Misc
Samsung has been a leader in the solid state storage market for a number of years. Whether you were looking for affordable SATA-based offerings or high-performance NVMe gumsticks, Samsung usually has an answer. And we’re not just talking about internal drives either; Samsung has also released a number of excellent external storage devices, like the T3 and last year’s T5, for example. What Samsung hasn’t had was an ultra-high speed external solid state device that shed the limitations of legacy interfaces – until today, that is. Samsung’s latest storage product, the...
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It seems a little late in the game to be reviewing Arctic's Accelero Xtreme IV GPU cooler, so what gives? Well, I recently upgraded my ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition model, and while that is a solid GPU upgrade for sure, it is a downgrade acoustically and thermally. Some people prefer the blower style cooler that ships on Founders Editions cards. I am not one of them. My main system sits in an open air Thermaltake Core P5 chassis, so there really is not a benefit to expelling hot hair out of the rear of the case, as Founders...
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Corsair's line-ups of K70 and Strafe mechanical gaming keyboards have been on the market now for quite some time. The Strafe is a more streamlined speedster for performance freaks and the K70 a more full-featured deck with ultra-premium build quality. We recently looked at Corsair's K70 Lux RGB in a 5-way round-up and the board walked away with our Editor's Choice award. Today, fresh off its Computex 2018 unveil, Corsair returns to our lab with buffed-up and decked-out versions of the K70 and Strafe, both sporting some disco RGB goodness, but now in their MK.2 (pronounced Mark 2) incarnations,...
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Amazon and Google are massive tech giants, for vastly different reasons. Google is the leading search engine provider, a smartphone platform juggernaut, and huge advertising machine, while Amazon is the largest e-tailer in the world and a cloud services powerhouse, though Google is coming up strong. Though they are different animals, these two companies find themselves locked in heated battle with their respective Google Home and Amazon Echo devices; a battle for AI dominance that could determine who will ultimately control a good chunk of the Smart Home market. The Smart Home market has massive...
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EVGA is best known for its graphics cards, and for good reason. EVGA is the number one NVIDIA authorized board partner in the U.S. and they have been for a long time. Like many brands in the PC enthusiast space, however, EVGA has started to branch out beyond just graphics cards and today they have a wide range of items in their product stack, ranging from motherboards and notebooks to peripherals and power supplies. Despite being in the peripherals game for a relatively short while, however, EVGA already has five gaming mice in the market, and it just introduced its first mechanical keyboard, the...
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The Commodore 64 holds a Guinness World record as the highest-selling single computer model of all time. After its initial release in August 1982, the C64 went on to sell millions of units – outselling all other popular 8-bit machines at the time, including the Apple II. For many long-time technology geeks, including me, the Commodore 64 was the first personal computer they ever owned. So, it’s no surprise that all these years later, the machine still hold a special place in our hearts. It is with that in mind, along with knowing how popular our Building An Amiga Emulator article was,...
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Today's system builders have more choices than ever before, beyond just internal hardware component selection. To see just how far things have come, you need look no further than the PC chassis market. There are so many options to chose from that, as a consumer, you can be selective about virtually any aspect of the design, from the type of RGB fans it comes with, to the implementation of tempered glass panels. This wasn't always the case in other segments, like the peripherals market for example, but over the last few years many popular brands have been leading the way and now peripherals, such...
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We have been experimenting with AMD’s Ryzen 5 processors here at HotHardware and while they have already proven to be a great value, we wanted to explore some different mainstream cooling options to see what kind of additional goodness we could extract from the processors. All-in-one liquid coolers are not quite as nice looking or as potentially high-performance as a custom built system that can employ hard line tubing and multi-waterblock arrangements, but they are still a step up from many air coolers and don’t require the same hefty investment. This makes all-in-one liquid coolers...
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Trackballs were all the rage a couple of decades back, when mice weren’t nearly as accurate, maintenance-free, or ergonomic as today’s offerings. Logitech was a leader in the space back then, and had a handful of popular trackball designs in its line-up, including – my favorite -- the Trackman Marble, but over time their popularity waned and mice got infinitely better. Although trackballs never really went away completely, Logitech made some noise recently with the introduction of the MX Ergo. The new Logitech MX Ergo is a modern trackball with increased accuracy, a comfortable design, and lag-free...
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For long-time enthusiasts that were around during the ascent of personal computers, the Commodore Amiga remains one of the most beloved systems of all time. When it was originally released back in the mid-80’s, the Amiga could do things that no other consumer-class computer could – its graphics, sound, and multi-tasking capabilities were simply unmatched at the time. That initial sense of amazement at the Amiga’s unique capabilities is one of the reasons why the platform continues to have rabid fans some 30+ years later and why a small group of skilled enthusiasts have designed and manufactured...
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Adjustable sit-stand desks are all the rage these days, after some smart person in the healthcare field put two and two together to figure out that planting your backside in an office chair all day long is really not good for you, and in more ways than one. Adjustable height desks come generally in two variants, stand-alone models like the Autonomous Smart Desk 2 you see above and desktop risers that essentially convert a standard desk to sit-stand positioning capability. Pricing for the various model types out there range from the cheesy $149 versions, to north of $500 or so for premium, motorized...
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Dave Haynie, one of the chief engineers that worked on the Amiga back in its heyday, put it best when he said, “Amiga users make Macintosh users look like PC users”, in the Viva Amiga documentary that was released early this year. Those of us that were around when the Amiga initially debuted knew Commodore had something special on its hands. At the time of its launch, the Amiga was the most advanced personal computer money could buy – bar none. It offered multimedia features that were unmatched for many years, it was affordably priced (relatively speaking), and was the first personal computer with...
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Last year, we took a look at an early version of Hykso’s Punch Trackers. Just in case you missed our initial coverage, Hykso’s wearable devices are meant to be worn under the wraps or wrist tape of boxers, martial artists, or anyone else that trains in combat sports – whether professionally or for fitness – and are designed to track a variety of punch types. On some levels, you can think of Hykso’s Punch Trackers like a "FitBit for combat sports," but the data provided by the devices and their associated mobile app is laser-focused and specialized. The early version of the trackers we looked at...
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Updated: 2/10/2017 - Since we initially launched this article, Netgear assisted with resolving a technical issue we were experiencing with 802.11ad connectivity and performance with the Nighthawk X10 router we had in for testing. As such, we have updated this review with both fresh 60GHz 802.11ad performance data, and we've upgraded our rating to HotHardware Recommended in the conclusion as well. We’ve reviewed all kinds of 802.11 routers here at Hothardware, including audacious tri-band routers that look like spaceships, and more pedestrian dual-band routers too. The recently released Netgear...
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