Tom's Hardware Premium's weekly roundup details extensive benchmarking of the Qwen 3.8 27B language model on consumer-accessible hardware, including an RTX 5090, Mac Mini, DGX Spark and Strix Halo systems, showing it can approach top-tier AI performance without cloud API costs. The issue also covers IFA show reports noting a market split between ultra-light MacBook-style laptops and pricey agentic AI PCs, squeezing out affordable mid-range machines, plus a note on Ajinomoto's role in supplying materials for the chip industry.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-12
A Reddit user acquired two old cryptocurrency mining rigs left in a basement, containing a total of 12 Zotac RTX 3070 graphics cards along with an MSI motherboard, a 1000W power supply, RAM and SSDs. Despite years of storage, the hardware showed only minor wear, including some silicone bleeding from aging thermal pads, but appeared largely salvageable.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-12
Shenzhen Suqiao Intelligent Technology, an established Chinese OEM/ODM, is listing a customized GeForce RTX 5090 with 96GB of memory—triple the stock 32GB—for $3,888 on Alibaba, undercutting the standard U.S. price by roughly 35%. The listing contains dubious specs like GDDR6X memory and 14 Gbps speeds, raising questions about accuracy, though the underlying GB202 chip used in Nvidia's 96GB RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell suggests such a memory configuration is technically feasible.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-11
HP is discounting its HyperX Omen Max 16 gaming laptop by $1,000, bringing the price down to $3,699.99. The machine pairs a mobile Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU with a 16-inch 1600p OLED display running at 240Hz, an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-11
Lenovo's Legion 9i Gen 10 pairs a 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus with an RTX 5080 GPU capable of drawing up to 175W, 64GB of DDR5-4800 memory, a 2TB Gen 5 SSD, and a nearly 100Wh battery. The reviewer calls it the best laptop they've tested, noting it performs almost identically to a desktop PC despite weighing 7.7 pounds and requiring a bulky 400W charger.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-11
Brazilian YouTube channel TecLab modified a Galax HOF OC LAB RTX 5090 to run on three 8-pin Mini-Fit Jr. power connectors instead of Nvidia's dual 16-pin design, by rewiring the Sense 0 and Sense 1 pins to fool the card into recognizing the new configuration. The card still hit its full 575W TDP and ran stable at 3.4GHz across load tests up to 900W and 120A peak current, with temperatures staying around 35°C and no firmware changes needed.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-10
YouTube modding channel TecLab rebuilt a Galax RTX 5090D HOF OC LAB XOC by removing its dual 16-pin power connectors and soldering in three 8-pin PCIe connectors directly to the power regulators, rewiring sense pins to remove power limits. Using liquid cooling, they pushed the card from 400W up to 900W, drawing over 120A and hitting clock speeds of 3,400 MHz, all through hardware changes alone with no BIOS or software tuning.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-10
Walmart is offering the MSI Cyborg 15 gaming laptop for $1,049, a $250 discount from its regular price. The machine pairs an Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU with 8GB VRAM and DLSS multi-frame generation with an eight-core Intel Core 5 210H processor, 16GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, and a 512GB Gen 4 SSD. It also features a 15.6-inch 1080p IPS display with a 144Hz refresh rate.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-10
Defense contractor RTX has entered a collaboration with fusion energy startup Xcimer Energy to explore applications of laser fusion technology, an approach with roots in Cold War-era research. The partnership aims to investigate whether high-powered laser systems originally developed for energy generation could be adapted for defense purposes, including countering missiles and drones.
wsj.com
· 2026-09-10
Remedy Entertainment has released final PC requirements for Control Resonant, launching September 24. Every listed configuration relies on upscaling, with a GTX 1070 and Core i5-8500 needed just for 1080p at 30fps, while 4K/60fps path tracing demands an RTX 5080 alongside performance-mode upscaling. All tiers require 16GB RAM and a hefty 120GB of SSD space.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-10
Brazilian YouTuber Fabian (fmklab) built a working version of the RTX 3070 Ti 16GB that Nvidia never shipped, by fitting an RTX 3070 Ti GPU onto an RTX 3070 PCB and swapping in higher-capacity Samsung GDDR6 chips. After reconfiguring the board's memory straps using Nvidia's BIOS Reader tool, the card correctly recognized the full 16GB pool in GPU-Z, matching the specs of a prototype that had only ever surfaced in database listings and photos.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-09
A technical deep-dive follows the STG.E instruction—the global memory store operation in a simple vector-add CUDA kernel—through an RTX 4090's pipeline, from register read through the load/store unit, coalescer, L1 cache, crossbar, and L2 slice, down to DRAM. The author benchmarks how frequently a single warp can issue store instructions, finding a new STG.E can be pushed through the register file, LSU, and coalescer roughly every 6.1 cycles (about 2.3 nanoseconds at 2.6 GHz).
blog.doubleword.ai
· 2026-09-08