The FPS Review Weekender: DLSS 5 Arrives in NBA 2K27 and Costs Half Your Frame Rate, Plus 11 More Hardware Reviews

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By David Schroth

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Neural rendering stopped being a demo this week. DLSS 5 shipped inside NBA 2K27, reviewers got their hands on it, and the picture that emerged is more complicated than either NVIDIA’s slides or the “AI slop” crowd suggested. Elsewhere Fractal Design emptied an entire product launch onto the review circuit in a single day, be quiet!’s new 1600W flagship drew six independent teardowns, and a two-year-old Z890 flagship became a value pick.

NVIDIA DLSS 5 in NBA 2K27

Written reviews:

Consensus summary: Reviewers converge on skin, hair, cloth and contact shadows as the areas where 3D-Guided Neural Rendering transforms the image, and several make the point that basketball was chosen precisely because close-up humans under changing arena light are the hardest thing to render convincingly. DSOGaming measured a 50 to 60 percent drop on an RTX 5090, taking native 1080p with ray tracing from 180 FPS to 134 FPS, and Club386 reached the same conclusion along with higher power draw at the wall. HotHardware made a conditional recommendation that depends entirely on your card, your resolution tolerance and how much you personally value near-photorealism, while noting NVIDIA has said Ada support arrives once RTX 50 tuning is finished.

FPS Review take: We covered the launch timing and RTX 50 requirement here, and if you are pairing this with a recent driver, our GeForce 616.56 write-up covers two regressions worth knowing about first.

be quiet! Dark Power Pro 14 IO 1600W

Written reviews:

Consensus summary: Six outlets in six days is unusual for a power supply, and they agree on the verdict: this is one of the best ATX 3.1 units of the year and priced accordingly. The digitally controlled full-bridge LLC platform carries both 80 PLUS Titanium and Cybenetics Titanium certification with efficiency rated up to 94.9 percent, and the IO Center software is the differentiator, offering live power and efficiency monitoring plus a genuine switch between single-rail and six-rail operation. Two native 12V-2×6 connectors, Japanese 105°C capacitors, a 135 mm Silent Wings fan and a ten-year warranty round it out. Club386’s summary is the fairest one: excellent, if you can afford it.

FPS Review take: Six-rail switching on a 1600W unit is not a marketing checkbox in a year when connector melting keeps making headlines, and it is worth reading alongside Hardware Unboxed’s RTX 5090 cable failure from earlier in the week. Most builds do not need 1600W, but if you are running a 5090 and planning to keep the PSU across two more GPU generations, this is the tier where the ten-year warranty starts to make financial sense.

Fractal Design Define One

Written reviews:

Video reviews:

Consensus summary: Everyone opened the box expecting the closed front panel to strangle airflow, and everyone came away saying it does not. Three 140 mm Momentum fans with liquid-crystal-polymer blades sit behind fine-patterned aluminium side intakes, and an integrated air guide in front of the power supply shroud steers intake toward the graphics card, which KitGuru rated 9 out of 10 and found genuinely effective as well as quiet. The one repeated complaint is roof clearance: front radiators go to 360 mm but the top caps out at 280 mm, which KitGuru flags as the sole negative and Guru3D corroborates. APH Networks reads it as a “Define Lite” at $154.99, essentials of the line at a competitive price rather than a flagship.

FPS Review take: A sound-damped case with bitumen-lined panels that still cools a 5080 properly is a harder engineering problem than another mesh box. If your build plan starts with a 360 mm AIO in the roof, this is not your case, and our motherboard specifications database is the faster route to a rear-connector board if you want to take advantage of the 37 mm of cable routing space behind the tray.

Fractal Design Radius 240 / 360 RGB

Written reviews:

Consensus summary: Fractal’s first all-in-one range lands as a competent, sensible product rather than a spectacle, which is on brand. The 360 mm model pairs a C1100 copper cold plate with a ceramic-bearing PWM pump rated to 3,400 RPM and 40,000 hours at 40°C, ships with three pre-installed Dynamic 3 fans, and routes its cabling inside the tubing, which is the detail Igor’s Lab spends the most time on and the one that will sell it to anyone building in a window case. Articulating 90-degree fittings, ARGB Gen 2 lighting managed through Fractal’s web-based Adjust Pro interface and a five-year warranty at $109.99 make the value case.

FPS Review take: Cable clutter is the last unsolved problem in AIO design and routing the wiring through the tubes is a better answer than another sleeve, so this is worth watching even if you are not shopping for a cooler today. Note that Fractal shipped the Radius, the Define One, the Summit and a new chair on the same day, which is an unusually aggressive single-day launch for a company that normally drips products out.

MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

Written reviews:

Video reviews:

Consensus summary: KitGuru’s month-long test is the interesting addition here because it moves past launch-day benchmarks (Ed: That’s the only new review here) into what living with the thing is actually like, including a Linux install and travel use. The performance verdict has not shifted since June: Intel’s Arc G3 Extreme and its 12-core Arc B390 GPU comfortably beat AMD’s best handheld silicon, with Tom’s Hardware measuring 20 to over 30 FPS advantages at 1200p and 800p against the ROG Xbox Ally X, and PC Gamer finding it tops nearly every benchmark in their suite. Every single review then arrives at the same wall, which is $1,799, or MacBook Pro money for a handheld, against a Legion Go 2 at $1,349.99 with an OLED panel.

FPS Review take: Intel finally has the fastest handheld chip on the market and MSI has priced the result out of reach of the people who would most enjoy it, which is a familiar 2026 story. If you want to see what the Arc G3 Extreme does in a real game rather than a synthetic, the handheld half of the Star Wars entry below tests this exact device.

Star Wars: Zero Company PC Performance

Written reviews:

Consensus summary: TechPowerUp is the only outlet to have done proper testing here, across 35 desktop GPUs and separately on the Steam Deck LCD, ROG Xbox Ally X, ROG Ally X and MSI Claw 8. The game is Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite and Lumen, it looks the part, and native maximum settings will keep even premium cards under 60 FPS, so EA’s own 1440p60 recommendation quietly assumes you are upscaling. The oddest finding is on Intel hardware, where enabling frame generation produced no measurable FPS gain and some crashes on both Arc GPUs and Intel handhelds.

FPS Review take: The settings that actually matter are the CPU-bound ones rather than the shadow and reflection sliders people reach for first. Worth reading next to our S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Update 2.0 testing, which showed what an engine version bump can recover in exactly this kind of CPU-limited scenario.

MSI PRO B550M-P WiFi6E (2026)

Written reviews:

Video reviews: No video reviews found.

Consensus summary: This is the second board in Rick’s series on MSI’s AM4 lineup refresh, and the PRO line has always been the business and basic desktop tier rather than the enthusiast one. The 2026 refresh moves to a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot with Steel Armor and doubles up on M.2, with one Gen4 x4 socket and one Gen3 x4, alongside refreshed WiFi 6E.

FPS Review take: New AM4 boards in late 2026 keep looking less absurd every time DDR5 pricing moves, which is the same argument we made alongside our MSI B550 GAMING WiFi6E review. If you are building on AM5 instead, our ASRock X870E Challenger WiFi review covers the value end of that platform.

GIGABYTE B850M AORUS Stealth Ice

Written reviews:

Video reviews: No video reviews found.

Consensus summary: Backside-connector boards remain a niche, and TweakTown’s stance is that this is the board for people who have already decided they want one. In a micro-ATX white build with a matching case, hiding every cable behind the tray is the entire point, and the Stealth Ice executes that cleanly without the price premium these boards usually carry.

FPS Review take: Rear-connector support keeps quietly appearing in mainstream cases, including the Define One above, and the ecosystem is finally deep enough that you can plan a build around it rather than hunting for the one compatible chassis. Our motherboard specifications database is the quickest way to check what else supports the layout.

Cooler Master V8 ACE 3DHP BLACK

Written reviews:

Consensus summary: Igor’s Lab is the fresh review for this week and most technically interested of the three, and the detail it fixes on is that Cooler Master did not build the obvious dual-tower cooler. Instead there is a single heatsink fed by six heatpipes with two 120 mm fans in unusually thick 30 mm frames, and the heatpipe arrangement is the part worth studying. The V8 name and the engine-inspired shroud are doing the marketing work, but the black finish version is a straightforward, competent air cooler underneath.

FPS Review take: Air cooling keeps getting quietly better while everyone argues about AIO screens, and a single-tower design that competes with dual-towers is a more interesting result than another 360 mm radiator. 30 mm fan frames eat RAM clearance that a spec sheet height figure will not warn you about.

Montech TEN

Written reviews:

Video reviews:

Consensus summary: A $70 micro-ATX case that swallows a large GPU and a 360 mm radiator is the headline, and TechPowerUp confirms it does both. The modular interior is the actual selling point, with three layouts, M1 for air cooling, M2 which flips the chassis so the base becomes the roof, and I3 which drops to a Mini-ITX sandwich, plus nine possible PSU positions. The repeated warning is that fitting a full ATX power supply eats most of that flexibility, and with no room behind the motherboard tray, all cable management happens in the main chamber. TweakTown calls it almost a perfect case at the price.

FPS Review take: Three layouts on a $70 chassis is the kind of thing that normally shows up at three times the money and gets called modular as a marketing term, so credit where it is due. Budget the extra for an SFX unit before you buy, because the ATX bracket turns the TEN’s best feature into a compromise.

ADATA SD820 Portable SSD

Written reviews:

Consensus summary: The pitch is ruggedness at reasonable speed rather than headline performance. A 20 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 interface, advertised sequentials up to 2 GB/s, IP68 water and dust resistance, survivable four-foot drops and a body under an ounce thanks to a USB-native Silicon Motion SM2322G controller paired with Micron 3D QLC. That QLC is the catch every reviewer lands on: PCWorld found that writing more than roughly 20 percent of the drive’s capacity in one go exhausts the secondary cache and collapses throughput to around 130 MB/s.

FPS Review take: For dropping in a bag with game installs or camera files this is the right shape of compromise, and the sustained-write cliff only bites if you routinely dump enormous single transfers. Storage pricing being what it is right now, worth reading next to our piece on external hard drive prices more than doubling in under a year before you decide how much capacity to buy.

ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Hero

Written reviews:

Consensus summary: TweakTown revisits a board it originally called excellent but badly overpriced, and the argument is entirely about the two years of price drops since. The hardware has not changed and did not need to, so the question is whether a former halo product at current street pricing beats a new mid-range board at the same money. TweakTown’s answer is yes, with the caveat that you are buying into a platform whose successor is already visible on the roadmap.

FPS Review take: The aged-flagship-becomes-value-pick trade is running everywhere in 2026, from AM4 boards to the 5800X3D, and it works for the same reason each time: component prices climbed while the used and clearance market did not.

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David Schroth
David is a computer hardware enthusiast that has been tinkering with computer hardware for the past 25 years and writing reviews for more than ten years. He's the Founder and Editor in Chief of The FPS Review.

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