Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
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...
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...
