AMD Reveals Radeon RX 6700 XT, A 1440p Gaming Powerhouse

The Episode 3 livestream of AMD’s “Where Gaming Begins” series just ended, during which the company revealed some feature updates coming to its Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs and officially announced the latest member of its RDNA2-based Radeon RX 6000 family, the forthcoming Radeon RX 6700 XT. But before we dive into the Radeon RX 6700 XT, AMD also announced updates coming to previous-gen Ryzen 3000 series processors and its Radeon Software suite, that should make more than a few gamers and performance enthusiasts happy... Smart Access Memory Comes To Ryzen 3000 Smart Access Memory...

Intel SSD 670p Review: Snappy, Budget-Friendly NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Mar 01, 2021

Intel is releasing a new family of solid state drives today, targeting mainstream users and everyday computing tasks. The new Intel SSD 670p series leverages the company’s latest 144-layer QLC 3D NAND flash memory technology, with an improved dynamic SLC caching algo and updated PCIe Gen 3 controller. Unlike some of the more recent ultra-high-end PCIe Gen 4 SSDs to be released recently, complete with insanely high sequential transfer speeds north of 7GB/s, the Intel SSD 670p eschews the blazing sequentials in favor of optimized performance for random transfers at low queue depths that are...

GeForce RTX 3060 Review: NVIDIA's Most Affordable Ampere Yet

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Feb 25, 2021

NVIDIA is launching its latest Ampere-based GPU today, targeting the sweet-spot of the PC gaming market, the GeForce RTX 3060. The GeForce RTX 3060 was announced post-CES 2021, all the way back in mid-January, but cards are going on sale today. In addition to the relatively early initial reveal, NVIDIA is doing a few other things a bit differently with this launch. For one, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention last week’s announcements regarding specialized CMP HX mining GPUs and the GeForce RTX 3060’s intentionally gimped mining hash rash rate, when it comes to the Ethereum...

Samsung SSD 980 Pro 2TB Review: Flagship PCIe 4 NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Feb 16, 2021

In September of last year, the initial salvo of Samsung SSD 980 Pro drives was launched. At the time, Samsung SSD 980 Pro PCIe 4 NVMe drives in capacities of 250GB on up to 1TB were made available, but a 2TB drive had been announced and was on the roadmap as well. It took a bit of time for Samsung to make the 2TB drive a reality, but nevertheless it is here now, and we’ve got one on hand for some benchmarking and evaluation. Except for its obviously higher capacity, the 2TB Samsung SSD 980 Pro doesn’t differ from the smaller drives that were previously made available. Due to how the...

ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 And S50 Lite Review: PCIe 4 Speed Or Value

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Feb 04, 2021

ADATA has been consistently expanding its line-up of XPG, or Xtreme Performance Gaming branded hardware, targeting PC enthusiasts and gamers. The XPG family now consists of everything from micoSDXC cards all the way on up to full gaming systems and notebooks. XPG's SSDs (Solid State Drives), however, are arguably the most extensive array of products in the company's portfolio. ADATA has a myriad of XPG SSDs available, at a wide variety of price points and performance levels. The two drives we’ll be showing you here today, the new ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 and XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite, are both...

Maximizing Ryzen 5000 Performance With AMD Curve Optimizer

by Ben Funk - Fri, Jan 29, 2021

Overclocking a CPU used to be a pretty simple process: change a bus speed or a multiplier, set an appropriate voltage, and voila: your Celeron 300A was running at 450 MHz, or your 600 MHz Duron was knocking on the 1 GHz barrier. These days with the advent of dynamic boost speeds and optimized frequency and voltage curves, processors intelligently push themselves up close to the limit straight out of the box. Setting a multiplier, even if it's higher than the base clock, might actually result in lower performance than stock speeds under certain conditions. The CPUs that likely have the most headroom,...

Creative SBS E2900 2.1 Speakers Review: Big Sound, Small Price

by Ben Funk - Fri, Jan 29, 2021

While Creative Labs has expanded its product offerings into other arenas, the company has never waivered from its core competency: PC and home audio. The Sound Blaster maker has almost always offered speaker systems to pump out the audio from our favorite PC and console games. Today, that tradition lives on with Creative marketing a wide variety of discrete speaker systems and sound bars, at a wide variety of price points. The SBS E2900 2.1 speaker set we'll look at today sits well above the entry-level Pebble speakers, but a bit below the Sound BlasterX Katana sound bar. Creative primarily aims...

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop Performance: What To Expect

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jan 26, 2021

NVIDIA unveiled its Ampere-based RTX 30 series mobile GPUs at a special GeForce Event during this year's virtual CES 2021 festivities. A wide range of notebook design wins were also showed off at various events, spanning a variety of form factors. With the GeForce RTX 30 series, NVIDIA is targeting high-performance gaming notebooks in form factors as thin 16mm, even with the flagship GeForce RTX 3080. Thinner, higher-performance form factors aren’t the only features NVIDIA is touting. A number of upcoming notebooks will also be sporting 1440p, ultra-high refresh rate IPS displays. In...

AMD Ryzen 5000 Mobile Explored: The Future Of Zen 3 Laptops

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jan 26, 2021

During her CES2021 keynote address, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, along with a handful of partners, revealed the AMD Ryzen 5000 series mobile processors. At that event, the overall line-up and a few details were disclosed, and over the course of CES many design wins were announced by multiple OEMs as well. Shortly thereafter though, AMD hosted a deep-dive press briefing and discussed a number of additional details regarding the Ryzen 5000 Mobile Series. And today, we’re able to disclose to you more details of AMD's robust new laptop platform, but before we do, a bit of a recap is probably in order......

Samsung SSD 870 EVO Review: The Fastest SATA SSDs Yet

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jan 19, 2021

Samsung is expanding their line-up of SATA-based solid state drives, with a new series of products designed to balance performance and capacity. A few months back, the company launched the SSD 870 QVO series of drives, based on QLC, or quad-level cell, V-NAND. These new Samsung drives launching today – the Samsung SSD 870 EVO series – are similar in many regards, but EVO SSDs feature Samsung’s latest TLC (triple level cell) V-NAND, with the commensurate firmware to match. These new TLC-based drives also offer slightly higher performance than their QLC-based predecessors, with...

AMD Unleashes Ryzen 5000 Mobile Processors For Big Laptop Performance Gains At CES 2021

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jan 12, 2021

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa kicked off the company’s highly-anticipated CES 2021 keynote with some discussion about the importance of high-performance computing and the gaming industry in general. She talked about the latest AMD-powered game consoles and the recent launch of the Radeon RX 6000 series, otherwise known as “Big Navi”. Dr. Su also used the big stage to chat with a number of key AMD partners, like Panos Panay, Microsoft Chief Product Officer; HP’s President and CEO Enrique Lores, François Chardavoine; the head of technology for Lucasfilm and ILM; Lewis Hamilton and...

Intel Takes Fight To AMD With Bevy Of New Mobile And Desktop CPUs Unveiled At CES 2021

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Jan 11, 2021

At its virtual CES 2021 event today, Intel’s Executive Vice President Gregory Bryant, along with a host of additional executives, engineers, and partners, unveiled an array of new processors and technologies targeting virtually every market, from affordable Chromebooks, to enthusiast-class gaming laptops, and high-end desktops, to big-iron servers. Whereas some companies tend to focus on just a handful of specific products during CES, it seems Intel is making a stand in multiple market segments with no less than 50 processors being announced or teased, with hundreds of design wins in tow....

WD Blue SN550 SSD Review: Superb, Budget NVMe Storage

by Ben Funk - Mon, Jan 04, 2021

Spinning hard disks are completely out for just about all but the very cheapest of systems. Solid state drives like the WD Blue SN550 we'll be evaluating in this article are here to stay, and continue to make their way into lower-priced, ever more affordable notebooks and desktops. That's no doubt due to the fact that these drives' asking prices have consistently dropped year over year. In 2020, there hasn't been much good news on the affordable, widely-available PC hardware front, but SSD availability has been one bright spot. There's never been a better time to grab an SSD to speed up any PC...

MSI GeForce RTX 3080 SUPRIM X Review: Big, Bad And Bold

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Dec 30, 2020

Despite the ongoing availability woes for current-generation GPUs, NVIDIA’s board partners continue to march forward with custom GeForce RTX 30-series designs, that are near complete departures from Founders Edition models. Case in point, the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 SUPRIM X we’ll be showing you here today. Although it is built around the same GPU as NVIDIA’s Founders Edition, MSI went in a completely different direction than NVIDIA's design. While the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founder’s Edition has a relatively small, notched PCB with a small form factor power connector...

Cyberpunk 2077 Review: Gameplay, Performance & Optimization

by Ben Funk - Wed, Dec 16, 2020

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 game is so massive, however, that we elected to take our time to really soak it in before tackling this review.  For those who are new to the franchise, Cyberpunk 2077 is based on the Cyberpunk tabletop role-playing game franchise. The second and fourth...

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Zen 3 Brain Transplant Yields Huge Performance Gains

by Dave Altavilla - Tue, Dec 15, 2020

There was little question, when we took a deep dive look at AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X in our launch day review, we came away thoroughly impressed. Not only did AMD deliver on its promise of a significant performance lift in many areas, versus its previous gen Ryzen 3000 series, but we also realized better power consumption characteristics for even better performance-per-watt results than we expected. But let's take a step back. You might recall that a little over a year ago, we trucked on down to scenic Kenilworth New Jersey to meet with our buds at Maingear for a very special all-AMD...

Radeon RX 6900 XT Review: AMD's Most Powerful Gaming GPU Ever

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Dec 08, 2020

A couple of weeks back, we were able to show you AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT in action, across an array of games and applications, in two different systems, with and without Smart Access Memory enabled. In that piece, we came to the conclusion that AMD’s latest high-end gaming GPUs are worthy adversaries for their NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series counterparts – the GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080. Today, however, we get to move all the way up the stack and show you Big Navi’s, Big Daddy, the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which AMD claims can go head-to-head with NVIDIA’s...

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Review: Breakout Speed At $399

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Dec 01, 2020

NVIDIA is bolstering its line-up of Ampere-based GPUs today with a new addition to the GeForce RTX 30 series, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. As its name suggests, the new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti supplants the previous-gen, Turing-based GeForce RTX 2060 / RTX 2060 Super and slots in just behind the recently-released GeForce RTX 3070, which we recently considered an Editor’s Choice winner at its introductory MSRP. For today’s launch, we got our hands on a pair of GeForce RTX 3060 Ti cards, NVIDIA’s own Founders Edition and MSI’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio. Although these two...

Build A Great Gaming PC With HotHardware's 2020 DIY System Guide

by Ben Funk - Fri, Nov 27, 2020

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 cards, storage, and more in an effort to assemble some truly drool-worthy gaming PCs at a variety of price points. From top to bottom, rest assured that we've done the hard work of balancing price and performance in a way that gets the most performance possible from a given budget. Because...

World Of Warcraft: Shadowlands Laptop Graphics Shootout With Variable Rate Shading

by Ben Funk - Tue, Nov 24, 2020

About two years ago, NVIDIA started talking about a shader rendering method that applied varying levels of quality to different objects in the game world. That method was called Variable Rate Shading, or VRS. When applied skillfully and artfully in different areas of a scene that are less prominent in the gamer's field of view, the resulting rendered image quality wouldn't look all that different than if the whole scene had been fully shaded, though the graphics workload savings would improve performance significantly. Fast forward a year or so, and benchmarks became available for measuring...

AMD Unveils Precision Boost Overdrive 2 To Amp-Up Ryzen 5000 Performance Even Further

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Nov 23, 2020

AMD introduced Precision Boost Overdrive, or PBO, a couple of years back to make extracting additional performance from its Ryzen processors, in systems with additional power and thermal headroom, as simple as a few clicks in Ryzen Master. And today, the company just updated the feature with a couple of new wrinkles to boost performance of Ryzen 5000 series processors even further. Unlike a manual overclock which can lock cores at a particular frequency, with Precision Boost Overdrive SenseMI is left in control of the processor, so frequencies and voltages can still dynamically scale up and down...

Radeon RX 6800 & RX 6800 XT Review: AMD’s Back With Big Navi

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Nov 18, 2020

For the past few weeks, PC gamers have been eagerly anticipating the launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series, a.k.a. “Big Navi”. NVIDIA shook up the GPU market over the last few months with its Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30-series cards, which offer significantly more performance and value than their predecessors. But, limited availability of GeForce 30-series cards has left a large contingent of enthusiasts in the lurch, with a pile of cash burning a hole in their pockets, itching to upgrade. So, when AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series was officially unveiled in late October and it...