Inhoudsopgave van August 2019 - Maximum PC

WE GET TO PLAY with a lot of high-end gear here. Our cupboard is bursting with premium processors, expensive graphics cards, superfast SSDs, feature-rich mobos, and everything else that goes into producing the best machines we can put our minds to. If we need to build a rig for a specific use, we can generally lay our hands on the core components quickly, and piece together a PC that excels at the task at hand. There’s a bit of a disconnect between having all this gear to play with and building in the real world, though, and this is most obvious when we’re building to a tight budget. It’s rare that we have everything we need for a budget build, for a couple of reasons: Firstly, new tech tends to…

FACEBOOK HAS LIFTED THE LID on its forthcoming blockchain currency, Libra. This isn’t a bitcoin rival; it’s pegged to the value of real assets, a basket of stable currencies, so its value won’t jump around alarmingly. Unlike typical blockchain “coins,” it will be tightly controlled, too. It’s not really a cryptocurrency, but international online money. Wallets are integrated into Facebook apps, and you can exchange money from within them. Don’t panic, though: It won’t be controlled by Facebook, but by a separate association, along with 27 other partners, including Visa and Uber. The fees are said to be “minimal,” and interest will be earned on any holdings. A major target is the millions of people around the world without access to banks, but with smartphones, which is a big market.…

WHATEVER YOU MAKE of the politics behind the US-China tussle, the ramifications are getting serious. A slew of big companies have been obliged to stop doing business with Huawei, including Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Google. No Google means no Android OS. The bulk of Android may be open source, but crucial parts of it—the Play Store, Gmail, location services, and more—aren’t. Huawei has been working on its own OS since 2012; according to sources inside China, it could be out by this fall. It will be compatible with Android, although recompiling apps makes them considerably faster. The Chinese market is huge, and difficult to break into. Google won’t want to be left out for too long, or it may find it hard to get back. The company is in talks…

1 AMD RYZEN 9 3900X There’s no doubt that Zen 2 was the star of this year’s Computex. This $499 12-core model looks stunning. 2 AMD RADEON RX 5700 Navi, Vega’s highly anticipated follow-up, may not look like much, but should bring the battle back to Nvidia. 3 CORSAIR MP600 M.2 SSD Offering read speeds of 4,950MB/s, this PCIe 4.0-ready SSD has us excited about where storage could go next. 4 ASUS ZENBOOK DUO You know what laptops need? Two screens. Luckily, Asus has your back, with this funky game-changer. 5 10TH-GEN INTEL CORE PROCESSORS Previously known as Ice Lake, these 10nm laptop chips offer improved integrated graphics and AI support. 6 CORSAIR HYDRO X Corsair is shaking up the water-cooling world with its Hydro X branding, and the possibilities…

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The rise of non-x86 laptops, especially ones powered by Qualcomm, has inevitably lead to Intel shaking off its complacency and moving to counter the threat of this new hardware. While it hasn’t explicitly admitted so, its Project Athena initiative is a response to the rise of non-x86 hardware. If you’ve not heard of it, Project Athena is a laptop design initiative that will see Intel work closely with a number of laptop manufacturers to help shape the future of laptops by offering products that are smarter, faster (thanks to 5G), and more power-efficient—so battery lives are much longer. If always-on, always-connected laptops with long battery lives sounds familiar, it’s because that’s exactly what Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform offers. While Intel’s focus on those aspects could be coincidental—or simply a response to…

ReShade is a clever piece of software, but perhaps slightly more clever than many developers would like. It’s able to peer into the depth map of your games and act on that information in a live manner—which is fine if you’re playing by yourself and just want some fancier graphics, but not so fine if you’re playing multiplayer games where depth map manipulation could offer you an unfair advantage. It’s the kind of thing that cheat engines were built to sniff out—and it’s so hated that it’s entirely banned in PUBG, among other games. While most multiplayer games do a fine job of disabling access to the depth buffer, if you’d like to keep your account intact, it’s probably a good idea to avoid installing ReShade on anything even slightly…

YOU’LL NEED THIS TRINUS CARDBOARD VR Download the app from www.trinusvirtualreality.com. A CHEAP HEADSET A plastic version should cost around $10. AN OLD PHONE Any handset that can fit inside your headset will do. VIRTUAL-REALITY HEADSETS ARE ALL THE RAGE THESE DAYS. Oculus can’t help but release a new one every five minutes, Sony has its own for the PS4, HTC has a bunch, and even Valve is getting involved. But if you’re willing to sacrifice graphical fidelity, responsiveness, convenience, and possibly your lunch, you don’t actually need any of them. All you need is an old-ish phone, a very cheap set of VR goggles to slot it into, a whole lot of patience, and some massively lowered expectations. But, although this is a very much botched version of VR,…

Smart Objects preserve the source file’s contents, using it as a reference, which means you can mess around with it all you like without actually losing any data. For example, you could shrink a Smart Object, then later make it bigger again without a loss in quality. This isn’t too much of a consideration here, where we’re setting out to ruin an image, but it can save a lot of work on composition where you unexpectedly need to alter a layer you thought was finished with. Creating Smart Objects makes your files bigger, but it’s good practice to create them nonetheless. Storage is cheap, graphic designers’ time is expensive.…

LET’S GET ONE THING straight, with 4K clarity: The UHD50, one of Optoma’s latest range of 4K-capable projectors, isn’t a native UHD model. It’s a 4K pixel shifter. That means it uses a 1080p DLP chip, and “shifts” the image at high speed to create a full UHD pixel grid. But there’s pixel shifting, then there’s pixel shifting. Optoma claims its take on it is superior. Or rather, it’s the pixel-shifting tech from Texas Instruments, known as XPR, that’s superior to its main competitor, that of LCD projectors. The idea is fairly straightforward to grasp: Project an image, then shift it slightly, and project it again with updated pixel data, but do it so fast the human eye perceives the result as a single, unified image. In really simple terms,…

WE’VE GOT NOTHING AGAINST quality wired headphones, but the freedom promised by wireless cans has us constantly on the lookout for that particular audio nirvana. The Sennheiser GSP 670 shares many mechanical similarities with the existing GSP 600 wired model, with the same speaker technology in each earcup, but this cable-free version features a 20-hour battery life and very low latency. Bluetooth compatibility means the GSP 670 can be used with just about any device you can throw at it, too, from consoles to smartphones, and tablets. The GSP 670 continues the family aesthetic, which could be described as “Terminator’s earmuffs.” The look is probably the aspect we’re least enamored with overall, but in fairness, Sennheiser is right to keep the color scheme muted by using black and gray, and…

YOU MIGHT NOT have heard of V-MODA. That’s OK; you’re about to. Italian design marries Japanese engineering tech, producing some of the highestquality audio gear we’ve seen. Its latest headset, the Crossfade II, is no exception. As the box says, “Veni, Vidi, Vici.” It came, saw, and conquered, pumping out top-quality bass and clarity, thanks to unique dual-diaphragm drivers and coils that support high-res audio sources. It’s wireless, too, boasting an impressive 14-hour battery life and simple buttons for volume and call control on the right headphone. A Qualcomm audio codec ensures sound quality is preserved over Bluetooth, and passive sound-damping tech means you can blast some tunes on the train without disturbing everyone around you. If you’re really craving that zero-latency performance for gaming, the Crossfade II also comes…

IF IT BELONGED to anybody, Computex 2019 was AMD’s. It picked the event to launch its new 7nm Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 series processors and the first Navi graphics cards. Zen 2 is no surprise—we’ve been drip-fed details for months—what we do have now are the hard numbers for the initial release. The five new chips range run from a $199 Ryzen 3 3600 through to a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X for $499. Clock speeds don’t vary much, with 300MHz between the fastest and slowest base clocks, and 400MHz on the boost clocks. We can’t expect miracles—as the die process shrinks, you have to lower voltages, which makes it harder to run really high frequencies. Chips are struggling to reach 5GHz; it’s as much about efficiency and core count. The…

THIS FALL’S UPDATE of the Mac OS, 10.15 Catalina, will see the end of iTunes, sort of. Its functions will be split across Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple TV. Anything you’ve bought will appear in one of those; your music and playlists are safe. Finder will take over the job of synchronizing mobile devices. It isn’t dead yet, though—the Windows version will live on. It has to, as not every iPhone user has a Mac. Why is this happening? Well, it had become a bloated mess, with too many functions, and endless updates. Legal issues over licenses added annoying DRM, too. Few are going to mourn its passing. iTunes arrived in 2001, and introduced purchases in 2003. It, and services like it, helped kill the CD market. From a…

We haven’t got PCIe 4.0 going yet, and already the official specs for PCIe 5.0 have been released. Speeds are set to double from 16GT/s to 32GT/s per lane. PCIe 4.0 was announced in 2011, but graphics cards didn’t need it. They rarely hit the buffers when running on an eight-lane PCIe 3.0 slot, let alone a 16-lane slot. PCIe 4.0 enables you to use fewer lanes on some peripherals, dropping the graphics card to a four-lane connection for example. It also helps AMD as it uses PCIe lanes as the processor chipset interconnect. Cheap, fast SSDs change all that. A four-lane M.2 board needs all the bandwidth it can get. Storage demands may prompt a fast adoption of PCIe 5.0.…

AMD’S LAST MAJOR REVAMP of its GPU architecture was in 2012, with the HD 7970 and related first-gen GCN graphics cards. Everything since then, up through the Vega 20 GPU at the heart of the Radeon VII, has used a variation of GCN. At E3, and with the official unveiling of the Radeon RX 5700 XT, AMD finally gave us the skinny on its plans for the next generation of GPUs, code-named Navi, and using a new RDNA architecture. Perhaps the biggest change from GCN is that AMD has reworked the way instructions are grouped. In GCN, AMD used a Wave64 work-item that combined work for 64 GPU threads. Each Wave64 would end up being split into four chunks of work that would be sent to a SIMD16 structure, requiring…

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To release a laptop as part of Project Athena, manufacturers will have to meet certain specifications, and this is what Intel has revealed so far…. 5G connectivity: One of the biggest features of Project Athena will be 5G connectivity. This means that every Project Athena laptop will come with the ability to connect to 5G cellular networks (via a SIM card). Longer battery life: Improving the battery life of laptops has been a constant struggle for manufacturers. With laptops getting ever thinner, the space to add batteries shrinks as well. Project Athena aims to drastically improve the battery life of laptops, with times between charges of around nine hours, which is a lot longer than modern Intel-based laptops. However, Snapdragon-based laptops have seen battery-life figures of beyond 24 hours. Instant-on:…

Google Pixel 3a BACKGROUND The Pixel 3a breaks all the rules—a polycarbonate back panel, no wireless charging, visible bezels, a headphone jack, and a top-notch camera in a budget phone. Is there a method to Google’s madness? Let’s find out…. MAJOR TECH SPECS 5.6-inch OLED display with FHD+ 2220×1080 resolution (441 ppi) and Dragontrail Glass Octa-core 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 processor (2.0GHz + 1.7GHz) with 4GB LPDDR4x RAM 12.2MP f/1.8 OIS main camera with dual-pixel phase detection autofocus; 8MP selfie camera 64GB built-in storage USB-C and a mysterious 3.5mm “headphone jack” Android 9.0 Pie KEY FINDINGS • The polycarbonate build should be more durable than a glass back, but it’s likely no match for the rigidity of the metal construction of yore. Meanwhile, this Pixel’s party piece—a rear camera like…

If you’ve tried this sort of thing before, you might note a couple of changes in the DIY VR landscape. Probably the most major is the demise of TriDef, the company behind TriDef 3D and TriDef VR. Both enabled you to quickly convert almost any game into stereoscopic 3D or, in the case of certain OEM monitors, shutter-goggle 3D. These were commercial apps, and their requirement to phone home to TriDef’s servers meant they died along with the company when it shut down. With TriDef pushing up daisies, we’ve looked at using ReShade and SteamVR to process the signal, but they’re not the only middleware options. If you’re happy to shell out, it’s worth looking at vorpX (www.vorpx.com), a $40 app aimed at thrusting more games into Oculus and Vive…

If you’re worried that you could lose access to Dashlane, you can ask another Dashlane user to be your emergency contact. Open Dashlane, go to “Emergency > Add New,” and enter the email address of your emergency contact in the box marked “New Contact.” By default, your emergency contact can access all your login credentials, so click “Advanced” to share only some of your passwords. Dashlane also sets a waiting time (the default is two days) after which your emergency contact can access your data. You can change this if you wish via the dropdown menu. Click “Next,” fill out the message to your emergency contact, then press “Send.” Ask your contact to open their email and click the link marked “Get emergency access.” If they need access to your…

LOGITECH’S LIGHTSPEED tech has wowed us in keyboards, but squeezed into a compact mouse, it’s easy to argue that the super-low-latency wireless protocol is where it needs to be. A good keyboard tends to stay where it is. Going wireless for keys is merely a matter of occasional convenience; rarely do you type so hard and so excitedly that a wire becomes a problem—if you do, perhaps it’s time to take a look in the mirror and ask some difficult questions. A mouse is made to move, and boy, does this Lightspeed edition of the iconic G502 move. The updated HERO sensor (now capable of an unnecessarily fine 16,000 dpi) is unerringly precise, the light-bodied mouse is slick underneath for maximum ease of travel, and it’s intricately and stiffly molded…

THE MASTERBOX SERIES has produced some decent budget cases in the past, and the Q500L is no exception. At just $60, it looks pretty unremarkable at first glance, but behind its polka-dotted steel frame and patterned magnetic dust filters, a broad selection of clever customization options is concealed. First off, there’s no PSU shroud; the power supply sits in an internal bracket that attaches to the interior of the case, at the front for an ATX board, or in the rear-bottom position if you’re using a smaller ITX board. It then connects to a fitted cable, which feeds back through to a standard three-pin socket at the rear. This makes for a neat power solution, but the bracket has to be removed in order to fit the PSU, and there’s…

QUAKE II IS THE LATESTin along line of games to get some retro love, with Nvidia releasing the RTX rendition of the id Software classic. This remastered version adds ray tracing to the firstperson shooter, and transforms its limited gray, beige, and brown palette to a slightly lighter gray, beige, and brown. There are a few mirrored surfaces to stare briefly at, and a smattering of upgraded models, but largely it’s the same game from 22 years ago, with nominally prettier visuals. And it’s a complete waste of everyone’s time. Not only does it not look particularly inspiring, and therefore completely fails at its primary goal of selling real-time ray tracing, but it doesn’t play particularly well either. Gameplay has come on in leaps and bounds in the last two…

> Ryzen 3000 Purchases > Optical Drive Noise > AMD Blu-ray Support Buy Now? I am in the throes of building a new system, and have a question on the next generation of Ryzen processors. Is it worth the wait for the new Ryzen 3000, AMD X570, chipset, or should I go forward with the AMD X470 chipset, Ryzen 2700X, and upgrade the CPU later? The machine will be handling moderate gaming, moderate photo, and everyday use. Also, what components would be potentially affected by the new AMD X570 chipset? –Thom Mason EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ALAN DEXTER, RESPONDS: At the time of going to press, Ryzen 3000 still hasn’t been released, and we’re waiting to get test samples so we can see if the reality can live up to the hype.…

INGREDIENTS WE TOOK A LONG, hard look at the budget build blueprint this month, and you can probably figure out the reason why—it’s plastered all over the front cover of this very issue. Obviously, this is a somewhat different build from our $350 machine, but we thought perhaps there were lessons to be learned. As it turned out, that wasn’t really the case. Some of the components in this budget build dropped in price of their own accord, and while we briefly dabbled with the idea of swapping over to an Intel processor, ultimately it wasn’t worth the change. The only change we did see fit to make was to go back to TeamGroup’s T-Force Vulcan memory, saving ourselves five dollars with little to no difference in performance. RAM pricing…

A monthly snapshot of what’s good and bad in tech TRIUMPHS ✓ HARD DRIVES NOT DEAD Seagate has revealed the biggest HDDs yet, the 16TB IronWolf and Exos, which use a laser; prices from $610. 20TB due next year. ✓ PHOTONIC AI CHIPS Researchers have built an artificial neurosynaptic network. Just four neurons, but 1,000 times faster than the real thing. ✓ CLASSIC GAME GETS RTX Nvidia has refreshed the 22-year-old Quake II with the full ray-tracing treatment. TRAGEDIES ✗ BLUEKEEP PATCH Microsoft has patched Win XP in an effort combat the BlueKeep vulnerability, which can enable nasty ransomware attacks. ✗ KEEP IT SIMPLE After spending over $10,000 on MacBook Pro screen repairs, an engineer realized the brightness was just right down. ✗ AI STILL NEEDS US Real people handle…

Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass for PC will run in beta at first, at $4.99 a month, then will jump to $9.99 a month. There’s a healthy library of over 100 titles, and it should grow fairly quickly. The Xbox console version of Game Pass (they have exactly the same name, which could get confusing) has over 200 titles, although a good few of those are getting old. It’s a good deal for PC gamers, as you get to pick your games and play them online with your buddies; console gamers have to part with $14.99 a month for Xbox Live Gold to do that. It also gives you a 20 percent discount on games, and 10 percent on addons. Microsoft describes the Xbox Game Pass as a “Netflix-style subscription service.”…

GITHUB SPONSORS has made it easy to support the developers of open source who host code on GitHub. The program aims to make it easier for people to contribute dollars, if they aren’t able to contribute code. The big question is, who will be willing put up cash for work that they’ve enjoyed for free? As the saying goes, free software is free as in speech, not beer. Beer is not free. Neither is rent, nor electricity. Yet these three things—beer, rent, and electrons—are just some things an aspiring developer might have to consider when giving up hours to build things for the benefit of strangers. If you’re not someone who busies themselves writing code or documentation for fun, it can be hard to figure out how to contribute to…

> Win 10 Upgrades > Video Editing > External Drives USB Won’t Act Right Dear Doctor, I’m hoping you can help me with a problem that’s been plaguing me for the last year: My USB ports can’t all be used at the same time. I’m only using a keyboard (two ports), a mouse (one port), and a Logitech C920 webcam (one port). They all plug into an Asus Sabertooth X99 motherboard, with a Core i7-5930K, and 32GB of Corsair RAM. I have to frequently switch the mouse (a Corsair Ironclaw) between USB ports for it to be recognized. This wouldn’t be an issue if I didn’t have to run Linux so often for my job. When I use Windows or Linux exclusively, there is no problem. All my drivers are…

THERE’S A LOT OF SEQUELS coming out of E3 this year, which is no bad thing. Many have been a long time coming, and we’ve seen a few original IPs cropping up, too. More and more are going multiplatform, as well, bringing great experiences to PC that might have been confined by console exclusivity in years gone by. The big names have all been throwing their weight around: While Sony may have been absent, Microsoft was keen to announce several games alongside its Xbox Scarlett project; Bethesda had plenty of hotly anticipated sequels to show off; and Ubisoft is keen to keep Tom Clancy revolving in his grave. So, read on, and check out our 30 most anticipated games from E3 2019. Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 March 2020 Long-awaited…

Perhaps the biggest hurdle for non-x86 laptops is software support, because the vast majority of PC software is written for 64-bit and 32-bit Intel and AMD hardware. In the past, this has meant that laptops running on non-x86 hardware have been restricted by what kind of hardware they can use. However, that is all changing. Microsoft has been pushing Windows on Snapdragon and Windows on ARM development, which are versions of its Windows 10 operating system that are designed for non-x86 hardware. It brings a Windows desktop experience you’d expect on a laptop—and there’s a growing number of apps on the Microsoft Store that can run on these devices. There are still noticeable absences, but Microsoft is making it easier for developers to recompile their win32 or Universal Windows Apps…

The Code Writer team recognizes that most programmers are keyboard veterans, and may even have started coding before the advent of the computer mouse. For this reason, virtually every command in the application can be accessed via a keyboard shortcut. There’s a comprehensive list of these available in the Code Writer documentation, which you can access by clicking the “?” at the bottom-right corner of the screen. If you’re keen to begin coding, we’ve listed a quick-start guide of some of the most useful keyboard commands below to get you started. Ctrl-Tab: Switch to the next document. Ctrl-Shift-E: Open the Explorer sidebar. Back or Shift-Back: Backspace. Ctrl-G: Open the Command Palette in go-to line mode. Ctrl-Shift-G, D: Format document. Ctrl-Right: Move to the next word. Shift-Ctrl-Home: Move to the start…

THE MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC falls at the less expensive end of the motherboards we tend to review, but it’s no less impressive for it. Initial examination had us hopeful—despite it only being a standard ATX size, MSI has worked hard to cram a lot of features on to this board. Designed to support eight and ninth-generation Intel Core CPUs, the Edge AC comes with a veritable slew of ports and pins, meaning it’s more than capable of carrying a high-end build, despite costing less than two hundred dollars. MSI is a trusted household name when it comes to PC building, so its products come with a certain expectation of quality. Thankfully, this Z390 doesn’t disappoint; it might not crack the overall performance of some motherboards, but it can…