EVGA Z12 Gaming Keyboard, X20 And X15 Mice Review: Value-Priced Arsenal

As enthusiasts, we're often most enamored by the latest and greatest graphics cards, processors, and storage technology in our endeavors to squeeze as much performance from our systems as possible. However, it is the human interface devices -- like our keyboards, mice, and monitors -- that can have the most significant impact on our user experience. A high-quality keyboard and mouse, for example, can make you more productive, reduce fatigue, and even improve your gaming chops. So, when EVGA offered up their upcoming X20 and X15 gaming mice and Z12 RGB keyboard, we were eager to take a look. After...

Dell UltraSharp 4K Webcam Review: Up Your WFH Video Quality

by Chris Goetting - Wed, Aug 25, 2021

The humble webcam has seen a surge to prominence fueled by the rise of web conferencing and remote work, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Only a few short years ago, a webcam could be buried away below the display of a laptop and few users would complain or even notice. With those days behind us, consumers and professionals alike have been scrambling to improve their on-screen presence to the point of creating a shortage of the now critical device. That same demand has drawn more players into the discrete webcam space, including Dell. Dell's recently released 4K-capable UltraSharp Webcam aims...

Meet Intel's Arc GPU Superpowers: Alchemist, Battlemage, Celestial And Druid

by Brandon Hill - Fri, Aug 20, 2021

Earlier this week, Intel announced its highly anticipated family of discrete graphics cards targeted at the enthusiast gaming market. The cards are based on Intel's Xe-HPG architecture, and will be marketed under the Arc brand name. The first-generation Arc graphics cards were developed under the GPU codename Alchemist, while the second, third, and fourth-generation Arc GPUs will carry the codenames Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid, respectively. At first glance, we didn't think much about these codenames, but upon reflection, there's more to them than meets the eye. One thing that all of these...

Intel Architecture Day 21: Alder Lake, Arc, Sapphire Rapids And More Revealed

by Dave Altavilla, Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Aug 19, 2021

Intel held its annual Architecture Day earlier this week, and it’s safe to say that members of the press and analyst communities were waiting with baited breath for the deep dive disclosures on the company’s next-gen silicon architectures and products that are typically unveiled at the event. This year, Intel gave us a densely-packed view of what it has in store for PC consumers, the enterprise and data centers. From Alder Lake to Intel Arc, Sapphire Rapids, Ponte Vecchio and more, Intel laid down the gauntlet in fair detail on a number of fronts. As usual, there was a lot to digest,...

XFX MERC 308 Radeon RX 6600 XT Review: 1080P Gaming Speedster

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Aug 12, 2021

The Radeon RX 6600 XT officially launched earlier this week, bringing AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture down to more affordable price points (relatively speaking). Radeon RX 6600 XT cards target mainstream, 1080p gamers, and the two models we previously looked in our initial coverage proved to be decent performers and quite power efficient. This time around, we’re going to take a look at a factory-overclocked Radeon RX 6600 XT from AMD board partner, XFX, the MERC 308 Black. The MERC 308 RX 6600 XT Black is the top-of-the-line model in XFX’s Radeon RX 6600 XT lineup. Like most...

AMD Radeon Pro W6600 Review: RDNA 2 Pro-Vis GPU For Less

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Aug 10, 2021

Embargos lifted on Radeon RX 6600 XT reviews this morning, but that mainstream gaming GPU isn’t the only one AMD is pushing out the door today. The Radeon Pro W6600, which was announced back in early June alongside the more powerful Radeon Pro W6800, is also launching today. As its name implies, the Radeon Pro W6600, like its gaming-class Radeon RX 6600 XT counterpart, is a professional workstation GPU that targets more mainstream price points and performance levels than the W6800. The Radeon Pro W6600’s feature set is right in-line with higher-end RDNA 2-based offerings, however, and...

Radeon RX 6600 XT Review: AMD RDNA 2 For Mainstream Gamers

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Aug 10, 2021

AMD officially unveiled the Radeon RX 6600 XT in late July, and just last week we were able to give you a first-hand sneak peek and tour of one of the higher-end partner boards, the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 XT Red Devil. Today though, embargos lift on performance and power data, and we’re able to provide some additional pieces to the puzzle. Incidentally, there’s an additional embargo lifting tomorrow for other partner boards, so stop on by in the morning if you’d like some additional Radeon RX 6600 XT flavor. But we digress. On tap for you here today we have two Radeon RX 6600...

AMD Ryzen 5000G Series Review: Zen 3 APUs Deliver Big Value

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Aug 03, 2021

AMD is officially taking the wraps off of its latest APUs, the Ryzen 7 5700G and the Ryzen 5 5600G. As their branding suggests, these new products are based on the same technology as Ryzen 5000 series processors, namely AMD’s excellent Zen 3 core architecture, but with integrated graphics capabilities as well, hence the “G” designation. These particular processors, however, mark somewhat of a departure from similar, previous-gen AMD products. While Ryzen 3000G series APUs were relegated to entry-level systems with a maximum of 4 cores and somewhat tame CPU and GPU clock speeds,...

Intel Details Ambitious Chip Fab Roadmap With Cutting-Edge RibbonFET, PowerVia And Foveros Tech

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Jul 26, 2021

The ‘Intel Accelerated' webcast kicked off today, hosted by newly-minted CEO Pat Gelsinger and Dr. Ann Kelleher, SVP and general manager of Technology Development. The dynamic duo disclosed a number of new and interesting details regarding the company’s IDM 2.0 strategy along with Intel’s process and packaging technology roadmaps. Some of the news was related to branding and messaging, but Pat and Ann also talked about some transistor and packaging innovations that will have a significant impact on the way Intel manufactures and builds its chips moving forward. Intel Renames Its...

Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800 XT Review: Beastly Big Navi

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Jul 14, 2021

Although the situation is improving, it is still extremely difficult to score some of the latest graphics cards at prices even approaching their MSRPs. With that in mind, we’ve held off on covering some of the hottest GPUs to come through the lab for a while, because the coverage was inevitably (and understandably) met with groans and frustration by some of you. We get it, but the beat goes on, and GPUs are some of our favorite things to cover around here, especially models like the Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800 XT we’ll be showing you today. We’re going to go ahead and spoil...

Intel SSD D7-P5510 Review: Ultra-Fast PCIe 4 Enterprise Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, Jul 09, 2021

Intel has been making noise in virtually all segments of the storage market as of late. A few weeks back, we took a look at the Optane Memory H20, which combines 3DXpoint media with traditional NAND on hybrid M.2 device to accelerate the storage subsystem in mainstream notebooks and PCs. More recently, we evaluated the blazing-fast, ultra-pricey Optane SSD P5800X for high-performance workstations, and we can't forget about the budget friendly SSD 670p that arrived in early March. Today, we’ll shift our focus to the enterprise space and inspect Intel’s recently-announced PCIe Gen 4 SSD...

Intel Optane SSD P5800X Review: The Fastest SSD Ever

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Jun 30, 2021

When we reviewed the Intel Optane SSD 905P back in 2018, despite a significant price premium over NAND-based SSDs, we gave the drive and Editor’s Choice award due to its exceptional performance where it mattered most for consumers, e.g. access times and random transfers at low queue depths. Intel Optane solid state drives typically offer much better latency characteristics, more consistent and predicable performance with a variety of workloads -- regardless of how much drive capacity is being used – and their endurance ratings are off the charts. The only caveats with the 905P were...

Kingston DC1500M SSD Review: High Endurance NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Jun 28, 2021

This morning Kingston announced that its latest DC1500M series of enterprise-class solid state drives have begun shipping. Like many of its predecessors in Kingston’s enterprise SSD line-up, the new DC1500M series leverages a hot-pluggable U.2 (2.5”, 15mm) form factor, that’s compatible with common U.2 backplanes. The drives are tuned for mixed-use case, data-intensive workloads, including cloud computing, web hosting, high-performance computing (HPC), virtual infrastructures, and AI and deep learning applications. There are four drives in the initial Kingston DC1500M SSD line-up,...

TEAMGROUP T-Force Cardea Zero Z440 PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD Review

by Ben Funk - Thu, Jun 24, 2021

The PCI Express 4.0 interface has been around on AMD's Ryzen platform for a long time now, ever since the launch of Zen 2 and the X570 chipset. The new spec has finally gone mainstream on Intel's platforms, as well, with the release of the Rocket Lake-S 11th Gen Core processor family and the accompanying Z590 PCH. That means that neither camp is restricted to the older 3.0 spec which has half the bandwidth of the newer PCIe interface. It's high time we saw PCIe 4 solid state drives go mainstream, and today we have another offering on tap as a result with TEAMGROUP's T-Force Cardea Zero Z440...

AMD's Frank Azor And Carlos Silva Talk FidelityFX Super Resolution Live Here 6/22 At 5:30 PM ET

by Brandon Hill - Tue, Jun 22, 2021

Today, HotHardware's Two And A Half Geeks webcast will have a live chat with two execs from AMD's Radeon graphics and gaming team. Frank Azor, AMD's Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions, and Carlos Silva, Director of Software Development, will join us at 5:30 PM EST to talk about everything you could possibly want to know about AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution technology. And you can get your own questions answered live as well via the chat, if you join us. We'll stream live via YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and Periscope for those interested in joining in on the chat to field questions in real-time....

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution Tested: Of Pixels And Performance

by Ben Funk - Tue, Jun 22, 2021

When AMD unveiled "Big Navi", now known as the Radeon RX 6000 series, the new GPU family brought with it support for Microsoft's nascent DirectX Ray Tracing. DXR adds photorealistic lighting, reflections and more visual effects to make games that support the technologies look more true to life. However, real-time ray tracing is an intensive task, and high resolution, complex effects can drag frame rates down into unplayable territory even on the most powerful of today's GPUs. AMD said not to fear though, as it had an upscaling solution in the works that would boost performance, while maintaining...

WD_Black D50 Game Dock Review: Wicked-Fast External Storage

by Ben Funk - Mon, Jun 14, 2021

Notebooks often have limited storage capacity, despite significant advancements over the last few years. An M.2 drive is only the size of a stick of gum, but not every laptop can fit more than one or two drives at a time, and some users aren't comfortable opening up their machine to upgrade them, which ultimately limits their storage capabilities. This is particularly painful in gaming notebooks, when many games can take up dozens of gigabytes a piece. Western Digital thinks it has a solution, though. The WD Black D50 Game Dock is an all-in-one Thunderbolt 3 dock and PCI Express NVMe storage controller...

GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Review: Supercharged Midrange Gaming

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Jun 09, 2021

After an official unveiling at Computex 2021 and last week’s launch of the powerful GeForce RT 3080 Ti, NVIDIA is ready to go open kimono and spill all of the new, more-mainstream GeForce RTX 3070 Ti’s juicy details. Cards are due to go on sale tomorrow, but we’ve been able to put a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition through its paces and have everything laid out for you on the pages ahead. As its branding suggests, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is an update / upgrade over the original RTX 3070 which launched about seven months ago. NVIDIA didn’t just goose the clocks and call...

Radeon Pro W6800 Review: AMD RDNA 2-Infused Workstation Muscle

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jun 08, 2021

AMD is expanding its line-up of RDNA 2-based GPUs today, with a trio of new Radeon Pro graphics cards targeting the professional workstation market. These new Radeon Pro cards leverage the same GPU architecture as their consumer-class Radeon RX-branded counterparts, but Radeon Pros feature completely different designs, go through additional qualification and are certified for a myriad of pro-vis applications. The new line-up is spearheaded by the Radeon Pro W6800. The Radeon Pro W6800 is packing AMD’s current top-end Navi 21 GPU and a beefy 32GB of GDDR6 RAM with ECC support. Though the Radeon...

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Review: Amped-Up Ampere For Gamers

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Jun 02, 2021

During their Computex 2021 keynote, NVIDIA’s Jeff Fisher, GeForce Senior Vice President, and Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing, unveiled a number of new enterprise and consumer products, targeting multiple market segments. For all of the gamers though, it was Jeff Fisher’s official unveiling of the oft-rumored GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti cards that most likely got your juices flowing. The new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is the spiritual successor to the previous-gen flagship RTX 2080 Ti, while the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti builds upon the popular RTX 3070 with much faster memory and...

AMD Radeon RX 6800M Rips Benchmarks In Powerful All-AMD ASUS Gaming Laptop

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, May 31, 2021

During her Computex 2021 keynote this evening, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, along with compatriots Frank Azor and Scott Herkleman, revealed a number of the company’s new products an initiatives, targeting the server, desktop and mobile markets. For gamers, perhaps the most enticing announcement was the revelation of AMD's Radeon RX 6000M series of mobile GPUs. Though Dr. Su had mentioned that mobile RDNA 2-based Radeons were inbound back at CES earlier this year, it wasn’t until today that the actual line-up with specs, speeds and feeds was announced. The flagship product in the Radeon RX 6000M...

Intel Expands Tiger Lake-U Laptop Line-Up, Teases Vicious Beast Canyon NUC

by Ben Funk - Sun, May 30, 2021

Computex might be a virtual online-only show this year, but you should expect some big announcements from many of the heavy hitters in tech. The virtual show kicks off May 31 at 7:30 AM local time in Taipei, which translates to 10:30 PM Eastern on Sunday the 30th in the U.S. While there will undoubtedly be a ton of announcements over the next few days coming out of the show, we do have some early news tonight from Intel, to get the show started. Intel hosted a press and analyst Performance Workshop, and has lifted the curtain on how it's expanding the Tiger Lake product lineup, with a few new point...