PC cases have come a long way since the late 90s, but one ATX case looks like any other ATX case. Take the Lian Li O11 Dynamic, first launched in 2018. This stunning piece of art was unlike anything else on the market; just about everyone copied it. The same goes for many other form factors. The NZXT H1 spans a few alternatives from the competition. Using similar designs isn't a negative as companies can put their spin but it becomes slightly uninspiring for those who are after unique-looking PC cases. There are many out there, but they're often too outlandish. Enter the be quiet! Light Base 600 LX.

The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition. | Image: Intel Intel is having an incredibly rough year — but at long last, the company’s discrete graphics card initiative has produced a card worth celebrating. While we haven’t managed to review it ourselves due to a fluke issue, the $250 Arc B580 “Battlemage” GPU launched to nigh-universal praise, has already sold out most everywhere, and Intel tells The Verge it’s working to ship new units every week.“Demand for Arc B580 graphics cards is high and many retailers have sold through their initial inventory. We expect weekly inventory replenishments of the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition graphics card and are working with partners to ensure a steady availability of choices in the market,” Intel spokesperson Mark Anthony Ramirez tells The Verge. To give you an idea, here are some of the headlines we’ve seen on reviews of this card:“The new $249 GPU champion has arrived” “The first worthy budget GPU of the decade”“The fastest mainstream GPU”“A New Mainstream King”“Intel Fixed Its Problems”Mind you, in some ways the B580 is a glass of ice water in GPU hell, as its primary competition — the RTX 4060 and AMD RX 7600 — utterly failed to impress last year, following years of GPU prices that were more inflated than inflation itself. (Linus Tech Tips called the $300 4060 a “wet fart of a GPU” but considers the B580 “great and affordable” now.) While reviewers have showed the B580 doesn’t beat the 4060 and 7600 in every game, especially for gamers who still play at 1080p resolution, it does seem to pull ahead on average, the drivers seem more mature than Intel’s earlier attempts, and the lower price and generous 12GB of video RAM make it relatively easy to recommend. If you can find one at $250, that is — which you probably can’t, because they’ve sold out so quickly. For what it’s worth, Hardware Unboxed’s Steve Walton doesn’t think this is a so-called “paper launch” where a manufacturer ships a token number of components for bragging rights instead of mass-producing a product; he said that manufacturers, retailers and distributors told him that supply of the card was “quite substantial.” That said, AMD and Nvidia’s next GPUs are apparently right around the corner.Newegg may restock the $250 “Limited Edition” model early next month, according to its listing, and it’s still “coming soon” at B&H. A $279 Acer model is listed as coming to Newegg in as soon as a few days. Some models started at far higher prices: you can still purchase several Gunnir variants from China at around the $400 mark.

Samsung makes some of the best storage solutions out there. So, whether you're looking to upgrade your PC or laptop with a new SSD, or just want to have some lighting-quick external storage, you can't go wrong with something from Samsung.

How much storage space do you need, minimum? If you're an HDD aficionado (and there are plenty of reasons to be one in 2024), you're likely the kind of person who enjoys a lot of storage space. Well, if you're in the market for something truly massive, Seagate is finally launching its 32TB heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) HDD, which should tide over the most hungry of storage fans out there.

VRAM is a key component of what makes up a fast graphics card. It’s much faster than system memory and has much higher bandwidth, allowing for rapid access to things like game textures. It usually comes at a premium, with the last few generations of graphics cards having as high as 24GB and as low as 6GB.

There are a lot of great mice to choose from if you're in the market for something new. And one of our favorites for this is the Logitech MX Anywhere 3S, which offers excellent accuracy, feels good in the hand, and is also easy to pack up if you're looking to take it with you. Of course, this mouse isn't that cheap, coming in at $80. Luckily, this rare deal knocks $10 off, dropping it down to one of its lowest prices to date.

I don't know about you, but there's something about the older Microsoft accessories that have that certain charm to them. Unfortunately, the Redmond giant had to let go of its accessories, but it did partner up with a company called Incase to continue their legacy. Now, we're seeing the first entries from the range, which makes me shed a retro-loving tear.

One of the biggest annoyances when it comes to laptops is how hot they can get, and when they get hot, they can thermally throttle and really diminish your experience. Plus, they can get really, really noisy. Arm-based laptops are significantly better when it comes to this thanks to their lower power draw, but what if there was a best of both worlds, where a laptop could be quiet and efficiently cooled? That's what Ventiva's new cooling tech, dubbed ICE9, promises to deliver.

Have you run into situations where you need to grab text from a screenshot or image you downloaded? Doing so used to take some work, but Microsoft is making it easier using built-in utilities. For instance, you might need to get the text from a PowerPoint slide, an infographic, or anything you screenshot. Once you extract the text, you can post it into a document or other apps. Luckily, the modern Snipping Tool on Windows 11 includes OCR (Optical Character Recognition), so you can do just that. Let’s take a look at how to do it.

Intel has been on some real tenterhooks the past few months. Its CPU business hasn't been doing so hot, to the point where Intel had to split its business in two to allow its workers to take on third-party contracts and earn more money. However, the company had a silver bullet loaded in the chamber: if it managed to impress people with its Battlemage GPUs, it would have another lifeline to hold onto.

Multi-core optimization has allowed modern processors to brute force their way through heavier workloads with parallelization. This hasn't always been the case and still to this day there are software and games that run better on processors with higher single-core performance than multi-core behemoths. Contemporary development will continue to improve multi-core support and performance, but even now it's still recommended to strongly factor in single-core clock speeds and performance when choosing a CPU for your PC. Here are a few reasons why.

Single-Board Computers are quite popular in the tinkering crowd thanks to their miniature designs, high versatility, and low power consumption. That said, the prices of SBCs have skyrocketed in recent times, with many high-end boards costing well above $100 – without taking any peripherals or accessories into account.