hardware

02 — Hardware Guide: What Do You Actually Need? 🟢 Beginner — No matter what computer you have, there's a model that will run on it. The Most Important Thing to Know VRAM is the bottleneck, not compute. A model running on a 5-year-old RTX 3060 at Q4 quantization gives you 96% of the quality of the same model on an A100 — just slower. And "slower" for most use cases (chat, coding, document analysis…

This is a submission for the Google I/O 2026 Writing Challenge " At Google I/O 2026, Google made a specific claim: Gemma 4 runs on consumer laptops without cloud dependency. They demoed offline coding on stage. Local AI on everyday hardware is finally practical, they said. " I tested that claim GPU and high-bandwidth memory prices are not normal right now. AI companies are buying hardware at a sc…

GPU Hardware & Driver Update: RTX 5090 Benchmarks, llama.cpp MTP, Windows 11 Fix Today's Highlights This week's top GPU news features practical performance optimization on NVIDIA's RTX 5090, a critical driver fix for Windows 11 users, and deep dives into multi-tensor processing for local LLM inference. Testing llama.cpp MTP Support on RTX 5090 (r/LocalLLaMA) Source: https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaM…

Published on May 16, 2026 12:45 PM GMT Recently I'm thinking on major in Electrical engineering(EE) vs CS, I think hardware knowledge is less relevant to AI s-risks research, however, it seems EE engineers would have more expected earnings than CS, which is better for earning to give(since hardware would be replaced later by AI than software). 80000 hours has put " AI hardware engineer" as a  car…

A new technical paper, “CMOS-compatible ferroelectric tunnel junctions integrate stochastic sampling and deterministic computing for image generation,” was published by researchers at Seoul National University, Sungkyunkwan University, Hanyang University, Sogang University, and SK Hynix. Abstract “Recent progress in generative modeling has intensified the need for compact, energy-efficient hardwa…

Is your GPU not running at its advertised speed? This BIOS setting could be holding it back.

Last week I had another run-in with VGA emulation, and like last time, the cause was very likely the generally woefully inadequate VGA documentation. The VGA is not, all things considered, a particularly complicated piece of hardware. It has no microcode, no CPU/microcontroller, and performs relatively simple functions. However, the VGA does consist of several logically separate components that w…

Foldables are only useful if their software makes the most of their hardware. Luckily, the Motorola Razr 2026 series looks to do just that.

I’ve been working on a PC Engine emulator (aka TurboGrafx-16) after getting the bug to start looking at a new system, and I’ve found it to be pretty interesting hardware-wise. Originally released in 1987, its hardware is in a sort of awkward spot between the 3rd generation gaming conoles (NES, Sega Master System) and the 4th generation consoles (Genesis / Mega Drive, SNES), though it’s generally …

Manufacturers often add a fast port and a slow port... but never indicate which is which.

I published a new tool on the site: the GPU Upgrade Value Calculator . This one started as a follow-up to my RX 6700 XT vs RTX 4070 Ti comparison . Revisiting that upgrade made something obvious: the interesting part of the decision was not simply "which card is faster?" The more useful question was: After selling the old card, accounting for power and PSU requirements, and thinking about what I …

I spent the last month building a power meter for sledgehammer strikes: a pad you hit that tells you how hard you hit it, and whether you can do it again tomorrow. This is the founder story: what I built, why I chose it, and what a month of hardware taught me. The engineering writeup will come later, once I've talked to someone who actually understands IP strategy. For now, the public home for th…

New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was to buy an expensive, large, and hot 10 GbE Thunderbolt adapter. With new RTL8159-based 10G USB 3.2 adapters coming onto the market, the bulky adapters might be a thing of the past. Just look at the size of the thing in comparison to my Thunderbolt adapters: 2.5G and even 5G USB…

The chips that power AI today weren't built for AI at all. They were created for video games. With some adaptation, GPUs quickly became the engine behind modern AI, powering everything from image recognition to large language models. But they were never designed for what came next.

title: "AIO vs Air Cooler: CPU Temp Tests + When Liquid Cooling Is Worth It (2026)" published: false description: "Tested 10 CPU coolers. Here's when AIO wins and when air is still better." tags: pc, gaming, hardware, tech canonical_url: cover_image: AIO liquid cooler or air cooler? AIO looks cooler but costs more. Air is reliable and cheaper. I tested both to show you exactly when each makes sen…

Whether you want a detachable tablet or a laptop screen that spins, these 2-in-1 devices manage to balance being both a tablet and a laptop.

This was a long one–I spent a fair bit of time with the Orange Pi 6 Plus over the past few months, and what I expected to be a quick look at another fast ARM board turned into one of those test runs where the hardware looks promising on paper, the software is wonky in exactly the wrong places, and you end up diving far more into boot chains, vendor GPU blobs and inference runtimes than you ever i…

You’ve somehow managed to get your hands on all the components for a brand-new PC, including RAM and storage, hopefully without paying inflated prices. That alone deserves some credit. You’ve put everything together, hit the power button, and the system boots on the first try. At that point, it’s tempting to call the job done. But that would be a mistake. A PC that powers on is not necessarily re…

My poor (potentially perforated) eardrums. I’ve been putting my lugs under a tremendous amount of strain since picking up the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025). That’s because one of the world’s fastest gaming laptops not only runs incredibly hot, but equally loud, too. When you’re dealing with a super-skinny laptop that houses Nvidia’s mobile RTX 5080 GPU, a whole lot of heat and all the decibels are…