Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
HotHardware's very own Dave Altavilla is on site in Maui, Hawaii, at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit where the chip company has revealed its latest Snapdragon 8-family of processors, known as "Snapragon 8 Elite" due to their inclusion of the same powerful Oryon CPU core used in the speedy Snapdragon X Elite laptop...
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The gaming handheld market is still booming, with customers buying PC-based portables to play their favorite games on the go in surprising numbers. At the heart of the overwhelming majority of these handhelds is AMD silicon—in particular, AMD SoCs based on its "Phoenix" processor, like the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. That...
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Given that AMD's standard Zen 5 processors barely moved the needle in terms of gaming performance, and Intel has admitted that its upcoming "Arrow Lake" Core Ultra 200S CPUs similarly won't be providing a big gaming uplift, hype is at an all-time high for the new Ryzen X3D CPUs because PC gamers are desperate for...
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Even within the niche of PC-based gaming handhelds, there are quite a few systems to choose from. We've written about them a lot, and reviewed a few. If you're trying to sell such a device, you might try to add extra features above and beyond what the competition offers, like the GPD Duo that comes with dual OLED...
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PC enthusiasts have a weird problem with overly-relativistic thinking. Case in point: AMD's newish Ryzen 9000 Zen 5 desktop processors. It's fair to say that they were disappointing given their relatively modest performance gains in typical client desktop tasks over the Ryzen 7000 Zen 4 CPUs. However, that doesn't...
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If you're a gamer, then Warframe is a title that probably needs no introduction—even if you might have mixed feelings about it. An ambitious title that blended genres even when it released back in March 2013, Warframe has morphed and transformed numerous times over the last eleven-plus years to the point that the...
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The early rumors concerning the naming convention of AMD's upcoming mobile processors appears to be true. We already suspected this, but things took a turn when the company revealed the final name of its "Strix Point" SoCs earlier this year: the Ryzen AI 300 family, headed up by the flagship Ryzen AI 9 HX...
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Have you tried the NVIDIA App yet, dear reader? It's a new piece of software from NVIDIA that combines most of the functions of GeForce Experience with the system configuration capabilities of the venerable NVIDIA Control Panel. You can download it right now; we've been using it for months. However, that version is a...
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Are you familiar with the concept of "negative option marketing"? It refers to a class of customer interaction where a customer's failure to take an affirmative action, such as denying an offer, is taken as assent to be charged for services or goods. It's like if I came by and shouted "cut your grass for a thousand...
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NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang had high praise to offer for Elon Musk and his team at xAI, calling them "superhuman." In an interview with YouTube channel BG2 Pod, Huang remarked that Elon's specific combination of engineering smarts and project management is "singular", and credited both the X owner and NVIDIA's own...
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Did you recently get served the big update to Windows 11 24H2? The upgrade, which would have been called a Service Pack once upon a time, comes along with the new Copilot AI features as well as the usual stack of OS add-ons. Unfortunately for some, it also brought along a less-welcome partner: blue screens of...
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If you read that headline and are thinking that 6400 MT/s isn't really fast for DDR5, then you've fallen into the same trap we did. The key detail is that the new modules, which feature a clock driver directly on the memory module itself, don't require overclocking to hit that speed. DDR5-6400 is a new JEDEC speed...
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Once upon a time, there were a myriad of CPU architectures vying for dominance. Occasionally, you'd even have multiple architectures from the same vendor competing against each other. As happens in competitive environments, processor ISAs died off one-by-one until the modern day, where we basically have x86-64 for...
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Memory overclocking can have a huge effect on application performance, depending on the app in question. One of the key features of Intel's new Arrow Lake processors is that they can support stratospheric memory transfer rates. However, that may only apply to the high-powered "K" series processors, at least if ASRock...
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ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA) ($1399 as tested, $1499 for 32GB RAM) The latest elegant corporate laptop out of ASUS comes strapped with Intel's latest and greatest mobile microprocessor. Elegant Styling, Refined Looks Excellent Performance On Wall Power Unreal Battery Life Fantastic HDR OLED Screen Limited External I/O...
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The physical size of a processor tells you a surprising amount about its cost and capabilities, especially if you know the manufacturing process it's made on. AMD has been characteristically tight-lipped about its upcoming series of graphics processors based on the RDNA 4 architecture, but a new leak reveals the...
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After Hurricane Rita nailed Southeast Texas in 2005, the worst part for residents like the author was the inability to contact friends and family to both make sure they were okay and also reassure them of our safety. Now, over a million folks in Florida are still struggling with the same sort of state in the wake of...
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Go ask analysts, investors, and tech bros what kind of company NVIDIA is and they'll immediately shoot back with "AI". It's definitely true that AI has fuelled the company's meteoric rise to become the largest company in the world by market cap in recent years. However, NVIDIA's expertise is in creating massive...
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AMD's cadence in laptop processors has traditionally followed a specific playbook: new consumer Ryzen parts come out, and then a few months later, the PRO versions of those parts hit the market for enterprise and commercial client devices. AMD has been marketing and selling PRO processors since at least the good ol'...
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At this point, AMD EPYC is certainly a brand which needs no introduction. AMD's dense server processors, based on its Zen 5 and Zen 5c core architecture, build on AMD's consumer PC origins to offer many-core solutions with huge compute resources and capabilities that continue to outstrip what people might have...
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It won't surprise anyone to hear that Hot Hardware is staffed by PC gaming stalwarts who (mostly) balk at the idea of playing games on consoles. After all, you have a limited game selection, few choices in terms of input devices, and you're restricted to whatever quality-versus-performance compromise the developer...
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Ever since William Gibson's Neuromancer, thousands or even millions of nerds worldwide have fantasized about the idea of the 'deck', or 'cyberdeck' as it has been known in later cyberpunk fiction. The idea is that of a portable computer, but not like a laptop—more akin to something like a condensed Commodore 64, with...
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