What should you look for when choosing a motherboard? The best CPUs might get all the attention, but motherboard choice can be just as crucial. We’ll show you how to buy based on the features that you need—without breaking the bank.Choose your CPU and chipset Your first decision also involves the CPU. Your choice here is either AMD or Intel. Motherboards only work with the specific families of processors they're designed for. Our guide to the best CPUs can help you pick the ideal processor fo
A tiny BIOS chip lurks inside every computer, sitting on your motherboard to breathe life into your system when you press the power button. It not only powers your PC, but helps protect it, too.BIOS stands for basic input and output system, and the BIOS chip initializes all the other devices in your PC, like the CPU, GPU, and motherboard chipset. But a few years ago, motherboard manufacturers—in partnership with Microsoft and Intel—introduced a replacement for traditional BIOS chips dubbed UE
In this episode of The Full Nerd, Gordon Ung, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, Keith May, and Adam Patrick Murray open up the books and admit worthy hardware into our officially unofficial PC Hall of Fame.In past years, the Intel 8086/8088 processors, Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics card, IBM Model M keyboard, 3DFX Voodoo graphics card, Raspberry Pi, and MLC NAND (as a stand-in for affordable SSDs) made the cut after a fierce debate. This year, each of us brought three more legendary picks to the tab
Should you buy a used mining GPU? Usually, you may want to avoid graphics cards that were used around the clock to mine cryptocurrency. But that's not necessarily the case during the Great GPU Shortage, when the best graphics cards are always out of stock even when they're going for exorbitant prices. Let's say you’ve done your research, stood in line for hours, and endlessly refreshed your browser at online retailers without any luck. When you’re finally about to give up, you find the perfec
The easiest way to watch TV on a personal computer--and the one that's most popular now--is to view programming over the Web. The major networks, a number of cable channels, and general sites such as Hulu allow you to view shows in your Web browser. If you want a more direct connection to your TV, you'll need extra hardware, namely a TV tuner. Tuners essentially turn a computer into a TV set. Usually they include software that allows you to record programming on your computer, too, so you can
As the name suggests, Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop Studio fuses together a number of different Surfaces, among them the Surface Laptop and Surface Studio. Inside the Surface Laptop Studio, however, new GeForce RTX hardware points to the power Microsoft has traditionally offered inside the Surface Book. Our full video above walks you through every inch of the laptop, which doubles as a physical avatar for Microsoft's Windows 11 ambitions.To read this article in full, please click here https:
If you think that overclocking is solely for performance-obsessed geeks armed with bottles of liquid nitrogen, it’s time to reconsider! Even a small bump in PC performance can delay the need to upgrade your processor, keeping money in your pocket. Yes, overclocking can make the best gaming CPUs even better.Today I’ll walk you through simple overclocking steps that can usually boost processor speeds 10 percent or more. If you’re a gamer, video artist, or media streamer, that’s a useful, no-cos
It’s easy to see why people mistakenly believe that all USB-C cables are essentially the same, and that differences are mostly superficial and a way to mark up prices. After all, it’s just a cable, right?Wrong. We can tell you from testing more than a dozen USB-C cables that they are not all the same. You will see huge performance differences in transferring data and charging devices depending on the particular cable you buy.Unfortunately trying to find a quality USB-C cable among the multitu
The trusty Pavilion has come a long way. With a magnesium aluminum chassis that looks elegant and feels durable and impossibly light, the HP Pavilion Aero 13 looks and feels more like a model from the company’s higher-end Envy or Spectre line than a mainstream Pavilion. And yet the Pavilion Aero 13 line starts at a reasonable $750.Despite its light price and weight, the Pavilion Aero 13 is roomy and powerful. The laptop is based on a 13.3-inch display with a 16:10 aspect ratio that makes the
Microsoft’s original Surface Duo folding phone designed in some serious flaws. The Surface Duo 2, to its credit, appears to have at least addressed them.When Microsoft launched the Surface Duo folding phone a year ago, Microsoft executives preceded it with a gauzy veil of hype that concealed the many flaws reviewers noted: a poor camera, a lack of NFC and 5G, a subsequently poor track record of patches and updates, and an interface whose bugs made the dual-screen interface painful to use.Micr