Ben Funk
Follow Ben on Twitter.
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Samsung has long dreamed of the modern smartphone extending its usefulness to more PC-like use cases, such as functions you might otherwise drive on a desktop or laptop. To that end, the company has poured resources into DeX, a Chrome...
Read more...
For those of us who are a certain age, the 1980s had the best after-school cartoons and comic books. Little did we know it at the time, but the toy companies were the masterminds behind some of our favorite '80s action heroes. For...
Read more...
Over the course of the last 11 months or so, tens of millions of Americans have been tested for the SARS-CoV-2 virus which has caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Many, many more people globally have undergone the same tests. Amidst the scramble...
Read more...
Complete honesty is not a mantra for many online retail sites, at least according to a study released by Princeton University. The school conducted an automated crawl of more than 11,000 online shops and found that around one in six used...
Read more...
When GeForce NOW launched, NVIDIA's cutting-edge gaming service supported streaming games that were rendered in cloud data centers to devices running a dedicated app. Over the course of 2020, the company opened up its cloud gaming service...
Read more...
Overclocking a CPU used to be a pretty simple process: change a bus speed or a multiplier, set an appropriate voltage, and voila: your Celeron 300A was running at 450 MHz, or your 600 MHz Duron was knocking on the 1 GHz barrier. These days with the advent of dynamic boost speeds and optimized...
Read more...
While Creative Labs has expanded its product offerings into other arenas, the company has never waivered from its core competency: PC and home audio. The Sound Blaster maker has almost always offered speaker systems to pump out the audio...
Read more...
AMD's Zen 3-based EPYC CPUs might be the worst-kept secret in all of technology. Details about these CPUs have been leaking onto the internet via Twitter since late last year. More recently, the 32-core EPYC 7543 made itself known via the...
Read more...
Alienware's m15 series of notebooks has typically impressed us, thanks to the family's performance and unique good looks in a relatively svelte mobile package. Performance always hinges upon having the latest platform hardware, so perhaps it's no surprise that the laptop we're looking at today...
Read more...
Back in September, NVIDIA and SoftBank confirmed the chip giant's intentions to acquire Arm for $40 billion. In the intervening months since the announcement, tech giants and governments alike have shown a range of reactions from hesitance...
Read more...
Everyone was afraid of the "Y2K bug" that would leave un-patched systems in a quandary, but January 1, 2000 came and went with hardly a whimper. Instead, it's January 12, 2021 that will live in infamy, perhaps. Adobe announced the coming...
Read more...
It's been kind of painful to watch Cyberpunk 2077 stumble and flounder since it launched on December 10. While the game is a blast when it's working right, bugs and glitches galore have caused a torrent of outrage, particularly from our...
Read more...
One of the more pragmatic aspects of Intel-powered Macs was their ability to run alternative operating systems, including Windows and Linux, without much effort at all. Apple even included a Windows preparation tool, Boot Camp, on all of...
Read more...
Intel's Tiger Lake mobile platform came out of the gate swinging, with excellent performance and improved power efficiency. The early Core i7-1185G7 development platform we evaluated set several mobile processor records in our benchmarks, and retail notebooks were just as strong when they...
Read more...
NVIDIA has released a bevy of GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards for desktop PCs of the last few months, but gaming notebooks have remained chained to the previous-generation GeForce RTX 20 family. That all changes today, however, as the...
Read more...
For as long as developers have been writing software code, they've been inadvertently creating bugs. It's when those bugs can compromise the security of a PC that a bug goes from an annoyance to a potential real danger. Security issues...
Read more...
Last year's Consumer Electronics Show was full of great new tech gear, most of which made its way into retail channels throughout the challenging year that was 2020. We saw AMD launch a two-pronged strike into the notebook and desktop CPU...
Read more...
AMD's Ryzen 5000 CPUs are still fairly hard to come by. The company delivered world-beating performance at reasonable prices, which has only driven up demand. However, scarcity and selling out every CPU the company makes hasn't stopped the...
Read more...
Spinning hard disks are completely out for just about all but the very cheapest of systems. Solid state drives like the WD Blue SN550 we'll be evaluating in this article are here to stay, and continue to make their way into lower-priced, ever more affordable notebooks and desktops. That's no...
Read more...
It never fails that when a game launches, players find a way to play it in ways that the developer never intended. Whether it's perfect Marine splits against Banelings in StarCraft II or rocket jumps in Quake III Arena, the best players...
Read more...
When you are an app developer in a walled garden, sometimes the walls start to close in. It doesn't even matter if if a useful app has been around for six years and attracted over 400,000 downloads with high user satisfaction in the form...
Read more...
Solid state drives are the best way to breathe new life into an older PC or add extra storage to a new build to store games and data that needs to be read frequently. NVMe drives typically top out at 2 TB and most motherboards only have...
Read more...
