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.
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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AMD introduced Precision Boost Overdrive, or PBO, a couple of years back to make extracting additional performance from its Ryzen processors, in systems with additional power and thermal headroom, as simple as a few clicks in Ryzen Master. And today, the company just updated the feature with a couple of new wrinkles...
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For the past few weeks, PC gamers have been eagerly anticipating the launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series, a.k.a. “Big Navi”. NVIDIA shook up the GPU market over the last few months with its Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30-series cards, which offer significantly more performance and value than their...
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AMD has a lot of to prove with its next-generation Radeon RX 6000 Series of high-end enthusiast graphics cards. NVIDIA has gone pretty much unchallenged in the high-end sector for the past two years; however, AMD is now looking to fight fire with fire and we've got the first pieces of hot hardware in our hands right...
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AMD made some bold claims when it unveiled the Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 series during its event early last month. Terms like “historic IPC uplift”, “fastest for gamers”, and “leading power efficiency” -- among a few other superlatives -- were bandied about with impunity. Over the course of the announcement,...
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Earlier this month, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su took to the stage and officially unveiled the company’s high-performance Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 series processors. Towards the end of that event, Dr. Su also snuck in a few juicy tid-bits of information regarding the company’s upcoming high performance RDNA 2-based Radeons...
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NVIDIA is expanding its line-up of Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series cards today, with the relatively affordable GeForce RTX 3070. Although the card was announced alongside the higher-end GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 during NVIDIA’s GeForce Event hosted by CEO Jensun Huang last month, and was originally due to...
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Earlier this year, Samsung unveiled the privacy-minded Portable SSD T7 Touch. This external USB-C storage device delivered high capacities up to 2TB and impressive read-write speeds over USB 3.1 Gen 2. Its headlining feature, however, was an integrated fingerprint reader to effortlessly unlock the drive’s AES...
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A few weeks back, we showed you NVIDIA’s Reviewer Toolkit, which gives publications like ours the ability to quantify GPU performance, power, and system latency in finer detail than we could before. One of the main components of the Reviewer Toolkit is a small device, dubbed LDAT, or the Latency Display Analysis...
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The AV1 video codec created by the Alliance for Open Media promises big gains in video quality for a given bitrate. The new codec also delivers an open, royalty-free standard that the consortium hopes to use to replace Motion Picture Entertainment Group's (MPEG) H.264 and Google's VP9. AOM says that AV1 can achieve...
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Intel's ultra-portable Tiger Lake aspirations got off to a great start and reset the playing field for laptop performance, once retail examples broke cover last week. We've all been interested in seeing what the company would do for an encore in segments where power budgets are higher. Current speculation is that...
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What happens when you take the burly GPU powering the GeForce RTX 3080, enable a couple thousand more cores, widen the memory interface, more than double the memory capacity, boost the texturing capabilities, and outfit the beast with a quiet, oversized, high-performance cooler? Well, we’ll tell you. You end up with the GeForce RTX 3090,...
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We first caught a glimpse of the Samsung SSD 980 Pro all the way back at CES in early January. The highly-anticipated drive was tucked away in a display case in Samsung’s massive booth on the show floor, but other than the branding, some early claimed performance data, and the fact that drive had a native PCIe 4.0 interface, details...
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CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most hotly-anticipated games of recent years. The Witcher developer's take on the dystopian Cyberpunk tabletop RPG series promises to merge tons of action, series lore, and amazing graphics into a huge open-world adventure through Night City. From the screenshots we've...
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Intel has been showcasing its forthcoming Tiger Lake mobile processor line-up since its public debut in January of this year at CES. However, more recently the company disclosed the architecture powering the 11th Gen Core series CPUs at its Architecture Day 2020 event and then followed-up quickly with a full product...
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The Ampere-based NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 review embargoes lifted yesterday, which immediately sent shockwaves through the gaming GPU market. Cards may not be in the hands of consumers just yet, but the witnessing the power and performance of the GeForce RTX 3080 alongside NVIDIA’s and AMD’s now...
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NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang officially unveiled the GeForce RTX 30 series based on the company’s Ampere architecture a couple of weeks back, to much fanfare. According to Jensen, who owns more spatulas than any human realistically should, the GeForce RTX 30 series represents the greatest generational leap in the company’s history....
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