Tuan Huynh
Tuan Huynh
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
It is once again time for a new console generation and Microsoft has two shiny new products ready for the holiday 2020 shopping season. Continuing its tradition of sometimes fuzzy model branding, we have the new Xbox Series X and Series S, which succeed the previous-gen Xbox One X, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and the console formerly known as Xbox....
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The late 90s and early 2000s was a special era for personal computing. We saw PC prices drop drastically, we moved from dial-up to broadband, and we dealt with Windows ME while waiting for XP to arrive. While some of us went the DIY route at the time, many started with a prebuilt rig purchased from a brick and mortar retailer. One of the more...
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Gaming on a much larger screen has always had this almost unnatural appeal. Over the years, many enthusiasts likely have tried to hook up a PC to a much larger display for gaming bliss, whether it was a TV or projector via S-Video, component or DVI, or nowadays, the biggest possible LCD one can afford. When LCD TVs...
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Dell's new OptiPlex 7070 Ultra desktop PC features a new, innovative design approach that's sleeker and more useful than traditional small form factor machines, when integrating them with standard displays. Small form factor PCs, like the Intel NUC, Gigabyte BRIX and ZOTAC ZBOX, tend to include VESA mounts for easy...
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In the last 5 years, gaming notebooks have essentially reached performance parity with desktop systems and made it easier for gamers to experience their favorite PC games virtually anywhere, without losing out on image quality or performance. However, because most components perform similarly in any given form factor, manufacturers are constantly...
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Purchasing a powerful, good-looking gaming PC used to require a visit to a boutique PC maker or a custom-built system from a local computer shop. There was a time when you couldn’t simply walk into a Future Shop or CompUSA and pick up something roughly equivalent to a DIY gaming system. Nowadays though, PC...
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Standing out in a sea of excellent laptops is tough nowadays, especially with a metal chassis being the bare minimum point of entry to the premium class. Each company offers its own unique take – Microsoft has Alcantara keyboards, Dell offers super thin screen borders and carbon fiber, Lenovo has fancy hinges and OLED displays, Apple...
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There was a time when choosing a thin and light 2-in-1 laptop meant making compromises and deciding which features you could live without. That isn’t much of a problem nowadays, as there are excellent premium notebook offerings from all the major OEMs, including Dell, HP, Microsoft, Acer, and Lenovo. Lenovo...
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Mobile device manufacturers seem to have really stepped things up in the engineering department since the arrival of the Microsoft Surface. After racing to the bottom with netbooks for a time, things turned around, and we’ve seen an influx of high-quality systems using premiums materials. We've seen gorgeous...
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Most of us have had a love-hate relationship with wireless networking. It’s a wonderful technology when all your devices remain connection and perform well in every room of your house, but that’s not always the case. When your devices intermittently drop off or can't find a strong enough signal strength...
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When Microsoft released the original Surface Pro five years ago, the mobile market was completely different – Windows tablets were an afterthought and weren’t the svelte and snappy performers you can buy today. The first-generation Surface Pro wasn’t perfect, but it was a huge step in the right...
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The PC gaming market continues to grow, thanks in part to the increasing popularity of eSports. While Lenovo is best known for its Thinkpad and Yoga family of notebooks with legendary reliability and slick form factors, it was time the company got serious about gaming. So, Lenovo took the plunge and launched a new...
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Last year’s release of the Moto Z family of phones introduced the world to Mods – magnetic accessory attachments that added features to the phones, like higher-quality speakers, a portable projector, or optical zoom camera. However, the US release of the Moto Z was limited to Verizon and unlocked customers only. This year Motorola is back...
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Creative Labs was instrumental in evolving PC audio with notable products, like the Sound Blaster 16, AWE 32, AWE64, Live!, Audigy, X-Fi, and Extigy, and algorithms like EAX technology. Most of its competitors through the last three decades, like Yamaha, ESS, Turtle Beach, Auzentech and M-Audio, evolved their product...
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There was a time when laptop options were basically a choice between desktop-like performance in a heavy and bulky form-factor, an ultralight with integrated graphics, or something in the middle, around 5-lbs with a low-end GPU. NVIDIA sought to solve this choice compromise with its Max-Q Design initiative that was...
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Dell updated its Alienware 17 gaming laptop at PAX West 2016 with NVIDIA Pascal graphics, but at the time Intel’s quad-core Kaby Lake mobile processors weren’t available yet. It was a short-lived update, however, as the Kaby Lake-powered Alienware 17 was announced a short time later at the start of the Consumer...
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Buying a shiny new car is an easy way to get the latest in-car technologies, but it’s not the most economical. I've had my fair share of new car purchases in the last decade – a 2008 Chevy HHR SS, 2011 Volkswagen Routan SE, 2014 Mazda 5 Sport and a 2015 Nissan Leaf – and driven hundreds of press cars featuring the...
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