Table of contents for February 2019 in Maximum PC

PC BUILDING is a personal endeavor. Ask each member of the Maximum PC team to build a system for a given task or to a certain budget, and you’d get completely different systems from each one, as personalities and experiences come into play. One may focus on storage throughput, another on processing power, graphics performance, or connectivity. That’s before we even consider personal touches, such as case, lighting preferences, and so on. Despite these variations, there are general trends, and there are two broad camps when it comes to PC building: One revels in putting the latest technologies to task, while the other is focused on how the machine is going to be used. Both methodologies have advantages and disadvantages (not least of which is cost), but for most practical…

A RANSOMWARE ATTACK hit the Los Angeles Times and other Tribune Publishing papers just before the new year. Only 15 percent of subscribers received their newspapers on time, and many editions were slimmer. It also disrupted west coast distribution of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, among others. According to the group, it was “the biggest publishing disruption in decades.” The culprit is a piece of malware known as Ryuk, named after a Japanese manga character. It encrypts files, and demands payment in bitcoin for their release. Ryuk first appeared last summer, and was used in a well-planned series of attacks that netted a reported $640,000. This new attack originated outside the US; the Department of Homeland Security and FBI are investigating. Sophos Labs estimates that by the…

Accurate, quick physics are the hallmark of modern games. While you might think game physics are simply the trajectory of an object in space, the real meat and potatoes of game physics are when things touch. When objects touch, Newtonian physics can give us a pretty good idea of where they are going to go, and how fast they’ll move. In simple terms, you can think of objects as simple as pool balls on a table, or as complex as a car in Rocket League. While it can operate on a CPU, PhysX is designed to do thousands of high-school physics problems in a massively parallel way on the GPU. Think of it as multithreaded physics calculations across hundreds of cores, because that’s exactly what it is. As anyone who’s…

ONE OF THE MOST common questions we get asked by folks is how much they should be spending on their next rig. It’s a tricky one to answer. We’ve mentioned in the past how the value of the dollar changes depending on the total available budget for a system, but there’s also a secondary factor you need to consider, and that’s one of price to performance. Once you get past a certain price point, the amount of performance you get for the dollar inevitably begins to drop—in some cases, quite dramatically. Take AMD’s Threadripper 2970WX, for example. At stock, it scores a fairly heady 4,407 points in Cinebench R15. Compare that to a Ryzen 5 2600’s 1,274 points, and that’s a 246 percent increase in performance. However, each dollar you…

Games aren’t noted for embracing the multicore world. Intel chips, with their stronger single-core performance, are still the CPUs of choice for gaming PCs, but that doesn’t mean AMD’s offerings, which are stronger in multithreaded applications, are being left behind. Gamers are more likely to be GPU-limited than waiting on their CPUs right now. Battlefield V appears to spread itself across a lot of threads, but never utilizes our 16-core Threadripper above 25 percent, which the math tells us equates to 100 percent usage on a quad-core. It’s nothing a Ryzen 5 couldn’t provide. Total War: Warhammer II makes better use of the same system, but tops out at around 50 percent usage. A Ryzen 7 could handle that. As compute-heavy tasks such as AI are shifted to GPUs, there will…

Project Sol Put together by a team at Nvidia, this demo reel shows masses of shiny high-tech machinery, with oodles of reflections and lighting effects, running in real time on an RTX 2080 Ti, using the Unreal 4 engine. Wow! Metro Exodus A first-person shooter from 4A Games, boasting beautiful RTX-enhanced graphics, including natural lighting, ambient occlusion, and realistic shadows. It uses 4A’s own game engine. Atomic Heart Another FPS, this time set in a creepy alternate universe, Atomic Heart from Mundfish really pushes RTX with its lighting and reflections, including curved mirrors and mirrors looking into mirrors. It looks to be the most impressive of the first generation of games, if it delivers. Battlefield V The first big title to break with ray-tracing effects, Battlefield V supports DirectX Raytracing,…

We may have railed against the trend for smart gear to require smartphone control, but let us do a 180: If you’ve put the effort into getting Home Assistant up to spec, a quick-to-access interface for those non-savvy members of your household is worth its weight in gold. There are apps for Home Assistant on both Android (look for HomeAssist on the Play Store) and iOS, with the latter (surprisingly) probably even better supported than the former, particularly once you’ve enabled the Home Assistant iOS integration in the web interface’s “Configuration” menu. Communication goes two ways; you’ll be able to take control of all of the entities you’ve set up in Home Assistant—and that means gear from a host of different manufacturers, controllable in one place— as well as set…

In this project, we created our own Pushover application that sends alerts to a waiting Android app, but there are other ways to interact with Pushover. There are apps for Android, iOS, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. We tested the Chrome application, which can be installed from https://pushover.net/clients, and it worked flawlessly. There’s also a dedicated system tray application that works pretty well with Pushover. The unofficial Pullover application is useful for receiving the alerts from our device, but sadly it can’t display images. That said, the app is handy for receiving text alerts—for example, remote sensor triggers, such as temperature, pressure, and light levels. Pullover can be found at https://github.com/cgrossde/Pullover, and it works with Linux, Mac, and Windows devices. Pushover has an extensive API (application programming interface) that enables us…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-3 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM THE CONCEPT I DIDN’T NEED A NEW PC, but I wanted one. My old gaming/image-editing build was constructed in 2012, and had grown organically over time. It was based around a Core i7-3770K, and had 32GB of DDR3—absolute overkill, but I didn’t foresee the effect cheaper SSDs would have, expecting huge amounts of RAM to become more common instead. Originally, it booted into Windows 8 from a Samsung 840 128GB SSD, with a 500GB WD Velociraptor for storage, plus a DVD drive, and a GeForce GTX 680 to push the pixels. All in a Cooler Master Silencio 450 case, with a Corsair 750W power supply. A games PC is also a multi-purpose PC, and it handled everything I threw at it…

A QUICK HEADS-UP: You’re going to read the beginning of this review and say, “What on earth are you on about?” But keep on reading and hear us out before you turn the page, because hopefully it’ll all make sense. Probably. If there’s one thing that separates a good manufacturer from a bad one, it’s intelligent use of design. Take VW, for example, or more specifically, the VW Group. Across a broad range of its vehicles—from its SUVs to its hot hatches to its sports cars—it uses a single chassis design: the MQB platform. Whether it’s a $44,000 Audi TT, a $21,000 VW Beetle, or a $31,000 4x4 Tiguan SUV, at the heart of them all lies the MQB chassis. There’s good reason for this: The design is modular, it’s…

WELL, FOLKS, this is my 46th and final issue of Maximum PC. My time as deputy editor has come to an end. One of our publishing house’s latest acquisitions, Tom’s Hardware, has sounded the call for a new associate editor, requesting I take up that mantle for a new project it’s developing. Unfortunately, that means I have to say goodbye to a team, a magazine, and a community that I absolutely love. I owe a lot to this little ol’ magazine of ours. It’s taught me so, so much over the years. From honing my writing style to pushing me to the absolute edge of my limits, both technologically and creatively, It’s been an absolute honor to have been a part of Maximum PC’s journey over the last three years,…

NVIDIA’S INNOVATIVE raytracing RTX series has grown, with a new entry-level RTX 2060, and a top-end Titan RTX. It has also launched new GTX cards that use the new Turing silicon. It has effectively made two brands: the RTX series with ray tracing enabled, and the GTX series without. The RTX 2060 is the card many have been waiting for. Nvidia’s 60-series cards usually provide the best bang for your buck, useful given RTX pricing. The 2060 has 1,920 CUDA cores, 240 AI Tensor cores, and 30 ray-tracing cores. All down on figures for the RTX 2070, which has 36 ray-tracing cores. It’ll have 6GB of GDDR6, a base clock of 1,365MHZ, and you’ll need a spare eight-pin power plug. First reports say that if you run Battlefield V with…

NEW YORK STATE and Charter Communication (which also does business as TWC and Spectrum) have reached a lawsuit settlement that will cost the ISP $174.2 million. Charter was accused of fraudulent, misleading, and consumer-hostile actions. At one point, it was even given 60 days to stop operating in the state. It is the biggest ever payout to consumers by an ISP. Charter was said to have “denied the customers reliable and fast Internet services it had promised.” Advertised speeds were only reached 60 to 70 percent of the time. The hardware the company distributed was deficient, and network capacity not maintained. Charter also used hardball tactics with Netflix, and other streaming services, leading to frozen screens, extended buffering, and degraded video quality. $62.5 million of the fine will be used…

Starting this year, Steam will no longer be an option if you’re running Windows XP or Vista. Understandable really, as they’ve lost Microsoft support, and Valve’s own figures put their usage at under one percent. Paradoxically, Steam’s support for old games is impressive. It has modified many to keep them available, such as 1995’s Ultimate Doom, the re-release of 1993’s original with an extra level. It appears that games have a longer shelf life than the OSes they were designed to run under. XP is the most stubborn survivor; its use worldwide is over four percent (of the machines online). Not bad for an OS launched in 2001.…

What’s the best processor on the planet? You might think there’s a simple answer, but it depends on what you plan to do. Just about any modern CPU is “fast enough” for general applications, and upgrading other components might be more worth your time. But let’s just focus on CPUs for now. The past two years, AMD and Intel have pushed the boundaries on core counts to potentially obscene levels. AMD’s updated second-gen Threadripper processors now offer up to 32 cores/64 threads in a single package, and at first you might be tempted to take the plunge. But when you start digging into the benchmarks, things get a lot more complex. Some heavily threaded workloads have excellent performance on Threadripper 2990WX, others do better on a Threadripper 2950X, and some…

Battlefield V is the first game released to feature real-time ray-tracing effects. Specifically, it has been used to add reflections, rather than go the whole hog and try every effect. It looks good; certainly, the carefully selected demo videos show some very cool effects. So, it all works—the next big question is: How much performance does this extra polish cost in frames per second? Running on a pretty chunky test rig, sporting an i7-8700, a 5GHz gaming monster, the good news is that if you stick to lower resolutions, such as 1080p, it is all perfectly playable in single-player. The bad news is that the frame rate hit is not insignificant. An RTX 2080 Ti runs at over 140fps without RTX, and drops to around 90fps with all settings at…

presents: BACKGROUND In the middle of the finale of last year’s flagship smartphone season, Huawei threw its last big fighter into the ring: the Mate 20 Pro. On paper, it looks more powerful than ever, but only a teardown will tell if it’s a true champ or just a poser. MAJOR TECH SPECS 6.39-inch 3120x1440 (538 ppi) AMOLED display Huawei Kirin 980 chipset: Mali-G76 MP10 GPU and an octa-core CPU (2x 2.6GHz Cortex-A76 cores, 2x 1.92GHz Cortex-A76 cores, and 4x 1.8GHz Cortex-A55 cores) Triple rear cameras: 40MP f/1.8, 20MP f/2.2, and 8MP f/2.4 lens with 5x optical zoom 24MP f/2.0 selfie cam IP68 dust/water ingress rating Android 9.0 (PIE) Facial recognition, plus under-display fingerprint sensor KEY FINDINGS • The Mate 20 Pro sports a notched, curved display—the notch has grown…

To cast to your Raspberry Pi from your Android phone or tablet (a reliable iPhone or iPad alternative has yet to be released), you need Raspicast, from the Google Play store. Once installed (with all permissions granted), ensure your phone or tablet and the Raspberry Pi are connected to the same network. You can’t use Raspicast to stream media from your mobile device to a Raspberry Pi otherwise. Within the app, you’ll find standard controls (play/pause and stop), a file browser, a “Cast” button, and some options that change how Raspicast streams your content. For example, should you want to replay the current file, open the menu and check the “Repeat” box. Meanwhile, tap “Audio output” to ensure audio is streamed in the correct way. For video, this is typically…

IF IT FELT LIKE THE HEDT wars got silly over the past year or so, that was only a prelude. AMD took its Zen architecture and doubled down on core and thread counts, the result being the 16-core/32-thread Threadripper 1950X. Intel had no choice but to respond with some one-upmanship of its own and an 18-core/36-thread monstrosity with the Core i9-7980XE. Fast-forward to today, and AMD has continued to push core counts, with up to 32-core/64-thread HEDT products, and 64-core/128-thread server parts. Intel has 28-core Xeon workstation processors, and those will be coming to a different HEDT platform, but with 10nm nowhere in sight, LGA2066 is in a tough spot. That brings us to the updated Skylake-X CPUs and the Core i9-9980XE. Fundamentally, there’s little difference between this Skylake-X part…

CAN WE ALL JUST take a moment to appreciate how frigging difficult it is to find a good mouse? Seriously, the list of trending pixel pointers is seemingly endless. Couple that with the variety of hand shapes and grasping preferences out there, and a severe lack of places to try these critters outside of the realms of cyber-space, and what you’re left with is a headache. A headache, and an overreliance on reviewers and YouTubers using poorly sized banana analogies to compare size. As if that’s some hilarious joke we’ll all collectively laugh at. It’s a tough one, that’s for sure. So, what should you be thinking about when it comes to the perfect mouse? Well, there’s its weight and shape—are you a lefty or a righty? Do you need…

SUBNAUTICA At the tail end of last year, Epic announced that it was introducing a new games store to compete with the likes of Steam, Origin, Uplay, and their ilk. Obviously buoyed by the success of Fortnite, the Unreal developer decided to sweeten the deal by giving away some games to get people interested. The first of these was Subnautica, a game I’d never spent any time with, despite it getting rave reviews pretty much everywhere. If you were lucky enough to grab it while it was free (or you fancy treating yourself), I urge you to spend some time in its beautiful, terrifying waters. Somewhat akin to Minecraft, with its exploration, survival, and building mechanics, I was happy enough uncovering the depths of its wonderfully realized world, well before…

INTEL MIGHT APPEAR to be having a tough time, with AMD’s Ryzen taking big bites out of the PC market, but the tech giant has big plans for 2019. Of most interest is that we will finally get to see its new 10nm chip using the Sunny Cove architecture, Intel’s first all-new design since Skylake in 2015. We don’t have many details, just a few slides shown at its Architecture Day event. It will have 50 percent more L1 cache, and “significantly” larger key structures, buffers, and so forth. It has a wider front end—that is, more paths—and can run two stores per cycle. It also gets an extra Address Generation Unit, a second Load Effective Address unit, 10 ports instead of eight, and a second shuffle unit, all adding…

TRIUMPHS ✓ 3NM CHIPS PLANNED TSMC is to build the world’s first 3nm foundry for $19.5 billion—we can expect to see the results in 2022. ✓ FORTNITE FORTUNE Gamer Tyler Blevins earned nearly $10 million last year through Twitch and YouTube. ✓ ULTRA SHORT THROW PROJECTORS LG’s new CineBeam Laser 4K can give a 90-inch image at just two inches from your wall. TRAGEDIES ✗ DRM DOES HIT GAME PERFORMANCE Proof emerges that Denuvo does impact games—frame rates and load times are slower. ✗ CLASSIC FLOP Sony’s retro PlayStation Classic isn’t selling well; blame falls on the poor games bundle. ✗ RIP DR. LARRY ROBERTS A founding father of the Internet, he laid out the original network, and introduced packet switching.…

If you turn off Location History on Facebook, you’d expect it not to know where you are. It transpires it still does, more or less, as it monitors your IP address. This is odd, as on the Facebook Business blog, it states people “only see ads based on their recent location if location services are enabled on their phone.” Not true. On its “How Facebook ads work” page, it’s more honest, saying it uses where you go online to track you. This came to light when Aleksandra Korolova, a university science professor, avoided sharing any location data, yet still got location-based ads. Facebook has since admitted there’s actually no way to turn off location-based ads.…

8 INITIATIVE Q Sold on the promise of free money, we’d wager our bonus that 20,000 Q never actually equals $20,000. Just a hunch. http://initiativeq.com 7 DOGECOIN Proof if it were needed that a (mercifully) longdead meme can live on in coin form. A top 30 one, at that. http://dogecoin.com 6 DENTACOIN Are you a dentist? Well, have we got the cryptocoin for you! Yes. It’s Dentacoin. And it’s specifically for dentists. http://dentacoin.com 5 COINYE What might have been, had Kanye’s lawyers not squashed this unauthorized Yeezy currency? We’ll never know. www.coinyecoinsglobal.com 4 UNOBTAINIUM Deliberately rare, with 250,000 coins available to be mined over the next 300 years. That’s quite the power bill. www.unobtanium.uno 3 USELESS ETHERIUM TOKEN Purposefully worthless, the initial offering somehow still made over $300,000. http://uetoken.com 2…

Brigade Something different from OTOY, Brigade is a real-time path-tracing game engine based on the company’s Octane 4 rendering engine. It claims to be able to path trace scenes at 30–60fps, although nothing beyond demonstrations has appeared as yet. Interestingly, OTOY has a deal to integrate Octane into the Unreal Engine. This is worth watching, as we are jumping straight to path tracing. Unreal Engine Developed by Epic Games, this first appeared in 1998, powering the FPS Unreal. It has been behind dozens of major titles since, and is now on version 4. The Unreal team has been working closely with Nvidia to incorporate RTX enhancements. Nvidia partnered with Epic to create some of its own showreels. Unity A huge cross-platform engine that boasts that it is used to produce…

OK, Nvidia has been hogging all the limelight so far, but let’s not forget AMD. It has its own ray-tracing engine, called Radeon Rays, “high-efficiency, high-performance GPU-accelerated ray-tracing software.” AMD is taking a slightly different approach to Nvidia, concentrating on ground-up software support. Radeon Rays is open source, based around OpenCL, and as such is platform and OS independent. We’ve yet to see Radeon Rays in a game, but it has quietly been gathering support; importantly, it is due to be integrated into Unity’s GPU Progressive Lightmapper, a hugely influential game engine. The next question is: Does AMD have a hardware response to the RTX series? Nvidia has the edge in performance, but that doesn’t equate to profit. Radeon cards have carved out a large chunk of the sub-$300 market,…

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR. You might just get it. Like, say, affordable solid-state technology for mass storage. That’s the end game we’re all after, isn’t it? Kiss goodbye to slow, failure-prone magnetic hard drives. It’s also why the new ADATA SU630 exists. At least, that ought to be why it exists. To deliver more solid-state storage for less money than before, while perhaps compromising a little on performance. Hold those thoughts. To cut to the chase, the ADATA SU630’s not-quite-USP is QLC, or quad-level memory cells; in this case, Intel’s QLC NAND, and thus the same memory chips as those used by the Crucial P1 (reviewed opposite). You should read that review for a little more insight into the technological nuances of QLC memory. Suffice to say here…

WHAT WE PERCEIVE as “normal” is something society instills in us from a very early age. We can comprehend a table as being a table because that’s what we’re told it is. It is, essentially, just four sticks of wood at the corners, with a flat piece on top. It could be a chair, bed, toilet, statue, art, but we’ve been taught from childhood to recognize it as a table. Using it as anything else would be odd. The problem with that notion is that it stifles creativity. It doesn’t allow for thinking outside the box. All design seems to stem from that principle. You take something we know, and change it to make it better, but only so far as it doesn’t exceed the original parameters of its classification.…

Sponsored by BUDGET WE’VE TAKEN A SIGNIFICANT HIT on the budget build this issue, but not without gain. We’ve managed to switch out that aged GTX 1050 Ti for our favorite GPU of the last two years, the GTX 1060 3GB. It’s a budget 1080p killing machine. Yeah, perhaps the 3GB of VRAM isn’t as future-proof as we’d like, especially in the bigger AAA memory-hogging titles, but it’s difficult to argue with how much better value this thing is over its 1050 Ti sibling. For $20 more, you get 50 percent more CUDA cores than the Ti, plus significantly higher boost clocks and memory clocks. We’ve also plumped out some more cash to upgrade the Ryzen 3 1200 to the Ryzen 5 2600, a six-core 3.9GHz processor. This effectively gives…