Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
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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In case you weren't aware, VMware operates a security arm called Carbon Black. On Halloween, Carbon Black's Threat Analysis Unit (TAU) announced that it had found 34 different vulnerable Windows drivers that had firmware access. To be clear, that's 34 unique filenames; the actual number of different driver files is...
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If you're a regular reader of HotHardware, then you are assuredly aware that Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake processors are coming, along with a massive overhaul of the company's branding. The new chiplet-based CPUs will reset Intel's generation counter and be known as the first-generation "Core Ultra" processors...
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Before we talk about Sapphire's new graphics card, let's go over what exactly comprises a Radeon RX 6750 GRE graphics card. AMD launched two cards under that name in the middle of last month, differentiated primarily by their memory capacity. The 10GB version of the RX 6750 GRE is essentially a Radeon RX 6700, while...
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If you bought a Steam Deck with a 256GB or 512GB SSD inside, you're probably not aware of an issue that affects people with the cheaper 64GB model. You see, games on SteamOS download pre-compiled shader libraries as well as additional data to help with Steam Deck compatibility, and this data can take up quite a bit of...
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Acer Predator BiFrost Arc A770 OC 16GB: MSRP - $399; Street Price - $319 (As Low As $289) Acer's take on Intel's Arc A770 GPU is the fastest and flashiest Arc card around, and you won't pay a premium for it when it's on-sale -- which is often. Complete Feature Set Solid Performance-per-Dollar Impressive XeSS...
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Bolt on your metal armor and pull out your automatic Beretta, because Robocop: Rogue City releases today. This new title from the developers of sleeper hit Terminator: Resistance has had almost no marketing, yet its extremely faithful adaptation of the film and Unreal Engine 5-powered graphics managed to garner the...
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If you pay attention to hardware news websites like ours, then AMD's Phoenix 2 processor may not need any introduction at all. The chip has already quietly made its debut in the ASUS ROG Ally's cheaper "non-Extreme" edition, and we've talked about it quite a bit elsewhere, as well.
Today, AMD is giving Phoenix 2 a...
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If you read that headline and thought, "why would I want my gaming PC to be a showpiece?", this new PC case might not be for you. However, most DIY PCs these days are gaming PCs, and gaming PCs tend to be slick or showy and harness powerful hardware. In addition, since Moore's Law has slowed, powerful hardware is...
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AI processing is a super heavy computing task that requires tens of thousands of dollars of graphics cards, right? Well, no, actually. AI tools come in all kinds of forms and sizes, and there are plenty that can run in real-time on a phone SoC. One of the most popular client applications of generative AI is local...
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You ever Googled yourself? No, it's not an improper question—we're talking about the actual process of putting your own name into Google and seeing what comes up. You might be surprised. Shady websites charge fees to list huge databases of personal information, matching names with addresses and phone numbers that may...
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Nintendo is ripe for a new piece of hardware, which is always a momentous event for game console purveyors. As a result, any sort of leak, rumor, or filing concerning new hardware by Nintendo is noteworthy, even when it doesn't seem like a device that the company might actually bring to market.
What we have here is...
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Back at Innovation '23, Intel announced that its Meteor Lake processors would be officially-launched on December 14th. Despite the fact that they haven't made their debut, Intel's first disaggregated CPUs have already appeared in a few places, including a handheld from Hong Kong as well as in some Lenovo laptops being...
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Much has been made of AMD's mobile SoC naming convention, but it's really not that complicated. The first digit tells you what year it came out, the second digit tells you where it sits in the product stack, and the third digit tells you exactly which Zen CPU core it's using. With that knowledge, we can accurately...
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It's a pain point for any system builder: you spend the time to coordinate parts that will look good together, and then you go to wire it all up and it doesn't matter because even with good cable management your aesthetic is still ruined by the heavy cable bundles required for power and data connections.
A few...
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When we saw the system requirements for Remedy's Alan Wake II, we knew this game was going to be a PC system smasher. Of course, we already knew that—the game supports path-tracing, also known as full scene ray-tracing, and we've already tested that feature extensively in Cyberpunk 2077, so we're familiar with...
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If you follow technology news much at all, you're probably familiar with the latest iteration of the GPT line of AI models, known simply as GPT-4. At its heart, GPT-4 is a large language model with billions of parameters, able to converse in many languages on almost any topic. GPT-4 is so smart that it can ace the...
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Are you a Skyrim fiend? Do you have thousands of hours in Bethesda's fantasy magnum opus, and long for more to do in the land of the Nords? Well, good news. Now you can conquer Skyrim in Age of Empires 2, thanks to an expansive custom map by creator /u/Grouchy_Bluejay4511.
If you're not an AoE2 player, then you...
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Remedy Entertainment's Control was one of the first games to really showcase the potential of real-time ray-tracing with its gorgeous reflections and excellent ray-traced shadows. The company's next game, a sequel to 2010's Alan Wake simply titled Alan Wake II, promises to up the ante in terms of graphics technology...
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In case you're unfamiliar, "delidding" is the process of removing the thick metal plate attached to the top of modern CPUs. This plate is known as the "integrated heat spreader" or "IHS," and it protects the fragile silicon die of the processor from cracking when fumble-fingered users are installing their cooling...
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Remember the days when graphics cards, like any other expansion card, simply took up a single slot? Sure, there'd be some cooling apparatus on them, and occasionally you'd see some ultra-high-end board with an extremely overbuilt cooler that took up two slots, but for years and years, graphics cards were...
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A major part of Intel's chip dominance over the last 30 years has been its bleeding-edge process technology. For decades the company was ahead of everyone else in fabrication, and this often gave its architectures superior performance simply on the basis of physics. That's not to discredit the hard work of Intel's...
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