Marco Chiappetta
Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com
Recent posts
As a species, we've come a long way from the days of carving notes into stone. While our ancestors used chisel and rock, we now use keyboards to hammer out our thoughts and anything that needs to be documented. Some of us spend hours a day sitting in front of a PC, a large portion of which is dedicated to...
Read more...
Office for iPad is finally here, and for once, the term “finally” is truly justified. For nearly as long as the iPad has been available, general consumers and enterprise users alike have been clamoring for Microsoft’s suite of document editing tools. In fact, the dearth of Office on iPad enabled an entire ecosystem to grow,...
Read more...
Going back all the way to the Rage Fury MAXX, ATI/AMD has had a long history of releasing dual-GPU powered graphics cards. During the previous generation, AMD so much as said the Radeon HD 7990 was coming well before the single-GPU powered Radeon HD 7970 even launched, but a number of things delayed the arrival of the 7990, and towards the...
Read more...
For the past few weeks, AMD has been strategically dropping hints about the product we’ll be showing you here today—the ultra, powerful Radeon R9 295X2. If you’ve spent any time on our home page recently, or on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, you may have seen the “two is better than one” tag-line...
Read more...
Our Spring Fling ’14 gaming system giveaway with CyberPower PC has come to a close and we’re ready to announce the winner! In case you missed it these last few weeks, readers had a chance to win an Intel Core i7-4770K-infused, custom-built rig complete with 16GB of awesome G.SKILL RAM, a powerful EVGA GeForce GTX 780...
Read more...
If you want the latest and greatest Nokia-built Windows Phone phone, and you’re an AT&T customer, the Lumia 1520 is a beast of a smartphone, but it’s not available to Verizon customers. Instead, Verizon offers the newer, and arguably more refined, Nokia Lumia Icon, which has nearly all of the same internal specifications as...
Read more...
In this episode of HotHardware's Two and a Half Geeks, Marco, Dave and Iyaz discuss various announcements that came out of NVIDIA's GPU Tech Conference last week including the big, bad dual-GPU powered GeForce GTX Titan Z, SHIELD updates, and an upcoming Tegra, SSDs from Samsung and Crucial, WD's MyCloud EX2 and...
Read more...
A few weeks back, we took a look at a new series of solid state drives from Crucial, the M550, which leveraged Marvell controller technology, 20nm MLC NAND flash memory, and firmware optimizations gleaned from the last couple of years of SATA SSD advancements. Ultimately, we found the M550 series of drives to be solid offerings, with well-rounded...
Read more...
A few weeks back, we took a look at a new series of solid state drives from Crucial, the M550, which leveraged Marvell controller technology, 20nm MLC NAND flash memory, and firmware optimizations gleaned from the last couple of years of SATA SSD advancements. Ultimately, we found the M550 series of drives to be solid offerings, with well-rounded...
Read more...
What better way to say good-bye to winter and usher in the spring season than to give away an awesome gaming rig? We have teamed up with our friends at CyberPower PC and have put together one heck of an awesome gaming system giveaway! This time around you've all a chance to win an Intel Core i7-4770K-infused...
Read more...
A few months back, we took a look at Samsung’s SSD 840 EVO series of solid state drives. At the time, we found their performance to be quite good, and the drives were competitively priced too. Shortly after the 2.5” versions of Samsung’s SSD 840 EVO drives hit the scene, the company prepared an array of mSATA drives featuring...
Read more...
A few months back, we took a look at Samsung’s SSD 840 EVO series of solid state drives. At the time, we found their performance to be quite good, and the drives were competitively priced too. Shortly after the 2.5” versions of Samsung’s SSD 840 EVO drives hit the scene, the company prepared an array of mSATA drives...
Read more...
NVIDIA has some big things planned for owners of its SHIELD portable gaming device. In addition to bringing new features and capabilities to SHIELD though an upcoming software update, NVIDIA will be upgrading the base OS to Android KitKat, and redesigning the interface of SHIELD’s gamepad mapper to make it more...
Read more...
We recently had the chance to sit down with some folks at NVIDIA to discuss high performance graphics APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). With all of the noise recently surrounding AMD’s Mantle, DirectX 12, DirectX 11 and even OpenGL, NVIDIA wanted to clear the air somewhat, and explain the...
Read more...
Western Digital’s original My Cloud personal cloud storage solution brought a unique approach to the NAS segment, for individuals and the SOHO crowd, and the subsequent multi-bay My Cloud EX4 offered a beastly amount of storage--8TB, 12TB, or 16TB--via the same “My Cloud” platform. WD introduced the My Cloud EX2 as something...
Read more...
Intel used the backdrop of the Game Developers Conference currently taking place in San Francisco to make a handful of interesting announcements that run the gamut from low-power technologies to ultra-high-end desktop chips. In addition to outing a number of upcoming processors—from an Anniversary Edition...
Read more...
In this episode of HotHardware's Two And A Half Geeks, Iyaz, Dave and Marco discuss the cool little Asus Chromebox, the powerful little CyberPower Zeus Mini Gaming PC, the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook, and the Dell UltraSharp UP3214Q 4K super high res monitor - AND you can win that CyberPower Zeus Mini PC if you check out...
Read more...
The solid state storage market continues to be one of the hottest in the PC industry. Over the last few weeks alone, we’ve seen the release of the Intel SSD 730 and the OCZ Vertex 460 series of drives and there are still plenty more on the horizon, as many companies ready products with different capacities, form factors and connectivity...
Read more...
The solid state storage market continues to be one of the hottest in the PC industry. Over the last few weeks alone, we’ve seen the release of the Intel SSD 730 and the OCZ Vertex 460 series of drives and there are still plenty more on the horizon, as many companies ready products with different capacities, form factors and...
Read more...
When we evaluated NVIDIA’s Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 750 and 750 Ti a few weeks back, we lauded the GPUs for their competitive performance and class-leading power efficiency. The GeForce GTX 750 and 750 Ti are mainstream products that didn’t tear up the benchmark charts like a bleeding-edge high-end...
Read more...
In case you didn't get the memo, the 4K Ultra HD revolution has begun. Services like YouTube and Netflix are already serving up 4K streams, while hardware makers like Dell are stepping to the plate with displays that can playback 4K video in all its native glory. The latter is what we have here for review -- a Dell UltraSharp UP3214Q monitor...
Read more...
In this episode of HotHardware's Two And A Half Geeks, Marco, Dave and Iyaz talk about Intel's hot new SSD 730 Series solid state drives, Intel's Ivytown Xeon E7 v2 server processors and Merrifield and Moorefield processors for smartphones, as well as the LG G Flex, hands-on with Samsung's Galaxy S 5, the GeForce GTX...
Read more...
