Zak Killian
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Recent posts
AMD and its partners have released a barrage of motherboards today based on the latest Socket AM5 chipsets. That's the X870, as well as the dual-chip X870E version, if you haven't been staying on top of things. Along with the fancy new mainboards, AMD has also released new AGESA firmware to its partners that promises...
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The Wi-Fi 7 standard brings the tantalizing possibility of improved transfer rates even over the already-speedy Wi-Fi 6E, but much like with HDMI and earlier versions of USB, many of the new features in Wi-Fi 7 are optional. As a result, vendors can still call their Wi-Fi adapters "Wi-Fi 7" even if they don't...
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If you're not keen on spending seven hundred American greenbacks on a PlayStation 5 Pro, how about half that much on a Switch 2? We don't know pricing yet, of course, but a new leak gives us a pretty solid idea of the launch window for Nintendo's next system, and also confirms a few rumored details about the...
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Hype for Intel's second-generation graphics parts is at an all-time high after the release of Intel's Core Ultra 200V processors, codenamed Lunar Lake. Those SoCs include graphics parts based on the same technology that will eventually show up in "Battlemage", the company's next Arc GPUs, and in case you didn't read...
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If you're a hardware enthusiast or PC gamer, then you probably already know all about Intel's troubles surrounding its high-end Raptor Lake desktop processors. If you're not, well, the short version is that a combination of factors led to major stability issues and silicon damage in some of Intel's high-end desktop...
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If you read that headline and thought, "wait, what's a Ryzen AI 9 HX 375," don't worry — you're not alone. That SKU was not part of the launch of AMD's Ryzen AI 300 processors, and we haven't heard a peep about it from AMD. It's definitely real, though; you can find the specifications page on AMD's website.
It's...
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Linux is a modern operating system that supports all of the latest technologies, but it's also a legacy-friendly system that dates back to 1991. If it's a computer, you can probably run Linux on it, except that, owing to its origins in 1991, Linux technically requires at least a 32-bit CPU and a few megabytes of RAM...
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For the first time in a decade, Nintendo's handheld gaming dominance is seeing a credible challenge thanks to the emergence of both powerful and affordable handheld systems based, surprisingly, on PC-compatible hardware. Machines like those from Ayaneo and GamePad Digital led the way, but it was really the Steam Deck...
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AMD's introducing a whole new class of products with the Strix Halo SoCs. These processors integrate CPU, GPU, and NPU into one package, and that's not novel. What is novel, at least in the x86 world, is the amount of each component included in the part. A full 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, a massive 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units...
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If you've been conisdering the purchase of a PC gaming handheld, but are not sure which one is the right machine for you, we totally understand. There are a whole bunch of PC-based handheld gaming systems out there right now, and if you don't stay abreast of this stuff, it can be hard to keep up.
If you look at the...
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We wouldn't blame anyone for being indifferent with the state of the PC hardware market right now. The most recent GPU hardware launch was in January, and while we've seen new CPUs drop from AMD, they didn't exactly set enthusiasts' hearts ablaze. What we need is a paradigm shift, a truly new product that hasn't...
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Bruce Nesmith is a guy whose name you may never heard even if you're a big fan of Bethesda's games. He got his start working with famed Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR on Apple II games, and joined Bethesda as early as 1995, where he was credited as a designer on The Elder Scrolls: Chapter II - Daggerfall. Nesmith...
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HP EliteBook 1040 Gen11 (Starts at $1,699, $2,099 as tested) HP's 11th Elitebook 1040 is a workhorse of a laptop with a minimalist, thin and light design with a solid feature set for business users. Great All-Day Battery Life Slim Size And Light Weight Minimal Pre-Installed Bloatware Extremely Quiet Operation Standard...
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The Rockstar Games Launcher on PC just got another update yesterday, and along with the patch came down yet more evidence of a forthcoming release for the first Red Dead Redemption game on PC. We knew this was happening; the same fellow who sniffed out the new evidence, found strings buried in the Rockstar Launcher...
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AMD's desktop Ryzen processors with more than 8 cores are fabricated using chiplets: one big die handles memory, I/O, and other functions, while smaller dice called "CCDs" contain the Zen CPU cores. This approach has a ton of advantages, but a few downsides too, and one of the latter is that core-to-core latency for...
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It can be tough to keep up with processor codenames, so let us lay it out for you. "Lunar Lake" is the code name for the new Intel mobile processors implementing "Lion Cove" P-cores and "Skymont" E-cores. Those same core architectures will show up in "Arrow Lake," the new high-power parts launching later this year...
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If you're into overclocking at all, you have probably heard of Skatterbencher. He's a veteran overclocker who has held multiple historical world records, but is perhaps best known for his YouTube videos giving explicit instructions to help novice overclockers tune their own systems for maximum performance.
His...
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AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) has been through a lot of iterations. The first major version was a straightforward spatial upscaler that produced unsatisfactory results unless the render resolution was very close to the output resolution. FSR2 was a major step forward, introducing motion vectors and temporal...
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Look, we know it's tempting if you're a gamer with the requisite $700, but please don't buy a PS5 Pro. It's an awful lot of money for a toy that can only play the games that Sony says you can play. It doesn't even have the excuse of being a really high-quality Blu-Ray player like the PS3 did—there's no disc drive at...
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It's a new school year, and chances are good that the old Windows 7-based 2012-vintage laptop you were planning to give to the kid is really on its last legs. Grab something new with a fresh version of Windows and all of the accoutrements you expect from a brand-new laptop, like a modern screen in high resolution, a...
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For Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 200 desktop processors, perhaps more familiar by their code-name "Arrow Lake", Intel has removed Hyper-Threading from the P-cores. That makes those CPUs narrower, so they might not need as much memory bandwidth, right? Well, the Skymont E-cores are nearly three times as wide as the...
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Look, before we even get into the meat of what the problems were, if you're on Windows, make sure you've got the latest updates. Yesterday's "Patch Tuesday" brought with it fixes for nearly 80 different security bugs across just about every single Microsoft product, but the real worry has to do with a zero-day bug...
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