Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
The next product in Ayaneo's Remake Collection has arrived. The Retro Mini PC AM01 is technically Ayaneo's first mini PC, although one could argue that the company's many x86-based handheld gaming systems also qualify. Still, this is the company's first machine without an attached screen or gaming controls, and you...
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Remember that Alienware M18 R1 laptop that we made some fuss about awhile back? We reviewed the original NVIDIA-powered version, but there's a new AMD Advantage model that uniquely comes with a mobile variant of Navi 31 called the Radeon RX 7900M. Sadly, reviewers and early adopters have complained of black screens...
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In AMD's mobile processor naming scheme, the first digit tells you what year the chip came out, and the third digit tells you what CPU core IP it implements. The Ryzen 7040 series came out this year and had Zen 4 CPU cores, so it follows that the Ryzen 8040 series will come out next year with, yes, Zen 4 CPU cores...
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Whether it's a skin in League of Legends, keys for Counter-Strike lockboxes, or some energy to continue playing Candy Crush, it's extremely likely that you've bought a microtransaction at least once. Imagine if you paid out for some in-game currency and the game operator shut down the title a couple of months or even...
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Alright, here's the scenario: you, a friend, or a family member want to move their gaming experience from console to PC, but you're looking at popular builds and balking at the prices. Who has $200 for a CPU cooler or $35 apiece for ARGB fans? Well good news: that stuff is for enthusiasts, and isn't necessarily...
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Today we've discovered a pretty big leak that, if accurate, reveals most of the pertinent details about AMD's first Socket AM5 "APUs", or desktop processors with powerful integrated graphics. We don't have any way to verify the content of the leak so take this with however many grains of salt that you wish, but the...
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Arguably the greatest handheld game system ever made, the Nintendo Switch may be nearing its end of life, but that's actually the best time to dive into a game system. You get the final revision of the hardware with all of the improvements made across its lifetime, and you have the full game library available without...
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If you're thinking it's finally time to retire the trusty old Haswell workhorse, or perhaps you're frustrated with the performance of your Ryzen 5 1600AF in Cyberpunk 2077, whatever the case may be, if you want some new PC parts, now is a great time.
We've picked out an absolutely astonishing gaming PC for you...
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AMD's Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards are based on the RDNA 3 architecture, and if you keep up with hardware news, you've probably heard of RDNA 3.5. That revision to the RDNA 3 design is not coming to discrete GPUs, though; it's strictly for integrated graphics. Instead, AMD's next Radeons will be based on RDNA...
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If you're reading this site, you're almost assuredly aware of the impressive GPT-4 language model, the basis of recent versions of ChatGPT as well as Bing Chat. OpenAI's GPT family of AI models are only one of many different language models, though. Anthropic's AI Claude is a similarly-capable language model in...
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It's one of the arguments of the age: like Coke vs. Pepsi, Apple vs. Samsung, or Nike vs. Adidas, the choice of Xbox or PlayStation is a highly contentious one. There are a lot of factors that fans take into account, but arguably the biggest one is simply your choice of controller layout; where Xbox pads have the left...
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As you'll know if you've been reading our deals posts recently, this Friday is Black Friday. The infamous day of deals heralds the beginning of the holiday shopping season. If you have kids, then you probably already know what they want as gifts, and there's a pretty good chance it's video games.
Actually, that...
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Meteor Lake, the first-generation "Core Ultra" processors, will be Intel's first "disaggregated" or chiplet-based CPUs. The launch of these important chips is less than a month away, and Intel is continuing to drip-feed details to the press and the public. The latest news comes from a video posted to the "Intel...
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Are you nostalgic for the days of slide-up screens and hidden, physical keyboards on mobile devices? Do you deeply miss your Motorola Sidekick, beloved Blackberry, or LG Ally proto-smartphone? If you do, you're squarely in the target market for Ayaneo's new Slide handheld gaming PC, which is available for just $699...
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Most of your writers up here at HotHardware are old farts, so we can scarcely imagine a Steam account without the original Half-Life. Back in the day, most of us owned boxed copies of the game, and you could put your CD-key into Steam to register it to your profile. If your existence on Steam is newer than that, don't...
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It's already been more than a year since the GeForce RTX 4090 hit store shelves. Truly, tempus does indeed fugit. Hardware enthusiasts are looking ahead to the next generation, and rumors have come a-plenty, but one of the most reliable NVIDIA leakers seems to have made a major screw-up with his GeForce RTX 5090...
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Intel's first-generation chiplet processors, code-named Meteor Lake, will include an entire chiplet (or "tile") dedicated to graphics. Intel has made some big promises about the graphics horsepower of its Meteor Lake processors. Today we've seen the first GPU benchmark of any kind for Meteor Lake, and the results are...
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You hear it said all the time: one of the best reasons to own a Steam Deck is for emulating classic games. The Steam Deck is fundamentally a PC, but despite this, you'll rarely hear anyone talk about playing classic PC games on it. The reason is simple: the Steam Deck's primary controls are gamepad-based, and enjoying...
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With its "Alder Lake" 12th-generation Core CPUs, Intel introduced the concept of the "P-series" processors. These 28W chips sit between the ultra-low-voltage "U" CPUs and the full-power mobile "H" units. Naturally, we'd expect its upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs to continue with this sort of segmentation, but it looks like...
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Today's PC-based gaming handhelds are incredibly powerful. Systems like the OneXFly offer eight Zen 4 CPU cores and up to 64GB of fast LPDDR5X memory—more than enough horsepower for even tasks like video editing. After all, we used to do that stuff on old Core 2 Duo systems. However, making use of the full potential...
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We tested Intel's Application Performance Optimizer last week and came away with a tentatively-positive opinion. The technology helps games leverage the hybrid architecture of Intel's CPUs more effectively, improving performance when CPU-limited, and it seems to really work. However, it's currently limited to the...
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Grand Theft Auto is absolutely not a series for children. While the earliest games had a cartoony style and relatively little objectionable content besides the nominative car theft, the games became surprisingly realistic, starting with the fully-3D GTA III on the PlayStation 2. Successive titles over the following...
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