Nick Evanson
Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in 1981, with the love affair starting on a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and a book on ZX Basic. He ended up becoming a physics and IT teacher, but by the late 1990s decided it was time to cut his teeth writing for a long defunct UK tech site. He went on to do the same at Madonion, helping to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its gaming and hardware section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com and over 100 long articles on anything and everything. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?
Latest articles by Nick Evanson
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Star Wars Outlaws performance analysis: Ray traced galaxies far, far away really, really demand upscaling and frame generation
By Nick Evanson published
Galactic FPS There's a colossal range of graphics options to tweak, so most gaming PCs can run the game well enough. Well, kind of.
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With Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Black Myth: Wukong, and Star Wars Outlaws, ray tracing in games is slowly becoming an Nvidia-exclusive
By Nick Evanson published
news Ray tracing is old news, full ray tracing is where it's at now. Just don't call it path tracing, okay?
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Nvidia's new partnership with MediaTek has just killed the module which made G-Sync monitors so damned expensive
By Nick Evanson published
news This new all-in-one scaler removes the need for a separate G-Sync module, helping to lower costs.
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Microsoft closes another door for bypassing the TPM 2.0 requirement in Windows 11
By Nick Evanson published
news It's only in the beta versions of Windows at the moment but it won't be long before it's fully rolled out.
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OneXPlayer is back with another external GPU and this time uses a graphics chip so new, not even its maker has announced it
By Nick Evanson published
news The full specs and price are still unknown at this time but expect it to be mightily expensive.
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Black Myth: Wukong—Here are the best settings to use with Arc, GeForce, and Radeon graphics cards
By Nick Evanson published
Monkey Magic The visual tour-de-force demands upscaling and frame generation for the best performance but at least you don't need huge amounts of VRAM.
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Zotac Gaming officially launches its Zone handheld gaming PC with a super fancy AMOLED HDR screen
By Nick Evanson published
news But the handheld party is already pretty full, so will a (very) late entrance make much of an impact?
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Intel's next-gen Arrow Lake desktop CPUs are reportedly only 7 weeks away from launch
By Nick Evanson published
news Bid a final farewell to the Core i9, Core i7, and Core i5. Say hello to the Core Ultra 9, Core Ultra 7, and Core Ultra 5.
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Best CPU for gaming in 2024: these are the chips I recommend for gaming, productivity and peace of mind
By Jacob Ridley last updated
Happy Cores Fire up your rig with the best CPU for gaming. More cores, more clocks, more of everything that matters.
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AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU review
By Nick Evanson published
Mighty Zen 5 The most expensive and powerful Zen 5 chip in the Ryzen 9000-series enters the arena to dominate the benchmark wars and your wallet.
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AMD Ryzen 9 9900X CPU review
By Nick Evanson published
Middling Zen 5 Round two of the Ryzen 9000-series kicks off with the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X but the shadow of the last-gen 7900X spoils its entrance.
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A robot trained with AI to beat average randos at table tennis is a much more impressive thing than you might think
By Nick Evanson published
news Anyone who has spent hours battling with toolpaths and G-code will certainly be interested.
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Once the apple of Microsoft's eye, Paint 3D will be fully killed off in favour of its elder sibling Paint
By Nick Evanson published
news Few people wanted it when it was first launched, fewer people used it over the years, and now very few people will miss it.
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Doom running on a Def Con attendee badge at 50 fps is the highlight of the otherwise messy backstory to this year's popular hacking conference
By Nick Evanson published
news Seeing hackers modding hardware to make it run Doom is cool. Seeing them fall out over coding projects is decidedly not cool.
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AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU review
By Nick Evanson published
Middle Zen 5 The second entry in the desktop Ryzen 9000 series chucks eight Zen 5 cores into the ring. Let's get ready to benchmark!
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AMD Ryzen 5 9600X CPU review
By Nick Evanson published
Little Zen 5 Ding, ding! Round one of the desktop Ryzen 9000 series throws six Zen 5 cores at PC gaming.
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GeForce GPU giant has been data scraping 80 years' worth of videos every day for AI training to 'unlock various downstream applications critical to Nvidia'
By Nick Evanson published
news "Full compliance with the letter and the spirit of copyright law,” says Nvidia.
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A decade after buying Oculus VR, Meta's Reality Labs' losses are spiralling out of control, with no end in sight
By Nick Evanson published
news $10 billion loss in 2020, $16 billion loss in 2023—and it's only going to get worse, says Meta.
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Workstation builder Puget Systems' report shows the stability problems with Intel's CPUs can be managed if only you 'mistrust the default settings on any motherboard'
By Nick Evanson published
news The risk of failure is still there, however, until Intel releases a microcode fix.
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Steam's favourite GPU, the RTX 3060, is nearing its end as Nvidia gets ready to issue the last batch of chips
By Nick Evanson published
news Ampere GPUs are still really great but Nvidia wants you to buy Ada instead.
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Best RAM for gaming in 2024: I've tested the best DDR4 and DDR5 RAM to find the right kits for you
By Chris Szewczyk last updated
Dynamic I've put the top gaming memory through its paces to find out what the best RAM to pair with your new gaming PC is.
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Brilliant execution, awful inspiration material: This AMD-powered Cybertruck mini PC really is in production
By Nick Evanson published
news It's a standard AMD Hawk Point system, shoehorned into a sturdy-looking chassis, but oh boy…those looks.
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GDDR6X VRAM is claimed to be in short supply and could lead to an RTX 4070 being launched with slower GDDR6 to meet the demand
By Nick Evanson published
news Which should be fine, as long as it's not too much slower. Or the same price.