It feels like an eternity we’ve last read the lines that PC sales are facing an upwards trend. In fact, year over year growth in Q2 2018 has been the strongest since Q1 2012. IDC claims a 2.7 percent growth rate over the period mentioned, which might be proof that the PC market is not yielding to phones and tablets. Market research firm Gartner is actually a little more cautious mentioning year-over-year growth of 1.4 percent.

If you are looking for a new graphics card to slap into your gaming PC, you will be happy to know that during the next month you might pay a bit less for it than now. According to latest rumors, we might be facing one of the rare occasions that is worth the wait.

A couple of years ago, Avago/Broadcom increased the prices of its PLX PCIe switches and several motherboard manufacturers stopped to use them. Since the PCIe switches are used primarily in servers, they come with a premium price. However some motherboard manufacturers still want to implement such a technology in their products, for this reason other companies are offering new switches.

A few days ago, Drevo has published a new Kickstart project regarding two upcoming mechanical keyboards. The funding goal of 20'000$ has been reached in less than 24 hours which is rather impressive.

According to DigiTimes, the demand of graphics cards and motherboards for cryptomining dropped unexpectedly at the beginning of this year. Major AIB partners of these components, such as MSI, Gigabyte, and TUL have seen shipments heavily impacted.

Today Gelid introduces the Tornado CPU cooler that features single fin-stack tower design. According to Gelid, the Tornado cooler can deliver good performance supporting CPU up to 160W TDP. The cooler comes with one 120mm PWM fan but it can accomodate a second fan.

Everytime that Intel releases a new CPU, everyone start asking if it can be delidded and what are the improvements. Once the CPU is delidded, you have to find a good compromise for the pressure of your CPU cooler. Ncore V1 is the first water block designed for delidded processors and it even comes with a delidding tool included in the delivery.

Right after the Meltdown and Spectre revelations, security researchers across the world have been working in order to find out how the exploits can be used and fixed. A few days ago, the experts from NVIDIA and Princeton University managed to develop some exploits known as SpectrePrime and MeltdownPrime.

Meltdown and Spectre are two new levels of security vulnerability. Although most of the work depends from Intel and its microcode, there are changes that need to be done in motherboard vendors' UEFI code. However it looks like ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI are already working on BIOS updates.

A few days ago, RAMBUS started unveiling its early specification for DDR5 and HBM3 memory. If you have just updated your PC with DDR4 memory, you should not be worried about another upgrade. It will take many years before we see DDR5 modules on the market, but we already have some early specs. The main focus will be on getting higher performances and better efficiency.

A few months ago Watercool announced that it was developing a specific Threadripper water block. During the past weeks, the company has released a conversion kit for the Heatkiller IV CPU block in order to make it compatible with AMD TR4 socket. Now after a couple of months, the company is ready to release a new water block designed for this massive chips.

ID-Cooling has announced its new FrostFlow 240G All-in-One liquid cooler for graphics cards which is a mix between earlier available FrostFlow 240L CPU liquid cooler and the FrostFlow 240 Hunter Duet cooler.

ID-Cooling has introduced its newest FrostFlow 240L All-in-One (AiO) liquid CPU cooler which will be able to handle CPUs with up to 200W TDP.

It was quite obvious back at CES 2015 show that 4K/UHD resolution is the "new 3D" and with various streaming services now offering content in 4K/UHD resolution, Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has now decided to finalize the specification for the new Ultra HD Blu-ray format.

Roy Schestowitz wanted to buy a PC from the English distributor Currys/PC World and eventually changed his mind when he learned that installing a GNU/Linux OS would cost him his PC and hardware related warranty.

After the recent announcement by Zotac, about the miniPC Zbox Pico, Minix joined this market and presented another little system, the Neo Z64.

In a quite a surprise move, at least after they have sold the LSI to Seagate, Avago Technologies Limited and the PLX Technology have announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which will Avago acquire PLX in an all-cash deal worth US $309 million.

The first quarter is usually one of the slowest quarters when it comes to GPU sales and the Q1 2014 is not an exception either, but, according to Jon Peddie Research, this quarter showed that Intel managed to gain some market share, Nvidia stayed flat and AMD lost some of its GPU market share.

Creative Technology has announce the new series of smaller USB audio solutions for PC and Mac systems as well as smartphones and tablets, the Sound Blaster E series.

The Video Electronics Standards Association, also known as the VESA, has announce the addition of Adaptive-Sync to the DisplayPort 1.2a video interface standard which should provide smoother, tear-free images for gaming and judder-free video playback as well as reduce power consumption of static desktop content and low frame rate video, according to VESA.