If you’ve missed the YouTube uploads lately, we’d recommend taking a look at the RX 6900 XT from AMD, as well as our tear-down of the Lian Li Galahad AIO. Of course, we’d be remiss not to mention that we took Cyberpunk 2077 through our GPU bench and CPU bench (and an updated CPU bench with 1.05).

Regarding news, we have some interesting commentary following hardware and component shortages and how they’re affecting segments outside of the DIY scene. Seagate has also gone the route of custom, specialized silicon to address future storage needs. We’re also seeing China’s biggest chipmaker, SMIC, added to the DoD blacklist.

There’s more to cover, of course, so find the article and video embed below.

As the end of the year approaches, things remain busy as ever with yet more GPU launches, Cyberpunk 2077 coming out, and plenty of cooler reviews. However, we’ve managed to scrape a few interesting stories together, amidst all of the end-of-year content (GN’s included).

We have the most recent Steam Hardware Survey, which continues the trend of AMD snatching up CPU market share, but getting beaten 18 times in the top 20 GPU rankings. There’s also a minor update on Nvidia’s supply woes, as it relates to the RTX 30-series drought.

We also have a bit more to go over, as you’ll find the usual article and video embed below.

It’s been another insanely busy two weeks for us here at GN, sandwiched between various product launches. Of course, this week has been anchored by the arrival of AMD’s RX 6000-series RDNA 2 GPUs. As ever, you can find our RX 6800XT and RX 6800 reviews, as well as our usual teardowns, on our YouTube channel. We’ll briefly recap them below, but you’ll need to watch the reviews for the full scope and context.

Outside of consumer GPUs, there’s also new GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia this week aimed at HPC and supercomputing. There’s also news of a new security co-processor from Microsoft, developed in collaboration with partners such as AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm. There’s also an interesting prospect of using supercomputers to help fuel progress in silicon manufacturing.

As usual, article and video embed follow below.

We’re back for our annual “Best Of” series. We’ve already published a buyer’s guide for the Best CPUs of 2020 (for gaming, workstation tasks, video editing, and more), and now we’re back with the Best & Worst PC Cases of 2020. This coverage provides a flyby overview of the best cases we’ve reviewed or worked on in the past year, but keep in mind that cases don’t age like CPUs or GPUs -- many good cases from 2019 are still available, and in some instances, the pricing has improved. We’ll talk about some of those, too, like the Phanteks P400A.

Each case will be accompanied with a link to our review and to the product listings. We often earn a commission from the retailer (not from the manufacturer and not from your purchase) if you click on the links. This does not influence our decision to choose one case over another -- we’re choosing based on our empirical testing data from the last year or so.

We’ll embed a few charts occasionally, but to get the full charts, you’ll want to check the individual case reviews for each enclosure. The target audience for this piece is either people returning to PC building for the first time in a while -- those who might be out of the loop -- or people who haven’t had time to watch or read every single one of our case reviews over the past year. We don’t blame you, if so. 

Hardware news this week has been busy, once again, slotting right in between silicon product releases. Our AMD Ryzen 5000 coverage is mostly done, but we're now ramping into RX 6000 GPU coverage. While preparing work for the RX 6800 XT (and subsequent) GPU launches, we opened a dialogue with NVIDIA to ask about a potential PCIe resizable BAR implementation as a counter to AMD's SAM. That's our leading story for this one, followed-up by some coverage of the Zen 3 delidding work done recently, Intel's add-in GPU for servers, and more.