Editor profile

Zak Killian

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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

Intel's next new processors will be the Meteor Lake chips coming to laptops and small-form-factor desktops by the end of the year and through the beginning of next year. After that, we'll see Arrow Lake likely late next year, which is expected to replace both Meteor Lake in laptops as well as the Raptor Lake Refresh... Read more...
Historically, the socketed desktop AMD Ryzen processors have come in two basic forms: your standard CPUs that typically didn't have graphics until the most recent Ryzen generation, and then your "APUs", or processors with powerful graphics built-in. The Ryzen APUs from the 3000 and 5000 series were also monolithic... Read more...
One of the greatest games of 2010, Red Dead Redemption was stuck on the 7th-generation game consoles until very recently, when the game was re-released for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 consoles. The release was controversial for several reasons including its high price, but the biggest was likely that it has... Read more...
Any way you slice it, Starfield has been a big success for Bethesda. The company has announced that it reached over ten million players, the biggest-ever launch for a Bethesda game, and it peaked at just over one million concurrent players on Steam and Xbox around its launch. Even if as many as half of those players... Read more...
The Nintendo Switch came out on March 3rd, 2017. Five months from now will be its seventh anniversary. Seven years is a pretty good run for a game console, and the Switch wasn't particularly impressive hardware-wise even when it came out, so we can safely assume that Nintendo is well into planning its next-generation... Read more...
Most of Rockstar Games is probably hard at work on GTA 6 right now, but the part that isn't is still working to keep GTA Online running. Yes, ten years after the original launch of Grand Theft Auto V, GTA Online is still being actively-supported with new content, even if some of Rockstar's changes have been... Read more...
Have you ever held a Nintendo Switch and thought, "I wish this were a PC." If so, that's kind of weird, but nevertheless, Lenovo has exactly the product you're looking for. If you read HotHardware regularly, you're surely aware of what we're talking about. It's the Lenovo Legion Go, the company's upcoming... Read more...
Intel's next desktop CPU release is going to be the 14th-gen Raptor Lake Refresh, and likely the last generation of processors in the current line of "Core i" family CPUs. As you could guess from the name, these will be essentially (if not literally) the exact same silicon as we're already using in the 13th-gen CPUs... Read more...
However you feel about NVIDIA's frame generation technology, you have to admit that the idea sounds good on paper. Tick a toggle in a game's settings menu and increase your frame rate by 50% or more? A framerate increase that isn't bound by CPU limitations, allowing you to hit higher frames in CPU-limited games? It... Read more...
When we reviewed the ASUS ROG Ally, we talked at length about how the SoC inside the machine was crying out for a higher power limit and better cooling than the handheld PC could offer. Engaging Turbo mode and then plugging in the charger nets you a peak 30W power limit, yet the Ryzen Z1 Extreme inside the unit we... Read more...
That's right: the game came out yesterday, and it's already getting major patches. Of course, while Counter-Strike 2 officially launched yesterday, replacing CS:GO on Steam, it has been in active development and semi-open beta for some months. The big patch yesterday for the release made an incredible number of... Read more...
Counter-Strike in all of its forms has some of the most hardcore players of any game out there. These are people who want the game to be running at hundreds of FPS above their screen refresh for the infinitesimal input latency benefit that it gives. In that context, it's kind of crazy that the brand-new Counter-Strike... Read more...
If you read that headline and balked at the idea of a gaming tablet, let us remind you that besides the Nintendo Switch, the recent spate of PC-based gaming handhelds are basically tablets. The device itself isn't really the interesting part of this story, though. Instead, the really interesting part is the SoC that... Read more...
The answer to the question of whether Intel's first disaggregated CPUs would be coming to desktop systems has flip-flopped several times. If you pay attention to leaks and rumors, you're probably tired of hearing about it because it's gone back and forth so often. Well, we got a definitive answer from Intel just a few... Read more...
A big part of AMD's business these days is in providing custom processors for its customers. That doesn't mean regular folks like you and me, but rather businesses who want a special CPU that no-one else has. The proper "semi-custom business" refers to the special chips that show up in the Steam Deck and commodity... Read more...
CAMM is a new memory module format proposed by Dell and released to the public early this year. JEDEC acknowledged the proposal, but to date has not ratified it as an actual standard. CAMM stands for "Compression Attached Memory Module", and it refers to modules that are both thinner and faster than traditional... Read more...
Scott Herkelman has been General Manager of AMD's Graphics Business unit for the last seven years, and he is also one of the company's Senior Vice Presidents. For now, anyway; in a tweet sent out at lunchtime today, he announced that he will be departing AMD at the end of the year. You can read his tweet below, but... Read more...
Intel's next generation of desktop processors is almost assuredly going to be a refresh of its extant Raptor Lake silicon. We say "almost" because Intel hasn't officially announced anything of the sort, but given all of the leaks up to this point, it is all but a forgone conclusion. According to those same leaks... Read more...
If you're reading this site, you probably are well familiar with the controversy over the 12VHPWR connector used on NVIDIA's recent graphics cards. This connector is a smaller-scale twelve-pin plug that can provide up to 600 watts of power over a single, smaller bundle of wires compared to the old-school 8- and 6-pin... Read more...
What games do you think of when you hear the term "MMO", dear reader? Probably stuff like Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, or maybe Everquest if you're an old geezer like your author. You probably don't think of Niantic's mobile augmented reality game Pokémon GO. Despite that, it almost assuredly qualifies... Read more...
When you hear "super-sampling", you have a certain expectation. Super-sampling is the oldest form of anti-aliasing, and it essentially amounts to just raising the render resolution. That's the type of anti-aliasing that early GeForce and Radeon cards used, as well as the last 3dfx Voodoo boards. NVIDIA's DLSS... Read more...
After what feels like ages and ages (but has really been less than two years), Microsoft is finally drawing near the finish line of its $68.7 billion dollar attempt to purchase Activision-Blizzard. The last roadblock, placed in the way of the acquisition by the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)... Read more...
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