TechSpot Features

If you've got some $200 to spend on a new CPU and you want something that can handle any and all tasks you throw at it with maximum efficiency, the Ryzen 5 2600 series is a must-have. But should you buy the Ryzen 5 2600X or the non-X 2600?

To the surprise of many, Nvidia has backed down from their G-Sync tower and enabled Nvidia GPU owners to use adaptive sync with a wide range of FreeSync monitors. The feature was announced during CEO Jensen Huang CES 2019 keynote and this week it's been enabled by the latest GeForce drivers.

What a difference a year makes. It was about this time last year that we discussed why building a gaming PC was a bad idea, but thankfully a lot has changed since. You may recall, DDR4 memory and graphics card prices were through the roof a year ago. GPU availability was quite poor and on top of all that, we were at the end of a few product cycles. Fast forward a year, what's changed?

Having a specialized 3d API was arguably both the highlight and the downfall for pioneer 3Dfx. The Glide API combined with Voodoo hardware truly enhanced the gaming experience. If you are old enough, odds are you owned a 3Dfx card and played some of these games. Let us take you a trip down memory lane and remember some of the best.

There are many reasons why you would buy a used graphics card. First and foremost, the savings, of course. With the mining madness now over, we've been given the opportunity of buying graphics cards on the cheap. Also this past generation of GPUs also received a much longer than expected life cycle, meaning you are not getting overly old GPUs, but fairly serviceable gaming hardware.

Though it's a year shy of the big decade marker, 2019 looks to be one of the most exciting and most important years for the tech industry in some time. Thanks to the upcoming launch of 5G and foldable displays, as well as critical enhancements in AI, robotics, and other exciting areas, there's a palpable sense of expectation for the new year that we haven't felt for a while.

As the heads of some of the largest companies in the world, these chief executive officers make decisions that can affect our daily lives, but just how much do we really know about the filthy rich dudes in positions of power? We examine their careers, personalities, and histories, and make a lot of speculative guesses.

Today we're addressing one of the most frequently asked questions we see about PC gaming: how many frames per second do you need? Should you be running at the same refresh rate as your monitor's, say 60 FPS on a 60 Hz display, or is there a benefit to running games at a much higher frame rate than your monitor can display, like say, 500 FPS?

We recently experienced an installation of Windows 10 with system files that were totally corrupt. After attempting typical repair options, we used a Windows 10 ISO to perform an in-place upgrade, reinstalling Windows 10 while preserving even the software you have installed.

Wi-Fi is set to get better and faster with its upcoming major update. While plenty of routers are already available with chips using draft specifications, 802.11ax Wi-Fi won't be finalized until December 2019, ushering in a wave of updated devices touting new wireless capabilities that will contribute toward next-generation networks with more speed and less congestion.

ICQ, short for the phrase "I Seek You," laid the groundwork for standalone instant messaging clients when it arrived in November 1996. Think about how long ago that was... Windows 95 was barely a year old, Nintendo had just introduced the N64, and those with a reason to have a cell phone actually used it to talk on.

Time is running out for 2018 and this will be last update to our series before new GPUs possibly arrive in Q1 2019. In the meantime, we are seeing some interesting trends with further discounts and some previous generation GPUs running out of stock. Here's how prices have changed, what we expect in the future, and the current best value cards.

We've compiled a list of things that you can do in the Windows Command Prompt, including some commands everyone should know for general usage, more advanced ones for tweaking or troubleshooting your PC, as well as lesser known Command Prompt features.

Today we're looking into how much RAM you need to play the latest and greatest gaming titles. About this time each year we set on a memory capacity quest and last year's expedition lead us to conclude that for gamers 4GB is out, 8GB was the minimum, 16GB is the sweet spot and 32GB is overkill. Read on for our 2018 test.

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.

PC has never been a singular platform like, say, PlayStation or Xbox. Instead, it's a series of disparate landmasses sharing the same turbulent sea. PC gaming looks to become more fragmented than it's been in the past few years---for better and worse. More options means more chances for new ideas to flourish and, perhaps, for a new middle class of developers to emerge.

For a long time Windows PCs (OEMs) came with a product key sticker with your license info, but now manufacturers are storing this license within the machine's UEFI/BIOS, so the information is retrieved and applied automatically. Furthermore, your Windows license can now be tied to your Microsoft account. Let us explain.

If you want to know what graphics card you should buy or what's the best CPU for your new rig, we've already got you covered. Today we're discussing something else. Welcome to our second annual hall of hardware shame, where we list what we feel were the worst CPU and GPU purchases of 2018. Some of these products should have never existed, others are just a bit pointless or made promises they did not fulfill.

It can be easy to talk yourself out of standing at a computer desk. Besides parting with your favorite chair, the price of most adjustable models can discourage many. Read on for a practical outlook on what you can expect from your first standing desk, whether you're building something yourself or having one shipped to your door.

Depending on where you live, you've likely seen a house with crazy flashing Christmas lights that change color and dance to music. Almost every neighborhood or town has "that one house" that goes all out for the holidays each year. In my neighborhood, that house is mine.

Enthusiasts have been pushing the limits of silicon for as long as microprocessors have existed. Early endeavors involved soldering and replacing crystal clock oscillators, but evolving standards brought options for changing system bus speeds via motherboard DIP switches and jumpers, while some of the most daring would gain boosts through hard modding. These are but a few of the landmark processors revered for their overclocking prowess.

If you've been in the PC community for a while, you may have heard the name Puget Systems before. They are a custom system builder specializing in workstations and gaming PCs. This includes workloads such as engineering, content creation, 3D modeling, ML/AI, streaming, and more.

Pepsi vs. Cola, Edison vs. Tesla, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, history is filled with famous rivalries, but few have matched the intensity and, quite often, the viciousness that comes when two tech industry giants clash heads. Chartering their path from the dawn of computers to the current digital age, here are the five biggest rivalries in computing history.

Did you know that a full copy of Windows can be installed and run from a USB drive? Microsoft introduced "Windows To Go" with Windows 8 Enterprise and has continued supporting the feature in Windows 10, which can be kept on a pen drive in your pocket as a portable operating system.

Since 2014 updates to Diablo III have been light and sporadic, and four years later, Blizzard's announcement of Diablo Immortal at a time when fans are hungry for any news of a Diablo IV has led to big questions about the future of the franchise. What's really going on with Diablo and what happened to Diablo III's long-term plan?

There's no place like home row, am I right? We have all undoubtedly come a long way from typing our very first letters to the point it becomes second nature, but it's probably safe to say that many of us don't know much about what lies beyond the standard QWERTY keyboard. Well, there's so much more. Let's take a look at some popular and regional keyboard layouts.

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.

While most people who enjoy music on the go these days are listening from their phones, there are still many reasons someone might want to own a standalone portable music player. Models range from around $1 to more than $3,000, for what is already a niche market, the world of dedicated MP3 players is fragmented into various sub-niches targeting wildly different shoppers.

Finding drivers online for old hardware can range from difficult to impossible. But we discovered that you can export drivers for third-party devices from one copy of Windows to another -- great news if you have a previous instance of Windows where your old device is installed and functional.

For a lot of gamers with demanding jobs, marriages and/or families, the excitement of reading good reviews for games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey is tempered by the sinking realization that they'll never have time to play them. How do you make time for a 60+ hour game when you have a busy life?