Posts in Category: pc hardware



An Overview of SSD Specifications

SSDs have been widely available to the public for many years now, and having an SSD within your computer has become a must-have for all but the most extreme data-hoarding budget builders. But when you go online, looking to buy an SSD, you are bombarded with intricate specifications: M.2? DRAM? NAND? What is all of that?

In this article, we are looking to answer those questions, and give some buying advice at the end.

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A Comprehensive HDD Specification Guide

If you are looking to store your digital goodies with the most bang for the buck, then hard disk drives are undoubtedly the way to go. Whether it’s for a NAS, a secondary drive for some less-played games, or any other use where capacity is a priority over speed—there’s no beating the ‘price per gigabyte’ of HDDs. But how do you pick the perfect drive for your use case?

Although almost any modern drive should fit and work fine if there is a free compatible motherboard slot and power connection present (usually SATA, although older systems might have other connectors), there are a few different things to consider when looking to get the perfect drive. In this guide, I will be going over the what and the how of picking out your new drive (or drives!). But first, let’s take a closer look at what HDDs can offer us that an SSD or some other technology can’t, and what drawbacks there might be.

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Top 5 Budget Curved Gaming Monitors for 2021

There’s more than a few curved gaming monitors out there with outrageous specs and equally outrageous price tags—displays that test the limit of what the human eye can perceive! Enormous panels that cost more than a new car! Huge ultrawide multi-monitor setups!

You, uh, aren’t going to find those in this article.

Instead, this list aims to stretch your dollar to its breaking point, focusing on curved monitors that provide a premium experience with a sub-premium price tag of less than $400. None of them are powered by nuclear fission or display 600 frames per second, but they’ll be enough to satisfy the average consumer without the need for a second mortgage.

Let’s begin!

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Previous-gen Graphics Card Showdown: RX 5500 XT vs. GTX 1650 Super

Things are not looking ideal for anyone planning to build a PC. The world is in a global pandemic, and supply deficiencies are mixed with high demand. One of the categories that is affected the most is the GPU market: even the cheapest graphics cards from the latest generation are inflated in price to over 500 bucks, across both AMD and Nvidia options.

Because of this, many people are buying graphics cards from the previous generation: Those cards offer a good bang for the buck, and excellent performance. With a budget of 200 bucks, you can get a pretty solid card. Both AMD and Nvidia offer good options, in the form of the RX 5500 XT (4 GB) and the GTX 1650 Super, respectively. Today we are opposing these two cards against each other. Which one should you pick?

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Professional Video Conferencing Guide (Webcam, Microphone, Lighting, Backdrop)

With there being little end in sight for folks working at home with the ongoing pandemic, we figured we could compile a quick guide to the hardware side of video conferencing and virtual meetings. We’ll be covering a couple of simple webcam and microphone choices, and then digging deep into lighting and backdrop/background.

For those of you stuck at home or those of you anticipating having (or wanting) to continue working from home long into the coming months, we hope that this will be a useful tool for having the best set-up possible!

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