AMD silicon arguably got here first: Strix Halo mini PCs and laptops were shipping with 128GB of unified memory well before NVIDIA entered the picture. But the local-AI desktop as a category is one NVIDIA effectively created when it put a Grace Blackwell superchip in a one-liter box and called it DGX Spark. The pitch
Intel’s Core Ultra 7 265K sits in the middle of the Arrow Lake-S desktop stack, pairing 20 cores with a much larger architectural change than you might expect. The layout consists of 8 Lion Cove P-cores and 12 Skymont E-cores, for 20 cores and 20 threads, with Hyper-Threading removed in this generation. The P-cores have
Intel’s return to boxed workstation processors arrived on February 2, 2026, when the company announced the Xeon 600 series, codenamed Granite Rapids-WS, with retail parts reaching shelves in late March. The launch folded the old Xeon W-2500 and W-3500 lines into a single family of 11 SKUs on the new W890 chipset and LGA4710 socket,
For most of the last decade, the high-core workstation conversation has been largely led by AMD. Threadripper PRO pushed core counts, cache, and PCIe lanes past what Intel’s Xeon-W line could offer; the prior Xeon-W flagship topped out at 60 cores, while AMD kept climbing. Intel’s Xeon 600 series, launched in February of this year,
The HighPoint Rocket 1604L is a $399 PCIe Gen5 x16 add-in card that carries four M.2 NVMe SSDs, each on a dedicated Gen5 x4 connection. In our testing with four Samsung 9100 PRO 4TB drives installed, the card sustained 55.6GB/s of 128K sequential read bandwidth and 10.1 million 4K random write IOPS, numbers that are
The Radeon RX 9070 GRE is not a new GPU. AMD introduced it last year as a China-only part, and at Computex 2026, the company gave it a global release. It slots into the upper-mainstream space below the RX 9070, focused on 1440p performance, modern display support, and the hardware behind newer features such as
There are two stories in the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus, and they pull in opposite directions. One is a top-tier mobile workstation: Intel’s 24-core Core Ultra 9 285HX, up to 256GB of CAMM2 memory, three M.2 slots, NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics up to the 5000-series with 24GB of GDDR7, MIL-STD-810H build, and a
The ORICO X50 is a Thunderbolt 5 portable SSD line for those who want external storage with much more bandwidth than a standard USB drive. ORICO is offering it in a few different forms, including a diskless version and preconfigured 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB models, so it can work either as a ready-to-use portable
The DGX Spark platform is familiar territory for us at this point. We’ve reviewed the Dell, ASUS, Acer, and Gigabyte takes on NVIDIA’s GB10 Grace Blackwell reference design, and the core ingredients are consistent across all of them: 1,000 TOPS of FP4 compute, 128GB of unified LPDDR5x memory, and dual 200GbE networking in a 150mm
LaCie has been a fixture in our lab for well over a decade. From the 8big Rack Thunderbolt 2 we covered in 2014 through the many generations of 5big, 6big, 8big, and Rugged devices that have followed, the formula has been consistent: premium Neil Poulton-designed enclosures, Seagate drives inside, Mac-centric polish, a solid warranty, and a
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