Don't waste your PC upgrade budget until you've fixed these 3 things first
…More often than not, the performance issues you face aren't a direct result of aging hardware, but how well your PC is balanced and set up. For instance, there's no…
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Your motherboard's M.2 heatsink is probably making your SSD temps worse
…Many people ignore this fact, and then wonder why their drive doesn't perform as advertised. While older SSDs didn't need heatsinks, newer models, especially high-performing ones, often require one…
Your GPU, RAM, and SSD all have firmware you've never updated, and it can actually matter
…issues too, prompting Samsung to issue updates for affected drives. Then there's RAM, which is the newest member of the updatable firmware club. DDR5 modules introduced on-DIMM components that older…
Free NAS distros beat Synology's price, and the performance gap doesn't justify the markup
…No matter how fancy DSM looks and how well it performs, it can't improve CPU performance, expand RAM capacity, or handle workload types. The company is slowly moving to 2.5…
These 4 PC maintenance tasks cost $0, but improve your performance drastically
…Together, these benchmarks surface issues such as thermal throttling and suboptimal performance. Inferring from this data, it makes it easy to diagnose issues like a misconfigured fan profile, a malfunctioning cooling system…
IPS monitors promise no burn-in, but they're hiding bigger problems that you can't ignore anymore
…OLED panels Your eyes can track the difference Another knock on IPS monitors, despite their excellent gaming performance, is the inferior response time when pitted against OLED displays. The "1ms" response time…
I bought an RX 9070 XT instead of an RTX 5070 Ti, and I can't find a single reason to regret it
…The driver issues, albeit very annoying, aren't a total deal-breaker, and the lack of ray tracing performance just doesn't affect me. I rarely turn on RT, and if I…
I wish I realized my RAM wasn't running at full speed earlier
…Sign in to your XDA account Enabling XMP/EXPO is one of the first things I always do after building a PC, mostly because I know I'll be leaving performance on…
DLAA is what I keep recommending over DLSS, but almost nobody uses it
…However, as someone who's been mostly gaming at 1440p, despite having an RTX 4090, I find myself coming back to DLAA because performance isn't an issue. I know most of…
My monitor's built-in USB hub was the desk upgrade I never knew I had
…This instantly improved performance across the board. The keyboard and mouse dongles on the monitor's hub allowed both of them to function as they should have from day one. And the…