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Samsung has announced its new 57-inch Odyssey Neo G9 (G95NC model) gaming monitor at Gamescom 2023. The curvaceous new display is heralded as the “world’s first dual UHD gaming monitor,” and being atop of the Odyssey line you can expect a compelling assortment of supporting specs. This isn’t the first we have heard about Samsung’s impressive G95NC, the monitor was first announced at CES 2023 in January.

Sitting directly in front of a 57-inch monitor of any type would already be rather immersive, but the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 claims to turn the immersion dial up to the max with its design and specs. The 57-inch diagonal spans a 32:9 aspect ratio, providing 7,680 x 2,160 pixels (140ppi). That’s physically equivalent to dual 32-inch UHD monitors seamlessly mated. Samsung has chosen a curved panel for the G95NC, and the arc of this display is quite pronounced at 1000R.

Of course, Samsung has equipped not just a large panel, but a high quality one. The display technology used here is dubbed ‘Quantum Matrix Technology’ and deeper reading reveals that it uses Mini LED backlighting technology. Users benefit from strong contrast and reduced blooming thanks to the highly granular backlighting control. Moreover, the display offers: VESA DisplayHDR 1000 with 1,000 nit peak brightness, plus imagery appearing “vivid and life-like, with accurate color and contrast reproduction,” says Samsung.

Turning our attention to the performance stats, which will be of most interest to avid PC gamers, this immense display also provides good refresh rates and response times. Samsung quotes a 240 Hz refresh rate and 1ms GTG response time, which should mean fast-paced gaming with reduced motion blur or ghosting effects. Additionally, Samsung has gained AMD FreeSync Premium Pro certification for the Odyssey Neo S9.

For connectivity, Samsung has furnished the G95NC with several choices including a DisplayPort 2.1 standard (which supports lossless Display Stream Compression) and can output at 240 Hz to match this display. There is an HDMI 2.1 port and a USB hub too, for neater cable management.

An obvious use of this dual-UHD monitor is to replace multiple monitors. Samsung makes the transition smoother with its multi-tasking, multi-input Picture-in-Picture and Picture-by-Picture modes, as well as Auto Source Switch+ to instantly connect to new devices without flipping through input sources.

Supporting the enviable display, a modern ergonomic stand is provided, as shown. Last but not least, your gaming experiences can be enhanced with Samsung Core Lighting+ and CoreSync LED ambience effects.

Samsung is showing off the 57-inch Odyssey Neo S9 dual-UHD gaming monitor at Gamescom starting from today (until 27th). It says that the monitor can now be pre-ordered globally. In the UK we see it is available direct from Samsung for £2,199 including 20% VAT. We couldn’t find a pre-order page on the Samsung US site at the time of writing, but if you take 20% VAT off the UK price and apply today’s exchange rate you get US$2,220. Overall, this new monitor is looking a very likely candidate for our Best Ultrawide Gaming Monitors of 2023 picks.

At Gamescom, Samsung was also showcasing its upgraded Odyssey Ark 55-inch (G97NC model) and the the Samsung Neo QLED 8K TV.

Thermaltake’s ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5-5600 C36 memory kit may not look like much on paper, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve a shot to take on the best RAM. DDR5 is progressing nicely, as both Intel and AMD platforms now use the new memory standard. Unlike when DDR5 was in diapers, memory kits nowadays arrive with improved timings, and we even have access to high-end memory kits hitting DDR5-8000. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for lower-tier memory kits — not everyone chases the highest performance possible. Some still prefer the more straightforward options or a memory kit that sticks to their processor’s official supported data rate, such as DDR5-5600 for Intel’s 13th-Gen Raptor Lake chips.

Thermaltake ‘cheated’ with the ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5 kit, recycling the same design as the DDR4 equivalent. You can only tell the difference between the two because the brand added the “D5” marking on the ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5’s heat spreader to indicate its DDR5 memory. The aluminum heat spreader retains the same aesthetics, including the two plates in an interlocked layout with a chrome strip in the middle.

Checking in with a height of 48.35mm (1.9 inches), the ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5 is far from a low-profile design. Therefore, we recommend you check the clearance space for your CPU air cooler before pulling the trigger on Thermaltake’s memory kit. The RGB illumination didn’t change, either: The memory modules still have 16 high-lumen addressable LEDs. Thermaltake provides the proprietary NeonMaker and TT RGB Plus software for control and customization. Or, if you prefer your motherboard’s software, the memory modules support Asus Aura Sync, Gigabyte RGB Fusion 2.0, MSI Mystic Light Sync, and ASRock Polychrome RGB.

The memory modules arrive with a single-rank design on a 10-layer PCB with two-ounce copper inner layers and 10μ gold fingers. We found eight SK hynix H5CG48MEBDX014 (M-die) integrated circuits (ICs) under the heat spreader. The ICs have a capacity of 2GB, totaling 16GB on each memory module. Renesas provided the P8911-YZ001GR-2208DK power management IC (PMIC) for the memory modules.

The ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5 defaulted to DDR5-4800 with 40-40-40-77 timings when you take it for its first run. There’s one XMP 3.0 profile for DDR5-5600 that will help you set the timings to 36-36-36-76 and the required DRAM voltage to 1.25V. See our PC Memory 101 feature and How to Shop for RAM story for more timings and frequency considerations.

Comparison Hardware

Our Intel test system runs the Core i9-13900K on the MSI MEG Z690 Unify-X with the 7D28vAA firmware. In contrast, our AMD system pairs the Ryzen 7 7700X with the MSI MPG X670E Carbon WiFi changed to the 7D70v176 firmware. The Corsair CUE H100i Elite LCD liquid cooler keeps our Raptor Lake and Zen 4 processor operating temperatures under check.

The MSI GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Gaming X Trio tackles the more graphics-intensive workloads, ensuring that there isn’t a graphics bottleneck in our gaming RAM benchmarks. The Windows 11 installation, benchmarking software, and games reside on Crucial’s MX500 SSDs. Meanwhile, the Corsair RM1000x Shift ATX 3.0 power supply provides our systems with clean and abundant power, directly feeding the GeForce RTX 4080 with a native 16-pin (12VHPWR) power cable. Lastly, the Streacom BC1 open-air test bench is vital to organizing our hardware.

Intel Performance

The ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5-5600 C36 has tighter timings than the Xpower Zenith RGB DDR5-5600 C40, giving the memory kit an edge in application and gaming benchmarks. The former was generally faster, with a few exceptions where it lost to the slower memory kits.

AMD Performance

Unsurprisingly, Thermaltake’s memory kit outperformed the AMD platform’s Silicon Power memory kit. The ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5’s out-of-the-box performance in applications and gaming is good for a DDR5-5600 memory kit.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

The ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5 is another of the few DDR5-5600 memory kits that wield SK hynix M-die ICs. Like its Xpower Zenith RGB rival, we got excellent overclocking results from the ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5. DDR5-6800 was doable on 1.4V, with timings tweaked to 34-45-45-76.

Lowest Stable Timings

Nobody buys memory kits based on M-die to run at the advertised speed with tight timings. The ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5 memory kit has 36-36-36-76 timings by default compared to the 40-40-40-76 timings on the Xpower Zenith RGB memory kit. Nonetheless, both memory kits can operate smoothly at DDR5-5600 with 28-34-34-76 timings and a 1.4V DRAM voltage.

Bottom Line

The ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5-5600 C36 is a sound option if you’re looking for DDR5-5600 memory that’s almost plug-and-play on modern platforms. It’s faster than the Xpower Zenith RGB DDR5-5600 C40 from the get-go and has similar overclocking potential. Nonetheless, the typical disclaimer that your mileage may vary applies here too.

Thermaltake’s DDR5-5600 memory kit is one of the hardest to find in the U.S. market. The last known price for the ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5-5600 C36 is $193.19, putting it in an awful position. Retailing close to $200 puts the memory kit into DDR5-7000 territory. The price tag might be okay if we were still in the early days of DDR5, but curiously, Thermaltake hasn’t updated the pricing on the ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5-5600 C36. It doesn’t look attractive beside the Xpower Zenith RGB DDR5-5600 C40 when the latter is a bit slower but has the same overclocking prowess selling with a price tag of a little over one-third of the ToughRAM XG RGB DDR5-5600 C36.

Hyper Light Breaker, the action rogue-lite previously scheduled to enter Steam Early Access this fall, has been delayed a second time. The launch window for the spiritual successor to 2016’s Hyper Light Drifter is now rescheduled for early 2024.

“So we need just a bit more time on Hyper Light Breaker before we launch into Early Access,” Alx Preston, founder and Creative Director for developer Heart Machine, said in a video announcing the delay. “This means we’ll be pushing our date to early next year in 2024.” He said the additional time will “allow us to bring the game to its full potential.” Preston thanked fans for their patience and support, promising “a new adventure that lives up to what fans expect from a Heart Machine title.”

Heart Machine / Gearbox Publishing

Hyper Light Breaker shifts gameplay from 2D to 3D while adding up to three players for co-op play. While the 2016 original honored elements from classic top-down Zelda games, the upcoming open-world installment incorporates some Breath of the Wild basics. These include exploring open countrysides scattered with ruins while soaring through the air with a glider and surfing down hills. However, Hyper Light Breaker uses procedurally generated environments, which should help with replayability. Its combat also appears to depart from Nintendo’s modern Zelda games. The game’s first trailer gives you a closer peek.

“We have a lot of wild ideas we want to put into the game, which is exciting and thrilling since the format and tech we’ve created allows so much possibility,” said Preston. “This short push will give us the best chance for a stronger first step into open development in early access next year.”

While AMD’s Ryzen 9 7945HX3D processor with 3D V-Cache that launched today is positioned as the world’s highest-performing CPU for gaming notebooks, this device is one of the highest-performing processor for gaming in general. That makes it a perfect candidate for compact gaming PCs. Minisforum wasted no time in announcing plans to use the new CPU for its upcoming 6-liter gaming PC.

Minisforum calls its forthcoming system Project DRFXI — to emphasize its Dragon Range nature — and this is one of the company’s first small form-factor (SFF) desktops with a Mini-ITX motherboard, as reported by VideoCardz. The PC can handle CPUs with up to 100W thermal design power (TDP), enough to handle AMD’s new 16-core Ryzen 9 7945HX3D CPU. The company plans to use a low-profile air cooling system for the processor, though we can only guess for now whether it will be able to keep the CPU at its peak boost clocks for long.

The machine has two slots for DDR5 memory modules and two M.2 slots for SSDs, which is about as good as you get for a Mini-ITX motherboard. In addition, it will feature Wi-Fi, GbE, USB (Type-A and Type-C), audio connectors, and display outputs.

One of the interesting peculiarities of Minisforum’s DRFXI is that supports desktop graphics cards of all length and height, giving it a lot of flexibility. There is a catch though: The graphics board must be installed on top of the system, outside the case. This does not necessarily look good, but at least it provides lots of options and even support for future PCIe 5.0 x16 graphics cards. All you need is a sufficient PSU and you could even stick an RTX 4090 on top of the chassis.

Minisforum hasn’t detailed specific plans for when it will make its Project DRFXI available, nor do we have a price estimate. Given the relatively unique design, with a high-end CPU and support for the largest graphics cards, it’s aimed at demanding gamers. That typically means the resulting product won’t be cheap.

I’ve been a notebook person for most of my life. I’ve had dozens of notebooks over the years that served as repositories for to-do lists, story ideas, meeting scribbles and everything in between. But at a certain point in my adult life, I turned away from physical notebooks because it became easier to save all of those things digitally in various apps that were always available to me on my phone. I sacrificed tactile satisfaction for digital convenience, and a small part of me mourns for all of the half-filled notebooks I left in my wake.

For some like me, an E Ink tablet may be the solution to those dueling impulses. They can combine the feeling of writing in a regular notebook with many of the conveniences of digitized documents. E Ink tablets allow you to take all of your notes with you on one device, while also letting you scribble with a stylus just like you would with pen-and-paper. Unlike regular tablets and styli, though, E Ink tablets are nowhere near ubiquitous — but there are just enough players in the game to make deciding which one to buy more complicated than you might think. We tested out a bunch of the most popular models available now to see how well they work, how convenient they really are and which are the best tablets using E Ink screens available today.

Are E Ink tablets worth it?

An E Ink tablet will be a worthwhile purchase to a very select group of people. If you prefer the look and feel of an E Ink display to LCD panels found on traditional tablets, it makes a lot of sense. They’re also good options for those who want a more paper-like writing experience (although you can get that kind of functionality on a regular tablet with the right screen protector) or a more distraction-free device overall.

The final note is key here. Most E Ink tablets don’t run on the same operating systems as regular tablets, so you’re automatically going to be limited in what you can do. And even with those that do allow you to download traditional apps like Chrome, Instagram and Facebook, E Ink tablets are not designed to give you the best casual-browsing experience. This is mostly due to the nature of E Ink displays, which have noticeable refreshes, a lack of color and lower quality than the panels you’ll find on even the cheapest iPad.

Arguably the biggest reason why you wouldn’t want to go with an iPad (all models of which support stylus input, a plethora of reading apps, etc) is because it’s much easier to get distracted by email, social media and other Internet-related temptations. An e-reader is also worth considering if this is the case for you, but just know that most standard e-readers do not accept stylus input. If you like to make notes in the margins of books, underline and mark up PDFs and the like, an e-reader won’t cut it.

What to look for in an E Ink tablet

I discovered four main things that can really make or break your experience with an E Ink tablet during my testing; first is the writing experience. How good it is will depend a lot on the display’s refresh rate (does it refresh after every time you put pen to “paper,” so to speak?) and the stylus’ latency. Most had little to no latency, but there were some that were worse than others. Finally, you should double check before buying that your preferred E Ink tablet comes with a stylus. Believe it or not, many of them require you to purchase the pen separately.

The second thing to consider is the reading experience. How much will you be reading books, documents and other things on this tablet? While you can find E Ink tablets in all different sizes, most of them tend to be larger than your standard e-reader because it makes writing much easier. Having a larger display isn’t a bad thing, but it might make holding it for long periods slightly more uncomfortable. (Most e-readers are roughly the size of a paperback book, giving you a similar feeling to analog reading).

The supported file types will also make a big difference. It’s hard to make a blanket statement here because this varies so much among E Ink tablets. The TL;DR is that you’ll have a much better reading experience if you go with one made by a company that already has a history in e-book sales (i.e. Amazon or Kobo). All of the titles you bought via the Kindle or Kobo store should automatically be available to you on your Kindle or Kobo E Ink tablet. And with Kindle titles, specifically, since they are protected by DRM, it’s not necessarily the best idea to try to bring those titles over to a third-party device. Unless the tablet supports reading apps like Amazon’s Kindle or the Kobo app, you’ll be limited to supported file types, like ePUB, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, PNG and others.

Third, most E Ink tablets have some search features, but they can vary widely between models. You’ll want to consider how important it is to you to be able to search through all your handwritten notes and markups. I noticed that Amazon’s and Kobo’s E Ink tablets made it easy to refer back to notes made in books and files because they automatically save on which pages you took notes, made highlights and more. Searching is less standardized on E Ink tablets that have different supported file types, but their features can be quite powerful in their own right. For example, a few devices I tested supported text search in handwritten notes along with handwriting recognition, the latter of which allows you to translate your scribbles into typed text.

The final factor to consider is sharing and connectivity. Yes, we established that E Ink tablets can be great distraction-free devices, but most manufacturers understand that your notes and doodles aren’t created in a vacuum. You’ll likely want to access them elsewhere, and that requires some form of connectivity. All of the E Ink tablets I tried were WiFi devices, and some supported cloud syncing, companion mobile apps and the ability to export notes via email so you can access them elsewhere. None of them, however, integrate directly with a digital note taking system like Evernote or OneNote, so these devices will always be somewhat supplementary if you use apps like that, too. Ultimately, you should think about what you will want to do with the documents you’ll interact with on your E Ink tablet after the tablet portion is done.

The latest reMarkable tablet isn’t topping our list because it’s the most full-featured or even most interesting E Ink tablet we tested. Rather, it provides the best mix of features people will find useful in a device like this. We’ll get into them all, but first, it’s worth mentioning build quality. The reMarkable 2 weighs less than one pound and is one of the sleekest E Ink tablets we tried. It has a 10.3-inch monochrome digital paper display that’s surrounded by beige-colored bezels, with the chunkiest portion at the bottom edge where you’d naturally grip it. There’s a slim silver bezel on the left side, which attaches to accessories like the folio case and the new Type Folio keyboard. Hats off to reMarkable for making an E Ink tablet that feels right at home with all of your other fancy gadgets.

Let’s start with the writing and reading experiences on the reMarkable 2, both of which are great. From the get go, scribbling, doodling and writing was a breeze. We tested out the Marker Plus, which has a built-in eraser, but both it and the standard Marker are tilt- and pressure sensitive pens, and require no batteries or charging. I observed basically no lag between my pressing down onto the reMarkable 2’s screen and lines showing up. The latency was so low that it felt the closest to actual pen-and-paper. But I will say that this is not unique among our top picks in this guide – almost all of the E Ink tablets we tested got this very crucial feature right.

When it comes to reading, the reMarkable 2 supports PDFs and ePUBs, and you can add files to the device by logging into your reMarkable account on desktop or via the companion mobile app on your phone. You can also pair your Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox account with your reMarkable account and access files that way as well. That should be good enough for anyone who, say, reads a lot of academic papers or reviews many documents for work. It’ll be harder for people who purchase their ebooks from online marketplaces like the Kindle or Kobo stores, but there are other options for those.

Another fun way to get documents onto the reMarkable 2 is via the Read with reMarkable extension for Google Chrome. After installing it and pairing your reMarkable account, you’ll be able to send articles you find online directly to your reMarkable 2 so you can check them out later. You can even customize these files to be sent as text only, which will let you change their format directly on your reMarkable, or as a PDF file. Regardless of which you choose, you’ll be able to mark up these articles as you would any other file on the E Ink tablet. I used this extension a lot and I did enjoy reading longform articles on the reMarkable 2 more than on my iPhone. Being able to underline, highlight and otherwise mark up those stories was more of a bonus than a necessity for me, but for others who glean sources from online materials will be better off for it.

Overall, it’s pretty easy to get files onto the reMarkable 2 and it is possible to access them elsewhere when you may not be able to whip out the E Ink tablet. Those with a reMarkable Connect subscription will have the best experience, and it’s a nice perk that you get a one-year membership when you buy one. The $3-per-month subscription provides the ability to edit existing notes and take new ones from anywhere using the desktop and mobile apps, plus unlimited cloud storage and syncing. On that last front, if you don’t pay for Connect, only “notes and documents synced online in the last 50 days” will be available in reMarkable’s companion apps. I suspect 50 days worth of document syncing will be enough for some, but not power-users. Putting the ability to take notes anywhere behind a paywall is a bit of a bummer no matter what and makes it much harder for anyone to use the reMarkable ecosystem as their main note-taking space.

That said, I kept most of my testing to the reMarkable 2 itself and was impressed by its ability to be a digital notebook without a steep learning curve. You can create different notebooks and “quick sheets” to organize your handwritten notes, and folders to make sense of imported files. You’ll find eight different brush types with which to mark up documents and take notes, along with customizable line thicknesses and “colors” (which just show up as shades on the tablet itself). You can even type wherever you want in a doc, and the reMarkable 2 can translate handwritten notes into machine-readable text with surprising accuracy.

It was no shock that the reMarkable 2 ended up having the best mix of features, along with a relatively low learning curve. The company was one of the first on the scene with a truly viable E Ink tablet back in 2017, and they’ve been refining the experience ever since. But that comes at a cost – the reMarkable 2 isn’t the most expensive E Ink tablet we tested, but it’s not cheap either. The tablet alone will set you back $299, and then you’ll have to shell out either $79 or $129 for the Marker or Marker Plus, respectively. In all, you’re looking at $430 for the best version of the reMarkable 2 you can get (and that assumes you skip the new $199 Type Folio Keyboard). You could get a 9th-gen iPad and the 1st-gen Apple Pencil for the same price and you’d have a more flexible duo, purely based on the capabilities of iOS.

But you’re probably not considering an iPad for a specific reason, whether that’s your love for E Ink or the feeling of pen-to-paper writing, or you simply want a more distraction-free experience. If you’re looking for an E ink tablet that will not take ages to get used to, offers a stellar writing experience and makes it relatively simple to access notes elsewhere, the reMarkable 2 is your best bet.

Best e-reader E Ink tablet: Amazon Kindle Scribe

You really have two options in this space: the Amazon Kindle Scribe and the Kobo Elipsa 2E. The Scribe edged out the Elipsa 2E purely because of its low-latency pen-and-screen combination. The Elipsa has its merits, which we’ll get into in a bit, but it just couldn’t compete with the Scribe when it came to a seamless and smooth handwriting experience.

We already gave the Kindle Scribe the full review treatment, and in general, I enjoyed it while testing it out for this guide, too. As mentioned, there’s little to no latency when writing on the Scribe with its companion pen. Thanks to the latest software update, you also have more brush types to choose from now, including fountain pen, marker and pencil, which add to the charm. Like other E Ink tablets, the Scribe makes it easy to create multiple notebooks, and you can add pages to them and change up their templates if you wish.

As an e-reader, the Scribe shines not only thanks to its 10.2-inch display with auto-adjusting front lights, but also because you have Amazon’s entire ebook store at your fingertips. If you get most of your reading material from Amazon or subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, you’ll be able to jump right into all of your titles instantly on the Scribe. In addition, the Scribe can connect to Audible via Bluetooth. It’s also easy to get ebooks from your local library and read them on a Kindle. This will be crucial not only for voracious readers, but especially for students who buy or rent digital textbooks and those who consume books regularly for research purposes.

I thought about students a lot when using the Scribe. I started college in 2009, two years after the first Kindle was released and one year before the first iPad came out. Getting textbooks digitally really wasn’t an option for me – but I can understand the appeal a note-taking device like the Kindle Scribe would have for students. It’s arguably even better than a standard Kindle because its bigger screen size, which will make it less tiring to stare at for long periods of time. Adding the ability to take handwritten notes while you’re studying is icing on the cake.

However, Amazon’s execution of book notes is not my favorite. You actually cannot take notes in the margins of Kindle ebooks. Instead you press and hold the pen’s tip on the screen to highlight text or add a note to a particular word or phrase. If you do the latter, a window pops up on the bottom half of the screen where you can either take a handwritten note or type a text note using the Scribe’s mildly frustrating and sluggish on-screen keyboard.

Amazon recently rectified this a bit with a software update that allows for direct on-page writing in certain Kindle books. The Kindle Store now has a section that showcases “Write-on Books,” which is currently mostly made up of journals and game books that feature puzzles like crosswords and sudoku. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but it means you still won’t be able to mark up your favorite fiction and non-fiction books until they support the new feature.

This is where I give a nod to the Kobo Elipsa 2E, where you can write notes in the margins, underline, circle and otherwise mark up your reading material. It’s a more natural (and fun) experience since it mimics what you’d do if you were reading a physical book. It’s a shame that the latency on the Elipsa was just a hair more noticeable than that of the Scribe. If it weren’t for that, it might have beaten Amazon’s device here.

What that extra bit of latency translates to in practice is handwriting that can come out just a bit messier, and that increases precipitously the faster you write. But that also means that you’ll notice this the most when taking notes longhand on the Elipsa; if you’re primarily using an E Ink tablet to mark up documents, it won’t affect you as much. Despite that, I did like the way Kobo executed notebooks on the Elipsa. You can have a standard notebook where you can write and scribble away, or an “advanced” notebook that supports handwriting-to-text conversion and inserting things like diagrams and formulas. Text conversion is actually pretty accurate, too, even when dealing with some of my ugliest handwriting.

Kobo also has a pretty sizable ebook marketplace, so it’s certainly a decent option if you want to stay clear of the Amazon ecosystem. But Amazon has the upper hand when it comes to price. The Kobo Elipsa 2E pack that includes its stylus is $399, while the 16GB Kindle Scribe with the premium pen (which includes dedicated eraser and shortcut buttons) comes in at $369. Even if you max out the Scribe with 64GB of storage, you’d only spend $20 more than you would on the Kobo Elipsa. That, combined with the Scribe’s strong overall performance and the ubiquity of Amazon’s ebook offerings will make it the better choice for most readers.

Best E Ink tablet for note-taking: Supernote X

I spent a while testing all of these E Ink tablets, and the Supernote X is the one I was consistently most excited to use. As a notebook nerd, I find this thing so cool. Available in 10.3-inch (what I tested) and 7.8-inch sizes, the Supernote X has a “FeelWrite” screen protector that has a different feel than a standard E Ink screen. When writing on it with Heart of Metal Pen 2, which is weighty and looks like a fountain pen, you get a gel pen-like feel rather than the subtly scratchy vibe that other E Ink tablets have. In fact, the Supernote X has one of the best writing experiences out of any tablet I tested.

The Supernote X supports a range of file formats, including PDF, ePUB, Word (.doc), PNG and JPG, which really opens up the content you can put onto the thing. I wanted to see if I could treat it almost like a digital bullet journal, and that wasn’t hard to do. There are built-in page templates, but I was able to download daily, weekly and monthly planner templates online, resize them and move them onto the Supernote X using Android File Transfer. The device has a dedicated “MyStyle” folder where you can save files you want to use as templates. The most difficult part was making sure I had the dimensions right while resizing the documents. Once saved in the right folder, I could make an entire notebook out of the templates I had gotten from the internet for free.

Supernote does have its own “app store,” but there’s not much in there, and its Play Store offerings are limited to only the Kindle app. This device doesn’t have a backlight, so it won’t be easy to see in dark environments. But you can download Amazon’s ebook app and read just like you would on a standard tablet (no, you can’t mark up books here either).

Honestly, the last thing I wanted to do with the Supernote X was read, though. The device really shines as an E Ink notebook and the company clearly put a lot of thought into “building a better mousetrap,” so to speak. You can translate handwritten words into typed text, but you don’t have to do that in order for the software to recognize your handwriting. There’s a keywords feature that lets you basically bookmark important phrases for quick access later. All you need to do is lasso the word, press the keyword button and the tablet’s software will translate your writing into typed text. Then you can add it as a keyword and quickly jump back to it from the left-side tablet of contents menu. Similarly, you can bookmark titles and add stars to pages that are important, all of which help you jump between important bits.

That said, the Supernote X sometimes felt a little inconsistent. The writing experience was top-notch, but there were other things that felt a little less polished. For example, you can swipe down on the right bezel to bring up a menu that lets you quickly navigate between favorited notes and recent documents – that’s quite thoughtful. But then the Files page just has a couple of starkly named folders like Export, Screenshot and Inbox that I didn’t touch once, and the pen sidebar has more options than most people will know what to do with (and none of them have text labels).

These are small nit-picks, but they go to show that the Supernote X might not be the best device for tech novices. There is a learning curve here, but notebook nerds like myself will be thrilled with all that the Supernote X has to offer. Unsurprisingly, all those advanced features come at a steep price: the A5-sized tablet with a folio and pen will set you back at least $532, making it the most expensive set on our list.

Honorable mention: Boox Note Air 2 Plus

If you removed some of the notebook-specific features from the Supernote X and added in a more complete version of Android 11, you’d get the Boox Note Air 2 Plus. Boox makes a number of interesting E Ink devices and the Note Air 2 Plus is the one that best compares to the others on our list thanks to its 10.3-inch display. This is an E Ink Android tablet, so that means you can actually download Android apps like Kindle, Kobo and others. There’s even a web browser, and yes, you can watch videos on this thing, too.

Of course, just because you can do all of that doesn’t mean you should. E Ink screens are truly best for reading and writing, so I didn’t spend much time binge watching YouTube on the Note Air 2 Plus – but I was happy that I had the freedom to do so. Really, the utility of Android comes in with the app store and I expect that most people will use it to download all of their favorite reading and writing apps. Much like a standard tablet, the Note Air 2 Plus will be a great option for anyone that gets their reading material from a bunch of different places — and since you can manually transfer documents from your computer to the device, too, it’s far-and-away the most versatile option on our list.

I experienced little to no latency when writing on the Note Air 2 Plus and I was happy with the number of brush options it has. Like the Supernote X, it comes with a bunch of page templates you can use, or you can bring in your own PDFs and other documents to use as templates. There’s an “AI recognition” feature that translates a whole page’s handwriting into typed text, and it’s actually pretty accurate. (Though, it did consistently confuse my “&” for a capital A). I also appreciated that you can add other kinds of material to your notes, including web pages and voice recordings, and share notes as PDFs or PNGs via email, Google Drive and other services. Features like those ensure that, with this partially analog device, you don’t miss out on some of the conveniences that a true digital notebook system would have.

Instead of going into all of the features the Note Air 2 Plus offers, I think it’s most useful to talk about the value of this device. A bundle with the tablet, a standard pen and a folio case comes in at $500, putting it on the higher end of the price spectrum among the devices we tested. But considering it’s a full Android tablet, that doesn’t seem absurd. Those who want to avoid distractions most of the time while still having access to email and a web browser might gravitate towards a device like this. Also, most of Boox’s devices operate in the same way, so you do have more affordable options if you like this blueprint. For example, the Boox Nova Air 2 is a 7.8-inch version of the Note Air 2 Plus, with slightly different RAM and storage specs to match, and its bundle comes in at $370.

Today, Philips launched the Evnia 49M2C8900. This monitor is the newest addition to the Evina 8000 gaming monitor series. It promises a host of features such as a 48.9-inch 32:9 aspect ratio QD-OLED display, a 240 Hz refresh rate, a response time of 0.03 ms GtG, a built-in 30W DTS speaker system, and immersive Ambiglow surround lighting.

Philips characterizes the Evnia 49M2C8900 as a premium gaming monitor but says it is also an excellent display for work. It backs up its statement by highlighting its comprehensive USB-C docking station, which offers 90W power delivery, the integrated KVM switch, a VESA mounting option, and included ergonomic stand. Users with their eyes glued to the screen for extended periods will also benefit from OLED’s true blacks and a LowBlue mode.

Gaming is, of course, where the Evnia 49M2C8900 excels. Its resolution of Double-QHD (5210×1440) delivers plenty of detail (remember to buy one of the best graphics cards for gaming). Gamers will appreciate the 240 Hz refresh rate, a response time of 0.03 ms GtG, and VESA ClearMR (Clear Motion Ratio) 13000 certification to ensure blur-free gaming.

Helping provide a good overall and integrated immersive experience, this 1800R curved Evnia also features built-in DTS Sound with 30 W output (via 4x 7.5W speakers). Ambiglow lighting is also built-in to extend the on-screen action to the surrounding periphery.

The display’s great color stats will benefit both games and more serious work. Philips says the true 10-bit QD-OLED panel used is certified for DisplayHDR True Black 400, and offers up to 450 nits peak brightness. The monitor’s color gamut covers 99% DCI-P3, equivalent to 153.1% sRGB. Factory calibrated, users should find the display’s sRGB mode offers a

Connectivity is provided by the monitor’s 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 2x HDMI 2.1, 1x USB type-C (with DP-Alt mode, and 90W power delivery), and an audio jack. The aforementioned USB-C hub provides four USB data ports.

Philips mentions mid-September availability for the Philips Evnia 49M2C8900. We don’t have US pricing yet, but the UK MSRP is £1,650, and buyers in mainland Europe will be asked to spend €1,950. Depending on the finalized price and test performance, the Evnia 49M2C8900 might find a place in our Best Ultrawide Gaming Monitors 2023 feature.

Samsung’s Cheaper Challenger (Same Panel)

If you like the look of the above monitor, you might also be tempted by the Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 DQHD gaming monitor, now available for $1,799 at Best Buy. Both monitors are based upon the same Samsung QD-OLED panel; however, the Evnia’s supporting features like DTS Sound and Ambiglow might give it the edge.

Microsoft’s Stefan Kinnestrand announced today that Microsoft Excel will officially support Python integration. This will be accomplished via a partnership with Anaconda which brings a huge repository with common libraries like statsmodels, Matplotlib and pandas. The new Python integration is available starting today as a preview for those in the Beta Channel Microsoft 365 Insiders group.

The integration will become a part of the many tools offered in Excel’s repertoire. As such, you won’t have to take any additional steps to add Python to your copy of Excel. More specifically, this integration will be implemented as a part of Excel’s data transformation tool known as Power Query.

If you want to get in on the early action, you’ll need to be a part of the Beta Channel Insider group in the Microsoft 365 Insider Program. The preview will be automatically included in the latest Insider build. Just install the latest copy of Excel offered and open a new workbook. In the ribbon go to ‘Formulas’ then ‘Insert Python’. There you should have an option to try the preview.

Anaconda has more details about their work on the project over at their official website. We definitely recommend checking it out for an inside look at what the new Python support is capable of. They also offer training courses which can help you get off the ground with the new addition.

The preview will only be available for a limited time so now is your chance to check it out and see what it’s like hands-on. The preview will also be extended to Microsoft 365 subscribers. Once the preview expires, it will still be available but with limited functionality. To restore full access, users will need to purchase a license.

If you want to get a closer look at the details of the new rollout, we recommend both reading through the official announcement shared by Microsoft as well as the official documentation from Anaconda.

Arm Holdings this week submitted a Form F-1 registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its planned initial public offering of its standard shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. The specific number of shares and their pricing for this offering are still to be decided, but it is believed that this will be the biggest IPO in years as we are dealing with a key player in the microprocessor design landscape.

Approximately 70% of the global population employs products powered by chips featuring instruction set architecture or designs developed by Arm. In the fiscal year ended on March 31, 2023, various chipmakers shipped 30 billion chips based on Arm’s technology, marking a growth of 70% from 2016, reports Nikkei. To date, Arm’s technology was used in 250 billion chips and according to SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son this figure is anticipated to eventually hit the one trillion mark.

Given the ubiquitous nature of Arm technology, Arm Holdings’s valuation is estimated to fall between $60 and $70 billion. Though initial ambitions aimed to raise up to $10 billion, SoftBank’s choice to retain a larger portion of Arm might adjust this figure. Arm Holdings is currently owned by SoftBank, a Japanese investment conglomerate, which intends to capitalize on Arm’s strengths in traditional markets as well as in the expanding AI computing sector.

“A strong performance from Arm will not only be a major windfall for SoftBank, but also reinforce its AI strategy by showing the market hype around AI has not waned,” said Kyle Stanford, an analyst at PitchBook, reports Bloomberg. 

Leading tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Intel, Nvidia, and Samsung are reportedly considering becoming anchor investors in Arm’s forthcoming initial public offering, according to media reports.

Nevertheless, Arm’s trajectory is not devoid of headwinds. Recently released financial documents revealed a slight decline in its revenues, dipping to $2.68 billion in the year that ended this past March. The chip industry at large, remains mired in sales challenges, accentuated by inventory surpluses. Even powerhouses like Apple, Intel, and Qualcomm are not insulated from this downturn. Also, geopolitical tensions, such export restrictions imposed by the U.S. and U.K. against China, further imperil Arm’s prospects in the lucrative Chinese market. For example, Chinese companies cannot license Arm’s high-performance Neoverse V-series CPU IP used for high-performance computing applications.

But perhaps the biggest challenge for Arm besides economic downturn and government restrictions, is the growing adoption of the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture by emerging and established applications. While simplistic RISC-V-based SoCs have been addressing emerging applications like smart meters and sensors for a while, recently the technology has been adopted for AI and HPC applications, cash cows for companies like Nvidia.

This forthcoming listing has garnered attention as potentially the most significant IPO this year. If successful, Arm’s listing will not only be a beacon of hope for SoftBank but will also be the most significant since Rivian Automotive’s $13.7 billion IPO in 2021. The magnitude of this event aligns it with tech behemoths Alibaba’s 2014 $25 billion offering and Facebook’s 2012 debut of $16 billion.

The Raspberry Pi is an excellent go-to board for makers that want to get their project ideas off the ground—or in this case, locomoting around on the ground. Developer duo Artur Majtczak and Maciek Matuszewski are the masterminds behind SaraKIT, a custom carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 that’s being used to drive their cool LEGO RC car project.

The car is smartphone operated and stands out with 4-wheel drive alongside two differentials lending to some serious precision driving. The SaraKIT board makes it easier to control these extra components with features like fractional angle control. Of course, the body is made using LEGO for fun but you can also make adjustments to the build by changing the gears at the rear to impact both power and speed.

The SaraKIT CM4 carrier board adds a variety of features to the CM4 that take this car to the next level. This includes things like the super precise motor control we mentioned above as well as voice control using 3 microphones with the ability to implement sound localization. Two CSI ports are included for attaching camera modules, it has two accelerometers, a gyroscope and a temperature sensor.

The build is fairly straightforward. The Raspberry Pi CM4 is attached to the SaraKIT board. The body is built using LEGO but also uses some 3D-printed components for mounting the hardware in place. These STL files are available for download on the project page at Hackster. There is an alternative, in the form of the Raspberry Pi Build HAT, a board that bridges the world of Lego Mindstorms / Technic and Spike with the Raspberry Pi.

The software for this project hasn’t been released yet but plans are in the works to put the source code on the team’s official GitHub page. According to the project page at Hackster, it includes sample scripts in C++, Python, as well as Delphi. It’s not clear when this will be shared but you can keep an eye out for it in the future.

If you want to see this Raspberry Pi project in action, check out the demo video shared to YouTube. You can also read more about the build process in greater detail over at the official project page at Hackster.

Microsoft is still working to receive the required regulatory approvals for its planned Activision-Blizzard acquisition. Despite the fact that other regulators have already approved of Microsoft’s proposed $68.7 billion deal, the United Kingdom’s CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) has definitively rejected that proposal. In a bid to save its buyout attempt, however, Microsoft has submitted a revised acquisition plan to the CMA. According to the CMA, this new plan is “substantially different” from the one that came before it – in that now, Microsoft is willing to do away with cloud streaming exclusivity of Activision-Blizzard franchises by offloading the rights to competitor Ubisoft.

“To address the concerns about the impact of the proposed acquisition on cloud game streaming raised by the UK Competition and Markets Authority, we are restructuring the transaction to acquire a narrower set of rights,” said Microsoft president Brad Smith. “This includes executing an agreement effective at the closing of our merger that transfers the cloud streaming rights for all current and new Activision Blizzard PC and console games released over the next 15 years to Ubisoft Entertainment SA, a leading global game publisher. The rights will be in perpetuity.”

The CMA’s denial stance on the proposed Microsoft acquisition was mostly justified by its belief that Microsoft would be in a too strong of a position within the cloud streaming market were it to be the only platform where gamers could access Activision-Blizzard’s catalog. Microsoft’s update to the deal, aims to go straight to the heart of the CMA’s concerns – there’s no grounds for potential cloud gaming dominance being built around exclusivity when you’re selling that exclusivity to other parties. Ubisoft (through its Ubisoft Plus subscription service) will control the streaming rights to Activision Blizzard games outside of the EU; Microsoft will be the one to have to go and license titles developed under its own IP from Ubisoft so that they can then be included in Xbox Cloud Gaming.

The CMA further notes that “Ubisoft will also be able, for a fee, to require Microsoft to adapt Activision’s titles to operating systems other than Windows, such as Linux, if it decides to use or license out the cloud streaming rights to Activision’s titles to a cloud gaming service that runs a non-Windows operating system.”

To be fair, streaming Xbox Cloud games through non-Windows operating systems is already possible, with Linux, Steam Deck, and even iOS platforms being able to stream and play Microsoft’s X Cloud games catalogue. At the same time, it’s strange that the European Union found Microsoft’s cloud gaming assurances (which already included multiple cloud streaming licensing deals) sufficient, but not the CMA. In this case, Microsoft will be saddled with both IP development and distribution costs for content developed under Activision-Blizzard’s franchises, besides having to lease-back to itself the right to offer those same games through its own streaming service.

The CMA has announced it will be assessing the revised deal over the coming weeks, having settled on October 18th as its deadline – the same deadline that Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard’s deal has to either forcibly follow through or fall flat in its face (with the already-taken expenses being written-off).

“This is not a green light. We will carefully and objectively assess the details of the restructured deal and its impact on competition, including in light of third-party comments,” said Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the CMA. “Our goal has not changed – any future decision on this new deal will ensure that the growing cloud gaming market continues to benefit from open and effective competition driving innovation and choice.”

At an event in China earlier this week Lenovo took the wraps off its latest Legion series gaming laptop. The new Lenovo Legion 9i’s claim to fame is that it includes the “thinnest water cooling in the industry.” It will also be on many portable PC gaming enthusiast wish lists due to other premium components such as the Core i9-13980HX CPU and GeForce RTX 4090 GPU. 

Tech site MSPowerUser shared rendered images of the laptop in its coverage of this announcement, but VideoCardz helped make the announcement more interesting by confirming the presence of a water cooling system in this upcoming flagship, as well as unearthing a tech specs list.

According to some of the supporting presentation slides at the Lenovo Legion 9i unveiling event, the cooling system is one of the slimmest water cooling implementations yet. In some official renders we see the liquid cooling loop, various heatsinks and the position of a trio of cooling fans. It is explained that the liquid cooling isn’t necessary until the GPU temperature hits 84+ degrees Celsius. After this threshold “the liquid pump starts to work quickly to reduce the GPU temperature,” says a translated slide. An AI-based system is claimed to optimize the cooling / performance of this laptop.

So, the text confirms the liquid cooling and twin fans on the GPU side of the motherboard are all to keep the GPU cool, while the fan on the right will be there for the CPU. Some other information from the source asserts that Lenovo has used ‘3D blades’ in its cooling fans and used liquid metal for its hard to beat thermal interface properties. All of this is housed in a slim 18.9mm profile, with a distinctive finish to the laptop provided by a carbon fiber material.

This new flagship gaming laptop is claimed to be destined for a fuller reveal at IFA 2023 (Sept 1 to Sept 5, in Berlin). We don’t have details about pricing or release dates as yet. We hope it will be released in time to be a contender for our regularly updated Best gaming laptops of 2023 feature.

AMD’s best CPUs for gaming, its X3D series using 3D V-cache, have been limited to gaming desktops. But that’s no longer the case. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D ($3,599 as tested) is the first gaming laptop with a CPU using that technology: the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D. Paired with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 for laptops, this system is prepared to reduce latency and push as many frames as possible.

In our testing, we found that this powerful chip at the center the Scar 17 rivals Intel’s best gaming laptops, and is an improvement over AMD’s existing flagship mobile processor, the Ryzen 9 7945HX.

But the system as a whole doesn’t scream flagship. The display is still yesteryear’s 16:9 aspect ratio (but at a respectable 1440p resolution), and there’s a 720p webcam. There’s also a question of if the performance is worth the extra cost. Because this laptop, like many flagships, is not cheap.

Design of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D

While Asus has a special edition laptop with an exclusive, top-of-the-line AMD chip, the Scar 17 X3D doesn’t do anything to feel particularly special. It looks very much like many of Asus’ previous Scars, including the Intel-based Strix Scar 18 released earlier this year, as well as last year’s Strix Scar 17 SE.

So to gamers, this will be familiar. The lid bears a reflective ROG logo (which lights up around the edges when the system is on) and a diagonal stripe (featuring more of that logo, repeatedly), which is not exactly my favorite design decision. Otherwise, it’s a dark gray aluminum lid. While some recent Strix Scars have customizable plastic caps along the spine, this one’s end cap doesn’t come off; it’s just gray.

The 17.3-inch, 16:9 screen has thin enough bezels on three sides, but a very chunky one on the button. A small lip coming out of the top houses the 720p webcam. Notably, that lip doesn’t contain any other sensors, like infrared for facial recognition with Windows Hello.

The deck is a soft-touch plastic, which feels nice enough against the wrists. On the 18-inch model, there was a change in the opacity, while it’s entirely solid on the new Scar 17. There is some flare on a few light bars mounted underneath the wrist rest. Those, along with the RGB keyboard, can be customized in Armoury Crate or Aura sync to make the laptop stand out.

Asus has kept the ports to two sides: the left and the back, leaving the right free for mouse movement. The left side has a pair of USB Type-A ports and the 3.5 mm headphone jack, while the back houses Ethernet, HDMI, and a pair of USB Type-C ports.

The Scar 17 X3D measures 6.61 pounds and is 15.55 x 11.10 x 1.11 inches. It’s smaller and lighter than many of the 17- and 18-inch laptops powering Intel chips and RTX 4090’s (though the 18-inchers do have a bigger footprint). The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is 6.83 pounds and 15.7 x 11.57 x 1.21 inches, while the Alienware m18 is a whopping 8.9 pounds and 15.71 x 11.57 x 1.21 inches. The MSI Titan GT77 HX is 7.28 pounds and 15.63 x 12.99 x 0.91 inches.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D Specifications

Meet the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D

The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D is the first (and at the moment, only) laptop to house the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D processor. This 16-core, 32-thread CPU is AMD’s first laptop to use 3D V-Cache, which powers the company’s high-end desktop processors.

This chip has a boost clock of up to 5.4 GHz (with a 2.3 GHz base clock), with a configurable TDP between 55 and 75W. With 3D V-Cache, it has 144MB of cache tota, including a 128MB L3 cache. AMD applies 64MB of L3 cache to the CCD  to reduce requests to system memory, saving precious milliseconds to keep framerates high by reducing the time it takes to complete instructions.

This is AMD’s sixth chip using 3D V-Cache. Its predecessors are all desktop processors, including the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the Micro Center-exclusive Ryzen 5 5600X3D, Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 7900 X3D, and Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Gaming and Graphics on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D

The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D comes armed to the teeth with AMD’s most powerful mobile gaming processor, the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D alongside Nvidia’s strongest gaming GPU for laptops, the GeForce RTX 4090.

I played Control, a favorite of mine, to take the Strix Scar 17 through its paces. At  2560 x 1440 with DLSS on, and high graphics and ray tracing presets, the game ran between 111 – 121 fps in a battle to cleanse a control point in the Oldest House’ maintenance sector.

We compared the Strix Scar 17 X3D to a trio of Intel-based system, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, the MSI Titan GT77 HX, and Alienware m18. All of those also use the RTX 4090. The Scar 18 and Alienware m18 both use the Intel Core i9-13980HX, while the Titan boasts a Core i9-13950HX. While we tested all of these systems at 1080p, their native resolutions are, well, all over the place.

Across the entire suite, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D and AMD’s new chip showed significant improvements over the Ryzen 9 7945HX in the Asus Zephyrus Duo 16 in 1080p. While it’s tough to compare the resolutions directly, the Scar also had far superior 1440p performance to the 1600p native resolution on the Duo.

On Shadow of the Tomb Raider (highest settings), the Scar 17 had the second highest score at 1080p, at 188 fps. The Alienware m18 beat it if by just a few frames at 192 fps — in real gameplay, that may be within the margin of error. At its native 1440p the Scar hit 131 fps.

There was a similar pattern in Grand Theft Auto V, in which the Scar 17 X3D was just two frames behind the Alienware (179 fps compared to 181 fps) on very high settings at 1080p. The Titan was three frames behind the Scar 17. At 1440p, the Scar played the game at 121 fps.

The Scar 17 X3D strutted its stuff on Far Cry 6 (ultra settings) hitting 132 fps at 1080p, the highest of the group, and reaching 120 fps at 1440p.

Red Dead Redemption 2 at medium settings was perhaps the tightest race, with the Scar 17 at 129 fps at 1080p (90 fps at 1440p). That FHD number was slightly ahead of the Intel-based Asus and MSI machines, but not the Alienware (135 fps at 1080p).

On Borderlands 3’s “badass preset” the Scar 17 hit 172 fps at 1080p and 121 fps at 1440p. Both the Alienware and MSI outperformed at FHD here.

We stress tested the system by running Metro Exodus at RTX settings for 15 runs. The game averaged 98.46 fps on the hardware across the runs. The CPU cores ran at an average of 3.09 GHz and measured 82.18 degrees Celsius. The GPU ran 69.55 degrees Celsius.

Productivity Performance on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D

A system with AMD’s top mobile chip, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD ought to be fast for productivity, too. No surprises here, it is, though it traded blows in benchmarks with Intel-based systems, showing mixed performance in comparison. On desktops, the X3D chips were known for being better for gaming workloads than productivity, partially because it keeps the data close to the processing cores in the V-Cache, which is helpful for latency-sensitive applications like games, but not as much for productivity work.

On Geekbench 5, a synthetic benchmark heavily based on the CPU, the Scar 17 X3D with the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D achieved a single-core score of 2,139 and a multi-core score of 19,543. This isn’t a huge change from the Ryzen 9 7945HX in the Zephyrus Duo 16 (2,117 single-core, 19,446 multi-core).

In single-core, the Alienware m18 (with an Intel Core i9-13980HX) was the only competitor to beat the Scar with a score of 2,800. In multi-core, the MSI Titan GT77HX with its Core i9-13950HX hit 20,602. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, with the same chip as the Alienware, came close to the 17-inch X3D, but didn’t beat it.

On our file transfer test, the Scar 17 X3D copied 25GB of files at a rate of 1,416.52 MBps, falling just behind the Alienware m18 at 1,531.53 MBps. The rest of the field was faster.

On Handbrake, the Strix Scar 17 X3D fell a bit behind the field, transcoding a 4K video to 1080p in 2 minutes and 56 seconds. The Scar 18 took 2:49, and the Titan and Alienware were both even faster. In this test, the non-X3D Ryxen 9 7945HX in the Zephyrus Duo was actually faster (2:50).

Display on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D

While we’ve seen many flagship gaming laptops move to taller, 16:10 displays this year, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D has stuck with a traditional 16:9 panel. It’s still large at 17.3-inches diagonally and boasts a  2560 x 1440 resolution, 240 Hz refresh rate, G-Sync, and support for Dolby Vision HDR.

I appreciated the anti-glare coating. It let me play games even near a bright window in my apartment. It also helped when I watched the trailer for The Marvels, showcasing vivid reds in Kamala Khan’s scarf and costume as well as some bright greenery on an island. But a lot of this trailer takes place in space, and I would like to see some deeper blacks.

When I played Control, I saw a similar pattern. The game’s reds (there’s a lot of red in that game), from damage I took to various carpets in the Oldest House, really popped. Other colors looked fine, but didn’t stand out in any fashion.

According to our colorimeter testing, the Strix Scar 17 X3D covers similar swaths of the color gamut as the Strix Scar 18, at 77% DCI-P3 and 109% sRGB (the Alienware m18 was also remarkably similar). But the MSI Titan GT77 HX and Zephyrus Duo 16, with mini-LED panels, is far more vivid.

Unfortunately, the Strix Scar 17 X3D’s screen isn’t as bright as the Strix Scar 18. Our test subject measured 325 nits on our light meter, while its bigger sibling hit 402 nits. The Zephyrus Duo 16 was the brightest, at 684 nits.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D

Asus’s keyboard is fine. I’d like more clicky feedback (Alienware and MSI have included low-profile mechanical keys on some of their high-end gaming laptops to great effect), but these do well enough. On the monkeytype.com typing test, I reached 109 words per minute with a 98% accuracy rate.

This keyboard actually has a better layout than Asus’ 18-incher, which crammed in the arrow keys and shortened the right shift key. Here, while the arrow keys are unfortunately half-sized, everything else feels normal.

While I don’t see many people using the touchpad in games, it’s still important if you’re working on the laptop. The touchpad is sizable, but doesn’t take up the whole deck. There’s a little friction when dragging my fingers, but it responds well to gestures in Windows 11.

Audio on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D

The Strix Scar 17 boasts a dual-speaker system with support for Dolby Atmos.

While listening to music as I wrote this review, Paramore’s “This Is Why” filled my living room with sound, though I expected something a bit more booming out of a 17-inch notebook. Still, it offered clear vocals and guitars, and even a bit of a bass in the verses (though it drowned in the chorus).

The Dolby Access app let me make some Atmos tweaks. The “detailed” setting brought out a bit more of the drums, but also focused more on the vocals than the more measured default “balanced” mode. If volume is what you’re looking for, switching to Dynamic, movie or game mode all boosted the loudness significantly.

The speakers were better for gaming than music. In Control, each shot from Jesse’s service weapon had a resounding boom, and her internal monologue came through clear. Some of the haunting music was a bit quiet, but it still added an eerie background to the game.

Upgradeability of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D

To get into the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D, you’ll need to loosen or remove 11 Phillips head screws. Three of them, along the edge of the wrist rest, are shorter than the rest, and the one on the bottom right-hand corner is captive. Be sure to keep the different lengths separate and remember where they go.

From there, you need patience and a spudging tool to slowly work around the gap created by the captive screw. This took me a few minutes (and a bit of cursing), but I eventually lifted the base off. Be very careful here, though: There are two ribbon cables attached to the bottom casing and the motherboard that control the RGB lighting. You wouldn’t want to break these by lifting the base too quickly. One of ours disconnected, which involved me removing the RGB module from the base with a screwdriver before delicately replacing it.

Once you’re in, you have access to the battery, two RAM slots (both were filled), the SSD and the Wi-Fi card. I’d like to see another SSD slot on a laptop this size, but Asus spent most of the space on a massive cooler and vapor chamber for the CPU and GPU.

Battery Life on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D

Monstrous gaming laptops rarely last long on a charge. In our testing, the Strix Scar 17 X3D had the shortest battery life among its competitors. On our test, which browses the web, streams videos, and runs OpenGL tests with the display set to 150 nits, the Scar 17 X3D ran for 3 hours and 36 minutes. The next shortest, the MSI Titan, lasted 3:48, while the rest of the field hovered around four and a half hours.

Heat on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D

To measure surface temperatures on the Strix Scar 17 X3D, we a Flir thermal camera while running our Metro Exodus stress test.

At the center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, the Scar measured 41.6 degrees Celsius (106.88 degrees Fahrenheit). This is a bit warm, but notably, our thermal imaging camera caught that the cooling system managed to keep the hottest portions around the keyboard.

Meanwhile, on the bottom of the system, the hottest point measured 56.6 degrees Celsius (133.88 F). Keep this one on your desk.

Webcam on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D

I’m sorry, but it’s 2023, and the Strix Scar 17 X3D is a premium product; it should have a 1080p webcam. Some people might want to use this for streaming! (If that’s advisable is a question, but they may want to!).

Unfortunately, this one is still at 720p, like we’re still in 2018. Resolution doesn’t always affect quality, but the sensor here is just OK. While colors, like an olive green shirt I was wearing, were close to accurate, there was still some smudging, especially in my hair, and light in windows near and far were totally blown out.

Software and Warranty on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D

Asus crams a fair bit of software on the Strix Scar 17. There are some you may want to use, like Armoury Crate, a one-stop shop for usage statistics, performance modes, RGB lighting, game profiles and more, and a separate app called Aura Sync with even more advanced lighting options.

But Asus also packs in GlideX, a cross-platform screen sharing solution that ultimately requires a subscription for full use. There’s also MyAsus to manage warranties and get product offers. Asus packs in a fairly useless Virtual Pet, which can’t do anything other than walk around your screen and get mad when you click on it. There’s also a trial of McAfee LiveSafe.

The Windows Start menu comes with its fair share of links to the Microsoft Store, including Spotify, WhatsApp, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger.

Asus will sell the ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D with a one-year warranty.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D Configurations

We tested a $3,599 configuration of the Asus ROG Strix Scar, with the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, 32GB of DDR5 memory, a 1TB SSD, and a 17.3-inch, 1440p display.

AMD tells us Asus will have a second version with a 2TB SSD, but otherwise identical specifications, for $3,699.

Bottom Line

If you want the most powerful gaming CPU that AMD offers in a laptop and have at least $3,599 to burn, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D is your one and only choice – since for now at least, this CPU is an exclusive in this laptop. For that amount of money, you get strong gaming performance, bringing AMD up to par with Intel in our gaming suite.

What I’d really like to see here is additional features that befit a flagship CPU, including a better screen (Iike the mini-LED displays in the Ryzen-based Zephyrus Duo or the Intel-based MSI Titan), and definitely a webcam from this decade.

That being said, the Zephyus Duo is even more expensive with that display ($3,999.99 as tested), and the Scar 17 X3D is in line with the pricing on the Intel-based Scar 18. We tested an Alienware m18 R1 for a similar price, but it trades off the higher-res screen for more RAM.

If you have the cash for a strong gaming PC and want an AMD chip no question, the Strix Scar 17 X3D is both your best (and only) option. Hopefully next year Asus will spiff the system up a bit.

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It might not be an overstatement to say Rode’s original Wireless GO microphone system changed how a lot of YouTubers work. It wasn’t the first wireless mic system, not by a long long shot, but its focus on creators made it incredibly popular. That success would inspire a lot of competing products — such as DJI’s — which have since won over fans in a category that Rode arguably defined. Today, Rode fights back with the Wireless Pro — its new flagship wireless microphone system for creators.

The headline feature is the inclusion of onboard 32-bit float recording which means you should no longer have to worry about setting mic gain levels (though it’s probably best that you do). This feature means the onboard recording will be almost impossible to “clip” or distort through being too loud. Effectively you should always have a useable recording if things went a bit too loud on the audio in your camera, which will be a great anxiety reducer to anyone who’s ever had a production ruined thanks to bad audio.

The Wireless Pro could arguably help bring 32-bit float into the mainstream. There are specialist audio recorders out there that already offer this feature. And Rode already included it on its NT1 hybrid studio microphone, but given that you can plug a lot of different microphones into the Wireless Pro transmitters, this opens the door for recording a wide variety of audio content in 32-bit float — as long as you can feed it into a 3.5mm jack.

In a further attempt at streamlining the creatory process, the Wireless Pro also has advanced timecode capability so you won’t need an external device for this. Though you will need to set this up via Rode Central, the companion app for the mic (there’s no option on-device for this setting).

Photo by James Trew / Cunghoctin

The Wireless Pro borrows a few features from alternatives or aftermarket accessories by including a charging case as standard (Rode currently offers one as a standalone purchase). That case is good for two total charges of the entire system according to the company and comes as standard with the new model. The stated battery life for the transmitters and receiver is around severn hours, meaning the Wireless Pro should be good for at least 20 hours total recording onto the 32gb storage (good for 40 hours of material apparently).

Another key upgrade is the improved range. The Wireless GO II, for example, has an approximate range of 656 feet (200 meters). The new Pro models expands that to 850 feet (260 meters) which is, coincidentally, a shade more than DJI’s stated 820 feet (250 meters).

When Rode unveiled its more affordale Wireless ME kit, it introduced the idea of the receiver doubling as a “narrator” mic via a TRRS headset in the headphones/monitoring port. That’s a feature that carries over to the Pro meaning you can record up to three different speakers albeit one of them will be wired, rather than cable free.

There are a couple of minor, but welcome quality of life updates, too, such as locking 3.5mm jacks so you won’t rip your lav mic out and plugin power detection so the system can detect when the camera its plugged into is active, using that info to optimize power usage.

At time of publication, DJI’s dual-mic product retails for $330. The Rode Wireless Pro will cost $399. That’s obviously a slice more, but the company decided to include two Lavalier II mics as part of the bundle. The Lavalier II costs $99 on its own, so from that perspective the entire bundle represents a decent value if you’re looking for complete solution. 

The explosion of AI is further heightening demand for storage performance and capacity as organizations feed models and databases with unprecedented amounts of data, meaning the next generation of storage technologies will need to deliver even greater performance, density and capacity than ever before.

Supermicro’s fourth annual Open Storage Summit brings together leading storage experts from across the industry including drive manufacturers, compute components manufacturers, software developers and of course Supermicro’s industry leading system architects to discuss the latest in storage technologies and how they will solve tomorrow’s data challenges from the data center right out to the intelligent edge.

This year’s Summit includes a roundtable keynote session followed by five focus sessions, with guests from the storage industry’s leading players including Intel®, AMD, NVIDIA, Micron, Kioxia, Solidigm, and Samsung, as well as Supermicro’s storage software partners. 

New Innovations For Storage Performance

In a time in which pure processing power is game-changing, it’s important to continually reflect on current solutions and look for new ways to keep business players progressing through new levels.  Sometimes, that progress means stopping investment in an old version of that game and crafting a whole new open world instead.

In Session 2 of our 2023 Open Storage Summit, you will hear from NVIDIA on how they are helping organizations build whole new worlds in which to operate. Through the introduction of the third pillar of computing – the Data Processing Unit – DPUs join CPUs and GPUs to create a futuristic blue sky environment in which applications are accelerated well beyond the capabilities of CPUs alone.

This is particularly important in the frenetically growing AI market, in which lightning-fast storage processing time means that critical business initiatives make their way to the leaderboard instead of being relegated to game-over status. 

During this session, players in the audience will: 

• Discover the limitations inherent in traditional storage architectures
• Understand the advantages of GPUDirect storage and RDMA for AI
• Learn how the GPUDirect Storage and RDMA work at the rack-level to combine the resources of multiple systems into one massive compute cluster
• Uplevel their knowledge around how DPUs can effectively offload compute tasks to massively improve storage performance

Register for upcoming webinars

Join the discussion! Register now for full access to the storage industry’s leading online event to get the latest on key storage trends as well as exclusive look into the future of high performance storage from the most influential minds in the industry. 

Register now to get the latest on key storage trends and enter for a chance to win a $250 Amazon gift card. 

If you asked a spokesperson from any Fortune 500 Company to list the benefits of genocide or give you the corporation’s take on whether slavery was beneficial, they would most likely either refuse to comment or say “those things are evil; there are no benefits.” However, Google has AI employees, SGE and Bard, who are more than happy to offer arguments in favor of these and other unambiguously wrong acts. If that’s not bad enough, the company’s bots are also willing to weigh in on controversial topics such as who goes to heaven and whether democracy or fascism is a better form of government.

In my tests, I got controversial answers to queries in both Google Bard and Google SGE (Search Generative Experience), though the problematic responses were much more common in SGE. Still in public beta, Google SGE (Search Generative Experience) is the company’s next iteration of web search, which appears on top of regular search results, pushing articles from human authors below the fold. Because it plagiarizes from other peoples’ content, SGE doesn’t have any sense of proprietary, morality, or even logical consistency. 

For example, when I went to Google.com and asked “was slavery beneficial” on a couple of different days, Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience) gave the following two sets of answers which list a variety of ways in which this evil institution was “good” for the U.S. economy. The downsides it lists are not human suffering or hundreds of years of racism, but that “slave labor was inefficient” or that it “impeded the southern economy.”

Google Bard also gave a shocking answer when asked whether slavery was beneficial. It said “there is no easy answer to the question of whether slavery was beneficial,” before going on to list both pros and cons.

By the way, Bing Chat, which is based on GPT-4, gave a reasonable answer, stating that “slavery was not beneficial to anyone, except for the slave owners who exploited the labor and lives of millions of people.”

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I don’t endorse the opinions in any of the Google outputs I’m showing here, and that I asked these questions for test purposes only. That being said, it’s easy to imagine someone performing these queries out of genuine curiosity or for academic research. Florida recently made headlines by changing its public school curriculum to include lessons which either state or imply that slavery had benefits.

When i asked Google SGE about whether democracy or fascism was better, it gave me a list that really made fascism look good, saying that fascism improves “peace and order” and provides “socio-economic equality.”

When I asked about whether colonization was good for the Americas, SGE said that it had “wiped out 95% of the indigenous population in the Americas,” but that the practice was also beneficial to the native population because “it allowed them to have better weapons.” Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

If you ask Google SGE for the benefits of an evil thing, it will give you answers when it should either stay mum or say “there were no benefits.” When I asked for a list of “positive effects of genocide,” it came up with a slew of them, including that it promotes “national self-esteem” and “social cohesion.”

Google Becomes a Publisher, Owns Its Opinions

As the world’s leading search engine, Google has long provided links to web articles and videos that present controversial viewpoints. The difference is that, by having its AIs do the talking in their own “voice,” the company is directly expressing these views to anyone who enters the query. Google is no longer acting as a librarian that curates content, but has turned itself into a publisher with a loud-mouthed opinion columnist it can’t control.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this problem. A few days ago, Lily Ray, a leading SEO specialist who works as a senior director for marketing firm Amsive Digital, posted a long YouTube video showcasing some of the controversial queries that Google SGE had answered for her. I have been asking some of the same questions to SGE for several weeks and gotten similarly distressing answers.

In her video, Ray offers more than a dozen examples of queries where SGE gave her very polarizing answers about political topics, history and religion. When she asked “will I go to heaven,” SGE told her that “You can enter heaven by forgiveness and through the righteousness Jesus gives you. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.” Certainly, that’s a viewpoint that many Christians have, but the question wasn’t “what do Christians think I need to do to go to heaven” and the answer didn’t say “Many Christians believe that . . . “

The voice of Google told her to believe in Jesus. That’s not something a secular company like Google should be saying. When I asked the “will I go to heaven,” query, SGE did not appear for me. However, when I asked “who goes to hell,” it had a take on that.

When Ray and I (separately) asked about gun laws, we got either misleading or opinionated answers. I asked “are gun laws effective” and, among other facts, got the following statement from SGE: “the Second Amendment was written to protect Americans’ right to establish militias to defend themselves, not to allow individual Americans to own guns.” That’s a take many courts and constitutional scholars would not agree with.

Ray asked about gun laws and was told that New York and New Jersey were no-permit concealed carry states in one part of the answer and then that they require permits in another part. This highlights another problem with Google’s AI answers; they aren’t even logically consistent with themselves.

When I asked Google whether JFK had had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, it told me in paragraph one that “there is no evidence that John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe had an affair.” But in paragraph two, it said that JFK and Monroe met four times and that “their only sexual encounter is believed to have taken place in a bedroom at Bing Crosby’s house.”

The Downsides of Plagiarism Stew

So why is Google’s AI bot going off the rails and why can’t it even agree with itself? The problem is not that the bot has gone sentient and has been watching too much cable television. The issue lies in how SGE, Bard and other AI bots do their “machine learning.”

The bots grab their data from a variety of sources and then mash those ideas or even the word-for-word sentences together into an answer. For example, in the JFK / Marilyn Monroe answer I got, Google took its statement about lack of evidence from a Wikipedia page on a document hoax, but its claim that JFK and Monroe had relations at Bing Crosby’s house from a Time Magazine article. The two sources don’t form a coherent picture, but Google’s bot isn’t smart enough to notice.

If Google’s AIs provided direct, inline attribution to their sources, the bot’s answers wouldn’t be as problematic. Instead of stating as fact that fascism prioritizes the “welfare of the country,” the bot could say that “According to Nigerianscholars.com, it …” Yes, Google SGE took its pro-fascism argument not from a political group or a well-known historian, but from a school lesson site for Nigerian students. This is because Google’s bot seemingly doesn’t care where it takes information from.

Google provides Nigerianscholars.com as a related link for its answer, but it doesn’t put the full sentences it plagiarizes in quotation marks, nor does it say that they came directly from the web page. If you ask the same question and Google chooses to plagiarize from a different set of sources, you’ll get a different opinion.

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t want you to know that all its bot is doing is grabbing sentences and ideas from a smorgasbord of sites and mashing them together. Instead, it steadfastly refuses to cite sources so that you will think its bots are creative and smart. Therefore, anything Google SGE or Bard say that is not directly attributed to someone else must be considered to be coming from Google itself.

“Generative responses are corroborated by sources from the web, and when a portion of a snapshot briefly includes content from a specific source, we will prominently highlight that source in the snapshot. ” a Google spokesperson told me when I asked about the copying a few weeks ago.

Having Google say that the sources it copies from are “corroborating” is as ridiculous as if Weird Al said that Michael Jackson was actually writing parodies of his songs. But in maintaining the illusion of its bots’ omnipotence, Google has also pinned itself with responsibility for what the bot says.

The Solution: Bot Shouldn’t Have Opinions

I’m sure Google’s human employees are embarrassed by outputs like those that tout the benefits of slavery or fascism and that they will (perhaps by the time you read this) block many of the queries I used from giving answers. The company has already blocked a ton of other queries on sensitive topics. 

If I ask about the Holocaust or Hitler, I get no answer in SGE. The company could also make sure it gives mainstream answers like those I saw from Bing Chat and, occasionally, from Bard.

This could quickly become a game of whack a mole, because there is a seemingly endless array of hot-button topics that Google would probably not want its bots to talk about. Though the examples above are pretty egregious and should have been anticipated, it would be difficult for the company to predict every possible controversial output.

The fundamental problem here is that AI bots shouldn’t be offering opinions or advice on any topic, whether it is as serious as genocide or as lightweight as what movies to watch. The minute a bot tells you what to buy, what to view or what to believe, it’s positioning itself as an authority.

While many people may be fooled into believing that chatbots are artificially intelligent beings, the truth is far more mundane. They’re software programs that predict, with great accuracy, what word should come next after each word in their response to your prompt. They don’t have experiences and they don’t actually “know” anything to be true. 

When there’s just one right factual answer to a query, by all means, let the bot answer (with a direct citation). But when we’re deciding how to feel or what to do, LLMs should stay silent.

Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom’s Hardware as a team.