TechSpot Features

Input devices have a key role in the computing landscape, so the guts of them must be pretty cool to look at. Naturally, this means getting our scalpels out for another dissection of the anatomy of hardware.

By far the most common types of display panels used on PC monitors are TN, IPS and VA. We're sure you've heard these terms before if you've researched monitors to purchase, and to be clear, the type of panel is a key piece of information that reveals a lot about how the monitor will behave and perform.

When we look at the video games that have truly stood the test of time, MMORPGs are always near the top of that list. The genre has been around for decades, but what's the secret sauce that makes MMOs so popular and long-lasting? And which titles are worth playing today?

There's plenty of graphics history and technology to unpack here after AMD purchased ATI, it didn't just absorb the company, but continued its reputation of being a graphics powerhouse for years to come.

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 and SD cards. With this guide, we'll break down what all the different codes and ratings mean, and offer the best choices for a range of categories.

We check out Intel's Core i5-10400F, a direct competitor to the Ryzen 3600 to see how this budget CPU performs when paired with a last-generation high-end Radeon gaming GPU.

Computer mice are often inexpensive and basic, but some of them boast all kinds of extras. In this Anatomy feature we'll dig into the guts of one inexpensive mouse and one Logitech MX model to see how the two compare on the inside.

Let's do a brief recap of 2020's best and worst PC hardware products. We have 5 categories to work through covering mostly PC hardware components like CPUs, GPUs and motherboards, as well as laptop hardware and monitors.

3D graphics turned a dull PC industry into a light and magic show after generations of innovative endeavour. Here's our extensive look at the history of the GPU, from the early days of 3D, to game-changing hardware and the industry's consolidation.

Today we're taking a detailed look at how AMD's Smart Access Memory (SAM) technology influences performance in a wide range of games. All in all, we plan to benchmark 36 games at 1080p, 1440p and 4K.

The Radeon RX 6800 is bound to be a popular GPU choice and with so many of you using the still amazing Ryzen 5 3600, it makes sense to see how it performs with the new RDNA2 GPU.

Portable apps are lightweight versions of applications that don't use an installer, so you can run them from a USB drive or a cloud folder. We've assembled a collection of the best and most useful portable apps across a variety of categories.

Resolution scaling is a great option if you're looking to eke out an additional 10-15% performance, after tweaking settings. If you're playing at a high resolution like 4K, and you combine res scaling with image sharpening, the results are often very close to native.

Computer technology is no strange to acronyms: CPU, RAM, SSD, to name but a few. Ever so often, new ones appear on the scene in the never-ending quest to improve the capabilities of our computing devices. Today we'll explain processor instruction set extensions MMX, SSE, and AVX.

Whenever you think of mobile computing, Arm is likely the first company that comes to mind, or it should be. Billions of Arm chips are used on phones, TVs, embedded systems and tablets. But they're coming for more.

Forging ahead with our reminiscence of the most memorable video game music, part two focuses exclusively on PC video game soundtracks. We've got our hands full as there's a lot of excellent material to consider, so here comes our list.

Today, multiplayer gaming is easy. But in the 90s, it was cumbersome and not exactly user friendly until an app called GameSpy hit the scene which made browsing for servers and connecting with players a far more intuitive process. It was a game-changer.

Do you think of the command line as an antiquated leftover from the past, or an old fashioned way of interacting with a computer? Think again. In Linux, the command line remains the most flexible and powerful way to perform tasks.

Few companies can brush off failure and come back stronger like the world's most famous gaming company. Nintendo has been synonymous with video games for decades, but it's not always been rosy for the Japanese giant.

Ever since Apple's M1 SoC launched, the tech community has been abuzz trying to draw comparisons to see where it stands in terms of performance and efficiency against Intel or AMD. Here's why we think M1 is a very relevant development in the world of computer hardware.

It's been nearly a decade and two console generations since Skyrim came out in 2011. The Elder Scrolls VI is eventually coming, but as the franchise turns 26, we're looking back at how things got started.

Cyberpunk 2077 is visually stunning and possibly the most graphically impressive game we've ever seen. Ray tracing elevates the game's visuals and provides a noticeable improvement, so it's time to test how your GPU performs with DLSS and ray tracing enabled.

The day has finally arrived: Cyberpunk 2077 is here and the massively popular game appears to be a huge success. This benchmark feature will cover Cyberpunk 2077 performance with all current and previous-gen GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

You've surely opened software as an admin on Windows before, maybe as recently as today. But do you know what happens under the hood of Windows when you tell the OS to run a program as an administrator, and why is this process necessary in the first place?

AMD has overcome Intel in terms of performance before, but previous wins against the chip giant have been rare over the years. Furthermore, every time Intel looked inferior, it responded swiftly and effectively.

With the arrival of DirectX 10, vertex and pixel shaders maintained large levels of common function, and so moving to a unified shader architecture made sense. The first GPU to go this route was Nvidia's iconic GeForce 8 Series.

With the turn of the century, the computer graphics market consisted of a discrete card duopoly (Nvidia and ATI), with both of them in addition to Intel supplying the vast majority of integrated graphics chipsets.

For GPU enthusiasts, it's been a long two year wait. But now that Nvidia's Ampere RTX 3000 GPUs are out, as are AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series, it's time to take a deep look at how these chips work. Is one of them fundamentally better than the other?

At its peak in the 1990s, Silicon Graphics had legendary status among 3D and graphic designers who leveraged the unique power of these workstations that were at cutting edge of visual computing.

Voodoo Graphics revolutionized the PC nearly. The 3D landscape in 1996 favored S3 with 50% of the market. That completely changed as it was estimated that 3Dfx accounted for over 80% of the 3D market during the heyday of Voodoo's reign.