Best Buy didn’t want Newegg hogging all the limelight and decided to make some shady decisions of its own by putting new GPUs behind a paywall. There's plenty of other news from the last week too, like rumors of Intel's Raptor Lake i9-13900K CPUs, Cooler Master's new Sneaker X case, the death of the NVIDIA-Arm deal, and plenty more.

Show notes and video below:

We're back with another hardware news episode. This week, as the year is winding-down, we're faced with a huge slew of rumor stories; that said, we've filtered through them to select for the most probable or for ones which we've independently confirmed. The reason for the surge in rumors now is because of the impending CES announcements in early January, although there's still some hard news to talk about this week. One of those items is the FTC's challenge of NVIDIA's acquisition of ARM, something we've expected for a while but which is finally progressing.

There was news this week on the DIY/enthusiast front, as updated mounting kits for Intel’s Alder Lake-S are arriving and AMD CPU market share is growing in most segments. We also have news of Nvidia finally admitting that its purchase of Arm may not go as planned and reports of an IPO from GlobalFoundries. 

There’s plenty more, of course, as you’ll find the news article and video embed below. 

This week, we have big news from Intel and TSMC. Intel’s plans for Europe could total $100B in investments across multiple sites, as the company moves forward with its grand IDM 2.0 initiative. Intel also announced a webcast for later in July, targeting details regarding its process technology and packaging roadmap, and there’s rumors of Intel looking to buy GlobalFoundries. 

TSMC is the latest to detail research on bringing liquid cooling directly onto silicon, with what seems like promising results.

There’s also hardware level news from Corsair and Gigabyte, an update on DRAM pricing, new research into the PC gaming market from JPR, and more.  

In this news recap, we talk about Nintendo finally announcing an updated Switch model, though the heavily rumored Switch Pro remains a mystery for now. We also have news on the Arm-Nvidia deal, this time in the form of commentary from Arm CEO Simon Segars. There’s also positive news on the right to repair, which is a topic we follow closely at GN. Additionally, we've covered the Steam Deck in a separate piece here.

In other news, Microsoft is working on its own AI-based resolution upscaling solution, and is also struggling to deal with a new critical security flaw affecting the Windows Print Spooler. There’s also news from Intel, Newegg, and more. 

At GN, we dove into a game streaming roundup, looked at Intel’s DG1 Iris Xe GPU, and reviewed our latest pre-built: The Lenovo Legion 5i.

Another busy week in hardware news as we settle into the month of May. We have substantial news items from Intel, as the company continues to explore fab options in Europe. Additionally, Intel is ratcheting up its fab investments, and possibly looking to sell off its Sport Technology Group, which is home to its True View tech. Rounding-out the headline stories is IBM announcing a breakthrough in “2nm” semiconductors using nanosheet FETs. 

In slightly lesser news, TSMC is deploying AMD’s Epyc CPUs in the data centers that not only power its R&D, but its manufacturing as well -- a bragging point for AMD, to be sure. There’s also news regarding Arm, Sony, Steam, and more. 

At GN, we recently reviewed Cooler Master’s MF700 case, in addition to reviewing the Phanteks P360A case. Spoiler alert: Only one of those cases impressed us. We also dove into a decade’s worth of GPU data from AMD and Nvidia to discuss price creep, release patterns, and greed.

This round of HW News brings in a ton of news from several corners of the industry. We have news of Nvidia winning the cryptocurrency lawsuit it found itself tangled in, which is likely some good news for both Nvidia and AMD as both companies become more involved within the cryptocurrency mining segment. 

There’s also news regarding AMD’s upcoming Epyc Milan CPUs and, also on the AMD front, updates for the Ryzen USB drop-out issue. Speaking of Microsoft, the company recently reported that it has completed the acquisition of ZeniMax, which will give it access to some of the most popular gaming IPs in history. 

There’s more, with news from Intel, Samsung, and Gartner. At GN, we’ve been busy with revisiting the GeForce GTX 1060 in 2021 and re-testing and X-raying NZXT’s H1 PCIe Riser. As usual, check out the article and video embed below.

Hardware news starts in 2021 with some concluding storylines from 2020, but there are also a few new items -- mostly end-of-year stuff -- that popped-up to be covered this week. Among those, Steam has released its list of most played (by peak concurrent players) and highest grossing (revenue) PC games for 2020. We'll also be talking about Class Action complaints emerging surrounding CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077, thus far related to securities law, then PlayStation 5 sales volume, NVIDIA RTX 3050 Ti and 3050/3060 leaks from Lenovo, and more.

As always, the video embed and show notes both follow. We'll have an additional embedded video from our Disappointment PC 2020 video. You should watch at least the first 5 minutes of it for the special intro we made -- it was a huge amount of work.

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.