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

The Microsoft Store Spring Sale is on, and it's running through April 15. Just about everything is on sale, from PC and Xbox Series X (and One) games to Surface PCs. Microsoft even has some really nice prices on other manufacturers' PCs... Read more...
From the beginning of the Pixel program, Google's phones have always run on Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platform silicon. In fact, you'd have to go all the way back to 2011's Galaxy Nexus, which ran on a Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 to find... Read more...
When it comes to high-end content creation, time is money. Businesses with employees that are stuck sitting around waiting for compute-intensive tasks to finish, simply can't get as much accomplished as those with speedy hardware that can... Read more...
Don't blindly click that link or assume the notification about a system update that you received is real. Zero-day exploits in popular server applications like Solarwinds and Exchange may grab headlines, but the biggest problems most users... Read more...
Graphics cards are in short supply at retail prices everywhere, but it hasn't stopped AMD and NVIDIA from pushing their latest tech further down the price ladder. We've heard in recent weeks about a lower-end Navi 23 GPU from AMD, and it... Read more...
Sometimes, a work of art hits our culture at just the right time, when it can transcend its medium and become something greater. Such events are exceedingly rare in video games, but we old folks remember Pac-Man Fever and Fred Savage in... Read more...
It feels like forever ago, but it's only been a few months since Apple kicked Fortnite out of the App Store and suspended Epic's developer account. Of course, you know how the rest of this story goes: Epic filed a lawsuit against the... Read more...
In case you missed it, the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro smartphones are coming on March 23. That announcement seemed inevitable, since smartphones tend to launch on a roughly a production schedule. While the price of OnePlus smartphones has crept... Read more...
Last year, the COVID-19 pandemic ended the NCAA college basketball season early, but this year, Selection Sunday is tomorrow afternoon. And of course there's still plenty of time to upgrade the living room TV prior to the play-in game on... Read more...
Whether you're streaming, video podcasting, or working from home to join meetings on Zoom or Microsoft Teams, visual fidelity is important. Video calls are hard to handle when we can't understand each other and body language is important... Read more...
After months of rumors and speculation, and then an accidental slip-up by AMD itself, the company finally announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT on Wednesday. The new GPU comes with a cut-down version of Big Navi, dubbed Navi 22 (not-so Big... Read more...
The never-ending parade of security vulnerabilities continues. Just as quickly as software vendors can tackle and resolve one set of exploitable issues -- i.e. the troubles at SolarWinds -- attackers find other vectors to break into... Read more...
Using a graphics processor or GPU for tasks beyond just rendering 3D graphics is how NVIDIA has made billions in the datacenter space. Of course, NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA language and API have been exclusive to the company's GPUs since... Read more...
Apple's latest M1 Macs -- and many Intel-based ones, for that matter -- all use the company's T2 security chip, which encrypts the system's built-in storage. The issue with highly-integrated motherboards with onboard storage is that if the... Read more...
If you're currently using the microphone built into your webcam, it might be time to up your audio game. Whether you're streaming for fun or working from home, the mics including with USB cameras aren't the best around. While many laptops... Read more...
Back in September, the World of Warcraft team asked players what they would want as their next mount. The options players had to choose from were pretty varied, including a spider-like Nerubian Swarmer and a Soaring Spelltome -- an actual... Read more...
While users may never want to have to rely on them, it's comforting to know that PCs running modern operating systems have fail-safes and recovery modes that can help get the system back up and running when disaster strikes. Back in the... Read more...
Sometimes old video game consoles never truly die, they just transcend into something something nostalgic and better. Thanks to the wonder of FPGAs, we've seen some pretty incredible demos, such as real-time ray tracing on the Super... Read more...
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is closing in on its one-year anniversary since release in March of 2020, and Nintendo is finishing up the last several holiday-themed events that haven't yet happened in the game. There are actually three... Read more...
Browser extensions like password managers and shopping aids can be very handy tools, or they can be up to no good, such as hidden crypto miners and keyloggers. Some of them even embed game console emulators and ROMs as a means to bypass... Read more...
When Intel announced its higher-performance Tiger Lake notebook CPUs with a 35 Watt TDP, the company proclaimed that it had snatched the single-threaded performance crown back from AMD. While Intel compared its new offerings to Ryzen 4000... Read more...
Intel officially announced its upcoming Rocket Lake-S family in its keynote during virtual CES 2021 last month, but those processors have been leaking onto the internet for the last several months. The leaks all seem to indicate that Intel... Read more...
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