TechSpot Features

Microsoft has been changing and improving the way it handles Windows licenses. We'll cover all you need to know in this article, from old school ways to retrieve keys, to the more modern approaches to make good use of your licenses and what restrictions may apply depending on your type of license.

Microsoft's Xbox controller has been the default gamepad for PC gamers for some time now, but you may prefer Sony's competing --- and also quite good --- DualShock 4 controller. The good news is, you can easily configure it to work on Windows or macOS.

The summer of 2019 saw the 50 year anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, when humans first walked on the surface of the Moon. But now there is a new race -- not of countries, but one fought by companies. Capitalism, growth, and business opportunities are the new fuels, and the goals are even bigger: not just back to the Moon, but on to Mars and beyond.

As a TechSpot reader you've surely opened software as an admin on Windows before -- maybe as recently as today -- so the function probably isn't foreign to you. However, we were curious to know more about what happens under the hood of Windows when you tell the operating system to run a program as an administrator, and why this process is necessary in the first place.

When the PlayStation 4 launched in 2013 its 500GB hard drive seemed like more than we could ever use, but the size of games has ballooned exponentially over the years. Upgrading your PS4 storage is not that difficult, so here's a quick guide to help users avoid headaches during the process. Grab your PS4, and let's get started.

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

Wi-Fi is set to get better and faster with this major update. While plenty of routers are already available with chips using draft specifications, 802.11ax Wi-Fi was not fully finalized until September 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.

So what counts as a strategy game? Here are the best games to play if you feel like taking charge of something, ruining an economy and/or driving an army across the fields of your enemies.

Come 2020 Intel will be back in the discrete graphics business and is expected to launch a new GPU for gamers. We can see this going one of two ways: Intel graphics become the butt of the next generation of PC jokes, or they achieve a miracle and enter a market that's been dominated by just two players since the start of the millennia.

In this second part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing what happens to the 3D world after all of the vertex processing has finished. We'll need to dust off our math textbooks again, grapple with the geometry of frustums, and ponder the puzzle of perspectives. We'll also take a quick dive into the physics of ray tracing, lighting and materials -- excellent!

You've followed the rumors and ignored the hype; you waited for the reviews and finally slapped down your dollars and walked away with one of the latest graphics cards from AMD or Nvidia. Inside these, lies a large graphics processor, packed with billions of transistors, all running at clock speeds unthinkable a decade ago. Welcome to our architectural comparison of the newest GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

It used to be that buying a new laptop every few years was more or less necessary just to keep up with the large leaps in processing power. Now those generational performance jumps are smaller, however there are good reasons to look into new laptops to replace your two- to five-year-old unit that go beyond performance alone.

Alongside their new Radeon RX 5700 Navi GPUs, AMD rolled out two new features in the Radeon driver suite. Radeon Image Sharpening which directly targets Nvidia's DLSS, and Radeon Anti-Lag to reduce input lag while gaming. So, how well does the latter work?

We were among the first to review the Ryzen 5 3600 and at $200 we found the 6-core, 12-thread processor a crankin' good deal. In short, it murders the 9600K in core-heavy productivity benchmarks and was right there for the gaming tests. But without question the most popular question we received afterwards was: should you buy the Ryzen 5 3600 or the 3600X?

In this first part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing entirely on the vertex stage of the process. This means dragging out our math textbooks, brushing up on a spot of linear algebra, matrices, and trigonometry -- oh yeah!

Expanding upon all the testing we performed in our day-one 3rd-gen Ryzen coverage, today we'll be running a clock-for-clock comparison benchmark. IPC can be a good indicator of a processor's architecture efficiency, so we're pitting the new Ryzen 3900X and 3700X against Intel's Core i9-9900K.

Today we're taking a deeper look into one of the new features that shipped with AMD's latest Navi GPUs: Radeon Image Sharpening. In short, RIS is a post-processing sharpening feature for games that AMD says carries nearly no performance penalty. How does it compare to GeForce's DLSS?

In the world of computer chips, bigger numbers are often better. More cores, higher GHz, greater FLOPs, all desired by engineers and users alike. But there is one measure that's hot news right now and the smaller it is, the better. Let's take a journey into the world of process nodes, to find out more.

Despite continuous improvements, processors haven't had industry shifting advancements for a long time. Yes, transistors are smaller, chips have gotten faster, and performance has increased hundredfold, but we're starting to see diminishing returns. Learn what 3D integration, FPGAs, sea of accelerators and near memory computing are all about.

Computex 2019 is over and there was more hardware that our daily coverage could handle, and yet we could still rejoice with the very PC hardware-centric show that makes Taipei's yearly stop ever so special. Here are the 10 coolest products we saw at the show this year.

You're playing the latest Call of Mario: Deathduty Battleyard on your perfect gaming PC. You're looking at a beautiful 4K ultra widescreen monitor, admiring the scenery and detail. Ever wondered just how those graphics got there? Curious about what the game made your PC do to make them? Welcome to our 101 in 3D game rendering: a beginner's guide to how one basic frame of gaming goodness is made.

It's a common misconception that cost is directly related to how useful a device is. This article focuses on supporting accessories -- devices that improve the use of other gadgets, enhance your life or minimize inconveniences. In some instances, they're outright essential.

The mainstream narrative of esports has been lovingly crafted by those who benefit from its success. There's big money in esports, they say. You've heard the stories. Yet there's a reason why these narratives attract lip-licking headlines in business news and have accrued colossal amounts of venture capital. More and more, esports is looking like a bubble ready to pop.

Today we're exploring the impact disabling Hyper-Threading has on Intel processors. We've done this in the past and it's an interesting test, however there are new incentives to check this out due to the newly discovered side-channel vulnerabilities affecting Intel processors and their impact on Hyper-Threading.

Gaming laptops have earned their place in the market and that's not up for debate. The idea is to show laptop buyers exactly how their systems will differ to a typical gaming desktop, so today's test is very simple: we've taken an RTX 2070 laptop and compared it to an RTX 2070 desktop in a range of games.

In this third installment we explore how the physics of how transistors work, how their individual components are built in silicon, and how they are connected to create useful circuits and chips. How do you transform a pile of sand into an advanced processor? Let's find out.

As video games have evolved, so have the ways that we control them. In the very early days, there were just knobs, joysticks and trackballs. Today's controllers have one or two analog joysticks and anywhere from 10 to 12 buttons. Here's our list of the most memorable console and PC controllers over the last four decades.

Now that we know how processors work at a high level, it's time to dig inside to understand how the internal components are designed. In part 2 we'll discuss transistors, logic gates, power and clock delivery, design synthesis, and verification.

The lightsaber has been around since the very beginning of Star Wars and they've been part of many different Star Wars video games throughout the past 30+ years. They also show us how video games have improved and advanced over the last few decades. So grab your lightsaber, turn it on and wave it around.

After testing the GTX 1650 we pledged to track down a popular OEM PC that didn't have a 6-pin PCIe power connector. This lead us to the HP Elitedesk 800 G1, a computer that most who were in favor of the GTX 1650 recommended we test with. Here we go.