Yesterday, October 17, 2024, we lost a great man and friend. Tyler Bernath, TweakTown Hardware Editor, lost his battle with cancer at age 41 years old at his home in Montpelier, Ohio. After going through several rounds of chemotherapy and treatment over several years, sadly, the cancer took over. He fought against the terrible disease for as long as he could with huge courage. In the end, he went peacefully at his home.

Tyler started with us in 2013 and was with TweakTown for almost 12 years and published 1452 content items - most of which were reviews. That's an amazing average of 2.5 reviews every week over 12 years - an incredible effort that will be hard for anyone to reproduce again. His first review was of the SanDisk Extreme 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive, and his final was of the Acer Predator Triton Neo 16 Gaming Laptop.

In fact, till the end, when he knew his time was near, he was still trying to complete reviews. That's sad, but it also makes me happy in a way, knowing that his work kept him busy and occupied. Tyler informed hundreds of thousands of consumers on which products to buy or avoid in the storage, networking, NAS, Mini PC, CPU, and motherboard fields.

Blizzard's Warcraft franchise is one of the most beloved in gaming history, from its roots as a strategy series to the ongoing success of World of Warcraft. Warcraft III: Reforged, the remastered release of the iconic 2002 real-time strategy game, was expected to be an easy win for the studio - instead, it became one of the most criticized releases in the studio's long history.

The game's initial reveal showcased rebuilt and extended cinematics with upgraded visuals, highly detailed character models, and more. The result featured none of this, with fans unhappy with the quality of the remastered 3D assets and multiplayer features that had been around for over a decade disappearing.

Yes, Blizzard chose to replace existing versions of the game with Warcraft III: Reforged, a decision that affected players enjoying a game for nearly 20 years. The good news is that there could be light at the end of the tunnel for Warcraft III, as the game could be getting a major update very soon.

NVIDIA has announced a new promotion for those who sign up for its GeForce NOW cloud gaming service. New and existing members who purchase six months of GeForce NOW Ultimate, the premium tier valued at $99.99, will get a free copy of BioWare's upcoming RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

The highly anticipated release is out on October 31. On PC, it will benefit from the full suite of RTX technologies: DLSS, Frame Generation, NVIDIA Reflex, and ray tracing. PC gamers with a GeForce NOW Ultimate subscription can access a GeForce RTX 4080 rig in the cloud to play the latest Dragon Age in 4K 120 FPS with max settings and features like G-SYNC.

Alongside the new promotion, available until October 31, NVIDIA announced that ten more titles will be added to the GeForce NOW library this week, bringing the total to over 2,000 games.

The NVIDIA App is not only a replacement for the aging GeForce Experience App for PC Gamers looking to update drivers and optimize their games, but it's also a replacement for the NVIDIA Control Panel. Yes, that thing has been a part of GeForce drivers for so long that right-clicking on your desktop to access the NVIDIA Control Panel feels more like a Windows feature than anything else.

Released into Beta earlier this year, the NVIDIA App is a brilliant and welcome overhaul combining the best GeForce Experience App and advanced Control Panel features with an intuitive interface and fast performance. The recent October update brought even more Control Panel features to the NVIDIA App, like G-SYNC controls, while enhancing new features like RTX HDR.

According to Team Green, the NVIDIA App will exit Beta before the end of the year and integrate the remaining NVIDIA Control Panel options. With that, the company's Community Manager has taken to Reddit to ask people which NVIDIA Control Panel "Manage 3D Settings" options are important to them.

Microsoft plans to launch Surface devices with Intel's new Lunar Lake mobile chips. As seen on Reddit (thanks, Windows Central), a Surface Laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V processor went up for sale on the Chinese eBay-like website Goofish. The listing even stated that the laptop won't officially be available for purchase until 2025.

Microsoft's new Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 launched earlier this year exclusively with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips, marking the arrival of Copilot+ PCs with Windows on Arm tech instead of traditional x86 hardware.

With Microsoft mandating a minimum of 40+ TOPS of AI performance to be compatible with Copilot+ AI features, Lunar Lake is Intel's first mobile architecture that meets this requirement. This new mysterious Surface Laptop could be the current Surface Laptop 7 with Intel Lunar Lake or a Surface Laptop 8 refresh on track for next year.

If you own certain models of Western Digital SSDs then the company is 'highly recommending' that you install a new firmware update that resolves a bug in Windows 11 24H2.

As you may have seen yesterday, the issue pertains to the Host Memory Buffer feature (for more details, read our previous article), and the resulting bug means that some SSDs are affected by repeated crashing (with some ending up in a boot loop of BSoDs, in fact - really nasty).

WD tells us that the affected models are as follows:

We've likely all been in the situation where we've subscribed to a service, and then had difficulty canceling that subscription - it's a frustrating place to be, but one which might be a thing of the past thanks to new regulations in the US.

The FTC has just announced a finalized 'click-to-cancel' rule which requires that businesses which get consumers to sign up to a subscription should ensure that it's very easy to subsequently cancel that service.

As mentioned at the outset, we've likely all been there where we come to cancel a service and find ourselves scratching our heads as to how this is achieved. Often, the method of canceling can be hidden deep within the service's dashboard, behind multiple nested menus perhaps.

Missed out on buying Doom Eternal when it was released? Well, don't miss out on this offer if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber, as you can now get the game for absolutely nothing.

Doom Eternal is the latest freebie to be provided by Amazon as part of its Prime Gaming package, which gives Prime subscribers access to a number of free games every month.

In this case, the slight catch with Doom Eternal is that you get a code for a download (of the Standard Edition) from the Microsoft Store, so that's not everyone's first port of call for their gaming platform (or indeed their second, third, or fourth port probably). Indeed, this is a major sticking point for some PC gamers, who apparently would rather have nothing than a game from the Microsoft Store.

Fallen out with your partner? That's nothing new, all couples have disagreements - or even more full-on arguments at times - but one person's solution, namely turning to AI, has gone viral for reasons that, well, you'll see.

This comes to us courtesy of a post on Reddit by 'Drawss4scoress' on r/AmITheA**hole (or AITAH) where as you can guess, people ask whether they might be, shall we say - in the wrong.

To sum up the gist of this scenario, Drawss4scoress has been dating their girlfriend for eight months, and every time they argue, to quote the Redditor:

Color e-ink displays have existed for a while. Still, this week, Amazon announced its very first e-reader with a color display - the new Kindle Colorsoft (priced at $279.99 USD), available for preorder today.

As part of the announcement, Amazon noted that creating a colorized Kindle required more than simply swapping out the traditional black-and-white display for a color one. "It uses an oxide backplane with custom waveforms for fast performance and a higher contrast on both color and black-and-white content," Amazon writes in the announcement.

The display includes custom nitride LEDs that enhance color and brightness without affecting image quality. Amazon adds that you can zoom in on images without "worrying about pixelation." The new technology also means that Amazon's new Kindle Paperwhite is the fastest yet, with 25% faster page turns.

Dell has just unleashed its new PowerEdge XE9712 with NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 AI servers, with 30x faster real-time LLM performance over the H100 AI GPU.

Dell Technologies' new AI Factory with NVIDIA sees the GB200 NVL72 AI server cabinet with 30x faster real-time LLM performance, lighting-fast connectivity with 72 x B200 AI GPUs connected and acting as one with NVLink technology. Dell points out that the liquid-cooled system maximizes your datacenter power utilization, while rapid deployment will see your AI cluster at-scale, with a "white glove experience" adds Dell.

We have 25x more efficiency than Hopper H100, 8K for LLM training with the highest performance delta at 8K+ GPU clusters, and 30x faster real-time trillion-parameter LLM inference compared to the H100 AI GPU.