Zak Killian
Recent posts
When you hear "macro pad", you probably envision something gamers use to cheat in video games. Cheaters or not, that's exactly who Keychron's new C100 8K macro pad seems to be targeting with its distinctive aesthetic featuring clear ASA...
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No, you read the headline correctly: that's the B450 chipset, which originally came out in 2018 ahead of the Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 processors. It is perhaps a sign of the times, but here in the post-Zen 6 era (AMD launched Venice last...
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If you're an enthusiast of a certain age, you may recall that there was a weird diversion between the Socket 7 platform used by the original Pentium and the Socket 370 platform used by the Pentium III. That diversion was Slot 1, an...
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ASUS has patched another serious security vulnerability in Armoury Crate and several other hardware-management utilities that could let an unprivileged application gain kernel-level access on Windows systems. The vulnerability, tracked as...
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Absolutely indispensable hardware identification and monitoring utility HWiNFO has no direct Linux equivalent, and that's one of the most frustrating things about using Linux as an enthusiast. The app frequently gets pre-release...
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Some applications demand a big CPU with eight or more big cores and a fat discrete GPU drawing 300W. Most don't, and if you disagree, let's interrogate how much time you spend on your smartphone. The fact of the matter is that you simply...
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If you're a PC gamer, you'd better pray to whatever divine being or beings you believe in that your current graphics card doesn't give up the ghost. While there are still graphics cards on the market to buy, pricing for current-generation...
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Intel hasn't released a graphics-focused desktop processor since the beloved (but not for its graphics) Broadwell-C family back in 2015. Since then, AMD has completely cornered the market for budget desktop gaming and SFF PC builds with...
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How much hardware do you need to run a large language model (LLM) locally? You need a massive GPU, or a powerful AI-targeted machine like the HP Z2 Mini G1a, right? That's certainly one way to go. Alternatively you could grab a handful of...
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Back in July, it came to light that LG monitors could actually install bloatware on your machine (specifically, an LG app that shilled McAfeee security software at you) through Windows Update. Understandably, gamers were furious, with many...
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A SiSoftware benchmark for an early engineering sample of Intel's upcoming Diamond Rapids "Xeon 7" processor, spotted by 188号 (@Momomo_US on Xwitter), shows promising progress for Intel's 18A-P followup to its 18A fabrication node. This...
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At the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) 2026 conference last week in Santa Clara, Samsung outlined its long-term vision for the next generation of AI infrastructure. While even limited deployment is still over the horizon, the headline...
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If you're shopping for an upper-midrange or high-end gaming monitor in 2026, that pretty much means OLED. There's no shortage of options on the market, but of course, ASUS' ROG family of displays remains popular with those who enjoy the explicit gamer styling. If that includes you, you need to...
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High-stakes Silicon Valley lawsuits are usually dry, legally cautious affairs fought through polite corporate PR statements, but OpenAI just threw out the rulebook with a scorching, highly irregular blog post that essentially accuses Apple...
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At the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) 2026 conference in Santa Clara, memory titans SK hynix and Sandisk have formally released the first open technical specification for High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF) through the Open Compute Project...
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Modern microprocessors come stacked with processor cores. This is great for lots of reasons, but many of the most demanding tasks we run on PCs are highly latency-sensitive because they are held up by fundamentally serial (meaning they...
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If you were thinking about buying one of AMD's really quite excellent Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards, you'd better get on the ball and do it soon, because more price hikes are on the way. That's the word out of China; specifically, this originates on the Board Channels forums, which are...
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It got a bit buried in all the other announcements, but back at Computex in May, AMD announced EXPO Ultra Low Latency (EXPO ULL), a new classification of memory kits that not only run high transfer rates but also exceptionally low...
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Intel is famously protective of the keys to the x86 kingdom, making its latest strategic move both highly unusual and undeniably fascinating. According to a Reuters report from yesterday, the semiconductor giant is handing over the...
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Enthusiasts had been clamoring for an all P-core Raptor Lake, but one never materialized, at least initially. The company would eventually make such a CPU, the Core 9 273PQE, but it's esoteric and rare, and it doesn't actually offer much...
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Intel's rumored desktop CPU with a surprisingly beefy integrated GPU is starting to look like a truly odd product. According to prolific leaker Jaykihn, the Nova Lake-S SKU with integrated 12-Xe GPU that we previously reported on will...
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You've probably read stories about China's home-grown CPUs and GPUs, which generally trail the world's leading designs in performance. That's in part due to Chinese chip designers lacking design history to iterate on, but it's also in part...
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