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
To usher in the spring season, we teamed up with our friends at EVGA, and along with a little help from the good folks at Intel and Corsair, put together one heck of an gaming system giveaway! This time around you all had a chance to win an Intel Core i7-3770K-infused, custom-built rig complete with 8GB of RAM, and a...
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If you love building computers, you probably appreciate a good case or chassis. While there are plenty of excellent products available for a song, there’s also an upper echelon of models that cost quite a bit and offer all the premiere features you could hope for. While it seems as though there’s a lot of similarity between low-end...
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The dawn of GPU computing came about in large part due to the immense gap in compute performance between traditional CPUs and programmable GPUs. Whereas CPUs excel with serial workloads, modern GPUs perform best with highly parallel operations. If you look at the slide below, it shows an array of Intel processors...
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Today marks one of those funky occasions when you’ve probably been aware of the “new” product we’re going to show you for quite some time. And we’re not talking about a few days or weeks here either. In fact, it was all the way back in December of 2011, when AMD introduced the original Radeon HD 7970, that we...
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Today marks one of those funky occasions when you’ve probably been aware of the “new” product we’re going to show you for quite some time. And we’re not talking about a few days or weeks here either. In fact, it was all the way back in December of 2011, when AMD introduced the original Radeon HD 7970, that we...
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Samsung has done an exceptional job the past few years building interest and recognition for their Galaxy-branded smartphones. The fervor isn’t quite on the level of Apple's iPhone launches, but if the attendance of their “Samsung Unpacked” event at Radio City Music Hall and the buzz on-line for today’s introduction...
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Samsung has done an exceptional job the past few years building interest and recognition for their Galaxy-branded smartphones. The fervor isn’t quite on the level of Apple's iPhone launches, but if the attendance of their “Samsung Unpacked” event at Radio City Music Hall and the buzz on-line for today’s introduction...
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For many users, smartphones are tools that are more about the software and user experience than the hardware. Of course, you still need adequate hardware and smooth performance to ensure a good experience, but beyond that, there are plenty of users who are attracted more to software and easy-to-use features than anything else. As the first...
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One of the perks of working at a place like HotHardware is that we have access to some of the hottest hardware around. So when I decided to dive into Windows 8 head-first a few months ago, I thought I’d give the OS as much breathing room as possible and install it on a freshly built, ultra high-end rig. Building myself a second...
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The awkward days of Window 8 laptops without touchscreens aren’t behind us just yet, but the end is in sight. It’s easy enough to resist touching the Start screen on a desktop PC, but when a laptop display is inches from your fingers, if you're anything like us, your instinct is to reach out and touch it...
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In between chipset releases, manufacturers typically pump out numerous motherboard variations, adding this or that feature or optimizing boards for a particular function. Unsurprisingly, folks like us enjoy tinkering with those boards when granted the opportunity to see if they offer anything special, over and above plain-Jane products. Gigabyte...
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At the Intel Developers Forum currently underway in Beijing, Intel revealed a number of details regarding future Atom and Xeon processors and proposed server and rack-level enhancements to improve efficiency and ease upgrades moving forward. As Diane Bryant (senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s...
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This coming Tuesday, April 9, is going to be a busy one for Microsoft’s update servers. In advance of what have become known as “Patch Tuesday”, Microsoft posted nine early security bulletins to notify users and system administrators of the slew of impending Windows updates. Two of the patches have...
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It has been quite a while since we last an mSATA solid state drive (SSD) under the microscope. It's actually only been about two years, and if you care to jump into our time machine, you can see what we had to say about Intel's 310 Series mSATA SSD in 80GB form. The idea then was the same as it is now -- to offer full-size SSD features and...
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Lenovo's first ThinkPad tablet was a bit of a disappointment to be candid. Even the best Android Honeycomb tablets were severely lacking on a number of fronts, back in the day. What was the use of a business tablet that couldn't run business apps? Well, forget all that. The ThinkPad Tablet 2 is a real business tablet, and one that actually...
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Intel used the backdrop of the Game Developer’s Conference to announce some new developer tools, graphics drivers, and features available in the graphics engine of upcoming, Haswell-based 4th Gen Core processors, which are due to launch later sometime this year. Over and above the DirectX 11.1 support present in...
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AMD made a number of interesting announcements today at the Game Developers Conference, currently taking place in San Francisco, CA. In addition to talking about a new strategy centered on gaming, AMD revealed some new products and previewed another that we’ve been hearing about for quite some time. During...
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In the final analysis of our AMD Radeon HD 7790 review, which launched last week, we mentioned that the mainstream GPU landscape would likely change again by the time the 7790 was actually available on store shelves. Although we posted a full review of the card on March 22, they aren’t slated to go on sale until April 2. Today we're...
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A few weeks back, the enthusiast community was abuzz after news broke that AMD’s Radeon HD 7000 series would remain “stable throughout 2013” and would be the company’s focus “for quite some time”. The wording of the initial news made it sound like AMD wouldn’t be releasing any new GPUs for the rest...
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A few weeks back, the enthusiast community was abuzz after news broke that AMD’s Radeon HD 7000 series would remain “stable throughout 2013” and would be the company’s focus “for quite some time”. The wording of the initial news made it sound like AMD wouldn’t be releasing any new GPUs for the...
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NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang kicked off this year’s GPU Technology Conference with his customarily impressive opening keynote. The focus of Jen-Hsun’s presentation was on breakthroughs in computer graphics and advances in GPU computing, but he also unveiled new GPU and Tegra roadmaps and took the...
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We spent some time with Samsung at their launch event for the brand new Galaxy S 4 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City last night and were able to snap a few pictures and get some hands-on time with the new device. If you missed the original announcement, we’ve got the full scoop posted here. Just to recap, the Galaxy S 4...
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