Editor profile

Zak Killian

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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. A former writer of news and reviews for The Tech Report, Zak is a modern-day Renaissance man who may not be an expert on anything, but knows just a little about nearly everything.

Recent posts

Computer cooling primarily happens with regular old fans blowing air through a fixed heatsink assembly. This has various complexities; fans need a relatively large amount of space, and they make a lot of noise due to the mechanical action... Read more...
UPDATE: Corsair has tweeted about this story, with an explanation and a promise to make the customer whole. Check out the company's response below: This is a perfectly reasonable explanation, as we expected there would be. Corsair isn't... Read more...
Coming from the early days of computing when we had half-a-dozen interfaces on a standard PC, none of which were compatible and few of which carried power, USB is a revelation. You can plug almost anything into a USB port and most of it... Read more...
It's easy to think of Cinebench as a purely synthetic benchmark given the way it works: you download a dedicated benchmark application, you run it from whatever folder, and it does its thing before spitting out a number that vaguely tells... Read more...
For as long as cameras have existed, they've had a fundamental limitation: they can only focus on one depth plane at a time, and everything in front of or behind that plane gets blurred. That's simply the way lenses work, but researchers... Read more...
GOG has just been acquired by its original co-founder, Michał Kiciński, and in an industry where acquisitions usually signal disruption, consolidation, or slow erosion of consumer-friendly policies, the most notable thing about this one is... Read more...
Check out this memory kit from Nemix: 4096 TB of DDR5-6400 memory across sixteen 256GB sticks. The voltage is JEDEC-standard 1.1v, and the registered RAM supports multi-byte ECC, too. It's only $76,999, which comes out to an eye-watering $18.80 per gigabyte, or $4,812 per module. Nevermind... Read more...
It's been quite a year. We came into it struggling with a massive GPU shortage, and we're coming out of it with a brutal memory shortfall. Microsoft largely lost the plot with both Windows and Xbox, and the President of the United States... Read more...
The long-awaited "double X3D" CPU, which AMD once denied would ever happen, has finally confirmed its existence with new leaks over at Geekbench and Passmark. We'll cut to the chase: neither benchmark result is particularly interesting, as... Read more...
Because of the way we interact with these features, it's easy to think of Intel XMP and AMD EXPO as binary, 'yes or no' features, but both standards have actually gone through a few revisions. Right now, we're on revision 1.1 of AMD's... Read more...
GamesIndustry.biz does a yearly analyst roundtable, gathering predictions for what the next year will bring to the industry. This year's post paints a picture of an industry stuck in cautious recovery mode, with growth returning slowly... Read more...
There was some significant controversy this summer when some customers complained of Gigabyte's GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs leaking the "server-grade thermal gel" that the board vendor touts on its product pages. Gigabyte acknowledged that... Read more...
The headline sounds like one of those things that's way too good to be true. Like a scam you'd find on a shady website; "install this SSD driver for huge speed gains!" It's real, though, and it's because one of the unfortunate realities of... Read more...
Intel has released version 3.0 of its AI Playground tool, which brings new multimodal upgrades to the app's functionality thanks to modern vision models like Qwen3 VL as well as agentic tool calling support, that allows users to... Read more...
This past Wednesday, AMD quietly published what appears to be the first official technical documentation for its upcoming Zen 6 CPU architecture, codenamed Morpheus. This document offers early insight into several notable architectural changes. While the company has not formally announced Zen... Read more...
You're a PC gamer. Maybe you're new to the hobby, or maybe you've been blasting away on your old faithful peripherals: an ancient 1080p LCD monitor, the rubber dome keyboard you stole from the office, an Xbox 360 gamepad where one of the bumpers doesn't work right. Look, brother — it's time to... Read more...
Intel's foundry arm says it has crossed a major lithography milestone: it has announced successful acceptance testing of ASML's TWINSCAN EXE:5200B High Numerical Aperture (High-NA) EUV scanner, one of the most advanced chipmaking tools... Read more...
The problem with a memory shortage is that virtually every single part of a computer uses memory in some way. That, obviously, includes graphics cards, and despite the author's earlier optimism that GDDR might be one of the less-affected... Read more...
You may not realize it, but we've been here doing our thing at HotHardware since 1999; we remember the good (and bad) old days of the PC enthusiast scene. There was a time when graphics cards were a wild market. You could find Quantum3D... Read more...
Have you looked at the price of RAM lately? Retail prices for desktop DDR5 memory kits are three to five times what they were just a month ago. Building a PC has gone from "your GPU should be the most expensive component" to "make sure to... Read more...
NVIDIA has announced the release of Nemotron 3, the latest generation in its ongoing Nemotron line of large language models (LLMs). It presents the new models as open, high-efficiency building blocks for agentic AI systems. The first model... Read more...
AMD's business is growing rapidly, and that means it needs more employees. The company is hiring for many positions on its website, and this is a frequent area of interest for leaksmen trying to find interesting info about the company's... Read more...
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