PC hardware news and analysis
News, analysis and buying advice on PC hardware: what changed, what it means for a build, and the sources behind it.
How to read a processor spec sheet, line by line
The chip with the lowest boost clock of three is the fastest in games by a wide margin. What each line of a CPU spec sheet decides, with four real processors.
Brian Sanchez
Software engineer
Latest articles
Is 8 GB of VRAM enough? The same chip with 8 and 16 GB
Three graphics cards come in 8 and 16 GB versions of the same chip. What the memory alone is worth, the settings that decide it, and when the cheaper card is a trap.
80 PLUS Gold or Platinum? What the power supply labels are worth
The efficiency metals save a few euros a year between neighbouring tiers. What 80 PLUS does not certify, and why ATX 3.1 matters more with a modern graphics card.
How much RAM you need, and how to install it so it counts
16 GB is the gaming floor and 32 GB the comfortable choice. What local AI and heavy work change, and the module mistakes that halve your memory bandwidth.
What AMD's X3D processors are good for, and when they are not
Stacked cache makes the 9800X3D about 30 % faster in games than the same eight cores without it. Ten processors on one scale, and the three cases where the premium buys nothing.
The 12V-2x6 power connector: what changed and how not to melt it
The 600 W graphics card connector was redesigned after the RTX 4090 failures. What the revision fixed, which cards use it, and the four things to get right when you plug it in.
About these articles
This section covers the decisions behind a desktop PC rather than the news cycle: what a part's specification sheet actually tells you, which pairings hold each other back, what a machine costs to run, and what it takes to run AI models at home. Each article works through real figures from the same hardware catalogue the calculators use, so a number quoted here and a number from a tool agree.
Articles start from primary sources — manufacturer specifications, official announcements, a publisher's own requirement list — and cite independent test data where it is used. Drafts are prepared with the help of AI writing tools, then checked against those sources and edited before publication, as the about page explains. No manufacturer pays for coverage or sees a piece before it goes out, and corrections are made in place with a new update date.
Good places to start
- Balancing the processor and the graphics card. Eleven common pairings run through the bottleneck formula, and why the resolution you play at moves the answer. Read it before spending more on one part than the other can use.
- Which graphics card your power supply can run. The upgrade question from the other end: you have the supply, so which cards fit inside it, and when is a new supply part of the price of a new card.
- How much VRAM local AI models need. Weights, cache and overhead for popular open models at common quantizations, and why context length decides more than most people expect.
- The 12V-2x6 power connector, explained. What changed from 12VHPWR, which cards use it, and how to connect one so the cable is not the weakest part of the build.
New pieces are added every few days. If a figure in any of them looks wrong, the contact page explains how to report it so it can be checked and corrected.