SteamOS is continuing its slow march to fuller support on a wider variety of non-Valve hardware. This weekend's release of the SteamOS 3.8.25 Beta includes "initial gamepad support" for a few recent gaming handhelds and improved support for a few others.
Those newly supported handhelds include MSI's Claw 8 EX AI+, the extremely expensive, extremely powerful handheld built around Intel's Arc G3 processor that launched this summer. While SteamOS has long included beta support for "other AMD powered handhelds," Valve has only recently been working on offering compatibility with Intel-based handhelds like the MSI Claw line. This weekend's update suggests the company hasn't abandoned those efforts and that Intel chips aren't being left out of the SteamOS conversation.
It feels like every week the component crisis worsens, driving the prices of hardware for even mid-level PC gaming to insane prices that only a few could afford without draining their savings.
Fortunately, price discounts are still a thing, giving us PC players brief respites from this RAMpocalypse. One such deal is this 26% discount for AMD Ryzen 7 7800XD, reducing the price of one of our favorite gaming CPUs from $449.99 to $333.99 on Amazon.
"Dominate any game at any level, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D offers ultimate performance with 8 cores, 16 threads, and up to 5.0GHz boost clock backed up with 96MB L3 cache." — Ben Wilson & Harish Jonnalagadda, Senior Editors
The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D in hand. (Image credit: Windows Central (Ben Wilson) | AMD)
The AMD Ryzen 7800X3D may be three years old, but it's still packing plenty of processing power to help your PC run games with extremely high performance that will make them feel so much smoother and more responsive to play with.
How high, you may ask? Well, my colleague, Ben Wilson, confirmed in his 4.5-star review of the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D that its 3D V-Cache makes an obvious difference to games, even if it doesn't thrill in productivity.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark.Ben Wilson | Windows CentralCyberpunk 2077 in-game at 200 FPS+.Ben Wilson | Windows CentralCyberpunk 2077 benchmark.Ben Wilson | Windows Central
You can boost the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D's performance further by overclocking it using the Precision Boost feature with the Ryzen Master app. This is all done while the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D's power management system keeps it stable and cool.
However, don't expect to use this CPU for grinding through productivity tasks in a speedy manner, as its performance rates in this regard are somewhat lacking compared to Intel's (often more expensive) offerings.
Additionally, the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D isn't compatible with DDR4 RAM, so folks running PC rigs with older RAM may need to upgrade (which is easier said than done thanks to this AI-induced RAM crisis sucking all our RAM dry).
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