Zak Killian
Recent posts
In case you missed it, Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs have launched! Well, "announced," anyway—and only six of them. The currently-announced 13th-generation CPUs from Intel are the "K" and "KF" models of the Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9...
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DirectStorage is one of those technologies that perpetually seems to be just on the horizon. Except, Microsoft actually launched DirectStorage back in March of this year. You haven't heard much about it because it simply hasn't seen...
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NVIDIA seemingly annoyed a few people with its decision to name two completely different Ada Lovelace graphics cards based on different GPUs both, "RTX 4080." The GeForce RTX 4080 16GB model uses the AD103 GPU and is significantly...
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There's not many negatives to say about the GeForce RTX 4090—pricing gripes aside—but there was one little detail we picked out as soon as NVIDIA put the part's specifications up on the product page: the lack of support for the latest...
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There are a lot of reasons to buy a GeForce RTX 4090. Beyond the massive raster performance and surprisingly good efficiency, there's also support for new technologies like DLSS 3 Frame Generation. There are also plenty of reasons not to...
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The GeForce RTX 4080 will come in two flavors when it launches next month. Given that the just-released RTX 4090 is too rich for the blood of most folks, everyone's been wondering how its smaller siblings compare. Well, the only people who...
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The GeForce RTX 4090 is a beast—check out our review—but it doesn't come cheap. Everyone loves to gawp at the top-end processors, but such mighty hardware is out of reach for the majority of enthusiasts. At least in the case of CPUs, you...
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Valve's Steam Deck is a killer little machine, for what it is and for what it costs. $399 gets you a quad-core Zen 2 PC with 16 GB of memory and a surprisingly-fast little integrated Radeon. The machine ships with the Linux-based SteamOS...
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When NVIDIA announced the Ada Lovelace-based GeForce RTX 4000 family, it was very clear about the fact that GeForce RTX 3000 cards based on its Ampere architecture aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Those cards are over two years old now...
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Everyone expects the GeForce RTX 4090 to be the fastest graphics card on the planet when it officially debuts this week. Of course, some folks won't be satisfied that easily. Like overclockers, who will propel the card to never-before-seen...
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Did you see our post a couple of days back about how you can now buy a Steam Deck straight from Valve without a reservation? (That's true, by the way; you can pick one up right from their store page and have it in a week or two.) In that...
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Graphics cards are usually the most power-thirsty component in a gaming system, and that's been the case for quite some time now. Things are approaching absurd levels, though. The GeForce RTX 4090 has a total board power spec of 450 watts...
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AMD's Ryzen 7000 series processors based on its Zen 4 architecture have a very unusual design to their integrated heatspreaders (IHS). If you're not careful, the notches on the sides of the IHS can trap thermal paste that squeezes over the...
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The Steam Deck has been a smash hit. It's not flawless, but it's a very good value considering its capabilities. If you're out of the loop, it's a portable PC that can play Steam games on top of doing all the other usual PC things, and...
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If you keep up with hardware news and reviews like ours, then you're no doubt already aware that AMD's Ryzen 7000-series processors run hot by design, and they can be pretty power-thirsty, too. In ages past, we'd fix a problem like this...
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AMD's Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 processors have just barely hit the market. Still, progress marches on, and software developers are looking ahead to AMD's next generation based on the Zen 5 architecture. Those chips won't be here for a year...
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Windows has moved to a policy of forced updates, and this has caused no end of problems for users that lack the savvy to troubleshoot when things go wrong. In faint defense of Microsoft, it's pretty rare that Windows updates cause hardware...
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OLED gaming monitors might actually become "a thing," at least if the latest reports out of Korea are accurate. It is unconfirmed, so take it with however many fistfuls of salt that you wish, but a report originating with Korean news site...
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Mitigations for the major security flaws that we keep discovering over the last few years have had significant performance implications for older hardware. (Convenient for the manufacturers, that.) It turns out that on the newest hardware...
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Intel has finally set the debut date for the top of its Alchemist graphics card line-up. The Arc A770 and A750 will hit store shelves on the 12th of this month, just ten days away. We have cards in hand, and of course, we also have...
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When AMD formally revealed Socket AM5 for its next few generations of desktop processors, it made the bold statement that CPU coolers for Socket AM4 would be compatible with the new socket. By now, we've got the parts in hand and are...
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It's the first of October, which means there's only 11 days left before you can buy your own GeForce RTX 4090—assuming your pockets are deep enough, anyway. If you've got the dosh but are on the fence regarding whether to dole it out for a...
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