They say that with age comes wisdom, so it should come as no surprise that on the eve of Alfa Romeo’s 115th anniversary, the company that originally made its name competing in endurance races like the Targa Florio and Mille Miglia with flame-spitting sportscars is currently looking to increase its market share with a sensible, high-riding crossover.

Produced in Stellantis’ Pomigliano d'Arco assembly plant near Naples, Italy, alongside its mechanical twin, the Dodge Hornet , the Tonale plug-in hybrid introduced last year helped the Italian automaker find a foothold at a time when many of the auto conglomerate’s brands have been struggling. Now, a non-hybrid version of Alfa’s answer to models like the BMW X1 and Audi Q3 has joined the fray, sporting turbocharged power, standard all-wheel drive, and the same sharp styling at a significantly lower base price. But old habits die hard, and as I discovered over the course of a few days with the latest iteration of the Tonale, even Alfa Romeo’s most pragmatic offerings have their fair share of quirks.

The new base model comes with a double overhead-cam 2.0 L inline four-cylinder engine producing 268 hp (200 kW) and 295 lb-ft (400 Nm) of torque. The turbocharged mill is paired with a nine-speed automatic transmission and an all-wheel drive system that can send up to 50 percent of the available torque to the rear wheels. While those numbers are down a bit compared to the Tonale Hybrid, at 3,715 lbs (1,685 kg), the 2.0 L Turbo is more than 400 lbs (181 kg) lighter than the PHEV model.

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They say that with age comes wisdom, so it should come as no surprise that on the eve of Alfa Romeo’s 115th anniversary, the company that originally made its name competing in endurance races like the Targa Florio and Mille Miglia with flame-spitting sportscars is currently looking to increase its market share with a sensible, high-riding crossover.

Produced in Stellantis’ Pomigliano d'Arco assembly plant near Naples, Italy, alongside its mechanical twin, the Dodge Hornet , the Tonale plug-in hybrid introduced last year helped the Italian automaker find a foothold at a time when many of the auto conglomerate’s brands have been struggling. Now, a non-hybrid version of Alfa’s answer to models like the BMW X1 and Audi Q3 has joined the fray, sporting turbocharged power, standard all-wheel drive, and the same sharp styling at a significantly lower base price. But old habits die hard, and as I discovered over the course of a few days with the latest iteration of the Tonale, even Alfa Romeo’s most pragmatic offerings have their fair share of quirks.

The new base model comes with a double overhead-cam 2.0 L inline four-cylinder engine producing 268 hp (200 kW) and 295 lb-ft (400 Nm) of torque. The turbocharged mill is paired with a nine-speed automatic transmission and an all-wheel drive system that can send up to 50 percent of the available torque to the rear wheels. While those numbers are down a bit compared to the Tonale Hybrid, at 3,715 lbs (1,685 kg), the 2.0 L Turbo is more than 400 lbs (181 kg) lighter than the PHEV model.

Read full article

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They say that with age comes wisdom, so it should come as no surprise that on the eve of Alfa Romeo’s 115th anniversary, the company that originally made its name competing in endurance races like the Targa Florio and Mille Miglia with flame-spitting sportscars is currently looking to increase its market share with a sensible, high-riding crossover.

Produced in Stellantis’ Pomigliano d'Arco assembly plant near Naples, Italy, alongside its mechanical twin, the Dodge Hornet , the Tonale plug-in hybrid introduced last year helped the Italian automaker find a foothold at a time when many of the auto conglomerate’s brands have been struggling. Now, a non-hybrid version of Alfa’s answer to models like the BMW X1 and Audi Q3 has joined the fray, sporting turbocharged power, standard all-wheel drive, and the same sharp styling at a significantly lower base price. But old habits die hard, and as I discovered over the course of a few days with the latest iteration of the Tonale, even Alfa Romeo’s most pragmatic offerings have their fair share of quirks.

The new base model comes with a double overhead-cam 2.0 L inline four-cylinder engine producing 268 hp (200 kW) and 295 lb-ft (400 Nm) of torque. The turbocharged mill is paired with a nine-speed automatic transmission and an all-wheel drive system that can send up to 50 percent of the available torque to the rear wheels. While those numbers are down a bit compared to the Tonale Hybrid, at 3,715 lbs (1,685 kg), the 2.0 L Turbo is more than 400 lbs (181 kg) lighter than the PHEV model.

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Nvidia will release the GeForce RTX 5060 on May 19 starting at $299, the company announced via press release today. The new card, a successor to popular past GPUs like the GTX 1060 and RTX 3060, will bring Nvidia's DLSS 4 and Multi Frame-Generation technology to budget-to-mainstream gaming builds—at least, it would if every single GPU launched by any company at any price wasn't instantly selling out these days.

Nvidia announced a May release for the 5060 last month when it released the RTX 5060 Ti for $379 (8GB) and $429 (16GB). Prices for that card so far haven't been as inflated as they have been for the RTX 5070 on up, but the cheapest ones you can currently get are still between $50 and $100 over that MSRP. Unless Nvidia and its partners have made dramatically more RTX 5060 cards than they've made of any other model so far, expect this card to carry a similar pricing premium for a while.

Compared to the RTX 4060, the RTX 5060 adds a few hundred extra CUDA cores and gets a big memory bandwidth increase thanks to the move from GDDR6 to GDDR7. But its utility at higher resolutions will continue to be limited by its 8GB of RAM, which is already becoming a problem for a handful of high-end games at 1440p and 4K.

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Nvidia will release the GeForce RTX 5060 on May 19 starting at $299, the company announced via press release today. The new card, a successor to popular past GPUs like the GTX 1060 and RTX 3060, will bring Nvidia's DLSS 4 and Multi Frame-Generation technology to budget-to-mainstream gaming builds—at least, it would if every single GPU launched by any company at any price wasn't instantly selling out these days.

Nvidia announced a May release for the 5060 last month when it released the RTX 5060 Ti for $379 (8GB) and $429 (16GB). Prices for that card so far haven't been as inflated as they have been for the RTX 5070 on up, but the cheapest ones you can currently get are still between $50 and $100 over that MSRP. Unless Nvidia and its partners have made dramatically more RTX 5060 cards than they've made of any other model so far, expect this card to carry a similar pricing premium for a while.

Compared to the RTX 4060, the RTX 5060 adds a few hundred extra CUDA cores and gets a big memory bandwidth increase thanks to the move from GDDR6 to GDDR7. But its utility at higher resolutions will continue to be limited by its 8GB of RAM, which is already becoming a problem for a handful of high-end games at 1440p and 4K.

Read full article

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Nvidia will release the GeForce RTX 5060 on May 19 starting at $299, the company announced via press release today. The new card, a successor to popular past GPUs like the GTX 1060 and RTX 3060, will bring Nvidia's DLSS 4 and Multi Frame-Generation technology to budget-to-mainstream gaming builds—at least, it would if every single GPU launched by any company at any price wasn't instantly selling out these days.

Nvidia announced a May release for the 5060 last month when it released the RTX 5060 Ti for $379 (8GB) and $429 (16GB). Prices for that card so far haven't been as inflated as they have been for the RTX 5070 on up, but the cheapest ones you can currently get are still between $50 and $100 over that MSRP. Unless Nvidia and its partners have made dramatically more RTX 5060 cards than they've made of any other model so far, expect this card to carry a similar pricing premium for a while.

Compared to the RTX 4060, the RTX 5060 adds a few hundred extra CUDA cores and gets a big memory bandwidth increase thanks to the move from GDDR6 to GDDR7. But its utility at higher resolutions will continue to be limited by its 8GB of RAM, which is already becoming a problem for a handful of high-end games at 1440p and 4K.

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Last month, Nintendo and its third-party partners revealed that many of the "physical" games on the Switch 2 would be made available only as "Digital Key Cards." Unlike traditional physical Switch games—which contain flash memory with the necessary data to play the game on the card itself—these key cards will simply enable the holder to download a copy of the game to their system and play that copy if and when the transferable key card is inserted in the system.

Already, many players are thinking ahead to what this means for their ability to play Game Key Card releases well into the future. It's not hard to find potential Switch 2 owners publicly worrying about games "disappear[ing] into the void" or becoming "effectively a worthless piece of plastic/e-waste" when Nintendo eventually disables its Switch 2 game download servers. Some go even farther, calling a Game Key Card an "eighty dollar rental" rather than a real game purchase.

While these are valid long-term concerns, I think some players are underestimating the likely timeline for when Game Key Cards will become "useless e-waste." As it stands, we already have an example of Nintendo supporting continued downloads of games purchased nearly two decades ago and counting.

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Last month, Nintendo and its third-party partners revealed that many of the "physical" games on the Switch 2 would be made available only as "Digital Key Cards." Unlike traditional physical Switch games—which contain flash memory with the necessary data to play the game on the card itself—these key cards will simply enable the holder to download a copy of the game to their system and play that copy if and when the transferable key card is inserted in the system.

Already, many players are thinking ahead to what this means for their ability to play Game Key Card releases well into the future. It's not hard to find potential Switch 2 owners publicly worrying about games "disappear[ing] into the void" or becoming "effectively a worthless piece of plastic/e-waste" when Nintendo eventually disables its Switch 2 game download servers. Some go even farther, calling a Game Key Card an "eighty dollar rental" rather than a real game purchase.

While these are valid long-term concerns, I think some players are underestimating the likely timeline for when Game Key Cards will become "useless e-waste." As it stands, we already have an example of Nintendo supporting continued downloads of games purchased nearly two decades ago and counting.

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Last month, Nintendo and its third-party partners revealed that many of the "physical" games on the Switch 2 would be made available only as "Digital Key Cards." Unlike traditional physical Switch games—which contain flash memory with the necessary data to play the game on the card itself—these key cards will simply enable the holder to download a copy of the game to their system and play that copy if and when the transferable key card is inserted in the system.

Already, many players are thinking ahead to what this means for their ability to play Game Key Card releases well into the future. It's not hard to find potential Switch 2 owners publicly worrying about games "disappear[ing] into the void" or becoming "effectively a worthless piece of plastic/e-waste" when Nintendo eventually disables its Switch 2 game download servers. Some go even farther, calling a Game Key Card an "eighty dollar rental" rather than a real game purchase.

While these are valid long-term concerns, I think some players are underestimating the likely timeline for when Game Key Cards will become "useless e-waste." As it stands, we already have an example of Nintendo supporting continued downloads of games purchased nearly two decades ago and counting.

Read full article

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