How well do you know the components that make up your PC? Take the humble motherboard, it sits there, quietly keeping everything running, and rarely gets the same attention as the CPU or graphics card. Motherboards are remarkably important though, so let's go all Grey's Anatomy, and dissect the motherboard -- breaking down its various parts and seeing what each bit does!

We all think of the CPU as the "brains" of a computer, but what does that actually mean? What is going on inside with the billions of transistors to make your computer work? In this new four-part mini series we'll be focusing on computer hardware design, covering the ins and outs of what makes a computer work.

Expanding upon all the testing we performed in our day-one 3rd-gen Ryzen coverage, today we'll be running a clock-for-clock comparison benchmark. IPC can be a good indicator of a processor's architecture efficiency, so we're pitting the new Ryzen 3900X and 3700X against Intel's Core i9-9900K.

Video game physics are something that we often take for granted. Programming physics into a game can be as simple as one or two routines, or as complex as requiring a separate physics engine to handle the computations. In this article we'll delve into the specifics of rigid body and soft body physics in games.

For the third year in a row, before the year comes to an end, lets look back at some of the worst CPU and PC graphics products released in 2019. Just like we have guides dedicated to the best CPUs and best GPUs you can buy, this is our hall of shame equivalent. Not meaning to create controversy, take this piece as informational light reading for the holidays.

You've followed the rumors, waited for the reviews and finally slapped down your dollars and walked away with one of the latest graphics cards from AMD or Nvidia. Inside these lies a large graphics processor packed with billions of transistors, all running at clock speeds unthinkable a decade ago. Welcome to our architectural comparison of the newest GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

In 2019, more games flowed between PC and other platforms than ever before and we saw the titanic clash between Valve and Epic. PC gaming retains its unique identity through mods, hardware configurations, and its inextricable ties to Twitch and YouTube. Increasingly, though, the lines between these platforms are dissolving, and everybody's winding up back where so many series and genres started: on PC.

In this third part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing what can happen to the 3D world after the vertex processing has done and the scene has been rasterized. The majority of the visual effects seen in games today are down to the clever use of textures -- without them, games would dull and lifeless. So let's get dive in and see how this all works!

Something we've been hearing a lot this year is that there's a lack of development and progress on the PC gaming/hardware front. In an effort to determine if that's true, we'll test 2016's prime $400 GPU, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 against 2019's $400 GPU players, the RTX 2060 Super and RX 5700 XT and compare them in 37 games at 1080p and 1440p.

To say that a lot of people use social media is an understatement. At last count, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat had more than 3 billion active users combined. In a small experiment to find out just how much social networks impact our lives, I decided to disable all my accounts for three weeks to see what, if any, effect it has on my day to day.

Time to revisit the state of ray tracing. It's been months since we last discussed ray tracing in detail, when we tested it on early titles such as Battlefield V, and the latest releases of Metro and Tomb Raider, so there's plenty of fresh stuff to go over, more benchmarks, more experience playing those games and quite a few opinions. This is bound to be a long one, so strap yourselves in.

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is brand fan, enthusiasts and cult/pop culture themed wallpapers. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, minimalism or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is minimalist and abstract wallpapers. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, illustrations or colorful designs, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is cars and sports wallpapers. Whether you are into abstract illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is nature photography and amazing scenes. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

A great wallpaper can start your day off on a good mood. There's certainly no shortage of places to find something to revitalize your desktop, whether you are into beautiful landscapes, minimalism, abstract illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns. With the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

I was bitten by the audiophile bug at a relatively young age, however I never got around to exploring the ins and outs of audio equipment as console gaming, computers and photography consumed much of my free time over the past two decades. Recently, however, an opportunity to further tinker with my sound system presented itself and I couldn't pass it up.

The summer of 2019 saw the 50 year anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, when humans first walked on the surface of the Moon. But now there is a new race -- not of countries, but one fought by companies. Capitalism, growth, and business opportunities are the new fuels, and the goals are even bigger: not just back to the Moon, but on to Mars and beyond.

When the PlayStation 4 launched in 2013 its 500GB hard drive seemed like more than we could ever use, but the size of games has ballooned exponentially over the years. Upgrading your PS4 storage is not that difficult, so here's a quick guide to help users avoid headaches during the process. Grab your PS4, and let's get started.

So what counts as a strategy game? Here are the best games to play if you feel like taking charge of something, ruining an economy and/or driving an army across the fields of your enemies.

Come 2020 Intel will be back in the discrete graphics business and is expected to launch a new GPU for gamers. We can see this going one of two ways: Intel graphics become the butt of the next generation of PC jokes, or they achieve a miracle and enter a market that's been dominated by just two players since the start of the millennia.

In this second part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing what happens to the 3D world after all of the vertex processing has finished. We'll need to dust off our math textbooks again, grapple with the geometry of frustums, and ponder the puzzle of perspectives. We'll also take a quick dive into the physics of ray tracing, lighting and materials -- excellent!

It used to be that buying a new laptop every few years was more or less necessary just to keep up with the large leaps in processing power. Now those generational performance jumps are smaller, however there are good reasons to look into new laptops to replace your two- to five-year-old unit that go beyond performance alone.

Alongside their new Radeon RX 5700 Navi GPUs, AMD rolled out two new features in the Radeon driver suite. Radeon Image Sharpening which directly targets Nvidia's DLSS, and Radeon Anti-Lag to reduce input lag while gaming. So, how well does the latter work?

In this first part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing entirely on the vertex stage of the process. This means dragging out our math textbooks, brushing up on a spot of linear algebra, matrices, and trigonometry -- oh yeah!

Today we're taking a deeper look into one of the new features that shipped with AMD's latest Navi GPUs: Radeon Image Sharpening. In short, RIS is a post-processing sharpening feature for games that AMD says carries nearly no performance penalty. How does it compare to GeForce's DLSS?

Despite continuous improvements, processors haven't had industry shifting advancements for a long time. Yes, transistors are smaller, chips have gotten faster, and performance has increased hundredfold, but we're starting to see diminishing returns. Learn what 3D integration, FPGAs, sea of accelerators and near memory computing are all about.

Computex 2019 is over and there was more hardware that our daily coverage could handle, and yet we could still rejoice with the very PC hardware-centric show that makes Taipei's yearly stop ever so special. Here are the 10 coolest products we saw at the show this year.

It's a common misconception that cost is directly related to how useful a device is. This article focuses on supporting accessories -- devices that improve the use of other gadgets, enhance your life or minimize inconveniences. In some instances, they're outright essential.

The mainstream narrative of esports has been lovingly crafted by those who benefit from its success. There's big money in esports, they say. You've heard the stories. Yet there's a reason why these narratives attract lip-licking headlines in business news and have accrued colossal amounts of venture capital. More and more, esports is looking like a bubble ready to pop.