Components

By PC Plus and Gary Marshall Introduction and steps 1 to 4 Note: Our sand to silicon chips feature has been fully updated. This article was first published in May 2009. Strange things happen in forests – especially Silicon Forest, as Hillsboro in Oregon has come to be known. That’s where D1X, Intel’s largest operational…

By Kevin Lee Critical components Deca-core processors and video cards with 12GB of video memory are arguably some of the hottest components of our generation. But, what do you know about the chips that made today’s veritable supercomputers actually possible? Anything? Well then, bring up a chair and listen up, whipper snappers. Without these chips,…

By PC Plus and Gary Marshall Introduction and steps 1 to 4 Note: Our sand to silicon chips feature has been fully updated. This article was first published in May 2009. Strange things happen in forests – especially Silicon Forest, as Hillsboro in Oregon has come to be known. That’s where D1X, Intel’s largest operational…

By Gary Marshall Introduction Processors have come a very long way in a very short time. CPUs have moved from 4-bit to 8-bit to 64-bit processing, and are gaining ever more cores on a single piece of silicon. They have become smaller, more efficient and more powerful than the earliest processor designers could ever imagine.…

By Gary Marshall Introduction Processors have come a very long way in a very short time. CPUs have moved from 4-bit to 8-bit to 64-bit processing, and are gaining ever more cores on a single piece of silicon. They have become smaller, more efficient and more powerful than the earliest processor designers could ever imagine.…

By Gabe Carey When to buy new CPU or GPU Picking the best CPU or graphics card is by no means an easy task. For most, factoring in everything from system temperatures to clock speeds is nothing short of a migraine. But, while dancing between Intel vs AMD and Nvidia vs AMD is a daunting…

By Gabe Carey When to buy new CPU or GPU Picking the best CPU or graphics card is by no means an easy task. For most, factoring in everything from system temperatures to clock speeds is nothing short of a migraine. But, while dancing between Intel vs AMD and Nvidia vs AMD is a daunting…

By Darren Allan External GPU enclosures are all the rage these days when it comes to ramping up the pixel shifting power of your laptop, and a fresh option has popped up on Kickstarter to tempt MacBook Pro owners. The Wolfe and Wolfe Pro are the two boxes on offer, with the former boasting an…

By Darren Allan External GPU enclosures are all the rage these days when it comes to ramping up the pixel shifting power of your laptop, and a fresh option has popped up on Kickstarter to tempt MacBook Pro owners. The Wolfe and Wolfe Pro are the two boxes on offer, with the former boasting an…

By Kane Fulton Introduction PC gaming isn’t cheap. First, you have to buy powerful hardware if you want to play the best PC games, then there’s the cost of AAA games themselves. As we all know, Steam sales only go so far. Most people barely stop to think about the ongoing electricity cost of running…

By Kane Fulton Introduction PC gaming isn’t cheap. First, you have to buy powerful hardware if you want to play the best PC games, then there’s the cost of AAA games themselves. As we all know, Steam sales only go so far. Most people barely stop to think about the ongoing electricity cost of running…

By Darren Allan According to a fresh snapshot of the GPU arena, AMD has actually gained market share for the first time since way back in 2012. New figures for Q2 of this year from Mercury Research show that when it comes to the discrete graphics card market for desktop PCs, Nvidia has a 77.2%…

By Kevin Lee Earlier this year Leap Motion announced its ambitions to make controller free VR a reality and now it’s bringing us one step closer by introducing the software you’ll need to bring your hands into virtual space. The new bit of software is named the Interaction Engine and it essentially acts as an…

By Joe Osborne When Google unveiled its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) during this year’s Google I/O conference in Mountain View, California, it finally ticked for this editor in particular that machine learning is the future of computing hardware. Of course, the TPU is only a part of the firm’s mission to push machine learning –…

By Orestis Bastounis Introduction Every household sporting broadband internet needs a wireless router. Without it, accessing the web on a mobile device will require either a pesky (and quite limited) mobile data plan or a complex workaround. Even older routers, like most technology, are due for an upgrade after a handful of years. If you…