ADATA XPG Alpha Review: An Ergonomic Gaming Mouse That Delivers

Adata recently launched its series of XPG Alpha gaming mice, which come in both wired and wireless flavors. The sleek and ergonomic mouse is designed to offer a combination of high-performance and gamer-centric features, with an array of customizable options available via the included XPG Prime software. The XPG Alpha gaming mouse is based on an industrial design language Adata XPG has dubbed its "Exoskeleton". The focus of the design is a balance between form and function. The XPG Alpha aims to provide an ergonomically sound and comfortable mousing experience, without skimping on features intended...

AMD Reveals RDNA 3 Chiplets, 3D V-Cache For Zen 4 And Phoenix Point Laptop Chips

by Zak Killian - Thu, Jun 09, 2022

At today's Financial Analyst Day, AMD revealed several tidbits of information about its forthcoming technologies and products roadmap, and the company also confirmed a few details that rumor-mongers have been reporting for months now. We're going to go over the company's announcements in the server space in future post, but first, let's take a look at what AMD's disclosed about its consumer-focused products. The most interesting news came concerning the company's new RDNA 3 graphics architecture. As the successor to AMD's extant RDNA 2 architecture currently found in game consoles, laptop...

Ryzen 6000 And ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 Laptop Review: Revisiting Performance

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, Jun 03, 2022

AMD had a wildly eventful keynote at CES 2022, jam-packed with announcements. During the festivities, CEO Dr. Lisa Su, Frank Azor, Jason Banta, and Laura Smith jointly revealed a wide array of products, including the Radeon RX 6500 XT, Ryzen 6000 series mobile processors, and refreshed Radeon RX 6000S series mobile GPUs, along with AMD Advantage program updates, and the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and next-gen Ryzen 7000 desktop processors. There was a mountain of information to unpack after the event, but as time passes things are coming into focus. We recently had the chance to check out the Radeon RX 6500...

HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless Headset Review: Great Battery Life And Fidelity

by Nathan Wasson - Thu, May 26, 2022

Gaming headsets, in an effort to stand out from regular headphones, often sport flamboyant designs with harsh angles, polygonal shapes, and RGB LEDs. However, this styling trend can put off some gamers who have more subdued tastes or simply don’t like the stealth-fighter-Christmas-tree look. Fortunately, HyperX has a history of offering gaming headsets with more restrained, classier designs, going back to the original Cloud, which launched in 2014. The HyperX Cloud looked like a regular pair of headphones with a detachable microphone and attractive red accents. Since then, the company has...

Radeon RX 6750 XT Review With MSI: Strong 1440p PC Gaming

by Zak Killian - Mon, May 16, 2022

One of the biggest differentiators of the Radeon RX 6000 family, and by extension of the RDNA 2 graphics architecture, is its reliance on a large local cache—known officially as "Infinity Cache"—to provide rapid framebuffer access. This helps to make up for the relatively slower memory used on the cards in comparison to competitor NVIDIA's GPUs. Indeed, at higher resolutions, the Infinity Cache is insufficient, and we see even AMD's fastest GPUs start to fall down a bit as the GPU has to spend more time waiting on the 16Gbps GDDR6 memory. This characteristic makes the Radeon RX 6000...

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU Review: The King Of PC Gaming

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Apr 14, 2022

AMD has been working on its 3D chiplet technology for quite some time now, but it was back at Computex last year that the company initially showed off its 3D V-Cache in a consumer processor, targeted squarely at gamers. Though the chip AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su held up on stage was somewhat different than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D we’ll be showing you here today, the technology at play is identical and as you’ll see shortly, it offers significant, tangible benefits to gamers. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D features 64MB of supplemental L3 cache, that’s bonded to the processor’s compute die,...

Alienware 34" (AW3423DW) Gaming Monitor Review: Oh My QD-OLED

by Ben Funk - Tue, Apr 12, 2022

The pixels output by your PC's graphics card are only as good as the monitor that displays them. Attach a shiny new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti to a bargain basement, slow 1080p panel with a refresh rate of 60Hz and you'll likely get what you had coming: blurring, color shift, dull images, and an unpleasant experience. We always encourage spending a few extra dollars on a higher-quality monitor. After all, a good display can live through multiple system upgrades, and it's the primary way humans interface with PCs. Simply put: treat your eyes right. In the past, gamers treating their eyes right meant maybe...

AMD Spring CPU Refresh: Ryzen 7 5700X And An Affordable Ryzen 5 Trio Tested

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Apr 04, 2022

AMD has been riding high since the release of its first Ryzen 5000 Series desktop processors back in late in 2020. Although Intel recently shook things up in the enthusiast desktop processor space with its Alder Lake-based 12th Gen Core processors, the AMD Ryzen 5000 Series remains attractive up and down its stack. Still, save for some new APUs and PRO series parts, AMD hadn’t significantly refreshed its mainstream desktop processor line-up in over a year. So, with Intel’s 12th Gen processors out in the wild, it made sense for for the company to further flesh out its processors offerings...

Intel Arc Alchemist Mobile GPUs Arrive With Powerful, Innovative New Features For Laptops

by Marco Chiappetta, Paul Lilly - Wed, Mar 30, 2022

For the past several years, we’ve been hearing about Intel’s extensive plan to enter the discrete GPU space. It’s the main reason why Raja Koduri joined the chipmaker in late 2017, who came on board to spearhead not just a one-off product launch, but a new era of graphics at Intel with a robust roadmap extending years into the future. What started off as an Odyssey has now reached its Arc, with Intel today launching its first discrete Arc GPUs for laptops. This was the plan laid out during Intel’s 2022 Investor Meeting last month. Intel would come out swinging with the first...

ADATA XPG Atom 50 Review: A Speedy Gen 4 SSD For Gamers

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, Mar 25, 2022

The NVMe M.2 solid state storage market continues to expand with an ever-increasing number of drives, at a variety of price points and performance targets. There has been a steady influx of high-end drives targeting enthusiasts, along with an array of more-affordable DRAM-less offerings specifically tuned for consumer and gaming workloads. The ADATA XPG Atom 50 we’ll be showing you here today falls into the latter category. The ADATA XPG Atom 50 is available for a relatively low price, yet packs some decent specifications, including a native PCIe Gen 4 interface and sequential transfers north...

NVIDIA Launches Hopper H100, World's Largest AI And Compute Accelerator With 30x A100 Performance

by Zak Killian - Tue, Mar 22, 2022

Back in the 1990s, NVIDIA got its start selling graphics adapters for desktop PCs. After a rocky start with the NV1, NVIDIA established itself as a performance leader soon thereafter with the release of the TwiN-Texel (TNT) chip, and with the original GeForce 256, as a technology leader, too. That's all ancient history now, but the facts haven't changed: NVIDIA is the world's biggest producer of discrete graphics processors. People usually simply say "GPUs," yet that's become a bit of an ironic name as the years go on. Team Green still sells lots of graphics chips, of course, but the biggest portion...

NVIDIA Unveils 144-Core Grace CPU Superchip, NVLink-C2C Interconnect To Shred HPC Workloads

by Paul Lilly - Tue, Mar 22, 2022

NVIDIA is expanding its CPU design efforts in with the introduction of its Grace CPU Superchip, its first discrete data center CPU for high performance computing (HPC) workloads. It's actually two processors linked together in the same package. The chips connect coherently over NVLink-C2C, a new high-speed, low-latency, chip-to-chip interconnect that NVIDIA also unveiled today at GTC 2022. The Grace CPU Superchip is intended to complement NVIDIA's Grace Hopper Superchip, a hybrid CPU-GPU integrated module introduced last year for giant-scale HPC and AI applications. Both solutions share the same...

Report Details Apple M2 Powered MacBook Pro 13 And Air Allegedly Inbound

by Lane Babuder - Sun, Mar 13, 2022

Well, it's that time again. You guessed it—Apple leaks and speculation time! It didn't take long for the product leakers to come up with new information for M2-based portable devices this time around, right after Apple unveiled its M1 Ultra at last weeks Peek Performance event. As part of that event, Apple also unveiled its compact Mac Studio. Hot on the heels of those announcements, there has been a leak that the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air are both expected to be released later this year at another event. An anonymous source told 9to5mac that the long-standing rumors surrounding...

WD Black SN770 SSD Review: Killer Gen 4 Storage For Gamers

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Feb 02, 2022

WD just launched a brand new series of PCIe Gen 4 solid state drives that target gamers on a budget, the WD Black SN770. As its names suggests, the new WD Black SN770 sits ahead of the previous-gen SN750 drives in WD’s line-up, but a tick behind the flagship, top-performing SN850. Like the WD Black SN850 though, the SN770 is a PCIe Gen 4 x 4 drive, designed to offer increased bandwidth and lower latency than older PCIe Gen 3 drives, but it’s also a cost-reduced solutions that eschews a DRAM cache and leverages a scaled back controller. We’ll get to the particulars shortly. For...

AMD Radeon Pro W6400 Review: Low Power RDNA 2 For Budget Workstations

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Feb 01, 2022

A couple of weeks back, AMD launched the Radeon RX 6500 XT, an entry-level GPU targeting mainstream gamers with 1080p displays. The Radeon RX 6500 XT is built around the Navi 24 GPU, which is the smallest discrete graphics processor in AMD’s current RDNA 2 line-up. Navi 24 is manufactured on a 6nm process node, and is comprised of roughly 5.4B transistors, with 16MB of AMD Infinity Cache, and a die size of only 107mm2. That's a tiny piece of silicon, compared to modern, higher-end GPUs. In addition to launching a mainstream gaming GPU, however, AMD also put Navi 24 to work in a freshly-baked...

GeForce RTX 3050 Review With EVGA: Potent, Mainstream PC Gaming

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Jan 26, 2022

Both NVIDIA and AMD announced new mainstream GPUs during CES 2022. AMD announced the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which we showed you last week, and NVIDIA the GeForce RTX 3050. NVIDIA also quickly teased a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti during its event, but details regarding that behemoth will be coming a little later. Today, we get to reveal the GeForce RTX 3050’s inner workings and performance. To test NVIDIA’s latest mainstream GPU, which also happens to be the most affordable Ampere-based GPU yet (at least in terms of MSRP), we got our hands on a card from EVGA. The EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black...

Intel Core i9-12900HK With RTX 3080 Ti Review: MSI's GE76 Raider Laptop Screams

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jan 25, 2022

At its annual architecture day event late last year, Intel revealed a multitude of details regarding its 12th Gen Core desktop and mobile processors based on Alder Lake. For the uninitiated, 12th Gen Core processors feature Intel’s latest CPU microarchitectures (yes, plural), in a hybrid design that mixes high-performance and high-efficiency cores on a single chip. Well, most 12th Gen Core mobile processors leverage a hybrid design, anyway. When CES 2022 rolled around earlier this month, Intel also revealed its initial line-up of 12th Gen Core mobile processors, some of which featured...

AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT Review: Budget RDNA 2-Powered Gaming

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Jan 19, 2022

Although some information regarding the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT leaked late last year, AMD officially took the wraps of the card during its keynote at CES. As its branding suggests, the Radeon RX 6500 XT drops into AMD’s current RDNA 2 GPU line-up, just behind the Radeon RX 6600 we evaluated a few months back. A somewhat scaled down Radeon RX 6400 based on the same chip as the 6500 XT is also inbound, but that card is destined for OEMs only at this point. The Radeon RX 6500 XT announcement generated quite a bit of chatter due to some of the interesting design decisions AMD made for the card....

Kingston KC3000 SSD Review: A PCIe Gen 4 Speed Demon

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Jan 10, 2022

At a time when it’s exceedingly tough for enthusiasts to acquire many top-flight PC components, dashing hopes for many a fun upgrade or new build, solid state drives remain a shining beacon of hope. The SSD market has seen a consistent influx of new and updated products, addressing virtually every price bracket, with good availability across the board. At the high-end, massive performance increases have also been the order of the day, with PCIe 5 drives – set to double peak sequential performance yet again to nearly 14GB/s – due to arrive later this year. As it stand today, Phison-based...

HotHardware's 17 Best Of CES 2022: Chips, Laptops, Displays & More

by Zak Killian - Fri, Jan 07, 2022

The 2022 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show has concluded. We didn't attend this year's show in Las Vegas in-person, but that's mostly because the majority of the biggest players in the market didn't show up either and we attended a handful of private briefings at other venues. The severity of the pandemic prompted Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Google (among many others) to stay away from the show and simply make their announcements virtually. Still, as they say, the show must go on; whether in-person at CES or strictly online. The tech industry proudly showed off its latest, greatest,...

Intel Arc Alchemist Claims Over 50 Design Wins And XeSS Lands A Killer Debut Game Title

by Jeff Butts - Tue, Jan 04, 2022

A new era’s begun in discrete graphics, as Intel has announced shipment of the latest Intel Arc graphics to OEM customers. Codenamed Alchemist, Intel Arc graphics chips will offer a new choice in the consumer high-performance graphics arena. Game studios have already adopted the technology, with several AAA PC gaming titles being optimized to take advantage of the new market share. As we’ve noted previously, Intel confirmed the Arc graphics processor is designed first and foremost for gamers. It’s built on TSMC’s 6-nanometer manufacturing process, and offers up 32 Xe cores....

Intel Launches Huge Arsenal Of 12th Gen Mainstream Alder Lake Desktop Chips, Coolers And Chipsets

by Paul Lilly - Tue, Jan 04, 2022

Intel has just expanded its lineup of Alder Lake desktop processors with nearly two dozen new SKUs spanning its Celeron, Pentium, Core i3, Core i5, and Core i9 product categories. it also unveiled a trio of stock cooling solutions for its latest Alder Lake chips, and added three additional 600 series chipsets, all in an effort to further extend its reach into the mainstream market with its latest-generation CPU architecture. The first batch of Alder Lake processors released in early November and consisted of three main models, each with ("K") and without ("KF") integrated graphics. They included...

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