Inhaltsverzeichnis für May 2019 in Maximum PC

AFTER A YEAR’S HIATUS, the Dream Machine returns. And what a return. Boasting not one, but two systems, both water-cooled, and fitted out with the latest and greatest hardware, it has drawn gasps even before the overall component price is revealed—at which point the gasps turn to shock, but that’s the nature of going above and beyond the norm. The Dream Machine is not reasonable, it’s excessive. This year, the Dream Machine hasn’t been without its issues, and while you could say that pretty much every year, sorting out two systems comes with its own special level of stress, and not just from trying to balance power between two very different form factors. Throw in a healthy amount of water cooling, the added fun of two separate power supplies, and…

IT LOOKS AS IF WE’RE going to get a third major player in the graphics card market as Intel announces that it’s getting ready to launch its own discrete graphics card in 2020. Intel says it will be branded Xe, and include mid-range, “enthusiast,” and data center AI cards. The GPUs will be built around the Gen11 integrated graphics architecture. The Gen11 iGPU is set to appear first in the 10nm Ice Lake processors (which use the new Sunny Cove core architecture). It has up to 64 execution units, an increase from the 24 on the Gen9, which give it 2.67 times the computational power. This will give Intel’s processors some pretty tasty graphics without outside help, on a par with the Radeon Vega 8 in AMD’s APUs. Putting together…

THE NON-PROFIT GROUP in charge of USB specifications, the USB Implementers Forum, has announced the initial specs for USB 4.0, and that USB 3.2 is finally ready. And it has done a spot of name changing in the process. Just as USB 3.0 morphed into USB 3.1 Gen1, USB 3.2 will absorb the previous USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 specifications. So USB 3.1 Gen 1 is now to be known as USB 3.2 Gen 1, while USB 3.1 Gen 2 becomes USB 3.2 Gen 2. On top of these is USB Gen 2x2, the new part. As the name indicates, this gives double the data rate, reaching a theoretical maximum of 20Gb/s. This is achieved by doubling the physical data channels; it’s essentially two USB 3.1 Gen 1 10Gb/s connections…

8 PIMAX 5K PLUS Fragile, expensive, and demanding a very powerful rig to function, Pimax’s attempt at high-end VR tech met little success. 7 OCULUS GO Despite being a frontrunner in the field of modern VR with its Rift headset, Oculus failed to impress with its later offerings. 6 VIRTUALITY 1000 An early British attempt at VR, this headset came with a wide array of peripherals, from plastic rifles to aircraft yokes. 5 VIRTUAL BOY This list would be incomplete without Nintendo’s infamous foray into headset gaming. Anyone for red-tinted Mario tennis? 4 GOOGLE CARDBOARD Not as much a failure as others, Google’s ultra-cheap offering nonetheless failed to leave a lasting impression. 3 LENOVO EXPLORER The most recent entry on this list, the 2017 Explorer was sadly too little too…

AT LAST, THE BEAST of bedlam rises again from the mist. Its elegant form glinting in the sunlight, as those charged rays sheen across its metallic surface. Dream Machine 2019 hath cometh, with back-breaking labor, a price list that only the divine could conjure, and a time frame in which to build it that makes memory latencies look lethargic. Dream Machine is always a labor of love, a challenge undertaken by only the most ardent of PC enthusiasts working for the magazine. Not only does it require an almost barbarous level of organization and charisma to will this thing into existence, but it also stretches those who undertake the mighty burden to the absolute limits of their creative output. As much as you build it, craft it, develop it and…

WHEN WE’RE ROLLING off our system specs in forum signatures, water cooler conversations, wedding speeches, and the like, we generally don’t tend to go into much detail about the audio componentry. After all, how many of us actually know the capabilities of our onboard sound chips? And who can tell the difference between 16-bit and 32-bit audio anyway? “Enough mini-jacks to connect a 5.1 speaker system” just doesn’t roll off the tongue as readily as “four RTX Titans,” and while we’re able to measure the difference between video components almost too easily—hands up who plays every game with an FPS counter in the top corner—the same simply isn’t true when it comes to sound. That makes it tricky when we ask: Should we get a soundcard? We can’t quantify the question…

If you’re serious about music production, you’re in the market for an entirely different kind of soundcard. There’s a world of professional audio external soundcards out there, but key to figuring out which one to go for is working out the number of inputs you need. If you plan to record several instruments at once—perhaps via mic’ed up amplifiers in addition to direct input—the more the better. Having a couple of XLR and stereo jack inputs would prove particularly handy if you’re recording in this way, and the same goes for capturing vocals on a microphone at the same time as an instrument via DI or MIDI. However, if you simply want to capture one performance at a time, a small and affordable soundcard, such as the Scarlett Studio Solo, featuring…

TIP OF THE MONTH ACCESS PREVIEW BUILDS Struggling with Windows updates? Welcome to the club. Our executive editor recently had his rig inform him that the (clearly installed) GPU was non-existent. Windows updating had left it catatonic, but a trip to “Update and Security” under “Settings” reveals options for the Insider Program; electing to download “Just fixes, apps, and drivers” sorted out his problem, so he could return to “Active development of Windows.” STAFF WRITER NEW FACE, NEW PLACE Darn, it’s weird seeing my picture up there. After a few years of freelancing, I’m settling down here at Maximum PC. It’s been fun to play the field as a high-class journalistic prostitute, but all good things must come to an end. It’s nice to have your name on something, and…

1. CONTROL WHAT YOU SEE Filters enable you to restrict what HomeBank shows you. They’re based on a tightly defined set of criteria, and can be applied both to the “Statistics” report and any account screen. Set up a filter in a report by clicking the “Edit Filter” button at the top of the report window. When viewing an account, you need to select “Tools > Filter.” 2. SELECT FILTER TYPE AND OPTION There are eight filter types available, including “Dates,” “Payees,” and “Accounts.” You can select one or more types to construct your filter. Start by selecting a filter option: “Include” means only those transactions meeting the criteria (a date range, for instance) are included; “Exclude” means transactions falling outside the criteria are included instead. 3. SET YOUR FILTERS…

VIDEOS ARE A GREAT WAY TO SHARE special experiences and events, and making them doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Shotcut is a completely free open-source video editor that’s easy to use, and is packed with an impressive selection of filters and special effects that can help bring your home video projects to life. If you’ve ever used Windows Movie Maker, Shotcut will feel immediately familiar, but even if you haven’t, its design is intuitive enough that you’ll be able to master it in moments. To get your project started, all you need is a collection of media files (videos, audio, and photos), an Internet connection, and 30 minutes. Once you’ve finished, you’ll have a video that looks and sounds as though it was made with professional software, and…

YEAH, AMD’S WON. Let’s just leave it at that, shall we? 32 cores and 64 threads in a mainstream processor. If there ever was a core war, it’s surely done with now. At least as far as the consumer market’s concerned, anyway. Honestly, this thing is just crazy. It houses 64MB of L3 cache, 16MB of L2 cache, and 3MB of L1 cache, and comes with a base clock of 3GHz, boosting up to 4.2GHz on a single core as and when needed. Couple that with an insanely low 250W TDP and a $1,730 price tag, and we’re done—what else is there to say? Seriously, Intel’s best bet against this gargantuan part is its “mainstream” Xeon W-3175X. You know, the 28-core chip that comes in at $3,175. And that’s not…

DRAWING A CROWD in the Maximum PC office takes a special piece of hardware. The problem is, we’ve seen it all before. So, it’s a measure of the sheer visual drama delivered by Philips’s new 49-inch monitor that it brought proceedings to a standstill. Everyone had to stop and look. The Philips Brilliance 499P9H is not actually the first 49-inch panel on the market to offer that crazy 32:9 aspect ratio—Samsung has done it already—but Philips has upped the ante in terms of pixel count. Where Samsung’s 49-inchers topped out at 3,840 across and a mere 1,080 vertical pixels, the 499P9H clocks in at 5120x1440. That’s a very useful uptick in vertical resolution, and immediately offsets the main objection faced by the Samsung alternatives. Sheer scale and resolution aside, the…

THERE ARE TWO WAYS to look at RGB illumination, and each carries equal weight. One tranche of humanity looks at all the pretty lights, the glowing, and the rainbows, and thinks, “This is what my computing hardware needs.” The others peer derisively at colorful gear, and wish it were grayer. Perhaps they even yearn for the return of the tobacco-stained beige of yesteryear. Neither group is correct. RGB done wrong can be distracting, and leave your PC looking cheap and cheesy, and there is such a thing as too little, as Asus’ ROG Strix Flare oppositely proves. Editors tend not to like it when we talk about RGB devices with the LEDs off, particularly before discussing the lights themselves, so let’s make this quick: Whack the light button on the…

GOOGLE IS TO launch a game streaming service called Stadia, already dubbed “Netflix for games.” It promises to deliver more gaming power than Microsoft’s and Sony’s consoles combined, with 4K at 60fps possible on even the most modest of hardware. Games will run in Chrome browsers, Pixel devices, and TVs with Chromecast dongles. Other than this, it is platform independent; you can play any game on any device with a healthy Internet connection. According to Google, Stadia addresses all the limitations of traditional gaming systems, and brings “a game platform for everyone.” There will be just one bit of hardware, an optional controller, which includes buttons to activate Google Assistant, and to stream your efforts to YouTube. It will communicate directly to the Stadia game servers via your Wi-Fi to…

THE NEXT UPDATE of Windows 10, the April 2019 Update, is nearly upon us, and among the slew of new features is the ability to uninstall updates if there are serious problems. This follows the troublesome October 2018 Update, which caused all sorts of problems, including the possible deletion of files from My Documents. The initial version was withdrawn, patched, and withdrawn again after new bugs emerged. The update was three months late. According to the support documents for the latest update build, if Windows can’t start properly, due to corrupt files, driver errors, errant Registry keys, or such, and a recent update is the suspect, Windows will remove it, and try again. If this works, it will block the update for 30 days, to give a chance for it…

AMD was limping along with a flawed Bulldozerderived architecture and FX-series processors, the best of which were only about equal to Intel’s Core i5 processors—but with two to three times the power use under load. In short, AMD CPUs were struggling and Intel CPUs were coasting. There were faster options, specifically Intel’s HEDT parts, such as the i7-6800K for LGA2011-v3, but pricing could get just as extreme as the model names. Ryzen changed all that. AMD’s individual cores still couldn’t quite match Intel, but with twice the cores/threads for roughly the same price, enthusiasts suddenly had an alternative. The result was a frenzy of CPU releases in 2017 and 2018. Now, heading into the third year of Ryzen, AMD is prepping its Zen 2 architecture for release. Unlike the previous…

LENGTH OF TIME: 20–30 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EXTREME 1 TWIN SYSTEM PREP THIS TIME AROUND, our Dream Machine is extra special, because we’re fitting two full systems in one super-tower chassis, under one cooling loop. It’s a complex affair, but the first thing we knew we needed to do was prep both the motherboards. That meant seating the CPUs into their respective LGA sockets, installing the memory, and more importantly, installing the CPU blocks ahead of time. The Phanteks blocks are actually fairly simple to fit, with the only noticeable challenge being the backplate on the ITX build requiring us to position the stand-offs correctly. Other than that, they also come with RGB cables. Those are a little funky to set up, and if we’re honest, we’re not convinced…

You’ve seen it on audio equipment boxes and mentioned in headset reviews. You know higher is better. But what is a signal-to-noise ratio? Expressed in decibels, it’s a measurement of how much useful, clean information passes along the signal, in relation to the amount of noise, or unwanted data. So, if a soundcard promises a 100dB signalto-noise ratio, you can expect a 100dB difference in volume between sounds you want to hear and those you don’t. To put that into context, we perceive total silence at 10dB. Conversation usually occurs at around 60dB (although, let’s face it, we’ve all got that one friend…), and 100dB is the limit of most home and car stereos. A Formula One car revving its engine gives off about 147dB, human eardrums rupture at 195dB, and…

Netgear Orbi Voice RBK50V WE’RE STILL A BIT SCARED OF ALEXA. The ubiquitous presence of digital assistants in our homes, offices, and cars feels faintly threatening, whether it’s Siri, Google, or Amazon’s own offering. Nonetheless, it’s hard to deny how helpful they are, and ordering your speaker to play your favorite jams does resonate with futuristic delight. Enter Netgear’s newest offering: the Orbi Voice, a two-part design that includes a high-end router and smart speaker. The Orbi is chunkier than some other home assistant options, at almost nine inches tall and six inches wide. It’s fairly weighty, too. Next to the Alexa-toting Amazon Echo Dot, it looks like a monster. But that extra size has enabled Netgear to shove more funky tech inside, and its sound quality equals that of…

1. QUICK ACTION BUTTONS The toolbar offers a quick and easy way to access HomeBank’s most popular functions. 2. ACCOUNTS LIST All your accounts are listed here, grouped by category. Double-click one to open its own account window. 3. REPORTS HomeBank provides several reporting tools that give you visual insights into how your finances are performing. 4. TRACK SPENDING The pie chart shown on HomeBank’s main screen gives you a convenient look at how your money is being spent. 5. SCHEDULED PAYMENTS See which recurring transactions—incomings and outgoings—are due in the next few days. 6. ACCOUNT WINDOW Manage each account in a separate window; you can add new transactions as well as view existing ones.…

THERE COULD COME A DAY WHEN WINDOWS 10 is on more ARM devices than it is on X86 devices. Perhaps that sounds a little mad, but Qualcomm (for one) is now pushing out mobile chipsets with more than enough grunt to manage it, and proper laptop manufacturers are jumping aboard the Windows 10 on ARM train—it means better battery life, enhanced mobile connectivity, instant return from standby, and many other quality-of-life improvements that may or may not outweigh the comparatively slashed computing power of running Windows on a RISC-based platform. Fancy trying it yourself, but without any of those benefits? Don’t expect the best results, as the Raspberry Pi is just about the most neutered platform capable of running Windows 10 on ARM, and an SD card is a terrible…

ONCE, IF YOU WANTED TO MAKE AN IMAGE, you would have needed things such as canvas, plaster, or a cave wall, plus some sort of pigment, maybe a brush. And talent. Today, we have no need for any of those—we have PCs. OK, maybe you still need talent. Brushes and canvas aren’t needed, though. And for this tutorial, neither is a Creative Cloud subscription. We’re using Luminar 3 from Skylum, a nondestructive image editing and raw conversion app that’s often compared to Adobe Lightroom, but actually occupies a middle ground between that app and Photoshop. It has full support for layers, enabling you to build up a complex effect in which many different edits interact with one another. It’s easier to use, however, thanks to its copious number of Looks…

THE ORIGINAL ASUS ROG Zephyrus was an intriguing portable gaming rig. At the time, it was the slimmest gaming laptop to offer Nvidia’s top GeForce GTX 1080 graphics. That was thanks to a novel hinged cooling solution that opened out as you raised the screen lid. Clever. Less brilliant was the relatively big bezel around the 15.6-inch LCD panel, which undermined the Zephyrus’s lowprofile pretensions. No longer. For the new Asus ROG Zephyrus S, that bezel has been massively minimized. The result? You get a 17.3-inch display in a chassis that’s only a tiny bit bigger than before. The other ROG Zephyrus attractions largely endure, including the funky cooling, the forward-located keyboard, side-mounted trackpad, magnesiumalloy body, a powerful CPU, and cuttingedge graphics, the latter updated to the latest GeForce RTX…

YOU’RE SPOILED FOR CHOICE when it comes to high-end and mid-range processors right now, but people on a somewhat tighter budget aren’t quite so well catered for. There are numerous reasons for this, some of which are down to technical limitations of the underlying architecture, while others are due purely to marketing decisions. So, what does this Athlon 240GE from AMD bring to the party? And is it a chip you should be considering when you don’t have a huge pile of cash? Before we really get started, there’s one aspect of this chip that needs flagging before going any further, and it could well put you off before we really begin: It offers up just eight PCIe lanes for your graphics card. This is due to the integrated Vega…

WHILE FAR CRY NEW DAWN (opposite) shows the aftermath of an atomic bomb as a sunny land covered in flowers, Metro covers it in ice, mutants, and serious men with guns who don’t whoop like sports fans when they kill you. This different approach leads to a very different game. While Far Cry is a gleeful slog across an open world, Metro keeps things more linear. It’s always sunny in Montana, while in Russia fog and blizzards block the view, and underground tunnels necessitate the use of a flashlight or oil lamp. There’s also a different amount of detail on offer, even if it means you’ll need more GPU grunt to get the most out of it. Metro’s look is one of cold dark metal, of floors you don’t want…

SOMETIMES IT’S BEST to just go simple. Roku has been knocking about in the media streaming market for a while, providing nifty little boxes that turn any screen into a stream machine. The Roku Express is the company’s cheapest offering, a diminutive module that perches beneath your TV or monitor. Unlike Google and Amazon’s products, the Roku has an HDMI cable with a sensible length, so no dangling awkwardly behind the TV like a Chromecast. The Express is controlled with a compact remote—or, much more efficiently, the Roku app. It’s standard stuff, but it does the job. What makes the Roku interesting is its approach to programming. All the usual suspects are here, of course: YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and others, as well as the Roku TV channel, an ad-supported…

HOW DO YOU FEEL about trusting Facebook with your money? It’s developing its own blockchain-based cryptocurrency. There has been no official announcement as yet, although it has been working with distributed ledger technology for a while. Facebook has been on a hiring spree, too, and the DTL development team is headed by the former president of PayPal. It looks as if the initial plan is for people to be able to send money to their WhatsApp contacts without any agent in between, just Facebook, which would take a small slice. Sending money “home” to another country is a huge business, which can attract large fees. Eventually, the new system will be used to sell content through Facebook, from micro-payments for apps upward, turning Facebook into a marketplace. The company has…

Dual-booting is a pain. I’ve begun booting into my Ubuntu installation on my desktop instead of Windows to get work done. However, in order to try out different Linux boxes, it can be a hassle to fire up VirtualBox, grab an ISO, and allocate the resources I think the virtual machine might need. There has to be a better way. And there is. I looked around and discovered GNOME Boxes, a virtualization application for the GNOME desktop. The coolest thing about it is the sheer simplicity. From the first run, you’re greeted with a simplistic interface. When you want to add a new VM, it presents you with a basic list of some great Linux OSes: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora 29, Ubuntu 18.10, openSUSE Leap, and Debian 9. However,…

> Text Size Troubles > Silent Sound > Mystery Slowdowns Windows 10 Font Sizes Hi Doc, I’ve been lucky to have you answer some of my questions in the past, so I’m pressing my luck and asking another one. After upgrading to a new, much more powerful PC, I also purchased a 32-inch LG 32UD59-B monitor with a 4K native resolution. Windows 10 detected the display properly, set it to 3840x2160, and configured the recommended 150 percent scale, at which almost all the on-screen elements are fine. Unfortunately, some of the fonts (such as icon text fonts) are way too small. In older versions of Windows 10 (before the Creators Update, I believe), you could go into the settings and change the icon text size without affecting anything else. But…

The maximum frequency response range of the human ear is 20Hz–20KHz, but that optimistic bracket decreases as we get older, spend our weekends standing next to speakers, and our cells give up trying to renew themselves. So, if we can only hear 15KHz, and the digital conversion process of a given MP3 file chops off a lot of the higher frequencies as it’s compressed into a narrower waveform, we won’t hear the loss in quality as well as someone with that nighsuperhuman 20Hz–20KHz hearing range. People who profess to be able to tell the difference between MP3s of various bitrates and lossless WAV files often talk about hearing “the space between the instruments” and other nebulous sonic details that our written language is too blunt an instrument to capture. What…

Gaming PCs emerged in the 1980s (their specifications would make you laugh now); by the 2000s, custom-built gaming machines were everywhere; and now you can buy just about everything you need off the shelf, from colored cables to whole systems swathed in lights. Tinkering with multipliers and clock frequencies has gone mainstream. If you’re putting together a gaming rig, you’ll want a gaming motherboard—obvious, right? But are these motherboards really worth it? What can a gaming motherboard actually do to improve gaming? In a word: overclocking. This is really what they are all about, squeezing every ounce of performance from your processor and subsystems. You know how this goes: You need a big cooler, an unlocked processor, and the right motherboard chipset. But getting the right motherboard to tie these…

DO YOU STRUGGLE TO STAY on top of your finances? Can’t ever seem to work out exactly where your money goes or how much is in your bank accounts? What you need is HomeBank, a free tool that enables you to record, track, and analyze your financial ins and outs, giving you everything you need to get on top of your money, and stay in control. 1 GET THE SOFTWARE HomeBank for Windows can be downloaded from http://homebank.free.fr/en/; if you’re running Ubuntu Linux, open a Terminal window (press Ctrl-Alt-T), then type the following: $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mdoyen/homebank $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install homebank >> Once installed, launch HomeBank, and a welcome dialog appears, providing a convenient link to the manual, which is also accessible online at http://homebank.free.fr/help/index.html.…

One way to curb your spending is by setting monthly limits on what you spend on specific categories. By default, all accounts are included in budgets. If you want to exclude individual accounts for any reason, open “Manage > Accounts” from the main screen, select your account, and check “Exclude from the budget” on the “Options” tab. Next, set your budget or budgets via “Manage > Budget.” Verify that “Expense” is selected, so only expense-related categories and subcategories are visible. Select the one you want to track. From here, you can set a monthly budget or set budgets for different months of the year. When entering your budget, remember to add the minus (-) figure before it to indicate an expense and not income you’re tracking. At the bottom, you’ll…

Luminar has a second selection of filters called “Looks,” accessible from a filmstrip at the bottom of the interface (there’s a button at the top to toggle it on and off). You can click any of these to try them out, because clicking a new one replaces the previous one. However, you can build up a striking look by using several Looks on separate Adjustment Layers. There are many, many Looks available across seven categories, and you can find more on the Luminar website. Looks are one-shot presets for the Edit module, and as such can be altered once applied by using the sliders that appear on the right-hand side.…

GAMING PCS COME in all shapes and sizes. There’s small and compact systems, with minimalist, understated design. And then there’s big, hulking machines that command the presence of a room, dazzling with their glowing lights and imposing stature. The Xidax X-6 fits on to the latter half of that spectrum. Let’s start with the outside. The X-6 we tested uses Be Quiet!’s Dark Base 700 case, which features large smoky tempered glass panels and Tron-like lights adorning the front. The system is big—21.5 x 9.5 x 20.5 inches—and relatively understated considering the gleaming lights on the front. This is somewhat due to the smoky, semitranslucence of the panels, which give a shadowy look at the glowing components inside—namely the MSI RTX 2080 Gaming X Trio GPU, G.Skill Trident Z RAM,…

WE’RE IN TWO MINDS about the Alpha. In some ways, it’s a fantastic board, worthy of high praise. It takes feature sets found in some of the best Asus motherboards and applies that same logic to an X399 setup that seriously scuppers the rest of the competition. Whether you’re talking about its extensive VRM cooling, the fantastically clean-looking rear I/O cover and armored PCB shielding, the PCIe layout, or the extensive M.2 connectivity, it’s a true beast of a motherboard. The thing is, in our eyes, this X399 board only exists because the original Zenith Extreme wasn’t good enough. Indeed, if you wanted to throw in a WXedition second-generation Threadripper, the VRMs wouldn’t be able to cope with all those additional cores. Let’s face it, that’s embarrassing for a flagship…

FAR CRY 5, if you made a certain set of decisions, ended with a nuclear explosion. Under other circumstances, this would seem to be quite final, but Ubisoft has used it to kickstart its next free-roaming adventure. Don’t expect a clean slate, however: Things haven’t changed much. We’re still in Montana, imagined as a land where the sun always shines, it’s permanently spring, and pink flowers carpet the ground. New antagonists the Highwaymen—murderous sportswear enthusiasts led by the latest in the series’s run of charismatic psychopaths—are fond of pink, too, spraypainting it wherever they go. It makes a nice change from Fallout brown. Couple this with the very reasonable system specs, and it’s a game that looks beautiful on even average PCs. But while the map is reused and the…

The past few months have been a great time for major game releases. From the surprise launch and excellent experience of Apex Legends to the tragic singing (not really) of Anthem, with post-apoc Metro Exodus journeys and more, we’ve had a lot going on. We tested The Division 2 beta in February, and with the final game in hand, it’s time for the full update. The good news is that performance has improved by about 15 percent. It could improve further over time, but given the impressive level of detail for the DC environments and other areas, not to mention the mature game engine, we don't expect too many changes. Also, note that The Division 2 is an AMD promo game, which means along with the Ryzen/Radeon splash logo when…