Table of contents for April 2017 in Maximum PC

Gaming is a common passion of PC enthusiasts, and it challenges manufacturers to continually push the envelope with their hardware. It’s not the only crux upon which computational performance sits, but it’s one of the biggest, raking in an astonishing $36 billion every year, so it’s easy to see why companies want a chunk of the pie. We spoke to PNY’s EMEA marketing manager, Jonathan Filleau, about how PNY is taking advantage of this, and what we’re likely to see from the Paris New York company this year. Maximum PC: It’s fair to say PNY has traditionally been more oriented towards largescale businesses and design houses, things like that. Can you give us a little insight as to why you’ve decided to target the gaming market so aggressively in the…

There’s plenty of help— offline and online—waiting for you with PowerShell. The obvious place to start is with its own built-in help tools. Type the following: help cmdlet Replace “cmdlet” with your cmdlet’s or alias’s name. You’ll receive a prompt that the more detailed help files require installing, but to avoid a string of error messages, first close and restart PowerShell as an administrator, then type: Update-Help A green progress bar appears, and then the files are added, one module at a time—don’t be surprised to end with an error message or two, which can be safely ignored. Close and restart PowerShell again. Now the help files have been replaced, use the following command: Get-Help cmdlet You can add some handy parameters: “-detailed” (“Get-Help cmdlet -detailed”) provides a list of…

NINE THOUSAND of your hard-earned dollars would buy you this behemoth. It’s a gaming notebook—if you can call it that—unlike any other. A titan in its field. The pinnacle of all you could possibly achieve with the laptop form factor. Packing an arsenal of the latest hardware, of which even the most exuberant PC enthusiast would be jealous, the 21 X sits on the cusp of a new concept: that curved screen. Sitting in front of you is a 21:9 superwide, IPS, G-Sync, curved screen, with a resolution of 2560x1080. Powering that screen are two GeForce GTX 1080s operating in SLI, fully capable of being overclocked on demand, simultaneously co-ordinated by the phenomenal processing power of Intel’s Core i7-7820HK, a four-cored, eight-threaded Kaby Lake powerhouse of a chip. On top…

About iFixit iFixit is a global community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people fix things through free online repair manuals and teardowns. iFixit believes that everyone has the right to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit www.ifixit.com. BACKGROUND Oculus finally catches up with the big boys with the release of its ultra-responsive Oculus Touch controllers. Requiring a second IR camera and featuring a whole mess of tactile and capacitive input options, these controllers are bound to be chock-full of IR LEDs and tons of exciting tech—but we’ll only know for sure if we tear them down! MAJOR TECH SPECS • An additional Oculus Sensor • A Rockband adapter • Two IR-emitting Touch controllers, with finger tracking and a mess of buttons KEY FINDINGS • Using our…

AFTER TESTING CRAZY multi-GPU setups for the past few issues, it was nice to kick back with a sleek, straightforward system. High-end machines are fun to play with, but their power levels (and price tags) are overkill for the majority of users, and SLI is becoming increasingly frustrating to deal with. This month, we’re looking at the Lenovo Y900 RE, a mid-tower desktop featuring top-end (but reasonable) components, accompanied by a 27-inch Lenovo Y27g RE curved monitor. The Y900 RE itself is a respectable system aimed mostly at gamers. The Intel Core i7-6700K CPU is clocked at 4.0GHz, but a “one-key turbo” button can push it up to 4.5GHz. That’s enough to not bottleneck the GPU, and should be able to handle streaming or light video editing—though it would have…

WE’RE FREQUENTLY TOLD that we can’t have it all, but just as frequently, that’s a lie. You can’t work hard enough to attain a reasonable standard of living and still have a fulfilling life outside. You can’t have jelly on your spaghetti. You have to choose. Corsair seems to disagree, as the K95 Platinum does, indeed, have it all. As long as you’re prepared to stump up a frankly eye-watering amount of green. Yes, for the price of a Radeon RX 480, you can get a mechanical keyboard with all the trimmings. Macro keys, Cherry MX Speed switches, RGB lighting inserted into places you never thought possible. Aircraft-grade brushed anodized aluminum. Eight whole megabytes of storage for swappable profiles. A detachable, double-sided wrist rest. An honest-to-goodness, proper USB 2.0 port,…

RESIDENT EVIL 4 was quite good. However, the series has seen a bit of a downturn in quality since 2005, so hopes were high that Capcom could return to past triumphs with the seventh main-line game. It certainly delivers. Resi 7 is a break from the fast-headshotting crowd-control style of the past decade, dropping even the once-innovative over-the-shoulder camera in favor of good old first-person. The other thing that’s changed is the globetrotting of Resi 6. Resi 7 is tightly framed, much of its action taking place around one house in the Louisiana swamps. It’s a throwback to the older games that were set in a lone mansion, but also a step forward, as it allows the designers to concentrate on puzzles and scares, rather than creating vast environments. Claustrophobia…

How much RAM do you really need for gaming? Time was that 4GB was more than enough for gaming and most daily tasks, but those days are in the past. If you have too little RAM—4GB, say— there’s a good chance that a lot of the games you want to play just won’t run, or at least won’t run well. Mass Effect: Andromeda, for example, lists 8GB of RAM as the required minimum, falling in line with many other modern games. And even for those that have a minimum of 4 or 6GB, 8GB is definitely recommended, because other programs on your PC run in the background. http://bit.ly/1xlbsmO…

IT’S HERE FOR REAL. AMD’s new processor architecture is available, and it’s just as fast and as competitive as we’d hoped. AMD has started at the top, by releasing three eightcore chips: the $329 3.0/3.7GHz (base clock and boost) 1700, the $399 3.4/3.8GHz 1700X, and the $499 3.6/4.0GHz 1800X. The “X” stands for eXtreme. Performance is very strong, and at those prices, Intel’s Core i7s are starting to look woefully poor value. Initial benchmarks put Ryzen on a par with or better than Intel’s finest (see our review of the 1800X on page 76). The overclockers have already been at play, and one bright spark has produced a world-record Cinebench R15 score of 2,449, achieved at 5.2GHz, with the help of some judicious cooling. Pre-orders have been huge; currently, the…

At first glance, the Windows PowerShell looks to be a facsimile of the Command Prompt, but to dismiss it as such leaves you missing a huge trick. In fact, PowerShell is a platform designed to automate many Windows tasks through a clever scripting language. It’s based on the .NET Framework, which gives it lots of flexibility and scope, particularly when you access it through the PowerShell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment) program, which provides even more useful tools and shortcuts—such as syntax highlighting and IntelliSense tab completion—to help you build the perfect script to achieve what you want. If you’ve already dabbled with the Command Prompt—and .bat batch files in particular—you’re already well on the road to getting to grips with PowerShell. Many familiar commands work in PowerShell, too—thanks to a…

By default, everything you set up in PowerShell— variables, functions, and other customizations, such as the color of warning messages—is lost when you close the current session. If you’d like to preserve this across multiple sessions, you need to create a profile. First, display the path to the Windows PowerShell profile by typing: $profile test-path $profile This reveals that the profile will reside in your Documents folder, while the second command returns a value of “False,” indicating that the profile doesn’t yet exist. To create a profile, type: new-item -path $profile -itemtype file -force Type the following to open it in Notepad: notepad $profile A blank document is opened, ready for you to record your variables and other customizations. For example, to change the warning message as outlined in the…

Is Intel’s new 3D XPoint tech the biggest paradigm shift in computing since the introduction of silicon chips? Is it merely the basis of faster SSDs? Or is this story nothing more than a combination of vaporware and conspiracy theories? 3D XPoint is one of the most mysterious technologies to come out of Intel in years. The first products derived from it are imminent, yet we don’t fully understand what it is or how it works. It’s not even totally clear what it’s really intended to do. Partly that’s down to a lack of clarity on Intel’s (and its partner, Micron’s) behalf. The messaging has been mixed, both in terms of the intended applications for 3D XPoint, and the insight Intel has provided into its technical underpinnings. It’s the latter,…

By the time you read these very words, AMD could be back on roaring form. The first of its Ryzen CPUs have launched, and the early indications are that the new architecture is going to sock it straight to Intel with CPU models up to eight cores, and therefore give $1,000 Core i7 CPUs a run for their money at less than half the price. Intel, of course, will hardly be blown out of the water. It’s been taking things very easy in recent years, and has quite a bit of performance in hand. It can easily up its game, and no doubt will. But there’s also a chance that 3D XPoint could give Intel a killer advantage, even without taking into account the more exotic end of the spectrum…

YOU’LL NEED THIS NCRYPTED CLOUD The free account contains all the functionality you need. SUPPORTED CLOUD ACCOUNT nCrypted Cloud currently works with OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and Egnyte. EVER WONDERED JUST how secure your data is when you upload it to the cloud? Providers such as OneDrive and Dropbox make a big song and dance about the fact your data is encrypted, but who holds the all-important encryption keys? If those keys are stored with your data, as is the case with most cloud providers, it leaves one glaring weakness in your secure backup plan. If you’re serious about protecting your data, you need to add extra layers of encryption to it that aren’t left in the hands of your cloud storage provider. nCrypted Cloud separates your encryption keys…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI The brilliant mini-computer costs under $50. See www.raspberrypi.org. YOU PROBABLY REMEMBER THE NEWS. In December 2016, it was reported that the infamous Mirai worm had infected a substantial number of routers used by customers of UK ISP TalkTalk, stealing their Wi-Fi passwords. The worm exploited the default admin passwords that are hardwired into a number of machines, and although the focus was on enslaving devices to take part in DOS (Denial of Service) attacks, the implications are staggering. Even those handfuls of users who take the trouble to change their router’s default passwords seldom bother to use firewalls. In plain English, this means your router’s settings, and theoretically devices on your home wireless network, could be laid bare by attackers. Fortunately, the Raspberry Pi comes…

Once enabled, Ufw automatically launches on startup, blocking all incoming connections, and allowing all outgoing ones. This might not be the ideal setup for you, particularly if you like to connect to your Pi via SSH or VNC. To configure Ufw, use Terminal on your Pi. Ufw recognizes most services like SSH, so in most cases you can enable access using ufw allow . For instance: sudo ufw allow ssh To see a full list of services you can enable in this way, simply run the following command: nano /etc/services If your service isn’t listed, you can simply open the port it uses. For instance, RealVNC, which can be used to connect remotely to the Pi’s desktop, runs on Port 5800. To have Ufw open it, run: sudo ufw allow…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PHOTOSHOP Available from www.adobe.com. A SOURCE IMAGE You need a portrait, ideally with a fair amount of background, to simplify the task. BE WARNED: This is time-consuming. If you’re not prepared to draw loads of little triangles, perhaps you should skip past. However, if that kind of work with Photoshop’s Polygonal Lasso tool leaves you breathless with anticipation, this low-poly portrait is a great way to create a striking representation of a friend or loved one to hang on your wall or something. We just tell you how to make it, not what to do with it afterward. You will, as ever, need a suitable source image to work with. We’ve chosen a full-face portrait of a beautiful young model, and halfway through the process wished we’d…

IS THE MARKET FOR M.2 SSDs with support for the NVMe control protocol already a bit stagnant? You certainly get the sense that it’s dominated by the usual suspects. More specifically, Samsung seems to have things sewn up with its 960 Pro drives. So we extend a warm welcome to PNY with this, its entry-level enthusiast M.2 drive. It’s powered by the Phison PS5007 NVMe controller, which has been shaking things up versus some arguably more established control chips, and hooks up via a quad-channel PCI Express 3.0 interface. It’s a quad-core controller, with some fairly lofty claims when it comes to internal house cleaning and in turn minimizing the performance delta between a full and empty drive. It also sports eight memory channels for maximum peak performance. As for…

THANKS TO the aggressive prices of the latest UHD TVs, the value proposition of any given PC monitor is pretty parlous. Take the new ViewSonic XG2703-GS. For around $700, you get a paltry 27 inches of LCD panel, and a mere 2560x1440 pixels. In UHD TV land, the astonishing reality is that $250 will buy you 40 inches and the full 4K complement of 3840x2160 pixels. That’s nigh on one third the money for roughly twice the screen, by the major metrics. Of course, UHD TVs are not directly comparable with PC monitors. What’s more, ViewSonic’s latest looks pretty clever next to what is arguably its nemesis, the Asus ROG Swift PG279Q. Both monitors check an awful lot of the same boxes. We’re talking 27-inch, WQHD resolution, IPS panel technology,…

We have questions. Questions that need answering. OK, maybe not quite on the same level as Gandalf needing to know whether a certain golden trinket belonging to Bilbo Baggins was wielded by the dark lord Sauron, but we think they’re just as valid. After all, isn’t the advancement of technology and silent computing just an extended metaphorical allegory of that servant of Morgoth’s rise to power? Too much? OK, back to something a little more rational. The questions of which we’re speaking are: Is it possible to build an almost fanless PC? One that has little, if any, capacity to generate noise? It’s a concept we’ve mused over ever since we crafted our Dream Machine in 2016. The Core i7-6950X located at the heart of our $10,000 build was cooled…

We’re featuring the most recent release of PowerShell—version 5.1—and it comes preinstalled with the latest version of Windows 10. All you need to do is launch it, either from the Start menu’s “All Apps” list, or by typing “powershell” into the “Search” box. You can then right-click its Taskbar icon and choose “Pin to Taskbar” for a convenient shortcut going forward. Windows 8 and 8.1 users currently use PowerShell 4. If you want to upgrade to version 5.1, simply download the correct version—x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit)—from https:// msdn.microsoft.com/enus/ powershell/wmf/5.1/ install-configure. Doubleclick it, and follow the installation prompts. Windows 7 ships with an even older version of PowerShell, dating back to 2009. To upgrade that, you first need to verify the .NET Framework 4.5.2 is installed (a link to it…

It’s going to be a while before we’ll be able to uncover the full implications of Intel’s 3D XPoint tech. But we do now know what shape the first products will take. At CES in Las Vegas, earlier this year, Intel divulged initial details of its first 3D XPoint products. To be sold under the new Optane brand, we’re talking solid-state storage in the M.2 form factor, and initially 16GB and 32GB capacities. Somewhat oddly, the marketing pitch for Optane has involved the shortcomings of using a “spinning hard disk” for data storage. That’s true, of course, but the fact that Optane drives are solid state and faster than magnetic hard drives surely isn’t what sets them apart. It’s the distinction compared to existing solidstate drives that makes Optane interesting.…

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDES TO IMPROVING YOUR PC TIP OF THE MONTH FREE VOIP SERVERS Are you tired of shelling out for TeamSpeak or Ventrilo servers? Then we recommend you jump ship and head over to Discord instead. We’ve already given it a try—along with the 25 million other players who have signed up during its first year—and can vouch for its fantastic-quality, free voice-over-IP servers. How can it possibly make any profit? Must be witchcraft…. www.discordapp.com MAKE – USE – CREATE 58 Secure your cloud backups with nCrypted Cloud 62 Protect yourself with a Raspberry Pi-based firewall 70 Breathe life into old gear by building a PC from discarded parts ZAK STOREY REVIEWS EDITOR DREAMING OF COPPER I’m grateful—incredibly so—for what my job enables me to do. Working at Maximum PC…

Its full name, Uncomplicated Firewall, might sound modest, but Ufw is a powerful firewall, and can be used to block access to certain websites. Although, technically, you can also do this with Dnsmasq, this would be a form of “DNS hijacking,” which is a rather dastardly procedure, usually carried out by scammers. The advantage of using Ufw is that it blocks domains by IP address. This means you have to write down only one rule per address, rather than remember the various domains and subdomains used by sites. Imagine trying to block every variant of Facebook.com, for instance: fb.com, m.facebook.com, the list goes on. It stands to reason, then, that in order to block websites by IP address, you need that information. Open Terminal on your Pi, or connect via…

YOU’LL NEED THIS BITWARDEN Head to https://bitwarden.com. SOMETHING TO PROTECT An Internet-connected PC and smartphone. WE ALL KNOW WE SHOULDN’T RE-USE PASSWORDS, but with so many websites requiring user accounts, creating a different, secure, memorable login for each is all but impossible. That’s before you consider how you’re going to change them regularly (a policy enforced by some companies). This leads to an problem: If someone can crack the password for one of your accounts, it can open the door to many others. That’s where password managers come in, storing all your account details in a central location, and automatically completing login screens so you don’t have to remember them yourself (or jot them down on sticky notes). The password vault is secured by a single master password, which is…

BACK IN 1944, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, when talking about slightly more important things than a wireless headset, said that, “The price of freedom … is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.” How right he was; while there’s a lot to absolutely adore about Logitech’s wireless G533 headset, there are also a few things you need to endure. So, let’s get through those first. Closed-back earcups are a bit of a science to get right. These wobbly, circa- 30-degree twisters should, at least in theory, clamp down on a head of any shape. But we found an element of looseness, even after properly adjusting the decent ratcheted headband. You do settle in to the slightly sloppy fit after a…

ALL-IN-ONES LIKE THIS ARE undeniably the future of processor cooling. They’ve come a long way over the last six years, from leaky, haphazard, nightmare-installation water blocks, to smooth, easy-to-mount, effective, bomb-proof pieces of equipment. So, what on earth could you do to make these things any better than they already are? After all, they’ve sported RGB lighting since the Corsair H100i days, and apart from improving fan design, and beefing up the thickness of the radiator, there’s little, as far as we know, that can be done regarding performance gains. So, appearance is the easier option to improve. But when you consider the size of the footprint you have to work on, what can you do to reinvigorate the looks department? What can you do to make people stop and…

THERE’S AN OBVIOUS POINT of comparison when considering Sniper Elite, Rebellion’s sneak-around-and-kill-Nazis game: Hitman. But while IO’s episodic title sees you travel the world in search of individual targets, in Sniper Elite everyone’s game for a bullet in the skull. Because they’re Nazis. Dropped into a plot concerning Hitler’s latest wonder weapon, Karl Fairburne finds himself in 1940s Italy, acting as a kind of one-man army. He totes a sighted rifle, plus a couple of secondary weapons, and a holdall of explosives with which he can blow his own cover. The game’s main focus is on the rifle, and stealthy, long-range kills, but it also encourages you to get up close and personal by making you search corpses and slaughter everyone you come across. The game’s kill-cams keep up the…