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.
Computex might be a virtual online-only show this year, but you should expect some big announcements from many of the heavy hitters in tech. The virtual show kicks off May 31 at 7:30 AM local time in Taipei, which translates to 10:30 PM Eastern on Sunday the 30th in the U.S. While there will undoubtedly be a ton of...
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A number of today’s best performing, PCIe Gen 4 solid state drives are built around Phison’s E18 controller. If you remember, way back when the AMD Ryzen 3000 series debuted, a number of SSD providers also launched Phison PS5016-E16 based drives alongside the processors to highlight some of the benefits of the platform's PCI Express...
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Intel first showed off its Optane Memory H20 solid state drive late last year. Just in case you missed the initial news, Optane Memory H20 is the follow-up to 2019’s Optane Memory H10, which combines 3D Xpoint-based Optane Memory technology and QLC (quad-level cell) 3D NAND flash on a single M.2 storage device...
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Last week, Intel officially unveiled its Tiger Lake-H45 based H-Series 11th Gen Core processor line-up, for high-performance gaming laptops and mobile workstations. The flagship consumer processor in the family is the Core i9-11980HK. The Core i9-11980HK is an 8-core / 16-thread processor, with a base clock of 2.6GHz...
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Back in The Day, figuring out which PC processor was better for gaming was a matter of architecture and clock speed. More megahertz on a fast CPU architecture generally also meant that the CPU would be better for a whole host of tasks, in addition to games, versus a lower clocked chip. An Intel Pentium II 450 MHz was faster than a Pentium...
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Over the last few years, AMD has made big changes to its Radeon Software control panel on an almost yearly cadence. This time around it's been a little longer than that, as those updates typically launch around the end of the year, though this specific roll-out was extended to April. What has AMD's Radeon team been up...
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PowerColor has historically released its high-end, customized Red Devil-branded Radeons in lock-step with AMD. AMD launches a new GPU with one set of specifications, and a short time later, board partners like PowerColor come through with tweaked versions injected with their own special sauce. On the surface...
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NVIDIA’s board partners have released a wide array of GeForce RTX 30 series cards, with various form factors, aesthetics and differentiating features. Some use higher frequencies to entice gamers and enthusiasts, while others are crammed with flashy lighting or over-the-top cooler designs. The Colorful iGame...
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Intel is launching its first server products built using its advanced 10nm manufacturing process today: the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable family of processors. 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are based on the Ice Lake-SP microarchitecture, which incorporates a number of new features and enhancements. For example, core counts...
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After disclosing some architecture details a few months back, and revealing the initial line-up of Rocket Lake-S based 11th Gen processors a few weeks ago, Intel is officially launching its latest family of mainstream desktop CPUs today, along with some new chipsets to enable all of their features in motherboard...
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Earlier this month, AMD took the wraps off the latest addition to its RDNA 2-based family of Radeons, the Radeon RX 6700 XT. During the livestreamed event, AMD disclosed that it was targeting high-framerate 1440p gaming with the Radeon RX 6700 XT, and that it would employ a new release strategy in an effort to get as many cards into gamers’...
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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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