Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Folks who follow technology news—probably you, if you're reading this—will no doubt be aware that the United States' federal government has allocated some $52 billion to promote microprocessor manufacturing inside the country. This money is being split between a few companies, but two of the biggest are both building...
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Until very recently, DDR5 DIMMs came in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB capacities—at least as long as we're talking about the kind of unbuffered memory you'll find in most non-server PCs. You may have heard that larger 24GB and 48GB capacities are now available, but what you may not have realized is that those unusually-sized...
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Hogwarts Legacy launched in a reasonably decent state—ray-tracing performance problems aside. The game was fully completable and had no common crash or progression-stop bugs, which is sadly above the bar for a new AAA title these days. That's not to say the game was flawless, though; like any big game release...
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Modern PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 SSDs get pretty warm because the powerful SSD controllers make a lot of heat, like any >1GHz processor. If you expand your PlayStation 5's internal storage with a fast PCIe 4.0 SSD like Sony recommends, the system offers very limited cooling. Folks who are concerned about the longevity of their...
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Graphics drivers are a critical component of a gaming PC, but they're also ludicrously complex pieces of software in their own right. Sometimes things go wrong, as they did this weekend with NVIDIA's GeForce driver version 531.18. This driver was found to have a bug that causes significant CPU usage in the background...
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Whatever your feelings on J.K. Rowling or the Harry Potter franchise, it's impossible to deny that Hogwarts Legacy has been a massive, smash hit. That's without even launching on the previous-generation consoles, something that a surprising number of new titles still do. The release of the game on the PlayStation 4...
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Intel's Arc graphics cards use a variant of the company's "Xe" graphics architecture, as do all of the blue team's recent integrated GPUs. The first-generation Xe had many variations for different applications, but the second-generation architecture is apparently only going to come in two forms: one meant for high-end...
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Most of the details of the design and fabrication of microprocessors are not public. Major sources of information on these components are actually various analyses performed by enthusiasts using the detailed die shots released by Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD. One component we'd been lacking a die shot for was the cIOD, or...
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Throughout the end of last year and the beginning of this year, Intel finally released its full line of data center-focused Arctic Sound and Ponte Vecchio GPUs, as well as its Sapphire Rapids CPUs. These chips have been a long time coming, but they offer solid performance for high performance compute operations, as...
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Just in case you aren't aware dear reader, Grand Theft Auto is kind of a cultural phenomenon. The fifth game, particularly its internet component (known simply as "GTA Online"), is by some measures the most successful video game of all time. Naturally, anticipation for GTA 6 is running high, and any tiny tidbit of...
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It doesn't pull the numbers that console-focused titles like Call of Duty can, but Counter-Strike is one of the most popular PC games of all time. It remains so to this day, consistently sitting near the top of the Steam player count charts. Popular games get sequels, right? Well, not yet at least—eleven years on from...
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You may have heard that the PC market is slow right now, with sales at their lowest in years. Perhaps as an attempt to counter this trend, prices on AMD's CPUs have never been lower, and the company's also running a promotion on most of its CPUs that could net you a decent discount on a new system. If you've got a tax...
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Back in the day, liquid cooling meant "custom loop," but you only needed to worry about the two or three processors at the most. These days, when you're doing custom-loop liquid-cooling, you need to cool almost every major component on every single board. That means cooling memory and power delivery hardware as well...
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Have you read our review of the Ryzen 9 7950X3D yet? If you have, or even if you haven't, you're probably already aware that it is either the fastest or second-fastest CPU on the planet in just about every game out there. In other words, if you're building a new gaming PC, you can't go wrong with one of these...
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This has been a pretty big year for game releases already and we're just now entering March. Besides Hogwarts Legacy, the long-anticipated Atomic Heart finally arrived, and we've also seen the release of Company of Heroes 3, Forspoken, Dead Space, and more. With a pile of game releases naturally comes a spate of...
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Once upon a time chipset drivers were just as vital as graphics drivers. In fact, you'd usually install them first, immediately after setting up Windows itself. That practice has fallen by the wayside as more and more parts of the "chipset" have been standardized, but you'd better make sure to grab the new AMD chipset...
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The AMD faithful are liekly elated, as this coming Tuesday marks the official release of AMD's Ryzen 9 7000X3D processors. That's the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D and the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D, both equipped with 64MB of 3D V-Cache on top of one of their eight-core CCDs. Those who bleed AMD red may have already...
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AI has been a ubiquitous buzzword for years, and it's everywhere. Mobile SoCs and desktop processors alike have been including AI acceleration for a couple of generations already, but what can an individual do, locally on their own device, with AI? Until relatively recently, not much, at least directly. Within the...
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Cheating in online games is an epidemic, and it's a big business, too. You've gotta be a pretty smart feller to make game cheats, but you don't have to be that clever to use them. Nothing lately has evinced that as well as this week's ban of some 40,000 Dota 2 cheaters that were caught using third-party software to...
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When AMD first announced the Ryzen 7000 processors with 3D V-Cache, we noted that the boost clocks on the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D were the same as their non-X3D siblings. It turned out that this is possible because only one of the two CCDs under the IHS actually gets 3D V-Cache applied; the other one is...
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If your heart doesn't set a-flutter when you hear "Intel Arc," well, that's understandable. The extant parts based on Intel's Alchemist architecture are squarely mid-range or entry-level GPUs, and they suffered significant issues on launch that left many gamers unimpressed. Intel's been working hard to turn those...
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Back in 2021, Intel had two different architectures going for its 11th-Generation mobile and desktop Core processors: Tiger Lake was handling laptops, and Rocket Lake was rocking desktops. According to rumors, we'll see the same thing again soon, where a refresh of Raptor Lake powers desktops while Intel's first...
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