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Thermal pads and thermal paste have been the go-to methods of cooling GDDR memory on graphics cards over the past 20 years, with thermal paste serving mainly as an alternative solution where thermal pads might not work. However, a YouTuber, Blighted Agent, tested thermal paste with thermal pads on an RTX 3080 and found that using both together dropped the GPU's GDDR6X memory temperatures by up to 15C.

The YouTuber did all of their testing on an EVGA RTX 3080 graphics card that needed maintenance on the thermal paste and thermal pads. First, they repasted only the GPU core, leaving alone the thermal pads on the GDDR6X memory modules. In Furmark with the power limit maxed and the GPU pulling 450 watts, the GPU ran at almost 70C with VRAM temperatures climbing above 95C.

The second test involved adding thermal paste to the GDDR6X modules while keeping the thermal pads on the GPU cooler, making it so the thermal paste was sandwiched between the G6X modules and the thermal pads. Temperatures dropped significantly in FurMark running the memory in this way, with temperatures spiking up to 80C on the hottest modules.

Red Dead Redemption 2 never got any single-player DLC from Rockstar Games, but a team of fans has now filled in some of that gap. A free mod called Nuevo Paraiso: The Forgotten Frontier brings the Mexican territory from the first Red Dead Redemption into the sequel. It showed up on Nexus Mods in mid-September, and it only works on PC.

The mod rebuilds the region as it would look in 1907, using familiar locations from RDR1. It adds three large regions called Diez Coronas, Perdido, and Punta Orgullo. Restored settlements include Escalera, Chuparosa, Casa Madrugada, and Las Hermanas. There are also new animal and plant species, and a new railway line connects the area to New Austin.

Activities include treasure hunts, bounty hunting, smuggling, train robberies, and fort defense. Players can also work as a taxi driver or stable hand, find gang hideouts, deal with merchants, and hunt for Easter eggs. The Nexus page credits a large team of modders, with Rixus724 listed as the uploader.

Losing mailbox data due to corrupted EDB files is, unfortunately, more common than you'd think. Something as simple as a Dirty Shutdown on the server side from a sudden loss of power, unexpected hardware failure, storage corruption, or malware can result in a corrupted Microsoft Exchange Database (.edb) file. When this happens, you can lose access to important emails, attachments, calendar items, and even contacts.

The good news is that a corrupted Exchange EDB file is repairable, and the process is easy, accessible, and intuitive with the Free Online Exchange Database Repair service. This free online web-based service lets anyone repair corrupt or inaccessible Exchange EDB files and recover mailbox data in three quick steps, without installing or running Exchange Server or Outlook.

For businesses of all sizes and individuals, Microsoft Outlook (including Live Exchange and Microsoft 365) is one of the most widely used email clients, along with calendar and contact management. When Exchange EDB files are corrupted, they become either inaccessible or present incomplete or partial data. The tool has successfully repaired well over 100,000 files, and the repair process takes about 15 minutes to complete.

Valve says that from early 2027, Steam's Discounts & Events area will move away from manually scheduled placements towards something more dynamic and personalised, with each player seeing a different set of discounted games. Unlike the dynamic and elastic pricing currently being tested by Xbox and PlayStation stores respectively, Valve's approach isn't about changing prices. It's more about which games get shown to you.

Valve has been experimenting with these dynamic discounts for the past few months, swapping some curated spots for personalised recommendations. According to the company, that has let it show ten times more games to customers in a single day, along with noticeable bumps in store page visits, wishlists, and cart additions.

The company hasn't given a firm date, saying it is still tuning the details and doesn't expect things to be perfect straight away. What it has said is that the curated calendar will be fully retired sometime early next year. Scheduling of curated placements, including Weekend Deals, Midweek Deals, and Daily Deals, has already been paused, and developers are getting new and updated tools to manage their own discounts and sales.

Mexico's protest against digital-only game distribution is escalating from a single complaint into a full legislative proposal. Senator Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas, who chairs Mexico's Digital Rights Commission, and federal Deputy Iraís Reyes have presented a consumer-protection initiative targeting how digital games and other digital goods are sold in the country, first seen in a video statement posted to Instagram.

The proposal has three main foundations. Digital platforms would be required to clearly disclose whether a purchase grants outright ownership or a license to access the software, something Colosio has previously contended over, saying consumers "pay as owners but receive rights similar to those of a tenant."

It would also require mechanisms to preserve a game's functionality if a publisher shuts down its servers, rather than letting titles simply stop working. Any foreign platform selling digital goods in Mexico would also need to maintain a local address or legal representative so customers have a place to file complaints locally.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is getting a new mode called Collateral, and anyone who has put time into Counter-Strike or Valorant will recognise it right away.

It's a round-based twist on Search and Destroy, with teams swapping between attacking and defending two bomb sites. The difference is the money. Everyone starts with a pistol and earns cash through kills and objective play, then spends it between rounds on armor, perks, grenades, riot shields, shotguns, rifles, and more.

A UAV is on the list too, but only as a team purchase. When you die, you lose your gear, though the cash stays with you. Respawns, killstreaks, health regeneration and custom loadouts are all switched off, so every purchase carries some weight.

Framework is finally putting a date on its most memory-stacked desktop yet. Pre-orders for the new Framework Desktop open Wednesday, September 30, in the morning Pacific Time, though pricing and details on how the pre-order system will work haven't been shared.

The Framework Desktop is built around AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495, the Gorgon Halo chip Framework first previewed at AMD's Advancing AI event back in July. The core layout matches last year's Strix Halo-based Ryzen AI Max+ 395, with 16 cores and 32 threads, but the boost clock climbs to 5.2GHz. The Radeon 8065S graphics come with 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, and Framework rates the whole system at 131 TOPS of combined AI performance.

The headline is the memory. It has a whopping 192 GB of unified LPDDR5X running at 273 GB/s, up from the 128 GB ceiling and 256 GB/s on the older chip, and up to 160 GB can be handed to the GPU. That's a big deal for anyone running large language models locally, and Framework says a single box can run DeepSeek V4-Flash at Q8 with room left for longer context. Since the memory is unified and soldered on, it can't be upgraded later, which is a slightly awkward fit for a company built on repairability.

The Witcher 3 Remastered launched on September 29 across PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 as a free upgrade for existing owners, but it seems like you may not need to own a copy to grab it on Switch 2. Reddit user Erik_REF posted on r/gaming claiming that they inserted an original physical Switch cartridge of The Witcher 3 into a Switch 2, got the free remastered upgrade, and then gave the same cartridge to their brother, who was able to claim his own free digital copy.

X user Wario64 made the trick popular, and other players on Reddit forums like r/NintendoSwitch2 have since tested and verified that it works. On top of that, once the remaster is claimed, the original cartridge is no longer required to play it, meaning the digital upgrade stays permanently on your Switch 2. Effectively, that means the cartridge could be borrowed, claimed, and passed along to anyone else, no matter how many times, with each new borrower able to claim their own digital copy.

CD Projekt Red hasn't made any statement on the behaviour, and it seems very unlikely that it will be patched out given how the entitlement system for the free upgrade works. That said, the Witcher 3 remastered is not a simple visual enhancement. CD Projekt Red updated the skill system, animations, combat, and the game's overall feel.

Finding a good deal on a GPU that's currently soaring past $10,000 would normally call for an instant grab, but this is a case where it shouldn't have been. A Reddit user found what looked like a deal on an RTX 5090, only to discover the card had no PCB, not even the GPU core, when unboxed.

The user posted the story on Reddit along with a full unboxing video. The card in question was the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090, which Amazon currently lists used at $6,449 from the official ASUS store. The user instead paid $4,193 for a "Used - Acceptable" listing, a whopping $2,000 difference that should have been the first red flag.

The bigger issue is where the card actually came from. The OP confirmed in the unboxing video, along with a screenshot of the listing, that Amazon didn't sell and ship the card directly. Instead, it came from a third-party seller called Warehouse Deals, another big red flag. Buying "on" Amazon is not the same as buying "from" Amazon, and that gap is exactly where scams like this can slip through.

Classic MMO Final Fantasy XI opens itself up to new players with an expanded free version with no time limit and a boosted level cap.

Having just celebrated its 24th anniversary this year, Final Fantasy XI is one of the oldest active RPGs on the market today. Now Square Enix is prolonging the old-school MMORPG's life with an increased free trial campaign.

Gamers can now play Final Fantasy XI for free without a time limit (users only had 14 days before the new changes), and the level cap for free users has been increased from 50 to 75, giving lots more opportunities to continue playing. Older accounts that already used the free trial in the past can also jump back in for free via the new program.

Better late than never--Xbox's answer to the platinum trophy is finally here, and Microsoft details how its new Mythic Achievements work.

Mythic Achievements are now available to Xbox Insiders testing, with a wider rollout on the way. The new unlock is essentially a digital milestone that commemorates a player's mastery of platform-level meta sidequests, aka achievement hunting.

Mythic Achievements are rewarded when gamers get all previous accomplishments in a given title, and the unlocks are retroactive. So if you 100% completed Halo 3 ODST, including the Vidmaster Challenge, back in 2010, you'll still get that Mythic Achievement today in 2026.

PlayStation 5 emulation on PC is picking up steam, with new milestones reached almost daily. Earlier this week, we reported that PS5 emulator KyTyPS5 booted Marvel's Wolverine on PC and reached the menu screen. Granted, trying to do anything but watch the menu render at 2 FPS on a GeForce RTX 5090 and a Ryzen 7 7800X3D-powered rig would crash the game, but it's an impressive milestone for what is still a brand-new first-party AAA PlayStation game.

Here we are just a few days later, and now KyTyPS5 can actually get into the game proper, though nowhere near playable. In fact, running on what looks to be a GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, it's basically a slideshow. However, as has been the case with several high-profile PS5 games KyTyPS5 has made quick progress on, it's only a matter of time before we see the game running on a PC at 20 FPS, 30 FPS, and then 60 FPS.

First-party platformer Astro Bot is a great example: a visually intensive, fast-paced title that struggled to maintain 20 FPS in menus and gameplay. Now, it can hit up to 60 FPS in some sections while also resolving graphical issues. Likewise, Demon's Souls Remake now runs at 120 FPS with NVIDIA's DLSS Multi Frame Generation on a GeForce RTX 5090. Basically, KyTyPS5 development is progressing at an impressive rate, and the wider PC gaming community is following it closely for good reason.

Recently, AMD formally unveiled its new 6th Gen AMD EPYC 'Venice' series of processors for data centers powered by the company's latest Zen 6 architecture. Built for the modern era of agentic AI, cloud computing, HPC, and general-purpose workloads, AMD has now released specs and pricing for 31 EPYC 9006 series processors across two sockets: SP7 and SP8.

The AMD EPYC 9006 SP7 Server CPU is the flagship platform, with 16 DDR5 channels at 1,024GB/s per channel with 8,000 MT/s RDIMMs or 1,638GB/s with 12,800 MT/s MRDIMMs. The flagship model here is the AMD EPYC 9996 with 256 cores, 512 threads, and a max boost clock speed of up to 4.1GHz with 1024MB of L3 Cache. Rated at 600W, the EPYC 9996 processor is priced at $14,904 USD.

With nine SP7 CPUs, the AMD EPYC 9556 is the most affordable model here, priced at $8,008 USD. With 64 cores, 128 threads, a max boost clock speed of up to 4.3GHz, and 384MB of L3 Cache, the EPYC 9556 is rated at 300W. SP7 is on track for release in Q4 2024, with enterprise buyer-focused SP8 on track for the first half of 2027.

With Diablo 4 getting its second major expansion earlier this year, one that overhauled the game in such a way that many players felt that it finally found its footing, Blizzard unexpectedly announced Diablo 5 at BlizzCon 2026, which is on track for a Spring 2026 launch. Although Blizzard has shown no gameplay, it has confirmed that Diablo 5 will differ from Diablo 4 and deliver an experience more in line with Diablo 2.

On that note, Diablo 5 game director Joe Shely took to social media platform X to reiterate this by stating that "any challenge can be overcome with the right build." Using action-RPG stats to make his point, he wrote, "While Diablo V will continue to feature some DEX (moment-to-moment execution) mechanics, on balance the game will be an INT/STR game (planning and investment)."

This is a direct response to Diablo 3 and Diablo 4's shift to a more action- and mechanics-based approach to combat, where timing dodge rolls, evading, and avoiding fast-moving attacks are key to tackling the game's most challenging encounters. It suggests a more measured approach to action, à la Diablo 2, where you still need to move around and react to enemies and bosses, but success is primarily based on gear, skill, and stats.

The PlayStation 5 Pro console is reportedly selling out in Japan, and with limited stock due to the current DRAM crisis and hype for the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto 6, Sony is implementing a lottery system for those looking to pick up a console. The lottery is designed to separate gamers from non-gamers because participants must have at least 60 hours of playtime logged on their Sony accounts since 2024.

This measure is reportedly intended to reduce the number of scalpers buying up PlayStation 5 Pro consoles and reselling them at higher prices due to shortages. The announcement confirms that the 60 hours of playtime cover two years, from September 27, 2024, to September 27, 2026, so those looking to pick up a PS5 Pro in Japan will need to be an existing PS4 or PS5 gamer.

The lottery system will ensure they can pick up a console at its current MSRP. That said, the official announcement (translated) states that Sony will handle selecting "winners" and the "subsequent purchase" starting on October 26. Winners will have until November 2 to purchase their PlayStation 5 Pro consoles directly from Sony; otherwise, the console will go back into the draw for the next round of PS5 Pro lottery sales.

AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 26.9.2 is now available for Radeon graphics card owners, and it's a big update for new game releases. With support for Minecraft Dungeons II, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered, Gears of War: E-Day, CONTROL Resonant, and Valor Mortis, it covers most of the major PC game releases right now and on the horizon.

That said, AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 26.9.2 is listed as a non-WHQL 'Optional Driver Release,' so you'll need to download and install it manually. If you have an RDNA 4 or RDNA 3 GPU like the Radeon RX 9070 XT or Radeon RX 7800 XT and plan to play any of the titles listed above, it's worth updating. Driver support for new games often includes optimizations and better support for technologies like FSR 4, so you can expect faster or more stable performance.

AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 26.9.2 isn't limited to new-game support; it also fixes a few notable issues, including "driver timeout" errors when playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on Radeon RX 7000 Series cards and War Thunder on Radeon RX 6000 Series cards. Here's a look at the full release notes, and you can download AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 26.9.2 here.

AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, the spatial AI startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at $8.2 billion. The transaction is expected to close before the end of 2026, pending regulatory approval. According to the company, Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su.

Li is one of the most influential figures in AI history, widely referred to as the "Godmother of AI" for building the ImageNet database, a collection of more than 14 million labeled images that became the foundation for modern computer vision research. She founded World Labs in 2024 with a stated thesis that language alone is not sufficient for genuine AI intelligence.

"The universe isn't made up of words; it's made of real things," Li wrote in a Substack post announcing the deal. The company has since raised more than $1.2 billion and developed the Marble family of world models, which it says can process text, images, video, and 3D data to generate and simulate spatial environments.

It has been a tough few weeks for ambitious unofficial game projects. We covered how developer Andy Nguyen was forced to abandon his PS5 Linux project after a critical Hypervisor exploit was reported to Sony, ending months of work in a matter of days. Now another project has met a similar fate, and this one was days away from a significant update when it ended.

Take-Two Interactive has issued a cease-and-desist to Paralympics Productions, the developer group behind the unofficial native GTA V port for Android. Project lead M0jso confirmed on X that the group will fully cease operations on October 3, 2026, thanking Take-Two for what he described as mercy, since the legal consequences could have been far worse.

M0jso's project was different from most community efforts to run GTA V on Android. The common approach involves running the PC version of the game through an emulation layer like Winlator, which translates x86 code on-the-fly and comes with performance costs.

Brendon Ray Hedrick, who worked at EVGA from 2016 to 2019, says the company believed it had to keep at least one GeForce card available at NVIDIA's advertised starting price, even when that model sold at a loss. This was believed to be necessary to protect EVGA's GPU allocation from NVIDIA.

In a personal essay, he says failing to launch a GPU at NVIDIA's MSRP could lead NVIDIA to cut EVGA's chip allocation. However, he cites no contract establishing such a rule and does not claim to have witnessed NVIDIA explicitly punish EVGA over pricing. "As I understood the arrangement," he writes, EVGA needed a loss leader, adding that the company couldn't know whether a smaller allocation was actually retaliation for its pricing.

For the first time, Microsoft has officially explained why AMD chips aren't in its current Surface lineup. Speaking to Windows Central's Zac Bowden, Microsoft Surface CVP Brett Ostrum stated the decision comes down to portfolio size rather than any issue with AMD itself.

"We love working with AMD. We have a limited portfolio, and so we have to make our choices pretty wisely in terms of what we're doing and where we're doing it," Ostrum said, additionally stating, "I love working with AMD."

AMD did actually have a run in Surface before. The Surface Laptop 3 launched in 2019 with an AMD option alongside Intel, and it was also an option in Surface Laptop 4 before being halted entirely with the Surface Laptop 5. Currently, the Surface catalog includes Intel, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2, and soon NVIDIA's custom RTX Spark chip in the upcoming Surface Laptop Ultra. However, this new lineup includes no AMD silicon.