Fractal, the Swedish company well known for making innovative PC cases, wants to create a new way of PC gaming. At Computex Taipei 2024, it introduced a line of new products, one of these is a desk chair (the first one ever made by Fractal) called Refine. It combines the comfort of high-end office chairs with special controls and a design made for gaming setups. Refine comes in mesh, fabric, and Alcantara finishes, and has premium features like adjustable lumbar support and armrests, aiming to provide comfort during long gaming sessions.

Fractal also showcased a gaming headset called Scape. It has custom-tuned speakers for high audio quality and a detachable microphone for clear communication. The headset comes with a wireless charging stand, so it's always ready for the next gaming session while keeping the desk tidy. Additionally, Fractal announced two new compact PC cases: Mood, and Era 2. The first one is designed to streamline the gaming setup with a sleek fabric outer body which slides off for 360° access to the build. It houses a powerful 180 mm fan at the top and can accommodate a 325 mm graphics card. The second case, Fractal Era 2 is a small form factor improved version of previous iterations, with better airflow through an anodized aluminium body and a wooden top panel. Inside, it can house a powerful GPU up to 326 mm in length and a range of cooling options.Prices, availability, and more pictures follow.

EK, the leading premium water-cooling gear manufacturer, has added a new silver color to its popular Quantum Torque Color Ring series. The silver version of the Quantum Torque Color Ring 10-Pack is the latest addition to the wide range of aesthetic rings that have already been available in numerous attractive colors.

Made of anodized aluminium, the interchangeable aesthetic rings are designed to enhance the overall aesthetics of your liquid cooling build. The new silver color adds an elegant touch to the existing range of colors, allowing users to mix and match colors to create a truly unique look. These rings are exclusive to the EK-Quantum Torque series fittings and must be screwed onto the fitting before the compression locking ring.

Intel has posted two product change notifications regarding the Gemini Lake Refresh, which is now reaching the end of its life. Launched in 2019 as a refresh to the original Gemini Lake, these low-end products had a longer lifespan than the original Gemini Lake (2017-2020). Most commonly found on low-end PCs, AIOs, and Mini PCs, these Gemini Lake Refresh CPUs were based on the 14 nm Goldmont Plus microarchitecture. Coming with up to four cores without HyperThreading, these CPUs were ideal for lower-power applications as their TDP was rated between 6-10 Watts.

Intel has separated the product change into two categories, with the first consisting of Celeron N4120, Celeron 4020, and Pentium Silver N5030, while the other features Celeron J4025, Pentium Silver J5040, Celeron N4020C, and Celeron J4125. Intel will ship the first group of CPUs by May 24, 2024, and the second by February 23, 2024. The last round of orders will go out by November 24, 2023, and August 25, 2023, respectively.

Intel has decided to restart operations in its previously winded-down Costa Rica facilities. An Intel Product Change Notification (PCN) for their Cascade Lake Xeon Scalable processors shows that the company has added Costa Rica to its three other "Test and Finish" sites - the other three are located in Penang (Malaysia), Kulim (Malaysia) and Vietnam. Intel's aim is to guarantee a "continuous supply" of the affected processors - namely, Cascade Lake second-generation Xeon Scalable processors in the Silver, Gold and Platinum lines (in both boxed and tray SKUs).

This move, which will be done in phases. The first implementation of the Costa Rica operations will be effective on April 19th, with the remaining operations to come online on August 3rd. Intel expects to reduce dependency on their other three Test and Finish sites, while being able to bolster final production capacity by some 25% with this move.

"That didn't last long" is what the user that brought us this story opened up with, and there's really not much more that can be said to encapsulate this event. Remember how Razer announced, in April of 2018, it would be introducing its own Razer Games Store, looking to grab a slice of the publishing revenue from Steam? Well, the project didn't quite pan out - whether because of its zSilver-associated rewards program or not, Razer is pitting this as part of its "realignment plans".

The Razer Game Store will close its doors at 1am PST February 28, with purchased games continuing to work, and pre-ordered titles shipping as planned. Discount vouchers, however, must be used before that date. TechCrunch reports that in a Q&A accompanying the announcement, Razer said it would "continue bringing games to gamers via other services." "We will be investing in other ways to deliver great content and introduce game promotions through Razer Gold, our virtual credits system," the company said. The Epic games store is developing at a relatively good pace, even if the titles are somewhat sparse - it has been nagging more and more high-profile launches from Steam's doorstep, as it did with Metro Exodus. So it isn't that much a problem of it being an impossible market to break in to - it just seems EPIC developed a wholly better strategy (businesswise) for it.

In a move that made us go "WTF" internally, Razer has decided to test their fanbase's loyalty more so than ever before. Today, the company introduced Razer Softminer, a mining software program that is intended to be installed on computers and run to mine cryptocurrency. But instead of the users getting whatever new cryptocurrency is in fashion, Razer instead wants to retain all mined crypto and in turn "award" users with the so-called Razer Silver- loyalty reward credits, in their own words. The miner appears to be running off a version of the Gamma desktop application, as per speculation from TweakTown.

Razer Softminer utilizes heavy GPU performance loads, and there is no mention as to what the actual mining is for. It is clear, however, that the users are not mining Razer Silver (which Razer is quick to admit is not cryptocurrency) and these loyalty credits are handed out in an equivalent manner based on the mining power of the system. In their estimate, a sytem with at least a NVIDIA GTX 1050 or AMD RX 460 running the mining program for a whole day will net ~500 Razer Silver, and these can be used to "redeem Razer peripherals, digital rewards such as games, vouchers and more" from a dedicated rewards page.

For those users who thought they'd like some silver with their Intel, german webshop Caseking has a product for you. The company has taken the binning concept that we've already seen with other webshops, which pass the onus of the silicon lottery towards themselves, and taken it to the next level. Caseking will offer Core i7 8700K products that have not only been binned towards achieving guaranteed speeds of 5 GHz, 5.1 GHz and 5.2 GHz, but they're also retrofitting these binned 8700K processors with a 99.9% purity silver heatspreader to improve operating temperatures for these guaranteed-overclocking processors.