Editor profile

Zak Killian

image
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

It's been six months (yes, really) since we were first introduced to the Zen 5 CPU architecture with the Ryzen 9000 series desktop CPUs, and it's been nearly a year and a half since AMD unveiled the Threadripper Pro 7000 series processors... Read more...
AMD's just launched its Strix Halo high-end mobile APUs, but progress marches ever forward, and so it goes that we are now looking at leaks concerning the Strix successor, supposedly known as Medusa Point. Based on the Zen 6 "Morpheus" CPU... Read more...
Imagine, for a moment, that you had a brand-new M.2 SSD rated for sequential transfers of over 15 GB/second. Obviously, it's the latest design, using four lanes of PCI Express 5.0 to achieve this immense throughput. Alternatively, it could... Read more...
Building out the datacenters—or as NVIDIA calls them, "AI factories"—required for training and operating state-of-the-art AI models is extremely expensive. So much so that even hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft are going to have to... Read more...
NVIDIA's Blackwell GB200 is an absolutely monstrous processor with up to 10 petaflops of dense FP4 tensor compute and 192GB of lightning-fast HBM3e memory delivering 8 TB/second of bandwidth per GPU. That number, though, that 192GB, is... Read more...
Intel has achieved a significant early milestone in its Arizona semiconductor fabrication plant, with the first wafers successfully processed on its advanced 18A process node. This achievement, announced at the same time as its March 13th... Read more...
If you're not a big gamer, you may have been perplexed at the recent preponderance of portable gaming PCs in handheld game system form. We could talk at length about why they've exploded in popularity *now*, but that's not why you clicked... Read more...
The last few weeks for AMD have been pretty remarkable. The chipmaker is firing on all cylinders: the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and 9950X3D have arrived to universal praise, the Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" processors finally launched to wide acclaim... Read more...
One by one, the barriers to gaming bliss on Snapdragon laptops are falling. Back in November, a new build of Windows brought support for Intel's Advanced Vector Extensions to the Prism emulator that is used to translate x86-64 program code... Read more...
For decades, the semiconductor industry has been laser-focused on shrinking silicon transistors, but Peking University researchers believe the future might lie in changing materials entirely. In a newly published paper, the team presents a... Read more...
The problem with introducing a new technology, whether it be an upscaler like FSR 4 or a hardware feature like AVX, is that you have to wait for software to make use of it. Except maybe not, in the case of FSR 4, thanks to the OptiScaler... Read more...
Have you ever been sitting at your desk wishing you had room for an air purifier alongside all of your computer gear? No? Me neither, but those who have serious hay fever or similar allergies to airborne allergens likely already have such... Read more...
If you were frustrated by an inability to doomscroll Xwitter on your lunch break, don't worry, you're not alone. The site has been suffering intermittent connectivity issues all morning. What's the deal? Did Musk forget to pay some bills?... Read more...
Nevermind the fact that the overwhelming majority of consumer desktop tasks don't really scale past four to six cores—fanboys have accused AMD of "stagnating" much as Intel did in years past, by having its top-end Ryzen desktop CPUs max... Read more...
We can talk until we're blue in the face about the actual effects of software piracy, but it's not hard to understand why companies like Electronic Arts and Nintendo get up in arms about it. Nintendo in particular has been highly... Read more...
Update: 3/6/25 - 5:24 PM: We have just received an official statement from representatives at AMD on this matter, and it appears there's more to this story for sure. We have left the entirety of our previous coverage in tact below... Read more...
The world's first "biological computer" has officially hit the market, marking what may actually be a significant breakthrough in AI technology. Developed by Australian company Cortical Labs, the CL1 fuses human brain cells with silicon... Read more...
It's pretty ironic, if you think about it. AMD makes desktop CPUs, then turns them into BGA chips for the high-end mobile market. Laptop vendors don't buy as many of those CPUs as AMD would like, and they start to filter into the market... Read more...
In what is a depressingly-rare show of pre-release transparency, AMD has posted a support article concerning UEFI support on its RDNA 4-based GPUs, including the soon-to-be-released Radeon RX 9070 series. The article is surprisingly wordy... Read more...
You've probably done it yourself: you need to know how hard a given application is hitting your CPU, so you pull up Windows' Task Manager to check the CPU utilization. For a casual inquiry, this is fine, but for anything approaching... Read more...
At MWC, Qualcomm announced that it is expanding its 5G portfolio with the Qualcomm X85 5G Modem-RF and the Dragonwing FWA Gen 4 Elite platform, which is the first major product under the company's new Dragonwing branding. While AI is... Read more...
Monster Hunter Wilds isn't perfect, but it is excellent—I spent about twelve hours playing it yesterday. It's a new main-line Monster Hunter game, with all that entails, including peak development expenditure from CAPCOM on one of its... Read more...
First ... Prev 4 5 6 7 8 Next