PC Components, Peripherals And Gadget Reviews And News
Dig into our deep-dive product reviews and news of PC components from processors, to motherboards, graphics cards (GPUs), sound cards, and storage, along with other gadgets and peripherals that complete the computing experience. Whether you're a DIY PC enthusiast builder or just looking to read-up on what should be inside or connected to your next pre-built PC, here's where you'll find all the nuts and bolts sorted on what makes modern computer systems tick, as well some of the best user interface devices to go with them.
AMD just launched its next-generation EPYC server processors, codenamed Milan, based on the company’s leading Zen 3 microarchitecture. The new EPYC 7003 series is an important milestone for AMD. The company has made significant in-roads in servers and data centers in recent years, and the arrival of the EPYC 7003 series brings with it...
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Although the company just recently fleshed out its flagship line of PCIe Gen 4 NVMe solid state drives with the 2TB SSD 980 Pro, Samsung is already back at it, with yet another family of drives that target a different market segment. While the Samsung SSD 980 Pro is intended for workstations types, performance enthusiasts and gamers that crave...
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The Episode 3 livestream of AMD’s “Where Gaming Begins” series just ended, during which the company revealed some feature updates coming to its Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs and officially announced the latest member of its RDNA2-based Radeon RX 6000 family, the forthcoming Radeon RX 6700 XT. But before we dive into the Radeon...
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Intel is releasing a new family of solid state drives today, targeting mainstream users and everyday computing tasks. The new Intel SSD 670p series leverages the company’s latest 144-layer QLC 3D NAND flash memory technology, with an improved dynamic SLC caching algo and updated PCIe Gen 3 controller. Unlike some of the more recent ultra-high-end...
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NVIDIA is launching its latest Ampere-based GPU today, targeting the sweet-spot of the PC gaming market, the GeForce RTX 3060. The GeForce RTX 3060 was announced post-CES 2021, all the way back in mid-January, but cards are going on sale today. In addition to the relatively early initial reveal, NVIDIA is doing a few...
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In September of last year, the initial salvo of Samsung SSD 980 Pro drives was launched. At the time, Samsung SSD 980 Pro PCIe 4 NVMe drives in capacities of 250GB on up to 1TB were made available, but a 2TB drive had been announced and was on the roadmap as well. It took a bit of time for Samsung to make the 2TB...
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ADATA has been consistently expanding its line-up of XPG, or Xtreme Performance Gaming branded hardware, targeting PC enthusiasts and gamers. The XPG family now consists of everything from micoSDXC cards all the way on up to full gaming systems and notebooks. XPG's SSDs (Solid State Drives), however, are arguably...
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Overclocking a CPU used to be a pretty simple process: change a bus speed or a multiplier, set an appropriate voltage, and voila: your Celeron 300A was running at 450 MHz, or your 600 MHz Duron was knocking on the 1 GHz barrier. These days with the advent of dynamic boost speeds and optimized frequency and voltage curves, processors intelligently...
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While Creative Labs has expanded its product offerings into other arenas, the company has never waivered from its core competency: PC and home audio. The Sound Blaster maker has almost always offered speaker systems to pump out the audio from our favorite PC and console games. Today, that tradition lives on with...
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NVIDIA unveiled its Ampere-based RTX 30 series mobile GPUs at a special GeForce Event during this year's virtual CES 2021 festivities. A wide range of notebook design wins were also showed off at various events, spanning a variety of form factors. With the GeForce RTX 30 series, NVIDIA is targeting high-performance gaming notebooks in...
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During her CES2021 keynote address, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, along with a handful of partners, revealed the AMD Ryzen 5000 series mobile processors. At that event, the overall line-up and a few details were disclosed, and over the course of CES many design wins were announced by multiple OEMs as well. Shortly thereafter though, AMD hosted a deep-dive...
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Samsung is expanding their line-up of SATA-based solid state drives, with a new series of products designed to balance performance and capacity. A few months back, the company launched the SSD 870 QVO series of drives, based on QLC, or quad-level cell, V-NAND. These new Samsung drives launching today – the Samsung SSD 870 EVO series...
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AMD CEO Dr. Lisa kicked off the company’s highly-anticipated CES 2021 keynote with some discussion about the importance of high-performance computing and the gaming industry in general. She talked about the latest AMD-powered game consoles and the recent launch of the Radeon RX 6000 series, otherwise known as “Big...
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At its virtual CES 2021 event today, Intel’s Executive Vice President Gregory Bryant, along with a host of additional executives, engineers, and partners, unveiled an array of new processors and technologies targeting virtually every market, from affordable Chromebooks, to enthusiast-class gaming laptops, and high-end...
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Spinning hard disks are completely out for just about all but the very cheapest of systems. Solid state drives like the WD Blue SN550 we'll be evaluating in this article are here to stay, and continue to make their way into lower-priced, ever more affordable notebooks and desktops. That's no doubt due to the fact that these drives' asking...
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Despite the ongoing availability woes for current-generation GPUs, NVIDIA’s board partners continue to march forward with custom GeForce RTX 30-series designs, that are near complete departures from Founders Edition models. Case in point, the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 SUPRIM X we’ll be showing you here today. Although it is built around...
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Cyberpunk 2077 has been one of the most hotly-anticipated titles in recent memory. Expectations were so high for this title that it's quite possible that CD Projekt Red could never live up to them. After numerous delays, however, Cyberpunk 2077 launched on December 10 to a mix of high praise and mild disappointment from many reviewers. The...
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There was little question, when we took a deep dive look at AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X in our launch day review, we came away thoroughly impressed. Not only did AMD deliver on its promise of a significant performance lift in many areas, versus its previous gen Ryzen 3000 series, but we also realized better...
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A couple of weeks back, we were able to show you AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT in action, across an array of games and applications, in two different systems, with and without Smart Access Memory enabled. In that piece, we came to the conclusion that AMD’s latest high-end gaming GPUs are...
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NVIDIA is bolstering its line-up of Ampere-based GPUs today with a new addition to the GeForce RTX 30 series, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. As its name suggests, the new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti supplants the previous-gen, Turing-based GeForce RTX 2060 / RTX 2060 Super and slots-in just behind the recently-released GeForce RTX 3070, which we recently...
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Welcome to HotHardware's PC Component Buyer's Guide, where we help prospective DIY system builders pick out just the right collection of components to build the rigs of their dreams -- or at least the rig which makes the best use of your budget. We've picked out the best bang for the buck in processors, graphics...
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About two years ago, NVIDIA started talking about a shader rendering method that applied varying levels of quality to different objects in the game world. That method was called Variable Rate Shading, or VRS. When applied skillfully and artfully in different areas of a scene that are less prominent in the gamer's...
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