Ben Funk
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Recent posts
We've been looking forward to this day ever since we first got our hands on a trio of high-powered gaming notebooks powered by AMD's Ryzen 4000 processors. We already know the Renoir-based CPUs could deliver excellent performance at an attractive price in higher power envelopes where the Ryzen 7 4900HS and Ryzen 7...
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By now, AMD's Radeon RX 5700 family of GPUs is a pretty well-known quantity. The Navi architecture that makes up the current crop of AMD-based graphics cards offers pretty good bang for the buck from the mainstream Radeon RX 5500 XT up to the biggest and baddest Radeon RX 5700 XT, thanks to aggressive pricing and the...
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It seems we can hardly take a breath without another leak about NVIDIA's GeForce RTX based on the company's next-generation Ampere technology. Yesterday, the top-end GeForce RTX 3090 Ti was posing for the cameras. Today, one of the smaller siblings, expected to be called GeForce RTX 3080, went for a romp on...
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Building a Ryzen system right now either requires a pricey motherboard based on the flagship X570 chipset, the recently released B550, or sticking with previous-generation mid-range chipsets like the B450. Help for budget builders with severely limited funds is on the way though, in the form of the as-yet unannounced...
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Between all the accidental leaks and myriad rumors surrounding NVIDIA's Ampere architecture and GPUs, there may not be much left to reveal by the time any next-generation graphics cards ship. This time we've got a spicy selection of specs and photos regarding what should be the company's top-end GPU, rumored to be...
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It's a new month, and that means there are new creatures to catch in Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch. As summer heats up, a handful of new bugs and fish will appear, ripe for catching and giving them to Blathers as donations to the museum or as gifts for that one villager who really seems to like...
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By now, everyone with even the vaguest of interest in PC technology can tell you how much snappier solid state drives are than even the fastest of spinning disks of yesteryear. There have been some interesting wrinkles recently, like ultra-high speed drives that ride the PCI Express 4.0 bus, but in test after test...
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We all know that bigger is better, right? At least in generalities, it's often true. More CPU cores help performance in multi-threaded workloads, while high frequencies boost performance in lightly-threaded tasks. With graphics, it's all about more as well; more shading resources, more ROPs, more VRAM, and a wider bus means more frames per...
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Backpacking across the country "Once...there was an explosion." So opens the oft-memed narrative of Kojima Productions' first post-Konami title, Death Stranding. If you've not been paying attention to the game, which launched in November as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, this title is about to make its jump to the PC. On July 14, non-PS4 gamers...
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Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch is the gift that keeps on giving. The latest free content release is the Summer Update that launched on Wednesday, and now you can swim with the fish. But before you dive into the ocean, you've got to be dressed for the occasion.
Unlike most of the clothing in...
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Personal electronics take quite a beating. Think for a moment about all the places your smartphone can end up: on top of the car, buried in a bag, shoved into a pocket along with keys, tossed on a seat where it may bounce off and hit the floor, and so many other situations. Just like a phone, a tablet can end up in a...
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It's official: from what we've seen so far, AMD's Ryzen 4000 series of mobile APUs are a hit here in the HotHardware labs. It started with the svelte ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 gaming notebook, which impressed us with excellent performance at a reasonable price point, all packed into a lightweight 2.7-pound 14" chassis...
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Always-on, always-connected PCs like the Samsung Galaxy Book S -- the kind of machines that are ready to go first thing in the morning and last all day and night, while never losing an internet connection thanks to cellular connectivity -- are a potential game changer for some users. Manufacturers have tried to make this happen with tablets,...
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Variety is the spice of life. Nobody would be happy with just one flavor of ice cream, a single car, or the monotony of a single video game. Thankfully, we don't live in a world like that, so even premium 2-in-1 laptops come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. Today we're going to take a look at Lenovo's Yoga C940 convertible notebook, which...
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When we reviewed the Dell G5 15 SE, an all-AMD gaming laptop that features an AMD Ryzen 7 4800H processor and a Navi-based Radeon RX 5600M, we didn't have a chance to dive into integrated graphics performance. The gaming battery life with powerful discrete graphics left something to be desired of course—the...
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Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Nintendo Switch came along at just the right time for our family. Just as seemingly the entire country began shelter in place plans, we could get away from it all on a remote deserted island and build a bustling village - a pandemic-free world of our own with new ways to profit...
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AMD is in an enviable position in the gaming laptop world. Not only does the red team arguably produce some of the fastest mainstream mobile CPUs around in its Ryzen 4000 series, there's also formidable graphics horsepower in the same camp. As a result, AMD can control the whole platform, hardware and driver stack in a PC with its CPU, GPU,...
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Apple seems like a company divided these days. While the technology juggernaut's Mac lineup continually stagnates between long-overdue updates, Cupertino's iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch families march ahead to a yearly cadence of updated designs, new features, and enhanced performance. It's almost like Apple is really two different companies—one...
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Lots of folks are working from home these days, and that means endless WebEx, Zoom, Skype, or other online meeting sessions. When you're not optimally equipped to work from home, especially if you don't have a dedicated workspace, that can be a bit of a mess with lots of background noise happening while you're in a...
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It was seven months ago that NVIDIA announced it was working to give Minecraft a makeover, thanks to the ray tracing hardware acceleration hardware built into its GeForce RTX line of graphics cards. Well, unless you've been living under a rock -- or haven't been spending as much time on our news page as you should -- you know that Minecraft...
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It's been nine months since AMD unleashed its Zen 2 processors and, more importantly as it related to this article, the X570 chipset with its PCI Express 4 connectivity, into the world. In the time since then, there hasn't been a torrent of extra-fast flash released by all that many storage vendors; even at launch, we only had Gigabyte's Aorus...
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When we evaluated the late 2019 model of Dell's XPS 13, we thought a few small things kept that ultraportable from achieving complete perfection. That machine shipped with Intel's Comet Lake-U family of processors, which are plenty fast on the CPU side of things. However, they lack the graphics "oomph" of Intel's latest Iris Plus graphics,...
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