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
Now that the holidays and CES craziness are over, we thought it would be a good time to launch our latest giveaway! This time around, we’ve teamed up with our friends at Gigabyte to give away a few of pieces of HOT hardware. Up for grabs, we have a Z68 series, Z68XP-UD3P motherboard, GeForce GTX 560 N56GOC-IGI graphics card, and a Force K3
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When AMD announced the Radeon HD 7970 last month, it revealed a new, ultra-powerful graphics card that snatched the single-GPU performance crown from the previous titleholder, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580. AMD may have staked a claim for the fastest single graphics card with the dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 6990, but its previous flagship...
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At the time of the Radeon HD 7970’s announcement, we knew the Radeon HD 7950 would be based on the same GPU and that it would arrive a few weeks after the 7970, but its final specifications and price point hadn’t been disclosed. As it turns out, we’ve had a couple of the cards in-house for a little while now and can finally...
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Options, folks. That’s what NZXT is shooting for with its new full-tower Switch 810 case, which can be configured in a number of different ways to optimize airflow or sound reduction and is equally friendly for air- or water-cooling setups. Available in black or white, the NZXT Switch 810 takes a while to get to know intimately. NZXT...
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The original A-Series APU line-up didn’t feature any enthusiast-targeted products, but AMD quickly reacted to the A-Series’ mostly favorable reception with a new flagship, dubbed the A8-3870K Black Edition, which we’ll be showing you here today. In its default configuration, the A8-3870K is a slight upgrade from the A8-3850,...
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When AMD initially released their Llano-based A-Series APUs, the company targeted cost-conscious consumers looking for highly-integrated, easy to assemble solutions for an entry-level or mid-range PCs. At the time of launch, the flagship model in the A-Series line-up was the A8-3850, which featured quad CPU cores paired to a DirectX-11 Radeon...
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The TouchSmart 520-1070 is a fairly remarkable AIO equipped with high-end hardware and a robust selection of software, all of which comes wrapped in a 23-inch touchscreen display with a speaker bar blasting out Beats Audio. Any fears that HP's recent preoccupation with righting its ship would result in a degraded product line go right out...
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When we first received the new NVIDIA Tegra 3-powered Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime for testing, we had solid communication from both Asus and NVIDIA that this tablet was one of Google's test vehicles for their upcoming Android 4.0 operating system, also referred to as Ice Cream Sandwich. Besides the fact that the folks at Google have a bit...
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In this latest episode of HotHardware's Two and Half Geeks, Marco, Iyaz and Dave discuss highlights from CES 2012 in Las Vegas, including OCZ's new blistering fast PCI Express and SATA SSD technologies, Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga, Intel Medfield Smartphones, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF700T, Samsung's Galaxy S II...
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As is always the case, CES 2012 was a complete blur of big product announcements, bleeding-edge technology and a mass of humanity clamoring to see it all. Our coverage of the event and the various product announcements came so fast and furious that, unless you were checking the page every few minutes (not a bad idea actually), you probably...
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As is always the case, CES 2012 was a complete blur of big product announcements, bleeding-edge technology and a mass of humanity clamoring to see it all. Our coverage of the event and the various product announcements came so fast and furious that, unless you were checking the page every few minutes (not a bad idea actually), you...
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A few weeks back, we took a look at the Core i7-3960X, Intel’s first desktop processor to feature the company’s Sandy Bridge-E microarchitecture. If you're unfamiliar with the chip, Sandy Bridge-E is the ‘tock’ in Intel’s tick-tock release schedule cadence that bridges the gap between first-gen Sandy Bridge-based...
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A few weeks back, we took a look at the Core i7-3960X, Intel’s first desktop processor to feature the company’s Sandy Bridge-E microarchitecture. If you're unfamiliar with the chip, Sandy Bridge-E is the ‘tock’ in Intel’s tick-tock release schedule cadence that bridges the gap between first-gen Sandy Bridge-based...
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Our coverage of the latest technology on display as CES continues today, with some goodies from Zotac. In addition to offering some hot graphics cars, Zotac has also been innovating in the small form factor and mini-ITX motherboard markets, especially over the last couple of years. As such, it should come as no...
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After years of work and a few false starts, Intel is finally ready to take the plunge into the smartphone market. At the CES keynote tonight, the CPU giant is officially launching Medfield, the 32nm smartphone SoC it's built to take it into the next generation of smartphones (and a few tablets). The chip---now officially named the Atom Z2460--is...
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We’re making our way around the show floor at the Consumer Electronics Show and have some interesting tid-bits to share with you all from our tours of the Intel and SuperMicro booths in the Central and South Halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Not surprisingly, much of Intel’s...
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In a lavish suite at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Asus set up a number of existing and upcoming products for eager members of the technology press to ogle and get some hands-on time. In the suite, we had a chance to checkout a handful of upcoming X79 motherboards, nettops, netbooks, notebooks, and even a few tablets...
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In a lavish suite at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Asus set up a number of existing an upcoming products for eager members of the technology press to ogle and get some hands-on time. In the suite, we had a chance to checkout a handful of upcoming X79 motherboards, nettops, netbooks, notebooks, and even a few tablets and a smartphone. One of...
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It’s been a while since our last case roundup--a long while, actually--so it’s high time we did another. We take a look at a slew of (mostly) mid tower cases on the following pages, including the Antec Eleven Hundred, the Corsair Carbide 400R and 500R, the NZXT Source 220, and Thermaltake Chaser MK-I, each designed for a slightly...
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Our friend Terry Makedon from AMD (You may know him as CatalystMaker on Twitter), conducted a poll on his personal blog asking gamers to vote on PC Game of the Year candidates. If you tracked our similar poll, which was posted a couple of months earlier, you may have an idea as to which game was most popular, but Terry’s got some interesting...
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Toshiba's Portégé R835-P330 is one of just a handful Ultrabooks currently available and is part of a new breed of laptops intended to blend ultra-portability with performance. Thin, lightweight, and well equipped, the Ultrabook form factor is the direction the Windows laptop market is headed, but first manufacturers have to get...
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We have evaluated a handful of Patriot’s SSDs recently, all of which proved to be solid (no pun intended) offerings in their respective categories. The high-end Patriot Wildfire SSD hung right alongside the best of the SandForce-based drives with synchronous NAND we’ve tested and the lower-priced Pyro was also competitive...
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