RELIABILITY IS KING

IT’S BEEN A STRANGE few months in the

Intel’s Raptor Lake liability

There’s a fix for crashing 13th and 14th gen desktop CPUs

NEW RTX 4070 VARIANT

NVIDIA’S GEFORCE RTX 4070 is a popular card

ZEN 5 HITS 6GHZ

© NVIDIA, AMD, INTEL SOMEONE GOING BY ‘Skatterbencher’

Tech Triumphs and Tragedies

A monthly snapshot of what’s good and bad in tech

ARROW LAKE GETS BENCHMARKED

Engineering samples aren’t impressive

Geekbench AI 1.0

© GEEKBENCH, DOJ/WIKIMEDIA PRIMATE LAB’S GEEKBENCH is one

Cheap AMD V-Cache

Often, the first we hear of a chip

China’s H100 AI Rival

Huawei is testing its new AI chip, the

Intel issues fix for Raptor Lake degradation

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote about difficulties I was having with a Core i9-13900K processor (see MPC230 Tech Talk). Little did we realize that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. While most complaints have involved the unlocked Core i9 Raptor Lake CPUs, it appears the instability problems build up and potentially impact many Raptor Lake—13th and 14th Gen Core—CPUs, with Intel identifying 22 different desktop parts.

THE LIST

THE BEST MOUSE PADS FOR GAMING

AMD’s turn to drop the ball?

WITH INTEL’S RAPTOR LAKE CPUs falling over, the company firing around 15,000 employees, and cancelling its 2024 innovation event, AMD must have been enjoying the view—until its new Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs rolled out. So, is AMD’s CPU a minor stumble or game-changing fumble?

BUILD AN IT SUPPORT HUB

Discover how to use RustDesk to provide remote assistance and control your own devices remotely with Nick Peers

DOCTOR

THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES...

Phantom of the Opera CPUs Unmasked

Zak Storey explores why Zen 4 might be the best CPU generation to date

LETTERS

WE TACKLE TOUGH READER QUESTIONS ON...

THE BUILDS

THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...

HAS THE END ARRIVED FOR HIGH VOLTAGE?

Zak Storey takes a look at whether overclocking is really worth it anymore

CENTERFOLD

PERFORMANCE GEAR LAID BARE

CPU Architecture DEEP DIVE

New AMD and Intel processors take center stage

HOW TO

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDES TO IMPROVING YOUR PC

AUTOPSY

THIS MONTH WE DISSECT...

Lock down your browser

YOU’LL NEED THIS A STABLE INTERNET CONNECTION ADAPTIVE

Remove stalkerware from your PC

YOU’LL NEED THIS A WINDOWS PC ACCORDING TO

Boost your gaming VPN

YOU’LL NEED THIS AN ACTIVE SUBSCRIPTION to your VPN

How to repair your graphics cards

YOU’LL NEED THIS HWMONITOR www.cpuid.com/softwares/ hwmonitor.html 3D MARK

LAB NOTES

Nvidia’s strangle-hold on AI Taking advantage of UL

AMD Ryzen 7 9700X

The new Zen 5 CPUs are here—time to benchmark!

Lenovo Legion Pro 5i 16 Gen 9

Excellent performance, but measly memory and storage

Asus ProArt PX13

Because professional laptops don’t have to be boring

Gigabyte Aorus CO49DQ

One of the best ultrawides, if you can stretch to it

Acer Predator Helios 18

Perhaps you don’t need a desktop PC anymore

Hyte Thicc Q60

Almost more mobile phone than CPU cooler

Bag a software bargain

Don’t pay full price for software when we can offer you huge reductions on everything from security software to Windows 11 Pro

NZXT C1500 Platinum

Top-tier performance and efficiency

BenQ X300G 4K Short Throw Projector

Priced high, yet punchy

Asus ROG Azoth Extreme

A gaming great with an absurdly heavy price tag

World of Goo 2

Goo-d enough for two

Nvidia DLSS vs AMD FSR

Which AI upscaling technique has the edge?