Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
AMD's super CPUs with a little something extra are tantalizing treats for gamers, as the 3D V-Cache upgrade gives a titanic performance boost in games that have complex code which doesn't fit in standard CPU caches as easily. For that reason, many hardcore gamers are likely looking with lukewarm interest at the...
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There were a whole bunch of brand-new laptops at Computex sporting fresh AMD and Intel silicon, but of course, con-goers aren't supposed to put hands on them, run benchmarks, and upload them to the internet. So we didn't—but a few naughty attendees did, and today we're looking at one such "leak" from a user on...
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AMD's 3D V-Cache is a prime example of a technology with a singular purpose. It sounds obvious: to improve effective memory performance, triple the size of your L3 cache. There was a lot of very smart engineering that went into making that possible, and the results speak for themselves, with huge gains in gaming...
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Computex 2024 was full of big announcements, like new desktop chips from AMD, new laptop chips from Intel, new handhelds from nearly everyone, and all kinds of cool hardware. It might not be as exciting as new CPUs, but it'd be a shame to overlook G.SKILL's booth at the Taiwan trade show, because the memorable memory...
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Micron just announced that it is now sampling GDDR7 SDRAM to customers. This means that if you are building products that can make use of bleeding-edge memory technology, the fastest RAM in the world is available to you for testing and implementation. Micron says that the new products will become available in volume...
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3dfx Voodoo graphics processors never gained much traction in the laptop market in their day, because putting a power-thirsty discrete graphics processor—an idea that 3dfx arguably pioneered—into a laptop was seen as an absurd venture at the time. Despite that, 24 years after the launch of the 3dfx Voodoo4 4500...
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It was the case for a very long time that if you were buying a laptop, you were almost assuredly getting an Intel processor. Sure, AMD was around, and there have always been Macbooks, but both were niche products at opposite ends of the market for ages. For the overwhelming majority of users, only Intel offered the compelling combination of...
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It's midnight right now in your author's native Texas, but it's only 1:00 PM in Taiwan, and not long before, AMD wrapped up the opening keynote for this year's Computex Taipei. We've already covered numerous announcements made during the keynote, including the Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs, the Ryzen AI 300 mobile...
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The PC scene is really heating up. With Arm-based processors from Qualcomm and Apple offering stark competition against the conventional x86-64 world, and with AI being such a focus of so many players, we've got hybrid machines with three, four, or five different types of processors on board and all sorts of hardware...
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Whether you knew you needed it or not, locally-hosted AI is the next big thing in PCs, and AMD is at the forefront of this movement. The company was first to market with consumer processors sporting AI-accelerating Neural Processing Units (NPUs), and it's now on its third generation of processors for "AI PCs."
That's...
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It's a pretty solid bet that GTA VI is not coming to PC on release, but what about later? Neither Rockstar nor Take-Two has said anything on the topic. We could infer from history that the game will hit PC a year or more after the console launch, but if that's the case, Strauss Zelnick isn't saying so—but he also...
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Yesterday afternoon, Sony gave its latest "State of Play" presentation showcasing new and upcoming games for its platforms and from its studios. While the response to Sony's show has ranged from enthusiastic glee to outright outrage, we're going to sidestep all of that and just show you the stuff that was presented...
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For both hard-core PC gamers and hardware enthusiasts like your average HotHardware reader, it's no big deal to head into a game's settings and flip on whatever upscaling technology applies to their graphics card. Most people won't bother, though; if it isn't enabled by default, it isn't getting turned on. This isn't...
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Arm Holdings plc, or "arm", was once considered a vendor of processors designed for embedded and low-power systems, but those days are well past at this point. Having conquered mobile some time ago, processors based on Arm's Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) are now challenging the supremacy of the long-dominant...
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In the last seven years since the launch of Ryzen, AMD has completely reversed its fortunes, and now you'll find Ryzen processors in a huge number of hardware enthusiasts' systems. This is thanks to consistent generational improvements year after year, and the next generation of AMD's most successful CPU family is...
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Regular HotHardware readers will recall that we reported on the leaked naming scheme for AMD's next-generation Ryzen processors. At that time, it was thought that AMD's upcoming chips would be named something like "Ryzen AI 9 HX 170", but according to more recent leaks, it seems like AMD will instead go with "Ryzen AI...
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Considering how the company is arguably best known for its TVs and game systems these days, it's easy to forget that Sony made its mark in the field of audio. Indeed, the very name of the company comes partially from the Latin "sonus", meaning sound. Sony's running a big pile of Memorial Day deals right now, and if...
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Popular hardware monitoring and detection application HWinFO's latest release notes include a handful of very curious entries. As you'll have already guessed from the headline, they're the names of Intel's upcoming graphics products: Battlemage, Celestial, and Melville Sound. The addition of these names to HWiNFO...
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Are you a FromSoftware fanatic? Do you hang on the end of every word out of Hidetaka Miyazaki's mouth? If so, you won't want to miss the opportunity to snag a very exclusive Elden Ring-branded Arc GPU, courtesy of a collaboration with Chinese GPU vendor Gunnir. To celebrate the release of Elden Ring's major expansion...
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When building a new PC, it's very likely that your fancy motherboard will feature multiple M.2 sockets. It's almost guaranteed that some portion of these SSD slots will be connected directly to the CPU socket, while others will connect to the CPU via the motherboard chipset. This undoubtedly adds latency, hurting...
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AMD's Radeon Anti-Lag has been around since 2019; it's not a new technology. However, the company's attempt to deploy an upgraded version of the driver-based input lag reduction feature late last year was abortive, as users who employed it found that they quickly got banned off of their favorite competitive games. AMD...
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Laptop enthusiasts will certainly recall the "AMD Advantage" badge that certifies certain systems with both CPU and GPU supplied by AMD as meeting particular performance metrics and including specific AMD "Smart" technologies. The program technically extends to desktops, too, but it's much more common in laptops...
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