Oh hi, gerbils. I'd be a little more uppity if it wasn't so darn cold around here. By "cold" I mean a temperature that's probably considered summer weather in parts of the US, but the local temperate climate has left me quite spoiled. I learned the meaning of "hot" when I travelled over to the US in the summer, and I suspect that if I were to repeat the endeavor, I'd learn the meaning of "death chill" too. Alas, weather can't get in the way of deals delivery. Here they are.
- AMD's Ryzen processors are a hot commodity these days. If you're doing a new build with one, you'd do well to look at the Aorus GA-AX370-Gaming K7. This high-end board is stuffed with goodies like a BCLK generator, Type-C and Type-A USB 3.1 Gen2 ports, an M.2 socket, and dual Gigabit Ethernet adapters courtesy of Killer E2500 and Intel chips. Oh, and lest we forget, a metric buttload of RGB LEDs. This board can be yours for $159.99 from Newegg.
- 'Tis the season for storage, and we have three offerings today on that front. First off, the smallest-but-mightiest one: a Western Digital Black 256 GB SSD. This NVMe drive can colloquially be described as "mucho fasto," with its read speeds up to 2050 MB/s, and can be obtained for only $97.99 from Newegg or from Amazon. The $0.38-per-GB price is pretty low for super-fast NVMe storage.
- On the spinning rust aisle, we have the HGST DeskStar NAS 10 TB hard drive. This enormous bucket o' bits has a 256 MB cache and 7200 RPM rotational speed, making it one speedy drive. You can grab it for $299.99 from Newegg with the promo code EMCBCRF25—or $30 a terabyte.
- If you prefer your hard drives outside your computer, then check out the Seagate Expansion 8 TB USB 3.0 external drive. There's not much to be said about this HDD, and that's just fine. The $149.99 ($18.75 per terabyte) price at Amazon will do all the talking.
- Who doesn't love a wheel-and-pedals set for playing the latest racing simulator? The Thrustmaster T300RS uses Hall-effect magnetic sensors and has an adjustable rotation angle up to 1080°. The dual-belt mechanism should make it a smooth movement when the wheel goes out of your hands because you slammed into another car, too. You can get the set for only $249.99 from Newegg while stocks last. A quick note, although the product page says the T300RS is for the Playstation 4, it's also compatible with PC.
- Finally, something for those eager to do some killing on the road. The Lenovo Y520 (80WK00HTUS) is a 15.6" laptop fitted with a Core i5-7300HQ CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a storage combo with a 128 GB SSD and a 1 TB hard drive. Those are meaty specs on their own, but the cake is topped by a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti card with 4 GB of VRAM. That entire combination is nearly perfectly balanced for gaming. It helps that the machine is rather slim for a gaming laptop, too. You can get one from Newegg for a measly $919.99 with the promo code EMCBCRF34. Our homeboy Jeff Kampman has personally used a Y520 himself and he only has good things to say about it.
That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at the Microsoft Store and Das Keyboard's shop.