Ben Funk
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Recent posts
Alienware may just be the most well-known gaming desktop and notebook brand on the planet. The company's gray alien logo graces everything from proper, upgradeable desktops like the Aurora R9 to the huge desktop-replacement Area-51m notebook complete with actual desktop hardware. What we have on hand today isn't quite...
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Creative Labs has been on something of a roll in 2019. The company has diversified into all kinds of gaming products from keyboards and mice to headsets and speakers. At the same time, Creative never lost track of its PC audio roots, and its flagship Sound BlasterX AE-9 delivered the goods with its high-end...
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Dell's XPS family of premium laptops has long been synonymous with excellent performance and build quality. In particular, the XPS 13 lineup has included some of the most highly awarded ultraportable PCs on the market today. Today, we have Dell's latest XPS 13 on hand: model 7390, which is a 2-in-1 model with a...
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It's no secret that Intel has a lot riding on its "Ice Lake" 10th generation Core CPUs manufactured on its 10-nanometer fabrication process. The chipmaker got by on squeezing more power and efficiency out of its 14-nm node for what seemed like an eternity, but we're talking about a mobile sector that relentlessly...
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The Raspberry Pi 4 is one of the cheapest single-board computers around, and thanks to its substantial performance boost over its predecessors, it also represents a good bang for the buck if you're interested in learning Linux, or just want to kick back and play some of your favorite retro games in Lakka. The good...
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It'd be a gross understatement to say that retro gaming has experienced something of a renaissance in recent years. Nintendo's NES Classic and SNES Classic mini-consoles or the Switch Online's NES and SNES catalogs might be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about older games, but the House of Mario is...
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Back in June, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced their newest single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi 4. This tiny PC packs a quad-core Cortex A72 SoC from Broadcom and up to 4 GB of DDR4 memory at a very attractive price. While aimed at emerging markets for folks new to computers, the Pi really caught on with...
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The modern work place is everywhere. Thanks to the need to attract top talent, many employers have lenient work from home policies that allow many employees who would normally be in an office to work from almost anywhere. Without the advent of fast portable PCs to do that work, however, this wouldn't be as easy as folding up a laptop and taking...
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Gears 5 officially drops on Tuesday, September 10th, but if you've got Xbox Ultimate Game Pass or Xbox Game Pass for PC you may have already played quite a bit of it. The newest Xbox One and PC exclusive launched for Microsoft's subscription service on Friday. The Coalition's newest Gears title brings with it a whole host of new graphical...
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Finnish game studio Remedy Entertainment makes some of the finest-looking, quirkiest games around. Perhaps best known for the Max Payne series (but not Max Payne 3, which was developed solely by Rockstar), Remedy has been publishing its games exclusively on Xbox and PC for the last several years. The studio...
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New year, new ThinkPad X1 Carbon—it's easy to think that yearly laptop iterations would be mundane. However, we're here talking about one of our most heavily-awarded line of laptops here at HotHardware, so expectations run high. Last year's Lenovo flagship really impressed us, with power under the hood...
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It seems like a great time to buy a shiny new monitor for a gaming PC. FreeSync 2-certified monitors are plentiful on the open market and multiple companies are actively pushing them out the door to fight for your hard-earned dollars. Since NVIDIA started supporting FreeSync earlier this year, both GeForce...
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AMD renewed competition in the CPU space back in 2017, when its Zen-based Ryzen processors stormed the scene a couple of months earlier than originally anticipated. These processors combined good enough single-threaded performance with many core architectures at attractive prices. If you needed king-of-the-hill...
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As most of you are probably aware, Creative Labs, is one of the Founding Fathers of PC Audio and has manufactured sound cards and other audio-related hardware for 30 years. The original Sound Blaster was the de facto standard for DOS gaming audio almost right from its release in 1989. As high-profile PC games like...
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