The best smart home upgrade I ever made cost $5 and required zero apps
Jasmine Mannan May 19, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT Jasmine is Software and PC Hardware Author at XDA with years of tech reporting experience ranging from AI chatbots right down to gaming…
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Is there a silver lining?
Right now, we are in a structural shortage that probably won't see relief for a good couple of years. As a result, so much consumer hardware feels like it's vanishing. With budget gaming PCs disappearing, Nvidia's Super Series potentially in jeopardy, and the Steam Machine currently in limbo too. The silver lining of all of this is that this crisis might force a software revolution where developers have to finally stop being lazy with RAM optimization. For now, the hardware we want is sitting on a shelf in a designer's drawer, waiting for the prices to drop to make it accessible for the averag
DRAM prices have tripled, and three products are paying the priceTop stories
I use Claude Pro, Qwen 3-Coder, and Gemma 4 together, and it's the most cost-efficient AI workflow I've ever built
…it has are quite manageable The most common pushback I've received when detailing this approach is the fact that it demands capable hardware, and that's quite fair. Running Qwen-3…
18 months later, the RTX 50 series' biggest feature is still waiting for games that don't exist
…The company has every incentive to lock its new AI rendering advances to the RTX 60 series hardware in order to create a "compelling" upgrade path. Related I used frame generation wrong…
An AI agent deleted a company's entire database in 9 seconds, then confessed it 'guessed' instead of asking
…PocketOS loses its entire database in 9 seconds after using an AI agent The agent confessed that it 'guessed' what it should do As spotted by Tom's Hardware , this story starts…
My self-hosted LLMs are a lot more than just a chat replacement – here's how they boost my productivity
…just fine on any ol’ hardware. On conventional LLMs, the only way to load them on VRAM-constrained GPUs is to use the --ngl flag to push entire layers off onto the…
By the time the Steam Machine ships, it will have already lost the market it was supposed to own
…The launch came after several delays, pushing the hardware out well past its originally intended window. Not quite. Steam Machines hit retail shelves in November 2015. The launch was delayed multiple times…
An RTX 3070 is living proof that software now matters more than hardware
…The RTX 5070 offers more VRAM, newer RT cores, and stronger AI hardware, but most of it is in service of enhancing its software-backed performance like multi-frame generation, dynamic super…
Over 40% of Steam gamers are still using RTX 30 and 40 GPUs, and DLSS is a big reason why
…Speaking purely in terms of hardware, we've reached a point of diminishing returns where the only hardware improvements are an increased number of AI-supporting cores. The entire while, older GPUs…
Running local LLMs every day for five months broke every assumption I had about them
…Running my own AI on my own hardware just felt like something worth trying, and not because I had a specific gap to fill or super strong feelings about data privacy at…
I replaced my local LLM with a model half its size and got better results — And it wasn't about the parameters
…Another thing I hadn’t considered was how badly the default settings were getting in my way, and how much of the “limitation” I’d been blaming on my hardware was actually…