Have you been saving up for some new PC gaming hardware? Want something a little more satisfying than just a simple graphics card upgrade? Well, we’ve just tested out two impressive additions to pine after: Razer’s recent OLED-equipped, high-refresh-rate Blade 15 gaming laptop and the similarly gorgeous — but more static — Alienware QD OLED gaming monitor.
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Now to the surprise of none of you, they’re both expensive. But we think they may be worth it. Razer’s new Blade 15 (we tested the $3,700 configuration… whoa) has a wide selection of high refresh rate display options, including both LCD and OLED. There’s a premium aluminum chassis with larger keycaps, too. But, I repeat, it’s almost $4,000.
Meanwhile, Alienware’s 34-inch curved QD-OLED monitor has Samsung’s new Quantum Dot OLED panel and rings in at $1,299. Sure, compared to Apple’s $1,599 Studio Display, it’s almost reasonable, but against many other monitors, this is a premium option. Both reviews are live over on the site now.
— Mat Smith
The biggest stories you might have missed
The company allegedly failed to disclose how much it benefited from crypto.
I already mentioned GPUs in the intro, but this is more about the increasingly lucrative market of NVIDIA graphics cards for crypto miners. I say lucrative, but the company is paying $5.5 million to settle US Securities and Exchange Commission charges after it failed to disclose crypto mining played a “significant” role in its surging revenue from GPU sales through fiscal 2018.
New Kids on the Blocks.
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Tetris, the basic NES version that birthed a phenomenon, is back again, at the highest levels of block destruction. It’s an era of new techniques (you haven’t heard of hypertapping?) and players barely older than a GameBoy Advance.
You can’t be serious.
What would happen if tennis legend John McEnroe played himself? An ESPN special entitled McEnroe vs. McEnroe featured the 63-year-old star, who retired from singles competition in 1992, playing a complicated, AI-trained version of himself. Which one had a meltdown first? The special is available to watch on ESPN+.
This second bout was only three hours after the first was supposedly resolved.
Xbox users faced a nine-hour outage on Saturday. Microsoft issued a tweet around 4 PM ET that day, acknowledging some users were unable to purchase and launch games or join Cloud Gaming sessions. Possibly the worst part: It was the second Xbox Network outage over the weekend. Xbox networks suffered a similar outage from late Friday afternoon and into Saturday morning.
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