Editor profile

Zak Killian

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Ever since playing Joust on his family's Atari 800XL 8-bit computer as a youth, Zak has been hooked on PC and console games. His passion for gaming as a kid led to an interest in PCs as a teenager, which ended up with him founding his own PC repair shop in the year 2000. Decades later, he's still building, still gaming, and still arguing on the internet with any opinion anyone has. A former writer of news and reviews for The Tech Report, Zak is a modern-day Renaissance man who may not be an expert on anything, but knows just a little about nearly everything.
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.

Recent posts

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... Read more...
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"... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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... Read more...
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