PNY announced their CS2030 line of M.2 NVMe SSDs this week. The CS2030 will be available in two capacities at 240GB and 480GB, and both drives will follow the M.2 2280 form factor.

The new CS2030 drives will utilize a Phison PS5007 controller with MLC NAND Flash memory to provide sequential read speeds of 2,750 MB/s and sequential write speeds of 1,500 MB/s for the 240GB model. The larger CS2030 480GB version will provide sequential read speeds of 2,800 MB/s and sequential write speeds of 1,550 MB/s.

One of our most commonly received Ask GN questions is “which video card manufacturer is 'the best?'” (scare quotes added). The truth of the matter is, as we've often said, they're all similar in the most critical matter – the GPU is the same. If MSI sells an R9 380X and PowerColor sells an R9 380X, they're both using the same GPU (Tonga) and silicon; core performance will be nearly identical. The same is true for the GTX cards – EVGA and PNY both sell GTX 960 video cards, and all of their models implement the same GM206 GPU. The differences are generally rooted in pre-overclocking, cooling units, support and warranties, and aesthetics.

All our content combined, we've spent hours and tens of thousands of words talking about which video cards perform the best in various categories. That's great -- but sometimes it's fun to do something different. This video allows each GPU manufacturer one minute to explain who makes the best graphics cards for gaming. It's a speed-round, to be sure.

PAX is always surprisingly full of PC gaming hardware, and we’ve run across a couple more items that aren’t yet available – but will be soon. PNY brought the newest addition to their red-and-black gaming suite, an overclocked Nvidia GTX 960, and OCZ came with an M.2 SSD, the RD400 NVME. Both devices are set to release sometime in May.

It's been a while since our last card-specific GTX 980 review – and that last one wasn't exactly glowing. Despite the depressing reality that 6 months is “old” in the world of computer hardware, the GTX 980 and its GM204 GPU have both remained near the top of single-GPU benchmarks. The only single-GPU – meaning one GPU on the card – AIC that's managed to outpace the GTX 980 is the Titan X, and that's $1000.

This review looks at PNY's GTX 980 XLR8 Pro ($570) video card, an ironclad-like AIC with pre-overclocked specs. Alongside the XLR8 Pro graphics card, we threw-in the reference GTX 980 (from nVidia) and MSI's Gaming 4G GTX 980 (from CyberPower) when benchmarking.

NVidia and AMD both define the ~$200 price-range as a zone of serious contention among graphics cards. The launch of the 960 held the card to high standards for 1080 gaming, a point nVidia drove home with data showing the prevalence of 1920x1080 as the standard desktop resolution for most gamers.

Our GTX 960 review employed ASUS' Strix 960, a 2GB card with a heavy focus on silence and cooling efficiency, but we've since received several other GTX 960 devices. In this round-up, we'll review the ASUS Strix, EVGA SuperSC 4GB, MSI Gaming 4GB, and PNY XLR8 Elite GTX 960 video cards. The benchmark tests each device for heatsink efficacy, framerate output (FPS) in games, and memory capacity advantages.

NVidia's latest addition to the Titan family diverges from its predecessors' market objectives. Previous Titan cards were fully double-precision enabled, ensuring marketability as affordable production and simulation cards that, by nature, also served reasonably as gaming cards. Because double-precision is detrimental to gaming performance, the original Titan and current Titan Z can be set to “single-precision mode” to better game, but aren't targeted as the “best gaming video card” out there. The Titan X is; in fact, that's exactly what nVidia calls it – the best single-GPU on the market. The selection of these words is intentional, ruling-out dual-GPU single cards (like the 295X2 or 690) and multi-card configurations (like what we're testing today).

Because the Titan X is heavily marketed as a gaming solution, something reinforced by offering just 1/32 of SP in DP performance, we decided to perform a value comparison between 2xGTX 980s in SLI. The SLI configuration offers indisputably powerful raw computational output, but has a smaller memory capacity than the Titan X's 12GB single-GPU pool.

The GTC 2015 show floor was home to several technology demonstrations, ranging from gaming graphics / consumer tech to self-navigating vehicle AI. GTC is a more enterprise-driven show than most that we attend, evidenced by ASRock's server rack presence and a heavy saturation of Quadro FX cards, but it's still important to gamers.

Aside from the obvious -- which would be the Titan X unveil -- GTC showcases technology that inevitably works its way down to the consumer market. We visited PNY at the show to look at the upcoming CL4111 Client SSD, the existing CS2111 XLR8 gaming SSD, and a host of graphics adapters.

"Scam," "fraud," "shadiness," and "lawsuit" are all words that have been somewhat haphazardly plastered across forums and websites this past week, with particular disdain expressed toward SSD makers Kingston and PNY. The internet's bandwagon mentality almost mandates a perpetuity of rage without necessitating a fundamental understanding of the industry toward which that rage is directed. It is an unfortunate side effect of social media that 'shares' and 'likes' will undoubtedly be attributed toward advocacy campaigns without the sharers ever reading accompanying links -- let alone clicking them.

That's an awful big statement to make without even introducing the topic.

Most of the RAM sales have subsided as prices have continued to hang onto their unseemly high, but this weekend sees a reduction in price in several cases and power supplies; there's a pretty big sale on most of Cooler Master's catalog right now, but we'll also be looking at some video cards in this sales round-up.