Tbt articles

Enthusiasts have pushed silicon to its limits for decades. The thrill of extra performance lives on, and here are some of the most iconic CPUs ever, revered for their overclocking prowess.

You bought a new CPU and it seems to run cool, so you try a bit of overclocking. The GHz climb higher. Did you hit the silicon jackpot? You've got yourself a binned chip. But what's that exactly?

#TBT Precursor chipmaker Cyrix made personal computing accessible to millions with its affordable budget PCs, only to be killed by its best product and its inability to run a popular game.

#TBT ICQ, short for "I Seek You," laid the groundwork for instant messaging clients when it debuted 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.

#TBT The year was 1982 and computers had finally made the jump from machines that took up a full room to something that could fit on a desk. But they were still far from portable, so three entrepreneurs decided to change that.

#TBT Intel's groundbreaking 8008 microprocessor was produced over 50 years ago, the ancestor of the x86 processor family that you may be using right now. While the 8008 wasn't the first microprocessor, it was truly revolutionary, triggering a revolution and leading to the x86 architecture that dominated personal computers for decades to come.

#ThrowBackThursday Most people who hear the word "Nokia" associate it with mobile phones, but there's a convoluted history to tell since the company's humble beginnings over 150 years ago and many reinventions.

3D graphics transformed a somewhat dull PC industry into a spectacle of light and magic after generations of innovative endeavor. TechSpot's look at the history of the GPU goes from the early days of 3D, to game-changing hardware and beyond.

#TBT A journey through memorable video game music, this second article is dedicated exclusively to PC video game soundtracks. We have our hands full given the wealth of excellent material available.

In the realm of computer chips, bigger numbers are often better. More cores, higher GHz, greater FLOPs. But there's one metric where smaller is better. Enter the world of semiconductors and process nodes.

You've just bought a new gaming PC or a laptop for the office. Maybe you just upgraded your PC. 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 21 programs that are great for analyzing and benchmarking your devices.

#TBT "Playing video games can make you a better driver," it's not exactly what you imagine. Ironically, studies show that first-person shooters like Call of Duty provide more benefits for drivers than driving games do.

#ThrowBackThursday What does a cattle ranch have in common with computers? Admittedly not much, but that didn't stop two college dropouts from capitalizing on the concept and reshape PC purchases in the 1990s.

#ThrowBackThursday Learn all that you can do in the Windows Command Prompt, from useful commands everyone should know to more advanced tweaks and troubleshooting features.

#ThrowBackThursday Many have tried to follow Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (of Moore's Law fame) in bringing their tech predictions into the public eye... with varying degrees of success. Every year for nearly a decade, we've revisited this TechSpot original feature to bring new quotes to your attention. Here's a taste of those now infamous quotes.

Launched in 1970, Xerox's PARC has played an instrumental role in the engineering of many of the technologies that compose the personal computer – most famously the graphical user interface (GUI), ethernet, laser printing, the mouse, among others. We'd like to take a few and give credit where credit's due.

#tbt 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.

#ThrowBackThursday As a TechSpot reader 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?

#ThrowbackThursday It's safe to say 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.

#TBT 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.

#ThrowBackThursday The PC business as we know it owes itself to an environment of enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and happenstance. The invention of the microprocessor, DRAM, and EPROM integrated circuits would help bring computing to the mainstream. This 5-part series explores the history of personal computing, from the invention of the transistor to modern day chips powering our connected devices.

#ThrowBackThursday 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.

Inside the latest graphics cards 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.

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.

#ThrowBackThursday 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?