Though it disappeared over 40 years ago, International Harvester is a mythical brand in North America thanks in part to the Scout, one of the world’s first SUVs. Now, Scout Motors is back under Volkswagen as an all-new marque and just revealed its first two models: the Terra pickup and Traveler SUV. Both use a brand-new EV platform and will start at under $60,000 before incentives when production launches in 2027.

Scout motors says its “priority was to honor the spirit of the original Scout,” sold by International from 1961 to 1980 in various forms. Though the Traveler and Terra clearly have modern designs, they use rounded contours and a “black mask” on the front and rear fascias to invoke the older models. They also come with separate bumpers and upward-sweeping side windows, again reminiscent of the classic Scout.

Other design elements are fully modern, like a thin LED strip around the “grill” and rectangular headlights bisected by slim daytime running lights. (The models shown here are 85 percent of what we’ll see in final production vehicles, Scout said).

The original Scout and International 150 pickup were practical and tough (we called it “Inter-smashable” back in the day), and the new models will keep some of those aspects. Both have body-on-frame construction with a solid rear axle, along with front and rear locking hubs for off-road use. They’ll offer 2,000 pounds of payload along with 7,000 pounds of towing capacity for the Traveler and 10,000 pounds for the Terra pickup. Both will come with all-wheel drive via front and rear electric motors.

That should keep working and outdoorsy buyers happy, but the vehicles can also raise your hairs. Both will accelerate from 0-60 MPH in 3.5 seconds thanks to an estimated 1,000 pound-feet of torque and four-wheel-drive system, though Scout has yet to provide a top speed.

The base trim package will offer up to 350 miles of range while the extended range version is effectively a hybrid that will go up to 500 miles using a gas-powered range extender. Charging times aren’t mentioned, but they’ll use an 800-volt architecture that supports up to 350 kW speeds. It will also feature bidirectional charging and vehicle-to-home capabilities, along with over-the-air updates and remote diagnostics.

The cabin is as far as it can be from the spartan interior on the originals. It looks luxurious and high-tech with a digital cluster and large displays, along with a promised “responsive” infotainment system and high-resolution backup cameras. At the same time, it comes with toggles and dials for climate and other controls. The seats and panels are covered with a mix of brown leather, fabric and a wood-like material.

Both have a frunk with 120-volt and USB-C outlets and can fit golf clubs, a gym bag and a small cooler, Scout says. The Terra’s 5.5-foot bed will also contain a 120- and 240-volt outlets for tools, compressors and the like.

The Traveler, meanwhile, will have a split tailgate and come with two roof options. The first is a Cabana top with panels that fold back for open-air motoring, while the second is a glass roof with a powered shade. Both vehicles will be available with a front bench seat to increase passenger capacity.

Much like Tesla, Scout will sell its vehicles directly to consumers without a dealership in the middle. Purchasing one will take “minutes” with the company promising full price transparency and handling sales, delivery and service. You’ll be able to check them out in person at dedicated “Scout Workshop” retail and service locations.

Both models are designed and engineered in Michigan and will be built at a new factory in Columbia, South Carolina by some 4,000 workers. Production starts in 2027 with vehicles arriving for the 2028 model year. Prices will start under $60,000, according to Scout Motors, and reservations are now open.

For the third month in a row, a football game has taken the top slot in the U.S. sales charts, according to industry-tracking firm Circana. Granted, the three games represent two different kinds of football — while Madden NFL 25 and EA Sports College Football 25 dominated August and July, respectively, September’s big seller was EA Sports FC 25. Circana reports that the latter also broke a record, having the highest launch month sales of any soccer game released in the U.S.

However, the picture was not so rosy elsewhere on Circana’s report. Video game hardware sales are still in freefall, while overall sales numbers for the industry are down year-over-year. Mat Piscatella, Circana’s executive producer for games reports, said in a statement, “September video game hardware spending fell 44% when compared to a year ago, to $251 million. This is the lowest monthly hardware spend total for a September month since 2019 ($242 million).”

The sales charts for the year-to-date are not much better, showing that total sales almost flat from September 2023’s chart. While video game content specifically is up 6% YoY, that number is dragged down by the almost 30% decrease from YTD 2023 to YTD 2024. Mobile content spending is up, according to Sensor Tower’s data, but most other stats are down.

There are a few things worth noting from the specific sales results: Circana’s sales show that the Xbox Series X is slightly edging out the Series S in sales, making up 51% of Xbox Series units sold life-to-date. Accessory sales are still holding on, with the PlayStation Portal being the best-selling accessory for the year-to-date — 3% of all PlayStation 5 owners also own a Portal.

Circana September 2024: Top 20 best-selling games in the U.S.

October’s sales charts contains a high saturation of new games, with seven new games making it into the top 20 slots — five of them in the top 10. The top game is the aforementioned EA Sports FC 25, which beat last year’s EA Sports FC 24 in sales and broke the record for launch month sales for a soccer title. The fact that EA’s soccer title continues to chart well despite the company’s break from the FIFA branding. The game was also the best-selling title on PlayStation and Xbox platforms, and the fifth best-selling title on Nintendo Switch. NBA 2K25 and NHL 25 also bring sports game success, debuting at 7th and 9th place on the charts, respectively.

Sony’s Astro Bot follows FC 24 at second place, and is also the second best-selling game on PlayStation platforms. Nintendo’s new Zelda title, Echoes of Wisdom is the fourth best-selling title and could have been higher, but Circana only has physical sales data for Nintendo products. Space Marine 2 is not only the 18th best-selling title, it was also the third most-played game on Steam during September. The Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics is the final new game that made the charts with its brand recognition and familiar characters.

Circana’s September 2024 chart might be the most chaotic yet

September’s sales charts contains not only a number of new games, but also a high number of games that have jumped up the charts from a relatively low position. The biggest example of this is Dead Rising, which went from 502nd place to 11th thanks to the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. Piscatella clarified on Bluesky that games are tracked by stock-keeping units (SKUs), which means that sales of the remaster count towards the number of the original as well. Age of Mythology appears to have received a similar boost thanks to the launch of its Retold remaster.

Other games that jumped up several places are Final Fantasy XVI and God of War Ragnarok, which launched on PC on September 17 and 19, respectively. The PC launches have boosted the profile of both games, though God of War Ragnarok has weathered some discontent from players for requiring a PSN account in order to run the game.

Circana September 2024: 20 best-selling games of 2024 so far

Unlike the September sales charts, the year-to-date charts remain relatively unchanged, albeit slightly remixed. The only September game that made it to this chart was EA Sports FC 25, which also pushed its predecessor EA Sports FC 24 one place down the list. Madden NFL 25 has also gotten a boost up the list with its continued high sales.

The StrictlyVC series — known for bringing the biggest stories and key players to an audience of VCs, LPs, founders, and operators — is holding its first-ever event at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Be at Disrupt in the Deal Flow Cafe on Tuesday, October 29, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., located at Moscone West in San Francisco.

This session promises to be an exceptional opportunity for investors. If you’re keen to network with fellow professionals in the investment space, then this is the session to attend. StrictlyVC is exclusive to Disrupt 2024 Investor Pass holders.

This StrictlyVC lineup features leading players in the investment world, prepared to offer their insights to investors attending Disrupt 2024. Without further delay, here is the full agenda for the StrictlyVC session.

The full StrictlyVC lineup at Disrupt 2024

• Aileen Lee, Founder and Managing Partner, Cowboy Ventures
• Alex Pall and Drew Taggart from The Chainsmokers, Co-Founders and Partners, MANTIS Venture Capital
• Beezer Clarkson, Partner, Sapphire Partners
• Jessica Archibald, General Partner, Top Tier Capital Partners
• Nirmal Utwani, Director of Engineering, Growth, Amplitude
• Rick Prostko, Senior Managing Director, Teachers’ Venture Growth, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan
• Vlad Voroninski, CEO and Founder, Helm.ai
• Wesley Chan, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, FPV Ventures

Don’t miss out on these investment talks at Disrupt

StrictlyVC events have featured top-tier speakers like VC Katie Haun, Federal Trade Commission chief Lina Khan, and Sam Altman of OpenAI, making them a must-attend for anyone in the industry. Now, for the first time, we’re bringing one of these boutique events to the massive Disrupt conference! Don’t miss your chance to connect with your peers and pick up some valuable insights from the top names in the investment world.

Grab your Investor Pass today and save up to $300. Ticket rates will rise at the door.

It’s already pretty hard to avoid being bombarded with TV ads, whether you’re watching Prime Video or pausing YouTube – and LG is now making things a little worse by bringing its pesky screensaver ads to older OLED TV models.

Last month, we reported that recent LG TVs, including premium OLEDs, were sneakily starting to show screensaver ads after sets had been left idle for a while. Some testing on our own LG G4 confirmed that to be the case. Now, FlatpanelsHD is reporting that those ads are rolling out to older models dating back to 2020, too.

Intel’s new Core Ultra 9 285K is finally here, promising a boost in performance with a significant reduction in power requirements, at least according to Intel. As you can read in my Core Ultra 9 285K review, Intel’s performance claims aren’t as rosy as reality, especially when stacked up against what is unequivocally the best processor for gaming you can buy: AMD’s Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

I threw both processors on the test bench to pit them head-to-head, looking at performance across productivity and gaming apps, as well as thermals and efficiency. These CPUs target different users, but there are still a lot of interesting comparisons we can look at between them.

Specs

The Core Ultra 9 285K and Ryzen 7 7800X3D are radically different CPUs, and that becomes clear when you compare their specs directly. Although it’s generally not a good idea to compare specs between two CPUs in the same class, the gap in specs here is so large that we can make some interesting observations. The main thing that’s different between the two CPUs is core count.

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The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is a fairly straightforward chip in that regard. It comes with eight Zen 4 cores and a total of 16 threads, and it can boost up to 5GHz. That’s not what’s interesting about the CPU. It’s the 104MB of cache packed on top of the CPU die, split between 8MB of L2 cache and 96MB of L3 cache thanks to AMD’s 3D V-Cache packaging tech.

The Core Ultra 9 285K doesn’t have any fancy 3D V-Cache, but it still has a few tricks of its own. It’s a 24-core CPU, but unlike the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, it doesn’t come with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). Each core only has a single thread. In addition, Intel uses its hybrid architecture, mixing together the Lion Cove P-core design with the Skymont E-core design. According to Intel, the E-cores are the main performance drivers here, unlike with the Core i9-14900K, where the E-cores were relatively weak.

With more cores and higher clock speeds, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Core Ultra 9 285K has much higher power requirements. I’ll address efficiency directly a bit lower down in this comparison, but I can tell you now that, under a full load, the Core Ultra 9 285K indeed draws twice as much (or more) power than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D — though usually with much better performance.

Pricing

The Core Ultra 9 285K and Ryzen 7 7800X3D force you to think about pricing because, depending on what you’re using your PC for, you can save quite a bit of money. The Core Ultra 9 285K is newer, and it’s the flagship chip from Intel’s latest range, so you’ll spend $589 if you want to pick it up now. The price will drop over time — the Core i9-14900K is about $450 a year after releasing — but until we see the next generation from Intel, you can expect to spend over $500.

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is much cheaper at $450, though I’ve seen some strange price shifts with the CPU over the past several months. Just a few weeks before publishing this comparison, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D was sold out everywhere, and prior to that, you could commonly find it for around $320. Now, at the time of publishing, you’ll find it between $450 and $500, but I expect the price will drop very soon.

AMD has confirmed that its next-gen 3D V-Cache CPU is arriving on November 7, so depending on when you’re reading this, make sure to check in on the price of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. If the new CPU is out by then, I expect we’ll see the price drop to around $350 to $400.

Even with its higher price, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is significantly cheaper than the Core Ultra 9 285K — $139 cheaper, at least, and close to $239 cheaper if the Ryzen 7 7800X3D drops in price.

Productivity performance

Here’s some quick proof that the Core Ultra 9 285K and Ryzen 7 7800X3D are in completely different weight classes. As you can see from Cinebench R24 above, the Core Ultra 9 285K is much faster than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D — it’s not even close. Intel says this CPU is particularly strong in a ray-traced renderer line Cinebench, but even if you dropped 10% or 15% of the performance from the Core Ultra 9 285K, it would still be miles ahead of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

For more of a mixed-use benchmark, take a look at Geekbench 6. The Core Ultra 9 285K still runs away with multi-core performance, but the single-core delta is much smaller. And despite the clear lead in multi-core performance, that gap is smaller, too. Throughout my testing, one thing became clear — the Core Ultra 9 285K is really fast in certain applications, but that performance doesn’t apply everywhere.

A great example of that is Photoshop. You’d assume that the raw multi-core advantage of the Core Ultra 9 285K would mean it obviously wins against the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, but that’s not the case. In fact, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is faster in Photoshop based on my testing. That’s not good considering the price and spec gap between these two CPUs. You’d expect the Core Ultra 9 285K to mop the floor with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D across all productivity applications.

In Premiere Pro, the Core Ultra 9 285K reclaims a dominant spot, but it really shouldn’t be this close. Not only is the Core Ultra 9 285K a much more capable CPU, it also has access to QuickSync in Premiere Pro, which speeds up performance significantly. The fact that these two CPUs are even competitive in Premiere shows how the performance of the Core Ultra 9 285K can be disappointing in certain apps.

Gaming performance

Gaming performance is where we see a more consistent divergence. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D crushes. Across the 10 games I tested, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D didn’t lose a single one. Sometimes it’s only showing a minor performance improvement, but in games like F1 22 and Cyberpunk 2077, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D provides a transformative uplift in gaming performance.

Not all games respond well to the additional cache on the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. As you can see from titles like Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Black Myth: Wukong, there’s some other factor limiting the performance of the processor — in most cases, your graphics card. However, other games can leverage the additional cache in quite a big way, as shown off by Final Fantasy XIV, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and even Red Dead Redemption 2. 

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For the Core Ultra 9 285K, it can only hope to match the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and in most games, it’s not even close to doing that. If you’re focused mainly on gaming, there’s really no contest here. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D absolutely crushes the Core Ultra 9 285K, and it’s significantly cheaper.

Thermals and efficiency

Another area where the Ryzen 7 7800X3D leads is efficiency. It not only has much lower rated power, it can also deliver higher performance in games while consuming less power. You can see that in action in the chart above. Looking solely at peak power draw during these games, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D stayed much more efficient under a heavy workload.

That’s not be critical of Intel. As you can see from the Core i9-14900K, Intel made massive efficiency improvements this generation, and it’s often able to deliver similar performance under 100 watts. But it’s still more power than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which rarely goes above 50 watts in games.

Temperature is a different story. On average, the Core Ultra 9 285K was a bit cooler than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D while playing games. It’s not a massive difference, but I tested with a 360mm all-in-one liquid cooler. In a small form factor PC, those temperature differences can really add up, and the Core Ultra 9 285K is set up to handle a more thermally constrained environment better.

It’s important to remember the design of 3D V-Cache CPUs. The cache is stacked directly on top of the cores, serving as an insolating layer between the cores and the integrated heat spreader (IHS). That’s why the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and other 3D V-Cache CPUs, tend to run a bit hotter and why they aren’t unlocked for overclocking.

The gaming king reigns supreme

There’s really no contest here if you’re a gamer — the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the way to go. It’s much faster, and it’s cheaper, and although productivity performance lags, the CPU still puts up a surprisingly impressive fight in apps like Premiere Pro and Photoshop.

The natural counter to that is productivity performance. If that’s what you care about, the Core Ultra 9 285K is the way to go. However, the inconsistent performance I saw with Intel’s latest CPU is worth keeping in mind. If you want good productivity performance and gaming in equal stride, I’d push you toward Intel’s Core i9-14900K or AMD’s latest Ryzen 9 9950X instead, the former of which is available for around $450.