It’s a crucial component in any laptop or desktop computer, but very few computer owners actually know what a motherboard is or what it does. There’s a motherboard (often called a logic board in smaller more mobile devices) sitting in every computer system: the processor, RAM, hard drives, graphics card, and other bits and pieces all plug straight into it. Read More >>

Computer specs can be a baffling mix of acronyms and numbers at the best of times, but it’s worth learning something about them: It’ll help you choose a new computer, troubleshoot your old computer, and generally understand more about the relationship between the specs on the page and the experience you’re getting. Read More >>

It isn’t only the processor that makes a really cheap computer slow. Or the memory, or the video card (or lack of video card). The primary reason your cheap laptop loudly chugs along at glacial speeds is because of the hard drive. Cheap laptops use cheap hard disk drives, which are much slower than the solid state drives found in better computers. But Intel’s new Optane Memory changes that. This little $70 (~£56) chip makes a cheap hard disk drive run as fast as a solid state drive. Read More >>

For nearly a decade, common sense has dictated that most people don’t need a standalone graphics card in their computer. Gamers need them to make rich titles like Rise of the Tomb Raider hum, and some professionals, like video editors and 3D designers, need them to take the pain out of rendering huge multimedia files. For everyone else, a video card has been treated more like a luxury item than a necessary computer component. But AMD’s $80 (UK price TBA, but who are we kidding it'll probably be £80) Radeon RX 550, a graphics card that costs a bit less than two brand new games you’ll render on it, is such a good value that it might make you rethink the notion that a graphics card is a splurge you should skip. Read More >>

For a decade now, one of the biggest factors in choosing a computer has been the choice between traditional hard drive and solid state drive. The former is cheap, bulky, and slow. The latter is expensive, light, and fast. There has been zero middle ground. You’ve had to compromise between price and speed. But Intel’s hoping to eradicate that compromise with its new Intel Optane Memory. According to Intel, installing this single memory stick in your computer could supercharge even the slowest hard drive and give you the SSD’s best feature: speed. Read More >>

The PC gaming world has a new king of graphics. Nvidia's new top-of-the-line GeForce GTX 1080 Ti handily beats the £619 GeForce GTX 1080 that we already love, bringing the lion's share of power from the £1,179 developer- and supercomputing-friendly Titan X to a slightly more affordable graphics card. Read More >>

It's almost time. That's what Nvidia is telling us in preparation for its keynote at GDC 2017, and it doesn't take a genius to work out that it's going to take the opportunity to introduce a new, top-of-the-line consumer graphics card to replace the powerful GTX 1080 — unsurprisingly called the GTX 1080 Ti. Read More >>

It’s time to replace your computer. Maybe it was purchased during the last Republican administration, or you ruined it was a spilled drink, or maybe you’ve just got some money to burn and you’d like to blow it on Intel’s new Kaby Lake microarchitecture. Whatever the reason, you’re ready to upgrade your computer, and you’re going to be left with a big choice. Do you spend the extra cash for the categorically faster i7 processor, or do you pinch a few pennies and go with the i5? Read More >>

We've been waiting a while for Intel's Kaby Lake CPUs for desktop PCs. Alongside native playback of 4K video, 7th-gen Core is going to make small but significant improvements to power efficiency — and that means overclockers are going to have a field day with cheap chips. Read More >>

Apple has embraced the mono-port. With the new MacBook Pro, the tech giant has scrapped the myriad of ports on the previous generation of Pros and fully embraced USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 (the two use the same port type). Combined, USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 are an extraordinary interface that’s super fast. Read More >>

Solid-state drives are all well and good — they’re bloody fast — but if you want a decent amount of storage capacity, you’re going to be paying through the nose. Seagate has two new mobile hard drives that you can install into any 2.5-inch laptop bay — one of them is the world’s fastest, thinnest and lightest 2TB drive, while the other has a ridiculous five terabytes of space. Read More >>

Driverless cars are very cool, but the technology that enables their self-driving smarts requires a novel mix of raw computational and deep learning power, using both general-purpose CPUs and GPUs to crunch real-time data and match it to a massive catalogue of imagery and vehicle profiles. A brand new Nvidia processor, the company says, has the power to finally make it happen. Read More >>

If you’re an owner of a new Apple MacBook, HP Spectre or Samsung Galaxy Note 7 you’d be familiar with the slim, high-speed, high-power USB Type-C connector. It’s set to become the new standard, with its reversibility (that’s right, there’s no wrong way up with the USB-C) just one of the advantages. It can power laptops, transfer data and solve world hunger (okay, maybe not that last one). Read More >>

Drop your Samsung Galaxy Note 7 down the toilet and all you'll have to worry about is who was in there before you – its IP68 rating means it's fully waterproofed for up to 30 minutes in five feet of water. But how has Samsung managed to keep all those smart components safe from a soaking? Read More >>

When Nvidia released its latest Pascal graphics cards for desktop PCs, it signalled a significant jump in outright performance from the previous Maxwell generation, with a completely new architecture offering not only improved frame rates but also much more efficient energy consumption — the critical metric of performance per Watt. Nvidia has taken that leap further with a new range of 10-series graphics chipsets for gaming laptops, and unlike in previous generations they’re not operating at a huge performance disadvantage versus desktops. Read More >>