We'd like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, from our family here at Hot Hardware, to you and your family--we consider you all our larger extended family here on the web. We hope whatever you had on your wish-list, naughty or nice, that your yuletide dreams came true. And if you still need some

Two recent studies have highlighted gaming's potential benefits for mental health and acuity. The most recent is a study published this month by JMIR Serious Games, named Super Mario Bros. and Yoshi Games' Affordance of Childlike Wonder and Reduced Burnout Risk in Young Adults: In-Depth Mixed Methods Cross-Sectional Study. This study, authored

Because of the way we interact with these features, it's easy to think of Intel XMP and AMD EXPO as binary, 'yes or no' features, but both standards have actually gone through a few revisions. Right now, we're on revision 1.1 of AMD's EXPO, but it looks like 1.2 is on the horizon, and we know that because it has just appeared in the patch

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and deal hunters far and wide, do yourself a solid and don't sleep on the Mac mini if you're in the market for a compact PC (yes, Macs are technically PCs too). They're great systems, and the model with an M4 chip inside is on sale right now for 20% below Apple's regular asking price, making this a really

Do you know what stinks about buying earbuds for gaming? The vast majority only support Bluetooth for wireless connectivity. That's fine and dandy for listening to music and making phone calls, but for playing games, a 2.4GHz wireless connection keeps latency at bay. The good news is, there are a few earbud options that feature 2.4GHz wireless

AMD's next-generation Zen 6 processor with 3D V-Cache may kick things up in a big way to compete with Intel's upcoming Nova Lake chips. How so? According to a popular leaker on X, AMD will offer single CCD (core complex die) variants with up to 144MB of L3 cache, and dual CCD models with up to a whopping 288MB of L3 cache. To put those capacities

Maingear, a well-respected boutique PC builder, has taken note of the ongoing RAM crisis and is attempting to offer a potential solution, beyond simply raising prices. Its solution is a new "BYO RAM", or "Bring Your Own RAM" program, which accepts a user's shipment of DDR5 RAM with an order of a custom PC. Maingear will take the RAM, install

GamesIndustry.biz does a yearly analyst roundtable, gathering predictions for what the next year will bring to the industry. This year's post paints a picture of an industry stuck in cautious recovery mode, with growth returning slowly, platform boundaries continuing to blur, and a handful of massive releases and technologies threatening to

One of the most influential names in the FPS genre, Vince Zampella, passed away at the age of 55 on Sunday, December 21st, in a tragic car accident with one other unidentified person. Vince Zampella worked on the Medal of Honor series, which spawned Call of Duty, which spawned Battlefield and eventually Respawn's own Titanfall. Between corporate

There was some significant controversy this summer when some customers complained of Gigabyte's GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs leaking the "server-grade thermal gel" that the board vendor touts on its product pages. Gigabyte acknowledged that some early-run cards used too much goop and that the quantity was adjusted on later models, but now it

Two intelligence services from at least two NATO nations have raised alarms over a potential "weapon of fear" currently under development by Russia. This anti-satellite system is reportedly being developed to target Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation, which has become a critical backbone for Ukrainian military communications and battlefield

Are you still shopping for a holiday gift? First and foremost, check out our staff picks of ho-ho-hot tech selections, then have a gander at our roundup of last minute stocking stuffer deals. Of course, it's a bit late in the game with Christmas now just two days away, but if you're shopping for yourself (or are okay with printing a picture

Astronomers have finally captured a black hole twisting the very fabric of spacetime. This phenomenon, known as frame-dragging or Lense-Thirring precession, confirms a cornerstone of Einstein’s general theory of relativity by showing that massive, rotating objects don’t just spin in situ—they drag it along with them like a spoon stirring honey

Nintendo confirmed in a roundabout way that it is discontinuing its Switch 2 + Mario Kart World bundle after an internal GameStop memo stating as much was leaked on X. However, it's not all bad news. If you're quick, you can still find the bundle in stock, and at a great discount to boot. More on that in a moment. CONFIRMED: the Switch

NVIDIA has made available a new out-of-band hotfix driver for GeForce GPU owners that aims to resolve a trio of quirky issues, one of which addresses slight banding that is sometimes observed on gradients in SDR color mode. As is always the case, you really should only install the hotfix if you're affected by any of the specific issues it

Spotify is the victim of what may be the greatest act of music piracy in history and the company is not happy. Recently, Anna's Archive released a massive 300 TB of torrents, which reportedly includes the metadata of 265 million tracks, 186 million unique IRSCs, and 86 million songs. The metadata composes "99.9% of tracks", while the 86 million

The headline sounds like one of those things that's way too good to be true. Like a scam you'd find on a shady website; "install this SSD driver for huge speed gains!" It's real, though, and it's because one of the unfortunate realities of using NVMe SSDs on Windows is that Windows hasn't actually supported NVMe natively until this October. First,

Sony Honda Mobility is a joint venture between industry titans Sony and Honda, and its AFEELA line of cars will be offering in-vehicle PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 Remote Play functionality. Per Izumi Kawanishi, President and COO of Sony Honda Mobility, "The introduction of PS Remote Play embodies AFEELA's vision for mobility: transforming

Call it a Christmas miracle, but there's actually still time to order a gift online and have it arrive in time for the holiday. That's not the case for every product out there, but we found a bunch of great gift ideas are suitable candidates for a stocking stuffer (also check out our staff roundup of ho-ho-hot tech gifts). And by that, we

Stick drift, which is when an analog stick registers movement without any input from a player, has been the bane of gamepad users. Even high end devices such as the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X (see our review), which have some nice holiday discounting at Amazon and Best Buy right now, employ analog sticks that are susceptible to this kind

A shortage of memory chips caused by a surge in demand in the data center to fuel artificial intelligence (AI) workloads is wreaking havoc on the consumer market, and especially in the realm of home computers where DDR5 DRAM kits have shot up in price. The ramifications run even deeper than overpriced DRAM, however, and could impact the availability

NVIDIA is not only hoping to finally begin shipping previously-banned H200 AI chips to China in the very near future, it's expecting to start fulfilling orders in mid-February just before the Lunar New Year, according to Reuters. Citing multiple people who are purportedly familiar with the matter, the site reports NVIDIA expects to ship 5,000

2025 was an eventful year for indie and AAA gaming alike, but what were the most-played new releases of 2025 per actual data? Sales and Steam charts can only tell so much of the story, but Alinea Analytics have published a report with a clear estimate on the top games in 2025 across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms including the MS Store

Intel has released version 3.0 of its AI Playground tool, which brings new multimodal upgrades to the app's functionality thanks to modern vision models like Qwen3 VL as well as agentic tool calling support, that allows users to orchestrate actions across different tools and features from within a single chat flow. Instead of completely separate