Matthew Connatser

Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Phison is set to reveal further details of its upcoming PS5031-E31T SSD controller for PCIe 5.0 Solid State Drives. However, unlike Phison's E26 controller that's used for today's SSDs, the E31T is designed to use much less power and be more efficient. That could enable the creation of PCIe 5.0 SSDs that don't require...
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Lenovo's GeekPro desktops usually offer entry-level parts, but the latest member of the lineup offers a never-before-seen GPU: the Radeon RX 6600 LE. This isn't one of the GRE, China-exclusive variants AMD has announced recently either; the RX 6600 LE has come out of nowhere. However, this seemingly brand-new graphics...
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AMD has released its 23.12.1 update for AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition, focusing on adding new features such as HYPR-RX Eco, an update to the game profile UI that allows HYPR-RX to be enabled on a game-by-game basis, and GPU hardware scheduling. Additionally, performance in a few AI applications has been improved...
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Acer's brand-new Nitro V 16 will be one of the first gaming laptops to offer AMD's upcoming Ryzen 8040 Hawk Point APUs. The Nitro V 16 can soon be had with up to a Ryzen 7 8845HS, which features eight Zen 4 cores, 12 RDNA 3 Compute Units, and the new Hawk Point NPU, which is the main selling point over the Ryzen 7040...
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GALAX has launched the thinnest RTX 40 card thus far with its RTX 4060 Ti Unparalleled Max, a single-slot graphics card that's just 20mm thick. The single-slot form factor is usually reserved for professional or workstation cards, and GALAX's new model is (as far as we know) the first single-slot RTX 40 card. Even...
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NVIDIA is aiming to lower the price of its GeForce RTX 3060 in China to 1,999 Yuan, roughly the equivalent of $280 in American USD, and these GPUs are set to last at least through the first quarter of 2024. That price would undercut even the cheapest GeForce RTX 3060 12GB by $10 in the US, if this price cut carries...
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Technological autonomy has been a priority for China in recent years, partly because the country can't import cutting-edge chips thanks to US sanctions, and also because being self-sufficient is popular policy. At the forefront of China's native CPU industry is Loongson, which has at last released its much-anticipated...
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Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, yet there are still great deals you can take advantage of to build a get entry level PC for just around $600. Though this PC build guide doesn't make use of the latest hardware, it certainly will offer great performance for a very economical price point. Additionally...
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Storage devices have gotten really fast lately, with the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs getting over 14GB/s in reads and writes, but that's nothing compared to a Ryzen CPU with 3D V-Cache. Tested by hardware enthusiast and engineer Nemez all the way back in February, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D was able to hit 183GB/s and 175GB/s in...
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A good chunk of the upcoming Ryzen 8000 series has just been uncovered by X user @harukaze5719, who has revealed other hardware tidbits over the years (usually with good accuracy). This latest leak reveals the name of many Hawk Point APUs in the Ryzen 8000 family, and it might even indicate that Ryzen 8000 is just a...
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It was only last week when we reported that an overclocked Threadripper Pro 7995WX broke the world record for Cinebench R23, but as of the time of this writing, the record has been broken five more times by overclockers using the same chip. The initial world record was set with air cooling, so it was expected that...
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Valve's Steam Deck is a handheld gaming device that has forever changed PC gaming on-the-go. While it's still a slick, fun device as we approach its second birthday, gamers always want for more performance. The Steam Deck 2 isn't coming any time soon, however, so what are users supposed to do to maximize their...
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AMD CPU overclocker Bill Alverson, who goes by the handle Sampson, set several CPU performance records on Wednesday with his overclocked Threadripper Pro 7995WX. The 96-core processor is based on AMD's Genoa family, which also powers the regular Threadripper 7000 lineup and 4th Generation EPYC CPUs. These records were...
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Cooler PCIe 5.0 SSDs might finally be on the horizon with Silicon Motion's new SM2508 SSD controller. With a maximum TDP of 3.5 watts, SSDs build on this new controller should run considerably cooler than Phison's PS5026-E26 controller rated for 5 watts, and running at 1.5 watts lower power draw could make a really...
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Although Intel and Argonne National Laboratory declared the Aurora supercomputer to be finally complete earlier this year, apparently it's not fully up and running just yet. It's only running with half of its 21,248 Xeon Max Sapphire Rapids CPUs and 63,744 Ponte Vecchio GPUs, which allowed it to snag second place in...
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DLSS modder PureDark just brought DLSS 3 frame generation tech to Grand Theft Auto V, an older but still fairly graphically intensive game for modern hardware, especially when using graphics mods. Although FSR 1.0 was modded into GTA V soon after the upscaling technology came out, DLSS 3 is a much different beast and...
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At last week's Intel Innovation Taipei 2023 Technology Forum, CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed the company's goal to ship at least 100 million NPU-enabled PCs with on-device AI acceleration by 2025. Gelsinger, which has lead Intel since early 2021, has overseen a radical transformation of Intel's business, and AI is one of...
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The Core i9-14900K and Core i9-13900KS are essentially the same CPU, featuring practically identical stock frequencies, but for overclocking it wasn't clear which one would be better. For such highly clocked CPUs, binning is the deciding factor, and although the 14900K is newer, it doesn't have that special -KS suffix...
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Futuremark, the company behind 3DMark, is teasing its upcoming Steel Nomad benchmark, which is 3DMark's first non-ray tracing benchmark for high-end graphics since Time Spy in 2016. Although the Port Royal and Speed Way graphics tests are modern and can stress even the most powerful GPUs of today, they both use ray...
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Intel Application Optimizer (APO) - Free Intel APO or Application Optimization technology is a brand-new piece of software that Intel claims will bring a big performance lift for games, and from what we've seen so far, those claims seem to check out. Free frame rate boosts are the best Easy to install\ Works as...
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Although it's been roughly a year since AMD launched its 4th Generation EPYC Genoa CPUs, the company is looking back at its 3rd Generation EPYC Milan chips and adding six new models to the lineup. With a focus on value, these new Milan variants seemingly indicate that 4th Generation EPYC Genoa, Bergamo, and Siena CPUs...
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The M3 Pro-powered Macbook Pro 16-inch benchmark results have surfaced inGeekbench 6 database, and the results have been received somewhat negatively. It's roughly as fast as the M2 Max and only a little faster than the M2 Pro, which is in stark contrast to Apple's "scary fast" marketing. Expectations for the...
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