Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
UPDATE: MSI, the maker of the motherboard at the center of both incidents, has issued a statement on the failures—or one of them, anyway. The statement is as follows:
Recently, we received a user report indicating damage to an AMD Ryzen™ 7 9800X3D processor on an MSI MAG X870 TOMAHAWK WIFI motherboard. At MSI, we...
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Once upon a time, the idea of gaming on a machine without a discrete graphics card was basically a laughable proposition, at least if you were trying to play anything other than decades-old titles or other light weight games like Peggle (remember that gem?). That time has long past, and now we have an entire class of...
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You remember yesterday, when we wrote about Micron's new 6550 ION SSD and how it wasn't exactly the biggest SSD we'd seen? Well, that was yesterday. Today, Solidigm is announcing a new model in the D5-P5336 SSD family with a whopping 122.88 terabytes of storage in a single drive, finally topping the Nimbus...
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When you think of bulk storage, you probably still think about hard drives, and that's fair enough; spinning rust still offers superior value in terms of price per gigabyte. When storage density is more important than value, though, solid-state drives win again. That's because there are SSDs like Micron's new ION...
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Have you ever read a monitor review or looked at monitor specification pages and wondered what all the terms meant? In this article, we're going to go over display basics, explaining the core specifications of monitors and what you should look for when shopping for a new display. Most of the information and...
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When NVIDIA debuted its GeForce Experience app over a decade ago, the online login requirement made many PC hardware grognards (like this author) leery of the software despite its many useful functions. The green team made many updates to the GeForce Experience application over the years, but it has ever remained...
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AMD's Zen 5 processors have been out a few months, and you know what that means for journalists like us -- it's time to start looking to the future. The successor to the Zen 5 architecture will naturally be Zen 6, and while AMD has confirmed that detail, the company said nothing else about its next-generation CPU...
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Valve said it wasn't going to make a new Steam Deck until there was a "significant" technical evolution, a step forward in terms of what capabilities the device would have. Other handheld vendors, particularly Ayaneo, aren't so shy. The company is well known for its tendency to introduce new handheld models as often...
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Speaking plainly, Intel's recently-launched Core Ultra 200 desktop CPUs, code-named "Arrow Lake", weren't quite what we expected out of this new generation of chips from Intel. While productivity and content creation performance was potent in some cases, gaming performance saw a significant regression. As it happens...
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If you read HotHardware, you're almost assuredly familiar with Lian Li. The company has been selling DIY PC cases basically as long as DIY PC building has been a hobby for enthusiasts, and was among the very first to offer aluminum chassis. What you may not know is that Lian Li has also been offering desk chassis for...
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MSI Datamag 20Gbps Portable SSD: Pricing TBA MSI's first external SSD offers NVMe-like performance in a compact and attractive aluminum chassis. Solid USB SSD Performance Unique Magnetic Mounting Options Durable Aluminum Chassis 5 Year Warranty No IP Rating MSI's been selling internal storage for a while now, and its...
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If you're gearing up to buy a new graphics card, chances are that you're probably hoping and praying that NVIDIA moves the price-to-performance curve with the GeForce RTX 5000 'Blackwell' series. While the GeForce RTX 4000 'Ada Lovelace' GPUs brought cool new features and an extremely efficient architecture to the...
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When we tested laptops based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processors, we were very impressed overall with the performance and the battery life, as both were objectively excellent—mostly making good on Qualcomm's claims.
One sore spot in our testing, though, particularly around the top-end Snapdragon X Elite...
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If you read that headline and thought, "hey wait, isn't the 285 already out," then you forgot to look at the letter. The Core Ultra 9 285H is an unannounced mobile processor from Intel based on the Arrow Lake architecture. Intel hasn't said anything about mobile Arrow Lake yet, but the first benchmark leak has...
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Some big PS5 Pro news today, just a scant few days before the upgraded console officially hits the market on November 7th. First up, we have some official specifications for the system shared not by Sony itself, but rather by Euro tech outlet Digital Foundry, who apparently acquired two separate PS5 Pro machines and...
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Everybody's excited about the next Grand Theft Auto game, especially considering all of the rumors surrounding the title. A dynamically-updating map, bleeding-edge NPC AI, and next-gen graphics are all said to be a part of Rockstar's next magnum opus. It's a fair ways away, still, though; the game is slated for launch...
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Look, we're all excited for the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and there's really no question that if you're primarily playing PC games, you're going to want a CPU with 3D V-Cache. It absolutely is that big of a difference; just look at our Monster Hunter Wilds numbers from yesterday, where the time-tested Ryzen 7 5800X3D manages...
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Monster Hunter is a series with a long and storied history, but if you're not a hardcore fan of Japanese action games, you might not know that. The upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds, which will usher in the sixth generation of the series with its launch in February, is in fact the twenty-sixth Monster Hunter game release...
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Now that updates for CD Projekt's massive open-world first-person RPG are finally more-or-less done, you might have reasonably thought you wouldn't see fresh news about it. Well think again, folks, because Cyberpunk 2077 is about to get a native release for Apple's Mac computers, and we're real curious to see how it...
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To understand this post, you're going to have to understand who Framework is. A company founded in January 2020, Framework sells highly-repairable laptops, with readily available replacement parts and standardized designs, where possible. The company will sell you an assembled, ready-to-go laptop if you like, or you...
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We could sit and talk all day about who was "first" with a modern-style PC gaming handheld, but Ayaneo was definitely the first to start selling a system that closely resembled modern PC gaming portables like the ASUS ROG Ally and MSI Claw. The mainline Ayaneo handhelds are simply called "AYANEO", and the company just...
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Case design is one of the few places where PC hardware manufacturers can still actively innovate with their products. We've seen some pretty fascinating cases in the last few years, like the back-connect designs from MSI and Maingear. Chinese vendor GameMax isn't doing something so drastic with its new Vista COC...
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