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2020 is (thankfully) almost over, and that means that it is time to look back at the year and find the things that had a positive impact on the tech industry. While there has been no end of negativity, from product scalpers to toxic streaming, there have been some extremely bright spots.

The best CPU of the year is the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X. While the entire 5000 series of processors have been great, the 5600X sets itself out. It's just the right combination of cores and power at an attractive price point. Most importantly, its performance beats Intel's more expensive processors at common tasks, including gaming at 2K resolution. On the GPU side of things is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. While there were a lot of new video cards that came to market, the RTX 3080 represented a massive single generation performance improvement. The processor also released at a price that couldn't be beaten, as was evidenced by the immediate sellout of inventory.

No good video card is worth anything if it isn't paired with a monitor that can support it. The Asus ROG Swift PG259QN is the gaming monitor to take advantage of those powerful cards. It offers 360 Hz refresh rate, allowing for major FPS for professional and aspiring gamers. Even if your system isn't capable of that kind of framerate, you'll still benefit from the best motion resolution Tom's Hardware's team has ever seen. But, if resolution is more important than framerate, the Asus ROG Swift PG43UQ offers the best 4K gaming performance on a giant screen. For storage, the Samsung 980 Pro is your best bet - if you're running a modern AMD system. This chip can reach 7 GBps read/write in a small M.2 package.

For the entire list of Best of 2020, head on over to Tom's Hardware.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

One of the most anticipated games of 2020, Cyberpunk 2077, has finally hit the street after several release delays. However, despite these delays, the game has launched with some high profile bugs. One of these bugs can force the game to crawl even if you have some of the most powerful system processors available.

But, what hardware do you need to play the game well? Jarred Walton at Tom's Hardware wrote a piece showing how the game played on a large variety of GPUs. The Frames Per Second (FPS) ranged significantly at 1280x720 Low, with the GTX 1050 Medium coming in as low as 13 FPS and the GTX 1650 Super maxing out at 105.1 FPS. At 1920x1080, the GTX 1050 performed at the bottom with 8.2 FPS, and the RX 6800 XT maxed out at 110.8 FPS. Obviously, those numbers drop as the resolution increases.

But, even if you have everything you should need, you might fail to get the correct performance. This is if you are using a modern AMD processor because the rendering engine is set up to prevent older AMD processors from overloading. It searches for AMD Bulldozer processors and, if it is not one of those, it disables usage of half of the processor. The problem is that Bulldozer is an architecture that predates the 3 generations of Ryzen. So, if you do have a Ryzen or Threadripper processor, this bug affects you. There is a "fix" but apply it at your own risk.

In addition, the company has apologized for not showing enough information about the Cyberpunk 2077 running on current generation hardware. Gamers have been disappointed with the performance on the hardware it is currently available for (PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X support will come later). As such, Sony and Microsoft are offering refunds in their stores, and retail has been asked to accept refunds.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

Over the past few months, the tech world has fallen victim to a problem that sneaker collectors have been dealing with for years - automated scalpers. There are services available that, for a fee, will scour the internet looking for the product of your choice and will purchase them for you. Some people may use this to acquire the product for themselves, most use it to turn around and sell a high demand product for a massive gain.

We have seen this process play out with video cards, gaming consoles, and more this year. It has accounted for some of the inventory issues with these products, as they are purchased by these bots and then relisted on eBay and Amazon. But, the process has drawn ire from tech companies and consumers alike. As such, things have been put in place to try to fight the problem.

Consumers have been creating fake listings on eBay looking to confuse these bots. They list photos of the products right at or slightly below the MSRP of the product and tell people not to big on the listing. The theory is that bots will encounter the listing at a price that could have a good return on investment and bids or uses But It Now. For those that Tom's Hardware has interviewed, they have said they return the money if the user asks. Otherwise, the person gets a photo of the product, we assume.

A more realistic option that requires a little more guts is bidding on the scalper's listings with massive prices. This drives the price way up, but of course, the bid isn't legit. So, in the end, the scalper's time has been wasted and the product is still in their possession. It does require the guts to make and abandon the bids, which is of course not for everyone.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

Artificial intelligence is a big part of the software world today. Whether it's the iPhone using it to determine the most optimal way to charge the device to preserve the longevity of the battery, or an automated vehicle looking for pedestrians and other obstacles in the road, it seems that the technology is being used everywhere. As a software developer, particularly someone getting started, it can seem like a big and scary technology to get into, but Adafruit is trying to make it a little easier with the Adafruit BrainCraft HAT.

As with other add-ons for the Raspberry Pi, this HAT is able to sit on top of a Raspberry Pi and add new capabilities. It is best used with the Raspberry Pi 4, and Adafruit recommends the 2GB model, though Avram is demoing with the 1GB model. In the case of the BrainCraft, the capabilities are not exactly what you might expect. It doesn't add the ability to do machine learning and AI processing, but it does add the sensors and outputs that will make the process easier for developers.

The HAT has got a pair of microphones, which allows for noise cancelation, and the mic array can be used for voice and sound inputs. That input can be processed for voice commands, like with Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, or for recognizing certain noises in an environment. It also has a screen that can be used as a viewfinder for computer vision recognition. Using TensorFlow Lite and existing models, you can easily recognize everyday objects, or a new model can be trained to recognize specialized items.

To use some of these features, you will need some additional hardware. For computer vision and image recognition, you will need an additional Raspberry Pi camera. If you want to be able to hear output, either from an assistant, the image recognition, or other output, you'll also need a speaker.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

During Apple's "One More Thing" Event this past week, Apple talked a lot about its new M1 processors and the first Macs to be released using them. The company went into detail about the specs of the processor, but they left more questions unanswered than they actually addressed. One of the things mentioned and completely glossed over was Thunderbolt 3. Many people were curious about what the difference is between Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 and their companion USB 3 and USB 4, including some in the media.

Thunderbolt 4 is less of a new specification and more of an updated certification. The underlying technology has not changed, and almost all USB 3 and USB 4, as well as Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4, devices are interchangeable. The major difference in all of these names is USB 4's ability to turn all upward flowing channels into downward flowing channels. This allows for great video support on monitors but does require the disabling of other capabilities. This is to support DisplayPort 2.0, which requires double the bandwidth available to USB 4's upper version. In fact, USB 4 will not be marketed as such in documentation and packaging. Instead, it will be labeled by speed - USB 20Gbps and USB 40Gbps. To support DisplayPort 2.0 at 8K, you'll need to have the 40Gbps version.

Another positive for USB 4 will be the addition of power delivery, which will not be available on all USB 4 ports. However, the wattage has not increased, so you're still stuck with a proprietary charger for gaming laptops. For all of the changes and differences between USB 3 and USB 4, as well as Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 34, check out the guide on Tom's Hardware.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. That is if you are hoping to build a high-performance gaming PC. Some of the best PC components have either just been released or will release in the very near future. However, it is nearly impossible to get them.

AMD announced its new line of hardware. The company claims that the new line of video cards will compete directly with their NVIDIA equivalents, with the Radeon RX 6800 being comparable to the RTX 3070, the Radeon RX 6800 XT being comparable to the RTX 3080, and the Radeon RX 6900 XT being comparable with the RTX 3090. But, of course, in grand AMD tradition, the prices are far below those of NVIDIA. Tom's Hardware has not had the opportunity to test these cards out, though, so the comparisons are currently based on AMD's info.

The company also officially took the wraps off of its next-generation Ryzen chips: AMD Ryzen 5000 series, based on the new Zen 3 architecture. The prices will range from $299 for the Ryzen 5 model (no more Ryzen 3) to $799 for the Ryzen 9 model. AMD is touting higher clock speeds, more instructions per clock, 7nm architecture (closer together, more transistors per inch). Most interesting is the synergy between the new Radeon GPU and the new Ryzen CPU. This will provide fast access to one another's memory and will give a 13% speed bump over Intel chip or previous AMD chip. Again, this is based on the company's claims, not independent verification.

But you cannot get the NVIDIA cards, and we fear the same thing will be the case with the AMD models. Within minutes of becoming available, they're gone - sold to scalpers. An $800 card is then sold for $1500 on eBay. The issues have even made the 2080 way overpriced because of the lack of 3080 inventory issues. Because of this, it is possibly the worst time to build a high-end PC because of these inventory issues. AMD is trying to take steps to avoid scalpers and bots, but legitimate demand could possibly produce the same results.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

Kids are often interested in the newest and most exciting things, and these days that is advanced electronics. In past years, electronic learning kits were available from places like RadioShack, and they offered all of the parts, pieces, and instructions to build something, such as a radio. These days, those kits are old news, with more advanced and more universal kits being available. One upcoming kit that is truly unique is the CrowPi2, a Raspberry Pi-based laptop.

This computer is different from standard kids' laptops for a couple of reasons. First, it runs on a Raspberry Pi, meaning it is designed for building things. That is emphasized by the laptop's design. The keyboard is easily removable, revealing a whole host of integrated sensors and displays. These are all obviously Raspberry Pi components, which range from an ultrasonic range finder and RFID reader to a 7 segment display and RGB LED screen. All of these are physically integrated together, allowing for projects that use one or more of these components.

Because it is an integrated system, it means that the laptop has its own software which allows for courses and projects in one place. These projects are presented in both Scratch and Python, meaning that the system teaches real-world skills. Other kits use their own languages and proprietary systems, but with the CrowPi2, kids can learn both concepts and transferrable language skills. This means that once they outgrow the integrated system and want to build custom electronics, they have enough experience to get started on their own.

There are several configurations that will be available when the product launches soon. Tom's Hardware reviewed the top model and gave it an Editor's Choice rating. You can pre-order the device now on the company's website with delivery scheduled as soon as this month (October 2020).

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

Earlier in the year, NVIDIA released the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX Developer Kit, a $399 developer board aimed at artificial intelligence development. While the device offered 8GB of RAM, it does run nearly $400. The recently announced Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit is here to try to fill a middle ground in both price and specs. The new nano computer, which is also intended for artificial intelligence development, has scaled down specs, including only 2 GB of RAM. It falls below the standard NVIDIA Jetson Nano which comes with 4GB of RAM but is obviously more powerful and more focused than a Raspberry Pi.

Now, what is this device for? It is entirely designed for hands-on, real-world learning, experimenting, and developing in the artificial intelligence world. Like its two bigger siblings, the Jetson Nano 2GB is designed to accommodate a number of NVIDIA's in-house AI code, such as pre-trained AI models from NVIDIA NGC. It also works along with the NVIDIA JetBot AI robot platform. This makes the developer board incredibly attractive for small artificial intelligence projects.

One of the best enhancements that this new board has over its siblings is a USB-C power port. Previous models, including the larger Nano and the Xavier NX, use a proprietary plug, meaning that it is harder to power in a mobile scenario. With USB-C power, you can use it on a mobile robot, or in a portable environment with just a standard battery pack.

The NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit is not available yet, but is listed on Amazon with the ability to be notified when it is available.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

While many of us have been staying home, technology vendors have still been hard at work bringing new products to market. While the most noteworthy have been Microsoft and Sony with their next-generation consoles, we have also seen a ton of new high profile PC components, with more to come.

The NVIDIA GTX 3900 and GTX 3800 videocards have already cemented themselves as the new must-have components for gamers, despite the challenge of getting one. The pre-orders were plagued with bots, and we have seen the product selling on sites like eBay for far above their market value. NVIDIA says that the problem isn't in supply, but in demand. But, as we have noted before, some of that demand has been inflated because of scalpers, creating a three point scenario.

NVIDIA might want to focus on the issue, because AMD is rumored to be on the verge of announcing their next generation of videocards, believed to be called the Radeon RX 6900, RX 6800, and RX 6700. While we have no official information yet, these new cards will need to at least try to compete with the current GTX cards, or they will have little chance of success. But, if they can compete with NVIDIA, and the company has enough stock, they could do some damage to NVIDIA's bottom line - and possibly image.

Videocards aren't all that AMD has up its sleeves, with new desktop processors in the Zen 3 family on the horizon. An event is expected where the company will show off its 5000 series processors, looking to continue the brand's massive growth. Intel is also expected to announce plans for the 12th Generation Rocket Lake processors in the near future.

The big takeaway here is that, if you are looking for bleeding edge technology, right now is a wait and see timespan, as everything is in flux. We will see over the next few weeks if inventory opens up from NVIDIA, and new hardware is announced from AMD and Intel.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

Prime Day, which is Amazon's annual celebration of itself, is a great opportunity to find some big deals at retailers across the internet. While the event itself is Amazon-branded and only applies to Prime subscribers, other retailers take advantage of the attention to sales and run their own promotions. While the event usually takes place in the Summer, Amazon delayed it this year because of the increase in demand for its service due to the lockdown.

Now we have the date, October 13-14, 2020, and we can begin to prepare for the sales. The most important part of Prime Day is not getting tricked by the false urgency. Just because something is on sale does not mean it is a good deal. For Amazon, using The Camelizer is the best way to compare the current price against the last few months. This will prevent you from spending more than you should just because it's a special couple of days. You also want to go in knowing what you want and not panic buy things because of the price.

Some of the best deals will be on Amazon's in-house brands. You'll see big price decreases on Amazon Basics, Amazon Fire, Ring, Echo, and more. If you're in the market for one of these product categories, waiting for 2 weeks will be your best bet. In fact, that will be the case for most tech products.

In addition to Amazon products, we will see sales on TVs, monitors, SD cards, SSDs, and more. Often times, Amazon is flooded with lower quality, no-name brands, and many of those will all be on sale during the event. But, when purchasing electronics, especially important parts like storage and screens, it's best to stick to known brands. You can use Tom's Hardware to check out reviews on products you find, and even use their product guides to see the best sales during the event.

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.