Dr. 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.
AMD’s new flagship shows some killer performances but comes with a premium $599 price tag, which means it’s more expensive than the competing 14900K. While productivity performance is mostly on par with this Intel beast, the 1080P gaming performance falls behind.
The Teamgroup T-Force Vulcan Z 2TB SSD offers good value for entry-level gaming, with solid performance and shock-resistant design. While its DRAM-less architecture leads to slower write speeds, SLC caching helps mitigate this issue. Its affordable price, compact size, and reliable performance make it a good choice for budget-conscious users, though it won’t match the speed of NVMe SSDs.
The Ryzen 9 9900X is AMD’s new flagship 12-core gaming chip but with lower base frequencies and a 120-watt rating. It impressed us in most benchmarks outside of gaming, and in gaming, the chip couldn’t even outperform the Ryzen 7 9700X. Its $449 price tag makes it compete with the 7800X3D and 13900K, but the former is a far better gaming CPU, while the latter is much better for both multi-threaded workloads AND gaming.
The Teamgroup PD20M Mag Portable SSD is a great option for content creators, offering fast storage with speeds up to 20Gbps thanks to its USB 3.2 Gen2x2 interface. Its slim, lightweight design and MagSafe compatibility make it an ideal match for iPhone users. It performs well in real-world use, though the small cache may cause occasional dips in write speeds. Overall, it’s a great value for anyone looking for a dependable, portable storage solution for high-quality videos and photos.
The Ryzen 7 9700X is AMD's new mid-to-high ranger, only with $40 off the price tag and reduced power consumption numbers. With its 65W TDP, the CPU is also limited in clock speeds and could not perform up to the mark in most tests, including gaming. Single-core performance is incredible, though, and you get full AVX-512 support, but maximizing its performance will require you to remove its power limits through PBO.
The Ryzen 5 9600X emerges as the new mid-ranger from AMD's lineup, but not as the ideal one. It shows great single-core performance numbers and supports AVX-512 but is limited heavily by reduced power targets and clock speeds. This does mean that power and thermal efficiency are great, but gaming performance numbers have barely improved over the last gen, and AMD continues to trail Intel in multi-threaded performance.
