Explainer articles

PCI Express has been around for 20 years, and with no sign of it being replaced any time soon, we dive into the technology to see what makes it so special.

With the best graphics cards now sporting more RAM than an average PC, we look at just why games are using ever more video memory to create all the visual effects.

When 2013-era graphics produce 2023-era memory loads

Let's see if you can spot the difference between a human writer and an AI. We asked GPT 4.0 various tech questions and put them side-to-side with our answers taken from TechSpot explainers.

Welcome to a most fundamental area of computer design: how numbers are represented in hardware! We know that modern computers use and are very efficient at using binary, but wasn't always the case.

When choosing your next monitor to buy, it might be worth considering one that offers HDR. Here's our explainer, giving you all the info you need on this amazing technology.

The latest and biggest 3D games often seem to have a problem with stuttering. Ask around and finger of blame often points to shader compilation. But why, and what can be done about it?

With power limits of CPUs and graphics cards climbing ever higher, and news reports of chips hitting sky-high temperatures appearing almost weekly, it seems that now is as good a time as any to ask a simple question – just how hot is too hot for today's PC components?

In this explainer we support with data why testing CPU performance with a GPU bottleneck is a bad idea, so you can have a full understanding of our testing methods when reviewing CPUs.

SSD trimming is a process that helps to maintain the performance of a solid-state drive over time. Windows and other operating systems optimize SSDs by using trimming. But what exactly is it and how does it work? Read our explainer on everything trim related!

#TBT You just bought a new CPU and it seems to run cool, so you try a bit of overclocking. The GHz climbs higher. Did you hit the silicon jackpot? You've got yourself a binned chip. But what's that exactly?

#TBT Every few years it seems like there's an amazing new technology with the promise of making games look ever more realistic. We've had shaders, tessellation, shadow mapping, ray tracing – and now there's a new kid on the block: path tracing.

Three vendors. Three new architectures. Three approaches to GPU design. Join us as we dive right into their semiconductor hearts and see how Ada Lovelace, Alchemist, and RDNA 3 contrast and compare.

Modern PCs have CPUs that can handle anywhere from 4 to 32 threads simultaneously thanks to developments in chip design and manufacturing. But what exactly are threads and why are they so important?

There are many different ways to organize files and directories in a computer, but in the abstract of how that happens at the hardware and OS level is typically assigned to the file system. This is how it works.

#tbt In the world of semiconductors, bigger numbers are often better. More cores, higher GHz, greater FLOPs. But there's one measure where smaller is better. Enter semiconductor manufacturing and the technology node.

The word cryptography evokes images of spies, secret messages and covert agencies. But what is cryptography? Cryptography is the method of scrambling data so that it looks like gibberish to anyone except those who know the trick to decode it.

When choosing a new computer monitor, the type of panel used by the display is a key piece of information that reveals a lot about how the monitor will behave and perform. By far the most common types of display panels are TN, IPS and VA.

Today, there are at least 1 million miners for Bitcoin alone. How is this all happening? What role is the miner playing? And how might this change the landscape of computing in the future?

At some point you may have heard someone say that for gaming you need X amount of cores. Examples include "6 is more than enough cores," or "you need a minimum of 8 cores for gaming," let's address that misconception.

Quantum computers are beginning to emerge in many industry and research labs. But what are qubits? And are the challenges ahead to control the quantum properties of our universe and leverage that for computing?

Direct3D. OpenAL. Winsock. You've probably heard of these and you might have even used them before. We're talking about APIs – the golden fleece to programmers around the world. Join us as we explain just what an API is, and take a quick look at where and how they get used.

The 3D games we play and love are all made up of thousands, if not millions, of colored straight lines, which inevitably will look jagged in our screens if not for smoothing anti-aliasing techniques. Let us explain in this new deep dive.

A checksum is a number, in the form of a binary or hexadecimal value, that's been derived from a data source. The important bits to know are that it's typically much smaller than the source, and it's also almost entirely unique.

Adaptive sync display technologies from Nvidia and AMD have been on the market for a few years now and gained plenty of popularity with gamers thanks to a generous selection of monitors with plenty of options and a variety of budgets.

Computer technology is no strange to acronyms: CPU, RAM, SSD, to name but a few. Ever so often, new ones appear on the scene in the never-ending quest to improve the capabilities of our computing devices. Today we'll explain processor instruction set extensions MMX, SSE, and AVX.