Sommaire pour Holiday 2019 de Maximum PC

GOOGLE HAS ANNOUNCED that it is to no longer index Flash files for its search engine, making Flash content invisible to most people. A little premature perhaps, but Flash is dying quickly now. Adobe is due to stop distributing and updating it before the end of next year. The latest version of Chrome has it disabled by default, and the next version won’t run it at all. Despite this, of the top 1,000 websites, over 8 percent sport Flash content. Why is it dying? Flash is resource-heavy, and uses elderly video decoding, so it drains phone batteries quickly. It is also propriety, i.e. not free, unlike the better open standards that followed. It’s vulnerable to hacking, too, and Adobe was sluggish in fixing those vulnerabilities. In its day, Flash was…

EA HAS ANNOUNCED that it plans to migrate its games back to Steam, starting with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Other titles will make the jump over the next few months. You still need an EA account, and Origin is still part of the setup process, for now at least. EA is also bringing its EA Access subscription service to Steam. Steam wasn’t very popular when it appeared back in 2003. Initially used to update Valve games, that all changed when it became mandatory if you wanted to play Half-Life 2. At which point, the servers crashed, and there was a lot of online moaning. By 2007, it had brought most of the biggest players in the business onboard. These days, it dominates game distribution, and has earned its creators…

MICROSOFT HAS started signing up players for a public beta test of its xCloud service. Like Google’s Stadia, xCloud will render games on racks of servers (basically lots of Xbox machines), and stream the screen image back to your device. You can play demanding top-tier games on fairly humble devices, as long as your Internet connection can handle it. That’s the theory anyway. It’s not a new idea, the main problem has always been latency: Can you get the right level of responsiveness while running a game remotely? Reactions are pin-sharp on modern consoles, and players will expect the same on xCloud. To participate in the beta test you need a device running Android 6.0 and Bluetooth 4.0 or better, and a Bluetooth controller, typically an Xbox controller, although not…

LIQUID-COOLING IS A FICKLE THING. I t’s complex, intricate, and filled with far deeper considerations than any standard PC build. There’s a finesse and beauty to it, and a risk involved. The very best systems out there incorporate it into their wonderful forms, yet the ideas and dreams of many a master builder often don’t come to fruition, at least not how they were first imagined. If you’re not committed to mastering this powerful art, and to overcoming the obstacles each build throws your way, it’ll shake you off just as sure as the turning of the world. This build has been a real challenge from start to finish. From the sponsor list, through the design phase and build process, to its real-world performance, every single element has come with…

IT’S BEEN FIVE LONG years since Intel’s very first 14nm CPUs came to market. That’s worth repeating. It’s taken fully five years for Intel to roll out the 10nm successor to its 14nm production node. This from the company that has led the industry in manufacturing integrated circuits for decades. More than anything, it’s Intel’s advantage in chip manufacturing that has defined the company. But only now is it ramping up production of 10nm silicon as part of its new 10th generation of Core processors. Of course, this is Intel, and nothing is ever simple. Strictly speaking, Intel trickled out a few dual-core 10nm chips in 2018. But if you can point us at an available retail product that uses these ultra-rare Cannon Lake chips, you’d be smarter than us.…

To add your Audible collection to your new DRM-free audiobook collection, you need OpenAudible, a tool for managing and downloading Audible books you own to your PC. Head over to https://openaudible.org to download the setup file. Launch it, clicking “More info→Run anyway→ when the SmartScreen filter pops up. Once installed, launch OpenAudible, and press Ctrl-K to connect to your Audible account using OpenAudible’s built-in browser. Close the window and, if necessary, press Ctrl-K to connect again, then choose “Controls→Full Library Sync→ to view all your previous purchases in the main OpenAudible window. By default, all downloaded audiobooks are converted to MP3 (verify this via “Edit→Preferences”). To download a single audiobook, right-click it in the lower pane, and choose “Download.” Keep an eye on the “Audio Book Info” pane, which tracks…

MSI Prestige X570 Creation HOW MUCH MONEY should you spend on a motherboard? More, says MSI’s Prestige series. No, more than that, too. If you’re the sort of person who relishes the idea of dropping half a grand on your motherboard, this could be the board for you. It’s part of the X570 selection of boards, and as such comes with all the latest bells and whistles, most importantly the introduction of the new PCIe 4.0 connections for M.2 drives and expansion cards. We’ve also got Wi-Fi 6, 10G super LAN for incredible intra-network transfers, and some extremely sophisticated multiphase power design that provides maximum performance for overclocked CPUs. Heat management is perfectly handled, with steel guards for the DIMM slots, and a massive heat pipe that almost curves around…

EVERYBODY LOVES A VIRTUAL MACHINE, don’t they? Whether you’re looking to try out an alternative operating system or want to resurrect an old version of Windows for compatibility purposes, VMs are the answer. And thanks to VirtualBox, the underlying technology powering that answer doesn’t cost you a single cent. VirtualBox is pretty straightforward to use, and by now you’ve probably got a handful of VMs up and running to cover your various bases. But perhaps performance isn’t quite what you’d like it to be, or you’re wondering whether there are other uses for virtual machines you’ve not thought to explore. In this tutorial, we’re going to delve into some more advanced topics to make sure your virtual machine is performing at its best. There’s stuff to speed up your VM’s…

WHEN WE ASKED industry veteran Falcon Northwest to provide us with a desktop that could crush benchmarks and had a long-haired dude on the side, it delivered—no questions asked. Joking aside, the latest iteration of the company’s popular Talon gaming PC is testament to FNW’s excellence and experience in building awesome PCs. Falcon’s towers are built for gamers and power users, and while you might want a slightly different configuration for video editing, our 20th Anniversary Talon was made to crush any gaming benchmark into a fine powder. Falcon Northwest’s Talon has base model configurations ranging from $3,000 to $ 4,000, and that’s without checking any optional boxes. Our build came with all the trimmings for the tidy sum of $5,316, and included a pair of RTX 2080 Supers, powered…

IS AIR COOLING worth it? The folks at Noctua seem to think so, as they doggedly refuse to produce liquid coolers for CPUs, sticking with chunky metal heatsinks with fans clipped to their sides. The slick new Chromax Black model of the NH-D15 is no exception; a massive heatsink split into two towers, each connecting to six heat pipes leading to a comparatively diminutive cooling plate. From here, there are two chunky 140mm NF-A15 fans to attach, one on the side and one between the two cooling stacks. As with many of Noctua’s air coolers, the NH-D15 is sort of a hassle to set up. It’s nothing too arduous, only requiring the installation of a bracket on top of the mobo’s included backplate, but thick plastic washers make it a…

THERE’S SOMETHING about twins in games at the moment. We played as them in Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and fought them in Far Cry New Dawn. In Borderlands 3, we just sort of sigh, wish they’d shut up, and consider skipping the cutscene. The Calypso Twins are streamers—Borderlands liking nothing better than to satirize its own audience—and once they’ve decided to set themselves up in competition with you, you can expect a stream of obnoxious videos calling you out. Borderlands’ world is one in which the biggest jerk rises to the top, so they’re appropriate villains, but it mostly feels like they’re there to keep up the barrage of knowing references to Internet life. The game itself differs little from its predecessors. Open world, cel-shaded style, vehicles, constant weapon upgrades, and loot…

We recently said that traditional spinning hard drives are dead to us, but some of the latest games are trying very hard to make us reconsider. Where we used to feel that 1TB of storage was more than sufficient and 2TB was spacious, multiple games have come out or will soon arrive where the install size is more than 100GB. We certainly don’t need every game we own installed on our PCs, but we do like to keep a collection around for testing and such. And with Red Dead Redemption 2 ready to suck up 150GB, and Call of Duty Modern Warfare thinking it may eventually need 175GB, it got us wondering. Just what is going on with game sizes that we’re suddenly jumping from 50GB being a large install…

the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small NEXT YEAR will see the start of a major fight between the tech and media giants over the video streaming market, and huge amounts of money are about to be thrown at your screen to earn your subscriptions. Network TV is on the decline—a generation has appeared that doesn’t consume media that way anymore. Why wait when you can binge? Why use cable when you’ve got the Internet? Is live TV dead? No, there’s always room for sport and news, and it’s also making the jump to the Internet. Some streaming services include live television channels, and there are also exclusively live TV services, aimed at cable-cutters. The good news is that the fierce competition means there are going to…

THE DAYS OF WIN 7 are numbered: Extended support is due to end on January 14, 2020. What happens after the end of support? Not much—it will continue to work, but there will be no official support. More importantly, there will be no security updates. Probably. If something really nasty happens, Microsoft can issue an “emergency” patch (it has done this before). If you’re running Office 365, you’ll still get security updates until January 2023, but you won’t get any new features or improvements. Other versions of Office will get bug fixes for their planned lifespan, which runs from October 2020 for Office 2010 to October 2025 for Office 2016. Internet Explorer 11 is less lucky; it’ll stop being updated along with Win 7. If you really must run a…

ROUND 1 Value Uh-oh! PCIe Gen4 stumbles right out of the gate. While the new M.2 SSDs boast incredible specs, those specs come with a less-than-excellent price tag. Even the cheapest Gen4 SSD is going to set you back over $100, with larger sizes, such as 2TB drives, running over $400. The performance gain over Gen3 simply isn’t significant enough to justify the price shift, unfortunately. Meanwhile, Gen3 M.2 prices have dropped since the release of the new generation, meaning it’s now a great time to make a purchase. A terabyte of high-speed Gen3 M.2 storage is currently available for scarcely more than $100—a far cry from the expensive HDDs of yesteryear. You might expect SATA SSDs to be the cheapest, and you’d be absolutely right—but not as right as…

LENGTH OF TIME: 20–30 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: HARD 1 ADD GPU BLOCKS IT’S ALWAYS SCARY taking a graphics card apart, because you’re messing around with something that’s insanely expensive. On the flip side, liquid-cooling anything below an RTX 2080 or equivalent tends to be difficult to justify from a cost-to-performance perspective, so it’s pretty much always the more expensive cards that you strip apart. In our case, it was two RTX 2080 Supers, which were provided by EVGA. We’ve combined them with two of EK’s Vector RTX waterblocks, along with some mirror-finished backplates to help both dissipate heat and throw light around the system. 2 SEAT THE CPU BLOCK WE KNEW WE WANTED to go with a mirror-finish EK block for this one, and fortunately the company produces a…

Having brought all your audiobooks together, now all you need to do is play them. If you only plan to listen to them on your PC, both iTunes and MusicBee (https://getmusicbee.com) offer dedicated audiobook views, enabling you to not just split your audiobooks from your music files, but also take advantage of specific audiobook features, such as the ability to pick up from where you left off during playback. If you plan to go down the iTunes route, we recommend moving the Audiobooks folder back inside the default iTunes Media\Music folder. After being added to your iTunes library, you’ll find them automatically classified as music. You can move them across by right-clicking a title (or titles) and choosing “Get Info → Options tab.” From here, change its “Kind” to “Audiobook.”…

TIP OF THE MONTH CHECK FRAME RATES WITH XBOX GAME BAR Xbox Game Bar has had a lot of useful features added over the years, to the point where it’s actually pretty good now. It’s got achievement support, system metrics, and capture tools—all helpful for the serious gamer. The latest addition is a real-time FPS counter, which can be pinned as an overlay in just about any game. It charts a graph, too, demonstrating how stable your frame rate is. MAKE – USE – CREATE 58 Advanced VirtualBox tips and tricks 62 High refresh rate monitor tweaks for competitive gamers 70 Enhance your video soundtracks with Audacity STAFF WRITER HEATSUNK I’ve mentioned this before, but it aggravates me, so I’ll do it again. What’s with the current obsession with stuffing…

ASK A PRO PLAYER about what’s really important in a competitive gaming setup, and they’ll all tell you the same thing: The truth hertz. As nice as it is to have RGB everything whirling away under your hands, and an RTX 2080 Ti churning out frames like tissue paper going through an industrial mulcher, it’s refresh rate that often provides the biggest performance benefit of all. Improved reaction times, easier player movement prediction, and an overall sensation of smoothness with the mouse are all marginal gains that add up to something substantial at the top level. And because we all fancy ourselves as an undiscovered S1mple, we go out and buy the kind of componentry that the pros use, lost in the fantasy that every failure and subsequent tea-bagging in…

WOULD YOU LIKE to use the same video-editing software as your favorite film-makers? Lightworks has been used on Pulp Fiction, Heat, The Wolf of Wall Street, and many more—and you can use it for your own videos, too. The core app is free, but if you’re a pro, you’ll want to shell out for extra tools and the highest resolution exporting; for most of us, though, free is just great. The app contains everything you need to edit movies and export to common file formats and services such as YouTube. Before you decide to make Star Wars in the shed, a word of warning: Video editing is very demanding on your PC, so it might be wise to keep things simple while you’re learning the ropes. And don’t let other…

RATHER APPROPRIATELY for a computer named after the lead vessel in an alien armada, the ROG Mothership looks like something from a science-fiction movie. More specifically, the bulky design and weight evoke an air of ’90s comedy sci-fi, like something a grumpy Agent Kay might struggle to use while Will Smith hovers in the middle distance. Unlike the technology of the time, however, this Mothership is a computational powerhouse, packing everything from 64GB of memory to a ninth-gen Core i9 processor, and more. Like a Microsoft Surface Pro that’s been on a particularly glorious Burger King diet, this hulking laptop’s keyboard folds down and detaches from the main body, but don’t be fooled—this is no convertible machine. The keyboard doesn’t fold around to the back of the unit, and while…

IT SEEMS LIKE (and indeed it was) only last month that we reviewed something calling itself the “World’s Fastest Mouse.” Now here comes Cooler Master, hopped up on extravagance juice, pouring scorn on its 16,000 dpi rivals with claims of a ludicrous 24,000 dpi sensor. That’s just one component of a mouse that, looking at its specs alone, basically seems like a monument to overcompensation. But is this the divorced dad sports car of mice, or merely something that has no time for compromise? Even the shell is design-heavy. It’s a truly solid and moderately weighty build, all angles and sharp edges, all of which are mercifully out of the way of your hand in normal use. There’s a textured finish to the top, etched right into the plastic, so…

PRETTY SOON, we’re going to need a new genre flash to describe games. Instead of “shooter” or “puzzle-platformer,” perhaps we should just put “Ubisoft.” Games under the Ubi umbrella trade systems and ideas like bacteria trade antibiotic resistance. This means you know exactly what you’re going to get when you start up the game, whether it’s Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs, or The Division. Ghost Recon has been part of the open-world mush since 2017’s Wildlands. Breakpoint is similar in many ways, but your special forces infiltrators are in action on the fictional island of Auroa, rather than the real country of Bolivia. Much less chance of setting off a diplomatic incident that way. The bad guy this time is an ex-Ghost, Lt. Col. Walker. He and your custom Ghost Lead,…

WE ALL NEED Wi-Fi to survive, from checking social media to doing office work. If you’re a gamer, a streamer, or you work with videos, you need it even more. And for Wi-Fi, we need routers; not very exciting, but Asus has done its best to make its latest option look cool. The AiMesh AX6100 Wi-Fi system has a symmetrical, spider-like design across two routers, designed to encompass even larger homes with a maximum coverage of 5,500 square feet. With new high-speed Wi-Fi 6 and connectivity to any other routers in your home, the AX6100 provides total coverage, even supporting legacy Wi-Fi 5 and 4 systems. Thanks to the nifty Target Wake Time option, it can even minimize wait times for router signals for your devices, allowing them to sleep…

TWITTER IS TO BAN all political and interest advocacy ads. The news was broken by Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, in a Twitter thread. He said that “forcing” highly optimized and targeted messaging “brings significant risks to politics.” He says that this is a power that “should be earned, not bought,” and “this isn’t about free expression.” The only ads Twitter will allow are ones for voter registration. Twitter’s decision will please some, although it’ll be difficult to enforce completely; “political” can be difficult to define. What of Facebook? The company has been under heavy fire for not doing enough to remove disinformation. Mr. Zuckerberg cited the First Amendment to defend the company’s policy, free speech being held as paramount. Facebook is officially neutral, which has allowed highly spurious content to…

8 ASUS TUF GAMING VG27AQ Whether you buy into the TUF series’s stripped-back aesthetics is a matter of taste, but this is a solid G-Sync IPS monitor. 7 DELL S2719DG A cheaper option that might not look as flashy as others, but gets the job done well with anti-glare and 1ms response time. 6 AOC AGON AG352UCG6 Excellent G-Sync performance on a curved display, plus fantastic color contrast with a blue-light mode for night-time gaming sessions, too. 5 ALIENWARE AW3418DW It’s expensive, but this ultrawide beauty packs a 100Hz refresh rate—overclockable to 120Hz—with a sleek design to boot. 4 ACER PREDATOR XB321HK This G-Sync monitor is reasonably priced for a 4K screen, thanks to its lack of superfluous HDR features. 3 ASUS ROG SWIFT PG27UQ 4K, 144Hz, and a ton…

> Surface Solutions > Inactive Hyperlinks > Handling Handoffs Surface RT Updates I have a Surface RT, the old-school first edition, and hope you can advise me. I had ditched this archaic device for an Android tablet, which worked great, but alas was taken by an ex-girlfriend in a situation I also wish you could help me with (but will spare you). I write a lot, so brought the RT back to life—or so I thought. The problems are beyond belief. I’ve checked with Microsoft, Googled until my brain hurts, and this Surface RT is just unable to update properly or use the Store, which makes it further obsolete because I can’t receive anything considered new (8.1 RT), thanks to an error regarding network speed. I’ve checked my Internet connection,…

UNSURPRISINGLY, when it comes to liquid-cooling PCs, the more experience you have, the easier they become to build. However, even after spending three days together, and the system was finally primed, our photographer and system-builder turned to each other with a look of confusion: It’s never this easy. Usually, if it can go wrong, it does. Yet we hit our deadline, nothing leaked, no tubes had to be replaced or reseated, and it all worked. The system looks incredible, but as with all builds, it’s not without its flaws. So, what would we change, what would we do differently if we had more time, and what will we do going forward? TUBING TWEAKS The biggest issue from an aesthetic perspective is some of the tubing runs, most notably the one…

WHEN IT COMES TO MEDIA, your PC has everything covered, right? There’s Kodi, Plex, or Emby for starters, managing your music, movies, and TV with aplomb. Except there’s something missing…. Everyone loves a good story, and audiobooks (along with radio-style dramatizations) provide an easy way to devour books when focused on other tasks, whether driving long distances or tweaking your PC’s hardware. The obvious place to go for an audiobook fix is Audible, but it ties you into a proprietary ecosystem that requires you to purchase your books outright via one-off fees or a recurring subscription. Furthermore, you’re indebted to Audible’s own apps and servers for accessing your books. That’s fine if you’re a fan of paying for streaming services, but the likes of Plex, along with audio-only services such…

To start configuring Booksonic, visit “Settings → Media folders” to specify where your audiobooks are stored. This is where you can take advantage of Booksonic’s support for multiple users, dividing up your library into subfolders, then creating separate libraries for each. Click “Save” to enable your changes, and “Scan media folders now” to start populating Booksonic with your books. Once done, switch to the “Users” tab to create individual profiles for other people in your household (or further afield if you’re opening access to the Internet). Configure individual levels of access—including which libraries they can use—and set a bit rate if you’re worried about bandwidth. Finally, click “Save.” Users can then log into Booksonic with their own account, and configure things via the “Personal,” “Players,” and “Shared Media” tabs. To…

LUMINAR 4 ARRIVED LAST MONTH, and sees Skylum’s image-editing app really come into its own with new “AI” cleverness and a general overhaul of its features. It still resembles Lightroom more than Photoshop, with its ability to display every image in a folder and let you take your pick of which to edit. It’s non-destructive, so you never save over your original file, instead exporting a new one that represents your changes. The AI features are particularly interesting, providing image analysis and improvement options that can be applied as a one-shot “Look” or as an “Edit” that gives you more control over the outcome. There’s everything from all-over image enhancement to smart sky replacement and portrait-centered tools. A free trial of Luminar can be obtained from http://skylum.com/luminar (drop down the…

WORRIED THAT YOUR VIDEOS SOUND AMATEURISH? Is the sound dull, or the background noisy? Perhaps you’re a YouTuber who wants to give your videos an edge, or a DIY film-maker seeking enhanced audio and sound effects. Before sinking time or money into big editing suites, check out what can be done on the easiest editor of them all: Audacity. It’s available on Windows, Linux, and macOS, with a mature codebase and intuitive interface that has become something of a standard among audio enthusiasts. If you want to tweak your video’s sound, you need to extract it first, then put it back in the video when you’re done, so we’ve included a short guide to this—see the box on the opposite page. We picked Kdenlive for our video editor, because it’s…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Nvidia launched its new GTX 16-series with the GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660, and GTX 1650 seeking to join the ranks of the best graphics cards. The lack of ray-tracing hardware is interesting after last year’s RTX 20-series, but it makes sense for the mid-range and lower markets. When Nvidia refreshed the RTX lineup with the Super models, we didn’t expect to see that extend into the GTX range, yet here we are. The GTX 1660 Super now exists, leveraging the same Turing architecture and TU116 GPU. We’re not saying the card is bad by any means, but it ends up overlapping the GTX 1660 Ti in many respects. It still has the GPU core counts and clock speeds of the GTX 1660, but it gets GDDR6…

PROFESSIONAL-GRADE NAS units tend to cost a pretty penny, with new features such as 10GbE support and Btrfs snapshot file security frequently driving the prices up into four figures. So, when TerraMaster revealed the F5-422, a five-bay NAS box with superfast Ethernet, extensive RAID support, and simultaneous access for up to 500 users, we were intrigued. Then suspicious, as the F5-422 costs just $600, practically half the price of a comparable professional NAS system from industry big-names such as Synology and QNAP. Yet, as we set up and tested this device, we were hard pushed to find any problems. Yes, the exterior is nothing special, with some cheap-feeling plastic parts, but a NAS box doesn’t have to look good. The outer chassis is solid metal, sufficient to prevent significant damage…

> Windows 10 Webcams > Switching to AMD > Bargain Buys Webcam Problems? A Google search suggests that the Microsoft Lifecam HD-3000 does not work with Microsoft Windows 10, either 32-bit or 64-bit. The same is also true for the Logitech C920. Were any of the eight webcams reviewed on page 19 of the October issue of Maximum PC tested successfully with Windows 10 64-bit? –Robert Rue EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ALAN DEXTER, RESPONDS: Given that the Lifecam is a Microsoft piece of hardware, you’d assume that it would definitely work with Windows 10, but there do appear to be plenty of users who have had problems—although we never had an issue in our testing. Some reports have the webcams working fine, only to be knocked out by the big Windows updates,…