Ben Hardwidge

Managing editor of Club386, he started his long journey with PC hardware back in 1989, when his Dad brought home a Sinclair PC200 with an 8MHz AMD 8086 CPU and woeful CGA graphics. With over 25 years of experience in PC hardware journalism, he’s benchmarked everything from the Voodoo3 to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. When he’s not fiddling with PCs, you can find him playing his guitars, painting Warhammer figures, and walking on the South Downs.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su predicts “double-digit percentage” decline in PC shipments for 2027, as gaming revenue drops by 40%

High RAM prices are wreaking havoc on the desktop PC business, and AMD is building further decline into its budget plans for 2027.
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Brace yourself, big Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 price rises are reportedly coming, particularly for the 5080

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 price is apparently set to go up by around £300 this month, with smaller bumps across the rest of the range.
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Intel Z970 motherboards spotted shipping, providing cheaper alternative to Z990 for Nova Lake CPUs

Z970 is rumoured to bring multiplier overclocking to Intel Nova Lake CPUs for a cheaper price than Z990, and ASRock is seemingly shipping boards.
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Tape is back – Fujifilm boosts production by 5x, as AI storage demands boom

Fujifilm says it's responding to demand for secure offline storage that can house huge amounts of data, beefing up its Ultrium10 magnetic tape production.
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This 2TB Samsung 990 SSD just dropped to its lowest ever price on Amazon

Save £82 on the usual MSRP of this PCIe 4.0 SSD - we won't pretend it's cheap, but that's not a terrible price in these times if you need a 2TB drive.
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Yikes, Phantom Blade Zero needs a massive 300GB of free drive space to install

Phantom Blade Zero system requirements are otherwise pretty modest, as long as you don't enable ray tracing, but storage demands are huge.
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Intel Raptor Lake Next CPUs are shipping, with records revealing cache and clock speed specs

Four Raptor Lake Next CPUs appear in shipping records, showing clock speeds and cache for these new chips, which will support both DDR4 and DDR5 RAM.
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Preserving the PC’s rich gaming heritage: GOG talks to us about big boxes, old graphics standards, and more

We talk to GOG about the challenges involved with resurrecting retro PC games, from CD soundtracks and old 3D graphics APIs, to bringing back big boxes.
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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 16GB reportedly discontinued, and replacement 24GB card could cost $2,999

Huge price increases for 16GB Nvidia graphics cards are described by Chinese tech industry sources at Board Channels, with the RTX 5070 Ti also affected.
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