Zak Killian
Recent posts
In case you haven't heard, extreme overclockers have found frustration with Intel's latest LGA socket and it's ILM (Integrated Loading Mechanism) because it bends the CPUs ever-so-slightly, creating an air gap in the middle and preventing...
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Did you read our piece on AMD's announcements at Computex? There wasn't a ton of new information, but we did get some juicy details on the red team's upcoming Zen 4 processors and the chipsets that said processors will use, among other...
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Let's recap: it's 2022, and the vast majority of displays in the world refresh at 60Hz or some multiple thereof. Aside from some fancy gaming monitors—which usually have the option to refresh at 120Hz as well as their native 144Hz - 200Hz...
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AMD's original implementation of its FidelityFX Super Resolution technique, while good, was not quite on the same level as NVIDIA's DLSS solution in many circumstances. FSR has its advantages, to be clear—it's super-easy to implement and...
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Right now, NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is still the most effective method for taking low-resolution gameplay and turning it into high-resolution display output without impacting interactive performance. That may change...
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"Hot Chips" sounds like a nice side dish, but is in fact a technological symposium held yearly in Silicon Valley. It's a place for processor vendors to talk about their latest innovations, and while branded-and-shipping products generally...
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When we tested the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, it came out ahead of the Core i9-12900K in every gaming benchmark. You've probably already heard that story, but you may not have considered the implications: Intel's Alder Lake CPUs are...
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While it's early morning (or late night) here in the US, it's mid-afternoon in Taipei, and AMD just finished up its Computex 2022 keynote. Some of the talk in today's event was a recap of the company's recent releases, such as its Ryzen...
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The past week, Vancouver was the site of the 2022 Pwn2Own contest, a timed test of skills for hackers and cybersecurity experts. This year marks the 15th anniversary of the contest, and 2022's gathering didn't disappoint. 17 contestants...
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What do you think the biggest problem in CPU design is, right now? If you said "thermal density", you win today's prize. You don't actually get anything but our admiration and some well-deserved satisfaction, but that's its own reward...
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AMD's next-generation Ryzen processors, intended to launch later this year, will include a basic graphics processor so you don't have to add a discrete GPU. That doesn't help anyone building Ryzen right now, though. If you want Ryzen, you...
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Intel does just fine for itself in terms of gaming performance, but it's impossible to deny the effects that super-large caches have had on competitor AMD's processors. The red team's extant Zen 3 processors were running well behind...
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As far as we know for sure, Intel's Arc graphics parts based on the Alchemist architecture will come in fundamentally two forms—a smaller die with up to 128 EUs, and a bigger die with up to 512 EUs. Obviously, indivdual SKUs will vary on the number of active functional elements, but aside from...
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One of the greatest benefits of being a PC gamer is the unfettered backward compatibility. You can load up PC games from the 1980s and 1990s right now on the same machine you use to play Cyberpunk 2077, and they'll run just fine. Moreover...
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We've been hearing leaks and rumors about the next generation of Radeons since before the current generation even came out. Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between leaks and rumors, but as we get closer to the launch, information is...
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There are a great many factors that enthusiast gamers consider when selecting a graphics card for a gaming PC. Despite that, speaking from experience helping others with builds for decades, things like feature support, power efficiency...
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Everyone's waiting anxiously for the release of new Intel Arc graphics cards to see how they stack up to the competition from AMD and NVIDIA, but don't forget that Intel has already released a couple of Arc products. Laptops packing the...
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If you're not keeping up with AMD Ryzen codenames, the three upcoming chips to watch are Raphael, Dragon Range, and Phoenix. Raphael is the codename for desktop processors sporting Zen 4 cores, DDR5 memory support, and PCIe 5.0...
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One of the biggest differentiators of the Radeon RX 6000 family, and by extension of the RDNA 2 graphics architecture, is its reliance on a large local cache—known officially as "Infinity Cache"—to provide rapid framebuffer access. This helps to make up for the relatively slower...
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Nintendo sells consoles based on the strength of its game experiences rather than the power of their processors, but technology marches on regardless, and the venerable NVIDIA Tegra X1 is getting pretty long in the tooth. While its ARM...
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NVIDIA's relationship with the open-source community has historically been a tale of intense on-again-off-again interactions. In recent years, the company has embraced open source more closely as of late, but its past refusal to...
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It's been a long road for Intel's Arctic Sound. We first heard the codename whispered back in 2018. At one time, it was rumored to be the codename for datacenter GPUs based on "Xe-HP". As it turns out, that didn't come to fruition, and the...
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