Reviews
A lot can happen as a system is under development, especially with a relatively new family of hardware. Maybe the drivers and BIOS aren't quite tuned for the best possible performance or power efficiency, and sometimes early reviews aren't completely indicative of what a user will experience when they first purchase a laptop, even a new one...
Read more...
Although the situation is improving, it is still extremely difficult to score some of the latest graphics cards at prices even approaching their MSRPs. With that in mind, we’ve held off on covering some of the hottest GPUs to come through the lab for a while, because the coverage was inevitably (and understandably) met with groans and...
Read more...
Intel has been making noise in virtually all segments of the storage market as of late. A few weeks back, we took a look at the Optane Memory H20, which combines 3DXpoint media with traditional NAND on hybrid M.2 device to accelerate the storage subsystem in mainstream notebooks and PCs. More recently, we evaluated...
Read more...
The biggest news to come out of AMD in recent weeks is no doubt the release of FidelityFX Super Resolution, which is supported across multiple Radeon GPU generations as well as as number of competitive NVIDIA products. In a nutshell, FidelityFX Super Resolution, or FSR, is a hardware vendor-agnostic technology that...
Read more...
In 2020, TCL ventured beyond its successful TV business by launching three TCL-branded phones in the US -- the $450 TCL 10 Pro and $250 10L (which we both reviewed), followed by the $400 TCL 10 5G UW. The company is no stranger to mobile, having previously sold budget handsets under the Alcatel brand. But last year’s TCL 10-series was...
Read more...
In the spring, Id Software and Bethesda announced that they would bring real-time ray tracing and NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 to the Vulkan-powered Doom Eternal. When we reviewed thsi latest Doom title, we found that it was already pretty stunning graphically while running really well on all kinds of different hardware. High performance and a bevy of...
Read more...
We were really impressed with Intel's latest high-performance notebook CPUs from the Tiger Lake-H family when we got to try them out in a test platform. Intel arguably produced the single fastest x86 notebook CPU on the planet, with blistering single-threaded speed and heavy multi-threaded prowess. However, we were itching to get our hands...
Read more...
When we reviewed the Intel Optane SSD 905P back in 2018, despite a significant price premium over NAND-based SSDs, we gave the drive and Editor’s Choice award due to its exceptional performance where it mattered most for consumers, e.g. access times and random transfers at low queue depths. Intel Optane solid state drives typically offer...
Read more...
This morning Kingston announced that its latest DC1500M series of enterprise-class solid state drives have begun shipping. Like many of its predecessors in Kingston’s enterprise SSD line-up, the new DC1500M series leverages a hot-pluggable U.2 (2.5”, 15mm) form factor, that’s compatible with common U.2 backplanes. The drives...
Read more...
The PCI Express 4.0 interface has been around on AMD's Ryzen platform for a long time now, ever since the launch of Zen 2 and the X570 chipset. The new spec has finally gone mainstream on Intel's platforms, as well, with the release of the Rocket Lake-S 11th Gen Core processor family and the accompanying Z590 PCH. That means that neither camp...
Read more...
Today, HotHardware's Two And A Half Geeks webcast will have a live chat with two execs from AMD's Radeon graphics and gaming team. Frank Azor, AMD's Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions, and Carlos Silva, Director of Software Development, will join us at 5:30 PM EST to talk about everything you could possibly want to...
Read more...
When AMD unveiled "Big Navi", now known as the Radeon RX 6000 series, the new GPU family brought with it support for Microsoft's nascent DirectX Ray Tracing. DXR adds photorealistic lighting, reflections and more visual effects to make games that support the technologies look more true to life. However, real-time ray...
Read more...
Last summer we reviewed the eponymous OnePlus Nord, and came away impressed. It never made it to North America, but its successor -- the $300 OnePlus Nord N10 5G -- did, and while the price was on point, we found that it simply cut too many corners to really hit the sweet spot. Most importantly, it seemed to lack that...
Read more...
Just a few months ago, we reviewed the Alienware m15 R4, a seriously powerful 15.6-inch form factor laptop that, at the time, posted the best gaming performance benchmark results we had ever seen from a notebook. Not that we were particularly surprised—armed with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPU based on Ampere and a 10th Generation Intel...
Read more...
Notebooks often have limited storage capacity, despite significant advancements over the last few years. An M.2 drive is only the size of a stick of gum, but not every laptop can fit more than one or two drives at a time, and some users aren't comfortable opening up their machine to upgrade them, which ultimately limits their storage capabilities....
Read more...
Check Out These Great Chromebook Options From Some Of The Most Trusted Names In Computing
Unless you've been living under a rock, you already know that the Chromebook market is red hot at the moment. The COVID-19 pandemic and the sharp increase in demand for cheap computing devices from everyday consumers and...
Read more...
After an official unveiling at Computex 2021 and last week’s launch of the powerful GeForce RT 3080 Ti, NVIDIA is ready to go open kimono and spill all of the new, more-mainstream GeForce RTX 3070 Ti’s juicy details. Cards are due to go on sale tomorrow, but we’ve been able to put a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition through...
Read more...
AMD is expanding its line-up of RDNA 2-based GPUs today, with a trio of new Radeon Pro graphics cards targeting the professional workstation market. These new Radeon Pro cards leverage the same GPU architecture as their consumer-class Radeon RX-branded counterparts, but Radeon Pros feature completely different...
Read more...
Most of you are likely familiar with ASUS’ extensive line of PCs and related components, including ASUS’ ROG gaming products. You’ve probably also seen our ASUS ROG Phone 5 benchmarks, which showcase this incredibly fast gaming phone. But let's not forget that ASUS has also been making innovative non-gaming handsets for years....
Read more...
During their Computex 2021 keynote, NVIDIA’s Jeff Fisher, GeForce Senior Vice President, and Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing, unveiled a number of new enterprise and consumer products, targeting multiple market segments. For all of the gamers though, it was Jeff Fisher’s official unveiling of the...
Read more...
During her Computex 2021 keynote this evening, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, along with compatriots Frank Azor and Scott Herkleman, revealed a number of the company’s new products an initiatives, targeting the server, desktop and mobile markets. For gamers, perhaps the most enticing announcement was the revelation of...
Read more...
Lenovo's venerable ThinkPad X1 Carbon has been one of the longest-running of the company's trusted business-class laptop series. Now in its 9th generation, Lenovo sought to re-energize the X1 Carbon not only with Intel 11th Gen Core Series processors (Tiger Lake), but with Intel Evo certification that brings with it a...
Read more...
