Building a budget gaming PC inevitably comes with compromises; my objective for the build in question is to make only the right ones. That means avoiding AM4, so that there's a legitimate upgrade path for the future. It also means GPUs with 8GB of VRAM are out of the running, which increases the price of this "budget" build, but that's where we are right now. I'm also avoiding components of questionable quality that might come back to bite you later.

It's no secret that people enjoy playing video games. Some experiences that we get from games are often so good that we want to experience them again and again, many times over. For some people, revisiting a game after an extended period of time is fun because they get to have a similar feeling to when they first played. But outside of nostalgia, there are certain things with game releases these days that can get us to return to our favorite video games for another run.

If you're looking to get a monitor that delivers the best of both worlds, featuring vibrant colors and crisp text, you're going to want to go with one that has a QD-OLED panel. You really can't go wrong here with this tech, delivering exactly what you need, when you need it. And while QD-OLED monitors do cost more, we think it's worth the extra money.

Managed switches are fantastic devices with a wealth of features to enhance your local area network (LAN). Most people can get by with a simple unmanaged switch, which handles traffic routing and that's about it. But if you wish to take your network game to the next level, a managed switch can bring with it virtual LAN (VLAN) support, which allows you to segment your network and keep various clients separate. This can be especially handy with a smart home and/or home lab.

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella (L), speaks with OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, who joined by video during the Microsoft Build 2025, conference in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025. As OpenAI attempts to restructure itself and eventually go public, a hurdle for the startup, recently valued at $500 billion, is its increasingly complicated partnership with Microsoft.  On Thursday afternoon, the two companies released this joint statement about an agreement they’ve reached.Microsoft & OpenAI:Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the next phase of our partnership. We are actively working to finalize contractual terms in a definitive agreement. Together, we remain focused on delivering the best AI tools for everyone, grounded in our shared commitment to safety.Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, and shares in the revenue earned by ChatGPT as well as its API. Microsoft also now includes OpenAI as a competitor, allows OpenAI to lean on other cloud providers for compute power, and has started to increase its reliance on its own AI models. In a company town hall meeting on Thursday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and AI chief Mustafa Suleyman committed to “significant investments” in its own models. “We should have the capacity to build world class frontier models in house of all sizes, but we should be very pragmatic and use other models where we need to,” said Suleyman.There was one specific detail about the agreement with Microsoft released by OpenAI in another statement, saying that its nonprofit parent company will continue to hold authority over the for-profit business, with an equity stake worth more than $100 billion. Other philanthropies and nonprofits have reportedly pushed back against OpenAI’s unusual restructuring plan, and the attorneys general of California and Delaware have opened investigations. In its announcement, OpenAI said, “We continue to work with the California and Delaware Attorneys General as an important part of strengthening our approach, and we remain committed to learning and acting with urgency to ensure our tools are helpful and safe for everyone, while advancing safety as an industry-wide priority.”

It had been a long time since I last built an SFF PC, and just this past weekend, I was tasked with doing just that. This person wasn't going for an ultra-compact, save-all-possible-space sort of build; just something that would easily fit on their desk in their condo without being an eyesore. Simple enough.

I'm a huge fan of Perplexity, which is an AI search engine as is, and rely on it heavily for college and research purposes. So, it's safe to say that I had high expectations for its AI-powered browser, Comet. Unfortunately, when I first tried Comet out, I didn't really see what the hype was all about.

This might sound like I'm a PC Luddite, but at a time when Wi-Fi 7 is becoming common on motherboards and devices, I'm still powering my home with a humble Wi-Fi 5 router. The ISP here provides Wi-Fi 5 routers for plans up to a certain speed, so our 200Mbps connection doesn't qualify for a Wi-Fi 6E router. Instead of buying my own, I'm content using the ISP's router for the foreseeable future, because there's nothing I'm missing out on.

Synchronise your watches, folks. In just over a month, Windows 10 will reach the end of its support. From then on, people still on Windows 10 will have a choice to make: either upgrade to Windows 11 (officially or unofficially), ditch Windows altogether and move to another operating system, sign up for a year of continued security fixes (if they haven't already), or stand defiant and continue using Windows 10 without any support (not recommended if it's connected directly to the internet).

When setting up your network-attached storage (NAS) device, you have a few options for the filesystem. You could choose to run absolutely anything you desire, but I'm here to tell you that the correct choice is actually the Zeta File System (ZFS). You'll often come across Btrfs, NTFS, and Ext4 on your travels, but ZFS is the way to go if you wish to maximize availability, reliability, and data storage redundancy. I'll cover data integrity checks, ZFS's Copy-on-Write (COW) design, compression, scalability, and advanced caching.Once at the end, you'll agree that ZFS is the best filesystem for your NAS.

I don't say this lightly: if you're a huge fan of horror games, but you've never given the original Dead Space a try, you really, really have to. The first game set a foundation for a series spanning multiple titles, and even to this day, the scares still hold up.

Online shopping is super convenient, but keeping track of everything after you've made your purchases can be a hassle. Usually, when you purchase something from an online store, it will send you an email receipt containing the details of your purchase, including the tracking number. So, if you want to track your package or simply double-check your purchase, you can do so from that email.