NVIDIA's oft-leaked GeForce RTX 5050 Mobile 8 GB GPU did not make a debut appearance at last week's Computex trade show. Given the very recent launch of GeForce RTX 5060 8 GB laptops, truly cost-conscious buyers will need to wait patiently for the next wave of even cheaper portable "Blackwell" hardware. Mid-way through the month, a British e-tailer inadvertently published pre-launch prices. Lenovo's least expensive option—utilizing a GeForce RTX 5050 Mobile card—sported a (likely placeholder) tag of £1149.97 (inc. VAT). So far, a lot of pre-release information has been sourced from official websites or webstores.

Yesterday, VideoCardz shared another NDA-buster—courtesy of Acer's "Predator and Nitro Gaming Laptop GPU Power Specifications page." At the time of writing, offending items are no longer present within this list. Prior to removal, three configurable Nitro AI laptop models (16, 16S, and 18) were visible with GeForce RTX 5050 specifications (alongside RTX 5060, 5070 and 5070 Ti options). Only clock speed and TGP data points were logged by the notorious investigator (see below). Currently, TechPowerUp's GPU database entry contains speculative information—a "GB207" GPU identifier was unearthed a while ago, but some insiders reckon that Team Green's GeForce RTX 5050 Mobile design will be based on "GB206" silicon. Additionally, debates continue to rage over the selection of GDDR7 or GDDR6 VRAM. So far, all launched tiers of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50-series have emerged with GDDR7 memory modules.

When your whole desk needs some whiteout. A PALER SHADE OF PERSONALIZATION: equipped with a white decorative top case, a white bottom case, and a matching white keycap set, this CSTM80 goes all the way with its white appointments.

MADE FOR MIXING AND MATCHING
In addition to the magnetic top case (which you can switch out for a huge range of colors), this white CSTM80 can also be configured with a host of additional add-ons-including several keyboard weights and switch plates. AND FINISHED WITH ENTHUSIAST FEATURES: alongside the top case(s) and long list of add-ons, this CSTM80 comes equipped with a host of enthusiast features: including south-facing LEDs, including removable gaskets, and a full array of foam.

BEHOLD THE ARGONATH, THE PILLARS OF THE KINGS! Standing guard over the northern borders of Gondor, the Argonath is a pair of statues without compare—even in a place like Middle- earth. Now, it's found a place on your desk. Follow the Fellowship South through storied statues. Depicted in stunning impressionist style by the talented artists at Dwarf Factory, the scene on this mat is pulled straight from The Fellowship of the Ring, following our nine heroes as they go south along the river Anduin.

GLIDE ACROSS A WATER-REPELLANT SURFACE WITH SPACE TO SPARE
Towering statues aren't the only breathtaking structures here. Nearly as impressive is our mat itself, measuring 36 inches wide, 16 inches tall, and 4 millimeters thick. It's also water-repellant-perfect for any accidental rivers across your desk. Work and play on mythical materials: made from high-density, low-friction Mercerized fabric and eco-friendly anti-slip rubber, this mat stays put and feels exceptional. It may just last as long as the Argonath itself.

MSI presented next-generation MEG and MPG series power supply models at CES 2025; both being range-topping examples: MEG Ai1600T and MPG A1250GS. January press material advertised the forthcoming new candidates with all sorts of impressive credentials: "certified by 80 Plus, Cybenetics, and PPLP and fully compliant with ATX 3.1 and PCIe (CEM) 5.1 standards, ready the power of your performance." Around late February, a slightly less powerful (1000 W) option was added to the new MPG line. The very expensive ($699 MSRP) flagship MEG Ai1600T SKU is already in the hands of evaluators; as disclosed by Wccftech. MSI's MPG series sits a notch down from premium-tier MEG offerings—earlier in the day, three "cost-effective" power supply models appeared online. A handful of fortunate souls—including chi11eddog—were blessed with early access to the manufacturer's freshly-published new product catalog. The excited reader shared a compelling feature: "got new PSU brochure from MSI. The new MPG GS series models feature 235% Power Excursion. Looks pretty good!"

A screenshot showed a trio of MPG A-GS options—including another addition; in 850 W form. As highlighted by chi11eddog's enthusiastic social media post, 235% total power excursions are listed on all three model specification sheets. Interestingly, "superior" MEG equivalents are marketed as: "fully compliant with the ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 standards; hold up to 240% total power excursion to meet future-proof power requirements." MSI's web presences now list the MPG A850GS PCIE5 model, as well as the previously announced 1000 W and 1250 W SKUs. The three offerings are boldly provisioned with dual-native 12V-2x6 connectors and PCIe 5.1 compatibility—MSI reckons that the two power avenues are fit for purpose: "seamlessly supporting two NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards for AI and machine learning applications."

AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GPU series is due for release next month; a specific date has not been set, but we will likely find out more through official channels at the end of this month. Team Red and its board partners have chosen to remain silent on the subject of RDNA 4's technical makeup; post-CES 2025, hardware news outlets have relied on a steady trickle of Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070-related leaks. Very basic sleuthing pointed to pools of 16 GB VRAM for both models, while insiders kept on mentioning an unannounced "Navi 48" GPU. The latest—courtesy of HKEPC—seems to confirm that the Radeon RX 9070 XT will utilize the aforementioned new RDNA 4 Navi chip. Earlier today, a screenshot was uploaded to social media—the leaker shared graphics card information displayed in a TechPowerUp GPU-Z (v2.62) session. Despite patch notes not disclosing compatibility, the latest version of GPU-Z is seemingly able to identify key aspects of the alleged "RX 9070 XT (Navi 48)" sample.

The card's name is obscured, but HKEPC and several press outlets believe that it is the genuine article. The fundamental details appear to be: 16 GB GDDR6 VRAM (Hynix-made), a 256-bit memory bus, 4096 stream processors, and a boost clock reaching a maximum frequency of 3.1 GHz. Older leaks have indicated that the first wave of RDNA 4 cards will make do with PCI-Express 4.0 x16 interfaces, but the GPU-Z screenshot shows a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 bus interface (detection could be bugged). The driver version was identified as Adrenalin 24.30.01.05. The unnamed card appears to feature a steep factory overclock; industry experts reckon that the sample could be a very high-end AIB model. Past reports suggest that PowerColor's Radeon RX 9070 XT Red Devil card is capable of boosting up to 3060 MHz. HKEPC uploaded another incriminating screenshot; showcasing performance results produced by Capcom's Monster Hunter Wilds PC performance benchmark tool. The test system—featuring Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K CPU and 48 GB of RAM—scored 36102 points and achieved a maximum frame rate of 211.71 FPS at 1080p, with "Very High" profile settings. The leaker confirmed that FSR and Frame Generation were enabled during the benchmark session.

The list of potent mini PCs continues to expand, with the Minix NGC-NR6600 being one of the latest additions. The mid-range mini PC should be sufficiently potent for the majority of non-intensive workloads, and should be able to fly through daily workloads without breaking a sweat. The system is already available for purchase on Amazon, starting at $399 for the entry-level variant with 16 GB of memory and a 512 GB SSD. Specs-wise, the Minix mini PC appears to be a well-equipped system that should suffice for most moderately intensive workloads, as long as it is forgiving on the GPU side.

At its core, the Minix mini PC in question is powered by the AMD Ryzen 5 6600H APU with 6 Zen 3+ cores and 12 threads, which can be paired with up to 64 GB of DDR5-4800 memory, courtesy of dual SO-DIMM slots. The diminutive 5 x 5.12 x 1.97 inch chassis, unsurprisingly, lacks the physical space for the comfort of discrete graphics, and has to settle for the decently capable Radeon 660M with 6 CUs, although it is by no means sufficient for modern AAA gaming. Some lightweight gaming is not our of the question, though. A 512 GB SSD takes care of storage requirements, while a supplementary M.2 slot allows for expansion down the road, up to a whopping 8 TB. The system packs HDMI 2.1 (TMDS, so basically HDMI 2.0), DisplayPort 1.4, USB4, as well as dual 2.5G LAN ports.

Thursday, January 23 was a big day for all of us at Compulsion Games. In addition to being a part of Developer_Direct, where members of our studio team shared more about the gameplay, look, and feel of South of Midnight, our third-person action-adventure game set in the American Deep South, we announced our release date of April 8, 2025, and early access beginning April 3. If that wasn't enough, we also released our brand-new story trailer, which expands on the narrative of South of Midnight, while including all-new gameplay, characters, and mythical creatures from the game. We're so excited to share more about South of Midnight, which is available now for pre-orders.

The Story of South of Midnight
In our story trailer, protagonist Hazel and her mother are preparing for the impending hurricane. The storm proves massive, causing catastrophic flooding-and causing their own home to be swept down river with her mother in it. Its aftermath shows the fictional town of Prospero, located in the southern United States, eerily calm while irrevocably changed from the hurricane's destruction. Here, Hazel undertakes a journey in search of her mother, while finding out more about herself and her family's lineage in the process. Hazel begins to see fantastical phenomena all over Prospero, including meeting Catfish, an enormous—and talking—creature in his own right, stuck in a tree following the hurricane's destruction. Catfish tells Hazel she is a Weaver, someone who possesses magical powers and can see how our threads connect to form the woven tapestry of our fates.

Hi everyone, Assassin's Creed Shadows is launching March 20, inviting you to experience the intertwined stories of Naoe, an adept shinobi Assassin, and Yasuke, a powerful African samurai. Today, you can pre-order the game on console and PC, and read up on Shadows' upcoming expansion, Claws of Awaji, which brings 10 hours of additional content free with your pre-order.

For those of you playing on PC, we've got all of Assassin's Creed Shadows' recommended PC specs listed in this article. Assassin's Creed Shadows will support raytraced global illumination and reflections, and will feature an in-game benchmark tool for performance analysis, ultra-wide resolutions, an uncapped framerate, and more. Check out all the specs chart below.

The majority of AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU-related leaks have emerged thanks to insiders playing around with pre-launch PowerColor RDNA 4 sample models. During and since CES, Team Red and its board partners have kept mum about specifications and performance figures—but happy accidents have allowed tech enthusiasts to pore over NDA-busting information. As reported by VideoCardz yesterday, Overclockers UK (OCUK) published a landing page that provided a brief look at basic Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 (non-XT) specs—the British retailer has since scrubbed this entry from its site.

Leaks have revealed alleged core counts—4096 for XT, and 3584 for non-XT—but Overclockers UK's charts listed a count of 4096 for both Navi 48 GPUs. They both sport 16 GB GDDR6 VRAM and 256-bit memory buses, and the leak reveals another shared trait: a 260 W TDP rating. VideoCardz reckons that this is an error—based on previous clock speed insider info, the Radeon RX 9070 non-XT's power consumption figure should be rated lower. The accidentally published clock speeds appear to be sourced from overclocked examples—AMD is reportedly not going to release full/finalized information until closer to launch, so OCUK could have relied on preliminary product guides. The FAQ section states that Team Red's RDNA 4 generation is sticking with a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 host interface—PCIe 5.0 systems are "thankfully" backwards compatible. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50 series will be leading the way into PCIe 5.0 spec territories.

Details of what is claimed to be Google's upcoming Tensor G5 and G6 SoCs have popped up over on Notebookcheck.net and the site claims to have found the specs on a public platform, without going into any further details. Those that were betting on the Tensor G5—codenamed Laguna—delivering vastly improved performance over the Tensor G4, are likely to be disappointed, at least on the CPU side of things. As previous rumours have suggested, the chip is expected to be manufactured by TSMC, using its N3E process node, but the Tensor G5 will retain the single Arm Cortex-X4 core, although it will see a slight upgrade to five Cortex-A725 cores vs. the three Cortex-A720 cores of the Tensor G4. The G5 loses two Cortex-A520 cores in favour of the extra Cortex-A725 cores. The Cortex-X4 will also remain clocked at the same peak 3.1 GHz as that of the Tensor G4.

Interestingly it looks like Google will drop the Arm Mali GPU in favour of an Imagination Technologies DXT GPU, although the specs listed by Notebookcheck doesn't add up with any of the specs listed by Imagination Technologies. The G5 will continue to support 4x 16-bit LPDDR5 or LPDDR5X memory chips, but Google has added support for UFS 4.0 memory, something that's been a point of complaint for the Tensor G4. Other new additions is support for 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 and PCI Express 4.0. Some improvements to the camera logic has also been made, with support for up to 200 Megapixel sensors or 108 Megapixels with zero shutter lag, but if Google will use such a camera or not is anyone's guess at this point in time.

Microsoft provided a detailed view of Maia 100 at Hot Chips 2024, their initial specialized AI chip. This new system is designed to work seamlessly from start to finish, with the goal of improving performance and reducing expenses. It includes specially made server boards, unique racks, and a software system focused on increasing the effectiveness and strength of sophisticated AI services, such as Azure OpenAI. Microsoft introduced Maia at Ignite 2023, sharing that they had created their own AI accelerator chip. More information was provided earlier this year at the Build developer event. The Maia 100 is one of the biggest processors made using TSMC's 5 nm technology, designed for handling extensive AI tasks on Azure platform.

Maia 100 SoC architecture features:

• A high-speed tensor unit (16xRx16) offers rapid processing for training and inferencing while supporting a wide range of data types, including low precision data types such as the MX data format, first introduced by Microsoft through the MX Consortium in 2023.
• The vector processor is a loosely coupled superscalar engine built with custom instruction set architecture (ISA) to support a wide range of data types, including FP32 and BF16.
• A Direct Memory Access (DMA) engine supports different tensor sharding schemes.
• Hardware semaphores enable asynchronous programming on the Maia system.

ZOTAC, best known for its graphics cards and to some extent its Mini-PCs, is going to present a new handheld gaming device - ZOTAC ZONE. Videocardz somehow managed to get their hands on an almost complete spec sheet just to find out that it will be powered by an 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 8840U processor. From this we can also get to know that it will use Radeon 780M integrated graphics with 12 RDNA3 Compute Units (15 W Default, 28 W Max). ZOTAC ZONE will feature a 7-inch 120 Hz AMOLED, 1080p, 120 Hz display with up to 800 nits maximum brightness.

The device specs include 16 GB of LPDDR5X memory, 512 GB dedicated storage and support for M2.2 2280 SSDs. The 48.5 Wh battery with an estimated 1.25 hours of runtime seems a bit weak, thus the lower 700 g weight, but that could change since the display/demo unit that will be available during Computex next week is a non-final prototype model. As confirmed by ZOTAC, ZONE is expected to be launched in the next quarter, with no details about the price.

AMD's next-gen EPYC Zen 5 processor family seems to be nearing launch status—late last week, momomo_us uncovered an unnamed motherboard's datasheet; this particular model will accommodate a single 9000-series CPU—with a maximum 400 W TDP—via an SP5 socket. 500 W and 600 W limits have been divulged (via leaks) in the past, so the 400 W spec could be an error or a: "legitimate compatibility issue with the motherboard, though 400 Watts would be in character with high-end Zen 4 SP5 motherboards," according to Tom's Hardware analysis.

AMD's current-gen "Zen 4" based EPYC "Genoa" processor family—sporting up to 96-cores/192-threads—is somewhat limited by its DDR5 support transfer rates of up to 4800 MT/s. The latest leak suggests that "Turin" is upgraded quite nicely in this area—when compared to predecessors—the SP5 board specs indicate DDR5 speeds of up to 6000 MT/s with 4 TB of RAM. December 2023 reports pointed to "Zen 5c" variants featuring (max.) 192-core/384-thread configurations, while larger "Zen 5" models are believed to be "modestly" specced with up to 128-cores and 256-threads. AMD has not settled on an official release date for its EPYC "Turin" 9000-series processors, but a loose launch window is expected "later in 2024" based on timeframes presented within product roadmaps.

HXL (@9550pro) has highlighted an intriguing pinned post on the Chinese Zhihu community site—where XZiar, a self described "Central Processing Unit (CPU) expert," has shared a very fuzzy/low quality screenshot of a Windows Task Manager session. The information on display indicates that a "Genuine Intel(R) 0000 1.0 GHz" processor was in use—perhaps a very early Lunar Lake (LNL) engineering sample (ES1). XZiar confirmed the pre-release nature of the onboard chip, and teased its performance prowess: "It's good to use the craftsmanship that others have stepped on. It can run 2.8 GHz with only A1 step, and it is very smooth."

The "A1" designation implies that the leaked sample is among the first LNL processor prototypes to exit manufacturing facilities—Intel previewed its "Lunar Lake-MX" SoC package to press representatives last November. XZiar's followers have pored over the screenshot and ascertained that the leaked example sports a "8-core + 8-thread, without Hyperthreading, 4P+4LPE" configuration. Others were confused by the chip's somewhat odd on-board cache designations—L1: 836 KB, L2: 14 MB and L3: 12 MB—XZiar believes that prototype's setup "is obviously not up to par," when a replier compares the spec to an N300 series processor. It is theorized that Windows Task Manager is simply not fully capable of detecting the sample's full makeup, but XZiar reckons that 12 MB of L3 cache is the correct figure.

In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, you play as a Na'vi learning to reconnect with your own homeland while reckoning with the human militaristic corporation known as the RDA. Ahead of launch, check out the recently unveiled PC specs, and catch up on some of the PC-specific features you can expect when Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora drops on December 7.

Ray tracing and Extended Graphic Settings
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will include raytraced reflections and shadows for more immersive environmental exploration, and extended graphic settings that allow for granular tweaks to a multitude of visuals such as environment reflection quality, and distant shadows.

Benchlife claims to have obtained full specifications of Intel's upcoming 14th Gen Core series—the site kicked things off by releasing details of a trio of Raptor Lake Refresh K-series SKUs earlier today. Insiders have seemingly divulged fairly comprehensive specs for i9-14900K, i7-14700K, and i5-14600K desktop CPUs. The expected lineup-wide implementation of greater clock speeds (+200 MHz) is present on these examples according to the leaked info—i9-14900K is reportedly capable of boosting up to 6.0 GHz (via Thermal Velocity tech), while its Core i7 and Core i5 siblings are said to be hitting 5.6 GHz and 5.3 GHz (respectively).

The Core i7-14700K seems to be the only rumored model to receive a core count increase—the listed 8P+12E configuration is decked out with more Gracemont efficiency cores when compared to the 13th Gen equivalent's makeup (i7-13700K, 8P+8E). This grants a slightly increased pool of Intel's "Smart Cache"—33 MB instead of the previous gen model's 30 MB. These 125 W TDP "K" SKUs are expected to arrive mid-October alongside "KF" models (lacking iGPUs). The 65-W non-K lineup could be presented at the next CES, and launched in January 2024.

Here are the final specifications of the Radeon RX 7600 RDNA3 graphics card, bound for launch later this month. The specs list springs up some surprises. To begin with, while the GPU at the heart of the RX 7600 is based on the latest RDNA3 graphics architecture, it is built on the older 6 nm (DUV) silicon fabrication process—the same one on which the previous "Navi 24" was based. The silicon has a transistor count of 13.3 billion, about 2 billion more than the 7 nm "Navi 23" Powering the RX 6600 series, but a die-size of 204 mm². The GPU has a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 host interface, and a 128-bit GDDR6 memory interface. As the RX 7600, it has a TBP (total board power) value of 165 W, which is over 30 W more than the RX 6600.

At this point, it's not known whether the RX 7600 maxes out the silicon it is based on. It gets 32 RDNA3 compute units (CU), which work out to 2,048 stream processors (with the same dual-issue instruction rate feature as the RX 7900 series); 32 Ray Accelerators, and 64 AI Accelerators. The GPU has 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The GPU has 32 MB of second-generation Infinity Cache memory. The 8 GB of GDDR6 memory ticks at 18 Gbps, which over the 128-bit memory bus works out to 288 GB/s of memory bandwidth. AMD claims that when coupled with the on-die cache, the "effective bandwidth" is 476.9 GB/s. NVIDIA is putting out similar "effective" figures for its RTX 4060 series, so this could become a norm. The RX 7600 comes with a game frequency of 2250 MHz, and 2625 MHz boost. AMD is making 550 W as its PSU recommendation, compared to the 450 W it did for the RX 6600. The company considers the RX 7600 to be the logical successor of the RX 6600 (and neither the RX 6600 XT nor the RX 6650 XT).

Following on from yesterday's news of Meteor Lake's "Adamantine" L4 cache another leaky bit of information has popped up. A tipster on Twitter, Bionic_squash, has uploaded a slide from a supposedly official Intel presentation document, and it shows a small selection of Meteor Lake-S and Arrow Lake-S desktop CPUs, as well as the refreshed Raptor Lake-S series. The majority of recent leaks have pointed to laptop variants of Intel's fourteenth generation Core lineup, and not much has emerged about a desktop-dedicated range in a while - prompting further murmurs about Team Blue canning that side of things. The Meteor Lake-S family is still in the works according to the leaked chart and industry experts reckon that a product launch is due later in the year.

By looking closely at the chart, it shows that the Meteor Lake-S desktop processors are limited to 35 and 65 W TDPs, meaning that Core i3 and i5 lines are the only offerings within the 14th generation desktop lineup. Performance enthusiasts will need to look at the 15th gen Arrow Lake-S lineup - where the big i7 and i9 CPUs (up to 125 W) sit, or the refreshed Raptor Lake lineup which also offers a wide range of options - from i3 up to i9. Industry experts are a bit puzzled about Meteor Lake's prospects in the desktop processor sector - when considering a (speculated) skew to more entry-level and mid-range minded customers. Will Intel lose out by not offering more powerful variants, or are they working on a refreshed 14th generation product lineup for 2025?

With less than a week to go until the official launch of the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, NVIDIA France has gone and spoiled things by revealing the official specs of the upcoming GPU. The French division of NVIDIA appears to have posted the full product page, but it has since then been pulled. That didn't prevent Twitter leaker @momomo_us from snapping a couple of screenshots, including that of the official performance numbers from NVIDIA.

There aren't any real surprises here though, as we already knew the CUDA core count and the memory size, courtesy of the RTX 4070 Ti having been the RTX 4080 12 GB, until NVIDIA changed its mind. It's interesting to see that NVIDIA compares the RTX 4070 Ti to the RTX 3080 12 GB in the three official benchmarks, as it makes the RTX 4070 Ti look a lot better than it is in reality, at least based on the rumoured MSRP of US$800-900. One of the three benchmarks is Cyberpunk 2077 using Raytracingl, where NVIDIA suggests the RTX 4070 Ti is around 3.5 times faster than the RTX 3080, but it's worth reading the fine print. We'll know next week how the RTX 4070 Ti actually performs, as well as where the official pricing and actual retail pricing ends up.

It's pretty clear that we're getting very close to the launch of AMD's AM5 platform and the Ryzen 7000-series CPUs, with spec details and even pricing brackets tipping up online. Wccftech has posted what the publication believes will be the lineup we can expect to launch in just over a month's time, if rumours are to be believed. The base model is said to be the Ryzen 5 7600X, which the site claims will have a base clock of 4.7 GHz and a boost clock of 5.3 GHz. There's no change in processor core or thread count compared to the current Ryzen 5 5600X, but the L2 cache appears to have doubled, for a total of 38 MB of cache. This is followed by the Ryzen 7 7700X, which starts out a tad slower with a base clock of 4.5 GHz, but it has a slightly higher boost clock of 5.4 GHz. Likewise here, the core and thread count remains unchanged, while the L2 cache also gets a bump here for a total of 40 MB cache. Both these models are said to have a 105 W TDP.

The Ryzen 9 7900X is said to have a 4.7 GHz base clock and a 5.6 GHz boost clock, so a 200 MHz jump up from the Ryzen 7 7700X. This CPU has a total of 76 MB of cache. Finally the Ryzen 9 7950X is said to have the same base clock of 4.5 GHz as the Ryzen 7 7700X, but it has the highest boost clock of all the expected models at 5.7 GHz, while having a total of 80 MB cache. These two SKUs are both said to have a 170 W TDP. Price wise, from top to bottom, we might be looking at somewhere around US$700, US$600, US$300 and US$200, so it seems like AMD has adjusted its pricing downwards by around $100 on the low-end, with the Ryzen 7 part fitting the same price bracket as the Ryzen 7 5700X. The Ryzen 9 7900X seems to have had its price adjusted upwards slightly, while the Ryzen 9 7950X seems to be expected to be priced lower than its predecessors. Take these things with the right helping of scepticism for now, as things can still change before the launch.

Although it hasn't been verified, it would appear that Intel might have let slip some details of its upcoming Arc A780 desktop GPU in a video where the company was showing off its Arc Control graphics card control and monitoring software. For a brief second or two, the Live Performance Monitoring part of Arc Control was shown in the video, displaying GPU and VRAM clocks for one of its upcoming GPUs, alongside the GPU power of the same card. As to the exact product, that is now being discussed on the internet, but the current consensus based on all the specs, is that it could be the Arc A780.

The reasoning behind this, is that the Arc A350M, which could in theory boost to 2,250 MHz, doesn't meet the listed GPU power of 175 W, nor does the much slower clocked Arc A770M mobile part. The VRAM clock at 1093 MHz also suggests an effective memory throughput of 17.5 Gbps, which is faster than the fastest mobile GPU according to the specs available so far. It also means that Intel is going for high-performance memory on its high-end parts, as this GPU has higher memory bandwidth than a GeForce RTX 3070, which sits at 14 Gbps. It's also possible that we're looking at a development card here and that these specs won't make it into a final product, so we'll just have to wait until this summer to see what Intel has in store for us.

It seemed has if NVIDIA was dropping the Max-P and Max-Q differentiators for their mobile graphics card, which would throw consumers into disarray and confusion as to what exactly was the performance of the graphics card built into their RTX 30-series laptop. In essence, due to the RTX 30-series configurable TGP (Total Graphics Power), as well as each laptop's own capability of supplying power and cooling to that chip, users might see themselves in situations such as their mobile RTX 3080 offering lower performance than a mobile RTX 3070, configured for a higher TGP. This meant that more attentive users would have to hunt for reviews of the laptops they were eyeing, or to be forced to count on system manufacturers to actually list specifications for the included graphics solution in their laptops. This would mean, more often than not, something akin to chaos, and could in truth impact NVIDIA's brand recognition and consumer confidence in expected performance.

NVIDIA, as a way to circumvent this, has decided to not only encourage, but actually require that manufacturers list their graphics cards' TGP as well as specific clock speed stats on their online product pages. Some manufacturers, such as Asus, Acer, Razer, Origin, MSI, Alienware, and Gigabyte have already updated some product pages - but not all. An NVIDIA spokesperson clarified to The Verge that "We're requiring OEMs to update their product pages to the Max-Q technology features for each GeForce laptop, as well as clocks and power — which communicates the expected GPU performance in that system." Perhaps that will help consumers make a more informed decision.