TechSpot Features

The TechSpot PC Buying Guide offers a comprehensive analysis of today's best desktop PC hardware spanning five well differentiated budgets. Starting at ~$400 for an affordable PC, followed by two well-balanced enthusiast-oriented machines, a premium high-end build, and finally a dream machine packing the baddest hardware available, period.

The latest sports games are not always the best. There's an obsession with incremental changes and bullet-point features, one which challenges fan's ability to take a step back and assess each game as its own title. It's something I try to do and I'm taking to its logical conclusion here in this Quixotic attempt to pluck one game out of hundreds and call it the "best."

The third and final installment in our 'Needs to Fix' series is focused on Nvidia. Having previously discussed what we feel Intel and AMD can do with their upcoming products to become more consumer friendly, it's now time to look at the green team. As before, we're looking at this from the perspective of the consumer, at the product level.

You don't have to be a professional photographer to snap amazing pictures of fireworks. All you need is some basic equipment and know-how, the latter of which we offer up here.

This is the second part of our "Needs to Fix" series and it's now AMD's turn. As the underdog, AMD has far more reason to play nice and you could argue they've been forced into doing many of the things we want Intel to do because of their smaller market share. We don't believe AMD is a saint, it's still a big company trying to accomplish what most businesses should: make money.

We've covered many ways that you can save space on your storage drives over the years and deleting duplicate files on your system could easily result in a sizable clean out if only a few large files are found. Although Windows doesn't provide a direct solution, there are many apps that can help, so here's a quick look at them.

It's becoming common knowledge that exposure to blue light can prevent your body from winding down properly before bed and making it more difficult to sleep. If you often work at night or simply like to read on a screen before going to sleep, this can be a game changer.

Vcore, or core voltage, is the voltage that is supplied to power your CPU. The amount of power the CPU uses and the amount of heat generated are tied to the amount of voltage it draws. The voltage identification definition, or VID, determines the amount of voltage your CPU needs to maintain stability at the default clock speeds.

As the market leader and long time dominant force in the CPU space, Intel's been able to get away with a lot and this is partly because the competition has allowed them to. In this column we're looking at possible improvements from the consumers' perspective and specific to Intel's personal computing side of the business.

Have you ever been to a presentation, or worse, a high-profile company keynote, it gets started on an empty Windows desktop showing nothing but the Recycle Bin icon? Hideous. Preferring to keep our desktop clean, we remove the Recycle Bin icon from Windows 10 as one of the first tweaks to a fresh installation of the operating system.

Heat is an inevitable byproduct of work. Heat is also prevalent in electronics, and when it comes to graphics cards you can manage it using passive cooling, fans and even water. But when these solutions aren't working, your GPU has one more way to beat the heat: thermal throttling.

At one point or another, you're bound to run into this pesky issue: you can see an application open in the taskbar, but can't see the window on your desktop. A number of things can cause this, such as disconnecting your laptop from a secondary display before dragging the windows back to the primary desktop. It can also occur when you open a program that alters your resolution, among a few others.

Printing to PDF is a widely available option these days, but what if you have a bunch of scanned pages in JPG format that you want to combine into a single PDF to be shared with someone else?

Today we're discussing a topic that's often raised when we do our CPU gaming benchmarks. As you know, we perform a ton of CPU and GPU benchmarks tests throughout the year, a big portion of which are dedicated to gaming. The goal is to work out which CPU will offer you the most bang for your buck at a given price point, now and hopefully in the future.

Earlier we covered in detail the required components for building your own keyboard and hopefully made the whole project feel a bit less daunting. Today we will go over the assembly process, so you can turn your pile of parts into a functioning board.

In the world of mechanical keyboards, big brand names like Corsair, Razer, HyperX, etc., take the bulk of the limelight. But what if I told you that every part of a keyboard can be customized? This goes far beyond the aesthetics, so if you're not one for making compromises, it may be time to build your own.

FreeSync 2 was announced over a year ago but it's only recently that we're starting to see the its ecosystem expand with new display options. As HDR and wide-gamut monitors become more of a reality over the next year, there's no better time to discuss FreeSync 2 than now, when you can actually buy it.

Today we're checking out the state of the GPU market, what pricing and availability is like relative to various points in the past year, and what the trends in pricing are looking like. We'll also go through some performance figures to show which graphics cards make the most sense to purchase right now.

AMD seems to have learned their lesson with 2nd-gen Ryzen. This time around the X-models are much more appealing with a bigger and better box cooler and better out of the box performance. And yet both models make sense depending on your wants and needs.

We can say upfront that this article is in no way buying advice, but we're testing purely for the science of it. For the unaware, IPC (instructions per cycle) provides a good indicator of how fast a processor is, so with that in mind we're putting Intel and AMD's latest CPU architectures to the test running at a flat 4GHz.

Google's Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL have commanded the phone camera throne since launch, producing astonishingly good photos that are unsurpassed by rivals of a similar era such as the iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy Note 8. In 2018, a new challenger has appeared in the Samsung Galaxy S9+ packing an upgraded camera system in an attempt to retake the crown.

Just because you don't have access to the fanciest gear around doesn't mean you have to play subpar games. Even if you're on a potato computer or low-end PC, there's plenty out there for you to enjoy. Here are some of Kotaku's top picks for quality games that should run on almost anything.

Apple users: Did you know that you can't buy Kindle books from the Kindle app on your iOS device? In fact, you can't purchase them from the Amazon app either. Even if you're an Amazon Prime member and you want to download a free book. Nah, not possible. But there's a workaround.

If you're interested in replacing your desktop monitor with a 4K TV and want to know what to buy, you've come to the right place. Maybe you aren't quite sure where to start or could use a hand in narrowing your search. Whatever the case, this guide is intended to help steer you in the right direction.

To play Far Cry 5, Ubisoft recommends that you have a Core i7-4770 or Ryzen 5 1600 processor along with a GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon R9 290X -- fairly heavy recommendations. Benchmarking the game has been made easy by its built-in benchmark which appears to do a good job of replicating the kind of performance you can expect to see when playing the game.

Along with our recent editorials on why it's a bad time to build a gaming PC, we've been revisiting some older GPUs to see how they hold up in today's games. But how do you know how much you should be paying for a secondhand graphics card?

Cryptocurrencies, ICOs, magic internet money---it's all so damn exciting, and you, the eager developer, want to get in on the madness. Where do you start? I'm glad you're excited about this space. I am too. But you'll probably find it's unclear where to begin. Blockchain is moving at breakneck speed, but there's no clear onramp to learning this stuff.

In 2012 I wrote an article about leaving Facebook. I've kept this stance for about five years now, but an accumulation of several small things during this time have had me questioning whether or not abandoning the social network was the brilliant idea I once thought it was.

If it's been a while since you've bought portable flash memory, you might be surprised by the broad availability and affordability of high speed, high capacity microSD cards. Commonly used to expand the storage in devices ranging from smartphones to drones, microSD cards are becoming more frequently purchased than any other SD form factors, although full sized cards remain popular among digital camera owners.

Continuing along with revisiting some of our favorite old graphics cards, today we'll be checking back in with the Radeon R9 280X, which is also to say that we're checking back in with the 7970 GHz Edition, both of which are essentially a factory overclocked Radeon HD 7970, so we'll technically be revisiting that, too, the very same card we first reviewed in December 2011!