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

First-person shooters may have originated on the PC, but for many years they've been most-played on game consoles. PC gamers typically use their mouse and keyboard to play the games, while console gamers are expected to use the standard... Read more...
When NVIDIA unveiled its grand plans to bring real-time ray-tracing to computer games, those of us in the audience who understood what that really meant were cautiously optimistic. It's probably fair to say that most of the uses of... Read more...
For a long time, your choice of motherboard has had very little impact on your CPU's performance. That's changed recently with the growing popularity of >150W CPUs; buying a cheapo mobo could sharply limit your CPU's clocks due to the... Read more...
It was in April of last year, almost fully a year ago, that Intel told us it had Meteor Lake silicon up and running well enough to boot Windows. That's why it's sort-of surprising that we're just now seeing our first benchmark leak for... Read more...
AMD's Ryzen "X3D" processors are created by very literally attaching a second piece of silicon that is almost entirely L3 cache memory to the top of a regular Ryzen processor die, just like the picture above implies. It is the central slab... Read more...
Jim Keller's been getting around in the last decade or so. Back in the early 00s, he was critical to the development of the Athlon 64 at AMD, and in more recent years, he's been at Apple, Tesla, Intel, and AMD again before joining... Read more...
Readers of this site are no doubt familiar with Intel's Arc A380, A750, and A770 graphics cards. The A380 was the first one to hit the market, and we've reviewed the other two. What you could have missed are the Arc Pro graphics cards: the... Read more...
Sony's gaming handhelds have typically been potent portables with expansive feature sets for their time. The original PSP could play audio and video off memory sticks, and it even had a web browser—impressive stuff for a handheld device in... Read more...
Polish developer CD Projekt Red seems to be among the few game publishers of decent size that understand the PC market: once you release a game, it doesn't vanish from the market after a few weeks, months, or even years. It stays in shops... Read more...
Are Intel's Arc GPUs dead? After all, we heard that rumor before we even had Alchemist GPUs in hand, and after the lukewarm reception that Intel's graphics products have received, as well as the departure of the father of Xe himself, Raja... Read more...
Going for a budget model of any product means making compromises: budget autos skimp on creature comforts and cargo room, budget motels eschew extra services (and often cleanliness), and budget motherboards usually miss out on premium... Read more...
Memory bandwidth isn't that big of a deal on desktop platforms. Client tasks like office work, web browsing, and even computer games are usually much more sensitive to memory latency than memory performance, which is why AMD sees such huge... Read more...
We surely don't need to tell you that it's April Fool's Day, given the preponderance of gags around the internet. SEGA decided to get in on the action, announcing on Twitter a new Steam game called The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog. Only... Read more...
When the Ryzen 7 5800X3D came out and allowed AMD users to instantly upgrade an aging AM4 machine with a CPU competitive against Intel's latest and greatest, a whole lot of people snatched them up, including your author here. It's a great... Read more...
You probably know Gigabyte most as a motherboard vendor, but it has a whole server arm known relatively recently as "Giga Computing." As part of an announcement for new Ryzen-based server systems, Giga Computing put out a press release... Read more...
We're at the end of a quarter, and you know what that means: investor meetings. Intel held a Data Center and AI Investor Webinar today, and along with the usual boring money talk, revealed a few key details about its upcoming Xeon... Read more...
Opinions on the internet can be misleading. You may have heard a near-universal cheer for the forthcoming federal ban of video-sharing app TikTok. Well, put away the champagne and poppers. The so-called "ban TikTok bill" is a lot more... Read more...
Nintendo has finally finished work on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and for the announcement, it has released a gameplay video narrated by none other than series steward Eiji Aonuma himself—at least, in the Japanese version... Read more...
Can you believe that the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D have already been out a month? Yes, indeed—the launch date for the eight-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, arguably the most exciting member of its family, is just nine days away now. What... Read more...
If you're trying to game on a budget, Microsoft's Game Pass is a pretty decent deal. As long as you stay subscribed at $10 a month, you get to play quite a few PC games to your heart's content, and they're not just Microsoft's own games... Read more...
Four days ago, we reported on a leak revealing quite a few key details about Intel's upcoming ultra-high-end server platform for Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest-family Xeon processors. Well, today, we've got what purports to be a pile of... Read more...
Real-time ray-traced graphics were big buzz around the time that Elden Ring was first announced. Close to the release, Bandai-Namco, the game's publisher, also announced that the developer FromSoftware would be releasing a patch for its magnum opus that adds ray-traced effects. Well, that... Read more...
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