Zak Killian
Recent posts
At today's Financial Analyst Day, AMD revealed several tidbits of information about its forthcoming technologies and products roadmap, and the company also confirmed a few details that rumor-mongers have been reporting for months now...
Read more...
Much has been written recently about the supposed death of the "High-End Desktop" (HEDT) concept. The OG "HEDT" systems back in the day were probably dual-socket Pentium Pro rigs used by hardcore enthusiasts who simply wanted the fastest...
Read more...
Back in the mid-90s, I recall sitting around with his friends at the school lunch table poring over glossy magazines like PC Gamer and the long-defunct PC Accelerator, as well as the immense, phone-book-like Computer Shopper. Sure, you had...
Read more...
HDMI and DisplayPort both keep increasing the peak transfer rates of data signals across their cables. This is necessary to support higher resolutions and refresh rates, as well as the extra signaling required for things like HDMI Deep...
Read more...
It's not really news to tell you that the next generation of graphics cards is going to be power-hungry. Truth be told, we don't have any official information on that point whatsoever, neither from AMD nor NVIDIA. The writing is on the...
Read more...
As an enthusiast, you have a great many concerns when moving to a new platform. One of those is what you'll need to do about cooling. Some hardcore types have hundreds of dollars invested in thermal solution systems and hardware, like...
Read more...
When we talk about modding third-person fantasy RPGs on the PC, you almost assuredly will start thinking about the Elder Scrolls series, and particularly Part V: Skyrim, with its enormous library of user mods. Those games have official...
Read more...
Even if you're not a big gamer, you are almost assuredly familiar with Street Fighter. As a franchise it's one of the most important in gaming history, as the legendary classic Street Fighter II essentially defined the entire genre of...
Read more...
Intel's Arc discrete GPUs are getting very real. They exist, and they're already out there in laptops—and not just in Korea, either. Heck, Dave even tested one just recently. Of course, all we've seen so far are the lower-end models, so...
Read more...
Intel's extant 12th-generation "Core" family processors, codenamed Alder Lake, are extremely fast CPUs by any standard. The single-threaded grunt of the "Golden Cove" P-cores combined with the multi-threaded capability offered by piling on...
Read more...
Around here, we're well-familiar with the Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards from AMD. We've reviewed most of them here at HotHardware, from the entry-level RX 6500 XT, the RX 6600 and 6600 XT, the RX 6700 XT, the recently introduced...
Read more...
Awhile back, around the release of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, Mr. Wallossek over at Igor's Lab stated that he expected the boards for the RTX 3090 Ti to be re-used for the next-generation GeForce RTX 4090. Other folks said that was not the...
Read more...
Remember Centaur Technology? No? Well what if I say "Cyrix"? Ah, that got your attention, didn't it? How about S3 Graphics? VIA Technologies—yeah, that "VIA"—owns the IP from both companies, and it has partnered with the Chinese government...
Read more...
Have you played the PC version of 2018's God of War? Despite the lack of a subtitle, it's the 4th main-series game in the franchise, and whatever your feelings on the title, its PC port was patiently crafted with love and care. It has...
Read more...
When we start talking about processor performance, it's important to understand that various applications have a variety of needs. It goes beyond simple "latency vs. throughput" considerations. There are many factors that go into actually...
Read more...
Hardware enthusiasts of a certain vintage will become misty-eyed and nostalgic when they hear the word "Mendocino." That might be exactly why AMD picked that codename for its own cut-down, low-cost Ryzen processors. Officially announced at...
Read more...
Supercomputing changed in the late 90s. It used to be that the biggest and fastest computers were all completely custom jobs, with proprietary everything and exotic hardware running esoteric architectures. In the late-90s, someone figured...
Read more...
On Socket AM4, it took a few generations for AMD to get its memory controller performance all maxed-out. The original Ryzen struggled with DDR4 memory faster than about 2667 MT/s, and it wasn't really until Zen 2 (the Ryzen 3000 series)...
Read more...
AMD's X570 chipset was stacked with potent I/O, but presented a significant annoyance for buyers: it required active cooling. That meant a return to the days of yore when the use of faster and faster memory meant that motherboard...
Read more...
There's a diverse cast of characters in the hardware enthusiast community, but among leakers, a few names seem to come up time and again. Some of those names are especially memorable, perhaps none moreso than "Enthusiastic Citizens Stroke...
Read more...
AMD's Socket AM4 has had a pretty good run. First released in 2017 alongside the company's then-new Ryzen processors, it's had nearly five years to host some of the fastest desktop chips on the market, giving Intel some much-needed...
Read more...
If you're familiar with M.2 SSDs, then you know that the standard sizes are named "M.2-2280", "M.2-2230", and so on. The last half of the number refers to the length of a drive's PCB, so an "M.2-2280" SSD is 80 millimeters long. M.2 SSDs...
Read more...
