welcome back to Paul’s Tech News Hope faded pretty much entirely this week and attempts to resuscitate the lifeless husk that was once PC gaming were abandoned after it became clear that hardware manufacturers had little interest in or incentive to normalize pricing particularly while continued tariffs push component prices even higher So we’re [ __ ] There’s no two ways about it And while some might find this news disappointing I have decided to make peace as best I can and set up shop here in this desolate place Because when optimism fails I’d rather fall back on stoicism than despair So steal yourselves my friends There’s a lot of bad news this week like a new and inevitably disappointing round of GPUs coming out Microsoft continuing to inchify Windows and the aforementioned tariffs which are just brilliant But we’ve weathered situations like this before and by God we’ll do it again It’s time for tech news Cheers Excellent Today’s video is brought to you by Thermaltch TR100 mini tower case and travel trunk The TR100 is a dimminionative but fullfeatured dualchamber chassis with a surprisingly roomy interior for high-end PC builds Available in a variety of colors with support for up to 360 mm GPUs and a 280mm AIO radiator on top The modular design means side panels are all removable for cable management And upgrades include an optional LCD panel or the travel trunk to easily take your TR100 gaming PC setup on the go For more on the TR100 mini tower case from Thermaltch check out my build or click the sponsor link in the video description Let’s start by clearing out some of last week’s roughage The next NVIDIA GPUs to launch strongly rumored to be the RTX 5060 and RTX 5060Ti seem poised to suck in all the ways you’ve come to expect from video card launches this year Per rumors from the board channels forums prices will likely be the same as the RTX40 series leaving us to rely on generational performance uplift for increased value But seeing how Nvidia has strategically avoided either of those things with the 50 series so far we should not be expecting much There does seem to be a bigger difference in pricing between the RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 Ti According to these early pre-built system listings that popped up on Newegg and Best Buy there’s a $300 gap here Whereas with the 5070 at the MSRP of 550 bucks and the 5060 Ti at 400 or 500 for the 8 gig or 16 gig version respectively the difference should be 50 or 150 bucks But since $550 RTX 5070s are just a myth we might as well be speculating about buying GPUs with all the golden eggs the Easter Bunny will be leaving us It does appear that both the 8 gig and 16 gig variant of the 5060Ti will be launching April 16th though with an announcement the day prior And while I would usually cap this off with a vaguely optimistic comment about more GPUs on the market being a good thing I’m trying to stick to my plan of not deluding myself or others today Speaking of new GPUs launching that won’t make much of a difference in the barren hellscape the GPU market has become AMD appears to be following up the successful if only you could buy them debut of the RX970 and 9070 XT with a 960 XT Something sequential Neither actually Instead we have the RX970 GRE in the rumor pipeline which might be a 12 gig card in the $400 to $450 range So why the [ __ ] isn’t it a 960 or 960 XT Well you see GRE originally meant Golden Rabbit Edition and was used for GPUs being sold in China And then sometimes those GPUs were sold in the rest of the world and then AMD said it now stands for great Radeon edition instead And then they stopped making the only GRE card that was actually good the 7900 GRE and now all the 7900 prices are ridiculously high My guess is they’re using GRE again partially to confuse us and because maybe it will be China exclusive or maybe just because that makes it a special edition and that’s always a good justification for there to be you guessed it very very limited stock available leading to scalper pricing once again Good thing PC gaming is already dead Speaking of things that kill PC gaming here in the United States we don’t like to leave things to chance Obviously we could just let our beloved hobby wither and die via neglect at the hands of Nvidia and AMD who would much rather spend time with their hot new AI waifuss but why not accelerate that process by making PC hardware even more difficult to obtain That sounds like a great idea or at least the current administration seems to think so And therefore another carefully selected and perfectly justified round of tariffs were announced on Wednesday And just to be abundantly clear note that I am laying the sarcasm on quite thickly here Tariffs which are taxes on goods that US citizens ultimately pay for have now been added to a litany of countries some that do not even import products to the US But that’s apparently just for good measure and not because the list was composed by a bunch of morons For PC hardware specifically you can expect about 20 to 25% higher prices thanks to the tariffs And when I’ve attempted to inquire with manufacturers about how they’re dealing with this situation they’re often just as lost as we are because there appears to be no rhyme or reason to how these tariffs are applied and hardware can come from a variety of locations Sourcing of raw materials gathering components and final assembly can all take place in different countries in different regions And the answer always seems to be see what happens when it goes through customs One thing that is certain though is that importers will add the price of tariffs to the cost of goods which is already happening with the justannounced Nintendo Switch 2 US pre-orders are on hold due to tariffs and the MSRP might go up by $50 to account for them Indeed all gaming handhelds will be getting costlier in the next couple months as they’re getting a 30% tariff with a $25 minimum that will go up to $50 on July 1st So it seems that just about all gamers are in the same boat a boat where having fun just got a whole lot more expensive Thanks Trump Seeing as I’d like to move past the continual throw up in my mouth sensation that has been a structuring motif of today’s show let’s proceed with all due haste through tech briefs The RTX5090 finally launched this week Oh mobile The mobile RTX 5090 launched Weird how they don’t just call it mobile Almost as if they intentionally want people to associate the laptop 5090 with the desktop 5090 Gosh wouldn’t that be deceptive But yeah the mobile 5090 has half the CUDA corores and therefore about half the performance of the desktop version which is painfully evident to the reviewers and you know like you and me but is likely lost on many laptop shoppers who will be paying an even higher price per frame than $3,000 RTX 590 desktop owners Next up Microsoft encouraged us all to switch to Linux yet again this week by removing the bypass NRO script from the latest Windows 11 preview build disabling the workaround that lets you install Windows without a Microsoft account supposedly to enhance security But that’s pretty transparent [ __ ] Of course there’s already a different way to do it So we will now all need to train ourselves yet again on a new command start ms-cloon only which pretty much does the same thing until Microsoft removes that too I guess Windows we’re practically stuck with it As discussed a couple weeks back there have been Ryzen 9000 CPU failures happening to perhaps a greater degree than normal which have been well documented by Natty_overlord on Reddit While ASRock previously claimed the problem was fixed more failed CPUs have been reported And there’s even a chart now where you can see it’s mostly ASRock but some other vendors have been reported as well As of Friday though with more than 100 incidents reported AMD has made a statement where they blamed it on a memory compatibility issue which has been rectified in yet another new BIOS Hopefully this time it will actually fix the problem and ASRock won’t continue blaming it on dirt in the socket which for some reason felt vaguely insulting Intel also let us down this week or late last week as it was revealed that the high-end Arc Battle Mage GPUs that were in the works have been cancelled Not that we were expecting much from Team Blue given the mediocre supply of B570s and B580s they’ve trickled out but it’s sad to hear they’re not even going to try to compete above the $300 price range I guess Intel was worried that they might put a product out that people actually want which from my understanding they swore off doing sometime back in the 14 nmter plus+ era Speaking of things people like a bit of laughter a bit of levity is always nice And while this one is also tinged with bitterness it was my favorite April Fool’s article from earlier this week The idea that Nvidia would accidentally give us more performance is just so absurd and ridiculous and far-fetched that I must give Tech PowerUp the April Fools Award for eliciting a bit of a chuckle with this headline And yes I had to read a line or two of the article before I realized it was fake So I was fooled But there you have it guys Tech news for the weekend If you liked it click that like button or leave me a comment down below While you’re down there all the articles I talked about today are linked in the video’s description if you’re interested And you can check out my store at paulshardware.net for highquality merchandise t-shirts hoodies beer sets and more Subscribing to my channel is always a good call too Thanks again everyone Cheers and we’ll see you next week