PCIe 5.0 SSDs only benefit two workloads, and gaming isn’t one of them

PCIe 5.0 or Gen5 SSDs have been on the market for a few years now, even dropping to relatively affordable levels before the DRAM crisis upended everything. The adoption, however, has been rather tepid. For one, countless PC users are still using PCIe 4.0 systems, and building a new PC with PCIe 5.0 support is anything but affordable right now. Even before PC hardware prices skyrocketed, there was little incentive for a complete platform overhaul. Secondly, the much-hyped transfer speeds of Gen5 SSDs don’t translate to any real-world benefits for the majority of gamers. Gen4 SSDs are still more than enough for gaming. PCIe 5.0 storage does, however, benefit heavy file transfer and productivity workloads, more than justifying the investment in these cases. Before you shell out a premium for an expensive Gen5 drive with 15,000 MB/s speeds, decide whether it will even benefit your use case.

Matteo Dufour
France

I stopped using motherboard audio after one cheap USB DAC solved every problem I had

For years, I treated motherboard audio as one of those PC features that simply existed in the background. As long as sound came through my headphones and my microphone worked well enough for Discord calls, I never paid much attention to the audio side of my setup. I spent more...

Hannah White
New Zealand

I self-host my PC game library with Moonlight instead of paying for a second PC or GeForce Now

Nothing ever quite beats couch gaming. That's why I often prefer playing on my PS5 Pro sitting under the TV. However, a problem that kept nagging me over and over again was that most of the experiences I wanted simply lived on my desktop PC instead. High ray-tracing, path tracing,...

Michael Johnson
Chicago

This Altoids tin ESP32 computer comes with a keyboard, and yes, it runs DOOM

Did you know that there's an entire scene around stuffing chips into an Altoids tin and making it do all sorts of things? We've seen it before with the Raspberry Pi, where someone even created a Kickstarter to help get an Altoid tin console up and running. There's something about...

Catalina Hernández
Spain

PlayStation exclusives aren’t coming to PC anymore

Sony reportedly won't release its major single-player PlayStation games on PC anymore. According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Hermen Hulst, who heads up PlayStation's studios business, informed employees in a town hall on Monday about the change in strategy. Schreier had previously reported on the shift in March, saying that Sony...

Janardo Gomes
Brazil

Microsoft has spent six months turning Windows Terminal into a rival to Warp, and it’s working

For the last few years, Warp has largely dominated the modern terminal space. The command blocks, AI command generation, agentic mode, Warp Drive, and other QoL features all made it a popular choice, and when Warp arrived natively on Windows early last year, it made the default Windows Terminal look...

Sophia Wilson
Atlanta

Your SSD has built-in maintenance tools that Windows keeps hidden from you

Modern-day SSDs are fast enough for most of us to not really think about their upkeep every day. Back when SSD technology was new, everyone treated their SSDs like fragile glass, sharing notes and advice on how to prolong the life of their drive by any means unnecessary.

John Doe
New York

Volvo teases a new affordable EV to replace discontinued EX30

Volvo's compact, quirky EX30 had a lot of problems when it was first released. Tariffs essentially erased its affordability, making it more expensive to own, and a battery recall made it dangerous to park indoors. But its discontinuation didn't spell the end of Volvo's efforts to sell more affordable electric...

Purificación Sanz
Spain

Claude is still the best agentic coding tool, but Anthropic’s tightening grip is the best argument yet for going local

Claude is typically considered the best agentic coding tool on the market right now. There are plenty of developers I know who use it daily, and Anthropic has spent the last year and a half giving plenty of reasons for that confidence. Opus 4.7 just launched last month, Claude Code...

William Garcia
Boston

ChatGPT finally got the memory transparency feature it needed — it still isn’t enough to beat Claude

Every time OpenAI releases a new model for ChatGPT, the buzz it generates makes me think I may be missing out if I don't switch. The latest update is GPT-5.5 Instant, and it's the default model for all ChatGPT users. It's paired with an upgraded memory system that shows you...

Emily Brown
Houston

These 5 simple habits make my PC feel much faster

Over time, Windows PCs start to feel slow. It happens to most of us, and we automatically assume this is linked to hardware limitations. But more often than not, Windows system slowdowns are due to neglect and bad usage habits. Over the years, I have made simple changes to my...

William Garcia
Boston

I stopped using Claude for coding, but now I can’t live without it for everything else

Up until recently, Claude was only spoken about in hushed tones in developer communities. It was the quiet favorite of people who lived in their terminals, and the biggest reason for that was just how good Anthropic's models were at coding. To everyone else, Claude was either invisible or vaguely...

Aloisia Runkel
Germany

You don’t need a 4K monitor to make DLSS 4.5 worth it

I totally understand why many people think enabling DLSS makes the most sense on a 4K monitor. At native 4K, you're almost always GPU-bound even if you have a flagship card like the RTX 5090, so DLSS is a great way to avoid paying the performance tax that comes with...