Thomas Soderstrom

My Experience

Years back, when a small website called out for product-review editors. I leapt at the opportunity: I’d just wrapped up a four-year stint as a systems supplier. That experience provided the credentials I’d need for the transition from industry supplier to industry observer. For one thing, I’d been the first source for an exposé on capacitor plague (“Got Juice”) at EDN.

By that time, I’d already self-published some guidelines on hardcore PC stuff: pin-modifying processors to defeat compatibility checks and overclock non-overclockable systems. I saw a chance to get paid for my knowledge, and have since written more than a thousand pieces (many of them for the seminal tech site Tom's Hardware) before finding my latest opportunity: with PCMag.

My Expertise

• System building. I've been known to take pictures of “wrong way” installations to help builders understand the difference.
• PC overclocking, with an emphasis on user ease and component longevity
• Motherboards, their infinite nuances and complexities
• PC memory, its many variations, and how to configure and understand it
• PC cases and PC cooling. The concepts may seem simple, but I help uncover the hidden problems.

The Technology I Use

Having a test system or two with modern hardware at hand means rarely needing to upgrade my office PC. My old reliable Intel-based workhorse desktop stands at the 6th Generation Core level with a 512GB SSD, 32GB of RAM, and gobs of external storage.

My trusty 3rd Gen Asus Zenbook Pro only comes out for remote conferences (not many of those in the past few years, alas), and even my Samsung Galaxy smartphone is a lower-end model that I bought to replace an old LG unit. Though my day-to-day work consumes the majority of my interest in tech, I've outfitted my home, in recent years, with a whole host of smart TVs.