Reviews
Fallout 4 is finally here. Channeling its best 50's era paranoia and the allure of a warm, radiation-free bomb shelter, Bethesda’s newest RPG tells us doomsday prepping and cryogenics actually work—yay! Well, that is until they malfunction and you’re thrust topside to an irradiated, post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with vile mutated everything,...
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PC gamers and longtime HotHardware readers will no doubt be familiar with the Killer series of network controllers. We’ve taken a look at a number of the add-in versions over the years, including the original beast with the massive “K” heatsink. Many of today’s gamer-targeted motherboards also feature Killer...
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Not long ago, we kicked the tires on Motorola’s well-received Moto X Pure Edition. The smartphone impressed us with its Quad HD display and overall build quality, as well as its $399 price tag, which places it more reasonably below the lofty prices of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Apple iPhone 6S lines. Today, we’re...
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Intel's 6th Generation Skylake family of Core processors has been available for some time now. We previously gave you a look at the desktop variant that Intel initially rolled out. However, the mobile variant of Skylake is perhaps Intel's most potent incarnation of the new architecture that's power-optimized on 14nm...
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One of the sharpest, classiest, most alluring Android Wear smartwatch yet has arrived, and it's manufactured by a company that many American consumers may not be familiar with. The Huawei Watch is just about as good as it gets for a smartwatch currently. The reason? It's a watch first, and a smartwatch second. For those clamoring for a timepiece...
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There’s no doubt that tablets have revolutionized the way many of us consume media. The tablets on the market today have developed to fill many niche categories and are beginning to rival notebooks in terms of performance. We see everything from the venerable iPads, to the upcoming Amazon Kindles, to a wide variety of Android slates...
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Not long ago, Amazon announced a revamped Fire TV with a handful of new and upgraded features including 4K Ultra HD video support and Alexa functionality. Although the original Fire TV which we reviewed last year had voice capabilities, those voice controls were limited to searching for content and applications. With Alexa built in, the...
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On the surface, there's nothing particularly glamorous about a universal remote. It's simply a device that controls multiple electronic gadgets, like your TV and Blu-ray player, so you don't have to keep track of and juggle multiple remotes. No big deal, right? If that's what you think, then you haven't encountered...
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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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It may be a bit too early to be shopping for the holidays just yet, but doing a little research never hurts, particularly if you’re in the market for a new mobile device. Tablet makers are continually in the process of slimming down their devices and boosting battery life, even in the entry-level space, where products like the Android-based...
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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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You don't need a crystal ball to figure out Apple will release a new iPhone handset every year. It's been doing it since the original came out in 2007, and starting with the iPhone 3G, Apple's naming convention has consisted of introducing a new model number every two years, with "s" variants in between. There was the iPhone 3GS in 2009, iPhone...
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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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The Internet is an ever changing congruous mass of standards, design, and interoperability challenges. Keeping on top of it all can be a daunting task. It's a delicate balance between features, security and performance. If you're considering swapping out your web browser for something new and fresh, but are uncertain over the real world performance...
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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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If you want to sell a tablet to the masses -- an increasingly difficult thing to do with tablet shipments now on the decline, according to International Data Corporation -- the go-to strategy is to pitch a vibrant display and boast about its thin and light design. Everything else is secondary for most consumers, including hardware specs and...
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Technology moves quickly, but when it comes to smartwatches, things seem to be moving more rapidly than usual. We published our Moto 360 review early last year and here we are merely half a year later testing the second generation of that device. In many ways, the original Moto 360 felt like the hero device for Android Wear. Google still...
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Apple and Samsung have already launched their latest flagship devices for 2015, and now, Motorola is taking its turn. For the third year in a row, a new Moto X has arrived that's built upon the successes of the original. There's no mistaking the design -- visual cues that created the silhouette of the original still...
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Unlocked smartphones are attractive to customers who are looking for ways to avoid a long-term contract with a carrier, replace a broken phone, or travel overseas. If you’ve shopped for an unlocked phone, you’ll likely have come across a company called Huawei. Huawei ships phones worldwide, though they aren't very well known here in the United...
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What does your desktop PC say about you? Is your system hiding by your feet and used only for serious business? Is it sitting on the corner of your desk with its window facing the wall because it’s just easier to reach its inputs that way? Or is taking up a third of your workspace with LEDs blazing, screaming “Fire me...
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