Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Okay, alright, fair enough—it's not really Black Friday yet. That'll be this upcoming Friday the 29th, in its classical place after Thanksgiving on Thursday. Just about every parts vendor on the web is already offering "Black Friday" component deals, though, so don't blame us—we're just participating.
Now's...
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Companies that offer AI services to the public, like Anthropic and OpenAI, try to prevent out-of-pocket behavior from their AI models by establishing "guardrails" on them, hopefully preventing their AIs from doing things like asking their human users to "please die." These guardrails prevent the networks from engaging...
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Regular readers probably think of Gigabyte primarily as a purveyor of motherboards and graphics cards. In the last few years, though, the component vendor has been positioning itself as a provider of premium PC display panels, and it has garnered itself a following among gamers for its reasonably-priced screens with...
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We're tentatively looking forward to the launch of Intel's second-generation Arc graphics cards (codenamed "Battlemage") with earned enthusiasm, as the showing from the Xe2-based integrated GPU in the Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processors was quite strong. Despite the fact that discrete Battlemage hasn't arrived...
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AMD is a company that is certainly no stranger to building semi-custom processors. Indeed, the semi-custom unit of the company basically kept it afloat for a couple of years before the launch of Ryzen by supplying SoCs to Sony and Microsoft for their 8th-generation game consoles. We haven't seen so much semi-custom...
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Today, at the Supercomputing 2024 conference, a numerous companies announced their latest AI, HPC and supercomputing offerings. Chief among those companies was of course NVIDIA, and the biggest new product announcement from the company was the GB200 NVL4. We'll get to what the GB200 NVL4 is in just a moment, though;...
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Fears about AI rising up and annihilating humans are a bit premature at this point, but neural networks can still behave in some unpredictable and shocking ways at times. Case in point: Google's Gemini AI chatbot just unsubtly told a human to die—but at least it was polite enough to say "please" first.
Jokes aside...
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UPDATE: MSI, the maker of the motherboard at the center of both incidents, has issued a statement on the failures—or one of them, anyway. The statement is as follows:
Recently, we received a user report indicating damage to an AMD Ryzen™ 7 9800X3D processor on an MSI MAG X870 TOMAHAWK WIFI motherboard. At MSI, we...
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Once upon a time, the idea of gaming on a machine without a discrete graphics card was basically a laughable proposition, at least if you were trying to play anything other than decades-old titles or other light weight games like Peggle (remember that gem?). That time has long past, and now we have an entire class of...
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You remember yesterday, when we wrote about Micron's new 6550 ION SSD and how it wasn't exactly the biggest SSD we'd seen? Well, that was yesterday. Today, Solidigm is announcing a new model in the D5-P5336 SSD family with a whopping 122.88 terabytes of storage in a single drive, finally topping the Nimbus...
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When you think of bulk storage, you probably still think about hard drives, and that's fair enough; spinning rust still offers superior value in terms of price per gigabyte. When storage density is more important than value, though, solid-state drives win again. That's because there are SSDs like Micron's new ION...
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Have you ever read a monitor review or looked at monitor specification pages and wondered what all the terms meant? In this article, we're going to go over display basics, explaining the core specifications of monitors and what you should look for when shopping for a new display. Most of the information and...
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When NVIDIA debuted its GeForce Experience app over a decade ago, the online login requirement made many PC hardware grognards (like this author) leery of the software despite its many useful functions. The green team made many updates to the GeForce Experience application over the years, but it has ever remained...
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AMD's Zen 5 processors have been out a few months, and you know what that means for journalists like us -- it's time to start looking to the future. The successor to the Zen 5 architecture will naturally be Zen 6, and while AMD has confirmed that detail, the company said nothing else about its next-generation CPU...
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Valve said it wasn't going to make a new Steam Deck until there was a "significant" technical evolution, a step forward in terms of what capabilities the device would have. Other handheld vendors, particularly Ayaneo, aren't so shy. The company is well known for its tendency to introduce new handheld models as often...
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Speaking plainly, Intel's recently-launched Core Ultra 200 desktop CPUs, code-named "Arrow Lake", weren't quite what we expected out of this new generation of chips from Intel. While productivity and content creation performance was potent in some cases, gaming performance saw a significant regression. As it happens...
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If you read HotHardware, you're almost assuredly familiar with Lian Li. The company has been selling DIY PC cases basically as long as DIY PC building has been a hobby for enthusiasts, and was among the very first to offer aluminum chassis. What you may not know is that Lian Li has also been offering desk chassis for...
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MSI Datamag 20Gbps Portable SSD: Pricing TBA MSI's first external SSD offers NVMe-like performance in a compact and attractive aluminum chassis. Solid USB SSD Performance Unique Magnetic Mounting Options Durable Aluminum Chassis 5 Year Warranty No IP Rating MSI's been selling internal storage for a while now, and its...
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If you're gearing up to buy a new graphics card, chances are that you're probably hoping and praying that NVIDIA moves the price-to-performance curve with the GeForce RTX 5000 'Blackwell' series. While the GeForce RTX 4000 'Ada Lovelace' GPUs brought cool new features and an extremely efficient architecture to the...
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When we tested laptops based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processors, we were very impressed overall with the performance and the battery life, as both were objectively excellent—mostly making good on Qualcomm's claims.
One sore spot in our testing, though, particularly around the top-end Snapdragon X Elite...
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If you read that headline and thought, "hey wait, isn't the 285 already out," then you forgot to look at the letter. The Core Ultra 9 285H is an unannounced mobile processor from Intel based on the Arrow Lake architecture. Intel hasn't said anything about mobile Arrow Lake yet, but the first benchmark leak has...
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Some big PS5 Pro news today, just a scant few days before the upgraded console officially hits the market on November 7th. First up, we have some official specifications for the system shared not by Sony itself, but rather by Euro tech outlet Digital Foundry, who apparently acquired two separate PS5 Pro machines and...
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