Editor profile

Zak Killian

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Ever since playing Joust on his family's Atari 800XL 8-bit computer as a youth, Zak has been hooked on PC and console games. His passion for gaming as a kid led to an interest in PCs as a teenager, which ended up with him founding his own PC repair shop in the year 2000. Decades later, he's still building, still gaming, and still arguing on the internet with any opinion anyone has. A former writer of news and reviews for The Tech Report, Zak is a modern-day Renaissance man who may not be an expert on anything, but knows just a little about nearly everything.
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.

Recent posts

Now that even entry-level GPUs are capable of producing hundreds of frames per second in popular games at the most common resolution (1920×1080), discrete GPU driver developers have turned their eye toward the latest metric everyone's making a fuss about. Indeed, input lag has once again become a hot topic for PC... Read more...
AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors are vulnerable to some serious security exploits, so you should be quick about slapping the latest system firmware into your board's BIOS. Head to your system vendor or motherboard maker's website to make sure you've got the latest firmware for your Ryzen rig or EPYC server. AMD has... Read more...
The science of generating content with AI has been progressing rapidly on all fronts as of late, but video presents a lot of unique challenges due to the amount of data involved. OpenAI is right at the forefront of solving these challenges, though, and the company just presented its new model called, "Sora", as proof... Read more...
We have a secret to reveal to you, dear readers. It's something that Intel and AMD are rather coy about, although if we're being honest it's not exactly a "secret". The truth is this: supposed "mobile" processors that end in "HX" from both Intel and AMD are in fact not really mobile processors at all, but rather... Read more...
If you're a regular reader around here, odds are very good that you've spent some time experimenting with AI, including large language models. Even if you're not a developer yourself, you've probably dallied with DALL-E, gabbed with Gemini (née Bard), or chatted with ChatGPT—perhaps in its more pervasive form as... Read more...
AMD's current-generation Ryzen 7000 desktop processors came out in September of 2022. That's over 16 months ago. Intel's gearing up to launch its own Arrow Lake second-generation tiled processors on the desktop, and naturally, AMD is readying its competitor: the Zen 5 architecture and the CPUs bearing it, likely to be... Read more...
PC enthusiasts of a certain age will recall the bad old days before DirectX, when developers who wanted to make use of advanced acceleration hardware in graphics processors had to use a vendor-specific API for it. This meant that your ATI Rage version of Mechwarrior 2 wasn't going to work on your fancy new Rendition... Read more...
More than ten years since Grand Theft Auto V launched, we're finally starting to hear some real news about the next title in the legendary series. The trailer that released two months ago broke every record, racking up more than 93 million views in the first 24 hour and sitting now at 174 million views and 11 million... Read more...
ADATA Legend 970 PCIe Gen 5 SSD: Currently $339 (2TB) The  Competitive Overall Performance Great Game Level Loads PCIe Gen 5 Interface Low Latency, Good Responsiveness Negative Notes Audible Active Cooler Price Premium At this point in time, PCIe 5.0 SSDs have been around for while, and we've already evaluated... Read more...
AMD slightly surprised the world when it released the Ryzen 5 5600X3D exclusively at Micro Center after the launch of the Socket AM5 platform, but it was even more unusual when, at CES this year, the company announced four more Socket AM4 CPUs. It looks like Intel isn't going to be left behind in the "releasing new... Read more...
If you're still cranking along on something like an aged Sandy Bridge system for gaming, you don't need us to tell you that you need every extra bit of performance you can get. Well, if you're keen to install a clever hack to the UEFI firmware of your motherboard, you may be able to enable Resizable BAR ("ReBAR")... Read more...
Every application presents a given workload, and disparate discrete GPUs are typically capable of computing and completing that workload at various performance levels. With that understanding, why not use multiple GPUs for the same application? The answer, of course, is that you can—it just depends on the specific... Read more...
Seagate FireCuda 540: 2TB for $299 The speedy Seagate FireCuda 540 is a PCIe Gen 5 SSD with fast sequential transfers, which targets discerning gamers and content creators. Excellent Overall Performance Fast Game Level Loads Competitive Latency Latest PCIe Gen 5 Interface Requires Additional Cooling Price Premium Over... Read more...
It's the question that the head of every AAA developer has to be (or should be) asking their staff right now: what is the deal with Palworld? This isn't an opening to a Jerry Seinfeld comedy skit, but rather a very serious question, because the game is kind of crappy and broken in a lot of ways, yet it's now the... Read more...
If you have somehow missed this story as it has been evolving, Japanese indie hit Palworld has been tearing up the leaderboards on both Steam and Xbox platforms. As we reported on Thursday, it has over 19 million players between the two stores, and while it's available on Game Pass, the majority of the players are... Read more...
Kioxia is one of those names that you might not see a lot if you're primarily a DIY PC gamer. Whether you realize it or not, the original inventor of flash memory (when it was known as Toshiba Memory Solutions) moves a LOT of NAND. You can find Kioxia flash memory in just about any kind of device, and now, that... Read more...
Despite continued claims that it is done with content updates to Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red continues to update its FPS-RPG hybrid with new features and functions. The patch notes are incredibly long for a "0.01" version number update, and if you're currently playing the game, you'll probably want to look through... Read more...
It's not as crazy as it sounds, really. Think of it from the perspective of a kid: you can get Fortnite or Minecraft on every electronic device known to man, so why not new hit game Palworld that all your favorite streamers are playing? Search it up on your phone and bam, there it is in the app store. The thing is... Read more...
Despite being socketed desktop processors, AMD's new Ryzen 8000G processors have a secret: they're really mobile silicon. The Ryzen 8000G family, which we just reviewed, is based on the very same Hawk Point chips that you'll find in the Ryzen 8040U and Ryzen 8040HS series mobile processors. There's no problem with... Read more...
The next product in Ayaneo's Remake collection, which pays homage to gaming hardware of years past, has just launched. Known as the Flip, this handheld gaming PC actually comes in two forms that are fundamentally similar, yet have one big difference. They sport gorgeous 7" 120Hz LCD screens, Hall-effect inputs, and... Read more...
There are a few key specifications that heavily influence the performance of a graphics card. GPU fillrate—the rate that it can "fill" polygons with color—is a major one. GPU compute throughput is another, and arguably more important in the modern era. However, one of the oldest specs remains one of the most... Read more...
It's sort of a sad state of things that your smartphone is almost assuredly tracking your every action and movement, and then sending that data to nebulous remote services. Perhaps that's not surprising to, but this really shouldn't be the way things are. Unfortunately, that's the world we live in today, however. Your... Read more...
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