Editor profile

Zak Killian

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Ever since playing Joust on his family's Atari 800XL 8-bit computer as a youth, Zak has been hooked on PC and console games. His passion for gaming as a kid led to an interest in PCs as a teenager, which ended up with him founding his own PC repair shop in the year 2000. Decades later, he's still building, still gaming, and still arguing on the internet with any opinion anyone has. A former writer of news and reviews for The Tech Report, Zak is a modern-day Renaissance man who may not be an expert on anything, but knows just a little about nearly everything.

Recent posts

Today's PC-based gaming handhelds are incredibly powerful. Systems like the OneXFly offer eight Zen 4 CPU cores and up to 64GB of fast LPDDR5X memory—more than enough horsepower for even tasks like video editing. After all, we used to do... Read more...
We tested Intel's Application Performance Optimizer last week and came away with a tentatively-positive opinion. The technology helps games leverage the hybrid architecture of Intel's CPUs more effectively, improving performance when... Read more...
Grand Theft Auto is absolutely not a series for children. While the earliest games had a cartoony style and relatively little objectionable content besides the nominative car theft, the games became surprisingly realistic, starting with... Read more...
As PC hardware enthusiasts, we talk about code names a lot. Stuff like "Raptor Lake" and "Bergamo" are technically internal names that aren't really supposed to be used in an official context. Intel, for example, would prefer that we say... Read more...
Super Mario RPG was an odd game when it came out back in 1996. Taking the beloved Mario characters and placing them into a Final Fantasy-style JRPG required a lot of world-building and characterization that simply didn't exist for those... Read more...
If you're reading HotHardware, there's a solid chance that you recall a time when device makers were going completely insane with the designs of their hardware. Just about everything now is a very boring slab or block with... Read more...
Yesterday's reveal of the Steam Deck OLED was rather exciting for some folks. If you haven't heard of or seen it yet, head over to yesterday's coverage to check it out, because the revised Steam Deck looks like a significant upgrade over... Read more...
One of the most common criticisms of Valve's generally-excellent Steam Deck is that the screen is a bit lack-luster.. While response times are good, it is a basic IPS LCD with characteristically-weak contrast ratio and mediocre color... Read more...
The first three generations of AMD Ryzen processors were given model numbers in the 1000s, the 2000s, and then the 3000s. However, between the launch of the Ryzen 3000 family and AMD's next-gen processors, the company released some... Read more...
After an awkward situation with Apple back in 2017, UK-based graphics IP developer Imagination Technologies was in a dire state. The company was quickly snapped up by a state-backed private equity firm from China known as Canyon Bridge... Read more...
The latest AMD AGESA firmware—that's the part of AMD's firmware that configures the CPU—includes support for upcoming Socket AM5 "APU" processors, at least according to HKEPC. The self-described #1 Hong Kong DIY PC site tweeted a... Read more...
You may not realize it, but you're probably interacting with a GPT-family AI almost every day. It stands as the most popular of the large language models by far, and it is impressively-capable, with the latest version able to ace the MCAT... Read more...
Before you start posting angry comments, we know—it's not actually called the "PS5 Slim". In fact, Sony simply refers to it as a "new look for the PS5 console." However, it is a bit smaller than the original release, and the timing is... Read more...
Most of AMD's upcoming Ryzen 8000 series processors will be based on the company's next-generation Zen 5 processor architecture, and that's a big deal because by all accounts, Zen 5 is going to be a major redesign of the Zen CPU core... Read more...
It's almost impossible to imagine it now, but city builders were once PC gaming royalty with Maxis' SimCity 2000 moving over 4 million copies. These days, the mantle of SimCity has almost entirely been handed off to Colossal Order's... Read more...
In case you weren't aware, VMware operates a security arm called Carbon Black. On Halloween, Carbon Black's Threat Analysis Unit (TAU) announced that it had found 34 different vulnerable Windows drivers that had firmware access. To be... Read more...
If you're a regular reader of HotHardware, then you are assuredly aware that Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake processors are coming, along with a massive overhaul of the company's branding. The new chiplet-based CPUs will reset Intel's... Read more...
Before we talk about Sapphire's new graphics card, let's go over what exactly comprises a Radeon RX 6750 GRE graphics card. AMD launched two cards under that name in the middle of last month, differentiated primarily by their memory... Read more...
If you bought a Steam Deck with a 256GB or 512GB SSD inside, you're probably not aware of an issue that affects people with the cheaper 64GB model. You see, games on SteamOS download pre-compiled shader libraries as well as additional data... Read more...
Acer Predator BiFrost Arc A770 OC 16GB: MSRP - $399; Street Price - $319 (As Low As $289) Acer's take on Intel's Arc A770 GPU is the fastest and flashiest Arc card around, and you won't pay a premium for it when it's on-sale -- which... Read more...
Bolt on your metal armor and pull out your automatic Beretta, because Robocop: Rogue City releases today. This new title from the developers of sleeper hit Terminator: Resistance has had almost no marketing, yet its extremely faithful... Read more...
If you pay attention to hardware news websites like ours, then AMD's Phoenix 2 processor may not need any introduction at all. The chip has already quietly made its debut in the ASUS ROG Ally's cheaper "non-Extreme" edition, and we've... Read more...
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