Sunday Entertainment Edition: RTX 5090 Drama, $7,000 Spark Laptops, and the Best Tech YouTube of the Week

October 18, 2026 — nxpc Entertainment Edition

It's Sunday. Your GPU is idle, your coffee is hot, and the tech internet has served up an absolutely unhinged week of content. This week had everything: NVIDIA quietly killing the RTX 5090 for gamers, a $7,000 laptop that weighs more than your willpower, retro GPUs that cost more than modern cars (almost), and a charity build stream that actually matters. Grab the popcorn — here's your watch list.

🎬 The Week's Best Videos

The Big One: The RTX 5090 Is Dead (Long Live the RTX 5090?)

The defining tech saga of the week was NVIDIA's halo card apparently vanishing from shelves. Hardware Unboxed kicked it off Tuesday with

**"The RTX 5090 Was Already Discontinued (For Gamers)"** — the thesis being that production has quietly shifted to AI-bound products. JayzTwoCents followed up Friday with **"NVIDIA Says 5090 isn't discontinued, I say they are liars"** after NVIDIA denied everything, and then HUB's podcast closed the loop with **"The RTX 5090 is Dead - Our Thoughts"** (). Three channels, one drama, zero boring minutes. If you watch nothing else this week, watch this trilogy unfold — it's the "silicon lottery" meta gone corporate.

Watch:

· ·

Gamers Nexus — HW News Delivers Again

Steve Burke dropped this morning's

**"HW News"** episode, and the headline stack reads like a fever dream: *NVIDIA's $7,000 RTX Spark laptop, RIP RTX 5090, GTA VI PC launch, CPU price hike*. Four stories, one video, all with GN's signature receipts-first style. Also don't miss **"Disgusting Greed of AI Memory Companies: Micron's 90% Margin"** from Monday — if you've been wondering why your DDR5 upgrade got 30% pricier this year, this is the video that names names. (Sound familiar, Canadians? Our DDR5 prices have been getting hammered by exactly this.)

Watch:

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Linus Tech Tips — The RTX Spark Roadshow

LTT went all-in on NVIDIA's new RTX Spark platform this week. The standout is Friday's

**"NVIDIA Tried to Tell me How to Benchmark RTX Spark"** — Linus vs. vendor benchmark guidance is always spicy television. Warm up with Wednesday's **"My First 15 Minutes with RTX Spark"**, and if you want the pure build-porn experience, the **AMD $5,000 Ultimate Tech Upgrade** from Tuesday is comfort food for PC enthusiasts. Bonus: Taron's pros-vs-fake-AI-Photoshop chaos from last Friday () is still making the rounds.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV81SqB6HQg · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjuisARFWn8 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndzz-YWvtkg

Hardware Unboxed — Nostalgia Benchmarks

Beyond the 5090 saga, HUB served a beautiful retro-meets-data sandwich:

**"Was Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 Good or Bad, Knowing What We Know Now?"** (Friday) is a proper retrospective re-test of the last halo king, and **"This Was The Best Mid-Range GPU Of All Time!"** (Thursday) will start arguments in every comment section. That's the point.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_JFYJAQWPc · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsLNBy6Lepw

JayzTwoCents — Retro Gold and CNC Dreams

Jay's

**"This GPU was the HOLY GRAIL 20 years ago..."** (Tuesday) is peak retro-tech joy — two decades back to when dual-GPU cards were a flex. He also put a **desktop CNC through its paces** (ToolDance X1) if maker content is your lane, and Thursday's **"Is this the WORST GPU ever?"** delivers the trainwreck energy we subscribe for.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGsfW0LX1Vs · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju9ZJAjySqs · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATKZyOm7fIc

MKBHD & the Laptop Lane

Marques kept it Apple-heavy ahead of the holidays:

**"Apple Homeview Impressions: Not Convinced!"** (Tuesday) is his skeptical take on Apple's $299 smart-home display, and **"The NEW Tesla Roadster: My Honest Reaction"** (Friday) is worth it for the b-roll alone. On the laptop side, Dave2D was quiet this week (enjoy the silence, Dave), so the laptop crown goes to Alex Ziskind's excellent **"NVIDIA Put a DGX Spark in a Laptop… Almost"** — MSI's Prestige N16 Flip AI+ vs. his own DGX Spark, with the plug literally pulled mid-test. And Monitors Unboxed just dropped **"I Changed My Personal Gaming Monitor. Again."** this morning — Tim's personal-gear videos are always refreshingly honest.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVv3mQzlrN0 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scwlR0QHGOk · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ88PPiAsl8

🗓️ The Event Horizon — Mark Your Calendars

• LAN All Night Gaming Festival — November 6–8, 2026, Great Wolf Lodge, Grapevine, Texas. Waterpark + BYOC LAN is a combo we can get behind. Details: https://lanallnight.com/
• PGL Masters Bucharest 2026 (Counter-Strike) — kicks off early November as part of a stretch that includes a $3,000,000 prize-pool event running Nov 1–Dec 1 per Esports Charts: https://escharts.com/upcoming-tournaments
• PGL Major Singapore 2026, Stage 2 — December 2026, per the HLTV calendar: https://www.hltv.org/events
• PUBG Global Championship — Istanbul hosts the 2026 season finale, with the Overwatch Champions Series World Finals landing in early December (Esports Insider calendar): https://esportsinsider.com/2026/01/esports-events-calendar-2026-every-major-tournament
• NVIDIA RTX Spark Dev Box launch — November 2026. The compact desktop variant is confirmed with a 20-core Grace CPU, 6,144-core Blackwell GPU, 128GB unified LPDDR5X and 2TB SSD, with Spark pricing running $2,599–$5,999 (Oct 16 report): https://tech-insider.org/nvidia-rtx-spark-windows-arm-pc-launch-2026/
• GTA VI PC watch — consoles get the game November 19, 2026 (Rockstar Newswire: https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/ak3ak31a49a221/grand-theft-auto-vi-is-now-set-to-launch-november-19-2026), and a Forbes report (Oct 13) claims the PC port window is much sooner than GTA V's infamous wait: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2026/10/13/the-gta-6-pc-release-date-window-revealed-says-new-report/ — GN flagged this in today's HW News too. Clear your SSD.

💗 Community Highlight of the Week

Shoutout to Hardware Unboxed, who spent Wednesday

**building pink gaming PCs for charity** in support of Breast Cancer Research (US donations: https://www.bcrf.org/other-ways-give/ · Australia: https://donations.bcna.org.au/). Also worth your time: the GN + Level1Techs investigation into LG smart TVs secretly recording viewing behavior — Wendell's team rooted the TV and documented everything. The coverage via Daily Julian is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaDg_IFMzwk. Check your TV settings tonight.

💵 Price Check: The RTX Spark Wave (USD + CAD)

The Spark ecosystem is fully live on Amazon now — here's what the mini-AI-desktop tier costs this week, both sides of the border:

Product	US Price (USD)	Canada Price (CAD)	Notes
Gigabyte AI TOP ATOM (GB10, 128GB LPDDR5X)	$8,499.99 (amazon.com/dp/B0HMJVMQZR)	—	DGX Spark-class, 9 left in stock
ASUS Ascent GX10 (GB10, 1TB)	—	$8,299.00 (amazon.ca/dp/B0G1MQYHRD)	4.4★, 88 ratings, in stock
NVIDIA DGX Spark (128GB, 4TB, retail)	—	$10,985.40 (amazon.ca/dp/B0FWJ16CCH)	Only 4 left in stock
NVIDIA Jetson Thor Developer Kit	$5,249.00 (was $5,499) (amazon.com/dp/B0FTM2LXSF)	$8,170.80 (amazon.ca/dp/B0FTM2LXSF)	4.2★, 50+ bought this month
GMKtec EVO-X2 (Ryzen AI Max+ 395, 128GB)	—	$5,099.00 (amazon.ca/dp/B0H8C1FJZW)	4.4★, 276 ratings — the value lane

My take: the ASUS Ascent GX10 at $8,299 CAD is the closest thing to a "deal" in the GB10 tier right now, and the GMKtec EVO-X2 at $5,099 CAD remains the sensible entry if you want local LLM horsepower without the NVIDIA tax. Nobody's calling an $8K AI brick an impulse buy — but it is entertainment-adjacent, in the same way watching crypto miners melt GPUs in 2021 was.

🏁 The Verdict

This week proved the healthiest thing about PC tech media: it's never boring. The 5090 discontinuation saga is a genuinely important story about where GPU silicon gets allocated, and it's being covered with receipts by three channels independently. The Spark platform is NVIDIA's most interesting (and priciest) consumer experiment in years, and GTA VI's PC port rumors are the closest thing our community has to a national holiday. Queue up the 5090 trilogy tonight — then check your smart TV's privacy settings.

Who this week was for: everyone. Watch the GN HW News for the big picture, HUB for the data, Jay for the retro feels, and Marques for the polished chaos.

📚 Sources

• Hardware Unboxed — The RTX 5090 Was Already Discontinued (For Gamers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YmFfIc500w
• JayzTwoCents — NVIDIA Says 5090 isn't discontinued: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YKStoqEuLI
• The Hardware Unboxed Podcast — The RTX 5090 is Dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C6KJxBpOo8
• Gamers Nexus — HW News (Oct 18, 2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFbLI71G5DM
• Gamers Nexus — Micron's 90% Margin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXLpZdkS7u8
• Linus Tech Tips — NVIDIA Tried to Tell me How to Benchmark RTX Spark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV81SqB6HQg
• Hardware Unboxed — RTX 4090 retrospective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_JFYJAQWPc
• Hardware Unboxed — Best Mid-Range GPU Of All Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsLNBy6Lepw
• Hardware Unboxed — Pink Gaming PCs for Charity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2wqrkU_hB0
• JayzTwoCents — Holy Grail GPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGsfW0LX1Vs
• JayzTwoCents — ToolDance X1 CNC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju9ZJAjySqs
• MKBHD — Tesla Roadster Reaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scwlR0QHGOk
• MKBHD — Apple Homeview Impressions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVv3mQzlrN0
• Alex Ziskind — MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+ vs DGX Spark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ88PPiAsl8
• Monitors Unboxed — I Changed My Personal Gaming Monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYnmu6ULg9g
• LAN All Night: https://lanallnight.com/
• Esports Charts — Upcoming Tournaments: https://escharts.com/upcoming-tournaments
• HLTV Events Calendar: https://www.hltv.org/events
• Esports Insider — 2026 Calendar: https://esportsinsider.com/2026/01/esports-events-calendar-2026-every-major-tournament
• Rockstar Newswire — GTA VI Nov 19, 2026: https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/ak3ak31a49a221/grand-theft-auto-vi-is-now-set-to-launch-november-19-2026
• Forbes — GTA 6 PC Release Date Window Revealed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2026/10/13/the-gta-6-pc-release-date-window-revealed-says-new-report/
• Tech-Insider — RTX Spark pricing ($2,599–$5,999, Oct 16): https://tech-insider.org/nvidia-rtx-spark-windows-arm-pc-launch-2026/
• Amazon US / Amazon CA product listings (prices as of Oct 18, 2026)
• BCRF donations: https://www.bcrf.org/other-ways-give/ · BCNA: https://donations.bcna.org.au/