Zak Killian
Recent posts
AMD's stacked 3D V-cache memory technology has been a big hit for PC gamers that are looking for the best performance out of their processors. By stacking on an extra 64MB of L3 cache, AMD is able to drastically reduce how often the CPU...
Read more...
Micron just put out a press release crowing about its latest achievement: 8-high HBM3 Gen2 memory stacks with up to 24GB of capacity and a 50% improvement in per-pin transfer rate over extant HBM3. That raises the data rate to 9.2 Gbps...
Read more...
Remember the GeForce GTX 280? The "GT200" GPU was a gigantic beast that maxed out the limits of the "Tesla" design it was based on. It boasted 32 ROPs and something almost unseen in graphics cards before or since: a 512-bit GDDR memory...
Read more...
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is one of a small handful of games that was originally developed exclusively for the PlayStation 5. Like Returnal, the game has found its way to the PC, and as you'd expect of a game targeting current-generation...
Read more...
Despite the vague name, Sony's Project Q is much more than just a concept or rumor at this point. The company has already announced its existence—if not much more than that—and we know it's on the way. It's a streaming handheld, intended...
Read more...
When you read that headline, you're probably thinking it's like Doom on the NES, or like running GTA V on the OG Game Boy—a trick, or "hack" that doesn't really use the original hardware. Well, you'd be mistaken. This is the real PC...
Read more...
Regular readers will recall that we wrote about Intel's X86S proposal awhile back. That was merely in the concept stages, but it's an idea to shed a lot of the legacy cruft from x86-compatible processors. It looks like Intel's engineers...
Read more...
AMD's Zen 4 processors are powerful; the Ryzen 9 7950X set new records in all of our productivity benchmarks when it came out. It "only" has 16 CPU cores, two memory channels, and 24 available PCIe lanes, though. What if you need some real...
Read more...
Memory overclocking performance has historically been a weak point of AMD's Ryzen processors. This is true even on Socket AM5; where Intel-based DDR5 rigs can hit 7000, 8000, all the way up to the world record of 11,202 MT/s, AMD systems...
Read more...
As a gamer, you sort-of get inured to loading time. It's largely unavoidable that games will, at some point, have periods where they have to say "please wait" and you can do little but twiddle your thumbs or maybe read some interesting...
Read more...
As far as current-generation GPUs go, AMD has largely ceded the mid-range part of the market—for this discussion, we're calling $350 to $600 "mid-range"—to competitor NVIDIA, at least for now. We could debate the reasons behind this, but...
Read more...
AMD and Intel have rather similar mobile strategies at this point. Both companies ship two types of laptop CPUs—larger chips, marked "HX", which are based on silicon that is also used for desktop CPUs, and then smaller processors that are...
Read more...
The folks over at at Chinese tech site BenchLife have posted up what they purport to be the key specifications for Intel's upcoming 14th-generation Raptor Lake Refresh processors. There aren't any surprises here, as this is fundamentally...
Read more...
Considering standard NVIDIA GeForce products, even the relatively-lowly GeForce RTX 3050 requires a power connector. The desktop GeForce RTX 3050, which was introduced in January of 2022, comes with 8GB of GDDR6 memory and has has a total...
Read more...
If you read this site, there's a solid chance that you have children. Do you pay attention to who they're talking to on the internet? Probably not as well as you should—like most parents. A fifteen-year-old girl was abducted from her home...
Read more...
If you're a dedicated fan of the original Portal, then chances are high that you're familiar with Portal: Prelude. For everyone else, Prelude was a popular fan-made mod that serves as an unofficial prequel to the megahit game that...
Read more...
Microsoft's purchase of Activision-Blizzard is practically a done deal at this point, and while it does result in the formation of a gargantuan gaming juggernaut the likes of which the world has hardly seen, there are some good things that...
Read more...
If you run Windows 11 on your gaming PC, you may have noticed weird performance issues in your keyboard & mouse games: a strange stuttering, particularly when you're moving the camera. That's not actually a performance issue, or at least...
Read more...
Baldur's Gate is a name that will make a bunch of old CRPG nerds get all wistful and misty-eyed. That game came out in 1998 on five CD-ROMs—with a sixth for the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion. It's based on the AD&D 2nd Edition rules...
Read more...
ASRock's Taichi series of motherboards have historically been fantastic pieces of hardware. Your author's main personal PC is based on an ASRock X570 Taichi motherboard, and it's been rock-solid and feature-filled through two different CPU...
Read more...
In comparison to the Golden Cove and Raptor Cove P-cores featured on Intel's recent desktop CPUs, the Gracemont E-cores are downright puny. However, they're not slow processors in comparison to "CPUs in general." In fact, the per-clock...
Read more...
We've still got our ASUS ROG Ally handheld system, and we're still using it on occasion to play a game while standing in the kitchen waiting on food or while covered up in cats on the living room floor. Something we've run into a couple of...
Read more...
