Zak Killian
Recent posts
There wasn't a lot of chatter about this when the reviews went up, but Intel's Arc graphics cards suffer from relatively high power draw for their performance. That's true not only under load, but also when idle. While even the monstrous...
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A lot of folks out there who don't bleed Radeon Red are eagerly awaiting the release of Intel's next-generation Raptor Lake processors to see how they compare against AMD's latest and greatest CPUs. We'll have those numbers for you soon™...
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The GeForce RTX 4090 is fast. Real fast. Fast enough that, even without DLSS upscaling—to say nothing of frame generation—you can play everything in 4K with the settings turned up to the ceiling. Despite that, it's not as fast as Ada could...
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The red team is readying a launch of some brand-new GPUs based on the fresh-out-the-oven RDNA 3 architecture. There's an event in about two weeks—on November 3rd—to announce the parts, which we expect to be broadly competitive with...
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AMD's Socket AM5 is a notable improvement over Socket AM4 in that it's impossible (or at least, much more difficult) to accidentally yank your CPU out of the socket when you're changing heatsinks. However, it does have its own share of...
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We recently reported that AMD's upcoming RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs (not to be confused with their older, GCN-based Radeon HD 7000-series GPUs) will support DisplayPort 2.1. That was curious, because at the time of writing...
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In case you missed it, Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs have launched! Well, "announced," anyway—and only six of them. The currently-announced 13th-generation CPUs from Intel are the "K" and "KF" models of the Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9...
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DirectStorage is one of those technologies that perpetually seems to be just on the horizon. Except, Microsoft actually launched DirectStorage back in March of this year. You haven't heard much about it because it simply hasn't seen...
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NVIDIA seemingly annoyed a few people with its decision to name two completely different Ada Lovelace graphics cards based on different GPUs both, "RTX 4080." The GeForce RTX 4080 16GB model uses the AD103 GPU and is significantly...
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There's not many negatives to say about the GeForce RTX 4090—pricing gripes aside—but there was one little detail we picked out as soon as NVIDIA put the part's specifications up on the product page: the lack of support for the latest...
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There are a lot of reasons to buy a GeForce RTX 4090. Beyond the massive raster performance and surprisingly good efficiency, there's also support for new technologies like DLSS 3 Frame Generation. There are also plenty of reasons not to...
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The GeForce RTX 4080 will come in two flavors when it launches next month. Given that the just-released RTX 4090 is too rich for the blood of most folks, everyone's been wondering how its smaller siblings compare. Well, the only people who...
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The GeForce RTX 4090 is a beast—check out our review—but it doesn't come cheap. Everyone loves to gawp at the top-end processors, but such mighty hardware is out of reach for the majority of enthusiasts. At least in the case of CPUs, you...
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Valve's Steam Deck is a killer little machine, for what it is and for what it costs. $399 gets you a quad-core Zen 2 PC with 16 GB of memory and a surprisingly-fast little integrated Radeon. The machine ships with the Linux-based SteamOS...
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When NVIDIA announced the Ada Lovelace-based GeForce RTX 4000 family, it was very clear about the fact that GeForce RTX 3000 cards based on its Ampere architecture aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Those cards are over two years old now...
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Everyone expects the GeForce RTX 4090 to be the fastest graphics card on the planet when it officially debuts this week. Of course, some folks won't be satisfied that easily. Like overclockers, who will propel the card to never-before-seen...
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Did you see our post a couple of days back about how you can now buy a Steam Deck straight from Valve without a reservation? (That's true, by the way; you can pick one up right from their store page and have it in a week or two.) In that...
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Graphics cards are usually the most power-thirsty component in a gaming system, and that's been the case for quite some time now. Things are approaching absurd levels, though. The GeForce RTX 4090 has a total board power spec of 450 watts...
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AMD's Ryzen 7000 series processors based on its Zen 4 architecture have a very unusual design to their integrated heatspreaders (IHS). If you're not careful, the notches on the sides of the IHS can trap thermal paste that squeezes over the...
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The Steam Deck has been a smash hit. It's not flawless, but it's a very good value considering its capabilities. If you're out of the loop, it's a portable PC that can play Steam games on top of doing all the other usual PC things, and...
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If you keep up with hardware news and reviews like ours, then you're no doubt already aware that AMD's Ryzen 7000-series processors run hot by design, and they can be pretty power-thirsty, too. In ages past, we'd fix a problem like this...
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AMD's Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 processors have just barely hit the market. Still, progress marches on, and software developers are looking ahead to AMD's next generation based on the Zen 5 architecture. Those chips won't be here for a year...
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