TechFuel HQ

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

Some retailer links below are affiliate links; if you buy through them TechFuel HQ may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Commissions never influence what gets recommended — see our disclosure.

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

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.

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:

Intel Processor N150 — Intel ARK: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241636/intel-processor-n150-6m-cache-up-to-3-60-ghz/specifications.html
Intel Processor N100 — Intel ARK: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/231803/intel-processor-n100-6m-cache-up-to-3-40-ghz/specifications.html
Intel Core 3 Processor N355 — Intel ARK: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241639/intel-core-3-processor-n355-6m-cache-up-to-3-90-ghz/specifications.html

Independent power measurement:

ServeTheHome, John Lee, 2025-09-21, CWWK Intel N150 4x SSD pocket NAS review: https://www.servethehome.com/cwwk-intel-n150-4x-ssd-pocket-nas-review/3/

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

CWWK S7 Pro: https://www.cwwk.com/products/mini-pc-firewall-cwwk-n150-mini-pc-firewall-2-port-10gbe-2-5gbe
Beelink ME mini: https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-me-mini-n150
GMKtec NucBox G3 Plus: https://www.gmktec.com/products/nucbox-g3-plus-enhanced-performance-mini-pc-with-intel-n150-processor
MINIX Z150-0dB: https://www.minix.com.hk/products/minix-z150-0db-fanless-mini-pc
ZimaBoard 2: https://shop.zimaspace.com/products/zimaboard2-single-board-server
MeLE Cyber X1: https://store.mele.cn/products/mele-cyber-x1-fanless-mini-pc-n150
Beelink EQ14: https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-eq14-n150
MINIX NUC150: https://www.minix.com.hk/products/minix-nuc150-mini-pc

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 exactly the things the sections above tell you to go and check yourself, and I am following my own instruction rather than guessing.

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.

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 2026-09-18 · ~10 min read · St. Louis County, MO

One retailer link below is an affiliate link; if you buy through it TechFuel HQ may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Commissions never influence what gets recommended — see our disclosure.

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.

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

Steam Support, Slow Downloads and Connection to Content Servers: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5AC5-8056-E88F-F3FF
Steam Support, Setting Client Rates (Limit Download Speed) in Steam: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/163C-7C89-406E-2F63
Steam Support, Programs Which May Interfere with Steam: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1F39-DCB4-FF28-5748
Steam Support, Troubleshooting Network Connectivity: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/669A-2F68-D1D1-A5EC
Steam Support, Clear download cache: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6AD7-820D-8BE5-E51F
Steam Support, Update & Installation Issues: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/21F5-8D5D-0141-7A5E
Steamworks Documentation, SteamPipe content system: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading
Steam Client Update Released, September 9, 2021: https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/88497
Steam Community, Speedtest 74.15 Mbp/s Steam download 9.1 Mbp/s (September 2026): https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/7/590688498095390453/
Steam Community, Steam downloading EXTREMELY slow (October 2024): https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/7413579240795244505/
Steam Community, Steam Slow Downloads (March 2021): https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/7/3084376689320298303/
Steam Community, Downloads from Steam are abysmally slow (December 2024): https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/591756872987536923/
Steam Community, Disk usage going up and down (January 2022): https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/3203748716332508733/
Steam Community, Steam Download rate stuck at 0 bytes/s (September 2013): https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/864979008818608129/
Arch Linux BBS, Downloading steam games too slow (March 2025): https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=304173
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux issue #10248, Http2 makes downloading speed slow: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/10248

GPU Price Index: Dated Street Price vs MSRP from Direct US Retailers (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

Latest capture, September 14, 2026 (UTC), method gpu-street-price-discovery-v1: 712 listings reviewed, 24 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 and exact variant are not confirmed at the retailer page.

Cheapest qualifying offer: $649.99 at Newegg.com (AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB, +18.4% vs MSRP).

Line	Cheapest qualifying offer	vs MSRP	Retailer
AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB	$649.99	+18.4%	Newegg.com
AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB	$799.00	+33.4%	Newegg.com
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB	$799.99	+86.5%	Newegg.com
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 12GB	$869.99	+58.5%	Best Buy
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB	$1,149.99	+53.5%	Newegg.com
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB	$1,480.00	+48.1%	Newegg.com
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 32GB	$4,699.99	+135.1%	Central Computers

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

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

Method, exactly

Captures run against Google Shopping (US, English) via DataForSEO’s merchant API, one exact-model query per tracked card. An offer qualifies 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. Once the gate opens, the daily series publishes at /data/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 from Direct US Retailers (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 eight mainstream 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives at named direct US retailers only, 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

Latest capture, September 14, 2026 (UTC), method ssd-usd-per-tb-discovery-v1: 164 listings reviewed, 1 eligible offer, 1 of 8 tracked drives qualified; the index metric activates at 6, so the gate is closed and no index row was written. Every row carries verification_status: discovery_only and publish_ready is False: stock and exact variant are not confirmed at the retailer page.

Cheapest qualifying offer: $672.98 at Adorama (Samsung 990 PRO 2TB, 336.49 $/TB).

Line	Cheapest qualifying offer	$/TB	Retailer
Samsung 990 PRO 2TB	$672.98	336.49	Adorama

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

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

Method, exactly

Captures run against Google Shopping (US, English) via DataForSEO’s merchant API, one exact-model query per tracked drive. An offer qualifies 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 eight qualifying drives 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: ssd-price-observations.csv — one row per qualifying offer with capture date, drive, price, $/TB, seller and verification status. Once the gate opens, the daily series publishes at /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 where each of these drives sits on hardware class rather than price, the SSD tier list tiers them by PCIe generation, NAND type and cache. 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

0.9.0 (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 thermal paste guide covers when to redo it. 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

How-To Geek, How to Monitor Your Computer’s CPU Temperature (Whitson Gordon and Chris Hoffman, updated January 31, 2022): https://www.howtogeek.com/1035/ever-wonder-what-temperature-your-cpu-is-running-at/
GeeksforGeeks, How to Check Your CPU Temperature on Windows 11 (updated February 2, 2026): https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/techtips/check-your-cpu-temperature-on-windows-11/
How-To Geek, How to Check Your CPU Temperature on Windows 11 (Mahesh Makvana, updated November 11, 2023): https://www.howtogeek.com/884911/how-to-check-your-cpu-temperature-on-windows-11/
Windows Insider Blog, Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18963 (August 16, 2019; GPU temperature in Task Manager): https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2019/08/16/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-18963/
Microsoft Support, Windows 11 and Secure Boot (steps to UEFI Firmware Settings): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-and-secure-boot-a8ff1202-c0d9-42f5-940f-843abef64fad
ASUS Support FAQ 1043819, CPU Over Temperature Error occurs after bootup (updated 2025-11-25): https://www.asus.com/support/faq/1043819/
AMD, Ryzen Master utility: https://www.amd.com/en/products/software/ryzen-master.html
Core Temp (ALCPU), version 1.20.1: https://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/
HWiNFO: https://www.hwinfo.com/
HWiNFO Forum, Is CPU Tctl value is still a Tdie value on Ryzen? (replies by the HWiNFO author, May 25, 2018): https://www.hwinfo.com/forum/threads/is-cpu-tctl-value-is-still-a-tdie-value-on-ryzen.4977/
AMD Ryzen Master User Guide 3.1.0, Gauges: https://docs.amd.com/r/en-US/68886-ryzen-master-user-guide/Gauges
AMD Ryzen Master User Guide 3.1.0, Supported Platforms: https://docs.amd.com/r/en-US/68886-ryzen-master-user-guide/Supported-Platforms
HWiNFO Forum, Tctl/Tdie vs Tdie (replies by the HWiNFO author, June 20, 2024): https://www.hwinfo.com/forum/threads/tctl-tdie-vs-tdie-which-should-i-be-referring-to.9808/
HWiNFO Forum, CPU Package Temperature Different For Intel DTS Sensor And Enhanced Sensor (September 1, 2023): https://www.hwinfo.com/forum/threads/cpu-package-temperature-different-for-intel-dts-sensor-and-enhanced-sensor.9140/
Reddit r/techsupport, Post-Build: My PC is giving off a lot of heat during gaming (September 2026): https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1wdmpm3/postbuild_my_pc_is_giving_off_a_lot_of_heat/

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, and the RTX 5070 vs RX 9070 page weighs it.

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

Tom’s Hardware, GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy 2026 (last updated June 24, 2026): https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
Tom’s Hardware, Nvidia RTX 5070 vs RTX 5060 Ti 16GB (Jarred Walton, April 21, 2025): https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/rtx-5070-vs-rtx-5060-ti-16gb
ComputerBase, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB im Test (Wolfgang Andermahr, April 16, 2025): https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5060-ti-16-gb-test.92119/seite-2
PCGamesN, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti review (Ben Hardwidge, updated June 4, 2025): https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/geforce-rtx-5060-ti-review
PCGamesN, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti benchmarks (Ben Hardwidge, April 16, 2025; test resolution for the Indiana Jones path-tracing result): https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/geforce-rtx-5060-ti-benchmarks
TechSpot, Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 8GB vs. 16GB Tested Across PCIe 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 (Steven Walton, June 28, 2025): https://www.techspot.com/review/3004-nvidia-rtx-5060-ti-pcie-benchmark/
Tom’s Hardware, GeForce RTX 50-series GPU prices spike as much as 39% (Jeffrey Kampman, August 10, 2026): https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/geforce-rtx-50-series-gpu-prices-spike-as-much-as-39-percent-as-blackwell-price-hikes-hit-the-us-rtx-5070-gets-a-36-percent-hike-rtx-5060-up-27-percent-at-the-median-of-newegg-listings
NVIDIA, GeForce RTX 5070 family specifications: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-series/rtx-5070-family/
NVIDIA, GeForce RTX 5060 family specifications: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-series/rtx-5060-family/
NVIDIA GeForce News, RTX 5060 Ti pricing (April 15, 2025): https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-5060-desktop-family-laptop-5060-coming-soon/
NVIDIA GeForce News, RTX 5070 pricing (January 6, 2025): https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-50-series-graphics-cards-gpu-laptop-announcements/
Newegg search results sorted by lowest price, read September 13, 2026: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=rtx+5060+ti+16gb&N=100007709&Order=1 and https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=rtx+5070&N=100007709&Order=1
llama.cpp discussion 15396, gpt-oss guide and benchmark table: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/15396
Reddit r/buildapc, Is a 5070 much better than a 5060 ti?: https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1p2psrc/is_a_5070_much_better_than_a_5060_ti/
TechFuel HQ, RTX 5080 LLM throughput dataset (my measurements): https://techfuelhq.com/data/rtx-5080-llm-throughput/

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	The games keep crashing 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.

Sources

Steam Support, Steam Client Troubleshooting: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/29A6-F529-F956-6292
Steam Support, Programs Which May Interfere with Steam: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1F39-DCB4-FF28-5748
Steam Support, Steamwebhelper is not responding: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6C3E-9504-CC20-AF49
Steam Support, Windows 7 and Windows 8 Support: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-800A
Steam Support, Windows 32-bit OS Support: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/49A1-B944-48B8-FF00
Steam Support, Clear download cache: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6AD7-820D-8BE5-E51F
Steam Support, Update & Installation Issues: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/21F5-8D5D-0141-7A5E
Steam Client Beta group, Steam UI not showing up after update (Valve employee reply, February 19, 2024): https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/3/7599331480040852944/
Steam Community, Steam Won’t Open, Only Shows in Task Manager (January 2025): https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/756141976595799629/
Steam Community, Steam interface is black (August 2021): https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/4939872515505045925/
Reddit r/Steam, Steam only opening as a background process (comments of August 24 and September 1, 2026): https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1p3ifrn/steam_only_opening_as_a_background_proccess/
Reddit r/Steam, [Fix] steamwebhelper.exe not responing (comment of August 23, 2026): https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/14fii53/fix_steamwebhelperexe_not_responing/
Reddit r/steamsupport, Steam won’t connect to the internet or log into my account (September 2026): https://www.reddit.com/r/steamsupport/comments/1wbouoq/steam_wont_connect_to_the_internet_or_log_into_my/
Reddit r/steamsupport, Steam and games wont open but they show up in task manager (September 2026): https://www.reddit.com/r/steamsupport/comments/1wat7fd/steam_and_games_wont_open_but_they_show_up_in/
Microsoft Learn, taskkill: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/taskkill
Steam Support, Disconnected by VAC: You cannot play on secure servers (Repair the Steam Service): https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/22C0-03D0-AE4B-04E8

Ultimate Performance Power Plan: What It Changes (2026)

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

TL;DR · Ultimate Performance power plan

Gaming PC: Balanced. It is the plan Power mode works on, and its processor boost mode is Aggressive, the same as High performance.
Ultimate vs High performance: one plugged-in difference. Ultimate never turns off hard disks. High performance turns them off after 20 minutes. Every untouched AC setting on my PC matched.
High performance is a stutter test. It holds the processor floor at 100 percent. If the stutter in a CPU-bound game does not move, go back to Balanced.
Ryzen 9 9950X3D: Balanced. XDA's review says the chip calls for it and uses Game Bar for core parking while you play.
Where it lives: Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options, with High performance behind Show additional plans. Ultimate needs one powercfg command first.

One setting. Plugged in, that is everything the Ultimate Performance power plan changes over High performance.

I read both plans out of the registry and powercfg on my desktop, a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and RTX 5080 on Windows 11 Home 25H2. Then I compared them value by value. The 164 settings nobody had edited on either plan all matched on AC power. The one that differs is the hard disk timeout: 20 minutes on High performance, never on Ultimate.

So the hidden plan with the grand name does not touch the processor at all compared with the plan one click above it. It keeps spinning drives awake.

That helps a workstation full of hard drives. On a gaming PC with NVMe storage it does nothing, which is why Balanced is still my answer for games. The rest of this page gives you the plan for your PC, the exact place to change it, and what the published tests show. If what you have is a game that stutters or a GPU that sits at 60 percent, the stuttering guide and the low GPU usage guide go after the cause; a power plan is rarely it.

What each plan does

Balanced is the Windows default, and Control Panel on my PC labels it “Balanced (recommended).” Windows’ default table in the registry sets its minimum processor state to 5 percent and its processor performance boost policy to 60, so an idle CPU clocks down and ramps when work arrives. It is also the plan Power mode works on, along with any plan derived from it. Microsoft’s slider documentation says that setting “will appear on a device only when the Balanced power plan, or any plan that is derived from Balanced, is selected.”

High performance hides behind Show additional plans. Its registry description reads “Favors performance, but may use more energy.” The default table raises the minimum processor state to 100 percent and the boost policy to 100. It turns PCI Express Link State Power Management off, where Balanced uses Moderate power savings. It never sleeps. Balanced sleeps after 30 minutes. Both plans leave the boost mode on Aggressive, and on my 7800X3D both keep every core unparked on AC power.

Ultimate Performance first appeared in a February 2018 Windows 10 Insider Preview build, listed under new features for Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. Microsoft’s announcement says it “builds on the current High-Performance policy, and it goes a step further to eliminate micro-latencies associated with fine grained power management techniques.” The same post says it was “not available on battery powered systems.” Its registry description is “Provides ultimate performance on higher end PCs.” On my Windows 11 Home install the template stores exactly one explicit value: Turn off hard disk after, set to 0. Zero means never.

Power mode is not a plan. It is an overlay on Balanced with three positions, and Microsoft’s support page lists them as Best power efficiency, Balanced and Best performance, the last described as “Maximizes performance.” The slider documentation adds that Game Mode “operates independently” of it.

The one setting Ultimate changes

Setting, plugged in	Balanced	High performance	Ultimate Performance
Minimum processor state	5%	100%	100%
Processor performance boost policy	60	100	100
Processor performance boost mode	Aggressive	Aggressive	Aggressive
Core parking, minimum unparked cores	100%	100%	100%
PCI Express Link State Power Management	Moderate power savings	Off	Off
Sleep after	30 minutes	Never	Never
Turn off hard disk after	20 minutes	20 minutes	Never

I read the Ultimate column from a copy made with the hidden template’s GUID. My High performance plan has edited values and so did the copy, so for any row edited on either one I used Windows’ default table, and I compared the untouched settings live. All 164 of those matched between High performance and Ultimate with the PC on AC power, the NVMe idle timeouts and NVMe latency tolerances included.

Settings agrees. With my Ultimate copy active, the Power page reads “Power mode is set automatically while the high performance power plan is used.”

XDA Developers’ March 2026 test says Ultimate “disables core parking.” True on my PC, and beside the point. High performance keeps every core unparked on AC too, and so does Balanced. Intel hybrid chips park differently, and I have not read one.

The plans do part ways on battery, in the direction the name would not suggest. Unplugged, 35 of those untouched settings differ, and my Ultimate copy leans toward saving power: energy performance preference 50 where High performance uses 0, and boost policy 40 where High performance uses 100.

On a desktop that never matters. On these values Ultimate is the less aggressive of the two on battery, though I have not read a laptop’s plans and OEM plans can differ.

A commenter on r/Windows11 reached the same reading earlier this year: hard drives are the only AC difference, and Ultimate saves more power on battery.

Which plan to use

Your PC	Plan	Why
Gaming desktop with SSDs, single-CCD Ryzen or Intel	Balanced, Power mode on Best performance if you want it	Boost mode is Aggressive in every plan. Balanced lets the processor floor drop to 5 percent at idle and keeps Power mode in your hands.
CPU-bound game that stutters on Balanced	High performance, as a test	It holds the processor floor at 100 percent. Play the same scene on both. No change means the stutter lives somewhere else.
Ryzen 9 9950X3D	Balanced	XDA’s review says the chip “calls for the Balanced power mode in Windows 11 for the best performance” and uses the Xbox Game Bar for core parking while you play. I have not tested a dual-CCD chip.
Tuning with Ryzen Master	High performance while you tune	AMD’s Ryzen Master guide says “Select High Performance power plan” when using Ryzen Master to maximize performance.
Laptop, on battery or plugged in	Balanced, Power mode to taste	Microsoft’s 2018 post aimed Ultimate at workstations and said it was not available on battery powered systems.
PC with hard drives that serve files, record audio or feed a VM	Ultimate Performance	This is the job it does. A spun-down drive has to spin back up before it serves the next read.
PC where Power mode is greyed out	Balanced	Microsoft’s support page says a custom power plan might be selected, and to select Balanced in Power Options.

Missing plans follow the same line. Microsoft’s 2018 post says Ultimate was not available on battery powered systems, and How-To Geek’s guide says the plan can be missing “mostly on laptops, but also on some desktops.” I have read the plan on a desktop only; the battery-side values above come from that desktop copy.

How to set it

Control Panel

I opened Power Options with control /name Microsoft.PowerOptions on 2026-09-13. The address bar reads Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options, the heading says “Choose or customize a power plan,” and Preferred plans lists Balanced (recommended) with a Show additional plans button underneath. High performance lives behind that button, and so does Ultimate once you create it. Microsoft’s support page gets there through Control Panel > System and Security > Power Options.

To change one setting without switching plans, open Change plan settings next to Balanced, then Change advanced power settings. That is where the freezing guide turns off PCI Express Link State Power Management, where the USB guide disables USB selective suspend, and where the black-screen guide lengthens the display timeout.

You can fix any of those inside Balanced.

Settings: Power mode

On my desktop the page is Settings > System > Power. Microsoft’s support page, written with laptops in mind, calls it Power & battery and shows separate Power mode choices for Plugged in and On battery. Microsoft’s slider documentation says the setting appears only while Balanced, or a plan derived from Balanced, is active. With my Ultimate copy active, the Power page said power mode is set automatically while the high performance power plan is used. If the dropdown will not change, Microsoft’s instruction is to open Power Options and select Balanced.

The command line

Open Terminal as administrator. These four lines cover everything:

powercfg /list
powercfg /duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61
powercfg /setactive SCHEME_BALANCED
powercfg /setactive SCHEME_MIN

/list shows every plan with its GUID and an asterisk on the active one. /duplicatescheme creates Ultimate from the hidden template, and Microsoft’s powercfg reference says “the resulting GUID which represents the new scheme is displayed.” Pass that GUID to powercfg /setactive to switch to it. The last two lines use aliases, and the names mislead: on my PC powercfg /aliases maps SCHEME_BALANCED to Balanced, SCHEME_MIN to High performance and SCHEME_MAX to Power saver.

MIN and MAX refer to power saving, not performance. powercfg /delete with a GUID removes a copy you no longer want.

What the tests show

I did not benchmark games across plans, and after reading the processor rows I do not expect a game to tell Ultimate from High performance. Here is what other people measured.

XDA Developers ran High performance against Ultimate in four games in March 2026. Fortnite went from 101 to 108 fps average and from 72.3 to 83.4 fps in 1% lows. Cyberpunk 2077 went from 102 to 100.6, Black Myth: Wukong held at 95, and Forza Horizon 5 dropped from 118 to 114. The article names no hardware and no run count, and XDA left DLSS Frame Generation off to keep the load on the CPU. Its conclusion: “By and large, though, there was barely an effect on the way my games performed.” It makes one exception, for players who “exclusively play online multiplayer titles.” With identical processor settings underneath, I read one game up and two down as noise.

How-To Geek’s guide is blunter: “you might only see a boost of a couple of frames per second.”

The idle cost is easier to see. In a September r/pcmasterrace thread, a 9800X3D owner who swapped plans for a few weeks reported cores dropping to 2 to 3 GHz and 38 to 40 C at idle on Balanced. On High performance they sat near 5 GHz and 48 to 52 C. No frame difference showed up in Cyberpunk 2077, CS2 or Warzone. That is one user without logs. Microsoft’s 2018 post warned that Ultimate may “consume more power than the default balanced plan,” and on AC it runs the same processor settings as High performance, so I would expect the same idle cost from it.

How it interacts with the other switches

Low GPU usage. A GPU coasting at 60 percent is usually a frame cap or a CPU limit, and the low GPU usage guide sorts the two. NVIDIA’s Power management mode is set in NVIDIA’s own control panel, not in Windows Power Options. If the bottleneck calculator flags your processor, a plan switch will not close that gap.

X3D chips. On my 7800X3D every core stays unparked on AC in all three plans. The 16-core parts are different. The 9950X3D vs 9800X3D comparison covers core parking on the dual-CCD chip, and XDA’s review of it names Balanced.

HAGS and V-Sync. People flip these in the same sitting as the power plan. Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling stays on for any modern card, and V-Sync depends on your monitor. Both are separate settings from the power plan.

Sources

Windows Insider Blog, Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17101 for Fast & Build 17604 for Skip Ahead (February 14, 2018; the Ultimate Performance section): https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2018/02/14/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-17101-fast-build-17604-skip-ahead/
Microsoft Learn, Customize the Windows performance power slider (slider availability, Game Mode note): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/customize/desktop/customize-power-slider
Microsoft Support, Change the power mode for your Windows PC: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/change-the-power-mode-for-your-windows-pc-c2aff038-22c9-f46d-5ca0-78696fdf2de8
Microsoft Learn, Powercfg command-line options: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/powercfg-command-line-options
XDA Developers, I unlocked a hidden Windows 11 power plan, and it improved my favorite game’s performance (Samarveer Singh, March 1, 2026): https://www.xda-developers.com/this-hidden-windows-11-power-plan-improved-my-games-performance/
XDA Developers, AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D review (Jacob Roach, March 11, 2025): https://www.xda-developers.com/amd-ryzen-9-9950x3d-review/
How-To Geek, How to Enable the Ultimate Performance Power Plan in Windows 10 (Brady Gavin, updated August 21, 2023): https://www.howtogeek.com/368781/how-to-enable-ultimate-performance-power-plan-in-windows-10/
AMD, Ryzen Master User Guide 3.1.0, Recommended Power Settings: https://docs.amd.com/r/en-US/68886-ryzen-master-user-guide/Recommended-Power-Settings
Reddit r/pcmasterrace, Balanced vs High Performance power plan for Ryzen 7 9800X3D? (September 2026): https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1wb82i5/balanced_vs_high_performance_power_plan_for_ryzen/
Reddit r/Windows11, So, the new feature that increases the clock speed when opening apps is practically an ultimate power plan? (2026): https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1tdd5en/so_the_new_feature_that_increases_the_clock_speed/

Cat6 vs Cat6A: Decide It by Run Length, Not Speed (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-12 · Updated 2026-09-12 · ~7 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · Cat6 vs Cat6A

Pull Cat6A for anything inside a wall, anything that might carry 10GBASE-T past about 37 meters, and anything zip-tied into a bundle. The cable is the cheap part of that job.
Pull Cat6 for short, open runs at 1 to 5 gigabit. Both categories carry those speeds to 100 meters, and the money goes further in the switch.
The gap is $80 per 1,000 feet at Monoprice on 2026-09-12 ($229.99 against $309.99 for comparable CMR spools), plus Cat6A-rated jacks if you want it to certify.
Wrong for: anyone told "Cat6 does 10 gig to 55 meters" as a promise. Fluke's own read of that guidance is that "no one really knows."

Every page on this question hands you the same two numbers, 250 MHz against 500 MHz and 55 meters against 100. Neither decides anything. Length does. The decision is about where the cable goes, how long it is, and whether it will ever carry 10GBASE-T. I run this site’s 10GbE and 2.5GbE pages, so this one stays on the cable itself. I have not certified a run for this page; every reach figure below is quoted from its owner, and the price is what Monoprice showed me on 2026-09-12.

The deciders that matter, ranked

1. Will the run ever carry 10GBASE-T, and how long is it

This is the whole decision for most people, and the number everyone repeats is softer than it sounds. Fluke Networks’ knowledge base quotes the guidance directly: “TSB-155 states: ‘10GBASE-T should operate over channel lengths of up to 37 meters of Category 6 cabling, and should operate over channel lengths between 37 and 55 meters of Category 6 cabling depending on the alien crosstalk environment. Channel lengths over 55 meters may require mitigation.’” Then Fluke adds its own read: “What this means is that no one really knows. There are so many variables in the cabling system. We have observed links as long as 60 m that meet the PS AXtalk requirements and links of 30 m which do not.”

That is the test-gear vendor hedging the standard. So the working Cat6 number for 10 gigabit is 37 meters, with no guarantee out to 55 and a test past that. Cat6A does not hedge. It carries 10GBASE-T to 100 meters by specification; Fluke’s article opens with that, saying that to support it “up to 100 m (328 ft), you should be looking to the Category 6A specification.”

What happens past the limit is where the vendors disagree, and I quote both. trueCABLE: “Cat6 only supports 10 Gbps to 165 feet (55 meters) under ideal conditions—less in heavy cross talk environments. Past 165 feet, Cat6 supports a maximum of 5 Gbps application speed.” Cable Matters, in its July 14, 2026 comparison, says Cat6 can run “up to 10 Gbps at lengths up to 55 meters. Over that length, and up to 100 meters its data rate drops to just 1Gbps.” One says 5 gigabit past 55 meters. One says 1. The link negotiates whatever the pair of ports can hold, so the answer on your run is whatever your run tests at.

2. Is it bundled

Alien crosstalk is what Cat6A’s construction is built against, and it is a bundle problem. The 8-point reply in a January 2024 r/HomeNetworking thread put it in one sentence: “Cat 6A is expressly designed for large, tight, long bundles of Ethernet like you see in a larger office building, where ’long’ is > 25 meters, and large is a bundle of 7 or more active cables and tight is zip tied together every 50 cm.” Those distances and counts are one commenter’s rule of thumb rather than a specification. trueCABLE describes the construction that addresses it: Cat6A “is made to tighter tolerances than Cat6 Ethernet cable. This means the copper conductors are twisted tighter and additional built-in ANEXT protection due to the higher operation frequency.” A single Cat6 run through a joist bay has no neighbors to hear. Twelve runs tie-wrapped up a riser do. That is the whole difference.

3. What speed you will hold it to

If the answer is 1, 2.5 or 5 gigabit, the categories are equal. trueCABLE lists it first among the similarities: both “Support 10 Mbps through 5 Gbps application speeds to 328 feet (100 meters).” A 51-point reply in the February 2024 r/HomeNetworking thread, as read on 2026-09-12, makes the point people miss: “Nothing about the cable says what frequencies they actually use. The switch port and the NIC negotiate and use the best and highest link rate that is available to them.” A 2.5GbE port on a sound Cat6 run inside 100 meters links at 2.5GbE. Full stop. Buying Cat6A for a 2.5GbE house is buying headroom, which is a fine reason if you say it out loud.

4. Whether you can ever get back in

This is the decider the spec sheets skip. I weight it most. The cable is the cheapest part of any in-wall pull; the drywall, the fish tape and the afternoon are the cost, and you pay them again if the run turns out short of what you need. The wall is the expensive part. A patch cable across a desk is Cat6. Every time. A run stapled inside a finished wall is a Cat6A decision, because the $80 per box is nothing against opening the wall twice.

5. PoE and heat

trueCABLE’s article notes that Cat6A “typically makes use of thicker conductor wires (copper + plastic insulation on the individual conductor).” I have no heat measurement of my own, and the two spools I priced are both 23 AWG, so I do not weight PoE heat in this decision. For a camera or an access point on a short run it does not move the decision. Short runs shrug it off. The long, bundled runs where it might matter are the ones Cat6A already wins on crosstalk.

6. Termination hardware

The plug is the same. What changes is the rating of the jack behind it. trueCABLE: “Cat6A requires Cat6A rated patch panels and Cat6A rated keystone wall jacks.” Budget for those if the point of pulling Cat6A is to certify the channel. A Cat6A cable on Cat6 keystones is a Cat6 channel, whatever the jacket says.

Side by side

Every cell is quoted from the source named in the row or read from the product page on 2026-09-12.

	Cat6	Cat6A	Source
10GBASE-T reach	37 m per TSB-155; 37 to 55 m “depending on the alien crosstalk environment”; over 55 m “may require mitigation”	100 m (328 ft)	Fluke Networks knowledge base
Past the 10-gigabit limit	5 Gbps maximum (trueCABLE) or 1 Gbps (Cable Matters)	Not applicable to 100 m	trueCABLE; Cable Matters, July 14, 2026
1, 2.5 and 5 GbE reach	100 m	100 m	trueCABLE, “10 Mbps through 5 Gbps application speeds to 328 feet”
Construction	Four twisted pairs, eight conductors	Same, twisted tighter, with “additional built-in ANEXT protection”	trueCABLE
Handling	Lighter, easier to pull	Thicker, and in Cable Matters’ words (about Cat6A and Cat7 together) “heavier, and harder to install”	Cable Matters, July 14, 2026
Maximum operating frequency	250 MHz (Monoprice’s 550 MHz on the spool is the vendor’s sweep, above the category limit)	500 MHz	trueCABLE (“Cat6 maximum operating frequency is 250 MHz”); Fluke Networks, which says a 10GBASE-T link must be tested for channel parameters “to 500 MHz”
Termination	RJ45 on T568A or B	Same plug; Cat6A-rated keystones and patch panels to certify	trueCABLE
1,000 ft CMR box, Monoprice, 2026-09-12	$229.99 (product 8103, solid, 23 AWG, UTP, 550 MHz)	$309.99 (product 18600, 23 AWG, UTP, 10G)	Monoprice product pages

What I run and why

The one cable I can speak for is the one behind my own desk. On 2026-09-12 Windows reports the Intel I225-V controller in this PC linked at 1 Gbps by auto-negotiation. Intel’s specification page lists the I225-V’s data rate per port as 2.5GbE, so something other than the controller is holding it at 1 gigabit, either the switch port or the run itself, and I have not opened the wall to read the jacket. That is the point. At 1 gigabit the category is irrelevant. I would learn nothing by pulling it.

If I were pulling new copper through this house, I would pull Cat6A for every in-wall run and keep Cat6 for the patch cables on the desk and in the rack. Not because I plan 10GBASE-T over copper; the 10GbE page makes my case for SFP+ with DAC and fiber where the runs are short, and that case has not changed. It is because a wall run is a one-time cost and the extra $80 per box is the smallest number in the job. For a house that will live at 2.5GbE, Cat6 is the correct answer and Cat6A is insurance you can afford. Buy the insurance for the runs you cannot reach again. Skip it for the rest.

Sources

Fluke Networks Knowledge Base, 10GBASE-T field testing requirements (TSB-155 quotation and the 37, 55 and 100 meter language): https://www.flukenetworks.com/knowledge-base/applicationstandards-articles-copper/10gbase-t-field-testing-requirements
trueCABLE Cable Academy, Don Schultz, The Difference Between Cat6 vs Cat6A Ethernet Cable (June 9, 2023): https://www.truecable.com/blogs/cable-academy/cat6-vs-cat6a
Cable Matters, Cat 6 vs. Cat 6a. vs. Cat 7: Which One Should You Choose? (July 14, 2026): https://www.cablematters.com/Blog/Networking/cat6-vs-cat6a-vs-cat7
Monoprice, Cat6 1000ft Blue CMR UL Bulk Cable, Solid, UTP, 23AWG, 550MHz (product 8103, $229.99 on 2026-09-12): https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=8103
Monoprice, 1000ft Cat6A Ethernet Cable, UTP, 23AWG, 10G, CMR-Rated (product 18600, $309.99 on 2026-09-12): https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=18600
Intel, Ethernet Controller I225-V specifications: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/184676/intel-ethernet-controller-i225v/specifications.html
Reddit r/HomeNetworking, ALL Cat6 and Cat6a differences beyond the “Cat6 can run 10 gig on a shorter distance” (February 14, 2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/1aqnyjp/all_cat6_and_cat6a_differences_beyond_the_cat6/
Reddit r/HomeNetworking, Is it worth to use a CAT6A cable over a CAT6 nowadays? (January 6, 2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/18zzvix/is_it_worth_to_use_a_cat6a_cable_over_a_cat6/

Debloat Windows 11 (2026): What to Remove, What to Skip

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TL;DR · Debloat Windows 11

Do it by hand first. Settings > Apps > Installed apps removes the inbox apps; four toggles under Personalization > Start and Privacy & security kill the recommendations and the advertising ID. Ten minutes, nothing to download.
It will not make the PC faster. PCMag measured a fresh 25H2 install at 1.9 to 2.1 GB of RAM on boot and no tool saved more than 100 to 200 MB.
Required diagnostic data stays on. Microsoft's own documentation says the off setting exists only on Enterprise, Education and Server. Every "disable telemetry" checkbox on Home and Pro drops you to Required, not to zero.
Use a script for what Settings hides: Copilot removal, search-box web suggestions, the Edge and lock-screen ads. Read the change list first, and know the two apps Win11Debloat says it cannot reinstall.

My own Windows 11 Home box is debloated. I know exactly what that means because I read it off the machine for this page: zero provisioned inbox apps left, 33 removable packages, every one of them something I installed or a codec, and every recommendation, advertising and web-search switch off. That is the finished state. This page is the route to it, in the order that costs you the least trust in other people’s scripts. Settings first. Then PowerShell for the apps Settings refuses. Then the two big scripts, for the switches Settings hides. And a clear line around what nothing on Home or Pro can switch off.

Before you start

Decide what you want. Debloating means four different things and people mix them up. Removing apps you never open. Turning off the recommendations and ads Microsoft threads through the Start menu and the lock screen. Cutting what the machine reports back to Microsoft. Disabling features like Copilot. The first two are safe and reversible from Settings. The third has a floor you cannot go below. The fourth is where the scripts earn their keep.

Do not expect speed. PCMag’s Chris Hoffman installed Windows 11 25H2 in a 4 GB virtual machine and measured 1.9 to 2.1 GB of RAM on a fresh boot with nothing removed. He then ran Chris Titus Tech’s Windows Utility, Raphire’s Win11Debloat, Tiny11 Builder and Tiny11 Core Builder, and wrote that “none of the four tools I tested made much of a dent in Windows 11’s RAM usage. At most, they saved 100MB or 200MB.” If your machine feels slow in games, the causes are on the stuttering page and the freezing page, and a debloat script is not on either list.

Know the floor. Microsoft’s diagnostic-data documentation lists four levels and says of the lowest, “Diagnostic data off,” that it “is only available on Windows Server, Windows Enterprise, and Windows Education editions.” On Home and Pro the floor is Required. Hoffman makes the same point about the scripts in his test: they can flip a policy value, but “Windows will ignore it unless you’re using a Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) version of Windows 11.” My own box has the AllowTelemetry policy set to 1, which is Required, and that is as low as it goes.

Know what cannot come back. Win11Debloat’s wiki says “To my knowledge, the only apps that cannot (easily) be reinstalled are the Microsoft Store itself and the XboxSpeechToTextOverlay,” and its app-removal page carries a warning on Windows Terminal: do not remove it if you launched the script from it. Leave the Store alone unless you have decided never to use a Store app again.

Make a restore point from Start, type “Create a restore point,” and hit Create. If Create is greyed out, select the system drive, choose Configure and turn protection on first. Then do the work.

Step 1: remove the apps (Settings, then PowerShell)

Microsoft’s own instruction is short: “Select Start > Settings > Apps > Installed apps. Find the app you want to remove, select More > Uninstall.” On my 25H2 box the page reads Apps > Installed apps in the breadcrumb, and every row has a More options button with Uninstall in it. Do this for whichever of the Xbox apps, Clipchamp, the new Outlook, Solitaire, News, Weather, To Do and Teams your box still has, and anything else you never open. Mine has none of them left, so I could not re-run the removals for this page. Microsoft adds that “Some apps can’t be uninstalled from the Settings app right now,” which is where PowerShell comes in.

Open Terminal and list what is installed:

Get-AppxPackage | Where-Object { -not $_.IsFramework -and -not $_.NonRemovable } | Select-Object Name | Sort-Object Name

That filter is the one I ran to get the 33-package figure above. Frameworks are runtime libraries other apps need. NonRemovable is Windows’ own flag for the shell pieces it will not let go; on my machine that second group holds 49 packages, and they stay. To remove one package for your account, Microsoft’s reference is Remove-AppxPackage -Package <full package name>, and it takes -WhatIf so you can see the effect before it happens:

Get-AppxPackage *Clipchamp* | Remove-AppxPackage -WhatIf
Get-AppxPackage *Clipchamp* | Remove-AppxPackage

The -AllUsers switch removes it for every account and needs an administrator terminal. Provisioned packages are the copies Windows installs for each new user account; Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online lists them, and on my box that list is empty, which is why a new account here starts clean. Removing provisioned packages needs Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online as administrator, and I would run the list first and read it before removing anything from it.

Step 2: turn off the recommendations and the ads

These are the toggles that make the machine feel debloated, and every one is in Settings. I opened each page on 25H2 to get the labels right; the values in brackets are what my box has.

Settings > Personalization > Start

Show recommendations for tips, shortcuts, new apps, and more [off]
Show recommended files in Start, recent files in File Explorer, and items in Jump Lists [off]
Show most used apps [off]
Show account-related notifications [off]

Settings > Privacy & security > Recommendations & offers (that is the page title on my 25H2 box)

Personalized offers, “Get personalized tips, ads, and recommendations based on my Windows activity” [off]
Advertising ID, “Let apps show me personalized ads by using my advertising ID” [off]
Recommendations and offers in Settings [off]
Improve Start and search results, “Let Windows improve Start and search results by tracking which apps I open” [on on my box; turn it off if app-launch tracking bothers you]

Settings > Privacy & security > Diagnostics & feedback

Diagnostic data, “Helps to improve Windows and keep it secure, up to date, and working as expected” [reads Off on my box, and the page carries the banner “Some of these settings are managed by your organization,” which is what a policy value set by a script looks like from Settings]. Required stays on regardless, per the floor above.
Improve inking and typing, “Send optional inking and typing diagnostic data to Microsoft” [off]
Delete diagnostic data, further down the same page, clears what Microsoft has collected from this device.

Settings > System > Notifications > Additional settings holds the welcome-experience, setup-suggestion and tips checkboxes. Clear them.

Step 3: the switches Settings hides on Home

Two things people want gone have no toggle in the Home edition’s Settings app, and this is the only place I reach for a policy value or a script.

Web results in the Start search box. My box has the Explorer policy value DisableSearchBoxSuggestions set to 1 under HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer, and the Start search box returns only local results. It is the mechanism behind Win11Debloat’s default tweak “Disable & remove Bing web search, Bing AI and Cortana from Windows search”: the script’s own registry file for that tweak sets exactly this value. One Microsoft Q&A thread reports the value also disabling taskbar search on Windows 10 version 1903; on my 25H2 box the search box works and simply stops showing web results. Set it by script or by hand in the registry editor, then sign out and back in.

Copilot. The Copilot app uninstalls from Installed apps like any other Store app, and that is the removal that holds. My box also carries TurnOffWindowsCopilot set to 1 under HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot, and no Copilot package is installed, but read Microsoft’s note on that policy before you copy it: the WindowsAI policy reference marks it deprecated and says it “isn’t for the new Copilot experience.” Win11Debloat’s default list includes “Disable & remove Microsoft Copilot” and, on 25H2, “Disable Windows Recall” and “Disable Click to Do,” which map to the Recall and Click to Do policies Microsoft documents under Windows AI. Microsoft lists those policies for Pro, Enterprise and Education; Home is not on the supported-editions table, so treat them as unsupported on Home even where the value writes.

Step 4: the scripts, and what each one changes

Two scripts are the ones people land on, and both are open source with their change lists published, which is the only reason I would run either.

Win11Debloat (Raphire, release 2026.08.24, repository last pushed 2026-09-10). The README’s one-line run is & ([scriptblock]::Create((irm "https://debloat.raphi.re/"))) in PowerShell, or download the release and run Run.bat. Its default tweaks, quoted from the wiki: “Disable telemetry, diagnostic data, activity history, app-launch tracking & targeted ads,” “Disable tips, tricks, suggestions & ads across Windows,” “Disable ads, suggestions and the MSN news feed in Microsoft Edge,” “Disable & remove Bing web search, Bing AI and Cortana from Windows search,” “Disable & remove Microsoft Copilot,” “Disable Windows Recall,” “Disable widgets on the taskbar & lockscreen,” and “Show file extensions for known file types,” among others. It also removes a default list of apps that runs from the Bing apps and Solitaire to Candy Crush, Disney+, Netflix, Spotify and TikTok. One tweak to check before you apply: PCMag’s test says “the default settings disable Fast Startup in Windows,” which forces a full shutdown every time, while the tool’s own Default-Settings wiki does not list Fast Startup among its default tweaks. Read the checkbox state on your run rather than either of us. Reverting is documented: “Almost all changes can be reverted simply by running the script again and unchecking any tweaks you want to undo,” plus a Restore backup option and undo registry files shipped with the script.

WinUtil (Chris Titus Tech, release 26.08.19). Run irm https://christitus.com/win | iex from an administrator terminal; the README says it “must be run as Administrator because it performs system-wide changes.” It ships three presets, Standard, Minimal and Advanced, and points to config/preset.json for what each does. Hoffman’s finding on the Standard preset is the one to know before you click it: it “sets a large number of background system services to launch manually when programs access them, rather than automatically at boot,” which saved no meaningful RAM in his test and “might introduce delays in regular computer use.”

My rule for both is short. Run the manual steps first. Then open the script, uncheck everything you already did or do not understand, and apply the two or three switches you came for. A script that changes forty things you did not read about is not a debloat. It is someone else’s preferences.

Step 5: check that it worked

Run the Get-AppxPackage filter from Step 1 again and count the rows. Mine is 33, and every name on the list is something I recognise.
Open Start. No “Recommended” section, no app suggestions.
Open Settings > Privacy & security > Diagnostics & feedback and confirm optional data is off. It will not say “off” for required data on Home or Pro, and nothing you ran changed that.
Type a word into the Start search box and confirm the results are local only.
Reboot twice. Microsoft makes no promise about what an update restores, and Hoffman warns that one “might reinstall parts of Windows you removed or otherwise undo your changes,” so check the list again after the next feature update.

If the reason you came here was a game that stutters or a PC that feels slow, the debloat is done and the cause is elsewhere: read games keep crashing for the launcher and anti-cheat faults, and the two settings pages that do move frame times, hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling and V-Sync on or off.

Sources

Microsoft Support, Uninstall or remove apps and programs in Windows (Settings > Apps > Installed apps; “Some apps can’t be uninstalled from the Settings app right now”): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uninstall-or-remove-apps-and-programs-in-windows-4b55f974-2cc6-2d2b-d092-5905080eaf98
Microsoft Learn, Remove-AppxPackage (syntax, -AllUsers, -WhatIf): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/appx/remove-appxpackage
Microsoft Learn, Configure Windows diagnostic data in your organization (the four levels; “Diagnostic data off” only on Server, Enterprise and Education): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-windows-diagnostic-data-in-your-organization
Raphire, Win11Debloat: README, Default-Settings, App-Removal and Reverting-Changes wiki pages; release 2026.08.24: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
Chris Titus Tech, winutil: README and presets; release 26.08.19: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
Microsoft Learn, WindowsAI Policy CSP (TurnOffWindowsCopilot marked deprecated and “isn’t for the new Copilot experience”; DisableAIDataAnalysis and DisableClickToDo): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/mdm/policy-csp-windowsai
Raphire, Win11Debloat, Regfiles/Disable_Bing_Cortana_In_Search.reg (the registry file behind the Bing-search tweak; sets DisableSearchBoxSuggestions=1): https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat/blob/master/Regfiles/Disable_Bing_Cortana_In_Search.reg
Microsoft Q&A, DisableSearchBoxSuggestions disables task bar search (a Windows 10 1903 report of the side effect): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3234673/disablesearchboxsuggestions-disables-task-bar-sear
PCMag, Chris Hoffman, I Put 4 Windows Debloating Tools to the Test. The Results Were Embarrassing, April 13, 2026 (RAM measurements, Fast Startup and services findings, the LTSC note): https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/i-put-4-windows-debloating-tools-to-the-test-the-results-were-embarrassing

Discord Not Opening? The Fix Order That Works (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-12 · Updated 2026-09-12 · ~8 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · Discord not opening

Nothing happens when you click it: Discord is usually already running in the background. Kill every Discord process, then launch again. On my machine a running client is six Discord.exe processes plus two helpers.
Stuck on "Starting": check discordstatus.com first, run it as administrator once, then delete the three cache folders. Still looping? Delete the whole Discord folder under %localappdata% and reinstall.
Grey window or stuck on "Connecting": that is the network branch: date and time set to automatic, no proxy, firewall allowing Discord, and hardware acceleration off.
The web app fails too: then the desktop client is not the problem. It is an outage or your connection.

Discord failing to open has three shapes, and each one has a different first move. Most guides hand you a long list. You work through it blind. I would rather you identify the shape in ten seconds, run the one fix that matches, and check the proof before moving on. Every command and path below was run or read on my own Windows 11 install on 2026-09-12; the details of that are at the bottom.

Which symptom you have

What you see	What it usually is	Start with
Click the icon, nothing appears, or the tray icon is there but no window	A stale Discord process still owns the app	Fix 1
The “Starting” splash sits there, or it cycles through “Update failed”	The launcher is stuck applying an update	Fixes 1, 3, 4, then 5
The window opens grey or black, or hangs on “Connecting”	Network path or a rendering problem	Fixes 2, 6 and 7
The web app at discord.com/app fails as well	Discord-side incident or your connection	Fix 2, then Fix 6
It passes “Starting”, then closes itself before the home screen	A renderer crash in the current Stable build	Fix 8
Discord opens fine, but a game crashes when its overlay is on	Overlay injection, not the client	The games keep crashing page
Discord is fine and it is the game’s launcher that will not start	A different app entirely	Steam not opening, Steam content file locked or Easy Anti-Cheat

One test sorts the first four rows fast. Open discord.com/app in a browser. If it loads and you can read messages, your account and connection are fine and the desktop client is the fault. If it does not load either, skip straight to the status page.

The fixes, in the order I would run them

1. Kill every Discord process, then relaunch

This is the fix behind the most-upvoted answer in a 2017 r/discordapp thread titled “Discord Won’t Open,” which had 270 comments when I read it on 2026-09-12. The top reply, at 116 points, is: “Press the windows key + r and type in cmd.exe, then type in taskkill /F /IM discord.exe and try to launch discord again.” It still applies in 2026 because the client is still a set of Discord.exe processes, which is what my own process list shows.

Here is what a running client looks like on my machine. With Discord 1.0.9257 open, Task Manager shows six separate Discord.exe processes and two DiscordSystemHelper.exe processes. When you close the window, the tray process stays. The standard explanation in the threads below, and it fits the process list, is that a startup failure can leave one of those processes alive with no window, so every later click on the icon hands off to it and shows you nothing.

Open a command prompt and run this:

taskkill /F /IM Discord.exe

On my machine that printed six SUCCESS lines, one per process. That is the whole fix. Then launch Discord from the Start menu. It came back in about fifteen seconds and the process count returned to six.

The proof it worked: the window appears. If Task Manager still lists a Discord.exe after the taskkill, the usual reason is that the prompt lacked the rights; right-click Command Prompt and choose Run as administrator, then run it again.

2. Read the status page before you touch anything else

Discord’s own status page lists each component, API through Client, with its state and a dated incident log. I read it on 2026-09-12 and it showed All Systems Operational, but the log underneath is the point. As of that day its incident history listed four incidents in twelve days, each with its own page: Some servers and other services (voice calls, activities) not available for some users on August 31, Some Servers Unavailable on September 3, Issue with establishing voice calls on September 10, and Media Proxy Latency High on September 11.

That is an incident every three days. If your client failed on one of those days, no amount of cache-clearing would have helped, and the January 2026 r/discordapp thread “Help discord stuck at starting” shows the pattern: the poster had “tried everything on yt” and reinstalled, and the replies I read were other people reporting the same failure that day and asking whether Discord was down.

The proof: the component your problem lives in says Operational, and there is no open incident. If there is one, stop here. Wait for it to say Resolved.

3. Run it as administrator, once

Discord’s troubleshooting guide lists this second for loading-screen freezes, and the Microsoft Q&A answer to a May 2025 “update failed” report gives the reason: “This helps if Discord needs extra permissions to finish updating.” Right-click the Discord shortcut, choose Run as administrator, let it finish starting, then quit it from the tray and open it normally. Once is enough. You do not want to leave it running elevated; the point is to let one update or one settings write complete.

The proof: it opens, and it keeps opening afterwards without the elevated launch.

4. Delete the three cache folders

Discord’s guide says “Clear Discord’s cache and temporary files” for loading-screen freezes. The folders it means live under the roaming profile. Press Win+R, type %appdata%\discord and press Enter. Inside are folders named Cache, Code Cache and GPUCache. On my install they hold 58 MB, 1.2 MB and 548 KB. Quit Discord fully (Fix 1), delete those three, and launch again. I did exactly that at 22:34 on 2026-09-12: all three folders were back twenty seconds after the launch, with Cache already at 21 MB, and the client opened signed in.

Do not delete the whole discord folder unless you are ready to sign in again. The 2023 thread “Discord stuck at Starting,” at 492 comments when I read it, was started by someone doing exactly that every day: “I have to delete the folders in %appdata% and then launch it again to get it to work, which is rather annoying because I have to log back in again.” The three cache folders are the part that goes stale. The rest of that folder is your session and settings. Leave it alone.

The proof: the splash passes and the folders reappear with fresh timestamps, still signed in.

5. Break the update loop

The “Starting” splash is not Discord itself. It is Update.exe, the Squirrel launcher, checking for a new build before it starts the real client. The install lives at %localappdata%\Discord, and inside it each version is its own folder. On my machine, the moment I launched the client on 2026-09-12 the updater log recorded “About to launch: app-1.0.9256\Discord.exe”, the client pulled an update in the background, and the next launch nineteen seconds later recorded app-1.0.9257 instead. The registry version string changed from 1.0.9256 to 1.0.9257 and the old folder was gone. A leftover app-1.0.9059 folder, dated June 9 on my machine, is still sitting beside it.

When that hand-off breaks, you get a splash that never ends or an “Update failed” message that repeats. Discord’s guide gives the fix under Update Problems: “Force quit Discord from Task Manager/Activity Monitor” and “Delete Discord AppData folder (Windows) or Application Support folder (macOS)”, and under Windows Installation Errors: “Clear temporary files and previous installation remnants.” The guide does not say which AppData folder. The Microsoft Q&A answer does: it sends you to %localappdata% and the Discord folder there, which is also where the registry’s InstallLocation string for Discord points on my machine. So my reading is: kill the processes (Fix 1), delete the entire Discord folder under %localappdata%, and run a fresh installer from discord.com/download. The Q&A answer suggests deleting a folder named Update inside it first; on my install there is no such folder, only Update.exe, the app folders and a packages folder, so I would go straight to removing the whole thing.

Your messages and settings are not in that folder. They live under %appdata%. This step leaves that alone.

The proof: the SquirrelSetup.log inside the new Discord folder ends with an “About to launch” line naming the new app folder, and the window appears.

6. Stuck on “Connecting”: the network list

Discord’s article “Stuck on the Main Connecting Screen” is short, and I quote its list because people paraphrase it badly. Check that your date and time are set automatically. Scan with Malwarebytes and restart. Make sure your firewall allows Discord. Then, in its words: “Windows: Control Panel -> Network and Internet -> Internet Options -> Connections -> Lan Settings - Uncheck ‘Use a Proxy’”. If none of that moves it, press Ctrl+Shift+I in the client and read the console for errors.

One number about that article changes how you should use it. As of 2026-09-12, 994 of 11,983 readers marked it helpful. That is about eight percent, and it is why this page does not start with the network list. My read of that number is that the list does not match most readers’ actual cause. An incident (Fix 2) or a stale process (Fix 1) is cheaper to rule out, so run the network list after those.

The proof: the client passes Connecting and loads your server list.

7. Grey or black window: hardware acceleration

If the window opens but never paints, Discord’s guide lists a third step for loading-screen freezes: “Disable hardware acceleration in User Settings > Advance.” That is quoted as written. The catch is that you need a working window to reach the setting, and I have no tested route to it without one. If the window paints for even a few seconds, use them for that toggle. If it never does, the full reinstall below removes settings.json, the file where the client keeps its local flags, and starts the client with defaults.

The proof: the window paints and stays painted after a relaunch.

8. It passes “Starting” and then closes itself (September 2026)

This one is new and it is not in any of the listicles yet. On September 11, 2026 an r/discordapp thread titled “Discord crashes on launch (no error in Event Viewer) - only on one user profile, works fine on another” described Stable 1.0.9257 on Windows 11 getting past the loading screen and closing before the home page, with a full reinstall, cleared AppData folders, a renamed settings.json and a clean boot all failing. Run from a command prompt, the client’s own log ended with “Initializing voice engine with audio subsystem: experimental” and then a renderer crash with exit code -1073740791. Two other posters on 1.0.9257, one of them on Windows 11 build 26200, reported the identical log lines within a day, and two of the three had a second Windows account on the same PC where Discord worked.

A Discord staff member replied in the thread asking for minidumps from the Crashpad folder under %appdata% and then pointed everyone at the PTB build: “Can you try our PTB build it might have a fix already for this.” The original poster’s follow-up: “PTB fixed it!” PTB is Discord’s test channel and installs as a separate app; one of the posters had it running normally on the same PC beside the broken Stable install. The installer link the staff member gave is discord.com/api/downloads/distributions/app/installers/latest?channel=ptb&platform=win&arch=x64, which redirected to a DiscordPTBSetup installer when I checked it on 2026-09-12.

For what it is worth, my own install went to 1.0.9257 during this page’s testing, its settings.json also selects the experimental audio subsystem, and it opened normally. The thread’s evidence says the crash is tied to something in the affected Windows profile, so if you hit it, try PTB before you rebuild your account.

The proof: run Discord.exe from a command prompt inside the app folder under %localappdata%; if the log no longer ends in the render-process crash line and the home screen loads, you are past it.

The nuclear option and what it costs

A full reinstall is: quit Discord (Fix 1), uninstall it from Settings, Apps, Installed apps (the same list the Windows 11 debloat page walks through, label by label), delete both the Discord folder under %localappdata% and the discord folder under %appdata%, restart Windows, and install fresh from discord.com/download.

It fixes anything a local file can cause. Here is what it costs, from the folders I read on my own machine. You sign in again, and any two-factor prompt comes with it. You lose the client’s local settings file, which on my install holds the window position and size, the audio subsystem choice and a handful of startup flags. The three cache folders held about 60 MB on my install before I cleared them and were back to 21 MB twenty seconds after a relaunch, so expect the cache to rebuild over the first days of use. Keybinds, overlay preferences and device choices that live locally are reset. Discord’s guide says it plainly: “Before attempting any installation fixes, back up your Discord settings and data.” Copy the discord folder under %appdata% somewhere first, and you can put settings.json back afterward.

Nothing server-side is touched. Your servers, friends, messages and roles live on Discord’s end and come back when you sign in.

What I ran on my own machine

Windows 11 Home, build 26200.9445, on 2026-09-12 between 22:27 and 22:35 Central. Discord was installed but not running; its registry version string read 1.0.9256. I launched it through Update.exe, the way the Start menu shortcut does. Fifteen seconds later Task Manager listed six Discord.exe processes and two DiscordSystemHelper.exe processes. taskkill /F /IM Discord.exe returned six SUCCESS lines and the process count went to zero. A second launch brought all six back, and the updater log showed it had switched to app-1.0.9257 during the first run; the registry string now reads 1.0.9257. I then quit it again so the machine was back where it started.

The cache folders under %appdata%\discord measured 58 MB (Cache), 1.2 MB (Code Cache) and 548 KB (GPUCache). I then deleted the three cache folders with the client closed and launched it again; twenty seconds later all three existed again and the client was open and signed in. The settings.json file there is 508 bytes and has no hardware-acceleration key. Windows’ startup command list has no Discord entry on this machine. I did not reproduce a Starting hang or a Connecting hang; the ordering above comes from Discord’s own guide and the threads cited rather than from a hang I measured.

Sources

Discord Support, Discord Troubleshooting Guide (read 2026-09-12; loading screen freezes, update problems, Windows installation errors): https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/31623498041623-Discord-Troubleshooting-Guide
Discord Support, Stuck on the Main Connecting Screen (994 of 11,983 found helpful as of 2026-09-12): https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001130052-Stuck-on-the-Main-Connecting-Screen
Discord Status, incident history read 2026-09-12: https://discordstatus.com/
Discord download page: https://discord.com/download
Reddit r/discordapp, Discord Won’t Open (July 30, 2017; the 116-point taskkill reply): https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6qj97u/discord_wont_open/dkxu8lu/
Reddit r/discordapp, Discord stuck at Starting (March 2, 2023; 492 comments): https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/11g8wry/discord_stuck_at_starting/
Reddit r/discordapp, Help discord stuck at starting (January 29, 2026; 58 comments): https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1qqdym5/help_discord_stuck_at_starting/
Reddit r/discordapp, Discord crashes on launch, only on one user profile (September 11, 2026; Discord staff replies and the PTB build): https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1wd2rvt/discord_crashes_on_launch_no_error_in_event/
Microsoft Q&A, Discord won’t start! (May 15, 2025): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3860914/discord-wont-start

GPU Sag Census: Measured Droop by Card, in Millimetres

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-12 · ~5 min read · St. Louis County, MO

The short version

“How much GPU sag is too much” is answered on every forum with a feeling and on no page with a measurement. As of a September 2026 check I could not find a dataset anywhere that records how far real cards droop, in millimetres, next to the card’s length, the mounting and the months it had been installed. This page opens that census. One row is one card somebody put a ruler on. Per-model distributions publish once a model has enough unsupported horizontal readings, and the page never publishes a verdict.

The raw data, schema, intake form and validator live in the open repository: github.com/iBlessi/gpu-sag-census (CC BY 4.0).

If you are here because your card looks like it is about to snap off the slot, the diagnosis, the fixes in order and the RMA rule are on the GPU sag guide. This page is the measurement.

Why distributions, never verdicts

Droop is a lever-arm effect: the card hangs from the PCIe slot and the bracket screws at one end, the cooler mass sits along its length, and the far end is free. How far it drops depends on the card’s length and mass, the slot and the board it is soldered to, how long the card has hung there, and what the machine went through in a shipping box. Two owners of the same model in different cases will read different numbers, and one photo of one card proves nothing about the model.

So the per-model answer is never “the RTX 4090 sags” or “it doesn’t.” It is a distribution: out of n measured cards, the median droop, the smallest and largest reading, and the share of cards in each band. That is what this page publishes, and always with the sample size in the same breath as the number.

The schema

One row = one physical card, measured once, in one mounting. Full machine-readable definitions live in schema.json.

Field	Required	What it records
`card_brand`	yes	As printed on the box: ASUS, Gigabyte, NVIDIA
`card_model`	yes	Model line, specific enough to group units: “ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC”, “Gaming OC RTX 4090”
`exact_sku`	no	Exact manufacturer SKU when known
`card_length_mm`	yes	Length from the manufacturer’s spec page, rounded to a whole mm
`card_slots`	no	Slot thickness as the manufacturer states it: 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 3.8
`mount`	yes	`horizontal` (straight into the board) or `vertical` (on a riser)
`support`	yes	What was holding the far end up when measured: `none`, `bundled-holder`, `aftermarket-bracket`, `cable-tension`, `case-integrated`, `diy`
`months_installed`	yes	Whole months the card had hung in this mounting when measured
`droop_mm`	yes	Far-end drop relative to the bracket end, whole millimetres; a level card is 0
`measurement_method`	yes	`ruler-straightedge`, `calipers`, or `photo-estimate`
`slot_reinforced`	no	Whether the board’s x16 slot is metal-reinforced per its spec page
`symptoms`	no	Any fault the owner attributes to the sag: `none`, `intermittent-detection`, `artifacts`, `no-display`, `other`
`notes`	no	Free text, max 280 characters
`submitted_date`	yes	ISO date of the report

The droop bands (anchored)

Droop	Reading
0–2 mm	Level; within measurement noise
3–5 mm	Visible droop
6–10 mm	Clear droop
11 mm and above	Severe droop

The bands are fixed on purpose. Changing them would make old and new rows incomparable, so any future change bumps the dataset’s major version instead of quietly redefining the numbers.

How to measure

Power the machine down. Leave the card installed.
For the row that counts, take any bracket, holder or prop out from under the far end.
Lay a straightedge along the card’s bottom edge at the bracket end, parallel to the slot.
At the far end, read how far the card’s bottom edge sits below the straightedge, in whole millimetres. Calipers against a fixed reference are fine too.
Note how many months the card has been in this mounting. Put the support back.

A photo estimate is accepted as a row and excluded from the medians. A ruler is what makes a number count.

How to submit a card

One report = one card you own, measured by you. A level card is one of the most wanted rows in the census, because it is the half of the distribution that never turns up in a forum thread.

No git knowledge needed. Fill in the GPU sag report issue form. It mirrors the schema field-for-field; a maintainer transcribes accepted reports into the CSV, with submitted_date taken from the issue’s creation date.
The CSV path. Add one row to data/submissions.csv following the schema and open a pull request. A stdlib validator runs on every PR that touches the data, schema or validator, and blocks malformed rows.

Every submission passes two layers before it lands: the mechanical schema check, and a maintainer review for outlier and troll patterns, such as bursts of new accounts filing the same model at the same droop, a card length that does not match the model’s spec page, or rows that summarize other people’s threads instead of a card the submitter measured. The full acceptance rules are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

What publishes as the census grows

The activation floor, stated verbatim: per-model n + droop distribution once a model has >=5 rows measured with support=none in a horizontal mount. Below that floor a model is listed as collecting, with no numbers attached. As models cross the floor, their distributions render on this page: n first, then the median, the smallest and largest reading, and the share of cards in each band.

A site-wide number publishes once the unsupported horizontal set reaches n=20: the median droop across every such card, with n beside it. That is the press number this census is built to produce, and it does not exist yet.

The census opened at 0 rows on 2026-09-12. My own card is an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC, and it hangs vertically on the riser in a HYTE Y60, so it has nothing to droop from and cannot seed the horizontal table. Every row here will be a real owner reporting a real card.

Current count: n=0. Every model is listed as collecting.

The verdict rules

No verdicts below n = 5. A model with three alarming photos is collecting, not “a sagger.”
Supported rows are kept and excluded from the medians. A card measured with a holder in place reports what the holder did.
Photo estimates are kept and excluded from the medians. A ruler is required for a number to count.
Reports are self-selected. Owners who noticed a droop are more likely to measure it, so published figures describe submitted cards and do not estimate what any given card will do.
Bands never drift. The four bands above are frozen; a change would be a new major version, and old rows would be marked as read on the old bands.

Use the data (CC BY 4.0)

The live dataset is one file: data/submissions.csv, one row per measured card, in the schema order above. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Attribute as “TechFuelHQ Community GPU Sag Census” linking to this page.

The coil whine census is the sibling dataset, built on the same rules for the other thing heavy cards do. If your card’s problem is not its shape, the GPU artifacts guide and the graphics card not detected guide cover the two faults that get blamed on sag.

Change log

0.1.0 (2026-09-12) — schema, the four droop bands, intake (issue form + PR path), validator, and the empty census opened: 0 rows, no seeded data.

GPU Sag: Is It Bad, How Much Is Normal, and the Fix (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TL;DR · GPU sag

A few millimetres of droop on a heavy card is normal. The card hangs from a slot and two bracket screws with its far end in the air; the lever arm does the rest.
Support it anyway. The holder in the box, a cheap adjustable post, or a vertical mount. Lift to level, no further.
Two faults trace back to sag: a card that drops off the bus, and a PCB stressed at the slot lock. Tom's Hardware documented Gigabyte RTX 40 boards cracking exactly there.
Measure it before you fix it, straightedge at the bracket end, ruler at the far end, and add the number to the GPU sag census. Nobody has that data.

Every big card I have owned drooped a little. None of them died of it. That is the whole tension in this question: sag is normal, it looks alarming, and in a small number of cases it does real damage at the one place a card cannot afford it, the PCIe slot.

This page separates sag from the faults it gets blamed for, gives you a measurement instead of a feeling, ranks the fixes by how reversible they are, and opens a census so the “how much is too much” question finally gets an answer with a sample size behind it. Measure first. Then brace.

Step 1: is it sag at all?

Sag is a shape. The fault people search for is usually something else, and it has its own page. Read the signature before you touch anything.

What you see	It is probably	Go here
The far end of the card sits visibly lower than the bracket end; the gap between card and the slot below it narrows toward the front	GPU sag. Keep reading.	This page
Coloured blocks, checkerboards or flicker in games; screenshots show the glitches too	Artifacts, which are a render-side fault; sag is on the list of physical causes only after a driver reinstall and a re-seat	GPU artifacts
The card comes and goes, or vanishes from the BIOS after the machine is moved	Detection, and here sag is a real suspect: Puget Systems warns that in severe cases the card can stop being detected	Graphics card not detected
Fans spin, no picture at all, motherboard VGA light stays lit	No POST on the GPU stage, almost always seating or power, occasionally a slot damaged by a drooping card	PC turns on but no display
A high-pitched electronic whine under load	Coil whine, an inductor noise unrelated to weight	Coil whine
The card is level but the fans never start	Fan control or a fan fault, not sag	GPU fans not spinning
A hairline crack in the PCB right beside the PCIe locking tab	A cracked board, the injury sag is accused of; Tom’s Hardware’s February 2024 report recalls “a repair technician received 19 cracked RTX 4090 graphics cards, all featuring PCB cracks near the PCIe locking mechanism”	Stop using the card and read when to RMA below

If your symptom is in the middle rows, fix that first and come back. Sag as a root cause is rare. Sag as a contributing stress on a card that then fails is the case worth preventing.

What I measured on my own hardware

Nothing. The reason is the useful part. My bench card is an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC, which ASUS lists at 357.6 x 149.3 x 76 mm and a 3.8-slot cooler, with “1 x ROG Graphics Card Holder” in the box. Mine lives in a HYTE Y60, and the Y60’s spec sheet lists “Expansion Slots 3 + 7 half-height” and a “PCI Express Riser 4.0 x 16 (included).” Half-height slots on the motherboard side mean a full-height card in that case goes on the riser, vertical, fans to the glass. A vertical card has nothing to droop from. So my droop reading is zero by construction. It says nothing about what this card would do hanging horizontally in an ordinary tower. It also means a PCIe 5.0 card is running on a PCIe 4.0 riser, and I have not measured what that costs.

The motherboard under it is a ROG STRIX B650-A Gaming WiFi, and its spec page lists SafeSlot, ASUS’s reinforced-slot feature, under ASUS EZ DIY. Puget Systems pointed at the same idea back in 2016: “Some motherboards have the slots reinforced with a metal jacket and various universal video card braces are available online.” That is why the census records whether your slot is reinforced. I want to know whether it changes the number.

So the horizontal droop numbers this page needs have to come from horizontal builds. That is what the GPU sag census is for. The bench card that seeded the coil whine census cannot seed this one.

The causes, in the order I check them

I have no frequency data on sag causes. Nobody has published any. So this is the order I check in, cheapest test first.

1. The lever arm. Puget Systems describes sag as “the weight and/or length of its heatsink pulling downward on the slot it is installed in,” and that is the whole mechanism. A card is anchored at the PCIe slot and at the bracket screws, both at one end; the cooler mass sits along the length; the far end is free. Isolation test: power down, lay a straightedge along the bottom edge at the bracket end, and read the gap at the far end with a ruler. That reading, in whole millimetres, is the number the rest of this page runs on.

2. Bracket screws and the I/O shield. A bracket that is not pulled tight against the case, or an I/O shield tab that stopped the bracket seating flat, leaves the card’s only rigid anchor loose. Isolation test: tighten both bracket screws and see whether the far end lifts. If it does, you had a loose card. Not a sagging one.

3. Slot and board flex. The slot itself is plastic, soldered to a board that is screwed to standoffs. Puget’s advice on reinforced slots and vertical mounting exists because both parts flex under a sustained load. Isolation test: with the machine off, press the far end of the card gently up to level and watch the slot end. If the whole board moves, the motherboard is carrying the load. A support post is the fix.

4. Handling before you ever saw it. Tom’s Hardware’s note on the Gigabyte cracks is worth repeating: the problem “seems to be more pronounced in pre-built systems that were roughly handled in shipping.” A prebuilt that travelled with an unsupported three-slot card may arrive with the stress already applied. Isolation test: on a new prebuilt, look at the slot lock area with a torch before the first boot.

The fix sequence, reversible first

Fit the holder that came in the box. If the card shipped with a stand, it was sized for that card. Mine came with one. Owners in the r/buildapc thread report a Strix RTX 4080 and a Hellhound RX 7900 XTX shipping with stands too. Ten minutes. Fully reversible.
An adjustable support post or bracket. Corsair’s own guidance is that “a GPU support bracket is an excellent way to combat GPU sag.” A telescoping post under the far end of the card, screwed up until the card is level, is the version I trust most, because you can set the height by eye against the straightedge. Do not lift past level.
Cable tension as a stopgap. A stiff power cable routed so it carries a little of the weight will hold a card level for a while. It is not a fix. Cables relax, and I would not leave a heavy card on one for a year.
A vertical mount. Corsair lists a riser-based vertical mount as a way of “reducing the strain on the PCIe slot and eliminating sagging,” and Puget lists cases with vertical mounting. This is what my own build does by accident of case choice. Check the riser’s PCIe generation against the card’s before you buy one.
A reinforced slot on the next board. Not a fix for the board you have, but a reason to read the spec sheet next time.

What not to do: do not wedge anything against the fan shroud where a blade can catch it; do not prop the card so hard that the far end sits above the bracket end, because a card bent upward loads the slot in the other direction; and do not ignore a card that has already dropped off the bus once. A top-voted reply in the r/buildapc thread says any support that keeps the card level is fine, and one owner reports a sag that ruined a PCIe slot. Both are owner reports, and both match the mechanism.

When to RMA rather than brace

A visible crack at the PCIe lock, a card that is no longer detected after a re-seat in a known-good slot, or artifacts that survive a driver reinstall on a card with a visible droop. Tom’s Hardware reported that Gigabyte responded to its cracking cases with a new PCB design that “features more surface area near the PCIe locking tab” and shipped the new boards as the v1.1 revision. That is a manufacturer answering the failure mode with a redesign, and it is the strongest argument on this page for spending the ten minutes on a support.

The census

Every guide on this subject I could find as of September 2026, this one included, argues about a number nobody has published a measurement of. So the companion dataset measures it: the GPU sag census collects one row per card, with the droop in millimetres, the card’s length, the mounting, what was supporting it, how many months it had been installed, and whether the slot is reinforced. It copies the coil whine census exactly: CC BY 4.0, an open repository at github.com/iBlessi/gpu-sag-census, an issue form so you need no git, a CSV for people who do, and a stdlib validator that blocks malformed rows.

The bands are fixed so old and new rows stay comparable:

Droop	Reading
0–2 mm	level; within measurement noise
3–5 mm	visible droop
6–10 mm	clear droop
11 mm and above	severe droop

The rule is the same one the coil whine census runs on. The page publishes per-model distributions once a model has five rows measured with no support in a horizontal mount. It never publishes a verdict, because the droop depends on the case, the slot, the cooler and the months as much as the model. And a level card is a first-class row. If your card does not sag, that is the row I most want.

The bottom line

A heavy card drooping a few millimetres is physics. The card will almost certainly be fine. Support it anyway, because the fix is ten minutes and reversible, and the failure it prevents is a cracked board at the one point that cannot be repaired at home. Measure before you brace. Put the number in the census. Then lift the card to level and forget about it.

Sources

ASUS ROG, ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 16GB GDDR7 OC Edition, Tech Specs (dimensions 357.6 x 149.3 x 76 mm, 3.8 slot, ROG Graphics Card Holder in the box): https://rog.asus.com/graphics-cards/graphics-cards/rog-astral/rog-astral-rtx5080-o16g-gaming/spec/
ASUS ROG, ROG STRIX B650-A GAMING WIFI, Tech Specs (SafeSlot under ASUS EZ DIY): https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-strix/rog-strix-b650-a-gaming-wifi-model/spec/
HYTE, Y60 (Expansion Slots 3 + 7 half-height; PCI Express Riser 4.0 x 16 included): https://hyte.com/store/y60
NVIDIA, GeForce RTX 5070 family specifications (Founders Edition 242 mm, 2-slot): https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-series/rtx-5070-family/
Puget Systems, GPU Sag, November 28, 2016 (mechanism, detection risk, reinforced slots, vertical mounting, “insurance plan”): https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2016/11/28/gpu-sag-867/
Corsair Explorer, How do I avoid GPU Sag? (brackets, custom supports, vertical mounting): https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/accessories/how-do-i-avoid-gpu-sag/
Tom’s Hardware, Gigabyte addresses PCB cracking issues with a revised design, February 10, 2024 (cracks near the PCIe locking mechanism, 19 cracked RTX 4090s at one repair shop, v1.1 PCB revision, shipping handling): https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/gigabyte-addresses-pcb-cracking-issues-with-a-revised-design
Reddit r/buildapc, Is GPU sag a serious issue? (owner reports: bundled stands on a Strix RTX 4080 and a Hellhound RX 7900 XTX; one ruined slot): https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/16z49hh/is_gpu_sag_a_serious_issue/

Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2: Buy It, or a Sonoff? (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TL;DR · Connect ZBT-2

Buy it for a first Zigbee network on a Home Assistant box that sits where the stick can sit, or for a Thread border router you can switch to later. $49 MSRP, cable and antenna in the box, ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT and OpenThread all supported.
It is one radio. Zigbee or Thread, never both at once, and no Bluetooth or Z-Wave. Both networks means two sticks.
Skip it when the Home Assistant machine lives in a rack or closet and the radio needs to live in the house: the SMLIGHT SLZB-06 goes on Ethernet with PoE. Skip it for Z-Wave; that is the ZWA-2.
Owners of a ZBT-1 or SkyConnect keep using it. Discontinued, still updated, same hardware under both names.

Home Assistant’s own Zigbee stick got a second generation in November 2025. The question people bring is not “is it good”. The owners in the r/homeassistant thread say it is. The question is whether it is the right radio for the machine and the house it is going into, and that turns on four things the product page will not decide for you. I have no ZBT-2 on my bench. This page is built from the vendor documents and the owner threads, and the verdict is my position on them.

The deciders that matter, ranked

1. One radio runs one protocol. Nabu Casa’s specification page says it plainly: “Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 supports either the Zigbee or Thread protocol. You can choose the protocol during setup and also switch later, if needed. Running Zigbee and Thread at the same time on the same adapter is not supported.” The product page says the same in fewer words: “Connect ZBT-2 cannot do both Zigbee and Thread simultaneously.” So the ZBT-2 is a Zigbee coordinator or a Thread border router, and if you want Zigbee devices and Matter-over-Thread devices in the same house you need two radios. The same Nabu Casa page adds that Home Assistant’s ZHA integration “is single instance only” and that “you cannot run 2 Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 adapters with the Zigbee Home Automation integration at once.” That limit is ZHA’s, not the stick’s. Two ZBT-2s on ZHA is out; one on ZHA and one on Thread is the documented pair.

2. Where the radio can physically sit. The ZBT-2 is a USB stick. Home Assistant ships it with a 1.5 m USB-C cable and a 164 mm external antenna precisely because the ZHA documentation tells you to keep the radio away from the computer: “Avoid USB 3.0 ports/computers/peripherals as they are known culprits of RFI/EMI/EMF disruption,” “only connect the Zigbee USB adapter to a USB 2.0 port,” and “use a long USB extension cable and place Zigbee Coordinator away from interference and obstacles.” A cable solves that for a Home Assistant Green on a shelf. It does not solve it for a Proxmox host in a basement rack, and that is the case where a network-attached coordinator wins. The top reply in the r/homeassistant thread makes the same cut: the ZBT-2 “is great if you’re using ZHA and have a good place to put it,” and “isn’t great if you want to connect it over something other than USB, for instance ethernet.” The mini PC for Home Assistant page covers the USB 3 interference trap in detail.

3. Which Zigbee software you run. Nabu Casa lists ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT and OpenThread Border Router as supported, and the product page answers the Zigbee2MQTT question directly: “Yes, Connect ZBT-2 is being used by many people with Zigbee2MQTT, and they are seeing great results.” Nabu Casa’s Getting started with Zigbee section carries migration guides from Zigbee2MQTT, deCONZ and an existing ZHA network onto the ZBT-2, so moving a network is a documented path rather than a re-pair. The Zigbee and Z-Wave tutorial is the setup walk-through for either path.

4. Z-Wave is a different stick. The ZBT-2 “does not support Bluetooth or Z-Wave.” Home Assistant’s Z-Wave radio is the Connect ZWA-2, a Silicon Labs ZG23 800-series stick that its product page prices at $69 / 59€ and that runs “Z-Wave and Z-Wave Long Range networks simultaneously.” If your devices are Z-Wave, the ZBT-2 does nothing for you.

5. Price against the cheap dongle. The ZBT-2’s recommended price is $49 USD / €45. ITead lists the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus, the ZBDongle-P, at $19.90 with a CC2652P, +20 dBm output and an SMA antenna. Both work with ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT. The Sonoff is a Zigbee coordinator only. It has no Thread firmware path. If Thread is never coming to your house, the price gap buys nothing.

6. The radio itself. The generation change is real. Home Assistant’s announcement says the ZBT-2 moves from the MG21 to the Silicon Labs MG24, takes the chip’s serial link to the host from 115,200 to 460,800 baud, which is the link speed and not radio range, and grows the antenna from “safety pin-sized” to “tablespoon-sized.” It also puts an ESP32-S3 on the stick as the USB bridge, which the blog frames as room for future firmware work. None of that changes the one-protocol rule.

Side by side

	Connect ZBT-2	Connect ZBT-1 (SkyConnect)	Sonoff ZBDongle-P	SMLIGHT SLZB-06	Connect ZWA-2
Protocols	Zigbee 3.0 or Thread, one at a time	Zigbee or Thread (an experimental multiprotocol firmware exists; Home Assistant does not recommend it)	Zigbee 3.0	Zigbee 3.0 (Thread noted in SMLIGHT’s guides)	Z-Wave and Z-Wave Long Range
Radio	Silicon Labs MG24 + ESP32-S3 bridge	Silicon Labs MG21	TI CC2652P + CP2102(N)	TI CC2652P + ESP32	Silicon Labs ZG23 + ESP32-S3 bridge
Link	USB-C, 1.5 m cable and external antenna in the box; 460,800 baud host link	USB, 115,200 baud host link	USB-A, SMA antenna, +20 dBm	Ethernet with PoE (802.3af) or USB-C; a Wi-Fi mode per SMLIGHT	USB-C, 5 V 1 A
Software	ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT, OpenThread Border Router	ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT, OpenThread	ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT	ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT	Z-Wave JS
Bluetooth	No (Nabu Casa)	No	Not offered (ships Zigbee firmware)	Not offered (ships Zigbee firmware)	Antenna present but inactive
Price on the vendor page	$49 / €45 MSRP (USD before tax, EUR with tax, per the product page)	Discontinued	$19.90	Not listed; set by resellers	$69 / 59€ (same tax note)
Availability, read 2026-09-12	Shipping since November 19, 2025	Out of production, still receives software updates	Listed	Listed	Listed

Specifications and prices are from the vendor pages cited in the sources below; the Bluetooth cells for the two CC2652P sticks, the availability row and the parentheticals are my reading of those pages, not vendor statements. I measured none of it.

What I would run, and why

I have no ZBT-2 on the bench, and no Zigbee stick is part of the hardware this site documents as mine. Read this as a position. Not a report.

For a first Zigbee network on a Home Assistant Green, Yellow, or a mini PC on a shelf, I would buy the ZBT-2 and run it on ZHA with the cable, antenna vertical, away from any USB 3 port. It is the stick Home Assistant’s own docs list first, it is the one the migration guides are written for, and if Matter-over-Thread devices arrive later it can become the border router while a $20 Sonoff takes over Zigbee.

For a Home Assistant VM on a Proxmox box in a closet, I would buy the SLZB-06 and put it on a PoE port in the middle of the house, because the radio’s location matters more than the radio’s chip and the Proxmox setup already has enough USB passthrough in it. The ZBT-2 on a 1.5 m cable does not reach the middle of a house from a rack.

For a house that already runs a Sonoff dongle without dropouts, I would change nothing. The owners in the r/homeassistant thread who report the ZBT-1 running “a handful of Zigbee devices (~30 or so?)” with no problems are describing the normal case, and Home Assistant says the ZBT-1 keeps getting updates. Spend the $49 when you have a reason: Thread, a dying stick, or a coordinator too far from the devices it serves.

The bottom line

The ZBT-2 is the right default Zigbee radio for a Home Assistant machine the stick can sit next to, and the right Thread border router for the same machine. Not both at the same time. Decide the protocol first, then the room the radio lives in, and the choice between the ZBT-2, a Sonoff and an SLZB-06 makes itself. Z-Wave is a different stick. A working ZBT-1 is not a reason to buy anything.

Sources

Nabu Casa Support, About Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 (one protocol at a time; no Bluetooth or Z-Wave; MG24 and ESP32-S3; ZHA single instance): https://support.nabucasa.com/hc/en-us/articles/31313065259421-About-Home-Assistant-Connect-ZBT-2
Nabu Casa Support, Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 status light (LEDs): https://support.nabucasa.com/hc/en-us/articles/31368700350109-Home-Assistant-Connect-ZBT-2-status-light-LEDs
Nabu Casa Support, Getting started with Zigbee (the migration guides): https://support.nabucasa.com/hc/en-us/sections/29400567268253-Getting-started-with-Zigbee
Home Assistant, Connect ZBT-2 product page (cable, antenna, MSRP, supported integrations): https://www.home-assistant.io/connect/zbt-2/
Home Assistant blog, The best gets better - Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2, November 19, 2025 (MG21 to MG24, 115,200 to 460,800 baud, antenna, ZBT-1 production ended): https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/11/19/home-assistant-connect-zbt-2/
Home Assistant, Connect ZBT-1 product page (no longer in production, still updated; formerly SkyConnect): https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/
Home Assistant, Connect ZWA-2 product page (ZG23, Z-Wave plus Long Range, $69 / 59€): https://www.home-assistant.io/connect/zwa-2/
Home Assistant, Zigbee Home Automation integration documentation (USB 3.0 interference and extension-cable guidance; recommended radios): https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha/
ITead, SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZBDongle-P (CC2652P, +20 dBm, $19.90): https://itead.cc/product/sonoff-zigbee-3-0-usb-dongle-plus/
SMLIGHT, SLZB-06 (CC2652P, PoE 802.3af, Wi-Fi, USB-C): http://smlight.tech/product/slzb-06
Reddit r/homeassistant, Is the Connect ZBT-2 the way to go for a Zigbee bridge? (owner reports): https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1phsj5c/is_the_connect_zbt2_the_way_to_go_for_a_zigbee/

Ryzen 7 9850X3D: Buy It, or the 9800X3D? (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TL;DR · Ryzen 7 9850X3D

It shipped January 29, 2026 at $499. Same 8 cores, 16 threads, 96 MB of L3 and 120 W TDP as the 9800X3D; the boost clock moves from 5.2 to 5.6 GHz. That is the whole change.
Buy it for a new build only when the gap to a 9800X3D is about $30 or less. Tom's Hardware measured marginal gains, high single digits in a few clock-sensitive games, and around 30 percent higher gaming power draw.
Ignore it if you own a 9800X3D, or a 7800X3D driving a 1440p or 4K monitor. My own 7800X3D sits GPU-bound at 4K on an RTX 5080; a faster CPU changes nothing there.
It is not the flagship. That is still the 16-core 9950X3D for anyone who needs the cores, and the reasons to pick it have not changed.

The 9850X3D is, in Tom’s Hardware’s words, “the first time AMD has re-released an X3D chip with a better bin,” and seven months after launch the question people bring to it is still the same one: is it worth the extra money over the 9800X3D, or the upgrade from what they have. The answer is short and the evidence is public. I have no 9850X3D on my bench. So this page is a decision built from the reviews and AMD’s own numbers, plus one first-party measurement that settles the 4K case. Prices move week to week; the specifications and the review findings do not.

What is confirmed

Everything in this section is dated and owned by someone.

The part. TechPowerUp’s CPU database lists the Ryzen 7 9850X3D with a release date of January 29, 2026, a launch price of $499, eight cores and sixteen threads, a 4.7 GHz base clock, up to 5.6 GHz turbo, 96 MB of L3, a 120 W TDP with a 162 W PPT, the Granite Ridge codename, DDR5-5600 rated memory, and an unlocked multiplier. AMD’s own store page lists the same eight cores, sixteen threads, up to 5.6 GHz boost, 4.7 GHz base and a 120 W thermal solution. Tom’s Hardware’s review table lists the 9800X3D it replaces at the top of the stack with the same eight cores and sixteen threads, the same 4.7 GHz base, a 5.2 GHz boost, the same 120 W TDP and 162 W PPT, and a $480 MSRP against a $470 street price in January 2026.

What the reviews measured. Tom’s Hardware’s verdict, from Jake Roach’s review: “The Ryzen 7 9850X3D claims a new title as the world’s fastest gaming processor, but it lives in the shadow of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, with a higher price, higher power consumption, and only marginal performance gains.” The pros list gives “5% to 7% uplift in lightly-threaded tasks”; the cons list gives “Around 30% higher power consumption in games compared to Ryzen 7 9800X3D” and “Largely similar performance in heavily-threaded tasks, despite higher power consumption.” On the games themselves: “There are some stand-out games where an extra 400MHz on the boost clock speed offers high single-digit performance gains, but in many games and apps, the gains are in the low single-digits, if there’s any performance gain at all.” And the line that frames the whole product: “Using the Ryzen 7 9800X3D as the basis for comparison sets you up for disappointment; this chip was never meant to be an upgrade to AMD’s existing Zen 5 X3D lineup.” His read after testing is that it “seems mainly targeted at OEMs, or perhaps, system builders that haven’t already picked up the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.”

Where it lands in the hierarchy. TechFuelHQ’s CPU gaming hierarchy, which normalizes Tom’s Hardware’s 1080p data so the fastest gaming chip equals 100, puts the 9850X3D at 100.0, the 9800X3D at 97.0, the 9950X3D at 95.7 and the 7800X3D at 85.6. Three points separate the two eight-core X3Ds. Eleven separate it from the 7800X3D.

Overclocking. TechPowerUp lists the multiplier as unlocked. Tom’s Hardware explains why every Zen 5 X3D part can do this: the review describes “a 96MB chunk of L3 SRAM placed under the CCD,” which “gives the CCD direct access to the IHS, improving thermal performance and letting AMD offer full multiplier-based overclocking.” In Tom’s words, “With PBO, a 200MHz boost is already possible on the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and although you can push the Ryzen 7 9850X3D up by that same 200MHz, the gap between the two chips remains small.”

What is not settled

The price gap is the only variable that decides the purchase, and it moves. In January 2026 Tom’s Hardware’s table had the 9850X3D at $500 against a $470 street price for the 9800X3D, a $30 gap. I am not printing a price table. Check both chips at the same retailer on the day you buy. Read the gap, not the number.

Then there is shelf life. Tom’s Hardware writes that the chip “looks like a way to keep the price of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D from slipping further, lest it finally drop below the $450 mark.” If the 9800X3D sells out and the 9850X3D takes its shelf slot, this page’s advice collapses to “buy the one on the shelf,” and I will update the capsule when that happens.

Intel is the other unknown. Tom’s Hardware writes that “Intel still has yet to answer 3D V-Cache, though that could change later this year as Intel is expected to introduce bLLC to its Nova Lake desktop processors.” Nothing on shelves today changes the X3D pick.

The decision, by what you have now

New AM5 gaming build. Price both. If the 9850X3D is within about $30 of the 9800X3D at the same retailer, take the 9850X3D; you get the faster bin and lose nothing except a little efficiency. If the gap is wider, the 9800X3D is the same chip at 5.2 GHz and the money goes further in the GPU or the motherboard. Either way, the X3D choice is settled; the only open question is the sixteen-core 9950X3D, and the 9950X3D vs 9800X3D page covers when the extra cores pay.

You own a 9800X3D. Ignore it. Three points on the hierarchy, low single digits in most games, 30 percent more power. Tom’s Hardware said it was never meant as an upgrade to the existing Zen 5 X3D line, and I agree. So did r/PcBuild, where a September 10, 2026 thread asking whether switching to a 9850X3D is worth it drew 35 comments and a one-word top reply, “No.”

You own a 7800X3D. Ignore it too, unless you game at 1080p on a very fast GPU and chase frame rates in clock-sensitive titles. My own bench is a 7800X3D under an RTX 5080 at 4K, and the numbers I measured on it are why: Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra with no upscaling runs 58 fps average with 49 fps 1 percent lows, RT-Ultra with DLSS 4 Quality runs 50 and 41, and Black Myth: Wukong at Cinematic runs 34 and 27. Every one of those is a GPU limit. A faster CPU would move none of them. The 7800X3D to 9800X3D page reached the same conclusion for the cheaper chip and it holds here.

You own a 5800X3D or anything on AM4. The upgrade is the platform, not the chip, and the 5800X3D to 9800X3D page prices that move. Once you are buying a board and DDR5 anyway, apply the new-build rule above: the 9850X3D only at a small gap.

You play competitive shooters at 1080p on a 240 Hz or faster panel. This is the one case where the 400 MHz is the point. Tom’s Hardware’s “stand-out games” with high single-digit gains are the clock-sensitive ones, and a CPU-bound esports title running far past the panel’s refresh rate is exactly that. Pay the gap if you are in this group and it is small.

You need the cores. The 9850X3D was never a productivity chip. That is the 9950X3D’s job.

Update contract

This page is dated in its front matter and will be refreshed when one of three things happens: the 9800X3D leaves retail or its street price crosses above the 9850X3D’s, AMD ships the next X3D generation, or Intel’s large-cache desktop part lands with reviews. Until then the specifications are stable. Only the price gap needs checking on the day you buy.

Sources

TechPowerUp CPU Database, AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D (release date January 29, 2026; launch price $499; 4.7 / 5.6 GHz; 120 W TDP, 162 W PPT; multiplier unlocked; DDR5-5600): https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/ryzen-7-9850x3d.c4301
AMD Store, AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D Processor (8 cores, 16 threads, up to 5.6 GHz, 4.7 GHz base, 120 W): https://shop-us-en.amd.com/amd-ryzen-7-9850x3d-processor/
Tom’s Hardware, Jake Roach, AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D review: The world’s fastest gaming processor, again (verdict, pros and cons, pricing table, overclocking notes): https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-ryzen-7-9850x3d-review
TechFuelHQ, CPU gaming hierarchy (Tom’s Hardware 1080p data normalized to the 9850X3D at 100.0): /articles/cpu-hierarchy-2026/
TechFuelHQ, open bench dataset for the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC (the first-party 4K figures and their methodology): /data/gpu/rog-astral-rtx-5080-oc-2026-06-09/
TechFuelHQ, the $2,500 7800X3D + RTX 5080 4K build the dataset was measured on: /pc-builds/2500-dollar-7800x3d-rtx-5080-4k-build-2026/
Reddit r/PcBuild, Is switching to a 9850x3d worth it? (September 10, 2026, owner discussion): https://www.reddit.com/r/PcBuild/comments/1wcbqml/is_switching_to_a_9850x3d_worth_it/