Michael Lin
Recent posts
The first half of 2011 is shaping up to be all about tablets. Truly, the tablet mania that everyone was so adamant about last year is finally here. While dozens of tablets were announced and shown off at CES in January, most of them won't be arriving until later this month or the March time frame at the earliest. The main reason for the delay...
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In the middle of December, at the beginning of the annual holiday shopping spree, AMD released their latest and greatest graphics cards, the Radeon HD 6970 and 6950. In our review, we noted that the new GPU, code-named "Cayman" is a notable step forward from the previous generation. It incorporates dual graphics engines whereas the previous...
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For PC gamers, the gear we use to play can provide a tangible edge in our games. Although much noise is made about backlit keyboards boasting gamer oriented layouts and fancy mice with odd shapes, the most important considerations for gaming are still the guts of the gaming machine, a comfortable desk layout, a good monitor and a quality...
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Touted as one of the biggest milestones in Windows games development in recent years, DirectX 10 ultimately didn't live up to the hype as far as end-users were concerned. A large part of the disappointment was perhaps due to a misunderstanding of what DirectX 10 was supposed to be. DirectX 10 was a fundamental refresh of the entire API and...
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One of the sub-categories cropping up amongst OEMs are videos cards which feature highly customized cooling along with special controller chips or other functionality that help facilitate tweaking the card's performance. These cards all have a few things in common. First, they all mount beefy and often very radical cooling designs which are...
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AMD has been attacking the mainstream PC segment lately with a slew of modestly priced processors and chipsets. The attack started with the new Athlon II X2 value processors back in June, which were a much needed replacement for the out-dated Athlon X2 series. Then a few weeks later, AMD released their new mainstream chipset, the 785G,...
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For the last several years AMD has delivered a series of solid, cost-effective mainstream chipsets with integrated graphics. First with the original 690G which offered a wealth of features and surprisingly competent IGP performance. Then later with the 780G and 790GX chipsets, which added a little more graphics horspower and IGP features,...
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Chances are good that you know at least one person who seems to know more than your average Joe about what makes computers tick. This person might work in IT or be an engineer in a related field, or maybe they are just self-proclaimed subject experts. Since you are reading HotHardware, chances are excepionally good that YOU are that guy/gal,...
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Thanks largely to all of the attention surrounding the Intel Atom platform and its alternatives like the Via Nano and NVIDIA Ion, small form factor (SFF) systems have been generating tech news in a big way for the past half year. While tiny toaster-sized machines have been relevant for some time, as proven by the continued success of...
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The latest socket AM3 compatible Phenom II processors have been available for several weeks now and they had proven in our initial coverage to be excellent chips, a notable improvement over their predecessors in several respects, including overclocking and in their support for higher clocked DDR3 memory. Thanks to the Phenom...
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Since the launch of their latest processor architecture in the form of the Core i7 processor line, Intel has been busy slowly reorganizing their desktop CPU offerings. While the Core i7 line-up currently takes a performance leadership position, it only covers the high end of the market at this time, and a new Core i7 capable platform...
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In this post, I'll show you a few select options for putting together an affordable media server computer for under $300 that can store all of your media in one central location and is small enough to fit just about anywhere in your house. This build guide is for a server that will probably be running headless (without a monitor) and not...
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When AMD launched their current generation of Radeon 4800 series graphics cards last summer, they propelled themselves back into the ring against NVIDIA, who had previously been dominating the performance game for a few product cycles. The Radeon 4800 series provided decidedly high-end performance at a comfortable mid-range price that undercut...
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Immediately after ASUS launched the Eee PC into an unsuspecting notebook market over a year ago, the short term answer from competitors was, well, nothing, save perhaps for the XO-1 from the OLPC organization. At the time, there was still speculation about whether or not anyone would even be interested in a low power, low cost, ultraportable...
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In this post, I'll show you a few select options for putting together an affordable computer for under $500 that can handle just about every game currently available for PC while maintaining a decent screen resolution and image quality. Here are the goals I wanted to hit with this particular computer build: Budget of $500 not including...
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We evaluated the original Dell XPS 730 in early May, shortly after its initial release. At the time, it was Dell's latest high-end gaming machine and the word on the street was that it would be the last to carry the XPS badge. Moving forward, Dell was to concentrate on their Alienware gaming brand and the XPS brand would lose its...
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About 10 years ago, in mid-November 1998, Valve Software released the first installment of one of the greatest and most enduring gaming franchises in history; Half-Life. The original Half-Life won Game of the Year awards in over 50 publications and set the bar for story-driven first-person shooter for years. It was also quite the technological...
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ASUS is one of the key drivers of the netbook arena, at least in the sense that they are often the first to bring new features and platforms to market. Not only did they launch the very first commercially available netbook, the Eee PC 701, they can also lay claim to having the first Intel Atom powered notebook, the Eee PC 900A, as well as...
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Here at Hot Hardware, we are big fans of the XPS 700 series of gaming desktops. Over the last two years, they have consistently earned our coveted Editor's Choice award time and again. We thought the last incarnation of the 700-series, the XPS 730 H2C, was the best yet in the series. It seems Dell isn't quite done with the XPS 730. Today Dell...
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As the mass media warns of the financial apocolypse, consumers are tugging on their purse strings and retailers are feeling the pinch. Manufacturers everywhere are trying out kooky gimmicks to try and lure dollars out of the pockets of spooked consumers. Whether it is a free copy of Far Cry 2 with your NVIDIA graphics card purchase or a bonus...
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The Lenovo ThinkPad X300, released earlier this year, was quite an exciting product and Hot Hardware wasn't the only publication to award it an Editor's Choice (our review). With its svelte form-factor, LED backlighting, solid state hard drive and unique, ultra thin optical drive, the X300 is a standout product packed full of cutting...
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The price of LCD screens has steadily declined and in the last few years, larger monitors are starting to become relatively affordable. This is especially evident in the 19", 20" and 22" categories, where we see a significant number of products in the sub-$300 range. However 24" and larger screens still remained premium products until very...
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