Lexar’s NM790 is a brilliant NVMe PCIe 4.0 gaming SSD, as it offers great performance for a very reasonable price, as we discovered when we reviewed the 4 TB version. It doesn’t have the very latest flash memory and controller chips, but the whole setup is very balanced and Lexar has done a fine job of configuring everything to work well.

There are, of course, better gaming SSDs but they’re more expensive and the NM790 should be more than quick enough for most gamers. What it doesn’t have, though, is a very large cache. Let me explain.

NAND flash, the type of memory that’s used in SSDs, isn’t super quick, especially when being written to. So when you’re trying to get lots of files copied from your PC’s system RAM onto the drive, the data needs to be buffered somewhere to stop things slowing to a crawl. And the table that stores the locations of where everything is on the SSD also needs to be constantly updated.

So-called DRAM-less SSDs, like the NM790, use a portio…

As We Descend, a pretty stylish-looking upcoming deckbuilder from new studio Box Dragon, will be published by Coffee Stain, the same folks publishing hits like Valheim and Deep Rock Galactic.

Describing itself as a “roguelike deckbuilder with the soul of a strategy game,” As We Descend has a nice aesthetic that seems to blend magic with technology in a desperate, dystopian city-vault that is humankind’s last outpost on a devastated world. 

As We Descend will have a roguelike structure, with each expedition out of the city having you compose your unit of several squads of specialist units, with retrieved tech from outside the vault giving you more types of units to access. Combat will have two zones for your units to move between: A forward defense area and a rear support zone. The key to success will be in moving them between the two in response to enemy intents.

The other part of the game will be exploring cityscape of the vault in order to “make contacts, ga…

Watch On

Ever wrestled to remove a graphics card, tears of frustration curling down your cheeks as you desperately fumble for the release catch, all the while cursing the heavens at the notion that somebody, anybody, thought this was a user-friendly or remotely ergonomic retention mechanism? Then you’re in good company.

But rejoice, because Asus has a new revision of its PCIe Q-Release mechanism, now known as PCIe Q-Release Slim. And it might just be the GPU slot we’ve all been waiting for. It’s totally tool-free, there’s no button, and once you understand how it works it’s totally intuitive.

Last time around, the Asus PCIe Q-Release involved a more easily accessible quick-release button that essentially popped the retention clip that holds a GPU into the PCIe slot. That saved you from having to get directly at the clip to manipulate it, the latter procedure often presenting something of an ergonomic nightmare for those who lack sextuple-jointed fingers. In other words, …