Zak Killian
Recent posts
We don't talk about specialty cameras much around these parts, usually because those discussions require deep technical detail, full of industry jargon about the optical characteristics of the device. That's not the case when talking about...
Read more...
Microsoft's Flight Simulator is one of those things you have to experience before you can truly appreciate it, and not everyone will understand what's so special about it—much like the experience of flight itself. On the surface, it might...
Read more...
As was the case with the move to DDR4 memory with Skylake and the move to DDR3 with Core 2-series processors, Intel's first DDR5-enabled platform is also backward-compatible with DDR4 SDRAM. That means that we'll be seeing motherboards for...
Read more...
We've reported on the performance problems with Ryzen CPUs under Windows 11 a few times now, and produced our own test results to demonstrate the issues. AMD and Microsoft said they had patches forthcoming, and indeed, that seems to be the...
Read more...
Valve's taking a lot of risks with the Steam Deck. The company has been quite up-front about the fact that it's a full-fat handheld PC, and while this comes with its own set of compromises, it also means that it should in theory be capable...
Read more...
Intel's Alder Lake launch is coming; are you ready? The new processors signal what Intel hopes will be a sea change in the market toward hybrid processors that combine multiple core types in a single socket—not just "CPU" and "GPU," but...
Read more...
Everyone who uses an Android phone has probably had some security-conscious acquaintance ask, "don't you know how much data your phone is harvesting?" Most of us shrug it off as one of the unavoidable circumstances of modern life: you want...
Read more...
One of the great advantages of video game emulators is that they allow us to shine up old titles that may suffer due to low resolutions or frame rate limits. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has remained one of the most popular...
Read more...
Laptops as a whole have never had a great track record for repairability or upgradeability, but the situation has gotten worse in recent years. Modern ultra-portable machines often come with soldered-down memory, integrated graphics, and...
Read more...
If you're reading this site, then Quake surely needs no introduction. As the father of online FPS deathmatch, the legendary classic holds a place in the pantheon of foundational video game history. Id Software's first fully-3D FPS got the...
Read more...
Windows 11 hit the ground running last week—or maybe stumbling, at least on AMD Ryzen-based systems. As we reported at the release of the new operating system, CPUs based on AMD's Zen architecture are seeing drastically-worsened L3 cache...
Read more...
Last week, we told you about NVIDIA offering the EU antitrust commission concessions to try and hurry along its acquisition of Arm. If you missed that story, here's the quick and dirty to get you up to speed: NVIDIA wants to buy Arm, and...
Read more...
Because of real-life responsibilities and the fatigue they can pile up, some folks just wanna spend their leisure time vegging out instead of mashing buttons, and that's completely understandable. In fact, we'd reckon that there are a whole lot of game consoles out there that spend more time...
Read more...
Accurate timers are critical to the function of the low-level parts of the underlying code that drives the user-facing software we actually use in our daily lives. Fortunately, x86-64 PCs include numerous timers. Actually selecting which...
Read more...
As popular as it is, the practice of "remastering" old games is still a contentious topic. Some folks are positively gleeful seeing old favorites get a new coat of polish and quality-of-life features. Others are directly dismissive of old...
Read more...
You might have read a story earlier in the week about a US Navy destroyer's internet connection being "hacked" and taken over to stream Age of Empires to Facebook. A tale like that is comical until you consider the national security...
Read more...
By all accounts—even our own—the Apple M1 SoC powering the company's newest machines is a beast, but it comes with a drawback in that you can only run MacOS on it. A lot of folks love MacOS for various reasons, to be sure. It's also...
Read more...
Consumers' right to repair their own devices is one of the lesser-discussed political battlegrounds in the United States, but it's probably one that most-directly affects gamers and hardware enthusiasts. It's a contentious issue:...
Read more...
Amazon's recently-released game New World is cracking open pent-up MMORPG demand to become a massive hit. At the time of this publication, it's currently the number-one most-played game on Steam. That's in spite of some bad press; we...
Read more...
One often-posted work-around for enthusiasts' inability to locate new graphics cards is to purchase a pre-built gaming PC or a gaming laptop. In the past, hardcore system-building enthusiasts have sneered at gaming laptops, as their...
Read more...
In case you've been out of the loop the last ten years, processors based on the Arm ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) have basically conquered mobile computing and much of the IoT, and they're making inroads into areas typically dominated...
Read more...
When Joe Gamer is building a PC, he probably doesn't even look at qualified parts lists, like memory QVLs. Products made to a given standard typically "just work," at least to a good-enough degree for general use, and don't need to be...
Read more...
