Editor profile

Ben Funk

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Ben has been fascinated by technology since he got a Commodore VIC-20 as a child in 1984. By day he's a software developer working in education technology, and at night he's a husband, dad, musician, gamer, and freelance technology writer. If he's not at his PC, Ben can be found hanging out with his family, gaming on a vintage Sega console, or grippin' and rippin' with his beloved Paul Reed Smith guitar. 

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Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.

Recent posts

When Apple announced in June that it would start building Macs with processors based on its own silicon that runs the Arm64 Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), that spelled the end for native Windows installations on Apple hardware. Boot... Read more...
Welcome to HotHardware's PC Component Buyer's Guide, where we help prospective DIY system builders pick out just the right collection of components to build the rigs of their dreams -- or at least the rig which makes the best use of your... Read more...
The deals keep pouring in, and we're doing our level best to keep up with them. While building a PC by hand can be a fun and exciting project, sometimes (like right now) components are hard to come by, and buying an off-the-shelf desktop... Read more...
It feels like Black Friday deals started somewhere in late October, but the day after Thanksgiving is finally upon us. Hopefully you've had some leftover pumpkin pie for breakfast and maybe a cup of coffee, because now it's time to shop... Read more...
About two years ago, NVIDIA started talking about a shader rendering method that applied varying levels of quality to different objects in the game world. That method was called Variable Rate Shading, or VRS. When applied skillfully and... Read more...
Official support for Windows 7 might have ended in January of this year, but software support for Microsoft's older operating system hasn't completely dried up yet. Google still fields the world's most popular web browser, Chrome, on the... Read more...
If you're playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch and sharing the system (and a single island) among family members, we're sure that this story will be a familiar one. There's a rivalry between siblings or across... Read more...
Smart watches are a great gift idea, especially for those in our lives who love tracking their workouts and checking out notifications from their phones without picking up the ol' glass slab. Garmin makes a pretty wide array of smart... Read more...
There's something fun about looking at a physical video game collection. That's especially true with retro games for systems like the original Nintendo Entertainment System, when cartridges came in boxes and those boxes were wide enough... Read more...
Intel's 10-nanometer Tiger Lake processors have one of the fastest CPU architectures available in Windows notebooks today. That's not to say they've got the fastest overall CPUs, though. There are competing mobile processors available with more cores and support for additional threads that are... Read more...
The smartphone upgrade cycle never ends for any manufacturer, and Samsung is no exception to that rule. The world's biggest smartphone maker seems to be pushing up its release cadence in an effort to combat slumping sales and an onslaught... Read more...
It seems like everybody on the planet is clamoring to build a new gaming PC, and that has left many components in very short supply. That cavalcade of hardware that nobody can get their hands on started in mid-September with the GeForce... Read more...
Everyone loves Animal Crossing's Isabelle. From her time as administrative assistant to the mayor (that's you!) in New Leaf on the 3DS, to the Resident Services coordinator in Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch, she's... Read more...
The Graphics Wars of 2020 continue to heat up. We already know most of the players on the field from both AMD and NVIDIA, but not all of the various models have been released into the wild yet. AMD talked a really big game when it... Read more...
Tablet PCs running Google's Android mobile OS have largely been relegated to the budget sector. For the most part, options are limited to Amazon's Fire HD series these days, with slower budget SoCs and a handful of small tablets with even slower processors. Those systems without exception are... Read more...
Thanks to COVID-19 and students doing their schoolwork from home, there might be some contention for the family PC, when all they really need is a Chromebook and internet access. The good news is that while it's not Black Friday yet, it's... Read more...
NVIDIA's so-called "BFGPU," the GeForce RTX 3090 has been in short supply since its release last month. The audience for the world's fastest graphics card might be a little limited thanks to its $1,500 MSRP, but that hasn't stopped them... Read more...
On the desktop, AMD's Ryzen 5000 family is quite remarkable. These CPUs thump anything available from Intel in the single-threaded performance department. Not only that, they also bring the multi-threaded hurt on loads that can handle it... Read more...
Happy N7 day, Mass Effect fans! November 7 has been something of an unofficial holiday for BioWare fans over the years, as news of a new game in the enormous hit sci-fi role playing series has traditionally dropped on this date. Today... Read more...
Machine learning is everywhere. Voice and handwriting recognition, medical diagnoses, digital assistants (like the Google Assistant or Siri) and self driving cars are just a scratch in the surface of all the different means and methods by which machines infer, learn, grow and seemingly think... Read more...
After a relatively quiet first year of existence, it seems like you can barely swing a cat without running into a new operating system distribution for the Raspberry Pi 4. Raspbian Buster has been around since the beginning, but last... Read more...
Back in 2005, Microsoft teamed up with ATi, now part of AMD, for the graphics processor in the Xbox 360. In the 15 years since, the two companies have cozied up to form a console alliance for the ages. That's a relationship, Microsoft... Read more...
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