paying for premium looks too and Gigabyte has delivered with a chunky set of dark, moody heatsinks for the M.2 ports and VRMs as well as a dash of built-in RGB lighting above the I/O panel and chipset heatsink. While it’s not exactly cheap, the board looks and feels every bit like something costing $100 more.

If you hate dealing with tiny M.2 screws or graphics cards stuck in their slots then you’ll love the tool-free features on offer with the X870E Aorus Pro. They’re similar to other manufacturers, but easily as good as anything from Asus or MSI. The EZ-Latch feature applies to both the M.2 SSD, heatsink and PCIe slot for your graphics card, with the former two benefitting from small latches that pop open with a finger press for easy removal and installation. To remove your graphics card there’s a push-button next to the memory slots.

Even the Wi-Fi antenna gets the EZ treatment with a combined connector that plugs into the I/O panel port so there’s no fiddly nuts or screws to deal with here either. All of the four M.2 ports cool SSDs on both sides and three of them support PCIe 5.0 SSDs although the lower two PCIe 5.0 slots will steal bandwidth from your graphics card so it’s best to avoid those.

The rest of the PCB has nearly everything you could want, even for a high-end system. There are eight fan headers, a couple of 2-pin thermal probe headers if you’re really going to town with your cooling and you even get a POST LED display and power and reset buttons. It also has impressively large VRM heatsinks to cool the 16+2+2-phase power delivery.

PC Gamer test bench
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | RAM: 32 GB Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR5-6000 | Storage: 2 TB Corsair MP700 | PSU: MSI MAG AB50GL 850 W | OS: Windows 11 24H2 | Chassis: Open platform | Monitor: Dell U2415

Apart from the funky Wi-Fi connector, the rear I/O panel is a standard-looking affair that doesn’t go all-out on USB Type-C like other boards have. Instead, you get two USB 4 Type-C ports and a total of nine USB Type-A ports comprising three USB 3.1, four USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0, so a good balance of ports and future-proofing without going too overboard and bumping up the price needlessly.

Also on the I/O panel is a Q-Flash Button, otherwise known as BIOS Flashback, a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port and audio connectors for the Realtek ALC1220 codec.

Gigabyte’s BIOS and software are pretty good too, with the former offering a snazzy front page that makes it easy to get to the basic options such as memory EXPO/XMP and quick links to fan control and BIOS updating. The software is definitely useful for controlling your fans from within Windows and its drover update utility also worked well so should be handy for beginners and did spot one or two things Windows Update missed.

If this was 2026 and AMD’s Socket AM5 maybe only had another 12 months left, we’d suggest not spending this much on a motherboard that’s likely got no upgrade path if you bought whatever Ryzen CPUs were around at that time too. However, the Gigabyte X870E Aorus Pro will enjoy a decent lifespan with AMD previously promising to support the socket through to at least 2027.

Spending a little more for cutting edge features that will see you through your next CPU upgrade as well is definitely a strong argument.

The board has plenty to offer aside from future CPU support, though, as it has good VRM and M.2 cooling, looks fabulous and is super-easy to work with thanks to a bunch of tool-free features. It has limited RGB lighting as standard and only two of the four M.2 ports are usable thanks to lane stealing, but other than that, it’s a very solid X870E board for the cash that’s particularly user-friendly.

But from the start the constant updates do make testing difficult.

BIOS updates, driver updates, Windows updates – they’ve all been coming thick and fast for Z890 motherboards in the hope of improving performance. Today we’ll be seeing if the latest tweaks for the platform and specifically the Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice make it worth considering, even when directly compared with its X870 counterpart that costs a touch more.

Of course, with Intel, it’s only releasing cheaper options of LGA1851 motherboards this month, whereas AMD had to content with older 600-series chipsets on its platform. Like AMD’s 800-series, the focus is on Wi-Fi 7, PCIe Gen 5 support, tool-free features and high-speed USB Type-C ports and being Intel, that means Thunderbolt 4.

While this particular board’s party piece is its glorious white colour scheme that even extends to the PCIe and memory slots, as well as small details on the PCB such as the POST code display and RGB headers. Really nice touches, Gigabyte.

Considering this board leaves you with plenty of change from $300, aesthetics and features-wise it doesn’t seem to be a bad deal at all. It looks beautiful thanks to Gigabyte’s attention to detail with the white theme, although it’s a shame there’s not a touch more RGB lighting to really make it pop.

As it stands, there are only two small illuminated areas above the I/O panel and below the chipset heatsink, although it has 3-pin and 4-pin RGB headers to add your own accessories too. Spending over $300 will likely get you a few more fan headers, but the six included here are ample for the majority of PC owners.

Despite having been released recently and carrying Intel’s flagship chipset, the board only has one PCIe 5.0 M.2 port, while its AMD equivalent has three. However, only one of those won’t steal lanes from your graphics card, so it’s somewhat of a moot point. Both boards have four SATA ports, which are a dying breed as many similarly priced AMD B850 boards have cut these to just two.

Gigabyte’s tool-free features are everywhere, from the push-button graphics card release of PCIe EZ-Latch Plus to its equivalent on the M.2 ports, heatsinks and even a quick-connecting Wi-Fi antenna all cutting the time it takes to jump into your favourite game.

Features such as a POST code display and power and reset buttons are usually reserved for pricier boards but Gigabyte has managed to include them.

The I/O panel has a decent nine Type-A USB ports too, although there’s only one Type-C Thunderbolt 4 port, while most USB4-equipped AMD boards have two of those for a little extra flexibility. Thunderbolt 4 hubs exists if you want to expand this, but they’re usually expensive.

Gigabyte’s EFI is also included in the white theme, so the company deserves plenty of credit for going to these lengths. It’s not quite as modern as Asus or MSI’s recent updated efforts, but it’s still easy to find your way around and get at useful settings such as the XMP memory profile, boot order or fan control, with the latter having an excellent suite in the EFI as well as in Windows using Gigabyte’s free software.

You’ll have to take our performance comparisons as you find them as there have been so many performance fixes updates for Intel’s Core Ultra CPUs over the last few weeks that making direct comparisons with boards tested back at launch is rather tricky.

PC Gamer test bench
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K | Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | RAM: 32 GB Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR5-6000 | Storage: 2 TB Corsair MP700 | PSU: MSI MAG AB50GL 850 W | OS: Windows 11 24H2 | Chassis: Open platform | Monitor: Dell U2415

Temperatures don’t change that much, though and for a Z890 board dealing with our Core Ultra 9 285K, it managed to knock a couple of degrees of the temperature we saw with the Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Hero and MSI MEG Z890 Ace at a peak of 50°C. Its peak PCIe 5.0 SSD temperature was a fair bit warmer than the Asus board, but at 72°C just comfortably away from the danger zone unlike the 77°C recorded by the MSI MEG Z890 Ace.

Performance seems to have improved compared to our earlier Z890 reviews, but this isn’t down to Gigabyte, rather than the plethora of fixes from Intel and Microsoft. Gaming performance was higher overall, sometimes by large amounts and it also saw smaller uplifts in Cinebench, Blender and 7-zip, each time taking the performance crown.

The combination if BIOS updates, Windows 11 24H2 and the latest Windows updates all contribute here and there are more fixes to come. Power consumption was largely in line with other Z890 boards we’ve tested, though, with a 91 W CPU package power reading in our game test and peak of 239 W in Cinebench sitting within 10 W of other boards.

If Intel’s Core Ultra 200 series had knocked it out the park, or even offered decent gains over its predecessor across the board as well as giving AMD something to think about, this review would have gone very differently. As it stands, though, it’s tricky to recommend anything Z890-related due to our initial findings, but the benchmarks here do suggest the situation for Arrow Lake has improved and sometimes significantly.

The trouble is, if your building a gaming PC, there’s only one CPU you should be pairing a $300 motherboard with and that’s AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D. In fact, it’s so good that it’s outsold all of AMD’s other Ryzen 9000 CPUs combined. However, you’re probably here because you want to buy a Z890 board for some reason and not anything from AMD.

Gigabyte has taken the white theme to the extreme, it has better port options in some areas than some AMD B850 boards we’ve seen and Gigabyte has shoehorned in way more features that we expected given there’s actually change from $300. Its AMD equivalent does offer a couple of extra bits for about the same price, but if three hundred bucks is your limit and you want a white Z890 motherboard, this is easily the best option out there.

A quick glance at the latest B850 boards sees quite a few retail for more than the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice, though, and also lack features such as USB4 and also opt for budget audio codecs. A quick glance over the PCB on this board, though, and we’re pleasantly surprised by the features considering there’s a two at the beginning of the price tag.

The X870 chipset is all about making features such as USB4 and PCIe 5.0 for SSDs and graphics cards mainstream, but there seems to be enough budget left over to add plenty of premium options in other areas though.

At nearly $300, it’s still a lot for a motherboard, but the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice would certainly be capable of running a high-end water-cooled PC if you wanted to and not feel dated even through 2027 when AMD has stated Socket AM5 could start to wind down.

Apart from the CPU socket and chipset, the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice has a nearly identical number in the Intel Z890 camp so making comparisons is interesting. You’re definitely getting the better deal with AMD despite a little less RGB lighting, with a few more ports and power delivery phases and the Z890 option lacks 2-pin thermal probe headers included on this board that allow you to hook up coolant probes in water-cooling systems or fine-tune your case’s cooling.

You get more Type-C ports on the I/O panel here too, albeit in USB4 guise rather than Thunderbolt 4, but here two is mostly better than one. There are more PCIe 5.0 M.2 ports as well, but you probably want to stick with the top one as the other two will steal lanes from your graphics card. It’s great to see features such as power and rest ports and a POST code display on a board at this price too as they just make it easier when testing, benchmarking or troubleshooting.

If you’re wondering what the HDMI port is on the PCB, it’s for external screens. You might have seen those included with cases such as the Y70 Touch from Hyte, where you have to wire the screen to a port on the rear of your PC. With this port, you can run the cable inside the case, which is less complicated, although it’s worth noting it only supports up to 1,920 x 1,080 at 30 Hz.

This area has another oddity too. There are no fan headers whatsoever in the middle of the PCB, with six located at the bottom and another two up top. This might make it tricky powering large numbers of rear or roof fans in addition to a CPU cooler without extension cables.

All of Gigabyte’s tool-free features are here with a push-button graphics card release and latch securing the M.2 heatsinks coming under the EZ-Latch Plus banner, EZ-Latch Click offering a screwdriver-less way of installing SSDs and single-piece Wi-Fi connector too. The upper M.2 heatsink is suitably chunky and cools both sides of your SSD with thermal pads, while just the top is cooled on the larger lower heatsink.

Gigabyte’s EFI has also received a coat of white paint too so it really has gone to town with its colour matching. The EFI itself looks pleasant enough and is well laid out, featuring a superb fan control suit too, but it maybe looks a little less modern than MSI or ASUS, both having recently upgraded theirs. Installing motherboard software is usually risky, but Gigabyte’s Control Center actually offers some decent features, especially with fan control that might be worth checking out.

PC Gamer test bench
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | RAM: 32 GB Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR5-6000 | Storage: 2 TB Corsair MP700 | PSU: MSI MAG AB50GL 850 W | OS: Windows 11 24H2 | Chassis: Open platform | Monitor: Dell U2415

Gigabyte seems to have done an excellent job in the cooling department, with the VRM’s not topping 44°C in our stress test and the chipset not rising above 35°C either. The M.2 temperature was exceptionally low for such an affordable board too, with our toasty PCIe 5.0 SSD only reaching 66°C, which was also 6°C cooler than it’s Z890 sibling, while matching the pricier Gigabyte X870E Aorus Pro.

Its average CPU temperature in games was surprisingly low too and overall it was a touch slower than other Socket AM5 boards we’ve tested. It wasn’t across the board, though, as Factorio saw better results and Baldur’s Gate 3 was much more in line with other AMD benchmarks with the same test system. Outside of games, performance varied by tiny amounts that aren’t really worth commenting on, except for Blender where it was faster in compressing. Power consumption was typical too and stayed within single digits of other Socket AM5 boards we’ve tested with the same CPU.

Apart from a slight hiccup in its layout with the top and middle of the PCB almost devoid of fan headers, the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wi-Fi Ice offers a decent amount of features both new and old while leaving you with change from $300. That’s still not a small amount, but with good cooling for SSDs and VRMs, plenty of USB ports and tool-free features helping to speed up your build time, we’d actually go as far as saying it represents good value, which is rare for a motherboard these days.

You might have to make good use of long fan cables or extensions if you plan on using lots of fans at the top of the case and connecting those to the motherboard and beware of its lane-stealing M.2 ports and stick to the top slot.

Other than these minor gripes that are likely to impact a niche few, the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wi-Fi Ice looks fantastic, offers a decent, balanced set of features and shouldn’t leave anyone wanting, even if you still own it long past Socket AM5’s final days.

This accessory has been a long time coming—I've been waiting on something like this since 2022 when Logitech first launched the Pro Racing Wheel. At the time a very impressive wheel and pedal set, but it was missing any sort of handbrake or shifter accessory. It also lacked any additional wheels for the wheel base. That's a bit of a whiff for an ecosystem claiming 'pro' status, even if it is possible to use another brand's shifter via USB to your PC.

Logitech amended its lineup late last year to include the RS Shifter and Handbrake and the new RS Wheel Hub with new wheel designs. This review only covers the shifter—I have more to say on the wheels that I'll save for a separate review.

The main thing is we're seeing the ecosystem for Logitech's Pro Racing Wheel expand into something a little more competitive with midrange offerings from the likes of Fanatec (now owned by Corsair), Thrustmaster, and Moza.

The RS Shifter and Handbrake is comprised of a tall base unit measuring around 15 cm (6 inches), a metal handle, and a USB Type-A protruding out the rear. This cable is attached to the unit and non-removable, so be careful not to chew it up in your brake pedal.

The RS Shifter and Handbrake can be used as either a shifter or handbrake. If you require both functions for your sim setup, you'll need to buy two. It's easy to swap between shifting and braking modes between races or different games, at least: the included metal handle screws into one of two threads on the unit to switch between modes. Though you wouldn't want to be doing this too regularly. There's also a small switch to toggle between handbrake, analogue handbrake, and shifting.

The thread in the middle marked in blue is for shifting, which offers a full sweep both towards and away from you. Both directions end in a satisfying and substantial clunk. It's a heavy shifter, not like your average road car manual gearbox, though when you're racing with a load-cell brake and 11 Nm or more of torque it is suitably weighty to match.

I measured about 1.5 cm or just under half an inch of travel to each shift—it feels like a pretty long shift when racing but not overly so. While racing around Silverstone in Assetto Corsa or Spa-Francorchamps in Forza Motorsport, each shift adds a level of engagement and realism that makes both games so much more enjoyable. As an upgrade to my sim rig, it's a very noticeable improvement and I find myself wanting to sit down and race more often to experience it.

It has also helped to keep shifting front and centre in my mind as I've raced around each track. Learning where to shift and what gear to shift into is a part of mastering any run, and I feel myself keeping a close eye on when I am upshifting or downshifting, and how many times, with this installed. But it can be both a benefit and a hindrance to your lap times. It's more punishing for the times when you mess up and have to wrestle the wheel with one hand occupied, though a lap is more entertaining for this extra jeopardy.

This doesn't serve up a traditional H-pattern manual gearbox with all of its quirks and conveniences, however. That's a bit of a shame, though PC users need not worry about compatibility—a large number of H-pattern shifters on the market will plug directly into your PC, bypassing any need to buy Logitech's own gear.

The RS Shifter and Handbrake is reportedly able to connect via the Pro Racing Wheel's rear USB Type-A ports or a direct USB connection to a gaming PC. However, I was only able to use the RS Shifter and Handbrake through connecting it to my PC directly, via the included Type-A USB cable. That works just fine in games—just set up the input as if the shifter is a separate device to the wheel—but it does mean there's one extra USB cable running between my rig and PC. I tried every port, multiple cables, various software updates, and all manner of combinations to get it up and running but it's yet to work.

Onto the braking function. This will appeal to players of rally games who don't want to go careening into a haybale or ditch when racing up to a hairpin. The unmarked thread on the unit is used for braking, which sits right at the top of the action and allows for roughly 3 cm or 1 ¼ inches of travel when engaged. The handbrake will sweep in a smooth motion to a spongy stop. It's not as mechanically satisfying as the sequential shifting but it's just about all you really need out of a handbrake accessory.

The RS Shifter and Handbrake will set you back $150/£130. That's not a terrible price for this level of quality—I'm yet to detect any sort of rattle during use. It gets a little less affordable if you feel you need two of these things. I'm happy with one in every racing game I've tested it in so far: the shifter for racing games and the handbrake for rally games.

It also comes with a table clamp that's comprised of thick plastic and feels pretty robust. It stayed put during my testing with the Secretlab Magnus Pro, which is only an inch thick, though it opens to about 6.5 cm or 2 1/2 inches.

In order to use the shifter on the Playseat Trophy required a mounting plate that's sold separately. That set me back £39. The shifter now sits happily atop it with room for one more besides, so I'll chalk that up to a good investment.

Weighing up the whole package, the versatility and build quality of the RS Shifter and Handbrake get my nod of approval. It might not be for everyone for that lack of H-pattern, and if you wanted to go more premium, you absolutely could, but it delivers on its core promise of convenient shifting and braking that should appeal to the sim racing player that hasn't yet found their 'one true racing game'.

I think there's a real purpose if you're a streamer and want the absolute best clarity but, with the likes of Google Meet limiting video calls to just 1080p, why I would want to pay a couple hundred extra bucks for niche use cases is beyond me.

Fortunately, the OBSBot Meet 2 with its solid specs, cute size, and very reasonable price aims to fix that problem. And give you an excellent everyday webcam in the process.

Starting off with the most noticeable thing, this webcam is absolutely adorable. At just under an inch tall and under two inches wide, it's one of the smallest webcams I've used. It's only about 70% of the size of the Logitech Brio 100 I'd previously used on my setup and not quite as cumbersome either. With grey, white, and green options available, they all look great but the almost seafoam shade of green is my favourite.

The lens of this webcam takes up the majority of the space of the device. Apart from a small OBSBot logo up the top left, it lacks any distinct branding. To set this thing up, you simply have to plug a USB-C cable into the receiver on the back and connect the included stand to your monitor.

The stand is the weakest part of the package. Instead of screwing in via a thread, the stand has a small magnetic pull that keeps the webcam in place.

This feels like a bit of an oversight and a slightly thick USB-C has enough power to constantly knock the webcam off the stand. It clips initially fine but lacks the strength to hold onto a surface well. As the stand itself is fairly small, when the webcam's weight is adjusted, this will often knock the entire thing off.

One night, the stand and webcam came off entirely and the Meet 2 took a nasty dent as a result. It's only small but noticeable. If you plan on using this webcam, you will need to have a small USB-C, preferably with tidy wire management so it doesn't dangle and get caught anywhere, or need a stand to screw this into. Luckily, it has threading at the bottom so works well once you do.

If you are worried about privacy, it comes with a handy magnetic cover. The webcam is so tiny that my, admittedly rather large, fingers occasionally move the entire webcam instead of removing the cover. But it's a smart feature that becomes very natural after only a few days with the cam.

Having a physical cover is one of those little peace-of-mind accessories that adds a lot, despite being a very small touch. It does mean there's a chance you can lose it as you can take it off entirely but, if you're careful with your tech, holding onto the cover shouldn't be a problem. Once set up on the desk, this tiny little webcam is an absolute joy for the price.

The half-inch CMOS sensor is the same you can find in OBSBot's more expensive Tiny 2 Lite webcam, and an inch smaller than the CMOS sensor in the OBSBot Tiny 2. The 48 MP sensor has an aperture of 1.8 with an FOV of 79.4°, which makes it very similar to the much larger and more expensive Tiny 2, and the image quality is pretty great as a result. In video, it can capture up to 4K at 30 fps and down to 1080p and below at 60 fps.

Though it supports HDR, I find the results to be a little inconsistent. In low or medium lighting, illuminated by the brightness of a monitor or mood lighting, the HDR mode felt crisper and dealt with the contrast of colours better. But it tended to feel a little more washed out in good lighting. Luckily, you can access easy HDR controls from the OBSBot Centre app, which also serves to get your webcam the latest firmware updates. This software is great, being not only intuitive but without any software hiccups or stalls.

In the software, the Console tab can be used to adjust framing as well as give a software approximation of a few lens types (wide, medium and narrow). You can also turn on auto framing, which is one of the many AI-powered functions, and it works fine to keep the body in the frame and focused. Though its limited size and FOV means it won't keep tracking for very long if you move to the left or right. From using the two, this section of the software hub is far more impressive in the Lite 2 than in the Meet 2, though the former is a more expensive webcam choice.

Focusing in particular is great on this webcam, adjusting to items in frame and in the distance in a matter of moments. In the image tab, you can further change how focus works, turn HDR on and off, as well as customise the image with contrast, sharpness, saturation, etc. These all work together to further hone a webcam that, from the very start, puts out high-quality video that is dynamic and adjustable. Naturally, in quite dark areas, the webcam does become a tad grainy and it won't work wonders with almost no light but, if you like to play games in a Discord call, it can illuminate your smiling face as you taunt your enemies friends.

The Meet 2 has a few extra AI features, like the ability to change auto framing by holding your hand up and zooming in and out by holding your hand in the shape of an L. It feels a tad gimmicky, especially when you have to explain what you're doing in a call while the software catches up with you, but it mostly works fine. The same is true of built-in beauty filters, that lightly pull in the chin or brighten the skin. They feel too obviously like a filter for me to get any genuine use out of them but they're not necessarily distracting.

If you do plan on using this webcam for games, you will want to use your own mic because this one sounds a bit muffled and far away. Part of the problem with a webcam of this size and price point is it has to make cuts in other areas and this mic's quality is fine for a quick chat but unsustainable for long-term use, without annoying enemies colleagues.

Other than this, video quality is great and clear in both 4K and 1080p, picking up the overhead light well while piecing individual strands of hair and movement together. The screen doesn't feel too cluttered with movement even at 30 fps, with very little visual artifacting or blur to its output. The software only ever feels like a boon to it, which is surprising from something that boasts "AI features".

From my time with the OBSBot Meet 2, I still don't fully get the need for a 4K webcam. But this is priced well enough that it can outpace many 1080p choices in the right places and still give you the option to bring up that quality if you plan on creating high-quality streams or video. That adorable aesthetic also serves a practical use case for anyone with a particularly small setup, and it can even work with a laptop. You may need a mic and a better stand for the best experience but, once that's sorted, it's hard to beat this kind of quality and aesthetic at its price point.

One place where the Virtuoso Max does definitely stand out is the microphone. Typically, the best wireless gaming headsets don't sound fantastic to your teammates as they often prioritise swift and accurate sound and battery life over the mic.

However, the Corsair mic sounds clear and unwavering, rarely cutting out or faltering. From my time with it, this microphone has withstood the whispers uttered below the steps of enemies in PUBG, and the inevitable shout, that comes from one of my squad hitting the wrong button and giving away our position.

Unfortunately, sidetone—the ability to hear yourself back while you speak—might not suggest just how nice this mic sounds as it's just not great in the software. You need to practically shout to hear your own voice, which isn't true when playing online. This sounds like a technical glitch but I can't figure out how to make it any better, other than setting sidetone sensitivity as high as possible.

Connectivity, while limited, is very thoughtful. On the left cup of the headphones is your on switch, which can be placed in the middle position to connect to the 2.4 GHz receiver, or all the way down to connect to Bluetooth at the same time.

A dial taking up the entirety of each cup can be used to adjust volume, with the left one initially changing the sound of the receiver's audio, and the right changing Bluetooth volume.

This is not only very intuitive to use but also excellent for a last-minute Duolingo lesson at 11:55 PM in the middle of a gaming session. Though you can swap which ear does what in Corsair iCUE, its own software, you can't customise it to adjust game to mic volume ratio, mic gain, or anything else you may want to control with those dials. This is a shame as a little more customisation would help out.

The Corsair software is basically necessary to really get the full use out of this kit. It controls your basic EQ functions and lighting, but also allows you to set up a custom sound ID, which tests your ears for the best volume of sound. I've found the EQ performs better with a slight boost in both bass and highs, leaving the mids more or less untouched.

Once you have done this, the Corsair Virtuoso Max sounds great, with a very neutral sound profile. The bass is not quite as strong as the other parts though, and boosting it too much in the EQ settings sounds a bit hollow. Rather than getting that thump of a heavy low end, it approximates the feeling of that rumble instead, not sounding quite as clear as I'd like a bass to sound.

I've noticed this more neutral sound profile functions at its best in single-player dynamic games like the surprisingly brilliant Indiana Jones and the Great Circle thanks to its wide range of sounds. It is a more immersive headset than it is a competitive one, which means it won't really outperform a much cheaper headset in listening for the footsteps of grunts (or well, other human beings) in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

But those diminishing returns are largely true of any headset over around $150. However, that sound quality is certainly clear in games intended to engross you more than they challenge you.

Not only do you notice that pretty hefty price tag of just over $300 in the mic and sound, but also in the build quality. This set of cans is super sturdy and stretching it out or moving the band, I never noticed a worrying degree of flexibility. The band itself is a combination of plastic and aluminium and stretches with ease. It's the kind of headset you can wrap over a monitor or throw onto a sofa without worries.

Unfortunately, this rigidity is definitely a point of contention, and though it works pretty well over gaming sessions for my (rather large) skull, it is hefty, and the cushioning on the earcups is very shallow.

This means a light touch on the cushioning can feel the rigidity of the cup itself. The same is true of the band at the top of the headset. If you are a bit more sensitive to the heaviness of a headset or the rigidity of its band, this might ache you after a gaming session for more than an hour or two.

At over 60 hours of battery life with RGB off, I've only ever charged this headset when the idea has struck me and I've somehow never run its battery dry in traditional use. That RGB is mostly a superfluous but pretty addition to the headset, providing lights in the side of the cups and the mic to signify whether or not it's muted. With my review set coming in all silver, it's a rather pretty set of headphones too.

Rather strangely, the included USB-C port only works for charging, which means you can't use this headset wired even if you wanted to. It doesn't have an aux jack either, which means you can't easily connect to PlayStation or Xbox in a pinch through the controllers.

The PC version does work on PlayStation, though, by plugging in the dongle and there is a version of the headset designed specifically for Xbox, but multiplatform connectivity with the same headset is impossible.

When connected to a PC and your phone, everything feels rather natural. You can swap between customised EQ modes by hitting the custom button in the right earcup and holding that down swaps from standard hearing to active noise cancelling to transparency mode, which is intended to let in outside sounds while you play.

Unfortunately, while the ANC mode very naturally hides sounds from around you, the transparency mode isn't quite as clear or consistent as I would like. It's not bad but not quite great either.

The Corsair Virtuoso Max show off their quality in sound design, mic quality, and sturdiness but this is both a blessing and a curse as it's quite rigid. It also has a high price tag to accompany it. Not doing anything majorly wrong but not standing above its competition, the Virtuoso Max is a set of cans I rather like, but not quite enough in any one area other than maybe mic quality and Bluetooth connectivity.

But there's a reason HoT starts like that: It's a mission statement. Yes, it's saying, you're one little guy against an army of hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of other little guys, and yes, you're sucking up experience gems by the bucketload, but this isn't that other autobattler. This is something different, more deliberate, more considered, and altogether less slot-machiney than its razzle-dazzle forebear. This is Vampire Survivors with a heavy Diablo gloss. It's exactly as dangerous for your time and productivity as it sounds.

Hellbound

I'm not namedropping HoT's clearest influences to demean it. The game doesn't shy away from its inspirations—they're there on its sleeve for all to see, but it would be unfair and inaccurate to call Halls of Torment derivative. By some mad alchemy, it blends the compulsive loops and endless enemies of Vampire Survivors with the gear and build-crafting of Diablo and produces something wholly its own.

Despite the writhing masses of sprites, it's a little more thoughtful and conservative than other autobattlers I've played. Your hero has over 20 stats for you to take into account and consider as you massacre your way through dungeons. There's the usual stuff: health, defence, damage, but there's also stuff like piercing, force, and a critical hit system composed of multiple substats.

Rounds are 30 minutes, so you're not likely to max them all out even if you want to. You have to decide how you're going to spec your little guy over a multitude of +1% and +0.2% increments to their myriad stats. And where ordinarily those kinds of minute increases are barely noticeable in RPGs, the constant churn of level-ups means they quickly accrue into meaningful differences.

Plus, your buildcrafting is made easier by one of HoT's primary cleavages from Vampire Survivors: Level ups only give you a chance to buff stats, not to choose new weapons, and you'll get four options to choose from (with opportunities to reroll your options, once you get in far enough). If you want new gear, actual gear, you'll have to slay one of the bosses roaming the levels, but it's not strictly necessary. Filling all your possible weapon slots is a rarity, and it wouldn't be unheard of to make it all the way though a level without ever getting anything on top of your default, class-based weapon.

Take my favourite class and probable war criminal: The Exterminator. He's got a flamethrower. Notionally, you could have other weapons, but who cares? My focus when playing him is turning him into a roving, angry Roman candle, melting hordes of enemies into masses of undifferentiated flesh. Is this optimal? Perhaps not. Is this satisfying? Like you wouldn't believe.

That's the handle: The thing that makes Halls of Torment different to Vampire Survivors and the thing that makes me keep coming back to it is that I feel like I'm following something resembling a plan. Vampire Survivors is great, but its experience is one of frantically assembling an ad-hoc toolkit out of whatever its level-up gachas spit at you. Failure is a quirk of the slot machine. In HoT? My failure is the failure of my plan or my ability to adhere to it. There's an element of luck, but only an element.

Plus, Halls of Torment's specific aesthetic couldn't be more attuned to my sensibilities as a child of the ARPGs of the late '90s and early 2000s. Give me two honking great orbs representing my health and mana and a protagonist who has no articulating joints in his legs and I'm a happy man, and HoT makes me very happy indeed with its lo-fi heroics and diffuse, stygian levels. If I could play this thing on a beige CRT while Rob Zombie screamed in my ears I wouldn't know it wasn't 1999. Actually, wait, I can do that. If anyone needs me, tell them I'm busy for the next… foreseeable future.

Thank Goodness You're Here! has an unwavering commitment to eliciting the kind of laughter that makes a little bit of pee come out. From the opening montage of surreal, whimsical and ever-so-slightly unnerving adverts to the anarchic musical number it ends on, it offers no time to breathe between all the guffawing you'll be doing. But it is absolutely worth risking the gag-induced asphyxiation for—it's a small price to pay.

At the end of last year, we called it the Best Comedy Game in our 2024 GOTYs, but for some reason we never actually got around to reviewing it, and thus it falls to me to slap a number on this thing and tell you that you owe it to yourself to spend a couple of hours exploring the fictional Yorkshire town of Barnsworth.

Technically we're in adventure game territory, but it has little in common with its joke-filled compatriots like Monkey Island and Sam & Max. You'll find no tricky conundrums or pixel-hunting puzzles here. Instead, playing as a nameless, voiceless, dogsbody of inconsistent size—allowing you to, say, explore a disturbing meat dimension inside a slab of ham—you'll mostly be finding yourself at the centre of increasingly bizarre skits.

Your task is to help the eccentric residents of Barnsworth with simple problems. Typically, the solution amounts to simply pushing forward, exploring this weird cartoon reality and embracing its lunacy. Sometimes you'll jump on something, knock another thing over, or give someone a playful slap. There's no inventory management to take you out of the world. Rather, you're like a child, randomly touching things with your sticky fingers to see what will happen.

Despite the absence of headscratchers, though, solving problems in Thank Goodness You're Here! is just as satisfying, if not more so, than it is in a traditional adventure game—such is the power of the jokes and their pay-offs.

One task sees you helping a new bed-ridden pal do their shopping, which immediately becomes a ridiculous escapade when you realise that their hand will be accompanying you, as their increasingly long arm slithers across Barnsworth. Inside the shop, you'll need to find the perfect soup for them, but it's just another excuse for a lark as you cause a terrible mess on the shelves and revel in some very silly product names, like "Tiny Tom's Tinned Pie" and "Herbert's Lovely Boy Soup". Knocking a tin of "Soup To Push" into the trolley, your pal—talking through their hand—will complain that it's "too meta".

Barnsworth is a small town, but you'll do several loops of it, giving the game the opportunity to create some brilliant running gags. God, there are so many great ones, full of escalating madness. But my favourite has to be the use of a chimney as a shortcut, covering a poor old fella's living room in soot, time and time again. The way the homeowner becomes resigned to their fate, trapped in a filthy cycle, endlessly tidying their home only for a tiny man to ruin it without offering even a single apology, it's slightly tragic. But mostly very funny.

Developer Coal Supper works comedy magic with this tiny scope, filling each loop with bizarre asides, new gags and weird detours. You'll find yourself shrinking down to the size of a rodent to briefly explore a society of rats one minute, then the next, you'll be treated to a cutscene that explains why the grocer with the huge noggin is so angry, delving into his past traumas and broken marriage. Scale and perspective are constantly being played with, both being almost pathologically inconsistent, but everything is tied together by one central objective: making you laugh.

The tone is cheeky and often veers into the puerile—plenty of cartoon violence and jokes about bodily functions—and along with the art style this gives Thank Goodness You're Here! strong Viz vibes. For the uninitiated (and outside of the UK, that's probably most of you), Viz is a long-running adult comic that serves as a rude alternative to the likes of The Beano and Dandy. The surrealism and occasional dark undertones, meanwhile, call to mind fellow Northern comedy The League of Gentleman.

One crucial difference, though, is that Thank Goodness You're Here! is never mean-spirited, nor does it set out to shock—though it's certainly full of surprises. Barnsworth might be filled to the brim with lunatics, but it's never anything less than warm and welcoming. It's steeped in colloquialisms and geographically specific oddities, but it's not a million miles away from Parks and Rec's Pawnee, Indiana.

It might be harder for players outside of the UK to connect with, but none of its gags are really exclusionary. If you've ever laughed at Monty Python, I Think You Should Leave, Aunty Donna—basically any surrealist sketch show—you're probably going to have a great couple of hours slapping your way through Barnsworth.

Indeed, a lot of effort went into getting the jokes to work in different languages, from Brazilian Portuguese to Simplified Chinese, since so many of them don't really make sense in a straight translation. But the concept of a small post-industrial town full of oddballs is pretty universal. Besides, when you're dealing with a game as strange as Thank Goodness You're Here!, everything doesn't have to make complete sense.

The lunacy, though, belies how tightly structured it is, as it funnels you through sketch after sketch, ensuring that no space or character is wasted. It is meticulously designed to evoke an absurd number of laughs per minute. And when it's over, you'll be pleasantly exhausted. It is so rare in games for something to give itself entirely to the noble pursuit of leaving us in stitches, and Thank Goodness You're Here! does so with such skill and glee that it's impossible to avoid becoming smitten.

It's tense and unpredictable. Learning how to improvise is a necessity, especially as I can't guarantee when, where, or even if vital equipment will turn up. Spells rarely do something as simple as hurt the enemy ahead, and deadly traps could be hiding under any and every inch of the floor. Any mistake or careless slip could (will) quickly spiral into an unrecoverable disaster, and that would mean I'd lose everything, every item, weapon, and even my stats, and have to start over from the first floor. Again.

The odd thing is Shiren doesn't feel merciless in practice. It's more like trying to juggle chainsaws on horseback. If—if—everything goes my way and I don't blink, or sneeze, or breathe at the wrong time, then I'll have pulled off the greatest trick ever.

Labbing the labyrinth

The first few floors cover simple concepts like attacking and diagonal movement in concise popups, keywords can be clicked on at any time (making it easy to find the answer to questions like "What the heck is the 'empathetic' status and do I want it?"), and the Monster Dojo back in the first village is a training ground and safe experimental sandbox all rolled into one. I love being able to pop in there and use the premade puzzles to not just read about but play through the fundamentals of successful Shiren-ing, or customise an empty room to test out some status effect or just observe an enemy's behaviour. How long, exactly, can I send a room full of monsters to sleep for? Just how much damage is reflected back at my opponent when I've got a Counter Shield equipped?

Everything I learn here I can apply to my exploration of the island, giving me a sneakier, smarter option when faced with a battle I'd definitely lose if I faced it head-on—like the sudden appearance of a buff muscular tiger, a monster that had tossed me around like a basketball on a previous run. This time was different. I'd taken a minute to experiment with magical staves back in the dojo, and remembered I had one on me now that could paralyse anything its magical bullets touched. In one move that tiger became about as dangerous as a fluffy kitten, literally unable to get its paws on me while I chipped away at its health from a safe distance.

It was the perfect reminder of Shiren's most important lesson. Everything from simple bracelets to shining swords are stuffed with conditional effects and unique properties (and can often be enhanced with even more), and I really do need to use them all. Mindlessly rushing up to a monster to hit it in the face—even if I can hit it really hard—is rarely the right answer unless I'm after a quick, inglorious death.

I can't be certain what will show up and try to kill me while I'm making the long trek from sandy beach to rocky summit, but as Serpentcoil draws monsters from predetermined pools I can get a sixth sense for when archers and samurai grasshoppers could start appearing, and with some time and practice I can at least prepare myself for them.

I was eventually so well prepared—in personal experience, not shiny items laden with special effects—that I decided to test my skills against the game's epic cold open, where I'm plunged into a do-or-die battle against the final boss with nothing more than a few semi-randomised pieces of standard equipment to help. The game expects me to lose here. I'm supposed to watch Shiren pass out and then wake up on the beach, ready to start his first full dungeon run. Instead, I won. No, I did more than just win: I comfortably cleared the entire adventure on a fresh save in less than five minutes.

To put that in modern roguelike terms: it's like I rode an elevator directly to Hades and beat him without a single upgrade or godly boon.

Break everything

After spending hours and hours learning and trying and failing and trying and failing again just so I could hope I'd reach the final battle, it felt like I'd reached a new stage of enlightenment. This game is so eager to accommodate absolutely any wild idea I have, to run with whatever crackers strategy I can imagine, it'll even let me win unwinnable battles. It makes all the hardship along the way feel collaborative—every enemy attack is a fresh clue, every sneaky trick something I can use myself. Shiren wants me to learn the rules so I can not just break them, but throw every last one of them back at it. Strategy and knowledge beat everything, even a backpack full of really sharp swords and shiny shields.

And the best part? When it's confident I've mastered the basics, Serpentcoil explodes into a wildly creative version of itself. As in Hades, beating it once is essentially just the beginning.

Clearing the story at any speed unlocks an avalanche of further tales. Challenges and new features await anyone brave enough to continue the adventure. The new labyrinths are often based on a particular concept or special item, such as clearing a dungeon in the shortest number of steps or stuffing Shiren so full of delicious onigiri he temporarily becomes a sumo-sized whirlwind of destruction. I'm tested in a dozen new ways I hadn't even imagined, encouraged to not just use everything I already know, but invent brand new strategies to counter problems that didn't exist an hour or two earlier.

This is an incredible roguelike. Newcomers will find it has all the information they need to learn the basics at their own pace, and a charming, well-paced story filled with memorable characters, from food-loving samurai to awkward pirates. Longtime wanderers can use their skills to break through to the NG+ features in mere minutes, and the game is happy to instantly raise its own bar to match.

At any and every level, this is a flexible and layered adventure packed with rewards, happy to give players a toolbox filled with absurd abilities and let them invent their own path through the game.

WD's SN850X SSDs aren't exactly new in the field either. We reviewed WD's SN850X line when it first debuted to the world back in October of 2022. But at last, Joe Public has finally been gifted with an 8 TB update from the company. Complete with a revised controller, far denser NAND, and a seriously large price tag.

For core tech, the 8 TB variant is running a proprietary Sandisk controller built off the back of its Triton MP16+ B2 platform (the same one found in the original line-up). It's combined that with Kioxia's 162-layer BiCS6 TLC NAND, fed into four separate packages on the stick. That's then backed up by a healthy slab of DDR4 to keep everything nicely chundling along, and of course it all comes packaged in that ever faithful M.2 2280 form factor (albeit it is double-sided) complete with a heatsink option if you need it.

As for cost, well, since the 8 TB's initial launch, WD has rather intuitively hit it on the head with a pretty big price cut hammer. You can now pick one of these up for around $650 in the US (it did debut at $850). That's a smart move, given two 4 TB WD SN850Xs will set you back just $600 total. WD basically has a balancing act to do with this thing. It needs to simultaneously keep the stock flowing on the older units without compromising the sales on its new launch. Expect these prices to ping pong around quite a bit, particularly around deal seasons as a result.

As for performance, the SN850X 8 TB puts on quite the show. Sequential figures in Crystal Disk Mark comfortably sat around 7,100 MB/s for read and 6,590 MB/s for write in my testing. Both respectable for a 4.0 drive, and around about what WD's claiming it'll compete at, albeit slightly lower on both than advertised. Random 4K though, well, that is more of a cause for concern. With speeds of just 72 MB/s on the read and 298 MB/s on the write, it's one of the slowest modern PCIe 4.0 drives I've tested, second only to Samsung's 990 Evo Plus.

That's a bit of a problem, especially if you're looking at using this for a games drive.

Sadly, far smaller SSDs, such as Crucial's P310 or WD's own SN770M run rings around it in that metric. The SN770M clocking in 79 and 305 MB/s respectively, and the P310 manages a svelte 76 and 315 MB/s as well. Even WD's own Blue SN5000, a far cheaper Kioxia 162-layer QLC alternative, managed to hang in with at least 80 MB/s on the 4K read. That didn't translate exactly into our gaming tests, mind you, Final Fantasy XIV's Shadowbringers benchmark clocked in a respectable 7.283 second load time on average.

Those slower read and write speeds are likely due to an increase in latency as a result of the SN850X 8 TB housing four NAND chips instead of the two, or even one, found in those alternative drives. That then slows down overall read and write speeds across the board, albeit mildly. That also tallies up nicely with the other SN850X capacity options marketing materials, as they're all listed as having 7,300 MB/s read, rather than the 7,200 found on the 8 TB.

That's also likely a big reason why WD picked Kioxia's far denser NAND to facilitate the 8 TB too, given it's far quicker, yet it's still not quite enough to bring up to the same speed as its predecessors.

PC Gamer test bench
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | RAM: 64 GB (2x32GB) Team Group T-Create Expert DDR5 @ 6000 C34 | GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super | Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi | CPU Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | PSU: 1200W NZXT C1200 (2024) 80+ Gold | Chassis: Geometric Future Model 5

The bigger question you have to ask yourself though is, is this worth it? From a purely practical level, having an 8 TB drive like this (7.27 TB in Windows for those curious) is a bit of a risk.

As a manufacturer, if you're aiming for your SSD to become one of the best SSDs around at any given time, reliability and endurance are key elements on that journey. And by no means am I saying that WD doesn't have a reputation for those two very things; it really does. But, like all SSDs, these things have a lifecycle and data cells that can corrupt and degrade. Things can go wrong.

If you're solely storing all of your games, media, or important documentation on a single 8 TB drive, without a suitable backup solution, and it all goes wrong, or your home gets struck by lightning and fries everything, that's a critical error that could cost you far more than the value of the drive itself.

From a gaming perspective, is the cost worth the convenience gained? If you have a solid internet connection already, doing the download, play, delete, and re-download shuffle isn't exactly that arduous of a task either. Which again hits the SN850X 8 TB on the nose a little. Sure, if you're spending days downloading the latest Diablo IV expansion, then maybe it'd be worthwhile, but even then, you're likely still far better off having far cheaper, slightly faster, twin PCIe 4.0 4TB drives instead. It's just far more practical, at least if your motherboard can support it.

Still, that aside, what's fascinating about this drive is actually not what it represents now, but what it means for the future.

When the initial 4 TB variant launched back in 2022, it had an RRP of an incredible $700. Today, at the time of writing this review, you can pick one up for just shy of $292. That's a drop in price to just 41% of what it was at launch, in the space of two years. That's a radical price cut, and the same's true of its competition too. With that mind, will 2026 finally be the year that we get 4 TB SSDs for $140, and this 8 TB solution doesn't seem quite so outlandish? I'm hopeful, that's for sure, and hopefully all of this will be a moot point.

IKEA’s Utespelare gaming desk absolutely nails that brief, but adds a few extra features that I’d argue are more battle worthy than an inbuilt rave experience.

The Utespelare comes in two colour options, an all black which feels very gamer chic, or a breezier grey with light wood look top. Both are otherwise identical so i grabbed the lighter colour way to match my setup. Unsurprisingly it arrived as a flat packed box ready to end relationships in its assembly.

Because the table top is largely one piece, it’s quite a large unwieldy box and you need a bit of room to set it up. This includes flipping the desk after installing the table top which was a mighty effort, but that’s to be expected for a desk this size.

That’s the first thing to hit me about the Utespelare gaming desk, it’s really pretty big. Coming from standing desks, having a 160 cm by 80 cm workspace is actually huge.

You can easily fit a full sized PC, a couple of monitors, routers, your mug printing gear, and that old iMac you rescued out of the rubbish and have been working on getting up and running for fun without any trouble. Plus there’s a decent amount of space under it for more stuff thanks to the relatively small space taken by the legs.

The official site says it has a 50 kg max tolerance but I’m a mystery number over that and have sat on it for science while feeling pretty safe. I can even lay on it if I’m a bit curled up. I could probably put curtains around the bottom and rent it in this dystopia.

There is just so much room for activities on this flat surface of opportunity.

While putting the desk together there are a couple of choices to make. One is how tall you’re looking to have your desk—which is decided by the leg height. This can be adjusted from 66 cm to 78 cm which is an important feature for ergonomics.

You’ll want to choose your height fast though, because it’s not so easy to adjust once everything is all set up. It’s a little weird if you’ve come from the flexibility of a sit stand setup, but with all the space on this desk it would be perfect for one of those desktop raisers added later down the line.

The other choice is where to place the metal mesh portion of the desktop and how that relates to the cut out in the wooden piece. After consulting the ancient Swedish hieroglyphics, I went with having the cut out backing onto the metal, giving me a really tidy way to hide my cables when pared with the hammock solution included.

It’s one of the easier cable management options to actually use I’ve seen built into a desk as I can keep a power board there, that’s easily accessible for swapping things while still hiding all of my mess.

While being a helpful cable tidy, the metal portion of the desktop is also perfect for all my hot running gamer stuff. It’s a great place to put your PC knowing it’ll have all the airflow it could possibly want accessible to it. I’ve also used it as a place to stick things like routers and other hot-running electronics. It’s great because they’re out of the way at the back of my deep desk but I don’t worry about them overheating or being covered in dust.

While the Utespelare is billed as a gaming desk it feels like a much more sensible product made with gamers in mind than the usual affair. It’s simple, smart, sturdy, and clean. When I walk past it sometimes I just look at it and smile, thinking to myself what a decent desk that is for AUD$199 and how useful it is while still looking quite good in my home.

I know that means I’m getting old, but it’s also a pretty clear sign that IKEA has delivered with this stealth battle station.

Marketed toward pro FPS players, and anyone who needs absolute pinpoint accuracy in the games they play, the Harp Ace Mini uses the same immense 42,000 DPI ROG AimPoint Pro sensor, to prove without any question that your mouse isn't the thing making you miss all those headshots.

In hand, the Harpe Ace Mini feels almost nonexistent compared to the more MMO focussed mice I'm used to. Next to the Razer Naga Pro this thing feels like it's filled with helium. That's partially thanks to the miniscule size, but also the lack of buttons. Where an MMO mouse might have buttons in the double digits, the Harpe Ace Mini packs just seven.

That's your standard two left and right clickers, a clickable scroll wheel, plus two buttons on the right side, and two on the underside. All have a satisfying click and most don't sound too hollow, bar the one on the back left side which resonates a bit within the body. It's to be expected on a mouse this light, since there's next to nothing absorbing sound on the inside. And while it can make a mouse feel cheap, the Harpe Ace Mini manages to come off as sturdy. Pair it with the lovely finish and it's certainly a quality-built little rodent.

The Harpe Ace Mini is mostly ambidextrous, in so much as it's semi-symmetrical. The side buttons still live on the left, so lefties will have to use their pinkie or whatever wizardry they perform to deal with our righty-dominated world.

There's definitely some thought that's gone into keeping the shape less curved to one side, at least. That may be better for lefties, but it means there's less ergonomic specificity for either. Pit it against something like the Logitech G502 X and its superior ergonomics and it comes up a little short, but then some will prefer a less curvy mouse design.

This thing is inoffensively small, which makes it great for my little hands, though I imagine players with bigger grippers would struggle a little with it. Not greatly, but if you're a palm grip user with large hands you might want to think twice before buying something so itty-bitty. That said, the size does go toward making this mouse all the more portable.

Speaking of portability, I've been really impressed with the Harpe Ace Mini's battery life. Using it for 12 hours on the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi without charging or letting it go to sleep the charge indicator still showed green.

Above: Tested at 1,000 Hz — The more erratic the dots are, the worse the tracking on the mouse.

A week of 3-4 hour gaming sessions a day later and it was still at more than half charge, even with the RGB lighting on. I don't have enough time to drain the battery but, by my calculations, it would take me four weeks at this pace to fully drain it, minimum.

As for the software needed, it requires Armoury Crate Gear to play with button assignments, performance and power settings, but if you want to get going with scenario profiles and design your own macro settings you'll have to download the full Armoury Crate & Aura Sync.

Frankly the latter is a little much just to access macro options. Even the lite Gear version is quite a large file to download and install which is a shame, and I've had a couple of issues with connection and setting changes being met with errors. Having to restart my machine at several junctures just to get the software to work isn't a good look, though when it does work it does all the basics well and the interface is nice and clean.

Performance-wise, the ROG Harpe Ace Mini is a stellar mouse. Hardly a waver when it comes to accuracy, and consistent tracking points all across the board show that this is one accurate rodent. Does it need to be this accurate for everyday use? Probably not, but with no tradeoff in terms of weight for a more impressive sensor, it's easy to appreciate the effort in this department.

The Harpe Ace Mini goes hard where accuracy is concerned, and while its attempts to stay ambidextrous cost it the more specific ergonomics of a right-handed mouse, I can really see it taking off for pro gamers and claw grippers who prefer light mice, as long as they don't mind downloading the huge Armory Crate software just to mess with macros. With impressive battery life, anyone wanting to take the Harpe Ace Mini on the go will be best pleased they won't have to charge it for ages. Sure there are cheaper wireless gaming mice out there with similar battery lives, but not many that also match the Harpe Ace Mini's impressive accuracy and weightlessness.

Lucky, then, that Corsair has been thinking a lot about keyboard switches recently. Exhibit A in this investigation are the Hall effect magnetic switches in the K70 Max, which went down quite well in the PC Gamer review. In the K70 Core you’ll find something slightly different, pre-lubed Corsair MLX Red linear mechanical switches, which are making their debut here, but still with a whole lot of sound-damping foam, just like the K70 Max.

Core keyboards are a step down from the top-of-the-line Pro boards in Corsair’s range. This doesn’t exactly make them budget models, as the price is still higher than that of truly cheap examples, but like a politician desperate for re-election they focus on the core values that make a keyboard great.

These are: having keys? Check. Flippy feet at the back? Rubber pads at the front? Check and check. USB connection? Check (though a wireless version is also available for the profane and corrupt). Absolute dust and fingerprint magnet? Check. Little dial in the top corner that looks neat but you’ll probably never use? Check... though we’re diverging from core values and into oppugnant morality here.

Otherwise, it’s the usual mix of aluminium and plastic, RGB LEDs and a smidge of flash memory (enough for five profiles). It also uses a USB wired connection that sees a rubber-coated cable emerge from the rear-left of the chassis and make its way round to the back of your PC. A USB hub would have been nice here, but we don’t get one. The cable has a plug on the end that looks for all the world like a USB-C plugged into a USB-A adapter, with a grippy bit to allow easy pulling off. However, after a heavy session of vigorous tugging it remained stubbornly attached. It seemed a bit extreme to get the pliers out, so we’re just going to have to accept that Corsair made it look like that on purpose.

But there's also foam, and it goes a long way to soundproofing the board. You’ll still get a clicky sound if you bottom-out the keys, but there's no case ping (probably thanks to the foam) and lubed switches mean actuations are silent too - though it does still make a sound as the key returns to its resting position following a press. While it’s never going to be as silent as a membrane keyboard, if you really try you can switch between a glorious mechanical noise and a reasonably quiet typing action.

Performance is excellent, with a 1,000 Hz report rate and full anti-ghosting rollover. The important thing here is the feel of the keys, and they are superb. They sit fairly high, mushrooming out of the deck as if left behind by frolicing fairies in the night, their stems clearly visible if you hold the board up and peer into the edge. Push down on them and you experience a smooth descent to the baseplate, with 45g actuation force and a pre-travel distance of 1.9 mm, before bottoming out at 4 mm. There's a degree of adjustability in this too, if you’re the sort to half-press a key while lining up a shot.

There are no clever optical or adjustable actuation systems here, and you can’t hot-swap anything, but there is a magnetic wrist rest in the box with a strange rough texture that makes you glad you’re not touching it with your fingers.

By default, the dial adjusts your PC’s volume, and there's an iCUE button next to it that maps to play/pause as there are no dedicated media keys. Much of the functionality can be customised in the iCUE software, which as well as remapping keys and cycling through RGB lighting schemes (there’s a keyboard shortcut for dimming which is much faster than opening up an extra app) can also record macros and change between presets for the control dial.

That dial is an exception to the ‘everything is customisable’ rule, but you can use it for brightness, scrolling and zooming as well as volume. It’s also an exception to the slippery lubed feel of the board, as not only does it have a textured surface and yellow highlight paint that’s not found anywhere else, but it jerks around with a tinny click that’s so different from the rest of the keys it’s almost as if it came from another keyboard entirely.

The iCUE button next to it is also the only key on the board not balanced on a high switch, so you have to dive over the surrounding keys to find it, and don’t get satisfying feedback from pressing it.

With storage for five profiles onboard the board, FN+ F2 can be used to switch between them, but if you’ve got a load of iCUE devices flashing away on your desktop it won’t communicate with them, forcing you to use software profiles.

Fire up the app and you get access to Corsair’s Mosaics, which are pre-set lighting patterns that are simple to activate. Community-created Mosaics can be found on a digital store, which thankfully has a degree of curation as even the Romans knew the levels of detail and lewdness that could be contained in a simple arrangement of square blocks.

The lighting patterns and customisability are nice to have, but the reason you’ll buy the K70 Core sits between the keycaps and the baseplate. These silky-smooth switches are a big draw for the board, and despite having a limited feature-set in a competitive market segment (and with it being possible to pick up a mechanical gaming keyboard for much less) its quietness and efficiency of operation mean the K70 Core is still able to stand out.

Use a 32-inch monitor every day and you’ll soon forget that it’s the sort of size that would have been considered excessive in a living room TV not so long ago. Stepping down to a 27-inch monitor after getting used to a 32-inch feels like going back to that 14-inch that buzzed and needed to be degaussed once in a while all over again.

And then you remember that this screen only costs £300/$350, and suddenly any sense of lingering disagreeableness passes. A mini-LED monitor for this kind of money is remarkable enough, with comparable models from Cooler Master or AOC going for twice the price, but the G Pro 27i also sports Quantum Dots, a fast 180 Hz refresh rate (with FreeSync), and a veritable plethora of inputs too.

For UK readers, there's also a three-pin plug on the power adapter. Previous Xiaomi screens have been sent out for review with US-style two-pin plugs that require an adapter, though work perfectly well on UK voltage, and it’s nice to see that this practice has stopped. Though as the screen requires its own power brick and the cable on it isn’t spectacularly long, you’ll need to keep it reasonably close to a power socket.

The mini-LED backlight is split into 1,152 local dimming zones, each made up of four mini-LED beads which means it’s mostly free of the haloes you can get from screens with larger zones. You’ll instantly realise that this means 3,200 pixels per zone, which at a pixel density of 109 ppi isn’t a large area—assuming the zones use the same 16:9 ratio as the screen itself you’re looking at each one being around 75x42 px. This is still much larger than the individually lit pixels of an OLED, but much better than traditional backlights.

There's still a little bit of bloom, though, especially around bright objects set against a dark backdrop. It’s very bright, unnecessarily so in fact, and most of the time you’ll want to turn the brightness down, something easy to achieve thanks to Xiaomi’s sensible implementation of the OSD controls. Place it next to a standard IPS panel and the difference is clear, with increased brightness and contrast.

It also has excellent colour reproduction, claiming to display 99% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut that can display 25% more colours than the more common sRGB. Combined with the HDR-1000 certification, this should lead to an extremely vibrant result if you’re keen on playing games that have colours in them. Tests with a colourimeter bear this out, showing a 98% response to P3, and a maximum brightness of 690 nits. That’s better than many OLEDs and a heck of a lot better than the usual figures we see at this price point.

The panel is the headline feature, but there's plenty else to like here. The G Pro 27i is a screen that’s meant to be admired from all sides. As a result, there's a lighting ring around the point at which the stand clips into the back of the screen itself (its colour controlled from the OSD), and a cover that will hide the bit where the input cables plug into their sockets (though you’ll still be able to see the cables themselves snaking away).

The foot, unusually, attaches to the vertical part of the stand with four screws (a driver is provided) instead of a single thumb-turned attachment, which feels rather old-fashioned, but it’s not the sort of thing you’re likely to do more than once or twice in the monitor’s lifetime and leads to a very stable configuration.

Having four video inputs is very nice to see on a gaming monitor, and the sort of setup that uses all of them is probably somewhere in our dreams. Desktop and laptop PCs, games console and streaming stick, perhaps? As the only screen in a dedicated gaming room or bedroom it’s good to be able to hook up multiple devices without needing to rely on switchers, though you will need to connect something to the audio socket as there are no built-in speakers on the Xiaomi screen.

The HDMI ports hit version 2.0, so are limited to 144 Hz at 1440p, but the DP 1.4 connectors can really let the pixels flow. The only thing that’s missing is a USB-C connection, and if you’ve become used to switching a USB hub between a couple of PCs, then it can be a wrench to go back to doing things the old-fashioned way.

And that’s one of the big things about the G Pro 27i. In a world of OLEDs, it uses mini-LED. Where USB-C is the up-and-coming video connector, it sticks with DisplayPort, and uses HDMI sockets that can’t feed it the max refresh rate. It doesn’t have anything like a built-in webcam or even speakers.

While other monitors have become hubs around which to organise your PCs and other devices, this is something more pure: a display, and nothing else. Happily, displaying things is something it’s good at, and as it’s available at a low price for a mini-LED panel we perhaps shouldn’t be too dismissive of its more focused approach. Stick one (or a pair!) of these on your desk, hook it up over DisplayPort, and you’ll have a fast, bright, colourful PC gaming experience. And isn’t that really all we want?

A lot's changed since then, and we've seen a whole host of non-fan-cooled PCIe 5.0 solutions arrive with us. However, heat has still always been a major concern.

That is what the MP700 Elite looks to rectify in its bold and brave quest to become one of the best SSDs out there today. In short, this is an exceptionally cool PCIe 5.0 drive that not only delivers relatively comfortable performance on the sequential front but does so with both a low power draw and radically lower temperatures as a result. I'm not saying you can run this without a dedicated heatsink just yet, but we're getting close. That does however come with some drawbacks.

As for the hardware, Corsair's built the MP700 Elite around Kioxia's latest 218-layer BiCS8 TLC NAND, combined with Phison's E321T controller. That does mean it comes without any DRAM cache or buffers, but honestly, that's not a huge concern given the raw throughput that Kioxia's NAND can deliver.

It's also worth mentioning that this is a single-sided M.2-2280 design, making it pretty ideal for laptops and other consoles, although if you do get the heatsink variant, please do note that it's too large to fit into something like a PS5 Pro (although you can easily disassemble it if you do).

On launch, it's a somewhat limited choice for capacity, sadly. You can grab one of these either as a 1 TB or a 2 TB configuration, and that's it. For this specific 2 TB model I've got on test here, it retails relatively respectable at $260 ($265 with the heatsink), or £235 in the UK (£240 with heatsink). Unfortunately, no AUD availability just yet.

Right, the big thing I need to cover first is temperatures, because boy, is this quite literally a cool drive. At least compared to other PCIe 5.0 offerings. To be clear, almost always, I try to test all of the SSDs I get in for review underneath the exact same heatsink with the same thermal pads. That's done on an Asus ROG Strix X870E-E motherboard. If the drive comes with a heatsink, if possible, I strip it off and chuck it in the board for the full testing suite.

So, for comparison, the Seagate FireCuda 540, a relatively early PCIe 5.0 drive, during its benchmark run, topped out at 83 C. The Crucial T700, which did use its own integrated heatsink, landed at 87°C. The MP700 Elite? 55°C. Ambient room temperature at the time of those tests was 24°C across all three SSDs. That is just a staggering drop in overall heat, and if we're generous and compare it only to the FireCuda 540, there's a 33.7% difference between them.

This is all thanks to Phison's latest E31T controller. In short, it's basically a pseudo-evolution of the E26 found in the bulk of most 5.0 drives to date (Teamgroup's Z540 a good example of that). Although it lacks any DRAM and features half the channels and bandwidth, it's wildly more efficient than the original controllers. That's thanks to Phison moving the manufacturing process from a 12nm FinFET solution to TSMC's 7 nm N7 process instead. It also has half the number of channels, and because of that power draw, equally has been cut significantly as well. What that leads to is a significant drop in overall temps as a result. Certainly compared to drives like Crucial's T700 or Gigabyte's Aorus Gen5 12000.

As for the numbers game, general sequential speeds are about what we saw with the initial PCIe 5.0 launch, albeit with one exception. Crystal Disk manages 10,197 MB/s, respectively, on the read, but 8,608 on the write (the latter quite a bit slower than the FireCuda 540 and Crucial's T700).

Where the MP700 Elite picks its head up, however, is in the random 4Ks. It dominates that field, with 88 MB/s on the read and a whopping 336 MB/s on the write, pipping both of our other PCIe 5.0 drives to the post. As for in-game performance, it basically sat in the middle of the pack, landing a load time of 7.426 seconds in Final Fantasy's Shadowbringers benchmark.

PC Gamer test bench
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | RAM: 64 GB (2x32GB) Team Group T-Create Expert DDR5 @ 6000 C34 | GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super | Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi | CPU Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | PSU: 1200W NZXT C1200 (2024) 80+ Gold | Chassis: Geometric Future Model 5

The real kicker is the price. There's a lot of tech and hardware featured here that's relatively new to the playing field. Whether that's Phison's E31T controller, which landed with us in September 2024, or Kioxia's latest 218-layer BiCS8 NAND, it all costs money up front to bring this together to the table, and despite this drive being pitched as sort of a "mid-range" entry-level option, it's got some tough competition from older hardware that right now, just kind of works.

Crucial's T700 is a fine example of this (and it's not alone either). If you go for the non-heatsinked variant, at time of writing, you can pick up 2 TB for just $210, and it's consistently been that price for the last four months (even lower during Black Friday). Corsair's MP700 Elite, on offer right now, is still slightly more expensive, despite dropping in price to $215. And to be fair, you can only grab that deal directly from its webstore. Admittedly, you can get the MP700 Elite with a heatsink for just $5 extra versus the $50 investment needed for the T700 heatsinked, but, in reality, most folk buying this are likely just going to chuck it behind a motherboard M.2 heatsink anyway, negating the issue.

Then there's the performance delta between those two drives. Although the random 4K numbers are higher for the MP700 Elite, those sequential numbers, particularly on write performance, are awkwardly lower by contrast. Depending on your workloads, that could be a real deal breaker.

Similar to graphics cards and CPUs, it feels like at this point that excess heat generated by most modern, less-efficient PCIe 5.0 drives has already been accounted for and designed around. Whether that's through better motherboard heatsinks or standard ones included with the drives themselves, it's no longer an issue. Although Phison's latest controller is impressive, it's technology that really should be utilized to better improve the performance of the next generation of PCIe 6.0 SSDs instead. Combine those facts with just how limited that extra performance is for gamers, and well it's a real tough sell.

Still, the MP700 Elite is a solid all-round performer. If you're looking for something a little cheaper and budget is a factor, if you can get this thing on offer, it'll deliver on its promise, and then some, all without breaking the bank.

No, the real kicker is that this is the first gaming handheld PC I've used, held, or tested that sports AMD's latest APU, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370—the chip whose name I can rarely get right on the first try. Seriously, it's a curse, and I only ever remember the first bit because I know it's AMD desperately trying to make 'Ryzen AI' happen. Stop trying to make Ryzen AI happen.

The Strix Point silicon is a bit of a game-changer for handhelds, especially when you start to factor in all the other extras AMD has crafted that really play into the literal hands of PC gamers. Radeon Anti-Lag and Fluid Motion Frames 2 really are the key ones for handheld gaming, but also any game which sports FSR3 and its own per-game frame generation implementations, too.

Those are what sets the OneXFly F1 Pro apart from any other gaming handheld you could care to mention, because of how the HX 370 extends performance over the competition. Mind you, the $1,339 price tag will also set it apart. That's the sort of money that will get you a full RTX 4070 Super gaming PC and still leave you change enough to buy yourself a decent 1080p gaming monitor, too. So yeah, you've got to really want the form factor and performance to consider dropping that sort of cash on a handheld.

But mobile gaming is expensive; high-end handheld PCs doubly so. That's where Valve came in and played a blinder with the Steam Deck; it took Nintendo's Switch smarts, picked a lower spec chip, and stuck to a price point. Asus and Lenovo, with their own manufacturing might, have managed to bring prices down for their own performance devices, but smaller scale manufacturers, such as OneXPlayer and Ayaneo, seemingly cannot compete on that front and so you get pricing that feels way beyond acceptable.

What you are getting in the OneXFly F1 Pro, however, is a stellar little gaming device with performance to match its aesthetics. Though it is worth saying these are the same aesthetics with which the original OneXFly F1 was adorned.

That is no bad thing, because the slightly rubberised texture and smooth curves of the chassis feel great in the hands. And, while it is relatively weighty—coming in around the 600 g mark—its ergonomics and balance make it feel like one of the best designed handhelds I've used. It's created for the gaming long-haul and I've not had any of the hand cramping I get with the Steam Deck or other larger devices.

Okay, I say it's created for the long-haul, but that sadly does not extend to the OneXFly's battery. I want to get it out of the way up front, this is the biggest issue with an otherwise beautiful little gaming handheld: the battery life. Outside of the upgraded APU, the 48.5 Wh battery was the only thing that I really wanted to change from the original design. It's far too small to deliver a convincing long-term gaming experience with the OneXFly.

Basically, you are absolutely going to need to get yourself an external power pack to be able to enjoy this thing for more than an hour and forty reliably. I wish there had been a way to fit a higher capacity battery in that chassis, but it's so tightly packed in there that ain't going to happen.

The good news is that the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (oof, nailed it first time) absolutely slaps inside a handheld gaming PC. From our time testing it in laptop form, that's come as no surprise, but I will say the level of gaming performance you can get out of it running at just 15 W is pretty jaw-dropping. Sure, that's only made real by the twin pillars of upscaling and frame generation, but being able to hit between 43 and 52 fps in Star Wars: Outlaws at an upscaled 1080p resolution feels great.

Especially when, running at the same 15 W level with the same settings, the original OneXFly F1—with its Ryzen 7 7840U APU—is only capable of knocking around the low 20s in the fps stakes.

That sort of performance delta looked unlikely, however, when I was first doing my comparative testing against the older Ryzen APU. Looking at most of our gaming performance numbers and you'll see that in general you're only getting a handful of fps between them, the same is true even when you start throwing in upscaling, too.

There's the odd outlier, such as F1 24 and Hitman, where you're looking at around a 10 fps margin in favour of the Strix Point handheld, which is definitely more significant. But otherwise the 16 compute units of the Radeon 890M inside the HX 370 APU, compared with the 12 compute units of the Radeon 780M GPU of the Ryzen 7 7840U (and 8840U), don't seem to amount to a hill of beans/frames in most games.

Where that changes is when you enable frame generation in any form. Instantly there's a bigger performance delta, and especially so when you start to pull back on the power you let the APU draw in the first place. I feel that's largely because the CPU cores in the F1 Pro are running pretty slowly in the grand scheme of things; where it's capable of 5.3 GHz boost clocks, when pushed the F1 Pro is mostly just running around the 3.3 GHz mark and below.

It's not like the games are going to be CPU-limited on the new OneXFly, but the use of frame generation helps take the load off the CPU a little and lets those extra compute units make more of a difference when it comes to gaming performance.

The main takeaway, though, is that you can be running most games at 15 W, with either per-game frame generation or Fluid Motion Frame 2, and see great gaming performance that is both smooth and responsive.

However, even at 15 W in Star Wars: Outlaws I was seeing the battery drain at almost exactly 1% per minute. That's going to get me more game time than the PCMark gaming benchmark delivers at 30 W—in testing that's just 68 mins—but crucially not twice as much.

It's worth saying that not every game is going to be as intensive as Star Wars: Outlaws or a modern 3D title, such as Elden Ring. Throw something more lightweight, such as OlliOlli World or Lonely Mountains Downhill, into the mix and you're going to see that battery life stretch much farther.

The new AMD APU is one of the main reasons I'm so smitten with the OneXPlayer F1 Pro, but not the only one. That 7-inch 144 Hz OLED panel has also got my attention. Running at 50 % brightness it's still got plenty about it, and throwing it all the way up makes it look just stunning because of that 800 cd/m² peak luminance. The contrast is obviously exquisite, but the colours also sing, and both the refresh and OLED response time make gaming feel great, too.

I've also got the 32 GB RAM / 1 TB SSD version of the F1 Pro in for testing, which makes it a very good PC, too. Combined with the fact that the Acer SSD in question is pretty rapid (7,300 MB/s and 6,600 MB/s for sequential read/write performance) and that you get two USB4 Type-C connections and a full-size USB 3.0 Type-A port on top, you could happily dock this bad boi to a monitor and have a fully functional PC without much messing around at all.

People will keep saying what a mess Windows 11 is on a handheld, and while yeah, it's not a touchscreen OS—especially not on a small-screen—set the thing up to boot directly into Steam's Big Picture mode and you're not a million miles off SteamOS functionally.

The F1 Pro has all the extra configurable physical buttons you could want, the OneXConsole application has matured a lot and, while it's still not as user-friendly as the excellent Ayaneo software, it's got all the functionality, especially now there are performance profiles you can make and switch to on the fly.

It's also a size that delights, too. I liked the Ayaneo Kun for its big screen and extra touchpads, but it's a lump to lug about. With the OneXFly it's just the size of that 7-inch OLED screen and the pads either side. The bezels are slim and the device relatively diminutive, if a little chunky. But, y'know, reassuringly chunky.

So yes, you can colour me a big fan of the new OneXFly F1 Pro. For me it's one of the best handheld gaming PCs I've used, combining functionality with form and performance. I love the fact I can scale back the APU to such an extent and still get great gaming performance out of the device, and it is absolutely my favourite aesthetic of all the handhelds I've used. Though, to be fair, the gorgeous Ayaneo Flip DS has a lot of appeal, too.

But there are still two big things letting the OneXFly F1 Pro down: the sky-high price and the weak, weak battery. With an external power pack you can combat one of those, but there's nothing anyone but OneXPlayer can do about the other.

Let's clarify that, though. While modular, the Pivot isn't coming for the Scuf Instinct Pro's lunch, nor does it have the versatility of something like the Victrix Pro BFG, which boasts unscrewable swappable pieces. No, the Pivot is really just two things: It's a conventional gamepad out of the box, but literally hiding underneath its default configuration is a gamepad made for fighting games, or arcade games, or any other kind of controller-centric game that doesn't require analog sticks.

In other words, the analog sticks, d-pad and face buttons can be "pivoted" to reveal an alternate pad configuration hidden within the controller itself. It's a neat set up.

Once you've lightly twisted down the analog sticks and toggled a lock switch at the rear, it's just a matter of giving either module a little push, revealing its fighter-friendly cousin beneath. It's reminiscent of gamepads like the aforementioned Victrix Pro BFG Controller, but since the Pivot forgoes screws it arguably takes a less fussy approach (though it does lack the freedom of, say, adjusting the analog sticks between symmetrical and asymmetrical placement).

Perhaps it's better to think of the Pivot less as a customisable gamepad than a hybrid one, and this blurry identity extends to its "pro controller" chops. The analog sticks use drift-free hall effect tech, which you should consider essential in any modern controller, and the trigger buttons have adjustable stops, meaning you can change the depth of their presses. It comes with a 2.4 GHz wireless dongle and also supports Bluetooth connectivity. If you have an Xbox, the Pivot needs to be wired with the included USB-C to A cord.

But where pro features are concerned, the P or “paddle” buttons are where that aforementioned blurriness comes in. There are four in total but only two on the rear. The other two P buttons are face buttons, contributing to the six button layout of the right pivoting module. I've never really used all four rear P buttons on a controller at once, but if you do, and you need them all on the rear, the Pivot won't do that. Up to five profiles for these P buttons can be stored locally and changed on the fly either with the lil' screen on the gamepad itself, or using Turtle Beach's Control Center app. Each of these profiles can also store different configurations for analog stick deadzones and trigger sensitivity.

Based on this, you can probably already see that the Pivot has a fairly niche use case, but if you happen to lie within that niche it may be a godsend. Rather than forking out for a premium gamepad and a fight stick, you can buy this and effectively get both. If you happen to play a lot of arcade and retro games, but also like your analog sticks for modern blockbusters, the Pivot is perfect. If you aren't either of these people, though? You may be better off with something else.

For all its fight stick credentials the Pivot does have one drawback: it doesn't have tactile microswitches. To be clear, all P buttons here are microswitches, but compared to the eminently clicky buttons on the Stealth Ultra—which feel more like mouse clicks than gamepad presses—all buttons on the Pivot have the same slightly mushy feel of a normal Xbox controller. Foregoing tactile switches is an odd choice; In my opinion their audible precision is perfect for fighting and arcade games, and while that's a matter for debate, the tactile switches on the Stealth Ultra were one of my favourite qualities of that pad.

Another of the Pivot's nice 'n' niche features is the ability to assign the analog stick functions to either of the D-pads, lest you prefer the exactness of digital inputs. Oh, and there's a slider beneath the Xbox button, which makes sense as a volume wheel, but can also be reassigned to be, for example, a mic volume wheel. The onboard screen lacks some of the functionality seen in the Stealth Ultra, such as the ability to tweak the sensitivity of the trigger buttons and analog sticks, but that can still be adjusted in Turtle Beach's Control Center desktop app where vibration settings and RGB lighting can also be tweaked. Another feature of marginal use is the social media notifications, which works via a separate app on your smartphone and is compatible with Discord and a bunch of other social media platforms. Like it did on the Stealth Ultra, it feels like a superfluous feature that only sounds good in theory, but you may come to love it.

I had no trouble at all with connectivity, even when I had a handful of pads connected via Bluetooth to a Steam Deck. Battery life is a chill 20 hours, but if that's not enough for you rest assured it charges to 100% in under half-and-hour. The RGB implementation is minimal—not as weirdly excessive as its predecessor—with just two colourful bars on either side of the volume slider. And overall, the Pivot feels great in the hand: I like a heavy controller so its 300 grams felt good to me.

I really liked using the Pivot, and if you're going to make use of the swappable face buttons it's a brilliant pad. It's undeniably better than the vanilla Xbox controller—hall effect sticks, rebindable P buttons, adjustable trigger stops—but it's also double the price. Keeping that in mind, the Pivot is really for the folk out there for whom it will really feel like two controllers in one, and on those terms it succeeds. For everyone else, its older sibling the Stealth Ultra can usually be had for around the same price on sale.

This sucks, especially given most people who most need them have probably spent a lot of their cash on things like medicine, and doctors. Reckless fools.

While it's not groundbreaking for ergonomics, Ikea's Matchspel gaming chair is a PC throne that offers a fair amount of customisation at a very friendly price.

Honouring Swedish tradition, the Matchspel arrived at my door, flat-packed in a cardboard box ready to be assembled. It's a fairly easy setup, and like most modern gas lift chairs relies mostly on gravity and your juicy behind to keep itself on its feet. I didn't have any trouble putting this chair together almost entirely by myself.

There's a choice between a black or grey colourway on these. The black sports a red trim which is very ROG gamer, but I went with the light grey to match my desk.

I also wanted to see if it gathered dirt or discoloured with sweat or just contact. Thankfully, I am happy to report both the mesh backing and leatherette seat still look as grey as the day they arrived, despite much use, including a little sweating during heated gaming moments.

For a seat this affordable, there are a fair few settings to play with to get your own individual comfort.

When setting it up the instructions tell you to leave some screws a bit loose so the back of the chair can move a bit with your body and the lumbar support on this stretched fabric is pretty decent.

The downside is it's a little rickety feeling and noisy when parts move but not obnoxiously so. The headrest also has this mesh fabric backing and can have its height and angle adjusted quite dramatically to suit different heights.

There's one lever under the seat that lets you adjust the height via gaslift, and also the tilt of the back portion of the chair. Adjusting vertically is fairly standard and quite granular, but the tilt locks in at different set points. The recline isn't all the way back either but does let you lean a fair way for a quick relax.

When pushed in, that under seat lever locks the adjustments so you don't accidentally change your comfortable seat in a heated gaming moment. The armrests are pretty standard plastic but can also be pulled up and be pushed forward and back for further personalised comfort.

Despite a fair amount of customisation, especially for the price point, my biggest complaint with the Matchspel is still about ergonomics, and it's that there's no tilt for the bum cushion. To be fair, being able to tilt this forward and back would have made this chair a bit of a holy grail as it's not the most common adjustment you find in computer chairs.

If a chair this cheap had it I would be shocked, but given all the other options I was a little hopeful.

Unfortunately, for a lot of people, especially women or other folks with pelvic pain problems or similar issues this is a big deal and arguably is the most important part of a chair to adjust.

It also might have helped make up for the seat being quite firm under the buns, by being able to adjust it on the fly, especially on long sessions. As it stands I do notice that pressure starts to seep into slight discomfort after a little while seated.

That slightly personal (50% of the population) complaint aside, the Matchspel sports a fair few customisation options, and is reasonably comfy, especially for a chair that only costs $290 / £129. It's on the lower effort end when it comes to hefty computer chairs to set up, and looks business-appropriate in an understated way, especially with the light grey colour options.

It's gamer stealth, so you can pretend you're a professional who didn't totally just alt-tab out of Steam while on Zoom calls.

You'll also need one with integrated graphics and, assuming you'll be using the X600 for some level of gaming, you'll want the best, namely the Radeon 780M. With those thoughts in mind, we decided to test-drive the DeskMini with the Ryzen 7 8700G (4.2 - 5.1 GHz, 8 cores, Radeon 780M graphics, 65 W TDP, 95 °C TJMax) and the Ryzen 5 8600G (4.3 - 5 GHz, 6 cores, Radeon 760M graphics, also 65 W TDP and 95 °C TJMax).

The chassis is a breeze to work with. Undo the four screws on the rear and the internal tray slides out to reveal the motherboard. Within minutes we had the CPU, the bundled cooler, RAM and M.2 storage secured, ready to do the Windows installation dance.

The specs are a curious mix of the cutting edge and the weirdly legacy. It has support for current AM5 CPUs, DDR5 up to 96 GB @ 6400MHz (we installed 32 GB @ 5600MHz), and it can take a fast, PCIe 5.0 M.2 drive plus a second PCIe 4.0 drive. And yet, round the back, I was bemused to find... a VGA port? Perfect for playing Leisure Suit Larry on your CRT monitor, but thankfully, you get DisplayPort and HDMI as well. There's no WLAN/BT card out of the box though; you get an E-Key M.2 socket to install one, but you'll need to provide your own or dongle up.

I/O options are spartan, with a single USB 3.2 type-C, a USB 3.2 type-A and an audio jack up front. Round the back, there are just two more USB 3.2 type-A ports, a 2.5G LAN port, plus the aforementioned AV slots. Without a USB hub, you may find yourself juggling devices in and out.

The kit also comes with cabling to snug a pair of 2.5” SSDs to the underside of the mobo tray, but frankly, two M.2 drive slots seems ample; I'd much rather ASRock forewent the SATA option and made space for a low-profile 120 mm fan somewhere. Because as it stands, there is no provision whatsoever for active case-cooling in the X600. Weirdly there are two fan headers, but that's a moot point; there's just no spare volume, or indeed mounting points, for a case fan.

The kit ships with a CPU cooler, but it's tiny. The fan is a mere 65 mm and it has a big job to do, both in cooling the heatsink on a 65 W CPU and exhausting the resultant hot air out of the case. It doesn't bode well for your ears either; when fans of this size get busy, they make like tiny, angry server-farms.

However, there's space enough to fit an aftermarket cooler up to 47 mm inheight instead. We tested the bundled cooler against Thermalright's AXP90-X47, a unit capable of handling higher-TDP chips and a popular choice with small form-factor builders, though we swapped the stock fan out for a Noctua NFA9-X14 to keep things civil.

Like many aftermarket coolers, the AXP90-X47 has a custom mounting system and CPU backplate, which means removing the stock AM5 heatsink-mounts from the business side of the mobo and unbolting the board from its mounting tray in order to remove the stock CPU backplate from its underbelly.

And let me tell you, that thing is not designed to be removed.

The backplate was glued on so hard, I simply couldn't pry it off without risking damage to the motherboard, either from my pry-tool skipping, or the amount of flexure the board was going through as I tried to lever the backplate up and loosen the glue. Admitting defeat, I found that I could bolt the Thermalright cooler onto the existing backplate, but thanks to a curved metal lip running around the backplate's outer edge, it was extremely fiddly to grip and tighten the four hex-nuts which tension the cooler onto the CPU.

Got there in the end with a nice tight fit but, I won't lie, it was a royal, finger-numbing pain in the ass. So caveat emptor: while ASRock states you can fit an aftermarket cooler—and this box absolutely demands one—it's not necessarily a straightforward job. Closing the case up afterward, I also found it a very squeaky fit, with the fan-frame pushed flush against the intake grill of the case panel, which is a perfect recipe for noisy air turbulence.

So with all our parts in place, let's get into it. Paired with the Radeon 760M and Radeon 780M respectively, the 8600G and 8700G offer comparable levels of gaming performance to AMD's mobile APUs in our 1080p, medium-settings, AAA game-tests. While the 8700G outmatched it's sibling and mobile peers in most cases, neither offered significantly better performance than, say, the Ryzen 7 7840HS and Radeon 780M combo running at a full 54 W, and the 8600G often fell below that.

Most of what we threw at each CPU saw 30 fps+, except for Total War: Warhammer 3's intensive campaign benchmark, which left the 8600G panting to make 25 fps, and Forza, which only saw 27 fps in contrast to the 8700G's 44 fps. With a negligible core clockspeed difference between the two chips and both having ample cores for gaming, It's clear that the Radeon 780M enjoys a tangible performance advantage over the 760M.

Both CPUs ran indies and less-demanding titles very nicely, with the 8700G predictably ahead. The 8600G made 45-55 fps in Stray, to the 8700G's 50-70 fps. In Subnautica, the difference was 45-60 fps to 55-75 fps; in Soulstone Survivors and Bioshock Remastered however, both chips performed similarly, at around 45-75 fps and 140-200+ fps respectively. While the 8700G is more costly, it's the clear choice if you're looking to build a compact 1080p gaming system in the ASRock DeskMini X600.

But should you? Because without any active cooling in the case, which equates to completely unmanaged airflow, it's hard to keep the temperature down on these chips without running the CPU fan pretty hard.

Predictably, the bundled CPU cooler performs dreadfully under load. It'll stop a CPU hitting its TJMax, but DEAR LORD does it sing. At idle it's virtually inaudible, but the second it starts spinning up, it emits a high-frequency whine that only increases in pitch with the RPM until you're at risk of defenestrating your lovely new build.

This is exacerbated by the CPU fan's speed-stepping. It's an absolute sluggard in responding to temperature change. Given multicore torture-test loads, both CPUs jump straight to 90 °C, but incredibly, the 65 mm fan takes 4-5 minutes to slowly accelerate to its highest, most irritating pitch-intensity. Upon killing the load, we then measured a twelve minute interval until the fan wound down to blessed silence, with the temperature inching slowly down all the way. The fan and cooler combo just cannot dissipate heat well, and with no case fans to shove it out the door, that's what you get.

The Thermalright AXP90-X47 shows a marked improvement, both in noise levels and heat displacement, but it still steps too slowly by default. We avoided the hassle of jumping in and out of the BIOS to remedy this, and installed the free and excellent Fan Control app to experiment with custom curves and reduce the speed-step interval to 1 second. This resulted in a near-instant RPM response to temperature change.

With a custom curve applied to the Noctua fan, we achieved a decent noise-to-cooling balance, where intensive gaming had the CPU hovering inthe 80-85 °C range with the fan capped at a palatable 55% of its max RPM, albeit with noticeable turbulence thanks to the fan's proximity to the inlet grill. We simply couldn't achieve the same results with the bundled cooler, which squeals disagreeably all throughout its rev-range.

All of which leaves the DeskMini X600 rather in limbo. You can pack in a cutting-edge CPU and RAM, but there are no active cooling capabilities to compensate. You can achieve a performant and moderately quiet (though by no means silent) build using the Ryzen 7 8700G and an aftermarket cooler, but the costs soon stack up. There's the price of the chip itself, some RAM, some WiFi provision, and we'd class an aftermarket 47 mm cooler plus a top-tier quiet fan as requirements rather than options.

Add those components to the cost of the box itself and you‘re blasting past the price of a quality, APU-armed mini-PC with broadly similar performance, a cooling solution to escort heat from the case, and quiet operation. With two M.2 storage slots and provision for a further two SATA drives, the X600 would make a neat media server, though we'd opt for a lower-TDP CPU, and you'd still want a superior cooler to eliminate the audio horror-show.

In short, if you're looking for a side-rig for 1080p gaming, this is not the droid you're looking for.

Machines which fold discrete GPUs into their design are both rarer and pricier, but they enable you to crank things up in terms of the resolutions, frame rates and graphics settings they can achieve. Pairing a 13^th-gen Intel i7 mobile CPU with a laptop-grade RTX 4070, the Zotac Zbox Magnus EN does just this, and brings the fight to Asus' ROG NUC 970 and the Minisforum AtomMan G7 Ti in terms of 1440p games performance.

The Magnus is barebones from the get-go, though some suppliers offer RAM and storage pre-installed for a fee. There are several CPU and GPU variant configurations to choose from, but Intel's penultimate mobile i7 chip, the Core i7 13700HX, features in our test unit. With eight efficiency cores and eight performance cores running at 3.7 GHz to 5 GHz on the turbo, It's a powerful chip capable of desktop levels of performance, and is also a product of Intel's last-gen philosophy: power at all costs, basically.

That's reflected in Intel's stated maximum draw of 157 W, though we suspect that Zotac have chosen to tune this at the hardware level, and wisely so given the limited volume for cooling in this box. With Cinebench 2024's render-test pushing all cores to the max, the chip settles in for the long haul at around the rather more sensible 60 W mark.

Where the chip shows its age is in RAM compatibility, tapping out at DDR5-4800. Low-latency RAM at this speed can still deliver greater throughput than higher-latency sticks at faster-rated speeds, but you'll absolutely pay for that privilege.

Like the ROG NUC 970, the Zbox Magnus sports the mobile RTX 4070 GPU, which differs from the desktop variant of the GPU. It has with 8 GB of dedicated VRAM rather than 12 GB, slightly lower clockspeeds, and a narrower, 128-bit memory bus. However, it can still pull its weight admirably at 1440p, as we'll see.

Design-wise, the case is all grills, no frills: a simple black box where every surface, save for the front fascia, features some form of intake or exhaust. The top is basically one big dust-meshed intake for the CPU and GPU cooling system. And while this means plenty of fresh air for panting processors, it also means you're intimately exposed to the full range of sounds that the Zbox's cooling emits.

From idle to full load, you're treated to a constantly modulating wind-scape as fans step up and down to counter heat, and air is sucked or pushed at varying speeds through various grills and mesh panels. Tucked under your desk or behind a TV, that's kind of fine, but we wouldn't recommend having the Magnus right near you on your desk, if you're not using a headset—it's not super-loud, but the constant variable frequency-changes start to wear thin pretty quick.

While the CPU and GPU are soldered in place, the SODIMM RAM and M.2 storage (there's space enough for two drives) are interchangeable. As is the wireless card, but as the Magnus ships with a Killer WiFi 6/Bluetooth 5.3 card, there's really no need.

If you go thrifty with the barebones option and choose to install your own M.2 drive and RAM, Zotac makes it super-easy to do so. Flip the unit on its back, undo two thumbscrews, and the bottom of the case slides off, laying bare all the slots you need to work with. No fussy mechanisms, no fiddly component-stacking, it's just the most straightforward and user-friendly design possible, and that's great.

I/O-wise, the front panel bears a type-C Thunderbolt port, a Type-A USB 3.1, SD card reader, and separate 3.5 mm headphone and mic jacks. At the rear you get dual 2.5G Killer Lan ports, an HDMI 2.1, twin DisplayPort 1.4 ports, and a further four Type-A USB 3.1s. Comprehensive to be sure, though I'd happily trade one of those five USB 3.1 slots for another Thunderbolt, or even a bog-standard Type-C USB.

Down to business then, and as expected from a machine with zesty silicon, the Magnus runs games very nicely. At 1080p, it blazes through everything you throw at it—173 fps in Total War: Warhammer 3's battle engine is crazy-smooth, and 154 fps in Cyberpunk using the Ray Tracing Ultra preset looks and feels just fab.

Moving up to 1440p and ultra settings, things are still very rosy, with everything moving at 60 fps or better. Cyberpunk with RT ultra on still nets a healthy 79 fps, Forza with full RT glides along smooth and stutter-free at 60 fps, and Warhammer 3's more demanding campaign-engine hits the same frame rate.

We also ran a bunch of other games without built-in benchmarks to get a general feel for ultra-settings 1440p performance across the board, and found similarly cheering results. Helldivers runs at a barely-variable 68-72 fps in every environment and combat situation we tried. Motive Studios' awesome Dead Space remake is a revenant meat-treat, enjoying a range of 94-125 fps in the final boss battle at 1440p/Ultra/DLSS Balanced. And A Plague Tale: Requiem's stunning Hives level looks and feels fabulous at 90-120 fps. In short, I have no doubt that the Magnus would see you right with any title at 1440p.

The machine absolutely trades blows with Asus' ROG NUC 970, and does so at a lower price (a quick squirrel around the web reveals a number of sites supplying the Magnus at appreciably under the RRP, so shop around). One of the key differences between the two machines is the choice of processor; the NUC 970's Intel Ultra 9 185H CPU is newer and more efficient than the Magnus' 13th Gen Core i7; it can employ faster DDR5 speeds, and likely adds a premium to the build-price of the machine. But the truth is, they perform at a very similar level when paired with the RTX 4070 mobile; you just don't really feel the difference when the game's afoot.

In price/performance terms, if it came down to a choice between the two machines, the Magnus would be our recommendation. But there's another factor to consider here which we've touched on already, and that's noise.

Setting the ROG NUC 970 to Silent Mode almost eliminates fan noise, for no appreciable loss of performance. With the Magnus, you're stuck with what you get—an admittedly capable cooling solution, but one that cannot be adjusted, with a noise output that's very hard to ignore. Even light tasks can set the fans off, and you can't help but notice every change in pitch and frequency. It's possible to zone out constant frequencies, but variable ones—not so much.

I enjoy much of my gaming-audio using hi-fi speakers, reserving the headset for multiplayer and nighthawk sessions. For my use-case, the Magnus is just too chatty, but your mileage may vary; If you only ever take your headset off to sleep, eat or interface with fellow earthlings, I doubt you'll be so bothered.

Like the ROG NUC 970, this machine isn't for those who envisage future CPU or GPU upgrades. It's for someone who wants solid off-the-peg gaming performance at 1440p, and for whom footprint is a key factor. If you can live with its 'lively' sound-profile, the Zotac Zbox Magnus EN is a solid performer at 1440p.

This next offering in Minisforum's AtomMan line may be viewed as the G7 PT's bigger brother. Marrying Nvidia's laptop RTX 4070 with Intel's Core i9 14900HX, The G7 Ti is a blade-thin desktop machine which is more squarely aimed at 1440p gaming. With its clean-and-sharp aluminium panelling and understated RGB flighting, it cuts a rather more serious and mature figure than the G7 PT.

Pop the side-panel off and the reason for its slim-and-tall form factor is plain to see. It's literally built around a laptop motherboard, with four wee daughter-boards cabling off to perform external IO duties. This isn't the standard modus operandi for Minisforum, which usually opts for custom APU boards and cooling in its mini-PCs.

A copper Yakisoba of heat-pipes shrouds the lower half of the mobo, which is heartening given the choice of CPU. In mobile terms, the mobile RTX 4070 is no slouch, but the Core i9 14900HX is downright monstrous; a 24-core, 5.8 GHz, desktop-level bulldozer. Together, they make for highest-performing mini-PC we've tested, outpacing both the ASUS ROG NUC and the Zotac Zbox EN—both of which pack the same GPU—across a range of synthetic and gaming benchmarks.

Like the G7 PT before it, the G7 Ti has two performance modes which alter the CPU's TDP from max 85W to max 115W, with different fan-RPM profiles configured for each. There's a button on the front of the chassis to toggle between the modes, or you can use the preinstalled hardware-management app, which also lets you customise the RGB lighting. Cranking the TDP up helps the machine blast through rendering workloads at a tangibly greater pace, though the performance gains you'll see in gaming are entirely title-dependent.

There's no doubt the G7 Ti makes for both a capable workstation and a solid 1440p gaming machine. Running Cyberpunk 2077 at the Ray Tracing Ultra preset, with DLSS and Frame Gen, sees a tidy 84 fps at 2560x1440 in 85 W mode, and 86 fps at 115 W. Homeworld 3, a more CPU-intensive title, sees bigger gains with a jump from 62 to 72 fps, but neither Forza (69 fps) nor Total War: Warhammer 3 (96 fps) saw any notable uplift for running the TDP up to 115 W.

And in all honesty, you won't want to. The G7 Ti's little turbo-prop blowers are silent at idle and maintain a bearable volume at 85 W under gaming loads, generating a consistent but largely unintrusive blow. Jump to 115 W though, and the noise becomes obnoxious. Neither mode produces any nasty variable coil-whine frequencies; it's very much the passage of air you're hearing, which is preferable. But with the CPU scarfing down 115 W in performance mode, the sheer volume emitted by the blowers at their max RPM is impossible to ignore, even with headphones on.

While I was benchmarking the machine, my wife (who works a couple of rooms away in our abode) poked her head round the door to say "It's so weird, I swear I can hear heavy rain but it's blue skies outside." Then her eyes alighted on the G7 Ti, puffing its cheeks and emitting a high-pressure TCHHHHHHH from its desktop perch, and the penny dropped.

CPU temps hover around the 90 °C mark, so my first assumption was "well, at least the cooling is keeping things in check," but HWinfo tells a different story. Whether at 85 W or 115 W, the CPU begins to throttle under load. Which means you're bouncing off the redline and not getting the full potential of the chip.

All of which leads one to conclude that this particular CPU in this particular form-factor just isn't the most sensible combination. The ultra-slim design doesn't allow for the volume of copper, or the larger and slower-spinning fans that the i9 14900HX so desperately needs to keep heat in check without throttling or setting off car alarms.

It's also not a sensible pairing with what is effectively a midrange laptop GPU. I suspect the G7 Ti would fare just as well at 1440p with a less power-hungry chip; an i5, Core Ultra, or modern Ryzen APU perhaps. And in fact, a variant of this machine—the AtomMan G7 Ti SE—is available at a slightly cheaper prince-point with the i7 14650HX. It's still a beast, but with lower turbo-boost clocks (5.2 GHz compared to the 14900HX's 5.8 GHz) and 8 fewer E-cores, it strikes me as being something approaching a saner match with the RTX 4070 mobile in a slim form-factor.

While WiFi7 and Bluetooth 5.4 are very welcome, the physical IO is not quite up to par. A single Type-C USB4 at the rear, and none up front? That's not great. Plus, the lack of a dedicated DisplayPort means that, if you want to run a DP cable to your monitor, you need to devote that single USBC socket at the rear to doing so. Which of course means no USB-C peripherals for you, plucky reader, unless you add a hub to your shopping list. The lack of any audio jack at the rear is another annoying omission, as it means trailing a 3.5mm jack round to the front if you want to plug in a set of desktop speakers.

There's also some awkwardness with the form-factor. The vertical alignment looks cool, but isn't comforting, as there's a lot of vertical weight balanced on that slim stand; it wouldn't take too much of a nudge to topple it. Plus, the cable from the external power-brick connects to the upper-portion of the rear-end, which introduces an extra leverage-point. This wouldn't be an issue if it connected nearer the base.

Laying the unit flat on your desk is out of the question, as the right-hand side-panel—what would be the ‘underside' if you were to lay it down - is all air-intake. In any case, a horizontal aspect would take up similar desktop real-estate to a tower PC; you'd be losing the one benefit of its blade-like design, which is the agreeably tiny footprint.

It all adds up to a machine that is somewhat in limbo. It's a static PC with a small desktop footprint but a large visual one, which underperforms against a desktop machine at the same price-point. Equally, there are identically-specced laptops out there that cost around the same, but offer the added benefits of a screen, keyboard, trackpad, speakers and mobility.

There's no question that It's a great performer at 1440p, even with the CPU limited to 85 W, which keeps the fans at a sedate and palatable volume. But that touches on my biggest gripe with the machine; if you want to get the best out of its Core i9 14900HX and feed it 115 W in performance mode, you're kind of punished for doing so. It quickly starts hitting the throttle and the cooling system becomes unbearably noisy.

This particular CPU in this particular form factor is overkill. And while I think Minisforum—an outfit with good form in bespoke cooling—has done its level best to tame the beast, there are way more sensible processors out there to build a slim gaming machine around, and better tier-matches for the mobile RTX 4070 GPU.

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra costs more than three thousand units whether you're pricing it in dollars, pounds, or euros. Its pricing is up there with the MacBook Pro and Predator Helios 18, and as distasteful as it is to talk about money when I could be rhapsodising about frame rates the simple fact is that if frames are all you care about then skip over to the latest from MSI, Asus, or any of the other usual suspects where you'll find things more to your taste.

The Galaxy Book4 Ultra isn't really a gaming laptop at all, it just kinda looks like one. Albeit a skinny one. The combination of the Core Ultra 9 (Meteor Lake, 16 total cores) and GeForce RTX 4070 certainly make it useful in that area, and the 16-inch, 3K, 120 Hz, AMOLED touchscreen is a lovely thing to look at, but it comes with RTX Studio drivers installed (and there's a sticker to that effect just below the keyboard) pointing to an intended usage in the creative arts instead.

Swapping over to the Game Ready drivers is a matter of a few clicks in the GeForce Experience software, or the newer Nvidia App, however, after which it becomes broadly comparable to any other RTX 4070-toting laptop.

There's a small amount of confusion over how much power the GPU pulls, however—the box states 70W, while a software check shows it going a little higher than that at 80W. Whichever is true, this is half (or thereabouts) what you're getting from a machine like the Razer Blade 14 or MSI Vector 17 HX which run their RTX 4070 chips at 140W, and the test results back this up.

Take the Time Spy Extreme benchmark, in which the Galaxy Book's GPU scores 3,426 points. Sounds good, until you look at the Lenovo Legion LOQ 15APH8, which has an RTX 4050 running at 95W and scores 4,105. It also only costs $1,100.

The Razer Blade 14 manages 5,634; the MSI Vector 17 HX scores a shattering 6,102 and costs $2,299. What about a proper game? In Cyberpunk 2077 the Galaxy Book struggled to get a playable frame rate using Ultra Ray-Tracing settings (yes I know you can turn settings down but this is PC Gamer) producing 24 fps at 1080p, 10 fps slower than the RTX 4060 in the Legion Pro 5i 16 Gen 9. This happens time and again in the tests, with cheaper laptops leaving the pricey Samsung behind.

So what sets the Galaxy Book apart, and justifies the price tag? Well, you do get 32 GB of speedy LPDDR5X, and a 2 TB SSD that posts a higher average bandwidth than many other laptops. It's possible to down-spec the machine too, to save a little cash, but what you get for your money is an extremely nicely built laptop.

It's from the slim, sleek and executive machined-aluminium school of design, which means that the Samsung logo on the lid is rainbow-reflective, like someone built it out of an oily puddle on a sunny day, and the keyboard has a solid white backlight rather than unicorn vomit RGB. The pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, alongside a full-size HDMI 2.1, USB Type-A, headset socket, and MicroSD card slot leave it as well equipped for the world outside gaming as they do for hooking up an external 4K screen and screaming into a microphone.

It's sturdy, the hinge is smooth, and there's no hint of flex even if you hold it by the corner and try to use the trackpad, something which can fox some less well-made laptops. It switches on automatically when you open the lid, which is faintly annoying when you just want to check whether there's a sliding cover over the webcam (there isn't, but it does at least have a 1080p sensor) yet very handy and efficient-feeling when you need to actually use the Book.

You get a fingerprint reader to login with too, which always feels like a more sci-fi method of authentication than face recognition. One day we'll retina-scan ourselves (or the excavated eyeball of the scientist we just chloroformed) using the webcam, but until then this will suffice.

The combination of the low-power cores in the Core Ultra and the lower wattage rating of the GPU allow the Book 4 Ultra to eke out a remarkable battery life. Under test conditions (shut in a cupboard where I can't see it flickering) the laptop managed almost 13 hours of life in a test that keeps its screen on (at 50% brightness) while running a loop of video and office applications. This test isn't troubling that GeForce chip too much, and in a simulated gaming benchmark that allows it to stretch its legs a bit more it kept going for 2 hrs 13 minutes.

This is a less excellent result, even in an age of gaming laptops that can barely hold enough charge to keep them alive between power sockets. The Book 4 Ultra isn't a particularly thick machine, with less space to hide battery cells than chunkier models, so perhaps relies on component efficiency rather than a large battery for its extended lifespan. The moral of this story is that, if you're gaming, you need to plug it in.

There are also a few Samsung-specific features, such as the ability to hook up with a Galaxy smartphone in a more intimate way than the standard Windows Phone Link, such as using it as a wireless video camera for meetings. These have absolutely no bearing on its gaming abilities, but are nice quality-of-life enhancements nonetheless, even if the constant nagging to create and sign into a Samsung account makes you fire up the Settings app to uninstall it all.

And that just about wraps up the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra. It's expensive, it's not amazing for games despite what the specs might tell you (though it's no slouch) and did I mention it's expensive? But it's an extremely easy machine to live with, and if you're envious of MacBooks' sleek design, sharp screens and long battery life, this is about as close as you're going to get without giving up Windows.

With a massive 168 mm-tall dual heatsink stack and dual 140 mm fans that top out at just 1,500 rpm, the NH-D15 G2 is designed for one thing, which is to bring the best that air cooling has to offer for as little noise as possible. That makes sense seeing as at $150, it’s competing directly with large 360 mm AIO liquid coolers.

There’s also a strong case for opting for cheaper air coolers too, many of which have similar size heatsinks and dual fans while costing less than half the price. If you want to dial down the noise even further then Noctua includes speed reduction cables if you’re prepared to take a small hit in cooling, with zero need to fiddle with your motherboard’s own control.

So what makes Noctua think the NH-D15 G2 is worth its asking price?

Well, there’s a lot of R&D that’s gone into making this the king of coolers for modern CPUs. For starters Noctua has worked out that having two fans mounted in close proximity on a cooler and spinning at the same speed can actually cause unwanted noise and vibration as the two interact. Ever wondered what that random, intermittent vibration from your PC is that comes and goes? If you were using a dual fan cooler in a push-pull configuration, this could be the reason.

To solve this problem, the NH-D15 G2’s fans spin at slightly different speeds.

The heatsink stacks have been optimised according the performance of the fans too, which have an improved pressure to airflow curve. This has allowed Noctua to reduce the fin clearance from 1.9mm to 1.6mm and include 23 extra fins compared to the original model, with the added benefit of making the heatsink nearly a centimetre less deep, but offering even better performance. The most important change, though, is that the NH-D15 G2 comes in three variants, all with slightly different shaped cold plates. This is to cater for the wide variation in convexity between modern CPUs.

For example, the high socket and cooler pressure applied to Intel LGA1700 CPUs can cause them to bend in the socket and over time came become permanently misshapen. With a combination of washers to reduce heatsink pressure on the CPU heatspreader and machining the cold plate of each variant to different amounts of convexity, you can buy the cooler that’s best-suited to your particular CPU.

For example, the high base convexity or HBC model caters for used Intel LGA1700 CPUs where a shaped base will allow for better contact and in term better cooling. By contrast, AMD Ryzen 7000 and 9000 CPUs remain relatively flat, so the low base convexity (LBC) model will result in better performance. There’s also a standard model that Noctua claims also works well with AMD CPUs as well as Intel LGA1851 Arrow Lake CPUs as well as LGA1700 CPUs that use a contact frame.

We’ll be looking at the results later, but Noctua has an excellent table on its website that we highly recommend checking out to see which model is best for your CPU. The down side here is whether you swap CPUs in future as it’s not recommended to use an HBC model with AMD CPUs and similarly performance might be worse with an LGA1700 setup with no modifications such as contact frames. In addition to these features, the cooler is equipped with an offset for AMD Ryzen 7000 and 9000 CPUs, which allows the cold plate to sit closer to the hot spot on those models that’s slightly off centre due to the location of the CCDs.

Installation is fairly straightforward, but in addition to requiring a specific screwdriver, the heatsink is heavy and quite ungainly to deal with that can make installing it a challenge. It’s something you’ll only have to do once or twice so we can’t be too harsh here. You’ll need to pay careful attention to the components too as some look similar apart from their colour, but the key is to make sure you get the right model for your particular CPU.

PC Gamer test rig
CPU: Intel Core i7 14700K | Motherboard: Gigabyte B660 Gaming X DDR4 | Memory: Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 3466 | SSD: 512GB Samsung 980 Pro | GPU: Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition | PSU: MSI MEG Ai1300P PCIe5 | Case: BarrowCH Rhopilema Test Bench

In our thermal testing it was very clear that both using the NM-ISW1 shim washers to reduce socket pressure or using the HBC version of the cooler definitely improved performance on our Core i7 14700K, with the HBC version usually edging ahead by a few degrees. The best result in Cinebench of 86°C of the HBC was 3°C better than the standard cooler, but that was still 11°C warmer than the Be Quiet! Light loop 360mm with both coolers hitting a peak of 52dBA.

There was another noticeable benefit using the HBC cooler in 3DMark’s Steel Nomad test where the NH-D15 G2’s lowest temperature of 84°C was only 6°C higher than the Be Quiet Light loop 360mm. It was 10°C adrift in the X264 test, with not much difference here between different configurations, but the Metro Exodus test saw the HBC version again edge out a lead and also come within 4°C of matching the 360mm liquid cooler and all but equalled it in returning to idle temperatures too, massively outstripping the smaller single fan Be Quiet! Dark Rock 5.

In games and lightly-threaded tasks the Noctua NH-D15 G2 offers real benefits over smaller air coolers and also keeps up with and even matches large 360 mm liquid coolers too. Even in its warmest results it was never more than 10°C warmer than the Be Quiet Light loop 360mm and was only a few degrees away from matching the Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 A-RGB while also running rings around smaller air coolers, completely taming the Core i7 14700K.

Its price is eyewatering for sure, but the fact it keeps up with enormous and powerful liquid coolers is impressive as are its maintenance-free credentials and potentially longer life span too. The only issue is that certain variants are CPU-specific and picking the right one can be tricky, especially for Intel owners. However, we can’t argue with the build quality and cooling performance, even if there are far cheaper dual-fan coolers out there.

It was much happier in our game tests, sitting at 83°C in Metro Exodus and 87°C in our 3D Mark Steel Nomad test, but even these were noticeably higher than Noctua’s larger dual-fan NH-D15 G2. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly airflow.

The cooler was fairly quiet at full speed, hitting 50 dBA on our sound meter, which was 2 dBA quieter than the Noctua cooler, but also shoving far less air through its relatively large heatsink. It also took a long time to return our processor to idle temperatures. Adding a second fan would undoubtedly help it out in all areas.

While it’s hideously expensive, the fact that air coolers such as this one last decades means that it will likely serve you well for many years maintenance-free where liquid coolers won’t. However, with that in mind there are some question marks over future compatibility the differing base convexity does reduce compatibility, especially if you swap from AMD to Intel or vice versa.

The price of $150 is still a lot to spend on an air cooler with limited features so it’s always work checking out cheaper alternatives and never miss out on GPU, CPU or SSD upgrades when something cheaper will be adequate. We can’t argue with the cooling, build quality or packaging, though, with performance on par with some 360 mm liquid coolers.

Retailing for an approachable $79 (£76, AU$140), the KK3 Max Pro brings impressive features such as Hall effect joysticks and triggers, swappable rear paddles, intriguing macro support, and versatile connectivity options.

Unlike many of its competitors, it works seamlessly with the Nintendo Switch but, curiously, is not compatible with Xbox or PlayStation consoles. I've been using it exclusively on my PC for the past couple of weeks, and while some features went unused beyond testing, I can confidently say it's an impressive device.

The Gulikit KK3 Max's design, however, is still reminiscent of an Xbox controller, enhanced with extra buttons, slots, and RGB lighting. Instead of an Xbox button, there's a smaller backlit Gulikit logo (non-functional as a button), and the standard menu and start buttons are replaced with a “-” and “+”. Beneath these are four additional Gulikit buttons for customization.

The Hall effect joysticks feature RGB rings but are non-swappable and lack height adjustment. The D-pad and face buttons offer decent tactility without feeling mushy, though they don't match the snappy feedback of Razer's mecha-tactile switches. The ABXY buttons are replaceable, and the included puller makes swapping them easy. Their slightly larger size helps reduce missed inputs.

On the back, you'll find trigger locks for switching between analog and digital clicks, along with four attachment slots for the six paddles included in the box. The spacing is more user-friendly, and the ability to choose specific shapes and placements makes this controller highly customizable compared to others with fixed rear buttons. Constructed from robust plastic, the KK3 Max Pro doesn't quite exude a premium feel, but it doesn't feel cheap either. The subtle textured grips could be grippier, more like those on the PowerA and the excellent Razer Wolverine V3 Pro controllers.

The Gulikit controller comes in black or white with matching paddles and ABXY buttons. However, the black seems to pick up odd stains that I couldn't wipe off while trying to snap pics for this review. I'm not sure what's going on but I never encountered this with other controllers. Furthermore, the plastic protective case that comes with the controller is really shady and I wouldn't want to be seen carrying this anywhere. I really think Gulikit could have sprung for a hard case rather than this thing.

In terms of connectivity, the Gulikit KK3 Max supports 2.4 GHz wireless with up to a 1000 Hz polling rate on PC, Bluetooth for smart devices, and USB-C wired connections. It works with Windows PCs, laptops, Nintendo Switch, and Android devices but, as mentioned earlier, not with Xbox or PlayStation. Pairing with the 2.4 GHz dongle took some effort, as the documentation wasn't particularly intuitive—a recurring issue when learning to use a lot of its features. I suspect many a user won't fully grasp the power in their hands due to the vague and complex steps required for most of them. Even switching between connections is slightly convoluted.

That said, at least the battery life is solid, providing around 15 hours of play with RGB lighting active and nearly 28 hours with it off. I'm happy to sacrifice the lackluster RGB in favor of longevity and I suspect you will too. However, the KK3 Max doesn't do a great job of indicating low battery. Rather than a clear warning, it just starts to disconnect intermittently until it doesn't connect at all anymore.

Performance is where the KK3 Max Pro truly excels, however. Its Hall effect joysticks deliver precision and longevity, outclassing traditional potentiometer designs. Whether lining up a sniper shot or executing tight manoeuvres, the accuracy is tangible. Sensitivity can be adjusted directly on the controller, as there's no accompanying software. Triggers and paddles are equally responsive, with the paddles proving easier to use than those on other pro controllers I've used. The ability to position them where you need and the unique squat paddle design make all four back paddles accessible—a rarity among controllers.

A Turbo Mode allows rapid button presses with a single hold, ideal for games requiring quick, repeated inputs. Auto Fire Mode enables continuous action without holding the button, perfect for sustained firing in bullet shooters. Auto Pilot Gaming lets you program action sequences for automatic execution, making repetitive tasks or complex combos a breeze.

Gulikit claims the KK3 Max's improved chipset and software enhance in-game self-correction, though its full potential is hard to gauge. Competitive gamers will appreciate the near-zero lag provided by the 2.4 GHz wireless and USB wired connections, as well as the 1000 Hz polling rate.

Remapping the paddles is straightforward, allowing on-the-fly adjustments without software. This is crucial during game play when quick changes are needed. However, the inability to save profiles will be a major drawback for players who frequently switch between games. The lack of dedicated software also means that deeper customization options are limited compared to premium alternatives like the Xbox Elite Series 2.

The Gulikit KK3 Max Pro stands out with its ergonomic design, durable build, and some rather unique advanced features. Hall effect joysticks, versatile connectivity, and performance-enhancing options make it a strong contender in the pro controller market. While it has some shortcomings—such as no software support, complex on-board customization shortcuts, and the absence of Xbox or PlayStation compatibility—these don't overshadow its strengths. Especially since the KK3 Max costs just $80 which makes it one of the best PC gaming controllers and a fantastic buy for the budget conscious buyer.

In 2007, a game called Peggle was released. In 2008, the world suffered a global economic crisis. To this day I refuse to believe these two facts were unrelated. Peggle was as all-consumingly moreish as it was simple—it was essentially just a pachinko machine, where you fired a ball into a screen full of ‘pegs’ and tried to hit ten orange ones on the way down. The thing is, the only agency you had was the direction you fired the ball in. After that, all you could do is sit back and watch, making it almost entirely luck-based.

Once you finally accepted that, the spell would hopefully break, and you could finally uninstall the bloody thing. But now developer newobject has come up with Ballionaire, a twist on pachinko that adds roguelike deckbuilding elements. Essentially Peggle has gone to college, smartened up, and gotten itself a masters degree in compelling strategy gameplay. Oh no. Oh God no.

The goal is to make enough money to pay a tribute that has to be cleared every seven balls or it’s game over. The starter tribute is 500 dollars, which is worrying, because the board is initially a complete tightwad. Hitting these pegs pays out a pathetic 1 dollar apiece, the kind of financial reward that would embarrass even a games journalist. Luckily, after every ball you get a choice of three obstacles (also, a little confusingly, called balls) that you can add to the table. A trampoline will pay out $200 if you hit it, and bounce the ball upwards. A smiling tree will also pay out $200, but only if you hit it from the bottom up. Ah, but as an apology for that irritating caveat, the tree also gains a small multiplier bonus after every single ball played, meaning it can become a substantial payout in the late game.

Oooh, hang on! If I place the trampoline ball under the tree, I’m far more likely to get that lovely multiplier money. And naturally this kind of synchronicity is what you’re aiming for with every ball you place on the table. Some balls are ‘droppers’ which means they’ll drop another ball when you hit them. These pair well with ‘holders’ that will hold onto any balls that hit them and give some lovely bonus in return (but naturally now the ball is ‘held’, it’s out of play and can’t hit anything else). Crucially, some balls automatically activate at the start of each go, like a fantastic butterfly ball that flies up the screen - only obtainable if you keep a caterpillar ball from being hit for five rounds, naturally.

It means a game that at first feels as random as flipping a coin can be manipulated into one that actually rewards strategy. Sure, sometimes God decides they hate you and nothing tumbles down the screen in the direction you want. But the trick here is to put together a Rube Goldberg machine so sophisticated that such randomness doesn’t stand a chance. There’s a Piggy Bonk ball that pays out $800 for every coin ball it’s holding, and I’ve become obsessed with molding my entire strategy around stuffing coin balls into it, regardless of what tools the game is offering me (this, in roguelike deckbuilding parlance, is known as ‘being an idiot’). Whatever, the runs where my beloved pig stratagem has worked have given me gloriously satisfying payouts.

Once you’ve won a run on the initial pyramid stage, you unlock four more, each nicely varied. One sees the ball being lowered in on a fishing line that’s then reeled back to the top when it hits the bottom. Great for making you try out stuff that relies more on being hit from below. The pinball table, with its two limited-use flippers, is my personal highlight, and I assure you that the Deathwheel stage has been named with no hyperbole whatsoever.

But let's get back to the balls for a moment, in what I’m fast worrying is becoming my most innuendo-laden review ever. Balls are divided into subcategories, such as Agers, Movers, and the aforementioned Droppers and Holders. I had fun slowly working out what all these different terms met. And that’s good news because the game did a pretty lousy job of explaining them to me. There’s a "Ballipedia" tucked away in the pause screen that gives you details on every ball, but it’s one of those irritating tutorial screens that often only gives you half the information you want. "Adjacent triggers to this ball have a +0.1 multi for each coin ball held". OK, cool, and a "trigger" is…? It’s incredibly irritating to mess up a run because you had to just make a guess at how something worked.

It’s not the only place where Ballionaire feels a little incomplete. Win a run and you’ll be rewarded with a currency that you can use on a vending machine to get more ball options for future runs. It won’t take you long to unlock everything (in fact it’ll only take a few seconds if you choose ‘unlock all’ in the pause menu, which is a nice touch). That’s all well and good, but it’s the limited difficulty options that have left me struggling for a reason to come back.

There are five difficulties, which throw predictable challenge increases at you like demanding heftier tribute amounts (yawn). Far more entertaining are the malicious curveballs which force you to place horrible annoyances on your lovely table. One has to be hit 500 times before the end of the game, or you lose. Another will sap all the payout money from the surrounding balls, and can require at least $250,000 before finally pissing off. I love these. Worrying about them while also still trying to hit those required tributes is a great, tricky balancing act.

I just wish it went further. After you’ve cleared the five difficulties, that’s your lot, and it feels like the game could easily keep escalating—look at all the horrible debuffs on offer in the create your own table mode! The lack of an endless mode is disappointing too—it'd be a perfect addition.

But maybe it’s greedy to complain about longevity when I got 20 fun hours out of Ballionaire. I’d rather pick on its irritating repetitive music, or its obnoxious dancing mascot. These are the ridiculously minor moans of someone who had to constantly slap themselves to stop alt-tabbing into Steam and playing more instead of writing this review. It’s a marvelous bookend to a year that opened with the almighty Balatro, and with a few updates, Ballionaire could easily become my new podcast game of choice. For now, it’s the elevator pitch of a Peggle deckbuilder, ball-illiantly executed.

I didn't expect Marvel Rivals to get its grips into me so quickly, but I'm having a good time feeling out the kits of its 33 launch heroes divided into three classes: vanguard, duelist, and strategist (tank, DPS, and Support), every one of which also includes unique 'team-up' abilities activated by building the right team composition. I've been maining Hawkeye, which I am ashamed to admit, considering how strong he is right now, and that's not even considering Black Widow's team-up ability, which gives him a 20% damage boost.

It's always fun to go through the wringer with a new hero shooter, especially at the chaotic beginnings. At first, I found it hard to recognise who was hitting you and where. I spent a lot of my time getting shot in the back by Moon Knight's Ankh, which he can set down and then reflect projectiles off. It doesn't matter if you're behind a wall or can't even see Moonknight—he'll find a way to get to you.

Eventually, I was able to pick up on the sound Moonknight's Ankh made when it reflected darts, and it became second nature to destroy it before trying to run for cover. There are loads of these little learning curves to master, many of which will feel familiar for Overwatch vets.

There's nothing quite like reflexively sleeping an enemy Scarlet Witch with Mantis before she ults or pushing away a diving Wolverine without a second thought before he can sink his claws into you. There are a lot of intuitive abilities and counters in Marvel Rivals—all you have to do is take the time and have the patience to learn them.

Getting to know each of the eight launch maps is also a lot of fun. Rivals' maps are one of its most distinctive features, as battlegrounds transform throughout a match either through a dynamic destruction or bespoke map events. It's a good way to shake up a match and can also be used to turn the tide in your favour. If there's a particular spot that a Black Widow player likes to perch on, for example, chances are you can blast it for a few seconds to destroy that vantage point. Unfortunately, the map will build itself back up every now and then, so it's best to be on the lookout for that pesky Black Widow.

Although I thought I was losing it when walls kept appearing in front of me on Klyntar, it turns out that the map's walls periodically shift around and literally change its blueprint, sorta like the Clockwork Mansion in Dishonored 2. This can be a blessing and a curse as it can sometimes cut off long lines of sight, which can protect attacking teams but also means you sometimes need to switch up your angles.

Too much of a good thing

Starting with 33 heroes is a bold move, considering most other hero shooters begin with a smaller roster that's easier for new players to digest before growing over time. That character select screen is a bit daunting, but the expansive roster is also great because it means there's something for everyone.

You have your straightforward heroes like Black Widow or Hawkeye, pure aimskill heroes who rely on players landing headshots, Punisher is your beginner-friendly Soldier 76 type with an assault rifle, and tanks like Groot and Magneto, who just place shields and gradually wear down the front line.

Then, on the slightly more complicated side, you have your rapid-dive heroes like Iron Fist, Psylocke, and Spider-Man. These heroes are a little trickier to get the hang of, but it's high-risk, high reward because I don't think there's anything scarier than a genuinely skilled Spider-Man player.

Marvel Rivals manages to cater to most sections of the hero shooter playerbase with characters that have varying skill ceilings and purposes. You can hide in the back, sniping or healing, or be in the midst of battle, darting around or breaking down walls with brute strength. On the other hand, this massive roster of heroes is also Marvel Rivals' undoing: There are loads of completely busted heroes right now. Hawkeye is a one-shot headshot for duelists and strategists, while Jeff the Shark is able to gobble up full teams of players and launch himself and all of them off the map in one go. Dominant heroes and instakill gimmicks are considered funny and meme-worthy right now in Marvel Rivals' honeymoon stage, but soon graduate to annoyances—talking points from which mobs of players will sharpen their pitchforks. Dr. Strange's teamkill teleport tactics are already beginning to wear thin—if I have to watch my team helplessly run off the map one more time, I'm going to seriously lose it.

Balancing a roster of heroes is arguably one of the hardest things a live service hero shooter has to do, and Marvel Rivals has made things unnecessarily difficult for itself by starting off with so many instead of drip-feeding players. But arguably, NetEase is more concerned with filling Marvel Rivals with loads of fun heroes rather than ones that are more balanced straight out of the gate. It's an unorthodox approach, but one that may work out in the long run if NetEase pulls up its sleeves quickly enough.

Duelists everywhere

In a similar vein to unbalanced heroes, there is also an uneven number of heroes in each class. The trouble is in a game that requires an even number of roles—usually two vanguards, two duelists, and two strategists, or something similar to this—if you have twice as many duelists than strategists and vanguards combined, chances are most teams will just be made up of duelists.

The worst matches I've experienced in Marvel Rivals have been when no one else is willing to switch off duelist, so we just get completely rolled by the opposing team, which has a balanced composition of vanguard, duelist, and strategist. I can play the strategist Rocket Racoon all I like, but if I'm stuck with a team full of duelists, we're not going to get very far.

This is something that Overwatch has struggled with ever since it merged the roles of offensive and defensive DPS. Since then, tank and support have been an afterthought for many years until a recent push to try and even out the classes. So I thought that this headache was something Marvel Rivals would want to avoid from the start by creating classes with a similar amount of heroes, but it seems that I was wrong. So, unbalanced team composition will probably stick around as a common issue until something like a role queue is added to the game, or the weak give in and assign themselves to vanguard or strategist.

The balancing issues and iffy team composition will hopefully not weigh Marvel Rivals down—my pessimistic outlook could just be a weary symptom of years playing Overwatch 2. I really hope the developers manage to even out the playing field a bit more so Marvel Rivals can carry on seeing the same kind of success that it has had in its launch week. But for now, at least, I'm going to enjoy the chaos of an unbalanced game while it's still fun and reap the benefits of running around as Hawkeye and getting more picks than anyone else, with the prize being my MVP award at the end of the match.

Starting with the design, Be Quiet! has introduced a magnetic cap for the Dark Rock 5 that covers the heatpipes and screwdriver hole for mounting the cooler. Its coolers, especially the more premium models, haven’t exactly been ugly in the past, often sporting a black anodized finish.

However, the cap, which can rotate around depending on the cooler’s orientation, looks even better and definitely makes the cooler stand out from the crowd. That’s just as well because you’re not looking at much change from $70 or £70 from this cooler, which is pretty steep for a single fan heatsink arrangement.

There are benefits to its compact dimensions and single fan, though, such as the ability to avoid all of your memory slots allowing for unrestricted height memory modules. At 161 mm tall it’s also going to fit in practically any ATX case too. The downside is that it’s a relatively deep heatsink and six heatpipes might benefit from a second fan.

Thankfully, Be Quiet! has included the clips for one in the box, but with a peak speed of 2,100 RPM, the included Silent Wings 4 120 mm PWM fan isn’t the largest or most powerful we’ve seen included with a heatsink so we’ll have to see how it holds up against our toasty Core i7 14700K.

The machined base is nickel-plated rather than bare copper, which means if you want to use liquid metal paste, you won’t run the risk of the paste staining or being absorbed by the copper and drying out as quickly. You won’t need to do any liquid metal paste research, though, as standard thermal paste is included.

This is in the form of a tube, so you get a couple of applications as opposed to just one when the paste is pre-applied. The base also has two sprung mounting screws fixed in place, while owners of older Be Quiet! coolers will remember a separate fiddly plate had to be used to secure the cooler.

The mounting mechanism is identical to that on Be Quiet!’s liquid coolers with quite a few pieces to deal with. It’s straightforward, but probably not something you’d want to attempt with your motherboard still mounted in the case.

The exception here might be on AMD motherboards, which don’t require the included backplate. Installing the Silent Wings 4 fan is far easier, though, as the clips slot into recesses in the heatsink with minimal fuss. The same definitely can’t be said of some cheaper heatsinks.

Unfortunately, the Dark Rock 5 wasn’t quite able to tame our Core i7 14700K. For the first few minutes of our various stress tests, the temperatures were acceptable, but would steadily climb and in our torturous x264 and Cinebench stress tests, the CPU ended up coming close to 100°C and throttling.

We should emphasise this only happened during extended multi-threaded stress tests and with Intel 14th Gen CPUs, but it seems that handling high loads for long periods with these CPUs is a bit beyond the Dark Rock 5.

It was much happier in our game tests, sitting at 83°C in Metro Exodus and 87°C in our 3D Mark Steel Nomad test, but even these were noticeably higher than Noctua’s larger dual-fan NH-D15 G2. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly airflow.

The cooler was fairly quiet at full speed, hitting 50 dBA on our sound meter, which was 2 dBA quieter than the Noctua cooler, but also shoving far less air through its relatively large heatsink. It also took a long time to return our processor to idle temperatures. Adding a second fan would undoubtedly help it out in all areas.

The Be Quiet! Dark Rock 5 is an attractive cooler with excellent build quality that remains fairly quiet at full speed and doesn’t suffer from memory and motherboard compatibility issues nearly as much as larger coolers.

Even with toasty Intel 14th Gen CPUs such as our Core i7 14700K, it’s able to tame them in games, but the same can’t be said for extended multi-threaded workloads where eventually the temperature climbed high enough to see it throttle.

Coping with less power-hungry AMD processors will be a different story, though, as will avoiding multi-threaded workloads using a high-end Intel 13th or 14th Gen CPU that take more than a couple of minutes to complete.

We can’t be too critical here as a result, especially if gaming and low noise are your main focus as most scenarios are well within this cooler’s capabilities.

That said, it’s a shame a cooler costing this much can’t handle all situations with popular current CPUs at stock speed and while it includes clips for a second fan, the inclusion of one would have made it a much sweeter deal.

Ultimately, the future looks like a chillier place as far as CPUs go, with Intel’s Core Ultra 200 processors running far cooler than their predecessors so while it’s not ideal for handling everything a Core i7 or Core i9 Intel 14th Gen CPU can throw at it, the Dark Rock 5 will fare much better once Intel’s hot-running LGA1700 CPUs have been consigned to history.

That startup mentality is also absolutely evident with the Dough Spectrum Black 32 OLED, the brand's very latest PC monitor. It ups Dough's ante to fully 32 inches of glorious 4K OLED action and, just like the original Spectrum, you sense the effort and investment, in terms of design and careful attention to elements like the design aesthetic and build quality, that's gone into this new OLED panel. You just don't see that from the bigger brands.

Where models from more mainstream monitor makers tend to feel a bit cheap, plasticky and mass produced, even at this premium end of the market, the Dough 32 OLED sports a lush metal rear chassis and a gorgeous, beautifully engineered alloy stand, albeit that latter feature is an optional $100 extra.

Add in the slick Corning Gorilla Glass screen cover and minimalist design and you have easily the most physically desirable 4K OLED we've yet reviewed. It makes most of the alternatives feel like cheap, disposable toys.

It's also mostly well specified. Dough has gone for the LG WOLED option as opposed to Samsung's QD-OLED tech. There are pros and cons to both panel types, but the LG panel in 4K format is the company's third generation WOLED technology and, importantly, it closes the gap to Samsung for full-screen brightness.

Actually, if anything it's a bit brighter full-screen for white tones, though QD-OLED probably still has the edge for color brightness. That's because WOLED, as the name implies, has an additional white subpixel to boost brightness that obviously does its best work with white tones.

Anyway, Dough has specced this panel up at 240Hz like most 4K OLEDs and its 275 nit full-screen and 1,000 nit peak HDR (in a 3% window) brightness ratings are largely par for the course, as is the claimed 0.03ms response performance.

To that you can add both HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 connectivity, plus a USB-C interface with 100 W of power delivery for slick single-cable connectivity, although the 100 W rating, while at least equal to that of most comparable displays, means that there's not enough power for a genuine gaming laptop. The only arguable exception to that is the new HP Omen Transcend 32 OLED with its 140 W USB-C interface, which is just about enough for some low-spec RTX 4060 laptops.

Anywho, while there is USB-C for video input and device charging, there's no USB hub for peripheral connectivity. At least, there isn't with this model which goes for $1,099, or $1,199 with the stand. A so-called "Hub" model which adds that functionality and a few other features is coming, but will be priced at $1,299 without the stand. Ouch.

That's a pity, because the USB-C interface without a hub rather undermines the whole single-cable connectivity notion. If you're not going to have a hub, it probably makes sense to ditch USB-C altogether and hit a lower price point. Still, at $999 with a stand, the Dough Spectrum Black OLED is actually pretty attractively priced given the overall feature set and clear build and design quality edge it has over the competition. If it performs well, it could be a no brainer as our pick of the current 32-inch 4K bunch.

Sadly, that's not quite the case. Out of the box, the sRGB calibration in SDR mode looks great, with accurate colors and plenty of punch with the brightness cranked up. There is a little ABL-driven brightness variation depending on how much of the screen is being ignited. But it doesn't distract to anything like the extent that ABLs or automatic brightness limiters did with earlier generation LG WOLED-equipped monitors.

The Gorilla Glass cover is likewise very sweet, enabling a sense of heightened contrast but without excessive reflectivity. In fact, it makes for the best glossy implementation of an OLED we've seen. You really would have to be using this monitor in incredibly bright ambient conditions to choose the matte version Dough will also be offering starting at $899 with no stand and no USB-C port.

As an SDR panel, then, this thing really pops, the pixel density thanks to the 4K resolution is fab, and then you're getting all the usual OLED upsides including ridiculously fast response times, great viewing angles and perfect per-pixel lighting. However, the problems begin when you enable HDR.

For starters, despite updating to the latest firmware that supposedly fixes an HDR brightness issue, our review sample wasn't producing the full HDR performance.

Meanwhile, SDR tone mapping in HDR mode is essentially broken. That means you have to switch between SDR and HDR modes depending on content type. Not the end of the world? Nope. But it's a problem lots of HDR monitors used to have but latterly far fewer exhibit and contributes to a broader impression of a monitor that's not quite ready for retail availability.

On that note, the USB-C interface in its current state is essentially broken and only works intermittently with the multiple laptops with which we tested. This should be a fairly straight forward fix for Dough, just like the SDR tone mapping in HDR mode. But as we write this review, actual customers are receiving monitors and they really shouldn't be shipping out with these fairly basic flaws.

This is, frankly, a little disappointing. At $999 with the stand, this could be our favourite 4K OLED. The design and build is lovely and the LG WOLED panel is fundamentally fabulous. Fix the SDR tone mapping and the USB-C interface and this will be a killer product. As it is, the Dough Spectrum Black 32 very much a hold rather than a buy.

If you're interested, our advice is to keep a weather eye on the Dough Reddit forum and jump in when it's clear all the issues have been sorted. They very likely will be, at which point the Dough Spectrum Black 32 OLED with Gorilla Glass will be very appealing, albeit at a price.

Ideally, we'd like to see a Gorilla Glass version with the arguably redundant USB-C ripped out and offered for about $100 less. That would be a very compelling proposition. As it is, we'd counsel caution for now. In its current state, the Dough Spectrum Black 32 OLED isn't quite ready to be bought.

Thankfully, a lot of the great features of previous Be Quiet! coolers are still here. You get a trio of Be Quiet!’s own Light Wings LX fans and being best known for its fans and air coolers, you can all but guarantee these will be epic.

Here, they have 16 RGB LEDs embedded in the fan hub that radiate light outwards through nine semi-transparent fan blades. The fans themselves use rifle bearings and are 4-pin PWM-controlled, topping out at a reasonable 2,100 rpm.

You get screws for the included fans to mount them to the radiator, but sadly there’s no extras included to add your own should you want to boost cooling or lower noise at a later date as some other manufacturers allow. Our sample had all-black components, but there is a white version available if that’s more your thing. The actual illuminated sections are the pump top, which features a diagonal blade-like design, and the fan hubs and blades and both can display multiple colours simultaneously. The lighting is very punchy and vibrant and easily more appealing than that on Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III coolers.

The pump can spin up to 2,900 rpm, but as it has its own 4-pin PWM cable, it can be controlled separately. However, Be Quiet! has certainly been singing the pump’s new progressive motor IC in terms of reducing noise so hopefully running it at full speed won’t involve dealing with any hideous whining. Another noise-reducing feature we’ve seen on previous Be quiet! liquid coolers is the cooler’s ability to be refilled. Coolant can, over time, evaporate out of the sealed loop meaning air can be introduced, potentially increasing the noise in the pump.

A coolant bottle is included to top the coolant up should this happen, but should also mean the cooler can be installed in any orientation without fear of air getting into the pump if it’s higher than the radiator, which also acts as a reservoir, trapping any air in the loop. This is a well-known issue with long term use on standard liquid coolers, but so long as you top up the coolant here every year or so, the Light Loop 360mm should live a long and happy life in any position. The radiator itself is your standard thickness model, sitting at just 27 mm deep and 52 mm with the fans installed.

Unlike Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III coolers, which feature much thicker radiators, there should be no compatibility issues, even in cases with modest clearance around fan mounts. Arctic’s coolers also suffer from motherboard compatibility issues due to their large pumps and integrated VRM fans, but the Light Loop 360mm’s pump is very compact so we double any standard motherboard will struggle to house it.

While its fan and pump cables lack the brilliant pre-tidying of Arctic’s alternatives, Be Quiet! has at least included a fan and lighting hub that can combine all of the cooler’s cables into a single 3-pin ARGB and 4-pin PWM cables. This means you just need to route the cables behind your motherboard tray to the hub, rather than trailing across your motherboard, but we’d still rather see something more elaborate here from Be Quiet! in future.

The installation process is simple, although there’s a significant number of parts to deal with. Thankfully, you don’t need to remove the processor socket mechanism on Intel motherboards like you do with Arctic’s coolers and the pump itself attaches to mounting brackets you construct on the board using just two screws. On AMD Socket AM5 boards, the brackets allow for a slightly off-centre pump installation too, catering for Ryzen 7000 and 9000 processor hot spots that sit away from the centre point on the heatspreader.

The pump’s noise level was impressively low, only audible at full speed if you turn down all other system fans and put your ear within a foot of it so if you’re concerned about pump whine then we can highly recommend the Light Loop 360mm and that’s before playing around with the pump speed, which cut the noise even further. The fans, on the other hand, were not so quiet, adding a few decibels to the noise we’ve seen from coolers such as Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III 360 and definitely less pleasant to sit next to at full speed. Thankfully, as you edge away from full speed, the noise drops significantly and the noise quality improves so if you’re particularly noise-sensitive, we’d suggest limiting the fan speed to only hit 100% under extreme conditions.

There’s definitely scope to do this too as the Light Loop 360mm outperformed the Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 in all of our tests and even once the ambient temperature was factored in, undercut the Arctic cooler by up to 5°C when pitched against our Core i7 14700K with a temperature of 77°C in our x264 test. It even shaved a few degrees of the temperature in our game test too and returned to idle temperatures far quicker as well.

Ultimately the Be Quiet! Light Loop 360mm is powerful, flexible, looks fantastic and its unique feature of being able to top up the coolant potentially means it has an extended lifespan compared to other coolers too. The negative points you’ll want to be aware of are relatively high noise levels from its fans at full speed and relatively high price in some areas for what is a fairly basic AIO liquid cooler in terms of not being software-controlled or having cable-free fans or other premium features. However, its excellent performance, good build quality and super-quiet pump go a long way to make up for this.

And where the previous generation Alchemist GPUs were notoriously unreliable in their levels of gaming performance, we were given to believe such things wouldn't be an issue with Battlemage. Indeed, from looking at the Xe2 GPU's first outing inside Lunar Lake, things did look pretty positive.

In its first discrete graphics card of this Battlemage generation—strangely the card whose Alchemist equivalent launched last—the $250 Arc B580 is offering a hefty 12 GB frame buffer, with a healthy 192-bit bus, and a re-designed graphics core aimed at being both more familiar to game engines and to deliver on the twin modern demands of AI and ray tracing workloads. Good job, considering it's launching at a higher price than the $190 A580 did.

Intel is also offering up XeSS-FG. This is its own take on Frame Generation, the interpolation technique introduced by Nvidia to magic up game frames seemingly from nowhere. And in principle it's far more like Nvidia's take on it than AMD's, using a single-model AI technique to achieve its own effects.

There's more cache, more memory, improved core components, and the promise of solid, reliable drivers. All very positive. That positivity, however, has largely evaporated upon first contact with the Arc B580, its BMG-G21 GPU, and the PC Gamer graphics card test gauntlet.

It's not all bad, not by a long shot, but given the state of the review drivers right now, I don't want to imagine what this launch would have looked like just a few months ago.

Intel Arc B580 verdict

The Intel Arc B580 was touted by its makers as a key 1440p budget GPU, and I wish I had the confidence to agree. Though the numbers I have managed to get do kinda bear that out for the most part; where it's behind the key RTX 4060 battle in terms of frame rates it's only by a relatively small margin at this relatively high resolution, and where it's ahead it's there by sometimes a fair margin, especially when you add in upscaling and frame generation.

But for the new Intel graphics card to be able to get any kind of recommendation from me it had to do one thing: run consistently. You had one job, Battlemage… Just run the games we throw at you, and not flake out.

Sadly, while things looked super positive from Intel's carefully picked pre-launch benchmarks, that hasn't translated into independent testing. I've heard of other reviewers having driver issues in their testing, so I know I'm not alone with the failure rate in our new GPU benchmarking suite.

Consistency was always going to be key and it's just not there yet with the Arc B580. It's going to be a problem for Intel to turn this initial impression around, even with the sorts of performance bumps we saw in Alchemist drivers over the past couple years.

If the issues are ironed out, however, then this $250 GPU will be a hugely tempting budget graphics card in a market where it's been tough to make a positive recommendation before. The $300 RTX 4060 is the obvious alternative, but its 8 GB VRAM has always been a stumbling block for its own 1440p frame rates. On the AMD side the similarly priced RX 7600 XT, with its 16 GB VRAM, is a far less tempting proposition. That hefty frame buffer is still hobbled by a 128-bit aggregated memory bus and RDNA 3 still struggles with ray tracing.

So, it feels like there is an opportunity here if Intel can make the Arc B580's handling of PC games far more consistent. That window of opportunity might be closing rapidly if Nvidia gets anything like a budget GPU out of its Blackwell generation in the first half of 2025, though.

Right now, however, it feels like too much of a lottery when for a small amount more you can buy a boring Nvidia card that will just work.

Intel Arc B580 architecture and specs

The Arc B580 is the first discrete graphics card Intel has released to sport the new Battlemage, or Xe2 GPU architecture, and its BMG-G21 chip represents a necessary change from the Alchemist GPUs launched in the tail end of 2022. We've covered the architectural changes in our Lunar Lake coverage, but it does bear repeating here what Intel's switched around and why it's done so.

In raw terms, the BMG-G21 looks like a lesser chip than the A580 or the A750 of the Alchemist generation, but in performance terms the B580 is actually somewhere between the $190 A580 and the $290 Arc A750. That's because Intel has made sweeping changes to its architecture to both improve efficiency and performance. And maybe to improve compatibility along the way, too.

Arguably the biggest change is the switch from SIMD8 to native SIMD16 execution, something that was seen as a bit of a misstep with the original Arc GPU design. Previously there were essentially eight lanes of processing for each instruction fed to the GPU, that has been swapped out for a native 16-lane design giving a wider execution model which helps efficiency and might even give it a little fillip in terms of wider compatibility.

Another mistake Intel has fessed up to is the decision to run some DirectX 12 commands entirely in software emulated states, rather than being supported by specific units within the GPU hardware itself. Intel states that its architects ran deep-dives on various workloads to see what its graphics acceleration hardware was doing, and this has led to the Xe2 GPU being far better optimised for DX12 and better utilises the hardware at its disposal.

The biggest jump is the Execute Indirect command, which was one of those previously emulated in software, but is used widely by modern game engines such as Unreal Engine 5. Now it has support baked into the Xe2 hardware Intel is claiming a performance boost on that part of a frame's draw time by anywhere from 1.8x to a massive 66x faster than with Alchemist. Though apparently it averages out to around 12.5x in general.

But there are a host of other small improvements in that graphics acceleration area which should all end up delivering the extra final frame rate performance that Intel is promising with Battlemage. And that is effectively a significant increase in performance per core, which is why the 20 Xe cores of the B580 are so much more effective than the 24 or 28 cores of the Arc A580 or Arc A750.

Those second-gen cores will be familiar to anyone who checked out the Alchemist GPUs in any depth, but Intel has kinda smooshed things together rather than separated them out. Instead of having 16 256-bit Vector Engines in each of the cores, there are now just eight 512-bit Vector Engines. And instead of 16 1024-bit XMX Engines, there are now eight 2048-bit XMX Engines. But that native SIMD16 compute capability means there's no lack of parallelism because of the new structure and it can throw the full force of a Vector Engine's floating point units at a task if it needs to, rather than having to pull them together from separate blocks.

Another reason for the improved Xe2 performance is that Intel has also bumped up the cache levels, with the first level cache being boosted by 33% to 256 KB in total, and a total of 18 MB of L2 cache, up from 16 MB in the previous generation.

Ray tracing was one of the more positive parts of the Alchemist picture, and Intel has improved on its second-gen RT units again. It was a major headache for Intel to implement originally with Alchemist, but being able to build upon it for Battlemage means that Intel has a better ray tracing GPU than AMD at this point in time.

Another positive has been Intel's own upscaling solution, XeSS, which is also seeing a version two with Battlemage. Though, arguably, the actual upscaling part isn't changing, just getting a slight naming change for clarity, now being known as XeSS Super Resolution in order to differentiate it from the new features of XeSS2.

The key one being XeSS Frame Generation, or XeSS-FG. Nvidia kicked off the interpolation race, and true to form Intel has followed its lead rather than matching AMD's less full-force simulacrum. That's because Intel, like Nvidia, has specific matrix engines inside its GPUs rather than doing all its extra work in shaders as AMD does.

The new XMX AI engines can hit both FP16 and INT8 operations, which makes them well situated to cope with the rigours of modern generative AI fun times. But they will also have a part to play in the new frame generation feature of XeSS, too, as that also has AI elements.

XeSS-FG is a single AI model implementation that looks at the previous frame as well as the new frame in flight, using optical flow and motion vector reprojection algorithms, blended together to create interpolated frames.

At the moment that's only available in one game, F1 24, but is certainly impressive from what I've seen. It will function in any Battlemage GPU, including those of Lunar Lake.

Alongside that, and often linked for what will become obvious reasons, is XeSS Low Latency, or XeSS-LL. This is akin to Nvidia's Reflex feature and is designed to cut the PC or display latency (depending on what you want to call it) of a game. That is fundamental for fast-paced competitive games, but also vital to make the most of Intel's XeSS-FG, too. Frame interpolation always adds latency as there's another step in the process before a rendered frame is displayed, but having XeSS-LL in play will cut that back down to a more standard level.

Combining all the XeSS2 features together and you get far greater performance, with both higher frame rates and lower latency. A win win. So, how does it all actually perform then when it comes down to the numbers?

Intel Arc B580 performance

Intel's claims of beating out the immensely popular—but certainly due a toppling—RTX 4060 graphics card definitely do have some merit from our own testing, but it's absolutely not a cut and dried case of Intel dominance of the budget market. Though, were you to just take the 3DMark performance of the B580 as gospel you would have a markedly different view of the situation than you get once you actually look at it on a game-by-game basis.

Intel has shown, from Alchemist onwards, how well optimised its drivers and hardware are when it comes to UL's benchmark standards. The 3DMark Time Spy Extreme performance of the Arc 580 is some 45% higher than the competing Nvidia GPU, which looks like a stellar achievement. In Port Royal, too, there's a huge gap in the ray tracing benchmark, with the Intel card having a 31% lead over the Nvidia RTX 4060.

But as soon as you start talking about games, that's where things look different. In raw native resolution terms—testing the hardware itself rather than upscaling algorithms—it is the dictionary definition of 'a mixed bag'. In one benchmark it will sit slightly behind the Nvidia card, in another it will be slightly ahead, another still and it's well behind, and then well ahead again in further tests.

This up and down performance was a feature of the Alchemist range of cards, and I was hoping it wouldn't be the case again with Battlemage. The twist here, however, is that where the A-series cards would just perform poorly, with this first B-series card I'm coming up against games that simply will not work.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a particularly frustrating example, because without upscaling enabled it completely froze our test system while trying to load into the game world. Not just a crash-to-desktop, but a complete lock which required a hard reset. And it's particularly frustrating because if you look at the pseudo real-world performance—our 1440p testing with upscaling and frame generation enabled where possible—the Cyberpunk 2077 performance is unbelievably good. Like, almost a two-fold performance hike over the RTX 4060 with the RT Ultra preset enabled at 1440p. It's a battering of, well, more than 3DMark proportions.

Then I had Homeworld 3 refusing to run in DX12 mode, and then performing really poorly in the DX11 mode I had to enable just to get some B580 numbers for the game.

There are glimpses, however, of where the Battlemage hardware, with all its architectural improvements, is making a big difference in terms of how it performs in games. And when you take into account the difference XeSS-FG makes in F1 24 it does lead me to feel more positive about how this card could end up in the future. The fact that, even with the RTX 4060 using its own Frame Gen feature, the B580 gets over 50% higher frame rates, and looks damned good while doing it, is testament to what Intel has done with the feature.

It's also notable that even when there are performance disparities on the negative side for the Arc B580, that chonk 12 GB frame buffer really helps shrink the gap when you start looking at higher resolutions.

When it comes to the system-level performance of the card, too, it's a positive story. The card itself looks great, stays impressively cool, and even without messing around in the BIOS and Windows extra power profiling its a relatively efficient GPU, too. The performance per watt levels are up there with Nvidia's efficient Ada architecture, despite being a much bigger chip.

PC Gamer test rig
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D | Motherboard: Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master | RAM: G.Skill 32 GB DDR5-6000 CAS 30 | Cooler: Corsair H170i Elite Capellix | SSD: 2 TB Crucial T700 | PSU: Seasonic Prime TX 1600W | Case: DimasTech Mini V2

Intel Arc B580 analysis

There are few things as disappointing as wasted potential. And maybe it's too harsh to slap that tag onto the new Intel Arc B580 graphics card only a day out from its eventual public release, but in my time testing the new Battlemage discrete GPU that's the overriding feeling I'm left with: Disappointment.

Though, the sucker that I am, it is still tinged with hope for the future.

By the way, I get it. I shouldn't be talking about feelings as someone who purports to be a serious hardware journalist, especially not as to how they pertain to a fresh lump of silicon and circuitry.

But I so wanted this new generation of Intel graphics architecture to be a tangible improvement from Alchemist, and there are glimpses of the true promise of the new Battlemage architecture here, shrouded as they are in the now-familiar veil of consistently inconsistent software drivers. The fact we're still talking in those terms about Intel's second generation of discrete graphics cards is so disappointing when we were promised its drivers suffered from "no known issues of any kind."

For what it's worth, even just looking at the release notes for the first Arc B580 driver I installed when I started my testing, it's pretty clear there absolutely are "known issues."

But it's not the total train wreck I was preparing for after my first few benchmarks in our new GPU testing suite. It was maybe unlucky that where I started my testing also just happened to be where there are serious points of failure with the new GPU. Performance picked up with later tests, and I've been impressed with XeSS Frame Generation for the little I've seen of it in the only game supporting the new feature, but the early going was rough.

I was initially interested in seeing what the 12 GB of VRAM would mean for creator applications, and it slapped in the Procyon GenAI benchmark compared with the RTX 4060, which will be its major competition at this level. But shifting on to the PugetBench for DaVinci Resolve tests and I get my first failure… not at any particular point, but every time I've tried the benchmark (after subsequent updated driver releases just days before launch) it falls over at some point in the process.

Then I started at the beginning of the alphabet in our gaming test suite. Black Myth Wukong works, but delivers gaming performance behind the RTX 4060 it's supposed to be topping by an average 10%. Then there's Cyberpunk 2077 and the game cannot even load into the world unless you enable some form of upscaling.

Cyberpunk 2077, by the way, does deliver a significant performance boost over the RTX 4060 when you're pitting DLSS and Frame Generation vs. the Intel card utlising AMD's GPU agnostic equivalent features. So, at least there's that.

A subsequent successful game bench is then followed by a total catastrophic collapse with Homeworld 3 and it crashing before the first splash screen. After a back and forth with Intel's PR I could then bench the game in the DX11 mode by using a command line argument on boot, but that just delivered performance well off the budget competition.

You'll be relieved to discover I'm going to abandon the benchmark blow-by-blow now, but I just want to show how inconsistent the testing process has been. Maybe I've just been unlucky and have somehow devised the perfect suite of gaming benchmarks to hit the only problems the new Arc B580 GPU has, and you might also suggest that if only three out of 11 specific tests have failed it's not that bad.

But those are infinitely more problems than you'll have than if you spend another $40 on the mature Nvidia GPU. And therein lies the rub; how do you recommend someone who's not a total contrarian spend their cash on an inconsistent graphics card?

If it were merely a case of the card not performing as well in some games and easily out-pacing the competition in others that wouldn't be such an issue, I'd take the cost savings and enjoy the hell out of a great new budget GPU. But it's not, it's a case of not knowing whether the card will even boot a given game. For the short time I've been given to test the card ahead of launch and ahead of the holiday season, I've not had the chance to just chuck a ton of different games at the Arc B580 to see how widespread these failures are. But my anecdotal evidence isn't painting a particularly positive picture.

This isn't the end for the Battlemage graphics card, however, as bad as it might seem on day one. Intel has shown with Alchemist that it is capable of shoring things up down the line with subsequent driver releases, and I'm told fixes for both my Cyberpunk 2077 and Homeworld 3 issues are in-hand as I type. So Intel could be again borrowing some of AMD's classic 'fine wine' ethos, where the struggling cards at launch are slowly transformed into functioning members of gaming society by fresh software.

Certainly the outstanding performance in Cyberpunk 2077 with upscaling enabled gives me hope, as does the exceptional F1 24 results, too.

And, if that does happen across the board, my own testing figures do show a card that has the potential to be a real budget champion if it can nail that consistent performance across a wide range of titles. Right now, though, it's a struggle to make it a confident recommendation as a buy now GPU.

Ultimately, there are only two sources you can go to for the actual 32-inch 4K OLED panel, LG and Samsung. So, every monitor including this new HP is a derivation of one of those two familiar technical themes. What chance, then, that HP has come up with something individual and compelling?

Actually, the Omen Transcend 32 is pretty nice. The caveat is that it all hinges on price. Conceptually, HP has gone for a full-feature take on the 32-inch OLED riff. It's the full 240 Hz treatment, sports probably the best connectivity of any display in this class, and HP has included some additional capabilities claimed to make this a great display for content creation, too.

All of that would have you expecting a pretty painful price. And indeed the MSRP is a hefty $1,299. That's around $500 more than the MSI MAG 321UP, which sports essentially the same Samsung QD-OLED panel. The difference is that the MSI lacks true single-cable USB-C connectivity and also runs at 165 Hz.

However, you can actually buy this HP Omen for $999 from Best Buy, even at launch. In fact, Omen's own website links you through to Best Buy if you click "Shop Now", though the listing for the Omen Transcend 32 on the sister HP website allows you to buy direct for $1,299. Much will hinge on that disparity, but we'll come back to the sordid matter of money later.

To drill down into the specifics, then, this Omen monitor uses Samsung's latest QD-OLED 4K panel running at the aforementioned 240Hz and offering 0.03ms response times. In other words, it's hella quick.

It's rated at 250 nits full screen just like every other Samsung-equipped 32-inch 4K OLED, along with a peak of 1,000 nits for HDR content in a 3% window. Again, much of a muchness with other Samsung-based 4K OLEDs, albeit those are great specs.

The Transcend 32 begins to carve out something of a niche with its industrial design. The white rear section of the chassis is a little redolent of some Alienware and Samsung Odyssey panels. But there are a few signature Omen flourishes, such as the square base and slim stand. Overall, it looks pretty slick, though perhaps feels a little plasticky for such a premium panel.

For the record, the display adjusts for height, tilt and rotate into portrait mode, but doesn't have any swivel support. There is also an invisible magnetic headphone hook on the left side of the panel for support headsets.

However, where the Transcend 32 really begins to separate itself from the competition involves connectivity. Along with the dual HDMI 2.1 and Display 2.1 ports, plus a USB hub with both USB-A and USB-C connectivity, most notable is the USB-C interface with DisplayPort Alt mode and 140 W of power delivery.

Yup, you read that right, 140 W. That's a fair bit higher than the usual 90 W and 100 W that USB-C interfaces top out at with most monitors. HP claims that it's enough to get a "full experience" with a single cable when gaming with their own Omen Transcend 14 gaming laptop.

We suspect that's because the Transcend 14 can be had with a relatively low wattage Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU. Whatever, what we can say for sure is that in our testing with a Lenovo laptop equipped with an RTX 4080, the 140 W USB-C power delivery certainly wasn't enough for a "full experience". Using the USB-C only for power delivery cut the frame rate in half playing Cyberpunk 2077, but even the restriction in power usage that implies wasn't enough to prevent the battery being depleted during game play.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the 140 W USB-C interface almost certainly won't be enough to keep most gaming laptops juiced. But what it does allow for is a reasonably powerful laptop to be used alongside a gaming desktop. To that end, HP has included full KVM switch support.

It's also worth noting that, likely due to the high-spec USB-C interface, this monitor has easily the most massive power supply we've ever seen for a monitor. It's rated at 480 W and weighs a metric ton.

Connectivity aside, what of the Transcend 32's image quality? If there aren't really any surprises, we can confirm this is one of the better Samsung-based 32-inch 4K OLEDs we've seen. It's nicely calibrated in SRGB mode, but perhaps more importantly, SDR content actually looks its best and most punchy with HDR enabled.

That means you can simply select HDR and you're good to go with all kinds of content. It's also good to see that panel brightness is very consistent in all modes, with little if any evidence of brightness variability on the desktop depending on the content being shown. In other words, the panel's ABL or automatic brightness limiter is not at all intrusive.

That may be down to the graphene film panel heat sink and fan, with the latter operating pretty much inaudibly during our review. Anyway, this is as punchy a 4K QD-OLED as we've seen. It's also slightly less prone to the overly warm color balance that some QD-OLED's exhibit. Nice.

Yes, you can still see the slightly grey, purplish tinge to the panel itself in very bright ambient light conditions. All QD-OLEDs suffer from that.

But it won't be an issue for most users and the general image quality, contrast and HDR performance is just fab.

The contrast and HDR visuals in particular benefit from a glossy coating that manages to really let the per-pixel OLED lighting pop while at the same time not being excessively prone to reflectivity. It's all nicely judged.

The net result is a pretty stellar gaming experience. Cyberpunk's ray-traced HDR visuals look utterly spectacular on the Transcend 32, while the 240Hz refresh and vanishingly short response times make for a very nippy experience in shooters like Counter-Strike 2. Of course, a 4K panel like this wouldn't be your first choice if you want the absolute last word in low latency and high frame rates. But if you're not a pretty serious esports type, there's more than enough speed on offer here.

Along with all that gaming goodness, this is a really lovely panel for more mundane desktop duties. The pixel density of the 4K native is much crisper and sharper than, say, a 27-inch 1440p or 34-inch ultrawide panel, for instance.

HP has also added a few features specifically for content creation pros, including configurable HDR clipping levels, manual or AV Info Frame HDR controls and factory calibration. We're likewise big fans of Omen's OSD controls. The interface is exceptionally logical, clear and easy to use and has all the features and options most users will want to see.

Oh, and HP has built in a quartet of downward firing speakers that perform comfortably above the norm. They're not going to displace even fairly basic dedicated speakers. But they produce decent audio in a pinch and are useful as a temporary backup.

The overall upshot, then, is that this is certainly one of the more appealing and better resolved 32-inch 4K OLEDs we've seen. Is it the best? That's hard to say. But one thing is for sure. Its appeal very much hinges on price.

At HP's $1,299 MSRP, we've not overly bothered. There are alternatives that can be had for $300 less that will deliver a similar experience. But at the $999 tag that's currently applied at Best Buy, the Transcend 32 is a different proposition.

In fact, if USB-C connectivity and sharing a monitor like this across a desktop gaming rig and a laptop is what you desire, then this Omen is probably our pick of the current bunch.

Of course, we could argue that if all you care about is exclusively gaming with your desktop and you don't mind forgoing 240Hz for 165Hz, the cheapest of the MSI options is the obvious pick. And if the $200 price differential is meaningful to you, then that absolutely makes sense.

But if you can afford the full $1,000, as an overall package in terms of its strong feature set and marginally superior image quality compared to cheaper alternatives, this HP Omen is probably worth the extra cash. It's certainly worthy of being on your 4K gaming OLED shortlist.

They’re available in a range of sizes in both 120 mm and 140 mm fan configurations, with the model I'm reviewing being the Liquid Freezer III 360 A-RGB. If you have more modest requirements then 240 mm and 280 mm models are also available, alongside a monstrous 420 mm model with three 140 mm fans.

This review concerns the illuminated white model with RGB lighting spanning both pump and fans, but if you want to save some cash there are standard black versions too with RGB lighting that cost even less. The equivalent of the 360 mm model I'm looking at here, for example, can be had for just £77 here in the UK—that’s good for a 360 mm AIO liquid cooler in anyone’s books.

Part of what impresses here is the extra thick radiator. At 38 mm, its depth is a good 10 mm or so above what you’d see on most other coolers and the added surface area inside means more heat can be dissipated with the same airflow. In theory it’s able to deal with more heat before its fans need to spin up too, but the added thickness can also mean more restriction.

Thankfully the fins inside the radiator spaced a little wider apart to reduce that restriction, but it can still potentially be a limiting factor, especially at lower fan speeds. The other issue with a thicker radiator is case compatibility, but most cases that can fit a standard liquid cooler can also house a Liquid Freezer III as we’re only talking another 8-10 mm.

If in doubt, your case’s manual or product page often has this information, though five minutes with a ruler will also suffice. Still, the thickness requires some fairly beefy fans and the P12 PWM PST A-RGB fans included top out at 2,000 rpm, though there are AIO liquid coolers with fans way north of this. So, I'm hoping Arctic has done its research, finding a balance between fan speed and optimising the airflow as well as the thicker radiator.

The other eyebrow-raising feature is the removable fan that sits on top of the pump section. This drives air down onto your motherboard and helps to cool components such as the VRMs and SSD heatsinks that otherwise can get very toasty due to an AIO liquid cooler’s lack of local airflow compared to an air cooler. There are two cables included in the box that you’ll need to choose from and attach to the pump to allow for different modes of control.

One combines the pump, radiator fans and VRM fan into a single 4-pin connector, ramping all up or down depending on CPU temperature. The other cable separates those outputs giving you individual control. If you’re worried about the pump or VRM fan making noise (after all, the latter does max out at 2,500 rpm), thankfully you can control them separately using your motherboard’s additional fan headers.

In fact, many motherboards allow you to swap from the CPU to the VRMs as the input for fan control on specific fan headers, so you could ramp the fan up only when the VRMs get toasty, which is a fabulous option. The down side is that the pump section is quite large and occasionally has issues with motherboard compatibility, especially with Mini-ITX models, so make sure you check Arctic’s list on the product page.

All these separate cables sounds like a nightmare, but Arctic has at least combined the three fans’ 4-pin and RGB cables into a single line and also run those through the coolant tube’s sleaving. Using a few cable ties—which you'll have to source yourself as Arctic doesn't include these—you could easily combine the separate cables into one strand for neatness. The RGB lighting itself covers the pump and fans from one cable. It’s vibrant and contrasts well with the white components, although it's maybe not as bright as more expensive coolers.

Arctic further impressed us with the inclusion of a contact frame for LGA1700 and LGA1851 CPUs to reduce the pressure on the CPU that can otherwise cause it to bend or affect the contact with the pump section. This sounds great in practice, but was a little fiddly to install. Adjusting the pump’s contact plate to sit directly over the hottest part of the CPU, which on modern AMD CPUs is not quite in the middle, also offsets the AMD mount slightly.

Installation was otherwise pretty straightforward, but attaching the correct PWM cable for your needs before mounting the pump to the motherboard definitely requires a bit of work, as doing so later is tricky. There seems to be plenty of length to the tubing too and, with the cables on the fans pre-tidied, the installation didn’t take long at all.

With everything at full speed, I recorded a reading of 49 dBA on my sound meter, but without any horrible whines or droning. The removable VRM fan proved its worth too, dropping the peak VRM temperature by 5°C with no discernible increase in noise either. The pump was a tad loud at full speed, but the VRM fan housing encloses it, hiding most of the noise within, plus the pump only reaches full speed when the fans run flat out with the single PWM cable.

Tuning the fan down to 40% speed saw it operate almost silently, and I only saw a 2°C rise in the peak load temperature with my Core i7 14700K. In my Metro Exodus game test, the CPU reached 69°C, but rose to 83°C and 84°C respectively in 3DMark’s Steel Nomad stress test, and x264 encoding test. Cinebench was a little cooler at 80°C, while it took the cooler just under three minutes to drop back to idle temperatures from load.

If you’re looking for an affordable AIO liquid cooler that’s both capable of handling the hottest CPUs out there, but also operates at very quiet levels under lower loads, then the Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 A-RGB is well made, easy to install (for the most part), and even includes RGB lighting. The VRM cooling fan is an added benefit, and the option to control it, the pump and radiator fans separately for fine tuned airflow is a welcome addition that caters to both die-hard tinkerers as well as those that just want to build their PC and start racking up headshots.

Smart and sturdy: that's how I'd describe this pegboard. But that's if I were comparing pegboard to pegboard, in a world where gaming desk pegboards were commonplace. We don't live in such a world, however. In this one, the average person has nary even seen a desk pegboard in the wild, let alone owned one.

So, much better that we first clarify exactly what this thing does and whether it's better to have one (in general) than not have one (in general). Here goes.

It's a plate—a piece of your finest powder-coated steel—chock full of holes to fit various storage and organisation accessories. It's essentially a DIY-er's space-saving shelving unit. But one that looks a little trendy in this gamer space. We see big ones behind used on gaming desks such as the Corsair Platform: 6 and Decztop Bifrost Elite.

The Thermaltake pegboard is one that you can fit on your non-pegboardy desk to get in on some of that peggy action, letting you hook and balance all kinds of things hopefully not-so-precariously vertically up the side of your desk.

So, how's it stack up? Well, first things first, I've had no complaints at all about sturdiness and build quality. It's only staying stuck to my desk because of its clamping mechanism, but I've honestly pushed and shook it quite hard and it doesn't move an inch. The steel is plenty strong, too.

It's only really with the single-peg accessories (the hooks) that "flimsy" comes to mind, because without two fixed points it can, of course, turn a little. But that's just the nature of single-peg pegboard accessories in general.

It was easy to set up, of course, being just a twisty-clampy ordeal. And once it's set up, it does look rather smart. I have mine on the left-hand side of my desk, which also gives my desk a little more of a boxed-in, cosy feel.

How about function? On that front, I've been quite pleased with it, but I'd have liked some different accessories to ship with it. I'm not sure whether I'm an oddball in this respect, but I have zero use for hooks or pin magnets. There's nothing small and magnetic that I want to attach, and no standalone cables I want easily available. That leaves me with a headphone holder and two controller holders for this Medium version. I only really need one controller holder, so that's just two useful accessories that come with it (for my use case, anyway).

What I'd have really liked is either a pen holder or a flat platform for me to display something, possibly even whatever book I happen to be reading at the moment. (I did actually rest a book on the controller holder for a while, but it was a little precarious.)

The large version of the pegboard, which is $10 extra and 52 x 42 cm, comes with just such useful accessories. In addition to some hooks and magnets (ugh), it also comes with one headset holder, two pen holders, and one storage shelf. But no controller holders in this one, for some reason. I had to go for the Medium because my desk has metal supports underneath that limited my clamping room, but I'd have probably gone Large if I could.

The main annoyance for me is that there doesn't seem to be an ideal package, whether small, medium, or large. What would be ideal? Well, IMO, that would be one controller holder, one headset holder, a pen holder, and a long platform, plus maybe a shorter display platform. And sure, throw in some hooks and pin magnets—why not? There's no version that comes with all of these things, though, and that's my only gripe.

On the plus side, it looks like the holes are spaced about an inch apart, so you might be lucky fitting third-party accessories to it, given a lot of them have similar peghole spacing.

And that brings us to the crux of it: Thermaltake's marketing this as a "gaming desk pegboard", but don't for a second assume that it's the only desk-clamp pegboard on the market and that this is a gaming-specific niche. Just search "desk clamp pegboard" on Amazon and you'll come up with a range of options, including some with incredibly similar accessories.

Saying that, though, the price does seem about right for this Thermaltake one. In fact, it's significantly cheaper than many third-party options from brands I've never heard of.

Where does that leave us, then? Well, it's not a particularly unique product and it comes with a frustratingly thin variety of accessories, but it's reasonably priced, comes from a known gaming brand, and feels like a sturdy, quality product.

My suggestion: If you're looking for a pleasant way to save some desk space and display your gubbins, and if you're willing to look out for some cheap third-party accessories, go for it. But if you want a wide variety of accessories in the box, this pegboard unfortunately isn't it.

That said, paying over $220 for an SSD is still a lot of money, but it works out at less than six cents per gigabyte. For a drive with performance claims of 7,400 and 6,900 MB/s sustained read/write, that's about as cheap as it currently gets. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that Team Group must be using poor-quality components to keep the price down.

The MP44 uses the same controller and NAND flash memory modules as those in the Lexar NM790, and nobody has ever accused that SSD of being cheaply made. It is simply a case that Team Group has sourced the best value parts on the market and delivered them all in a package that's free of frills and fancy features.

For example, there's no DRAM cache to help maintain sustained performance. Instead, like all such DRAM-less SSDs, it uses part of its capacity in a pseudo-SLC mode. NAND flash comes in various types (SLC, TLC, QLC, etc) and the YMTC 232-layer modules in the MP44 are TLC-based.

These have less performance than SLC modules but they offer far more capacity. However, modern TLC chips can run some sections as if they're SLC, and the MP44 uses this high-speed section as a cache—buffering data transfers to ensure the drive keeps going at full speed for as long as possible.

Something else the MP44 doesn't have over some of the competition is a heatsink and with a maximum operating temperature of 70 °C, it's important that the drive is installed into a motherboard with a decent M.2 heatsink, as well as having good airflow inside.

That limit is 15 °C lower than that of the WD Black SN850X, the best gaming SSD around right now, which means the Team Group drive isn't ideal for situations where the SSD isn't going to be especially well-cooled (e.g. inside a console, laptop, or small form factor PC).

It does come with a graphene label covering all of the memory modules and controller but I found it rather easy to remove, which suggests it's perhaps not as effective at dissipating heat as one would believe, given the use of graphene.

Benchmarking SSDs is both simple and tricky. It's easy to throw one into a PC and run a series of tests to examine its performance in a variety of scenarios, but at the same time, the results one gets have the potential to be impacted by a number of factors.

For example, if you use a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot on a motherboard that's managed by the chipset and not the CPU, then you're not likely to see the absolute full performance of the drive.

In reality, though, such differences rarely affect how well it works. You certainly won't notice your games loading considerably slower if you did use a chipset socket rather than a CPU one.

As you can see in the above results, the Team Group MP44 performs better than any of the other SSDs in the charts, although some of the test results are so similar that it's fairer to say that the MP44 is just as good as any other DRAM-less SSD.

Team Group does sell 4 TB SSDs with heatsinks but they're obviously more expensive than the MP44. If your gaming PC isn't best suited for a heatsink-less SSD, then you'd be better off choosing one of them.

Performing a sustained and demanding sequence of data writes to the MP44 highlights the size of the pseudo-SLC cache. An average write speed of around 5,900 MB/s is maintained for around 196 seconds before dropping to 2,650 MB/S—which points to a maximum cache size of a little over 1 TB, and unless you're trying to write lots of huge 4K video files to the drive all the time, the MP44 will sustain that 5,900 figure comfortably.

That cache size is a lot larger than I was expecting. The WD Blue SN5000, for example, has a maximum SLC cache of 800 MB or so, and the Lexar NM790 which uses the same components, is smaller still at 600 MB. The MP44 doesn't perform quite as well as that drive in a sustained write but it's not far off, and I'd take the larger cache any day.

Do note that all dynamic SLC cache sizes depend on how much free space is available in the SSD—the fuller it gets, the lower the maximum size the cache can be.

During this test, the Team Group drive reached a reported peak temperature of 66 °C in an open-platform PC, with no active chassis cooling. That's a little close to the thermal limit for my liking but it's probably fine if one has a decent number of fans blowing air over it.

However, I have no concerns about the overall performance of the Team Group MP44. Even when the SLC cache is full, the write rate is more than acceptable. One note of interest, though, is that once the MP44 hits around 50% of its capacity, the write rate drops to an average of 980 MB/s, whereas the NM790 maintains a steady 2,700 MB/s.

That's possibly because of the controller limiting the rate to prevent the thermal limit from being reached but if you need to write 2 TB files on a regular basis, then a low-cost SSD like the MP44 probably shouldn't be your number one choice.

With an endurance rating of 3,000 TBW, you could write 1 TB of data to the MP44 every day for a total of eight years before reaching that figure. You can certainly use the MP44 as a primary drive and not worry about its longevity, that's for sure.

There's an awful lot to like about the Team Group MP44. For its capacity, it's very good value for money—there are cheaper 4 TB drives available but they certainly don't have the same level of performance as this one—and it's perhaps all the SSD you'd ever need in your gaming PC. I personally prefer to have multiple drives, to separate apps, documents, games, and whatnot, but I appreciate that some people are perfectly happy to use just one big drive.

I do wish it had a higher thermal limit, though, and if I were fitting an MP44 in one of my rigs, I'd be looking to ensure there was a big fan blowing air across it at all times. That's tricky to achieve if it's mounted in the primary M.2 slot, as the graphics card will be belching out heat right next to it.

But as a secondary drive, inserted in a lower M.2 slot, I'd have no such qualms and this seems to be the ideal use scenario for the Team Group MP44. Sure it doesn't have DRAM—but when it's this good, who really needs it?

I wasn't over the moon about the prospect of a triple-A Indiana Jones game before starting The Great Circle. A new MachineGames joint, now that's something I'd hang my hat on, but Dr. Jones? How many stories could there be left to tell about the Connecticut-based archeologist named after Illinois' weird little neighbor? Well it turns out he had at least one damn good videogame left in the tank⁠—MachineGames' finest to date.

The pairing made great sense on paper: The neo-Wolfenstein games were pulpy, swashbuckling adventures with tons of heart where a lovable, all-American protagonist gave those dastardly Nazis what-for. But I didn't believe it, feel it until Indy donned a Catholic priest's vestments to go undercover in a fascist-occupied Vatican—a miniature open world that I can only compare to the best hubs of the Deus Ex series. The combat, stealth, and puzzles are all simple but fun enough (maybe not the stealth⁠—more on that later), but paired with The Great Circle's phenomenal levels and nailing of what makes Jones such an iconic character, the result is a Batman Arkham-tier "who knew a licensed game about this guy could be this good?"

Crouch walking

Rather than the dual-wielding ultraviolence of Wolfenstein, The Great Circle is all about more brand-appropriate stealth, hand-to-hand brawling, exploration, and puzzle solving. There are guns, but limited ammo makes them more situational tools⁠—I only ever used Indy's trusty revolver to help take down a particularly meddlesome boss. Of The Great Circle's four pillars, the exploration is Indy's ace in the hole, while the rest range from "situationally tolerable" to "pretty fun." This game can be a bit wonky, but the overall experience, the immersion, atmosphere, and sense of fun are greater than the sum of its parts, with the magic and believability of MachineGames' vision of the 1930s and The Great Circle's fantastic storytelling carrying the day. I'm reminded of how the Elder Scrolls games have bad stealth, bad combat, samey dungeons, and uneven skill systems, but sell a fictional world so well, so completely, they're still some of the best RPGs around.

In a preview of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, PCG senior editor Robin Valentine worried it would wind up being just a mediocre stealth game. I'd go so far as to say it's a bad stealth game, with the saving grace being that sneaking about Solid Snake-style is only core to a few story missions, while it can be minimized in the side stuff.

The Great Circle has simple, line-of-sight stealth, without much in the way of sound propagation, visibility control (camouflage or light/shadow), silent ranged takedowns, or tools for keeping track of enemies (a tagging system or radar). None of that stuff is particularly Indiana Jones, but only one of The Great Circle's stealth levels feels tailor-made to these limitations. A nighttime infiltration of Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo feels fit to task, with close quarters, limited numbers of guards, and lots of vertically-oriented alternate paths well out of their sightlines.

The other pure stealth sequences later are decidedly not that, with tons of enemies whose crisscrossing lines of sight preclude picking them off one by one, while the levels simultaneously lack reliable alternate paths around those guards. One main mission in particular felt like a base lifted straight out of Metal Gear Solid 5, but with less than half of that game's information and tools at my disposal. These sections absolutely sucked, and I found myself just crouch walking through them as quickly as possible, ignoring any side content and keeping my fingers crossed that none of the guards' "hey, I see you!" meters would fill up completely as I passed.

Thankfully there are only a few mandatory examples of these in the game, and stealth can be otherwise minimized through The Great Circle's disguise system. It's not Hitman, but it works well enough: Each open world hub has two disguises, one you get at the beginning that allows access to most of the zone, and another, hidden costume that lets you walk freely in restricted areas. In the Vatican, Indy starts with that priest outfit and can upgrade to an Italian fascist Blackshirt's uniform⁠ (that feels very weird to say). While disguised, there's no "that guy's acting weird" quotient for you to worry about⁠—you're free to climb about, grapple with your whip in full view of anyone, whatever, with the only hard stops on your activity being thievery in plain view or archeologist-detecting officers who aren't so easily fooled.

It's as simple as the line of sight stealth, but it works much better: It freed me up to explore and soak up The Great Circle's environments without having to worry so much, while the remaining danger of being spotted by an officer adds just enough tension to keep things interesting. I also dig how NPCs will react differently to you depending on your disguise. Story-wise, this setup results in a multitude of scenes as tense and memorable as Wolfenstein's train interrogation or Venus infiltration⁠—one in particular that involved a fascist and a confession booth gave me a real belly laugh.

You've seen the brawling here before in better and worse form. You can punch and counter enemies, with a super-generous parry window meaning the fights are fairly fun and easy without wearing out their welcome. On the second-hardest difficulty, I only had real trouble with some optional boxing prizefights against The Fascist Heavyweight Champion of Italy and The Strongest Nazi Who Ever Lived⁠—I kept getting up again and again for rematches like a brave glass jaw in an old cartoon, drastically increasing Indy's risk of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The one real moment of brilliance for the combat was a boss fight that paired stand up fighting with some avoidance horror straight out of an Amnesia game. The improvised weapon system, meanwhile, doesn't add much mechanically, but it's an undeniable joy to see everything you can whack Nazis with, as well as their varied takedown animations.

In the great videogame scale of "BioWare Tower of Hanoi puzzle" on the simple end to Void Stranger or "Day one Destiny Raid" at most complex, The Great Circle's brain teasers are just barely upper middle class, like a notch above Uncharted. I was only really stumped once because I missed a super obvious aspect of a puzzle's mechanics, but otherwise it was a lot of sensible self-satisfaction at deducing safe combinations, finding hidden paths behind breakable walls, and using mirrors to bounce light beams around in that one puzzle you always see. Something I really appreciated was just how many little puzzles there were⁠—most side quests involved puzzle solving or navigational challenges of some kind, and I absolutely had more fun with that than I would've with yet more base clearing or whatever else most open-worlders have us doing these days.

Papal State of mind

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is organized around three acts with their own open world hubs, with more linear, set piece missions stringing them together, and the design of these levels is the real triumph of the game: The open ended areas have the density, inspired design, and "feels like a real place" magic of a Deus Ex hub (Paris, Hong Kong, Detroit) or Dishonored map, and exploring them was pure joy.

Indy gets a range of different objectives in the hub zones, with your main story quest front and center, a selection of three or so story and cutscene-heavy side quests that are virtually indistinguishable from the main stuff in terms of production values, and then a wide array of bite-sized "mysteries" or one-off little side-puzzles whose stories are mostly told through notes and other clues in the environment.

Vatican City is the peak of the game for my money: It's a visual feast, all sumptuous Renaissance interiors⁠—including a digital facsimile of the Sistine Chapel⁠—and towering architecture over sunny cobbled streets. It 100% feels like there was an Assassin's Creed level of historical research (and budget) poured into The Great Circle's environments. The urban density of Vatican City also really works in its favor compared to the other two hubs, which have more of a sprawl to them. The Vatican looks like it has a small footprint based on its map, but then you're climbing up and down buildings, crisscrossing through shortcuts, or popping out of windows to shimmy to hard-to-reach areas.

The second act, which takes place in the shadow of the Pyramids of Giza, almost feels more like a slice of The Elder Scrolls. It verges into a little bit of that open world checklist gameplay, but it still worked for me thanks to The Great Circle's capacity for surprise. Even if the puzzles weren't too complex, the fact that each stop in the desert was unique⁠—often with a little surprise or twist of some kind⁠—had me wanting to see what each one had in store. I was reminded of Cyberpunk's gigs or The Witcher 3's monster contracts: This side content is fun to do on its own, independent of checklist clearing or character upgrade enticements.

The hub zones also reward exploration beyond formal quests. Money and ancient relics (that Indy is ostensibly returning to their rightful homes) are liberally scattered among the tasteful environment clutter and in all sorts of secret chambers or other nooks and crannies. I found a Thief-like appeal to waiting until guards' backs were turned to hoover up everything worth taking. They unfortunately didn't have terminals to hack into back in 1937, but The Great Circle provides the analogue version of that voyeuristic immersive sim thrill with inter-office memos and fascists' diaries for Indy to purloin.

For the climactic bits of the game, The Great Circle does console-style, minimally interactive "wow factor" set pieces better than maybe any game I've played. I usually don't even go for that sort of thing⁠—I like RPGs and systemic interactions and other crusty PC gaming things. Substance, not flash! But The Great Circle had scenes that were so imaginative and surprising, I was just 100% on-board. An early one sees Indy catching a ride on a departing zeppelin by hooking it with his trusty whip, followed by a short sequence of climbing and ledge shimmying on the outside of the dirigible as Rome sprawls below you. I don't want to spoil too much, but later on you literally pull off a prop plane version of the beloved Battlefield Jet Swap, and that had me hooting and hollering in my office.

Tenure track

Troy Baker's turn as Indy is killer. He can say he wasn't trying to impersonate Harrison Ford, but I would have confused him for the real thing if I didn't know better. And beyond that, he just gives a phenomenal performance that nails Indy's easy, everyman-concealing-academic charisma. I'm usually against the digital de-aging/necromancy thing⁠—qualitative issues aside, I feel like it speaks to how stunted we've gotten culturally, we apparently can't make new movie stars and have to reheat the old ones⁠—but I'll make an exception here and hope that Harrison Ford is getting a big fat check in the mail for it.

The rest of the cast is similarly full of winners, calling to mind the great ensemble from the Wolfenstein games: You've got a fiery antifascist reporter, a jovial and portly cardinal, a sophisticated aristocratic patron of archeology, and a guerilla freedom fighter, to name a few. I'd like to make special mention of the late, great Tony Todd's turn as one of the game's antagonists⁠—this may be one of his final performances, and he just oozes menace, but with a mysterious dignity and gravitas as the eight-foot-tall man who kickstarts the adventure.

MachineGames remains the industry leader at making new kinds of sneering Nazi freaks who twirl their proverbial mustaches while declaring "Oho, you sentimental fool, but it is I who has the upper hand." There's this awful fascist-sympathizing priest who serves as your act one starter villain at The Vatican⁠—think a stuffy sitcom principle guilty of collaboration with world-historic crimes⁠—and he winds up serving as the perfect punching bag to introduce our true villain, Voss, the freakiest, creepiest, most "I'll get you next time, Herr Jones!"-ass Nazi villain to ever come out of MachineGames' R&D skunkworks. I wanted to punch the guy and shove him down a hill the second he showed up onscreen.

As a final note on playtime and tech: The Great Circle is a great value as far as triple-A games go, laughing those pre-release playtime estimates of "12 hours or so" outta the room with a robust runtime more in the 30-hour ballpark for a thorough, but not completionist playthrough. Graphically, this thing is beautiful but a system hog, punishing my poor RTX 3070 with its always-on ray tracing and VRAM gluttony. But even with lighting and textures down to low (the only setting that wouldn't give me a big old VRAM warning) and DLSS Performance mode at 1440p, The Great Circle is an absolutely gorgeous game. I did notice some obnoxiously flickering, shimmering shadows in the foliage-dense introductory areas that persisted no matter what shadow quality I set things to. That feels day one patch-coded, but even if it's not, it proved less of an issue later on.

The Great Circle is an odd duck to be sure, combining immersive sim level design with set piece spectacles that put Call of Duty or the Sony first party stable on notice; incredible graphical technology and triple-A polish with some truly baffling and idiosyncratic design choices. Despite (and at least partially because of) that funkiness, it's one of my favorite releases of this year and a new outing from a favorite studio that was well-worth the wait.

Across the great salt desert there is a jungled plateau encircled by mountains and speckled with the ruins of an advanced, ancient civilization. At its center lies the Spindle, a towering cable that stretches into and through the heavens. This is where your stranger arrives, the protagonist in an epic science-fantasy RPG full of engrossing stories and elegantly-designed, deep world simulation. It's the best one I've ever played.

Caves of Qud is a traditional roguelike RPG in form, a top-down, turn-based game that relies on text and simple-yet-evocative graphics to convey its world. It doesn't stick hard and fast to permanent death, though, instead letting you choose whether you want save points and even tweak how much fighting you'll have to do. Nor does Qud stick hard and fast to the traditional roguelike rules of having an opaque, frustrating user interface and arcane, entirely keyboard-driven control scheme—it even plays very well on a mobile PC like the Steam Deck.

You make your character from a variety of archetypes that describe normal humans or the far more numerous mutant inhabitants of Qud. You then build in a relatively freeform way, choosing new skills, upgrading your abilities, and gathering equipment for a dizzying and thrilling array of possibilities. From there you set off across Qud from your starting village in true RPG sandbox fashion, choosing to follow or not follow the many quests and whimsical distractions you may come across. A lot of that will involve carefully delving into the ruins of the ancient civilization of the Eaters of Earth, fighting the strange and deadly creatures you find there, and pilfering their treasures.

Each playthrough has the same world map but randomizes nearly every local area according to a complex system of generated histories chronicling the sultans who ruled Qud in ages past. What they did then influences what you find now, where you go, and what you can expect to find there—and it integrates that generated history into the main story quest's fixed objectives in clever and subtle ways that you might otherwise think had the hand of a designer behind them. Though it may take you a hundred hours to really get to grips with and master Qud, a seasoned player can burn through the main story in 15 hours.

Layer qake

The big-idea, high weirdness science-fantasy world of Qud's far future is of an old genre (think Dune) with its own tropes, such as influence from ancient mideast cultures and mythology, but one that's so underutilized in videogames that the setting comes off as refreshing. The spires of humanity's utterly ruined past sit below and on top of Qud, forming a layer cake of dungeons filled with objects from a civilization so outrageously advanced that they invented teleportation and mined the neutron-degenerate matter at the heart of dead stars. The Eaters' civilization was once so advanced that its fall was just as spectacular as its rise, leaving Qud a vast ruin cut off from the universe and scoured by terrible plagues—fresh water is so precious, for example, that a dram of water is the only true currency on Qud.

Pure-blooded "normal" people have become one of many different successor species and ancient genetic engineering combined with reality-altering phenomena have unleashed a tidal wave of strange creatures onto this world—the many talking plants, for example, barely register as exciting compared to a Twinning Lamprey, which exists in a strange quantum state where only when both its bodies are killed simultaneously will it die. Qud is a world where you start off fighting Hyena-people in a swamp with a bronze dagger and end it clad in zetachrome armor made of forgotten matter from the start of the universe, fighting mecha and cosmic terrors while wielding an eigenrifle that fires a subatomic particle beam capable of piercing through every single thing on the screen, friend or foe.

Rich storytelling

The main quest takes you on a journey well-suited to pit stops, dotted with odd characters like a deaf-mute albino bear-porcupine gunsmith and a very rude talking fungus you have to bring with you by letting it grow on your skin. It also stays varied: You'll delve ancient ruins for lost technology, yes, but also manage diplomacy among factions, make friends, solve riddles, and unpick that generated history. All of this is written in a prose so flowery and rich that it passes beyond purple and arrives in the same place as something like Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, utterly unafraid to pillage the depths of the English language for the right words and then invent its own words when those don't quite cut it. I could fill this review with phrases cut from item descriptions. ("It's a large piece of rock, older than every idea" reads the description for a boulder. "Its shelled torso is downside up and sprouts a bouquet of crumpled legs," I'm told about the corpse of a giant crab.)

The world and writing and story are so appealing in part because Qud draws from a diverse set of sources that aren't just other videogames and obvious, obligate nerd pop culture stuff. Its cultural borders extend well outside the limits of so many games. It's rare we get the pleasure of playing a videogame influenced by Dune or The Book of the New Sun or Gamma World that also freely quotes Lord Byron and A.E. Housman while drawing elaborate allusions to the Hebrew Bible.

Get weird

Your character's traits and background will be just as rich as the world's. You might play a True Kin, one of the last unmutated remnants of old humanity close enough to their biology and genome that the Eaters' technology, robots, cybernetic implants, and miracle medicines still recognize and work for you, enhancing yourself with cyberware like extra-large hands and firearm hardpoints to wield four two-handed chainguns at once. You might instead be a mutant with a beak, wings, night vision, and talons whose mutations grow in power so that they can sunder steel. Your mutant might have psychic powers like cryokinesis and telepathy and disintegration. You might even play as a purely physical chimera that grows twelve arms, or a purely psychic esper who becomes so powerful that their Glimmer attracts extradimensional hunters and predators from beyond our own universe.

It's not just variety that makes Qud so fun, it's the depth of simulation in the world you explore. Aside from your health value or the rare damage calculation that can go to the hundreds, you rarely have to deal with numbers larger than 30 when considering statistics and attributes. But Qud's world is powered by a physics simulation that lets you drill through walls with a jackhammer or melt rock into lava or spread clouds of corrosive gas that shift in the wind. The characters you meet all have a faction and a base attitude and an allegiance to it that plays out in hilarious ways: You might be beloved by apes, causing the shaggy white monsters that roam the canyons to leap to your defense, or hated by insects, causing typically chill giant dragonflies to come after you with a vengeance. Manipulating other factions' attitudes toward you is key to enjoying Qud, causing you to form alliances with groups like the machine-worshipping Mechanimists or become self-appointed protector of the villagers of a randomly generated town. I defended one with my life because I thought it was hilarious that its mayor was a talking pig that was hated by other swine for "defiling their holy places."

Stay weird

Random generation can of course make or break a game like Qud. Sometimes it's against you in the most hilarious ways, sometimes it's just frustrating as you plumb some deep stratum praying that the next chest has some upgrade—please, any upgrade—for your gun or armor. Sometimes it's for you as it spits out a unique relic that feels purpose-made to fit just the character you wanted to play—as a sword-wielding knight I once found a shield that could reflect enemy lasers back at them.

Your tolerance for unpleasant, run-ending (or save-reloading) surprises has to be pretty high as you first discover things like which robot is armed with missile racks and how to kill a Twinning Lamprey and how when you see a biblically accurate angel you should just run away. You can contract infections or lose a limb, but to enjoy yourself those must be interesting problems to solve or situations to exploit, part of your overall story rather than frustrations. The fun to find in Qud is about learning—reading the flavor text for hints, figuring out which randomly-generated named creature to befriend, and carrying a variety of tools for different situations. Always have an EMP grenade on hand, for example, to deal with wayward robots. You have to be willing to try and fail and to learn when it's better to run away, consolidate your gains, and try again tomorrow. Every challenge in Qud was not hand-made to be beaten. Quite the opposite, in fact.

That is no surprise to fans of the traditional roguelike's deep details and convoluted systems and surprising random events. For others it will be unpleasant at first. Caves of Qud has what is likely the best, most modern interface and controls in a game of its kind, but the experience is still at times frustrating as you try to unravel just what happened in the last combat round that caused you to die. For some who have not played games like this before, simply the act of learning to control and maneuver your character will be frustrating. Despite this I cannot recommend Caves of Qud enough for its innovations in mechanics and storytelling, however anachronistic it may look.

Besides, on top of it all? You can easily mod this game.

It's not the most flashy of entries in the ever growing list of Windows handhelds. It's a more subtle affair, despite its typical "gamer aesthetic" outer shell. It's all in the hardware, without the gimmicks.

However, it is the PC handheld that has felt the most detached from Windows during set up. After digging through Microsoft's endless requirements and agreements vertically (there's a gyroscope), I wasn't met with any baked-in software. I did find Zotac's software pre-installed, but it was a much older version than the latest release, and it consistently crashed.

Once I got it working Zotac—like everyone else—presents a far worse version of Steam Big Picture Mode (Valve's additional front end originally intended for TVs) to get around Microsoft's inability to launch its own, handheld console-like experience.

Zotac's launcher is just riddled with glaringly obvious oversights. On the ROG Ally systems, Asus has presets for the performance options you'd like. Zotac's "One Launcher" instead has you build your own presets, which without prior knowledge would make little sense. Does the regular consumer know that 17 watts is the agreed upon “best middle ground” for the 8840U or what a TDP even is?

Even the launcher's controller remapper left me wanting more. A lack of options, including remapping a keyboard button to one of the back paddles or even having the remap function when active just led to frustration.

More frustrating is the branded buttons can't be remapped either, an issue I found on the ROG Ally. It's wasteful, when it could very easily be a generic guide button rather than causing the Zotac proprietary launcher to lurch to the front on instinctive presses.

I'm quite down on Windows handheld software, simply because we've been at this for some time now. GDP and OneXPlayer didn't figure it out in the years before the Steam Deck. Not one manufacturer has cracked it since Valve's release, with only Ayaneo really getting close.

While I could whittle on about Windows 11 on handhelds, it's old hat. Just know that it's the same here. You'll be thumbing at the desktop environment—even with the trackpads—and fumbling through Game Pass to try get the wretched app to install anything.

It does make me look like a fan boy, but the honest truth is that Valve's custom built version of Linux and major rework of Steam Big Picture to be a true frontend work so well, and work so well precisely because they're custom-built to work with the hardware. It's the complete package, something that Zotac is ever so close to figuring out.

While Zotac's software is lacking, its hardware decisions aren't. It feels as though at every turn, it took into consideration what people would want from a higher end handheld.

Underneath the hood is AMD's 8840U, a killer chip that is the current favorite of companies like Ayaneo. It provides just that extra smidge of power over the previous 7840U, but the 16 GB of RAM means it still lags behind in some applications that of a fully upgrade Ayaneo 2S with 32 GB or Asus ROG Ally X with its 24 GB.

The Zotac Zone performs best when you have total control of its hardware. In initial tests with the hardware, I found that if I didn’t manhandle it to exert to 30 W, it’d play it too safe. Performance in 3DMark was significantly lower, circling nearer to 2100 points than the 3027 it actually scored.

I also saw it in Cyberpunk 2077, where the average framerate was 30 fps until giving it the juice it really needed. After fumbling around in the Zotac One Launcher and creating a profile to show off the true capabilities of the system, it began to show how much more important RAM is this time around.

The Zotac Zone and Ayaneo Flip DS, for example, are split by RAM speed and a meager difference of two watts in total power draw. Ayaneo’s slower RAM—6400 MT/s—and Zotac’s 7500 MT/s just prove that a simple chip upgrade isn’t all it takes these days.

However, with the 8840U I found that Metaphor: ReFantizo ran exceptionally well at 1080p, 60 fps. I've been playing it quite a bit on the Steam Deck and the jolt between seeing everything at 30 fps, 720p and what the Zotac Zone can do, is a little like whiplash.

Other titles such as Ace Combat 7, Amid Evil, and Half-Life 2 all played magnificently at the higher end of the frame rate. Half-Life 2 and Amid Evil obviously held down the 120 fps mark, while Ace Combat 7 held steady at 60 fps. Even in the newest Forza Motorsport game I was hitting mid-40s with FSR supersampling helping along the way.

These handhelds do need supersampling for some newer titles. You'll never be playing that new Indiana Jones game comfortably on one of these, but some of the Unreal Engine 5 games I played also needed that extra push.

Robocop: Rogue City ran extremely poorly without supersampling and frame generation. Both software tools, they use algorithms to achieve better performance. Supersampling shrinks the image and blow it back up at the desired resolution, taking work off the GPU. Frame generation literally tries to create the next frame based on the data provided.

I found that Rogue City introduced quite a bit of latency when using frame generation, but also, even with FSR, still needed to be bumped down a graphical notch in the settings to achieve a steady frame rate. Essentially, as with any of these handhelds, so long as you keep your gaming expectations in check, the Zotac Zone could be your next best friend.

One area that I wish Zotac had considered more was the storage space. 512 GB is paltry in the modern era. After installing Cyberpunk 2077 for benchmarks, as well as a few other titles, I was fast running out and it hadn't even been a day. It really needs to be a 1 TB or more for a modern handheld. However, upgrading should be cheaper and easier than on something like the Steam Deck. Inside is a full sized, 2280 NVMe drive, instead of the usual 2230 short stack. This is a fantastic move for tinkerers, just making the system even more flexible.

Where Zotac obviously thought things through is the AMOLED screen. Measuring 7-inches, it is glorious. Rich, vibrant colors pour out of it. Horror titles like Crow's Country ooze atmosphere as the deep blacks envelope everything. I found no major haloing or weird effects coming from it either, with not much in the way of color inaccuracies either.

The Zone is incredibly comfortable to hold, even with its jagged edges on the palm rest. Aping Valve's design, it sports two small trackpads with a definitive, satisfying click. There's two USB 4 ports, making peripheral or docks use super easy to use.

It even has a Switch or Legion Go like stand to prop it up. There's also a webcam on the front for Windows Hello and I've even used it as a last minute Teams meeting device—helped by its stand.

One major addition is the Hall effect sticks, meaning that even after prolonged use, you shouldn't find them drifting. Even the rings around the sticks twist to adjust the brightness, volume, or RGB lighting. While I wish I could properly remap these, it shows Zotac's genuine care in the hardware space.

Zotac has taken notice of the push in the controller space for, well, more control. The software might not be helpful, but the physical switches beside the triggers means you can set if you want it to be a quick snap press or a longer, more analogue one depending on the game you're playing.

Its things like these which set the Zotac Zone apart from the other Windows handhelds. The Zone feels like a contemplated idea, rather than a rushed to market thing. Combined with its performance prowess, if you can put up with some quirks—as with any of these machines—you should put this on your list of considerations.

But it's hard to hold such timeworn clichés against Fantasian. The game's producer and chief storyteller is none other than Final Fantasy legend Hironobu Sakaguchi, who's been making RPGs for so long he practically invented some of these tropes, or at least knew the person who did. Besides, this retro-styled approach to the plot brings a fantastic focussed attitude along with it, never spending any longer than absolutely necessary on an energetic prison break sequence or the latest almighty god's dramatic monologue. The game wants to take me away on a grand adventure filled with magic and monsters, whisked from one place to the next before I've had the chance to think too hard about why I'm currently fighting a haunted gondola or a really angry sun.

The places I end up in are as traditional as they come—a dusty little town, a shining city, strange mechanical nowheres filled with danger—but they all look brand new thanks to the game's unusual visual style.

Here the locations I visit aren't created from 3D renders or detailed pixel art, but photographs of real handmade dioramas. The effect is so stunning I often ended up wandering around just to see more of the craftsmanship that's gone into these sets, places where every tiny glass bottle and folded bed sheet has been made and then positioned by hand. There are obvious paint marks on rocky outcrops, curled corners on tiny rugs, and all sorts of other wonderful imperfections that enliven these scenes in ways no quantity of raytraced polygons could ever hope to match. At a time when a hundred CEOs are insisting faceless AI mush is the future of "creativity," this proudly human touch is a very welcome respite.

As RPG tradition demands, wandering around these incredible spaces triggers random battles against anything from mechanical snakes to adorable little mouse-gicians, and again Fantasian has a novel twist up its sleeve that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary: the Dimengeon Machine.

When it's turned on, this handy little device will automatically hoover up any enemy types I've previously fought, allowing me to grab a distant treasure chest or make my way to the nearest save point without being interrupted. The fun thing is those enemies are stored, not destroyed, and the machine needs manually emptying from time to time in one large-scale gauntlet of a battle, unless I want to suddenly face a potentially fatal grab-bag of 30 monsters in one painful go when it overflows. It's a brilliant mix of reward and risk, allowing me to avoid fights when I'm tired or in a rush, while still making me put in the work at a more convenient time. Unique items appear to help tip these longer battles in my favour, from straightforward attack boosts and status clears to the chance to take an extra turn.

And unlike the random battles in so many RPGs, whenever I choose to fight Fantasian's menagerie of monsters I always have to take them seriously. The game may be perfectly charming in cutscenes, but it's never anything less than merciless when the swords come out.

Learning how to master the unusual manual targeting system is crucial. Here attacks aren't a simple choice between hitting one enemy or a neat row of them at once—they can pierce through an uneven line if I aim them at just the right angle, or even bend in a graceful curve around a defensive blocker to hit the fragile spellcaster standing behind them.

Using an analogue stick to aim instead of jabbing my finger at a touchscreen feels so natural that, bar the odd inclusion of a battery meter on the in-game menu, it's easy to believe the game had always been made with PCs in mind, and it plays like it's just another RPG sitting on my SSD. The only weak point is the lack of graphical options, reduced to resolution, FPS (up to 120), and a choice between "low" and "high" detail settings. Although considering most of the time I'm looking at a photo with a few small 3D people on it, maintaining a visual consistency between these elements is more important than really cranking up shadow detail.

I'm usually too busy hacking away at one of Fantasian's many, many, bosses to notice fine details anyway. Some change stances as the fight goes on, making them more vulnerable to attack. Some have weapons or body parts I should aim for and destroy before they use them to wipe out my entire party. There's even action-style timing in here, the right move at the wrong time perhaps completely blocked by a rotating barrier or hard shell, or not landing as powerfully as it would have if it had hit the softest body parts.

This concept really goes into overdrive in the second half of the game, to mixed results. I appreciated being forced to use every last spell, skill, and item at my disposal instead of saving them for some imagined "next time" that never came. Debuffs, barriers, and turn-altering tactics are absolutely essential life-saving techniques in Fantasian, and it's extremely satisfying to shut down everything a boss tries to throw at me.

But as the game wears on too many of these epic clashes start to hinge on how I set up my characters before the battle, rather than how clever I am once I'm in it. Equipping the right sort of status-nullifying or elemental resistance-boosting gems can be the difference between getting hit by a painful blow and an unrecoverable one, and if I didn't happen to have the right gear on my team already then my only real option is to wait to die so I can fiddle with everyone's equipment after a reload. Some enemies are incredibly weak to a specific elemental attack I might not currently have unlocked, and I can't do anything at all about that until I've struggled, failed, and then gone back to an earlier checkpoint to access a character's expansive skill tree and reallocate their points to counter the latest issue.

In spite of these setbacks the pleasure is generally worth the pain, and I always come away from my sessions exhausted but happy. These late-game challenges are just one surmountable issue in a game filled with fresh takes on old ideas, and I admire Fantasian for daring to be a turn-based RPG with real teeth to it—one that makes it all but impossible to out-level or overpower my troubles.

Don't worry though, you don't need any knowledge of the previous games to jump in. Infinity Nikki doesn't directly follow on from any of its predecessors, but it does retain their main themes: A human stylist named Nikki and her sassy talking cat Momo end up getting sucked into Miraland, a fantasy realm stuffed with all kinds of fashion-related lore and a history that implies some sort of war among eight garment wizards.

At least, I'm pretty sure that's what's going on, from what I've gleaned. My history with the series lies almost entirely with Love Nikki, the third game in the series, one which I remember having a heap of translation issues and an oft-confusing narrative. Huge improvements have been made for the former, but the latter still remains. Dialogue was occasionally entirely unnecessary—one moment where I had to listen to Nikki back-and-forth with a character over the fact they repeated a sentence had me questioning my sanity—and concepts are either over-explained or under-explained.

I went through a good chunk of my time not really getting anything, narratively. There are a ton of lore books knocking around though, which I found helped to add a ton of much-needed background history to Miraland, giving me more insight into what was actually going on around me. I often preferred these flavour texts to the main narrative, and as I read more I was having a much easier time piecing together the story I'd largely been thrown into the thick of.

Sew far, sew good

To be fair, part of my half-baked understanding definitely came from the huge time-gaps between completing quests, which happened entirely on account of me repeatedly venturing off the beaten path. Infinity Nikki is the first time the series has gone open world, and it's bloody gorgeous to look at. Every blade of grass, stone fence, and babbling brook is stunning, and I regularly found myself stopping in my tracks to make use of the game's excellent photo mode.

I spent far too many hours clicking through every pose—each of which has their own subtle animations you can cycle through for a frame-perfect shot—fiddling with the lighting and the framing to capture Miraland's stunning sunsets or the reflection of the moon off a large lake. I could even leave behind a 'snapshot' which allows friends to come along to my photo spot and take a snap alongside me.

There's no better pairing for a pretty landscape than some beautiful threads to go with it, and I had a hard time finding an item of clothing that I didn't like. There's a huge variety available, from giant princess dresses to pyjamas and sneakers. While I did have the occasional clipping issue between items that definitely should be able to be worn in harmony, I had a great time mixing and matching all the different pieces I had crafted, collected, and pulled from its gacha banner.

When I wasn't busy turning into a professional photographer, I was putting a whole load of other fits to use: Infinity Nikki's ability outfits. They're really just a way to show off loads of different pretty clothes in a variety of scenarios—there's an outfit for fishing, bug catching, animal cleaning (yes, it's adorable), floating, combat, and story-specific fits that have more niche uses like electrical repair and one for playing the violin. Additional outfit options for these can be unlocked through rolling on the gacha banners, but thankfully they're merely a cosmetic change rather than offering anything different on a mechanical level.

I regularly found myself getting lost in simply collecting everything I could. Picking every flower, catching every bug, or sneaking up on skittish birds to wipe their wings or scrubbing away at a cat's paw, with every animal receiving their own adorable cleaning animation. Making full use of the ability outfits let me get my hands on all manner of materials to craft clothing items, so it's well worth doing. They also come in handy for collecting Whimstars, which are a sort of skill-tree currency, allowing me to unlock new outfits, small stat boosts and extra rewards.

Whimstars are one of the many ways Infinity Nikki stuffs small puzzles into the world—there are your standard platform puzzlers where I have to nab a star off a roof somewhere, but there are also ones that have me finding a hidden star shape in a certain area, or even hopping into another domain to try and puzzle out a path with blocks, balls, and using the ability outfits I've picked up along the way.

I was a particular fan of the latter, especially as I gained more ability outfits such as one that lets me shrink down and hop on Momo's back, using him to navigate small crawl spaces or make use of weight-based puzzling. It was one of the rare occasions I had to actually use my brain or implement any real level of problem solving, something which I desperately wish Infinity Nikki made more use of.

Yeah, the game's biggest issue right now is its lack of any real challenge. Despite movement feeling really great, it's never used for any particularly tight or complex platforming. While the game's dungeons are a highlight in world design, creating fantastical areas like frog-filled sewer systems or bright-white rooms with floating bookcases to hop along, they have perfectly laid out paths that rarely branch out. Almost all of Miraland's mysteries are easily solvable in a way that feels infantilising at times.

The lack of challenge is felt most in its combat, however. It's incredibly primitive, with Nikki throwing out an orb and being able to one-shot the vast majority of enemies, called esselings, in the game. Most of them will stay stationary, maybe firing out the odd projectile. Nikki's own orb can be a pain to wield sometimes too, and I found myself in situations where it was shooting straight over an enemy's head because the game couldn't comprehend that I was slightly uphill.

The only relief is that thanks to the one-shotting, encounters are over incredibly fast. That's even true of its bosses, which offer Infold Games a better opportunity to show off that it can make engaging battles. The boss battle in chapter seven was a particular highlight for me, giving me vibes of an MMO crossed with something like Super Mario Odyssey. Even then, I was able to fell my foe in a mere 90 seconds, which left me a tad gutted.

I only wish the mini-Nikki ability outfit came hours sooner, because it really does open up the world design and puzzles in a way I would've preferred to have from the start. The final zone I visited had tons of verticality, requiring me to regularly shrink down and hop on Momo's back to be fired through a cannon, crawl through a tunnel or hop up a rope with my big ol' cat claws.

Superstylin'

I do think Infold Games is perhaps finding its feet with all these new experimental open-world activities, so I'm glad to see its still retaining some of its classic Nikki gameplay with styling battles. They're simple enough: Every item of clothing has a handful of tags attached to it—playful, cool, retro, ballroom, elegant, you get it—along with a score in each category attached to each piece. One dress might have an S-rank fresh rating, while another will specialise in elegance.

Styling battles basically put these numbers and tags to use, with NPCs dotted around Miraland giving some kind of theme to meet. Ultimately the theme doesn't matter, rather the tags attached to each item of clothing. It means I ended up presenting some downright ugly fits to my opponent, but that's the way it's always been in Nikki. I've always had a soft spot for how the actual number-crunching fashion battle aspect of the series has you throwing together some right atrocities, and I'm glad to see it's still present.

It does take more of a backseat than in previous games though, and I'm kind of glad about it. Getting hold of clothes that were able to hit some ludicrously high scores was difficult at times, as the game expects you to funnel a bunch of materials into levelling up individual garments.

What materials, you may ask? Well, a little bit of everything. Even for a gacha, Infinity Nikki is a bit oversaturated in the currency and growth mats department, having a staggering array of systems and items and even different methods of doing the same thing—for example, getting a palette-swapped version of an outfit is totally different depending on how you obtained the outfit. A 5-star outfit you pulled in the banner? You'll need one material for that. A 4-star outfit you crafted? You need something completely different. Oh, and sometimes you'll need a duplicate set of the outfit, too.

It's the classic gacha obfuscation, and I did find myself getting dizzy trying to figure it all out at times, even as a battle-hardened veteran of the genre. That was before I even had to deal with any real-life money, which of course wasn't offered to me in the review build.

I did take time to peruse the shop though, and it seems largely on par with what you'd expect from other gacha offerings. There's a battle pass, which appears to be a carbon copy of the one Hoyoverse offers, and premium currency which can be used to buy shop-exclusive outfits, ranging anywhere from a $1 offer to a $50 outfit.

When it comes to free-to-play generosity, that's something I'm still feeling out. Right now, I'd wager it's somewhere in the middle: It's not ultra-generous, but not robbing me blind either. Something I did appreciate was that, on the permanent banner at least (there was no limited banner so I'm not sure if it works the same way), you're guaranteed a 4-star item every 10 pulls, and a 5-star item every 20 pulls. The game also won't feed you any duplicates until you've completed every outfit the banner has to offer which, on the one hand, is a bummer if you're jonesing for a palette-swapped version, but it also means that for a long time you'll be getting something new. I'm sure more glaring monetisation woes and wins will reveal themselves in the weeks post-release—it's a free-to-play gacha, it's gotta make money somewhere—but right now it seems fairly reasonable.

Whatever the grind may be, I'll most definitely be taking part. Despite its over-easygoing nature—which I think may have come from Infold overcorrecting itself in wanting to make an inclusive experience—I found myself falling in love with Infinity Nikki. I can't wait to continue to soak in its picturesque landscapes and dress up Nikki to match the vibes of wherever I am. Ultimately, that's what it's about, really. Dressing up, having fun, and sharing the views with pals. I do sincerely hope Infold Games stops being scared of making things hard, because Infinity Nikki already has the groundwork laid to stand up there with the gacha greats.

Presenting the entire Earth in even greater fidelity than its 2020 predecessor, it's hard to overstate what a remarkable technical accomplishment Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 represents. The aircraft and cockpits are astoundingly detailed, both visually and in how they function. The physics of flight are delightfully authentic, and while it has its quirks, no one has ever even tried to include our entire planet in a game with such fine-grain detail.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, I want to acknowledge the horrendous state of the servers at launch that prevented me and many others from even being able to play at all. These have been, at least for me, almost entirely resolved as of the writing of this, though I still do run into occasional issues like the fact that I can never seem to get all of the high-res geometry in the Grand Canyon to load. It was not an acceptable launch day experience, by any means. But I have seen no indication in my testing that you will have that bad of an experience today, so I'm willing to let the past be the past.

It is worth noting, though, that due to the streaming nature of modern Flight Simulator, you will have a variable experience depending on your network set-up. I'm lucky enough to be soaring on gigabit wired ethernet, and allocated 200 GB on a fresh SSD to FS2024's "rolling cache" that stores things like terrain data for frequently-visited locations. The load times, especially for a first-time launch, are much better than they were in FS2020 regardless, but Microsoft does recommend at least 100 Mbps of bandwidth for playing on max settings. I haven't needed that much—the most I've seen FS2024 use at any given time is around 46 Mbps. But it's something to be aware of.

You are a pilot

Microsoft has identified three types of players Flight Simulator aims to cater to: hardcore simmers who want the most realistic experience, gamers who want to earn rewards for completing challenges, and sightseers who want to visit cool world landmarks. I like to think I have a little bit of all three wolves inside of me. I appreciate a lot of the little touches of realism, I'm a geography and architecture nerd who is easily delighted by things like being able to fly under a faithful recreation of the Golden Gate Bridge, and I sure do like it when number goes up.

While I'd say the simmers and sight-seers are well served, FS2024's attempt at a goal-driven career mode is a little bit underwhelming. I did enjoy practicing and taking exams to earn new certifications for stuff like IFR flight and jet aircraft, but the actual economics of being a freelance pilot are shallow and not that interesting to manage. It takes many, many hours of mercenary work on borrowed wings, handing over most of your pay in finder's fees, before you can even afford to own the cheapest plane available. And while the mission variety—from dropping off skydivers at 10,000 feet to helping put out forest fires—is enough to keep things interesting, I never got the feeling of running a small business that I was looking for.

Blue Yonder

It hardly mattered when I was cruising in and out of gorgeous volumetric clouds or diving down almost low enough to dip my toes in the sparkling Nile, however. FS2024 truly looks incredible. At least from 1000 feet up, or when you're admiring the many bespoke airports and landmarks—both new and returning from FS2020—it's probably one of the best-looking games I've ever played. Beyond the bounds that human artists have touched up, though, it handles certain things better than others at eye-level.

I know, I know. This isn't Microsoft Walking Simulator 2024. But if you give me the option to exit my aircraft and trudge around with a custom avatar, of course I'm going to put it through its paces. And what I found was a startling level of believability across a multitude of distinct biomes… as long as you stick to rural or wilderness, inland areas. Walking through the wooded hills around Divide, CO that I spent a lot of my childhood in was almost eerie in how faithful it felt.

But if you get to more populated areas, things get surreal and bizarre pretty quick. Don't expect to be able to walk around the streets of Tokyo without wondering if your graphics card is malfunctioning or you're maybe having a bad trip. This engine also still can't handle places where land and water meet that well, which is unfortunate if you want to take a cruise up the Pacific Coast or around the fjords of Norway. Waves often look painted on and unmoving, and river banks frequently defy gravity in wacky ways. It's still damn impressive. I mean, they modeled the whole Earth! But these details stick out more because of how unbelievable a recreation it is otherwise.

Different yokes for different folks

Aside from a good internet connection and a good GPU, the remaining entry cost to have an ideal experience with FS2024 is some kind of a dedicated peripheral. You don't have to splurge on a full HOTAS if you don't want to—my trusty Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, which will run you about $30 on sale, served perfectly admirably with a keyboard beside it to give me access to more hotkeys.

But I also tried to tough it out with an Xbox controller for about 12 hours, and I can only just barely recommend this experience if that's your only option. It's playable, but not having fine throttle control is a constant issue, and all of the control surfaces are really, really touchy with that tiny thumbstick. I definitely got cramps trying to hold the correct angle of attack for climbing, and I had to adjust the sensitivity per aircraft to not put myself into a death spin on every take-off and landing. I can't even imagine trying to play with a mouse and keyboard alone.

If you're less interested in the simulation aspects, there are a lot of options to tweak your flying experience. With all of the assists turned on, it can feel pretty arcadey. Much too arcadey for my taste, but it's nice that they give you that choice. On the other end of the spectrum, you can go through a pre-flight checklist and manually flip every switch in the cockpit before takeoff, and the air traffic control system is much more detailed than FS2020. You're still going to hear a lot of uncanny AI voices, which I don't love. But given the number of missions and different airports, it's not like they could have recorded human dialogue for all of it.

Final destinations

The variety of aircraft, with 70 even in just the base edition, is also pretty incredible—with everything from commercial airliners to fighter jets to hot air balloons. Each has its own distinct quirks and handling challenges to learn, which makes each excursion in a new vehicle feel almost like getting to know a new person. Helicopters and I never quite saw eye-to-eye, but I'm particularly partial to the rugged "taildragger" bush planes that let me take off and land quickly in the middle of some random field in Africa.

And many of these wild areas are now populated by migrating local wildlife, too, with the highly-detailed and excellently-animated models borrowed from Frontier's Planet Zoo. They don't have a wide variety of behaviors, unfortunately. You can walk right up to a polar bear or a water buffalo and they really won't even acknowledge your existence. But it's a cool little touch, and yet another excuse to use the full-featured photo functions. There's even a whole new World Photographer mode that challenges you to snap pics of various animals and landmarks, which I found to be a relaxing break from career mode.

If you want to really put your piloting skills to the test, there's also a selection of challenges with weekly leaderboards, ranging from perfecting difficult landings to doing what I can only describe as "some Top Gun shit," trying to fly through locales like the Grand Canyon in an F-18 while maintaining as low an altitude as possible. These are neat, but definitely a lot more stressful than the other modes as well.

And this sim is also not without some quirks, glitches, and oversights. One issue I ran into multiple times was at some of the smaller, procedurally-generated airports you might fly out of for certain missions, where my plane would spawn with one wing partially stuck inside of a structure, making it impossible to take off. Other times, I'd get dinged for infractions like using my flaps at too high of a speed when my plane was standing completely still with the parking brake on. These issues tend to be small, infrequent, and with an easy workaround of simply picking a different mission. But they are still annoying.

None of that gets in the way of what Flight Simulator 2024 represents in its entirety, though. It takes the mind-boggling ambition of the 2020 sim and executes on it even better—launch woes notwithstanding—which is already a massive accomplishment. Some of the new things it tries to do work better than others, but the core of what makes this long-running franchise great is stronger than ever.

But, y'know, if you do want to travel with it, it even comes with a carry handle. Yes, the custom Velocity Micro NX2 mini-ITX chassis comes with its own pop-out carry handle, which definitely feels robust enough to support its weight. But, let's be honest, that's just a thing you're going to find yourself fiddling around with (handle goes up, handle goes down) more than actually using on the reg.

The chassis itself actually feels very Lian-Li, all black brushed aluminium and clean lines, but mercifully without the machined edges that I always end up shredding my fingers on with Lian-Li cases. Its tool-less design means you can pull both the solid and tempered glass side panels off with ease and the simple layout makes it easy to get access to the insides for upgrades, etc.

There's also a maybe surprising amount of space inside for your graphics card, too. I did try to get an RTX 4090 in there, but that was a little over-ambitious. I reckon you could just squeeze one in there if you removed the front 120 mm fan first, but suffice to say you'll be able to get cards under 300 mm in length into this system when it does come to a GPU upgrade.

But what I've gone in there in my review machine, however, is already something fairly spicy, and is actually the top-end of what Velocity Micro will ship the Raptor ES40 with. We've got the RTX 4070 Super in there at the moment, an Asus Dual version, which comfortably fits within the mini ITX confines without looking like it's going to struggle for breath.

The intake pulls air in from the front and blows it across the back of the GPU, over the RAM, SSD, and VRMs and through the push/pull configuration of the120 mm liquid CPU cooler, which vents out the rear of the chassis. It's impressive, in a chassis of this size, that the cooling is actually so effective.

Compared with the iBuyPower V40 Valorant machine we've recently reviewed, which comes in a larger case with a 240 mm CPU cooler, the Raptor ES40 manages to keep both GPU and processor running cooler. That's kinda counter to what you might otherwise expect given their relative sizes.

Alongside that Nvidia GPU, a graphics card made for 1440p gaming, you also get one of the latest Zen 5 processors, the Ryzen 7 9700X. It was actually one of our favorite Ryzen 9000-series chips and the sequel to one of our favorite Ryzen 7000-series CPUs, too. That's a resolutely eight-core, 16-thread processor which delivers great all-round performance with a mighty efficient power core, too.

My only concern with this setup lies in what motherboard that processor has been jammed into. With the price of this build set at over $2,500 I would have much rather had something with a bit more about it than a basic AMD A620 chipset board. The Gigabyte A620I AX is a decent budget mini ITX motherboard, and we were fairly impressed with its overall performance when we reviewed it ourselves, but it's certainly not the most feature rich.

I would certainly not feel comfortable recommending you upgrade the CPU beyond something like the 9900X at most. The 5+2+1 VRM is a little lightweight, and a beefy processor, chugging down system power like black coffee on a rough morning, is going to struggle.

It's also only sporting a single PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot for your storage needs. An affordable B650I board here would have given you the option to drop a PCIe 5.0 SSD in there and given you a second slot for another M.2 SSD. As it is, you only get a further two SATA 6 Gbps plugs inside the chassis.

That motherboard choice means you're also getting a limited selection of USB ports on the rear, but ever as it were for mini ITX boards, though you do at least get a pair of Type-A and one Type-C socket on the chassis' front panel.

That niggle aside, however, the rest of the spec fits the brief. The 2 TB Crucial SSD isn't the absolute fastest, but is capacious enough to give you a lot of space for your OS and game installs, and the 32 GB of DDR5-5200 is perfect for a 2024/5 gaming PC. There's also an excellent 750 W EVGA SFX power supply in there, too. That's a PSU that will support graphics cards all the way up to the RTX 4080 Super… if you can fit one in the case.

As it is, you're getting great 1440p gaming performance out of this RTX 4070 Super-powered rig. In my benchmarks, only the Avatar performance looks off the pace, and for the life of me I can't figure out why, because the rest of the benchmarks are absolutely on par, or better than the iBuyPower machine with a similar spec.

You can see in the Baldur's Gate 3 bench where the newer CPU pushes it ahead of the iBuyPower rig, though, and in the 1% Low frame rates across the board, too. This machine will just deliver a better, smoother gaming experience.

In terms of the raw processing and productivity benchmarks, too, the Raptor ES40 is a real performer. In a world with almost ludicrous core counts being proffered between the two CPU makes of Intel and AMD, it's tempting to look upon an eight-core chip as pretty low rent stuff, but it shows here how capable the Ryzen 7 9700X is both for gaming and productivity.

The kicker, however, is the price. That's often going to be the issue when you're putting a standard system against a prebuilt compact gaming PC. There is absolutely a price premium to shrinking a rig, but even so the fact the Velocity Micro machine is almost $1,000 more than the similarly specced iBuyPower might be a bitter pill to swallow.

But if you want to buy yourself a well-specced, powerful, impressively cool and quiet gaming PC then the Raptor ES40 should absolutely be on your list. You could definitely build one cheaper yourself, but that's not why you're looking for a prebuilt PC, is it?

Which I think is grand. I am all for that when it comes to affordable gaming PCs, I don't want to see money wasted on needless luxuries when I'm chasing down a good budget rig. And there certainly aren't any of those here. Pull that side panel off and you'll see what I mean; the CPU cooler is a no-name brand, there are no VRM heatsinks or SSD-cooling plates on the barebones motherboard, and the memory sticks are likewise bare PCBs, too.

The OEM Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card (basically a non-branded one made for system builders) is similarly simple, but beautifully so. I'm into miniature cards where they make sense, and the low-end Ada Lovelace GPU is so efficient that it doesn't need a massive dual-slot, triple-fan cooling array to keep it running to full effect.

Now, you might be getting a bit of the fear with all this talk of limited cooling options, basic CPU cooler, and a small GPU. I get it, you're worried this thing's going to overheat and get hella loud when you boot up any game more demanding than Solitaire. Bury that fear, because at this level we have components smart and efficient enough they don't overly tax the cooling options available.

In my testing neither the CPU or GPU go beyond the 76°C mark under heavy gaming loads, and, while the Intel processor will hit 95°C when all its cores are being hit at 100% processing load, that's actually entirely standard. In fact, other systems we've tested will go all the way up to a throttling 100°C, so the fact the Legion Tower 5i doesn't go that far highlights why it doesn't need an expensive chip chiller atop its CPU.

But what is this processor of which I speak? Lenovo has gone for the Core i5 14400F, a ten-core, 16-thread Raptor Lake Refresh chip, that's arguably one of the best budget CPUs around. We still recommend the Core i5 13400F as the best budget CPU but only because it's around $10 cheaper if you're buying it as an upgrade—they are otherwise the exact same processor.

It's no productivity beast, I'll be honest. Despite that effective ten-core labelling, what you're getting are actually just six Hyperthreaded Performance cores, with a further four Efficient cores for lighter workloads. But for gaming those P-cores are the important factor, and are more than capable of delivering data to the GPU in a speedy enough manner to keep the good frames rolling.

And that GPU is the budget-focused RTX 4060. It's the lowest-spec graphics card in the RTX 40-series, with a specs sheet that only serves to highlight that positioning. It's an effective enough 1080p gaming GPU, though, and comes with all the DLSS 3.5 goodness, which includes Nvidia's Frame Generation technology for some free fps in supporting games. It's that extra GeForce frosting which slightly pushes Nvidia's budget card ahead of the AMD alternative.

Alongside that well-balanced CPU/GPU combo, Lenovo has dropped in a 1 TB Samsung PCIe 4.0 SSD (and a pretty speedy one) and 16 GB of DDR5 memory. Sadly, that bare memory is running at 4400 MT/s, but as this isn't exactly designed as a workstation beast, that slow RAM isn't going to be a real hindrance.

So, how does it actually perform? Well, our benchmark suite for gaming PCs runs at 1440p to capture the performance at both ends of the market, both the high and low end machines. And while the native performance isn't too hot—you can see why they call the RTX 4060 a 1080p GPU—as soon as you start to drop in DLSS and Frame Generation you can actually start to see properly playable frame rates.

Hitting a smooth 60 fps on average in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p, supported by that 49 fps 1% Low figure, is pretty impressive—especially given that running natively without Frame Gen and DLSS you're only getting 24 fps. Still, even with the panacea of upscaling and interpolation, I wouldn't recommend this Legion Tower 5i as anything other than a 1080p gaming PC.

You're still well behind something like the RTX 4070 Super in terms of gaming performance, but you'll only find that GPU in gaming PCs which cost well over the $1,200 mark. Which is, I guess, where we need to start talking about money.

When I first received this machine for testing it was on offer for $850 at Best Buy, and had been for a number of months, but despite there being a ton of Black Friday gaming PC deals around at the moment, the cheapest this rig is on offer for is $900 at Lenovo's own store.

That is still a decent price, but there are RTX 4060 machines out there with the same spec discounted down to much less, such as the iBuyPower Scale. In general, non-silly season sales times, however, the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i remains one of the best budget gaming PCs from a known brand.

The Legion's simple setup works for me, and also means it's an easy system to upgrade down the line, too. There's a spare M.2 slot for an additional SSD to supplement the 1 TB drive already in there, and there are no clearance issues if you wanted to go for higher-spec memory. The only issue there is the OEM B660M motherboard is very basic, even down to the BIOS and that might cause some issues trying to get XMP on speedy RAM kits running. It's also only got a handful of USB sockets, and only a solitary Type-C connection on the back panel.

The other sticking point would be that 500 W PSU. You could probably stretch to an RTX 4060 Ti as an upgrade, but even that might be stretching things a little. Realistically, if you wanted a big GPU upgrade you'd need a new PSU alongside it. But, unlike something like an Alienware PC, the PSU inside the Legion Tower 5i is entirely standard, too.

I've got a real soft spot for the Legion Tower 5i, in fact for the other Legion Towers I've tested, too. They're simple gaming PCs that don't pretend to be something they're not, and even that flowing RGB lighting can be disabled via a single physical button on the rear of the machine. But Lenovo has a lot of competition in the budget market, from the likes of Newegg's ABS range, and upstarts such as Yeyian. That is a level of competition that seems to be far more aggressive than Lenovo is, or maybe more aggressive than it can be.

If you're after a rock solid build from a known brand, then the Tower 5i will be a great shout, especially as you'll be able to find it with a consistently solid discount If you're purely chasing the best performance at the lowest price, however, there are better alternatives if you're willing to shop around.

Void Crew is a chaotic first-person mix of FTL: Faster Than Light and Sea of Thieves that asks you to take your team of one to four players and tumble through the galaxy, trying to keep your ship intact as you bounce between increasingly difficult space battles.

The structure actually is FTL. At the end of each encounter you'll power up the ship's void drive and hop into space, before going to a glowy 3D map to choose which of three missions you want to take a swing at next. They are varied, and while you inevitably end up throwing down with clouds of enemy ships, it does feel like there's a difference between, say, ambushing a convoy and wiping out shipyards.

The end result is basically the best Firefly game ever made, with you and as many friends as you can cram into the ship waging a guerilla war in every direction, jumping away into the void just as things start to turn against you.

Your crew is divided into four different classes: Pilot, Engineer, Gunner and Scavenger. The roles are simple: the Pilot flies the ship, the Engineer fixes it, Gunners defend it, and the Scavenger… gets a grappling hook. The first three have skill trees that boost their specific niches and even give them a power-up that's perfectly suited for moments of do-or-die heroism, from letting Gunners supercharge their emplacements to the Engineer running faster and repairing quicker.

The Scavenger, meanwhile, has a loose hodgepodge of upgradable skills that makes them better outside of the ship. It's a role that’s just not needed - while hull breaches require someone to go out into wide open space to fix them, in that case you really want that someone to be an Engineer, who's better at the actual fixing. There are certain objectives that require you venture outside of the ship, too—but generally speaking, having someone off-ship is a negative. As a result, the Scavenger simultaneously offers both the most exciting possibility and most disappointing experience when you hop into a game for the first time. Compared to the other classes, there's not a clear fit for the Scavenger, so you feel anomalous in the ecosystem of keeping your little boat safe.

These roles are loose and you can multiclass, but because the farthest reaches of the skill trees for each role are so powerful, it seems inefficient to spec into other classes. When I level up a bit further it might turn out that I can pick up every different skill in every class—I haven't yet found the upper limit of how many skill points I can get—but because each successive skill feels like a huge leap forwards in terms of what is possible, it feels foolish to spread out your points early on.

There's a narrative here, but you can ignore it. The real story is the one you make. I couldn't tell you whether the faction you are aligned with, the METEM, are good guys or bad. But I can't stop thinking about our Engineer, who remained preternaturally calm as he bounced around the belly of the ship, powering up the void drive, extinguishing flames and fixing shorted wires to keep us alive long enough to make the jump outta dodge. This isn't the only tale of improbable survival Void Crew has given me, and honestly several of them hinge on my friend Tim being a calm engineering presence while the rest of us try our best not to get crushed by the unfeeling universe.

Still, Void Crew's story engine is far from the only hardware you'll be getting your hands on. This is a game all about spaceships and tinkering with them.

Void Crew's ships feel like they were made by Fisher-Price, all big buttons for opening the airlock door and chunky levers for depressurising afterwards. You can interact with just about everything using a quick tap of the F key, and most things are quite self-explanatory. Constructing new modules in your ship is a simple case of dragging a box into an empty space and then turning a handle on the top. You deconstruct parts of your ship by pulling a big lever in the base of each part. You can do this at any time, but outside of slapping a shield generator down mid-fight it's hard to imagine why you would want to do it anywhere outside of the relaxing safety of the void tunnel.

The Frigate is easy to pilot and maintain, but the Destroyer is huge and feels like a stretch for a four-person team to keep afloat. You unlock several different configurations with their own specialities, whether that's a CQB (Close Quarters Battle) ship that starts with two whirring miniguns, or an energy boat that offers more laser guns (and power issues) than you can shake a stick at.

We didn't pick a favourite, but did find ourselves more comfortable on the smaller Frigate, and as we learned every inch of that ship, the game came alive—the team running around like little ants inside our colony. "I'm running out of ammo," I'd call out as I got to the last 600 rounds in my ridiculously fast-firing gatling gun. At this point, the Engineer would run from the engine room to the storage shelves, grab a box of ammo, leg it up to my emplacement at the back of the ship and load more ammo in. On the way back, he'd dip into the power room and take a battery from the charger, loading it into our shield and allowing us to take a tiny bit more punishment. From there, he'd take the empty battery from the shield to put it on charge, before returning to his nest in the engine room, keeping the engine trimmed and thrusters charged so our Pilot had as much mobility as possible.

It's a role he was born to play, and I think most groups will find people gravitating into their roles quite easily. My love of things that go boom make me a natural Gunner, but I also enjoyed the twists and turns of piloting, and found some peace in darting around the inside of the ship during combat as an Engineer.

Ultimately though, it's the guns that draw me in. There's a range of different weaponry here, from long range snipers to gatling guns and everything in between. The energy weapons don't require ammo but draw a lot of power, while physical guns put out an unholy amount of damage and never overheat. Having to track enemies and then lead your shots is unusual in a game of this type, and a blast to get to grips with.

All in all, Void Crew feels like it has a good foundation here. There are a few omissions: as a Pilot it's weird that you can't control your pitch and yaw. And we've already covered how pointless the Scavenger feels. But the only major flaw is that there isn't quite enough content yet for sustained play. I've played a fun 20 hours but feel like I've just about seen everything, even if I haven't mastered much of it. My next challenge is to start topping the bosses: giant, screen-spanning things like a giant spike surrounded by turrets, or a hollow sun full of energy that will set your ship on fire from the inside as soon as its giant energy beam touches you. After that, I’m not sure what I’ll have left to do.

Still, Void Crew offers a compelling reason to go to a galaxy far, far, away—and while there are a few quirks here and there, this is a sci-fi blast of co-op chaos. Grab some friends, get out there and make your own stories.

Zooming in on tiny things and imagining what life is like for them: it never gets old. Like 2016 platformer Unravel and Obsidian survival game Grounded, new RTS Empire of the Ants plops us into the world of macro photography. It does a great job of showing us the world from an ant's perspective, where pebbles are boulders and a beetle is an elephant, but you've really got to love that feeling for it to work, because as an RTS campaign, it's not great.

In Empire of the Ants you're 103,683rd, a warrior-caste red wood ant who fights for their confederation of ant colonies against the much larger world's wonders and horrors. It's a wonderfully whimsical world—drawn from a series of French novels—and although the game mechanics aren't anything special, and the campaign missions are a letdown more often than not, there is an undeniable delight in exploring its tiny world. This is a game about beauty and enjoyable scenery above all else.

The art almost aggressively leaps at you, with as photorealistic a set of greenery and logs and other tiny things as Unreal Engine 5 can muster. The many insects and arachnids and other creatures have believable texture to their exoskeletons that varies between species and type. I was especially enamored by the huge ferns, grasses, and flowers your ant can climb all around on. The surfaces aren't always as detailed as insect carapace, but the way your ant's legs twist to clutch at the stem as you climb or spread out on smoother surfaces is just kind of detail you hope for from a game about zooming in on details. It's simply a very fun, and pretty, game to move about in.

The huge artifacts of the larger human world are also delightful. A rugged old soccer ball features quite early on and looks realistic with its worn stitching and fraying panels and slick slug-trail from a circling, curious creature. These human objects are accompanied by ant-scale descriptions wondering what they might be: We can't eat the soccer ball, says one, it's not real leather. Avoid a glass jar in the summer, says another, as it gets very hot.

That does make the places that lack similar detail very obvious: You can build little wood walls for your nests, for example, but you just clip right through them when walking. Lack of attention to certain mechanical details is painful in your average mission, because much of Empire of the Ants isn't actually RTS missions—it's platforming around these worlds as a little ant. And that's fun when you're traversing and sightseeing, but most of those platformer segments boil down to timed scavenger hunts that have you rushing about and fighting with the awful UI for smelling pheromones more than enjoying the scenery.

The antgony of defeat

As a whimsical ant exploration simulator, Empire of the Ants does pretty well, but it's in theory a third-person RTS first and foremost. That part of it is lacking quite sorely. Running around and directing your ants to take new nests—the fixed-in-place capture points that also serve as your only base building—is often too simple. The battles are largely deterministic, where you can see from the start which side would win and which will lose because of the Warrior-Worker-Spitter unit triad forming a Rock-Paper-Scissors counter system. The only wrench in those gears is that sometimes you can use pheromone abilities from your otherwise non-combatant ant leader to do stuff like boost your units' movement or cause an enemy to flee. It's very simple stuff that doesn't inspire an interesting range of tactical scenarios.

That becomes painfully obvious in multiplayer, where the battles devolve pretty quickly into who's quicker on the draw to take resources and leverage them—I didn't have any interesting or surprising tactical interactions. There's little to nothing to recommend this as a committed multiplayer game over other, more strategically-varied games that'll feel fresh longer.

In the later campaign missions, it's often frustrating to tab through the long list of ant legions and allied creatures like beetles and wasps you command—and tabbing through the list is indeed the only precise way to select units other than facing and clicking them directly… which can be hard when a half-dozen enemy and friendly unit icons overlap. The UI for base upgrades can also frustrate: it's projected on the ground and can get covered by friendly ants.

The two halves of Empire of the Ants, exploration and tactics, are both mediocre and at war with each other. It is possible to blend puzzle-platforming and small-scale tactics—typified by the excellent Pikmin series—but Empire of the Ants strictly separates the two types of play. Campaign missions are always either exploration or strategic scenarios, and the exploration is only sometimes mysterious or surprising enough to justify itself. A Pikmin-style game blends the two gameplay types into a fluid whole, with larger levels or regions that reward exploration with strategic bonuses. Here, I feel like I'm hopping between a passionate environmental tech demo and a mediocre third-person RTS in stutters and stops, but those environments are at least enough to recommend it, with big caveats, to lovers of insects and other tiny things.

The new Arrow Lake CPUs only fit into an LGA1851 socket, so you can't fit one in a previous-generation motherboard. At the moment, there's only one chipset available (Z890) and most board vendors have focused on creating ATX-sized models that are quite expensive. Then again, if one is going to spend over $500 on a Core Ultra 9 285K, you're probably best off getting a suitably capable motherboard to ensure the setup lasts you as long as possible.

The ROG Maximus Z890 Hero isn't at the very top of Asus' Intel motherboard range but it's not far off, as it sports as comprehensive a set of features as one could possibly ask for. Naturally, that means the price tag is equally as big, but that's par course for high-end motherboards these days.

Pretty much everything about the ROG Maximus Z890 Hero is big—opening the enormous packaging reveals a motherboard that weighs in at an astonishing 3.6 kg (8 lbs). From the huge primary M.2 slot heatsink to the massive polychromic display, nothing about it is subtle even though it doesn't sport in-your-face graphics.

Just read through the specifications to see what I mean. Few motherboards come with six M.2 slots and fewer still have two Gen 5 slots and four Gen 4 ones. If that's not enough storage for you, then there are a further four SATA ports and a SlimSAS connection, for additional NVMe or SATA drives. How about 11 USB ports on the rear IO panel and a further 10 via headers?

If overclocking is more your thing, then you're not going to be disappointed. Power is handled by a total of 27 stages (22 of which are rated to 110 amps), covered by some of the chunkiest heatsinks I've seen for a very long time. I'm a little surprised that Asus didn't choose to use active cooling for the VRMs but given Arrow Lake's reduced power consumption compared to Raptor Lake, it's perhaps not necessary.

The engineers at Asus have worked hard at making the motherboard more user-friendly ('EZ DIY', as Asus calls it) and it's replete with lots of so-called 'Q' features—M.2 Q-Release, M.2 Q-Slide, M.2 Q-Latch, PCIe Slot Q-Release Slim, Q-Antennae, and so on. Fortunately, it's not just marketing nonsense, as the features genuinely make it really easy and simple to install and remove graphics cards, SSDs, and the Wi-Fi aerial.

I do wish Asus would refresh its BIOS layout and structure, though. It's packed full of options as always and now defaults to a 1080p resolution (so it looks crisp and clear) but it's somewhat overwhelming at times. The jump in complexity between Easy and Advanced modes can't be very welcoming for beginners, that's for sure. Still, at least the Q-Dashboard is a nice touch, displaying an overview of your motherboard's parts and connectors.

Performance testing motherboards is a somewhat tricky affair, mostly because there's usually very little difference between various models in most tests. It's only when one uses highly specific synthetic benchmarks that small differences begin to make an appearance, and these rarely translate into a noticeable discrepancy in real-world situations.

This is especially true in the case of Z890 motherboards because they're all brand new in the market, so there isn't a wealth of results to compare against. Hence why there are only two other boards in the results below: an MSI MEG Z890 Ace and an MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk.

For the most part, you can see there's little to separate them, especially in gaming. However, the Factorio test really stands out, as the Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Hero achieves a 21% faster result than either of the MSI boards. I've spent some time discussing this with both companies without much success in understanding the result.

The only thing I can think that might be behind it is that the Asus motherboard applies a fixed clock speed for the Core Ultra 9 285K's internal ring bus, whereas the MSI boards allow it to vary. Intel tells me that Asus' approach is the correct one.

However, the ROG Maximus Z890 Hero is slower in the 7zip tests and not by a margin of error, achieving a 14% lower result in the decompression benchmark. Games store all data in a compressed format and decompress it on the fly when required so the 7zip figure suggests that one might notice a decrease in gaming performance when using the Asus motherboard. But as you can see in the gaming results, it doesn't affect those particular games.

Tracking the CPU package power, VRM and chipset temperatures during the main benchmarks will highlight any deficiencies in a motherboard's power delivery and cooling systems and while there are some disparities between the three motherboards, they're not significant. The ROG Maximus Z890 Hero's heatsinks do an excellent job of keeping everything cool but given that the MSI board's do likewise, I do wonder if their vast size was really necessary.

But I have no such concerns over the heatsink for the primary M.2 slot. It's a monstrous slab of metal and as you can see, it does a superb job of keeping a PCIe 5.0 SSD's temperature under control.

At no point did it ever exceed 70 °C and this is the only motherboard I ever tested that's managed to do this with a Gen5 SSD. The fact that it's so easy to remove and reattach is the proverbial cherry on top.

There's an awful lot to like about the Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Hero. Despite its sheer mass, hulking heatsinks, and pretty polychromic display, it's a relatively understated design that should suit most PC enthusiasts.

Underneath all the metal is a motherboard that's loaded to the hilt with ports, slots, and sockets. If you want to build a new gaming PC with an Intel Core Ultra 200S processor, you're not going to be left wishing for anything.

Well, apart from its price, that is. At a few bucks over $690, it is very expensive—and while there are even pricier Z890 motherboards on the market, that price tag is enough to make anyone look twice before buying.

The Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Hero is an excellent motherboard, of that there's no doubt, and should easily last you through many years of use. Whether that's enough to justify spending that kind of money, especially when more LGA1851 motherboards will come out in 2025, is far less certain.

Reactive lighting isn’t new for the brand known for turning wall geometry into a nerdy subculture of home decor. Its new take is the Nanoleaf 4D Screen Mirror Kit—a trimmable light strip for screens up to 65-inches (or 85-inches for a premium), flexible corner brackets, a camera, and a tiny control hub. It’s a clean, affordable marvel that supports anything on your screen. However, some minor issues during setup can hold it back.

The Quick Start guide summarises the installation process in four steps: Apply the corner brackets, stick the lights down, place the camera, and link it to the box. A handy kickstand lets the camera sit in front of the display if you don’t want it perched atop your screen. It’s not ideal on a desk, but it’s an option for living rooms. Either way, plug it in, and you’re good to go. Oh, if only things were that simple.

The purpose of the flexible corner pieces is never explained. You’re told to skip that step if you don’t want them, but there’s no mention as to why you might. In reality, they’re a simple solution to a very real problem.

By wrapping the lights along the corner buffers, the LEDs can shine further afield. This keeps the corners from becoming too bright where the LEDs on the strip bunch up while allowing the lighting to spread further along the wall or, in a tight space, onto adjacent ones.

But that was the least of my worries. The 3M adhesive lining of the light strip just couldn’t hold on. Interestingly, the aforementioned corner strips performed much better. Could chilly conditions be blamed? The manual didn’t mention optimal application temperature. Google suggested above 15 degrees celsius. The room? Around 13C. Warming things up and applying after-market adhesive improved things, but they’re still slowly peeling away.

With things in place and a docked Steam Deck as its source, it was time to give things a go. But now that the hardware issues had been ironed out, software issues needed to be tackled.

While clean next to Govee’s icon-laden app, the Nanoleaf app isn’t perfect. It’s good fun setting things up with a wide fisheye view from the camera displayed on your phone, but a minimal UI often means minimal instruction. The setup process was somehow too basic. Showing the camera each edge was no trouble, yet in cutting the calibration process short for simplicity, the performance of the reactive lighting was borked.

By cutting down the light strip to fit a 42-inch TV without the control box intelligently concluding the lack of LEDs, it couldn’t accurately deduce how to translate a glowing object in one corner to the respective spot along the strip. It thought opposite corners were actually beside each other. This led to a top-right light source being displayed beside a dark corner in the bottom right.

Rectifying this isn’t a huge hurdle: it’s just hidden away. Worse still, the lights would lose connection. That issue was solved with a software update, but it was another annoying setback, furthering the complaint of poorly worded UIs.

Another thing never explained is the 4D mode. That’s the top end of “D” settings (they start at 1D of course). Even when trying each, it isn’t clear how they work. They’re immediately different, but an explainer would have been appreciated. There are interactive graphics on the Nanoleaf website to demonstrate the difference, but it does claim the lights offer “VR levels of immersion,” which is complete nonsense.

In practice, they seem to affect the range and complexity of the reactive lighting. The higher you go, the more camera data is translated into illumination: 1D appears to display a simple bright or dim effect on the wall to suit the mood of a scene. At 4D, the contents of the screen edge make up the light show. Settings below that focus on highlight the focal action in the centre of the screen. You can enable Rhythm to have sound taken into account as well.

On that 4D setting on a wide-ranging game like Dead Cells, you’ll notice the alluring warmth of a distant torch, light on a shallow pool reflected beneath the screen, and the rays bleeding through the high prison window highlighting the upper corners. In battle, explosions and effects burst beyond the panel. At a lower setting, the focal point of the action is what you’ll see blasted onto your wall.

Employing a camera to extract that data isn’t the fastest solution. Still, you won’t see the blood splatter appear off-screen long after damage has been dealt. It’s imperfect, but it’s practical. But like any camera pointed at a screen, it’s susceptible to glare. A darker room is recommended—as it would be for a light show—but the app does feature sliders to rectify imperfect conditions.

Amusingly, Nanoleaf managed to simplify the method of creating custom ambient lighting themes to a word or phrase. That’s where the AI comes in. I typed in YMCA and got a fittingly vibrant gradient the hub’s built-in microphone could manipulate. Generative AI is still a scourge, but this is a sensible use.

Despite the initial setbacks, the Nanoleaf 4D Screen Mirror kit entranced me. Move beyond the poor setup process and it’s a genuine joy. It’s a simple solution to the once-complex quest for reactive lighting. And at $80/£90, it’s considerably cheaper than the bulkier Govee T2 while still feeling as fast as the Govee AI Sync Box 2.

Sweetening the deal is compatibility with Nanoleaf stuff like the Smarter Essentials Bulb and its myriad wall decor. If you have other lights around your TV, you can save $40/£20 by foregoing the LED strips. Plug your current lights into the box and you’ll get the same feature set. And with support for Razer Chroma, you can add specific game compatibility for context-based lighting on PC—the sort you can configure to mirror health bars, react to damage, or celebrate a triple kill.

Want it all? Link the lot over Wi-Fi to spread reactive lighting throughout your room. Philips Hue and Govee have had this for years, but that doesn’t make it any less magical. And by never linking up to your PC, there’s zero overhead bogging down your system.

But there’s always room for improvement. The lights themselves do a terrific job of extending the visual flare of your media beyond the screen. It’s just a shame the sticky solution is rarely up for the task, the hardware can struggle for a connection, and the app is so simple it’s perplexing.

With 10 RGB clusters per meter, the Govee AI Sync Box 2 wins out with 17 RGBWIC bulbs per meter, drastically improving contrast and colour mixing. But this Nanoleaf solution is ⅓ the price. With that in mind, great compatibility, a low cost, and in-store availability make the Nanoleaf 4D the easiest reactive RGB solution to recommend. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a very good option.

The Govee AI Sync Box Kit 2 is the successor to its reactive RGB solution from a couple years back. It’s a flexible strip light for your monitor, two lighting towers, and a sturdy hub that’s one part HDMI switch and one part processing unit. You get some good-quality HDMI cables, too.

Reactive lighting uses hardware or software to translate the colours on your screen into a dynamic light show that can respond to the image in real time. The result is a soft and immersive ambience that reacts to the scenes of your games and movies.

It’s a technology that’s been around for decades. But with Wi-Fi enabled lights everywhere now, the Govee AI Sync Box Kit 2 can technically fuel a house-wide solution of lamps, wall art, string lights, and spotlights. The use of AI is there to offset the traditionally processor-heavy workload needed to reflect specific in-game actions without requiring collaboration between individual game developers.

Setting up this kit is identical to the last Sync Box Kit, which I've previously used. Though while there are many similarities, there are some key differences. The strip’s LEDs now pushes for 75 bulbs per meter. We can’t count the bulbs in the light towers, but the whole package now supports RGBWIC: bright white LEDs that expand its range of colour temperature.

But I never had a problem with the apparent lack of LEDs on the old model. My issue was the main hub’s lack of DisplayPort output. With the box acting as the middle man between your graphics card and monitor, this locked popular gaming displays out of Nvidia G-Sync, creating a conundrum: immersive reactive lighting or silky smooth images.

Competitive players running high refresh rates and low resolutions were fine, with the lighting being a distracting way for an enemy flashbang to feel worryingly real. For those looking to add extra flair to their single-player adventures, the compromise wasn’t welcome.

With no support for VRR solutions, I retired my original kit. Given the £200+ asking price, it was a demoralising decision likened to removing an extra monitor to clean up your space. Thankfully, all five ports on the Govee AI Sync Box Kit 2 are HDMI 2.1. G-Sync, Freesync, VRR, and ALLM are all fair game. Ultrawide 1440p displays can hit 240 Hz with 144 Hz supported at 4K. Above that, 60 Hz is the peak.

Still, the 34-inch length of the LED strips means anyone rocking a Samsung Odyssey Ark can forget it. There’s a version for larger screens in select regions. You won’t get the light towers, but you’ll get the hub and strips. That’s because the towers are designed to sit away from a screen of equal height, extending the glow beyond the backlights.

Unlike Corsair’s LT100 light towers, the tower base isn’t illuminated. So while the lighting can stretch across your wall, you won’t have bursts extending along your desk. With no option to choose specific parts of the screen to sample, manually matching the towers to ally and enemy resource bars is limited to what’s officially supported through the phone app.

Speaking of the app, it’s required for setup. Want to link up multiple devices through its Dreamview system? You need the desktop software—but only after enabling LAN control through your phone. The problem? Despite mentioning Dreamview in the box, the app says the Sync Box doesn’t support LAN.

I’ve always had issues with Govee’s convoluted software solutions, but this takes the cake. The messy app’s poor English wording only makes matters worse. You’ll also need to jump into the app to enable profiles for supported games. They won’t kick in automatically. Still, reactive lighting support is there the moment you hook everything up.

Beyond its AI capabilities that generate ambient lighting profiles based on keywords, the four HDMI 2.1 inputs and eARC output on the hub can make it an essential part of your desk-based gaming setup. You can connect modern-day consoles and streaming sticks, removing the need to swap cables on monitors with limited I/O, introducing immersive reactive lighting to more than just your PC titles.

Though I can only realistically shine these against a set of brown blinds, which is understandably dumb, I dug out a pure white projector screen in the name of science.

The result? Bright and enthralling reactive lighting that admirably reflects the warm glow of the forge (and Fatalis fire) in Monster Hunter World or the chill of its snowy climes. The popping colours of a frantic Overwatch match faired just as well. Even the smooth-panning landscape of Hyrule in Echoes of Wisdom on a connected console was an added delight.

There’s still a perceivable delay, and transitions can appear sudden and staggered. But when you’re not actively looking for faults and properly lose yourself in your on-screen entertainment, the effect is joyous and easy on the eyes. Especially in a dark room.

The Govee AI Sync Box Kit 2 fixes most of the major issues of the first, and most of my gripes. The lights are brighter, more colourful, and more even. The hub also no longer bottlenecks expensive gear, supporting higher resolutions and frame rates alongside its fanciful, immersion-enhancing ambient lighting. There’s still no support for DisplayPort, so you’ll still be sacrificing Nvidia G-Sync without an HDMI 2.1 monitor.

But there’s still the issue of just how expensive it is. With the box being the original thorn in the foot, why they won’t sell it as a standalone upgrade is irritating. If you found no fault with the original lights, at nearly $300/£300, it’s a lot of money to right one wrong. At least there’s a slim chance you’ll need to bin it if you buy another monitor.

Is it the best solution to the reactive lighting conundrum? For some, it very well could be. So long as it’s against a largely white surface, the bright LEDs help create a mesmerizing display with more punch than before. The powerful HDMI switch alone can solve an annoying issue of the complete gaming desk.

But if your desk is for PC gaming only, Corsair’s iCUE system still feels like the more premium offering with better build quality, additional lighting zones, cleaner software support, and a more manageable price tag.

At first glance, the Kraken gives off a distinct Titan Evo vibe but it's different enough to not be a direct clone. There is clear evidence of some strong influences in the design but the main reason why I'm using Secretlab as a reference is the Kraken's price. Blacklyte wants $519 for its chair, which also just so happens to be the same amount of money as a Titan Evo if one buys it directly from Secretlab.

There's only one size of Kraken available, recommended for people between 165 and 195 cm (66 - 75 inches) in height, and under 150 kg (330 lbs) in weight. I'm 184 cm and 70 kg (read: tall and thin) and I have to say that its dimensions don't fit particularly well for my build.

It's not because the Kraken isn't spacious—the seat base is quite wide and filled with dense memory foam and covered with some nice PU leather (aka leatherette). The problem is that it's quite short and there's quite a large gap between the edge of the base and my knees. Tilting the chair back doesn't help, due to the large 'panel' that fills much of the seat back.

This is the Kraken's lumbar support and it's basically a spring-loaded section that moves forward with the pull of a small lever. Blacklyte claims that it "perfectly match[es] the natural shape of your lower back" but it absolutely doesn't with mine—all it does is push me further along the base, leaving my legs with even less support than it already does. A small pillow stuffed down my back does a far better job.

Speaking of pillows, the Kraken comes with one for your head/neck that magnetically attaches to the headrest and it's really quite nice. I'd prefer it to be larger than it is, though, because even with the seat back fully upright, it doesn't quite reach my head or neck enough.

It's a similar story with the armrests. They're fine for the most part but the amount of positioning available is a bit restrictive. I'd prefer it if they could go a little lower and more forward than they do. They're topped by a magnetically attached pad that's a little too firm for my tastes but where Secretlab offers alternate pads to apply to the Titan Evo, Blacklyte has nothing (so why are they removable?).

The armrests are four-way adjustable (three-axis movement and rotation) but it's a rather clunky affair, with quite a lot of play in the fixtures. In fact, there's a lot of play in the whole chair and loosening the tilt mechanism, to allow one to rock back further, induces some rather worrying-sounding clunks.

It might just be the specific sample I was sent, but the build quality was poor. The chair's height adjustment mechanism stopped working within a week and from the very start, the two levers controlling it had such a degree of slop to their fitting, I thought I'd broken them during assembly. The mechanism to adjust the lumbar support is also starting to fail, with the cable sticking in its sheath.

Unlike Blacklyte's Atlas gaming desk, which was very straightforward to build, the Kraken was a fiddly affair, involving much juggling of heavy parts whilst trying to line up bolts with holes, many of which were partly hidden by material. At least all the fittings came in a labelled package, so judging which piece to use during the assembly process was easy enough.

I was disappointed to see that the Kraken is shipped with a lot of packaging material that's non-recyclable. Some of that can't be avoided, given how far the chair needs to travel in distribution, but in this day and age, having every component wrapped up in some kind of soft plastic isn't environmentally friendly.

But I could forgive all of this if the Blacklyte Kraken was comfortable to use for lengthy periods. In my case, that means spending a day at a desk working and then a few hours in the night gaming.

Unfortunately, it's not and I have to say it's one of the least comfortable gaming chairs I've ever used. Now, a good part of that is because it just doesn't suit my body's dimensions and shape, but I've asked a few people to try it out and none of them found it nice to use.

As with all gaming chairs with a thick memory foam base, it takes a while for it to bed in, and my scant weight is probably delaying that process. But the unpleasant lumbar support, short seat base length, and overly high armrests all contribute to the general lack of comfort.

Now, if the Kraken only cost $250, like the Corsair TC100 Relaxed does, then I'd happily forgive its failings. But what's acceptable at a few hundred dollars is absolutely not at $500, even accounting for my atypical body dimensions. You might fit the Blacklyte Kraken better than I did, nor suffer any of the quality control issues, but are you willing to take the risk? For this kind of money, I suspect the answer is no.

I admit it: I was scared. The gleaming trailers, the Microsoft showcases, the Unreal Engine 5—Stalker 2's marketing didn't look like any Stalker I've known and loved. Had GSC traded in all the series' beloved jank in pursuit of streamlined console success? Had it made Metro by another name?

Well, never trust a trailer. It might be shinier and it might have gamepad support, but Stalker 2 is still Stalker down to its bones, that unique and unreplicable mixture of FPS, survival horror, and immersive sim. Whether X-Ray or UE5, the game's ambition still strains against the seams of its engine. It's still filled with systems—factions, artifacts, anomalies, a world filled with people going about their business and the staccato thuk-thuk of Eastern Bloc weaponry—that at times push the whole thing to breaking point and beyond it.

It's excellent, and undoubtedly my personal game of the year, but here comes the caveat. I meant what I said: Stalker 2 is Stalker to the bone, and that means the bad stuff too. There were errors, crashes, progress-halting bugs and at-times hilarious glitches in animation and AI, plus minor stuttering that I just came to accept as the price of admission, even at 1440p on my 3700X, RTX 4080, and 32GB RAM-equipped machine. And though a meaty day-one patch has helped a lot, the game still feels rickety: a bit stuttery, with AI that still sometimes fails to distinguish between friend and foe, and so on.

Lord knows I can't fault the devs—that the game exists at all despite its home country being invaded partway through development is a miracle—but it does mean the whole thing feels like it hasn't quite set just yet. Do I love Stalker 2? Yes. Does Stalker 2 make itself easy to love? No. Or at least, not without the patches that GSC promises are in the pipeline.

Fire and forget

You don't play anyone familiar in Stalker 2 (which is actually the fourth in the series, if you're new to the Zone). You're Skif, an ex-military type from the Mainland—the relatively normal Ukraine outside of Chornobyl—who awoke in the night to find his kitchen rudely annihilated by an artifact, one of the many priceless, semi-magical treasures that the Zone produces as a matter of course, and which make it catnip to fortune-seekers.

Down one apartment and rather annoyed about the whole thing, Skif ventures into the Zone to figure out just what the hell an artifact thinks it's doing spawning in his flat, and soon finds himself entangled in a multi-layered plot pileup of factional warfare, personal vendettas, competing ideological visions, and sporadic gangland violence, with plenty of choices for you to make about who to side with along the way.

Stalker has always, quietly, had one of the stranger and more philosophical stories in the videogame narrative pantheon, and boy does Stalker 2 make good on that legacy. It doesn't so much have a plot as it has a series of small ones in sequence that all eventually add up, each taking you to some new part of the astonishingly massive Zone map, which encompasses, so far as I can tell, every location featured in previous games and then some, and which looks more beautiful than ever with all the whizzbang bells and whistles of 2024. Never before have videogames let us descend into cursed basements with lighting so atmospheric or so eerie.

Exploration feels never-ending, as do the 2-kilometre sprints every time the game sets down a new quest marker that seems almost spitefully far away (fast travel requires you to speak to paid guides in population hubs, and they only go to other hubs). Ah well, you'll probably pick up some neat artifacts on the trip.

I enjoyed the tales-within-a-tale structure, for the most part, but it does have the discombobulating effect of making you feel multiple times like you are approaching the final showdown, the great denouement, the climax of climaxes, only for the game to turn around and pretty much say 'and now, the rest of the story. Please turn your cassette to side B'. Its pacing gets fatiguing, particularly as you get into the true endgame but things still continue to go on. And on. And on.

The world at war

But you don't really come to a Stalker game for its story. You come for its stories: the bizarre anecdotes that the game's systems and "A-Life" AI can't help but spit out, and Stalker 2 has those in spades. This is a bonafide clockwork world, and its NPCs—who to this day retain their utterly charming procgen names like "Gena Badass," "Vanya Ampoule," "Max Sleepy," and so on—are just as much subject and victim to its whims as you are.

Take, for instance, the military checkpoint that solved itself. Sprinting to a quest marker, I ran into a roadblock set up by the bullying, military Ward faction. I was not on good terms with the Ward. The main plot had given me multiple opportunities to side with them and I responded to every single one with gunfire, so the troops weren't keen on letting me pass.

A conundrum. I stood, brow furrowed, rain pattering on my hardened military exoskeleton, pondering how best to resolve the situation. I could open fire, I could sneak through, I could search for some other means of ingress.

Or I could count on the enormous pack of feral dogs that descended out of the darkness to lay total waste to the camp. Stalker 2's stars had aligned in such a way that these dogs, on their travels, happened to walk right into the checkpoint I needed to get through. Like a plague sent by God, they devoured every troop in there, taking heavy casualties themselves as the panicked soldiers let rip a hail of gunfire that turned night into day. After 15 seconds my problems were a dim memory. I put down the few remaining pups and carried on.

This, to me, is Stalker's soul, and it burns bright in Stalker 2. It's not just the checkpoint dogs, it's the quasi-bossfight with a big scary mutant that got cut short before I even breached the basement he was hiding in, because he'd gotten caught in a burner anomaly and died. It's watching two hostile factions destroy each other in a woodland skirmish before you pick off whoever remains for the loot. It's being pursued across the map by a faction you've tanked your rep with by, uh, picking off its members in the aftermath of a woodland skirmish. It's a world that obeys its own rules without favour or bias: action meets consequence meets action, on and on and on.

But it's also here, in the knotty systemic stuff like the faction system, that some of the worst bugs reared their head for me. Although I went to great lengths—including multiple extended bouts of mass murder—to communicate my dislike for the Ward, the game never quite processed that I had completely severed ties with them.

One of their main quests, loose and orphaned, appeared in my log and sat there abandoned right up to the ending. This confused things multiple times when I had an objective along the lines of 'kill all these Ward guys.' The enemies wouldn't attack, and when I had finished the slightly disconcerting task of euthanising my foes like cows, the quest log wouldn't update, leaving me stranded. To be fair, GSC's day-one patch mostly fixed this. The quest was updated, but the Ward still refused to treat me like an enemy. Better, but not quite a clean bill of health.

The rough with the smooth

But as a Stalker die-hard even the bugs feel a bit like an old friend. It's these idiosyncrasies—the quirky, unforgiving, systems-driven game design and, yes, even the jank, that I worried GSC might be tempted to sacrifice in the leap to whatever 'AAA' means.

More fool me. The devs have been resolute in refusing to sand down any of the series' rough edges for a new audience of potentially more casual players. Stalker 2 does not hold your hand and the Zone does not care about you. This is a game where the first mutant you fight is completely invisible, and that won't hesitate to chuck its strongest enemies at you if you happen to make a wrong turn early on. Even if you escape, you spent precious resources on staying alive and your equipment probably got chewed up in the tussle; they'll get you next time.

It's almost uncanny to play something with such unsentimental, old-school design sensibilities that looks as good and feels as modern as Stalker 2 does, and it's a welcome return for one of PC gaming's greatest and most eccentric series. Yes, there are bugs aplenty, so maybe give it a little while before you dive in, and yes, the abrasive mechanics might put some people off. But it's great to be back in the Zone after over a decade away, and to find that it hasn't sacrificed the things that made it so special all those years ago.

It's a full-array affair with 1,152 zones. On paper, it enables HDR1000 support, which means a peak brightness of 1,000 nits. This panel will also do fully 700 nits full-screen, something that no existing OLED monitor can even approach. Even the latest generation large-screen OLED tech tops out at about 250 nits full screen.

Indeed, with a typical price of around $1,200, this BenQ really does need to do something a bit special to justify its existence. Currently, 4k 32-inch OLED panels can be had from around $800. An LCD panel for 50% more cash is a serious ask.

Anyway, what with all the attention on OLED of late, it's worth briefly recapping what this mini-LED, full-array shizzle is all about. The idea is to use an active backlight to compensate for the fact that LCD panels allow light to leak through even when a given pixel is supposed to be switched off or showing a very dark colour.

To fix that, theoretically at least, you use a backlight split into zones. That allows the backlight intensity to vary across the panel according to the image being shown. For brighter areas of the image, you crank up those zones, for darker areas, the opposite.

If that sounds like a neat trick and a good idea, it comes with downsides. We'll dig into the details momentarily, but the basics involve weirdnesses arising from the algorithms used to control the zones and the resolution of the backlight itself. 1,152 zones might sound like a lot, but it actually means each zone is lighting up 7,200 pixels. That's not exactly precise.

Full-array backlighting aside, the BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX has plenty more going for it. It's a 144 Hz 4K panel, for starters. In this age of 480 Hz-plus panels, that's a relatively modest refresh. But it actually makes sense with the 4K native resolution. Even with upscaling, realistically, you're not going to be playing the latest games at 4K and 200 Hz-plus, especially if you don't have an RTX 4090.

It'll do its 4K60 thing over both HDMI and DisplayPort. Oh, it'll do it over USB-C, too, which includes 65 W of power delivery. That's not going to be enough to keep a proper gaming laptop juiced. But it does make this monitor ideal to share between a gaming desktop and laptop or, whisper it, a console. Speaking of connecting multiple PCs, there's full KVM switch support, too. Incidentally, the HDMI interfaces have eARC 7.1 support and there's a built-in audio DAC.

If the feature set is pretty strong, BenQ has also leaned into the aesthetics a little, too. There's white plastic for the stand and the rear of the screen that gives a similar overall vibe to Samsung's high-end Odyssey gaming monitors and helps to justify at least some of the price premium. It's a pretty good-looking monitor, then, just not anything truly exceptional.

Of course, it's the image quality where the BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX really needs to stand out and first impressions are good. This is a very bright, clean, punchy IPS panel. Notably, BenQ has gone for a matte rather than a glossy anti-glare coating, the latter being borderline compulsory on OLED monitors of late.

Matte versus glossy is a pretty subjective thing. But one thing is for sure, this panel is easily bright enough to offset any perceived dullness that can come with matte anti-glare coatings. It looks good for every one of those 1,000 nits in HDR mode and SDR content can be set almost uncomfortably bright.

On the subject of SDR versus HDR, SDR content looks absolutely bob-on in HDR mode, with perfect colour calibration. So, this is very much a display you can set to HDR and just leave it, regardless of content type.

Another brightness-related foible is that this display allows you to adjust the overall brightness levels in HDR mode. That's unusual and somewhat counter-intuitive given that brightness data is inherent to an HDR signal. But it is actually a welcome feature and one we wish more monitors would include.

Whatever, the HDR experience is mostly impressive. This is a really zingy, impactful display. It's also more prone to light up a backlight zone for a small image element than many full-array LCD monitors.

On the plus side, that means you don't lose small details on dark backgrounds. Less welcome is the more apparent popping on and off of backlight zones as a small bright object moves across a dark background, plus the inevitably bright halo that entails.

In the end, there are unavoidable compromises that have to be made when the backlighting resolution is so low. So low, that is, compared to the resolution of the panel itself. And thus also very low compared to the perfect per-pixel lighting of an OLED panel, which effectively has eight million zones to this panel's 7,200. All that said, this thing still looks pretty bloody marvellous in, say, Cyberpunk 2077 with all the HDR bells and whistles fired up.

Arguably the other major contention when it comes to LCD versus OLED is the assumption that the latter is far faster for pixel response. And it is. But it is also debatable how much that matters.

As IPS panels go, the BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX is very quick indeed. There's very little blur or smear and, just as important, no obvious overshoot or inverse ghosting. For most gamers, most of the time, the response and clarity will be just fine. But an OLED panel is definitely that little bit better, and a much higher refresh OLED is better still.

Now, were this monitor significantly cheaper than an OLED alternative, it would be easy to rationalise away the response deficit. You could acknowledge OLED's advantage, note how much more it costs and conclude this monitor still looks pretty good for the money.

But at $1,200, it's much trickier. Along with the comparatively clunky HDR rendering, this panel is clearly slower and slightly blurrier than an OLED monitor. And yet it's priced up with the most expensive OLED options. In return, you do get superior full-screen brightness. But that really is about it.

In the end, the BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX is a very good example of its breed. As LCD gaming monitors with mini-LED, full-array backlights go, we like it a lot. It's got one of the better backlight algorithms we've seen. But at this price point, it's just so hard to recommend. Mini-LED panels like this would be much more appealing as a budget alternative to OLED, priced slightly above a conventional LCD monitor.

At, say, $600 to $700 and roughly $100 to $200 more than a basic 144 Hz 4K 32 incher while still undercutting all the OLED options, this monitor would be intriguing. But at basically double that price point, it really doesn't make much sense.