Editor profile

Zak Killian

image
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

It's easy to dismiss Palworld after many outlets—us included—unfairly described it as a knock-off of Pokémon, just with guns. In reality it's a lot more than that, as it includes a massive open world for co-op players to explore and build in, not unlike ARK: Survival Evolved. On top of that, there's considerable... Read more...
We're now 2/3rds of the way through January (and over 5% through 2024 already), so the holidays are well and truly over, and everyone's back to work. That doesn't mean that there are no more tech deals to be had, though! Indeed, if you're a tech industry worker or just someone who has to deal with endless Zoom... Read more...
It might not be nice, but it might just be fair to call anyone who uses Google Chrome's Incognito Mode and then expects real privacy a "rube," given that Google is a company that makes an incredible amount of money on selling other people's information. We're not saying that, though, and the reason is simply because... Read more...
We've reported on handheld gaming systems quite a bit recently thanks to the boom in the market spurred by the success of the Steam Deck. Products from pre-existing vendors like Ayaneo, GPD, and OneNotebook have been battling with newer machines from larger OEMs like Asus, Lenovo, and most recently, MSI. Today's... Read more...
There are a lot of ways to stream gameplay to an internet audience these days. PC gamers can use hardware encoders built into their PC's processors to stream right from the same PC they're gaming on, while consoles have their own streaming features. Folks serious about streaming will want a whole dedicated streaming... Read more...
AMD's next desktop processor release will be based on the Hawk Point silicon originally intended for mobile machines including laptops, tablets, and handheld gaming consoles. The Ryzen 8000G family, despite the incremented model number, is still based on the Zen 4 CPU architecture, just with the addition of RDNA3... Read more...
We've just posted up a review of the Ayaneo Retro Mini PC AM01. The vendor's first mini-PC is a cute little machine that's part of Ayaneo's Remake collection, and sports an aesthetic inspired by the original Macintosh. It's focused on affordability, and offers a slightly older SoC in a compact and nostalgic package at... Read more...
AYANEO Retro Mini PC AM01: Starting at $149 Ayaneo's first-ever mini-PCs sport a cute retro aesthetic and good-enough performance for desktop use or casual and retro gaming.   Cute Macintosh Throwback Aesthetics Efficient & Nearly Silent Operation Capable Desktop Performance Accessible Pricing Power-Limited... Read more...
Did you check out our coverage of CES 2024? There was a lot to sift through, but among those posts was NVIDIA's official announcement of the GeForce RTX 4000 SUPER GPUs. There's three of them: the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER (yes, really), and the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER. The two higher-end models... Read more...
It's Friday, and that means CES week is over. It's been a wild ride, as the market has finally fully shed the lethargy that came with the pandemic and is back into full swing. There have been tons of interesting and innovative products at this year's show, but few companies brought as wide a range of new gear as... Read more...
As gamers, we've all had that experience of interacting with a game NPC and wishing that you weren't limited to just the conversation options provided by the developer. Now that generative AI is real and finding its way into nearly every industry, we can solve this problem forever, right? That's certainly the goal of... Read more...
We met up with Tom "TAP" Petersen at CES 2024, but schedules didn't line up and we didn't have time to sit down with him for a chat. However, PC World did, and the man delivered on some pretty interesting interview topics. Chief among them was the new MSI Claw handheld, of course, but he had more interesting comments... Read more...
We've covered "back-connect" motherboards multiple times, most recently yesterday when Maingear was showing off its Maingear Zero lineup of systems with cleaner cable cable management than you'll find in just about any other system. That's because they're built on MSI's Project Zero motherboards, produced in... Read more...
Of course, Intel wouldn't be left out of the CES 2024 launch party. Just like last year, the company has a whole plethora of new processors to show off at the Las Vegas expo. The list includes new 14th-gen "non-K" desktop CPUs in both 35W and 65W flavors, the first series of "non-Ultra" Core processors, and Intel's... Read more...
Did you love the GeForce RTX 4080 and GeForce RTX 4070 Ti? Well, too bad, because they're going away forever. Don't fret, though. In their place, NVIDIA's just announced two faster GPUs along with a card to slot in between the GeForce RTX 4070 and the new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super. That's right: the GeForce RTX 4070... Read more...
Today's Consumer Electronics Show marks the first time in three years that AMD hasn't brought a whole new lineup of mobile CPUs to Las Vegas. That's not because AMD doesn't have new mobile CPUs, rather the company already launched them just last month. The Hawk Point mobile processors, which are essentially Phoenix... Read more...
Zen 5 hasn't even arrived yet, but of course AMD is hard at work on designing the next generation after it. According to serial leaker Everest (@Olrak29_ on Twitter), the codename for consumer Zen 6 processors—analogous to "Raphael" for consumer Zen 4 processors and "Granite Ridge" for consumer Zen 5 processors—will... Read more...
If you're not already a fan, you may not be aware that the Monster Hunter game franchise is actually a huge, massive deal outside of the US, and it has been for a long time. The original game on the PlayStation 2 wasn't a big hit over here, but it was a massive success in developer Capcom's native Japan, and the... Read more...
Dell's "Ultrasharp" is not a brand that needs introduction. Dell has been doing its display thing for a very long time now, and Ultrasharp has been associated with high-quality displays for many years. While not every Ultrasharp display has featured top-of-the-line technology, these upcoming models certainly fit the... Read more...
Kioxia is the company formerly known as Toshiba Memory Solutions, the inventors of NAND flash memory. Along with a myriad of other major tech companies, Kioxia is et to showcase its extensive portfolio of technologoes at CES 2024, more specifically its array of SSDs and memory solutions. In announcing the company's... Read more...
You may have heard that Marvel's Spider-Man and Ratchet & Clank developer Insomniac Games suffered an extremely extensive breach that stole over 1.6 TB of data—yes, terabytes—from the company's servers. An unbelievable amount of confidential data was included in the leak, including not only proprietary technology and... Read more...
It's not difficult to imagine a scenario where the integrated Radeon graphics on one of AMD's extant Socket AM5 Ryzen processors simply isn't adequate. "Raphael" only has a single RDNA 2 Workgroup Processor (WGP), after all. However, adding a discrete GPU is a whole other layer of expense and complication, not to... Read more...
First ... Prev 25 26 27 28 29 Next