TechSpot Features

Every single CPU found in any computer, from a cheap laptop to a million-dollar server, will have something called cache. More likely than not, it'll possess several levels of it, too. It must be important, otherwise why would it be there? But what does cache do?

3Dfx's Voodoo and Voodoo2 graphics are widely credited with jump-starting 3D gaming and revolutionizing computer graphics nearly overnight. The 3D landscape in 1996 favored S3 Graphics with around 50% of the market. That changed rapidly as it was estimated that 3Dfx accounted for 80+% of the 3D accelerator market during the heyday of Voodoo's reign.

One of the best ways to protect your privacy is to encrypt important information on your computer. Whether you need to send personal information to someone, or simply want to make sure that no one who gets access to your computer can see stuff you would rather keep private, encryption is the way to go.

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

Nvidia has been making graphics chips that feature extra cores, beyond the normal ones used for shaders. Known as tensor cores, these mysterious units can be found in thousands of system, but what exactly are they and what are they used for? Today we'll explain what a tensor is and how tensor cores are used in the world of graphics and deep learning.

OCZ Technology was founded in 2000 by Ryan Petersen as "The Overclockerz Store," an online hardware reseller that catered to computer enthusiasts. The company started out selling binned processors and memory kits capable of running faster than their rated speeds - items which overclockers were willing to pay a premium for.

Every once in a while, a video game is made that becomes part of the industry's history. For PC gamers, there's one title that's almost legendary thanks to its incredible, ahead-of-its-time graphics and ability to grind PCs into single digit frame rates. Join us as we take a look back at Crysis and see what made it so special.

Monitor calibration is very important to a creative professional's workflow, but pretty much anyone can benefit from it. Calibration will deliver color accuracy and correct problems with white balance, gamma, and oversaturation. It'll also help color matching multiple monitors for a consistent experience.

Machine learning (ML) is the study of computer systems that automatically improve with experience, a hot topic in the last few years, but a concept that's been around for decades. IBM programmer and AI pioneer Arthur Samuel coined the term "machine learning" in 1952.

Today we're revisiting AMD's budget-oriented Ryzen 3 3300X. This Ryzen 3 CPU thoroughly impressed us when it launched two months ago and now we're taking a look back to see where it stands against the Ryzen 5 3600 and 2600.

AMD is one of the oldest designers of large scale microprocessors and has been the subject of polarizing debate among technology enthusiasts for nearly 50 years. Its story makes for a thrilling tale. We'll revisit the company's past, examine the twists and turns in the path to the present, and wonder at what lies ahead.

We went on a hunt for 10 fantastic free (or free-to-play) Steam games. By narrowing things down so much, this list was never meant to be exhaustive nor comprehensive, but to highlight a handful of great titles.

Developed by Nullsoft in 1997, Winamp is a media player that supports a wide array of audio formats and was an iconic software application in the heyday of MP3 music. Winamp was nearly ubiquitous, used by millions in the early 2000s.

You've just bought a new CPU and it seems to run pretty cool, so you try a bit of overclocking. The GHz climbs higher and higher, it's surely not supposed to be like this? You rush to the internet to share your excitement of hitting the silicon jackpot, and within a few posts, somebody proclaims that you've got yourself a binned chip. But what is it?

We've have on hand nearly every Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics card model in existence. We've tested them and now we want to share what are the best models, and more importantly, which one you should (and shouldn't) buy.

I've been excited to play Riot's Valorant for a long time, and not just for the sake of the game itself. I'm a long-term Counter-Strike player and my hope with Valorant was not just that Riot would make a game I love, but one that would give another game I love a boot up the backside.

Every single computer has RAM, whether it's embedded into a processor or sitting on a dedicated circuit board plugged into the system, computing devices simply can't work without it. RAM is an astonishing feat of precision engineering, and yet it is manufactured in epic quantities every year. Given how super important RAM is, a proper dissection is called for.

We asked everyone on the TechSpot team to think about their top 5 favorite tech items released in the last decade. This article is a collective list of those products (later on you can share your own with the community in the comments), so please join us as we go through our favorite tech from the 2010s: blasts from the past, that impressed us with their value for money, outstanding performance, or those feel-good vibes that they gave us!

If you have multiple computers, chances are you've wanted to get a file from one system to another at some point. Maybe you have some files on your phone that you want on your laptop, or media on a PC that you want to stream to a smart TV. Maybe you want a secure location to back up all your important files to. In any of these cases, Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a great option.

Take the computer know-how, the love of games, and the interest in components, and mix them all together. It's a perfect recipe for diving into benchmarking. In this article, we'll explain how you can use games to benchmark your PC and what you can do to analyze the results.

Many believed VR would take video games to the next level. But even with better games and more impressive hardware, the sobering realization is that VR remains far from widespread adoption. Facebook may have had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to capitalize on an unfortunate circumstance. Perhaps the situation hit us, but VR in general is simply not there yet.

Sony's DualShock 4 is a really good controller that can double as your full-time PC gamepad as well. If you have an aging DS4, you may have noticed that it does not hold a charge as long as it once did. In this guide, we'll show you how to save over 70% by replacing your DualShock battery yourself.

The vast majority of visual effects you see in games today depend on the clever use of lighting and shadows -- without them, games would be dull and lifeless. In this fourth part of our deep look at 3D game rendering, we'll focus on what happens to a 3D world alongside processing vertices and applying textures. It once again involves a lot of math and a sound grasp of the fundamentals of optics.

We want to help with a few helpful tips for working from home, not only of what you can do, but what you probably shouldn't. Our hope is that we can contribute with ideas that will get you than ready to tackle the challenge.

You've just bought a new gaming desktop, or a laptop for the office. Maybe you've upgraded your PC with a new CPU and motherboard. You might be into overclocking. But do you know exactly what you've got? How well is that PC actually working? We've compiled a list of 20 programs that are great for analyzing or benchmarking your devices.

The first 3D graphics cards appeared 25 years ago and since then their power and complexity have grown at a scale greater than any other microchip found in a PC. In going from one million to billions of transistors, smaller dies, and consuming more power, the capabilities of these behemoths is immeasurably greater, but what can we learn about efficiency?

If your gaming PC is in desperate need of a GPU upgrade and you want to save as much money as possible, strap yourself in, this is the guide for you. For the past weeks we've been gathering data for about 80 AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. We've tested them all in 3 representative games using 2 quality presets each, and for the sake of our sanity, limited testing to 1080p performance.

The CPU is often called the brains of a computer, and just like the human brain, it consists of several parts that work together to process information. In today's explainer, we'll go over the key elements that make up a CPU and how they all work together to power your computer.

Resident Evil 3 is a remake of the PlayStation original released back in 1999, with brand new graphics and reimagined gameplay mechanics. But today we won't delve any deeper on that, but check out how the game performs on PC using a variety of GPUs tested at 1080p, 1440p and 4K.

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?