Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Next month, most of the big laptop OEMs are expected to release machines based on AMD's Ryzen AI 300 processors sporting the shiny new Zen 5 CPU architecture and RDNA 3.5 graphics. Naturally, everyone's chomping at the bit to know how these chips actually perform, because this is AMD's first real chance to take mobile...
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The simple fact is that the main bottleneck in game smoothness is system memory performance. When we talk about games being "CPU-limited," we're actually talking about a memory performance limitation most of the time. That's why AMD's 3D V-Cache works so well: the extra 64MB of cache saves on a lot of accesses going...
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Application performance obviously uses hardware speed as a baseline, but software optimizations are ultimately where large gains can be realized. It's not uncommon for developers to make an application run five, ten, twenty, or even a hundred times faster—something you'll never do by replacing the hardware. Intel has...
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Intel shared a lot of information with us at Computex concerning its Lunar Lake mobile processors launching soon, but had very little to say about its upcoming Arrow Lake desktop CPUs. There were a few tidbits buried in the presentations on the Lion Cove and Skymont CPU architectures that constitute Lunar Lake and...
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AMD seems to have been having a hard time moving its graphics cards lately, which is a bit of a shame, because they're capable hardware—just check out our most recent GPU review to see evidence of that. If you've been considering a GPU upgrade, AMD just sweetened the pot with a game bundle that lets you select two of...
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AMD's first processors sporting the Zen 5 architecture, the company's Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs, will go on sale next month, in July. There's been some question over whether people already rocking Zen 4 processors with 3D V-Cache, those being Ryzen 7000X3D series chips, should consider upgrading. After all, while Zen 5...
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ASRock Challenger Arc A580 8GB OC: MSRP $169 We test the ASRock Challenger Arc A580 graphics card for mainstream gamers and assess where this GPU fits in the current market. Excellent Connectivity At This Price Good Value Inconsistent Performance High Power Draw Idle & Load Large Form Factor Dual 8-Pin Power...
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Odds are that every PCI Express device you have in your machine right now uses PCIe 4.0 or an older standard. We have PCIe 5.0 support in the latest desktop machines, but there are no PCIe 5.0 graphics cards yet, and while PCIe 5.0 storage is available (and fast!), it's also relatively expensive and offers little...
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AMD's super CPUs with a little something extra are tantalizing treats for gamers, as the 3D V-Cache upgrade gives a titanic performance boost in games that have complex code which doesn't fit in standard CPU caches as easily. For that reason, many hardcore gamers are likely looking with lukewarm interest at the...
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There were a whole bunch of brand-new laptops at Computex sporting fresh AMD and Intel silicon, but of course, con-goers aren't supposed to put hands on them, run benchmarks, and upload them to the internet. So we didn't—but a few naughty attendees did, and today we're looking at one such "leak" from a user on...
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AMD's 3D V-Cache is a prime example of a technology with a singular purpose. It sounds obvious: to improve effective memory performance, triple the size of your L3 cache. There was a lot of very smart engineering that went into making that possible, and the results speak for themselves, with huge gains in gaming...
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Computex 2024 was full of big announcements, like new desktop chips from AMD, new laptop chips from Intel, new handhelds from nearly everyone, and all kinds of cool hardware. It might not be as exciting as new CPUs, but it'd be a shame to overlook G.SKILL's booth at the Taiwan trade show, because the memorable memory...
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Micron just announced that it is now sampling GDDR7 SDRAM to customers. This means that if you are building products that can make use of bleeding-edge memory technology, the fastest RAM in the world is available to you for testing and implementation. Micron says that the new products will become available in volume...
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3dfx Voodoo graphics processors never gained much traction in the laptop market in their day, because putting a power-thirsty discrete graphics processor—an idea that 3dfx arguably pioneered—into a laptop was seen as an absurd venture at the time. Despite that, 24 years after the launch of the 3dfx Voodoo4 4500...
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It was the case for a very long time that if you were buying a laptop, you were almost assuredly getting an Intel processor. Sure, AMD was around, and there have always been Macbooks, but both were niche products at opposite ends of the market for ages. For the overwhelming majority of users, only Intel offered the compelling combination of...
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It's midnight right now in your author's native Texas, but it's only 1:00 PM in Taiwan, and not long before, AMD wrapped up the opening keynote for this year's Computex Taipei. We've already covered numerous announcements made during the keynote, including the Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs, the Ryzen AI 300 mobile...
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The PC scene is really heating up. With Arm-based processors from Qualcomm and Apple offering stark competition against the conventional x86-64 world, and with AI being such a focus of so many players, we've got hybrid machines with three, four, or five different types of processors on board and all sorts of hardware...
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Whether you knew you needed it or not, locally-hosted AI is the next big thing in PCs, and AMD is at the forefront of this movement. The company was first to market with consumer processors sporting AI-accelerating Neural Processing Units (NPUs), and it's now on its third generation of processors for "AI PCs."
That's...
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It's a pretty solid bet that GTA VI is not coming to PC on release, but what about later? Neither Rockstar nor Take-Two has said anything on the topic. We could infer from history that the game will hit PC a year or more after the console launch, but if that's the case, Strauss Zelnick isn't saying so—but he also...
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Yesterday afternoon, Sony gave its latest "State of Play" presentation showcasing new and upcoming games for its platforms and from its studios. While the response to Sony's show has ranged from enthusiastic glee to outright outrage, we're going to sidestep all of that and just show you the stuff that was presented...
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For both hard-core PC gamers and hardware enthusiasts like your average HotHardware reader, it's no big deal to head into a game's settings and flip on whatever upscaling technology applies to their graphics card. Most people won't bother, though; if it isn't enabled by default, it isn't getting turned on. This isn't...
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Arm Holdings plc, or "arm", was once considered a vendor of processors designed for embedded and low-power systems, but those days are well past at this point. Having conquered mobile some time ago, processors based on Arm's Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) are now challenging the supremacy of the long-dominant...
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