Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
If you read this site, there's a solid chance that you have children. Do you pay attention to who they're talking to on the internet? Probably not as well as you should—like most parents. A fifteen-year-old girl was abducted from her home in Virginia last August, and it was only thanks to the careful eye and decisive...
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If you're a dedicated fan of the original Portal, then chances are high that you're familiar with Portal: Prelude. For everyone else, Prelude was a popular fan-made mod that serves as an unofficial prequel to the megahit game that introduced us to Aperture Science, the portal gun, and murderous AI GLaDOS.
Well...
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Microsoft's purchase of Activision-Blizzard is practically a done deal at this point, and while it does result in the formation of a gargantuan gaming juggernaut the likes of which the world has hardly seen, there are some good things that could feasibly come out of the conglomerate entity. Microsoft's game publishing...
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If you run Windows 11 on your gaming PC, you may have noticed weird performance issues in your keyboard & mouse games: a strange stuttering, particularly when you're moving the camera. That's not actually a performance issue, or at least, it's not the usual kind of performance issue. Instead, what you're noticing is a...
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Baldur's Gate is a name that will make a bunch of old CRPG nerds get all wistful and misty-eyed. That game came out in 1998 on five CD-ROMs—with a sixth for the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion. It's based on the AD&D 2nd Edition rules, a set of regulations so archaic and arcane that your armor class gets better...
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ASRock's Taichi series of motherboards have historically been fantastic pieces of hardware. Your author's main personal PC is based on an ASRock X570 Taichi motherboard, and it's been rock-solid and feature-filled through two different CPU upgrades since its release in mid-2019.
However, your author does have one...
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In comparison to the Golden Cove and Raptor Cove P-cores featured on Intel's recent desktop CPUs, the Gracemont E-cores are downright puny. However, they're not slow processors in comparison to "CPUs in general." In fact, the per-clock integer performance of Gracemont is not far off of the Skylake core used in every...
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We've still got our ASUS ROG Ally handheld system, and we're still using it on occasion to play a game while standing in the kitchen waiting on food or while covered up in cats on the living room floor. Something we've run into a couple of times is that the microSD card, where many of our games are stored, will stop...
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As technology enthusiasts, we all have a love-hate relationship with Wi-Fi. It's so convenient, the way it enables devices to access networks including the internet in a totally untethered fashion. It's also super frustrating at times, with unreliable connections and poor performance in crowded areas. Most of this is...
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Windows 11's minimum system requirements, according to Microsoft, include a UEFI system with a supported processor, 64GB of available disk space, a compatible DirectX 12-capable graphics processor, and at least 4GB of memory. Four gigabytes isn't a lot of RAM these days, and a lot of techy types would probably sneer...
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Bethesda's upcoming "NASA-punk" space exploration title Starfield is sure to be a showpiece title for the Xbox Series X, but the game is launching simultaneously on the PC, and of course, PC players will probably enjoy the best performance—at least, as long as their hardware is up to par. If you're excited about the...
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You read the headline so we probably don't need to re-state it, but just in case you're reading this on an ancient archive in the year 2330 and the headline has been lost to history, here it is: Microsoft has been given the go-ahead to pay $69 billion dollars for competing publisher Activision-Blizzard. That green...
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In quite a surprising move, Intel has announced today that it is stopping "direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business." What does that mean? In short, no more NUCs. This is sort-of a shock because it was barely two months ago that we heard about some upcoming NUCs from Intel using its Alder Lake-N...
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All you have to do is trawl the support forum or Discord channel for any popular gaming project, like an indie title or especially game emulators, and you'll quickly become aware of how many folks are gaming on Intel integrated graphics. It's not the ludicrous proposition it once was, but it's still a pretty tall ask...
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Did you know that you can run Android apps directly on Windows 11? You don't have to use an emulator like Bluestacks; you can just load the app and run it in a window like any other application. The "catch" to this wondrous feature is that only certain apps are available, and you have to get them through a special version of the Amazon Appstore
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By now, we have a pretty decent idea of what's going to show up on the desktop for Intel's "14th-generation" Core CPUs: a refresh of Raptor Lake, using fundamentally the same cores with slightly higher clocks. It does look like Intel is doing the same thing with core counts that it did with the lower-end 13th-gen...
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Can you believe we're already a quarter of the way into July and past the halfway point of 2023? A new month means a new middle version number for the latest Radeon driver release, naturally numbered 23.7.1. These drivers have the usual pack of bug fixes and known issues, but the real star of the show is something...
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NVIDIA has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, as it skirts a one-TRILLION-dollar market valuation. While we're fond of the company's products, its corporate behavior has occasionally come under fire, with some of the most high-profile remarks coming from former partner EVGA.
The latest such allegation comes...
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If you read that headline and thought, "what the heck, Zen 4 just came out," I have bad news for you, friend. The Ryzen 7000 series processors for desktop and their Socket AM5 platform came out last September—over nine months ago. It'll still be a long while yet before we see the release of any Zen 5 processors, but...
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Let's talk about AI-generated content. In case you've been living under a rock, humans have iterated on neural networks to the point that descriptively-named "generative AI" can actually create new images, audio, and even video from whole cloth. These generative AIs create new content by observing patterns in existing...
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SNK's Neo·Geo was an extremely-powerful 16-bit home game console because it shared its hardware with the Neo·Geo MVS arcade system. While you couldn't exactly slap a game from the MVS into the living-room "Arcade Entertainment System" (AES), they did play the exact same software—no ports required. Games for the system...
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Did you think that the Ryzen 5 5600X3D would be the last Socket AM4 CPU? We did too, and we were sure we were right. As it happens, there are two more AMD CPUs headed to the last-generation socket, although they're not exactly "new". Despite their familiar origins, though, it was hard to pin down exactly what they...
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