Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Welcome to 2024, the year of the dragon, gamers. The previous year was such an incredible one for game releases that we wouldn't be surprised if you're still working through some of them. Besides incredibly long titles like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Starfield, there was also no shortage of live service games that continued
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Like all modern processors, AMD's Ryzen chips require microcode updates at boot to do their thing. These microcode updates come from AMD as part of its AGESA firmware that contains System Management Unit (SMU) configurations for each type of processor supported by that particular mainboard. Right now, all AMD Socket...
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During the ongoing Steam Winter Sale, Valve just published its list of the "Best of 2023", which is not to be confused with the Steam Awards. Instead, this list compiles the year's games in general order of gross revenue, many of which are available with deep discounts.
This data is particularly neat to see because...
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If you're a DIY PC enthusiast, then you've probably re-installed Windows countless times. Often, it's simply the fastest and easiest way to fix a broken Windows install, and while you might think that an indictment of Windows itself, Microsoft clearly agrees given the prominence of its "Reset" option alongside...
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If you follow PC hardware news, you'll almost assuredly be familiar with the name Fritzchens Fritz. The man is a photographer, and specializes in taking extremely high-detail pictures of processors with their silicon laid bare. If you've ever looked at an annotated die shot such as the many we've published here on the...
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Once upon a time, the components in your PC required a wide variety of voltages. The ATX standard defines 3.3V, 5V, and 12V connections as well as -12V and 5V standby power connections. Only some of this is actually used today. Virtually all modern PC components just take 12V and convert it to whatever voltage their...
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Remember that big Rockstar hack last year? The stuff that made headlines at the time was predictably the material related to GTA VI. Rockstar's next entry in its giga-hit franchise hadn't even been officially confirmed at that time, so the hype was unreal. Well, the hackers got a whole lot more than just GTA VI in...
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Love 'em or hate 'em, Intel's decision to start shipping CPUs with both big and little CPU cores was a major turning point for the industry. Whether you realize it or not, AMD is already doing fundamentally the same thing. The company has several products shipping right now based on its "Phoenix 2" silicon that sports...
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If you know anything about hardware emulation, you'll expect that emulating the Nintendo Switch is a pretty tall task, and as far as it goes for "all hardware," you'd be right. However it's now possible to play a lot of Switch games on ARM64-based Android devices with better-than-real-hardware performance thanks to a...
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If you've read our review of Intel's Meteor Lake, then you'll be well aware that the company's new Core Ultra processors offer impressive integrated graphics performance that trades blows with the Radeon parts integrated into AMD's "Phoenix" APUs. Given that, it's no surprise that Geekom's next mini-PCs will offer...
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Intel often disseminates slide decks to tech journalists like us, which are packed with information about its upcoming products, but presentations to its partners can often be much more interesting. It appears Intel held one such gathering on Monday in Tokyo for its Japanese partners, outlining its "AI Everywhere"...
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DLSS frame generation lets folks with GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards enjoy a boost to frame rate in supported games with very little downside. The interpolation is mostly performed by hardware on the GPU that isn't doing anything else, so the only real penalty is a small hit to input latency. You do have to have...
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Console video games go through an extensive qualification process with the platform holder to make sure that they meet specific standards. This was even more true back in the day, when it wasn't so easy to simply patch a game that shipped with serious flaws. Despite that, the developers of Alien Resurrection, a cult...
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Ask anyone in the chip industry, and you'll probably get a similar answer: chiplet-based CPU designs are the way of the future for high-performance, advanced processors, and it's fairly likely that most highly-integrated CPU architectures will be headed that way eventually. Intel obviously agrees, as the company has...
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You might have heard that Intel's Core Ultra CPUs (codenamed Meteor Lake) are actually out and available now. That's true; you can order a laptop with one right now, if you'd like. There are some reviews out around the web, but obviously we recommend waiting for our own coverage before you make any purchasing...
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Unless you have a GeForce RTX 40 series GPU or you're a really big fan of mediocre fantasy games, you probably haven't had much experience with frame generation technologies. Suffice to say that we're fans around here. While AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution is a fair (if somewhat inferior) competitor with NVIDIA's...
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As you may have heard, today is launch day for Intel's Core Ultra processors, likely better known by their codename, Meteor Lake. These parts are not only Intel's first disaggregated design, but also the company's first CPUs to include a bespoke Neural Processing Unit (NPU) designed to accelerate AI processing...
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If you're a regular HotHardware reader, we probably don't have to explain to you that Intel's new Core Ultra processors launching today were codenamed Meteor Lake, and that they represent not only Intel's first "disaggregated" consumer CPUs built from disparate tiles, but also the debut of Intel's "Intel 4" process...
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AMD's latest APUs combining Zen 4 CPU grunt with serious RDNA 3 graphics firepower have been very popular in handheld gaming machines, but they're arguably best-suited for deployment in mini-PCs because, in our testing, the silicon serves best when spec'd for higher power limits than handheld devices can really...
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If you still had "attend E3" on your bucket list, it's time to scratch that one out. The ESA has announced on Xwitter today that the Electronic Entertainment Expo (better known as E3) is well and truly dead. This announcement marks the end of an era as the biggest and longest-lived games expo in America finally carks...
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Regular readers of this site who are gamers are very likely to be primarily PC gamers. That may have muted your enthusiasm for Rockstar's next Grand Theft Auto game, GTA VI, as it has been widely reported to skip the PC, at least at launch. Rockstar hasn't said anything of the sort, but the trailer only mentions the...
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If you've been using the internet for the last ten years, you've almost assuredly heard about some absurd exploit or other of "Florida Man". These stories are commonplace not because Floridians are insane, but because of Florida laws requiring the public reporting of criminal offenses. That's not to say that Florida...
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