Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Intel's current-generation 12th Gen Core-family processors employ DDR5 memory for optimal performance, at least in theory. In practice, a lot of folks building Alder Lake systems are sticking with DDR4 DIMMs instead of the newer standard, because DDR5 memory is in short supply and seriously scalped. Testing has shown...
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Ever since the advent of the Multi-Media eXtensions, better known as "MMX," Intel has had a long history of tacking on instruction set extensions to add additional capabilities to its x86-family of CPUs. There have been many other instructions for other purposes, but arguably the most important additions to the ISA...
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You may recall that HDMI 2.1 offers improved transfer rates and extra features (like variable-refresh-rate support) over previous versions of the format. If you're properly informed, you may also recall that all of those features, including the improved transfer rate, are completely optional.
The HDMI Administrator...
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FromSoftware's latest game, Elden Ring, may not wear the "Souls" moniker, but it's certainly a spiritual sequel to that storied series (with more than a little bit of Sekiro sprinkled in for taste.) The "Soulsborne" series is notorious for its difficulty, arising in part from its relatively deep mechanics that require...
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They might be confusing to the uninitiated, but graphics card model names generally make sense. Sure, you have your trouble spots, like NVIDIA's lower-end GPUs (particularly from earlier series, like the four different models of GT 640.) But still, if you understand the labeling, you generally know what you're...
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It would be easy to assume that the Nintendo Entertainment System needs no introduction, but it's important for us old farts to remember that it came out in 1985, some 37 years ago. Many people reading this are probably younger than the NES.
Nintendo's first home video game system to be released in the west changed...
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Have you been playing Elden Ring, lowly tarnished? If you've been playing it on the PC, you've probably noticed that it has a little bit of a stuttering problem. The severity varies drastically from system to system, and you can modulate it a bit with the fixes we posted on Friday, but it's pretty much present for...
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This story continues to get stranger. On the 25th, The Telegraph ran a story claiming to have insider knowledge of a hack at NVIDIA HQ. At that time, it wasn't known who was responsible or what their motives were; The outlet speculated that it may have been related to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
The very next...
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Lenovo's bringing out the big fireworks this year to celebrate ThinkPad's 30th anniversary. At the 2022 Mobile World Congress, the company announced top-to-bottom refreshes of most of its laptop products, including ThinkPads, ThinkBooks, and IdeaPads. We'll have a gander at the IdeaPad models in a bit, but for now...
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Today at Mobile World Congress 2022, Lenovo unveiled a revitalized lineup of laptops, tablets, and other mobile computers. We've already taken a look at the company's upgraded ThinkPads and ThinkBooks, but let's step over to the IdeaPad category and gawk at some accessible gaming hardware and some flexible...
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Competition is a good thing, especially when it results in healthy back-and-forth between the competitors. AMD and Intel are duking it out in the CPU space once again, and given that gaming is one of the primary purposes for which anyone is purchasing PCs right now, both companies are keen to claim the title of...
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Just yesterday, we reported on The Telegraph's report claiming that NVIDIA had suffered a cyber-attack. NVIDIA didn't provide any details, but the company's statement that it was "investigating an incident" was admission enough. As it stood last night, it seemed clear something had happened, but we didn't know...
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As you may have heard, NVIDIA is kind of a big deal these days. Like, "bigger than Facebook" big. Mean Green's expertise in providing machine learning accelerators for hyperscalers, the enterprise and high-performance computing markets (as well as GPUs for gamers of course) has brought them powerful profits. This fame and fortune, unfortunately,
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From Software's latest dark fantasy epic, Elden Ring, is out now for PCs and consoles, and this writer spent over ten hours last night playing it. In a word, it's fantastic. It's not flawless, but if you like action RPGs, fantasy settings, or just video games in general, you owe it to yourself to play this...
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If you talk to long-time fans of the Fallout series of games, there's one thing that almost all of them will agree on: Fallout 2 was the best. Of the newer games, though, the most well-regarded is certainly 2010's Fallout: New Vegas. Rather than being developed by series custodians Bethesda, New Vegas was created by...
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If you've been trying to get a GeForce RTX 3000-series graphics card, been unsuccessful, and decided at this point to just wait for next-generation, well—you probably better have a real beefy power supply. We've reported on similar rumors before, but this one is even more concerning.
Simply put, oft-seen Twitter...
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Speaking as hardware nerds ourselves, if there's one thing that hardware nerds love to do, it's speculate on upcoming products. Around these parts, we're pretty pleased with Intel's 12th-Gen Alder Lake processors, but even still, we've done a lot of deliberating on Intel's future chips.
Reportedly, we could see...
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Alright, so—remember how Intel's LGA 1700 sockets seem to be bending CPU heatspreaders, causing reduced cooling performance? We told you about it back when we talked about how AMD's socket AM5 seems specifically designed to avoid this particular problem by screwing the CPU retention bracket directly through the board...
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Regular Hot Hardware readers and general hardware enthusiasts probably already know this, but SiSoftware is the creator and maintainer of the Sandra utility for Windows PCs. Originally created as a tool to simply capture and display system information (as Windows' own capabilities in that regard were quite primitive...
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You might have seen the Street Fighter 6 logo, reproduced above, on this very page yesterday. We posted about the teaser for Capcom's next entry in its seminal fighting game series, and the thumbnail for said post was in fact the logo for the game, borrowed directly from the end of the teaser.
Well, we may not have...
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The Capcom Pro Tour fighting game tournament just wrapped, and at the end of the fights last night, the series' host dropped an announcement that was news to absolutely no-one that pays attention to these sorts of things. As expected, Street Fighter 6 is on the way, and along with the announcement, Capcom released a...
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Barely more than a week ago, we heard through the grapevine that AMD had moved up its plans to launch its Zen 4 CPUs from Q4 of this year to Q3, and possibly as soon as August or July. The only source is frequent Twitter leaker Greymon55, but their information has been accurate many times in the past.
Perhaps adding...
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