Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
AMD's introducing a whole new class of products with the Strix Halo SoCs. These processors integrate CPU, GPU, and NPU into one package, and that's not novel. What is novel, at least in the x86 world, is the amount of each component included in the part. A full 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, a massive 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units...
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If you've been conisdering the purchase of a PC gaming handheld, but are not sure which one is the right machine for you, we totally understand. There are a whole bunch of PC-based handheld gaming systems out there right now, and if you don't stay abreast of this stuff, it can be hard to keep up.
If you look at the...
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We wouldn't blame anyone for being indifferent with the state of the PC hardware market right now. The most recent GPU hardware launch was in January, and while we've seen new CPUs drop from AMD, they didn't exactly set enthusiasts' hearts ablaze. What we need is a paradigm shift, a truly new product that hasn't...
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Bruce Nesmith is a guy whose name you may never heard even if you're a big fan of Bethesda's games. He got his start working with famed Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR on Apple II games, and joined Bethesda as early as 1995, where he was credited as a designer on The Elder Scrolls: Chapter II - Daggerfall. Nesmith...
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HP EliteBook 1040 Gen11 (Starts at $1,699, $2,099 as tested) HP's 11th Elitebook 1040 is a workhorse of a laptop with a minimalist, thin and light design with a solid feature set for business users. Great All-Day Battery Life Slim Size And Light Weight Minimal Pre-Installed Bloatware Extremely Quiet Operation Standard...
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The Rockstar Games Launcher on PC just got another update yesterday, and along with the patch came down yet more evidence of a forthcoming release for the first Red Dead Redemption game on PC. We knew this was happening; the same fellow who sniffed out the new evidence, found strings buried in the Rockstar Launcher...
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AMD's desktop Ryzen processors with more than 8 cores are fabricated using chiplets: one big die handles memory, I/O, and other functions, while smaller dice called "CCDs" contain the Zen CPU cores. This approach has a ton of advantages, but a few downsides too, and one of the latter is that core-to-core latency for...
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It can be tough to keep up with processor codenames, so let us lay it out for you. "Lunar Lake" is the code name for the new Intel mobile processors implementing "Lion Cove" P-cores and "Skymont" E-cores. Those same core architectures will show up in "Arrow Lake," the new high-power parts launching later this year...
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If you're into overclocking at all, you have probably heard of Skatterbencher. He's a veteran overclocker who has held multiple historical world records, but is perhaps best known for his YouTube videos giving explicit instructions to help novice overclockers tune their own systems for maximum performance.
His...
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AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) has been through a lot of iterations. The first major version was a straightforward spatial upscaler that produced unsatisfactory results unless the render resolution was very close to the output resolution. FSR2 was a major step forward, introducing motion vectors and temporal...
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Look, we know it's tempting if you're a gamer with the requisite $700, but please don't buy a PS5 Pro. It's an awful lot of money for a toy that can only play the games that Sony says you can play. It doesn't even have the excuse of being a really high-quality Blu-Ray player like the PS3 did—there's no disc drive at...
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It's a new school year, and chances are good that the old Windows 7-based 2012-vintage laptop you were planning to give to the kid is really on its last legs. Grab something new with a fresh version of Windows and all of the accoutrements you expect from a brand-new laptop, like a modern screen in high resolution, a...
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For Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 200 desktop processors, perhaps more familiar by their code-name "Arrow Lake", Intel has removed Hyper-Threading from the P-cores. That makes those CPUs narrower, so they might not need as much memory bandwidth, right? Well, the Skymont E-cores are nearly three times as wide as the...
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Look, before we even get into the meat of what the problems were, if you're on Windows, make sure you've got the latest updates. Yesterday's "Patch Tuesday" brought with it fixes for nearly 80 different security bugs across just about every single Microsoft product, but the real worry has to do with a zero-day bug...
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Laptops with AMD graphics may be few and far between, but that's partially because AMD simply hasn't had many current-generation GPUs to offer laptop vendors. Until recently, it was basically the entry-level Radeon RX 7600M family or the top-end Radeon RX 7900M—essentially a Radeon RX 7900 GRE in mobile form.
Now...
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After the competent but uninspiring performance of AMD's Ryzen 9000 processors, the PC enthusiast space is looking for some real excitement to drag it out of the doldrums. Some folks are so weary of the same old stuff that they're actually excited about the PS5 Pro launch, despite it's lofty price tag. Don't fret...
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We already know that Intel is absolutely looking to launch its Arrow Lake desktop processors, branded as the Core Ultra 200 series, later this year. But when, exactly? According to a social media post from HKEPC, the launch will occur on October 24th. HKEPC is a Hong Kong-based tech blog with a long history of...
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Whatever it ends up being called in actuality, the "Switch 2" is definitely real and definitely on the way. We know that because Nintendo itself has tacitly confirmed that it is working on such a thing by saying that it won't be releasing this fiscal year, which ends in March 2025 for Nintendo. We might hear something...
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After the somewhat-underwhelming launch of AMD's Ryzen 9000 processors, some enthusiasts are looking to Intel to drag us out of the hardware enthusiast doldrums. The company's upcoming Arrow Lake processors are a departure from standard practice in a number of ways, including the use of all-new CPU cores as well as...
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It's Friday, friends! Did you just get paid today, and do you have a pocket full of change? Time to splurge on some PC parts! Not that pocket change will get you very far, really, but it'll get you further today than it would last week thanks to some killer deals on core components from Amazon. We've got CPUs, RAM...
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Intel has done a fair bit of talking recently over successes from its 18A process node, which rather brings up the question, "why bother with 20A at all, if 18A is already yielding well?" Apparently someone at Intel had the same thought, as the company has announced today that it is canceling the 20A node altogether...
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Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Series processors are very potent 12 and 10-core CPUs that are occasionally power-limited in the systems we've tested. Unlike Intel's processors, Qualcomm's chip doesn't contain a mix of performance and efficient cores—you get three quad-core clusters of full-fat Oryon CPUs. A dozen cores is...
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