Build A Great Rig With HotHardware's PC Components Buyer's Guide, Just In Time For Black Friday

Welcome to HotHardware's PC Component Buyer's Guide, where we help prospective 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...

AMD Threadripper 3970X And 3960X Review: Multi-Threaded Domination

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Nov 25, 2019

AMD has been on an impressive run since the release of its first-generation Ryzen processors a couple of years back. After a long stretch playing second-fiddle to Intel in the desktop processor space, unable to effectively compete at the high-end of the market, AMD’s Zen micro-architecture propelled the company into a much more competitive position. And follow-on products turned the heat up on Intel even further. Today, that heat becomes a blazing hot inferno as AMD completely reshapes the HEDT landscape with a pair of processors as impressive as we’ve ever seen. At the risk of...

Intel Core i9-10980XE Review: 18-Core Cascade Lake-X Battles AMD [Updated]

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Nov 25, 2019

Intel officially took the wraps off of its upcoming Cascade Lake-X based HEDT processors back in early October, revealed its updated pricing strategy, and the new features coming to its flagship desktop processor line-up. If you missed the original announcement and array of leaked performance data since then, Cascade Lake-X is a essentially a refresh of Skylake-X (the processor cores are mostly unchanged), but with official support for faster memory, more aggressive clocking and boost algorithms, and DL Boost integration, to help accelerate and array of AI workloads. Cascade Lake-X will work in...

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review: A 16-Core Zen 2 Powerhouse

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Nov 14, 2019

When Dr. Lisu Su took to the stage at an event back in June and officially announced the Ryzen 9 3950X, it didn’t come as much of a surprise to be honest. Considering the fact that Zen 2 CPU chiplets feature 8-cores each, and the Ryzen 9 3900X with dual CPU chiplets launched with only 12-cores enabled, there was immediate speculation that a 16-core Ryzen 3000 series variant was in the works and that AMD was perhaps holding it back for strategic reasons. Of course, there were a multitude of leaks leading up to the announcement that continued to fuel the flames, but needless to say a 16-core...

Alienware Aurora R10 Ryzen Edition Review: A 3950X Invasion

by Ben Funk - Thu, Nov 14, 2019

Intel had a deathgrip on high-end gaming PCs for years while AMD's processors struggled to provide enough gaming performance to be competitive in the high end enthusiast tier. The tide has recently turned, however, and this summer AMD's Ryzen 3000 series of Zen 2-based 7nm processors took the world by storm. As a result of this monumental shift, Dell's gaming products division, Alienware has more recently started offering AMD's CPUs in its desktop lineup for the first time since the glory days of AMD's Phenom II. Previously we took a look at a Threadripper-powered Alienware Area-51 desktop, but...

Update: AMD Announces Zen 2-Powered 32-Core Threadripper 3970X, 24-Core Threadripper 3960X

by Brandon Hill - Thu, Nov 07, 2019

AMD just announced that its Ryzen 9 3950X will be shipping on November 25th priced at $749, and now the company is giving us some early details on its third-generation Ryzen Threadripper HEDT processors that are on the way. As we reported yesterday, the first two members of the family are the Threadripper 3960X and the Threadripper 3970X.  Like the "lesser" third-generation Ryzen 3000 processors, these new Threadripper processors are built on 7nm Zen 2 architecture and include all of the performance, security, and feature benefits (including PCIe 4.0 support). Both the...

Intel Core i9-9900KS Review: The Fastest Gaming CPU Bar None

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Oct 30, 2019

Intel has been talking about its Core i9-9900KS processor for months now. It was all the way back in May that the company first revealed what would become the new flagship processor in its mainstream computing platform. The Core i9-9900KS is not something totally new, however. As the “S” in its name implies, the Core i9-9900KS is something akin to a special edition of the existing Core i9-9900K. The processors are built from the same slab of silicon – an 8-core, Coffee Lake-refresh based die, packaged up for Intel’s LGA1151 socket. What makes the Core i9-9900KS different...

Intel Tremont CPU Microarchitecture: Power Efficient, High-Performance x86

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Oct 24, 2019

Late last year, at its Architecture Day event, Intel revealed a new, low-power microarchitecture, codenamed Tremont, that would power and array of processors and SoCs targeting products across the client, data center, 5G networking, and Internet of Things markets. While Intel did disclose the codename and show-off a Foveros-based SoC featuring Tremont -- codenamed Lakefield -- it did not dive deep on the microarchitecture or discuss its inner-workings. Today, however, at the Linley Fall Processor Conference that’s currently underway, Intel discussed Tremont in-depth and revealed its main...

Intel Gen 11 Graphics Takes Fight To AMD In Dell XPS 13 2-In-1

by Ben Funk - Thu, Oct 10, 2019

It's no secret that Intel has a lot riding on its "Ice Lake" 10th generation Core CPUs manufactured on its 10-nanometer fabrication process. The chipmaker got by on squeezing more power and efficiency out of its 14-nm node for what seemed like an eternity, but we're talking about a mobile sector that relentlessly demands more performance and longer battery life. This oft-delayed Intel process node promises to reduce power consumption and increase performance by a wide margin over the Kaby Lake Refresh processors that previously served as the brains for thin and light PCs. Dell's XPS 13 2-In-1 Gets...

How To Overclock Raspberry Pi 4 Over 2GHz For A Tasty Speed Bump

by Ben Funk - Mon, Oct 07, 2019

The Raspberry Pi 4 is one of the cheapest single-board computers around, and thanks to its substantial performance boost over its predecessors, it also represents a good bang for the buck if you're interested in learning Linux, or just want to kick back and play some of your favorite retro games in Lakka. The good news is, the latest version of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Linux distribution, Raspbian Buster, comes with a new firmware revision for the tiny system which removes the previously imposed 2 GHz clock speed limit and loosens restrictions on voltage boosts, so of course we had to...

AMD EPYC 7002 Series Zen 2 Architecture Doubles Data Center Performance And Density

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Aug 07, 2019

AMD has officially taken the wraps off its second generation EPYC 7002 series processors. The EPYC 7002 series builds upon the success of the original EPYC processors by leveraging the Zen 2 microarchitecture, which is also at the heart of the recently released Ryzen 3000 series desktop parts. EPYC 7002 series processors maintain platform compatibility with existing first-gen EPYC parts, but significantly increase the platform’s capabilities in aggregate and per socket, and introduce a number of new features as well. In terms of the microarchitecture, all of the benefits Zen 2 afforded the...

Intel 10nm Ice Lake Benchmarks: 10th Gen Core i7 Performance Explored

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Aug 01, 2019

Back in May, Intel disclosed a number of details regarding its next-generation 10nm Ice Lake architecture and Project Athena. The latter is an innovation program Intel kicked-off in collaboration with key industry partners that’s meant to usher in a new breed of advanced laptop designs and mobile devices. Today, Intel inches closer to broad availability of its first-wave of Ice Lake-based products, with the release of 11 10th Generation Core mobile SKUs, ranging from a dual-core Core i3 with a nominal 9W TDP all the way on up to a quad-core / eight-thread Core i7, with Gen 11 Iris Plus graphics,...

AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Vs Intel Core i9-9900K IPC Shootout: Did AMD Close The Gap?

by Ben Funk - Thu, Jul 25, 2019

AMD renewed competition in the CPU space back in 2017, when its Zen-based Ryzen processors stormed the scene a couple of months earlier than originally anticipated. These processors combined good enough single-threaded performance with many core architectures at attractive prices. If you needed king-of-the-hill single thread performance, Intel was still on top, but Ryzen brought multi-core performance to a price point more palatable to the masses, and were great choices for general purpose workloads and multitasking alike. A year later, second-generation Ryzen CPUs based on the Zen+ architecture...

AMD Ryzen 9 3900X And Ryzen 7 3700X Review: Zen 2 Impresses

by Marco Chiappetta - Sun, Jul 07, 2019

The Zen 2-based AMD Ryzen 3000 series is easily one of the most anticipated product launches in the PC space in recent memory. AMD has essentially promised to address virtually all of the perceived shortcomings of the original Zen-based Ryzen processors, with the Ryzen 3000 series, while continuing to aggressively challenge Intel on multiple fronts – performance, power, price, you name it. AMD has been extolling the virtues of Zen 2 for quite some time, but in the last few weeks the company has really turned up the heat and revealed some exciting details, like single-thread performance on-par...

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