Gigabyte has both Intel and AMD’s next generation of motherboards on display at its VIP suite during Computex. The Gigabyte X870E Aorus Extreme is the least mysterious—the new chips are out in July and it only makes sense that the motherboard for AMD’s Ryzen 9000-series Granite Ridge chips are already finished. More mysterious were the Intel boards.

With the processors and socket redacted with white tape it’s almost impossible to know what this new “Next-gen Z Aero G” could possibly be. Almost, but because I think collectively we’re bordering on the verge of genius at times, the PC Gamer hive mind has got together, and we think this might actually be a Gigabyte Z890 motherboard.

How on earth did we work that out, eh? Well, Gigabyte couldn’t tell us on pain of being tol…

Intel is cutting it fine with Meteor Lake. But it looks like it will just—just—make its self-imposed schedule for pushing its new 4nm CPU out the door before the end of the year. The new Core Ultra, the CPU formerly known as Meteor Lake, will be launched on December 14th during an event Intel is calling “AI Everywhere” and that will also big up Intel’s AI prowess “across the data center, the cloud and the edge”. Huzzah!

We know quite a bit about Meteor Lake thanks to various briefings from Intel, including the fact it’s essentially a mobile-only CPU and won’t be coming to desktop PC sockets. But December 14th will be when the final details emerge including initial CPU models in what Intel might be calling its 14th Gen mobile CPU family, though maybe not. Who k…

It might not surprise you to learn that PCIe 5.0 SSDs, Gen 5 by another name, isn’t selling in anywhere near the sort of quantities that PCIe 4.0 is. As Micron tells me over at Computex 2024, the newer, faster SSDs haven’t reached a tipping point in popularity.

“The percentage of Gen5 shipping to the percentage of Gen4 is very small,” Dinesh Bahal, VP and GM of Micron’s Consumer & Components Group, says.

“It again goes back to ‘what am I trying to do and am I really going to be able to get the advantage of using that’.”

We’ve reviewed a good few PCIe 5.0 SSDs and ended up on the same fundamental conclusion: the benefits of a PCIe 5.0 SSD simple don’t justify the costs right now, at least not for gaming. The sequential read and write speeds are extremely quick, thou…

A lot has happened at this year’s Summer Games Done Quick speedrunning showcase, and there’s a lot left to come. But I really don’t think any part of it is going to top this: Peanut Butter the speedrunning dog, whose appearance at Summer Games Done Quick last night left me thoroughly baffled until I figured out that he is literally a dog, finished his Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball “win a game” speedrun with a walk-off home run in extra innings.

SGDQ issued a warning in advance that access to this particular run would be restricted once it began to ensure “the most comfortable environment,” which makes a lot more sense when you realize the speedrunner in question is, in fact, the shiba inu who previously completed a Gyromite run at Awesome Games Done Quick…

I suspect players are going to be finding little references and additions in Starfield for some time to come, but they’ve already found the one most likely to make me cry. Bethesda has slipped in a tribute to Alex Hay, a long-time fan of games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and the Fallouts who died of cancer several months ago, and whose disappointment at not being able to make it to Starfield’s release date was preserved in his viral Reddit thread from earlier this year.

Spotted by player HunterWorld on the Starfield subreddit, Bethesda’s memorial to Hay comes in the form of a short note found on the Eye (just on the right as you enter, says HunterWorld). Titled “Alex Hay’s Note,” it reads “To all my friends and fellow explorers, I’m always w…

It’s all gotten out of hand. They’ve got concepts playing games now. Specifically, the venerable genre of Twitch Plays—those times when a swarming Twitch chat competes for control over games like Pokémon, and Dark Souls—has evolved to the point that Pi is currently playing Pokémon Sapphire. Actually, it’s been playing it for three years (via GamesRadar).

That’s Pi as in the mathematical constant. The one you probably know as (at least) 3.14 but which goes on, well, forever if you let it. The way it works is this: Every digit between 0 and 9 has been assigned to a button on the Game Boy Advance (some buttons have two digits assigned). The computer then simply proceeds through digits of Pi sequentially and makes the corresponding input. For examp…

There’s now a free prologue-style preview for the minimalist resource management sim Masterplan Tycoon, just released this week in the form of Masterplan Tycoon: Foundations. The  demo takes you through early stages of building out your empire of flowing stuff, letting you plop down camps, quarries, farms, and factories.

Masterplan Tycoon’s basic concept is that it’s more a blueprint or outline of a resource management game than a dedicated, in-depth resource transportation and logistics extravaganza. That really shows up in how it’s laid out: There’s no clock ticking down and no real penalty for making any mistakes other than having to tear up and rebuild chunks of your network.

That’s best explained by how you connect your little boxy buildings: You just drag and drop…

My friends, it’s my delight to inform you that we have entered the era of magical gun wizards. At least, that’s my takeaway from the trailer for Veil, a just-announced, four-player co-op shooter based around squads of tactical warlocks as they try to keep demons from spilling over into our world. It got its first gameplay trailer today, which you can see above.

Billed as a “mission-based shooter, where you perform work for various power-hungry groups locked in century-long struggle,” Veil looks to me like someone took a Rainbow Six game and gave everyone in it Eldritch Blast. “You’re not just a grunt with a gun,” continues the description, “to even the odds against numerous and powerful enemies, you make demonic pacts that grant you supernatural powers.”

It looks and sounds …

Paradox Interactive has revealed the official theme song for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, a dark, moody piece called Midnight that’s really quite good. Also, I don’t think I like it. Let me explain.

Written by Michel Zitron, Paulina Palmgren, and Jarly, Midnight is an interesting tune: Slow, electronic, forcibly gloomy. In many ways, that makes it at least potentially a good fit for Bloodlines 2. We don’t know much about the game at this point, but we can be reasonably sure that it’s not going to be a lighthearted, uplifting romp.

Here’s my issue with the song. The theme from the original Bloodlines, performed by Ministry, is one of the greats. As a big Bloodlines fan I may be biased, but I’d say it’s as much a genuinely iconic piece of game music as anythin…

You need a new graphics card, right? We all do. I’ve needed one for about two years at this point, over the course of which my current GTX 1080 Ti has entered a kind of tech-dotage, communicating only in warbles and squeaks and intermittently failing altogether. There’s no hope for me, I’m afraid, but you could be in luck: We’re partnering with the folks behind Perish to launch a giveaway that might just be the cure to your GPU woes. 

The grand prize is a Gigabyte Gaming OC GeForce RTX 3070 8GB GPU. That’s not an explosion at the alphabet factory, it’s a hefty last-gen graphics card that can breeze through pretty much anything you throw at it. We’re talking framerates north of 60fps in 4K gaming and over 100fps at 1440p. 

Of course, you’ll need a game to actually p…

Keep your Wordle win streak going with our help. Scroll on down for today’s clue, tips and guides, and the answer to the November 24 (888) Wordle if you need it. However you want to win today’s game, from a gentle push towards the answer to clicking straight through to the winning combination of letters, you’ll find it all here.

I was quite proud of one of my guesses today. It was the sort of clever reorganisation of my uncovered yellows around my solo green, topped off with a sprinkling of untested extras, that had me nodding to myself in smug self-satisfaction. It’s a shame it was wide of the mark. It did however (accidentally) confirm where one of my letters needed to go, making it a roundabout way of heading towards today’s Wordle answer.

Today’s Wordle hint Read more

Look, I’m not even the worlds biggest fan of the series. I can quote it, sure, but to me the Lord of the Rings was, at school, an extremely dense series of books I felt I needed to get through, and after that a series of films that were quite entertaining when watched leaning back on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon. 

However, I’ve just seen Drops new artisan Rohan-themed LOTR keycaps that are available for pre-order, and even I want some. 

They are, Drop says, a celebration of the Rohan people and the places they’ve (fictionally) ridden through, and yet it’s not the theme that’s working for me here, it’s the sheer aesthetics of the objects themselves.

Ordinarily I’d let my words do the talking, but in this case I think it’s better if you just look at them. Loo…

Here’s my toxic trait: I get annoyed when games aren’t on Steam. Not for any principled reason, not because I love my Steam Deck (though I do), and not even because Steam—per our own ranking of the PC’s many launchers—is the best client of the bunch. I just don’t like my collection being scattered all over various clients. It feels like having all your games on one shelf in your living room but being compelled, by some mysterious force, to occasionally go and put some of them on a different shelf upstairs. It’s not right, it’s unnatural, and I shan’t have it.

Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, right, I mention this because Dead Island 2—last year’s underwhelming zombie-basher that’s been hitherto Epic-only—is making the inevitable jump to Steam on Apri…