Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen 7700X makes enough sense to feature in our higher-end gaming build. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It's been a while since our last system guide , and a few new products—most notably AMD's Ryzen 9000 series CPUs —have been released since then. But there haven't been many notable graphics card launches, and new ones are still rumored to be a few months off as both Nvidia and AMD prioritize their money-printing AI accelerators.

But that doesn't make it a bad time to buy a PC, especially if you're looking for some cost-efficient builds. Prices of CPUs and GPUs have both fallen a fair bit since we did our last build guide a year or so ago, which means all of our builds are either cheaper than they were before or we can squeeze out a little more performance than before at similar prices.

We have six builds across four broad tiers—a budget office desktop, a budget 1080p gaming PC, a mainstream 1440p-to-4K gaming PC, and a price-conscious workstation build with a powerful CPU and lots of room for future expandability.

Enlarge / The Terran 1 rocket made its only flight (a beautiful one) in March 2023. (credit: Relativity Space/John Kraus)

A splashy California-based launch company named Relativity Space shared a photo of sleek-looking rocket hardware on its social media channels last week. The image featured an impressively large payload fairing, which protects satellites on the ride into space.

"Time to take a look at Terran R’s payload envelope," the company said, calling attention to three people standing to the left of the tall fairing.

Such an anodyne post seems an unlikely candidate to spark an analysis of what is really happening at Relativity Space, but that’s exactly what happened. Less than an hour after its publication, a source I've been talking to about Relativity for a while contacted me again.

Enlarge / After launching some smaller and cheaper electric vehicles, it was time for Volvo to push the boat out with a flagship SUV, the EX90. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Volvo provided flights from Washington to Orange County and accommodation so Ars could drive the EX90. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

An early convert to the idea of an all-electrified lineup, Volvo has taken a slightly different tack to most other automakers as it electrifies its product range. Where most would start off with a big and expensive electric vehicle first, it did the opposite, starting out with small and affordable . That means it's now time for a flagship EV, an all-new three-row SUV called the EX90, which we've driven ahead of US deliveries toward the end of this year.

That's later than Volvo planned, and as you'll see, some EX90 features have fallen even further behind and will need to be enabled via software update in the future. Because while the EX90 is a good demonstration of a new, tech-forward approach to car design, it's also the latest example of automakers adopting the "minimal viable product" approach from the tech sector.

Volvo has developed an all-new platform for larger EVs, which the EX90 will share with other brands within the Geely group, notably the Polestar 3 we drove a few weeks ago . The Volvo is a little longer than the Polestar, and unlike the SUV from the upstart startup, the EX90 is a three-row, with seats for either six or seven depending on whether you opt for a bench or a pair of captain's chairs for the middle row.

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If you were suspected of a crime, would you trust a chatbot to accurately explain what happened?

Some police departments think the tech is ready. And officers who have started using chatbots to quickly complete their most dreaded task of drafting police reports seemingly don't want to go back to spending hours each week doing their own paperwork.

In June, a police department in Frederick, Colorado, boasted that it was the "first law enforcement agency in the world to go live with Axon Draft One," a new kind of police tech that allows a chatbot to spit out AI-generated police reports almost immediately after a body camera stops recording a police interaction.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Content warning: The following story describes instances of animal abuse.

In 2017, the Des Moines, Iowa, lawyer Philip Colt Moss was facing felony drug charges after a raid on his townhome turned up marijuana, hash, OxyContin, Klonopin, Xanax, zolpidem (the active ingredient in Ambien), and "four pills that contained methylphenidate" (the active ingredient in Ritalin).

The cops found enough material that they charged Moss as a drug dealer, but Moss's lawyer told the Des Moines Register that his client was simply someone who "needs help." Moss had stepped aside from his work as an attorney and "checked into an eight-week inpatient treatment facility outside of Iowa," the paper reported at the time.

Enlarge / A Starliner spacecraft mounted on top of an Atlas V rocket before an unpiloted test flight in 2022. (credit: Boeing )

Ten years ago next month NASA announced that Boeing, one of the agency's most experienced contractors, won the lion's share of government money available to end the agency's sole reliance on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.

At the time, Boeing won $4.2 billion from NASA to complete development of the Starliner spacecraft and fly a minimum of two, and potentially up to six, operational crew flights to rotate crews between Earth and the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract for essentially the same scope of work.

A decade later the Starliner program finds itself at a crossroads after Boeing learned it will not complete the spacecraft's first Crew Flight Test with astronauts onboard. NASA formally decided Saturday that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the Starliner capsule June 5, will instead return to Earth inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Put simply, NASA isn't confident enough in Boeing's spacecraft after it suffered multiple thrusters failures and helium leaks on the way to the ISS.

Enlarge / NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, seen in their Boeing flight suits. (credit: NASA/Francisco Martin )

After months of consideration, NASA said Thursday that it will finally decide the fate of two astronauts on board the International Space Station, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, by this weekend. As soon as Saturday, the two crew members will learn whether they'll return on a Starliner spacecraft in early September or a Crew Dragon vehicle next February.

On the eve of this fateful decision, the most consequential human spaceflight safety determination NASA has had to make in more than two decades, Ars has put together a summary of what we know, what we believe to be true, and what remains yet unknown.

Why has NASA taken so long?

Wilmore and Williams arrived at the International Space Station 11 weeks ago. Their mission was supposed to last eight days, but there was some expectation that they might stay a little longer. However, no one envisioned the crew remaining this long. That changed when, during Starliner's flight to the space station, five of the 28 small thrusters that guide Starliner failed. After some touch-and-go operations, the astronauts and flight controllers at Johnson Space Center coaxed the spacecraft to a safe docking at the station.

Enlarge / For this "neutral," hardware-focused review of the Pixel 9 phones, I asked the Pixel to "reimagine" a "neutral white background." (credit: Kevin Purdy / Gemini AI)

I asked Google's Gemini Live chatbot, running on a new Pixel 9 Pro, how easy it was to use the Pixel 9 without all the Gemini AI features?

"It's definitely possible to use a Pixel 9 without Gemini," the bot responded in a remarkably casual voice. "While Gemini adds some cool features, your phone will still work pretty much the same as any other Android phone. You'll still have access to all the basic stuff like making calls, texting, taking photos, and all your favorite apps."

"But," I followed up, "didn't Google emphasize the Pixel 9 as a Gemini phone?"

Enlarge / Firaxis has upped the ante on presentation for the cities. It's still a bit abstract and removed, but they have more vibrancy, detail, and movement than before. (credit: 2K Games)

2K Games provided a flight from Chicago to Baltimore and accommodation for two nights so that Ars could participate in the preview opportunity for Civilization VII. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

From squares to hexes, from tech trees to civic trees, over its more than 30 years across seven mainline entries, the Civilization franchise continues to evolve.

Firaxis, the studio that has developed the Civilization games for many years, has a mantra when making a sequel: 33 percent of the game stays the same, 33 percent gets updated, and 33 percent is brand new.