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It pleases me to say we’re firmly planted in a new era for external SSDs. For the longest time, it was hard to recommend anything other than a 10 Gbps drive such as the (still-wonderful) Crucial X6 because that’s all that most motherboards could manage. Now, however, 20 Gbps SSDs like the ADATA SD810 are widely supported, much to the benefit to us gamers.

It’s not just a USB generation thing, either. It’s also a value thing. USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 external SSDs such as the SD810 are now very reasonably priced, making it difficult to recommend an older drive unless you’re on a strict budget or have an older PC that doesn’t have a Gen 2×2 port.

For most people using a modern gaming PC, however, USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 is where it’s at, and in this segment, the SD810 rules the r…

The cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 has evolved over the game’s Early Access period and beyond—Wyll in particular had a whole rewrite between the game’s conception and its full release. Whether it’s whole storylines shifting or just toning down Gale’s accidental thirstiness, finding the core of a character in a story this large is bound to be complicated.

But not for Lae’zel, according to a recent interview by IGN with Larian’s CEO and Founder Swen Vincke, as well as lead writers Adam Smith and Chrystal Ding. “In the beginning she was very aggressive towards the players, so we toned her down a little bit”, Vincke admits, but that was pretty much it.

“She is probably one of the companions that changed the least throughout the entirety of development. She was so…

Few things are more certain than Jim Keller, ex-AMD and ex-Tesla engineer and current CEO of AI computer company Tenstorrent, making bold claims in public appearances. There is at least one thing more more certain than this, however, this being that Nvidia is firmly cemented as the king AI hardware. Combine the two certitudes and you have Keller, in a recent DemystifySci podcast, stating that “Nvidia is slowly becoming the IBM of the AI era.”

According to Keller, for AI, Nvidia currently has “the best processors by functionality and obvious proof points,” which has meant that “all the big tech companies are in an arms race and they’re all calling Nvidia to get allocation” for their new AI processors. This, at least, is certainly true.

2024’s exploding AI market almost feels …

Microsoft’s newest AI tool, Recall, has been hitting the headlines that the Redmond software giant perhaps hasn’t quite intended. Part of a collection of features that only Copilot+ PCs sport, Recall also demands that the processor running the software has an NPU. However, one ingenious coder has already got it to work perfectly well on a basic PC that doesn’t have an NPU whatsoever.

The NPU, or neural processing unit, is the latest hardware bandwagon, with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm all fighting to take ownership of the reins. Core Ultra, Ryzen 8040, and Snapdragon X processors all play host to a system of circuits that can handle the common operations used in AI routines.

One such application is Microsoft’s Recall feature in Copilot+ and it needs an NPU capable of 45 TOPs …

If you’re a streamer, have an accessibility need, or just want to see your face in multiple apps for some reason, a new Windows 11 feature in its latest dev build may just be worth updating your PC for. Just give it a few months to actually arrive in a stable build of Windows 11.

As reported by Windows Latest, citing @phantomofearth on X, then personally verified by me spending hours waiting for Windows updates, the original feature is actually intended to be an accessibility tool. It is “designed for the hard-of-hearing community” though the function doesn’t elaborate on how it might be utilised.

To even access it, you need to sign up for the latest dev build of Windows 11: 10.0.26120.1542. Once you have this, you then have to go to a hidden setting in the advanc…

AI has been a bit weird as of late. It has been used to generate naff images, play Doom, and build the loneliest social media app out there. A potentially great but also potentially worrying use of generative AI has been spotted with General Practitioners (GPs) across the UK, suggesting up to 20% could be using it as part of their practice.

As spotted by ScienceDaily, a paper titled “Generative artificial intelligence in primary care: an online survey of UK general practitioners” has recently polled Doctors.net.uk—an online forum and database for GPs across the UK. Of the 1,006 polled, 205 (20%) reported “using generative AI tools in clinical practice”.

When asked “Have you ever used any of the following to assist you in any aspect of clinical practice?”, 16% reporte…

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Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling. AMD’s frame generation technology. On the same GPU at the same time. Really? It’s cats and dogs living together! Or just the first game to enable that combo, namely Ghost of Tsushima, originally a Playstation 4 title and released just yesterday on PC.

That Nvidia leans into AI isn’t exactly news. And it’s the reason why you can’t have Nvidia Frame Generation on anything but the latest RTX 40-series Nvidia GPUs. Because Nvidia’s take on frame gen uses fancy AI Tensor cores and Optical Flow accelerators. And only the Ada architecture of the RTX 40-series has that stuff in the right specs to run Frame Generation.

But not AMD. Its frame gen is technically simpler and can run on the shaders of any fairly modern GPU, including Nvidia graphics cards. Up unt…

Just a few weeks ago we reported on rumours that there could be a Legion Go Lite and a Legion Go Gen Two approaching—that’s two new Legion Go handhelds. Now, however, there’s reason to believe there might be three.

The reason being that Notebookcheck has discovered EEC filings (via VideoCardz) for a Legion Go S 8ARP1, 8AHP2, and 8ASP2—three separate models. There’s also speculation over what these enigmatic model names might mean, and they might hint at a mess of upcoming AMD Z2 processors spanning three different generations.

AMD’s Z1 Processors (the Z1 and the Z1 Extreme) adorn a couple of the best handheld gaming PCs today: the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go. The Z1 Extreme processor is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the mobile 7840U…

The Internet Archive—the online repository of, well, pretty much everything—is under attack. It’s been hit by a series of DDOSes that have rendered the site essentially unusable since Wednesday, with the non-profit’s engineers scrambling to fend off the assault, upgrade security, and keep users informed all at the same time.

None of which, alarmingly, is the worst part. If you try to go to the site at time of writing, you’ll just find an error page, but visitors yesterday were greeted by a pop-up reading “Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”

HIBP means Have I Been Pwned, a site you can use to check if your emails a…

Baldur’s Gate 3‘s latest patch—the third in two months—is out right now, and it’s a doozy. 

The two big headliners are things we knew about already, but just in case you missed them—Baldur’s Gate 3 is now on Mac, and there’s also now a magic mirror in your camp that’ll let you change your custom Tav’s appearance. 

These are both pretty huge inclusions which’d be worthy of a patch on their own, but Larian being Larian, the patch notes for bug fixes, combat tweaks, writing changes, and more are still big enough to break the Steam page. Guys, I know you’ve got a fancy 24-hour setup with teams in multiple time zones, but I really hope you’re getting some sleep.

It’d be impossible for me to summarise everything on this list in a …

If you’ve ever wondered “What plant is this?” or “Why does my dog look like that?”, you’ve probably thought about testing out ChatGPT. If you have tried it in the last week, you will have joined 1.9999 million others (give or take), according to recent information.

According to Axios (via TweakTown), ChatGPT owner OpenAI claims that its chatbot has grown from 100 million weekly active users in 2022 to 200 million in 2024. To put these astronomical figures into perspective, Reddit, one of the world’s biggest groupings of geeks, enthusiasts, and answers to all the nonsense questions you have throughout the day, is said to sit at around 260 million users a week.

This is not only a sign of how much the AI chatbot has grown but the internet as a whole. At its very peak, MySpace…

Even as a lover of RGB lighting, I admit that gamer lights have gotten kind of ridiculous, and it’s amazing. Sure you can use lighting to have a subtle splash of colour, but if I’m going to have an RGB lit battlestation then I want the works, and wow is Govee’s Evangelion themed kit exactly that.

The line includes two different kinds of anime aesthetic wall mount lights, as well as gaming light bars to splash colour all over your room. All together they create a package so over the top even Nerv would be jealous.

Each piece is available separately and comes in its own sealed black box with red imagery from Nerv, the company in the anime. Get past that and you get to the brighter purple packaging themed after Unit 01 with its vibrant green trimmings to match. Inside each se…

Google researchers claim that, in an experiment simulating what happens when you leave a bunch of code strings alone for millions of generations, they’ve observed the emergence of “self-replicators” from what began as non self-replicating code chunks. New Scientist rather implausibly claims this “could mirror—or at least shed light on—the emergence of actual biological life.”

Hm. This is one of those studies where the experiment and findings definitely feel consequential, but at the same time need some heavy caveating. Google has not somehow simulated the emergence of life as it happened on Earth. What its researchers may have possibly done is suggest a new theory for how non-living molecules could come together to form living molecules, ie, how biological life ever …

If there’s one thing that might hold you back from your next headset purchase being cable-free, then it’s likely to be the battery life. While a good wireless gaming headset unchains you from your desk, it does mean keeping an eye on the battery indicator and rummaging around for charging cables on occasion.

Well, rejoice, because our best wireless gaming headset has a truly monstrous 300-hour battery life, meaning those visits to the wall plug will be much less frequent. I’ve found the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless for $139 at Amazon, and at that price, it’s an even more obvious pick for cable-free gaming audio.

It’s not just that battery life worth shouting about, either. With a set of 50mm dynamic drivers, the Cloud Alpha Wireless offers a powerful, rich, and well-balance…

World of Warcraft revealed its roadmaps for both retail and Classic yesterday, and while there’s plenty of exciting news—including a confirmed Summer release window for The War Within—one particular stop on the road hit me like a cannon full of grapeshot. A black flag with a skull and crossbones.

So, some context: back in September, WoW players were hoisting the mainsails in preparation for a pirate-themed expansion. This was due to a cosmetic item on the store (which Blizzard have used to foreshadow expansions previously, such as with the Dragon Pack) and an in-game book called “Return of the Nightsquall.”

Added to The Forbidden Reach zone in Dragonflight Patch 10.0.7, this book can be found on the Irontide Ship on the northern shore of the island, via an intera…

Nightmare Kart, the game formerly known as Bloodborne Kart, has had quite the roundabout journey to get here. Announced back in March 2022, the fan project—a Bloodborne-themed kart racer which feels like it started as a bit that was yes-anded into a real thing—was meant to be released January 31 of this year. 

Alas, Sony eventually stepped in just as the game was about to cross the finish line, and developer Lilith Walther was forced to completely rebrand the entire game. This has turned out to be a blessing and a curse—a curse, because it made the release date drift by a couple of months. A blessing, because in Walther’s own words: “This is a fan game no more!” Now it’s here, as announced by Walther on Twitter. 

You can’t play Nightmare Kart on S…

Steam has surpassed 37 million concurrent users for the first time in its history: That’s 37,242,724 people connected to Valve’s digital distribution platform at the same time.

The new record, set on August 25, represents a sharp climb in concurrent users since the beginning of 2024, when the new year ushered in a new concurrent user record of nearly 33.7 million. The number of people actually in a game concurrently has seen a comparable pop, according to SteamDB, from 10.8 million when that January record was set to more than 12.5 million at the time of this newest record.

Steam is a very reliable “number go up” operation as a regular thing but even so, this particular peak coming in the later days of summer—not exactly a time of peak gaming interest, I don’t think&…

Sunday’s football game might have been the lowest scoring Super Bowl of all time, but Superb Owls scored big on social media on Sunday night.

Birders and wildlife nonprofits took advantage of a common misspelling on social media today to draw attention to post photos of the birds. The images ranged from the tiny and twee-looking elf owl to the elegant great horned owl.

One owl enthusiast, James Duncan, even took over the r/Superbowl thread on Reddit to take questions about the animals.

Duncan, who wrote that he is the founder of social enterprise company Discover Owls, explained on Twitter that his mission is to teach people about owls so that they’ll support conservation efforts.

“People protect things they care about, and science alone will no…

When American basketball star Sue Bird was growing up playing hoops in Long Island, New York, she had no WNBA pros to look up to. (The league started in 1997, when Bird was 16). All she had was the Olympics; when the 1996 U.S. women’s team won a gold medal in Atlanta, that seemed like the lone possible pinnacle of her sport.

In Tokyo, Bird will be making her fifth Olympic appearance: she is chasing a fifth gold medal, and winning it would make her and American teammate Diana Taurasi the first basketball players to ever win five basketball golds. “Every time I’m named to an Olympic team, because I’m chill and not screaming from the rooftops that I’ve made the team, people assume I’m not excited,” Bird told TIME in a June interview. She is. …

When Maya Moore announced in January that she was once again sitting out a basketball season — and this year, skipping what would be her third appearance in an Olympic Games — in order to keep pursuing a wrongful conviction case in Missouri, her peers expressed admiration. “We are proud of the ways that Maya is advocating for justice and using her platform to impact social change,” said Cheryl Reeve, head coach and general manager of the Minnesota Lynx, the team with which Moore has won four WNBA titles, and the 2014 WNBA MVP award.

The summer after her senior year of high school, Moore first met Jonathan Irons, who is serving a 50-year sentence after he was convicted in 1998 of burglary and assault with a deadly weapon. Moore got to know Irons through her …

The U.S. has set its women’s and men’s gymnastics teams for Paris. The group features five Olympians, including Simone Biles, who is competing in her third Summer Games, and five who will make their Olympic debuts at the Bercy Arena.

Read More: Your Guide to the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics: When and How to Watch—and What to Expect

In total, 36 gymnasts, 16 women and 20 men, competed for the 10 spots available, and four were named as alternates who will travel to Paris. The women and men each competed over two days, and their scores from both days, combined with their competition results from the past season, factored into the selection decision.

No trials process is easy, and this was no exception. Many gymnasts see the winnowing process …

Well hello! I’m so glad you’re here. A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up to get a new edition every Saturday.

The supernova that is gymnast Simone Biles has been explaining a phenomenon called “the twisties” for we who are more earthbound creatures. It’s “not having your mind and body in sync,” she says. Not great for most people, but if you’re upsidedown and six or eight feet above the ground, that disconnection can be deadly.

On July 30th, days after upending a truckload of other people’s expectations by pulling out of her the American team’s all-around final at the Tokyo Olympics in order to…

If you’ve been watching any of U.S. Open coverage on ESPN over the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably noticed the graphic sitting on the right of the screen, right off the sideline at Arthur Ashe Stadium: a digital stamp touting tennis as “The World’s Healthiest Sport.” 

That’s quite an in-your-face claim to make, during the sport’s highest-profile, most-viewed event staged in the United States. During, say, the Super Bowl, I can’t remember football touting itself as “the world’s most exciting sport” or some such on the TV screen (“world’s healthiest” certainly wouldn’t work for football). Or a commercial trumping broccoli or beets as “The World’s Healthiest Food.” 

So bold. And effective: with the slogan buried in my brain, I…

Jessica Mendoza, the glass-shattering baseball broadcaster who is the first woman, in any major American men’s team sport, to serve as top color commentator for a national network, never envisioned this: walking through Fenway Park, on her way to calling baseball’s prime-time game of the week, talking veggies with Jennifer Lopez. But on this perfect New England summer evening, the former Olympic softball player is indeed pointing out to Lopez–who’s in town to hang out with fiancé Alex Rodriguez, Mendoza’s ESPN broadcast partner–the urban farm the Boston Red Sox planted on a Fenway roof a few years ago. (J. Lo seems mildly impressed.) For this game between the Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers, ESPN has perched the broadcast booth atop the Gre…

The gloves are off in Taiwan, where government officials and citizens alike are furiously denouncing J.K. Rowling, after the Harry Potter author weighed in on the culture war overshadowing Olympic boxing.

Local politicians and journalists are taking jabs at Rowling, some Harry Potter fans have vowed to boycott her products, and social media users have defended Lin Yu Ting, the 28-year-old Chinese Taipei women’s boxer who has found herself at the center of a raging debate about biology and sports.

Read More: What to Know About the Gender Fight in Olympic Boxing

As boxing events kicked off at the Olympics in Paris this week, the eligibility of Taiwan’s Lin as well as Algeria’s Imane Khelif has been questioned by critics c…

Despite rougher-than-expected seas off the Japanese coast for the Olympics surfing competition as tropical storm Nepartak heads toward land, American surfing phenom Carissa Moore owned the waves.

Moore, the four-time world champion and top-ranked women’s surfer in the world, defeated Bianca Buitendag of South Africa in the finals of the women’s Olympic surfing competition at the Tsurigasaki Surfing Beach, two hours east of Tokyo, on Tuesday to win the first-ever women’s Olympic surfing gold medal. (Brazil’s Italo Ferreira won the men’s event). With tropical storm Nepartak expected to bring strong winds and heavy rains that could impact an already unpredictable sport—waves have minds of their own— organizers decided to hold the final round…

Julio Carrasco, general manager of a sports bar near the train station in Hoboken, New Jersey, has welcomed a new sort of clientele in the past few months.

Some are reps for sports-betting websites, like DraftKings or PointsBet, there to promote online wagering via events in the bar. The others are New York gamblers, typically single men, who come in by train just to bet.

“You notice the guys, everyone else is a regular, meeting friends, then you have one guy, specifically here to gamble,” said Carrasco, who runs the bar, called Texas Arizona.

New Jersey has seen a surge in sports bets since the state convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a ban on such wagers last year. More than $4 billion in bets were placed there in 2019. But rather than going to …

Janja Garnbret defended her gold medal in sports climbing on Saturday, becoming a double Olympic champion in the Boulder & Lead event.

Garnbret, 25, won the gold for her home country of Slovenia, her score topping Team USA’s now silver-medalist Brooke Raboutou and the other finalists. The two are close friends though, and after the competition was completed, they ran over to one another and embraced.

“We have an incredible friendship to where we both want each other to do our best, and that’s what happened today,” said Raboutou, according to the Washington Post. “And that feels really good to share that with somebody, and to represent the sport in a way that we know we’re doing it right and we’re doing it for ourselves.”

I…

Two horses died Thursday after they collided during a morning training session at the Del Mar racetrack in California.

It was the second day of the racing season, following a controversial past season that saw a high number of horses die at another California track.

A horse named Charge a Bunch turned around and ran straight into a horse named and Carson Valley. A veterinarian said that both horses suffered cervical fractures and died on the racetrack, according to NBC.

“There were three horses breaking from the starting gate,” Director of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club Joe Harper said, according to NBC. “The horse made a U-turn, that was galloping.”

NBC reports that track officials said the jockeys were both thrown from the horses but are …

Going up against an American player in a late-stage match at the U.S. Open is always a challenge. It’s one Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 2 tennis player from Belarus, knows all too well. 

A year ago, against Coco Gauff in the U.S. Open final, the raucous pro-Gauff crowd in New York City got in Sabalenka’s head. The noise, she said before today’s final against another American, No. 6 ranked-Jessica Pegula, “was blocking my ears. So that was, like, so much pressure.”  

This time around, rather than let the support for Pegula irk her, she tried embracing her status as a spoiler. With a tight-tense first set, for example, tied at 5-5, Sabalenka turned the tables, pumping her arms in the air after winning a point, as if to say, “Hey, all you suppos…