NVMe drives are fast, but sometimes they're not. If you have one, you might think it only slows down when temperatures are high, as CPUs and GPUs do. But SSDs are a bit more complex, and they can slow down for many reasons. Thus, you might find your drive slowing down even if temperatures are normal.

We all have our own preferences when it comes to hardware, but occasionally, a product will hit a sweet spot that makes it a good choice for most people. If you're looking for a new monitor, for the time being, that product is going to be the HP Omen 34.

Instead of adding more and more tools to my existing workflow, I’m always looking for new ways to make the ones I already use work better. There are always hidden features and ways to squeeze more value out of the tools I already rely on. The tool I use most these days in my daily workflow is NotebookLM.

The plug-and-play style of smart home devices is convenient but expensive. ESPHome is monumental in helping you save costs and build your own smart devices to pair with Home Assistant. All you need is an ESP32 microcontroller board and a bunch of sensors — no soldering or traditional code writing required.

At first, I treated Perplexity like a nicer and smarter version of Google, but it has snuck into my digital life permanently at this point. I even find myself reaching for it more than my good ol’ Brave browser at times, mainly because it personalizes the results based on whatever prompt I give it. It’s become pivotal to some of my design workflows and even helped me set up my first local LLM. It also pairs really well with note-taking apps like Microsoft Loop and Obsidian.

Have you given Warframe a try? I actually gave it a go for the first time earlier this year, despite it being around for 12 years now. It's a ton of fun, and it's one of those games that just get better the more you play it. By the time I hit the Warframe: 1999 expansion, I was pretty much sold on always being a player.

Every time I look at the state of portable gaming, I'm reminded of how complicated the "gaming laptop" route has become. Manufacturers want to feature the most enviable selection of mobile GPUs, a decently powerful CPU to complement its performance, a large heat sink and thermal design that adds to the bulk, and to top it off, a 4-pound charging brick for you to carry around in your carry-on.

There are plenty of great laptops on the market right now, and most you don't even need to pay top dollar for because of all the great sales that are going on during the holidays. If you've been looking to pick up a gaming laptop for a good price, the MSI Katana is going to be one to check out.

When you're building a gaming PC, it might feel logical to buy "gaming" components. However, just like there's no such thing as a "gaming" motherboard or "gaming" RAM, you don't need to fall into the trap of "gaming" SSDs. What determines the suitability of a PC component for gaming workloads is the underlying specs, not what the manufacturer decides to call it. So, just like a CPU or GPU can be used in both gaming and non-gaming PCs, regular SSDs lacking any "gaming" branding work just like any other drive in a gaming PC. You don't even need the fastest SSDs with fancy features; you just need to get the basics right.

Proxmox’s powerful virtualization prowess, support for LXCs (and OCI images with VE 9.1), and clustering provisions are only a part of what makes it a terrific home lab platform. Technically, ESXi may have a more fleshed-out collection of first-party tools, but Proxmox is slowly working its way up with official and community-created offerings. You’ve got Proxmox Backup Server to create space-efficient snapshots of your virtual guests, while the Mail Gateway lets you add an extra layer of protection to your self-hosted email server.

Reactions to Metroid Prime 4: Beyond have been mixed among Nintendo fans. Some people really love what the game brings to the series, while others have taken issue with the writing and dialogue of the characters that appear in the story. When the game was being previewed by media outlets, there was a harsh reaction I saw online to some of the new characters that interact with Samus Aran during the game. But it may not be those new characters themselves that are the issue, and instead, may be a byproduct of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond trying to remain faithful to the earlier entries in the series.

120 words per minute. That's a stat I brag about to anyone who hasn't heard it from me already. Even my idea of taking breaks between work consists of playing rounds of Tetris or just going on over to Monkeytype to try and get my WPM up. So when I heard about a typing battle royale game at this year's Steam Next Fest, it had my full attention. Thankfully, it succeeded in keeping my attention after my first look.