Zak Killian
Recent posts
There's a long history of vendor-locked graphical techniques that only see implementation in a few games. Names like Quincunx and Truform (among many others) resonate in PC gamers' memories, and it sometimes inoculates us against...
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Publicity is a hell of a thing. By all the data we have, incidents of melting 12VHPWR connectors on GeForce RTX 4090s are vanishingly rare. Despite that, everyone knows exactly what Sasa Marinkovic (AMD's Senior Director of Gaming...
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There's been much ado in the DIY PC hardware space about the issue of the new ATX 3.0 and PCIe 5.0 12+4-pin peripheral power connector melting on GeForce RTX 4090 cards. There's a class-action lawsuit, AMD's managers are memeing on NVIDIA...
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While we tend to think of the computer industry as centered on Taiwan, the companies that do most of the R&D are all based in the US, including AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, IBM, Qualcomm, and others. China would like to have its own home-grown...
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Streets of Rage is a name that will make many Gen X and Millennial gamers turn misty-eyed. A trilogy of belt-scroller titles that released for Sega's 16-bit Genesis console (known as the "Mega Drive" internationally), they were regarded as...
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One of the noteworthy takeaways from AMD's announcement of the Navi 31-based Radeon RX 7900 XTX was its lower power spec (355W) relative to NVIDIA's power-thirsty GeForce RTX 4090. Of course, it's not expected to be as fast as NVIDIA's...
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Much has been written already, both here and elsewhere, about the issue of melting 12VHPWR connectors on GeForce RTX 4090 cards. If you're new to this topic, the shortest summary is that recent GeForce cards use a new type of auxiliary...
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We love to talk desktop hardware around here. Those are the high-powered parts, of course, with potent performance that puts up the big benchmark numbers. Even still, laptops make up a huge swath of the market, so we can't ignore those...
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The GeForce RTX 4080 is a powerful GPU. In our full review it was able to outpace every card from the previous-generation including the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, as well as every Radeon ever made. However, AMD has its own new parts on the way...
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The GeForce RTX 4090 has gotten a lot of bad press since its launch due to the 12VHPWR adapters and native cables driving the card overheating and melting. In reality, this problem seems to have been confined to a fairly small fraction of...
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There's been a ton of speculation over the last couple of years about a potential successor to the Nintendo Switch. To be clear, what developers have achieved on that machine is nothing short of astonishing considering that it was fairly...
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Throughout the period encompassing the Radeon HD 7000 series, the Radeon Rx 200 series, Rx 300 series, Polaris, Fury, and Vega, AMD struggled with efficiency. Its GPUs were powerful, and had brute-force might to spare, but that didn't always translate into the top-shelf gaming performance the...
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Intel's desktop Raptor Lake CPUs offer competitive-or-better performance compared to AMD's Ryzen 7000 family, and they do it at comparable-or-lower prices, too. The power usage is even higher than last-generation though, and higher than...
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It seems like every other day there's a news story telling you to be afraid of this or that commonplace thing, right? Well relax, because this isn't one of those stories, exactly. No one's infecting your computer when you view a PNG image. However, executable code hidden in PNG images is a key...
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The GeForce RTX 4090 is the fastest GPU around; of that, there's no question. However, Galax wants to lay to rest the idea that anyone's GeForce is faster than the RTX 4090 HOF. Galax hasn't told us that, but it's clear to see from the way...
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NVIDIA's recent high-end graphics cards from the GeForce RTX 3000 and 4000 series use a new 12 or 16-pin connector that is known as 12VHPWR. The implementation of the connector on the RTX 3000 cards was fine, but since the release of the...
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When you buy a new game console, you expect improved graphics and performance over the last generation, right? You don't want your current-generation game console to have performance problems. The Xbox Series S may be a step down from its...
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Lately, Intel faces stiff competition in what have traditionally been its strongest markets: data center and the enterprise. NVIDIA muscled in on Intel's territory a long time ago with its powerful GPU compute accelerators, but now the...
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Microsoft teased the next version of DirectStorage technology back in mid-October, saying that it was "coming soon." Well, the developers weren't kidding around, because it's barely three weeks later and DirectStorage 1.1 is now available...
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Right now, all of the fastest microprocessors in the world are made in one place: Taiwan. That country's Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has the most advanced fabrication technology on the planet. As as result, companies...
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AMD's Q3 earnings statement confirmed what had been rumored in the industry for weeks: sales of Zen 4 CPUs have been slow, or at least, slower than AMD would have liked. There's probably a few reasons for this, but the biggest one is...
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Before AMD announced its RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards on Thursday, wild rumors were flying from regularly-reliable leakers about their clock rates. Numbers as high as 4 GHz were bandied about. The final parts are...
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