Editor profile

Zak Killian

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Ever since playing Joust on his family's Atari 800XL 8-bit computer as a youth, Zak has been hooked on PC and console games. His passion for gaming as a kid led to an interest in PCs as a teenager, which ended up with him founding his own PC repair shop in the year 2000. Decades later, he's still building, still gaming, and still arguing on the internet with any opinion anyone has. A former writer of news and reviews for The Tech Report, Zak is a modern-day Renaissance man who may not be an expert on anything, but knows just a little about nearly everything.

Recent posts

Ever since the first rumors started swirling about AMD using a chiplet-based design for its GPUs (just as it had done for its Ryzen processors), knowledgeable folks expressed concern about exactly what that would mean for said GPUs'... Read more...
We're fans of GPD around here. The Shenzen-based startup has been successfully selling super-portable micro-PCs running full-fat Windows for half a decade now, and its latest model, the Win Max 2, looks to be its most powerful yet—even if... Read more...
While CPU performance typically grows in terms of percentage points with each successive generation, GPU performance increases tend to come in the form of whole-number multipliers. There's a few reasons for this, but the biggest one is... Read more...
Intel's expected to follow up its extant 12th-generation Core processors (codenamed "Alder Lake") with the 13th-generation chips known as "Raptor Lake." Those CPUs, which will feature extra cache, P-core revisions, additional E-cores, and... Read more...
Epic Games' Unreal Engine has been evolving ever since its first appearance as the engine powering its namesake, the original Unreal, in 1998. The second iteration wowed us with its wide-open landscapes, the third version came in with... Read more...
We're all spoiled these days. Indeed, in 2022, even low-end smartphones can browse most websites with relative responsiveness. The dark times when clicking a web link could hang up your system for seconds are well and truly done with... Read more...
Everyone's been waiting with great trepidation for the arrival of the first Arc desktop graphics cards in the US. That "everyone" includes enthusiasts that want cheap GPUs, reviewers (like us!) who want to put them through their paces, and... Read more...
Typically when introducing a new series of CPUs, along with their accompanying platform, Intel will publish a platform overview diagram (or the very similar "Chipset Block Diagram") that lays out all of the links between the processor... Read more...
Have you ever played a FromSoftware game? The legendary developer's list of beloved titles includes such storied names as King's Field, Armored Core, and of course, the progenitor of the "Soulsborne" genre, Demon's Souls. That's to say... Read more...
If you're not a hardcore racing fan, you may not have been aware that this year's F1 cars have seen significant redesigns to comply with the latest regulations for the racing class. Indeed, every team's cars look and perform quite... Read more...
Loyal HotHardware readers, you know all about RISC-V, right? Well, just in case you don't, a brief refresher is in order. RISC-V is an instruction set architecture like ARM or x86, but unlike those, it's completely free and open-source... Read more...
A whole new generation of new PC hardware is just around the corner. We've got new CPUs and GPUs on the way very soon from both AMD and Intel, as well as NVIDIA's purportedly-power-thirsty next GPU generation. For the more frugal folks in... Read more...
After all the rumors about insane power draw (and thus insane heat output) for the flagship model of the upcoming family of GeForce GPUs, most folks have been expecting some kind of insane, exotic cooling system for the cards. That may... Read more...
The AM4 platform's exceptional longevity has earned it immense and continuous praise from the enthusiast community, but now its reign is over and it's time to move on to Socket AM5, right? Well, maybe not quite yet. Regular readers will... Read more...
We're fans of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D around here. Sure, it's pricey for what it is; that much is inarguable. Still, the fact that you can slap a brand-new processor into a two- or three-year-old motherboard and immediately get chart-topping... Read more...
You're tired of hearing it, we're tired of saying it; yes, Intel's Arc graphics are real and out there. They haven't hit store shelves in the US yet, but they're on the way—probably as we write this. Extant hardware needs available... Read more...
As gamers and creators are both well aware, AMD's CPUs have been at-least competitive for a few years now, and for a while, roundly superior—at least, depending on your workload. However, there's been one sticking point for several years... Read more...
Synthetic benchmarks get a bad rap. Sure, they're not always representative of real application performance -- that much is inarguable. They're still extremely useful, though. Not only can they help developers pinpoint performance problems... Read more...
If you have a Windows 10 or 11 machine with an Intel Core CPU from the 8th-through-11th generations, you definitely want to read this post. As it happens, Windows Defender's real-time protection on these machines is sapping even more... Read more...
Regular HH readers may recall that Saturday before last, we reported on a rumor regarding the existence of processors based on Zen 4 CPU cores that slot into extant AM4 motherboards. Frequent leaker Greymon55 suggested that such a thing is... Read more...
If that headline leaves you wondering what Phoenix and Dragon Range are, let's get you up to speed first. Phoenix, apparently also known as Phoenix Point (not to be confused with the game of the same name), is the codename for AMD's future... Read more...
It wasn't all that long ago that the majority of consumer CPUs came with regular old thermal paste under their heatspreaders. It's not just one vendor that did this, either; both AMD and Intel have shipped numerous microprocessors with... Read more...
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