Most SSDs get installed once and never touched again. That habit is worth breaking, because firmware is the code that runs the drive’s controller, and vendors use updates to fix real faults in it. The job takes about 40 minutes when…
Memory costs make the timing interesting. Our earlier look at DRAM prices rising 10-15% in Q4, with a DDR5 kit reaching $450 shows why cheaper platforms keep their audience. A new chip that drops into an existing DDR4 board would speak directly to buyers squeezed…
Intel and AMD sell two different answers to the same desktop question in October 2026. AMD’s Ryzen 9000X3D chips still hold the gaming lead. Intel’s Core Ultra 200S Plus chips, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus at $299 and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus at $199, hold the…
The Ryzen 7 9800X3D is still the best CPU for gaming for most buyers, even though newer chips now hold the raw speed crown. TechPowerUp’s review of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D calls it the fastest gaming processor in the world. Tom’s Hardware testing still…
AM4 vs AM5 is no longer a nostalgia debate. AMD’s US store lists the Ryzen 7 5800X3D at $349 and the Ryzen 7 9850X3D at $499, according to Windows Forum’s October price check. That is a $150 gap on the chip alone. Reports from October 23 to 25 add a twist:…
A memory-corruption bug in TianoCore EDK II, the open-source codebase that underpins much of the UEFI firmware industry, became public on October 27, 2026. Ars Technica reported that the flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-97631, sits in an ICMP component and may allow code…
Intel’s October 5 adjustment was not a one-off. It was the third increase this year, following earlier hikes that analysts say have compounded to push some processor families roughly 30% above where they sat in 2025. Intel has not publicly broken out which…
AMD’s rumoured Ryzen AI 7 HX 455 would put the 12-core chips’ 16-CU graphics and 24MB cache on an eight-core processor. The mix resembles the Ryzen Z2 Extreme, the chip in gaming handhelds. VideoCardz says that processor pairs three Zen 5 cores and five Zen…
An enclosure is only half of the equation, and the drive you put inside it matters just as much as the shell itself. Three things to check before buying or repurposing a drive for a portable ssd enclosure build: PCIe…
Socket support covers the current and prior generation on both major platforms: Intel LGA 1700 and LGA 1851, plus AMD AM4 and AM5. That range means the cooler works on everything from older Ryzen 5000-series builds through Intel’s current Core Ultra lineup, a wider…
Number of slots, CPU vs chipset lanes, and heatspreaders for M.2 drives.
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