Asus just announced the Crossblade Ranger, a gaming motherboard centered around an FM2+ socket. That’s right, this is AMD only, baby. No Intel CPUs permitted beyond this point.
The Asus Crossblade Ranger’s FM2+ socket is compatible with AMD’s A-series and Athlon processors. You can stuff up to 64GB of RAM into this bad boy, but we feel that anything more than 16GB is overkill. In fact, even 16GB might be a bit much. 8GB or 12GB should be more than enough.
Though whatever AMD processor you put in the Crossblade Ranger won’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of measuring up with Intel’s latest, you can still stuff it with some incredibly powerful graphics cards courtesy of its dual PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots. If you put in one graphics card, it’ll run at x16. Put in two, and they’ll run at x8 each. Other PCIe slots on the Crossblade Ranger include one 2.0 x16, a 2.0 x1, and a pair of vanilla PCI slots.
With the Crossblade Ranger’s eight SATA ports, you can hook up eight SATA devices to it. However, you’ll need to stuff the motherboard in a case with plenty of upgrade real estate if you plan to take advantage of every single SATA connection. Other ports on the Crossblade Ranger include HDMI, DVI, VGA, Ethernet, and six USB ports around back. Four of those are of the USB 3.0 variety.
In case you want to push your AMD processor to and past its limits, the Crossblade Ranger’s UEFI makes it fairly easy to overclock your CPU/APU, complete with voltage adjustments.
Everyone knows that if you want to build a beastly gaming PC with enough power to make HAL 9000 jealous, you’re probably going to stuff it with Intel hardware. However, Intel CPUs are generally much more expensive than their AMD-based counterparts, and though AMD processors are not nearly as powerful, they can still serve as solid backbones for gaming rigs.
The Asus Crossblade Ranger will be available sometime this month, though it’s unclear how much it will retail for once it hits the market.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.