Zak Killian
Ever since playing Joust on his family's Atari 800XL 8-bit computer as a youth, Zak has been hooked on PC and console games. His passion for gaming as a kid led to an interest in PCs as a teenager, which ended up with him founding his own PC repair shop in the year 2000. Decades later, he's still building, still gaming, and still arguing on the internet with any opinion anyone has. As a former writer of news and reviews for The Tech Report, Zak is a modern-day Renaissance man who knows a little bit about nearly everything.
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Remember that 2700-page, $1 trillion dollar infrastructure bill that the US government passed back in August? Well, have you read it? Of course we're joking -- we know you haven't read it. Most of the legislators who voted on it probably haven't either. Some folks have, though, and they're finding some pretty alarming...
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If you're a PC gamer and you haven't tried out Halo Infinite yet, well, why not? The multiplayer game is free, after all. Sure, the monetization is wack—play for hundreds of hours to unlock cosmetics, or pay more than a grand to get everything—but most folks agree that if you ignore the customization aspect, it's the...
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Everyone's waiting with bated breath for the GPU shortage to abate, with current models perpetually out of stock and gamers paying out the nose for ultra-scarce hardware just to play a bit of Halo. We might see some relief early next year though, in the form of new GPU releases -- especially if TSMC is right about...
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Pop quiz: you're launching an online game, and you want to grow your player-base as fast as possible. What's the easiest way to do that? If you answered, "give my game away for free," congratulations, you win the grand prize. Unfortunately, it comes along with a free side of unscrupulous jerks.
Unfortunately...
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You want to have a look at the non-overclockable versions of Intel's Alder Lake 12Th Gen Core desktop CPU lineup? Well, there they are, pictured plain as day right above this text. Have a gander, if you want. These pictures come to us by way of a post on Zhihu, which is a Chinese social media site that is sort of like...
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We're finally seeing some more chatter about the long-rumored desktop version of the GeForce RTX 3050. The last time we heard anything about this mini Ampere variant on the desktop was on New Year's Eve, when a document from Lenovo seemed to confirm the existence of the low-power GeForce. It seems like NVIDIA may have...
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Did you know you can play PC games on Linux? And not just games with Linux-native versions, either. Sure, Wine's been around for nearly three decades, but it's Valve's Proton that has been making the most significant progress lately. By combining DXVK, the aforementioned Wine, and a bundle of its own code, Proton lets...
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We'd reckon more than a few HotHardware readers are parents. How would you feel if you bought a singing toy for your kids and it suddenly started belting out curse words and singing about cocaine and depression? Putting aside the fact that most parents would likely rather not buy their kids noisy toys, you'd probably...
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If you're a hardware enthusiast of a certain age, you may recall a time when upgradeable memory on graphics cards was commonplace. This writer himself recalls carefully installing SDRAM packages in DIP sockets to upgrade his ATI Rage from 2MB to 4MB so he could run Windows 95 in 1280×1024 resolution on his fancy new...
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When we tested Intel's latest and greatest desktop CPUs, the 12th-generation Core family codenamed "Alder Lake," we found them to have world-beating gaming performance. That's thanks in large part to the refinements made to its "Golden Cove" P-cores over the "Willow Cove" cores used in Rocket Lake, which we can infer...
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The Battlefield series is one of the most venerated names in military shooters. Starting with the legendary Battlefield 1942, the series has typically been a somewhat-realistic military combat simulator, with huge conflicts and a wide array of military hardware, including vehicles.
The series has fallen slightly on...
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Judging by the way many people talk about them, it seems like a large contingent of folks don't realize that 12th-generation Intel Core desktop processors based on Alder Lake have actually been released. They're out there; you can go buy them right now, along with compatible motherboards and premium-priced (at least...
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Server admins and security-heads take note: there's a new Windows zero-day that's like leaving the key in the lock. It just requires access to any standard user account, and provides administrative privileges with the execution of a single application. There's pretty much no defense against it as it stands, so keep...
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Images generated by NVIDIA's GauGAN2 AI
Visual imagination works differently for every person. Some people, with a condition called "aphantasia," aren't able to generate mental pictures at all. Others have the imagery come to mind first, and then describe it with words. Still others, like this HH contributor, think...
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This past Saturday we reported on the possible existence of some low-powered Radeon cards based on a long-rumored but as-yet-unseen Navi 24 GPU. Well, today it seems like those products are inching ever closer to market. News has come to us revealing key specifications of the Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400, as well as...
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AMD's Radeon RX 6600, the most mainstream RDNA 2 card so far.
Remember when graphics cards had more than two performance tiers, the line-ups were easy to decipher, and you could actually buy one? We remember, and that's why we've been disheartened by the dearth of any display devices below "upper-midrange" in the...
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RPCS3 is the world's leading PlayStation 3 emulator software. It allows users to play their own rips of commercial PlayStation 3 games, and last month, the project announced that it is now able to boot every game title released for the PS3. Progress doesn't stop there, though, and there's much to be done.
The...
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Are you a Windows developer who'd like to become more hardware-agnostic? Alternatively, are you an Arm hipster? Do you still mourn the death of Motorola-based Macs and the RISC dream? Do you loathe Intel, AMD, and the x86-64 hegemony—yet somehow still like Windows? Then Qualcomm has just the PC for you. Qualcomm has...
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Iodine electric thruster firing in a vacuum chamber. (Image credit: ThrustMe)
Extant satellites orbiting the Earth typically use electric ion drives for propulsion. There's a few different types of ion drives, but the most common type relies on ionized xenon gas that is driven out of the craft by natural forces...
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There's no denying that cybersecurity is a major concern for anyone on the internet. One wrong move can get your device infected with malware that can steal your personal data, corrupt or encrypt your precious, unreplacable files, and even worse, snatch your credentials. Even if you avoid malware, there's myriad other...
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Quantum computing might be our path to real science-fiction computing power, and it's been making grand strides in the last couple of years. About two years ago, Google announced that it had achieved "quantum supremacy," which means that its quantum computers were able to perform specific tasks much faster than...
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AMD's Zen 2 and Zen 3 processor cores stack up pretty well against Intel's finest, largely thanks to the use of a secret weapon: massive last-level caches. The company's Radeon arm pulled the same trick—calling it "Infinity Cache"—to allow its recent Radeons to compete with Mean Green on performance despite coming...
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