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If you thought those were all the news, you're mistaken:

Noctua's pumpless 'thermosiphon' liquid cooling unit is expected to be released in 2026 and has already given me a free lesson in basic thermodynamics
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/cooling/noctuas-pumpless-thermosiphon-liquid-cooling-unit-is-expected-to-be-released-in-2026-and-has-already-given-me-a-free-lesson-in-basic-thermodynamics/
Noctua is perhaps best known for its brown fans and conventional air coolers, but it might not be long until it makes its move into the liquid cooling world, too. Noctua founder, Roland Mossig, showed off the prototype of its pumpless thermosiphon cooling unit in Japan this weekend, and according to Japanese tech outlet Hermitage Akihabara it's expected to be released in 2026.

Our Jacob first took a look at the thermosiphon prototype at Computex last year, and came away impressed. Essentially it creates a vapour chamber-like effect by using heat emitted from the CPU to evaporate a refrigerant, which then moves up a vapour tube into a fan-cooled condenser, where it cools off, condenses back to a liquid state, and makes its way back to the CPU to be heated again—no pump required.
>> It’s Noctua. If they say 2026, expect at least one extra year.

MSI shuns AMD GPUs with some of its newest power supplies
https://overclock3d.net/news/power_supply/msi-shuns-amd-gpus-with-some-of-its-newest-power-supplies/
Yesterday, we reviewed the new MPG A1000GS PCIE5 power supply from MSI, and it left us confused. Unlike almost all other high-wattage PSUs on the market, it only features one 8-pin (6+2-pin) PCIe power connector. As such, it cannot power GPUs that require multiple 8-pin PCIe power connectors. In fact, this problem seems to affect two newly released MSI power supplies.

Upon further investigation, we found that the MSI MPG A1250GS (the 1250W version of the MPG A1000GS) also has only one 8-pin PCIe power connector. This means that two of MSI’s high-end PSU models cannot support most of AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 series GPU lineup, with Sapphire’s 16-pin powered RX 9070 XT Nitro+ being the only exception that we know of.

While we have highlighted AMD’s RX 9070 XT series as unsupported, this is the case for all GPUs that require more than one 6+2-pin PCIe power connector. This includes older Nvidia GPUs (most RTX 3090 GPUs, for example) and some Intel ARC graphics cards.
>> I don’t really see it as a problem. Very few people will buy a PSU for an existing system, and if you need 2 or 3 8-pin connectors, there are plenty other brands to choose from.

Gabe Newell had his eyes on a social network in the '90s that 'was not in a games context at all'—meaning Valve-owned social media could've been a very real thing
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/gabe-newell-had-his-eyes-on-a-social-network-in-the-90s-that-was-not-in-a-games-context-at-all-meaning-valve-owned-social-media-couldve-been-a-very-real-thing/
During the Game Developer's Conference 2025, Monica Harrington—one of Valve's founders and its first chief marketing officer, who once outright threatened Sierra over the rights to Half-Life—gave an illuminating talk on the company's infancy. Before, of course, it became the goliath-felling company it is today.

While this is interesting in itself—another fascinating snippet she shared was about how Gabe Newell, circa 1998 to the early 2000s, had his eyes set on a social network. Y'know, like Facebook, Instagram, or X. "Gabe had interesting ideas that had nothing to do with software," Harrington said. "I mean, with games—and some of those would have been really interesting."

Really interesting indeed, which is why PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield asked about it when he sat down for an interview with her after the talk. Harrington revealed the bombshell that, if a time traveller had gone back and stepped on a butterfly, we could all be yelling at each other on a Valve-owned social media platform instead.
>> Well, it couldn’t have been worse than what we have now, right?

Mars Attracts Demo Is Here
https://www.techpowerup.com/334480/mars-attracts-demo-is-here
The upcoming park management sim Mars Attracts has just released a playable demo of the game on Steam. The demo release coincided with the release of an all-new trailer featuring an in-depth look at the gameplay, which sees the player building whacky rides, managing the needs of fickle Martian guests, and abducting humans to serve as the star attractions. This latest trailer reveals all new experiments and amenities for messing with the unfortunate human captives.
>> It’s like Theme Hospital or the recent Two Point “something” games. Here’s the link.