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
Seagate’s FireCuda X Vault is the gaming-flavored half of a two-drive launch that brings bus-powered USB-C to 3.5-inch external hard drives for the first time. Available in 8TB and 20TB capacities starting at $269.99, it runs on a single USB-C cable for both data and power, provided the host port can supply at least 15W.
Seagate’s new One Touch Desktop HDD sidesteps one of the staples of the desktop external drive category: the power brick. The refreshed lineup runs 8TB, 20TB, and 24TB in a 3.5-inch chassis, but instead of a DC input and wall adapter, it draws everything it needs over a single USB-C cable. Seagate bills it as
AMD is once again pushing the boundaries of the high-performance desktop market with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, which launches at an MSRP of $899. When we reviewed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D in March 2025, it made a compelling case as the first 16-core X3D processor, with thermal and TDP constraints no longer forcing
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