Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
If you're into overclocking at all, you have probably heard of Skatterbencher. He's a veteran overclocker who has held multiple historical world records, but is perhaps best known for his YouTube videos giving explicit instructions to help novice overclockers tune their own systems for maximum performance.
His...
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AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) has been through a lot of iterations. The first major version was a straightforward spatial upscaler that produced unsatisfactory results unless the render resolution was very close to the output resolution. FSR2 was a major step forward, introducing motion vectors and temporal...
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Look, we know it's tempting if you're a gamer with the requisite $700, but please don't buy a PS5 Pro. It's an awful lot of money for a toy that can only play the games that Sony says you can play. It doesn't even have the excuse of being a really high-quality Blu-Ray player like the PS3 did—there's no disc drive at...
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It's a new school year, and chances are good that the old Windows 7-based 2012-vintage laptop you were planning to give to the kid is really on its last legs. Grab something new with a fresh version of Windows and all of the accoutrements you expect from a brand-new laptop, like a modern screen in high resolution, a...
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For Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 200 desktop processors, perhaps more familiar by their code-name "Arrow Lake", Intel has removed Hyper-Threading from the P-cores. That makes those CPUs narrower, so they might not need as much memory bandwidth, right? Well, the Skymont E-cores are nearly three times as wide as the...
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Look, before we even get into the meat of what the problems were, if you're on Windows, make sure you've got the latest updates. Yesterday's "Patch Tuesday" brought with it fixes for nearly 80 different security bugs across just about every single Microsoft product, but the real worry has to do with a zero-day bug...
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Laptops with AMD graphics may be few and far between, but that's partially because AMD simply hasn't had many current-generation GPUs to offer laptop vendors. Until recently, it was basically the entry-level Radeon RX 7600M family or the top-end Radeon RX 7900M—essentially a Radeon RX 7900 GRE in mobile form.
Now...
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After the competent but uninspiring performance of AMD's Ryzen 9000 processors, the PC enthusiast space is looking for some real excitement to drag it out of the doldrums. Some folks are so weary of the same old stuff that they're actually excited about the PS5 Pro launch, despite it's lofty price tag. Don't fret...
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We already know that Intel is absolutely looking to launch its Arrow Lake desktop processors, branded as the Core Ultra 200 series, later this year. But when, exactly? According to a social media post from HKEPC, the launch will occur on October 24th. HKEPC is a Hong Kong-based tech blog with a long history of...
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Whatever it ends up being called in actuality, the "Switch 2" is definitely real and definitely on the way. We know that because Nintendo itself has tacitly confirmed that it is working on such a thing by saying that it won't be releasing this fiscal year, which ends in March 2025 for Nintendo. We might hear something...
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After the somewhat-underwhelming launch of AMD's Ryzen 9000 processors, some enthusiasts are looking to Intel to drag us out of the hardware enthusiast doldrums. The company's upcoming Arrow Lake processors are a departure from standard practice in a number of ways, including the use of all-new CPU cores as well as...
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It's Friday, friends! Did you just get paid today, and do you have a pocket full of change? Time to splurge on some PC parts! Not that pocket change will get you very far, really, but it'll get you further today than it would last week thanks to some killer deals on core components from Amazon. We've got CPUs, RAM...
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Intel has done a fair bit of talking recently over successes from its 18A process node, which rather brings up the question, "why bother with 20A at all, if 18A is already yielding well?" Apparently someone at Intel had the same thought, as the company has announced today that it is canceling the 20A node altogether...
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Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Series processors are very potent 12 and 10-core CPUs that are occasionally power-limited in the systems we've tested. Unlike Intel's processors, Qualcomm's chip doesn't contain a mix of performance and efficient cores—you get three quad-core clusters of full-fat Oryon CPUs. A dozen cores is...
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Today at the IFA Berlin tech trade show, HotHardware honcho Dave Altavilla caught up with Intel's Robert Hallock to do a quick interview concerning the company's new Core Ultra Series 2 mobile processors. This family currently comprises the Core Ultra 200V parts, code-named Lunar Lake, a set of extremely efficient...
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We've been telling you all that it's too early to count Intel out. The company has more than four decades of making chips under its belt, and there's a whole lot of talent on the blue team. Today's launch, of the "Core Ultra Mobile Processors (Series 2)"—better known to enthusiasts by its "Lunar Lake" code name—could...
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Don't blame us for the awkward construction in the headline, because Intel has formally named the stability problem affecting its 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs: "Vmin Shift Instability Issue". Non-words aside, the issue is that the company's high-powered Raptor Lake desktop CPUs have issues with excess...
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RDNA4 is definitely on the way, despite the fact that AMD has said almost exactly nothing about it besides confirming that it does technically exist. As far as we know, there are two Radeon GPUs on the way based on AMD's next-generation graphics architecture, known as Navi 48 and Navi 44. According to leakers, these...
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Whatever you think about global warming, there are plenty of other serious environmental crises to worry over. One of the most pressing is the problem of what to do with all this plastic. We keep producing a near-endless quantity of plastic for all kinds of purposes, but plastics don't really degrade naturally, which...
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If you're reading HotHardware, you probably already know that displays based on Organic Light-Emitting Diodes, or "OLEDs", have a lot of advantages over more conventional liquid-crystal displays (LCDs.) They offer essentially-instant response times, highly-saturated colors, and inky blacks that make for decent final...
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Well, chalk one up for the reliability of occasional leaker chi11eddog (@g01d3nm4ng0 on Xwitter). Back on August 14th, he posted that AMD would increase the TDP of the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X from 65W to 105W in an AGESA update. Technically, he was wrong; the TDP increase is an optional toggle. However, it's...
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We were very fond of Lenovo's Legion Go gaming handheld when we reviewed it—particularly its massive 16:10 display and detachable controllers. It's arguably the most feature-filled of all of the gaming handhelds out there, and no other handheld offers the unique options that it does, like the ability to use the...
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