Nick Evanson

Nick Evanson

Hardware Writer

Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in the early 1980s. After leaving university, he became a physics and IT teacher and started writing about tech in the late 1990s. That resulted in him working with MadOnion 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 PC gaming 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 covering everything and anything to do with tech and PCs. 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

A photo of an Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processor, resting on an Intel-branded box with a colorful pattern
Intel quietly bumps the price up of the best CPUs it's made in years to 'reflect current market dynamics'

By Nick Evanson Published

News Fortunately, the Arrow Lake Refresh chips are still worth the extra money.

News
A close-up of the blue LED strip on the front of the Steam Machine
Valve's aim for a console-like experience with its Steam Machine lands a little too close for comfort as one of the first cases of 'Red Line of Death' comes to light (Update: The machine survived)

By Nick Evanson Published

News The issue eventually resolved itself.

News
A stock photo of a computer motherboard with multiple memory slots filled with DRAM DIMMs for High Performance Computing (HPC)
Meta's solution to the global memory shortage is to use DDR4 in a DDR5 server, with a custom chip making the impossible possible

By Nick Evanson Published

News Alas, this solution won't work for gaming PCs. Not yet, at least.

News
A screenshot of a Valar Atomics promotional video, showing an employee holding an Nvidia DGX Spark, ready to be powered by a nuclear microreactor.
Nuclear reactor start-up targeting AI energy demands showcases its tech with an Nvidia DGX Spark, though the website demo needs its own power plant

By Nick Evanson Published

News HTGR does brrrr. CPU in PCs running the demo goes brrrr-er.

News
Gun fight in the parking lot
With 32 GB as a minimum and 64 GB as the recommended amount, Cinder City's RAM requirements are all kinds of wrong in today's AI-mangled memory market (update: phew, it's a mistake)

By Nick Evanson Last updated

News But hey, at least an RTX 4060 is good enough to meet the recommended GPU specs. Wait, what?

36 Comments
News
A close-up photo of the CPU power sockets on an MSI MEG Z890 Ace motherboard
Intel's mega-core Nova Lake desktop processors look all but confirmed to have sustained full boost power limits at least 220 W higher than Arrow Lake

By Nick Evanson Published

News There's no other reason why a Z990 motherboard would have three CPU power connectors, after all.

News
A cropped screenshot of a YouTube video by polymatt, showing the components of a handmade magnetic-core memory USB storage device
The maker calls it the 'world's worst USB drive' but to my eyes, it's far more impressive than any external SSD you can buy right now

By Nick Evanson Published

News So what if it only stores 64 bits? Each one is a little marvel of 1950s science and engineering.

News
A screenshot from a video posted on the Dave's Garage YouTube channel, showing a recreation of the original Windows Notepad
'No bloat, no telemetry, no nonsense.' Former Microsoft coding wizard makes an OG Notepad clone that's just 2,686 bytes in size

By Nick Evanson Published

News How about tackling File Explorer next?

News
A Steam machine sitting in front of a TV.
The latest SteamOS beta update includes a performance boost for GPUs with limited VRAM, though devices with iGPUs probably won't see any gains

By Nick Evanson Published

News But if the device is a certain Machine, then this is definitely good news.

News
AMD Strix Point APU chip, held in a hand, with the reflected light showing the various processing blocks in the chip die
AMD's next-gen Zen 6 CPU cores will come in a low-power compact flavour, which should help laptop batteries last even longer

By Nick Evanson Published

News Intel's Panther Lake has similar LPE cores, and they work a treat.

News
Zotac RTX 3060 12GB Twin Edge graphics card
New production runs of Nvidia's much-loved RTX 3060 finally hit the shelves in Europe, but the price just ain't right

By Nick Evanson Published

News Ignore how much VRAM it has; it's simply not worth 333 euros.

News
A promotional image of a dual-channel G.Skill Trident Z5 CK DDR5 memory kit
With the RAMpocalypse set to rage for years, memory kit makers are responding in one of two ways: Do nothing or go hell-for-leather

By Nick Evanson Published

News Neither response is what the PC industry needs right now.

News
A photo of SK Hynix's manufacturing plant in Chongqing, China
South Korea's president declares that it will invest over $580 billion in its AI chip industry, with Samsung and SK hynix coughing up most of the money

By Nick Evanson Published

News That's great and all that jazz, but can I have affordable DDR5 and SSDs again, please?

News
A stylised image of AMD's RDNA 3 GPU design for its Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards
True to its word, AMD brings FSR 4.1 to Radeon RX 7000-series card owners with its latest Adrenalin drivers

By Nick Evanson Published

News The Steam Machine will eventually get it too. Whaddya mean, so what?

News
A promotional image showing a render of the two CCD chiplets in the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor
AMD is said to be holding talks with Samsung about making some of its future chips to offset TSMC's constrained supply of cutting-edge wafers

By Nick Evanson Published

News If true, my money would be on low-end laptop APUs or Ryzen IO chiplets.

News
A screenshot of the Epic Games Electric Dreams Environment demo for Unreal Engine 5.8, with Lumen Lite being used for global illumination and reflections
My quick test of Lumen Lite shows that it's probably good news for ray-traced gaming on handheld PCs, but I suspect that it will be used everywhere because of the pressure developers are now under

By Nick Evanson Published

Lite rays With studios being closed down faster than you can blink, every coder is going to be using one-click fixes.

19 Comments
Lite rays
A promotional image for the State of Unreal Chicago 2026 announcement for Unreal Engine 6
'[It] is going to change a lot about how games are made': Epic merges Unreal Engine 5 with Unreal Engine for Fortnite to give game devs around the world Unreal Engine 6

By Nick Evanson Published

News When two become one.

News
A screenshot of Epic's YouTube video showcasing some of the features of Unreal Engine 5.8
Unreal Engine 5.8 launches with improved terrain and vegetation tools, a Lumen Lite option for faster global illumination, and for the times we now live in, an open standard plugin for LLM systems

By Nick Evanson Published

News Plus a whole heap more stuff that's genuinely useful for all kinds of devs.

News
A photo of an Autonomous ErgoChair Ultra 2
Autonomous ErgoChair Ultra 2 review

By Nick Evanson Published

Score: 82% The makers might be heavily into AI, but its chair design is all about humans.

Score: 82%
A promotional image for the Samsung 990 Pro SSD
Consumer rights champion and tech-whizz Louis Rossman is taking Samsung to court over a failed 990 Pro SSD it says it can't replace, even though Amazon has plenty of them in stock

By Nick Evanson Last updated

News The fact that they now cost $949 instead of $300 surely has nothing to do with it, right?

21 Comments
News
An image of the Asus ROG Equalizer 12V-2x6 power cable, against a gradient green background
Possibly the first instance of Asus' anti-melting 12V-2x6 power cable…err…melting shows up, adding more fuel to the fire that is Nvidia's connector

By Nick Evanson Published

News Normally I'd suggest burning such things to the ground but they're doing that themselves.

7 Comments
News
A screenshot of the official announcement video for Arm/Sumo Digital's Neural Dawn, showcasing the use of ray tracing and Arm neural rendering technologies such as upscaling, denoising, and frame generation
Arm's ray-traced demo of its neural technologies for mobile phone gaming proves that there's an alternate chip for handheld gaming PCs to use outside of AMD or Intel

By Nick Evanson Published

News After all, the hardware inside your phone is rather wasted, so let's stick it in something better.

News
A close-up photo of a pair of Micron and SK Hynix DDR5 DIMMs, showing the memory modules on black/green PCBs
SK hynix claims it will be able to triple its memory chip output by 2034, roughly 10 years sooner than first projected

By Nick Evanson Published

News Just in time to solve the current crisis, right?

News
A screenshot of a promotional video clip for Squeez Lab's CrankGPT, showing a person's arm rotating a crank attached to a small red box
There's one AI machine that doesn't need a nuclear power station to run, and it points to a potential way forward in the memory crisis

By Nick Evanson Published

News You, a box, and a crank.

News
An image of an ATI/AMD Radeon HD 5970 graphics card against a red gradient background
Linux driver for vintage AMD GPUs gets an update with a helping hand from Copilot AI, keeping old hardware alive and kicking

By Nick Evanson Published

News Today, just refactoring. Tomorrow, the whole driver set?

News
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