Zak Killian
Recent posts
Can you believe that the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D have already been out a month? Yes, indeed—the launch date for the eight-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, arguably the most exciting member of its family, is just nine days away now. What...
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If you're trying to game on a budget, Microsoft's Game Pass is a pretty decent deal. As long as you stay subscribed at $10 a month, you get to play quite a few PC games to your heart's content, and they're not just Microsoft's own games...
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Four days ago, we reported on a leak revealing quite a few key details about Intel's upcoming ultra-high-end server platform for Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest-family Xeon processors. Well, today, we've got what purports to be a pile of...
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Real-time ray-traced graphics were big buzz around the time that Elden Ring was first announced. Close to the release, Bandai-Namco, the game's publisher, also announced that the developer FromSoftware would be releasing a patch for its magnum opus that adds ray-traced effects. Well, that...
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ChatGPT is undeniably fun to mess with. It's fascinating to have a conversation with a machine, especially when that machine is practically omniscient and can offer up interesting tidbits of information about whatever topic. That function...
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At this stage, we probably don't need to tell an audience of technology enthusiasts that Unreal Engine is capable of mind-blowing photorealistic visuals. Indeed, that's really not even what Epic's demo at GDC was all about. Unreal Engine...
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There's two paths that live service games tend to take. Sometimes, they are overloaded with microtransactions, burdened with bugs, or just plain bad, and in that case, they tend to die out rather quickly. Other times, a company hits an...
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Counter-Strike is one of the oldest and most-respected names in online FPS gaming. You may think of it as a thing of the past, yet Counter-Strike is anything but that. With hundreds of thousands of players on at any given time, it remains...
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If you're in the know, you 8BitDo. That's not a slogan the company uses, but it probably should be, because 8BitDo has been quietly producing some of the best game controllers ever made for years now. If you're an avid buyer of 8BitDo...
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It's kind of ironic, but one of the main drivers of improved computer performance is in fact... improved computer performance. To design ever-faster chips, you need ever-faster chips, and that's true at several layers of the processor...
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AMD's Phoenix APUs were just announced back at CES, and will be finding their way into laptops any day now. These processors come in a variety of configurations but they can sport up to eight Zen 4 cores and up to twelve RDNA 3 compute...
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PCIe 5.0 SSDs are about to be out, and they're super-fast, with peak transfer rates up over 12 GB/second. Anything moving data around that quickly is going to use some significant power to do it, and as you are likely already aware if you...
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AMD's Zen 4 processors can display remarkable performance-per-watt once they've been manually tuned, or if you enable ECO mode in the system setup. You lose some multi-core performance, but the power consumption of the chip drops...
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It's hard to believe it, but it's already been more than two years since the launch of the PlayStation 5. That system released on November 12th, 2020—not that anyone could find one at that time. This November will mark the 3rd year since...
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It's probably fair to say that a good number of PC enthusiasts have pirated a copy of Windows once upon a time. It's also probably fair to say that a certain number of folks have had the thought "I'll go legit and buy my Windows this...
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That's right friends, fanboys, and fiends—it's time for another quarterly Steam sale, with more slashed prices on PC games than you can shake a stick at. This year's Spring Sale brings deep discounts on some seriously solid games, as well...
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Every new generation of smartphones has some sort of fancy gimmick as a selling point, and one of the key features of Samsung's Galaxy S22 Ultra was "Space Zoom". (It's also present on the Galaxy S23.) The idea is that the phone has a 100x...
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By now, you've probably read no end of articles about GPT-3 and its derivative model, ChatGPT. You may even have played with the AI yourself, whether using the OpenAI website directly, using Bing's new chat feature, or some other...
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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a smash hit for Nintendo, and one of the most widely-acclaimed video games of all time. Naturally, the sequel—known as Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom—is hotly-anticipated, but that didn't...
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The Nintendo Switch is a handheld game console that uses hardware already a year old when it released back in 2017. Considering all that, it should be trivial to emulate on modern PCs, right? Well... no, actually. Not only is emulation...
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Intel's Arc GPUs launched in a bit of a rough state, and early reviews were critical of both the cards' inconsistent performance and relatively high power consumption. However, Intel's been working hard to reverse those fortunes in its...
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If you're building or buying a new gaming PC, you really can't go wrong with almost any current-generation Intel or AMD CPU. All of the mainstream desktop processors from either company offer fantastic gaming performance, even stretching...
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