AMD is expected to unveil its next-gen Zen 6 platform at CES 2026 with Ryzen 10000 series processors. While we're looking forward to IPC and clock speed improvements, it seems like more subtle, under-the-hood changes could end up upgrading the gaming experience in a big way. According to a tip received by Videocardz, AMD is implementing various per-core optimizations to ensure foreground tasks get priority over background applications. Each new feature is supposed to more smartly manage the power and thermal budgets at the silicon's disposal, so let's go over each of them.

First up, we have CPPC Performance Priority — CPPC stands for Collaborative Processor Performance Control, and it's responsible for communication between the silicon and the OS. It lets the firmware sitting in between decide the performance of each core separately. This feature has actually existed since the Ryzen 3000 series, but it doesn't work perfectly. Zen 6 CPUs are apparently supposed to apply a band-aid fix and improve their effectiveness.

Secondly, we have FloorPerf, which acts as a dynamic, targeted power delivery system. It sets a minimum clock speed for all cores that the silicon can clock down to in case of thermal throttling. For instance, imagine you're running a game in the foreground while Discord and Spotify sit in the background. The temperatures on your Zen 6 CPU rise to the point of throttling, but instead of reducing the speed of all cores, FloorPerf will target the cores running the background tasks first, in order to maintain the performance of your game.

We covered a recent fix like this for the Linux world as well, where a sudden spike in the background can cause the foreground task to choke. Linux has an issue with priority allocation across tasks, so that was a different situation, but similar logic applies here. On a Zen 6 CPU, instead of your game suddenly experiencing microstutters because of aggressive throttling, FloorPerf will try to limit whatever's running in the background first. The aforementioned CPPC Performance Priority should work hand in hand with this feature to maintain clocks on the important cores.

CPPC will get another boost in the form of HighestFreq, which will allow the OS to access more granular chip data to make better core management decisions. As the name suggests, it pertains to maintaining high clock speeds on the cores running a foreground task. The OS will be aware of exactly which core can boost the highest and maintain that speed the longest. This will allow it to assign, for instance, a game's main rendering thread to the fastest cores, while pushing background apps to more power-efficient ones.

In conjunction with this, Zen 6 is also seemingly getting per-core EPP boost. EPP stands for Energy Performance Preference, and it's supposed to fix core parking issues caused by a momentary bottleneck. For example, if the CPU is waiting for the GPU to render the next frame, the clock speeds for the active cores will drop in that moment and struggle to ramp back up in time, forcing all cores to boost when the frame is ready. EPP boost is supposed to identify the active cores and individually keep them in high-performance mode to eliminate any wait times.

Lastly, Zen 6 is reportedly introducing PQOS Global Bandwidth Enforcement and an updated IBS Memory Profiler. Both of these target memory bandwidth with the same goal of maximum stability as everything else discussed so far. The former is responsible for allocating RAM to background tasks, ensuring their usage stays under the limit for foreground priority. The latter will limit L3 cache access to background tasks when it detects that those tasks are slowing down the foreground application, which should help with frametime consistency in games.

As you can tell, all of these optimizations are supposed to work together and harmonize into a more efficient processor at the end — one that maximizes the silicon's potential as much as possible. Of course, none of this is confirmed and there's a lot that could be gated behind product segmentation. We could see some features only on high-end parts, while some are limited to mobile; there's no telling at the moment, but it's exciting stuff, nonetheless. Seems like a battle for the ages is brewing between Nova Lake and Zen 6 next year.

Firmware development company 3mdeb has officially launched the first open-source UEFI firmware for AMD's AM5 platform. In a blog post, the company announced Dasharo v0.9.0, featuring initial support for Zen 4 Phoenix APUs and MSI's Pro B850-P WiFi motherboard. The firmware is built on Coreboot and AMD's openSIL, the latter being AMD’s new open-source firmware framework.

The patch notes are comprised of 19 features to make the open-source code work on the B850 board, including the following: a UEFI-compatible boot interface, UEFI Secure Boot support, fTPM support, fast boot support, EFI system partition scanning, quiet boot and fast boot support, AMD CPU temperature reporting, and integrated SBOM.

Development of this open-source firmware for the MSI Pro B850-P has been an ongoing process over the past several months. We initially saw development announced in February, after 3mdeb developed an open-source firmware for the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1, a server board compatible with AMD EPYC 9005 series CPUs. Development of the open-source firmware version for the MSI Pro B850-P is based on the work done for the MZ33-AR1.

Dasharo is the first development team to produce open-source firmware for AMD's mainstream consumer AM5 platform. AMD is already looking to switch from AGESA to openSIL starting with Zen 6, but 3mdeb has opted to port AMD's openSIL firmware to older Ryzen CPUs.

Open-source firmware represents a big improvement over existing closed-source firmware solutions, particularly AGESA. AMD touts its openSIL firmware as being more secure than AGESA, with better platform security and better vulnerability tracking thanks to its open-source nature. Going open-source opens up room for experts and developers beyond AMD's own firmware development team to check for vulnerabilities in firmware code.

Another benefit of openSIL is that it is compatible with alternative firmware beyond UEFI, including Coreboot, oreboot, FortiBIOS, and Project µ. Projects like Coreboot also provide optimized code compared to closed-source firmwares, improving boot-time performance.

The new firmware can be found on the 3mdeb shop, under the MSI Pro B850-P hardware-firmware bundle.

Buying a new GPU is always a joyous occasion, but the celebration was cut short for an unfortunate customer in China. Right after buying an AX Gaming RTX 5060 Ti, they got into a serious car crash that ended up totaling the car — and the card along with it. Fortunately, the driver was safe, and somehow the GPU survived, too, with no major electronic damage. Despite being bent in half, the card ended up only requiring minor repair work and was brought back to life quickly by Brother Zhang.

Visually, the card didn't look salvageable, and midrange GPUs like these often don't make for feasible repair jobs either because of the high labor cost. The backplate and cooler were completely destroyed, so Brother Zhang separated them from the actual PCB. Luckily, this variant of the 5060 Ti used a very short PCB that just barely touched the point of curvature, so the internals were mostly fine.

The technician checked all the power rails for a short circuit but saw no abnormal resistance, which confirmed the core and memory weren't dead. He then proceeded to quickly test the GPU with its bare PCB, and it booted successfully. Brother Zhang devised a makeshift cooler that consisted of the bent fin stack straightened back to the best of his abilities, and two 120mm fans strapped on top via zip ties. This seemed enough to keep the card cool.

However, as soon as he tried to install drivers, the PC would black screen and hard crash, showing consistent signs of instability. At this point, Brother Zhang reopened the card and inspected the PCB. He inspected the flex point and decided to resolder the memory module closest to the edge of the board since it experienced the most torque. A simple removal and reapplication fixed the issue, and the card was detected correctly as a 5060 Ti with the full 8GB of VRAM.

Brother Zhang rechecked for any short circuits to ensure no solder bridges were created during the BGA work before moving on to benchmarking. In Furmark, the temps peaked and stabilized at 64°C with no visual artifacts. He then ran a full 3DMark loop to test the PCIe 5.0 x8 link speeds — the card passed with a high 98.9% stability score. It drew around 92% of its maximum power limit during the run, with core temps peaking at around 67°C. This 5060 Ti was officially a survivor.

The PC hardware industry is facing an unprecedented challenge at the moment: a component crisis. During times like these, if you wanted to build or upgrade your own PC, you'd be stuck with overpriced parts unless you find deals. Well, worry not, as we've spotted exactly that — a combo bundle featuring a Ryzen 5 5500 with 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a B550M motherboard for just $280.99 on Newegg right now.

• Check out this deal on Newegg

The Ryzen 5 5500 is not exactly the newest or fastest processor on the block, but it's plenty for gaming on a tight budget. It's a six-core CPU with 12 threads that can boost up to 4.2 GHz. It has 16MB of L3 cache and 2MB of L2 cache, along with a 65W TDP. Since it's based on the Zen 3 architecture, it uses the AM4 platform, which means more affordable motherboards and, more importantly, access to less-expensive DDR4 RAM.

The AM4 socket also gives you a direct upgrade path to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D down the line because the motherboard is strong enough to support it. You're getting a Gigabyte B550M Gaming X board with Wi-Fi 6 that costs $155 on its own. It has strong rear I/O thanks to its four USB 3.2 ports on the back, along with two USB 2.0 ports and Gigabit Ethernet for wired connectivity. Internal I/O includes two ARGB headers and a Type-C header for your case's front panel.

You get two M.2 slots running at PCIe 3.0 speeds, which can be a blessing in disguise since you don't have to look for the latest SSDs anymore, helping you save a bit of money. There are four RAM slots with support for up to 128GB of memory at DDR4-3200. Speaking of which, the final product in this bundle is a 16GB (2x8GB) kit of TeamGroup's T-Force Delta Force RGB RAM in black. It's running at DDR4-3200 with a CAS latency of CL16.

Even though DDR4 is a generation old now, it's not outdated. It's sufficient for gaming and even some professional workflows. You're only getting 16GB in this combo, but the four-slot motherboard leaves room for an easy upgrade to 32GB later when things normalize. Overall, this is a fantastic budget bundle to get you started whether you're building a new PC or coming from a really old platform.

When you purchase all these items separately, the total bill comes out to around $420, so you'll be saving 32% upfront by going with the bundle instead! For just $281 on Newegg, you'll get a few essential components knocked off the list without compromising on performance or breaking the bank, all the while leaving room for upgrades that make sense in the current state of the industry.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.

We're celebrating the 30th anniversary of Tom's Hardware. Since the beginning of Tom’s Hardware in 1996, we’ve been covering CPUs. Over the course of the past 30 years, we’ve maintained a comprehensive list of the best CPUs for gaming by reviewing each new release, and we’ve compiled thousands of data points spanning years to compile our CPU benchmark hierarchy. From the Pentium II and the introduction of Dual Data Rate memory to dual 3D V-Cache CPUs, Tom’s Hardware has been there for it all.

It’s time to look back, not just on Tom’s Hardware’s role in the world of CPUs over the past 30 years, but on the broader CPU market. Earth-shattering releases at a given time turned out to be footnotes in hindsight, and bubbling competition that seemed like no real threat turned into seismic shifts in the AMD vs. Intel battle. Hopefully, along the way, we’ll see some reflections of what’s going on in the world of CPUs today.

This is a celebration of 30 years of CPU coverage here at Tom’s Hardware, a history lesson about how the AMD and Intel of yesteryear arrived at the positions they’re in today, and a retrospective of the CPUs that stood the test of time against the refreshes that faded into obscurity just as soon as they were released. We hope you enjoy it.

Ruffling feathers from day one (1996 - 1998)

Ruffling feathers from day one (1996 - 1998)

Like much of the early internet, the true beginnings of Tom’s Hardware (or, rather, Tom’s Hardware Guide) is difficult to pin down, but the earliest archived article concerns the SoftMenu BIOS, which allowed you to change CPU settings through software rather than physical jumper cables; it should go without saying that this article was from July 1, 1996. There were articles before this one, with the original domain of sysdoc.pair.com going online in February 1996.

Tom’s Hardware gained a lot of traction a year later with a CPU review: a look at the Intel Pentium II ‘Klamath’ processor.

Tom’s Hardware’s founder, Thomas Pabst, had discussed CPUs previously, like in a dense CPU guide published the same year, but the Intel Pentium II review marked a turning point. It was published March 1, 1997, more than two months before Intel launched the Pentium II 80522 (or Klamath). It was not positive: “...since I wouldn't eat [Mad Cow Disease] infected beef, I wouldn't be interested in risking an infection of my computer with this CPU either,” wrote Pabst.

The CPU wasn’t officially available, but Pabst was able to test the chip with a pre-release unit shared by two German magazines: C'T Magazin fur Computertechnik and PC Professionell. Following the publication of all three reviews, Intel targeted the two German magazines, threatening to withhold advertising dollars and take legal action against them. Pabst publicized this fiasco and was contacted by The New York Times, which also covered the story. Intel backed down. Pabst later wrote that “...this 'David against Goliath'-incident made Tom's Hardware Guide very famous.”

In the following months, Pabst focused on CPUs quite a bit, breaking from the performance-tuning guides and general enthusiast information the website had previously published. The situation with Intel made Pabst a “secret star,” so much so that AMD not only offered Pabst a free review unit of the upcoming K6, but also apparently offered to cover legal fees should Intel pursue the situation further.

Although the unofficial review of the Pentium II predates it, the first review that looks most like the technical reviews that have been published on Tom’s Hardware for decades came in April 1997 with a review of the AMD K6, a CPU that established AMD as a true competitor to Intel, claiming Pentium II-like speeds for less money.

The performance wasn’t quite on the level of a Pentium II, most notably because the K6 originally arrived at 233 MHz, when 266 MHz was promised. But it was competitive, particularly when compared to the Pentium II 233, and much cheaper. Pabst concluded the review, “All in all I'm sure that this CPU will be very successful… Whoever is contemplating the purchase of an Intel Pentium or Pentium MMX CPU can forget about this now. The AMD K6 is faster and cheaper.”

Later that same month, Pabst published a proper review of the Pentium II, now using finalized silicon. In DOS games and the 32-bit Windows NT, Pentium IIs showed a commanding lead over the K6, though the battle on Windows 95 was closer. “The world is back to normal. Intel’s managers can sleep quietly again. The Pentium II shows that Intel is still the leader in the CPU market,” the review concluded.

A review of the Cyrix/IBM 6x86MX went live in 1997, as well, showing competitive performance with the K6, but much of the rest of the year was focused elsewhere after the Pentium II/K6 showdown. Looking back, it’s interesting to note the dynamic at play between AMD and Intel, with Pabst using a running gag of referring to Intel as the “Empire,” and competitors like AMD and Cynix as “Rebels.” Although Intel backed away from further action on Pentium II, it wouldn’t be the last time Pabst and Intel butted heads.

The Pentium III incident (1999 - 2001)

The Pentium III incident (1999 - 2001)

The competitive performance of K6 brought AMD into focus as the rival to Intel, which Pabst often described as “almost-monopolistic” at the time. However, AMD really put itself on the map with the release of K7, or as it’s better known, Athlon, in June 1999. In our review, we described it as “a milestone in the whole processor scene,” due in part to AMD’s unique three-way instruction decoder, which allows instructions of variable complexity through all three lanes. Intel’s P6 architecture in Pentium III also had a three-way instruction decoder, but they were segmented based on the complexity of the instruction.

We’re still firmly in the single-core era of CPUs here, so an architectural divergence like this, even before testing, represented a goldmine of speed gains. Rather than releasing several variants of silicon sliced up in different ways, as we see with modern CPUs, Intel and AMD refined their chips and released new versions with faster clock speeds. AMD released the Athlon 600 as the fastest chip in the range at 600 MHz first, but less than two months later, it introduced the Athlon 650, and two months after that, the Athlon 700.

Intel was caught off guard and quickly introduced the Pentium III 600 to counter AMD. The original Pentium III range, codenamed Katmai, was largely a refinement of Pentium II ‘Deschutes’ chips; both were built using a 250nm node, in fact. In our original Athlon review, we noted instability with the Pentium III 600, suggesting the architecture couldn’t handle such high clock speeds.

The original ‘Katmai’ range of Pentium IIIs was short-lived, and later in 1999, Intel introduced a new revision called Coppermine. Coppermine introduced an on-chip L2 cache for Intel, and it was built on a 180nm node, allowing Intel to go from 9.5 million transistors on Katmai to 28 million on Coppermine, as well as push clock speeds up to 733 MHz with the initial range, squeezing out a minor increase over the Athlon 700. Less than two months later, AMD introduced Orion, or Athlon Model 2, which also used a 180nm node and clocked up to 750 MHz. This back and forth of minor clock speed improvements is going to stick with us for at least another half of a decade, so strap in.

The goal, of course, was the first 1 GHz CPU, a milestone that AMD claimed for itself in March 2000 with the introduction of the Athlon 1000. Intel had shown a 1 GHz Pentium III, but AMD released a 1 GHz Athlon first. Intel followed shortly after with its first CPU to hit the gigahertz milestone. Intel didn’t want to place second again, so it went to work on the Pentium III 1.13 GHz, which it introduced in July.

Pentium II made Tom’s Hardware a name in the PC industry, but the Pentium III 1.13 GHz gave it a name among enthusiasts. Our review found that the processor wasn’t stable at 1.13 GHz, and less than a month after introducing the chip, Intel recalled it. The Pentium 1.13 GHz would eventually come back in 2001, but at the pace of CPU innovation at the time, even a six-month delay was detrimental.

In June 2000, AMD introduced a refinement of Athlon, codenamed Thunderbird, and days before Intel’s recall, introduced the Athlon 1100. AMD remained uncontested throughout the rest of the year, pushing Thunderbird up to 1.2 GHz. Intel was closing the curtain on Pentium III and trying to move attention away from Athlon toward its upcoming Pentium 4 range.

Going for gigahertz (2001 - 2004)

Going for gigahertz (2001 - 2004)

Intel was struggling to keep pace with Athlon, but work was going on behind the scenes on the new NetBurst microarchitecture, which was set to become the successor to P6. It was introduced to the world with the Willamette core inside the first Pentium 4. Like most major microarchitecture shifts we’ve seen from Intel and AMD, NetBurst wasn’t an immediate success. However, Pabst noted in our review: “I am certain that Intel will deliver very fast Pentium 4 processors very soon. Intel has finally won back the ability to make AMD's life a lot harder.”

Intel pushed P6 down to a 130nm node with the release of Tualatin Pentium III chips, but the focus was on Pentium 4 and optimizing NetBurst. In March, AMD introduced the Athlon 1333, but Team Red was losing steam. Intel had already released a Pentium 4 1.5 GHz, and it introduced the Pentium 4 1.7 GHz (along with a price cut to the range) in April 2001. With a new microarchitecture seemingly bursting with potential, it was only a matter of time before Intel made its way back to the top.

That came in August, when Intel planted its flag on the 2 GHz milestone with Pentium 4, and beat out AMD’s fastest Athlon chip. AMD didn’t like that. Later in the year, in October, AMD introduced its Athlon XP range, and with it came a sneaky switch in marketing strategy. Rather than include the clock speed as part of the processor name (i.e., Athlon 1333), AMD started using model names. No, the Athlon XP 1500+ wasn’t clocked at 1.5 GHz; it was clocked at 1.3 GHz. This nomenclature climbed all the way to the top, with the Athlon XP 2100+, which was not 2.1 GHz, but rather 1.7 GHz.

At the time, AMD described this shift as an alignment with what it was able to deliver with Athlon. During this era, we start to see more significant architecture divergences between Intel and AMD, so much so that like-for-like clocks could result in vastly different performance. That’s what we found in our Athlon XP review, in fact, with the Athlon XP 1800+ (clocked at 1,533 MHz) contesting the Pentium 4 2 GHz. Still, it’s not hard to see what AMD was trying to do. In January 2002, Intel introduced its Northwood core for Pentium 4, which could clock up to 2.2 GHz. AMD wasn’t able to break the 2 GHz barrier yet, but it used product names to suggest it had.

Names weren’t enough. By the middle of 2002, Northwood had picked up steam and could clock as high as 2.8 GHz; even the 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 was able to beat AMD’s fastest Athlon XP 2100+ across our benchmarks. AMD was working on the Thoroughbred revision of Athlon XP, including a node shrink down to 130nm to match Intel’s new Northwood core, which it trickled out through 2002. By the end of the year, AMD had shown the Athlon XP 2800+ as a rival to the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz.

Despite lagging in clocks, AMD had become quite popular during this time due to the competitive performance of Athlon XP and (most importantly) a lower price point than the expensive Pentium 4s. Still, there was a stalemate in technology between Intel and AMD, and Intel would break it in November 2002 with the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz.

It was the first consumer CPU to clock to 3 GHz out of the box, adding another notch to Intel’s belt, but it was also the first CPU to bring Intel’s long-standing simultaneous multithreading implementation, called Hyper-Threading, to market. With higher clocks and two threads to play with, the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz cemented Intel at the top of the performance charts, beating out AMD’s fastest Athlon XP and even a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 (no Hyper-Threading) in some benchmarks. Tom’s Hardware actually benchmarked the Pentium 4 3.6 GHz nearly a year before it was available, and had data in time to compare to the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz with Hyper-Threading.

More cores, more fun (2004 - 2007)

More cores, more fun (2004 - 2007)

The clock speed battle from the late 90s and early 2000s was starting to fall apart. AMD had demonstrated that performance was more than peak clocks with Athlon XP, and Intel was pushing ahead with Hyper-Threading to get more work done simultaneously each clock cycle. The first half of 2003 was dull in the world of CPUs as Intel worked on its Prescott core and AMD mulled over “ClawHammer,” which would eventually become Athlon 64.

Athlon 64 would be the first to bring AMD’s x86-64 ISA extension (called AMD64) to the desktop market (it previously showed up in Opteron). It rolled out in September 2003, and just a week before release, Intel launched the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, which was widely considered a panic switch in response to Athlon 64 while Prescott was still under wraps. Although Intel maintained the performance crown with P4 Extreme against the Athlon 64 FX-51, it did so at a much higher price.

Still, this late-stage battle as Intel and AMD moved toward a 90nm node was important. Intel started marketing expensive, high-performance processors directly to enthusiasts in a market that would eventually get the HEDT, or high-end desktop, name. Meanwhile, AMD designated some Athlon XP chips with the FX name, which signaled high-performance chips with unlocked multipliers.

Intel was first to get down to 90nm with its highly anticipated Prescott core, though it arrived with a whimper. It clocked slower, allowing the FX-51 to remain competitive and Northwood chips to remain at the top of the charts in our review. There, our reviewer Patrick Schmid wrote: “In our opinion, Intel today does not care about Prescott as a processor, but as a marketing instrument. It is fast enough, which is mainly what counts, and since the 90 nm production process yields cheap processors in vast quantities, the Santa Clara-based company gains new flexibility.”

AMD made it down to 90nm later in the year with the FX-55. The FX-55 allowed AMD to close the gap with higher-clocked Pentium 4s, as we found in our review. However, it was becoming clear that the chase for higher clocks wouldn’t be enough. In our review, Schmid wrote in 2004: “Today, the performance gap between the fastest and the slowest processors in our benchmark charts is rather small.”

Intel fired back at the beginning of 2005 with Prescott 2M, a minor revision to the Prescott core with 64-bit ISA extensions, and released the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73. The tide shift came in the summer of 2005 when AMD launched the Athlon 64 X2, built on a 90nm node, and featuring two cores on the same package.

Intel had released its double-core Pentium D just weeks earlier, which was also a dual-core chip, but the design forced Intel to compromise clock speeds — an important spec given how few applications could actually leverage a dual-core chip in consumer software. AMD ultimately won the battle with the Athlon 64 X2, largely due to the fact that it could keep pace with single-core Athlons in most benchmarks, as you can see in our early preview of the chip.

AMD released more Athlon 64 X2 chips throughout 2005, while Intel rolled out various chips under different Pentium brands, including the Smithfield core on Pentium D. Intel built out the range into 2006, using another node shrink down to 65nm with the Presler core, which was the final revision under the Pentium brand. In January 2006, Tom’s Hardware first reported that Intel planned to drop the Pentium brand, a name that it had kept for over a decade.

In its place? The new Core microarchitecture, finally moving on from NetBurst, which had been plagued with thermal issues as clocks climbed. Built out of Intel’s work in mobile chips, the Core 2 Duo was Intel’s first proper dual-core processor — the “double-core” Pentium D was just two Pentium dies fused together. It was a tide shift.

As we found in our Core 2 Duo review, the base E6600 and E6700 often beat, or at least matched, AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-62, while the supercharged Core 2 Extreme X6800 established a new performance tier at the high-end. Further, it did so at reasonable power levels, finally taking the efficiency fight back to AMD.

Intel doubled down, literally, with the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 at the end of 2006. Although Intel had introduced a four-thread processor previously, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 was the first CPU with four cores to hit the market. It took two dual-core dies from Core 2 Duo and put them together on a single package. AMD brute-forced a quad-core with the 4x4 platform and dual Athlon 64 FX-70 chips, but there was a major tradeoff in cost, thermals, and power demands.

The coast of Nehalem (2007 - 2010)

The coast of Nehalem (2007 - 2010)

For the first time in the early aughts, Intel was firmly in the driver’s seat for enthusiasts. AMD drummed up some interest with its dual-chip Athlon 64 systems, and it finally moved down to a 65nm node at the start of 2007. But Intel was on a tear, and it would continue its momentum for years to come.

That started by formalizing the success of the Core microarchitecture. Instead of squeezing everything out of a microarchitecture for several generations, as it had done with P6 and NetBurst, Intel transitioned to its well-known tick-tock cycle. First, there’s a node shrink on its existing architecture, then there’s a new microarchitecture on that node, and the cycle continues. Core was the tock at 65nm, and it would move down to Penryn revision at 45nm later in 2007.

AMD struggled to keep pace. After introducing its AM2 socket in 2006, it continued refining the Athlon 64 X2 lineup with a new 65nm node, but Intel was firmly in the lead, forcing AMD to slash prices and settle into the market as a budget-focused alternative to the shiny Core 2 Duos. AMD doubled down in this area with its K8 microarchitecture, releasing a series of efficient “BE” series chips throughout the back half of 2007, which we found were excellent for efficiency and price-to-performance in our review.

Team Red had its chips on K10, and specifically, the new Phenom brand that it made noise about throughout 2006 and 2007. The Phenom X4 series launched in November, featuring the first true quad-core design; that is, using a monolithic die as opposed to MCM like Intel’s Core 2 Quad. Unlike Intel’s Core 2 Extreme, which was reserved for only the most entrenched enthusiasts, AMD targeted midrange builders.

In our Phenom 9700 review, we found that Intel still maintained the performance crown, but AMD offered a cheaper quad-core and offered identical price-to-performance at release. Further, AMD offered support for the chips on both the AM2 socket and the new AM2+ socket, starting a trend of socket longevity that we can still see in action today. With cheaper quad-core CPUs and less upgrade cost, AMD focused less on battling Intel at the high-end and more on delivering in the midrange.

Intel continued to release more Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad models throughout 2008, but behind the scenes, it was working on its next major architectural shift: Nehalem. AMD built out its Phenom line, meanwhile, introducing a tri-core variant, as well as several “Black Edition” models that featured peak clocks and unlocked multipliers for enthusiasts, likely in a bid to grab some attention from Intel’s Extreme lineup.

Nealem came onto the scene in late 2008 in the form of Bloomfield chips. They required an entirely new platform and DDR3 memory, but also promised entirely new performance benefits. Intel managed to create a true quad-core chip with Bloomfield, and one that enthusiasts could actually afford, with the range going down as low as $280. Further, it reintroduced Hyper-Threading after ditching the technology during the early dual-core days, giving enthusiasts eight threads to play with.

The spread between Intel and AMD grew wider. In our review of the Core i7-965 Extreme, we found it was 64% faster than AMD’s fastest chip at the time. Despite offering compelling products at competitive prices, AMD was falling further behind. Intel was far ahead; it had a die shrink ahead, and the legendary Sandy Bridge microarchitecture was waiting in the wings to pick up the tick-tock cycle once again.

AMD bit back in early 2009 with Phenom II (along with Athlon II), finally moving down to 45nm. It brought Team Red back up in the rankings, but Bloomfield still held onto top-end performance. In our original Phemon II review, we found that Intel was about 22% ahead of AMD at the high-end, but AMD offered compelling performance given the platform costs. Sounds familiar.

With tight integration of design and manufacturing under one roof, Intel was moving faster than AMD on process improvements, allowing it to keep a consistent lead in performance, particularly at the high-end. Intel had its Lynnfield chips at 45nm, as well as Clarkdale chips at 32nm, but the 32nm successor to Bloomfield came in early 2010, known as Gulftown. And with Gulftown, Intel could claim a multi-core milestone on a monolithic die for the first time with the six-core Core i7-980X.

At $1,000, the Core i7-980X still only appealed to a small number of enthusiasts. AMD helped fill the gap later in the year with the Phenom X6 launch, introducing six-core models of its own. AMD couldn’t match the 980X at the high-end, but Phenom represented an affordable entry-point to six-core chips if you ran heavily-threaded workloads, as we noted in our review. Still, Phenom X6 was AMD trying to keep pace with Intel. Behind the scenes, AMD was working on a new microarchitecture called Bulldozer, which was built from the ground up for a new generation of chips and finally allowed AMD to move down to 32nm.

Bulldozer bulldozes world records, thermals (2010 - 2013)

Bulldozer bulldozes world records, thermals (2010 - 2013)

It’s easy to pick on Bulldozer in hindsight, but leading up to release, the anticipation was palpable. K8 was a smash success, and K10 built on that success, but Bulldozer was built from the ground up, presumably for the position AMD had found itself in the market. Nearly a year before Bulldozer showed up on the market, however, Intel introduced an architecture that still resonates among enthusiasts today — Sandy Bridge.

Intel unified its product stack with Sandy Bridge and set much of the foundation for the company’s releases through Raptor Lake Refresh. Instead of two broad ranges, Intel placed most of the Sandy Bridge lineup on a single socket. It also brought integrated graphics to all the chips in the lineup, at least in the initial range (some later releases cut the iGPU), as well as unlocked the multiplier on some non-Extreme SKUs to compete with AMD’s unlocked Black Edition chips.

It was a smash success. Reviewing four Sandy Bridge chips, our reviewer Chris Angelini wrote: “Existing Lynnfield- and Clarkdale-based processors already offer strong performance compared to AMD’s lineup. Significant gains, clock-for-clock, compound in the face of notable frequency increases across the board (thanks to a mature 32 nm process), giving Sandy Bridge an even more commanding position.”

Raw performance improvements are one thing, but Sandy Bridge was attractive for several other reasons, as well. Overclocking still represented a solid performance boost in this era, and Intel was offering overclocking capabilities at mainstream price points alongside chart-topping performance out of the box. They also introduced Quick Sync to accelerate video encode/decode, and although we have video encode/decode acceleration in modern GPUs, Quick Sync still serves as a fundamental feature for video editing and media servers.

AMD’s response was Bulldozer, which was rumored ahead of release to outperform Intel’s Core i7-950 by upwards of 50%, as well as introduce a true eight-core chip to the consumer market for the first time. If that wasn’t enough, prior to release, the flagship FX-8150 set a world record for clock speed, peaking at 8.429 GHz. AMD would be the first to release a consumer CPU with eight cores, but just about every other aspect of Bulldozer was problematic.

Achieving eight cores in a single package came with significant trade-offs. Up to this point, AMD hadn’t used any form of simultaneous multithreading, but it implemented a version of SMT in Bulldozer. Unlike Intel’s traditional SMT implementation, Bulldozer used two integer units on a core, but shared floating point resources. The major trade-off was how small the integer execution clusters were in order to save space. AMD designed an architecture for a world of heavily-threaded software that just didn’t exist at the time, and it traded very important single-core speeds to achieve that design.

The flagship FX-8150 was marketed as an eight-core chip, with the eight-core count coming from AMD’s odd SMT implementation. Although there were two integer execution units per “module,” as AMD calls them, the floating point unit was shared. This discrepancy was actually the focal point of a 2015 lawsuit, which AMD settled in 2019 to the tune of over $12 million.

It was a flop. Angelini sums up the issue nicely in his October 2011 review of the FX-8150: “[Intel doesn’t] have to do anything at all. Its nearly year-old 95 W parts fend for themselves without even a price adjustment.” Intel had new chips of its own, as well. Just six months later, it introduced Ivy Bridge, taking the solid foundation of Sandy Bridge and moving it down to a 22nm node.

Ivy Bridge wasn’t a big hit on desktop, but it didn’t need to be, given the advantage Intel had already established with Sandy Bridge. Improvements were in the single digits, as we noted in our Core i7-3770K review, but Ivy Bridge brought improvements to integrated graphics to fight against AMD’s burgeoning lineup of APUs and thermal improvements targeting small form factor devices — especially laptops in a new category of “ultrabooks” that Intel was targeting.

12 months after the FX-8150 was introduced, AMD released a revision of the Bulldozer architecture named Piledriver. It promised better IPC and higher clock speeds, which was compelling, as AMD’s FX-4170 released earlier in the year as the first CPU to hit 4 GHz out of the box. Piledriver had a test run earlier in the year through AMD’s Trinity APUs, as well, showing around a 15% improvement compared to Bulldozer.

The flagship Piledriver, the FX-8350, was indeed better than its Bulldozer predecessor, but it was clear the underlying architecture had issues that wouldn’t allow AMD to scale up. AMD’s flagship was only competitive with Intel’s Core i5 options, and power use, although tamed in Piledriver, still meant the chip ran hot. It was immediately forced into a price cut upon release. After two failures to launch flagships, Intel effectively owned the high-end, which it continued to dominate with CPUs like the Core i7-3970X.

Around six months after Piledriver chips shipped, AMD released another two chips, both running at an insane 220W TDP and shipping with their own liquid cooling system. The highest-end offering, the FX-9590, was the first CPU to hit 5 GHz out of the box. AMD had learned the hard way what it had preached back in the Athlon XP days — clock speed isn’t everything.

The dawn of 14nm (2014 - 2016)

The dawn of 14nm (2014 - 2016)

With a 22nm product shipped, Intel went back to a tock and came out the other side with Haswell. Today, Haswell is heralded as a legendary architecture; we’ve all seen forum comments about gaming with a Core i7-4770K more than a decade after it was released. At the time, however, it established a narrative that would follow Intel for the next several years. That narrative being that Intel ships a new generation of quad-cores, each year, with minor IPC improvements and not much more. That’s certainly the impression Angelini came away with after reviewing the Core i7-4770K.

Intel didn’t have to move the needle beyond that point. Although AMD had shipped Bulldozer and Piledriver, a lot of turmoil was going on behind the scenes. Two further revisions of Bulldozer, Steamroller, and Excavator were planned, but AMD largely canceled the two revisions outside of a few low-end products. During this time, AMD underwent a series of sweeping layoffs and executive changes, cutting thousands of employees. Looking back at the time through a modern lens, some long-time AMD employees say that the company would’ve faced bankruptcy had it not been for semi-custom partnerships with Microsoft and Sony for their game consoles.

From the release of Piledriver in late 2012 through 2017, AMD didn’t release a ton of new CPUs. It released some revisions of Piledriver chips like the FX-8370, but we didn’t see any new microarchitecture. And planned node shrinks with Steamroller and Excavator were canned, with only a handful of desktop CPUs surviving, which were repurposed as low-end Athlon X4 CPUs years later. Intel had won.

It didn’t immediately rest on its laurels, however. Hearing the criticism of Haswell for desktop enthusiasts, Intel introduced the Core i7-4790K alongside other ‘Devil’s Canyon’ chips in mid-2014 as it worked on another tick behind the scenes down to 14nm. The result, which arrived almost a year to the day after Devil’s Canyon, was Broadwell. The Broadwell-H range — not Broadwell-E, which shows up later — isn’t very big and didn’t have much for enthusiasts. But Broadwell got Intel down to 14nm, and it would stay there until the release of Alder Lake CPUs in 2021.

We didn’t know that at the time, though. Broadwell laid the 14nm foundation for Skylake, which came hot on the heels of Broadwell-H after that architecture experienced a series of delays. Intel’s first true eight-core chip, the Core i7-5960X from the Haswell-E range, still gave the HEDT market what they were looking for, but Skylake was pushing ahead in the mainstream. In early performance testing, we said Skylake was the first architecture “to really get enthusiasts excited since Sandy Bridge.”

Intel didn’t need to rush at the time, so it didn’t. There wasn’t an Athlon 64 breathing down Team Blue’s neck. A year later, in 2016, Intel launched Broadwell-E for HEDT, marking the first-ever 10-core desktop CPU with the Core i7-6950X. It wasn’t a massive leap forward over Haswell-E, but Intel was competing with itself. “Intel’s clearly the prettiest girl in the room, is well aware of this fact and, based on Broadwell-E's pricing, doesn't need to beat the ‘value’ of last generation's -Es by much,” our reviewer Igor Wallossek wrote in his Broadwell-E review.

Although Intel was a clear market leader, it was slowing down significantly. Earlier in 2016, it quietly revised its tick-tock cycle, moving to a tick-tock-tock cadence where we’d see a new process followed by a new microarchitecture followed by an optimization of that architecture. Intel wasn’t juiced up with Moore’s Law like it was in the early aughts, but it competed in a category of one. What were you going to do? Buy AMD?

Feeling Zen (2017 - 2020)

Feeling Zen (2017 - 2020)

Shortly after the ball dropped into 2017, Intel released its Kaby Lake range of CPUs, now sporting the “14nm+” process and serving as the first optimization pass in Intel’s new release cadence. It was fine. The range came with a clock speed bump over Skylake, but otherwise, Intel released the same architecture sporting nearly identical specs, from core counts to cache sizes.

Behind the scenes, trouble was brewing. Six months before Kaby Lake made its way to market, AMD detailed its first entirely new microarchitecture since Bulldozer, named Zen. In addition to promising a 40% improvement in IPC over Excavator, the Zen platform would come with support for DDR4 and finally move AMD down to a 14nm node. For the architecture itself, AMD implemented SMT, completely redesigned its cache hierarchy, and added a micro-op cache to aid an updated branch predictor.

Two months after Kaby Lake rolled out, AMD launched the Ryzen 7 1800X. The revolution didn’t happen in a day. In our Ryzen 7 1800X review, reviewer Paul Alcorn (now Tom’s Hardware editor-in-chief) wrote: “AMD's Ryzen 7 launch represents more than just a new CPU family. For most of our readers, it signals the return of competition to the enthusiast-oriented processor market. And considering the flagship 1800X’s potent cost advantage compared to Intel's Core i7-6900K… Ryzen 7 does deliver. It's just not as universally superior as the company wanted everyone to believe.”

AMD still had quite the year ahead. A month later, the Ryzen 5 1600X launched with performance that could rival Broadwell-E, just for a much cheaper price. And by Summer, the Ryzen 3 1300X proved you didn’t need an expensive CPU and motherboard to get into overclocking. AMD capped its Ryzen rollout with Threadripper, scaling up the Zen microarchitecture to massive core arrays and finally bringing something to the HEDT market — a market that Intel had almost wholly owned since the Pentium 4 days.

Still, Zen had shortcomings, particularly in games, where just about any quad-core from Intel still ruled the roost. AMD was competitive, but Intel was still firmly in the driver’s seat. It barely reacted to the Ryzen onslaught over the summer, rolling out its high-end Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X HEDT offerings throughout the back half of 2017. Even then, however, problems started emerging.

Kaby Lake-X was effectively a rerelease of Kaby Lake with a bit of extra headroom, but restricted to the expensive X299 platform. It was discontinued less than a year after release. Skylake-X was Intel’s true next-gen HEDT offering, signaled by the first use of “Core i9” in front of its flagship SKU. It performed like an Extreme Edition, and it was priced like one too, despite an issue in thermal dissipation that we uncovered in our Core i9-7900X review. Meanwhile, AMD was rapid-firing firmware and chipset updates for its small Ryzen range, and fixing several issues that came up in reviews in the process.

Less than a year after Kaby Lake launched, Intel released Coffee Lake, which was yet another Skylake revision built on 14nm, but this time with extra cores in tow. As you can read in our Core i7-8700K review, Coffee Lake did what Intel wanted it to do, shoring up the fight in heavily-threaded productivity applications against AMD while maintaining leadership in games. Still, AMD was making headway. By the end of 2017, estimates suggest AMD took back anywhere from 2% to 12% market share from Intel, with the higher end of the spectrum coming mainly from the DIY PC market. That’s no small feat for a company that was dead in the water with CPUs 12 months earlier.

Back on more even footing, the next goal post was a node shrink. Intel was gunning for 10nm, which is a milestone it failed to meet with both Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake. AMD, as a fabless designer, was at the mercy of its then-partner GlobalFoundries for the next node shrink. AMD struck first with Ryzen 2000 in early 2018, built on GlobalFoundries 12LP node, which was a revision of the 14LP (14nm) node used in the original Zen. Fittingly, AMD called it Zen+.

Debuting the architecture was the Ryzen 7 2700X, which was an iterative update. However, it helped reacquaint the market with the progress AMD had made. Zen+ came with higher frequencies and reduced memory latency, and all of the software adjustments AMD had made after the original Zen launch. And the range seemed specifically designed to undermine Intel, offering overclocking support across the full stack (and with B-series chipsets), and bundling a surprisingly decent cooler in the box.

Intel still held the edge in gaming, but the margins were narrowing, especially with a bit of overclocking thrown into the mix. Intel was feeling the heat, due in no small part to its continued issues moving down to 10nm. It responded in late 2018 with Coffee Lake Refresh, bringing the Core i9 branding into its main lineup for the first time with the Core i9-9900K and offering an eight-core, 16-thread chip. The strategy, it seems, was to push out AMD at the high-end, as Ryzen 7 was closing in on Core i7.

It worked. Intel had the fastest gaming processor on the market, and even the Core i7-9700K managed to push Intel’s lead in the Ryzen 7 battle higher. These marginal updates were buying time for AMD and Intel. Both companies clearly understood that whoever could go below 14nm first would have a massive advantage, and likely define an entirely new market dynamic.

AMD claimed that advantage for itself with the introduction of Zen 2 in mid-2019. Bolstered by TSMC’s 7nm node, AMD pushed out the Ryzen 9 3900X, moving beyond eight cores to AMD’s first 12-core consumer design. Intel held a slight edge in gaming through Coffee Lake Refresh, as you can read in our Ryzen 7 3800X review, but that delta was becoming less important as AMD took the lead in heavily-threaded workloads.

Later in the year, AMD rolled out the Ryzen 9 3950X, the first 16-core desktop processor ever. It was a bloodbath. Less than a year earlier, Intel had introduced its Skylake-X HEDT platform, including the Core i9-9980XE priced at $2,000. Now, at stock settings, the $750 Ryzen 9 3950X offered better multithreaded performance, along with competitive single-threaded and gaming performance. And you didn’t need to shell out for Intel’s expensive HEDT platform. And you could unlock PCIe 4.0, whereas Skylake-X (and even the following Cascade Lake-X) were locked to PCIe 3.0. You don’t spend top dollar on an HEDT platform for last-gen connectivity.

Intel was getting pushed into a corner, and it followed up less than six months later with Comet Lake to stave off AMD’s Ryzen onslaught. The flagship Core i9-10900K allowed Intel to maintain the lead in gaming, but now, AMD was in a clear lead in applications with the Ryzen 9 3950X.

Reviewing the Core i9-10900K, Alcorn wrote: “The Core i9-10900K is exactly what we would expect from an overclocked 10-core 14nm Skylake derivative: Exceptional performance in gaming and lightly-threaded workloads, competitive performance in multi-threaded work, and downright ugly power consumption and thermal output. And that's pretty much what you get with the Core i9-10900K – an overclocked 14nm processor right out of the box.”

AMD didn’t let up. It moved onto Zen 3 later in the year, launching its 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X alongside the main range in late 2020. And with its fourth Ryzen salvo launched, the battle was over. Opening our Ryzen 9 5950X review, Alcorn wrote, “With the Ryzen 5000 series, it's fair to say that AMD has finally, and fully, eclipsed Intel's performance dominance in desktop PCs.” It was a clean sweep, with AMD taking the lead in gaming, multithreaded, and single-threaded performance. Three years and four CPU generations later, AMD was back on top.

Forging a new path (2021 - 2024)

Forging a new path (2021 - 2024)

In the years leading up to 2021, it had become clear that a tick-tock, or even a tick-tock-tock, wasn’t possible any longer. Process shrinks were arriving later, and a pesky little pandemic threw the tight supply chain required for chip manufacturing into a frenzy. Both AMD and Intel knew they needed a different approach, but that would manifest in wildly different ways.

Intel was all-in on a hybrid architecture, using a mixture of microarchitectures on a single package to bolster core counts, similar to Arm-based designs. Intel talked a lot about Alder Lake leading into 2021, overshadowing its own launch of 11th-Gen Rocket Lake chips. The flagship Core i9-11900K was a massive disappointment, carrying all of the issues of the previous-gen Core i9-10900K while packing two fewer cores. Yes, Intel actually cut two cores from its flagship.

It seems Intel knew the issues with Rocket Lake. The chips launched with little to no fanfare, and as opposed to a gradual rollout like we see with most CPU generations, Intel blasted every model of Rocket Lake onto the market, knowing full well that Alder Lake chips would take their place eight months later. AMD, with renewed confidence, slowly built out the Zen 3 lineup with new APUs and variations of Ryzen 5000 as it worked on its next-gen Zen 4 architecture.

In late 2021, Intel swept Rocket Lake under the rug with the release of Alder Lake. Intel had finally moved on from 14nm with Intel 7 (10nm), and it was mostly successful. Intel reclaimed top placements in gaming, multithreaded, and single-threaded performance, and although the margins were thin, Alder Lake made it clear that Intel wouldn’t go quietly. “The Alder Lake processors mark a massive generational leap forward for Intel in nearly all facets, including gaming, performance in lightly- and heavily-threaded work, power consumption, overclocking, and platform connectivity options,” wrote Alcorn in our Core i9-12900K review.

AMD was working on something unique of its own, however. Zen 4 was in the oven, and it was clear there would be a competitive battle with Alder Lake. But before Zen 4 arrived, AMD introduced the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. It was the first processor with AMD’s 3D V-Cache packaging, and at the time, it looked like a slightly-tuned processor targeting gamers, with somewhere in the range of a 10% to 15% uplift in gaming performance specifically. In a surprising turn, the speculation actually undersold just how big of a deal the Ryzen 7 5800X3D would become.

Six months after the release of the Core i9-12900K, AMD was back on top of the gaming charts with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, no less sporting a last-gen architecture and an SRAM stacking technique that limited boost clocks and locked the multiplier down. It outran the Core i9-12900K by nearly 10% in games while costing hundreds less, and it was nearly 30% faster than a stock Ryzen 7 5800X, as you can see in our Ryzen 7 5800X3D review.

Intel would come back with Raptor Lake in late 2022, but the Ryzen 7 5800X3D established a new category of true gaming CPUs that traded some application performance for peak frame rates. And that’s a category of chips that even today Intel hasn’t managed to crack.

AMD came first, however, launching Zen 4 in September 2022. The flagship Ryzen 9 7950X managed to leapfrog the Core i9-12900K, as you can see in our Ryzen 9 7950X review, but not by much, and the Ryzen 7 5800X3D remained at the top of the gaming charts. Immediately, speculation around 3D V-Cache chips for Zen 4 went into motion. Also tampering the Zen 4 release was an entirely new platform, which required costly DDR5 memory.

Intel capitalized with Raptor Lake mere weeks later. The flagship Core i9-13900K was back on top across tests, even managing to outclass the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in games. For the first time since the heyday of Athlon, we had a hotly competitive CPU market with AMD and Intel leapfrogging each other with each new release. Still, there was a niche that wasn’t being filled. 3D V-Cache disrupted the status quo for gaming processors, but it came with a significant trade-off to application performance. The stage was set for a CPU that could offer the best of both worlds.

AMD delivered that in early 2023 with the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and (to a much lesser degree) Ryzen 9 7900X3D. A couple months before, Intel cracked the 6 GHz barrier out of the box with the Core i9-13900KS, but AMD was offering something more compelling than peak clocks. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D managed to outclass Intel in multithreaded and single-threaded performance, all while offering a double-digit jump in gaming performance thanks to 3D V-Cache.

Raptor Lake saw a refresh later in 2023, and although the flagship was able to close the application performance gap in our Core i9-14900K review, AMD still held a firm grip on gaming performance, especially with the trimmed-down and relatively affordable Ryzen 7 7800X3D. AMD had taken the lead, but Intel, finally, executed its tick-tock-tock strategy and set its eyes on a radically new architecture in the form of Arrow Lake.

Reckoning with the real world (2024 - today)

Reckoning with the real world (2024 - today)

Under AMD’s thumb and clearly behind in pace, Intel needed to innovate. The result was Arrow Lake. Like Bulldozer, it’s easy to write Arrow Lake off in hindsight, especially given how recent it is. As you can read in our Core Ultra 9 285K review, Arrow Lake chips only marginally improved in application performance over their 14th-Gen counterparts, and they were actually slower across most games. But, architecturally, Arrow Lake is as big a swing as Bulldozer was.

For the first time, Intel outsourced manufacturing to TSMC, clearly behind the Taiwanese manufacturer for cutting-edge nodes. It disabled Hyper-Threading, killing off a staple of Intel CPUs for decades, and it doubled down on Intel’s hybrid architecture. Those bets didn’t pay off, but they were big bets for a company struggling to reckon with a reinvigorated AMD.

AMD followed up Zen 4, predictably, with Zen 5 in mid-2024, shortly before the Arrow Lake release. With Arrow Lakes' struggles, it’s easy to forget the problems Zen 5 had at launch, and the relatively small generational uplift it offers even today. AMD has continued to build out this lineup with X3D chips, and it finally delivered 3D V-Cache on both CCDs with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2. But going back to our Ryzen 9 9950X review, Zen 5, at its core, isn’t the massive uplift we had become accustomed to in the early days of Zen.

Intel tried to give Arrow Lake a bit more life with a small refresh earlier this year in the form of the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, and those CPUs set the stage for the next era of CPUs. They put Intel into the position AMD found itself during the Bulldozer/Steamroller days, clearancing off silicon to maintain a competitive position in the market.

That’s where we are today, with our sights set on Zen 6 and Nova Lake. But there are some realities in the PC enthusiast space that we have to contend with today. DRAM pricing is out of control, and showing no signs of slowing down, and a sudden boost in demand for CPUs for agentic AI means consumer chips have taken a backseat. Zen 6 and Nova Lake were both expected by the end of the year; it’s looking more likely that they’ll slip into 2027.

History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes, and we can see traces of days past over the last 30 years start to creep into the dynamics today. Today, we see a defiant AMD and an Intel that seems ready to get scrappy in order to earn back market share. Will it pay off? We don’t know, but Tom’s Hardware will be here to cover whatever comes next in the world of CPUs, just as we’ve been for the past 30 years.

It has now been 30 years since our founder and namesake, Dr. Thomas Pabst, wrote the first articles that came to define Tom’s Hardware, focusing on providing unbiased, fact-based reporting backed by comprehensive testing, a mission that we strive to continue today. To celebrate our 30^th Anniversary, Tom’s Hardware is kicking off a series of articles that look back at the evolution of PC hardware and peripherals over the course of the last 30 years, with the first being a look at the evolution of the CPU. But before we dive into the history of CPUs and GPUs, let’s take a quick look back at the early history of Tom’s Hardware.

A then-practicing doctor and surgeon, Pabst began testing hardware in the early days of the desktop PC revolution, first publishing under the name of Tom’s Roadrunner Page in 1996, then rocketing the brand to fame after it evolved to become Tom’s Hardware Guide later that same year. In the early days, Pabst focused on testing motherboards and CPUs, but he also began testing graphics cards with the Nvidia Riva 128 being the first, followed by others like the 3Dfx Voodoo, among many, and he even penned a custom benchmark that was billed as the world’s first real-world 3D benchmark. Those foundational categories still live on today in our coverage.

Pabst’s biggest breakthrough came when he published an unsanctioned pre-release review of an Intel Pentium II CPU that he acquired from friends in the publishing business, who also published reviews. Naturally, Intel wasn’t fond of the resulting negative coverage, and the firm threatened to pull ads from two of the publications involved if the reviews weren’t removed. The ensuing spat garnered widespread coverage, with the conflict making it into the pages of the New York Times and other mainstream news outlets. Intel admitted to using its advertising contracts to threaten the sites and apologized, and the issue thrust the Germany-based Tom’s Hardware into the spotlight on the international stage right as CeBIT 1997 began, where Pabst met many of the industry contacts that helped move the site forward.

A few years later, Pabst discovered persistent bugs with the Intel Pentium III, some of which he exposed in Linux, which wasn’t commonly used for benchmarking at the time. Pabst refused to surrender his sample to Intel, saying it was his only proof of the issue. Due to the bugs Pabst discovered, Intel eventually pulled the processors from the market until a new chip stepping could be developed. Intel then excluded Pabst from coverage of the Pentium 4, which he viewed as another retaliation, sparking another very public conflict that cemented the brand's reputation for uncompromising independent journalism.

Tom’s Hardware Guide evolved over the intervening 30 years, spreading into new categories like networking and news coverage, eventually becoming known as Tom's Hardware — though it is still easy to spot our veteran readers because they still refer to the site as ‘THG.’ Pabst sold the site in 2007 to Best of Media Group and served as Chairman until 2008. Our sister site, Tom’s Guide, was born in 2007, and Tom’s Hardware has also branched out with multiple non-English licensees of the brand over the years, with Tom’s Hardware France and Tom’s Hardware Italy still operating to this day. Tom's Hardware was acquired by our current publisher, Future plc, in 2018.

PC building certainly looks a lot different today than it did when Pabst first began testing PC hardware. Back in those early days of the PC, things such as user-friendly BIOS tuning didn’t exist; enthusiasts simply adjusted jumpers and DIP switches to fine-tune their systems, paving the way for the overclockers of today with skill and a determination to wring more performance out of their systems. That spirit lives on in our coverage and in our vibrant community of enthusiasts.

You’ll see constant references to our past in our valued forums, where thousands of enthusiasts, from newcomers to veterans of 20 years or more (many who still remember setting DIP switches by hand), help the community solve vexing issues with their tech while also providing valuable insight and commentary on the latest happenings in the tech sphere.

Today, our ethos remains the same — we strive to deliver unbiased coverage of the latest technology, backed by comprehensive benchmarking to underline our conclusions, thus delivering the best possible buying advice to our readers. We now cover the full breadth of PC components and peripherals while continuing to branch out into new areas that resonate with our audience, such as 3D printing and associated products, but we’ll always remain grounded in our core areas of PCs and PC components.

Despite newfound challenges facing the publishing business, such as the rise of AI that lifts our expertise without compensation — and often without attribution — and an ever-more punishing Google landscape, we work tirelessly to stay on our current growth trajectory while developing additional new means to serve our readers, such as our Tom’s Hardware Premium service. This subscription-based service provides our readers with longer-form news, analysis, testing, and features for those who want to dig even deeper into our core coverage areas. Our service also includes access to our Bench database, which provides up-to-date benchmarks of the latest PC hardware in an easy-to-compare format.

The silicon, software, and publishing landscape have all changed dramatically over the last three decades, but our goals haven’t shifted, and yes, we still carry on with many of our old traditions. We thank you, the readers, for providing us with the opportunity to share our passion for hardware with you for the last thirty years, and invite you to join us for the next 30.

In less than two years, the entire market for PC hardware has erupted into a high-priced inferno. Catastrophic might seem hyperbolic, but if you’re trying to build or buy a PC, the impact of the AI boom on prices has been immense, with costs consistently bolting upwards. Buying RAM, SSDs, traditional hard drives, and graphics cards, along with the PCs and laptops that require them, is now significantly more expensive than it was in 2024 and 2025, which makes finding a great deal an almost essential part of the process.

That’s easier said than done, of course. Like Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster, a truly great deal on PC hardware can feel like an impossible myth. As somebody who spends their days looking for deals, however, I can say that’s not the case. There are plenty of good deals out there each week, if you know where to look and what to avoid. Here are some of the places you should be checking to find the gear you need at a better price.

Bundles, bundles, and more bundles

A component bundle isn’t a new concept; we’ve seen retailers offer combo deals that throw together various bits you’ll need to build a PC for years. Newegg’s bundle deals, however, have been a lifeline for PC builders over the last few months. If you’ve been a regular Tom’s Hardware reader, you’ll have seen a fair few of them yourself.

There’s a good reason why: value for money. Newegg’s RAM bundles, while not universally good value, allow buyers to pick up RAM at an effective cost that is significantly lower than buying it separately in many cases. While the RAM deals have been among our favorites lately, Newegg also combines SSDs, monitors, GPUs, and other components into bundles, although you’ll need to carefully review the deals to see if they’re worth the value.

Other retailers offer combo deals, too, including Amazon (in rare cases) and B&H Photo, but with less frequency than Newegg. If you need a bargain for your budget, refresh Newegg’s Combo Deals page on a daily basis, because the deals are always changing.

Microcenter is a PC bargain powerhouse if you can visit one

Microcenter often advertises deals on PC hardware that are in-store only. While this is inconvenient for those who prefer to shop online, it does mean that scalping bots can’t just hoover up any great deals on kit. You need to physically go to a store to pick up the best prices.

Like Newegg, it also runs combo deals that combine RAM, CPU, and motherboard together for a great price. You’ll also find open box and clearance stock on sale, with prices hugely marked down compared to buying new, as well as in-store exclusives that can’t be beaten via its online rivals.

The biggest problem with Microcenter is location: it has only 30 stores across the United States, with plenty of states missing out on the action. If you’ve got one nearby, however, make sure to pop in regularly to see what you can pick up.

Buying second-hand can sometimes save your money

Buying used isn’t always a bad idea. While plenty of second-hand scams exist, if you’re savvy with your purchases, you can save money on building or upgrading your PC. This is especially true for the components that require a little less care, like cases, peripherals, fans, and coolers.

You don’t need to buy from individual sellers to do this, either. Certified refurbished hardware, straight from manufacturers or trusted third-party resellers, can also get you a tidy discount on parts or full-blown builds. Woot, Amazon’s budget marketplace, is a great place to find sales on refurbs from brands like MSI and Dell on a regular basis. Some brands also offer their own refurbished products, including Apple, which offers up to 15% off and includes an additional warranty.

Don’t dismiss the private sellers, but make sure you use your best judgement if you decide to buy gear this way. Our full guide on buying second-hand PC hardware will help you bypass the scams.

Woot is Amazon, but cheaper

Woot is a website that, as a deals writer, I check on a daily basis. As it's owned by Amazon, you can take some assurance in the fact that the company isn’t just going to go bankrupt overnight. It’s a tried and, for many people, trusted retailer.

That’s not why I like Woot. I like Woot because it’s cheap. You can pick up serious bargains on PC hardware at Woot. Laptops, PCs, peripherals, and components can all be found at varying discounts, some as high as 75-80% compared to their highs. The deals aren’t universally great, but when they’re good, they’re good. A good example is with RAM, where we’ve seen DDR5 RAM kits drop $70-100 below anything you’ll find elsewhere.

As with all good discount warehouses, the deals on Woot will ebb and flow. Sales on certain brands will appear and disappear. The best deals will sell out in hours, if not minutes. If you’re planning a build or upgrade, make sure to look at Woot first.

Check the price before you buy

A huge price cut can seem like the deal of the century, but don’t be fooled. You need to perform due diligence on deals before you jump in, even if you’re being bombarded by ‘limited-time only’ labels. This can let you narrow down a shortlist of products to buy or, in some cases, force you to change your plans and look at buying another product entirely.

Unfortunately, most retailers aren’t hugely open about their historical pricing for products, so you have to look elsewhere. A good tool to keep in your arsenal is Camelcamelcamel, which gives you historical price data for products sold on Amazon. The graphs allow you to see immediately how good a ‘discount’ really is.

For example, Amazon has an LG monitor listed on sale right now. Camelcamelcamel’s data shows that the price has steadily dropped since it launched, from as high as $850. The most recent Camel data shows a price of $484.99, but the new price, $399, is a new record low. That’s a deal worth grabbing, and Camel’s data makes it easy to understand.

Use Newegg’s PC Builder to help you put together a bargain build

Other PC building sites exist, but I like Newegg’s custom PC builder tool. It lets you find all of the parts you’ll need for different projects, whether it’s a 4K gaming PC or a budget 1080p rig, and gives you the immediate price you’ll need to pay. In some cases, it’ll also apply additional combo discounts, as well as extra coupons, to help you bring the prices down further.

It works in a few different ways, depending on how comfortable you are putting a build together. You could start by selecting your individual components. I’d probably start by picking out my CPU first, as this will help you determine the type of RAM you’ll need, as well as the motherboard.

If that seems too difficult, you can use Newegg’s AI search to put something together for you, or use the popular ranked builds, with all of the products you’ll need grouped together. The ranked builds are useful, as they can give you an idea of the type of build you can get for your money right now. If it’s too high, you can always mix-and-match by buying new with used, or by carefully picking up deals as you go.

Patience, luck, and compromise

Unfortunately, you can’t go back in time to 2024. PC hardware is more expensive now than it was, and with the AI revolution showing no signs of stopping, that’s unlikely to change for the time being. If you can’t stick with your existing rig, a great deal on an upgrade could be your only option, as long as you don’t rush out your build.

The limiting factor, of course, is that you might end up paying more if you wait around. There isn’t a way around that. Components are getting more expensive, but if you follow these rules, you should find reasonable deals pop up each week. Some weeks do feel slower for deals, most noticeably before or after a big sales event like Black Friday, but that doesn’t mean they stop completely.

You’ll have to compromise, however. 2024 and 2025 pricing is long gone. That’s a hard, bitter pill to swallow for all of us. Judgmentally, you’ll need to look at the value of products right now, not three or six months ago, and decide whether you’re comfortable with the prices on offer. With luck, you’ll find some of the diamonds in the rough.

There’s been a shift toward using a single DIMM of DDR5 to skirt the worst of the RAM pricing crisis. AMD has suggested to us previously, at least, that it’s an option PC builders are exploring, and it’s a wrinkle that’s shown up in dozens of prebuilts; one that we’ve been careful to avoid when recommending products, particularly during peak shopping events. But just how much gaming performance are you giving up with a single DIMM when using one of the best CPUs for gaming?

The conventional wisdom is that you’re giving up quite a bit of performance, resting on the ideas of previous DDR generations, where going down a single stick will cut your bandwidth in half. The same is true with DDR5, but things are a bit messier, which we’ll dig into later.

At a high level, using a single DDR5 DIMM doesn’t compromise gaming performance by nearly as much as you might expect. We saw drops of around 8% to 10% across Intel and AMD CPUs, and less than a 5% difference with AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

A proper dual-channel configuration is still the way to go for optimal performance. However, our testing shows that even a single DDR5 DIMM offers superior performance to dual-channel DDR4 on CPUs that support both memory generations.

Using a single DIMM isn’t ideal, and it brings up compatibility issues if you plan on adding another DIMM down the line (another area we’ll touch more on in-depth later). But as a stopgap measure amid surging DRAM prices, a single DIMM of DDR5 holds up surprisingly well in gaming scenarios, and it represents a nice on-ramp into a DDR5 platform while prices are out of control.

Testing single-DIMM DDR5 in games

The geomean below speaks for itself. Moving down to a single DIMM drops some performance, but it’s not nearly as stark as I expected. There are some important notes about how we tested before dissecting the results, however.

As usual, we tested at 1080p with a mixture of High and Ultra settings, using Nvidia’s RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition to minimize the influence of the GPU. That’s even more important here, as we’re not evaluating CPUs but the memory that feeds the CPU. We're looking at a separate GPU and CPU here, as well; dual-channel memory is vital if you're using an iGPU.

We also wanted to create a realistic testing scenario. Assuming you’re going for a 2x16GB configuration, that means starting with a single 16GB DIMM, not a 32GB one. That’s what we did here. Our single-DIMM configurations run with just 16GB of memory, while dual-DIMM configurations run with 32GB. Capacity isn’t a major limitation for our testing here, though it will pose performance issues if you’re running several applications alongside your game.

The Ryzen 5 7600X was our biggest loser, dropping 10.9% of its average performance across our 13-game geomean with a single 16GB DIMM. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, meanwhile, dropped 8.7% of its average performance, while the Core i5-14600K similarly dropped 8.3% of its performance. The 1% lows are especially notable here, scaling with average performance rather than falling off a cliff.

Unsurprisingly, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D fared the best, dropping just 2.8% of its performance on average. As you’ll see through our individual game tests, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D shows identical performance with two DIMMs and a single DIMM in multiple games. The large and speedy L3 minimizes the impact of using a single DIMM, giving AMD’s 3D V-Cache CPUs another notch in their belt (as if they needed another).

Our other geomeans don’t say much. A single-DIMM configuration consumes a few watts less, leading to slightly lower efficiency when balanced against the lowered performance.

007 First Light, the newest game in our test suite, shows good scaling across our test pool, so it’s a good place to start. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus dropped 8.9% of its performance with a single DIMM, while the 9800X3D dropped 6.5%. The 14600K is worth highlighting here. A single DIMM lost us 7.9%, but that’s still better than dual-channel DDR4, and by a decent 6.8% margin.

This trend is fairly consistent, too. Starfield is punishing for single-DIMM configurations, with the 14600K losing 10.6% of its average performance. Even then, a single DDR5 DIMM is 6.9% faster than dual-channel DDR4. Intel platforms can scale up to high data rates, and we use 7,200 MT/s for Intel chips. With slower speeds, the performance will equalize. Still, I’d strongly consider a single DDR5 DIMM if you’ve been eyeing an LGA 1700 platform with DDR4, assuming you’re primarily focused on gaming.

Starfield shows the benefits of 3D V-Cache in this single-DIMM configuration clearly. While the performance losses with other CPUs are brutal in this title, the 9800X3D dropped just a few frames, a 1.6% decrease in average performance.

Doom: The Dark Ages is similarly harsh on single-DIMM configurations. The Ryzen 5 7600X dropped 17.3% of its average performance, and the 270K Plus fell by 14%. The 9800X3D holds up well, however, with just a 4.2% average performance loss. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (in the gallery below) shows a similar dynamic.

However, the addition of 3D V-Cache mainly helps in these games where we see bigger losses with other CPUs. There are several games in our suite where the performance loss between a single DIMM and dual-channel configuration was minor, particularly in GPU-heavy titles. The Last of Us Part One shows that in action.

Similarly, the performance loss is minor in Counter-Strike 2, just a handful of frames even north of 600 FPS. Even the Core i5-14600K, which was hit the hardest by far, dropped just 5.9% of its average performance (and it’s still faster than a dual-channel DDR4 configuration).

You can browse the results of the other games we tested in the gallery above, though they tell much the same story as the titles we highlighted. The two biggest learnings from this testing are that a single, fast DDR5 DIMM often outpaces dual-channel DDR4, and that AMD’s 3D V-Cache can smooth over the rough edges of using a single DIMM, particularly in those memory-sensitive titles.

How we tested

We tested on our normal test bed that we use for CPU reviews, with the only difference being dropping one of our DIMMs. As usual, we enabled XMP/EXPO for testing, both on single- and dual-DIMM configurations, opting for higher speeds on Intel platforms. AMD’s sweet spot is around 6,000 MT/s.

The data rate is noteworthy for the DDR4 comparison, in particular. With slower DDR5, we expect the delta between dual-channel DDR4 and single-DIMM DDR5 to decrease.

In addition to enabling XMP/EXPO, we disable Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), enable Resizeable BAR, and disable any automatic overclocking features that aren’t covered by warranty, including AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive and Intel’s Extreme performance profile.

Complexities of DDR5

DDR5 has much higher data rates compared to DDR4 (2x or more), and that’s the result of significantly more complexity on DDR5 DIMMs compared to DDR4. Notably for this testing are the two 32-bit subchannels of DDR5, as well as enlarged prefetch and bank groups. You are getting half the total bandwidth with a single DDR5 DIMM, absolutely, but it’s a little more nuanced than simply running your memory in a single-channel configuration.

DDR4 uses a single 72-bit channel, and 64 of those bits transfer data (the additional 8 are for ECC). With DDR5, you get two 40-bit subchannels, 32 of which are used for data transfer. Critically, these subchannels have their own Command/Address (CA) interface, allowing them to operate independently of each other.

In addition, DDR5 doubles the prefetch size to 16N, doubles the number of banks and bank groups, and increases burst length from 8 bytes to 16 bytes. The math here is straightforward enough. With DDR4, you can transfer 64 bits of data over the interface at a burst of 8 bytes, giving you 64 bytes of data and aligning with cache line sizes. Each of the subchannels in DDR5 can transfer 64 bytes of data, as well, with a 32-bit width and burst length of 16 bytes.

It’s pseudo-dual-channel memory on a single DIMM. There are two independent memory operations that can happen each cycle, both of which transfer 64 bytes of data. That is a big reason why even a single DDR5 DIMM (particularly one with a higher data rate) can outpace even a proper dual-channel DDR4 configuration.

The common wisdom about using a single DIMM comes mainly from previous DDR generations, where you can only get that single 64-byte transfer each cycle, necessitating a second DIMM to have two independent operations.

Let me be clear: two DDR5 DIMMs are still better. Instead of two operations per cycle, you can perform four. The main difference is that, for modern CPUs and games, just those two operations give you the vast majority of your performance, and you don’t run into a massive performance bottleneck as you do with just a single operation via DDR4. After all, there are still a lot of DDR4 systems out there.

On the issue of compatibility

The elephant in the room with upgrading to a DDR5 platform with a single DIMM is compatibility. If you get a single DDR5 DIMM now, you should plan to add another in the future. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of easy answers when it comes to combining two DIMMs that aren’t in a kit together. It should work, but mixing and matching can lead to stability issues and/or lowered performance.

Generally, combining two DIMMs of the same spec should work. For instance, if you bought this Patriot Viper Venom DDR5-6000 CL30 DIMM to start your new build, and then bought a second one later, it should work. “Should” carries a lot of weight on its shoulders, however. Maybe Patriot sources DRAM from multiple places, or your second DIMM’s timings don’t completely align with your first. That could cause stability or performance issues.

There have been some attempts to get past this hurdle, such as the ROG Certified program with select Asus motherboards, but it’s impossible to know for sure if two separate DIMMs will work together or not without testing. The best you can do is to make sure you buy the same brand of memory, with the same spec, if you add a second DIMM. Make sure to keep your receipt handy in the event you need to return it, as well.

Once you have your second DIMM, make sure to test it first at stock JEDEC speeds/timings (no XMP/EXPO). Run games or applications you normally run, and then use a utility like MemTest64 to check for stability. I’d recommend keeping your PC running in this state for a few days to see if any BSODs, application crashes, or poor performance issues pop up. After that’s done, repeat the process with XMP/EXPO enabled, assuming you’re using matching DIMMs (incompatible XMP/EXPO profiles won’t work together).

Assuming DRAM prices continue at an elevated rate before you upgrade, you may want to consider investing in a dual-channel kit down the line and selling your single DIMM. Even kits can run into compatibility issues, though the likelihood is far, far lower.

M.2-based SSDs have been around for about a decade now in PCs, and have all but replaced the much larger and notably slower 3.5-inch hard drives, and even 2.5-inch drives, both spinners and SSDs. Over that time, we’ve seen these tiny drives increase not only in capacity but also in speed as new flash, controllers, and PCIe generations are released. And with that increase in performance comes increased heat that you need to manage. This is especially true when using the latest-generation PCIe 5.0-based drives, which tend to run hotter than previous-generation drives and are more prone to thermal throttling and performance loss.

Many of these drives already come with heatsinks to help manage thermal output. And so long as it isn’t a simple thin plate, many do the job well enough to either delay or prevent thermal throttling.

However, not all include heatsinks, and if your workflows lean on storage, longer transfers can be significantly slower due to the drive overheating and thermal throttling. The amount of throttling, if any at all (some actually won’t), varies by circumstance. Whether by drive and controller, workload, and even case airflow, these factors affect whether you’ll see thermal throttling and how severe it is. If time is money, this is obviously a bad thing. The longer it takes to read or write the files you need, the longer it takes to finish your work and get to something more pleasurable, or move on to the next task.

You may be thinking: My motherboard has heatsinks for M.2 drives, and of course, if you aren’t using a bargain-basement or business board, you would be right. Those also come in all shapes and sizes (plate-style to massive), with varying cooling capabilities. In general, the more mass a cooler has and the greater its surface area, the better it can cool. There are other variables, including thermal pad efficiency, chassis airflow, and, of course, physical contact, but at a high level, this is the way.

But we wondered if these motherboard heatsinks actually make good contact to whisk away the heat? After seeing seemingly random complaints online in forums and on Reddit over the years, we tested the primary M.2 heatsink from the top PCIe 5.0 M.2 socket on 20 different motherboards to see how many actually make good contact with the included heatsink. And I was honestly a bit surprised at what we found.

What thermal throttling looks like and M.2 contact is so difficult

So what does thermal throttling look like on M.2 drives? It’s a sudden, typically severe, drop in data transfer speeds, appearing as a sharp cliff where blazing-fast speeds plummet to a fraction of the drive’s rated performance, or a saw-tooth pattern where it drops, cools below the critical temperature thresholds (typically by reducing the duty cycle and capping the IO stream and data bandwidth), then jumps back up. Some drives even drop back to PCIe 4.0 to limit bandwidth and reduce thermal throttling.

As you can see from the charts below (which contain throttled and non-throttled results from the same drive), the heatsink-less Transcend 260S 2TB PCIe 5.0 SSD we used for this testing throttled just after the 50-second mark, dropping from just under 4,000 MB/s to around 1,700 MB/s. It then briefly recovered after dropping below its critical temperature threshold (typically between 70 and 85 degrees Celsius) around 90 seconds into the transfer. Several seconds later, it dropped again, and minutes later, it dropped again, this time slowing performance even further to around 600 MB/s, over six times slower than its steady-state performance and much closer to SATA-based SSDs than PCIe 5.0.

That said, it takes a pretty big file/set of files to transfer for over 10 minutes on these speedy drives, so we don’t expect to see this behavior too often during mainstream workflows. Also, how much performance is lost varies by drive and conditions. But this gives you a great idea of just how much performance you can lose.

You’d think that designing a heatsink for cooling hardware the size of a stick of gum would be easy for engineering teams. However, it’s not as cut-and-dry as you may imagine. The reason is that the M.2 standard (governed by the PCI-SIG) lists only maximum Z-heights for single and double-sided drives, leaving board partners to decide, for example, how thick the thermal pad should be. And while thermal pads work better with some compression, too much reduces efficiency, so there is a Goldilocks zone, but one that’s tough to hit consistently, since heights vary by drive.

Below is a handy table that shows the different M.2 SSD form factor standards. Single-sided devices are identified with the “S” in the table, while double-sided drives use the “D,” which shows the z-heights on the top and bottom.

A single-sided drive has components (NAND chips, controller, and DRAM) on only one side of the PCB. These drives can be 1.2-2.0 mm tall on the top side (2.2 to 2.38 mm with the PCB). Double-sided drives range from 1.2-1.5 mm on the top and 0.7-1.35 mm (3.5 to 3.8 mm total thickness). While 0.8 mm on single-sided drives and 0.15 and 0.3 mm for double-sided don’t sound like a lot, they can be the difference between good contact and none at all. So you can see the problem motherboard partners face when trying to consider all the available M.2 drives and their varying component heights.

Results

We picked 20 modern motherboards from AMD with B850 and X870/X870E chipsets, as well as options for Intel's B760, B860, and Z890. They range from budget boards with simple plate-style primary M.2 heatsinks to flagships with massive coolers. While this is only a small cross-section of available motherboards, it gives us a general idea of how good the contact is across brands at various price points, and whether those variables even matter.

We test the contact by removing the primary M.2 heatsink from the motherboard and taking off any protective plastic film. We then install the drive into the M.2 socket, ensuring the motherboard secures it properly with its default latching mechanism. After that, we reinstall the heatsink, ensuring it’s also properly secured. The process isn’t any different from how you would install yours, though I personally press down a bit on the heatsink (on all of my builds).

Earlier, I mentioned I was surprised at the results of our contact tests, and here’s why. Of our 20 tested motherboards, only six made good contact across the ICs on the PCB, and what we’d consider adequate compression across the length of the drive we used for testing (a double-sided 2TB Crucial T705 that’s 3.8mm thick). Five other boards had questionable contact with very light, but complete compression across the drive. Finally, nine boards didn’t make good contact, only touching the controller (arguably the most important part to prevent throttling), and not everything, be it the top or the bottom. See the pictures from each board below.ALBM (40x - board contact images)

Among the brands, MSI had the worst track record across this selection of boards, with only two of six making good contact (Z890 Tomahawk II and X870E Godlike X Edition). The rest had issues with complete coverage, only touching the NAND or the Controller.

Gigabyte had only one of its three tested boards, the Z890 Aorus Elite Duo X, make complete contact on both sides of our double-sided M.2 module, in part because of the M.2 EZ-Flex technology, which offers a flexible base to improve contact between the heatsink and SSD. The former flagship, the X870E Aorus Xtreme AI Top, also uses double-sided pads. Still, it doesn’t utilize the M.2 EZ-Flex technology, and so it made contact only on the top, and there only with the controller.

ASRock had the most tested boards (seven), and four of those had adequate contact. This includes the new X870E Taichi White, the X870 Livemixer and Taichi Creator, and the Z890 Taichi Lite. The B860I Lightning covered only the controller, while the B860 Challenger made contact with all the bits, but with barely noticeable compression.

We tested four Asus boards, and three of those were good, though all had what we’d consider light compression on our test drive. But any contact is better than none or partial. The B850 Creator Wifi was the sole board found to be insufficient, covering only the controller on top and one of the NAND chips on the bottom of our double-sided drive.

From our limited testing, the primary heatsinks on most motherboards don’t make good contact. It was really only a couple that I looked at and said, "Yep, they’re good." It’s inconsistent across brands, and even price points don’t seem to matter, as we’ve seen expensive motherboards fail to make complete contact while inexpensive ones do. Granted, this is a small sample size. If we tested many more boards, a clearer pattern might emerge. But for now, our results point to a disappointingly inconsistent answer to the question of whether motherboard M.2 heatsinks actually cool your SSD as they should.

Gigabyte boards using the company’s EZ-Flex technology look promising for double-sided drives, but that doesn’t leave me much faith in the top and single-sided drives. As noted earlier, this isn’t a specific shortcoming per se, but rather a problem of z-height variability on the drives themselves, which makes it difficult for companies to consistently achieve good contact. A simple answer would be to use a thicker pad and perhaps softer pads to get compression without warping the PCB. But if it were actually that easy, I’m sure the motherboard vendors would have figured this out already. Right?

Conclusion

So what does all this mean? Well, that depends on who you are, or better, how you use your PC. The reality is that most users won’t be affected by thermal throttling very often in the first place. If you’re primarily a gamer, chances are installation times are limited by your internet connection. Game loads are a mix of large and smaller files, many (if not most) of which don’t take more than a minute to load anyway. At that point, depending on the drive, performance has settled to a steady state and is still using DRAM cache (where applicable). Granted, drive throttling depends on multiple factors, and typically only the fastest PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 drives will throttle.

But if you frequently transfer massive file pools to your M.2 drive, or you're running heavy AI or database workloads, you want to look for two things from the start. First, make sure your drive has a cooling solution on the bottom, in case you have a double-sided drive. Second, but most obvious, is to look for good contact on the heatsink. If you find you don’t have it and absolutely need it, one option is to buy thicker thermal pads with the same or higher thermal conductivity. Something like Thermal Grizzly Minus Pad 8 will do, and it’s a cheap fix with prices ranging from $6.99 to $12.99 for the varying thicknesses (0.5 to 1.5mm). Arctic TP-3 also works well. Another option is to buy a third-party M.2 heatsink (here’s a great article reviewing 30 of them) and remove the cooler that is part of the motherboard.

We certainly expected some variation between boards, but didn’t expect to see so many primary M.2 heatsinks failing to make sufficient contact with our test SSD. Fortunately, for most gamers and mainstream users, it probably won’t matter. But if you regularly move terabytes of data and rely on sustained storage performance on PCIe 4.0 and particularly PCIe 5.0-based drives, it’s worth taking a closer look at your motherboard’s M.2 cooling, or buy one that includes a cooler and use it.

Either way, good airflow inside your case also helps, so keep that in mind, too. But until motherboard vendors find a better way to account for varying drive heights, checking for good contact or spending a few dollars on a thicker thermal pad could mean the difference between getting the performance you bought and leaving it on the table.

AMD officially launched its cheapest RDNA 4 graphics card, the Radeon RX 9050, a few days ago, and we already have some performance numbers for it. Preliminary testing from Japanese outlet GDM puts the GPU up against its closest Nvidia rival, the RTX 5050, in a matchup that sees the AMD offering lose by a big margin. The RX 9050 is fine on its own, especially if you're limited to 1080p gaming, but in the head-to-head it leaves a lot to be desired based on its roughly 30% slower framerates averaged across various titles.

The test bench consisted of a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and specifically the ASRock Challenger variant of the 9050, alongside the Gigabyte Windforce OC variant of the RTX 5050. Starting with synthetic benchmarks, the Red Team's GPU is almost 20% slower in the 3DMark suite. The biggest difference lies in Port Royal, where the RTX 5050 scores 6,181 points but the RX 9050 only manages 4,531 points. Time Spy sees the smallest delta, where both cards are separated by about 500 points.

Moving onto gaming, the testing was conducted across multiple resolutions, so we've chosen to show the most representative results possible. When talking about esports titles such as Apex Legends and Rainbow Six Siege, the RX 9050 holds its ground well, especially as you scale up the resolution. At 4K Ultra+ settings, both GPUs actually match at 64 FPS. The biggest difference was 20%, reported at 1440p medium, where the RTX 5050 pushed 150 FPS while the RX 9050 could only manage 125 FPS.

The rest of the games show a more underwhelming result for the RX 9050, with DOOM: The Dark Ages acting as an outlier where both GPUs take turns destroying the other. The game has multi-frame gen support at up to 6x for the Nvidia card, while the FSR frame gen is limited to just 2x. Regardless, the RX 9050 wins at higher resolutions in all settings due. As mentioned, however, this is the only test where the 9050 seemed to beat the 5050.

The remaining titles show rather boring numbers where the RX 9050 loses every single time, no matter the resolution or preset. It comes the closest in Final Fantasy XIV at 1080p, where the internal benchmark separates the two GPUs by 23%, whereas the biggest difference lies in Onimusha, where the RTX 5050 is almost twice as fast. Across these games, on average, the RX 9050 is 31% slower at 1080p, 34% slower at 1440p, and 42% slower at 4K.

The RX 9050 scores a win in power consumption, drawing about 8W less when idling and about 35W less under heavy load compared to the RTX 5050. The card seems to run cool and quiet, and can be manufactured to be rather small, making it ideal for SFF builds. Overall, it's an okay experience when it comes to gaming, performing amicably in a vacuum, but disappointing against competition. Thankfully, the 4GB variant of the RX 9050 seems to be limited to OEMs. As always, these are preliminary testing results from one outlet, so take them with the customary grain of salt.

The best RAM on the market became even better with the introduction of AMD's EXPO ULL technology, at least for AMD users. Recognizing that not all users have access to EXPO ULL-compatible kits, MSI has stepped up by introducing a new feature called High-Efficiency Mode, which offers comparable optimizations and performance improvements for those who do not own one of the new EXPO ULL memory kits.

AMD EXPO ULL memory kits are similar to standard AMD EXPO memory kits. What really sets them apart is that the former come with specially optimized memory sub-timings that lead to a noticeable reduction in memory latency. The optimizations are done at the factory. MSI's High-Efficiency Mode performs similar optimizations on regular memory kits on AMD motherboards.

Even though machine tuning has improved over the years, it is not a magical formula that works for every single system since each one is unique; The level of optimization will differ with different hardware configurations, and you also have to take into consideration silicon quality. Some samples are just better than others, so you should not expect High-Efficiency Mode to magically match the same optimizations as factory-binned EXPO ULL memory kits. High-Efficiency Mode is essentially the motherboard doing the tuning for you, and as a result, it could introduce system instability similar to manual tuning.

MSI High-Efficiency Mode Benchmarks

MSI’s High-Efficiency Mode is available with four different presets: Tightest, Tighter, Balance, and Relax. Each preset dictates the level of aggressiveness you want the motherboard to use to fine-tune the memory sub-timings for your specific memory kit. There is no one-size-fits-all, so MSI encourages users to experiment with different presets to find the one that is most suited for their hardware.

MSI compared the Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 C30 32GB (F5-6000J3038F16GX2-TZ5N) with its EXPO ULL counterpart, the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C32 32GB (F5-6000A3038F16GX2-TZ5NXRK), to demonstrate the effectiveness of High-Efficiency Mode. On the tightest setting, the Trident Z5 Neo exhibited a 9.8% reduction in memory latency, falling within a hairline of the Trident Z5 NeoX. The other takeaway is that since EXPO ULL memory kits already come with optimized memory sub-timings, enabling High-Efficiency Mode does not offer tangible improvements.

Whether users benefit from improved memory latency depends significantly on the specific workloads they run. For instance, in latency-sensitive workloads such as large-scale databases or compiling complex code, a lower memory latency can lead to substantial improvements. On the other hand, in scenarios like video editing or 3D rendering, memory bandwidth is more important.

Before the memory shortage, the Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 C30 32GB sold for just $119.99. Since then, the same kit now sells for more than 5X its original MSRP. To rub salt in the wound, the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C32 32GB debuts with an additional 4.1% premium on top of the already-inflated price.

While we continue to live in a world with supply shortages and sky-high prices, we'll take anything that can improve performance. If a feature in the motherboard’s BIOS can close the performance gap between standard and premium EXPO ULL memory kits, we are all for it.

SSD prices in general remain considerably higher than a year ago. Still, this discount on Samsung's 9100 Pro 2TB SSD is a welcome sight, as Samsung's fastest PCIe Gen 5.0 drive returns to the lower pricing that we witnessed during the most recent Amazon Prime Day sales event at the end of last month. You can currently grab the 2TB Samsung 9100 Pro for $399.99 at Amazon, a discount of 41% compared to its list price. That's only $10 more than Samsung's excellent 2TB 990 Pro SSD at $389.99, and $30 more than Samsung's recently released 2TB 990 at $369.99, which are both previous-generation PCIe 4.0 SSDs with half of the available bandwidth speeds.

● Check out this Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB SSD deal at Amazon
● Check out this Samsung 990 Pro 2TB SSD deal at Amazon
● Check out this Samsung 990 2TB SSD deal at Amazon

Samsung's 9100 Pro SSD boasts sequential read speeds of up to 14,700MB/s and write speeds of 13,400MB/s thanks to the available PCIe 5.0 bandwidth, making it one of the fastest drives on the market, perfect for heavy professional application workloads, and of course top-end gaming PCs.

By contrast, the 990 Pro offers about half the read and write speeds of this drive at around 7,450/6,900MB/s, with the recently released Samsung 990 offering up to 7,250/6,450 MB/s, but switching from TLC to QLC NAND. These drives pretty much max out the PCIe Gen 4 bandwidth, with the new Samsung 990 being marketed as a budget-oriented SSD, but in reality and most importantly, in terms of pricing, the difference between the Samsung 990 and the much faster 9100 Pro is just $30.

We've reviewed Samsung's 9100 Pro and found this impressive Gen 5 drive to be one of the fastest SSDs available to buy. During benchmark testing, the Samsung drive placed near the very top of the charts. In our PCMark 10 Storage tests. the 9100 scored higher than any other drive we've tested.

However, if your motherboard doesn't support PCIe Gen 5, or you only have a single Gen 5 M.2 slot on your mobo and need to populate any other spare M.2 slots with PCIe Gen 4 SSDs, then the Samsung 990 Pro is the best shout.

Or save a further $20 and opt for Samsung's latest SSD, the 2TB 990. This PCIe Gen 4 drive opts for QLC NAND, but still has fast access speeds. The drive can reach 7,250/6,450MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 850K/1,200K random read and write IOPS.

RAM and SSDs are some of the toughest PC components to get your hands on at the moment at prices that won't give your bank account an aneurysm, so we take any discounts we can. Especially if it helps us build or upgrade our beloved PCs for slightly less. There's currently no end in sight for memory and NAND prices to return to more normalized values until manufacturers can ramp up production, and AI hyperscalers stop sweeping up all the demand. So definitely give these Samsung SSD deals a look if you're on the hunt for an SSD upgrade.

Mechanical pressure serves as a better system to design computers around than natural buoyancy, but a new experiment from der8bauer is attempting to challenge that notion. The legendary modder recently built a chimney to exploit the "stack effect," which uses temperature differences to catalyze natural convection to the point where it becomes effective again. As a result, the CPU in his test bench saw temperatures drop by 19 degrees Celsius without any fans.

The video above explains the concept of the stack effect pertaining to its foundation, natural convection, in great detail. Also known as the chimney effect, it relies on differences in indoor-to-outdoor air density, which are dictated by differences in temperature and humidity. The bottom of the chimney becomes a low-pressure zone, sucking in cold air that escapes through the low-pressure exit at the top.

In the experiment, der8auer uses a fog machine to show how a radiator can't "pull" air without fans attached to it; the hot air dissipating from the other side is forced to fall back on natural convection. The test bench was water-cooled and consisted of an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, so he added a temperature probe to the fittings to monitor the water temp as well. The experiment then begins with the first 3D-printed chimney that's 10cm tall — it barely works, but temps already start to drop by 0.5 degrees.

At this point, the water was at 61°C and der8auer added another 20cm chimney atop the previous one, making the enclosure 30cm tall in total. This made the temps drop by another 5 degrees over a 30-minute stabilization period. The fog machine didn't really show any difference in the airflow, however. Now, it was time for the big boy: an 80cm tall chimney made up of 4x 20cm parts, bringing the total height to 110cm.

Right away, temperatures began dropping below 55°C before the modder could even set up his camera for the ultrawide framing this setup warranted. Just five minutes later, the water had hit 50°C, but the visual demonstration really sealed the deal. Turning on the fog machine underneath the radiator showed air being pulled through the chimney as if there were fans facilitating airflow on top.

The CPU temperatures had peaked at 90°C previously, but the "big tower" had now brought them down to just 71°C, as reported by HWiNFO. The experiment was a raging success. The video ends with der8auer actually tying the stack effect back to how we use fans in modern PCs to synthesize air pressure, since they achieve the same goal — a pressure differential — just more reasonably. So, unless you want to redefine what a tower PC means, sticking to regular, boring old fans is enough.

If you were hoping GPU prices would settle down anytime soon, you are in for disappointment. Nvidia’s RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 models from various OEM partners are once again selling well above their launch prices. As per a recent listing noticed by users on Reddit, the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5080 is now priced at $2,099.99 at Best Buy. That's $600 above its official launch MSRP of $1,499.99 and even $100 more than the flagship RTX 5090's launch MSRP of $1,999.

Similarly, pricing for the RTX 5090 has also skyrocketed in recent months. According to a Reddit post, the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 is currently listed at $4,329.99 on Amazon, roughly $1,530 above its launch MSRP of $2,799.99. Even the MSI Gaming Trio RTX 5090 has gone up to $4,299.95, a whopping $1,900 more than what it was when it debuted in early 2025.

That said, these hefty prices are primarily limited to premium partner models. Certain mainstream RTX 5080 cards can still be purchased closer to Nvidia's MSRP. For instance, Zotac's RTX 5080 Solid OC is selling for $1,249.99 on Amazon while PNY's RTX 5080 OC is listed at 1,256.99 at Best Buy.

While one cannot ascertain the exact reason behind this price increase, it does take us back to when tech YouTuber der8auer claimed that Nvidia has discontinued its Observed Pricing Program (OPP). This was essentially an incentive scheme that helped board partners to sell certain Nvidia products at or near MSRP. The termination of this program meant that manufacturers such as Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte gained no incentive to keep prices close to Nvidia's suggested retail price. As a result, premium custom cards have become even more expensive, with manufacturers passing higher production costs on to the consumers.

In addition to that, rising DRAM prices thanks to AI-driven demand have led to a massive increase in the cost of GDDR7 memory used in RTX 50-series cards. Nvidia was also said to be prioritizing production of higher-margin products, including the RTX 5080 and AI hardware, which has further tightened supply of certain gaming GPUs.

For potential customers, the latest listings suggest that waiting for premium RTX 50-series cards to return to MSRP may take longer than expected. While Founders Edition models remain the closest option to Nvidia's suggested pricing, they're often low in stock, forcing customers to choose between paying a hefty premium for high-end partner cards or settling for more affordable custom models.