News from Tom's Hardware

AMD B650 expansion cards hit retail starting at $199 — add four M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots and 11 USB ports to any PC with a PCIe slot

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Tom's Hardware · 06/06/2026 12:29 EDT

A couple of new add-in cards exemplify the trend of slapping AMD's Promontory 21 chipset onto a card for extra I/O expansion. Read more ›

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Jay Forrester filed the first practical computer RAM patent 75 years ago this week — his Magnetic Core Memory patent would be granted five years later

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Tom's Hardware · 05/17/2026 08:29 EDT

Granted as U.S. Patent 2,736,880 in February 1956, Forrester's invention evolved from MIT's Project Whirlwind. Read more ›

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Forza Horizon 6 boots up in just 4 seconds instead of 90 with new Advanced Shader Delivery tech and AMD GPUs — Microsoft claims 95% reduction in gaming load times

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Tom's Hardware · 05/17/2026 08:00 EDT

Microsoft is bringing Advanced Shader Delivery to Windows 11 PCs at large, after introducing the tech on Xbox ROG Ally handhelds last year. The company says you can expect up to 95% faster load times in Forza Horizon 6, for instance, going from 90 seconds to just 4 seconds on initial launch thanks to precompiled shaders. Read more ›

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US FTC reportedly launches antitrust probe into Arm following its launch of its own AGI CPU — regulators investigate if chip designer is restricting architecture access to rivals

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Tom's Hardware · 05/17/2026 07:40 EDT

The U.S. FTC is looking into Arm Holdings to see if it's abusing its market position as a dominant chip designer to gives its new chip manufacturing business an advantage over competitors who build semiconductors based on Arm designs. Read more ›

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Josef Prusa warns Chinese 3D printing software poses massive security risks — Bambu Lab allegedly violates AGPL license with an un-auditable network 'black box'

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Tom's Hardware · 05/17/2026 07:20 EDT

Bambu Labs continues to draw fire. Read more ›

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China bypasses US GPU bans with 1.54-exaflops 'LineShine' supercomputer — CPU-only monster packs 2.4 million Huawei-designed Armv9 cores

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Tom's Hardware · 05/17/2026 07:00 EDT

China's National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen takes a page from Japan's Fugaku supercomputer and Fujitsu's A64FX processor, build LineShine supercomputer based entirely on Armv9-based LineShine LX2 CPUs. Read more ›

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OpenClaw creator burned through $1.3 million in OpenAI API tokens in a single month — bill covered 603 billion tokens across 7.6 million requests and 100 coding agents

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Tom's Hardware · 05/17/2026 06:40 EDT

The bill covered 603 billion tokens across 7.6 million requests, all generated by roughly 100 Codex instances. Read more ›

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Taiwan declares itself 'sovereign and independent' after Trump questions US defense commitment — comments come after Trump said he opposes Taiwan independence

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Tom's Hardware · 05/17/2026 06:20 EDT

The statement came hours after President Donald Trump told Fox News he opposes Taiwan pursuing formal independence. Read more ›

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Jensen Huang slams 'stupid' analogy comparing GPUs to nuclear weapons — Nvidia CEO says government should allow selling GPUs to 'adversarial countries'

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Tom's Hardware · 05/17/2026 06:00 EDT

The Nvidia chief said that you cannot compare AI GPUs to nuclear weapons. Read more ›

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Maker packs an opinionated, googly-eyed AI chatbot into a mobile suitcase, powered by an Nvidia Jetson — entirely local machine entity runs Gemma 4 E4B and can respond in 200ms

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Tom's Hardware · 05/17/2026 05:40 EDT

Sparky is an opinionated googly-eyed AI in a suitcase powered by an Nvidia Jetson Orin NS Super 16GB. Read more ›

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The Core Ultra 7 270K was too good, so Intel scrapped the flagship Core Ultra 9 290K Plus — benchmarks of the 290K prototype find slim 2% faster performance in gaming and applications

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Tom's Hardware · 05/16/2026 11:06 EDT

The Core Ultra 9 290K Plus, which never came out, was only marginally faster than the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, which explains why Intel ultimately chose not to release it. On average across 1080p and 1440p games, it's only about 2% faster, and in synthetic benchmarks and productivity workloads, it's less than 4% ahead. Read more ›

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Get an entire RTX 5090 gaming PC for around the price of just the GPU — a high-end battle station for under $4,000

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Tom's Hardware · 05/16/2026 10:44 EDT

The Omen 45L may currently be one of the most sensible ways to secure an RTX 5090 gaming system without having to deal with inflated standalone GPU prices. Read more ›

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Trump calls $14 billion Taiwan arms deal a 'negotiating chip' with China after Xi said Taiwan issue could lead to 'clashes and even conflicts' — Trump says 'Taiwan would be very smart to cool it a little bit'

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Tom's Hardware · 05/16/2026 10:40 EDT

Trump's remarks came at the close of a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Read more ›

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Texas county passes data center ban for rural areas for a year, move comes in wake of AI data centers moving to remote areas to skirt regulations — state senator says counties cannot legally impose these bans

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Tom's Hardware · 05/16/2026 10:37 EDT

Hill County passed a one-year ban on data center projects, as the country authorities study the effects their effects on the community. Still, the County Attorney warned that they could get sued if they pass this moratorium, with a Texas State Senator asking the State Attorney General to investigate counties that have done so. Read more ›

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60% of PC gamers have no plans to build a new PC in the next two years — AI pricing crunch on RAM and other components paralyze enthusiast market

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Tom's Hardware · 05/16/2026 09:43 EDT

A survey of Tom's Hardware readers has revealed that 60% of PC gamers are not planning to build a new PC in the next two years. Read more ›

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Modder uses Nintendo Switch to boost aging 3D printer's speed by 90%, dropping 3DBenchy print time from 90 minutes to a mere 8 minutes and 41 seconds — enthusiast claims big quality improvements by using jailbroken quad-core console

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Tom's Hardware · 05/16/2026 08:20 EDT

A keen nozzle-head has dramatically sped up their 3D printer using the portable power of a Nintendo Switch and Klipper firmware replacement. Read more ›

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AI data centers trigger massive 'irreversible' 76% electricity price spike in largest US region — federal watchdog demands tech giants pay for their own power infrastructure

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Tom's Hardware · 05/16/2026 08:02 EDT

Industry watchdog Monitoring Analytics says that PJM Interconnection is not doing enough to prevent power prices from spiking due to massive data center demand. Read more ›

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Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus vs AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D faceoff — Battle for the fastest mid-range gaming CPU

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Tom's Hardware · 05/16/2026 08:00 EDT

We tested both CPUs across gaming, rendering, encoding, efficiency, and pricing to determine whether Intel’s Arrow Lake Refresh can finally challenge AMD’s X3D dominance in the mid-range segment. Read more ›

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AI data centers require 36 times more fiber than designs with standard servers — severe glass shortages push cable lead times out to a full year

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Tom's Hardware · 05/16/2026 07:40 EDT

Major Chinese optical fiber manufacturers have booked orders stretching into 2027, as AI data center construction drives demand growth that the supply chain can't match. Read more ›

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First Apple M5 memory exploit discovered using Anthropic AI, gives root access on MacOS — Claude Mythos helps security researchers bypass Memory Integrity Enforcement

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Tom's Hardware · 05/16/2026 07:00 EDT

Apple M5 architecture gets its first privilege escalation exploit Read more ›

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M5 Max MacBook Pro paired with RTX 5090 in an eGPU dock — runs Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100 FPS at max settings with frame generation

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Tom's Hardware · 05/16/2026 06:40 EDT

A software engineer figured out a way to run an RTX 5090 on an M5 Max MacBook and play Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100FPS. The process required a lot of tweaking, including running a Linux VM and using the FEX translation layer to get games to work. Read more ›

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