Inhaltsverzeichnis für September 2020 in Maximum PC

ALTHOUGH Moore’s Law may be fluttering around the edges today, its effect on the industry is well-documented, and very apparent. In fact, thinking of computing performance, just how much we’ve managed to gain in ever-smaller form factors is seriously impressive. Take Apollo 11’s guidance computer, for example: According to some figures, modern iPhones house over 100,000 times more processing power than the legendary computer that landed man on the Moon. And that’s just in the world of mobile…. Even in the last five years in our own heady domain, computational performance has quadrupled in the mainstream marketplace, and in the land of HEDT it’s more than six times higher than when we first started, and that’s just on core count alone. Moore’s Law may not be to thank for that—intuitive…

CPUOverheating M2NVMe vs SATA HDMIVoltageBleed Unexplainable Data Loss I have an HP Elitebook that is currently fitted with a 2.5-inch SSD as the main Windows 7 drive, and a 1TB mSATA that contains working files and a majority of VirtualBox images as both VHD and VDI files. I have recently swapped out the 2.5” SSD with another one and installed Windows 10 on it, which has gone very smoothly apart from one issue: When I swap back to the Windows 7 SSD I notice that I have lost some VDI files completely, and others have been corrupted. I have managed to recover some of the lost files from backups and have tried the swap again, and the same thing keeps happening. What is causing this, and is there anything I…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WORDPRESS SERVER Any reputable web host will do, or you can host it yourself on your own server. LAST ISSUE WE REVEALED how to set up and secure your new WordPress website. Now it’s time to start using your new site’s tools to produce the content you’ll be showcasing to others. Content on WordPress consists of two basic types: Posts and pages. Posts are primarily the stuff of blog posts: Time-sensitive material like an ongoing diary, where everything is published in a single feed and is date and time-stamped, with the most recent post at the top. Posts can be assigned categories and tags, to enable your readers to create their own filtered feed based on specific topics or areas of interest. Pages are for static content…

IN THIS WONDERFUL world of working from home, finding the right monitor to maximize your productivity is pivotal. You can have the best system on the planet, but if you’re still staring at a 22-inch screen from 2009, it might be about time you ditched the aging tech, and boosted your monitor real-estate to something a little more modern, and with quite a lot more breadth. We’re big supporters of ultra-wide and multi-screen setups here at Maximum PC, and have had a lot of hands-on time with the 21:9 form factor as a result. We’ve tested everything from the very budget-oriented panels from the likes of Acer, AOC, and MSI, to the absolute high-end Asus ProArt screens and LG’s fantastic 38-inch panels. So why do we recommend it? Well simply…

THE WORLD OF professional image-editing applications is not a wide one. There’s Adobe Photoshop, and then there’s everything else: Maybe PaintShop Pro or PhotoPaint from Corel, or the opensource GIMP, or Paint.net if your needs aren’t very great. Then Serif, maker of the also-ran app Serif PhotoPlus, decided to play Adobe at its own game with the Affinity suite. First came Affinity Designer, then Affinity Photo, then Affinity Publisher, rivalling Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign in terms of features and usability. Serif is quick to retweet stories on social media of professionals abandoning Photoshop for Affinity Photo, often underlining the difference in payment schemes adopted by the two software developers. But just how similar are the two programs? And can someone who’s been using Photoshop for 20 years navigate a new…

ONE OF THE PERKS of being in this industry is that you get to get hands on with a lot of kit early. Tons of engineering samples and concept ideas typically head our way before they go into production. It’s kind of something companies do, especially the smaller ones, to get our insight into things and see how they can improve stuff before pitching and selling products to the public. It’s cool, because obviously this is new stuff that we’re trying for the first time, but the flip-side is that sometimes (not in this case) you come up against things that don’t quite have the same durability, or warranty, or quality as something that’s manufactured and ready to go. So when Mayhems offered me the opportunity to take a look…

AFTER WEEKS of rumors and leaks about AMD’s new Threadripper, AMD has revealed what it likes to call “the first and only 64-core professional workstation processor”: the Threadripper PRO 3000WX series. There are four in all. The top model is the Threadripper PRO 3995WX, which has 64 cores and a base clock of 2.7GHz, with a maximum boost to 4.3GHz. Below this are the 32-core 3975WX, the 16-core 3955WX, and lastly the 12-core 3945WX. The clock speeds increase as the core count drops, all the way up to 4.0GHz on the base model 12-core chip. Essentially they are pro versions of existing Threadripper chips, employing the same 7nm Zen 2 cores: The 3995WX is a 3990X, and so forth. The base clock rates are a shade lower across the range,…

Razer Blade Pro 17 4K RAZER IS BACK with an update to its long-running and kick-ass Blade laptop line. We’ve managed to snag the most powerful one on offer: The top-spec model of the Razer Blade Pro 17. This bad boy comes equipped with an RTX 2080 Super and a shiny new Intel Core i7-10875H processor, bringing eight speedy cores to the party. Intel’s Turbo Boost can clock those cores up to 5.1GHz for improved performance in CPU-intensive tasks. A 1TB M.2 SSD means lots of storage and excellent data transfer rates, while 16GB of high-speed memory supports the processor. Both of these can be upgraded: There’s a spare M.2 slot for adding a second drive, and the compact motherboard supports up to 64GB of SODIMM RAM. All that hardware…

YOU’LL NEED THIS TASKBARX https://chrisandriessen.nl/taskbarx WINDOWS 10 THE WINDOWS 10 TASKBAR may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but you can give it a healthy dose of visual flair with the help of TaskbarX, an app that makes it easy to center your taskbar icons—and a whole lot more. It works particularly well if you want to have a cleaner, more understated look for your taskbar. Centering your icons with TaskbarX gives a more modern look than the default Windows taskbar appearance, especially if you only have a couple of pinned icons. You can take things further with some of TaskbarX’s built-in options. For example, you can make your taskbar entirely transparent, making your icons appear to be floating against your wallpaper. You can change how your…

$127 FOR A QUAD-CORE, eight-threaded processor, complete with a hefty 18MB of cache, a fairly typical Ryzen clock knocking in at 4.3 GHz at max, and of course access to all the juicy connectivity options bundled in with the X570 and B550 chipsets: There’s a lot to love when it comes to the Ryzen 3 3300X. For not a lot of cash, it offers a tempting solution for those looking to upgrade their ageing rigs, or set up a brand new one. We always enjoy looking back at the past with processors, as it gives us a good idea as to what the future might hold, and just how far we’ve come in such a short time. And with the Ryzen 3 3300X, it’s absolutely no exception. Back in the…

THIS IS THE BLACK SHEEP of SteelSeries’s Apex line, a lone membrane keyboard in a collection of mechanical offerings. It is by far the cheapest Apex keyboard, costing just 50 bucks (every other Apex keyboard costs upwards of $100), and it’s easy to see why: This is the toned-down version of the Apex chassis, a simplified model that forgoes per-key illumination and the little OLED smart display that defines its fellow keyboards. That’s not to say that the Apex 3 isn’t a great product. This sensibly priced keyboard definitely still has the build quality of the pricier Apex keyboards, with a sturdy polymer casing and durable keycaps. It comes with a snap-on magnetic wrist rest with a matte, rubberized surface, and includes the same metal scroll wheel and button for…

PART OF THE HYPE around Disintegration has centered on the presence in the game director’s seat of one of the co-creators of Halo. Disintegration takes an odd approach: This is a shooting-management game, where the manager has a big gun. Positioned up to 15m above the battlefield on a "Gravcycle," shooter-manager Romer Shoal has a couple of guns, a healing ray, and up to four troopers with abilities that he can direct to move, attack, or use a special weapon. Adapted from a racing machine, the Gravcycle is meant to swoop gracefully around the battlefield, dodging enemy fire and issuing commands, all while firing to take down heavier threats and heal allies. In reality, you spend as much time hovering in place, dishing out priority targets and manoeuvering close to…

Not Enough Time Letting go of gaming LAST YEAR, for my 28th birthday, I decided to spend it in Norway. It was a big plus for me because I don’t like being the center of attention, especially around that day, and I’m quite an introvert too, so getting away from everything was perfect. In October, myself, my fiancée, and two of my friends flew to Bergen, and then drove from there to a quiet little town called Stranda in Møre og Romsdal. Honestly, it was the most relaxing experience of my entire life. We didn’t really do much, but nonetheless the country had quite the effect on myself and my future wife. To that end, we’ve both decided to move there one day, and make it our (forgive me, I…

OCULUS HAS two versions of its standalone VR headsets: The accomplished Quest, and the considerably cheaper Oculus Go. But no longer, as the Oculus Go is to go. There will be no new software or updates after December, although you’ll still receive security patches and bug fixes until the end of 2022. The Go was an attempt at low-cost VR. Lacking position tracking and fancy controllers, it managed to sell over 2 million headsets in a year. The Go was designed to introduce VR to people unwilling to invest in the bigger headsets, but the limited capabilities didn’t show VR at its best, and it was still too expensive for the mass market. Oculus is to concentrate on higher-end headsets with the full six degrees of freedom, and high-resolution graphics.…

APPLE’S DECISION to ditch x86 processors and move to ARM-based chips for all its machines has caused a stir. Now we are starting to get an idea of what’s in store as development kit is distributed, based around the existing A12Z Bionic chip, along with beta software. There are no meaningful direct benchmarks yet, its not the final hardware, or software, and there’s lots of emulation going on. However, developers have been impressed. Apple’s new iPad Pro already runs an A12Z chip, and it’s no slouch, holding its own against a MacBook Pro armed with a Core i5-8257. The next version will be based around this, although exact details are still fuzzy. We can expect a SoC version with more cores, higher frequencies, and integrated GPU. Some analysts are predicting…

TIP OF THE MONTH UPDATE THOSE DRIVERS It’s easy to fall behind keeping your hardware up to date. Tools like GeForce Experience are helpful but are also clunky, and motherboard BIOS updates can be a nightmare to manage. Thankfully, these aren’t difficult to check; most manufacturer websites make it easy to find and download the latest drivers for your product—it’s just up to you to remember to update them once a month! submit your How To project idea to: comments@maximumpc.com…

YOU’LL NEED THIS CRYSTALDISKMARK 6 https://crystalmark.info/en ANVIL’S STORAGE UTILITIES 1.1.0 https://anvils-storage-utilities.en.lo4d.com/windows Beyond that, around 30GB of mixed files, ideally from a game install, is required. SURELY THE MOST MERCURIAL of PC components, solid-state drives have long presented a moving target when it comes to benchmarking. Early SSDs were all about headline transfer speeds. Then it became apparent that performance fell off rapidly as the drive’s capacity was used. As solid-state technology matured, random access to small data sets emerged as a more relevant measure of real-world performance. But even now, the best test regimes can’t fully capture the character of an SSD. After all, there’s no substitute for hammering a drive with day-to-day storage for years. However, it is possible to capture a pretty good idea of the performance of…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT WITH AMD’S RYZEN 3300X FINALLY LANDING on our shores, we just knew we had to throw it into a full-on system build to get the most out of it, and its accompanying new chipset, B550. It’s not every day that AMD launches a brand-new budget chipset quite like this series, and certainly not with such fanfare, so we decided to put together a little budget(ish) build to see exactly what we could get out of this fledgling quad-core, eight-thread processor. So yes, at its heart we have the Ryzen 3 3300X processor. Compared to today’s many-threaded monsters littering the consumer ecosphere, a quad-core processor certainly does look small-fry in comparison, especially as we’ve already had the 3200G from AMD…

BUILDING A CUSTOM liquid loop yourself is hard. Why do that work yourself, when you could pay someone far more experienced to build it for you? While we here at Maximum PC will always advocate for building systems with your own hands, it’s hard to argue against the level of professionalism on display in the EK Fluid Gaming range. We’re looking at the Fluid Gaming 270 Vanquish, the “mid-range” offering from EK’s pre-built gaming series—although calling this $2,900 beast mid-range is laughable. The 270 Vanquish rocks an RTX 2080 Super for graphics, and an eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 3800X processor, backed up by 32GB of highspeed memory from HyperX. So, it’s a powerhouse machine. All of EK’s systems are capable gaming maxhines, and this one is no exception. As you…

ASUS IS WELL-KNOWN for its motherboard and GPU lineup, but its peripheral range is sometimes overlooked. Don’t get us wrong, many other options are cheaper, and the ROG tax can hit the user hard, but if you put the price aside, its products are usually solid. The ASUS ROG Chakram is the latest mouse we’re looking at from the company, and despite appearing very familiar at first glance, Asus has implemented some features that we rarely see at this price point, some of which are done impressively well. The Chakram is certainly pricey. It retails officially at $150, but it is worth searching for other deals, as we found it for $120 at some retailers. For this price, you get a PixArt PAW 3335 sensor. This has been designed specifically…

THE BANDITS OF THE WILD WEST are an inquisitive bunch. They can be enticed to wander away from their buddies by something as innocuous as seeing a cat, or discovering footprints. A medical bag thumping down just inside their cone of vision is irresistible, curiosity overcoming all fear when near railroad tracks or the dangerous end of a horse. Funnily enough, the hard-eyed outlaws who go to investigate these things don’t come back. Desperados III is from the same studio that brought us Shadow Tactics in 2016, and hews closely to the real-time stealth tactics template laid down in that game, inherited from the Commandos and Desperados games of the late 90s and early 00s. This being the Wild West, everybody has guns, but guns are loud, and noise brings…

DataAnalysis CaseConstruction MicrosoftEdge Case Conundrums Hi folks—long-time reader and love the mag. I have a Maingear Shift PC that’s getting long in the tooth (seven-year-old Haswell processor, one panel doesn’t stay in). I’m looking into building a new PC. One minor question, and don’t laugh: My PC sits between my desk and sofa, and because of the height of the PC, it’s a fantastic drink-holder as the height is exactly the same level as the arm on my sofa. Is there an equivalent-sized new case that’s easy to build in that you would recommend? The sharp edges of the Shift were another detriment, although it looks great—thanks! –Jerry EDITOR ZAK STOREY RESPONDS: This is a tough one, actually more because the dimensions are incredibly difficult to source. We’ve found a…