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
Normally we don't cover games that are still in alpha. While beta coverage is typically a good example of how final gameplay is shaping up, alpha is a time when major design elements are still in flux. We're making an exception for Crysis 3's recent multiplayer test, however, to highlight just how gorgeous the game already is... Crysis 3 Multiplayer...
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Last month, Intel brought us out to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin to brief us on its latest and greatest foray into high-performance computing (HPC) and exascale level processing performance. For Intel, years of heady talk about parallelism and exascale computing have finally come to fruition. Intel is bringing to market...
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After 25 years of typing on keyboards, I've field-tested everything from IBM's legendary Mode M to the sort of $4.99 specials that were, as far as I could tell, constructed from styrofoam, packing peanuts, and pocket lint. About a year ago, I made the jump to a pair of mechanical keyboards and haven't looked back. The mechanical board on the...
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The Intel SSD 335 is the company’s first solid state drive to ship with NAND flash memory produced using a 20nm process. Intel claims the drive “uses the smallest, most efficient multi-level cell NAND flash on the market”. The flash memory used on the Intel SSD 335 was jointly developed my Intel’s and Micron’s...
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The solid state storage market has rapidly evolved over the last four years or so. Whereas early drives were relatively slow and offered inconsistent performance, current high-end drives routinely approach the limits of the SATA interface and off much better performance, both in terms of sequential and random IO operations. Over the same time...
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Calling the Alienware M18x R2 a laptop is like referring to a Harley Davidson as a bicycle. Both have handlebars and ride on two wheels, but when the rubber hits the road, the Harley's going to leave a Schwinn in the rear-view mirror. So it goes with the Alienware system we abducted from Dell. Technically, it's a gaming laptop, but more accurately,...
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The original Samsung Galaxy Note was a bit of an oddity. When it was first introduced, many reviewers, analysts, and industry pundits scoffed at the device’s relatively large form factor. The 5.3” screen on the original Note looked simply gargantuan next to anything else available on the market at the time, leading many folks to...
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The original Samsung Galaxy Note was a bit of an oddity in the smartphone market. When it was first introduced, many reviewers, analysts, and industry pundits scoffed at the device’s relatively large form factor. The 5.3” screen on the original Note looked simply gargantuan next to anything else available on the market at...
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Even before AMD officially released its Bulldozer-based FX-Series of desktop processors last year, the company was already talking about the follow-on microarchitecture codenamed “Piledriver”. In fact, in the conclusion of our launch article featuring the AMD FX-8150, we posted an AMD-provided slide that showed Piledriver...
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Even before AMD officially released its Bulldozer-based FX-Series of desktop processors last year, the company was already talking about the follow-on microarchitecture codenamed “Piledriver”. In fact, in the conclusion of our launch article featuring the AMD FX-8150, we posted an AMD-provided slide that showed Piledriver was already...
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Smartphones, tablets and computers are constantly consuming (and creating) more and more content. And with that comes massive amounts of data consumption. The amount of sharing that takes place on today's smartphones and tablets is astounding, and every instance of that requires data -- and storage. Lately, it seems as if companies are...
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For our latest End-of-Summer giveaway, we partnered up with our good friends at ZOTAC and planned to give away a full-featured, ultra small form factor HTPC / mini-PC! This time around, you could have won a ZOTAC ZBOX nano AD12 Plus, complete with a dual-core APU and AMD Radeon HD 7340 series graphics, all wrapped up in a tiny enclosure that's
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Given all the frenzy around ultrabooks, Microsoft's Surface, and the low power potential of future chips like Haswell, you might think that desktop replacement-class laptops had fallen out of favor with modern laptop manufacturers. iBuyPower's CZ-17 "Valkyrie" is proof that they haven't -- and while its size and weight won't appeal to road...
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The Motorola DROID RAZR M is billed as a mainstream DROID variant that's aimed at consumers looking to spend less than $100 on a new smartphone. With many Android-based LTE phones selling for $199 to $299 on-contract, having a $99 entry point is a pretty big deal. Perhaps more impressively, Motorola has managed to include a rather stout list...
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NVIDIA has been on a tear as of late, releasing a constant stream of GPUs over the last few weeks. In mid-August, the GPU giant released the GeForce GTX 660 Ti and less than a month later, followed up with the GeForce GTX 660 and GeForce GTX 650. Here we are now, less than a month since that release and NVIDIA is at the ready again with yet...
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NVIDIA has been on a tear as of late, releasing a constant stream of GPUs over the last few weeks. In mid-August, the GPU giant released the GeForce GTX 660 Ti and less than a month later, followed up with the GeForce GTX 660 and GeForce GTX 650. Here we are now, less than a month since that release and NVIDIA is at the ready again with...
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Apple upped the ante in the tablet market with its Retina display found in the third-generation iPad, which offers a resolution of 2048x1536. Since then, some Android tablet manufacturers have followed suit by increasing screen resolution and providing a better display overall. Acer's latest Iconia Tab A700 is one such tablet that aims to...
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The summer may be coming to an end, but it’s just the beginning of our latest giveaway here at HotHardware! For our latest End-of-Summer giveaway, we’ve partnered up with our good friends at ZOTAC and are giving away a full-featured, ultra small form factor HTPC / mini-PC! This time around, you could win a ZOTAC ZBOX nano AD12 Plus, complete
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We’ll be taking a somewhat different two-tiered approach with our coverage of AMD’s new Trinity-based APUs for desktop systems today. AMD is lifting the veil on their new product line-up, in addition to graphics performance and power consumption, but we can’t quite give you the full monty just yet, due to a new multi-tiered...
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Apple's iOS 6 is now available to download, and Apple has been quick to tout some "200 new features" over iOS 5. But of those 200, only a select few are noticeable to the end user. While a ton of stuff has been tweaked under the hood to enhance or otherwise modify the OS, not all of it is apparent to the end user. There are a few features,...
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In this special episode of HotHardware’s Two and Half Geeks webcast, Marco takes us through a system build of a killer new Gaming PC built with top-notch Corsair components that we'll be giving away to our lucky “Back to School” contest winner JOMA! A couple of episodes back, I (Marco) said that I...
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Intel's next-generation CPU, codenamed Haswell, was the major star of IDF. One aspect of the chip we haven't talked about at length, however, is its emphasis on reduced power consumption. When Intel announced that its Ivy Bridge mobile products would target 17W for mainstream systems, it made headlines. Pushing Haswell down to 10W is an even...
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