Ben Funk
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Recent posts
We wish you all a happy Boxing Day, and hope you've been having a great holiday season. While today has traditionally been a day for standing in long lines at brick and mortar stores, waiting to return gifts that didn't work or didn't fit, it's also possible you've come into some green presents in the form of good ol'...
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Cyberpunk 2077's launch was a little rocky, to say the least. The worst bugs and issues were with last-gen consoles, though the #PCMasterRace was somewhat less affected. While the PC port had (and still has) a little wonkiness to it, it's at least playable. Patch version 1.05 has now hit all platforms, and it brings...
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The battle over privacy online rages between key platform holders who strive to protect their users from monopolistic megacorps that earn their money turning personal data into cash. In this particular case, the platform owner is Apple, a megacorp of its own whose recent App Store policy changes on iOS and macOS force...
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Who's ready for another round of 14-nanometer desktop CPUs from Intel? What if those CPUs have a refreshed Cypress Cove architecture with better IPC? Ah, now I see a few more hands. Get ready, because it seems that the 11th generation of Core processors is on track to launch in January at CES 2021. Fortunately, it...
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If 2020 can be notable for any trends in the tech sector, it's these two: working from home and shunning Intel's x86 processors. Apple famously and most recently gave Intel the boot in favor of its own M1 system-on-a-chip (SoC). However, Apple didn't start this trend. Windows on Arm got a big boost very late in 2019...
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Cyberpunk 2077 has been one of the most hotly-anticipated titles in recent memory. Expectations were so high for this title that it's quite possible that CD Projekt Red could never live up to them. After numerous delays, however, Cyberpunk 2077 launched on December 10 to a mix of high praise and mild disappointment from many reviewers. The...
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The increasing cost of flagship smartphones over the last couple of years has put them out of reach for many consumers. We all knew it was coming in late 2018 when Apple priced the iPhone X at a cool $999. It wasn't long afterward that Android handset makers capitalized on the new normal of flagship phone pricing as well, but not everybody...
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Zen 3-based Ryzen processors showed some really outstanding performance on the desktop when we looked at the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X. In the high-performance computing server space, though, 12 to 16 cores is the bare minimum, and systems only scale up from there. AMD has yet to announce its Zen 3 EPYC CPU platform...
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Sony's PlayStation 5 has been available for about a month now, and quantities have been extremely limited, to say the least. Sony says the PS5 has been its largest console release ever and that absolutely every unit the company has made has been sold. However, so far the only way we've seen inside the console so far...
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In case you've been living under a rock, CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 launched on Thursday, and the game has been a massive success for the game studio. That should come as no surprise, at least based on Steam's active Cyberpunk players. Those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg, however, as Steam doesn't...
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The massively-multiplayer online RPG Genshin Impact has taken the world by storm when it launched for PC, iOS, Android, and PlayStation 4 at the end of September. Since then, big content updates have added a whole raft of new features. Developer miHoYo claims the game had over 10 million accounts registered before it...
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Single-board computers seemingly get more powerful by the day. The Raspberry Pi 4 gets all the attention and a lot of software support, but there are plenty of other alternatives out there that also deserve your attention. One new SBC will run x86 Windows 10 or most Linux distros without any need for platform-specific...
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CD Projekt Red's latest mega-blockbuster game, Cyberpunk 2077, launched this week on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. The developer announced its oft-delayed RPG way back in 2012, but anticipation has been running particularly hot for the several months now. We got our hands on the game right as the gates opened at...
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When Apple announced its new Mac lineup -- consisting of a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac mini -- with its new M1 processor, the company was met with a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism. Apple's performance claims were incredible. For instance, the company said that its new Apple Silicon offers upwards...
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Troubleshooting issues with our PC can be a frustrating experience, especially if the cause of the problem is hard to detect. Power management bugs are often the worst to get sorted. It seems like either the system won't go to sleep, or it won't start up right after sleeping. Hardware these days seems to be pretty...
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Apple's M1-based (Apple Silicon) Mac mini, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air spelled the end of Boot Camp, the company's solution for booting into Windows natively on its Intel-based hardware. At the same time, the big names in commercial virtualization options, VMWare and Parallels, are still scrambling to get an Arm64-native version of their
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It seems like NVIDIA is on the verge of announcing some new mobile GPUs perhaps, if recently leaks are any indication. It started yesterday when some Gigabyte Aero and Aorus laptops with unannounced GPUs leaked courtesy of @momomo_us on Twitter. Today the leaks keep on coming, and this time it's ASUS. A small army of...
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Black Friday may have come and gone, but good deals are forever. Cyber Monday is officially tomorrow, but Best Buy's biggest Cyber Monday deals have already gone live. We've gone through a whole big pile of deals and pulled out some of the very best ones for you below.
We'll start today with some PC component...
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When Apple announced in June that it would start building Macs with processors based on its own silicon that runs the Arm64 Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), that spelled the end for native Windows installations on Apple hardware. Boot Camp may be no more on Apple Silicon Macs built around the company's M1...
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Welcome to HotHardware's PC Component Buyer's Guide, where we help prospective DIY system builders pick out just the right collection of components to build the rigs of their dreams -- or at least the rig which makes the best use of your budget. We've picked out the best bang for the buck in processors, graphics...
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The deals keep pouring in, and we're doing our level best to keep up with them. While building a PC by hand can be a fun and exciting project, sometimes (like right now) components are hard to come by, and buying an off-the-shelf desktop presents itself as a convenient and time-saving method for getting a new system...
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It feels like Black Friday deals started somewhere in late October, but the day after Thanksgiving is finally upon us. Hopefully you've had some leftover pumpkin pie for breakfast and maybe a cup of coffee, because now it's time to shop. We've been poring over the best tech deals available and found some truly nice...
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