Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Look, we know—AMD's got too many different chips with too many different codenames to keep track of. This one's easy: Fire Range is simply Granite Ridge (that is, the Ryzen 9000 desktop processors) for mobile, just as Dragon Range was Raphael (Ryzen 7000 desktop) for mobile. These parts have barely-there integrated...
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We're big fans of AMD's Phoenix and Hawk Point processors around these parts. A miniature monolithic die with eight fast Zen 4 CPU cores, a powerful RDNA 3 Radeon GPU, and a competent (if modest) XDNA NPU makes for tiny systems that can do just about anything a regular user wants to do. Any processor can have faults...
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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge Laptop: Starts At $1,099; $1499 As Tested The fastest Qualcomm-powered portable we've tested to date delivers fantastic productivity, media and content creation experiences. Fantastic Native App Performance Amazing AMOLED Display Super Thin And Stylish Surprisingly Spatial Sound Excellent...
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Amidst a storm of controversy over the reliability of Intel's Raptor Lake processors, many buyers are turning to AMD as an alternative. However, the Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 processors are getting a bit long in the tooth; if folks are going to make a new purchase, they'd probably prefer to buy the latest hardware. AMD...
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There are a multitide of companies who have expended significant funds in an effort to get PC users excited about AI, but many people still think of AI products as something that is run exclusively in the cloud. Of course, that's completely incorrect; anyone with a reasonably recent discrete GPU can run many AI...
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Don't get excited; these aren't the Bartlett Lake processors that we just reported on last week. However, they are new LGA 1700 Raptor Lake processors that come with all the usual features you expect—except for Intel's heterogeneous architecture. That means that these parts are 100% composed of Raptor Lake...
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Laptops bearing AMD's Ryzen AI 300 processors, code-named "Strix Point," are expected to start appearing any day now. However, many enthusiasts are already looking past Strix Point toward a higher-end model in the same family, the so-called "Strix Halo". This unique chip promises to bring a new class of product to the...
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One of the many great effects that Steam has had on the games industry is that it has given players another way to express their displeasure with a game publisher or developer's actions. You see, the effects of "vote with your wallet" aren't that obvious when we're talking about live-service games. A sharp dip in a...
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The ASUS ROG Ally X is due to launch on the 22nd of this month. That's this coming Monday, if you haven't been keeping up. Arriving alongside the revised version of ASUS' gaming handheld is a new version of the Armoury Crate software designed specifically to improve the user experience on the handheld gaming...
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Remember that whole kerfluffle about Radeon Anti-Lag+ getting gamers banned from CS2 and other competitive titles? That's all water under the bridge now, as the new and improved Radeon Anti-Lag 2 requires game-specific support, and will no longer set off anti-cheat packages. However, that does mean it has to be added...
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The Ryzen 9 9950X isn't actually available yet, but benchmarks have been cropping up all over the web. We reported before on some leaked results in Geekbench, but today we have a pile of multi-threaded tests from a fellow on the Anandtech forums who got ahold of an ES (engineering sample) Ryzen 9 9950X and has been...
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Before we get started on this story, let's recap a bit. Intel's currently-available mobile processors are called "Core Ultra 100", codenamed Meteor Lake, and it's about to release the "Core Ultra 200V" series, codenamed Lunar Lake. There are also "Core Ultra 200" desktop processors on the way; those will be Arrow...
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If you want a desktop platform with a long upgrade path, you buy an AMD Ryzen, right? Not so fast, says Intel—the company is apparently readying one more round of CPU releases for its LGA 1700 platform. We first heard about "Bartlett Lake" back in February of this year when it was leaked by Chinese sources. A new...
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ADATA SD810 SSD: Starting at $89.99 (1TB), up to $149.99 (2TB) The ADATA SD810 is a no-frills portable SSD with a tough titanium chassis, fast USB 20 Gbps connectivity, and IP68 ingress protection. Excellent USB SSD Performance IP68 Ingress Protection 5 Year Warranty No Software Required A Little Pricey Utilitarian Aesthetics ADATA sells a...
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As you're no doubt already aware, it's Prime Day, and that means everyone is shopping for the hottest deals both to help you and to bolster our own hardware arsenals. You can benefit from our bounty by checking out these killer PC component prices we spotted while scouring Amazon for discounted parts.
The headline...
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Remember that story where some people were suffering stability issues while gaming on Intel 13th and 14th-generation CPUs? Despite many of the errors blaming the GPU, NVIDIA pointed the finger at Intel back in April. It's been more than six months since the issues began, so after a pile of software updates as well as...
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Intel's Lunar Lake processors are expected sooner than later for mobile machines, and may just give the competition a shock when they hit. What about desktop, though? Intel's current-generation desktop parts are pretty fast, but they're besieged by reliability concerns and are extremely power-thirsty. Not only that...
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With CPU core counts and GPU silicon sizes simply skyrocketing, it's become harder and harder to feed all that processing power with data. Regular old DRAM packages just aren't cutting it anymore for server systems. Even for CPUs, we're seeing a clear transition over to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which offers, well...
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If you hang around spaces on the 'net full of PC builders, there's usually a never-ending war of FUD and fanboyism, fueled by old memes and outdated preconceived notions. Depending on who you listen to, AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs are either going to be the greatest thing ever or a sad disappointment. The...
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AMD sells CPUs with model numbers ending in "X3D" that have something called "3D V-Cache." These CPUs very literally have an extra piece of silicon stapled to them that adds another 64 megabytes of L3 cache. This, in turn, radically improves performance in some applications—particularly complex games. There have been...
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Mobile processors these days don't come with sockets like desktop CPUs, but they're still manufactured for a specific package type. The package for AMD's "Phoenix" and "Hawk Point" processors is called FP8, and it seems like Strix Point is going to use the same. The much larger "Strix Halo" processor isn't going to...
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We don't know about the wider market, but we're ready to be rid of spinning rust. It's an incredible technology that served its purpose for decades, but even loading files from a hard drive feels tiresome when it's a large number of files or lots of data. The 21st century is solid-state, and we'd like flash memory to...
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