Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
ASUS' ROG Ally handheld doesn't have the absolute best specifications in any area compared to the exploding market of handheld PC game systems. However, it has arguably the best balance of features and price, and that's why we feel it is the most credible challenger to the Steam Deck so far. Versus the Steam Deck...
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When you plug in a USB or Thunderbolt cable to your computer, that connection is often being routed to a small chip that then translates that data into a PCI Express signal for the final connection to your CPU. In that case, why don't we just use PCI Express for external cabling, too, and route it directly from CPU to...
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AMD's RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPUs, even the ones as small as the integrated GPU on the Steam Deck, fully support DirectX Ray-Tracing, or DXR. Despite that, their relatively poor performance in ray-tracing workloads is well-documented. The reason is because the RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 architectures only accelerate a small (but...
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What is "an AI"? Put simply, the way we use the term "AI" these days is a little misleading. It primarily describes neural networks, functionally black boxes into which you stuff data and then out comes other data, munged in (hopefully) the way you want. Neural networks aren't programs, though; they're not executable...
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MSI's Claw gaming handheld is unique in one specific way that makes it really interesting to a particular class of gamer. That particular class is the hardware geek, and the specific interesting detail is that it is based on an Intel Core Ultra processor rather than one of the AMD Phoenix APUs upon which almost all...
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Intel's Raptor Lake processors, including the 14th-generation Core CPUs known as "Raptor Lake Refresh", have been facing criticism among PC gamers over the last few months, and especially the last few weeks, due to instability issues in certain games at completely default, stock settings. This isn't a matter of...
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Look at your poor old TV. The brightness is fading, worsening the contrast, and motion doesn't look quite as clear as it used to. Certainly not as clear as it would on one of these brand-new OLED TVs, with their sub-1ms pixel response time and brilliant HDR capabilities. If you're still rocking an old pre-quantum-dot...
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Intel's been under some fire recently for issues affecting its top-end Core i9 processors from both the 13th- and 14th-generation Core families. Some of these chips, even when set to "BIOS defaults", will crash or otherwise fail in certain tests, most commonly Cinebench 2024 and especially, games using Unreal Engine...
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Frame generation isn't a solution to a stuttery, unsmooth experience. However, the ASUS ROG Ally comes with a 120-Hz Freesync display, and there are plenty of games that it can get to 60 FPS reliably, yet where it will struggle to hit the triple digits. If your favorite game falls into this category, you may be in...
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In case you haven't been paying attention, AMD's Zen 5 processors are expected to debut before long. In fact, many people are expecting AMD to announce the first wave, likely the "Granite Ridge" desktop processors sporting Zen 5 CPU cores, at Computex 2024. That's about six weeks from now, in the first week of...
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The next generation of AMD Radeon graphics cards might be quite a departure from its past products, if the rumors to date are accurate. The cards, which are likely to be part of the Radeon RX 8000 family, are expected to be based on the fifth revision of AMD's RDNA architecture, known as "RDNA 4" (with the fourth...
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We're big fans of the ASUS ROG Ally around here. It's not only one of the best-performing gaming handhelds in existence currently, but it's also one of only a very select few (including the Ayaneo KUN but excluding the Legion Go and Steam Deck OLED) to have a variable-refresh-rate display. That means that the...
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There's no two ways about it—AMD's Ryzen 8040 mobile CPU family and its Ryzen 8000G desktop CPU family are the exact same silicon: Hawk Point, the evolution of Phoenix featuring 60% better NPU performance. AMD takes the same chip, attaches it to either an LGA or BGA interposer depending on whether it's destined for...
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HighPoint is a name that will need no introduction to the people that will probably be interested in these products. Distinct from the budget firearms manufacturer with a similar name, HighPoint is a company who has been selling storage controllers since the 20th century. The latest products from HighPoint are...
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Hardware enthusiasts who have been around the block a few times will recall some concern over the reliability of chips based on Intel's 14nm FinFET fabrication process. With the fully-integrated voltage regulator (FIVR) being manufactured at such a tiny feature size, overclockers doing even minor overvolts might be...
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The company formerly known as Facebook made a couple of big announcements yesterday in cooperation with Intel, who may be providing some of the potent AI hardware to power Meta's new AI products. The big new things to know about are the Llama 3 AI model and Meta's new AI assistant, simply called "Meta AI".
Meta's...
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If you weren't there in the late 90s, it is very difficult to explain the particular cachet that "3dfx Voodoo" has among a certain generation of PC gaming enthusiast. 3dfx cards never had the best image quality, they rarely actually had the absolute best performance, and for the first two generations, the VGA...
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If you're a budding young tech enthusiast or simply a casual PC purchaser, you may have seen "cache" listed in the specifications for this or that processor and wondered what exactly that is. It's been a major marketing point for CPUs for decades, and recently it has even become a matter of discussion for...
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There can't really be any doubt at this point: AI is going to change all of our lives, and there's no going back from here. Still, there's quite a bit of debate over exactly how it's going to happen. If you listen to hardware vendors like AMD and Intel, they'll tell you that you absolutely need to upgrade your...
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Final Fantasy XIV Online is one of very few true success stories in the MMORPG space, and it comes as all the more of a surprise given the rocky launch of the title. Your author is one of many unfortunate fans of the previous Final Fantasy MMORPG, Final Fantasy XI Online, who pre-ordered the original release of Final...
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When OpenAI's GPT-4 hit the internet, it was pretty much the best large language model (LLM) around. Many of OpenAI's competitors have long since surpassed the original GPT-4 on various metrics, from Claude's enormous context window to Gemini 1.5's excellent performance with complex multi-modal datasets. Of course...
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We didn't cover it, but recently there was a story about how Intel's Raptor Lake -K processors—that's the overclockable members of the 13th- and 14th-generation Core family—were seeing extremely high return rates in certain circumstances, particularly in Korea. The problem seems to be that these CPUs are identified as...
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