Reviews
The 2022 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show has concluded. We didn't attend this year's show in Las Vegas in-person, but that's mostly because the majority of the biggest players in the market didn't show up either and we attended a handful of private briefings at other venues. The severity of the...
Read more...
This past year was a tough one for PC enthusiasts. It was exceedingly difficult to acquire some of the most sought after components, like the latest and greatest CPUs and GPUs for example, and if you were lucky enough to score one, you often had to pay through the nose for it. Solid state storage, however, continued...
Read more...
As the holiday shopping season shifts into high gear, we at HotHardware wanted to share a few last minute gift ideas from our staff that should excite any enthusiast or mainstream tech users you have left on your shopping list. We know it has been a tough year for us geeks and trying to find the right gift for a loved...
Read more...
Since OnePlus introduced the original and excellent OnePlus Buds ($79) a year and a half ago, the company has launched two more pairs of TWS (true wireless) earbuds – the affordable ($49) OnePlus Buds Z, and the higher end ($149) OnePlus Buds Pro with ANC and wireless charging. Today we’re taking a listen to OnePlus’ fourth...
Read more...
Ignoring the difficulties securing hardware for a moment, it's a pretty glorious time to play games on the PC. We get our choice of resolutions, frame rates, and detail levels, and if our hardware isn't up to snuff there's some innovative creative technologies available that try to bridge the gap. NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling requires...
Read more...
We’re long-time proponents of big, bold and bodacious desktop systems around here. We’ve been evaluating the latest and greatest PC hardware for over two decades after all, and many of us have ben PC enthusiasts even longer than that. As much as we dig fully-loaded, high-end desktops though, there’s just something awesome...
Read more...
Qualcomm recently announced a new flagship mobile chipset for next-gen Android devices, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which also kicks off a rebrand of the Snapdragon platform. Going forward, Qualcomm will no longer use three-digit model number designations as it has done with past chipsets like the Snapdragon 888+ 5G. In...
Read more...
Gaming is a lucrative business, and that includes the mobile front, which generates around $175 billion per year from an audience of 2.5 billion mobile gamers. Compare that to the movie industry that raked in less than $45 billion last year and you'll understand why gaming is such an important consideration for many...
Read more...
Experimenting with SiFive's HiFive Unmatched RISC-V development board over the last few weeks has felt a bit like stepping back in time. The experience left me feeling a bit nostalgic. Picture this. It's 1997. I'm a high school sophomore. I head over to my friend's house after class because a long-awaited CD with something called "Slackware...
Read more...
Last week, Qualcomm teased a fresh new look and colors as part of a bold rebranding effort, with Snapdragon becoming a standalone consumer brand. Now a week later, at the Snapdragon Tech Summit that's currently underway, Qualcomm is ready to share more details about what lies ahead for Snapdragon.
To kick off the...
Read more...
Around this time last year, there was much hoopla over Apple's first Macs with the company's home-grown Apple Silicon, dubbed the M1. Almost immediately, rumors swirled about what the follow-up, rumored to be called the M1X, would have in store. Never mind that at the time, Apple released a power-efficient champion...
Read more...
Ultraportable laptops with 13 or 14-inch displays and low-power processors are great for a certain kind of user. Those folks are usually found running from gate to gate in an airport or catching an Uber to a sales meeting. These machines have great single-threaded performance and good-enough graphics capabilities, but the thermal limits and...
Read more...
There's been a lot of discussion about image quality and super-sampled graphics in 3D games over the last few months. Ray tracing is quite expensive from a computational standpoint, so frame rates typically suffer when it's enabled. Upscaling technologies seek to claw some of that performance back, by rendering at a...
Read more...
If there was a poster child for business-class laptops, it is indisputably the Lenovo ThinkPad. ThinkPad notebooks are well known for their matte-black, no-nonsense designs, but their utility in corporate and industrial settings is more than skin-deep. Lenovo has wisely developed an array of ThinkPad models to address...
Read more...
DJI's worst-kept secret has arrived. After months of extensive leaks, the new DJI Mavic 3 has landed (or taken off depending on your perspective). DJI has advanced its done line-up significantly since introducing the first Mavic Pro back in 2016. The Mavic Pro line, including the upgraded Mavic 2 Pro, have been workhorses for those in the...
Read more...
It hasn't been long since we last took a look at the 2021 version of the Falcon Northwest Talon, and found it to be impressive. However, it’s finally time for Intel’s Alder Lake 12th Gen Core processor launch and we all know what that means -- a deluge of reviews with tons of charts and opinions for you to...
Read more...
After many months of speculation, an early glimpse into the hybrid Alder Lake architecture in August, and an official line-up and feature reveal last week, Intel’s 12th Gen Core processors are finally ready for prime time. The time for innuendo and speculation is over – for the most part. We’ve had...
Read more...
If there's been one drawback to Alienware's previous gen Aurora desktop series, it's that the systems we've gotten in for review have made a bit of a racket at times. These systems have always been well-equipped with the latest hardware and turn in some great performance, but their noise floor has sometimes been a...
Read more...
This past Summer, LG created a new product category with its UltraGear Gaming Speaker (GP9), though not entirely from scratch. The GP9 combines aspects of a soundbar with a portable Bluetooth speaker, and also serves as an external USB soundcard with a built-in Hi-Fi Quad DAC (ESS9038 Pro) to bring your headphones to...
Read more...
NVIDIA's GeForce NOW is not a new product, but today the company's game streaming service is expanding in a couple of key ways to bring more performance and better visuals to gamers everywhere. Announced last week, NVIDIA is bringing a whole new tier of graphics horsepower to its service, dubbed GeForce NOW RTX...
Read more...
At its inaugural InnovatiON event, which kicked off this morning, Intel revealed a number of additional details regarding its upcoming 12th Gen Core processors, codenamed Alder Lake. We’ve been covering leaks, rumors and whatever else emerged regarding Alder Lake for ages. And after Intel’s recent...
Read more...
Last week we gave you an early hands-on look at Google's oft leaked Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. Even Google has teased these new Android flagships a time or two, leaning into the engineering the company has done on the semi-custom design of its Tensor mobile platform processor. Tensor is rumored to be based on Samsung's...
Read more...
