Hardware News

Check the news feeds from tomshardware!

• AMD's former pound-for-pound gaming champ hits its historic low again — Ryzen 7 9800X3D offers unmatched value for gamers at $429

  The Ryzen 7 9800X3D is down to an all-time low price, making it a more enticing option than the slightly more performant but also much more expensive Ryzen 7 9850X3D.

• Shopper scores $1,000 in PC hardware for just $86 in a shocking pricing glitch — Newegg shrugs off massive loss and responds with a thumbs-up emoji

  A Redditor only paid $86.98 for a Ryzen 5 7600X, a Gigabyte B850 Eagle motherboard, and a 32GB DDR5-6000 Corsair Vengeance RGB kit from Newegg. The CPU even included a free 240mm Cooler Master AIO worth $85 on its own. All these parts would typically cost $1,012, but this customer scored a combo deal for the ages.

• Invisible malicious code attacks 151 GitHub repos and VS Code — Glassworm attack uses blockchain to steal tokens, credentials, and secrets

  The technique exploits Unicode Private Use Area characters, which render as zero-width whitespace in virtually every code editor and terminal.

• MSI MAG B850 Tomahawk Max Wifi II Motherboard review: Sharpening the Tomahawk’s blade

  The B850 Tomahawk Max Wifii II refines the popular budget AM5 board with additional M.2 storage, an OC Engine chip, a 64MB BIOS, a minor facelift, and a small price increase.

• US gov't revokes controversial AI hardware export rule that would mandate investments from foreign companies — new export rules are still in the works, though

  U.S. Department of Commerce withdraws draft export rule for AI accelerators that would give the U.S. government ultimate power over export controls and mandate investments of foreign firms in the U.S. AI sector.

• Chocolate 3D printer startup Cocoa Press levels up with former Prusa executive

  David Randolph brings 10 years of manufacturing experience to the chocolate printer startup, Cocoa Press.

• Noctua teases upcoming PC case with brown color scheme and bundled fans — appears to be Antec Flux Pro Noctua Edition with NF-A14x25 G2 fans

  The case builds on the standard Flux Pro design with enhanced cooling hardware, mesh airflow panels, support for large radiators, and Noctua’s well-known brown color scheme.

• Chip material prices double as Middle East conflict compounds China's existing gallium export ban — wide range of materials for chipmaking skyrocket as supply constricts

  Manufacturers have said that prices for key chipmaking metals have doubled, and gallium has climbed sharply, as disruptions from the ongoing Middle East conflict pile onto supply constraints.

• Fiber internet provider says it can detect leaking water pipes using existing infrastructure, prevented loss of 2 million liters a day over three months — Lightsonic tech detects underground vibrations, machine learning isolates the source

  U.K. fiber network provider Openreach used startup firm Lightsonic's technology to detect leaks in Affinity Water's service area, helping save over 2 million liters of drinking water daily.

• DoJ dismantles botnet made of 360,000 infected routers and IOT devices spread across 163 countries that ran for 16 years — SocksEscort proxy network eliminated in joint operation with Europol

  Long-running SocksEscort proxy network brought down by US-EU operation

• CPU fraud scandal erupts as another Chinese laptop busted with a fake chip — second device sporting a disguised Ryzen 5500U uncovered after vendor threatens legal action

  Notebookcheck has uncovered yet another case of a Chuwi laptop allegedly featuring a processor different from the one advertised, intensifying concerns over CPU authenticity.

• Enthusiast rebuilds AA-battery-powered PC, sextuples run time to 30 minutes with 64 batteries — uses three voltage regulators in parallel to achieve stability, runs computer for over 30 minutes on 64 AA cells

  YouTube creator ScuffedBits re-did their experiment and was able to eke out 30 minutes of game time (and a benchmarking session!) while running their desktop PC on 64 AA batteries.

• Six-month rewritable DVD endurance test crowns winner with 1,000 rewrites, shows the best discs are no longer manufactured — six month of tests find TDK is a clear leader, Verbatim and Memorex didn’t do well

  A tech enthusiast has shared their DVD rewritable durability findings, following six months of testing.

• US and Gulf states race for Ukrainian interceptor drones, 3D printed model costs $1,000 apiece — Shahed-136 kamikaze drone threat spurs rush for interceptors

  Ukraine has sent drone interceptors and training crews to the U.S. and its Gulf State allies as the Iran War rumbles on.

• Windows 11 is getting support for 1,000 Hz+ monitors soon as part of Insider builds — Microsoft has reportedly increased the refresh rate limit to 5,000 Hz

  Microsoft says "monitors can now report refresh rates higher than 1000 Hz" in the patch notes for its latest Windows 11 Insider builds. These updates are part of the Release Preview channel, which means they're very close to final, public release. On the other hand, Nvidia has also pushed the first update for its G-Sync Pulsar displays.

• Tech titans team up to form optical interconnect alliance to solve the AI buildout's big data bottleneck — Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom & more set sights on building PHY to break through the limitations of copper

  AMD, Nvidia, Microsoft, Broadcom, and Meta have formed an Optical Compute Interconnect Multi-Source Agreement (OCI MSA) to develop a standardized optical interconnect for AI data centers, with the aspiration to build a PHY capable of handling speeds of up to 3.2 Tb/s.

• Nvidia claims 1 million times better path tracing performance is coming in future gaming GPUs — says current GPUs are already 10,000x faster than Pascal

  At GDC 2026, Nvidia held a presentation somehow aimed at gamers and not data center clients. Still, it was sprinkled with AI pat-on-the-backs, with the company touting that its future gaming GPUs will offer 1,000,000 better path tracing performance. And the current-gen Blackwell family is apparently already 100,000x better due to dedicated Tensor and RT cores.

• The ongoing Strait of Hormuz blockage will impact the semiconductor and AI industries with Aluminum, Helium and LNG shortages — and with no timeline for re-opening, supply chains face significant challenges

  As global oil prices spike due to the ongoing pseudo-blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, other shortages are looming, and they could hit the chip and AI industries dramatically. Aluminum and helium for chip production have been impacted, but shortages of LNG could also cause problems for gas turbines powering many AI data centers.

• ROG Xbox Ally X gaming handheld to get Auto Super Resolution boost in April — Microsoft touts 30% performance boost thanks to AI-powered image upscaling

  Auto Super Resolution, an OS-level AI upscaling feature for Windows 11, is heading to the ROG Xbox Ally X and could deliver noticeable frame-rate improvements.

• Grab a new Elegoo 3D printer for as little as $154 in this massive Spring sale — save up to 31% on top-rated FDM and resin models before the stock runs out

  Elegoo's Spring sale has just started, slashing prices on its FDM and resin printers by up to 31% until March 26, with bulk-buy deals on filament, too.