Editor profile

Ben Funk

image
Ben has been fascinated by technology since he got a Commodore VIC-20 as a child in 1984. By day he's a software developer working in education technology, and at night he's a husband, dad, musician, gamer, and freelance technology writer. If he's not at his PC, Ben can be found hanging out with his family, gaming on a vintage Sega console, or grippin' and rippin' with his beloved Paul Reed Smith guitar. 

Follow Ben on Twitter.

Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.

Recent posts

At the heart of every autonomous machine, modern industrial robot, and automated manufacturing apparatus is some form artificial intelligence. These things are amazingly complex, too—not only are there models to train, but there are... Read more...
The trend of OLED displays in laptops is typically reserved for flagship devices that cost a pretty penny. Logically, the extreme contrast ratio, total lack of ghosting, and colors that pop are the sort of thing that most PC shoppers... Read more...
Acer's Predator series of gaming displays is one of the longest-running lines of high-refresh monitors with G-Sync in the PC industry. The newest X32 and X32 FP entries really push the bar on what a gaming monitor can be with some pretty... Read more...
Razer warned us at the end of last year that gaming laptops were about to get more expensive. One of the only consistent ways for gamers to get their hands on current-generation GPUs was to buy a whole system, so the laws (and sad... Read more...
2021 was a big year for graphics, despite all the shortages, in large part thanks to dueling upscaling technologies. While NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling gets a lot of attention, Fidelity FX Super Resolution knocked our socks off... Read more...
Lightweight gaming notebooks don't have to be slow: something that has been proven out time and time again by products like Razer's Blade series and ASUS's ROG Zephyrus G14. Because of that, more and more gaming notebooks are thinner and... Read more...
SK Hynix isn't necessarily the first name one thinks of when conjuring up images of PCI Express SSDs, but in the years to come it certainly will be. The company is the second-biggest producer of memory on this planet Earth, although its... Read more...
For gamers of a certain age, Sonic the Hedgehog is synonymous with blazing speed, intricate two-dimensional platforming, and of course Blast Processing on the Sega Genesis, which was reborn on the Genesis Mini. However, gamers on the go... Read more...
Amazon has come under quite a bit of fire over the last week due to tornadoes that ripped through the midwest last Friday night. In the wake of those storms, there's been a lot of finger pointing in particular over a warehouse that... Read more...
Ignoring the difficulties securing hardware for a moment, it's a pretty glorious time to play games on the PC. We get our choice of resolutions, frame rates, and detail levels, and if our hardware isn't up to snuff there's some innovative creative technologies available that try to bridge the... Read more...
Around this time last year, there was much hoopla over Apple's first Macs with the company's home-grown Apple Silicon, dubbed the M1. Almost immediately, rumors swirled about what the follow-up, rumored to be called the M1X, would have in... Read more...
Ultraportable laptops with 13 or 14-inch displays and low-power processors are great for a certain kind of user. Those folks are usually found running from gate to gate in an airport or catching an Uber to a sales meeting. These machines have great single-threaded performance and good-enough... Read more...
There's been a lot of discussion about image quality and super-sampled graphics in 3D games over the last few months. Ray tracing is quite expensive from a computational standpoint, so frame rates typically suffer when it's enabled... Read more...
If there's been one drawback to Alienware's previous gen Aurora desktop series, it's that the systems we've gotten in for review have made a bit of a racket at times. These systems have always been well-equipped with the latest hardware... Read more...
The Android version of Genshin Impact running on Windows via side-load The Windows Subsystem for Android required for installing Android apps from Amazon's App Store has arrived for everyone running the Release Preview or Beta channels of Windows 11. There's already been a hack released to... Read more...
NVIDIA's GeForce NOW is not a new product, but today the company's game streaming service is expanding in a couple of key ways to bring more performance and better visuals to gamers everywhere. Announced last week, NVIDIA is bringing... Read more...
Right about a year ago, Apple announced the first Macs with its own home-grown processor technology, dubbed the M1. The first 13-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini shipped with the company's new wonder-chip, and even the base... Read more...
The Left 4 Dead games were great cooperative fun. For the uninitiated, four players blasted their way through frantic zombie hordes in the L4D games, working together as a team just trying to survive. Developer Turtle Rock Studios, which was acquired by Valve prior to the release of the first... Read more...
Month after month since its launch in March of 2020, Nintendo has released new content for Animal Crossing: New Horizons like clockwork. The smash hit feels like a living, breathing organism all to itself because it seems like every time... Read more...
The raid on this fort is reminiscent of infiltration missions in Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag A whole new crop of blockbuster games are lining up for a big holiday shopping season. Ubisoft didn't really intend for that to be the case for... Read more...
Another Apple iPhone launch event has come and gone, with the company's latest flagship and mid-range phones already shipping to customers, arriving on front porches just a few short days ago. In a second consecutive year of component shortages, Apple's deep resources and influence seemed... Read more...
Did you pick up a shiny new iPhone 13 Pro expecting silky-smooth 120-Hz animations and seamless integration with an Apple Watch? I know I sure did, but things haven't gone as expected on Apple's new smartphone platform right out of the... Read more...
First ... Prev 3 4 5 6 7 Next