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...

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...

Kingston KC2000 NVMe SSD Review: Competitive Pricing And Performance

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Sep 26, 2019

Kingston recently expanded its portfolio of solid state drives, with a new family of products targeting high-performance desktop and workstation applications. The Kingston KC2000 series of drives feature a PCI Express Gen 3.0 x 4 controller, 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory, and boast of peak transfer speeds north of 3GB/s. The drives are offered in an array of capacities, ranging from 250GB all the way on up to 2TB, and they support a number of security-conscious features as well. All told, the Kingston KC2000 series drives try to cater to a myriad of use cases, from mainstream consumer desktops,...

Asura Genesis Xtreme SSD Review: Speedy NVMe With RBG Bling

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, Sep 06, 2019

Now that SSDs and their components have been substantially cost-reduced and essentially gone mainstream, there are more and more players in the space. What was once a market reserved for but a few top-tier semiconductor manufacturers, is now increasingly crowded by new, lesser-known third-party companies looking to capitalize on the increasing demand for super-fast storage. One such company is Asura Technology. Asura was founded less than a year ago, and has developed a high-end, NVMe SSD with a handful of interesting features, targeted specifically at gamers and performance enthusiasts -- the...

Toshiba BG4 SSD Review: Mini But Mighty NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Aug 14, 2019

Toshiba announced its next-generation BG4 solid state drive all the way back at CES in early January of this year. The diminutive, little Toshiba BG4 isn’t about the latest and greatest in bleeding-edge SSD storage performance or pushing the envelope in terms of throughput. However, it does still represent a significant step forward in regard to power and performance in the smallest of form factors – you’ll see exactly what we mean in a couple of the photos below. The 1TB Toshiba BG4 we will be showing you here is essentially a single-chip solution, cable of multi-gigabyte per...

Kingston DC500 SSD Review: High Capacity Enterprise Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jul 16, 2019

Kingston has been a dedicated stalwart of the memory, storage, and peripheral markets for many years. The company’s products target virtually every type of user, from entry-level first-time PC builders to seasoned sysadmins. The products we’ll be showing you here today, the Kingston DC500R and DC500M solid state drives, target the latter type of user, in need of reliable, high-capacity SSD storage for enterprise and data center applications. At first glance – of both their physical design and specifications -- the Kingston DC500R and DC500M drives appear to be similar. The ‘R’...

Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB Review: Burly, Speedy NVMe Storage

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, Jun 26, 2019

A few months back, Samsung launched its SSD 970 EVO Plus series of solid state drives, which featured the company’s latest TLC NAND flash memory and an updated firmware optimized for higher performance. When the line-up initially arrived, capacities up to 2TB were announced, but only the 250GB – 1TB models were made available. The highest-capacity, 2TB Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus has just arrived, however, and we got the chance to take one for a spin. At its core, the 2TB Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus is virtually identical to the other drives in the line-up, save for a larger DRAM cache and,...

WD Black SN750 NVMe Heatsink SSD Review: Speedy And Cool

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jun 04, 2019

A few weeks back, we took a look at the WD Blue SN500 SSD. That solid state drive is an affordable NVMe M.2 option, that’s targeted at mainstream systems and budget-constrained users. The WD Blue SN500 offers the benefits of NVMe, with pricing that is in-line with legacy SATA devices. The drive we’ll be looking at today, however, the WD Black SN750 SSD with Heatsink, takes things in a completely different direction. The WD Black SN750 SSD with Heatsink targets enthusiasts and gamers, and offers much higher performance in some scenarios. It is also priced higher, but not exorbitantly...

Samsung 883 And 983 DCT SSD Review: Enterprise Class Storage At Consumer Prices

by Marco Chiappetta - Wed, May 15, 2019

Enterprise-class solid state drives used to be rare beasts that commanded heavy price premiums over their more common, consumer-oriented counterparts. As leading SSD and flash memory manufacturers have evolved their processes and technologies, however, availability and pricing for many enterprise-class solid state storage solutions have dropped dramatically. Whereas enterprise SSDs that target mission-critical workstations or data centers used to cost many times that of a consumer SSD, that is no longer the case for some products. Samsung's 883 and 983 DCT drives we’ll be showing you...

WD Blue SN500 SSD Review: NVMe Performance, Dirt Cheap

by Marco Chiappetta - Fri, May 10, 2019

WD’s Blue family of solid state drives has historically been comprised of nothing but SATA-based offerings, but the company recently updated the line-up with some brand-new NVMe-based drives. The WD Blue SN500 we’ll be showing you here today is the first Blue-branded NVMe SSD from the company, and as has been the case with many of WD’s “Blue” products, it is aggressively priced and pushes NVMe into more mainstream territory. The WD Blue SN500, however, does not target the high-end of the NVMe market; that is the WD Black family's job. As you’ll see in the WD...

Intel Optane Memory H10 Review: Hybrid SSD Storage Acceleration

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Apr 22, 2019

Intel announced its Optane Memory H10 back during the Consumer Electronics Show, early this year. Just in case you missed the initial announcement, the company's Optane Memory H10 is a new class of products from Intel that combines 3D Xpoint memory technology and QLC (quad-level cell) 3D NAND flash on a single M.2 device. The goal for the product is to offer the benefits of 3D Xpoint and Optane Memory in conjunction with the affordability and speed of a QLC-based NVMe SSD in a single device. Initially, these hybrid drives will find their way into utlrabooks or small form factor systems that may...

Crucial P1 SSD Review: Nimble NVMe Storage For Pennies Per Gig

by Marco Chiappetta - Thu, Apr 18, 2019

Like a handful of other recently-released solid state drives that feature QLC (quad-level cell) NAND flash memory, the Crucial P1 series is designed to be a relatively high-performing, but still affordable storage option, versus legacy SATA-based solutions. When it initially arrived, the Crucial P1’s MSRPs didn’t necessarily reflect this design goal, but now that availability has ramped and street prices have settled, the Crucial P1 could represent a significant upgrade for users still hobbling along with slower storage or planning a new, budget-friendly build, and it won't break the...

Samsung EVO Plus 512GB MicroSD Card Review: Speedy Device Storage

by Chris Goetting - Fri, Apr 05, 2019

The humble SD card has evolved in a number of ways since its introduction two decades ago. While early SD cards could hardly store more photos than a roll of film, modern cards may offer the capacity to contain hours of high-quality HD video. SD cards have also become commonly used as boot drives for lightweight operating systems, powering everything from Raspberry Pi's to server hypervisors. SD Cards, and MicroSD cards in particular, can also be useful for expanding the storage of cell phones and even laptops. Samsung introduced its blazing fast EVO Plus UHS-I MicroSD cards last year, featuring...

Intel Unleashes 56-Core Xeon, Optane DC Memory, Agilex FGPAs To Accelerate AI And Big Data

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Apr 02, 2019

Intel is launching its latest salvo of data-centric products today, targeting a wide range of workloads and applications. You may think that means a fresh batch of powerful Xeons are on the way – and you’d be correct but there's more. Today marks the official arrival of Intel’s Cascade Lake, many-core 2nd Generation Xeon Scalable Series Processors, but the company is also announcing or launching a plethora of adjacent products including new FPGAs, innovative network controllers, a new server chassis platform, and Optane DC Persistent memory. And along with those powerful Xeon...