Items tagged with Hardware
2020 was a weird year. A pandemic changed the way we do many things, and it heavily impacted the entertainment world. This does not include the video games market, though, which seemed to be reasonably healthy in 2020. Mat Piscatella of the NPD Group tweeted out charts showing how much was spent on video games, including hardware, software, and accessories in 2020 and December alone. Take a look for yourself, but the numbers for gaming are quite impressive. Dec 2020 US NPD THREAD - December 2020 consumer spending across video game hardware, content and accessories reached a December record $7.7B, 25% higher when compared to a year ago. Full year spending also set a new record, totaling $56.9B,...
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The Raspberry Pi developer board has been around for a long time and one of the best things about it has always been its low price. The last new major model that we talked about was in March when the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ turned up featuring a 1.4GHz processor, integrated WiFi, and Gigabit Ethernet port onboard selling for $35. For folks who don't need that Ethernet port or the USB hub and would like to save a bit of cash to boot, Raspberrypi.org has announced the launch of a new version of the developer board called the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+. The Model A+ device sports a Broadcom BCM2837B0, Cortex-A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit SoC that operates at 1.4GHz; the same processor in the model B+ device from...
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A new device called the Renegade Elite (ROC-RK3399-PC) has surfaced as a competitor to the Raspberry Pi 3 that is packing much higher specifications and can stream 4K video, albeit significantly more expensive. The Renegade Elite is made by Libre Computer and will soon surface for pre-order on Indiegogo. One thing not in the favor of the Renegade Elite is the price. While the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ sells for $35, the Renegade Elite will set you back $100. That much loot will get you a hexa-core processor, 4GB of RAM, and dual USB 3.0 Type-C ports, one of which can be used for power input. Other features include three standard USB 3.0 ports, HDMI 2.0 output, and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity....
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Intel and Micron have just jointly announced shipment of the first quad-level cell (QLC) NAND-based SSD in the industry: the Micron 5210 ION, which is aimed directly at read-intensive cloud workloads. Intel-Micron say that the new QLC NAND has 33 percent greater bit density than TLC NAND, which gives it the ability to address opportunities in the market that used to be serviced only by lower cost, higher density Hard Disk Drives (HDD). QLC technology allows the SSD to reach 1-terabit densities using a 64-layer 3D NAND structure. However, the Intel-Micron team also notes 96-layer QLC NAND is also en-route. Regardless, the first products are optimized to meet demands of high performance data...
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Normally when you want a high-end liquid cooled PC, you end up having to roll your own. For people that lack experience that can be a daunting task because one leak could spell doom for your PC hardware. EK Water Blocks traditionally made the water blocks that gamers would purchase for building up their own gaming computers. It has now announced that it will be building pre-assembled gaming PCs ready to roll right out of the box. The machines are being built under the EK Fluid Gaming Systems brand. The company notes that it is allocating all of its GPUs to gaming rigs rather than crypto miners (buying a pre-built PC is sometimes the only way to get hands on a decent video card on the current...
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Fans of gaming and computer hardware who didn’t get to go to PAX East this year take heart; we have booth video tours from the floor of the show that give you an excellent glimpse at what you missed. Our first video is the tour of the MSI booth at the show and all of the latest gaming notebooks the company offers are on full display. The full RGB keyboard backlighting is nice and some of the keyboards can be programmed to light specific keys for each game. Our second booth tour is of the Gigabyte booth, and the company has lots of its computer hardware on display. One of the coolest products was the full Aorus setup that shows all the RGB lighting and high-end gaming hardware that Gigabyte...
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Biostar didn't want to wait around until Monday to pull the wraps off its new B360 and H310 motherboards. These boards are intended for a slew of Coffee Lake processors that Intel is due to announce on April 2, so it appears someone at Biostar hit the "Go" button too soon. The pages for the mainboards have since been pulled from its website, but not before all the details and images were siphoned by eagle-eyed enthusiasts . There are a pair of Biostar Racing mainboards including the Biostar B360 Racing GTS5S and the Biostar B360 Racing GTS3S. Both of those boards have dual M.2 ports for storage while the GTS5S packs a trio of PCIe 3.0 x16 slots for graphics and three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots. The...
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An updated version of the Raspberry Pi Model B has launched, and this new "Plus" version offers a number of upgrades. The official name is the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and it is on sale now for the same $35 price as the previous version of the developer board. Updates include: A 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU Dual-band 802.11ac wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.2 Faster Ethernet (Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0) Power-over-Ethernet support (with separate PoE HAT) Improved PXE network and USB mass-storage booting Improved thermal management The maximum CPU clock for the B+ is 200MHz higher than the previous version and the wired and wireless network throughput is three times that...
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As most US-based companies have learned by now, it's very difficult to penetrate the Chinese market (just ask Microsoft), with the country's government being at the crux of the issue more so than cultural differences. Apple in particular has had a rough go at feeling comfortable in China, and recently, things have been made more difficult with sliding sales. In the past year, Apple had to mold its products to better-suit the Chinese market, which included getting rid of iTunes Movies and iBooks, and crippling its popular news app. Since then, Apple has invested more in the Chinese market, which included a staggering $1 billion investment in "Chinese Uber" Didi Chuxing. Next up? The opening up...
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If you're contemplating a small form factor build for your next system, you may want to consider ASRock's new Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac motherboard. That's a mouthful and as the name suggests, this is a mini ITX motherboard for space saving builds, though don't be fooled by its diminutive size. Though its small in form, it offers a high level of function, starting support for Intel's 6th Generation Core processor line (Skylake) that utilizes the new LGA1151 socket. You could certainly do worse for a Skylake chip -- this thing boasts an eight-layer PCB with an eight-phase power design. It also uses high end components such as "Premium 60A Power Chokes, Dual-Stack MOSFET, Nichicon 12K Platinum...
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There’s a lot of positive energy flowing through Microsoft these days. The company by all accounts won E3 with the unveil of a new 1TB Xbox One console, a swanky new “Elite” wireless Xbox One controller, and backwards compatibility support for Xbox 360 games. And we can’t forget the July 29 release of Windows 10, which is the highly anticipated follow-up to Windows 8.1. However, there are also a few dark clouds heading towards Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington headquarters and they are zeroing in on the company’s smartphone division. Microsoft today announced another round of job cuts, this time totaling 7,800 employees. This is on top of the 18,000 cuts that it already announced last year. As...
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Your existing game console is about to be behind the times. That's because all three major console players - Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony -- have something new up their respective sleeves. Starting with Microsoft, the company is planning to release a revised Xbox One console that comes with 1TB of onboard storage and a tweaked game controller. We learned a little about the new controller just over a week ago when Microsoft updated one of its support pages to reflect the addition of a 3.5mm audio port. Microsoft revealed that it would be available on controllers released after June 2015, but didn't offer up any other details. Fast forward to today and we now know that the new controller will...
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After a rapid rise in the mobile market to become Apple's chief rival (and target of many lawsuits), Samsung hit a rough patch in 2014, one that will challenge the South Korean company going forward. And as expected, Samsung today confirmed its first year-on-year profit drop since 2011, even after factoring an uptick in sales in the fourth quarter. Samsung's flagship Galaxy S5 handset is largely to blame. More precisely, Samsung's shortfall in Galaxy S5 sales isn't doing the company any favors -- after being left with unsold inventory, Samsung decided to restructure its business model, including a shakeup of high-level execs. At issue there is stiff competition from Apple's hot selling iPhone...
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Following the philosophy that it takes spending money to make money, Samsung Electronics announced plans to invest around 15.6 trillion won (around $14.7 billion in U.S. currency) to build a new chip manufacturing plant in South Korea. This qualifies as Samsung's biggest investment ever into a single semiconductor plant. Construction of the new facility will begin in the first half of next year in Pyeongtaek, located about 47 miles south of Seoul, and is expected to generate 150,000 jobs, according to Reuters. That's equivalent to around a third of the city's total population. If all goes to plan, the plant will open for business in 2017. Samsung is still deciding whether to use the upcoming...
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Lenovo is already the world's top PC maker in terms of shipments and sales, and once it closes the deal with IBM for its server division, the Chinese company will become the third largest player in the global x86 server market. No small deal, Lenovo is paying IBM $2.1 billion to increase its standing in a market that's worth $42.1 billion. "With the close of the x86 acquisition, Lenovo will add a world-class business that extends our capabilities in enterprise hardware and services, immediately making us a strong number three in the global server market," said Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo. "Now, our priorities are to ensure a smooth integration and deliver a seamless transition for...
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This week, Broadcom announced that it would exit the LTE modem market and shut down its LTE research division. The move comes less than a year after Broadcom bought Renesas' (formerly known as NEC) LTE modem -- and that purchase was supposed to give Broadcom a leg up in modem design after its own in-house LTE product had failed to ship. With Broadcom gone, Qualcomm is, for all intents and purposes, the Emperor of LTE mountain. The market shift has happened quickly -- look at where revenue share sat in 2009, when 4G was still on the horizon and 3G modems were the norm. Qualcomm is still the leading provider, no question, but ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, MediaTek, and Infineon all have...
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After reading the title, you might be thinking, "OMG why does HotHardware hate tablets?!?!" Don't get us wrong, we think tablets are great for what they're designed to do, but when it comes to servicing and/or upgrading parts on your own, they don't hold a candle next to a traditional PC. Teardown after teardown reveals liberal use of adhesive and other challenging factors, as tablets just aren't built to be cracked open like a desktop. Underscoring this point is iFixIt's teardown analysis of Valve's prototype Steam Machine, a full-fledged PC in a console-like shell. If the Steam Machine design represents the future of PC gaming, rest assured, you'll still be able to upgrade and replace components...
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Gamers aren't supposed to be able to get their mitts on Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One console until it launches to retail on November 22, 2013, a week from this Friday, however some lucky individuals received an early surprise. Due to a retail glitch, some Xbox One consoles landed on doorsteps two weeks ahead of schedule. Microsoft's Major Nelson confirmed the early shipments, saying that only a "very small number" of consoles went out to gamers ahead of schedule. While Major Nelson didn't specify which vendor was responsible, it's since been revealed that Target was the one that missed the mark. Image Source: Twitter (Moonlightswami) Twitter user "Moonlightswami" tweeted a picture of his Xbox...
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A few weeks ago, we covered the news that Microsoft's Xbox One would feature a slightly faster GPU than originally planned, with a boost from 800MHz to something in the 845-855MHz range. Now, it seems the company is giving its CPUs a kick as well. Xbox Chief Marketing Officer Yusef Mehdi spoke at the Citi Global Technology Conference, and commented that the Xbox One's eight Jaguar cores would be clocked at 1.75GHz, up from the 1.6GHz originally forecast. That's a relatively modest increase of about 9% -- enough to be noticeable, in some tests, but unlikely to redefine the experience of using the console. The CPU clock shift probably provides a bit more power for background tasks or simultaneous...
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Barnes & Noble may be scaling back its NOOK hardware business as Amazon, Apple and Google eat up whatever remains of the tablet market, but that doesn't mean that it's ditching the brand entirely. The company has just launched a suite of free NOOK Video Apps for iOS, Android and Roku devices. The apps enable customers to watch movies and TV shows from NOOK Video instantly on a wide variety of mobile devices, and moreover, customers with the NOOK Tablet and NOOK Color will now have access to NOOK Video through a specially designed app that will automatically appear in customers’ lockers starting today. Streaming video seems to be all of the rage these days, and now that B&N is joining...
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According to a joint survey from Intel and IDC, the PC market could see sunnier days in 2014. That's the proposed takeaway from a survey IDC conducted of 3,977 adults across both suburbs and cities. The respondents, who all owned at least one PC or Mac, were organized into two basic groups -- those using a PC 4 years old or older, and those using a PC purchased in the last 12 months. Between the two groups, 45% had tablets and 64% owned smartphones -- further underscoring that tremendous popularity of tablets in the American market. According to the survey, 40% of buyers are interested in upgrading a PC within the next 12 months. 97% identify the PC as their primary computing device, 83% believe...
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Square has taken the mobile payments world by storm in the U.S., and evidently there has been demand to help make Apple's iPad an actual cash register. As the conventional POS machine begins to see the end of the line, it's devices like the Square Stand that have a chance to take its place. The new device actually fully converts the iPad into a complete point of sale system. It's a piece of hardware designed for savvy B&M locations, and while it looks pretty slick, the asking price ($299) is certainly on the high side. Square Stand works with Square Register, the free point of sale application, and gives merchants access to real-time analytics and reporting.Square Stand features an integrated...
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