PC Gaming

The company’s answer was brief:

MSI will cover 2 year extended warranty on all MSI Desktop. 

We asked all its competitors the same question about Intel’s crashing chips. Here are the answers:

The number-one PC maker has answered our question whether it’ll honor Intel’s two-year extended warranty on damaged chips — but the answer doesn’t even include the word “warranty.”

Lenovo has been made aware of the instability issue affecting Intel’s 13th and 14th Generation Processors and is working with Intel to understand the potential impact on our products and how to best resolve them. We will work toward integrating into our future product BIOS any fixes provided by Intel once available. We recommend customers impacted by any CPU instability issues to contact Lenovo service for support.

Intel is footing the bill for replacements; this shouldn’t be a hard decision for Lenovo.

It now offers a five-year warranty on Intel’s problematic 13th and 14th Gen CPUs, just like its closest competitors.

We also got a vague new statement from Dell/Alienware that suggests it might extend its own parts warranty, but doesn’t promise to do so.

Falcon Northwest CEO Kelt Reeves tells The Verge:

Please help us get the word out to all Raptor Lake desktop users, especially i9 users, in big screaming headlines that they need to update their PC to the latest BIOS now to stop/prevent the CPU wear and hopefully avoid the need for an RMA. Don’t wait for the August microcode – that’s the last 5% (we hope) of the solution, but 95% of the fix is available now. Think of the new BIOS’ as the vaccine against this issue, but it will do no good unless people get shots in arms.

Intel spox Thomas Hannaford wouldn’t go as far as “95% of the fix,” but he says “Kelt’s PSA is a good one”. Besides, the August microcode is rolling out now:

Asus is the first OEM to release BIOS updates for its range of Z790 motherboards. The latest beta BIOS includes Intel’s new microcode fix to address stability and crashing issues with its 13th and 14th Gen processors. This won’t fix chips that are already damaged, though. You’ll need to swap your CPU, with Intel or a PC maker, if it has degraded.

With Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Directions (SOCD) features like Wooting and Razer’s new Rappy Snappy / Snap Tap enabled, FPS players don’t have to let go of one key to press another, enabling near-instant changes of direction. Some players have called it “basically cheating.”

Now SteelSeries says a beta update for its GG software (68.0.0) adds the same thing for all Apex Pro keyboards.

Price of Persia: The Lost Crown is one of my favorite games of this year — my colleague Ash Parrish loved it, too — so if you’ve been holding out for the game to come to Steam, I strongly encourage you to check it out. It’s playable on Steam Deck, too!

Intel added two years of additional warranty coverage for its 13th and 14th Gen Core processors last week, and now it’s clarifying this will also apply to processors sold without a box to OEMs or system integrators. If you’re having crashing issues you can contact Intel if you purchased a boxed CPU, or your OEM or system builder otherwise. Intel has also supplied a list of processors that will get the warranty extension, found below.

Puget Systems writes it’s indeed seeing higher failure rates with 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core processors — so it’ll extend warranty to three years for affected buyers. Normally, Puget only warranties parts for one year.

We don’t yet know if Intel is helping PC makers extend warranty. So far it’s only extended warranty on its own retail chips.

Nvidia:

Starting in November, GeForce NOW will transition away from updating the GeForce NOW Windows and macOS apps for legacy operating systems, including Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and macOS 10.11-10.14. Members on these systems can still enjoy streaming on play.geforcenow.com via supported web browsers.

Probably fine; just feels odd! Nvidia marketed GFN as the way to virtually stuff a new GPU into your aging laptop.

Asus thermal engineer Sam Jiun-Wei Hu has revealed he’s been working on an unannounced ROG Flow Z13 gaming tablet for 2025 that would contain the unannounced AMD Strix Halo chip — with an incredible 80W of power for its integrated GPU alone, and 30W more for the CPU.

The previous-gen housed up to a 65W RTX 4070 Mobile, but limited it to 35W on battery power.

If you have the latest Steam client beta, you may notice a new Steam Deck icon in your friends list indicating who is on the handheld.

That should make it easier to figure out which of your friends is on the Steam Deck or Big Picture mode, as Steam previously used the gamepad icon for both.

You can try the technical preview now if you’ve got RX 7000 or RX 6000 series discrete GPUs; it looks like it’ll also come to some laptops and handhelds with 780M integrated graphics.

Like Nvidia’s DLSS 3, AMD’s AFMF imagines new frames between existing ones for higher FPS — with many tradeoffs and caveats. AFMF 2 may reduce them.

That’s no exaggeration, it’s just me checking in on my 2022 story about the Logitech Powerplay Wireless Charging System, now on sale at Amazon for its best price in two years.

Mind you, that price is $94, not including a compatible mouse... but in hindsight, I’d gladly pay it.

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The free launcher, announced last month, will let you access Jackbox games you own from one place instead of having to hunt around through individual party packs.

You can wishlist the Megapicker on Steam right now ahead of its release on July 29th. It won’t have controller support at launch, but that should follow “pretty quickly after,” according to a developer AMA.

Also, “we’ll be Steam native — meaning the EA App will not be required to play the game,” according to BioWare. This is great news; I’ve loved Mass Effect: Legendary Edition on the Steam Deck, but logging in to the EA App can be a pain.

The Veilguard is set to release this fall. More launch details are coming “later this summer,” BioWare says.

Can a Windows handheld beat Valve’s Steam Deck OLED? This sequel to last year’s ROG Ally answers with more storage, faster RAM, double the battery, and USB4. We’ll need more time for benchmarking and battery testing before we can publish our review, but if you can’t wait, it is available now from Asus and Best Buy.

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