ADATA Falcon And Swordfish SSD Reviews: Affordable NVMe Storage

By now, everyone with even the vaguest of interest in PC technology can tell you how much snappier solid state drives are than even the fastest of spinning disks of yesteryear. There have been some interesting wrinkles recently, like ultra-high speed drives that ride the PCI Express 4.0 bus, but in test after test, regardless of drive type, just having a modern SSD offers enough of a boost to make an older PC feel new again. Similarly, it's basically a necessity to slap an SSD like one of the ADATA drives we'll be showing you here, into a new system build to not make any big sacrifices in responsiveness....

XPG Spectrix D60G Review: How Fast DDR4 RAM Affects Ryzen

by Ben Funk - Thu, Jul 23, 2020

We all know that bigger is better, right? At least in generalities, it's often true. More CPU cores help performance in multi-threaded workloads, while high frequencies boost performance in lightly-threaded tasks. With graphics, it's all about more as well; more shading resources, more ROPs, more VRAM, and a wider bus means more frames per second. About the only way more doesn't help is when it's the wrong kind of more, as in latency. If a monitor has a long response time, it can hurt your game play. Similarly, if system memory has higher latency on data requests from the CPU, to help it complete...

LG's 27-Inch UltraGear 4K IPS Gaming Monitor Boasts A Blazing-Fast 1ms Response Time

by Paul Lilly - Tue, Jul 21, 2020

LG on Tuesday laid claim to offering the world's first IPS monitor to combine a 4K resolution with a 1-millesecond (ms) gray-to-gray (GtG) response time, to keep the action fast and smooth for gamers. The implication here is that you can have the speed benefits of a cheaper TN panel, on a monitor that uses a higher-quality IPS screen. "Our latest gaming monitor delivers the unrivalled performance consumers have come to expect from LG UltraGear," said Jang Ik-hwan, senior vice president and head of the IT business unit of LG Electronics Business Solutions Company. "UltraGear monitors will continue...

AMD Brings Power And Performance Of Ryzen 4000 Renoir Processors To Desktop PCs

by Brandon Hill - Tue, Jul 21, 2020

Today is a big day for AMD, as the company looks to spread the reach of its powerful 7nm Zen 2 processor architecture to additional segments. We’ve seen Zen 2 make waves in the server (EPYC 7xx2), HEDT workstation (Threadripper 3000/Threadripper Pro 3000), consumer desktop (Ryzen 3000), and the laptop (Ryzen 4000) markets over the past year. The latest extensions of the Zen 2 family are Ryzen 4000 processors targeting the consumer desktop market. Although it may be a little confusing, since AMD already has the Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 family to handle desktop duties, but those processors don’t...

AMD Unveils Ryzen Threadripper Pro Processors To Battle Intel Xeon W

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jul 14, 2020

AMD has offered “PRO” branded Ryzen processors for a number of years. Although the base processor architecture and platform is unchanged versus their standard counterparts, Pro series Ryzen processors enable a number of security, reliability, and manageability features targeted at the enterprise market, where Intel’s competitive vPro-enabled products play. Today, however, AMD is pushing its Pro branding and feature set way up its product stack, with a new line-up of powerful Ryzen Threadripper Pro processors, designed for high-end workstations and creative professionals. Unlike...

Kingston DC1000M SSD Review: Big, Fast NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, Jul 10, 2020

Kingston recently released its DC1000M series of solid-state drives for data center applications, capped off by a massive 7.68TB model. The DC1000M series leverages a hot-pluggable U.2 (2.5”, 15mm) form factor, that’s compatible with U.2 backplanes and the drives target mixed-use, 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 DC1000M family, bookended by a 960GB model and the aforementioned 7.68TB behemoth. We’ve got...

AMD Ryzen 3000XT Processors Reviewed: Zen 2 Turbocharged

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jul 07, 2020

Last month, AMD made the 3rd Generation Ryzen 3000XT series processors official after weeks of leaks and speculation. In case you missed the original announcement, Ryzen 3000XT series processors are tweaked versions of the original 3000X series products, but with higher clocks and the ability to maintain turbo frequencies longer, to boost overall performance. The “XT” branding, which is being used for the first time on a Ryzen processor, is a call-back to AMD’s top-end GPU components. The 3000XT line-up consists of three processors – the Ryzen 5 3600XT, the Ryzen 7 3800XT,...

Samsung SSD 870 QVO Review: Terabytes Of Solid State Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jun 30, 2020

Although much of the excitement in the solid state storage market revolves around the latest, bleeding-edge NVMe-based drives, there is still a massive need for SATA-based solutions. Not only are there a myriad of legacy systems ripe for upgrades that rely on SATA, but owners of current-gen systems often want more affordable, higher-capacity -- but still fast -- solid state storage to pair with their NVMe boot drives. Samsung has traditionally been a leader in the space, with a succession of popular drives over the years. The newest members of the family, the Samsung SSD 870 QVO we’ll be...

Intel Unleashes New 3rd Gen Xeons, Optane Memory, And FPGAs To Accelerate AI And Analytics

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Jun 18, 2020

The Intel Data Center Group (DCG) unveiled a plethora of new products today targeting AI and big data analytics workloads, including 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable Processors, 200 Series Optane Persistent Memory, AI-optimized Stratix 10 NX FPGAs, and faster 3D NAND-based solid state drives. Over the last few years, Intel has taken a multi-pronged approach to its data center products portfolio. In addition to advancing its processor platforms to improve compute performance and better accelerate new, emerging workloads, Intel has also focused on bringing data closer to the processor, and granting the...

SilverStone Fara B1 Review: An Affordable, Stylish PC Case

by Chris Ledenican - Fri, Jun 05, 2020

SilverStone released a handful of new cases and coolers a few months back, targeting an array of price points for DIY PC builders. One of the more affordable additions to the line-up was the SilverStone Fara B1 mid-tower we're evaluating today. The Fara B1 is priced to move at about $60, but it has the looks and features of much more expensive cases. Of course, looks can be deceiving, so we decided to get our hands on the Fara B1 to see if its worthy of consideration for your next budget-friendly desktop #PCMasterRace build. We are going to get down and dirty with the SilverStone Fara B1 and...

AI Benchmarks For Mobile Devices And What You Should Know

by Dave Altavilla, Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jun 02, 2020

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are hot topics in virtually all tech sectors at this moment in time. The technology is gaining traction in many industries, from massive social networks that are analyzing mountains of data, to the tiniest of IoT smart home and mobile devices. Even during our everyday workflow here at HotHardware, we currently utilize a few key AI-enabled applications to enhance our content. Further, if you’ve ever talked to a smartphone for speech-to-text messaging or for Google Assistant recommendations, AI has impacted your connected experiences as well. For...

Dell G5 15 SE: Testing AMD Radeon Vega 7 Integrated Graphics

by Ben Funk - Mon, May 25, 2020

When we reviewed the Dell G5 15 SE, an all-AMD gaming laptop that features an AMD Ryzen 7 4800H processor and a Navi-based Radeon RX 5600M, we didn't have a chance to dive into integrated graphics performance. The gaming battery life with powerful discrete graphics left something to be desired of course—the system lasted just an hour on battery with a gaming workload—but bypassing the discrete GPU should give a bit more time away from the wall socket. Folks wanted to know how this integrated AMD GPU performs, and come to think of it, so did we. So now it's time to find out.  If...

AMD's Chief Architect Of Gaming Solutions, Frank Azor Joins Our 2.5 Geeks Podcast

by Brandon Hill - Fri, May 22, 2020

We've got a heads up for you folks that tune in to our weekly 2.5 Geeks podcast. As a reminder, the next show goes live Friday (5/22) at 5PM EST, and we'll have none other than Frank Azor on the line to rack his brain on all things gaming related.  For those that don't already know, Frank serves as AMD's Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions. So, we'll be sure to pepper him with questions on AMD's current Ryzen 3000 processors and Radeon RX 5000 Series graphics cards; and perhaps he'll be able to give just a hint of what to expect with Ryzen 4000 and Radeon RDNA 2 graphics that are currently...

Intel Core i9-10900K & i5-10600K Review: Comet Lake-S Benchmarks

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, May 20, 2020

A few weeks back, Intel officially announced its 10th Generation Core series processors based on the Comet Lake-S architecture, and its companion Z490 chipset. 10th Gen Core series processors are not all-new, HEDT (High-End Desktop) products that target extreme enthusiasts, but rather tweaked, tuned, and enhanced mainstream parts, meant to supplants 9th Gen Socket 1151-based processors at the heart of Intel’s mainstream CPU line-up. Intel’s 10th Gen Core series desktop processors are still based on the same architecture and leverage the same 14nm++ manufacturing process as their 9th...

AMD Ryzen 3 3300X And 3100 Review: Serious Quad-Core Value

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, May 07, 2020

AMD announced a pair of new Ryzen 3 processors a couple of weeks back, designed to drive its Zen 2 microarchitecture down into even more affordable price points. These new processors, the Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X, are the latest entry-level, quad-core processors in the Ryzen family. Over and above disabling a few cores and tweaking clocks, however, AMD’s got a couple of additional tricks up its sleeve with these new CPUs – more on that in just a bit. In addition to the processors, AMD also announced the new, lower-priced B550 chipset is coming to an array of affordable Socket...

Intel 10th Gen Core CPUs And Z490 Boards Launch At 5GHz Plus To Combat Ryzen 3000

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Apr 30, 2020

Intel is officially taking the wraps off of its 10th Generation Core S-Series processors, spearheaded by the new flagship 10-core / 20-thread Core i9-10900K. Although this new line-up continues to leverage Intel’s 14nm process node – the 10th Generation Core S-Series processors are not next-generation, 10nm parts based on a new microarchitecture – Intel has tweaked, tuned, and modified quite a number of things to produce an extensive family of processors that target a wide array of price points and use cases. Although we haven’t been able to run a Comet Lake-S based 10th...

NVIDIA RTX Voice Tested: How To Use GPU AI For Perfect Zoom Conference Audio

by Ben Funk - Fri, Apr 24, 2020

Lots of folks are working from home these days, and that means endless WebEx, Zoom, Skype, or other online meeting sessions. When you're not optimally equipped to work from home, especially if you don't have a dedicated workspace, that can be a bit of a mess with lots of background noise happening while you're in a session. It's not all bad, though, because Team Work From Home can clean up captured audio in real time with the help of NVIDIA's new RTX Voice application. Video Conference Call Noise Cancellation For GeForce Owners Basically, RTX Voice works as a software layer between an audio source...

Experiencing Minecraft RTX: A Whole New Ray-Traced World

by Ben Funk - Thu, Apr 16, 2020

It was seven months ago that NVIDIA announced it was working to give Minecraft a makeover, thanks to the ray tracing hardware acceleration hardware built into its GeForce RTX line of graphics cards. Well, unless you've been living under a rock -- or haven't been spending as much time on our news page as you should -- you know that Minecraft publisher Microsoft will make a beta of this new techology available to the public at 1 PM Eastern time today. We've been playing Minecraft RTX with its new graphics features the last few days, and now we can show you what it's all about.  While...

Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 SSD Review: Premium, Fast Storage

by Ben Funk - Tue, Apr 14, 2020

It's been nine months since AMD unleashed its Zen 2 processors and, more importantly as it related to this article, the X570 chipset with its PCI Express 4 connectivity, into the world. In the time since then, there hasn't been a torrent of extra-fast flash released by all that many storage vendors; even at launch, we only had Gigabyte's Aorus PCIe 4 SSD on hand to test. Considering that Gigabyte's drive could far outstrip the bandwidth available in PCI Express 3.0 x4 drives, while putting up some solid IOPs figures, it seems that those who feel a need for speed would want these drives, assuming...

AMD Radeon Pro W5500 Review: Navi Pro Graphics For Less

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, Apr 10, 2020

AMD is further fleshing out its professional workstation graphics cards line-up, with an additional Navi-based offering that targets a more affordable price point. The Radeon Pro W5500 we will be showing you here offers essentially the same feature set as its more powerful cousin, the Radeon Pro W5700, but it's outfitted with a scaled down GPU, with commensurately lower compute performance. The scaled down GPU, however, also allows for somewhat smaller form factor and lower-power consumption, though the card has a similar amount of on-board graphics memory and higher GPU clocks than the Radeon...

Evaluating NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 Quality And Performance In Mech 5 And Control

by Ben Funk - Fri, Mar 27, 2020

Back when the GeForce RTX family launched in late 2018, NVIDIA unveiled its Deep Learning Super Sampling anti-aliasing method, which upscales low-resolution images via machine learning on the GPU's Tensor cores. While the technology was promising, there were some drawbacks. First of all, image quality was typically lower than rendering at the target resolution, even when the game was in motion. Also, DLSS required per-game training on the graphics giant's neural network, and as a result adoption wasn't quite as high as NVIDIA would have liked. All that changed this week when the GeForce maker unleashed...

Doom Eternal: Demon Killing Gameplay And GPU Performance Review

by Ben Funk - Tue, Mar 24, 2020

Update 3/25/2020: We've added results for the Radeon RX 5600 XT 6 GB to our tests and value charts.   Doom is a game franchise that needs no introduction. In 1992, id Software laid down the groundwork for first-person shooters with Wolfenstein 3D. When Doom came along a year later, the studio cemented its status among elite American game developers, thanks in no small part to the game's outstanding graphics and addictive gameplay. The series saw several releases up through 2005's Doom 3: BFG Edition, and then Doom went dormant. In 2016 after being acquired by Bethesda, id released...