Ben Funk
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Recent posts
These days just about everybody takes Bluetooth for granted. Manufacturers phase out useful physical ports like headset jacks in high end devices with the expectation that buyers will use Bluetooth headphones. Our cars, watches, locator...
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"Epic" might be the best word to describe what's sure to be a prolonged, dramatic court battle between gaming heavyweight Epic Games and iOS App Store walled garden builder Apple. By now you're familiar with the somewhat sneaky direct...
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Windows 10 on Arm is starting to gain more traction, thanks to a bevy of new systems based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx high-performance mobile SoC, and its second-gen follow-on which was just announced. Those laptops have all been defined...
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AMD's Navi family of graphics cards falls into a pretty tight price range currently, from the $170 Radeon RX 5500 XT 4 GB to the $400 Radeon RX 5700 XT, where AMD's Navi-based GPU ambitions max out (for now). Anything priced lower than...
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We've been looking forward to this day ever since we first got our hands on a trio of high-powered gaming notebooks powered by AMD's Ryzen 4000 processors. We already know the Renoir-based CPUs could deliver excellent performance at an...
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By now, AMD's Radeon RX 5700 family of GPUs is a pretty well-known quantity. The Navi architecture that makes up the current crop of AMD-based graphics cards offers pretty good bang for the buck from the mainstream Radeon RX 5500 XT up to...
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It seems we can hardly take a breath without another leak about NVIDIA's GeForce RTX based on the company's next-generation Ampere technology. Yesterday, the top-end GeForce RTX 3090 Ti was posing for the cameras. Today, one of the smaller...
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Building a Ryzen system right now either requires a pricey motherboard based on the flagship X570 chipset, the recently released B550, or sticking with previous-generation mid-range chipsets like the B450. Help for budget builders with...
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Between all the accidental leaks and myriad rumors surrounding NVIDIA's Ampere architecture and GPUs, there may not be much left to reveal by the time any next-generation graphics cards ship. This time we've got a spicy selection of specs...
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It's a new month, and that means there are new creatures to catch in Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch. As summer heats up, a handful of new bugs and fish will appear, ripe for catching and giving them to Blathers as...
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By now, everyone with even the vaguest of interest in PC technology can tell you how much snappier solid state drives are than even the fastest of spinning disks of yesteryear. There have been some interesting wrinkles recently, like...
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We all know that bigger is better, right? At least in generalities, it's often true. More CPU cores help performance in multi-threaded workloads, while high frequencies boost performance in lightly-threaded tasks. With graphics, it's all about more as well; more shading resources, more ROPs...
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Backpacking across the country "Once...there was an explosion." So opens the oft-memed narrative of Kojima Productions' first post-Konami title, Death Stranding. If you've not been paying attention to the game, which launched in November as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, this title is about to...
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Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch is the gift that keeps on giving. The latest free content release is the Summer Update that launched on Wednesday, and now you can swim with the fish. But before you dive into the...
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Personal electronics take quite a beating. Think for a moment about all the places your smartphone can end up: on top of the car, buried in a bag, shoved into a pocket along with keys, tossed on a seat where it may bounce off and hit the...
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It's official: from what we've seen so far, AMD's Ryzen 4000 series of mobile APUs are a hit here in the HotHardware labs. It started with the svelte ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 gaming notebook, which impressed us with excellent performance at a...
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Always-on, always-connected PCs like the Samsung Galaxy Book S -- the kind of machines that are ready to go first thing in the morning and last all day and night, while never losing an internet connection thanks to cellular connectivity -- are a potential game changer for some users...
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Variety is the spice of life. Nobody would be happy with just one flavor of ice cream, a single car, or the monotony of a single video game. Thankfully, we don't live in a world like that, so even premium 2-in-1 laptops come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. Today we're going to take a look at...
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When we reviewed the Dell G5 15 SE, an all-AMD gaming laptop that features an AMD Ryzen 7 4800H processor and a Navi-based Radeon RX 5600M, we didn't have a chance to dive into integrated graphics performance. The gaming battery life with...
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Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Nintendo Switch came along at just the right time for our family. Just as seemingly the entire country began shelter in place plans, we could get away from it all on a remote deserted island and build a...
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AMD is in an enviable position in the gaming laptop world. Not only does the red team arguably produce some of the fastest mainstream mobile CPUs around in its Ryzen 4000 series, there's also formidable graphics horsepower in the same camp. As a result, AMD can control the whole platform...
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Apple seems like a company divided these days. While the technology juggernaut's Mac lineup continually stagnates between long-overdue updates, Cupertino's iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch families march ahead to a yearly cadence of updated designs, new features, and enhanced performance. It's...
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