14 Movies And TV Shows Every Geek Should Watch And How To View Them

Although being a geek was not always chic, geek culture has been celebrated in cinema and on television for decades in one form or another. In some ways, it is a genre unto itself. The appreciation of science, fantasy, and intellectual concepts have given birth to a wide range of both celebrated and cringe worthy flicks and TV episodes, from Weird Science and Revenge of the Nerds, to Star Trek and Star Wars. The list is long, and expands exponentially when you relax the criteria of what fits the mold of geek entertainment. Do Ghostbusters and Breaking Bad qualify? I would argue they do, in their...

Google Stadia Review: Setting Expectations For Cloud Gaming

by Chris Goetting - Wed, Dec 18, 2019

As most of your are probably aware, Google Stadia is an ambitious new game streaming service. It supplants the need for dedicated gaming hardware that renders high-end graphics by processing the workloads in the cloud and piping the final frames over the Internet to your device. In theory, all your device needs is a fast and stable Internet connection and software support for Stadia. It is a lofty goal. If successful, the monetary and complexity barriers to gaming are reduced even beyond traditional console setups, and cost is limited to just the price of game titles and maybe Stadia's Pro subscription....

AMD Unveils Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition With Radeon Boost, Streamlined Interface, New Features Galore

by Ben Funk - Tue, Dec 10, 2019

Over the last several years, AMD has released major new driver features and enhancements at the end of the calendar year, and as 2019 draws to a close, it is no different. The just-released Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition overhauls the driver suite's installation and interface to surface what's important, adds new features (and enhances several others), and promises performance improvements in a variety of games. This new driver suite supports any GCN-based Radeon going back to the December 2011 release of the Radeon HD 7970 all the way up to the latest Navi architecture and the Radeon RX...

GeForce RTX Ray Tracing On A $300 To $500 Budget: What To Expect

by Ben Funk - Wed, Nov 20, 2019

When NVIDIA's GeForce RTX graphics cards first launched, there weren't many games on the market that could take advantage of Turing's new bells and whistles. Over time that's changed, however, and some of this year's biggest hits—titles like Control and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—can take full advantage of stunning ray-traced visual effects. NVIDIA's high-end Turing cards include some of the fastest GPUs around with equally eye-watering pricing, but it doesn't have to be that way if you want to take a more modest approach. The $299 - $329 GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB and $499 GeForce...

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...

Alienware m15 R2 Review: Beautiful OLED, Beastly Performance

by Ben Funk - Wed, Nov 06, 2019

Alienware may just be the most well-known gaming desktop and notebook brand on the planet. The company's gray alien logo graces everything from proper, upgradeable desktops like the Aurora R9 to the huge desktop-replacement Area-51m notebook complete with actual desktop hardware. What we have on hand today isn't quite so big and bulky, however: the new 2019 edition of the company's workhorse m15 gaming notebook, the m15 R2. We had a chance to spend some one-on-one time with this sweet portable machine back at Computex, but now it's come through our labs from the alien mothership for an extended...

Sound Blaster X3 Review: Portable Super X-Fi Audio For PCs And Consoles

by Ben Funk - Tue, Nov 05, 2019

Creative Labs has been on something of a roll in 2019. The company has diversified into all kinds of gaming products from keyboards and mice to headsets and speakers. At the same time, Creative never lost track of its PC audio roots, and its flagship Sound BlasterX AE-9 delivered the goods with its high-end SABRE-class DAC and external breakout box with tons of connectivity options. You can't really stuff a PCI-Express card into a notebook or many small form factor PCs, however. For audio enthusiasts who need a USB solution, the $119.99 Sound Blaster X3 is the newest external audio device...

HP Omen X 2S Review: A Sleek, Dual-Screen RTX Gaming Beast

by Tuan Huynh - Fri, Nov 01, 2019

In the last 5 years, gaming notebooks have essentially reached performance parity with desktop systems and made it easier for gamers to experience their favorite PC games virtually anywhere, without losing out on image quality or performance. However, because most components perform similarly in any given form factor, manufacturers are constantly striving to predict what the next hot desirable feature may be, to help their devices stand out from the crowd. HP’s 15-inch Omen X 2S banks on dual screens being the next big feature and packs an innovative, two-display setup into a sleek, lightweight...

NVIDIA SHIELD TV 2019 Review: AI Enhanced Android TV Streaming

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, Oct 28, 2019

The NVIDIA SHIELD TV is widely regarded as the best media streaming device on the market. In addition to offering high-performance, access to a massive repository of 4K streaming services and apps, and leading-edge features that some competitors have only just recently caught up with, the SHIELD TV gives users access to GeForce NOW and game streaming capabilities from a GeForce-enabled PC. There is a growing library of native AAA Android games too, along with a myriad of casual games as well. And that's not to mention the huge community of enthusiasts that use the SHIELD TV to emulate a multitude...

Falcon Northwest Talon Review: A 12-Core Ryzen Powered Battle Station

by Chris Ledenican - Fri, Oct 25, 2019

Update: 11/9/19 - You could WIN a machine just like this, only with a killer Outer Worlds paint job, in our 20th Anniversary Giveaway! Falcon Northwest has been in the boutique PC building game since 1992, but the company's Talon desktop PC didn't hit the market until 1999. Ironically, that's about the time HotHardware.com came into being on the interwebs, but we digress. The first Talon came loaded with a AMD Athlon 500MHz processor, a 13.5GB hard drive, 64MB SDRAM, and the Pièce de résistance: a 3dfx Voodoo3 graphics card. Yeah baby, good times. These specs are laughable by today's standards,...

Nyrius Aries Pro Wireless HDMI Kit Review: Low Latency Cord Cutting

by Brittany Goetting - Tue, Oct 22, 2019

The number of “cord cutters” has accelerated over the last decade. Many people are cutting their ties to cable companies TV programming packages, and instead looking for online entertainment solutions. In that regard, consumers have been turning to streaming devices like Google Chromecast, Roku and NVIDIA Shield TV. However, HDMI wireless transmitters and receivers are another viable option for cord cutters. Wireless transmit/receive video products like these can be used for much more than streaming your favorite shows, including everything from gaming to office presentations...

Autonomous Kinn Chair Review: Ergonomic, Unique Materials And Style

by Dave Altavilla - Fri, Oct 18, 2019

Office chairs, whether they be for a home office or a corporate work space, are a personal thing for any self-respecting desk jockey. For most folks, it's all about ergonomics and comfort rather than style points, though certainly industrial design aesthetics shouldn't have to be compromised. Autonomous has made a concerted effort to try and strike this delicate balance with its new Kinn Chair. Known more so for its family of adjustable, intelligent sit-stand desks, Autonomous also makes a line of related "smart office" equipment. And though the Kinn Chair isn't motorized with memory presets like...

Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 Review: Ultra Fast, Affordable Next-Gen Wi-Fi

by Paul Lilly - Tue, Oct 01, 2019

Over the past few months, we have seen a spattering of Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) routers enter the fray, including the ASUS ROG GT-AX11000 and Netgear Nighthawk AX8, both of which we recently put to the test. There was a caveat to our testing, however—we had to benchmark them using Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) hardware, because at the time, Wi-Fi 6 had not yet really permeated the marketplace on the client side. That's to say, practically every modern device with Wi-Fi connectivity is sporting a Wi-Fi 5 adapter. In a sense, companies like ASUS and Netgear had put the cart before the horse. It is not that...

Which Major AI Companies Care Most About Your Privacy: Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook?

by Brittany Goetting - Mon, Sep 30, 2019

Many companies are working hard to improve their artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. AI could impact everything from medicine to silly Instagram overlays and everything in between. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are all toiling to gain an edge in the AI field by leveraging their massive treasure troves of data, but what are their existing privacy policies and user data security track records? Which of these companies cares the most about protecting your privacy? Should you even trust Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google with your data? We examined the kind of data that is collected by...

Integer Scaling Explored: Sharper Pixels For Retro And Modern Games

by Ben Funk - Tue, Sep 24, 2019

It'd be a gross understatement to say that retro gaming has experienced something of a renaissance in recent years. Nintendo's NES Classic and SNES Classic mini-consoles or the Switch Online's NES and SNES catalogs might be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about older games, but the House of Mario is hardly alone. Sony stumbled into the retro scene last year, and both the Sega Genesis and NEC TurboGrafx-16 (by way of rights-holder Konami) will get their respective official love letters shortly. We'd be remiss, however, if we didn't think about the technology at the heart of...

Raspberry Pi 4 With Lakka May Be The Best Retro Game Console Yet

by Ben Funk - Fri, Sep 20, 2019

Back in June, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced their newest single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi 4. This tiny PC packs a quad-core Cortex A72 SoC from Broadcom and up to 4 GB of DDR4 memory at a very attractive price. While aimed at emerging markets for folks new to computers, the Pi really caught on with retro gamers and "makers" in general from the start. The latest Pi has a whole lot more computing horsepower than the last iteration, but software support hadn't quite caught up—until just now. The LibRetro team released Lakka version 2.3 with a ton of new features, a retro gaming...

Gears 5 Review: UE4 Performance, Guts And Glory Explored

by Ben Funk - Tue, Sep 10, 2019

Gears 5 officially drops on Tuesday, September 10th, but if you've got Xbox Ultimate Game Pass or Xbox Game Pass for PC you may have already played quite a bit of it. The newest Xbox One and PC exclusive launched for Microsoft's subscription service on Friday. The Coalition's newest Gears title brings with it a whole host of new graphical effects and HDR lighting to both the console and PC alike, thanks to the latest iteration of Epic's Unreal Engine 4. We took the PC version for a spin and spent some time testing how the latest Gears title runs.   Gears 5 features lots of details in the characters...

Control: A Visually Stunning Ray Traced Gem Of A Game Explored

by Ben Funk - Mon, Aug 26, 2019

Finnish game studio Remedy Entertainment makes some of the finest-looking, quirkiest games around. Perhaps best known for the Max Payne series (but not Max Payne 3, which was developed solely by Rockstar), Remedy has been publishing its games exclusively on Xbox and PC for the last several years. The studio has delivered interesting, story-driven games more recently in the form of cult survival classic Alan Wake and the more recent sci-fi thriller Quantum Break. Both games featured cutting-edge graphics for their respective times. For that reason, maybe it's no surprise that the...

Maingear Vybe: Building A Liquid-Cooled AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Performance Desktop On Location

by Dave Altavilla, Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Aug 13, 2019

AMD's Ryzen 3000 series processors have made a positive impact on the PC enthusiast market, the likes of which we haven't seen in years. From a performance-per-dollar standpoint, AMD's disruptive Zen 2 architecture offers a strong value proposition for new desktop PC builders from all walks of life and for many use cases including gaming, content creation and other workstation-class requirements. In fact, we were so impressed by Ryzen 3000 series processors in our launch review, that we decided we needed to have AMD's new architecture in our production flow here at HotHardware. This also presented...

Gigabyte Aorus CV27F Monitor Review: 27" Of 165Hz Curved Gaming Bliss

by Ben Funk - Fri, Aug 09, 2019

It seems like a great time to buy a shiny new monitor for a gaming PC. FreeSync 2-certified monitors are plentiful on the open market and multiple companies are actively pushing them out the door to fight for your hard-earned dollars. Since NVIDIA started supporting FreeSync earlier this year, both GeForce and Radeon owners can take full advantage of variable refresh rate goodness without paying the price premiums associated with buying certain displays with G-Sync modules inside. If you haven't already, the time is right to start shopping for a high-refresh-rate FreeSync display -- the...

Corsair RGB Gaming Mouse Round-Up: M55, Glaive Pro, Nightsword, Ironclaw Tested

by Chris Goetting - Tue, Aug 06, 2019

You've just finished meticulously routing cables in your new battlestation and are basking in the subtle glow of RGB LEDs, but your setup is not ready yet. Your old generic mouse has served you well, but its bargain-bin sensor is holding you back. Your crosshairs are unsteady and trying to select individual units is frustrating. Worst of all, it disrupts the svelte aesthetics of your new rig. Fortunately, Corsair has recently released a family of gaming mice with something to fit anyone's needs and budget. These newest additions are the ambidextrous M55 RGB Pro, the shape-shifting Glaive RGB...

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Review: More Bang For The Buck

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Jul 23, 2019

The final member of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX Super-series officially arrives today, the GeForce RTX 2080 Super. In case you missed it, a couple of weeks back, NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super, to preemptively zing AMD in the lead-up to the Radeon RX 5700 series launch. The GeForce RTX Super-series will supplant and eventually replace their original, “non-Super” counterparts once availability dries up. At the top and bottom of the stack, however, the GeForce RTX 2060 and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti will remain. It is in the meat of the 20-series where the Supers...