Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Nintendo has a little under three months to officially reveal the successor to the Nintendo Switch, but the company has been almost completely mum to date besides acknowledging that it will play your current Switch games. Fortunately, we have numerous leaks that paint a pretty vivid picture of what the machine will be...
Read more...
CES is next week and you can bet that there will be a bevy of beautiful hardware announcements, including many luxurious laptops sporting the latest processor designs. Apparently, Taiwanese ODM Elitegroup (better known to the DIY crowd as "ECS") couldn't wait though, and showed its hand early. In the company's...
Read more...
Most DIY PC builders are guys, and we reckon that's probably why the overwhelming majority of PC hardware is designed like the latest Decepticon. Such styles typically have extremely low Wife Approval Factor, though, and that might be part of why some case builders have been experimenting with more natural-looking...
Read more...
There are all kinds of CAPTCHAs out there: unscramble the characters, identify the object, count the cats, classify items, move the slider, and so on. Many of them are rather transparently crowdsourced AI training data. That's not the case with the latest CAPTCHA, though, which challenges users to kill three enemies...
Read more...
Until this week, the latest news on Half-Life 3 was that Valve had canceled several iterations of the game, which was revealed in a news tidbit in the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Documentary produced by Valve in November. Now, we have two more clues that seem to give a pretty strong indication that we could see...
Read more...
CES 2025 is less than a week away, and you know what that means: all sorts of fancy new technology that you probably can't afford. Just going by the numbers, most of the folks reading this are probably using significantly sub-par monitors in comparison to what's available on the market these days, but progress doesn't...
Read more...
I have played a lot of GTA V's online component, simply referred to officially as "Grand Theft Auto Online." The mode has evolved tremendously since its launch in 2013, and yet, like most long-lived live service games, it still carries immense cruft from the era of its creation. As a dedicated player, I have a lot of...
Read more...
2024 was a banger year for gamers. Sure, the largest developers in the industry may have faltered due to ballooning budgets and grossly-unpopular game releases, but there were still no shortage of absolutely awesome games—just check out our post about the top 11 games that came out this year.
The thing is, it might just be the case that
Read more...
This story is fairly straightforward, and it's not as alarmist as you might think. Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Nobel prize this year for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence development, stated to BBC Radio 4 that he feels the chances of a potential AI apocalypse are "around 10 to 20%" within the next 30...
Read more...
After a couple of relatively weak years in the post-COVID slump, the gaming industry roared back in 2024 with a flurry of amazing releases. There were a number of great games released this year that didn't make it onto our list here, like Hades II, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and Pentiment (for non-Xbox consoles.)...
Read more...
Even after the release of next-generation CPUs from both Intel and AMD itself, the Ryzen 9 7950X remains one of the fastest desktop CPUs we've tested—especially if you can use all sixteen of its Zen 4 CPU cores. That's a five-hundred dollar CPU, though; you've still got to buy a motherboard and all the other...
Read more...
Just in case you thought Windows 11 24H2's issues were over, here's the latest headache from the good folks at Microsoft. It turns out that physical installation media (meaning CDs and flash drives) created for Windows 11 24H2 that also includes security updates from between October 8th and November 12th could result...
Read more...
One of the key characteristics of most Ryzen "X3D" processors with AMD's 3D V-Cache tech, is that they offer reduced clock rates compared to the same CPU without it. The cut to clock rates was larger in earlier generations, but the Ryzen 7 9800X3D only loses 300 MHz from the Ryzen 7 9700X's boost clock thanks to a...
Read more...
Feel like playing Star Fox 64 again? You could drag out the old N64 and an unwieldy pile of display connection adapters. You also could play it on the Nintendo Switch, if you happen to have one of those, are a subscriber to Nintendo's Switch Online service, and pay up for the "Expansion Pass" to that service so that...
Read more...
Have you checked out our review of Intel's Arc B580 "Battlemage" GPU yet? Hopefully, you already have and you're well aware that the Arc B580 is a competent entry-level GPU with solid 1080p and 1440p performance. We benchmarked 20 games, though, including the usual suspects alongside some more unusual titles, like...
Read more...
AMD's product naming schemes have been all over the place for a while now, but you have to give the red team some credit for this one. After all, the previous-generation discrete GPUs based on the RDNA 3 architecture were the Radeon RX 7000 series, and then the RDNA 3.5 GPU on Ryzen AI MAX is apparently the Ryzen 8000...
Read more...
AMD's Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series processors didn't set the DIY and enthusiast worlds ablaze when they initially launched, and that's understandable considering their relatively modest gains over the previous generation. However, the 3D V-Cache equipped Ryzen 7 9800X3D is out now, and it offers explosive...
Read more...
You're almost assuredly familiar with the hassle, because you probably use Windows, and you probably use another browser besides Microsoft's Edge on Windows. That's just going by statistics. Most Windows users use something besides Edge, and a huge majority of those users are on Google's Chrome.
Microsoft wants to...
Read more...
A couple of days ago on the official PlayStation YouTube channel, Sony uploaded an unusually technical video. It features Mark Cerny, the architect of the last few PlayStation consoles, talking in bits-and-bytes fashion about the PlayStation 5 Pro and its hardware capabilities. It's a fun watch for HotHardware...
Read more...
Windows' Auto HDR feature is a wonderful convenience for those with high-end gaming displays. Basically, it allows PC gamers to play games without built-in HDR support in HDR mode. Unfortunately, it turns out that Auto HDR (like many other things) is kind of broken on Windows 11 24H2, and it's also behind a spate of...
Read more...
Intel's Robert Hallock came onto our livestream again today to talk about the promised performance-improving updates for Intel's Arrow Lake processors. It turns out, four of the promised updates are in fact already available. If you're in a hurry, make sure you're running the latest version of Windows 11 and make sure...
Read more...
Ever since we first heard about AMD's Strix Halo APUs, we've been wondering exactly what kind of products would make use of them. After all, these parts are high-powered, with the top-end Ryzen AI MAX processor coming in with sixteen full-fat Zen 5 CPU cores and a massive 40-CU GPU on a single package. It's reasonable...
Read more...
