Usman Saleem brings 8+ years of comprehensive PC hardware expertise to the table. His journey in the tech world has involved in-depth tech analysis and insightful PC hardware reviews, perfecting over 6+ years of dedicated work. Usman’s commitment to staying authentic and relevant in the field is underscored by many professional certifications, including a recent one in Google IT Support Specialization.
Position at Tech4Gamers
At Tech4Gamers, I’m the PC Hardware Specialist, primarily contributing to the “Best-Ofs” section and covering news about technology and the PC hardware industry. I provide thoughtful buying advice based on thorough testing and personal expertise. I also review hardware products and games to keep things fresh.
Tech Journey
From childhood, I’ve been immersed in gaming and PC hardware. Starting with a Pentium 2 PC, each named PC, from ZEUS to APOLLO, symbolizes a chapter in my journey. My true passion lies in the beating heart of the gaming industry – PC hardware.
The Biwin Black Opal NV7400 2TB NVMe SSD offers impressive speeds of up to 7400MB/s read and 6500MB/s write, making it a solid choice for high-performance storage. The SSD is PS5-compatible, includes a graphene thermal pad for heat management and comes with a five-year warranty. While it performs well in most tests, it lags slightly behind some competitors in real-world scenarios, especially under heavy loads. Overall, it’s a fast, affordable option with a few trade-offs.
The ASRock B850M Steel Legend WiFi is a solid MicroATX motherboard for $179, offering good features like PCIe Gen5, WiFi 7, and plenty of USB ports. It supports AMD Ryzen 7000, 8000, and 9000 CPUs and performs well in gaming. While its VRM cooling isn’t great for heavy overclocking, it’s a great pick for budget-friendly, compact builds, especially if you like its sleek white design.
The ASRock B850 Pro RS WiFi is a $189.99 motherboard and falls into the budget category. The motherboard offers plenty of fine features for its price, like WiFi 6E connectivity, heatsink armor for VRMs and NVMe drives. It performs fine on most parts but runs slightly hotter than most other competing motherboards. However, the aesthetics of the motherboard sure look appealing.
The MSI MPG X870E Edge Ti WiFi is a great choice for an X870E chipset that costs you $329.99. This motherboard can also be called the beauty and the beast because of its appealing white aesthetics and powerful VRMs that ensure great performance output. The board also comes packed with an EZ-DIY mechanism all over it. Moreover, the VRMs stay very cool even under intense load, which impressed us quite well.
The MSI MEG X870E GODLIKE is the most expensive X870 chipset motherboard, costing $1099. For this, you get a top-notch VRM setup and impressive cooling, a premium-looking design, high-end build quality (courtesy of a 10-layered PCB), and great features. While we were thoroughly impressed by the board in all departments, we still think the price tag is too high.
The Intel Core Ultra 5 245K offers decent performance at a considerable price range. It is equipped with the latest architecture and has great power efficiency. Moreover, it delivers satisfactory performance in multi-core tasks and handles everyday applications smoothly. However, its gaming performance, while adequate, doesn’t quite match up to competitors in the same price range. Therefore, users seeking balanced productivity can consider this an option. However, gamers should look elsewhere for better performance in highly demanding games.
The Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the new gaming champ, outclassing AMD's own Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU in our gaming charts. With its improved 3D V-cache design, combined with the Zen 5 architecture, the CPU improves gaming and productivity performance while becoming more efficient than its predecessor.
The MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk WiFi is a $299 motherboard packed with the latest I/O and EZ-DIY features. It has a fairly basic (almost) all-black design with silver accents and yellow-green colors to represent the board's branding. For VRMs, the board's 16+1+1+1 (16A 90A duet stages for the board), which is enough for Intel's 15th gen chips, even if you want to overclock a bit.
The MSI MPG Z890 Carbon WiFi is a power-packed board with a feature set covering everything you could possibly think of. Its power-phase design is a 20+1+1+1 with 20x 110A SPS powering the VCore, leaving plenty of overclocking room for any Arrow Lake chip. The design is excellent, with 2 RGB zones, but the branding goes a bit overboard.
The MSI MEG Z890 ACE motherboard is a powerhouse for those who want the best features without worrying about cost. Built for Intel’s latest Core Ultra processors, it supports high-speed DDR5 memory, PCIe 5.0, and offers a generous range of M.2 and USB ports. With an impressive VRM and heatsink setup, this board is optimized for overclocking and handled both gaming and synthetic tests with top scores.
