TechFuel HQ

Best RTX 5070 Ti Prebuilts (September 2026)

LK Wood IV — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-30 · 14 min read · St. Louis County, MO

Newegg’s search for a Ryzen 7 9800X3D tower with a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti returned 153 listings on September 30, 2026. Eight are refurbished or used. All of those were out of stock. Of the 145 new listings, 93 ask $4,000 or more, most of them the same few configurator towers repeated at every memory and drive size, and another 31 sit between $3,000 and $3,999. That leaves 21 new machines under $3,000, 20 of them with 32GB of memory, and I opened fourteen product pages, thirteen of them under $3,000, to rank the field.

The picks share one core: Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5070 Ti 16GB, 32GB of DDR5 and a 2TB NVMe drive. So the price, the seller, the warranty, and what each listing discloses about its power supply and memory decided the order.

The three picks at a glance

Prices are what Newegg’s buy box showed, signed out, in the US, on September 30, 2026. The affiliate feed deposited the evening before carries the same figure for the Yeyian and the Andromeda and no figure for the GIGABYTE.

System	Newegg price, Sept. 30	Sold and shipped by	Warranty as listed	Power supply as listed	Board and memory
1. Yeyian Phoenix Iron Mesh Top pick	$2,419.99	Newegg	2 years parts, 3 years labor	850W 80 Plus Gold, model not named	B650, Wi-Fi 6E; 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000
2. Andromeda Insights V3 Elite 50	$2,649.99	Newegg; also sold on Amazon by Andromeda Insights	2 years parts, lifetime labor (US based)	850W 80 Plus Gold, model not named	B850; 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000
3. GIGABYTE AORUS PRIME 5	$2,699.99	Newegg	3 years parts, 3 years labor	850W, no efficiency rating printed	B850, Wi-Fi 7, 2.5GbE; 2 x 16GB DDR5-5600

No price tie this time. The Yeyian is $230 under the Andromeda and $280 under the GIGABYTE, and it clears every line of the floor, so the question for the other two is what the extra money buys. For the Andromeda it buys a B850 board, a 360mm cooler and a lifetime labor term. For the GIGABYTE it buys a third year of parts coverage, Wi-Fi 7 with 2.5GbE, and the only listing in the field that names the maker of its graphics card, at the cost of a power supply line with no rating and memory rated at DDR5-5600.

How I ranked the systems

Four tests, in order.

The floor. Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5070 Ti 16GB, 32GB of DDR5, a 2TB NVMe drive, and at least 850W. NVIDIA lists 300W for the card and 750W of required system power, so 850W is one size of headroom, and every listing I opened under $3,000 ships it except one. The RTX 50-series power supply guide explains what moves that number.
Price and seller. The buy-box price, who sells the machine and who ships it. Newegg sells and ships five of the fourteen I opened, with 15-day returns. Skytech sells and ships its seven listings itself through Newegg’s marketplace, with 30-day returns; Andromeda Insights sells its V4 the same way. One listing, the ASUS ROG GM700, comes from a third-party reseller.
Disclosure. Whether the listing names its power supply model or at least its rating, states how the 32GB is split, names the board chipset, and names the maker of the graphics card. Of the fourteen product pages, none names the power supply model. Eleven print a Gold efficiency rating somewhere on the page. Four state the module count. Twelve name a chipset. One names the card maker.
Warranty as printed. Newegg prints a parts and labor term in its warranty box for most of the machines it sells itself (the Andromeda V3’s term is in the seller’s bullets); the marketplace listings carry the term in the seller’s bullet list, and Newegg’s box says to contact the seller.

I did not benchmark any of these towers, and TechFuelHQ has not measured an RTX 5070 Ti. The performance section below says what the vendors publish and where the site’s own comparison pages put the card against its neighbours.

1. Yeyian Phoenix Iron Mesh: the cheapest machine that clears the floor

The Phoenix Iron Mesh (part number YPA-PM980DC-57T1N) cost $2,419.99 on September 30, marked down from a $2,699.99 list price. Newegg sells and ships it, and it was in stock. That is $180 under the next in-stock listing that clears the floor, Skytech’s Hawkeye at $2,599.99, and $230 under the Andromeda V3.

The spec table names a B650 board (“B650 D5 Wi-Fi CEC”), an 850W Gold 80 Plus power supply, 16 GB x 2 of DDR5-6000, a 2TB Gen4 NVMe drive, a Yeyian Inf 240mm liquid cooler and Wi-Fi 6E. A keyboard and mouse are in the box. Newegg’s warranty box lists two years of parts coverage and three years of labor; among the warranty boxes Newegg prints for the machines it sells here, only the GIGABYTE’s three and three is longer. Returns run 15 days. The listing was first posted on February 25, 2025, so this configuration has been on sale for over a year and a half.

Two compromises. The board is a B650 rather than a B850, which the 9800X3D motherboard guide covers, and the cooler is a 240mm unit on a processor AMD rates at 120W . Neither changes what the machine is. It is the only tower in this field that clears every line of the floor for under $2,500.

Amazon sells a Yeyian Phoenix Mesh with a 9800X3D, but it is the RTX 5070 12GB version (ASIN B0FFT7KJM9), a different card. So the Amazon control below is a labelled search, not a twin.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30

2. Andromeda Insights V3 Elite 50: B850, the biggest cooler among the picks, and lifetime labor

The V3 Elite 50 (part number V3-RTX5070TI-9800X3D-2TB-32GB-850W-BLK) cost $2,649.99 on September 30, down from $2,799.99. Newegg sells and ships it, and it was in stock. Newegg ranked it the number 4 best seller in gaming desktops that night.

The listing names a B850 board with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, an 850W 80 Plus Gold supply, 16 GB x 2 of DDR5-6000, a 2TB Gen4 NVMe drive and a 360mm liquid cooler with a digital display. The warranty appears in the seller’s bullets rather than in Newegg’s box: two years of parts, lifetime labor and lifetime service, both US based. Returns run 15 days through Newegg.

The same machine is on Amazon as ASIN B0GG4M3DLR, where Andromeda Insights sells and ships it, in stock on September 30. This is the pick with a real twin at both retailers. Andromeda also sells a V4 Elite 50 at $2,699.99 directly through Newegg’s marketplace with 30-day returns and a liquid cooler with a customizable LCD; it is in the field table below with its own Amazon twin.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Check AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30

3. GIGABYTE AORUS PRIME 5: a three-year warranty and a named card, with a gap in the power supply line

The AORUS PRIME 5 (model AP5A7N7T-5102) cost $2,699.99 on September 30. Newegg sells and ships it, and it was in stock. It was first listed on August 25, 2026. It is the one machine in this field whose graphics card has a named maker, because GIGABYTE built the tower around its own RTX 5070 Ti.

The spec table names an AMD B850 chipset, 16 GB x 2 of DDR5-5600, a 2TB Gen4 drive, a 240mm liquid cooler, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, a Realtek 2.5GbE port, nine rear USB ports and GIGABYTE’s AC301G case. Newegg’s warranty box lists three years of parts and three years of labor, the longest parts term in the field. Returns run 15 days.

The gap is the power supply line, which reads “850W” and nothing else. No rating, no model. Every other machine I would buy prints at least the Gold rating. The memory is also rated at DDR5-5600 where the other two picks ship DDR5-6000. If the three-year term and the named card matter more to you than those two lines, this is the machine; if not, the Andromeda costs $50 less. I found no Amazon listing for this system on September 30, so the Amazon control is a search.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30

The back-ordered contender: STORMCRAFT Phantom

The STORMCRAFT Phantom (PH980XDCC-57TN1) would sit second on price at $2,599.99, down from $2,799.99, and Newegg sells and ships it, but on September 30 the buy box read “backordered” with an October 2 estimate. The listing names a B850 board, an 850W 80 Plus Gold supply, 32GB of DDR5-6000 with no module count, a 2TB Gen4 drive, a 360mm liquid cooler and seven ARGB fans, with a keyboard and mouse in the box. Newegg’s warranty box lists two years of parts and three years of labor, the same term as the Yeyian, and Newegg ranked it the number 24 best seller in gaming desktops. The affiliate feed deposited the evening before does not carry it.

If it is back in stock at that price when you read this, it is a real alternative to the Yeyian for $180 more, with a B850 board and a bigger cooler. Ask STORMCRAFT for the module count first. STORMCRAFT’s machine on Amazon is a different model, the Skyhawk PRO (ASIN B0FBL4CR6T), with the same core and a B850 board; STORMCRAFT PC sells and ships that one.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30

The rest of the field under $3,000 on September 30

Skytech’s seven listings are the bulk of it. They share one description: sold and shipped by Skytech through Newegg’s marketplace with 30-day returns, a one-year parts and labor warranty in the bullets, an 850W Gold ATX 3 supply named by rating in the title, 802.11ac Wi-Fi in the bullet list, a 360mm cooler, and a line saying the graphics card brand may vary on five of them or that component brands may vary on the other two. The spec tables print “850W” and a chipset and no module count.

System	Price, Sept. 30	What the listing says	Why it is not a pick
Skytech Hawkeye (ST-HAWKEYE-3228-YE-SK)	$2,599.99	B650; 850W Gold ATX 3; DDR5-6000; 2TB; Wi-Fi 5; 1 year; sold by Skytech	Cheapest of the seven and $180 over the Yeyian for a shorter warranty and a card of unstated make Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30
Skytech Azure 3 (ST-AZURE3-2695-W-AL, Montech XR)	$2,699.99	B650; 850W Gold ATX 3; DDR5-6000; 2TB Gen4; Wi-Fi 5; 1 year; sold by Skytech	The Hawkeye’s story for $100 more in a different case Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30
Skytech Tempest (ST-TEMPEST-3362-W-AL)	$2,699.99	B650; 850W Gold ATX 3; DDR5-6000; 2TB; Wi-Fi 5; 1 year; sold by Skytech; first listed August 27, 2026	Same as the Azure 3 in another case, marked down $500 from a $3,199.99 list price Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30
Skytech Blaze 5 (ST-BLAZE5-3193-B-AL)	$2,699.99	B650; 850W Gold ATX 3; DDR5-6000; 2TB; Wi-Fi 5; 1 year; sold by Skytech	An exact Amazon twin sold by Amazon.com (ASIN B0H7WNHZHK, in stock September 30, with the same DDR5-6000 and 2TB), which matters if you want Amazon’s return path Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Check AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30
Andromeda Insights Elite 50 V4 (V4-RTX5070TI-9800X3D-2TB-32GB-850W-BLK)	$2,699.99	B850; 850W 80 Plus Gold; DDR5-6000, module count not stated; 2TB Gen4; LCD liquid cooler; 2 years parts, lifetime US labor; sold and shipped by Andromeda Insights, 30-day returns	The V3’s sibling sold by the builder rather than by Newegg, for $50 more; assembled in Eugene, Oregon per the listing; Amazon twin ASIN B0H3F6S67C, sold by Andromeda Insights Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Check AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30
Skytech King 95 (ST-KING95-2702-W-AL)	$2,799.99	B650; 850W Gold ATX 3.0; DDR5-5600 non-RGB; 2TB Gen4; Wi-Fi 5; 1 year; sold by Skytech	$100 over the Azure 3, Tempest and Blaze 5 for slower memory; the title prints 4.2GHz and a 5GHz turbo for a processor AMD rates at 4.7GHz and 5.2GHz, and the Amazon twin (ASIN B0F4KJLYT2, sold by Amazon.com) lists DDR5-6000 where Newegg’s lists 5600, so confirm the memory on whichever page you buy from Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Check AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30
Skytech Legacy 4 (ST-LEGACY4-2619-B-AL)	$2,799.99	X670; 850W Gold ATX 3; DDR5-6000; 2TB Gen4; Wi-Fi 5; 1 year; sold by Skytech	The only X670 board among the listings I opened, for $200 over the Hawkeye Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30
Skytech Prism 5 (ST-PRISM5-3560-B-AL)	$2,799.99	B850; 850W Gold ATX 3; DDR5-6000; 2TB Gen4; 1 year; sold by Skytech; first listed September 11, 2026	The only Skytech on a B850 board; the title says Wi-Fi 6 and the bullet list says 802.11ac, so ask which Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30
iBUYPOWER Y40 (Y40BA7N57T03)	$2,899.99	1TB NVMe; 750W, no rating; DDR5-5200; 1 year parts and labor; sold by Newegg; first listed September 10, 2026	Fails the floor twice at the highest price in this table: a 1TB drive and a 750W unit, on NVIDIA’s minimum Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-30 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-30

Listings under $3,000 that I saw only as search tiles and did not open: Andromeda’s Elite 50 V1 at $2,749.99, V2 at $2,799.99, Vector at $2,899.99 and Frame at $2,899.99, all sold by Andromeda Insights; a Hoengager tower at $2,899.99 sold by Hoengager; iBUYPOWER’s Trace at $2,999.99, sold by Newegg and out of stock; a tower listed only as “Gaming PC” at $2,499.99 with a 1TB drive; and a sponsored Mloong X-Dragon at $2,899 with 96GB of memory, sold by Mloong. I do not rank a listing I have not read.

What I rejected and why

Sixteen gigabytes of memory. MSI’s MAG PANO M100R configurations at $3,249 and $3,499 list 16GB, and ArsenalPC’s Hyte X50 at $3,399 lists 16GB with a 1TB drive. That is an immediate upgrade bill on a new machine.
A 1TB drive at 2TB money. The iBUYPOWER Y40 at $2,899.99 and the $2,499.99 “Gaming PC” tile both ship 1TB.
One memory module, as listed. The ASUS ROG GM700 at $3,299 lists its 32GB as 32 GB x 1, is sold by a third-party seller rather than by Newegg, and its warranty box says to contact the seller.
An undescribed power supply. “850W” with no rating still needs a question to the seller before checkout. That line is why the GIGABYTE sits third rather than first, and why the iBUYPOWER’s 750W line is a rejection.
The configurator towers. Above $3,000 the search is dominated by the same chassis repeated at every memory and drive size: more than forty Adamant Custom listings from $4,049.99 to $9,149.99, two dozen Hyper Cyber listings from $4,519 to $5,619, about twenty ArsenalPC builds from $3,399, and two Velztorm towers at $3,749.25. I opened none of them. At those prices a 9800X3D and a 5070 Ti are not what you are paying for.
Refurbished units that are not for sale. Eight refurbished or used towers, seven of them ABS Eurus, Stratos and Kaze II machines at $1,899.99 to $2,199.99 and one used STORMCRAFT Phantom, were all out of stock. A price you cannot pay is not a price.
Brand-name towers I did not open. HP’s OMEN MAX 45L at $3,679.99 was in the search, sold by Newegg. It may be a fine machine; it is $980 over the GIGABYTE and I did not read its page.

What a 9800X3D and an RTX 5070 Ti deliver

I have not benchmarked any of these prebuilts, and TechFuelHQ has not measured an RTX 5070 Ti. What follows is what the vendors publish and what the site’s own comparison pages hold.

The card. NVIDIA lists the RTX 5070 Ti at 8,960 CUDA cores , 16GB of GDDR7 on a 256-bit bus, a 2.45GHz boost clock, 300W of total graphics power and 750W of required system power, fed by two PCIe 8-pin cables through the adapter in the box or one PCIe Gen 5 cable rated at 300W or more. That connector is one more reason the power supply model matters on a tower you did not build.
The processor. AMD lists the Ryzen 7 9800X3D at 8 cores and 16 threads, a 4.7GHz base clock, a 5.2GHz maximum boost, 96MB of L3 cache and a 120W default TDP. Every pick uses it, so it does not separate them.
Frame rates and the neighbours. The RTX 5070 vs 5070 Ti page holds Tom’s Hardware’s June 2026 averages, prices each frame at 1440p and 4K, and finds the RTX 5080 a poor step up from the Ti. The RTX 5070 Ti vs RX 9070 XT page covers the AMD card that undercuts it. If a 5080 tower is on your list anyway, the RTX 5080 prebuilt guide runs this same survey on that field.
Local AI. The open RTX 5080 LLM throughput dataset recorded a 20-billion-parameter model resident in about 14 GiB of graphics memory on a 16GB card. The RTX 5070 Ti carries the same 16GB, so the model fits; the tokens per second are that card’s own number, which I have not measured.

The price ceiling for a 32GB, 2TB build

My cutoff for this specification is roughly $2,800 before tax. All four machines above sit under it. Past it, show me why:

64GB instead of 32GB, or 4TB instead of 2TB
a named power supply and a named board, together
a warranty longer than GIGABYTE’s three years
a chassis you specifically want, such as HP’s OMEN MAX 45L at $3,679.99, which I did not open

If you are willing to assemble the machine, load the same parts into the PC Builder and size the supply with the PSU wattage calculator. The RTX 5070 vs 5070 Ti page records an MSI RTX 5070 Ti at Newegg for $1,149.99 on September 26, 2026, which puts the card alone at close to half the Yeyian’s price.

The 60-second checkout audit

Do this after clicking through and before payment.

Match the item number to the exact row in this guide.
Confirm Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RTX 5070 Ti 16GB in the selected configuration; several of these pages carry other processors and other cards under the same name.
Look for two memory modules. Only the Yeyian, the Andromeda V3 and the GIGABYTE print the split.
Find the power supply model. If only a wattage or a rating is listed, ask the seller for the model before the return window closes.
Confirm the board chipset and count open M.2 slots.
Read who sells it and who ships it, and the return window: 15 days on the machines Newegg sells, 30 on the Skytech and Andromeda-direct listings.
Open the warranty and return terms. The prebuilt warranty piece says what those terms are worth.
Screenshot the final configuration, price, and delivery promise. Then pay.

If one of those fields changes, re-rank the machine. Two towers wearing the same family name can differ in the power supply, in the memory layout, in the board, in the seller and in the return path. On a heavy glass-sided tower the expensive failure is discovering after delivery that the machine differs from the tile while the only remedy is packing it up again.

Where to buy the Yeyian Phoenix Iron Mesh (Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5070 Ti): Check Newegg · Check Amazon. Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

12V-2x6 Pin Current Census: Measured Amps Per Pin

LK Wood IV — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A 16-pin graphics card connector carries its whole 12 V load on six pins. Intel’s design guide rates each of those pins at 9.2 A and the connector at up to 600 W, and at 600 W the six pins share 50 A, so an even split puts 8.3 A on each. That leaves under one amp of room per pin.

Nothing in the connector makes the split even. It depends on how well each pin seats, and until recently an owner had no way to see it. Some hardware now measures every pin. ASUS puts a sensor chip on its ROG Astral cards, Thermal Grizzly sells an inline meter that logs each pin, and owners post their six numbers in forum threads and issue trackers, one card at a time. A search in September 2026 turned up no dataset that collects those readings and sets them beside the cable they came from.

This page opens that census. One row is one connector on one card, read once under one load. The data, the field definitions, the validator and the report form live in the open repository: github.com/iBlessi/techfuelhq-census (CC BY 4.0).

If you are here because a connector looks or smells wrong, shut the machine down first. The symptoms of a failing supply are on the PSU failure symptoms guide.

How results are reported

The census publishes distributions. For each cable type it gives the number of readings, the median ratio of the busiest pin to the average pin, the lowest and highest ratio, and how many readings had a pin at 9.2 A or more. The sample size sits beside every figure.

It publishes no verdict on a card, a cable or a power supply. A reading describes one connector as it was seated on one day, and the same cable pulled out and pushed back in can read differently the next, which is why every row records how many months the cable has been in the card.

What one row records

A row is one connector on one card, read once under one load. Of its 31 fields, you fill in 13, the reading fills in 13, 3 are worked out from the row and the maintainer sets 2.

All 31 fields of a row

Field	Filled by	What it records
`card_brand`	You	Card brand. As printed on the box: ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte.
`card_model`	You	Card model. The model line: ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC.
`gpu`	You	GPU. The chip, written like RTX 5080 or RX 9070 XT.
`sensor`	You	What measured it
`capture`	The reading	Capture
`cable_type`	You	Cable. What carries power from the supply to the card.
`inline_part`	You	Anything between cable and card
`psu_brand`	You	Power supply brand
`psu_model`	You	Power supply model. With its wattage if that is part of the name: RM1000x.
`psu_watts`	You, optional	Power supply watts
`months_in_use`	You	Months this cable has been in this card. Whole months since it was last plugged in. A cable reseated last week is 0.
`load_kind`	You	What the card was doing
`load_name`	You, optional	Which one. The game or test by name.
`samples`	The reading	Samples counted
`duration_s`	The reading	Seconds covered
`total_a`	The reading	Total current, mean (A)
`pin1_a`	The reading	Pin 1, mean (A)
`pin2_a`	The reading	Pin 2, mean (A)
`pin3_a`	The reading	Pin 3, mean (A)
`pin4_a`	The reading	Pin 4, mean (A)
`pin5_a`	The reading	Pin 5, mean (A)
`pin6_a`	The reading	Pin 6, mean (A)
`peak_pin_a`	The reading	Highest single pin seen (A)
`peak_total_a`	The reading	Highest total seen (A)
`min_v`	The reading, optional	Lowest pin voltage seen (V)
`imbalance`	Worked out from the row	Busiest pin over the average pin
`max_share_pct`	Worked out from the row	Busiest pin's share of the total (%)
`band`	Worked out from the row	Load band
`notes`	You, optional	Notes
`submitted_date`	The maintainer	The day the report was sent
`source_issue`	The maintainer	The issue the row came from

Cable types

Value	Meaning
`native-16pin`	The supply maker's cable, 16-pin at both ends
`native-8pin-psu-side`	The supply maker's cable, 8-pin sockets at the supply, 16-pin at the card
`boxed-adapter`	The adapter that came in the card's box
`third-party`	A cable or adapter from another company

Load bands

The band comes from the total current in the row.

Value	Meaning
`idle`	Under 6 A total
`moderate`	6 to 25 A total
`high`	25 A total and above

The 6 A floor follows astral-hwmon’s reference measurements. Its notes record that the sensor reports current in 20 mA steps, that the pin shares scatter at low current for that reason, and its own share figures use samples at 6 A total and above. I took the same floor.

How to take the reading

Put the card under a steady load for at least a minute: a game you play, a benchmark loop, or a render.
Read the six pins while the load runs. A log is better than a glance, because it holds every sample.
Note which cable carries the power, what sits between the cable and the card, and how many months the cable has been plugged in.

What you have	How to read it
A ROG Astral card on Windows	GPU Tweak III shows six pin currents under Power Detector+. Type the six numbers into the builder below.
A ROG Astral card watched by 12VHPWR Guard	The guard writes a flight file to its `logs` folder only when it limits the card or shuts the machine down. The file holds the minute before. It opens in the builder, and its row is kept apart from ordinary readings.
A ROG Astral card on Linux	A session file from astral-hwmon’s `log-session.py` opens in the builder.
A WireView Pro II or another meter	Type the six numbers it shows.

A log is summarised over the part of it that was under load. If 20 or more samples sit at 25 A total or above, the row uses those; otherwise it uses every sample at 6 A or above, or the whole log when fewer than 20 samples reach that. Peaks are kept apart. The highest single reading anywhere in the log is recorded beside the means.

Send a report

What you paste is read on this page, inside your browser. None of it is sent anywhere until you open the report on GitHub yourself.

This builder needs JavaScript. Without it, the report form on GitHub takes the same report written by hand, and the census folder lists every field.

Sending needs a GitHub account, because the report is filed as an issue. No account? Copy the report and email it to contact@techfuelhq.com.

What has been published

Current count: 0 reports. No group has rows yet, so nothing is published.

A cable type publishes once it holds five readings taken at 6 A total or more. Below that it is listed as collecting, with its count and no figures.

Limits of this data

Reports come from people who chose to send them. An owner who saw a worrying number is more likely to report than one who saw nothing. The figures describe the rows in the dataset.
Only owners of measuring hardware can report. That is mostly ROG Astral cards, so the census says little about other cards until inline meters add rows.
The readings are as good as the sensor. ASUS’s guide to Power Detector+ gives no accuracy figure for it.
A reading at or above 9.2 A is counted and reported as a count. What it means for that connector is between its owner and the maker of the card and cable.

Use the data

The dataset is one file. submissions.csv holds one row per reading, in the field order above, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Attribute it as “TechFuelHQ open census” with a link to this page.

To size a supply for a card like these, the PSU wattage calculator works from the parts in the build. The coil whine census and the GPU sag census are the sibling datasets.

Change log

0.1.0 (2026-09-29): fields, load bands, report builder, validator and intake form. The census opened with 0 rows.

Drive Arrival Census: Hours on Recertified and Used Drives

LK Wood IV — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A recertified or used hard drive costs less than a new one, and the first thing its buyer does is read how many hours it has run. The answer gets posted in forum threads one drive at a time. This seller, that model, so many hours.

In January 2025 heise online reported a second number. A reader had bought two Seagate drives as new. Their SMART values looked unremarkable, and their FARM logs held 10,000 and 15,000 hours. Seagate confirmed to heise that SMART values can be reset, and Tom’s Hardware reported in March 2025 that sellers had since found ways to alter the FARM values as well.

So a buyer has two hour counts on some drives, one on others, and no record of what either usually says for a given seller. That record is missing. A search in September 2026 turned up no dataset that collects arrival readings by seller and by what the listing called the drive, with the raw hour counts beside them.

This page opens that census. One row is one drive on the day it arrived. The data, the field definitions, the validator and the report form live in the open repository: github.com/iBlessi/techfuelhq-census (CC BY 4.0).

For what drives cost this month, see the HDD price index and the account of the 2026 drive supply squeeze.

How results are reported

For each seller and listing condition the census gives the number of drives, the median SMART hours at arrival, how many arrived dead or failed a first test, and how many had reallocated sectors. FARM figures need more rows. Where five or more drives in a group carry a FARM log, the census gives the median FARM hours and how many drives showed FARM more than 24 hours above SMART.

I publish no verdict on a seller. A recertified drive with thousands of hours in its FARM log may be exactly what its listing described, so the census reports the numbers beside the words on the listing and leaves the reading to the buyer.

What one row records

A row is one drive as it arrived. Of its 28 fields, you fill in 6, the reading fills in 19, 1 is worked out from the row and the maintainer sets 2.

All 28 fields of a row

Field	Filled by	What it records
`seller`	You	Seller. The shop, or the marketplace and the seller's name on it.
`listing_condition`	You	Condition on the listing
`purchase_month`	You	Bought. Year and month, written 2026-08.
`drive_vendor`	The reading	Drive maker
`model_family`	The reading, optional	Model family
`model`	The reading	Model
`capacity_tb`	The reading	Capacity (TB)
`interface`	The reading	Interface
`smartctl_version`	The reading, optional	smartctl version
`smart_poh`	The reading	Power-on hours, SMART
`smart_power_cycles`	The reading, optional	Power cycles, SMART
`reallocated`	The reading, optional	Reallocated sectors
`pending`	The reading, optional	Pending sectors
`offline_uncorrectable`	The reading, optional	Offline uncorrectable
`crc_errors`	The reading, optional	Interface CRC errors
`load_cycles`	The reading, optional	Load cycles
`farm`	The reading	Seagate FARM log
`farm_poh`	The reading, optional	Power-on hours, FARM
`farm_spindle_poh`	The reading, optional	Spindle power-on hours, FARM
`farm_head_flight_hours`	The reading, optional	Head flight hours, FARM
`farm_power_cycles`	The reading, optional	Power cycles, FARM
`farm_assembly_printed`	The reading, optional	Assembly date, as smartctl printed it. Four digits, kept as printed. smartctl labels them year and week. On the two Seagate drives in the test data each pair arrives with its digits swapped, so 2264 reads as week 46 of 2022.
`poh_gap_h`	Worked out from the row	FARM hours minus SMART hours
`arrived`	You	How it arrived
`first_test`	You	Test run before use
`notes`	You, optional	Notes
`submitted_date`	The maintainer	The day the report was sent
`source_issue`	The maintainer	The issue the row came from

Listing conditions

Value	Meaning
`new`	Sold as new
`manufacturer-recertified`	Sold as manufacturer recertified
`seller-refurbished`	Sold as seller refurbished or renewed
`used`	Sold as used
`open-box`	Sold as open box

Record the condition as the listing stated it on the day you bought, in the listing’s own category.

How to take the reading

Read the drive before it holds anything, with smartmontools 7.4 or later.

Connect the drive directly, by SATA or SAS. heise notes that a FARM query through a USB adapter may not work.
Run smartctl -x on the drive and keep everything it prints.
On a Seagate drive, run smartctl -l farm as well.
Paste both into the builder below.

smartctl -x /dev/sdX
smartctl -l farm /dev/sdX

Replace /dev/sdX with your drive. Both commands only read. Adding -j prints the same data as JSON, and the builder reads that too.

The output holds the drive’s serial number. The builder reads past it, the report has no place to put it, and a paste in which it would land in the report is refused. Paste one drive at a time. The builder is tested against output that other owners published, which is listed with the test data in the repository.

Reading the hours

What the drive shows	What it means
SMART and FARM agree to within a day	The two counters tell the same story. That does not prove the drive is new; both can be altered.
FARM is far above SMART	The SMART counter was reset at some point in the drive’s life. On drives sold as new, this is the gap heise’s readers found.
No FARM log	The drive is from another maker, or is a Seagate model that does not keep one. SMART is the only hour count.

Send a report

What you paste is read on this page, inside your browser. None of it is sent anywhere until you open the report on GitHub yourself.

This builder needs JavaScript. Without it, the report form on GitHub takes the same report written by hand, and the census folder lists every field.

Sending needs a GitHub account, because the report is filed as an issue. No account? Copy the report and email it to contact@techfuelhq.com.

What has been published

Current count: 0 reports. No group has rows yet, so nothing is published.

A seller and listing condition publish at five drives. Below that the group is listed as collecting, with its count and no figures.

Limits of this data

Reports come from people who chose to send them. A buyer who found a surprise is more likely to report than one who found what the listing promised.
Hour counts can be altered. The census records what the drive reported and cannot say what is true.
A seller’s stock changes. Rows carry the month of purchase, and a figure from last year says little about a pallet that arrived last week.
A drive that worked on arrival can fail in its first month. The census records the day of arrival and nothing after it.

Use the data

The dataset is one file. submissions.csv holds one row per drive, in the field order above, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Attribute it as “TechFuelHQ open census” with a link to this page.

If the drive is going into a machine you already own, building a NAS from an old PC covers the rest of the build. The coil whine census is the sibling dataset that started this series.

Change log

0.1.0 (2026-09-29): fields, the smartctl and FARM reader, validator and intake form. The census opened with 0 rows.

Monitor Says No Signal? Find Where Your PC Stops (2026)

LK Wood IV — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · 2026-09-29 · ~10 min read · St. Louis County, MO

No Signal is a message the monitor draws itself. It means the monitor has power and working electronics, and that the input it is set to carries nothing. Dell reads an amber or blinking power light on its monitors the same way, as power with no video coming in, and puts the problem in the computer or the cable. ASUS monitors use amber for the same state.

So the question that matters is how far the PC gets before a picture should appear.

A machine that never reaches its startup logo needs different work from one that shows the logo and then loses the picture as Windows loads, and a machine that was fine until you swapped memory or cleared the CMOS may need nothing but a few minutes of patience. This page follows that split. The free checks come first.

It is written for a PC whose fans spin and lights come on. If the power button does nothing at all, the PC is not starting, and that is a different fault, covered in computer won’t turn on. If the picture drops out for a second and comes back, the monitor keeps going black guide covers it.

Four checks at the desk

None of these needs a screwdriver.

Choose the input by name. Open the monitor’s menu with its button or joystick and pick the exact port the cable is in, HDMI 1, HDMI 2 or DisplayPort. Samsung notes that most monitors pick the live source on their own and sometimes pick the wrong one. It also warns that a monitor with two video cables attached may be listening on the wrong cable, so run this test with one cable.
Use the graphics card’s ports. A desktop with a graphics card has two sets of video ports on the back, and the card’s set is usually the lower one. Dell calls the motherboard’s port a common cause of a no-signal screen, especially on gaming desktops. LG gives the same instruction: with a dedicated card, the cable goes into the card.
Reseat the cable at both ends. LG’s version is to unplug it completely, look for bent pins or debris, plug it back in firmly, and try another cable if nothing changes. Take any dock, KVM switch or adapter out of the path while you test; Microsoft lists docks, dongles and adapters as a source of conflicts with external monitors.
Press Num Lock a few times and watch its light. This is LG’s test, and the answer splits the rest of this page. A light that turns on and off means the PC is running. LG reads a light that never changes as a PC that is likely frozen. On a machine that has just been switched on, I read it as a PC that never finished its startup checks. If the keyboard has no Num Lock light, use Caps Lock.

Some motherboard ports can never show a picture, whatever cable you use. Intel’s naming guide defines the F on a desktop processor as “Requires discrete graphics”, and AMD lists the Ryzen 7 5800X and the Ryzen 5 7500F as “Discrete Graphics Card Required” — on those chips the HDMI port on the motherboard carries nothing. Even with a processor that has graphics, Intel says some desktops switch them off once a graphics card is installed. Moving the cable to the motherboard is a test with a catch, then. A working PC can show No Signal there too.

Where the PC stops

What you see	Where it stops
No startup logo, and the Num Lock light never changes	Before the logo
No picture right after new memory, a CMOS reset or a first build	Memory training
The logo and BIOS show, then the screen dies as Windows loads	Windows output
HDMI works and DisplayPort shows No Signal	The DisplayPort link
No Signal only when the PC wakes from sleep	DisplayPort hot-plug after sleep

Wait three minutes after new memory or a CMOS reset

A PC that has had its memory changed or its CMOS cleared retrains the memory on the next start, and the screen stays blank until that finishes. ASUS puts the training at about 1 to 3 minutes, depending on how much memory is installed, and asks you not to force the machine off while it runs. I treat the first boot of a new build the same way.

After training, a cold boot is far quicker. The ROG Strix B650-A I ran under a Ryzen 7 7800X3D took about 25 to 30 seconds to POST with a DDR5-6000 EXPO kit, as I noted in my review of that board. A screen still dark after a minute on an ordinary restart is worth chasing. After a memory change, a minute proves nothing.

I don’t read the debug lights, and I don’t touch the power button, until three minutes are up.

Read the debug LEDs

Many motherboards carry four small lights labelled CPU, DRAM, VGA and BOOT. ASUS calls them Q-LEDs and usually puts them near the 24-pin power connector or the memory slots, MSI calls them EZ Debug LEDs, and Gigabyte calls them Status LEDs. All three use them the same way. A light that stays on after power-up names the stage that failed, or in MSI’s words, the LED for the failing hardware “will remain constantly on”.

Light	What the maker says	What I do first
DRAM	No memory, or faulty memory (ASUS)	Reseat each stick until the latches close, then boot on one stick in the slot the manual names
VGA	No graphics card, or a faulty one (ASUS)	Reseat the card and every power plug on it
CPU	No CPU, or a faulty one (ASUS)	Check the CPU power cable, then the board’s CPU support list
BOOT	The operating system has not started yet (Gigabyte); no boot device, or a faulty one (ASUS)	Go back to the port, the cable and the input

DRAM

ASUS’s order is to confirm each stick is fully seated, clean the contacts, use memory from the board’s support list, use the slots the manual recommends, and start on one stick before adding the others. If a single stick in the recommended slot still stops on DRAM, clear the CMOS as described below, then try other memory. ASUS’s last step for this light is to reinstall or change the CPU.

VGA

With a graphics card, ASUS says to reinstall it, clean the slot and the card’s gold contacts, and then try another card, and its graphics card guide adds a detail worth checking before any of that: on ASUS cards, a red LED at the power socket that stays lit points to the power cable, so reseat it and then try another. If the processor has graphics of its own, pull the card, connect the monitor to the motherboard and start the PC. MSI reads a picture there as a sign the card may have an issue. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D in my desktop allows this test, since AMD lists it with Radeon graphics.

The card-side work beyond that, from slots to power supply to BIOS settings, is in graphics card not detected.

CPU

MSI’s page covers two checks for this stage. One is the CPU power cable from the power supply. The other is the board’s CPU support list, because some boards need a BIOS update before they will run a newer processor. ASUS adds reseating the chip and checking the socket and pins for dirt or damage.

BOOT

Gigabyte’s manual says a lit BOOT LED means you haven’t entered the operating system yet, and ASUS points the same light at the boot drive. The board has already moved past its graphics light. With No Signal on the screen, I go back to the port, the cable and the input before I touch a drive.

No light stays on

Then the board believes it started. Press Num Lock again, and if the light responds, go to the Windows section below.

The minimal test and a CMOS reset

When the lights don’t settle it, or the board has none, strip the machine down. MSI’s test uses only the processor with its cooler, one stick of memory, the power supply and the monitor; USB devices, drives and other PCIe cards come out. If the PC shows a picture like that, put the parts back one at a time. The part that brings No Signal back is the fault.

Clearing the CMOS returns the BIOS to its defaults. MSI’s method is to disconnect the power completely, then either short the CMOS jumper, labelled JBAT1 on its boards, or remove the coin battery for 5 minutes. Expect the memory-training pause on the next start.

The logo shows, then Windows goes dark

If the maker’s logo or the BIOS screen appeared, the motherboard and the graphics card did their part. I treat that as Windows sending the picture to another display, or in a mode the monitor won’t accept.

Press Windows + Ctrl + Shift + B. Microsoft describes this as a reset of the graphics driver, and you hear a beep or see a flicker when it works.
Press Windows + P, then P again, then Enter. Microsoft’s blank-screen page gives that sequence for cycling the display modes, such as PC screen only, Duplicate and Extend, and you don’t need to see the screen to use it. It matters when a TV or a second monitor is plugged in and Windows is sending everything to that one. Repeat it a few times, a few seconds apart.
Unplug every display except one, and every USB device the PC doesn’t need to start. Dell recommends disconnecting nonessential devices when the screen is black at startup.
If the black screen began after a driver update, or after you raised the resolution or refresh rate, start in Safe Mode. Microsoft’s route is to hold the power button for 10 seconds to force the PC off, and to repeat that 2 to 3 times until Windows opens its recovery screen. Then choose Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > Startup Settings > Restart, and press F5 for Safe Mode with Networking.

In Safe Mode, open Device Manager, expand Display adapters, open the card’s Properties and use Roll Back Driver on the Driver tab. If the display mode was the trouble, set a resolution and refresh rate the monitor supports; ASUS’s monitor guide gives the same Safe Mode step. For a clean driver reinstall after that, the DDU steps are in the GPU driver crash guide.

DisplayPort no signal while HDMI works

A picture over HDMI and No Signal over DisplayPort means a working panel and a working graphics card. That leaves the DisplayPort link. BenQ’s list for this case covers these four steps, in the order I run them:

Open the monitor’s input list and confirm DisplayPort is there to select. If it is missing, BenQ’s advice is to check the cable is connected at both ends.
Unplug the DisplayPort cable and plug it back in, so the monitor detects the connection again.
If DisplayPort worked until recently, use HDMI to set the DisplayPort output to a resolution and refresh rate the monitor supports.
Update the graphics driver and the motherboard BIOS, over HDMI if DisplayPort shows nothing.

BenQ puts the driver and BIOS update before the resolution step. I leave the BIOS for last. I also suspect the cable here — if the trouble started when you raised the refresh rate or moved to a higher resolution, check that mode against the cable in the DisplayPort and HDMI bandwidth calculator before you buy another cable or blame the card.

A DisplayPort monitor that says No Signal only when it wakes from sleep has a separate fault, covered in the after-sleep section of the blackout guide.

When the monitor is the problem

The No Signal box shows the monitor can draw an image, so the suspect on the monitor side is its inputs. Connect a laptop or a console you know works, with the same cable and the same input. If that source gets No Signal too, try another cable with it. A monitor that shows nothing from two sources you trust has a fault in its input.

Before you call it, reset the monitor’s settings. On ASUS monitors the path is Menu > System Setup > Restore factory mode, and Dell monitors carry a self-test that checks the monitor on its own, with the steps for each model in its user guide.

Before you buy a part

Each branch ends at a swap. These are the points where I stop testing.

The graphics card shows no picture in a second PC whose power supply meets the card’s requirement. That card is faulty; if it is under warranty, start the maker’s RMA.
The DRAM light stays on with each stick alone in the slot the manual names, after a CMOS reset. ASUS’s next step is other memory.
The CPU light stays on with the chip reseated, the pins clean and the CPU power cable connected. ASUS’s final step is another CPU.
The minimal test still stops on memory and a processor that both work in another machine. What remains is the motherboard.

OLED Burn-In Census: What Owners See, by Panel and Hours

LK Wood IV — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Whether an OLED monitor will burn in is argued in every thread about buying one. The evidence on the table is mostly long tests of single monitors. Monitors Unboxed has used one MSI MPG 321URX for desktop work for 21 months and reported on it at intervals, and Notebookcheck’s account of the latest update puts it at about 5,000 hours, with burn-in that keeps worsening in the areas where it first appeared. That is one unit, used one way.

What nobody holds is the spread. How many owners see nothing after two years? How many see a faint taskbar line on a gray slide, and how many sent the monitor back? A search in September 2026 turned up no dataset of owner reports that records the panel, the hours and what the owner sees on a fixed scale.

This page opens that census. One row is one monitor, judged once by the person who owns it. The data, the field definitions, the validator and the report form live in the open repository: github.com/iBlessi/techfuelhq-census (CC BY 4.0).

My own OLED is the Gigabyte AORUS FO48U in this review. If you are choosing between an OLED television and a monitor for a desk, that comparison is in OLED TV as a PC monitor.

How results are reported

For each panel type the census gives the number of monitors, how many sit at each step of the scale, the median months in use, and how many warranty claims were approved or denied. Hours are handled with more care. Only hours read from the monitor’s own menu feed a median, and only once five rows in the group carry them.

It publishes no verdict on a model or a brand. Two owners of the same monitor can use it in ways that have nothing in common, one on spreadsheets for ten hours a day and the other on games for two, so the row records the use beside the result.

The scale

Value	Meaning
`0`	Nothing visible on a full-screen gray slide
`1`	Visible on a test slide, never in normal content
`2`	Visible in normal content when I look for it
`3`	Visible in normal use without looking
`4`	Replaced, returned or retired because of it

The steps are fixed. A change to their wording would make old and new rows incomparable, so it would be a new major version of the dataset with the old rows marked.

What one row records

A row is one monitor, judged once. Of its 18 fields, you fill in 16 and the maintainer sets 2.

All 18 fields of a row

Field	Filled by	What it records
`monitor_brand`	You	Monitor brand
`monitor_model`	You	Monitor model. The model number on the back label: AW3423DWF, FO48U, PG32UCDM.
`panel_type`	You	Panel
`size_in`	You, optional	Size (inches)
`purchase_month`	You	Bought. Year and month, written 2024-03.
`months_in_use`	You	Months in regular use
`panel_hours`	You, optional	Panel hours. From the monitor's own menu if it shows them. Leave empty if it does not and you would be guessing.
`hours_source`	You, optional	Where the hours come from
`use_mix`	You	What is on it most of the time
`brightness`	You, optional	Brightness
`care_cycles`	You	Panel care cycles
`static_mitigation`	You, optional	Habits
`severity`	You	What you see
`location`	You	Where
`warranty_claim`	You	Warranty claim for burn-in
`notes`	You, optional	Notes
`submitted_date`	The maintainer	The day the report was sent
`source_issue`	The maintainer	The issue the row came from

How to judge a panel

Let the monitor run for half an hour, then dim the room.
Open the test slides in the builder below. Start with dark gray, where faint marks show first.
Look where static things live on your screen: the taskbar, the edges of windows you keep in one place, the HUD of the game you play most.
Pick the step of the scale that matches what you see. If you see a mark only on a slide and never in normal content, that is a 1.
If the monitor’s menu shows panel hours, read them there. Leave the field empty if you would be guessing.

Send a report

What you paste is read on this page, inside your browser. None of it is sent anywhere until you open the report on GitHub yourself.

This builder needs JavaScript. Without it, the report form on GitHub takes the same report written by hand, and the census folder lists every field.

Sending needs a GitHub account, because the report is filed as an issue. No account? Copy the report and email it to contact@techfuelhq.com.

What has been published

Current count: 0 reports. No group has rows yet, so nothing is published.

A panel type publishes once it holds five monitors that have been in regular use for a month or more. Below that it is listed as collecting, with its count and no figures.

Limits of this data

Reports come from people who chose to send them. An owner who found a mark is more likely to report than one who never looked.
The middle of the scale is a judgement. Steps 0, 1 and 4 are close to facts; the line between 2 and 3 is where two careful owners can differ.
Hours from a monitor’s menu are kept apart from estimates, and only menu hours feed a published median.
A row is one look at one monitor. It says nothing about what the same panel shows a year later unless its owner reports again.

Use the data

The dataset is one file. submissions.csv holds one row per monitor, in the field order above, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Attribute it as “TechFuelHQ open census” with a link to this page.

The coil whine census and the GPU sag census are the sibling datasets.

Change log

0.1.0 (2026-09-29): fields, the five-step scale, test slides, validator and intake form. The census opened with 0 rows.

POST Time Census: Firmware Boot Seconds by Platform

LK Wood IV — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Every PC times its own start. The firmware counts from power-on until it hands over to the operating system’s loader, and the system keeps that number. On Windows it appears in Task Manager as Last BIOS time, and on Linux systemd-analyze prints it as the firmware part of the startup line, beside the loader, the kernel and everything after.

On DDR5 platforms the number has grown, and memory training is the usual reason. A moderator’s guide on ASUS’s ROG forum describes training as the board testing and adjusting memory signal timings during POST, says later boots are quicker than the first, and says Memory Context Restore shortens cold boots further by skipping part of the work. Owners trade single readings in threads. This board, that BIOS, so many seconds. A search in September 2026 did not turn up those readings collected anywhere with the board, the BIOS and the memory beside them.

This page opens that census. One row is one boot of one machine. The data, the field definitions, the validator and the report form live in the open repository: github.com/iBlessi/techfuelhq-census (CC BY 4.0).

If the machine never reaches a picture, this is the wrong page. Monitor says no signal covers the wait after new memory or a CMOS reset, and computer won’t turn on covers a machine that does nothing.

How results are reported

For each platform, split by the state of the memory training shortcut, the census gives the number of readings, the median, the shortest and the longest firmware time in seconds, and how many board makers are among the rows.

It publishes no verdict on a board or a BIOS version. The same board with two memory kits is two different measurements, and a BIOS update replaces the firmware that does the training, so the row carries the memory and the BIOS version beside the time.

What one row records

A row is one boot of one machine. Of its 18 fields, you fill in 4, the reading fills in 12 and the maintainer sets 2.

All 18 fields of a row

Field	Filled by	What it records
`os`	The reading	Read from
`platform`	You	Platform
`cpu`	The reading	Processor
`board_vendor`	The reading	Board maker
`board`	The reading	Board
`bios_version`	The reading	BIOS version
`bios_date`	The reading, optional	BIOS date
`dimms`	The reading	Memory modules
`ram_gb`	The reading	Memory (GB)
`ram_speed`	The reading, optional	Memory speed as configured
`memory_fast_boot`	You	Memory training shortcut in the BIOS. Memory Context Restore on AMD boards, MRC Fast Boot on Intel boards.
`boot_kind`	You	How the machine was last started
`fast_startup`	The reading	Windows Fast Startup
`fw_post_ms`	The reading	Firmware time (ms)
`os_build`	The reading, optional	System build
`notes`	You, optional	Notes
`submitted_date`	The maintainer	The day the report was sent
`source_issue`	The maintainer	The issue the row came from

The memory training shortcut

Value	Meaning
`on`	On
`off`	Off
`auto`	Auto, as the board shipped
`unknown`	I have not looked

The setting is Memory Context Restore on AMD boards. The moderator’s guide gives its place in ASUS’s BIOS as Extreme Tweaker, then DRAM Timing Control. If you have not looked, say so. “Not checked” is a better row than a guess.

How to take the reading

On Windows, start the machine the way you usually do and sign in. Open PowerShell, which needs no administrator rights for this, then paste the line below and press Enter.

$p=Get-ItemProperty 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power';$o=Get-CimInstance Win32_OperatingSystem;$b=Get-CimInstance Win32_BaseBoard;$f=Get-CimInstance Win32_BIOS;$c=Get-CimInstance Win32_Processor|Select-Object -First 1;$d=@(Get-CimInstance Win32_PhysicalMemory);[ordered]@{census='post-time';v=1;os='windows';fw_post_ms=[int]$p.FwPOSTTime;fast_startup=$(if($null -eq $p.HiberbootEnabled){-1}else{[int]$p.HiberbootEnabled});board_vendor=$b.Manufacturer;board=$b.Product;bios_version=$f.SMBIOSBIOSVersion;bios_date=$(if($f.ReleaseDate){$f.ReleaseDate.ToUniversalTime().ToString('yyyy-MM-dd')}else{''});cpu=$c.Name.Trim();dimms=$d.Count;ram_gb=[int](($d|Measure-Object Capacity -Sum).Sum/1GB);ram_speed=[int]($d|Select-Object -First 1).ConfiguredClockSpeed;os_build=$o.BuildNumber}|ConvertTo-Json -Compress

It prints one line that starts with {. Copy that line into the builder below. The command reads the firmware time from the registry and the board, BIOS, processor and memory from Windows, and it prints no serial number, computer name or user name. The figure was checked against Task Manager on one Windows 11 build 26200 machine before publication: the registry held 63,981 milliseconds while Task Manager showed a Last BIOS time of 64.0 seconds.

On Linux, run systemd-analyze and paste what it prints. The builder asks for the board and BIOS by hand. If the line has no part marked (firmware), the machine did not pass a firmware time to systemd and there is nothing to report.

The reading belongs to the boot that started the session you are in. Say whether that was a restart or a start from off, because the two can differ.

Send a report

What you paste is read on this page, inside your browser. None of it is sent anywhere until you open the report on GitHub yourself.

This builder needs JavaScript. Without it, the report form on GitHub takes the same report written by hand, and the census folder lists every field.

Sending needs a GitHub account, because the report is filed as an issue. No account? Copy the report and email it to contact@techfuelhq.com.

What has been published

Current count: 0 reports. No group has rows yet, so nothing is published.

A group publishes at five readings. Below that it is listed as collecting, with its count and no figures.

Limits of this data

Reports come from people who chose to send them. An owner annoyed by a slow start is more likely to report than one who never noticed.
The firmware reports its own time. A board that counts differently from another will read differently for the same wait.
Time spent in the BIOS setup screen is part of the figure. A boot where you entered setup is not a reading of the board.
The state of the memory training shortcut is the owner’s word. The system cannot read it.

Use the data

The dataset is one file. submissions.csv holds one row per boot, in the field order above, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Attribute it as “TechFuelHQ open census” with a link to this page.

My own board is the ROG Strix B650-A, reviewed here. The coil whine census is the sibling dataset that started this series.

Change log

0.1.0 (2026-09-29): fields, the Windows command, the systemd-analyze reader, validator and intake form. The census opened with 0 rows.

Windows Idle Memory Census: In Use by Installed RAM

LK Wood IV — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

How much memory Windows uses before you open anything decides how much of a 16 GB machine is left for a game. The answers in circulation are single machines. They do not agree. One machine’s number says little, because it depends on how much memory is installed, what starts with Windows, and how long ago the machine booted. Microsoft has the subject on its list. On July 31, 2026 Pavan Davuluri wrote on the Windows Insider Blog, under the heading “What happens between now and the end of the year”, that Windows is expanding into four new focus areas. One is “Memory optimization for 8GB and above”, described as “Reducing Windows memory footprint”. A baseline taken now, from many machines, is what a later reading can be set against.

This page opens that census. One row is one machine, read once with the counters Windows keeps. The data, the field definitions, the validator and the report form live in the open repository: github.com/iBlessi/techfuelhq-census (CC BY 4.0).

If the question behind this is which memory to buy, prices are in the DDR5 buying guide and the RAM price index. If it is what to remove from Windows, that is in debloating Windows 11.

How results are reported

For each amount of installed memory the census gives the number of machines, the median memory in use, the lowest and highest, the median committed memory and the median number of processes.

It publishes no verdict on Windows and no advice on how much memory to buy. It reports where machines start.

What the numbers mean

Figure	What it is
In use	Total minus available. Microsoft’s table of counters gives this as the usage Task Manager draws.
Available	Memory that can be given to a program at once. Microsoft defines it as the standby, free and zero page lists together.
Cached	The system cache plus the modified and standby lists, as Microsoft’s table maps them to Task Manager.
Committed	Microsoft’s counter reference describes committed memory as memory “for which space has been reserved in the paging file(s)”. It can exceed what is in use.

The first three are worked out from Microsoft’s own table.

What one row records

A row is one machine, read once. Of its 22 fields, you fill in 2, the reading fills in 16, 2 are worked out from the row and the maintainer sets 2.

All 22 fields of a row

Field	Filled by	What it records
`installed_gb`	The reading	Memory installed (GB)
`visible_mb`	The reading	Memory Windows can use (MB)
`in_use_mb`	Worked out from the row	In use (MB)
`available_mb`	The reading	Available (MB)
`committed_mb`	The reading	Committed (MB)
`commit_limit_mb`	The reading	Commit limit (MB)
`cached_mb`	Worked out from the row	Cached (MB)
`cache_mb`	The reading	System cache (MB)
`standby_mb`	The reading	Standby (MB)
`modified_mb`	The reading	Modified (MB)
`free_mb`	The reading	Free (MB)
`paged_pool_mb`	The reading	Paged pool (MB)
`nonpaged_pool_mb`	The reading	Non-paged pool (MB)
`processes`	The reading	Processes running
`startup_items`	The reading, optional	Startup entries
`uptime_min`	The reading	Minutes since Windows started. Counted from the start of Windows, not from signing in.
`os_caption`	The reading	Windows edition
`os_build`	The reading	Windows build
`state`	You	What the machine was doing
`notes`	You, optional	Notes
`submitted_date`	The maintainer	The day the report was sent
`source_issue`	The maintainer	The issue the row came from

What the machine was doing

Value	Meaning
`fresh-boot-idle`	Restarted, signed in straight away, left alone with nothing opened, and read 5 to 60 minutes after the restart
`in-use`	In use, or read at any other time

I keep the row from a machine that has been up for hours, with a browser open and a game launcher in the tray, and leave it out of the published figures. It is a different measurement.

How to take the reading

Restart the machine and sign in straight away. The command counts minutes from the start of Windows, not from signing in.
Leave it alone and open nothing. Take the reading 5 to 60 minutes after the restart.
Open PowerShell, which needs no administrator rights for this, paste the line below and press Enter.
Copy the one line it prints into the builder below.

$o=Get-CimInstance Win32_OperatingSystem;$m=Get-CimInstance Win32_PerfFormattedData_PerfOS_Memory;$d=@(Get-CimInstance Win32_PhysicalMemory);$s=$m.StandbyCacheNormalPriorityBytes+$m.StandbyCacheReserveBytes+$m.StandbyCacheCoreBytes;[ordered]@{census='windows-memory';v=1;installed_gb=[int](($d|Measure-Object Capacity -Sum).Sum/1GB);visible_mb=[int]($o.TotalVisibleMemorySize/1KB);available_mb=[int]($m.AvailableBytes/1MB);committed_mb=[int]($m.CommittedBytes/1MB);commit_limit_mb=[int]($m.CommitLimit/1MB);cache_mb=[int]($m.CacheBytes/1MB);standby_mb=[int]($s/1MB);modified_mb=[int]($m.ModifiedPageListBytes/1MB);free_mb=[int]($m.FreeAndZeroPageListBytes/1MB);paged_pool_mb=[int]($m.PoolPagedBytes/1MB);nonpaged_pool_mb=[int]($m.PoolNonpagedBytes/1MB);processes=@(Get-Process).Count;startup_items=@(Get-CimInstance Win32_StartupCommand).Count;uptime_min=[int]((Get-Date)-$o.LastBootUpTime).TotalMinutes;os_caption=$o.Caption;os_build=$o.BuildNumber}|ConvertTo-Json -Compress

The command reads memory counters, counts processes and startup entries, and reads the Windows edition and build. It prints no process name, computer name or user name. It was run without administrator rights on Windows 11 build 26200 before publication, on a machine that had been up all day, and what it printed is one of the test files in the repository.

Send a report

What you paste is read on this page, inside your browser. None of it is sent anywhere until you open the report on GitHub yourself.

This builder needs JavaScript. Without it, the report form on GitHub takes the same report written by hand, and the census folder lists every field.

Sending needs a GitHub account, because the report is filed as an issue. No account? Copy the report and email it to contact@techfuelhq.com.

What has been published

Current count: 0 reports. No group has rows yet, so nothing is published.

An amount of installed memory publishes at five machines, each read 5 to 60 minutes after a restart. Below that it is listed as collecting, with its count and no figures. Nothing is published yet.

Limits of this data

Reports come from people who chose to send them, and people who read a hardware site run more at startup than most. The figures describe the machines in the dataset.
“Left alone” is the owner’s word. The row carries minutes since boot and the process count, which show when a machine was busier than its owner thought.
A machine with a laptop maker’s software is a different starting point from a clean install. The row does not record which it is.
The census measures memory held at rest. It does not measure how a machine behaves when memory runs short.

Use the data

The dataset is one file. submissions.csv holds one row per machine, in the field order above, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Attribute it as “TechFuelHQ open census” with a link to this page.

The coil whine census is the sibling dataset that started this series.

Change log

0.1.0 (2026-09-29): fields, the Windows command, validator and intake form. The census opened with 0 rows.

Computer Won't Turn On: What to Check First (2026)

LK Wood IV — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · 2026-09-28 · ~10 min read · St. Louis County, MO

Two different faults hide behind “my computer won’t turn on.” In one, nothing happens at all when you press the button. In the other, the fans kick for a second and everything stops. They share the first few minutes of checks and then split, so it pays to know which one you have before you open anything.

This page is for a desktop that will not start. If yours powers on with the fans running and the screen stays black, that is a display or POST fault, and my graphics card not detected guide starts from there.

Match what the PC does to where the fault is

When you press power	What it means and where to go
Nothing. No fans, no lights, no click	The power supply never got the signal to start, or cannot. Start outside the case.
Fans twitch or spin for a moment, then stop	The supply started, then shut itself off. Do the outside checks, then twitch and die.
Fans and lights stay on, no picture	The PC is on and the fault is later in the boot. See graphics card not detected.
It starts and runs, then cuts out minutes later	Power-on works. See PSU failure symptoms or CPU overheating.
It seems asleep and a press will not wake it	It may be hung while still on. Hold power four seconds or more, then press again.

The last row is easy to miss. A press normally wakes a sleeping PC, and on the board in my desktop ASUS’s manual says the power LED blinks in sleep. A machine that ignores the press may be hung while still running, and for a running system the ACPI specification defines holding the power button for four seconds or longer as an override that sends it to soft-off, so the next press is a clean start.

Outside the case first

None of this needs tools. All of it together takes about a minute.

Plug a lamp or a phone charger into the same wall outlet. Intel’s troubleshooting guide starts here, with a device you know works.
Take the power strip or UPS out of the chain and plug the PC straight into the wall.
Check the rocker switch on the back of the power supply. I is on and O is off, and a moved tower can knock it to O.
Reseat the power cord at both ends. Many monitors use the same cord, so Intel suggests swapping the monitor’s cord onto the PC as a test.
Unplug everything else from the back: USB devices, display cables, the lot. Intel notes that USB devices and display cables occasionally cause power problems.

Then drain it. Pull the cord from the power supply, hold the case power button for 15 to 20 seconds, plug back in, set the rear switch to I and press power once. That hold is Dell’s desktop step for discharging residual power, and it costs nothing.

Look for a light on the motherboard

With the supply plugged in and its switch on, look at the board through the side panel before you press anything. Any lit LED there is good news.

A power supply keeps one small output alive whenever it has AC power, the +5VSB rail, and Intel’s ATX design guide says the signal that turns the PC on has no effect on it, so a light on the board means the outlet, the cord and the supply’s standby side all work and the fault sits somewhere between the button and the supply’s main outputs. Intel’s guide names the case button and its wires as a potential culprit there.

The board in my desktop is an ASUS ROG STRIX B650-A Gaming WiFi, and ASUS’s manual for it names two lights worth knowing. The case power LED on that board’s header “lights up when the system is connected to a power source”, so a glowing power LED with the PC off means standby is there. A second LED, marked PLUG_8PIN_PWR, “lights up to indicate that the 8-pin power plug is not connected.” If that one is lit, plug in the CPU power cable before anything else.

No light proves nothing. Plenty of boards have no standby LED, so carry on either way.

Start it with a screwdriver

This is the test that splits a dead button from a dead power supply or board. I would never skip it. If the PC is a prebuilt still under warranty, stop first: Intel’s guide warns that opening one can violate the warranty and suggests asking the system maker.

The case power button does very little. It connects two pins on the motherboard’s front-panel header for a moment. The board then pulls the supply’s PS_ON# line low, which Intel’s ATX guide defines as the signal “that allows a motherboard to remotely control the power supply”, and the supply turns on its main outputs. You can make the button’s momentary connection yourself.

Leave the PC plugged in with the rear switch on, and leave the 24-pin and CPU power cables connected.
Find the front-panel header in the motherboard manual. The two power pins carry a label like PWR_SW or PWRSW. On my B650-A, ASUS labels the pair PWRBTN# and GND.
Pull the case’s power-button plug off those two pins.
Touch the tip of a metal screwdriver across both pins at once, briefly.

Intel’s guide says the system will turn on “if everything is connected correctly.” Touch only the two pins the manual names. Some boards also have a power button soldered on, and Intel says pressing it does the same job.

What happens next decides the rest of the page:

It starts. The board and the power supply work. The case button or its lead has failed; go to the button section.
Nothing at all. The button is cleared and the fault is in the power path; go to the power path.
A twitch, then off. Go to twitch and die.

The button or its lead

The repair costs nothing if the case has a reset button. Intel’s guide says the reset and power switches “operate in the same way”, so move the case’s reset plug onto the power pins and the reset button becomes the power button. You lose the reset function. On my B650-A the reset pair sits in the same header, labeled RSTCON# and Ground.

Look at the lead itself before you settle for that. A plug that slid half off one pin, or a wire broken where it enters the plug, gives exactly this symptom, and reseating or replacing that lead is the whole repair. A button that feels stuck or gritty has a mechanical fault in the switch itself, and for a failed case button Intel’s advice is to ask the case maker for the long-term fix.

Follow the power back to the PSU

If the screwdriver did nothing, the board never got power or never passed the signal on, so the next stop is the two cables that carry both and the supply behind them. Unplug the PC from the wall before you touch a cable.

Reseat both motherboard power cables, the wide 24-pin and the 8-pin CPU cable, until each latch clicks. On a modular unit, reseat both ends. Some boards carry a second CPU power socket — a 4-pin or another 8-pin — and ASUS’s no-power FAQ recommends filling every one the board has, while the manual for my B650-A asks for the 8-pin alone or the 8-pin and the 4-pin together.

The 24-pin matters more than it looks, because the power-on signal travels through it. PS_ON# is pin 16, the green wire. Intel’s design guide says that when PS_ON# is open-circuited the main outputs stay at zero, so a pin that never makes contact leaves the board with no way to start the supply.

Test the power supply on its own

My PSU failure symptoms guide calls the paperclip test limited, and for a PC that crashes under load it is. Here it answers the exact question you have: can the supply switch on at all?

Switch the supply off at the rear and pull the cord.
Unplug every supply cable from the parts, the 24-pin included.
Bridge the green wire’s socket (pin 16, PS_ON#) to any black wire’s socket, which is ground, with a bent paperclip.
Plug in and switch on.

A supply that starts spins its fan, with one catch. Many current units run a zero-RPM fan mode, and Corsair describes the fan as “completely off when it is not needed”, so a still fan on a quiet unit proves nothing. On those, set a multimeter to DC volts and read a yellow wire, which is +12 V, against a black one at the back of the connector. About 12 V means the supply switched on. Switch off at the rear and pull the cord before you remove the paperclip or move a probe.

Some Dell desktop supplies skip the paperclip entirely. They carry a built-in self-test button, and Dell says the supply works if its LED lights when you press it.

If the supply fails the paperclip test on a known-good outlet and cord, it is dead. Replace it or claim the warranty. If you have a spare supply you trust, Intel’s version of the test is to connect only its 24-pin and CPU cables to the board and press power; if the PC starts, the old supply was the fault.

If the supply passes and the board still will not start from the screwdriver with both cables seated, the board or the CPU is what is left. Telling those two apart takes a spare of one of them.

If it twitches and dies

A twitch means the supply started and then shut itself down, and a tripped protection is the first suspect. Corsair’s explainer says short-circuit protection shuts the supply down “should the 3.3V, 5V, and 12V rails short to any other rail, or to ground”, and its over-power protection trips at 115 to 135 percent of rated output.

After a trip, Intel’s ATX guide says the supply returns to normal only once the fault has been removed and its on signal has been off for at least one second. Pressing again gives you the same twitch for as long as the fault is there. So stop pressing and go looking.

Look for a short first. Intel names two: a motherboard screwed to the case without the standoffs it needs, and stray Molex pins touching the chassis. After a new build, those two and anything metal loose in the case are where I would look.

Then strip the machine to the minimum Intel describes. Pull the graphics card, disconnect every drive including M.2 SSDs, unplug everything from the I/O ports, and leave one stick of RAM in the slot your manual names for a single module (DIMM_A2 on my B650-A). If it now stays on, add parts back one at a time, powering down between each, until the twitch returns. The last part you added is the suspect.

You do not need a picture for this. The only question is whether it stays on with the fans running.

If it still twitches stripped to board, CPU and one stick of memory, with nothing shorting, the fault is the board, the CPU or the supply. A known-good supply is the cheapest of the three to borrow, so test that first.

On a laptop

A laptop gives you less to reach.

Try a known-good charger if you have one, and check the charger’s light.
If the battery is removable, take it out and try on AC power alone. Dell’s no-power steps include this one.
Do a power reset. HP’s version is to shut down, disconnect the charger and any nonessential devices, hold the power button for about 15 seconds, then reconnect and start.
Some Dell laptops support a real-time clock reset: with the charger connected, hold power for 30 to 35 seconds until the power light blinks three times. Dell says it aborts under 25 seconds or over 40, and that it resets the BIOS settings, date and time.

Past that, a laptop showing no sign of power is a repair or warranty job.

What not to do

Never plug modular cables from your old power supply into a new one. Corsair’s guidance is to “never try to use one brand’s cables with another brand’s PSU”, because each maker wires the PSU end its own way, and even within one brand the cable type has to match.
Do not short pins you have not identified. On my B650-A, ASUS warns that shorting or jumpering the clear-CMOS header, CLRTC, outside of a CMOS clear “will cause system boot failure.” Read the label before the screwdriver touches anything.
Keep the power supply’s case closed. It can hold a dangerous charge after it is unplugged, which my PSU guide covers in its safety section.
A pop, a spark or a burning smell ends the diagnosis. Unplug the PC and leave it off.
Ignore generic beep-code charts. Intel’s guide points out that every motherboard maker uses its own codes, so read your board’s manual.

When to stop and send it back

A supply that will not start on the paperclip test, on a known-good outlet and cord, is finished. Replace it or claim its warranty.
A board that will not start from the screwdriver with a known-good supply, both power cables seated, nothing shorting and the machine stripped to CPU and one stick of memory has failed, or its CPU has. That is warranty work for one of the two, and a shop with a spare of either can tell you which.
A prebuilt still under warranty goes back to its maker before you open the case.

Intel N150 Mini PC: Which Box, and Is It Enough?

LK Wood IV — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-18 · St. Louis County, MO

Intel’s ARK page for the N150 is short and unambiguous. Four cores, four threads, 3.6 GHz turbo, 6 W processor base power, 16 GB of memory maximum across one channel, 24 graphics execution units at 1 GHz, nine PCIe Gen 3 lanes, Quick Sync.

Then you go shopping. On 2026-09-18 I opened eight N150 manufacturer pages, and the boxes built on that chip tell you something else entirely: five of them state a power figure, and between those five the same part is rated at 6 W, 7 W, 8 W, 10 W, 12 W and 25 W. Four state a memory ceiling above the 16 GB Intel allows. One of them by three times.

So “is an N150 enough” is the wrong first question. The chip is a known quantity. The box is not, and the box is what you are buying.

What the chip decides, and what it does not

Three of the N150’s numbers are fixed no matter whose case it arrives in, and each one closes off a class of work.

One memory channel, 16 GB. This is the real ceiling. Four small cores are rarely what stops an N150; a database plus a Jellyfin library scan plus three containers all wanting memory at the same time is. And because it is single-channel, the bandwidth those four cores share does not improve when you spend more.

Nine PCIe Gen 3 lanes. Every extra network port, M.2 slot and SATA connector on an N150 board is carved out of those nine. It is one reason a four-port N150 firewall and a six-slot N150 NAS arrive as different products rather than one flexible chassis. Read a spec sheet as a budget, not a list.

Quick Sync, 24 EUs. The video engine is present, which is what makes these boxes credible for camera work at all. For what that buys in a Frigate setup specifically, the Home Assistant mini PC guide covers the decode-and-detect path on the same silicon.

N150 against N100 and N355

	N100	N150	Core 3 N355
Code name	Alder Lake-N	Twin Lake	Twin Lake
Launched	Q1'23	Q1'25	Q1'25
Cores / threads	4 / 4	4 / 4	8 / 8
Max turbo	3.40 GHz	3.6 GHz	3.9 GHz
Processor base power	6 W	6 W	15 W
Max memory	16 GB	16 GB	16 GB
Memory channels	1	1	1
Graphics EUs / max dynamic clock	24 at 750 MHz	24 at 1 GHz	32 at 1.35 GHz
PCIe lanes	9 (Gen 3)	9 (Gen 3)	9 (Gen 3)

All three rows come from Intel ARK, read on 2026-09-18 (N100, N150, N355).

Read the middle two columns and the N150-versus-N100 argument evaporates. Two values move: turbo, by 200 MHz, and the graphics clock, by 250 MHz. Everything that constrains a homelab workload stays exactly where it was, which means the choice between the two chips is a question about price and build quality wearing a question about silicon. I would not pay a premium for the newer name. I would not avoid it either.

The N355 column is the interesting one, because it shows what a step up does and does not fix. You get twice the cores. You get the same 16 GB, on the same single channel, through the same nine lanes. Cores were probably not your problem.

The three things that separate N150 boxes

Since the chip is constant, the spec sheet is the product. Here is what I found on the eight pages, and what each column is worth.

Box (vendor page, opened 2026-09-18)	Power as stated	Memory as stated	Ethernet as stated	Vendor price
CWWK S7 Pro	not stated	1 × SO-DIMM DDR5 4800, “up to 48GB”	2 × Intel X550-T2 10GbE, 2 × Intel i226-V 2.5GbE	$348.36 barebone
Beelink ME mini	not stated	“16GB LPDDR5-4800 memory (soldered)”	Dual 2.5G, Intel I226-V	$329.00 is the N95 config; the N150 configs are not separately priced
GMKtec NucBox G3 Plus	“TDP 6W”	1 × SO-DIMM DDR4-3200, “Supports up to 32GB”	1 × 2.5G, Intel i226-V	$499.99
MINIX Z150-0dB	“12W (Typical), 25W (Max)”	1 × DDR4 SO-DIMM, “Up to 32GB Max”	1 × RJ-45 2.5G, chip not named	$345.00
ZimaBoard 2	“10W”	8 GB or 16 GB LPDDR5-4800, no slot	2 × 2.5GbE, chip not named	$339.00
MeLE Cyber X1	“8W (LPDDR5) / 7W (DDR4)”	LPDDR5 or DDR4, single slot, “32GB” max	1 × RJ-45 Gigabit, Realtek RTL8111H	$459.99 for 8 GB / 128 GB
Beelink EQ14	“TDP(MSP): 25W”	SO-DIMM DDR4, “Max 16GB”	Dual 1GbE Realtek RTL8111H, or dual 2.5G Intel I226-V	$385.00 (pre-order)
MINIX NUC150	not stated	16GB DDR5-4800, no slot stated	1 × RJ-45 2.5G, “8125GB(8111K)”	$570.00

A “not stated” cell means the vendor’s page does not say it in words. Page text can miss a spec that lives inside an image, so it does not mean the hardware lacks the feature.

Memory: read the word, not the number

Read the memory line. Five of the eight give you a socket, and three solder the memory down, of which two say so only by listing LPDDR5 against a fixed capacity rather than by using the word “soldered” anywhere a shopper would see it. If the line says SO-DIMM or slot, you can change it later. If it says LPDDR5 and a number, the machine you buy is the machine you keep, and an 8 GB or 16 GB box is a permanent decision dressed up as a starting point.

The 32 GB claims deserve their own warning. Intel rates the part at 16 GB. GMKtec, MINIX and MeLE each print 32 GB on their own pages, and CWWK prints 48 GB. Four out of eight is no rounding error. What you are reading is still a board vendor’s claim standing against the chip vendor’s published specification, though, and Intel is not the party that ships you the machine or takes it back when the 32 GB module fails to post. Buy the memory from a seller who accepts returns.

Ethernet: the chip name is the spec

Six of the eight name a controller. That matters more here than it would on a desktop, because these boxes get pointed at firewalls and hypervisors. On that duty I want Intel silicon rather than Realtek, for driver support in mainline Linux, and I treat an unnamed controller as a Realtek until the vendor says otherwise. Intel i226-V shows up on four of the eight. That is the part I would hold out for. Two machines give you gigabit rather than 2.5: the MeLE Cyber X1 with a Realtek RTL8111H, and the Beelink EQ14’s base configuration, whose 2.5G option is the pre-order one.

That last detail is worth holding onto, because the class-level shorthand for these boxes — that an N150 comes with a real 2.5GbE port — is not reliably true of the machine that ships today.

Power: the vendor numbers are not measurements

This is the column I trust least, and the reason is sitting in the table. Six different figures for one chip, from five pages, spanning 6 W to 25 W. They are not describing the same thing. Intel’s 6 W is a processor base power, Beelink’s “TDP(MSP): 25W” is a package limit the board sets, MINIX splits the difference by publishing a typical figure and a maximum, and MeLE varies its own number depending on which memory type you order. Same chip. Four different questions being answered.

For a number you can put in a spreadsheet, use somebody’s meter. ServeTheHome’s John Lee measured a CWWK N150 pocket NAS on 2025-09-21 at around 2.2 W idle for the SoC alone, 8.6 W on burst and around 6.1 W sustained. The same machine at the wall, with one SSD and without the USB fan, drew 10-11 W at idle, 22-23 W in burst and 17-18 W sustained. The gap between 6 W on a spec sheet and 10-11 W at an outlet is the platform, and it is the part you pay for every hour.

Put your own figure into the homelab power-cost calculator rather than a manufacturer’s, and see the 24/7 idle-power breakdown for what the difference is worth over a year.

Which N150 box, by the job

I have not benched these machines. What follows is a reading of eight spec sheets against one Intel specification, which is enough to narrow a shortlist and nowhere near enough to settle it. These are starting points.

A firewall or router — CWWK S7 Pro. It is the only box in the survey with 10-gigabit copper: two Intel X550-T2 10GbE ports alongside two i226-V 2.5GbE ports, all four named on the page rather than left as a bare speed rating. It ships barebone at $348.36 and takes DDR5 in a single SO-DIMM slot. Four Intel ports carved out of nine PCIe lanes is the whole argument for this chassis. The OPNsense mini PC setup guide covers the install.

A small NAS — Beelink ME mini or ZimaBoard 2. These solve the same problem differently. The ME mini puts six M.2 slots and a built-in power supply in a small tower, with Intel I226-V networking, and solders the memory at 16 GB; its N150 configurations ship with a 1TB SSD and carry no separately listed price, so the $329.00 on the page is the cheaper N95 machine. The ZimaBoard 2 at $339.00 gives you two SATA 3.0 ports with power and a PCIe 3.0 slot instead, which is what you want if the storage is spinning rust rather than flash. Neither lets you add memory later. For how either fits a wider build, see the budget NAS builds guide.

A general Docker or Proxmox box — GMKtec NucBox G3 Plus or MINIX Z150-0dB. Both give you a DDR4 SO-DIMM slot and both claim 32 GB, which is the only route to headroom on this platform. The MINIX is fanless and states 12 W typical, and at $345.00 it is the cheaper of the two; the GMKtec states 6 W and names its i226-V, and at $499.99 for 16 GB and 512 GB it is asking a lot for an N150, on top of showing as sold out when I looked. Proxmox on a mini PC is the install path from here.

A silent appliance — MeLE Cyber X1. Fanless, 7-8 W by its own page, a DDR4 slot, and a gigabit Realtek NIC rather than 2.5. At $459.99 it is priced against machines that would outrun it in every dimension except noise, which makes the decision simple: buy it for the silence or skip it.

Home Assistant specifically is a different decision with a different answer, and it is already answered here — an N100 and an N150 are interchangeable for that job.

Whether to buy an N150 at all is the bigger question, and it sits one level up. If you are choosing between this class, a used office micro and a Minisforum MS-01, start with the homelab mini PC comparison and come back here once the class is settled.

Where to buy

Which of these machines a retailer stocks itself, rather than listing on behalf of the manufacturer, moves week to week. Check the seller line as well as the price, and check the processor line against ARK before you pay.

I may earn a commission if you buy through these affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Search NeweggLink checked 2026-09-18 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-18

So, is it enough?

For a job that is small and constant, yes. Comfortably. Pi-hole, a handful of containers, a light automation stack, a firewall pushing a residential connection — four cores at 6 W doing steady work is exactly what this part was designed for, and the wall figure that comes with it is genuinely cheap to run.

For a job that is bursty and large, no. The reason is memory rather than cores. You will hit 16 GB on one channel long before you run out of clock, and no N150 box sells you a way past it that Intel endorses. If that is the shape of your workload, the money belongs in a platform with two memory channels, not in a faster four-core chip.

And when you have picked a job and a box, pick it from the vendor page rather than from a retail listing. Six power figures, four memory ceilings above spec and four different network controllers on one product line is not a market you can shop by chip name.

Sources

Chip specifications, read on 2026-09-18:

Independent power measurement:

ServeTheHome, John Lee, 2025-09-21, CWWK Intel N150 4x SSD pocket NAS review

Manufacturer product pages, all opened 2026-09-18, which are the source of every row in the survey table:

Port Forwarding: The Four Things That Must All Be True

LK Wood IV — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · 2026-09-18 · ~11 min read · St. Louis County, MO

A port forward is one line in a translation table. Traffic arrives at your router on a public port, the router rewrites the destination, and the packet goes to one machine inside your network.

That is the whole mechanism. The reason this page runs long is that the mechanism is almost never what fails. Four separate conditions have to hold at once, they fail independently, and every one of them fails silently. A port checker reports “closed” for all four.

One quick disambiguation before anything else, because two different things share this name. This page is about the rule in your router. If you came looking for ssh -L, ssh -R and -D, that is a different tool with different failure modes, and it lives in SSH port forwarding.

What the router is doing

Your home network runs on private addresses. Mine sits on 192.168.1.0/24, and addresses in that range are not routable on the internet by design. When my desktop opens a connection outward, the router replaces the private source address with the one public address it owns and remembers the swap, so the reply finds its way back.

That works because your machine started the conversation. The router has a table entry waiting for the reply.

An unsolicited packet from outside has no such entry. The router receives it, finds nothing that explains where it should go, and drops it — no security feature was switched on to make that happen. The address translation simply has no answer to the question.

A port forward supplies the missing answer in advance. You tell the router that anything arriving on TCP 32400 belongs to 192.168.1.40, permanently, whether or not that machine asked for it.

So the rule you write has four parts: the external port, the internal address, the internal port, and the protocol. Get any of them wrong and nothing tells you.

The four conditions

Every one of these has to be true. Check them in this order, because each one makes the next one worth testing.

1. Your line has a real public IPv4 address

This is the condition that ends the conversation for a growing number of people, and it is the first thing to check because you cannot fix it yourself.

Read the WAN address on your router’s status page. Then compare it with what a what-is-my-IP site reports.

If the two match, you have a real public address and this condition passes. If they differ, something upstream is translating your traffic, and the WAN address tells you which problem you have.

An address inside 100.64.0.0/10 means carrier-grade NAT. RFC 6598 reserves that range as Shared Address Space, assigned for service provider use to number the link between a CGN device and customer equipment. You share one public address with other subscribers. There is no port on it that belongs to you, so there is nothing to forward, and no setting in your router changes that.

Whether your provider will move you off it varies. On Spectrum’s own community forum, a verified employee answering one customer who asked to opt out of CG-NAT said there is no way to opt out, naming a static IP on a business account or a VPN as the two alternatives. That is one provider’s answer to one customer, so ask yours before planning around it. Hold on to the second half of that answer, because a tunnel out to somewhere with a public address is where this page ends up too.

An address in 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x or 172.16.x.x through 172.31.x.x, the three private ranges RFC 1918 sets aside, means double NAT instead: a second router upstream of yours, usually the ISP’s own gateway running in router mode with your equipment behind it. That one you can fix. Either put the ISP gateway into bridge or passthrough mode so your router holds the public address, or write the same forward twice, once on each device. Bridging is the better repair, because the second rule is a thing you will forget in a year. If you want to check whether a given address falls inside a private range, the subnet and CIDR calculator will tell you.

2. Exactly one device is doing the translating

Condition 1 finds the common version of this. The uncommon version is a router you forgot about: a mesh node in router mode rather than access-point mode, or a travel router still plugged in behind the main one.

The symptom is a forward that is configured correctly on the device you are looking at and lands on a device that is not the one holding the public address. Count the boxes between your machine and the wall.

3. The rule points at an address that does not move

Your router hands out LAN addresses by DHCP, and a lease expires. If the machine you forwarded to comes back on a different address after a reboot, your rule now points at whatever took its old one.

Fix it in the router rather than on the host. Assign a DHCP reservation that ties the machine’s MAC address to one LAN address permanently. A static address configured on the host itself works too, as long as it sits outside the DHCP pool, which is a detail people skip and then spend an evening on an address conflict.

4. The destination machine’s own firewall allows it

This is the one that catches experienced people, because the router configuration is visibly correct and the port still reads closed.

The router forwards the packet. The host receives it and drops it.

Microsoft documents the -DefaultInboundAction values for Set-NetFirewallProfile plainly: Block “blocks inbound network traffic that does not match an inbound rule”, and “the default setting when managing a computer is Block”. On my own Windows 11 desktop, reading the effective policy rather than the configured one, all three profiles agree:

Get-NetFirewallProfile -PolicyStore ActiveStore |
 Select-Object Name, Enabled, DefaultInboundAction

Domain True Block
Private True Block
Public True Block

Measured 2026-09-18 on Windows 11 Home build 26200. The ActiveStore part matters. Querying the default store on the same machine returns NotConfigured for all three, which reads like permissiveness and is not. The effective policy is Block.

So a forward into a Windows host needs an inbound rule on that host as well. Most server software adds one at install time. Anything you unzipped and ran by hand did not.

The automatic version, and why it keeps not working

Routers can open these rules on request, without you touching the admin page. Three protocols do it: UPnP IGD, NAT-PMP, and PCP, the last of which RFC 6887 defines as a way for a host to control how incoming packets are translated and forwarded by a NAT or a simple firewall.

When it works it is genuinely better than a hand-written rule, because the application asks for exactly the port it needs and gives it back afterwards.

It frequently does not work. Tailscale’s David Anderson, writing about NAT traversal in 2020, put the problem in one line: these protocols “might not be implemented on your devices. They might be disabled by default and nobody knew to turn them on.” He adds a detail worth knowing before you go looking for three separate settings, which is that “many devices come with a single ‘UPnP’ checkbox that actually toggles UPnP, NAT-PMP and PCP all at once.”

That single checkbox is also why the advice to disable UPnP for security is coarser than it sounds. Turning it off removes all three, including the two that never carried UPnP’s vulnerabilities.

My position: leave it off, and write the rule by hand. A permanent rule you wrote is one you can find again. A rule some application opened for itself is one nobody will ever audit, and the reason UPnP has the reputation it has is that malware on a LAN machine can ask for a forward exactly as politely as your game does.

IPv6 does not have port forwarding at all

On IPv6 there is no address translation, so there is nothing to translate. Every device on your network already holds a globally routable address. What stands between the internet and that device is your router’s firewall policy, and nothing else.

So the IPv6 equivalent of a port forward is a firewall rule, usually labelled a pinhole. You specify one address and one port, and you allow inbound traffic to it.

The default behaviour is genuinely vendor-dependent. RFC 6092, the recommendations document for residential IPv6 gateways, requires in REC-49 that a gateway “MUST provide an easily selected configuration option that permits a ’transparent mode’ of operation that forwards all unsolicited flows regardless of forwarding direction”, and then adds that “the transparent mode of operation MAY be the default configuration”. A conforming router can ship wide open or closed. Check yours rather than assuming.

Which address to open, and the one your port checker will hand you

Here is the part that costs people an evening, and it is measurable rather than theoretical.

A Windows machine does not hold one IPv6 address. It holds several at once, for different jobs. On my wired desktop, on a Charter line, I read the interface on 2026-09-18:

Get-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias 'Ethernet 2' -AddressFamily IPv6 |
 Select-Object IPAddress, PrefixOrigin, SuffixOrigin, AddressState, PreferredLifetime

That returned eight addresses. Four were link-local and unique-local, which never reach the internet and are not what a pinhole targets. The other four were globally routable under the ISP’s delegated prefix, and those are the rows below. They appear as truncated SHA-256 hashes, because the addresses themselves identify the line:

address (sha256, first 12)	PrefixOrigin	SuffixOrigin	state	preferred lifetime left
`8c54b72251e1`	RouterAdvertisement	Random	Preferred	22:02:03
`3bcb63976cb9`	RouterAdvertisement	Random	Deprecated	00:00:00
`51d7bac62b7c`	RouterAdvertisement	Link	Preferred	23:59:05
`3e69fab27a83`	Dhcp	Dhcp	Preferred	22:58:50

On this machine the two marked Random are the two that ipconfig /all labels Temporary IPv6 Address, and I am reading the mapping off that correlation rather than off the property name. Random does not by itself mean temporary: a stable SLAAC address also reports a randomized suffix on a host configured for it. The Link row above is what tells me this box is not doing that. Check the ipconfig labels on your own machine instead of trusting the mapping.

Temporary addresses exist so that the address a remote server sees cannot be used to follow your machine around. RFC 8981 describes them as “typically employed for initiating outgoing sessions” and used “for a short period of time (typically hours to days)” before being deprecated, with a default preferred lifetime of one day. My desktop’s own setting agrees: netsh interface ipv6 show privacy reports a maximum preferred lifetime of 1d.

Now the two measurements that make this concrete.

Windows sends outbound traffic from the temporary address. Asking the routing stack which source it would pick for a remote IPv6 host, without sending anything:

Find-NetRoute -RemoteIPAddress 2001:4860:4860::8888

It returned 8c54b72251e1, the Preferred Random one. That is the documented default, not a quirk: RFC 6724 Rule 7 says “if SA is a temporary address and SB is a public address, then prefer SA.”

The temporary addresses really do go away, and the stable ones really do not. I read the same interface four days earlier, on 2026-09-14. The temporary address that was Preferred then, and that Windows was using as its source, is now not on the interface at all. Meanwhile 51d7bac62b7c and 3e69fab27a83, the stable SLAAC address and the DHCPv6 address, are the same two addresses they were four days ago, across a reboot in between.

That is the rule, measured on one line rather than quoted from a standard: the addresses ipconfig labels Temporary are the ones that disappear, and the plain IPv6 Address and DHCPv6 lines are the ones a firewall rule should name.

Which brings me to the part that makes this a trap rather than a curiosity. The obvious way to find out your own IPv6 address is to ask a website, and port-checking tools offer exactly that: yougetsignal’s open-ports page has a “Use Current IP” control, and it was in Bing’s top ten for “port forwarding” when I searched on 2026-09-18. Loaded from this desktop, that control pre-filled an IPv6 address. On 2026-09-14 it offered the temporary address current that day. On 2026-09-18 it offered 8c54b72251e1: the new temporary address, the same one Find-NetRoute had just picked and the same Preferred Random row from the table above.

On both days I checked, it offered the temporary address and neither of the two stable ones. That is not a flaw in one tool. Any site that reports “your IP” can only report the address your connection arrived from, and Rule 7 above is what makes that the temporary one. So the entire category of what-is-my-IP controls will hand you the wrong address for this particular job, and the better the tool is at its actual job the more reliably it does so. Ask your own machine instead.

Copy that into a router firewall rule and the rule works. It works for hours — long enough to close the admin page and call the job done. Then the address behind it is retired, the rule points at nothing, and the thing you are running stops answering with no configuration having changed.

When to stop forwarding entirely

There is a decent case that most people reading this should not write the rule at all.

A forward is still the right tool in a few places. A self-hosted WireGuard endpoint needs exactly one forwarded UDP port and gives you an encrypted path to everything behind it, which is one rule instead of one per service. A game server for friends is a reasonable use. So is anything already designed to face the internet.

Everywhere else, an overlay network has quietly become the better answer, because it satisfies condition 1 by refusing to depend on it. Both ends dial outward, so CGNAT stops being a problem instead of being an obstacle, and nothing on your router is open. That is the decision covered in Tailscale vs WireGuard, and neither Tailscale nor a Cloudflare Tunnel needs an inbound port. The cost is client software on whatever is connecting, which is the one thing a forwarded port never demands, and it is why the answer is not unanimous.

If your ISP gateway turns out to have no usable forwarding table or no IPv6 firewall controls at all, which is common on carrier-supplied hardware, the fix is your own router behind it in bridge mode. The Wi-Fi 7 router picks cover that purchase with current pricing.

And if what you wanted was to reach one media server from outside, the service-specific version of this decision is worked through end to end in Jellyfin remote access, including why forwarding its plain HTTP port is the one setup nobody should copy.

What I measured and what I did not

The Windows figures here are first-hand, from read-only commands on my own wired desktop: Windows 11 Home build 26200, Charter line, captured 2026-09-14 and again 2026-09-18. The IPv6 addresses appear only as truncated hashes because the addresses identify the connection. The prefix owner comes from ARIN’s registry, which returns Charter Communications LLC for that block.

Three things are outside what I tested, and they change what you should trust.

I did not read the router. That means I cannot tell you whether this line is behind CGNAT, and I cannot tell you what this router does with unsolicited inbound IPv6. Both are things the sections above tell you to check on your own router.

I did not press the port checker’s test button. Watching which address it pre-fills is reading the page; running its scan submits a probe against the operator’s own address to a third party. So the address it offers is measured, and whether its test runs over IPv6 is not something I checked.

The disappearance of that temporary address has two possible causes I cannot separate, since the four-day window contained both a reboot and several preferred lifetimes. Either retires a temporary address and neither touches the stable pair, so the advice is the same, but I am not going to claim a mechanism I did not isolate.

Sources

SSD Health Check: Reading Your Drive's Own Numbers

LK Wood IV — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · 2026-09-18 · ~9 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · Checking SSD health

No download needed for NVMe. Settings → System → Storage → Advanced storage settings → Disks & volumes → Properties. Press Win+R and run ms-settings:disksandvolumes to skip the clicks.
SATA SSDs and hard drives are excluded. Microsoft monitors NVMe only, so a missing Drive health section is the drive type, not a bug.
Three fields decide it: Available spare versus its threshold, Estimated remaining life, and any critical warning. Media errors should read zero.
Estimated remaining life is not your TBW. Settings shows life remaining, the drive's log shows the same estimate as percentage used. Mine has written 8.5% of its rated budget and puts its own wear at 2%.
The wmic method older guides teach is gone. Microsoft removed it from Windows 11, and it cannot be added back.

A drive that is about to fail rarely announces it. The machine gets slower, a file refuses to copy, a game stutters where it never did, and you start wondering whether the SSD is on its way out. The good news is that every modern NVMe drive keeps a running log of its own condition, and Windows 11 will show you the important parts without installing anything.

I read that log on my own boot drive while writing this page. Below are the fields, what each one means, the thresholds that matter, and my drive’s actual numbers next to them so you have something real to compare against.

The 60-second check, no download

Open Settings, then System, then Storage. Scroll to Advanced storage settings, open Disks & volumes, select your SSD and choose Properties. Microsoft’s support page for storage critical warnings documents that exact path. The faster route is Win+R and ms-settings:disksandvolumes, which Microsoft lists in its ms-settings URI reference as the shortcut to that page.

Under Drive health you get three values, and Microsoft defines each one:

Estimated remaining life — “The approximate percentage used, which is based on the manufacturer’s prediction of drive life.”
Available spare — “A normalized percentage (0% to 100%) of the remaining spare capacity available.”
Temperature — the whole device’s temperature in degrees Celsius, per Microsoft’s definition.

Microsoft’s own wording for the first field is confusing, so it is worth being plain about what you are seeing. The drive reports its wear as a percentage used. Settings shows you the other side of the same figure, as life remaining. A drive reporting 2% used is the drive Settings labels 98% remaining. Same estimate, subtracted from 100.

One caveat decides whether you see anything at all. Microsoft’s page states it in a single line: “Windows only monitors NVM SSD and not SATA SSD or hard disk drives (HDD).” If your drive is a 2.5-inch SATA SSD or a spinning disk, the section simply is not there.

That limit is worth knowing before you go looking for a fault. A Microsoft Q&A thread from March 2025 opens with a Windows 11 Home user reporting that “the whole section of device health is not showing.” The one substantive reply sent them to WMIC commands; the other asked where they were looking. Neither mentioned the documented reason the section can be absent.

What the fields mean

Windows shows you a summary. The drive itself keeps more, in a structure Microsoft documents as the SMART / Health Information log. These are the fields that answer “is it dying,” with Microsoft’s own definitions:

Field	What it means	Read it as
Critical warning	Five bits: spare low, temperature threshold crossed, reliability degraded, read-only, backup device failed	Any bit set is the whole answer. Back up now
Available spare	Normalized 0–100% of remaining spare capacity	Compare against the spare threshold, not against 100
Available spare threshold	The level at which the drive raises a warning	Mine is 10%. Falling toward it is the real alarm
Percentage used	“A vendor specific estimate of the percentage of NVM subsystem life used”	At 100 the drive’s estimated NVM endurance is consumed, which “may not indicate an NVM subsystem failure”
Media errors	Occurrences where the controller “detected an unrecovered data integrity error”	Anything above zero deserves attention. Climbing is worse
Error log entries	Count of error-information entries over the controller’s life	A counter, not a verdict. Read it next to media errors
Data units written	512-byte units, reported in thousands	Multiply by 512,000 for bytes. This is your host-write total
Unsafe shutdowns	Power lost before the shutdown notification arrived	A power-behaviour statistic. It does not score the NAND

Two of those repay a second look.

Available spare is the one to watch, and the threshold is the reason. Spare capacity is the pool of reserve blocks the controller swaps in as cells wear out. The number on its own says little; its distance from the threshold says everything. Microsoft’s definition ties the two together: when Available spare falls below the threshold field, the drive can raise an asynchronous event. A drive at 100% spare has spent nothing. A drive at 12% against a 10% threshold is close to the line it will flag on its own.

Percentage used is an estimate, and the drive maker wrote the formula. Microsoft is explicit that the value is vendor specific, that it is allowed to exceed 100, and that it updates once per power-on hour. It is not a fraction of your TBW rating, which is a common misreading of the field. My own drive demonstrates the gap, below.

What my drive reports

This is the Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB that boots my desktop, read on 2026-09-18 at 14:09 Central. I have reviewed this drive for performance separately; this is its health log.

Field	Value
Critical warning	`0b00000000` — no bits set
Available spare	100% (threshold 10%)
Percentage used	2%
Media errors	0
Error log entries	0
Composite temperature	45 C (the controller’s own figure; the two sensors read 45 C and 53 C)
Warning temperature threshold (WCTEMP)	82 C
Critical temperature threshold (CCTEMP)	85 C
Minutes from 82 C up to 85 C	0
Minutes above 85 C	0
Data units written	99,675,461 → 51.03 TB
Data units read	134,341,561 → 68.78 TB
Power-on hours	5,615
Power cycles	1,214
Unsafe shutdowns	693

Now the part that changes how you read your own drive. Samsung’s data sheet rates the 1TB 970 EVO Plus at 600 TBW, and the warranty runs “for the stated time period or the TBW, whichever comes first.” My 51.03 TB of host writes is 8.5% of that rated budget. The drive’s own Percentage Used field says 2%.

Those two numbers disagree because they are answering different questions. The TBW figure is a warranty boundary Samsung published in 2021. Percentage Used is the controller’s live estimate of consumed life, built from what the NAND has actually endured. Neither is wrong. Treating one as the other is what produced the panic in the forum thread further down this page.

So read Percentage Used and Available Spare when you want to know how the drive is holding up. Save the TBW figure for warranty questions, which is where our SSD endurance calculator turns a daily host-write rate and a rating into years.

One number here is mine alone and should not be copied. Those 693 unsafe shutdowns across 1,214 power cycles work out at 57% of this machine’s power cycles. Microsoft defines the counter as incrementing when a shutdown notification is not received before power is lost, and that is the limit of what I can say about it, because what on this desktop triggers it remains an open question for me. It has produced no media errors in 5,615 hours.

What to do at each result

Everything clean. No critical warning, spare at or near 100%, zero media errors, Percentage Used low. Storage drops to the bottom of your suspect list. Note the numbers somewhere, because the trend over months tells you more than any single reading. If you arrived here from a blue screen, the CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED triage picks up where a clean drive report leaves off.

Percentage Used climbing, spare still full. This is normal ageing. A drive at 40% used with 100% spare and no errors is reporting that it has consumed under half the life its maker predicted for it, and the SSD endurance calculator will tell you how long your write rate takes to spend the rest. Re-check quarterly and watch the rate of change rather than the value.

Available spare approaching its threshold, or any media errors. Copy your data off today. A spare pool that is draining means the controller is retiring blocks faster than the drive was designed for, and media errors mean data has already been lost that the controller could not recover. Neither improves.

Any critical warning bit set. Microsoft’s guidance is short: back up your data and contact support. Treat the drive as untrustworthy from that moment. If it is still under warranty, the health log is the evidence a support agent will ask for.

For the last two cases you need a replacement, and budget for more than you paid last time. NVMe prices rose sharply through 2026, and our reporting on the memory and storage squeeze has the numbers. Buy at least the capacity you are replacing, and check current listings before you commit to a model.

I may earn a commission if you buy through these affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Search NeweggLink checked 2026-09-18 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-18

If you want the comparison rather than a listings page, our NVMe SSD guide sorts drives by the role they fill.

Two routes that will waste your time

Older guides hand you a Command Prompt method: run wmic, then diskdrive get status, and read OK or Pred Fail. It no longer exists. Microsoft’s removal notice puts it in one sentence — “The WMIC utility has been removed from currently supported versions of Windows 11 and is no longer available as a Feature on Demand (FoD)” — with the change shipping in the August 2026 preview update for versions 24H2 and 25H2. On my 25H2 desktop the command returns 'wmic' is not recognized as an internal or external command.

The advice outlived the tool. That March 2025 Microsoft Q&A thread told its asker to run dism /online /Add-Capability /CapabilityName:WMIC~~~~ to install it first. As of Microsoft’s own notice, that capability is no longer there to install.

The same Status field still exists, so PowerShell gets it back in one line:

Get-CimInstance Win32_DiskDrive | Format-Table Model, Status, InterfaceType

Mine prints OK. That word carries almost no information — it is a pass/fail flag with no numbers behind it, which is why the health log above is worth the extra minute.

The second dead end is subtler. PowerShell has a cmdlet that looks perfect for this job:

Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter | Format-List

Microsoft’s documentation for it describes counters covering “device temperature, errors, wear, and length of time the device has been in use,” and the page says nothing about needing administrator rights. Run it in an ordinary PowerShell window and you get:

Get-StorageReliabilityCounter : Access to a CIM resource was not available to the client.
 + CategoryInfo : PermissionDenied

That is a permissions refusal rather than a missing capability, so the line wants an elevated Terminal. Microsoft’s page for the cmdlet never mentions it. The documentation gap is the trap, not the cmdlet.

Temperature: which number to act on

Your drive publishes two thresholds of its own. Mine declares a warning composite temperature of 82 C and a critical composite temperature of 85 C. It also keeps two clocks against them, which Microsoft defines precisely: one counts minutes at or above the warning figure while still below the critical one, the other counts minutes above the critical figure. Both read zero on my drive.

Samsung’s data sheet for the same drive gives a different figure: an operating range of “0°C to 70°C (Measured by S.M.A.R.T. Temperature Proper airflow recommended)”. So the firmware tolerates 82 C before it complains while the manufacturer specifies 70 C as the ceiling.

Design for the smaller number. The firmware thresholds exist to protect the drive from damage; the data-sheet range is where the manufacturer expects it to operate. A drive idling at 45 C like mine has plenty of margin. One sitting at 75 C during a long file copy is inside its firmware limits and outside its data-sheet spec, which is the point at which a motherboard M.2 heatsink earns its place.

Sustained heat also shows up in the log rather than only in the moment, so if the warning-temperature minute counter has moved off zero, the drive has spent real stretches of time above its own threshold whatever a single spot reading happened to say when you looked at it.

If your drive is SATA

Windows will not help you, by design. You need a tool that reads S.M.A.R.T. attributes directly, and CrystalDiskInfo is the free one I would reach for. Read its raw values rather than its headline percentage.

Crystal Dew World’s own criteria page shows why. It documents Caution when the raw values for Reallocated Sectors Count, Current Pending Sector Count or Uncorrectable Sector Count exceed their thresholds, and, for SSDs, Caution when “Remaining Life <= 10%”. Those are SATA-style attributes. The page does not document how the tool judges an NVMe drive, so on NVMe the fields in the table above remain the ones to read.

The gap between a tool’s summary and a drive’s data is not hypothetical. A September 2025 thread on the Tom’s Hardware Forum has a member reporting 10% health on a five-year-old M.2 SSD. One reply warned that CrystalDiskInfo “is generic software and doesn’t always interpret vendor specific SMART parameters properly,” and the owner came back to say the drive maker’s own utility rated the same drive in good health. A third member traced the 10% figure to a reported Percentage Used of 0x5A, which is 90. The tool read the field correctly. What it did with it afterwards was a judgement call.

The short version

Check the drive first. On NVMe that takes a minute in Settings and costs nothing, and it answers the question everything else only circles: read Available spare against its threshold, watch for any critical warning, confirm media errors sit at zero, and treat Percentage Used as the drive’s own estimate rather than a fraction of your warranty budget. Then write the numbers down. In six months the direction they moved will tell you far more than today’s reading does on its own.

SSD Tier List 2026: NVMe Drives Tiered by Hardware

LK Wood IV — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-18 · ~12 min read · St. Louis County, MO

Search for an SSD tier list and most of what comes back has stopped moving. The Level1Techs thread still circulating opened on 3 September 2020 and drew its last reply five days after that. The stoRAGE list on GitHub opens with a header saying it is unmaintained and missing new drives. Zach’s Tech Turf carries no date of its own and sends readers to a Google Sheet whose very first row reads DEPRECATED, dated 3/24/2026. I opened eight of these lists while building this page. One of them, the current NewMaxx sheet, carries a 2026 revision stamp: “Last Updated: August 19, 2026”.

So here is mine. Fourteen current M.2 NVMe drives, rebuilt from vendor documents, tiered on the four hardware facts that decide how a drive behaves under a long write, with every row citing the document it came from and the capacity that figure belongs to.

Two rules run through it. Every specification traces to a source linked in its row, and that source is the maker’s own datasheet wherever one exists. Where a maker does not publish something, the cell says so and names the review that opened the drive instead. Blank beats guessed.

What this page ranks on

Not a score. ssd-tester.com sorts a large field on a composite “Score” its own page never explains, and Tom’s Hardware’s SSD benchmarks hierarchy still carries 2025 in its heading. Sequential benchmark sums flatter the wrong thing anyway. They reward peak queue depths a desktop almost never reaches.

This page ranks documented hardware class, from four facts the makers publish:

PCIe generation — the interface ceiling.
NAND type — TLC or QLC, three bits per cell or four.
Cache architecture — an on-board DRAM chip, or Host Memory Buffer borrowed from system RAM.
Rated endurance — TBW at a stated capacity, under JEDEC’s client workload.

Every specification figure below is for the 1TB capacity. Specifications move with capacity, and comparing a 4TB row against a 500GB row is how a tier list quietly becomes wrong. The daggered cells are the exception, because a teardown reports whatever sample the reviewer had in hand, so Sources records which capacity each one came from. Samsung’s own datasheet puts the 990 PRO at 600TB written for 1TB and 2,400TB for 4TB. Same drive name, four times the number.

How the tiers are decided

The letters are my editorial call. The criteria behind them are stated, so you can audit any placement:

Tier S — PCIe 5.0, TLC NAND and a DRAM cache. The current ceiling.
Tier A — PCIe 4.0, TLC NAND, DRAM cache. For almost every desktop and homelab build, this is the sensible tier and the one I would start from.
Tier B — no DRAM cache. The mapping table lives in a slice of host memory over the PCIe bus instead of on a chip beside the controller, which Lexar and Samsung both name as Host Memory Buffer. Fast on paper, different under sustained write pressure.
Tier C — QLC NAND at any generation, or a PCIe 3.0 drive. Fine for what they are. Not a new primary drive in 2026.

One flag sits outside the letters. Check the revision marks a drive whose maker changed the hardware under an unchanged model name. That is not a demerit. It means the name on the box will not tell you which of two drives you are holding, so the row links straight to the section that says what will.

The 2026 SSD tier list

Tier	Drive (1TB)	Interface	NAND	Cache	Rated TBW	Source
S	Samsung 9100 PRO	PCIe 5.0 x4	V-NAND TLC	1GB LPDDR4X	600 TB	Samsung
S	WD_BLACK SN8100	PCIe Gen5 x4	TLC 3D CBA	DRAM	600 TB	SanDisk
S	Seagate FireCuda 540	PCIe Gen5 x4	3D TLC	DRAM †	1,000 TB	Seagate · TPU
A	Samsung 990 PRO	PCIe Gen 4.0 x4	V-NAND TLC	1GB LPDDR4	600 TB	Samsung
A	Kingston KC3000	PCIe 4.0 x4	3D TLC	DRAM	800 TB	Kingston
A	Solidigm P44 Pro	PCIe Gen 4 x4	176-layer 3D TLC †	1GB LPDDR4 †	750 TB	Solidigm · TPU
A	SK hynix Platinum P41	PCIe 4.0, 4 lanes	176L 3D TLC	DRAM †	750 TB	SK hynix · TPU
A	WD_BLACK SN850X	PCIe Gen4 x4	TLC 3D NAND	DDR4 †	600 TB	SanDisk · Tom’s
B	Lexar NM790	PCIe Gen4 x4	not stated	HMB 3.0	1,000 TB	Lexar
B	Samsung 990 EVO Plus	PCIe 4.0 x4 / 5.0 x2	V-NAND TLC	HMB	600 TB	Samsung
B	WD_BLACK SN7100	PCIe Gen 4x4	TLC 3D NAND	DRAM-less	600 TB	SanDisk · TPU
B	TEAMGROUP MP44	PCIe 4.0 x4	not stated	none	500 TB	TEAMGROUP
C	Crucial P3 Plus	PCIe 4.0	176-layer QLC †	none †	not in Micron’s flyer	Micron · Tom’s
C · check the revision	Samsung 970 EVO Plus Which one is it?	PCIe Gen 3.0 x4	V-NAND 3-bit MLC	Samsung DRAM	600 TB	Samsung, archived

† marks a cell the maker does not publish. The linked review opened the drive and reported it, and those reviews are credited by name in Sources at the foot of this page. Every other cell comes from the vendor document linked in its own row.

Rated TBW is the maker’s figure for the 1TB model under JEDEC’s client workload, so it is a write budget rather than a failure date. Samsung’s “V-NAND 3-bit MLC” on the 970 EVO Plus row is Samsung’s own wording for three bits per cell, which the rest of the industry calls TLC, and I have left it as Samsung prints it.

How to read it

The tier names a class. It does not promise a speed. A Tier S drive in a PCIe 4.0 slot runs at PCIe 4.0. Three of the seven makers here say so explicitly in the sheet: Samsung, SanDisk, Seagate. SanDisk goes furthest and spells the whole ladder out for the SN8100, backward compatible through Gen4 x4, Gen4 x2, Gen4 x1 and on down to Gen2 x1. The other four print no compatibility statement at all. Check the wiring of your board’s M.2 slot before you buy up a tier.

Endurance does not follow the tiers. This is the part that surprised me while building the table. The Lexar NM790 sits in Tier B because it has no DRAM, and its 1TB model is rated at 1,000 TBW. Both Tier S flagships, the Samsung 9100 PRO and the WD_BLACK SN8100, are rated at 600 TBW at the same capacity. The Seagate FireCuda 540 is rated at 1,000 TBW. If a write budget is what you are shopping for, read that column on its own; the SSD endurance calculator turns a TBW rating and your measured daily writes into years.

Cache architecture is where vendors get quiet. Samsung prints the cache row in every datasheet I opened, including the word HMB for the 990 EVO Plus, which is the rare case of a maker volunteering that its drive has no DRAM at all. Kingston prints “DRAM Cache: Yes”. TEAMGROUP prints “DRAM Cache: NO”. SanDisk is the inconsistent one. It prints “DRAM: Yes” in the SN8100 spec table, calls the SN7100 “this DRAM-less drive” in body copy rather than in a row, and says nothing at all about the SN850X, which is the one of the three where a buyer most needs the answer. That is why five cache cells in the table carry a dagger.

Warranty sorts nothing here. Every maker that states a term states five years. The fine print differs, though. Samsung caps at five years or the TBW limit, whichever comes first, and so do SanDisk and TEAMGROUP. Kingston’s KC3000 sheet instead caps at “5 years or ‘Percentage Used’”, a SMART attribute you read with Kingston’s own utility. Useful to know, useless for ranking.

If a drive you own is behaving strangely rather than slowly, a tier letter will not help. Read its SMART data and its host-write counter first, then come back to this table when you are actually shopping.

Which hardware is it

Here is the problem that made me build this page instead of updating a spreadsheet.

In 2021 Samsung changed the controller inside the 970 EVO Plus without changing the name on the box. TechSpot reported the swap from the Phoenix controller to Elpis, with the part number moving from MZVLB1T0HBLR to MZVL21T0HBLU, and made the point that matters: “The part number isn’t on the package, so you can’t distinguish them that way.” The FPS Review named the silicon on both sides, Phoenix S4LR020 and Elpis S4LV003, and reported the revised units shipping firmware 3B2QEXM7.

The change was not cosmetic. TechSpot’s 200GB copy test had the original drive running at 1.8 GB/s until 40GB, then settling at 1.5 GB/s. The revised drive started faster, at 2.6 GB/s, and then fell to 0.8 GB/s at the 115GB mark, which The FPS Review puts down to the SLC cache being exhausted. Two drives. One name. Opposite behaviour as soon as the write runs long enough to fill the cache.

Two of the eight SSD tier lists I opened do name both controllers. None of the eight gives an owner a way to tell which one is in the drive on their desk. The Italian-language Buonaurio guide names the practice outright, “i produttori cambiano di continuo i componenti di nascosto”, and resolves it by rating only the newest variant it knows about. The Comparator grades the 970 EVO Plus at 250GB and 500GB with no revision split at either. The two that do mention the change bury it inside a single row. The deprecated NewMaxx sheet puts “Samsung Phoenix” in its controller column and “Elpis + 128L flash change” in a notes field; stoRAGE writes “Samsung Phoenix OR Elpis” in one cell. A controller name tells you the drive exists in two versions. It does not tell you which one you bought.

So this page carries the identifier, linked from the row it applies to. The first-party reading below is mine.

What my own drive reports

I ran a read-only inventory on my daily machine on September 18, 2026 at 14:17 Central:

Get-PhysicalDisk | Select-Object FriendlyName,BusType,FirmwareVersion,HealthStatus

It returned Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB, BusType NVMe, FirmwareVersion 4B2QEXM7, HealthStatus Healthy. No install, no elevation, no vendor utility.

Methodology note: that is one drive in one machine, a Ryzen 7 7800X3D desktop, read with the built-in Windows storage cmdlet. It identifies the drive. It measures nothing.

Now the limit of it. Firmware can be updated long after purchase by anyone who runs the vendor tool, so the string on its own does not pin down which controller is sitting underneath it. The FPS Review’s 3B2QEXM7 figure describes what revised units shipped with. It says nothing about what they run today. The identifier that settles it is the part number on the drive’s own label, MZVLB1T0HBLR for Phoenix or MZVL21T0HBLU for Elpis, which means unscrewing the drive to read it. I have not pulled mine.

That is the method, and it costs a screwdriver rather than a benchmark suite:

Read the firmware string first, because it is free. Get-PhysicalDisk in PowerShell, or Device Manager under Disk drives, Properties, Details, Hardware Ids. Write it down.
Read the part number off the label. It starts with MZ for Samsung and is the value the news coverage tracked when the swap was found.
Compare both against the reporting for your model, and treat a model name with two documented hardware versions as two drives that happen to share a box.

Our own 970 EVO Plus review covers how the drive behaves after years in that machine. This page covers which drive it is.

Your SSD is not in the table. Tier it yourself

Fourteen rows is a starting field. The market is far wider. The method takes about ten minutes per drive and uses the same public sources:

Open the maker’s datasheet rather than the retail listing. Search the model plus “datasheet” or “product brief”. Every maker in the table above publishes one: Samsung, SanDisk, Kingston, Seagate, Solidigm, Lexar, TEAMGROUP, Micron. A retail bullet list is marketing copy.
Find the interface line and read the lane count. “PCIe 4.0 x4” and “PCIe 4.0 x2” are different drives.
Find the NAND row. TLC or QLC. If the sheet says only “3D NAND” with no cell count, the maker is not telling you, and that is worth knowing on its own.
Find the cache row. DRAM, HMB, or absent. If it is absent, look for a review that photographed the board.
Read the TBW at your capacity. A headline endurance number is almost always the largest model’s.

Four facts, four cells, and the tier falls out of the rules above. If the NAND row and the cache row are nowhere to be found, that is itself the finding. You are being asked to buy a drive whose maker will not say what is inside it.

The questions builders keep asking

Should I replace a working Tier B or Tier C drive?

No. Tiers earn their keep at purchase time, when four drives in a price bracket look identical on the shelf. A DRAM-less drive that has been holding your game library without complaint does not become slower because a table ranks something above it. What deserves attention is a drive being asked to do a job its class is wrong for: a QLC drive under continuous virtual machine writes, or a Gen3 drive as the scratch disk for a video timeline.

Is Gen5 worth the money in 2026?

For a desktop that games and browses, the gap is hard to feel, and Gen5 drives draw more power doing it: Samsung rates the 1TB 9100 PRO at 7.6 W average active read against 5.5 W for the 1TB 990 PRO, and Seagate rates the 1TB FireCuda 540 at 10 W active. The Gen5 rows sit in Tier S because the class ceiling is genuinely higher. That ceiling rarely shows up in a game load. Where it earns the premium is sustained sequential work: multi-stream video, large model loading, virtual machine images under real write pressure.

Why is there no price column?

Because a price on a tier list is wrong within a week, and this one would be wrong faster than most. NAND pricing moved sharply through 2026, which our RAM and SSD price crisis explainer covers with its sources. Dated prices live on the NVMe SSD price index instead, captured daily against named direct retailers. Its September 14, 2026 capture had exactly one drive clear every acceptance rule: a Samsung 990 PRO 2TB at $672.98 from Adorama, or $336.49 per terabyte.

Which drive should I buy for a specific job?

That is a different question from where a drive sits, and it has its own page. The homelab and PC build NVMe guide makes the role picks: boot disk, virtual machine pool, ZFS cache device, secondary game storage. Use this table to check the class of anything it names, or anything you are cross-shopping against it.

What is deliberately not here

Crucial T500, T705, T710. Micron’s product pages render their spec tables through scripts that a fetch cannot read, and I did not find a published flyer for these three carrying the NAND and cache rows. They go in when a readable Micron document exists.
WD Blue SN580. Same reason: SanDisk publishes a datasheet PDF for the WD_BLACK line and I did not find the equivalent for this Blue model.
Anything that is not an internal M.2 NVMe drive. SATA, portable, enterprise U.2: different products with different rules.
Controller part numbers as a tier input. Most makers do not publish them, several changed silently, and repeating a forum’s attribution as though it were a specification is how the older lists went stale.
Prices. They live on the price index above, with capture dates attached.

Revision 1.0 — published 2026-09-18, 14 drives. Next scheduled review: December 2026. A drive enters when its maker’s own document has been opened and its interface row, its NAND row and its cache row have been read; a documented hardware revision earns the flag. Corrections are welcome at contact@techfuelhq.com with a source, and they get checked against the same standard the rows were.

For the other maintained tier databases on this site: GPU hierarchy 2026 ranks 43 graphics cards, CPU hierarchy 2026 ranks 28 processors on gaming performance, and the PSU tier list tiers 28 power supplies with the low-load efficiency data that 24/7 boxes need.

Sources

Vendor specification documents, all opened September 18, 2026: Samsung 9100 PRO datasheet rev. 2.0 · Samsung 990 PRO datasheet rev. 2.0 · Samsung 990 EVO Plus datasheet rev. 1.0 · Samsung 970 EVO Plus specification page, archived January 2024 · WD_BLACK SN8100 datasheet · WD_BLACK SN850X datasheet · WD_BLACK SN7100 datasheet · Kingston KC3000 datasheet · Seagate FireCuda 540 datasheet · Solidigm P44 Pro product brief · SK hynix Platinum P41 product page · Lexar NM790 product sheet · TEAMGROUP MP44 spec sheet · Crucial P3 Plus product flyer

Teardowns and reviews cited where a maker publishes no cache or NAND row: TechPowerUp, Solidigm P44 Pro — SK hynix ACNS075 controller, 176-layer 3D TLC, and 1GB of SK hynix LPDDR4 on the 1TB unit it tested, plus its finding that the P44 Pro shares a hardware configuration with the Platinum P41, which is what the P41 cache cell rests on · TechPowerUp, Seagate FireCuda 540 — Phison E26 controller, Micron 232-layer TLC, and a dedicated DRAM cache for the mapping tables, on the 2TB sample it tested · TechPowerUp, WD_BLACK SN7100 — a DRAM-less design on WD’s Polaris 3 controller with Kioxia 218-layer BiCS8 TLC, measured on the 2TB sample, where the host memory buffer is 64MB · Tom’s Hardware, WD_BLACK SN850X — DDR4 cache and 112-layer BiCS5 TLC, listed for every capacity column including the 1TB this table uses · Tom’s Hardware, Crucial P3 Plus — Phison E21T controller and Micron 176-layer QLC

The 970 EVO Plus hardware revision: TechSpot, August 28, 2021 — controller swap, part numbers, and the copy-test figures · The FPS Review, August 28, 2021 — Phoenix S4LR020 and Elpis S4LV003, the 115GB cache figure and the revised firmware string

The eight tier lists surveyed for dates and method: NewMaxx SSD Basic Tier List · the NewMaxx sheet it replaced, marked DEPRECATED 3/24/2026 · Zach’s Tech Turf SSD list · ssd-tester.com top SSD ranking · stoRAGE consumer SSD tier list · Level1Techs SSD tier list thread · The Comparator SSD tier list · Riccardo Buonaurio’s guida SSD · Tom’s Hardware SSD benchmarks hierarchy

Steam Slow Download Speed: Find the Real Bottleneck

LK Wood IV — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-18 · Updated 2026-09-28 · ~10 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · Steam download speed

Check the units first. Speed tests count bits, Steam counts bytes. A 74 Mb/s line and a 9.25 MB/s Steam download are the same speed.
Then read the byte plan. Open steamapps\appmanifest_<appid>.acf and compare BytesToDownload with BytesToStage.
Stage far above download? Your drive is doing the work. No region, throttle or cache setting will change that.
Stage close to download? It is a network problem, so read the per-host rates in logs\content_log.txt and then try a different download region.
Before anything else on a gigabit line: confirm the adapter negotiated 1 Gbps and not 100 Mbps.

Byte figures are from 46 updates in my own Steam log, September 2 to 16, 2026. Everything else is Valve documentation or the threads named below.

A slow Steam download is two different problems sharing one progress bar, and almost every guide treats it as one. What you get instead is a list of eight to thirteen client toggles in a row, tried in hope, with nothing in it that tells you which of the two problems you are looking at. On September 14, 2026 I worked through Bing’s top ten for this query and read the four how-to pages in it that would load. Their fix lists ran from eight items to thirteen. Not one of them opens the file where Steam writes down exactly what it is about to do before it does it.

That file settles the question in about ten seconds. So it goes near the top here.

Which problem you have

What you see	What it usually is	Go to
Steam’s number looks about one eighth of your speed test	Bits against bytes, and no fault at all	Step 1
Download crawls, disk light is busy, game is large and already installed	Steam rebuilding packed files	Steps 2 and 3
Download crawls, disk barely moves, fresh install	Network or content server	Steps 4 to 6
Speed is fine on other apps but only Steam is slow	Region, route or security software	Steps 5 and 7
Download stops with “Content File Locked”	A blocked write rather than a slow one	Steam content file locked
Steam will not open, or hangs signing in	The client, not the download	Steam not opening
Local file copies to a NAS are slow too	Storage or SMB, not Steam	10GbE at home

Step 1. Settle the units before you change anything

It is the first answer the most recent of the threads below reached for, and it costs nothing to check.

Internet connections are sold in bits per second. Steam reports downloads in bytes per second. A byte is eight bits, so one transfer produces two numbers that differ by a factor of eight. Valve publishes a conversion table for exactly this confusion, tucked inside a collapsed block on its slow-downloads article headed “Example download speed conversions”, and the bottom row of it lists a 50 megabits/second connection against 6.25 MB/S.

Watch it play out. In a Steam Community thread opened on September 3, 2026, the poster set a 74.15 Mb/s speed test against what they wrote down as a 9.1 Mbps Steam download, and asked why the thing had suddenly broken overnight. The first reply did the arithmetic. Steam’s readout is in bytes, so that 9.1 was 9.1 MB/s, and 74 Mb/s divided by eight comes to about 9.25 MB/s. Two numbers, two units, one speed. Nothing was broken.

To make the two numbers comparable, open Steam, Settings, Downloads and tick Display download rates in bits per second. Valve also points out that the speed shown in your system tray is your local network link rate rather than your internet speed, which is why a “1 Gbps” adapter tooltip proves nothing about your actual connection to the outside world.

Multiply your Steam figure by eight. If the result lands anywhere near your speed test, your download is already running as fast as the line you pay for, and every remaining step on this page is going to tell you the same thing in more words. You are done here.

Step 2. Read the byte plan

Here is the part no ranking page does.

Before Steam starts an update it works out three totals and writes them down. How many bytes it must download, how many it will reuse from files you already have, and how many it will stage onto your drive. Those totals live in two places. You can open both right now.

The easier one is the game’s manifest. Go to steamapps in your Steam library folder and open appmanifest_<appid>.acf in Notepad. Two lines matter:

"BytesToDownload" "7305760"
"BytesToStage" "2217366028"

That is the real file on my desktop as I write this, for Total War: WARHAMMER III. Steam needs 7.31 MB off the internet and is going to write 2.22 GB to my SSD. The download is a rounding error. The drive does everything.

The fuller version is logs\content_log.txt in your Steam folder. Search it for update started and you get a line per update:

[2026-09-02 15:12:44] AppID 1142710 update started : download 1220164112/42976779808,
store 0/0, reuse 0/0, delta 0/0, stage 2008143587/81633734737

The second number in each pair is the total. That update had 42.98 GB to download and 81.63 GB to stage.

I parsed all 46 update records in my log, covering September 2 to 16, 2026. The pattern is consistent and it is not subtle:

Update	Download	Stage	Stage ÷ download	Time
Wallpaper Engine, fresh content	2.15 GB	2.13 GB	0.99	21 s
WARHAMMER III, large content update	42.98 GB	81.63 GB	1.90	637 s
WARHAMMER III, routine patch	1.70 MB	2.21 GB	1,298	53 s
WARHAMMER III, routine patch	7.31 MB	2.22 GB	304	5 s

A fresh download stages about what it downloads. A patch to a large packed game stages hundreds of times what it downloads. Seventeen WARHAMMER III patch records landed in that fortnight, and every one of them pulled between 1.70 MB and 18.27 MB off the internet while writing between 2.21 GB and 4.73 GB onto the drive.

So when a 2 MB patch takes a minute, the byte plan has already explained the wait.

Step 3. When the drive is the wait

Valve documents why this happens, in the developer documentation rather than the support pages. SteamPipe splits every file into roughly one-megabyte chunks so it can send only the changed ones. Packed files break that. Valve’s guidance to developers spells out the consequence: to update a 25 GB pack file, SteamPipe always builds a new 25 GB file, and if the update only requires 10 bytes of changes it still copies almost the entire 25 GB from the old file to the new one. The documentation then says, plainly, that depending on the client storage hardware this can be a very slow process.

That is the whole mechanism. The reuse figure in the log is Steam reading your existing install back off the drive to build the replacement, which is why my 1.70 MB patch shows 1.97 GB of reuse sitting next to it in the same line. The sum will not quite close. Stage runs about 240 MB above download plus reuse on that patch, Valve does not document what else it counts, so read stage as the size of the write job.

Valve has also acknowledged the confusion in the client. The September 9, 2021 client update rebuilt the Downloads page, and the release notes say that previously the progress bar would only display the downloading content progress but not the disk allocation process, which would make an update appear completed when it was not.

What to do about it:

Leave it alone and let it finish. On my Samsung 970 EVO Plus most of those multi-gigabyte staging passes took two to seven seconds. The slowest took 53 seconds, and that was a patch that downloaded 1.70 MB and wrote 2.21 GB.
Move the library if it lives on a hard drive. Every patch means reading a couple of gigabytes off that drive and writing them straight back, and Valve names the client’s storage hardware as the thing that decides how long that takes. This is the one place on this page where the fix is hardware rather than a setting.
Give the drive headroom. Valve’s documentation says Steam builds the new file alongside the old one and only then commits, so a patch needs room for both copies at once. How a nearly full drive behaves beyond that is my inference, not something Valve states.

My measurements come off an NVMe drive, so what I can show you is the cost on fast storage. For the slow case the authority is Valve’s own documentation, quoted above. If your games sit on a spinning disk and every small patch turns into a long wait, the byte plan in Step 2 will tell you whether staging is where that time goes.

I may earn a commission if you buy through these affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Search NeweggLink checked 2026-09-18 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-18

Once the drive is fast enough, Steam will move the library for you. Settings, Storage, pick the new drive, then move the games across rather than reinstalling them.

Step 4. Read the per-host rates

If the byte plan says stage and download are close, then the bytes really are coming down the wire and you have a genuine network problem, which is the one case where the region and connection advice on every other page is pointed at the right thing. The same log tells you where it sits.

Search content_log.txt for stats: while an update runs. Steam logs one line per content server it is pulling from, plus an aggregate line:

[2026-09-02 15:17:11] stats: (SteamCache, 273) cache8-ord1.steamcontent.com:
2943899992 Bytes, 193 sec (121.74 Mbps). 5301 Hits / 439 Misses (92 %, 93 % bytes)
[2026-09-02 15:17:11] stats: (Invalid, 0) : 17440492742 Bytes, 291 sec (480.29 Mbps)

On my desktop that big update ran across ten Chicago hosts at once. Each one sat between 71.45 and 121.74 Mbps in the sample above, and across the whole fortnight no single host ever went above 185.95 Mbps. The two aggregate lines for that update read 480.29 and 591.67 Mbps. The minute-by-minute samples peaked at 850.26 Mbps, which is 85 percent of my gigabit port. Steam also logged how many servers it had been handed, between 30 and 35 each time.

That is what a healthy download looks like on my box. No single host is fast. The client makes up the difference by using many of them at once.

Now the useful part, and the comparison is against your own line rate rather than my numbers. If your per-host lines each read a few Mbps while your connection is rated far higher, the route to that region is your problem and Step 5 is the fix. If each host is quick but Steam has only opened two or three of them, the client is not spreading the load. If the hosts are busy and the aggregate is close to what your line can carry, go back to Step 2. The wait is on the drive.

The same lines appear on Linux. An Arch Linux forum post from March 2025 shows a user’s log with five Frankfurt hosts at 11.76 to 13.97 Mbps and a 64.25 Mbps aggregate, which is the same diagnostic on a much slower route.

Step 5. Change the download region, with a reason

Valve’s position is that Steam picks a content server based on where you are. If downloads run slower than expected, its article tells you to check the download region under Steam, Settings, Downloads, then to try various regions near your location until one performs better.

The community evidence says this works often enough to try and not reliably enough to trust. All of the following are from threads I opened:

On the night of October 10, 2024, several people reported sudden slow downloads within hours of each other. One switched away from US servers to Ukraine or London and got expected speeds back. Another thanked the thread for the region tip and said it helped. A third tried Denver and Phoenix and still faced a two-day estimate for Baldur’s Gate.
A reply posted on February 7, 2023 to that same 2021 thread came from someone in the Netherlands who switched to Germany, Hamburg. They reported going from 5 MB/s to a steady 45 MB/s after a decade of slow downloads.
A different 2021 poster was pinned at 1.4 MB/s for over a month. They had already worked through multiple regions, several drives, three filesystems, both wired and wireless, and even a different house. Region changes did nothing for them.

Several strangers going slow on the same evening points at a region or a route. One machine slow for a month while everything else on the network is fine does not. That person belongs in Step 6.

Step 6. Confirm the link you think you have

A gigabit connection that negotiated at 100 Mbps caps Steam at roughly 12 MB/s, and Steam has no readout that would tell you the link is the reason. The client just looks slow.

In the Arch Linux thread above, the first reply was exactly this. That user had gigabit service. They went and read the link rate, and found their network card had negotiated a 100 connection instead of a 1000. On Windows, open PowerShell and run:

Get-NetAdapter | Select-Object Name, InterfaceDescription, LinkSpeed

Mine reports Intel(R) Ethernet Controller (3) I225-V at 1 Gbps. If yours says 100 Mbps on a gigabit line, replace the cable before anything else and reseat both ends.

Valve’s network troubleshooting article makes the related point about wireless. It says wireless and powerline connections can cause intermittent failures due to interference and recommends testing Steam over a direct wired connection. That matters more than it sounds. In the December 2024 thread where a poster spent the afternoon toggling disk write caching, they mentioned in passing that the PC was on Wi-Fi, and nobody went back to it.

Valve’s article also notes that a connection with problems only at certain hours, its example being evenings between 5pm and 11pm, may be shaped by the provider.

Step 7. The client settings worth checking, in one pass

These are the toggles the other guides lead with. They are worth a minute each, once the two diagnostics above have told you which half of the problem you are in.

Limit Download Speed. Steam, Settings, Downloads. Confirm it is off. Valve notes that the rates listed there are in kilobytes and megabytes a second while most connections are rated in bits, which is a reliable way to set a limit eight times tighter than you meant to.

Security software and VPNs. Valve keeps a list. Anti-virus hooks very deep into user systems and can affect disk and network operations. VPN software has the potential of preventing the Steam client from reaching the Steam network. Valve names download accelerators specifically and says they should be disabled while using Steam, and says peer-to-peer programs have the potential to consume a large portion of your bandwidth or other system resources if not properly configured. Valve’s slow-download article adds that some third-party applications can cause Steam to use incorrect content servers, which is the mechanism behind “only Steam is slow”. Disable one temporarily, restart Steam, retest, then turn it back on.

Clear Download Cache. Steam, Settings, Downloads, at the bottom. Valve says it can solve problems with games that will not download or start, that it will not affect your currently installed games, and that you will need to log in again afterwards. It fixes downloads that are stuck. It will not make a working one faster.

Steam server status. Valve’s network article puts checking its own status page first, ahead of every local step, on the reasoning that a system-wide outage explains the symptom and nothing you change at home will help until it clears. It takes one look.

What not to do

Do not edit steam_dev.cfg to disable HTTP/2 on Windows. The three config lines circulating for this come from ValveSoftware’s Linux issue #10248, opened in November 2023 and closed as completed on October 15, 2024. The header on that issue now tells readers the problem is solved and to use a newer distribution. The HTTP/2 variable it names, @nClientDownloadEnableHTTP2PlatformLinux, is Linux-scoped in its own name; the other two are undocumented client internals with no platform in them at all. I found no Valve documentation for any of the three. You would be setting undocumented client variables against a bug that was fixed on a different platform.

Do not toggle disk write caching on a guess. The advice circulating for this points in both directions at once. In a January 2022 thread about disk usage swinging between 100 MB/s and zero, one reply said their own write caching had been switched off and that turning it back on made a huge difference. In December 2024, a poster was told the opposite, turned write caching off on a Kioxia Exceria G2, and reported that nothing had really changed, after which the person advising them concluded the storage angle was a dead end for that machine. The byte plan in Step 2 answers the underlying question without touching a disk policy at all.

Do not reinstall Steam for a speed problem. It is a large action for a symptom that has cheap diagnostics, and it carries a real risk if you do it the wrong way. Valve’s update and installation article says to reinstall Steam to the same location where it is already installed, that installing into the same location will preserve all installed games, and then warns in capitals that uninstalling Steam will delete all game content. The Steam not opening guide covers the safe route if you ever do need it.

Do not read a nearly idle Task Manager as proof. Two of the posters above opened with it. The one who started the October 2024 thread wrote that most of the performance metrics in Task Manager were barely even moving, and the 2021 poster listed never going above 5 percent on CPU, memory or disk. A staging pass that reads and rewrites 2 GB on an NVMe drive finishes in seconds. A one-second glance at Task Manager will miss it completely.

The nuclear option and what it costs

If the byte plan says network, the per-host rates are poor across several regions, the adapter is at full speed, and security software is ruled out, the remaining move is to take your own machine out of the picture. Put the PC on a phone hotspot and start a download.

That costs mobile data and about five minutes. What it buys is a clean split. If Steam is fast on the hotspot, then the problem lives in your router, your local network or the route your provider takes to Steam’s servers, and no setting inside the Steam client is going to fix any of those three. If it is equally slow on both, the problem is on the PC. Go back to Step 6 and Step 7 knowing that.

The 2021 poster who was stuck at 1.4 MB/s had effectively run this test by trying a different house entirely. That is the point at which to stop changing Steam settings.

What I checked on my own machine

Windows 11 Home, build 26200.9457, on September 18, 2026. Steam installed to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam, library on a Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe, networking through an Intel I225-V at 1 Gbps. The steam.exe file version reads 10.96.30.42, which is the file version on disk rather than the build number the About dialog shows.

I read content_log.txt and the appmanifest_*.acf files with Steam and every game closed, parsed all 46 update started records between September 2 and September 16, and timed each one against its matching scheduler finished line. I started no download and changed no Steam setting for this page, so every figure here comes from updates that happened on their own.

The gap I cannot close from this box is the slow-storage case. My staging passes finish in seconds because the drive is fast. The claim that a slow drive turns those same passes into a long wait rests on Valve’s SteamPipe documentation and on the community reports above rather than on any measurement of mine.

Sources

GPU Price Index: Dated Street Price vs MSRP at Newegg (Pilot)

LK Wood IV — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-14 · ~4 min read · St. Louis County, MO

The short version

Graphics card prices spent the whole RTX 50 and RX 9000 generation above MSRP, and most of the numbers that circulate are undated screenshots. This page is a dated, checkable record: the cheapest qualifying street price for eight current cards at named direct US retailers only, each scored against its launch MSRP, with the method, the acceptance rules, every rejection reason and the raw data published beside the numbers.

It is labeled a pilot because the index metric has an activation gate, and the gate status is printed here verbatim rather than worked around.

Latest capture

Collection status: Captures since September 26, 2026 read Newegg directly. The block below names the latest one; check Newegg for current price and stock.

Latest capture, September 29, 2026 (UTC), method gpu-street-price-newegg-direct-v2: 654 listings reviewed, 7 eligible offers, 7 of 8 tracked cards qualified; the index metric activates at 6, so the gate is open and a series row was written for this date. Every row carries verification_status: discovery_only and publish_ready is False: stock is the retailer page’s own flag at fetch time; exact variant matching is mechanical by title, not confirmed by a person.

Cheapest qualifying offer: $499.99 at Newegg (AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB, +43.3% vs MSRP).

Line	Cheapest qualifying offer	vs MSRP	Retailer
AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB	$499.99	+43.3%	Newegg
AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB	$649.99	+18.4%	Newegg
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB	$779.99	+81.8%	Newegg
AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB	$799.99	+33.6%	Newegg
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 12GB	$869.99	+58.5%	Newegg
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB	$1,149.99	+53.5%	Newegg
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB	$1,679.99	+68.2%	Newegg
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 32GB	no Newegg listing confirmed: all candidates rejected: price_outside_sanity_range	-	-

This block is rewritten by the capture script on every run; the dated commentary below it is not.

Every qualifying observation

The file below accumulates one row per qualifying offer for each capture date. The table renders from the raw CSV at build time, so it updates the moment the data does and can never disagree with the download.

Correction, September 15, 2026. The first version of this table counted eight September 14 listings as new, standalone cards. Five were recertified PNY cards at Newegg. One was Gigabyte’s AORUS AI BOX, an external GPU enclosure. Two sold a card with another product: a Best Buy package that included a Samsung SSD, and a Newegg listing that included an ASRock power supply. I removed those eight rows, fixed the two rules that let them in, and re-ran the corrected rules over the stored September 14 search response. No new prices were collected. Three cheapest offers changed. The RTX 5060 Ti moved from $739.99 to $799.99, the RTX 5070 from $800.99 to $869.99 (now at Best Buy), and the RTX 5070 Ti from $1,119.99 to $1,149.99. The day’s median premium to MSRP moved from +48.1% to +53.5%.

Capture Date Utc	Product Label	Vram Gb	Msrp Usd	Title	Seller	Price Usd	Premium Pct	Verification Status
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB	16	429.0	MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB Gaming TRIO OC Graphics Card	Newegg.com	799.99	86.5	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB	16	429.0	GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G VENTUS 2X OC Black PLUS	Best Buy	858.86	100.2	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 12GB	12	549.0	PNY NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 ARGB EPIC-X RGB OC Triple Fan Graphics Card 12GB	Best Buy	869.99	58.5	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 12GB	12	549.0	ASUS PRIME GeForce RTX 5070 White OC 12GB GDDR7 Graphics Card	Newegg.com	919.99	67.6	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB	16	749.0	MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB GDDR7 FRIEREN EDITION OC Graphics Card	Newegg.com	1149.99	53.5	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB	16	749.0	Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5070 Ti EAGLE OC SFF 16G Graphics Card	Newegg.com	1179.99	57.5	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB	16	749.0	MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti VENTUS 3X OC Black 16G Graphics Card	Newegg.com	1189.99	58.9	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB	16	749.0	Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 5070 Ti SOLID SFF OC 16GB GDDR7 Video Graphics Card	Newegg.com	1299.99	73.6	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB	16	749.0	MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16G GAMING TRIO OC PLUS	Best Buy	1499	100.1	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB	16	749.0	ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 5070 Ti OC 16GB GDDR7 Edition Graphics Card	Best Buy	1549.99	106.9	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB	16	999.0	Zotac ZT-B50800J2-10A Zotac VCX GeForce RTX 5080 SOLID CORE OC 16GB	Newegg.com	1480	48.1	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB	16	999.0	MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Shadow 3X OC Graphics Card 16GB GDDR7 256-Bit Memory	Central Computers	1499.99	50.1	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB	16	999.0	MSI - NVIDIA GeForce GeForce RTX 5080 16G INSPIRE 3X OC 16GB GDDR7 PCI Express Gen 5 Graphics Card	Best Buy	1749.99	75.2	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB	16	999.0	MSI RTX 5080 16G VENTUS 3X OC	Best Buy	1789.99	79.2	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB	16	999.0	ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 16GB GDDR7 White OC Edition Graphics Card	Newegg.com	1929.99	93.2	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB	16	999.0	Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 5080 INFINITY 16G Graphics Card	Best Buy	2013.99	101.6	discovery_only
2026-09-14	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 32GB	32	1999.0	ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 5090 32GB GDDR7 OC Edition	Central Computers	4699.99	135.1	discovery_only
2026-09-14	AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB	16	549.0	ASRock 16GB Radeon RX 9070 Challenger GDDR6 Graphics Card	Newegg.com	649.99	18.4	discovery_only
2026-09-14	AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB	16	549.0	Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 GAMING OC 16GB Graphics Card	Newegg.com	699.99	27.5	discovery_only
2026-09-14	AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB	16	549.0	XFX AMD Radeon RX 9070 Swift Overclocked Triple Fan 16GB GDDR6 PCIe 4.0 Graphics Card	Best Buy	709.99	29.3	discovery_only
2026-09-14	AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB	16	599.0	Yeston Sakura Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB GDDR6 PCI Express 5.0 x16 Graphics Card RX9070XT	Newegg.com	799	33.4	discovery_only
2026-09-14	AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB	16	599.0	ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition 16GB GDDR6 Graphics Card	Newegg.com	819.99	36.9	discovery_only
2026-09-14	AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB	16	599.0	XFX Quicksilver AMD Radeon RX 9070XT White Gaming Edition with 16GB GDDR6	Best Buy	899.99	50.2	discovery_only
2026-09-14	AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB	16	599.0	XFX Mercury AMD Radeon RX 9070XT OC Magnetic Air Edition with RGB 16GB GDDR6	Best Buy	909.99	51.9	discovery_only
2026-09-26	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB	16	999.0	MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Video Card RTX 5080 16G VENTUS 3X OC BLACK	Newegg	1679.99	68.2	discovery_only
2026-09-26	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB	16	749.0	MSI FRIEREN EDITION GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Video Card RTX 5070 Ti 16G FRIEREN EDITION OC	Newegg	1149.99	53.5	discovery_only
2026-09-26	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 12GB	12	549.0	MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 5070 Graphics Card RTX 5070 12G GAMING TRIO OC	Newegg	869.99	58.5	discovery_only
2026-09-26	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB	16	429.0	MSI SHADOW GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Graphics Card RTX 5060 Ti 16G SHADOW 2X OC PLUS	Newegg	779.99	81.8	discovery_only
2026-09-26	AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB	16	599.0	ASRock Steel Legend Radeon RX 9070 XT Graphics Card RX9070XT SL 16G	Newegg	819.99	36.9	discovery_only
2026-09-26	AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB	16	549.0	ASRock Challenger Radeon RX 9070 Graphics Card RX9070 CL 16G	Newegg	649.99	18.4	discovery_only
2026-09-26	AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB	16	349.0	PowerColor Reaper Radeon RX 9060 XT Video Card RX9060XT 16G-A	Newegg	499.99	43.3	discovery_only
2026-09-28	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB	16	999.0	MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Video Card RTX 5080 16G VENTUS 3X OC BLACK	Newegg	1679.99	68.2	discovery_only
2026-09-28	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB	16	749.0	MSI FRIEREN EDITION GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Video Card RTX 5070 Ti 16G FRIEREN EDITION OC	Newegg	1149.99	53.5	discovery_only
2026-09-28	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 12GB	12	549.0	MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 5070 Graphics Card RTX 5070 12G GAMING TRIO OC	Newegg	869.99	58.5	discovery_only
2026-09-28	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB	16	429.0	MSI SHADOW GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Graphics Card RTX 5060 Ti 16G SHADOW 2X OC PLUS	Newegg	779.99	81.8	discovery_only
2026-09-28	AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB	16	599.0	PowerColor Reaper Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB GDDR6 PCI Express 5.0 x16 RDNA 4 ATX Graphics Card RX9070XT 16G-A	Newegg	799.99	33.6	discovery_only
2026-09-28	AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB	16	549.0	ASRock Challenger Radeon RX 9070 Graphics Card RX9070 CL 16G	Newegg	649.99	18.4	discovery_only
2026-09-28	AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB	16	349.0	PowerColor Reaper Radeon RX 9060 XT Video Card RX9060XT 16G-A	Newegg	499.99	43.3	discovery_only
2026-09-29	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB	16	999.0	MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 5080 Graphics Card RTX 5080 16G VENTUS 3X OC WHITE	Newegg	1679.99	68.2	discovery_only
2026-09-29	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB	16	749.0	MSI FRIEREN EDITION GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Video Card RTX 5070 Ti 16G FRIEREN EDITION OC	Newegg	1149.99	53.5	discovery_only
2026-09-29	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 12GB	12	549.0	MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 5070 Graphics Card RTX 5070 12G GAMING TRIO OC	Newegg	869.99	58.5	discovery_only
2026-09-29	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB	16	429.0	MSI SHADOW GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Graphics Card RTX 5060 Ti 16G SHADOW 2X OC PLUS	Newegg	779.99	81.8	discovery_only
2026-09-29	AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB	16	599.0	PowerColor Reaper Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB GDDR6 PCI Express 5.0 x16 RDNA 4 ATX Graphics Card RX9070XT 16G-A	Newegg	799.99	33.6	discovery_only
2026-09-29	AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB	16	549.0	ASRock Challenger Radeon RX 9070 Graphics Card RX9070 CL 16G	Newegg	649.99	18.4	discovery_only
2026-09-29	AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB	16	349.0	PowerColor Reaper Radeon RX 9060 XT Video Card RX9060XT 16G-A	Newegg	499.99	43.3	discovery_only

Rendered at build time from the raw CSV — the table and the download can never disagree.

Method, exactly

The current method, first used on September 26, queries each tracked card on Newegg and confirms the selected sold-by-Newegg item on its pinned product page. The row comes from ItemDetail: FinalPrice less a real shipping charge, seller, stock, new/refurbished/open-box flags and fetch time. Marketplace, used, refurbished, open-box, out-of-stock, wrong-model, non-card and out-of-band rows are rejected. Stock and the mechanical title match are not independently verified.

The archived captures used Google Shopping (US, English) via DataForSEO’s merchant API. That collection route is retired. The historical method used one exact-model query per tracked card. Under that historical method, an offer qualified only if the seller matches a named direct-retailer allowlist (Best Buy, Newegg, B&H, Micro Center, Adorama, Walmart first-party, and peers — marketplace suffixes excluded), the title names the exact model and states its VRAM, the listing is a single discrete card rather than a laptop, prebuilt, external enclosure, bundle, or multi-product package, condition is new (not used, refurbished, recertified, or open-box), and the USD price sits between 0.5x and 3.0x the card’s MSRP. Each accepted row records its premium or discount to MSRP to one decimal.

The tracked cards: RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti, 5070 and 5060 Ti 16GB, and RX 9070 XT, 9070 and 9060 XT 16GB. Their MSRPs were verified against NVIDIA and AMD press releases on 2026-09-05; the verbatim passages are in the basket file in the site’s repository, alongside the collector, its tests, and every capture’s raw response.

The index metric (median cheapest premium across cards) activates at six of eight qualifying cards on the same day. Below that, the observations still publish; the index row does not.

Use the data (CC BY 4.0)

Download every observation: gpu-price-observations.csv — one row per qualifying offer with capture date, card, MSRP, street price, premium, seller and verification status. When at least six of eight cards qualify, that day’s row is added to gpu-price-index.csv. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — attribute as “TechFuelHQ GPU Price Index” linking to this page.

Choosing between these cards? The GPU comparison tool holds the specs, and the GPU reviews hold the measured results. The sibling DDR5 RAM price index uses the same collector and the same gate.

Change log

0.9.1 (2026-09-15) — correction to the September 14 capture, with no new capture taken. Eight rows that break the rules on this page were removed from gpu-price-observations.csv. Five were “Recertified - PNY” cards at Newegg (RTX 5060 Ti $739.99, RTX 5070 $800.99, RTX 5070 Ti $1,119.99, and two RTX 5080 listings at $1,599.99). The other three were the Gigabyte RTX 5060 Ti AORUS AI BOX external enclosure ($899.99, Newegg), a Best Buy package pairing an ASUS RTX 5070 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD ($1,289.98), and a Newegg listing pairing a ZOTAC RTX 5070 Ti with an ASRock 750W power supply ($1,374.98). The collector’s condition rule did not recognize “recertified”, and its card rule did not recognize “External Graphics”, Best Buy’s “Package” listings, or a power supply in the title. I fixed both rules, added regression tests built from these listings, and re-ran the rules over the stored response. Eligible offers for the day fall from 32 to 24, and 7 of 8 cards still qualify. The 2026-09-14 row in gpu-price-index.csv is restated in place. Its median premium moves from +48.1% to +53.5% and its median cheapest price from $800.99 to $869.99; the minimum and maximum are unchanged. The method name stays gpu-street-price-discovery-v1 because this page already excluded these listings and the collector had not enforced that. Until this entry, the FAQ answer saying refurbished listings are rejected was false for that capture.
0.9.0 (2026-09-14) — pilot publication and first live capture. The collector and its tests predate this page (2026-09-05); the page ships the day the daily runner first exercised them against the live API.

NVMe SSD Price Index: Dated $/TB for 2TB Drives at Newegg (Pilot)

LK Wood IV — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-14 · ~4 min read · St. Louis County, MO

The short version

NAND pricing turned upward through 2026 alongside DRAM, and the $/TB figures that circulate are mostly undated deal posts. This page is a dated, checkable record: the cheapest qualifying price for twelve 2TB NVMe drives sold by Newegg itself, with the method, the acceptance rules, every rejection reason and the raw data published beside the numbers. Rows dated before September 26, 2026 came from a list of named direct US retailers.

It is labeled a pilot because the index metric has an activation gate, and the gate status is printed here verbatim rather than worked around.

Latest capture

Collection status: Captures since September 26, 2026 read Newegg directly. While fewer than six of the twelve tracked drives qualify, the gate stays closed and no index row is written. The basket grew from eight drives to twelve on September 28, 2026, so a capture made before that change counts against eight. The block below names the latest capture; check Newegg for current price and stock.

Latest capture, September 29, 2026 (UTC), method ssd-usd-per-tb-newegg-direct-v3: 73 listings reviewed, 12 eligible offers, 12 of 12 tracked drives qualified; the index metric activates at 6, so the gate is open and a series row was written for this date. Every row carries verification_status: discovery_only and publish_ready is False: stock is the retailer page’s own flag at fetch time; exact variant matching is mechanical by title, not confirmed by a person.

Cheapest qualifying offer: $279.99 at Newegg (WD Blue SN5100 2TB, 140 $/TB).

Line	Cheapest qualifying offer	$/TB	Retailer
WD Blue SN5100 2TB	$279.99	140	Newegg
Crucial P310 2TB	$299.99	150	Newegg
WD_BLACK SN7100 2TB	$319.99	160	Newegg
TEAMGROUP T-FORCE G50 2TB	$324.99	162.5	Newegg
TEAMGROUP MP44 2TB	$325.99	163	Newegg
TEAMGROUP T-FORCE CARDEA A440 2TB	$351.99	176	Newegg
Samsung 990 EVO Plus 2TB	$369.99	185	Newegg
Samsung 990 PRO 2TB	$389.99	195	Newegg
Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB	$399.99	200	Newegg
Kingston NV3 2TB	$411.99	206	Newegg
WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB	$429.99	215	Newegg
Kingston KC3000 2TB	$499.99	250	Newegg

This block is rewritten by the capture script on every run; the dated commentary below it is not.

Every qualifying observation

Capture Date Utc	Product Label	Title	Seller	Price Usd	Usd per Tb	Verification Status
2026-09-14	Samsung 990 PRO 2TB	Samsung 990 PRO 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 Internal SSD with Heatsink	Adorama	672.98	336.49	discovery_only
2026-09-26	Samsung 990 PRO 2TB	SAMSUNG 990 PRO 2TB SSD, PCIe Gen4 M.2 2280, Seq. Read Speeds Up-to 7,450MB/s for High End Computing, Gaming, and Heavy Duty Workstations (MZ-V9P2T0B/AM) Non-Heatsink	Newegg	389.99	195.0	discovery_only
2026-09-26	WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB	WD_BLACK 2TB SN850X NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Solid State Drive - Gen4 PCIe, M.2 2280, Up to 7,300 MB/s - WDS200T2X0E	Newegg	429.99	215.0	discovery_only
2026-09-28	Samsung 990 PRO 2TB	SAMSUNG 990 PRO 2TB SSD, PCIe Gen4 M.2 2280, Seq. Read Speeds Up-to 7,450MB/s for High End Computing, Gaming, and Heavy Duty Workstations (MZ-V9P2T0B/AM) Non-Heatsink	Newegg	389.99	195.0	discovery_only
2026-09-28	WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB	WD_BLACK 2TB SN850X NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Solid State Drive - Gen4 PCIe, M.2 2280, Up to 7,300 MB/s - WDS200T2X0E	Newegg	429.99	215.0	discovery_only
2026-09-29	Samsung 990 PRO 2TB	SAMSUNG 990 PRO 2TB SSD, PCIe Gen4 M.2 2280, Seq. Read Speeds Up-to 7,450MB/s for High End Computing, Gaming, and Heavy Duty Workstations (MZ-V9P2T0B/AM) Non-Heatsink	Newegg	389.99	195.0	discovery_only
2026-09-29	WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB	WD_BLACK 2TB SN850X NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Solid State Drive - Gen4 PCIe, M.2 2280, Up to 7,300 MB/s - WDS200T2X0E	Newegg	429.99	215.0	discovery_only
2026-09-29	Kingston KC3000 2TB	Kingston KC3000 M.2 2280 2TB PCI-Express 4.0 x4 3D TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SKC3000D/2048G	Newegg	499.99	250.0	discovery_only
2026-09-29	TEAMGROUP MP44 2TB	Team Group MP44 M.2 2280 2TB PCIe 4.0 x4 with NVMe TLC Laptop & Desktop & NUC & NAS, PS5 Compatible, Internal Solid State Drive (SSD), (R/W Speed up to 7,400/7,000MB/s) TM8FPW002T0C101	Newegg	325.99	163.0	discovery_only
2026-09-29	Samsung 990 EVO Plus 2TB	SAMSUNG 990 EVO PLUS SSD 2TB, PCIe Gen 4x4 \| Gen 5x2 M.2 2280, Speeds Up-to 7,250 MB/s, Upgrade Storage for PC/Laptops, HMB Technology and Intelligent Turbowrite 2.0 (MZ-V9S2T0B/AM)	Newegg	369.99	185.0	discovery_only
2026-09-29	WD_BLACK SN7100 2TB	WD_BLACK SN7100 M.2 2280 2TB PCI-Express 4.0 x4 TLC 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) WDS200T4X0E	Newegg	319.99	160.0	discovery_only
2026-09-29	TEAMGROUP T-FORCE CARDEA A440 2TB	Team Group T-FORCE CARDEA A440 M.2 2280 2TB PCIe Gen 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.4 TLC with Dram cache, PS5 Compatible, Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) TM8FPZ002T0C327	Newegg	351.99	176.0	discovery_only
2026-09-29	WD Blue SN5100 2TB	WD Blue SN5100 2TB NVMe SSD, PCIe Gen 4.0, up to 7,100 MB/s read speeds	Newegg	279.99	140.0	discovery_only
2026-09-29	Crucial P310 2TB	Crucial P310 2TB 2280 PCIe Gen4 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD - Up to 7,100 MB/s - Shift up to Gen4, with Acronis Offer, Internal Solid State Drive (PC)	Newegg	299.99	150.0	discovery_only
2026-09-29	Kingston NV3 2TB	Kingston NV3 M.2 2280 2TB PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SNV3S/2000G Up to 6000 MB/s	Newegg	411.99	206.0	discovery_only
2026-09-29	TEAMGROUP T-FORCE G50 2TB	Team Group T-FORCE G50 M.2 2280 2TB PCIe 4.0 x4 with NVMe 1.4 TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) TM8FFE002T0C129	Newegg	324.99	162.5	discovery_only
2026-09-29	Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB	SAMSUNG SSD 9100 PRO 2TB, PCIe 5.0x4 M.2 2280, Seq. Read Speeds Up to 14,700MB/s, Best for AI Computing, Gaming, and Heavy Duty Workstations (MZ-VAP2T0B/AM)	Newegg	399.99	200.0	discovery_only

Rendered at build time from the raw CSV — the table and the download can never disagree.

Method, exactly

The current method, first used on September 26, queries each tracked drive on Newegg and confirms the selected sold-by-Newegg item on its pinned product page. The row comes from ItemDetail: FinalPrice less a real shipping charge, seller, stock, new/refurbished/open-box flags and fetch time. Marketplace, refurbished, open-box, out-of-stock, wrong-model and out-of-band rows are rejected. Stock and the mechanical title match are not independently verified.

The basket changed on September 28, 2026. I track twelve 2TB M.2 2280 drives: Samsung 990 PRO, Samsung 990 EVO Plus, Samsung 9100 PRO, WD_BLACK SN850X, WD_BLACK SN7100, WD Blue SN5100, Kingston KC3000, Kingston NV3, Crucial P310, TEAMGROUP MP44, TEAMGROUP T-FORCE G50 and TEAMGROUP T-FORCE CARDEA A440. Ten are PCIe 4.0. The 990 EVO Plus runs at PCIe 4.0 x4 or 5.0 x2 (Samsung’s specification). The 9100 PRO is PCIe 5.0. I picked the earlier basket of eight for results across retailers. At Newegg alone, two of the eight qualified and the gate never opened.

Four drives left because Newegg itself does not sell them: Crucial T500, Lexar NM790, Solidigm P44 Pro and SK hynix Platinum P41. A search of Newegg’s own listings for each model name returned nothing that day.

Two drives this page showed with no Newegg listing were on sale from Newegg itself. The TEAMGROUP MP44 was in the September 26 and September 28 captures at $325.99, rejected because my title rule required “teamgroup” where the listing says “Team Group”. The Kingston KC3000 never came back from the search. My query named “NVMe”, a word its listing does not use. Both rules are fixed. Both drives stay, and queries now name the model and nothing else.

Eight drives joined, chosen from the 41 Newegg-sold 2TB M.2 2280 listings I found that day: two more Samsung lines, two more from WD, the Kingston NV3, the Crucial P310 and two TEAMGROUP T-FORCE drives. Each tracked drive is the bare M.2 2280 version. A heatsink version, another capacity, an M.2 2230 version or a sibling model such as the MP44Q is rejected by title. The method name moved to ssd-usd-per-tb-newegg-direct-v3 with the basket, so every series row says which basket produced it.

The archived captures used Google Shopping (US, English) via DataForSEO’s merchant API. That collection route is retired. The historical method used one exact-model query per tracked drive. Under that historical method, an offer qualified only if the seller matches a named direct-retailer allowlist (Best Buy, Newegg, B&H, Micro Center, Adorama, Walmart first-party, and peers — marketplace suffixes excluded), the title names the exact model line and the 2TB capacity and identifies an internal NVMe or M.2 drive, condition is new, and the USD price sits inside a sanity band. Dollars per terabyte is the price divided by two.

The index metric (median cheapest $/TB across drives) activates at six of twelve qualifying drives on the same day. Below that, the observations still publish; the index row does not. The minimum was six before the basket changed. I left it there.

Use the data (CC BY 4.0)

Download every observation: ssd-price-observations.csv — one row per qualifying offer with capture date, drive, price, $/TB, seller and verification status. When at least six of the twelve drives qualify, that day’s row is added to /data/ssd-price-index.csv. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — attribute as “TechFuelHQ NVMe SSD Price Index” linking to this page.

Sizing a drive for its write life? The SSD endurance calculator turns TBW into years. For hardware class rather than price, the SSD tier list tiers NVMe drives by PCIe generation, NAND type and cache, and it covers seven of the twelve tracked here. For why the prices look like this, the RAM and SSD price crisis explainer is this dataset’s narrative companion, and the DDR5 RAM price index is its sibling.

Change log

0.10.0 (2026-09-28) — basket re-baselined to drives Newegg sells itself. Twelve drives are tracked, up from eight; the six-drive minimum is unchanged; the method is ssd-usd-per-tb-newegg-direct-v3. Left: Crucial T500, Lexar NM790, Solidigm P44 Pro and SK hynix Platinum P41, none of which Newegg itself sells. Kept: Samsung 990 PRO and WD_BLACK SN850X, the two that qualified on September 26 and 28, and Kingston KC3000 and TEAMGROUP MP44, which Newegg sells and my query and title rule had missed. Joined: Samsung 990 EVO Plus, WD_BLACK SN7100, TEAMGROUP T-FORCE CARDEA A440, WD Blue SN5100, Crucial P310, Kingston NV3, TEAMGROUP T-FORCE G50 and Samsung 9100 PRO, the basket’s one PCIe 5.0 x4 drive. Rows already in the observations file are unchanged, and no index row existed to restate. This is the first entry since the source moved from Google Shopping results to Newegg’s own listings on September 26 (method ssd-usd-per-tb-newegg-direct-v2).
0.9.0 (2026-09-14) — pilot publication and first published capture. A single unpublished pilot capture from 2026-08-11 is retained in the evidence archive and is not part of the observations file.

How to Check CPU Temp in Windows 11 (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TL;DR · How to check CPU temp

Any Intel or AMD PC: Core Temp for a quick per-core number. HWiNFO, a free download, for several readings side by side.
A desktop Ryzen: AMD's Ryzen Master shows the current CPU temperature.
No software: the BIOS shows CPU temperature, but only while the PC sits in firmware. It is an idle number.
Which reading on AMD: I watch CPU (Tctl/Tdie). HWiNFO's author says the Die (average) value always runs somewhat lower.
GPU temperature: Task Manager's Performance tab shows it for a dedicated card. On NVIDIA, nvidia-smi prints it in one line.

Windows shows your graphics card’s temperature and hides your processor’s. How-To Geek’s long-running guide puts it flatly: “Neither Windows 10 nor Windows 11 has a built-in way to see your computer’s CPU temperature, so you’ll need a third-party program for this.”

I checked what my own desktop exposes, a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and RTX 5080 on Windows 11 Home 25H2. One command printed the GPU at 60 C. The two thermal sources Windows offers to scripts came back empty.

So the CPU number has to come from the firmware or from a tool that reads the chip’s sensors. This page covers the four routes that work and which reading to trust. It also covers two commands that came back empty on my desktop. Already have a number and want to know if it is too hot? The safe CPU temperature guide has the ranges by chip. If it is too hot, CPU overheating sorts out the cause by when it happens.

Which number to watch

Open a serious monitoring tool and you get several CPU temperatures. HWiNFO’s author explained why on his forum in June 2024, answering a 7800X3D owner who could not tell which to trust: “There are dozens of various temperature sensors inside the CPU (CCD or IOD) and each of those values takes a different set of sensors into account and uses a different evaluation formula.” He added that “AMD doesn’t fully disclose all details about the exact meaning.”

Two tools reading different sensors can disagree. That alone does not mean one is broken.

On a Ryzen, I watch CPU (Tctl/Tdie). The author labels Tctl the control temperature. HWiNFO shows that single CPU (Tctl/Tdie) line when the two values are the same. On a chip with an offset it lists Tctl and Tdie separately, and in 2018 he put a Ryzen 7 2700X’s gap at 10 C, with Tdie as the real temperature.
Expect CPU Die (average) to read lower. In the author’s words it “is the average value among multiple sensors during a certain period. So it will always be somewhat lower than the instant (max) value.”
On Intel, users on HWiNFO’s forum describe a CPU Package reading next to the per-core values.
Judge idle and load separately. A number means little until you know what the PC was doing.

Method 1: the BIOS, no software needed

Microsoft’s own route from Windows 11 starts in Settings. Select System, choose Recovery and select Restart now under Advanced startup. On the next screen select Troubleshoot. Choose Advanced options. Select UEFI Firmware Settings and choose Restart. The PC reboots straight into the firmware.

Where the temperature sits depends on the board maker. Check your manual. On ASUS boards that stop at boot with a CPU Over Temperature Error, the company’s support page tells owners to “Press [F1] to enter into BIOS Setup EZ Mode,” where the current CPU temperature is shown in EZ Mode, in red when it is too high. How-To Geek’s Windows 11 guide says you “might find your CPU’s current temperature next to the ‘CPU Core Temperature’ or a similar option.”

The catch is what the PC is doing at that moment. Nothing.

The same guide notes that “this method shows your CPU temp when Windows 11 isn’t loaded,” so it is good for spotting a cooler that is not mounted and useless for judging how the chip runs in a game.

Method 2: Ryzen Master on an AMD CPU

AMD’s own utility is the first thing I would open on a desktop Ryzen. AMD’s user guide lists desktop processors on the AM4 and AM5 sockets, plus SP6. AMD describes it as offering “real-time monitoring of per-core clock rates, temperature and voltages including average and peak readings,” and says that for the CPU “you can monitor individual CCDs.” The current download covers Ryzen 5000 processors and later, with separate builds for older generations. I have Ryzen Master 3.1.0.5185 installed on my desktop.

Read it while the load is still running.

A CPU’s temperature falls quickly once a load stops, as the Reddit example further down shows. AMD’s user guide defines the CPU Temperature gauge as the current processor temperature, so after twenty minutes of play the number you see when you alt-tab out has already started to fall. Keep the window on a second screen while the game runs.

Method 3: Core Temp, the quick check

Core Temp does one job. Its maker calls it “a compact, no fuss, small footprint, yet powerful program to monitor processor temperature and other vital information,” and says it is “capable of displaying a temperature of each individual core of every processor in your system.” It reads the processor’s digital thermal sensor, which the site says “provides more accurate and higher resolution temperature readings than conventional onboard thermal sensors.” It supports both Intel and AMD processors. The current release is 1.20.1, dated May 2, 2026.

Method 4: HWiNFO, every reading at once

HWiNFO is what I would use to settle an argument between two tools. It lists the instant and averaged CPU readings side by side. Its site offers it as a free download and describes it as “Comprehensive Hardware Analysis, Monitoring and Reporting for Windows and DOS.” On a Ryzen whose Tctl and Tdie match, CPU (Tctl/Tdie) and CPU Die (average) sit together in its sensor readings. The gap between them is the averaging the author described. I have not installed HWiNFO or Core Temp on this desktop, so the details for both come from their makers and from the HWiNFO author’s forum answers.

GPU temperature: Task Manager and nvidia-smi

Task Manager does show one temperature. Microsoft added it in August 2019: “If you have a dedicated GPU card, we will now bubble up the current temperature next to its listing in the Performance Tab.” It needs a graphics driver “which supports version 2.4 (or higher) of WDDM.” To check yours, Microsoft says to “press WIN+R and enter dxdiag. Under the Display tab, it will say your WDDM version next to Driver Model.” The value is shown in Celsius only.

On an NVIDIA card the driver’s own tool is faster. I ran this in a terminal:

nvidia-smi --query-gpu=name,driver_version,temperature.gpu,utilization.gpu,power.draw --format=csv

It printed my RTX 5080 at 60 C on driver 616.56, at 99 percent utilization and 350.20 W.

If your card runs far hotter under a similar load, the GPU overheating guide is the next stop.

The commands that came back empty on my desktop

Search results still hand out a PowerShell or Command Prompt query of MSAcpi_ThermalZoneTemperature as the no-download answer. On the day I checked, Bing’s answer box told readers to run the Command Prompt version as administrator. On my desktop the PowerShell version, run without administrator rights, answered “Not supported.” Windows’ own Thermal Zone Information performance counter did no better: “The specified instance is not present.” I did not run either one elevated. I would not send anyone down that route when the four above work.

Check that the reading is real

A real CPU temperature moves. It drops within seconds of the PC going idle and climbs as soon as a load starts. A poster on r/techsupport shared exactly that shape this month, reading a Ryzen 7 5800X on a 240 mm AIO: 34.1 C doing nothing, 60 C when Firefox opened before it “quickly returns to 35,” and 83.2 C during a game. Does your number barely change whatever you do? Then you are probably watching the wrong sensor.

Then compare the load number with your chip’s limit. On my 7800X3D that ceiling is about 89 C, lower than most Ryzen chips. The safe temperature guide lists the rest. If the peak climbs toward the limit on a light load, old paste is a common culprit, and the CPU overheating guide covers the repaste. On an X3D chip already near its limit, the 9800X3D undervolt guide can buy back a few degrees on its efficiency path, though the guide says neither result is guaranteed on your chip.

Sources

RTX 5060 Ti vs RTX 5070 (2026): 31% Faster, 4GB Less

LK Wood IV — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TL;DR · RTX 5060 Ti vs RTX 5070

Speed: the RTX 5070 is 31% faster at 1440p in Tom's Hardware's June 2026 hierarchy, and ComputerBase measured 36% in 2025.
Memory: 16GB on the 5060 Ti against 12GB on the 5070. That decides path-traced Indiana Jones and which local AI models fit on the card.
Price on September 13, 2026: the cheapest new listings I found at Newegg were $779.99 and $819.99. Each 1440p frame costs 20% less on the 5070.
Power: 180 W against 250 W, with NVIDIA recommending a 600 W or 650 W system supply.
Already own a 16GB 5060 Ti? I would keep it.

I owned an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB but have not benchmarked it or an RTX 5070, so every benchmark here is Tom's Hardware's, ComputerBase's, PCGamesN's or TechSpot's, named where it appears. Prices are Newegg listings as I read them on September 13, 2026.

Why I would buy the 5070 in September 2026

NVIDIA put these cards $120 apart at launch, $429 for the 16GB RTX 5060 Ti and $549 for the RTX 5070, and when Jarred Walton compared them for Tom’s Hardware in April 2025 the price gap and the speed gap came out about even. That was a fair fight.

It is not one now.

Both cards got more expensive over the summer of 2026, and not by the same amount. When I checked Newegg on September 13, sorted by lowest price, the cheapest new 5060 Ti 16GB was $779.99 and the cheapest new RTX 5070 was $819.99, so forty dollars now separates a card from one that is about 30% faster.

That gap is small. The case for the 5060 Ti comes down to its extra 4GB of memory, so most of this page is about when that 4GB is worth more than the speed.

Specs and prices side by side

	RTX 5060 Ti 16GB	RTX 5070
GPU	GB206	GB205
CUDA cores	4,608	6,144
VRAM	16GB GDDR7	12GB GDDR7
Memory bus	128-bit	192-bit
Memory bandwidth	448 GB/s	672 GB/s
PCIe link	5.0 x8	5.0 x16
Total graphics power	180 W	250 W
NVIDIA’s recommended system power	600 W	650 W
Launch price	$429 (April 2025)	$549 (March 2025)
Newegg median, August 2026	$804.99	$899.99
Lowest new listing I found at Newegg, September 13, 2026	$779.99	$819.99

The core, memory and power rows come from NVIDIA’s spec pages, and the launch prices from NVIDIA’s announcements. The GPU and bandwidth rows and the launch months come from Tom’s Hardware’s comparison, the PCIe row from TechSpot and the cards’ Newegg listings, and the August medians from the table in Tom’s Hardware’s price survey.

The 5070 has a third more CUDA cores and half again the memory bandwidth, while the 5060 Ti answers with 4GB more memory on a narrower bus, connected through half as many PCIe lanes. It also draws less power.

How much faster the RTX 5070 is

Tom’s Hardware’s GPU hierarchy, last updated June 24, 2026, runs both cards on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D at ultra settings. I took its average frame rates and worked out the lead.

Test, ultra settings	RTX 5060 Ti 16GB	RTX 5070	5070 lead
1080p	105.2 fps	132.6 fps	26%
1440p	73.4 fps	96.4 fps	31%
4K	40.2 fps	54.3 fps	35%
1080p ray tracing	56.2 fps	74.1 fps	32%
1440p ray tracing	38.9 fps	51.5 fps	32%
4K ray tracing	20.6 fps	22.7 fps	10%

Two older tests land in the same place. Walton’s 21-game comparison from April 2025 put the 5070 31% ahead at 1440p and 32% ahead at 4K. ComputerBase measured 74.8 fps against 55.0 at 1440p that same month, a 36% lead, and 30% with ray tracing on.

The lead narrows at 1080p, where Walton found both cards running into CPU limits, and he saw it fall to 24% at 1080p medium settings. Now look at the last row. At 4K with ray tracing the 5070 is only 10% ahead, which I suspect is its 12GB filling up, though an average cannot show that, and Walton’s 2025 test had one ray-traced game hitting that limit at 4K ultra.

Commenters land in the same range. In an r/buildapc thread on this question, the top answers put it between 25% and 40%. The 2026 GPU hierarchy shows where both cards sit against everything else.

Where 16GB wins

Extra memory does nothing for a game that fits in 12GB, and in Walton’s 21-game suite from 2025 no game fell short at 1440p and only one did at 4K.

That one was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, where the 5060 Ti finished 5% ahead of the 5070 at 4K ultra. In a separate test, PCGamesN’s Ben Hardwidge pushed the same game to its Supreme preset with full path tracing at 1080p. The 5070 averaged 5 fps.

The 16GB 5060 Ti started from 40 fps, and Hardwidge put the 5070’s collapse down to its 12GB of VRAM. He still judged 40 fps too low for frame generation to smooth out without obvious input lag, so the 16GB card wins that test without making it pleasant.

Local AI is the other case. On my RTX 5080, which also carries 16GB, nvidia-smi showed 13.1 to 14.0 GiB of the card’s memory in use across two captures with gpt-oss 20B loaded in Ollama. That reading is above a 5070’s 12GB.

Qwen 2.5 14B at Q4_K_M read 10.6 GiB at a 4,096-token context and 12.8 GiB at 16,384 tokens, already past 12GB. All of these are whole-card readings, and the dataset treats such readings as an upper bound because Ollama can keep an earlier model loaded, so they overstate what each model needs on its own.

They come from my RTX 5080 LLM dataset. A 5060 Ti 16GB runs gpt-oss 20B in MXFP4, and the benchmark table in llama.cpp’s gpt-oss guide discussion lists it at 111.51 tokens a second in llama.cpp’s short generation test, a different benchmark from the MLPerf figure below.

Where the model fits both cards, the 5070 has been faster. Tom’s Hardware measured 111.7 tokens a second against 84.2 in MLPerf Client’s text generation test, a 33% lead.

So I pick by the model and its context. If the whole footprint, buffers included, sits comfortably under 12GB, buy the 5070. If it runs between 12 and 16GB, the 5060 Ti has room the 5070 does not. The local LLM by VRAM guide lists which models land in each tier.

PCIe x8, power and features

The 5060 Ti uses eight PCIe lanes and the 5070 uses sixteen, and TechSpot’s Steven Walton tested what the x8 link costs on older boards and found the PCIe mode has little effect while a game stays within the card’s memory.

His 16GB card on PCIe 3.0 averaged 66 fps in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, where the 8GB model managed 27. TechSpot only ran the 16GB card on PCIe 3.0, and it ran well there. The link is a real problem for the 8GB version on a PCIe 4.0 or 3.0 board.

The 5070 draws more power. NVIDIA rates it at 250 W of total graphics power against 180 W and recommends a 650 W system supply, 50 W more than for the 5060 Ti. If your power supply sits near either number, the PSU wattage calculator will tell you whether the rest of your parts leave room.

Features match. NVIDIA lists DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation on both cards.

The price math

Walton ended his April 2025 comparison with a rule for gamers, that the 5070 was worth paying up to 30% more than the 5060 Ti 16GB, and he argued for as much as 40%.

At launch prices the 5070 cost 28% more. At Newegg’s August 2026 medians it cost 12% more. At the cheapest new listings I found on September 13, the difference was 5%.

By that rule, it is not close. Using Tom’s Hardware’s 1440p averages, each frame cost $10.63 on the cheapest new 5060 Ti and $8.51 on the cheapest new 5070. That is 20% less per frame. The hierarchy page is blunt about the smaller card, calling the 5060 Ti 16GB “hopelessly overpriced for the performance it offers in mid-2026.”

Check both prices before you buy. If the gap widens past Walton’s 30 to 40%, the 5060 Ti starts to make sense.

Upgrading from a 5060 Ti to a 5070

I owned a 16GB 5060 Ti. If you own one, I would keep it. The 5070 is about 31% faster at 1440p, but $819.99 is a lot to pay for one tier, and you give up 4GB of memory you may already be using. I would save for a bigger jump.

The 8GB 5060 Ti is a different story. TechSpot measured it falling apart once games ran past its memory, and in Dragon Age: The Veilguard it stayed unplayable even on PCIe 5.0. Its 8GB was the problem. Moving from that card to either of these is a real upgrade.

Who should buy neither

If you only game and your budget sits nearer the 5060 Ti’s price, AMD’s 16GB RX 9060 XT had a median Newegg price of $474.99 in Tom’s Hardware’s August survey. It is far cheaper. The RTX 5060 Ti vs RX 9060 XT comparison covers that trade in detail. AMD’s 16GB answer to the 5070 is the RX 9070.

If 12GB worries you and the budget stretches, look one step up. The RTX 5070 Ti has 16GB, and its August median held at $1,099.99. The RTX 5070 vs RTX 5070 Ti page covers whether that premium pays.

Sources

Steam Not Opening on Windows 11: Fixes in Order (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TL;DR · Steam not opening

Nothing appears: save and quit any game, end every steam.exe and steamwebhelper.exe in Task Manager, start Steam again, then restart the PC if that fails.
Still nothing: unplug controllers and other extra input devices. Valve lists it, and five replies in one Steam Community thread said it worked.
"steamwebhelper is not responding": use the dialog's option to restart with GPU acceleration disabled.
Stuck connecting or signing in: try a phone hotspot. If Steam signs in there, look at your home network, router or provider before reinstalling.
Last resort: run the Steam installer over the same folder. Valve says uninstalling any other way deletes game and userdata content.

Steps come from Valve's support articles and the threads named below. Steam was running on my desktop, so I read its files and processes for this page and did not break it on purpose.

Steam failing to open usually looks like nothing at all, because you click the icon, the cursor spins for a moment and no window ever arrives. In three of the threads I cite below, Steam was already running in Task Manager with no window to show.

That shape has a cheap fix, so it comes first, and the order after it is mine, built from Valve’s support articles and the forum threads that add what those articles leave out.

Which symptom you have

What you see	A likely cause	Start with
You click Steam and nothing appears, but steam.exe or steamwebhelper.exe is in Task Manager	A process left over from an earlier start	Fixes 1, 2 and 3
A dialog says steamwebhelper “is not responding”	The built-in browser that draws Steam’s window is slow or blocked	Fix 4
The window opens, but the store and library panes stay black	The web view layer, not your account	Fix 4, then Fix 7
Steam starts, then hangs updating or will not connect or sign in	The update and login step, blocked by the network or security software	Fixes 5 and 6
Steam opens fine and a game is what will not start	The game, not the client	Outside this page
A game update stops with “Content File Locked”	A file lock during the update	Steam content file locked
The PC runs Windows 7, 8, 8.1 or a 32-bit Windows	A system Steam no longer supports	The Windows section below

The fixes, in the order I would run them

1. End every Steam process, then start it again

Valve’s first instruction is to restart Steam as well as the computer. The catch is that closing the window does not close Steam. That detail matters for this fix. On my desktop, a running Steam is one steam.exe and eight steamwebhelper.exe processes, plus a Windows service called Steam Client Service, and my reading of the threads below is that a copy stuck from an earlier start can sit there with no window while new clicks do nothing.

Open Task Manager with Ctrl+Shift+Esc, find every Steam entry, including the web helper processes, and end each one. The command-line version is two lines in Command Prompt:

taskkill /f /t /im steam.exe
taskkill /f /im steamwebhelper.exe

Microsoft’s reference for taskkill says /f forces the process to end and /t also ends the child processes it started, which can include a game Steam launched, so save and quit any game before you run it. The second line catches any helper left behind.

Discord fails in the same way, which is why ending every process is also the first step on the Discord not opening page. A Steam Community thread from January 2025, titled “Steam Won’t Open – Only Shows in Task Manager,” is this exact symptom, with 26 comments, and it is also where the controller fix in Fix 3 comes from.

The proof it worked is an empty Task Manager list before you relaunch, followed by a window. If it fails, move to Fix 2.

2. Restart the PC

This sounds too simple to list, and Valve lists it anyway. Its reasoning is specific. A restart flushes system states and caches and releases locks on files and other resources.

Restart, then start Steam before opening anything else.

3. Unplug controllers and other input devices

Valve’s advanced list says external input devices need their own drivers, that those drivers can interfere with Steam, and that you should unplug every non-essential input device.

People dismiss this one, and the January 2025 thread shows why they should not. Five separate replies said unplugging a controller let Steam open, and others in the same thread blamed a recent Steam client update. One poster admitted to reading the suggestion and thinking it was nonsense.

Then they unplugged the controller and restarted the PC, and Steam opened. Another said a third-party Switch controller had been the cause. Another blamed NACON controllers for stalling game launches as well as Steam’s starts and shutdowns.

Unplug any gamepad, wheel, flight stick or drawing tablet and restart before trying again. Plug them back in one at a time once Steam is up, so you know which one was at fault.

4. The steamwebhelper dialog, and a window that stays black

Steam’s window is drawn by an embedded web browser, steamwebhelper.exe, which on my install lives in a folder named bin\cef\cef.win7x64. When it is slow, Steam shows a dialog saying steamwebhelper is not responding, and Valve’s article on that dialog explains each option it offers.

Restart Steam comes first, and Valve says that frequently resolves it, while the second option restarts Steam with GPU acceleration disabled, because some video drivers have trouble rendering Steam’s content with it on. If that works, Valve suggests updating your graphics driver, and the GPU driver crash guide covers a clean reinstall.

Leave acceleration off for good in Steam, Settings, Interface only if the problem survives new drivers, since Valve warns that will affect interface performance. The third option points at security software that interferes with the helper’s sandbox, which is Fix 5. The last restarts only steamwebhelper, the rendering part of Steam.

One r/Steam commenter wrote on August 23, 2026 that their dialog offered to restart Steam with browser sandboxing disabled, and that choosing it worked. Valve’s article describes that sandbox as the webhelper’s security sandboxing, so treat the option as a one-time test and go back to a normal Steam start once you have your answer.

If you never get a window to reach those settings, there is a command-line route. In February 2024, a Valve employee answering a Steam Client Beta thread about windows that would not appear first pointed the poster to a newer beta build and, if that did not work, asked them to try launching Steam with -cef-disable-gpu or with -system-composer. Press Win+R and run:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steam.exe" -cef-disable-gpu

That thread’s poster was fixed by a newer beta build rather than by either switch. Treat both as tests.

5. Security software and VPNs

Valve keeps a separate article on programs that interfere with Steam. Anti-virus hooks deep into disk and network operations, VPN software can stop the Steam client reaching the Steam network, and firewalls can block Steam from talking to its servers. Its advice is to add exceptions for Steam and, for testing, to disable the program temporarily and restart Steam.

One recent report fits that advice. On September 1, 2026, a commenter in an r/Steam thread about Steam opening only as a background process wrote that turning off Windows Defender’s real-time protection once let Steam start, after six hours of other fixes.

That is one person’s result, and Valve’s own steamwebhelper article is the reason it is plausible, since it names security software breaking the helper’s sandbox. If you test it, turn real-time protection back on right after the test, whether Steam opened or not. Do not leave it off.

6. Stuck connecting or signing in: try another network

Steam checks for updates and signs you in as it starts, and Valve says network hardware left running for a long time can get into a broken state that makes that update and login process fail silently or crash. Its fixes are to restart your modem and router and to test on an entirely different network, ideally from a different provider.

A thread on r/steamsupport this month shows what that test looks like. The poster’s PC was on a wired connection where Valorant and websites worked fine, yet Steam would not connect or sign in. A reinstall helped for one day. Then a second user described the same problem with one detail: Steam refused to sign in on home Wi-Fi and signed in fine over a phone’s mobile data. The original poster tried it and got the same result.

Tether the PC to your phone and start Steam. If it signs in there, that points to your home network, your router or your provider. Try it before reinstalling.

7. Repair the Steam service, or clear the web cache

Two community fixes cover cases Valve’s articles do not name.

Steam installs a Windows service. On my desktop it is called Steam Client Service and runs from steamservice.exe under Common Files\Steam, and the Steam install also keeps a SteamService.exe in its bin folder. On August 24, 2026, a commenter in the same r/Steam background-process thread said this command fixed it on Windows 11:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\bin\SteamService.exe" /repair

Valve documents the same command in its VAC disconnection article, for a Steam service failure. Exit Steam first, run it from Win+R, and expect it to need administrator rights and a few minutes. If Steam lives somewhere else, swap in your own install path. Valve does not list it for a client that will not open, so that use rests on the commenter’s report.

The second fix is for a window that opens with black panes. In a 2021 Steam Community thread, a poster had already turned off hardware acceleration for web views and rebuilt the Steam folder without success. Two weeks later they reported that deleting the htmlcache folder fixed it. That folder is not inside the Steam install. On my PC it sits under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Steam, so press Win+R, type %localappdata%\Steam, and delete htmlcache with Steam fully closed (Fix 1).

Both are single reports, so run them after Fixes 1 to 6.

8. Reinstall Steam over the same folder

This is Valve’s second basic step. Download the installer from Steam’s site and install it to the location Steam already uses, which Valve says may fix issues with client and service files, while installing into the same location will preserve all installed games.

The warning sits right under it. Uninstalling Steam through any other method will delete all game and userdata content. So do not uninstall first. Run the installer on top.

The proof is Steam opening with your library still marked installed. Your games stay put.

Windows versions Steam no longer supports

Old Windows is a separate problem. Steam stopped supporting Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 on January 1, 2024, because core features rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome that no longer works on those systems. It stopped supporting 32-bit Windows on January 1, 2026.

Valve says existing installs on either will no longer receive updates of any kind, and it cannot promise they keep running. That includes security updates. Windows 10 64-bit is still supported. The client manifest on my desktop is labelled for win10.

The nuclear option and what it costs

When I searched on September 13, 2026, Google’s AI answer told readers to delete everything in the Steam folder except steamapps and Steam.exe. Valve’s troubleshooting article does not include that step.

It costs more than it looks. On my desktop the Steam folder also holds userdata, the folder Valve’s warning names beside your games. It did not save two posters I read who tried versions of it. The 2021 black-window poster rebuilt the folder that way and still had a black window, and a September 2026 r/steamsupport poster went further, deleting everything except Steam.exe and then uninstalling and reinstalling, and Steam still would not open.

Valve’s advanced steps, which it suggests working through with a local IT specialist, come before that. Check the drive for errors under This PC, the drive’s Properties, Tools, Error checking. Run Windows Memory Diagnostic with mdsched. Turn off any overclock in the BIOS, since Valve says overclocking can corrupt memory and files.

If Steam opens but a game will not download or start, Valve’s download cache clear is the tool, in Steam, Settings, Downloads. It keeps installed games and signs you out. It needs a working Steam window, so it is not a fix for this page’s problem. If the download runs but crawls, that is a different diagnosis again, and the Steam slow download speed guide starts by reading the byte plan Steam writes before each update.

What I checked on my own machine

Windows 11 Home, build 26200.9445, on September 13, 2026, with Steam installed and running from C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam. steam.exe, steamclient64.dll and bin\SteamService.exe all carry file version 10.96.30.42, dated September 2. The browser helper is at bin\cef\cef.win7x64\steamwebhelper.exe.

The win64 client manifest lists its OS type as win10. Task Manager showed one steam.exe and eight steamwebhelper.exe processes, and the Steam Client Service was running with a manual start type, while the htmlcache folder sat under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Steam rather than the install folder, which holds userdata alongside steamapps.

Steam was in use, so I did not end its processes, repair the service, delete a cache or reinstall it for this page, and the order above comes from Valve’s articles and the threads cited rather than from a failure I reproduced.