Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
If you're like the rest of the DIY PC enthusiast community, there's a good chance that you've mostly been building AMD Ryzen machines for the last few years. Upcoming Arrow Lake processors could give you a strong reason to swap back to Intel, though, thanks to expected high performance-per-watt and rumored massive...
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The umbrella of generative AI includes a wide variety of tools that could feasibly make game development easier and faster. Besides using language models for code review and optimization, there are also ways to use language models for generating NPC dialogue, whether beforehand or in real-time, like with NVIDIA's ACE...
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Most enthusiasts seem to treat currently-available Intel Arc graphics parts as viable, budget-friendly options. This isn't entirely fair, but we get it—a less-than-perfect launch and positioning in the lower echelons of the market left many people unenthusiastic about Intel's discrete GPUs. However, it might be time...
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AMD's all-new Zen 5 CPU core is going to debut with the launch of its "Strix Point" mobile processors in less than two weeks. However, those parts will largely be paired with soldered-down LPDDR5X memory thanks to the performance benefits it offers over socketed RAM. The desktop parts, branded as part of the "Ryzen...
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If you're reading this site, Noctua almost assuredly needs no introduction to you. It's rare that Austria's premiere purveyor of puissant cooling apparatus actually launches a new product, and rarer still that it replaces its top-end, flagship cooler. That's exactly what's happening here, though: after many delays...
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On Intel's current platforms, if you want a PCIe 5.0 SSD connected directly to your CPU for the most optimal performance, it's going to split off of the PCIe x16 slot normally meant for graphics. That's because the only PCIe 5.0 lanes on the LGA 1700 platform are dedicated to that x16 slot—unlike AMD's 16+4+4...
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Public opinion is turning against AI on certain topics. Some people have been dubious about the practical benefits of all the power and money spent on developing and operating AI for some time, but recently, leadership at multiple companies has gone completely "mask off" with regard to how they feel about the impact...
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If you want a PCIe 5.0 SSD right now, your options are basically limited to drives based on Phison's potent E26 controller. We like Phison around here, but from a consumer perspective, it's always good to have competition. That's why we're excited about SK hynix's new PCB01 SSD -- it's a lightning-fast PCIe 5.0 drive...
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Intel's Arc launch was weak, to be sure, but we've retested the parts several times since launch, and the software is competent at this point. All Intel needs now is some new graphics hardware. That's on the way, and we'll get a sneak peek of its capabilities with the launch of Intel's Lunar Lake mobile CPUs. Intel...
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The download size of video games is getting out of hand. For a massive open world game with ten years of updates like GTA Online, 110 GB isn't out of the realm of possibility. When a first-person shooter like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is 235GB, with the upcoming Black Ops 6 reportedly being over 300 GB, well, we...
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When AMD announced its new "Strix Point" Ryzen AI 300-series laptop chips at Computex, it said that they would be available in July. But when, AMD? Recent rumors reported that the launch day for AMD's Zen 5 architecture would be July 15th, but we had no confirmation from the manufacturer itself. Well, we still don't have that, but ASUS has
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AMD's upcoming Ryzen AI 300 series processors based on its 'Strix Point' design are pretty cool, but they're essentially an iteration on its previous-gen Phoenix parts. The really exciting new chip supposedly still on the way from AMD is 'Strix Halo', a monster microprocessor meant for luxurious laptops and mighty mini-PCs. It purportedly
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DigiTimes Asia is a site that frequently shares semiconductor scuttlebutt and anonymously-sourced industry leaks. The site posted up one such story back on Thursday, alleging that Intel's hotly-anticipated Lunar Lake processors have been delayed. Intel, for its part, has responded today in the form of a confirmation to Digital Trends that
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There's ample reason to be excited for Zen 5. After all, AMD says that it is the largest re-architecting of its CPU core since the original Zen. However, the company also acknowledged at Computex that the generational performance gain between Zen 4 and Zen 5 is only around 16%. That's a pretty solid gen-on-gen uplift...
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"The year of the Linux desktop" is a long-standing meme among PC enthusiasts, but thanks to controversial decisions by Microsoft, continual development effort from Linux lovers, and the massive success of Valve's Steam Deck, Linux is seeing greater adoption than ever among consumer PC users.
Intel has had excellent...
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If you've followed the market of handheld machines out of Asia as well as recent mini-PC releases like Minisforum's own MS-A1, you've probably seen an OCuLink connector. This port is a standard connector from PCI-SIG that offers internal or external routing of regular old PCIe on a cable. This makes it much better...
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AMD's Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) are desktop CPUs based on mobile silicon. These laptop-derived chips have fewer CPU cores and lower clock rates than the full-on desktop models, but they also include powerful integrated graphics parts that are probably faster than you think. For a small-form-factor system, a...
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Intel's top-end desktop CPUs have had some stability problems. This has been an on-going story, and we've reported on it a couple of times before, but the short version is that certain games and apps are likely to crash on some Core i9 and Core i7 processors from the 13th- and 14th-generation CPU families. The...
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It wasn't all that long ago that the idea of using integrated graphics for gaming was strictly a last resort endeavor. Chips like Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator and even early integrated Radeon parts weren't powerful enough for much beyond displaying a basic desktop. Putting aside the fact that game consoles have...
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Do you need a new mobile workhorse, or just want a lightweight, powerful laptop with all-day battery life? Whatever the individual reasons, a lot of people are understandably very excited about Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series processors and the associated push for Windows on ARM by Microsoft. If that's you, then the...
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The 2024 PCI-SIG Developers Conference, or "SIG DevCon", took place last week, and one of the most impressive demos on the show floor was undoubtedly Cadence's. The company demonstrated PCIe 7.0 running stable on optical fiber at 128 GT/s, bidirectional, for the entire 48 hours of the show.
Test results show good...
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Minisforum has made a name for itself selling mini-PCs based around mobile hardware. There are systems like the Neptune HX100G, which pairs a Ryzen 7 7840HS with a discrete Radeon card, and then there are machines like the BD790i, which is an ITX desktop motherboard with a "mobile" Ryzen 9 7945HX CPU. As AMD and Intel...
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