Right now, the best way to pick up a gaming PC is to buy a pre-built, with hardware prices shooting through the roof. Luckily, the big tech retailers continue to throw out deals for gamers to take advantage of. For instance, you can pick up this ABS Cyclone Aqua machine with an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPU, giving you 1440-capable performance for $1,499.99.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

If you took these specs and tried to build a matching PC yourself, you'd struggle to beat this price. Front and center here is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB of VRAM: a formidable option for a budget-friendly gaming PC. You're also getting a 20-core Intel Core i7-14700F CPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB SSD.

With the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti at your disposal, you're getting one of Nvidia’s latest-generation mid-tier graphics cards. It has 4,608 CUDA cores and a boost clock speed of 2,527MHz. Unlike the more power-hungry top-end RTX 50-series cards, you only need one eight-pin PCIe connector to deliver power here, so you can banish those worries about burning GPU cables.

Our RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB review makes clear how good the performance is with this Blackwell GPU for gamers, especially at 1080p and 1440p. The charts you'll see below show that, especially with ray tracing in the mix, compared to rival cards at this level. Full DLSS support is included, too, so you can add multi-frame generation as a backstop. That'll give you a nice frame rate boost in the most resource-heavy games if you're pushing up to the highest resolutions.

You can also count on 16GB of GDD7 VRAM with this GPU. That makes it a much more appealing option than 8GB variants you might have to settle for in other rigs at this price point. 16GB gives you more headroom, as far as performance goes, for the most resource-heavy games at 1440p.

For the CPU, you're getting the Intel Core i7-14700F. This continues to be a popular CPU option for gaming, despite being a little older. This Raptor Lake Refresh CPU has 20 cores, with eight performance cores, which are the ones you'll want for gaming, along with 12 efficient cores for multi-threaded work. It also has a maximum turbo clock speed of 5.4 GHz, along with a 65W TDP. At 1080p or 1440p, you won't see much of a bottleneck with the 14700F at your disposal in modern games.

No risk of settling for slower DDR4 RAM here, either. You get fast DDR5 instead, with 16GB of G.Skill Flare X5 DDR5 memory included with speeds of 6,000 MT/s. You aren't getting 32GB, which is a compromise, but you do have room to upgrade later, and DDR5 ensures some extra longevity.

Storage-wise, you're also getting a 1TB Patriot P410 SSD. It has Gen 4 speeds, with that 1TB of storage ensuring you get space for a couple of the big AAA games alongside your Windows installation. This ABS build also comes with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless connectivity, along with gigabit Ethernet for a wired connection to your local network.

The $1,499.99 sale price for this ABS Cyclone Aqua gaming PC makes it an affordable option for gamers who want a 1440p-ready rig right now, especially with prices rising elsewhere. The RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is the standout component, but there's no guarantee that this price will last for very long.

Right now, you can grab a budget-friendly, entry-level gaming PC at Best Buy for a very low price, especially given the current economic climate for anything gaming PC-related. On sale at Best Buy is the iBuypower Slate Gaming PC with Intel Arc B570 graphics for just $899. With $300 off its $1,199.99 list price, this is a superb deal for a 1080p gaming machine with DDR5 memory and 10GB of graphics VRAM.

● Check out this deal at Best Buy

This iBuypower's Slate gaming PC comes with a 10-core, 10-thread Intel Core Ultra 5 225F processor, an Intel Arc B570 graphics card with 10GB of VRAM, 16GB of DDR5 memory, and a 1TB NVMe SSD for storage. You will be able to play games in 1440p also with this rig, but you will have to tune individual game settings to get the best frame rates and performance. Ideally, this configuration supports 1080p gaming on higher settings.

The graphics card used in this prebuilt iBuypower gaming PC is the Intel B570 graphics card, which comes with a generous amount of VRAM considering the card's price. 10GB of VRAM is fantastic for 1080p gaming; it is more than ample to handle the textures and shaders on high and ultra settings, offering a great gaming experience at this resolution.

At 1440p resolutions with higher settings, this GPU may begin to struggle when that 10GB of VRAM gets used up and starts to rely on the CPU to compensate. The B570 is a budget graphics card from Intel and has come a long way since its launch performance, thanks to driver optimizations and compatibility with more game titles.

In the chart below, the B570 sits in the middle of the pack, competing with the Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB. You can also check out our Intel Arc B570 review for more detailed information on this GPU's performance.

This prebuilt gaming PC deal from Best Buy is one of the easiest ways to currently jump into the world of desktop PC gaming. The prices of individual components are very high currently, and with that comes the stress and added risk of messing something up trying to build the rig yourself. If you're not confident or familiar with building your own PC, buying a prebuilt comes with the added bonus of an easier warranty situation. Should anything go wrong with your computer, the whole system is covered, and you don't have to troubleshoot individual parts and manufacturers for an RMA.

RTX Spark is NVIDIA's new local AI-focused Windows PC platform, combining Blackwell RTX graphics and Grace CPU technology into a single processor that brings secure LLMs, high-end creative workflows, and gaming performance to laptops and desktops. With that, NVIDIA positions RTX Spark as a new generation of Windows PCs, with Surface Laptop Ultra as the flagship device.

OEMs are also on board, with RTX Spark laptops launching alongside Microsoft's Surface from brands like HP, Dell, ASUS, and MSI. Our team at Windows Central has followed NVIDIA's efforts closely since its inception and has since gone hands-on with its wave of launch devices. This is everything we know so far about RTX Spark and what we expect to see in the future.

At the moment, the best value for money when you're thinking about a new gaming PC is to pick a pre-built, especially a discounted one. With that in mind, Newegg has slashed the price of this ABS Flux II Aqua gaming PC with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 by $500, bringing it down to just $1,799.99.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The core components in this build include the Intel Core I7-14700F, still a popular choice in pre-builts, along with that powerful Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070. The RTX 5070 is a solid, mid- to high-tier option for gaming that'll ensure you'll be able to hit high frame rates at 1440p, with the potential for 4K, too. You're also getting 32GB of DDR5 RAM here, along with a 1TB SSD for storage.

Our RTX 5070 review makes clear what a good performer this mid-tier GPU is for gamers in this current generation. It's on our best GPU list as the best all-rounder option for gamers right now, too. This is a solid 1440p card, but with Nvidia DLSS features at your disposal, including multi-frame generation to boost your frame rates, you'll be helped to push it even further.

With the RTX 5070, you're getting 6,144 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, operating on a 192-bit memory bus. Performance-wise, you can expect the highest frame rates at 1080p, along with 1440p, even at Ultra. 4K will push it harder, and you might need to drop down a preset or two for stability, or make use of multi-frame gen to cover the gaps.

Coupled with the RTX 5070 is the Intel Core i7-14700F. This Raptor Lake Refresh CPU is getting older, but it's still popular and powerful, too. It has 20 cores, 12 of which are efficient cores for multi-threaded work, with the final eight performance cores giving you the power you'll need for gaming. With the RTX 5070 alongside it, there isn't much of a bottleneck here for gaming with the 14700F, and it'll handle 1440p with little trouble.

Elsewhere, you're getting 32GB of G.Skill Flare X5 RAM, split dual-channel across two 16GB modules, with speeds of 6,000 MT/s, leaving slower DDR4 memory far behind. You're also getting a 1TB Kingston SNV3S SSD here, offering Gen 4 speeds, with enough space for a couple of big AAA games alongside Windows.

The $1,799.99 sale price for this ABS Flux II Aqua gaming PC is a good one in the current market. ABS is Newegg's own brand, and the specs you're getting here are formidable for the price, especially for under $1,800.

NVIDIA's RTX Spark is almost here. Laptops powered by the chip launch on October 16, 2026, but reviews of the chip are already out.

Reviews of the first wave of RTX Spark laptops work a bit differently than some other product launches. Today, those who were given access to RTX Spark laptops can share their experience with the chip itself, but thoughts on specific RTX Spark laptops cannot be shared until October 16, 2026.

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While that is different than what we normally see, it's not that surprising. RTX Spark is not just a new chip akin to a new processor from AMD, Intel, or Qualcomm. It is a new platform for NVIDIA, a major addition to Windows on Arm computing, and the mark of a new silicon partner for Windows.

Note that reviewers of the RTX Spark were limited to sharing details about the performance and benchmarks of the processor. Dedicated GPU performance varies based on the laptop it's paired with, so some reviewer experiences may differ depending on the hardware used to test RTX Spark.

RTX Spark: Reviews

• Windows Central: "The RTX Spark GPU is very performant and is capable of pretty much handling anything you'd want to throw at it on a mobile workstation. Where it really shines, however, is running local AI models directly on it. It's the reason NVIDIA built this platform to begin with, and it does this very well."
• Tom's Hardware: "Still, for a first-generation mobile platform that joins complex silicon IP from multiple design teams onto one chip and relies on several OEM partners to bring it to life in highly integrated notebook form factors, the maturity of the RTX Spark platform is an impressive achievement. (Take it from someone who has seen a couple of rough product launches from the inside.)"
• Tom's Guide: "Judging RTX Spark purely by its single-core CPU speeds is like judging a Ferrari by its cup holders. And after a week of stress-testing the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra with Spark — running every synthetic and real-world test we can throw at it — it's clear that this is so much more."
• HotHardware: "In its most potent form, which is what we’ve tested here, the RTX Spark N1X is a powerful SoC that offers competitive multi-threaded CPU performance versus today’s top mobile platforms, with class-leading GPU performance. The RTX Spark N1X’s AI performance and capabilities are also unmatched, not only because of the powerful hardware on tap and unified memory architecture, but because NVIDIA’s AI software stack is so pervasive and mature."
• Lowyat: "For NVIDIA? They basically took multiple pages out of Qualcomm’s book of trial and errors, added their gaming DNA, made damn sure that the majority of compatibility issues between the x86 and ARM architectures were resolved, and what you have is something I’d never thought I’d see: playing AAA titles on an SoC, along with all the accoutrements that comes with an NVIDIA chipset."

NVIDIA RTX Spark shows promise, but you have to understand who it is for

Early impressions of RTX Spark are largely positive. Across multiple reviews, experts praised the processor's strong GPU performance, AI capabilities, and surprisingly polished first-generation experience.

At the same time, several reviewers cautioned against viewing RTX Spark through the lens of traditional gaming benchmarks, reminding readers that the platform is designed for AI workloads, creators, and developers.

The RTX Spark is not meant to power gaming laptops. It is aimed at developers and high-end creators. The processor is especially focused on local AI performance, an area many expect to be the next major shift in personal computing.

That being said, the RTX Spark is capable of gaming. It may show the future of Windows on Arm gaming, but that's yet to be seen. Over the coming weeks I am sure we will see countless reviewers test games on RTX Spark laptops. I think they'll be surprised by how well the processor does, but gaming-focused reviews still won't be the best way to judge those PCs.

The first wave of RTX Spark laptops are already available for preorder and hit shelves tomorrow. Our Cale Hunt rounded up all the RTX Spark laptops you can buy, which you can also find below.

Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.

RTX Spark is finally here. After years of rumors, NVIDIA has re-entered the Windows silicon game with the MediaTek N1X, a tailor-made 18/20-core SoC with 5,120 or 6,144 GPU cores, up to 128GB of unified memory, and a heck of a lot of power for apps, games, and AI experiences under the hood.

It's not every day that Windows gains a new silicon partner, which is why everyone seems to be involved with ensuring this launch goes as smoothly as possible. Microsoft has worked closely with NVIDIA on optimizing the Windows platform, especially for RTX Spark, and third-party app vendors like Adobe, Blender, anti-cheat software, and more have mobilized to optimize their products and frameworks for the new chipset.

But the big play with RTX Spark is on-device AI. LLMs and agentic workflows have become all the craze over the last year, and NVIDIA believes the RTX Spark is the first chipset for Windows that has been designed from the ground up for running local AI experiences locally and securely, without sacrificing performance.

NVIDIA has 6 hardware partners lined up to ship RTX Spark hardware starting this week, and all of them are aimed at the high-end content creator or developer crowd. NVIDIA has set its sights on competing head-to-head with the MacBook Pro, and is eager to win over AI developers who flocked to that platform thanks to Apple Silicon.

I've been testing out the top configuration of RTX Spark over the last week on a Surface Laptop Ultra, and here's what I discovered it's good at, and what it's not so good at. FYI, today's embargo only allows us to detail the RTX Spark's performance and benchmarks, not the Surface Laptop Ultra itself. So battery life, thermal performance, and laptop-specific variables are not included in this piece. That information will be shared in the full laptop review, coming soon.

NVIDIA RTX Spark Overview

If you're looking for a quick rundown of what RTX Spark is and how it compares, here's what you need to know:

RTX Spark is a powerful SoC with good CPU performance and great GPU performance. Its CPU is comparable to the Apple M4 Pro and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite, with multi-thread performance being its stronger asset in the CPU department, though it trails behind the Apple M4 Max and Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme.

The GPU is the star of the show, with great performance thanks to its 6,144 GPU cores that deliver smooth framerates (with help from DLSS and framegen), faster rendering times, and very capable AI performance. Its quantized INT8 tensor execution, unified memory sharing, and computer vision acceleration easily leapfrog mobile discrete GPUs in its power class for AI workflows, which it excels at.

I don't believe RTX Spark is for everyone. It's very good at key things, and shines primarily for those who are knee-deep in local AI workflows and experiences. If you're not a mobile content creator, software developer, or utilize local LLMs often, RTX Spark probably isn't for you.

Mobile efficiency varies depending on power profile. The GPU is hungry and will drain power fast when at full pelt, but in day-to-day usage that only occasionally leans on the GPU, it should last the workday. The good news is, you should see the same performance regardless of plugged-in state.

Compared with most integrated Snapdragon, Intel, and AMD systems, RTX Spark is substantially faster in AI image generation and local inference, while matching or approaching dedicated RTX 4070/5060/5070 class GPU performance in most workloads outside of AI.

The latest generation of high-end Apple Silicon retains an advantage in peak single-thread CPU performance, but RTX Spark’s strength is its GPU, with TensorRT execution and high-speed memory providing advantages in diffusion, quantized models, and sequential data access.

NVIDIA RTX Spark CPU Performance

The RTX Spark CPU was co-designed by NVIDIA and MediaTek. The N1X, as it's known, comes in either 18- or 20-core configurations and is relatively efficient while delivering good performance. With that said, it's not leading in its class, leaving something to be desired when it comes to raw benchmarks.

In Cinebench 2026, the 20-core N1X achieved a single-core score of 558 and a multi-core score of 6,885. To put that into perspective, its single-core score beats the first-gen Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 at 519, but falls short compared to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, which achieves a score of 662 for single-core. Multi-core fares better, with a score of 6,885, which is only just behind the X2 Elite Extreme and Apple M4 Max.

These scores do place it ahead of Intel's and AMD's latest flagship mobile workstation chips, but the chipset simply doesn't compete with Apple's latest Max chips, consistently trailing behind the Apple M4 Max and the M3 Ultra. This is a little disappointing given that the RTX Spark is directly targeting Apple Silicon.

It's a similar story with our Geekbench 7 results, achieving a single-core score of 2,718 and a multi-core score of 23,571. It's clear that multi-core performance is the N1X's stronger asset, competing with the likes of the Apple M4 Pro or Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, and is well ahead of the last-gen Snapdragon X Elite and Intel Lunar Lake, as it should be.

Outside of benchmarks, in day-to-day use the N1X feels fine. This isn't a slow CPU by any means, and will chew through even complex workflows with no sweat. Most day-to -day apps are Arm native these days, but for the few that do require Microsoft's Prism emulation layer, you won't even notice it. RTX Spark makes it so emulated apps feel just like native ones.

All our benchmarks were run with the Best Performance setting enabled, and in our tests we ran them a number of times in both plugged-in and unplugged states to see if there's any performance drop when away from a wall outlet. The good news is the RTX Spark delivers pretty much the same power regardless of plugged-in state, which mimics Apple Silicon.

NVIDIA RTX Spark GPU Performance

The star of the show with RTX Spark is the Blackwell RTX GPU with either 5,120 or 6,144 cores. We benchmarked the top-end, 6,144-core configuration for these benchmarks, and it does impress, outputting performance in workflows like video editing, model rendering, and gaming similar to an RTX 4070 or 5060, but in an efficient package with all-day battery life.

For what is essentially an integrated GPU, it outputs dedicated GPU performance in pretty much all workflows. But it really excels at AI workflows, especially when optimized for tensor and CUDA.

The 128GB configuration is set to split that memory evenly between system RAM and the GPU, meaning in our default configuration and for how we ran most of our benchmarks, the GPU had 64GB of video RAM to make use of. In this configuration, it's more than capable for most tasks, with the only exception being running AI models that surpass this size. In that situation, you can allocate more memory to the GPU so that it will fit.

In our 3DMark tests, we found that the RTX Spark performs similarly to an RTX 4070. It's very capable at 1440p gaming with high settings in most titles, though more demanding games will need to lean on DLSS and frame generation for smooth 60+ FPS gaming. In most titles we benchmarked, games ran without a hitch and looked great.

Gaming is not the main reason to buy an RTX Spark laptop, but it is an additional benefit. It's the first Windows on Arm platform that does gaming relatively well, supporting the usual breadth of gaming technologies and frameworks such as:

• Ray tracing
• DLSS 5
• Multi Frame Generation
• Neural Rendering
• Reflex
• G-SYNC
• RTX Remix

Most games run under emulation on RTX Spark, as the platform is Arm64, and most games are compiled for x86. However, in most titles, this isn't a problem. Most mainstream anti-cheat software is now compatible with Windows on Arm, and the Prism emulation layer has been tuned specifically for RTX Spark to ensure most games run without a hitch, though there are exceptions.

Some games, such as Red Dead Redemption 2, will require you to change settings to get them to run successfully. For example, by default Red Dead Redemption 2 was set to run with Vulkan, which caused it to crash at launch. Switching it to DirectX12 fixed this for me. Most games run without needing to change any settings first, however.

I tried Cyberpunk 2077, which runs pretty well right out of the box. The game analyzed my system and decided that Ray Traced Ultra settings were a perfect fit for the RTX Spark. Running at 1440p with frame gen enabled, the game was easily able to maintain 60fps while looking good doing it with these graphics settings enabled.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider also works great, but it takes quite a while to actually load up. But once the game is running and you're in-game, it looks great and runs well above 60fps at high settings at 1440p. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and The Witcher 3 Remastered ran without a hitch, reaching close to 90fps in high settings at 1440p.

For content creators, RTX Spark is a great choice. Whether you are editing photos or rendering videos using apps like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro, or rendering 3D environments in Blender, the RTX Spark is well suited for those tasks.

Adobe and NVIDIA say the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite has been optimized specifically for RTX Spark. These optimizations include:

• Photoshop on-device AI object removal
• Premiere Pro TensorRT acceleration
• Blender support for DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction

When it comes to video rendering times, the RTX Spark trails the current-gen RTX 50 series GPUs. We benchmarked it against three other laptops with an RTX 5060, 5070 Ti, and 5080, in which it trailed the RTX 5060 in video rendering performance, finishing a few seconds later in most instances. In this benchmark, we ran Premiere Pro Beta, as that version includes necessary optimizations for RTX Spark.

Dedicated GPU performance can vary depending on laptop chassis size, cooling solution, and thermal envelope, which is why the 5070 Ti frequently trailed the 5060 in our testing.

The RTX Spark GPU is very performant and is capable of pretty much handling anything you'd want to throw at it on a mobile workstation. Where it really shines, however, is running local AI models directly on it. It's the reason NVIDIA built this platform to begin with, and it does this very well.

We ran several Procyon AI benchmarks to see how well the GPU performs when running on-device AI workflows. Text generation LLMs ran very fast, with Spark delivering responsive time-to-first-token results, including 0.27 seconds on Phi and 0.39 seconds on LLaMA3, but its sustained decoding rates trail higher-wattage discrete GPUs.

But quantized AI performance is where RTX Spark truly leads. In Stable Diffusion 1.5 INT8, the RTX Spark scored 11,294 and generated images in 2.77 seconds, substantially outperforming the tested RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5060, on which we ran the same tests.

AI Workflows

The GPU is best suited for running large on-device AI models such as Qwen 3.8 27B, Gemma 4 31B, or even 120B-parameter models such as Nemotron or GPT-OSS.

NVIDIA is touting local agentic capabilities with this GPU, leaning on apps like Hermes Agent and OpenClaw to achieve this. We tested Hermes Agent, as OpenClaw failed to connect to the gateway once setup was complete.

The selling point of running LLMs and agents locally is that you are no longer constrained by usage limits or the amount of tokens you have available. When the AI runs locally, it's yours. You can run it for as long and as hard as you like.

It's also good for security and privacy reasons. You may have confidential documents, audio recordings, intellectual property that you need summarized or explained to you, and feeding that data to a cloud-based LLM or agent is giving that data away to the host.

With RTX Spark, you can feed whatever data or task you want to your local AI running off the GPU, and that data will never leave the device. You can build up your own personal agent that is capable of managing your local files, creating documents, making edits, and in some cases even controlling your PC.

Hermes Agent is a great tool for beginners, as it offers local AI compute experiences and makes setting it up a breeze. You open the app, choose to run AI locally, and it recommends the best model for the specs you have. Once downloaded, you're good to start chatting with your own AI locally.

Hermes Agent is particularly good at automating tasks. The first thing I did was tell it to clean up and organize my large, cluttered downloads folder. It moved images to my photos library, deleting any old executables, and organizing and categorizing PDFs and Word documents appropriately. It did all this without sending any of my data to the cloud, all processed by the GPU.

I also asked it to build me a basic website that included all my benchmark results so that I could refer back to them more easily. It ran that process entirely off my GPU, and came up with a pretty nice looking webpage design in the process. Zero cloud-based tokens used:

NVIDIA has even built MCP support into NVIDIA Broadcast and NVIDIA Control Panel, allowing you to hook it up to your local LLM and issue commands that allow it to configure your NVIDIA PC's settings.

Windows and RTX Spark

In addition to raw CPU and GPU performance, Microsoft has worked closely with NVIDIA to optimize RTX Spark for Windows 11. This partnership runs deep, and there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes that will aid the performance of Windows and support for apps on RTX Spark over the coming months and years.

For those unboxing a new RTX Spark laptop this fall, the Get Started app on Windows 11 will present a step that makes downloading and installing apps that can handle AI agents super easy. Hermes Agent will even go a step further and recommend a suitable model to download once up and running, meaning the user has to do zero research to get started.

With that said, I still find these recommended apps quite complex and convoluted. Many beginners will feel overwhelmed by these apps, especially OpenClaw, which I could not get working properly after it failed to open a gateway to allow the AI model to communicate with the OpenClaw chat interface.

Microsoft has optimized the system scheduler specifically for RTX Spark to squeeze out as much performance across Windows, menu flyouts, app launches, and more as possible. It has also made changes and enhancements to how Windows handles unified memory so that it's faster and more reliable at feeding that memory to where you need it.

TensorRT is now supported by Windows ML, and DirectX 12 has neural rendering support. The Prism emulation layer has also been tuned for RTX Spark, which results in emulated apps that simply do not feel like they are being emulated.

Microsoft is also keen to position Windows as the platform for local AI and agentic workflows. It has built safeguards and security into the Windows platform to ensure the local agents you run on Windows aren't capable of making severe changes or causing damage to your files, apps, and more.

This is a direct attempt at combating the sudden rise in local AI developers flocking to the Mac. Apple has made little optimizations to macOS to adopt and safeguard local AI and agentic workflows on that platform, whereas Microsoft is moving to make agents a native extension of the Windows platform.

RTX Spark is a Copilot+ PC certified chip, but you won't find any Copilot+ PC features at launch. Microsoft says it's working with NVIDIA to bring features like Windows Recall, Click To Do, and on-device Semantic Search to the RTX Spark platform in the coming months, which will run off the RTX Spark's 50 TOPS NPU.

Conclusion

RTX Spark is a super interesting chipset. It's forward leaning in a lot of ways, built on the Arm64 architecture that delivers serious performance and great efficiency. While its N1X CPU is just okay, its Blackwell RTX GPU really shines.

This is the first time we've seen RTX 4070-5070 level performance in an SoC that is this small and efficient. It's optimized for AI workloads, which is its strongest workflow by far. Quantized AI models run great, and with up to 128GB of unified memory, most mainstream models will fit entirely on the GPU without a hitch.

It's also great for content creators, and is very capable at gaming also. But at the prices that these devices are launching at, I think most people would be better served getting an Intel or AMD laptop with a dedicated NVIDIA GPU instead, as these often cost less than the cheapest RTX Spark laptops right now.

But if your workflow involves running AI models locally all day, software development, or complex data crunching and source code management, the RTX Spark is one of the better choices in the Windows space right now, especially for laptops that are thin-ish and (relatively) lightweight.

These RTX Spark laptops are more efficient and portable than typical laptops with a dedicated NVIDIA GPU, which is one of the key benefits of an SoC like this. The power this GPU outputs, for what is essentially integrated graphics, should not be understated.

Of course, just how efficient RTX Spark is will depend entirely on the hardware you choose to buy, as OEMs are free to feed the GPU more or less power depending on the chassis and thermal envelope. Keep that in mind.

Benchmarks

All benchmarks ran on RTX Spark 20-core CPU configuration with 128GB RAM and 6,144 GPU cores. All tests ran connected to power with Best Performance profile enabled, unless stated otherwise. We are still running benchmarks and new tests, and will update accordingly.

With new gaming PCs continuing to rise in price, it's worth grabbing a discount or a deal where you can. This MSI Codex gaming PC features a 10-core Intel CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 GPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 2TB SSD for storage, all for just $1,429, thanks to a $270 saving.

● Grab this gaming PC deal at Newegg

These are all the specs you'll want for a machine that will comfortably play games at 1080p. The current-gen Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 is top of the list, though, with features like DLSS that mean you'll be able to take advantage of both upscaling and multi-frame generation, making games smoother to play if you decide to boost up to higher resolutions or better graphics settings.

The RTX 5060 will be a significant improvement over an older graphics card or integrated GPU, too. It has 3,840 CUDA cores, along with 8GB of GDDR7 VRAM. With DLSS enabled, this'll let you run most games at 1080p with high graphics presets enabled.

You're also getting the best value GPU in our GPU hierarchy when looking at FPS per dollar at 1080p with the RTX 5060. The 8GB of VRAM isn't as limiting as you'd think with a build like this, because you're not going to be hitting 4K here. It has more than enough power for modern games, but you'll need to occasionally optimize for the mos demanding ones. 1440p is possible in some games, too, especially with MFG switched on.

As far as the CPU goes, the Intel Core i5-14400F processor is a little older these days, but still a well-sold and solid option in pre-builts at this price point. You get 10 cores, with six performance cores that offer the best performance for gaming. The other four are efficiency cores for multi-threaded work, with a clock speed that can boost up to 4.7 GHz in total.

You'd expect compromises elsewhere, especially with RAM and SSD prices flying through the roof at the minute, but you don't see that here. 32GB of DDR5 RAM is a good amount for a rig at this price, while a 2TB SSD with Gen 4 speeds leaves plenty of space for a growing games collection. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 support gives you good wireless connectivity, with gigabit Ethernet for a faster wired hook-up to your network.

You won't really see many PCs priced as well as this $1,429 MSI Codex R2 gaming PC at the moment. Yes, this spec is pricier than it was a year ago, but you could easily pay more for less in the current market. If 1080p gaming, with DLSS-supported 1440p upscaling, is all you want and need, this is the rig you'll want to buy before the $270 discount disappears.

We've reviewed Asus' ROG Edition 20 anniversary kit. We've built a PC with it. It's about as premium as a gaming PC build can get. Right now, you can pick up the same kit for a whopping $10,849.96 on Newegg in a combo deal. To put it mildly, this is one expensive deal, but it's actually hiding a secret gem: it's the cheapest RTX 5090 graphics card on sale right now.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

Writing up a near-$11,000 combo set as a deal might seem silly, but one of the core components here is the Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Edition 20 that is priced as part of this deal at $5,999. You can't buy this Astral card on sale individually right now. In fact, you can barely buy an RTX 5090 anywhere. RTX 5090 stock has almost completely disappeared in the United States, with only sketchy third-party sellers offering it at prices approaching $10,000.

This premium GPU is now ultra premium and, for the time being, ultra rare. Does that make this $10,849.96 Newegg combo deal a good option? If money is no object, you're perversely getting some value for your money, as long as you don't think too hard about the RTX 5090's original $1,999 MSRP.

Yes, the GPU is an unstoppable force for any gamer. Our GPU benchmarks make that very clear. The RTX 5090 is the best GPU you can buy, and no other consumer GPU is going to beat it. It has 21,760 CUDA cores and 22GB of GDDR7 VRAM, with a 512-bit memory bus and bandwidth speeds of up to 1,792 GB/s.

This Astral is a world-beater of its own, though. It features an upgraded design, with a second BTF power connector to pull up to 800 watts, a glass backplate, and a curved OLED screen. It has faster clocks, hitting 2,750 MHz, with a 4.7-slot design. Performance-wise, the OG Astral is beating world records, so this is a card that you can really push to its limits (if you're not scared of charred power cables).

The $6,000 GPU aside, you're also getting a $3,299 Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Edition 20 motherboard. Asus has a few variants of this, but the Edition 20 board here has (alongside some beautiful gold accents) supports for up to nine M.2 SSDs, with five slots on the board and more via add-in cards. There are six USB-C ports, plus two 20 Gbps front-panel connectors. Large copper VRM heatsinks work with its integrated AIO cooler, with a curved 6.7-inch AMOLE screen and a huge copper heatsink. Probably overkill, but for $3,299, you want it all.

You're also getting a $899.99 Asus ROG Thor Titanium III 3000W Edition 20 power supply. It's a PSU, but 3000W isn't to be sniffed at, and it'll certainly provide enough power for the monstruous Astral RTX 5090. It’s fully modular, with another OLED display (magnetic, this time) which you can mount either side, or extend with a cable.

Finally, you get the Asus ROG GR20 open-frame EATX PC case, set at $649.99. This is a totally new design from Asus, supporting large EATX motherboards, and you can stand it vertically or horizontally. There's a crossflow fan to blow cool air onto the GPU, RGB light strips, and several fast USB ports. It's mostly aluminum, with some plastic, magnetically attached cosmetic covers around the sides.

$10,849.96 for this Asus combo kit is so much money for anyone to spend on a gaming PC build, but, unfortunately, we are where we are. As our Asus ROG Edition 20 build write-up mentions, this is a kit that few will buy and own. AI is pushing gaming PCs to new heights, and it's a real shame that we're now seeing current-gen flagship GPUs like the RTX 5090 becoming so rare to buy that combo offers like this are, perversely, almost good value. If you're spending $6K or more on a GPU, though, then it might make sense. You won't find an RTX 5090 cheaper (or, probably, at all, at least for some time) so if you want the best gaming PC build that you can find, this is the kit you'll want. For once, we don't imagine this will sell out soon, but Newegg might pull the deal at any point.

A pre-built gaming PC with one of AMD's top X3D chips inside is always going to be a formidable option, especially if it's coupled with a current-gen Nvidia GeForce GPU. That's exactly what you're getting with this all-white CyberPowerPC machine, down to $1,859.99 thanks to a $560 discount, that ships with a 9800X3D, RTX 5060 Ti, and 32GB of DDR5 RAM.

● Check out this deal at Walmart

That's a serious set of specs with few compromises to think about in a market that's seen huge price rises over the last 12 months. Building a new gaming PC has become far more expensive than buying a good pre-built, and the specs you're getting here set you up with a rig that'll let you play games at 1440p at high frame rates and the best graphics presets for years to come. This particular rig scored 4 stars in our CyberPowerPC Gamer Supreme review, with praise for its performance and room for upgrades later.

Featured in this rig is one of Nvidia’s current mid-tier graphics cards in the RTX 5060 Ti. It ships with 4,608 CUDA cores and a boost clock speed of 2,527MHz, along with that all-important 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM. Unlike the RTX 5090, this RTX 5060 Ti only requires a single eight-pin PCIe connector to deliver power, so you won't need a huge amount of electricity to run it.

Our RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB review is clear that this GPU is a very good option for mid-tier builds, with ray tracing performance proving to be much better than its rivals. You've also got the full support of Nvidia DLSS 4, giving you access to functionality like multi-frame generation to give your rig a frame rate boost in the most resource-heavy games, especially if you want to try and push to 4K.

At this price point, though, 16GB of VRAM is the serious winner. You're giving yourself much more headroom for better performance than the budget-friendly 8GB GPUs that you'd otherwise have to switch to. That'll mean that stable gaming at 1440p will be easier to achieve.

Couple that with the eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. This continues to be the best CPU overall for gamers, even if AMD has launched faster models since, because of its price-to-performance value. It continues to offer outstanding gaming performance, as the CPU benchmarks show, with 1% low frame rates that ensure the smoothest possible gameplay. The power of AMD 3D V-Cache, stacking extra L3 cache (96MB in total) so that games don't need to drop down to the slower system RAM, gives you a serious performance boost.

You won't see much compromise elsewhere, either. 32GB of DDR5 RAM means you won't face memory bottlenecks, and a 2TB Gen 4 SSD gives you good storage capacity for several big game installations alongside Windows. You're also getting Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless connectivity, along with Gigabit Ethernet for a wired setup.

The $1,859.99 sale price for the CyberPowerPC Gamer Supreme rig on sale here is a good price given its performance potential. You're getting a solid 1440p-capable gaming PC, with the best CPU and a formidable GPU to match, with plenty of room to upgrade in the future, and a lot of longevity until then. Don't expect this $560 discount to be around for long.

A tech enthusiast says that they managed to put together a home lab-worthy Proxmox server using PC parts scavenged from the nearby county landfill. Furthermore, Tsuto told fellow Redditors that they now routinely raid the dump’s separate electronics recycling area once a week. We can’t blame them; their gallery of liberated hardware includes plenty of valuable trinkets like SSDs, HDDs, GPUs, even RAM, complete laptops, and more.

‘It’s wild what people throw away these days,’ says the successful tech scavenger. Tsuto seems to admit that many of the bits and pieces are “on the older end,” but even folks paying cold, hard cash at retail in 2026 are competing for components like RTX 3060s, AM4 motherboards/CPUs, and DDR4. That’s how hard the components shortage is hitting folks.

Tsuto also seems rather pleased with an Asus ROG laptop found at the landfill site. “The Asus ROG laptop just needed a $25 battery off Amazon and still has decent enough specs for casual gaming for my son,” they comment. Pixel peeping Tsuto’s gallery indicates that this portable gaming laptop packs an Intel Core i7-4710HQ (4C/8T) supported by 16GB of RAM, and allied with a GeForce GTX 860M 2GB GPU. It will be playing less demanding titles such as Stumble Guys, we see.

In a follow-up post, the Redditor explains that one of their home lab projects that has been built from the dumpster finds includes a Proxmox server. It’s a dusty-looking machine (it’s a shame Tsuto hasn’t found an air duster yet?), but it is ample for their needs. The ‘new’ Proxmox machine is said to pack in “Two mirrored 256GB SSDs for the OS, one extra 1TB SSD for fast storage, and three 2TB HDDs in RAID1 for ZFS storage.”

Despite the lavish tech finds from this landfill, Tsuto says they actually bought some key components off Amazon to finalize the system – a Core i7-7700 and 64GB of RAM. We hope the RAM wasn’t bought in recent months, with the prices as they are.

Where I live, you might as well rob a bank as try and swipe electronics from the local council recycling centers. There’s security and cameras around these trash = treasure hoards, which can be particularly appealing to folks who appreciate retro computing.

A self-taught electronics tinkerer called Mike recently shared details of his retro-computing project on Hackaday. It certainly is retro, as the design eschews modern computer component niceties like microprocessors or microcontrollers. Instead, Mike’s computer is “a modern 8-bit design, built with recycled 1950s vacuum tubes.” It uses 460 Soviet-era 6N3P (Cyrillic 6Н3П-ЕВ) double triode tubes, which were manufactured around 50 years ago, combined with era-appropriate germanium diodes.

The wall-mounted vacuum tube-based computer you see in the video above is apparently the third tube computer Mike has engineered this decade. Previous iterations have sometimes come to an explosive end…

Of course, there have been a number of famous historically significant computers based on arrays of these tubes or valves, which offer similar functionality to the transistors that largely succeeded them. There are plenty of reasons the computer industry moved from tubes to transistors, and then silicon ICs, but enthusiasts aren’t bound by such practicalities.

Mike notes a few drawbacks with vacuum tubes, actually. Most notably, this simple 8-bit computer design needs 460 of these fragile, rather bulky, white-hot glowing tubes to run. Furthermore, these used/old stock 6N3P models only have about a 500-hour operational life, so a few handy spares are required, as is a stepladder to reach the whole array of tubes, which may fizzle out at any time. The tubes run hot, so Mike's computer room is always toasty whether the season makes that a nice thing or not. A fire extinguisher is always kept handy, and the room smells of burning dust.

Performance and capabilities are about as limited as one might expect. Mike notes that starting The Tube Computer (MK3) means waiting 10 to 15 mins after power-on for the machine to literally warm up. This is followed by a mandatory reset to get the tubes into a unified operational state.

For compute functionality, Mike’s Tube Computer architecture uses an arithmetic logic design to perform just the five essential functions needed for its instruction set (sum, carry, not, increment, and XNOR). Meanwhile, its instruction cycle relies on a non-pipelined architecture with a six-step fetch and single-execute cycle.

Components:

• 460 × 6N3P vacuum tube
• 46 × 10 tube pcbs
• 1 × 190cmx130cm 4mm acrylic panel
• 3 × 2m 30mmx30mm Aluminium box section
• 5 × Backplane pcbs

User interaction with this wall-mounted homemade computer varies depending on the program in use. Currently, Mike has it set up to run an Airship Simulator piloting a British R80 airship from Brighton to Paris. “By pressing controls on the image of the bridge of the R80, you can direct the airship software,” says Mike. “These membrane buttons simply put 5 volts directly to the input board of The Tube Computer. You can control the ballast, gas release, engine power, elevators, rudder and the bow mooring gear, which is used to release the airship from the tower.”

Another charming feature of this admittedly “build it now, fix it later” computer design is the very audible accompanying ex-British Rail flip-digit display. That add-on will invoke another entirely different flavor of nostalgia for some of our readers.

As building a PC becomes prohibitively more expensive, buying a pre-built option continues to look like a much better way to get started with PC gaming in 2026. Right now at Newegg, you can score this ABS Cyclone gaming PC with a 20-core Intel CPU, RTX 5060 8GB, and 32GB of DDR5 RAM for just $1,379. That's $420 off a 1440p-ready rig that should see you through the next few years of the RAMpocalypse.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The DDR5-6000 RAM in this PC is currently worth $400 alone, making this build a good value proposition over buying the parts yourself. Likewise, the GPU is worth $450, meaning that more than half your build cost is covered by just these two parts. This PC would be perfect as a beginner gaming rig or mid-range replacement for a DDR4 gaming PC. With a Raptor Lake refresh CPU and Nvidia's latest GPU technology, it's the perfect stepping stone into modern PC gaming without breaking the bank.

As you can see, without frame generation, the RTX 5060 can put out a respectable 41 frames per second across our 1440p test suite, and easily manages 60 frames per second at 1080p in our other testing. Using Nvidia's DLSS technology, you'll be able to bump that up no problem and enjoy high-fidelity gaming with good frame rates. With just 8GB of VRAM, this card won't be useful for 4K gaming but would make a great upgrade for someone on an older RTX 30-series card or integrated graphics.

The GPU is complemented by the excellent Intel Core i7-14700F CPU, with 20 cores (eight performance and 12 efficiency), perfect for productivity and gaming workloads. The Raptor Lake Refresh CPU offers boost clocks of up to 5.4GHz.

This is a great all-round build at the price point, as evidenced by the strong supporting cast of components. You're getting that all-important 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM for multitasking and gaming, as well as a 1TB Gen 4 SSD — specifically Kingston's SNV3S — for storage.

The motherboard is an ASRock B760M-CX with room for M.2 expansion should storage prices settle down in the future. You also get a very capable Cooler Master Hyper 212 air cooler, more than enough for this CPU, as well as a 650W 80 PLUS Gold PSU.

It also features Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2, as well as a copy of Windows 11. For the price, this is a really good PC in the current market. You're getting a $300 discount, plus a further $120 off when you use the promo code SSF73457, for a $420 discount total. Thanks to the Intel's Gamer Days sale, you'll also get two free games to enjoy on your new PC: Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and Star Wars: Galactic Racer, due to be released in February 2027 and October 2026, respectively. That's $120 of free upcoming new releases to enjoy on your new PC.

The price of PC parts continues to rise on a daily basis, so finding a monstrous gaming PC cheaper than it was in April is no small feat. Right now at Newegg, you can score an RTX 5080 gaming PC with a 9800X3D CPU, the ultimate in 4K gaming performance, for $2,999. A $500 saving that makes it cheaper than when we covered this same deal back in April.

● Check out this deal on Newegg's website

The individual cost of some of these components makes this a pretty remarkable deal in Fall 2026. The RTX 5080 GPU in this rig alone will set you back more than $1,500 in today's market. The CPU is nearly $500, bringing the cost of just those two components to 2/3 of the build's entire price.

RAM and SSD prices are heavily inflated, which means 32GB of DDR5 would normally set you back $400 right now. Add the storage to the bill of materials, and you've covered nearly the entire cost of this PC before you've added the case, fans, cooler, motherboard, and PSU. With the best CPU for gaming on the market and a huge GPU, this PC is no slouch either.

While the 9800X3D is not quite the fastest gaming CPU on the market these days, it is still the best all-rounder by some distance thanks to its combination of power efficiency and performance compared to the 9850X3D. This 8-core, 16-thread CPU chews through gaming titles, even at 4K, thanks to its 3D V-cache. Reducing reliance on slower RAM, this industry-leading tech makes AMD's X3D CPUs the best gaming chips on the market, as you can see from our testing data.

The RTX 5080 likewise needs no introduction. This behemoth features 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM and 10,752 CUDA cores. As you can see from our GPU hierarchy, that translates into average frames per second of 60 even at 4K, performance eclipsed only by the extremely powerful and expensive 5090. At 1440p, we clocked average fps of over 100. The 5080 will also unlock Nvidia's powerful DLSS 4.5 and new DLSS 5 technology for frame generation and neural rendering.

Headline components aside, this build features 32GB of Kingston Fury DDR5 6400 RAM, a fantastic addition considering it's easy to hide cheap, slow RAM inside a pre-built PC. The SSD is Team Group's NV5000 2TB Gen 4 drive, giving you plenty of storage and gaming performance. The motherboard is a Gigabyte B850 with Wi-Fi 6, giving you plenty of power and performance as well as room for expansion in the future. The build also features a 360mm AIO cooler for the CPU, Windows 11, and a 1000W 80 Plus Gold to keep everything running.

NVIDIA has confirmed new details and availability info about its upcoming RTX Spark SoC for Windows 11 devices. At IFA 2026, the company announced that it expects the first RTX Spark laptops to begin shipping as soon as next month, sometime in October depending on the OEM. Additionally, two new devices are joining the launch lineup; the Lenovo Yoga 9n laptop and Acer SFF desktop PC.

Alongside availability news, NVIDIA has also confirmed configuration details for the upcoming RTX Spark chips. There will be two different configurations of the RTX Spark N1X, with configurable RAM and storage based on what OEMs wish to offer. The high-end RTX Spark will be targeted at desktops and laptops, with support for up to 128GB unified memory, 20 CPU cores, and 6144 Blackwell RTX cores.

There will also be a less powerful RTX Spark configuration exclusively for laptops, which can only be configured with 24GB or 32GB unified memory, a 5120-Core Blackwell RTX GPU, and an 18-core CPU. While still a high-end chip, this should allow RTX Spark to ship in laptops that cost closer to $2,000, significantly lower priced than the high-end SoC.

NVIDIA is touting RTX Spark as the best SoC for AI development on Windows. It supports NVIDIAs full AI stack, as well as the Windows Agent Framework and 120B parameter agents. It also supports hardware accelerated 4:2:2 video for video editing professionals.

It's also good for gaming, with expected 100 frames per second in many games at 1440p with RT and DLSS. In fact, NVIDIA has announced that many popular and mainstream gaming developers have committed to supporting RTX Spark with native games and frameworks so that there are no compatibility issues with the RTX Spark's Arm architecture.

While the first RTX Spark devices are expected to begin shipping in October, it's not yet clear which OEMs will be first out the gate. All major Windows hardware makers, including Dell, Lenovo, HP, ASUS, and Microsoft have all announced RTX Spark devices that are expected to ship by the end of this year. Devices like the Surface Laptop Ultra have not yet been given a release date, though Microsoft typically does aim to ship new Surface PCs in October.

We'll be sure to keep you updated on all the RTX Spark device availability as more information is revealed by OEMs. In the meantime, are you considering an RTX Spark device as your next Windows PC? Let us know in the comments!

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If you're not a keen follower of the AI space, then the name Hugging Face may not mean anything to you. But the company has just been acquired by NVIDIA, which continues to reinforce its new identity as an AI company.

Announced today by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, Hugging Face will be joining the company in an acquisition priced at just under $13 billion.

Hugging Face is an open platform that has been likened to GitHub, except for local, open AI models that anyone can use. NVIDIA's plans are to keep Hugging Face the same as it is today but to scale. Because if you're not scaling AI these days, what are you even doing?

"Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.

Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work."

Keeping personal opinions about AI aside, I'm certainly more in favor of real people being able to use AI models without having to rely on massive, un-evironmentally friendly data centers from the likes of Microsoft and OpenAI.

AI is very much here to stay, whether we choose to embrace it or not. But I'm definitely on the side of being able to use it however you want to use it and without feeding all your data to companies that don't necessarily deserve it.

NVIDIA is very much AI-first these days, though. Gone are the days we'd all look at its shiny new GPUs, and our only thoughts would be about gaming. It does make you ponder what the future holds for gamers, though.

I've got an RTX 5090, for example, and it's still overkill for gaming. But with 32GB of VRAM and a ton of compute horsepower, it's pretty damn good for local AI use. But is this where future products will be aligned first? Everything's getting more expensive, and AI is definitely to blame for a good chunk of it.

Alas, here we are. If you use Hugging Face currently, it doesn't sound like anything's going to change. But if you're a gaming customer of the company, as I am, I am starting to wonder how important we're going to be in the future.

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You've got the chance to score a toolkit upgrade that's a firm favorite among Tom's Hardware staff. This Hoto screwdriver has proven to be a personal lifesaver of mine, helping me during DIY projects and PC repairs alike. It's genuinely impressed me with its functionality, along with its battery life, over the last few months. Thanks to Amazon, you can pick up this upgraded Hoto electronic screwdriver set for $29.99, saving you 40% on its list price for a limited time only.

● Check out this deal at Amazon

This particular kit is an upgraded version of the one we've seen Hoto sell over recent months, with more driver bits and a more robust case for users. The 40% discount isn't quite a record low, but it's on the lower end of the scale, and it's still a good price for the kit you're getting here. This is a good upgrade for a PC builder or hobbyist, as well as for any DIY tasks at home.

The 3.6V driver is the same model that several Tom's Hardware staffers own, and it comes with a 1,500 mAh battery that should reportedly allow you to drive over 1,000 screws without a charge. From my own use, that feels about right, as I've been using it almost every weekend since January and I've only needed to charge it once. USB-C charging is easy using the supplied cable, and it takes about two and a half hours to fully charge.

The driver is fully adjustable, with three torque settings, along with a sensor that stops driving as soon as you release control. It has a circular LED light at the top to help you see what you're driving, which is useful in those dark spaces, especially inside a PC case. The driver is magnetic, too, so you should find it easier to keep hold of any tiny screws.

The screwdriver and bits come with an upgraded storage case to help protect and organize the set while you're not using it. This is a nice upgrade over the circular casing that came with the earlier NEX O1 Pro kit, which, while compact, was a little tricky to open from time to time. You also get 24 different screw bits, along with an extended PH2 bit, which should cover all of the bases, giving you Phillips, Torx, flat, hexagon, and Pozidriv head options, which are all rated for 60HRC on the Rockwell scale.

This $29.99 25-piece Hoto screwdriver set is a must-buy for PC builders and DIYers, and the 40% discount makes it a good price. I wouldn't be without mine, and I've found it to be a particularly versatile driver to reach for when I need a lightweight driver with a bit of extra power.

The Seagate Xbox Expansion Card is a must-have accessory for the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. It's a plug-and-play drive with quick enough speeds to play games right from the card.

But the Seagate Xbox Expansion Card is running out of stock. Scanning the web shows retail listings with warnings of low stock or a lack of stock at all. Other stores have the cards but at inflated prices. If you want to get a Seagate Xbox Expansion Card, you need to act quickly.

Below, I'll list all places I've found the card in stock. It's now difficult to find them at all, let alone at a good price.

Is it a good time to buy a Seagate Expansion Card?

Right now is a good time to buy a Seagate Xbox Expansion Card for three reasons. First, the card is below its launch price at certain retailers. Second, the card is running out of stock, so if you want one you need to act quickly. Third, games like GTA 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will take up a lot of space, so you'll need more storage.

Gaming prices are out of control right now. RAM and storage seem to get more costly each month. There aren't signs of the market correcting any time soon, either.

The most pressing factor here is that stock of the Seagate Xbox Expansion Card is running out. Literally as I wrote this article, Best Buy marked the card as unavailable. Newegg and Amazon have the card in stock but at wildly inflated prices.

The only Seagate Xbox Expansion Cards I've found in stock are the ones listed above, including the 2TB model at Walmart. If you spot a model in stock, please flag it and I'll update this piece.

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