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Chinese police have arrested 22 people in connection with selling counterfeit GPUs at online retailers. 

Police from Binzhou City, located in the Bincheng district of China, raided a warehouse of a gang suspected of acquiring old GPUs from cryptomining rigs, cleaning and repackaging them for sale as new. This is the result of a reported year-long investigation (via Videocardz).

According to the police, it was an elaborate operation involving several different crews, each responsible for various tasks. One team ‘acquired’ the GPUs, another was charged with cleaning and testing them, and another group packaged and labelled them to appear brand new. Of course, a team was also responsible for selling the counterfeit products.

Since the end of the crypto mining boom, the second-hand market, especially in China, has been flooded with used GPUs. Many of these GPUs suffered tremendous wear and tear from 24/7 mining, sometimes drastically affecting their performance an…

It may surprise you to know that Idris Elba has musical collaborations with Taylor Swift, Wiley and Paul McCartney under his belt, and now we can add to that his contributions to Phantom Liberty: a 3 track EP (The Phantom Files) and full DJ set. Elba’s acting career may overshadow his musical output, but he does have an extensive back catalogue of songs as well as a seriously impressive list of collaborators.

Driving around the streets of Night City, flicking between the radio stations and experiencing the electric range of dystopian tunes is crucial to my immersion, so three brand new stations is more than welcome. The three new Elba tracks are split across two of the three new stations. 99.9 Impulse contains one of the originals, Walk of Shame—a four to the floor club song with a tasty drop and vocal samples—and the rest of the station is “basically his DJ set put together from unreleased tracks” as senior composer P.T. Adamczyk put it during this Night City Wire…

If you’re in the market for a new gaming chair then you may have timed it well. Secretlab, the maker of our favourite gaming chair, the Secretlab Titan Evo, is launching a cheaper model that shares many characteristics with the best gaming chair—it’s called the Titan Evo Lite.

From looks alone, you might not be able to spot many differences between the Titan Evo and Titan Evo Lite. Both share the same multi-tilt recline, seat base design, foam construction, and style; though there are a few key differences to note.

For starters, the Evo Lite only comes in medium and large sizes. Smaller chairs are only available with the more premium model. The upholstery is also a little different when you get down to it. The Lite comes with Prime 2.0 Leatherette and SoftWeave Fabric options, whereas the Titan comes with updated versions of both. From our experience with older Secretlab chairs pre-Titan Evo, I still have high hopes for the longevity of the cheaper materials, thoug…

Every Bethesda game’s character creation menu has witnessed some horrors in its time. From attempts to make Anakin Skywalker in Skyrim, all the way to some of the most terrifying Fallout 4 faces that were enough to break the bathroom mirror. And I’m sure you’ve been witness to plenty of stars made in Bethesda games, too—maybe even attempted some yourself. It does take some effort to get it right, though.

More to the point, I don’t want to have to spend hours in the Starfield character creator to live out my dream of playing Seinfeld characters in space. Thanks to this new Nexus Mods character preset, that dream can become a reality, minus all the hard graft. 

Yep, the first character preset for the game appears to be George Costanza. For… reasons?

Uploaded by dunce13, a creator with this as their sole contribution to Nexus Mods, the character preset does bare a pretty impressive likeness to the actor. And as the preset descripti…

The quirky cats at Asrock have come up with another offbeat idea. Adding a second chipset to an AMD motherboard via a PCIe add-in card. Yup, really. The starting point is an ASRock B650 LiveMixer board to which a second AM5-spec chipset is added to the setup using an extra board adapter. Genius, right? Kinda.

Numerous caveats ensue, and ultimately this is a recipe for spending more money that you would have on the X670 motherboard in the first place, only to have the X670 chipset bit hobbled by the PCIe interface. But hold that thought. 

As Level1Techs explain, the whole idea hinges on the fact that the AMD AM5 platform can support multiple chipsets either directly connected to the CPU or via daisychaining. That’s how it differentiates between X670 and B650 motherboards, one has two chipsets dies and the budget version just one. So, ASRock decided to add a second chipset via a PCIe add-in card.

The X670 expansion kit comprises an add-in board with dual quad-la…

Remember Megaton Rainfall? It’s a VR game released in 2017 about flying around like Superman and using your powers to battle hostile aliens and also accidentally demolish the occasional skyscraper. Today the developers revealed their next project, and it looks to be even weirder: Tenebris Pictura is an “ultra-corporeal action adventure” about a paranormal investigator in Victorian England who becomes caught up in a battle against demonic extra-terrestrial beings who have escaped from supernatural paintings.

Invited to a strange island where the laws of physics appear to be breaking down, you’ll use the Aeter Pendulum and your psychic abilities (you’re also a psychic, btw) to detect “murky presences” and clues that will help explain why the world around you is in such a strange state.

“Conceal your body from danger and separate your soul to face the demon hordes,” the Steam page explains, sort of. “Dodge their barrages of ectoplasm and counter-attack with your psychic ene…

PC Gamer’s all-singing all-dancing all-action 30th anniversary issue is on-sale today, and includes a slew of major interviews with the creatives that have shaped our industry and some of the most important games in history. PCG’s editor Robert Jones sat down with Warren Spector and Paul Neurath, key members of the original System Shock team, which is generally considered the first game you could call an immersive sim, with its influence is still prevalent in the contemporary industry across the likes of Arkane’s various titles and 2K’s Bioshock series.

The origins of the game go back to its lead programmer Doug Church who, while Warren Spector was polishing up a proposal for something called Alien Commander, shared how bored he was with the then-industry’s over-reliance on genre tropes. 

“Doug Church was hanging out in my office one day, and we were both talking about how sick we were of fantasy games, and dungeons, and rescuing princesses, and heroes that were bui…

Solve today’s Wordle exactly the way you want to with our helpful range of tips and advice. There’s a fresh clue for the May 17 (697) game waiting below if you’d like a hint, or today’s answer is only a quick click away if you need to rescue an unlucky game. You’ll also find past answers, general help, and plenty more.

The results of today’s opener really could’ve gone either way for me—one green and one yellow isn’t a terrible start, but it’s not good enough to guarantee a swift win either. Happily, luck was on my side this time, my follow-up almost gave me today’s Wordle answer, and my third go polished off a satisfying game.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Wednesday, May 17

The word you need to find today describes a long, thin piece of wood often used to build floors. Pirates apparently had a fondness for making people walk one of these, stereotypically into shark-infested waters. There’s only one vowel today. 

ViewVie…

New mid-range GPUs from AMD and Nvidia are just around the corner, including the Nvidia RTX 4060 and RTX 4070 cards and AMD’s Radeon RX 7800 and 7700. Well, we say mid-range and therein lies the problem. Where the heck are these graphics cards going to be priced?

All the indications are that the likes of Nvidia’s TX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti along with AMD’s RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX are pretty tough sells. After all, pretty much all of them have reverted to their official MSRP shortly after launch and they all seem to be in abundant supply.

That’s without appealing to rumours of particularly poor sales of certain examples of those listed SKUs. Of course, the cheapest of that quartet is the Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti. But even that is a $799 graphics card.

What with a global economic downturn and cost of living crisis, plus crypto-fuelled GPU demand evaporating over night, in part thanks to the end of ethereum mining as we knew it, it’s hard to imagine a sudden spike in graphi…

Activision’s bold new vision for unifying the Call of Duty experience is off to a bad start. With the early release of Modern Warfare 3’s campaign, players are discovering that launching Call of Duty HQ, the unified front end for current and future CoD titles, is required to access the new game. That might not be such a big deal if it wasn’t so slow, inelegant, and seemingly pointless. Call of Duty is now a launcher within a launcher, and it sucks.

I’ll explain: Before you can launch Modern Warfare 3, you have to launch Modern Warfare 2 first. Seriously. “Call of Duty HQ” is just the Modern Warfare 2/Warzone client under a new name.

Switching between Modern Warfares 2 and 3 from the HQ is not like switching modes. Once you’re on the main menu, you could jump immediately into Warzone or a multiplayer match of MW2. Clicking the Modern Warfare 3 button, however, closes the HQ app and launches an entirely different executable called Modern Warfare 3. There is no option to

This Noctua power supply is really something. It’s an optimised and improved version of Seasonic’s Prime TX-1600. It now comes in brown, of course, including the cables, and includes a single NF-A12x25 fan and redesigned grill. 

For these seemingly small changes, it’s 8-10 dB quieter than the standard Seasonic model. 

“Depending on where in the RPM range, you’ll look at around six to eight of that is coming from the fan and around two decibels contributed by the fan grill,” Noctua’s Jakob Dellinger tells me.

“So that’s custom designed to reduce turbulence.”

I’m told the idea with the new grill is the fan blades are never, ever parallel to the grill’s struts. If that were to happen, the high and low pressure fluctuations that would occur would increase noise. You’ll notice looking at Noctua’s grill, the fan blades and grill never run the same way.

So, next time you’re PSU shopping, keep an eye out for those parallel struts.

Other features…

As is usually the case with Bethesda RPGs, Starfield is a dream for modders. There are bugs to fix, a clunky UI to replace, and plenty of wide open spaces to fill with nonsense. Our list of the best Starfield mods is growing, and there’s plenty still left to do.

It’s not all creativity and wonder, however. Someone made a mod that removed the option to select your character’s pronouns from Starfield’s character creator, and uploaded it to popular mod-hosting hub Nexus Mods. Which then deleted it.

Even if you play Starfield, you might not remember it even has the option to change your character’s default pronouns. It’s a low-key choice that only gets brought up as you finalize your character. And yet, it’s been the subject of bizarre rants like streamer HeelvsBabyface screaming, “Sorry, did you want to get immersed in our world? Well, guess what? Fucking pronouns!” as well as Steam forum complaints like, “It was disheartening to see that Starfield, a game …