Zak Killian
Recent posts
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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Folks who follow technology news—probably you, if you're reading this—will no doubt be aware that the United States' federal government has allocated some $52 billion to promote microprocessor manufacturing inside the country. This money...
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Until very recently, DDR5 DIMMs came in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB capacities—at least as long as we're talking about the kind of unbuffered memory you'll find in most non-server PCs. You may have heard that larger 24GB and 48GB capacities are...
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Hogwarts Legacy launched in a reasonably decent state—ray-tracing performance problems aside. The game was fully completable and had no common crash or progression-stop bugs, which is sadly above the bar for a new AAA title these days...
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Modern PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 SSDs get pretty warm because the powerful SSD controllers make a lot of heat, like any >1GHz processor. If you expand your PlayStation 5's internal storage with a fast PCIe 4.0 SSD like Sony recommends, the system...
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Graphics drivers are a critical component of a gaming PC, but they're also ludicrously complex pieces of software in their own right. Sometimes things go wrong, as they did this weekend with NVIDIA's GeForce driver version 531.18. This...
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Whatever your feelings on J.K. Rowling or the Harry Potter franchise, it's impossible to deny that Hogwarts Legacy has been a massive, smash hit. That's without even launching on the previous-generation consoles, something that a...
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Intel's Arc graphics cards use a variant of the company's "Xe" graphics architecture, as do all of the blue team's recent integrated GPUs. The first-generation Xe had many variations for different applications, but the second-generation...
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Most of the details of the design and fabrication of microprocessors are not public. Major sources of information on these components are actually various analyses performed by enthusiasts using the detailed die shots released by Intel...
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Throughout the end of last year and the beginning of this year, Intel finally released its full line of data center-focused Arctic Sound and Ponte Vecchio GPUs, as well as its Sapphire Rapids CPUs. These chips have been a long time coming...
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Just in case you aren't aware dear reader, Grand Theft Auto is kind of a cultural phenomenon. The fifth game, particularly its internet component (known simply as "GTA Online"), is by some measures the most successful video game of all...
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It doesn't pull the numbers that console-focused titles like Call of Duty can, but Counter-Strike is one of the most popular PC games of all time. It remains so to this day, consistently sitting near the top of the Steam player count...
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You may have heard that the PC market is slow right now, with sales at their lowest in years. Perhaps as an attempt to counter this trend, prices on AMD's CPUs have never been lower, and the company's also running a promotion on most of...
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Back in the day, liquid cooling meant "custom loop," but you only needed to worry about the two or three processors at the most. These days, when you're doing custom-loop liquid-cooling, you need to cool almost every major component on...
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Have you read our review of the Ryzen 9 7950X3D yet? If you have, or even if you haven't, you're probably already aware that it is either the fastest or second-fastest CPU on the planet in just about every game out there. In other words...
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This has been a pretty big year for game releases already and we're just now entering March. Besides Hogwarts Legacy, the long-anticipated Atomic Heart finally arrived, and we've also seen the release of Company of Heroes 3, Forspoken...
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Once upon a time chipset drivers were just as vital as graphics drivers. In fact, you'd usually install them first, immediately after setting up Windows itself. That practice has fallen by the wayside as more and more parts of the...
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The AMD faithful are liekly elated, as this coming Tuesday marks the official release of AMD's Ryzen 9 7000X3D processors. That's the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D and the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D, both equipped with 64MB of 3D V-Cache on top of...
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AI has been a ubiquitous buzzword for years, and it's everywhere. Mobile SoCs and desktop processors alike have been including AI acceleration for a couple of generations already, but what can an individual do, locally on their own device...
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Cheating in online games is an epidemic, and it's a big business, too. You've gotta be a pretty smart feller to make game cheats, but you don't have to be that clever to use them. Nothing lately has evinced that as well as this week's ban...
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When AMD first announced the Ryzen 7000 processors with 3D V-Cache, we noted that the boost clocks on the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D were the same as their non-X3D siblings. It turned out that this is possible because only one of...
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