Ben Funk
Recent posts
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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