Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Meteor Lake, the first-generation "Core Ultra" processors, will be Intel's first "disaggregated" or chiplet-based CPUs. The launch of these important chips is less than a month away, and Intel is continuing to drip-feed details to the press and the public. The latest news comes from a video posted to the "Intel...
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Are you nostalgic for the days of slide-up screens and hidden, physical keyboards on mobile devices? Do you deeply miss your Motorola Sidekick, beloved Blackberry, or LG Ally proto-smartphone? If you do, you're squarely in the target market for Ayaneo's new Slide handheld gaming PC, which is available for just $699...
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Most of your writers up here at HotHardware are old farts, so we can scarcely imagine a Steam account without the original Half-Life. Back in the day, most of us owned boxed copies of the game, and you could put your CD-key into Steam to register it to your profile. If your existence on Steam is newer than that, don't...
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It's already been more than a year since the GeForce RTX 4090 hit store shelves. Truly, tempus does indeed fugit. Hardware enthusiasts are looking ahead to the next generation, and rumors have come a-plenty, but one of the most reliable NVIDIA leakers seems to have made a major screw-up with his GeForce RTX 5090...
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Intel's first-generation chiplet processors, code-named Meteor Lake, will include an entire chiplet (or "tile") dedicated to graphics. Intel has made some big promises about the graphics horsepower of its Meteor Lake processors. Today we've seen the first GPU benchmark of any kind for Meteor Lake, and the results are...
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You hear it said all the time: one of the best reasons to own a Steam Deck is for emulating classic games. The Steam Deck is fundamentally a PC, but despite this, you'll rarely hear anyone talk about playing classic PC games on it. The reason is simple: the Steam Deck's primary controls are gamepad-based, and enjoying...
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With its "Alder Lake" 12th-generation Core CPUs, Intel introduced the concept of the "P-series" processors. These 28W chips sit between the ultra-low-voltage "U" CPUs and the full-power mobile "H" units. Naturally, we'd expect its upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs to continue with this sort of segmentation, but it looks like...
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Today's PC-based gaming handhelds are incredibly powerful. Systems like the OneXFly offer eight Zen 4 CPU cores and up to 64GB of fast LPDDR5X memory—more than enough horsepower for even tasks like video editing. After all, we used to do that stuff on old Core 2 Duo systems. However, making use of the full potential...
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We tested Intel's Application Performance Optimizer last week and came away with a tentatively-positive opinion. The technology helps games leverage the hybrid architecture of Intel's CPUs more effectively, improving performance when CPU-limited, and it seems to really work. However, it's currently limited to the...
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Grand Theft Auto is absolutely not a series for children. While the earliest games had a cartoony style and relatively little objectionable content besides the nominative car theft, the games became surprisingly realistic, starting with the fully-3D GTA III on the PlayStation 2. Successive titles over the following...
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As PC hardware enthusiasts, we talk about code names a lot. Stuff like "Raptor Lake" and "Bergamo" are technically internal names that aren't really supposed to be used in an official context. Intel, for example, would prefer that we say "13th-Generation Intel Core Processor" and AMD would like to read "AMD EPYC...
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Super Mario RPG was an odd game when it came out back in 1996. Taking the beloved Mario characters and placing them into a Final Fantasy-style JRPG required a lot of world-building and characterization that simply didn't exist for those characters before that. It was Squaresoft's final game for the Super NES in the...
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If you're reading HotHardware, there's a solid chance that you recall a time when device makers were going completely insane with the designs of their hardware. Just about everything now is a very boring slab or block with inoffensively-rounded corners and a neutral color scheme, but around the turn of the millennium...
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Yesterday's reveal of the Steam Deck OLED was rather exciting for some folks. If you haven't heard of or seen it yet, head over to yesterday's coverage to check it out, because the revised Steam Deck looks like a significant upgrade over the original model. It isn't a true second-generation system, though; the SoC...
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One of the most common criticisms of Valve's generally-excellent Steam Deck is that the screen is a bit lack-luster.. While response times are good, it is a basic IPS LCD with characteristically-weak contrast ratio and mediocre color saturation. The Nintendo Switch's original display wasn't super-great either, so what...
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The first three generations of AMD Ryzen processors were given model numbers in the 1000s, the 2000s, and then the 3000s. However, between the launch of the Ryzen 3000 family and AMD's next-gen processors, the company released some refreshed APUs that it gave a 4000-series model number. That meant that the...
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After an awkward situation with Apple back in 2017, UK-based graphics IP developer Imagination Technologies was in a dire state. The company was quickly snapped up by a state-backed private equity firm from China known as Canyon Bridge. Since then, ImgTec graphics IP has appeared in graphics components offered by...
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The latest AMD AGESA firmware—that's the part of AMD's firmware that configures the CPU—includes support for upcoming Socket AM5 "APU" processors, at least according to HKEPC. The self-described #1 Hong Kong DIY PC site tweeted a relatively lengthy description of the CPUs that AMD has purportedly provided to OEMs...
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You may not realize it, but you're probably interacting with a GPT-family AI almost every day. It stands as the most popular of the large language models by far, and it is impressively-capable, with the latest version able to ace the MCAT and pass the BAR. In fact, it's more popular than most people even realized, as...
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Before you start posting angry comments, we know—it's not actually called the "PS5 Slim". In fact, Sony simply refers to it as a "new look for the PS5 console." However, it is a bit smaller than the original release, and the timing is right, so people are still calling it "PS5 Slim." You'll just have to accept that...
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Most of AMD's upcoming Ryzen 8000 series processors will be based on the company's next-generation Zen 5 processor architecture, and that's a big deal because by all accounts, Zen 5 is going to be a major redesign of the Zen CPU core. Earlier leaks have put Zen 5 down for a 10-15% IPC increase, but the most recent...
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It's almost impossible to imagine it now, but city builders were once PC gaming royalty with Maxis' SimCity 2000 moving over 4 million copies. These days, the mantle of SimCity has almost entirely been handed off to Colossal Order's Cities: Skylines. That game just got a sequel, but unfortunately instead of the wide...
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