Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 runs smoothly across a wide range of GPUs at 1080p through 4K, but Beenox's ray tracing decisions, switching off DLSS/FSR/XeSS and forcing Variable Rate Shading, are being called "inexcusable" despite a spectacular campaign. The Simagic Aston Martin Valkyrie steering wheel earns TweakTown's 96% Editor's Choice at $799 for its authentic Alcantara, carbon, and magnesium build. Tom's Hardware tips the IQUNIX MQ80 low-profile keyboard as well-made but tells buyers to wait for a sale unless they actively dislike magnetic switches, while the XASTRA LZ360 ARGB AIO cooler and Edifier Hecate G2000 Pro speakers round out a week where looks and performance both count. The recurring theme? In markets this crowded, few products are undisputed winners.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 runs great on PC. Its ray tracing choices, though, are a different story.
A day-one performance analysis, plus this week's reviews of a $799 sim wheel, a low-profile keyboard, a 360mm AIO cooler, and some RGB desktop speakers.
It's late October 2026 and the review desks are stacked with the usual suspects: a GPU-churning shooter, a cooler that doubles as a light show, and a pile of peripherals all betting that looks now matter as much as specs. Five reviews dropped this week spanning cooling, input devices, desktop audio, and a day-one PC performance test. Read on.
Performance has become table stakes
Let's put the biggest item first. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is out, it runs well, and a day-one analysis confirms it. Beenox built the game (Infinity Ward gets the box credit), and DSOGaming's John Papadopoulos benchmarked the campaign across a genuinely broad spread of GPUs on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D with 32GB DDR5 at 6000MHz. Keep in mind that's campaign-only, so don't expect multiplayer numbers here.
The GPU list is the point. AMD shows up with the RX 6900XT, 7900XTX, and 9070XT. NVIDIA brings the 2080Ti, 3080, 4090, 5080, and 5090. At 1080p and 1440p on Extreme with ray tracing off, the tested cards held a steady 60+ FPS for the entire run. Native 4K Extreme isn't brutal either, with the top five GPUs each posting a constant 60.
If you've followed COD's PC ports over the last several years, you know the rhythm. Optimization usually arrives late. The community patches what the publishers ship unfinished. Someone is always promising a patch to fix the rest. It holds this year too. AMD tends to pull ahead in these titles, and the pattern persists: the RX 9070XT and 7900XTX beat the RTX 5080, while even the older 6900XT bested the RTX 3080.
Then comes the part that made the reviewer wince.
Enable ray tracing in MW4 and it switches off every PC upscaler. DLSS, FSR, XeSS all vanish, locking you to the default render scale. Variable Rate Shading also kicks in automatically whenever RT or any upscaler is active, so you lose a layer of control too. NVIDIA Ray Reconstruction isn't present at all. The game looks spectacular, a real jump from the underwhelming recent COD entries, and RT helps in some scenes though it's barely noticeable in others. There's a cosmetic gripe as well: character faces can read as fake, plastic, and soft under certain lighting. Traversal stutters show up in a few campaign areas that stream in new data, worse with weaker CPUs or at high frame rates, not as badly as the Oblivion Remastered mess, but you'll feel it.
DSOGaming: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 PC Performance Analysis
Since I had pre-ordered Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, I benchmarked its campaign to provide you with a day-1 PC Performance Analysis.
Overall verdict: MW4 runs great across a huge hardware range with plenty of graphics customization. The ray tracing decisions are called "inexcusable," with hope they get patched. The author even floated interest in a DLSS 5 mod to tackle those faces.
The XASTRA LZ360 tells the same story in cooling. It's a proper 360mm AIO with respectable numbers, then a full matrix-display ecosystem layered on top. The radiator is 394 × 120 × 27mm, three FDB fans spin from 800 to 2,200 RPM pushing up to 74.76 CFM, and the pump runs 600 to 3,000 RPM over a copper cold plate with 0.1mm microchannels. The showpiece is the lighting, a 16×16 LED matrix on the pump and a 28×8 matrix on each fan frame, driven by Xastra PC software through a dedicated controller. It's a lot of pixel playground, and the cooler does its job as well as it looks. Whether that display ecosystem is worth the attention depends on you, but it's a bold way to stand out in a market where everyone runs the same Intel and AMD chips.
NikKTech: XASTRA ASTRA LZ360 ARGB 360mm CPU Liquid Cooler Review
Modern AIO coolers often compete on performance, aesthetics, and features, but few attempt to stand apart quite like the XASTRA ASTRA LZ360 ARGB. Equipped with customizable dot-matrix displays and a feature-rich design, it aims to bring something different to today's enthusiast systems.
Looks are no longer an afterthought
If MW4 is about chasing frame rates, the Simagic Aston Martin Valkyrie wheel is about chasing authenticity. TweakTown hands it 96% and an Editor's Choice, which is a rarity when the price tag is this high. It faithfully replicates the cockpit of the road-going Valkyrie, the Adrian Newey-designed hypercar making 1,140 BHP with a 220 MPH top speed and an original price above $3.5 million. You get a slice of that cockpit for roughly a twentieth of the cost.
The build does the talking. An Alcantara rim, genuine 3D carbon fiber center face, magnesium alloy back, and a CNC aluminum frame give it 1,718 grams of zero-flex rigidity aimed at mid- to high-end wheelbases. A 5-inch touchscreen carries the real dashboard interface, eight RGB buttons sit alongside a pair of 5-way switches and self-centering stalks, and a start/stop button rounds it out. SimPro Manager handles the button mapping and LED tuning, with SimHub compatibility out of the box. Simagic tested it with Valkyrie mods in Assetto Corsa and Forza Motorsport, and the verdict lands cleanly: "Simagic has done Aston Martin proud."
A fair question, though: is a $799 wheel really worth it? TweakTown says yes, pointing to build quality and performance that justify the price, even if the product sits more as a collector's showpiece than a mainstream purchase. For what it's worth, it's hard to argue against the craftsmanship when the collar matches the real car's orange.
Simagic Aston Martin Valkyrie Steering Wheel Review
Our Simagic Aston Martin Valkyrie Steering Wheel Review examines its authentic design, 5-inch touchscreen, SimHub support, and $799 price.
IQUNIX makes a narrower case with the MQ80, its low-profile, all-aluminum mechanical keyboard. Gasket mounting, PBT keycaps, and some of the best-sounding keystrokes in the segment are the selling points. It's a deliberate opposite move from the company's Hall Effect EZ series, aimed at people who'd rather stick with traditional switches over magnetic flexibility. Tom's Hardware, however, doesn't hand over an automatic pick. At $175.99 on Amazon (also at Best Buy) it's well-made and stylish, but the switches aren't adjustable and the options are thin. It's also heavy enough that it stops being a genuinely portable keyboard. So the guidance is simple: if you actively dislike magnetic switches, grab it. Otherwise, wait for a sale, because a lot of the competition is pushing that same idea back.
Tom's Hardware: IQUNIX MQ80 low profile mechanical keyboard review
It has stiff competition.
Finishing with the Edifier Hecate G2000 Pro, a compact 2.0 system that puts out a soundstage bigger than its footprint suggests. Tom's Hardware calls it a unique-looking statement piece with impressive audio for the size and plenty of connectivity, available in black-and-white for $249.99. It isn't spotless, though. The clear transparent enclosure is a love-it-or-hate-it call, the double-press buttons for flipping lighting modes and EQ profiles are finicky, the sound goes muddy at low volume, and the companion software is basic. For the right desk setup, the audio outperforms the size by a wide margin, but the design will turn some people off before they ever hear it.
Tom's Hardware: Edifier Hecate G2000 Pro Review: Clear and Colorful
A love-it-or-hate-it design with impressive audio
The through-line is plain once you lay the reviews side by side. Looks stopped being an afterthought a while ago, but performance remains the floor. MW4 runs everywhere, the cooler delivers real headroom, and the wheel actually rips. And if there's a single takeaway, it's the "wait for a sale" sentiment turning up twice from Tom's Hardware. In markets this saturated, few products are undisputed winners, and that's arguably a good thing for anyone shopping.
