Inhaltsverzeichnis für February 2021 in Maximum PC

WELCOME to the latest edition of Maximum PC. So first let’s start with the good. This issue is jam-packed with a ton of features, content, and gloriousness to get your teeth stuck into. We’ve gone and compiled our favorite hardware from the last 12 months, handing out our awards in this year’s prestigious Gear of the Year feature. We’ve also got Jarred back in the house to give us the lowdown on ray tracing, DLSS, Cyberpunk 2077, and what the future holds for graphics in general. Our man from Down Under, John Knight, gives us his fine interpretation of the history of computing, from analog all the way up to the modern era, while Ian Evenden has a fantastic piece on stripping out your old operating system and replacing it…

APPLE HAS BIG PLANS for its impressive new ARM M1 chip. Its first incarnation was as a hybrid with four high-performance cores, and four low-power cores. The next versions are in development, which will push the high-performance cores to eight, 12, and even 16, the last one destined for the MacBook Pro. These are due next spring. Beyond that is Mac Pro territory. Rumor has it that Apple is developing a full 32-core ARM chip for its workstation, which currently runs 28-core Xeon Wchips. Apple isn’t just ditching Intel either: The AMD GPUs are due to be replaced by Apple’s GPU design, which we first saw integrated into the M1 chip. We can expect everything from 16-core mobile models, up to 28-core bad boys, all due next year (give or…

THE LAUNCH OF THE GEFORCE RTX 3080 TI was set for January, but has been pushed back to the end of February. Why? Well demand for the existing cards is high, and while AMD’s cards are good, they aren’t good enough to make Nvidia rush out anything, particularly as it can sell every $1,499 RTX 3090 it can make. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti sits squarely between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. It has the same number of cores as the RTX 3090—10,496—but carries 20GB rather than 24GB of GDDR6X memory sitting on a 320-bit rather than a 384-bit memory bus, so the bandwidth drops from 936GB/s to 760GB/s. It’s expected to go for $999, neatly in the middle of its siblings at $1,499, and $699. The GeForce RTX…

CYBERPUNK 2077 from CD Projekt Red was a hotly anticipated AAA game. Development started in 2012, but it missed four release dates this year. It sold 8 million pre-order copies, and the buzz was palpable. Then the wheels came off the bus. There were bugs, poor performance, and a host of technical issues we won’t go into here (although we do on PG15). Patches followed quickly—it received a whopping 43.5GB patch before release, and another on day one. Patches aren’t uncommon in games, where discs have to be prepared weeks in advance, and the internet makes distribution after release easy. However, these patches were well beyond simple tweaks. The biggest gripe was the graphics, which had looked so good in the previews. Those playing on PS4, and Xbox One were…

IN THE 2020S, Our CPU speeds are measured in gigahertz. Our RAM size is measured in gigabytes. Our machines are thousands of times faster than when home computing started. It’s easy to look at how far computing has progressed and be smug. But is it possible that we think we’ve progressed further than we really have? Try watching old episodes of The Computer Chronicles or The Computer Programme (BBC, UK) and it can be very surprising to see what they could do with technology of the past—computers that were thousands of times slower than what we have now, or just entirely different. From analog and mechanical computing, to early inter-planetary digital photography; from early multimedia, to an internet before the internet—history is full of technological sophistication, largely driven by methodologies…

Creating a local account, as opposed to a synced Microsoft account tied to an email address, used to be the default way of accessing an operating system. Microsoft is trying to change all that with Windows 10, however, and is pushing the Microsoft account hard, to the extent of removing the option to create a local account during installation. This makes sense, as the account you made during setup is the PC’s admin account, and so needs to be secure. The option is still there though, albeit buried. Open “Settings > Accounts > Family & other users,” and choose “Add someone else to this PC.” Click “I don’t have this person’s sign-in information” in the window that pops up, then “Add a user without a Microsoft account” in the next…

iPhone 12 Pro Max BACKGROUND We’ve torn down the mini iPhone and the two medium iPhones, but we saved the biggest for last: the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Time to give this full-bodied phone the full teardown treatment. MAJOR TECH SPECS A14 Bionic SoC with fourth-generation Neural Engine 6.7 inch (2778x284 pixels) Super Retina XDR OLED display with P3 wide color gamut and True Tone 12MP triple camera with wide angle f/1.6 (OIS), ultra-wide angle f/2.4, and telephoto f/2.2 (OIS) cameras, with a LiDAR module 6GB RAM, 128GB storage (256 and 512GB configs available) 5G (sub-6GHz and mmWave), plus 4x4 MIMO LTE, 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6, ultra-wide band (UWB), NFC, and Bluetooth 5.0 MagSafe 15W wireless charging IP68 rating, water resistant to a maximum depth of 6 meters for up to…

YOU’LL NEED THIS CAPRICE32 Both 32 and 64-bit versions are available. Linux users who don’t have a native package available in their repositories need a distro with Snap support enabled. https://bit.ly/39Ly6Du THE AMSTRAD CPC may be unknown in the US, but this British machine was a darling of Europe and a key player in the 8-bit gaming world. A product of Lord Alan Sugar (Donald Trump’s British counterpart on the UK Apprentice), this machine was designed to take the fight to the mighty Commodore 64 and British rivals such as the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum. With a production run lasting into the mid-’90s, there is an enormous amount of software for any retro gamers seeking undiscovered gems. However, the machine was never launched in the US, meaning emulation is…

WATCHING the fastest GPUs trade blows is all well and good, but many of us prefer to stick with something more affordable. As we see elsewhere, with the RX 6900 XT, moving up the product stack often requires increasingly large sums of money for decreasingly small gains in performance. What that means is that the best options, in terms of bang for buck, are often a few steps down from the top dogs. If you’ve been watching the new Ampere and RDNA2 GPUs, and wondering when we’ll get a mainstream option, you’re in luck, because the RTX 3060 Ti is here. Built on the same GPU and card design as the RTX 3070 we looked at last month, the RTX 3060 Ti has fewer cores and shaders but makes up…

THE THING ABOUT Assassin’s Creed games these days is not so much what changes between releases, but what stays the same. Odyssey followed a very similar path as Origins, the series’s rebirth into a curious action-stealth-RPG hybrid, but Valhalla takes the opportunity to shake things up a little, mixing it with an evocative new setting (and acting as a launch title for the powerful new consoles) to great effect. That said, it’s still an open-world Ubisoft game, which means, well, not quite what it used to. You can choose before you start playing whether to keep the constant nag of map icons trying to drag you off to find a stash of silver coins or a strange character to do a job for, or whether to explore the lands yourself, stumbling…

LETITIA JAMES, the attorney general for New York, has started two major anti-trust legal actions. One is against Facebook, which she claims has used its financial and marketing power to quash competition by buying smaller competitors before they can become rivals, and using market dominance to restrict competing services—in particular the $1 billion purchase of Instagram in 2012. The case has been joined by 47 other states. The second case is against Google, with claims it has “deprived consumers of competition that could lead to greater choice and innovation, as well as better privacy protections.” This case has been joined by 38 states. At the same time the Federal Trade Commission has also launched a case against social media giant Facebook, highlighting its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram in order…

The company admitted as much, and in an unprecedented move, the game was pulled from the PlayStation store, and everyone who purchased it was offered a full refund. Microsoft likewise offered full refunds for Xbox One players. The PC release running on modern hardware still has some issues, but nothing so far that I’ve considered fully showstopping. Maybe I got lucky, but more likely is the fact that I’m drastically exceeding the official minimum recommended specs. CD Projekt Red lists a relatively ancient Core i5-3570K or FX-8310 CPU, 8GB RAM, and a GTX 780 with 3GB of VRAM as the minimum hardware requirements. You’ll really want a newer GPU, and the GTX 1080 barely breaks 60fps at 1080p medium. Along with a decent graphics card, though, you’ll want a better…

OVER TWO YEARS AGO, Nvidia surprised nearly everyone by announcing that its next-gen Turing architecture would feature the holy grail of computer graphics: Ray tracing (RT). It’s a technique that’s been around for decades, and the movie industry makes extensive use of it these days—or at least it did, back when movies were still being made, and we could go out to watch them. The thought of getting hyper-realistic visuals in games that could rival the latest blockbusters sounded too good to be true, and it was. Today, we have Nvidia’s second generation of RT hardware in the Ampere architecture, and AMD has joined the fray with its RDNA2 GPUs. It’s time for a State of the Union address on the subject of ray tracing in games. A BRIEF OVERVIEW…

THERE’S SOMETHING to be said for a screen like this. It’s without doubt a bit of an oddball. There’s a flow and elegance to it—it’s big, bold, extravagant, and beautiful—and yet its purpose is singular. It has one target audience, and although it excels very well in that area, it excels only in that area. This is, for all intents and purposes, a workstation screen, designed with the productivity clan in mind. It is flawless when looking at it from inside the business world, yet uniquely flawed in its dogmatic approach to appeasing that market. The price? $999. That crisp, succinct number is a figure itself attuned to marketing standards to elicit a “cheaper than it really is” feel. A sheep in wolf’s clothing then? Perhaps. But if ultimate productivity…

Windows activation is a kind of super fun thing that, if it goes wrong, shows you really unhelpful messages and gets you to phone Microsoft support. However, if you didn’t have a licence key to type in during installation, and this is a reinstallation onto a system that’s been activated and tied to a Microsoft account before, there is one thing you can do. On the “Settings > Update & Security > Activation” page, click “Troubleshoot.” You must be logged into your Microsoft account for this to work, and it needs to be the same one that was previously activated. The troubleshooter thinks for a while, then gives you a list of the Windows activations registered to your account. Click the one you want to use, and the “I’ve recently changed…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 You can use Windows’ own Task View option, or try a number of third-party apps. TIRED OF MANAGING AN UNRULY MESS of a desktop, with tons of windows clogging up your view? There is a solution: Windows 10’s virtual desktop feature. This lets you create a new instance of your current desktop setup, enabling you to divide your tasks into separate desktops, all walled off from each other. You might have a desktop with your work documents and apps open, for example, with another used for unwinding during your lunch break. That way, everything is neatly ordered and in control, without becoming overwhelming. You can’t have different wallpapers or themes for your different desktops—instead, think of them as close copies of each other, with the…

LENGTH OF TIME: 16–24 HOURS DEPENDENT ON SKILL LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: ADVANCED THE CONCEPT THERE’S A couple of approaches you can take to building a PC. By far the most common is a rather pragmatic one, where you build a machine that’s solely meant as a means to a specific end (say, for gaming, or some other task, or within a set budget), keeping looks in the back of your mind, but mostly as a side concern. However, with this build we decided to take a completely different approach. This month, we’re not building a PC that’s meant to squeeze as much power as possible out of each dollar spent, but rather one that tries to offer the most refined experience—not just beautiful looks or record-breaking performance. Naturally, when tackling…

I’VE BEEN HARD at work tinkering with my home setup to try to get the most out of it now I’m more housebound. At the moment, I’m one of the lucky ones—I’ve managed to nab myself a 100Mb/s line for my day-to-day activities (I live somewhat out in the wilderness). It’s not fiber (which I dream of), but it’s more than ample for my work life and free time. I’ve changed out all the cables in my home to Cat7 (the stock cable my ISP provided, to go from the socket to the modem, was a non-twisted pair Cat5e cable, which I didn’t think existed anymore), then from the modem I plug directly into an Asus RT-AX88U router. This is a gluttonous product, for sure. It rolls in at $350,…

GEN-THREE PCIE. QLC. Up to 8TB. Five-year warranty. We give you the new Corsair MP400, summed up in soundbites. Reducing a product as complex as an SSD into a few phrases obviously isn’t the whole story, but those headline features do give you a pretty good idea of what you can expect. Thus, this is a PCIe 3.0 rather than 4.0 drive. Consequently, Corsair pegs sequential read performance at 3,480MB/s for all variants of this drive. The 2TB version tested here, meanwhile, is said to be good for 3,000MB/s of writes. As for random 4K read performance, 380,000 IOPS is your lot with this 2TB drive, with 4K writes rated at 560,000 IOPS. That’s all enabled by the E12S iteration of Phison’s widely used PS5012 eight-channel NAND memory controller. Of…

RAZER IS RENOWNED for its peripherals, its cult-like fan base, and, of course, its RGB lighting. Razer spends its marketing budget very well; even those who have never or will never use its products see the Razer logo and branding all over the place, from Twitch streams to YouTube ads, TV, and more. This means that impressionable young minds see their heroes playing on a $200 keyboard, then have to have one. Often, parents don’t understand the need for expensive keyboards, can’t afford them, or simply, don’t want to buy them for younger children. Equally, there are many adults who don’t understand the mechanical keyboard hype, but still want the rest of the features Razer offers. This is where membrane keyboards hold their own. For $60, you can get a…

DOES ANYONE NEED paid-for security software these days? Indeed, does anyone need any third-party security, given Windows now ships with a full-fledged antimalware tool in the form of Windows Security? That’s the conundrum we’ve put to this issue’s head-to-head, focusing on two products—one free (Avira Free Security) and one paid-for (Bitdefender Total Security)—to see whether you should still be paying for security in 2021. We’ve also taken the liberty of measuring both against Windows Security (Win 10’s built-in protection) to see whether you actually need to install either. Let’s start with the most important factor: their ability to detect, block, and remove malware. The good news is that in the most recent tests (October 2020), all three scored highly across the board for protection, performance, and usability. Ironically, it was…

INTEL’S 11TH-GENERATION ROCKET LAKE CHIPS will be in our hands in March. We’re starting to see unofficial leaks as engineering samples are distributed to the industry for testing. Early benchmarks have surfaced featuring the Core i9-11900K, an eight-core Rocket Lake with a reported base clock of 3.5GHz, and a maximum boost just shy of 5GHz. It apparently fairs well against an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. The important thing is that there is a decent IPC bump of around 18 percent over previous Skylake-derived cores. The Cypress Cove cores used in Rocket Lake chips are essentially 10nm Ice Lake ones shifted to a 14nm process, and combined with Tiger Lake’s Xe graphics. We finally get a version of the Sunny Cove microarchitecture in a desktop chip, the first such new architecture…

RECENTLY there have been a lot of lovely new graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD, each with new GPU architectures setting performance records. The trouble is actually getting hold of one. The “unexpectedly” high demand (really?), coupled with production problems have made this a frustrating time to build a gaming rig. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 cards are all over the media but not the shelves, even online. Speculators bought everything they could to resell at a profit. The RTX 3090 is officially $1,499, but the average resale price is $2,250. This isn’t helped by the ending of production of RTX 2000 series cards, the supply of which seems to have dried up. Samsung, which makes the 8nm GPUs for Nvidia, has been having “issues” with yield (the…

> Video Transcoding > Locked Out Of BIOS > Failing USB Ports? Plex Transcoding I recently opened up my Plex server running on a QNAP TS-251+ to a few friends to discover that transcoding does one of two things: If I enable hardware transcoding, the video frequently looks blocky and pixilated, but I can stream to multiple clients with no problems. But if I disable it, only one person can watch a transcoded stream without overwhelming the server. What can I do to improve the quality over hardware transcoding? –Phil West THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: The problem here is your QNAP’s Celeron J1900 processor. Although it supports hardware transcoding through QuickSync, the processor’s onboard GPU is based on the old Ivy Bridge generation of Intel HD graphics. These are known for…

THERE ARE MANY REASONS why you may want to reinstall Windows on your PC. The most common is hardware change—a fresh installation will often run better than one that was previously installed on a different PC, so if you’re swapping out motherboards and CPUs, it’s worth doing it to squeeze the maximum performance out of your new hardware. Then there are reasons of maintenance: Perhaps something has gone wrong deep inside the operating system, a botched driver installation or damage from some malicious software affecting how your PC runs. Maybe Windows is just unbearably slow, and you don’t know why. All of these are good reasons to reinstall Windows, and it’s a quick and easy process these days. And while a complete reinstall is your nuclear option, wiping away all…

TIP OF THE MONTH READ EASY WITH MERCURY Do you read on screens a lot? We do, and we know it’s bad for our eyes. Mercury Reader is a one-click Chrome extension that enables you to instantly remove the clutter from online articles for easy reading. It works a charm, and also performs well with Chrome’s existing reading list functionality, making it straightforward to save multiple articles for later reading. Give your eyes a break. MAKE – USE – CREATE 56 Tidy up your screen by using virtual desktops 62 Emulate our Machine of the Month: the Amstrad CPC 64 Follow our reflections on our Mirror Maze build STAFF WRITER SIZE MATTERS OK, so I went to the dark side and played some games on a PS5. I was seriously…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 And a keyboard for all the shortcuts! ONE OF THE KEY STRENGTHS of Windows is its Smaug-like hoard of shortcuts and secrets. Master them and you will zip around your operating system like a hare on a sugar binge. You probably already know the basic ones, such as Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, so today we are going to look at some power user shortcuts. Speaking of which, a good one to start with is the Windows key (Win) and X. Press these and you get the hidden version of the Start menu, with quick links to various handy admin tools and settings. Windows is full of great shortcuts. For example, if you’re using a work PC and need to leave your desk, hit Win-L to go…

IF YOU’VE READ my “Editor’s Intro,” you’ll know this has been one heck of a month for myself and the team. I’ve been stuck at home self-isolating, fighting off COVID-19, and Christian’s also had to take a significant chunk of time out due to health concerns. It’s been rough, for sure, yet also very moving to see how our publishing house and the wider industry has come to our aid. I can’t thank the guys and gals at Tom’s Hardware enough for their support—it’s been invaluable. But I also want to apologize—when I first came on board, I promised two builds an issue, and this is the first time we haven’t managed to hit that target (although I’ve got two epic builds lined up for the March edition). That aside,…

THEY SAY imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If so, the Radeon RX 6800 XT must be feeling pretty dang good about itself. Nearly every aspect of the reference RX 6900 XT is the same as the RX 6800 XT, except it has 80 CUs instead of 72. That means at best we’d expect a 10 percent bump in performance; in practice it’s often less. Along with the incremental increase in shader core counts comes a painful 50 percent jump in price. Everything good that we said about AMD’s RDNA2 architecture still applies. The Infinity Cache means the 512GB/s of memory bandwidth can still compete with Nvidia’s 936GB/s. But all the bad bits with RDNA2 remain unchanged. That means the RX 6900 XT is the fastest GPU in some…

THE RASPBERRY PI MODEL B has had the same board layout since the Pi B+ arrived in 2014. So, when we received a parcel from Raspberry Pi Trading and opened the box to find a white keyboard, we were somewhat puzzled as to the contents. But not for long. Within this compact and well-designed keyboard is a Raspberry Pi 400, a variant of the Raspberry Pi 4 4GB that’s been designed specifically to make the most of its new surroundings. The device is sold as a single unit for $70 or as a $100 kit with mouse, power supply, cables, microSD card, and a copy of The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide. Either way, the Pi 400 is an ideal way to introduce the Pi to your home. If you’re…

> Undervolting > Budget Builds > Journo Picks Connecting Mice Hey Zak, I love your work. I was just thinking back to your article on the Corsair Ironclaw. Did you end up using it for a long period of time? I was thinking about grabbing one, but I’ve read that people have had connectivity issues with it in the past, and wanted to see if you’d encountered that as well. Thanks! –Kyle S EDITOR, ZAK STOREY, RESPONDS: Hi Kyle, good to speak to you. Wow, it’s been a while since I checked that out. I’ve had a go with a fair few wireless mice since then, and can report that I’ve had very few issues with them. It seems the tech and software have improved quite dramatically over the last…