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.
Last week, we paid a visit to ARM's headquarters in Cambridge, England and sat down with the company for multiple deep dives into its structure, processor architecture, and the future of its product design. The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in the past six years and ARM has had to evolve along...
Read more...
Ask any person who owns a dual-monitor setup and they'll all tell you they couldn't fathom going back to a single display. Maybe you're one of those people, and if so, you know exactly the feeling we're talking about. But what if you could enjoy all the benefits of a dual-monitor configuration from a single monitor? Would you be game to reclaiming...
Read more...
For Windows users of all kinds, the Windows "Blue" 8.1 update has been long-awaited. Those who've been using the base OS since launch have no doubt been anticipating some of the enhancements that are coming, while many others have been waiting patiently to see if the update manages to right enough wrongs to help persuade them to make...
Read more...
NVIDIA is launching yet another new member of the GeForce GTX 700 series today, the freshly minted GeForce GTX 760. Like the GeForce GTX 770 which arrived just a few weeks ago, the new GeForce GTX 760 is built around the company’s GK104 GPU—the very same chip used last year’s GeForce GTX 680 and a few other GTX 600 series...
Read more...
The SSD market is very competitive at the moment, to say the least, and though ADATA isn’t always necessarily front and center, the company has a handful of interesting product offerings, including the ADATA XPG SX900 we'll be showing you here. SSD manufacturers sometimes roll with proprietary controllers, such as OCZ and Samsung,...
Read more...
Odds are, if you’ve bought anything that uses flash memory in the last 20 years or so, you already own a small piece of SanDisk technology. The company has been a leader in flash memory storage since the late ‘80s and manufactures products used in everything from smartphones and portable media players to digital cameras and...
Read more...
Intel is updating its line of enterprise-class solid state storage offerings today, with a new more cost-effective drive that targets datacenter and cloud-computing applications. The Intel SSD DC S3500 as it is known, is similar in a number of ways to the SSD DC S3700 we evaluated a few months back. The new drives, however, are built around...
Read more...
A few months back, AMD unveiled a handful of mobile Elite A-Series APUs, formerly codenamed Richland. Those products built upon the company’s existing Trinity-based products but offered additional power and frequency optimizations designed to enhance overall performance and increase battery life. In addition to these optimizations, AMD...
Read more...
If Haswell's debut on the desktop has left you feeling a bit flat, the company's mobile efforts may be the pick-me-up you've been hoping for. If you step back and think about the entire CPU market, the last two years have been marked by tremendous shifts in consumer buying habits, as tablet sales skyrocketed and desktop/laptop sales have...
Read more...
We've been talking about Intel's 4th Generation Core processor technology, codenamed Haswell, for over two years now. If you've been hanging around these parts and are like most self-respecting geeks, you've likely been feeling the build-up of Haswell for quite some time. Intel has disclosed lots of information on their latest...
Read more...
It was just last week that NVIDIA launched the seriously potent GeForce GTX 780, which is essentially a scaled-back GeForce GTX Titan, at much more palatable—but still relatively high—price. NVIDIA is not quite done making news, however. As is typically the case when NVIDIA launches a graphics card in a new product family, derivatives...
Read more...
We’re only a few days removed from the launch of the new GeForce GTX 780 and one of NVIDIA’s key add-in board partners is already set to release a custom version of the card with higher clock speeds and enhanced cooling. The EVGA GeForce GTX 780 SuperClocked Edition with ACX cooling we’ll be showing you here today, takes...
Read more...
OCZ already offers a wide array of popular, high performance SSDs, but to the company’s credit, it’s not resting on its laurels. After employing SandForce controllers on some of the earlier Vertex SSDs, OCZ snapped up Indilinx and is using what is now its own proprietary silicon in many of its drives. Thus, the brand...
Read more...
When NVIDIA introduced the GeForce GTX Titan a few months back, the company created a huge gap in its single-GPU product line-up. With its GK110 GPU and massive 6GB frame buffer, the GeForce GTX Titan was easily able to outrun the GK104-based GeForce GTX 680 and it hung with the dual-GPU powered GeForce GTX 690 as well. That gap...
Read more...
AMD has been pretty open about discussing certain products in the roadmap. In fact, we’ve disclosed a number of details regarding the main products we’ll be talking about in this article--Kabini, Temash, and Richland--over the last few months. It was all the way back at CES that we first showed you Kabini, Temash, and Richland-based...
Read more...
It’s no secret that Intel is readying processors based in its Haswell microarchitecture. The new chips are due to be released in the not too distant future and feature a number of noteworthy enhancements, including a much more powerful integrated graphics core. When Haswell arrives though, it will supplant current Ivy Bridge-based...
Read more...
Just before the mid-range AMD Radeon HD 7790 hit store shelves in early April, NVIDIA countered with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST. NVIDIA’s move also involved pricing changes that were good for mid-range card shoppers, but what matters most is that the card NVIDIA managed to launch coincident with the Radeon HD 7790’s launch, offers...
Read more...
This news has been a long time coming. It's been six years since Intel first began talking about Atom. When it was initially announced, the 45nm, in-order core, based on the Bonnell microarchitecture, was a new product from the ground up. It drew on Intel's expertise in other areas and shared some design elements with the original Pentium,...
Read more...
If you love building computers, you probably appreciate a good case or chassis. While there are plenty of excellent products available for a song, there’s also an upper echelon of models that cost quite a bit and offer all the premiere features you could hope for. While it seems as though there’s a lot...
Read more...
Today marks one of those funky occasions when you’ve probably been aware of the “new” product we’re going to show you for quite some time. And we’re not talking about a few days or weeks here either. In fact, it was all the way back in December of 2011, when AMD introduced the original Radeon HD 7970, that we...
Read more...
One of the perks of working at a place like HotHardware is that we have access to some of the hottest hardware around. So when I decided to dive into Windows 8 head-first a few months ago, I thought I’d give the OS as much breathing room as possible and install it on a freshly built, ultra high-end rig. Building myself a second...
Read more...
In between chipset releases, manufacturers typically pump out numerous motherboard variations, adding this or that feature or optimizing boards for a particular function. Unsurprisingly, folks like us enjoy tinkering with those boards when granted the opportunity to see if they offer anything special, over and above plain-Jane products. Gigabyte...
Read more...
