Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a near-perfect example of how to build a great sequel to a classic franchise, but there was one major issue that a number of gamers disliked. While the game allowed players to skip combat in virtually every instance, the game's boss battles couldn't be skipped or bypassed in any fashion...
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Over the past few years, Corsair has steadily ramped up the number and types of computer chassis it manufacturers. The high-end 700D and 800D have been followed by a number of midrange products and one uber-expensive deluxe model, the massive 900D. The case we're reviewing today, the 750D, is meant to drop into the sub-$200 price bracket,...
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Over the past few years, a handful of mobile graphics companies have emerged as key pillars of the industry. The top dog, by far, has been Imagination Technologies, with Qualcomm, Nvidia (during the Tegra 2 / Tegra 3 era) and ARM all picking up significant businesses of their own as well. But now, there's a new kid on the block -- a company...
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USB 3.0 offers excellent performance characteristics for external storage, but thumb drives that take full advantage of the standard have been few and far between. According to Silicon Motion, its upcoming SM3267 controller will boost single-channel USB 3 speeds for flash drives to 160MB/s read, 60MB/s write, while...
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Microsoft's onetime Chief Privacy Advisor, Caspar Bowden, has come out with a vote of no-confidence in the company's long-term privacy measures and ability or interest to secure user data in the wake of the NSA's PRISM program. From 2002 - 2011, Bowden was in charge of privacy at Microsoft, and oversaw the company's...
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At a press event today, AMD announced a full suite of new GPUs based on a new, evolved version of its Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The Radeon R7 and R9 families are the new product lines aimed at mainstream, performance, and high-end gaming, respectively. Specs on the new cards are still limited, but we...
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This is one of those announcements that's so odd, I'm still trying to figure out if it works out to a positive. I'm fairly certain it does. So as you likely know, the Xbox One has both HDMI-in and HDMI-out capability. The point of HDMI-in is to allow you to hook up a cable box, with output then running from the Xbox...
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Crime might not pay -- but video games about crime certainly do, particularly when they're the follow-up to one of the biggest franchises in gaming. Grand Theft Auto V -- easily one of the biggest titles left for the Xbox 360 and PS3 -- went on sale today and cleared $800M in revenue in just 24 hours. That's not just...
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AMD's next-generation Radeon is set to debut later this fall and rumors about the upcoming chip have begun to leak out into the wild. While unconfirmed, the specs are in line with our expectations and what AMD has previously said about the chip. Hawaii won't be a fundamentally new architecture, but a refined approach...
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When Blizzard launched Diablo III, one of the game's most controversial features was the inclusion of a real money and standard auction house. This was an optional component of the game that allowed players to purchase items and equipment for real money. It ran concurrently with the game's traditional auction system...
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One of the ongoing debates between the Xbox One and PS4 revolves around the expected performance difference between the two consoles -- or lack thereof. According to Edge, developers have privately stated that the PS4 is significantly faster. A console agnostic game can, according to their sources, run at 30 FPS in...
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Google has released a 26-page report detailing how it strives to balance the rights of copyright owners against fair use policies and individual users. The search giant has come under increasing fire from copyright owners over the past few years, and faced repeated accusations that it earns enormous amounts of money...
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Today, for the first time since Atom first debuted, Intel is launching an updated version of the core that does more than integrate additional function blocks and lower power consumption. The tablet iteration of the new SoC is called Bay Trail, and it's aimed at the red-hot tablet and handheld market currently occupied by various chips from...
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It's common knowledge that game console and game sales have been in a serious slump this year. According to conventional wisdom, this is part of the console refresh cycle -- sales of older hardware falls off as customers await new products, even when manufacturers are publicly committed to long life cycles for current...
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Intel has announced a new family of SSD hardware aimed at business deployments with support for 256-bit AES encryption, the Trusted Computing Group's Opal management specification, and support for the vPro features inside Haswell. This last is a bit of an inaccuracy -- while the new drives do apparently support some...
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Last week, Samsung and Qualcomm both launched their own smartwatch products -- Samsung with its Galaxy Gear, and Qualcomm with the Toq. Early coverage on the hardware has been mixed, but that hasn't stopped an explosion of hyperbole, including the laughable idea that smart watches are going to replace smartphones. At...
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Over the past few months, as the Snowden leaks have exposed increasing levels of detail about the scope and nature of the NSA's "oversight" of the Internet, there's been a great deal of discussion on how users can protect themselves. The latest leaks from the Guardian, New York Times, and Pro Publica shed light on...
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Intel announced a pair of new products today designed to boost data center efficiency, shrink footprints, and allow for faster deployments. The first are new microservers based on the C2000 (codename: Avoton) Atom architecture. We've discussed the Bay Trail Atom core several times and Intel's plans for the technology...
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A few weeks ago, we covered the news that Microsoft's Xbox One would feature a slightly faster GPU than originally planned, with a boost from 800MHz to something in the 845-855MHz range. Now, it seems the company is giving its CPUs a kick as well. Xbox Chief Marketing Officer Yusef Mehdi spoke at the Citi Global...
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Facebook's search for new sources of revenues continues unabated -- and this time, the company wants to target your own profile phtoos for inclusion in its database. That's a change from the previous system, in which users were only scanned if other people tagged them first. Your own profile photos weren't...
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The story around AMD's upcoming Kaveri continues to evolve, but it's increasingly clear that the chip won't be available for retail purchase this year. If you recall, AMD initially promised that Kaveri would be available during 2013 and even published roadmaps earlier in May that show the chip shipping in the...
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At Gamescon 2013 in Germany, Blizzard Entertainment unveiled the next chapter in Diablo 3, dubbed Diablo III: Reaper of Souls. The expansion picks up where the original game left off, in what should have been a time of peace and prosperity. The Black Soulstone is safe, the Prime Evils and the Lords of Hell are...
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