TechSpot Features

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.

2018 was a fantastic year for the gaming world at large, but for PC gamers, it was a bit of a mixed bag. Kingdom Come: Deliverance launched in February to great success and other titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Forza Horizon 4 and Vermintide 2 were received to excellent user impressions. What's in store for 2019?

Enthusiasts building their own PCs are accustomed to keeping up with latest drivers, especially when it comes to things like graphics cards. Motherboard BIOS updates are also critical to get the most out of your hardware and improved compatibility.

In this first part of our "Future of Tech" series, we'll call some predictions about the next generation of PCs. Rather than dreaming far into the future, we'll try to go for the practical and feasible... evolutionary steps that we could easily see happen in the next five to fifteen years.

The perfect PC chassis is a bit of a misnomer. Plenty of cases over the years have been highly regarded as being great, trend-setting or iconic, but one size does not fit all. This article aims to help you construct that shortlist of options and steer your search in the right direction.

We all think of the CPU as the "brains" of a computer, but what does that actually mean? What is going on inside with the billions of transistors to make your computer work? In this new four-part mini series we'll be focusing on computer hardware design, covering the ins and outs of what makes a computer work.

Sean Murray, lead developer of No Man's Sky, has seen the best and worst of it since the game's incredible first trailer was shown in 2013. But after a failed launch, No Man's Sky has flourished in recent years. While he won't release sales figures, Murray said that "last year we sold the kind of numbers a AAA game would be happy with at launch," using the industry jargon for big budget games.

Pranks are awesome. They are one of those few things in life that most people can unequivocally agree on being great. Pranks are in the same league with cat videos, candy, and free stuff - everyone loves 'em. You're a tech-savvy individual, and it's time that your pranks showed that. We've got some ideas...

Many hardcore computer users might consider themselves above learning new tricks, but there are always new ways to sharpen your skills on the PC and we bet that you will find at least one useful thing here that you didn't know before.

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?

Critically-acclaimed game Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been updated to receive support for both DirectX ray tracing shadows and Nvidia's DLSS upscaling technology. It's been seven months since ray tracing was shown off in this title and a good six months since the game was released, but hey, the feature was added in eventually and it's a very good game, we must add.

The Web is turning 30 years old this month and clearly we've come a long way since Tim-Berners Lee wrote his paper proposing an information management system to facilitate information-sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world. Nowadays it's hard to imagine what life would be like without the web.

Today we're looking at a few different hardware configurations to see if certain matchups work better than others. We're testing some popular games using the Ryzen 7 2700X and Core i7-8700K processors, pairing each with the Radeon VII, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and RTX 2080, as all three GPUs provide a similar level of performance.

Earlier this year we first put Nvidia's support for FreeSync monitors to the test, grabbed every FreeSync monitor we had in the office, and verified that in all cases adaptive sync worked as expected. LG recently sent us 5 of their latest FreeSync monitors, which we've used to revisit Nvidia's FreeSync support.

Today we're looking at the very first set of official Ryzen Mobile GPU drivers to come from AMD. Owners of Ryzen Mobile laptops have been waiting for this day for months now, so the fact these drivers are finally out is great news for the small but growing community of Ryzen laptop early adopters.

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.

Today we're discussing quad-core processors, namely how relevant they are in 2019. The last time we covered this specific topic was back in 2017, so this article means to explore if these budget quad-cores are worth buying for gamers, or are they dead on arrival.

It's time for our final look into Metro Exodus, exploring the game's DLSS implementation which is exclusive to GeForce RTX graphics cards. We've been covering both ray tracing and DLSS closely, testing where it makes sense and following up as patches are released. As one of the key features on Nvidia's flagship RTX graphics card, the discussion is not only relevant but necessary.