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MSI’s take on the killer 4K gaming OLED segment has always looked appealing. How so? In a word, price. At $899, it’s easily the cheapest of the bunch.

Of course, there’s a catch. You kind of can’t buy the MSI MAG 321UPX. At least, you barely ever could, it has been sold out almost all the time. But now you can for that $899 price from Newegg.

I reviewed this monitor back in May. At least, I reviewed the MSI MAG 321URX, which is identical save for having a USB-C interface with 90 W of power delivery. This 321UPX model (note the “P” second from last letter where the other model has an “R”) only serves up 15 W over its USB-C connection.

That detail aside, you’re getting the same stunning QD-OLED panel. Though it’s not perfect. Like all monitors using the Samsung QD-OLED panel tech, it’s a little on the warm side in terms of colour balance. And the quantum dot tech and lack of polarising filter means that the panel kicks some ambient light back out in re…

PC manufacturers are always chasing ways to lower component temperatures, often going as far as using exotic materials, cutting-edge manufacturing techniques, or innovative new cooling methods. But sometimes the best solution is the painfully simple one, as Noctua proves with its new offset mounting bracket—a part that costs under $5 and lowers CPU temps by as much as 3ºC.

Noctua’s latest AM5 mounting bracket is offset by 7mm. That might not sound like much, but it’s importantly the exact distance required to set the cooler more centrally over the hottest and most thermally sensitive parts of an AMD Ryzen CPU: the core chiplet die (CCD).

It’s AMD’s chiplet architecture that’s the important thing here. AMD has been using chiplets in its CPUs for many years now, and on the desktop that means an IO die (cIOD) and one or two CCDs. It’s the CCD that run hottest, containing up to eight Zen cores each, and in both one- and two-core configurations they sit slightly of…

The Overwatch 2 developers explained the constant battle they have to fight for fair matchmaking in a stream today, and said one of the hardest problems to solve are players who smurf.

“To be clear: please don’t do that,” lead meta designer Scott Mercer said of players who make fresh accounts to see how fast they can climb the competitive ladder or to dunk on new players, otherwise known as smurfing.

Mercer and senior software engineer Morgan Maddren said smurfing ruins matchmaking for new players because the system was made to expect gradual skill improvement. Overwatch 2’s swap to free-to-play from the first game brought in tons of fresh accounts, and the new matchmaking system was carefully built to handle that.

“The situation we don’t want is like, ‘Hi, I’m a new player to Overwatch,’ and we totally misevaluate your skill and you lose a bunch of games because we think you’re way better than you are,” Mercer said.

The team had to build systems to anticipat…

Well, that kind of snuck up didn’t it. Nvidia has quietly launched the RTX 3050 6GB. At a glance it’s an unexciting and slower version of a graphics card with a GPU that’s been on the market for nearly three years.

According to benchmarks from a retail card purchased by Computer Base, it loses just over 20% to the RTX 3050 8G in the handful of benchmarks it ran. That would put it around the GTX 1650 Super and Radeon RX 6500 XT in performance. Hardly a compelling upgrade unless you’re moving up from something low end from a few years further back.

Spec wise, it includes the GA107 GPU, with 2,304 CUDA cores, a 1492MHz boost clock and 8GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 with a 96-bit bus. Its launch price is $169, at least for the MSI RTX 3050 6GB Ventus 2X that was tested. It’s not very exciting stuff is it?

But it’s not all bad. There are subsets of users that will find some of its characteristics appealing. In particular, its 70W TDP means it doesn’t require external power. That m…

I confess, I have not set my eyes on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s Steam numbers for a while. I’ve been predominantly busy with Shadow of the Erdtree and, today, Final Fantasy 14.

Rocksteady’s ill-fated live service shooter had mostly slipped my mind and, with fellow PC Gamer writer Morgan Park’s assertion that it was, against all odds, a harmless bit of middle-of-the-road fun, I’d at least assumed it would’ve garnered a modest but tidy audience. Too humble to make up for a $200 million loss, sure, but enough to keep its gears running.

Jeez, though. Things are a lot worse than I imagined.

Looking at the stats SteamDB over the past 3 months, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has endured a steady decline from a still-not-great 2,700 players in March. By the end of April, only 170 people were playing it on Steam. This rose to about 500 again in May with the advent of Season 1, Episode 2, but soon returned to numbers that’re almost hamlet-sized. At the …

After 15 years of drought, the BattleTech floodgates opened again and mechs poured forth late last decade. Now a new flood of classic 1980s mechs is coming to PC with MechWarrior 5: Clans, putting us back into the cooling suit of a genetically engineered warrior ready to conquer the worlds of humankind from the cockpit of a 25-100 ton war machine. This is not just a minor expansion, but a standalone game. Clans is a confident leap over 2019’s MechWarrior 5, with a much deeper story and new-to-the-series emphasis on narrative cinematics while losing none of its focus on the simulator-like experience of piloting a mech knock-down, drag-out armored brawls.

The subtitle is a lot more meaningful than it might sound. In the world of MechWarrior, the Clans are militaristic invaders from outside of known civilization with advanced technology and a strict, almost alien caste system. They use genetic engineering to create warriors rather than have them born as natural “freebirths”&mda…

The WD Black SN850X is the best NVMe SSD you can buy right now, and both the 4TB and 2TB models are on sale. Walmart’s got the chunky 4TB drive for the all-time low price of only $341; the 2TB version is just $155 at Newegg. There are many SSD deals daily, but a sale on our favorite NVMe? That’s too good to be true! (It is true, though. Promise.)

The SN850X is pretty much the best Gen 4 SSD on the block, solving a major issue with its impressive predecessor, the SN850, by running so much cooler. Some might say that it’s the SN850X’s ‘X’ factor. I’m sorry. 

The 4TB and 2TB SN850X manage a speedy 7,300MB/s read and 6,600MB/s write speed. As for performance, they’re both a great all-around drive that would make a killer upgrade for your storage. For gaming, this means you’re looking at quicker load times and a generous amount of storage for even your biggest games.

According to our WD Black SN850X review, the SN850X isn’t the best step forward from the SN850 thou…

A Valve designer has revealed that at least one developer associated with the company is working on spinning up HDR for Linux gaming.

Joshua Ashton, who works on key bits of tech like DXVK and VKD3D-Proton, has apparently gotten HDR properly going. The development was noted by Steam Deck developer Pierre-Loup Griffais via Twitter, where he showed off both Halo Infinite and Deep Rock Galactic.

I find it specifically very spicy to play Microsoft’s flagship series on a Linux machine. There’s something deliciously heretical about that.

For avid Steam Deck watchers eager to read the tea leaves on new hardware developments at valve, this milestone seems significant. This announcement could lend some hope to the idea that the next Steam Deck will ship with a powerfully bright OLED screen supports HDR.

At this point that’s purely wishful thinking—and an OLED Deck wouldn’t have to support HDR, of course—but at least the possibility exists. And if …

Two US Congressmen have called on the Biden administration to launch an investigation over concerns that networking products made by the widely used TP-Link brand could be used to covertly spy on Americans, or be used for cyber attacks.

Republican Representative John Moolenaar and Democratic Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi have formally requested an investigation from the US Department of Commerce citing national security risks. According to a letter posted by the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (via Reuters), “TP-Link’s unusual degree of vulnerabilities and required compliance with PRC law are in and of themselves disconcerting”.

TP-Link products are widely used in the US, and can be found inside critical facilities, including US military bases.

Last year, TP-Link routers were used to launch an attack on European foreign affairs organizations. TP-Link firmware was infected with malware, giving attackers the ability to run shell commands, a…

I admit it: I kind of thought, given that the original Resident Evil 4 has been reissued more times than the Bible and the Little Red Book combined, that enthusiasm for its full-blown remake might have been at a low ebb. Well, shows what I know. Capcom just announced that the RE4 remake has topped 7 million sales a little under a year post-release.

Not only that, but the Resident Evil series as a whole has sold over 154 million games since it first emerged from a gross flesh chrysalis back in 1996, which means you could give a copy to the entire population of Russia and still have almost eight million left in reserve. Congratulations to Resident Evil on becoming the eighth largest nation on Earth.

Capcom attributes this success to “continuous support from the passionate fan base across the globe” and says it’s the publisher’s “flagship game series.” I suppose that’s the kind of thing you have to write in a press release, but it’d be good if one day a game company swerved…

I’ve always got my eyes peeled for interesting upcoming city builders, and the more ambitious the better. But sometimes a game comes along that feels maybe… a little too ambitious?

I’m talking about The Bustling World, a game set in ancient China that wants to be a whole lot of different kinds of game all at once, including an open world RPG, a city builder, a crafting and exploration game, a business management sim, a war and diplomacy strategy game, a farming and survival sim… and even more. It’s a lot for a single game. Heck, it’s a lot for three or four games.

On the other hand, it looks pretty darn good so far. Here’s the trailer:

Just that three-minute look shows off so much, from commerce on busy city streets to a quiet rural life of farming and fishing. There’s also store management and home building, plus combat, stealth, raids, and even bounty hunting, and construction of everything from a humble shop to an entire city. Gol…

Nvidia’s latest RTX 40-series graphics card launches today, January 5. Announced during CES 2023, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is a $799 graphics card with some fairly lofty 1440p and 4K performance to offer. I just hope we’ll see prices actually sticking around that price tag for a decent amount of time today—early listings would suggest that $799 price tag will be hard to come by, however.

If you’ve been keeping up with the Nvidia 40-series launch, you’ll know that the RTX 4070 Ti is one and the same with the RTX 4080 12GB that was originally announced by Nvidia only to be pulled from the roster pre-launch. The RTX 4070 Ti is the exact same card, only now comes in at $100 cheaper.

We’ve already published our Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti Gaming OC review, so take a look if you’re still not entirely sure whether you want to drop $799 or more on one today. In summary, it’s likely the card to buy around this price range, especially with DLSS Frame Generation, but it’s not quite a…

Turns out Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski’s mysterious tease about the future of his flopped FPS LawBreakers may have been a bit premature. Two weeks ago, he tweeted “Just got a text from my lawyers about… LawBreakers. Stay tuned” (before launching into a rant against people who “were rooting for the game to fail”), implying some kind of return for the now long-dead game. It’s now looking like that was based on a misunderstanding of who holds the game’s rights in 2023—a more recent tweet says “Well, turns out Nexon does own the rights to LawBreakers.” before appealing to Nexon’s CEO to DM him about a resurrection.

Nexon retaining the rights makes sense—they published the game when it originally launched in 2017. What’s less clear is what incentive they’d have to bring back LawBreakers. Though it reviewed well (we gave it a very respectable 84%), it was a desperate flop commercially and ultimately killed Bleszinski’s studio Boss Key Productions, making …