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.
Thanks to the emergence of NVIDIA’s G-SYNC, AMD’s FreeSync, i.e Adaptive Sync, 4K and various other display technologies, we’ve had the pleasure of evaluating a number of new monitors recently. One of our favorites from this past year was the ASUS ROG SWIFT PG278Q. Although it featured a resolution of “only” 2560x1440, and employed a TN panel,...
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The rapid pace of innovation in the solid state storage market shows no signs of letting up. In only a few generations, the industry bumped up against the limits of the legacy SATA interface, and began leveraging PCI Express for additional bandwidth with some passable, though somewhat clunky bridged solutions (in...
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When we took a look at the ASUS ROG SWIFT PG278Q G-SYNC monitor last year, we praised it for its sleek design, thin bezels, support of NVIDIA’s adaptive refresh rate technology, and high-quality TN panel—relatively speaking. TN (Twisted Nematic) panels generally have fast response times and can be more affordable, but at the expense of color...
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Wireless routers are going through somewhat of a renaissance right now, thanks to the arrival of the 802.11ac standard that is "three times as fast as wireless-N" and the proliferation of Internet-connected devices in our homes and pockets. Whereas before we merely had a handful of laptops and PCs connected to the...
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Intel Skylake processors have landed and motherboard manufacturers now have a wide range of boards sporting the necessary LGA 1151 socket and Z170 chipset to support the CPUs. Under the microscope today we have a high-end model from Gigabyte, the formidable Z170X-Gaming G1—a board that's virtually bursting at the...
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Although the $999 GeForce GTX Titan X is currently the King of the single-GPU hill, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti is the far more palatable option for most hardcore enthusiasts, due to its lower $649 starting price point. As we showed you in our initial coverage of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, however, the card is still a monster in terms of performance....
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Major players in the solid state storage business continue to innovate at a breakneck pace, especially now that the market has begun a shift away from the lowly SATA interface towards higher performing alternatives like PCI Express. For a while, manufacturers were bolting multiple SATA controllers together on single devices, in RAID configurations,...
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Today, Intel is taking the wraps off new NVMe PCI Express Solid State Drives, which are the first products with these high speed interfaces that the company has launched specifically for the enthusiast computing and workstation crowds. Historically, Intel's PCI Express-based offerings, like the SSD DC P3700 Series...
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NVIDIA’s power-efficient Maxwell GPU architecture is a perfect fit for the notebook market, as evidenced by the slew of strong products up and down the company’s mobile GPU line-up. But today NVIDIA is taking things is a slightly different direction at the ultra-high-end, and introducing a “new” mobile GPU, that’s not...
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Logitech's Performance MX Mouse series has long since been a favorite with enthusiasts and workstation professionals alike. Introduced to the market several years ago, it was high time Logitech revisited and refreshed their flagship general purpose mouse with the latest technologies and creature comforts. And boy what...
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Information about the AMD Radeon R9 Nano has been trickling out for months. Even before it was officially shown off at a swank event adjacent to E3 earlier this summer, some pictures and preliminary details regarding the R9 Nano leaked to the web. Since its official unveiling, we’ve also revealed a plethora of information about the latest...
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We already know a lot about the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960. In our launch coverage of the GPU we noted, “The GeForce GTX 960’s low-power characteristics, beefed up video engine, and overclocking headroom, in addition to support for technologies like NVIDIA’s Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI), Multi-Frame sampled AA (MFAA), Dynamic Super Resolution...
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Prices for solid state drives have fallen precipitously over the past year. This is especially true when shopping 2.5-inch form factor SATA SSDs, which is where some of the best values in solid state storage are currently found. That's certainly true of Micron's Crucial brand MX200 line, two of which we have in for...
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Although working at a publication like HotHardware often involves tight deadlines and countless hours of benchmarking, product photography, and writing, plenty of fun activities get thrown into the mix as well.
Case in point--I came home from the Intel Developers Forum this past week to a pair of boxes that were...
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NVIDIA is launching a new mainstream graphics cards today, the GeForce GTX 950, based on the company’s GM206 GPU. If you remember, the GM206 debuted on the GeForce GTX 960, which launched a few months back. As the new card’s name suggests though, the GM206 used on the GeForce GTX 950 isn’t quite as powerful as the one...
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To compliment today’s launch of the GeForce GTX 950, Nvidia is also announcing that they’ve taught their GeForce Experience software a few new tricks.
Two and a half years ago when Nvidia debuted GeForce Experience, it carried a simple tagline: “Console Simplicity, PC Performance.” In its infancy, it merely...
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Intel is still keeping a number of details regarding its complete Skylake microarchitecture and product line-up under wraps for a few more weeks, but at a public session at IDF, some of the key technologies and design updates introduced with Skylake were discussed.During the session, Julius Mandelblat, Senior Principal Engineer at Intel, talked...
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If you were planning a new PC build within the past several months, the phrase you might have heard over and over again was "wait for Skylake." Well, Skylake is here, and the new architecture comprises Intel's 6th generation Core line of CPUs. If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out our review of Intel's Core i7-6700K processor
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If you’re still rocking a 1TB or even 2TB hard drive on your PC, you’re probably starting to feel squeezed by that capacity ceiling sneaking closer and closer. Game download sizes are swelling with the addition of ever-increasing detail and 4K textures (Star Citizen is rumored to exceed 100GB) and content producers...
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Sometimes I wonder if we should cook up a TMZ-style column explicitly for reporting on all the drama that transpires between AMD and NVIDIA. Today we’ve witnessed one of the first shots fired from one of those camps, on what’s poised to be a very heated battleground over the next several years: DirectX 12.
Over the...
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If your kiddos are griping about how soon they start back to school (or, if you are heading that way yourself, begrudgingly), it's probably high time you took inventory. Is that aging netbook really going to get you through another semester? Is that Gingerbread handset up to the task of piloting you through yet another straight-A year? Take...
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If some recent rumors are to be believed, high-end gaming notebooks are poised to get a serious dose of graphics horsepower later this year when Nvidia's powerful GTX 990M hits the streets by September.
The origin of the rumor is Chinese manufacturer Hasee -- specifically their CEO Wu Haijun -- who revealed the...
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