This week on Tom's Hardware Premium: October 24, 2026

We're back with another weekly roundup, containing everything that we've published on Tom's Hardware Premium this past week. From a brand-new type of SSD to reasons why buying that expensive audiophile-grade headset might not be the wisest idea for gaming, and much more. To read any of the articles featured in this roundup, be sure to subscribe to unlock access.

TP-Link’s alleged ties to China have drawn scrutiny from regulators, even though the company says it split from its Chinese parent company back in 2024. With the FCC’s ban on foreign-made consumer routers in place, it has pledged nearly $1 billion in U.S. R&D and manufacturing, and has also signed a letter of intent with Key Tronic to assemble its Wi-Fi 8 routers in Mississippi, hoping to win approval. We chronicle the saga of keeping those routers off U.S. shelves, and how TP-Link hopes that Key Tronic will once again unlock the U.S. market for the networking firm.

• TP-Link proposes $1 billion US Wi-Fi router manufacturing alliance with Key Tronic — potential deal seeks to end ongoing saga blocking its Wi-Fi 8 products from American homes

Last week saw the release of Nvidia's RTX Spark platform, with a brand-new high-end Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra in tow. However, despite the device's focus on running local AI workloads and inference, it can be a capable gaming machine. There's just one thing getting in its way: a 3:2, 3270x2180 display that demands a lot out of the relatively humble Blackwell-based GPU within. We tested the ideal custom-resolution cocktails to bolster gaming performance on the Surface Laptop Ultra, with benchmarks on how it performs in Control Resonant, and how to get a better gaming experience out of Nvidia's pricey slab of silicon.

• One easy change makes Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra with RTX Spark a better gaming system — custom resolutions make DLSS easier on the device

Gaming PCs and setups aren't merely about getting the best performance possible; it's also about immersion, comfort, and ease-of-use. All of those elements are heavily informed by your choice of gaming headset. With the market saturated up and down, ' audiophile'-grade headsets are sitting on storefronts with some of the heftiest price tags. So, is pure audio fidelity really the be-all and end-all for gaming headsets? We argue that other elements, like microphone quality and additional quality-of-life features, can make a bigger difference.

• Why you don't need an audiophile headset for gaming — comfort, convenience, and a good mic win over pure audio fidelity

Tape storage is far from obsolete. As the AI boom produces and demands massive datasets that don't always need to remain on expensive SSDs or HDDs, tape shipments jumped by 57% year-on-year in Q1 2026. But where does the technology go next? We explore how companies like IBM, HPE, and Quantum are building new standards beyond LTO-10 with new standards and upcoming cartridges with up to 365TB native capacity, balancing time-tested reliability, performance and cost.

• LTO roadmap extends to 365 TB per cartridge as tape storage refuses to die —25-year-old format sees 400x capacity increase without changing form factor

China's domestic chipmaking technologies have lagged behind Western counterparts due to a lack of access to advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. However, despite this setback, the country continues to rely on older DUV machines instead. We talked to experts to find out how much further DUV can go.

• China can make advanced chips without EUV, but the bill keeps growing — DUV multiple patterning means bigger dies, lower yields, and longer manufacturing times

SSD controller designer FADU announced its File-Semantic SSD (FS-SSD) and detailed the technology in a white paper. The FS-SSD puts the filesystem directly onto the SSD's flash to bypass host CPUs, enabling GPUs, DPUs, and NICs to open and read files directly. The company also presented initial tests, with results that still need to be qualified by real silicon. The FS-SSD builds upon existing frameworks and a Gen6 controller, and the company claims that partner samples should be shipping by Q3 2027.

• FADU puts the filesystem inside the SSD's flash to bypass host CPUs — File-Semantic PCIe 6.0 SSD delivers 460,000 ops/s to GPUs and DPUs, samples due by Q3 2027

On the AI front, Deepseek released its latest AI model. Named Deepseek V4-Flash-1017, the model scores well across intelligence and agentic workloads broadly. However, further analysis of the open-weight model shows that it is more prone to hallucination than Western closed-source counterparts, which is important as the model sits directly between GPT 5.6-Sol and Claude Opus 5, but at a much lower cost-per-task ratio than either of the two, potentially making it an attractive option for those looking to run tasks with verifiable outputs like programming or OCR functions.

• Deepseek's latest AI model is smarter than ever, but its low running costs come at a price — uses only one-quarter of the HBM and one-eighth of SSD storage but still battles hallucinations in agentic workloads

Vast swathes of modern tech infrastructure rest on open source software, yet many of the projects used by billions of people are either underfunded or understaffed. We explore a sobering report wherein 11 out of 23 critical pieces of open source infrastructure only have one or two maintainers. We look back at major vulnerabilities like Shellshock and Log4Shell to show what neglect can truly cost, and why the people maintaining these critical pieces of online infrastructure deserve more support.

• Nearly half of critical open-source software relies on just one or two low-paid maintainers, opening the door to potential threats — report details critically underfunded projects that remain understaffed or unfunded

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