Zak Killian
Recent posts
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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If you recall, some benchmarks for AMD's new Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5"-based desktop processors were well behind the expected performance gains compared to the previous generation. Those expectations were set by AMD, and in response to community...
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If you've ever directly compared modern LCDs and OLEDs, you'll know that the biggest problem with most consumer OLEDs is that they just don't get that bright. This is a problem for users who want high contrast for sharp HDR highlights, but...
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Governments across the world seek to control the flow of information, particularly within their borders, and while it may be popular to think of Facebook as now being an app for grandparents and businesses, the truth is that it is still a...
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For GPUs that will supposedly release within the next six months, AMD's RDNA 4-based Radeon chips have had few leaks. We don't know much, aside from that there will apparently only be two chips—Navi 44 and Navi 48—and that they will...
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China has had a thriving game industry for a fair while now, but the country hasn't produced many developers that can stand alongside the giants of Japan, Europe, and the US. Well, now there's at least one more: Game Science, developers of...
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We've never seen the source, but we can safely assume that Microsoft Windows' codebase is an absolutely sprawling spaghetti code mess. We say that because the venerable OS still includes elements dating all the way back to Windows 95. One of those is the venerable Control Panel; while earlier...
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If you've ever rebuilt a PC, you know the struggle: the GPU is locked in the slot, and you can't get your fat adult fingers down next to the oversized CPU cooler you installed to press the retention lever down. In the words of many classic...
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Zen 5 is out, and AMD Ryzen 7000 Zen 4 processors are distinctly last-generation now. Only, a lot of reviewers produced benchmark data that makes Zen 5 look less like a step and more like a stumble. AVX-512 performance is fantastic, and...
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These days, virtually every monitor—certainly every gaming monitor—supports at least some form of variable refresh rate technology. NVIDIA's G-SYNC was the pioneer, but AMD's FreeSync is far more ubiquitous largely due to its lower costs...
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When we talk about technological advancements in video games, there are a few things that always spring to mind: new rendering techniques or paradigms, advanced physics simulation, or perhaps new ways of presenting the game, like...
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So the reviews are out, the dust has largely settled, and the conclusion of the community is that AMD's Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 processors are more of an iterative step than a groundbreaking leap forward. Some reviews have found excellent...
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Before the launch of AMD's Zen 5 CPUs, many people remarked that Intel's Raptor Lake woes had left AMD with a competitive "opening" against rival Intel. However, given the modest performance and efficiency gains over the...
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This one's important, so let's get right to it: a new security flaw in all versions of Windows opens the door for a wormable remote code execution vulnerability. That means it can be exploited by an automated worm with zero user...
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When people talk about the AI race, most folks' thoughts immediately go toward large language models powering functions like ChatGPT or Google Assistant. There's a lot more going on in the AI space than just language models, though. Before...
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The Geekbench suite of system benchmarks have their limitations, but they present a reasonable impression of overall performance for a wide variety of productivity, content creation, and high-performance computing tasks, and they're also...
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Intel has traditionally dominated the consumer laptop segment with its fast and compatible CPUs, but right now it's facing a three-pronged assault from Apple, Qualcomm, and even AMD, thanks to new and extremely efficient processors from...
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Beautiful ray-traced visuals, that is, if your PC can handle it. Chinese developer Game Science's long-awaited action-adventure title Black Myth: Wukong is finally nearing release, so the newbie studio has released a stand-alone benchmark...
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As soon as the broader discussion about the Raptor Lake stability issues began, many people were already speculating that the potential "fix" would have a deleterious effect on performance. In essence, the thought process was that Intel...
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