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

This week might have included the launch of the GeForce RTX 3070, but the talk of the internet has been AMD's big unveiling of its RDNA 2 graphics architecture and the Radeon RX 6000 series of graphics cards, aka Big Navi. The Red Team... Read more...
There is no shortage of ways to make some quick bank in Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch. In fact, there are so many different ways, it starts to beg the question, "What do we do with all these bells?" The game has an... Read more...
The war of the Watch Dogs series has always been fought in two parts -- physically with weapons and by proxy in the online space. In the original, which took place in Chicago, hacker Aiden Pearce, aided by the DedSec crew, hacks just about... Read more...
Playing the Stalk Market in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is never a sure thing. Some weeks, you buy as high as 120 bells a piece from Daisy, only to sell them to the Nook Boys on Saturday afternoon for a measly 60 bells a pop. Other... Read more...
For many, Ubuntu is the go-to distribution for a Linux desktop. Sure, there are a host of other distributions, some of which like Linux Mint are themselves based on Ubuntu. Thanks to pre-built systems like Dell's XPS 13 Developer Edition... Read more...
Smartphones have never been all that easy to repair, but that hasn't stopped owners from fixing (or attempting to fix) broken screens, dead charging ports, speakers that don't make sound, and a host of other issues. There's nothing quite... Read more...
Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 series, the company's flagship notebook lineup, is no stranger to our offices. The various iterations of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon are some of our favorite ultra-light notebooks. In recent years, Lenovo has pushed the X1... Read more...
Zen 3 is coming, and it's close enough that we can just about taste it. While the Ryzen 5000 family of CPUs just might squash just about every architecture before it in single-threaded performance, every member of AMD's new processor... Read more...
Intel's 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake family of processors really impressed us in terms of is single-threaded performance gains as well as its general high level performance. It doesn't matter what the task, content creation, productivity or... Read more...
Single-board computers (SBCs) are wildly popular AI development platforms and excellent tools to teach students of all ages how to code. The de facto standard in SBCs has been the Raspberry Pi family of mini computers. NVIDIA of course has... Read more...
Lots of HotHardware readers love to learn about, look at, and experience high-end portable PCs with their sturdy build quality, luxurious materials, and high-end specs, but not everyone has the budget to buy one for themselves. An interesting subgenre of premium ultra-portable PCs is the... Read more...
Amazon's Prime Day may not have officially started yet, but much like Black Friday sales, retailers have no reason to wait for the actual day to start grabbing eyeballs and convincing consumers to bust out the ol' credit card. The... Read more...
The AV1 video codec created by the Alliance for Open Media promises big gains in video quality for a given bitrate. The new codec also delivers an open, royalty-free standard that the consortium hopes to use to replace Motion Picture... Read more...
There is very little worse than knowing you've just lost everything to ransomware. When it happens on our phones, where so much of our identity and our lives live, the situation can feel hopeless. It's a never-ending battle for platform... Read more...
Intel's ultra-portable Tiger Lake aspirations got off to a great start and reset the playing field for laptop performance, once retail examples broke cover last week. We've all been interested in seeing what the company would do for an... Read more...
The Nintendo Switch phenomenon known as Joy Con drift "isn’t a real problem or hasn’t caused anyone any inconvenience." Reportedly, Nintendo is making this claim in its defense of the class-action lawsuit regarding Switch controllers... Read more...
The name Team Xecuter might bring back nostalgic waves for console pirates from the early 2000s, but for Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, the name likely brought shivers down executives' spines. In the early 2000s, the notorious pirate... Read more...
Always-connected Windows 10 PCs powered by Arm processors have plenty of potential as nice portable workstations with other-worldly battery life. Every time we've tested one of these machines, starting with the Surface Pro X, we've come... Read more...
The last few weeks has been full of exciting product launches, and it seems like it might not let up for the next couple of months. One mammoth release among them is the emergence of Tiger Lake, Intel's 11th-generation Core processor lineup for notebooks and 2-in-1 laptops. We've already... Read more...
While we are still in the early stages, more and more PC manufacturers have jumped aboard the Windows on Arm train. First we had Microsoft's initial offering, the Surface Pro X. Then Samsung joined the fray with the traditional-looking Galaxy Book S, with battery life that lasted for days. Now... Read more...
While COVID-19 can claim some credit for more workers than ever performing their job duties remotely over the course of this year, the fact is the corporate world has been moving in that direction for a long time. At the same time... Read more...
CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most hotly-anticipated games of recent years. The Witcher developer's take on the dystopian Cyberpunk tabletop RPG series promises to merge tons of action, series lore, and amazing graphics... Read more...
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