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.
Over the years, Corsair has earned a solid reputation in the PC enthusiast community for consistently offering some of the best system memory kits in their respective classes. Corsair has a myriad of memory kits available in many different capacities and speeds, and virtually all of them rate well versus their competition. Some of Corsair's...
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Last week NVIDIA officially launched the $199 GeForce 7900 GS, and jointly announced the $299 GeForce 7950 GT. In our coverage of the GeForce 7900 GS, we were able to reveal the 7950 GT's specifications and features, but were asked to reserve posting any benchmark results until the cards were made available. Well, here we are only...
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The call of most computing enthusiasts or workstation professionals has always been "more power, more bandwidth and more features, please". The advent of serial PCI Express-based computer architectures was the foundation of an enabling technology that provided a much needed solution to the bottleneck problems...
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Over the course of the last few months, the vast majority of news coming through the doors of NVIDIA has been in regards to enthusiast-class products such as the GeForce 7950 GX2 GPU and nForce 570 chipset. However, today the company is launching two new GPUs aimed squarely at the more mainstream price segments of the gaming community....
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Last month, Intel officially launched their new Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors with much fanfare. Based on the heavily hyped "Conroe" core and utilizing the modern "Core" microarchitecture, as opposed to the NetBurst microarchitecture employed in the Pentium 4 and Pentium D, Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core...
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Water cooling for high-end PCs is, in theory, a terrific idea. Using water to cool vital system components like your CPU and GPU allow for cooler temperatures, lower noise levels, longer component life spans and / or enhanced overclockability. Water is simply a more efficient medium for transferring heat compared to traditional metal-based,...
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It is fairly safe to say that Intel has far and away been the dominant player in the mobile processor market for what seems like forever. Though AMD's Turion 64 is a solid alternative to Intel solutions, clearly AMD's market share of 13% or so is an obvious sign that the company just hasn't been able to penetrate...
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Six to nine months prior to the launch of Intel's Core 2 Duo product line, if you polled the average HotHardware.com reader, regarding their thoughts on an Intel 975X based motherboard, you might well have gotten a luke-warm reception. Back then AMD's dual core Athlon 64 X2 and FX offerings were in full stride and NVIDIA's...
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Although there has obviously been a lot going on behind the scenes at ATI these last few months, i.e. the proposed AMD merger, the company has remained relatively quiet. The last major graphics card launch was for the Radeon X1900 family back in January. And since then, the company has released only a...
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As computer enthusiasts, we all love to see PC components get more and more powerful. Unfortunately, with this increasing power often comes an increase in power demands. This is especially true of video cards. In fact, it can be reasonably argued that if it weren't for the high-end video card market, power supplies probably wouldn't...
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In recent months, we've seen a major step forward in the image quality of TV Tuner cards on the PC. As we recently saw with our review of NVIDIA's DualTV, an analog signal can now be cleaned up nicely with finely tuned comb filters and other technologies to bring clarity not seen with previous products. ...
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Selecting the right video card when you're on a budget can be difficult. The major deciding factor for many gamers out there is price. As mouthwatering as it is to think about getting a top-notch SLI or CrossFire setup, it's a luxury that most simply cannot afford. Fear not though, as both Nvidia and ATI have some quality entry-level...
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Avid readers of HotHardware will certainly recognize the brand Corsair as one of the most respected and reputable companies within the industry. Since 1994, the company has made a name for themselves by offering some of the most stable and overclocker-friendly memory on the market. Backed with exceptional reliability and stellar support, the...
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For almost a year now, NVIDIA has been teasing enthusiasts with their Quad-SLI technology. It was back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show that we got our first glimpse of a Quad-SLI based system, the Dell XP 600 Renegade. That first Quad-SLI implementation consisted of four GeForce 7800 GTX GPUs, each coupled to 512MB of...
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We've evaluated a myriad of Asus-built products over the years here at HotHardware.com, including countless motherboards, graphics cards, notebooks, and optical drives. But to date, we have only taken a look at one of the company's LCD monitors, the PM17TU. There is a good reason for this, however, as Asus has only been selling...
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ATI's chipset division, talented as they are, seem to have always played second fiddle to rival nVidia. Both nVidia and ATI started originally producing chipsets in 2001/2002 for low-end markets, using their experience in producing graphics processors as leverage to produce chipsets with integrated graphics abilities. Over time, both nVidia...
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Energy efficiency and power consumption are major concerns for modern computing architectures, whether you're an Enthusiast, an IT Manager in a Data Center, or simply an ecologically minded individual. Let's face it, the modern high end computer is like a small space heater for all intents and purposes, and where there's...
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Despite the recent trend of using dual and sometimes even quad graphics card configurations, the true benchmark of total gaming performance is how a single graphics card performs. Over the course of the last few years, the industry has witnessed an epic battle between ATI and NVIDIA as they trade punches in an effort to own...
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It can be tough for a company to decide how and where to market a video card in today's demanding retail environment. Price something too high and only a brave few might purchase the card; price it too low and it could be dismissed as a low-end or budget card by some consumers, regardless of its value proposition. These issues can...
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Rumors have been circulating for weeks, but yesterday the two companies involved made it official. AMD and ATI announced that the two companies planned to merge in a deal worth approximately $5.4 billion dollars. The quote below from the initial press release reveals some of the combined entity's vision of...
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If we were to play a word association game with a PC enthusiast and said "Western Digital," it's likely his geek reflexes would immediately trigger and force him to reply "Raptor" before he even realized he had spoken. Western Digital makes many more storage products other than just the speed demons known as Raptors,...
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As of late, due to reported issues with overheating and graphic anomalies with overclocked GeForce cards, many gamers are starting to think twice before purchasing factory overclocked cards. Some hesitation before buying the highest overclocked card makes sense, but XFX along with the other companies affected by this problem are...
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