Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
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...
Read more...
It's been a month since the release of the franchise-rebooting Mortal Kombat 1, and the reviews are in. Generally speaking, people are pretty fond of the game, citing its gorgeous Unreal Engine-powered graphics, new assist character mechanics, and improved accessibility features as high points for the...
Read more...
Spotted by sleuths at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair this past weekend, footage of what is likely the most interesting product showcased at the fair has come to light. Laptop OEM Emdoor is getting ready to launch its first gaming-focused product, and that's an 8" gaming handheld that you'll see pictured throughout...
Read more...
Laptop aficionados and HotHardware devotees will both recall when we reviewed the Alienware m18 R1 earlier this year. That machine was gorgeous inside and out, with the latest Core i9 processor and GeForce RTX 4090 graphics wrapped up in a slick "Metallic Moon" aluminum chassis. We had little to complain about with...
Read more...
Well, the Microsoft purchase of Activision-Blizzard-King has finally closed, and we're now observing what may well be the the first knock-on effect of the acquisition. Anyone who didn't expect major ripple effects from the purchase hasn't been paying attention to the actions of Microsoft's previous acquisitions, like...
Read more...
It's common for gamers to talk about input lag as stems from input devices and display devices, but the majority of the motion-to-photon lag for most PC gamers actually comes from the software stack itself. NVIDIA has its Reflex technology to counteract this latency, and AMD has its Anti-Lag, but Radeon Anti-Lag isn't...
Read more...
Let's talk display technology. Almost all TVs and computer displays these days are based on LED-backlit LCDs. The only other common display technology anymore is OLED, and despite the similar name, those have nothing to do with this post, so let's set them aside for now—even though they're arguably a superior...
Read more...
If you're into PC hardware, you're probably familiar with Galax whether under that name or as one of its sub-brands, like KFA2 and Gainward. Galax has been known as a global seller of graphics cards and other PC parts. Indeed, it actually began operations in 1994 in Hong Kong, but it's celebrating 2023 as its "20th...
Read more...
Surprise, surprise: an upcoming first-party Nintendo game has leaked to the internet ahead of its launch date. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the long-awaited new traditional-style side-scrolling title in the famous franchise of everyone's favorite video-game plumber, has found its way to pirates through the usual...
Read more...
Have you been enjoying Counter-Strike 2, PC gamers? Despite the fact that the game has become Valve's lowest-rated release ever (largely due to complaints from players who are no longer able to play it), it's still been an enormously-successful launch for the company, with nearly a million players online and playing...
Read more...
You want to get fat paid by Microsoft without having to sign a pesky employment contract? Just find a major security hole in one of the company's many new AI-powered services. That'll earn you a cash prize of between $2,000 and $15,000, depending on the severity and ease of the exploit.
To be clear, simply getting...
Read more...
To appreciate the subject of this post, you're going to have to take a trip back to 1993 with us. The gaming scene on the IBM PC had been growing rapidly for a few years, championed by graphics-heavy games taking advantage of the explosion of clones of the expensive Video Graphics Array (VGA) adapter. Gorgeous titles...
Read more...
It's a rallying cry frequently heard among certain groups ever since the "Occupy" protests: a demand for corporations to "pay their share" of tax obligations. The truth and fairness of these demands is still debated to this day by people who are much smarter and more educated than we are, but the fact that the matter...
Read more...
Folks who have been around the hardware scene for a while will likely recall that NVIDIA used to release new GPUs every year, even if they weren't necessarily a new architecture. This went on for quite some time, but in the last decade or so, ever since the relatively-long gap between the Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 900...
Read more...
If you saw that headline and thought, "but wait, DDR5-7200 has been around a while now," remember that almost all of the DDR DIMMs that you buy as an end user are overclocked. When you buy a G.SKILL or Teamgroup memory kit that's rated for DDR4-4000, DDR5-6400, or DDR5-7200, you're almost assuredly buying a kit with...
Read more...
Do play Counter-Strike? If you read this website regularly, there is a very good chance that, even if you don't play CS anymore now, you probably did at some point. However, there's a pretty low chance that you frequently played Counter-Strike in any of its incarnations on a Mac.
That's the ultimate reason that CS2...
Read more...
A lot of truly awesome PC games have come out over the last two years. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Baldur's Gate 3, Lies of P, the System Shock remake, Hogwarts Legacy, Atomic Heart, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, the Dead Space remake, Elden Ring, Remnant 2, Street Fighter 6...
Read more...
Late last year, sensing a market slowdown, memory manufacturers elected to cut production from earlier estimates. That has turned out to be a wise decision on their parts, as companies like Phison, Adata, Teamgroup, and Winbond all have reported spectacular financials in the most recent quarter.
This news comes to...
Read more...
We've all been there, right? You want to add another SSD to your system, but all your M.2 sockets are full. You could get a SATA SSD, but that's not going to satisfy your need for speed. No, you definitely need more NVMe storage, and that means you're going to have to get a PCIe-to-M.2 adapter. If that's the case...
Read more...
We here at HotHardware are very much like the many people who have spent hundreds of hours playing Grand theft Auto V. We could write entire articles about the good, the bad and the ugly qualities of this legendary game franchise, but one of the biggest and most frequent complaints about the title is with its sense of...
Read more...
Until very recently, AMD's Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards only existed at the extreme enthusiast tier with the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX cards and then at the entry-level tier with the Radeon RX 7600. That means that access to the company's fledgling Fluid Motion Frames driver-based frame generation technology...
Read more...
If you're clueless at that headline, let us break it down for you. Assassin's Creed Mirage is the latest game in the long-running Assassin's Creed franchise, and it was highly-anticipated by longtime fans as it is at least an attempt to return to the series' roots: no RPG elements, no crazy mini-games or alternate...
Read more...
