Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2021 i Maximum PC

ON JUNE 8, a little before 9.47 a.m., one of Fastly’s customers decided to change their settings. The change was valid, but it triggered a bug in the Fastly software, and things started to go wrong rapidly. About 85 percent of Fastly’s CDN (content delivery network, a geographically distributed set of proxy servers) crashed. At 9.58 a.m., a status report from the company said it was “currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.” By 10.44 a.m., it reported that “the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” The fix was in place at 11.36 a.m., and most services restored. By 12.41 p.m., all services had been recovered, although low cache hit rates remained a problem. The major outage lasted about an hour. This isn’t…

A computational chemist undertaking a postdoctoral study at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, Sergio Perez Conesa uses Folding@home in the hope of uncovering a new drug or treatment for common illnesses associated with ion channels. Maximum PC: Hi Sergio, thanks for talking to us. Can you give us an overview and insight into what it is you do, and what your work entails? Sergio Perez Conesa: I have training in chemistry, but my work is multidisciplinary. I use a lot of physics, a lot of programming, and a lot of biochemistry, and ideas from biology, too. Our main tool is the computer, and the systems we want to understand are biological, but the way to do this is to understand the physics, and this we can…

WHEN THE Maximum PC Illustrated Bumper Book of World History is written, the years 2020 and 2021 will get their own chapter. Not because of politics but because of the global pandemic and shortage of microchips. Folding@home will probably need a lot of coverage, too—a citizen science project contributing to biochemical research projects that is free to add to and feels extremely cool while you do it (except for the heat it pumps out of your PC case). There’s not much we can do about the chip shortage, but the pandemic and Folding@home collided beautifully. It led to Folding@home becoming the fastest supercomputer on the planet, hitting one exaflop (a1 followed by 18 zeros) on March 25, 2020, then peaking at 2.4 exaflops the next month. That’s as powerful as the…

Let’s start with a history lesson. The first high-level languages—which made their debut in the 1950s and included the likes of FORTRAN, ALGOL, and COBOL—were designed as down-to-earth tools with little thought given to education. This changed in 1964 with the introduction of BASIC. The language’s acronym hints at its nature, and its full name, Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, emphasizes its educational credentials. Indeed, BASIC was designed for use by students who had little appreciation of computers. It outlived other languages of that era, having been adopted for use in the home computers of the late ’70s and ’80s, and helped another generation learn to code. While BASIC remained largely unchallenged for several decades, if you want to help your children learn to code today, it’s not nearly as…

TIP OF THE MONTH AERO SHAKE Your open tabs can get piled on top of each other in no time at all when you’re deep in a project or flicking between applications. One elaborately named action you can perform is to “Aero Shake” them away. Instead of clicking the minimize buttons one by one, simply click and hold on any window bar, then shake it from side to side until all the other windows rapidly collapse. Quick, efficient, and with a name we like. MAKE – USE – CREATE 60 Create surreal spherical art with Photoshop 62 Build yourself a better liquid-cooled setup 68 Step by step guide to building our pseudo retro rig…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RAZER CORTEX Download for free from www.razer.com. 1 ENABLE ULTIMATE PERFORMANCE One of the first things you can do to help speed up your PC or laptop’s performance is to check what power plan you are running. Head to ”Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options.” This should show a list of preset power plans. To see all available options, click the drop-down arrow labeled “Show additional plans,” and make sure you are running your PC on the “Ultimate performance” option [Image A]. If using a laptop, ensure you are plugged in when using this setting, otherwise your battery life will be no better than that of an iPhone 4. Yikes. Switch back over to “Balanced” when unplugged to preserve your battery life. 2 DISABLE…

If you’ve been following our tutorials for a while, you may have picked up on a particular website we use for finding free licensed imagery. Unsplash (https://unsplash.com) is great for a variety of projects; whether you’re a graphic designer, photographer, artist, or content creator, it’s a convenient hub for finding images to complement your work. One of its main tenets, displayed on the homepage, is that it is “powered by creators everywhere.” The images are available to download in various sizes, including small, medium, large, and original, the latter being the highest resolution option. The site’s licensing rules are: All photos can be downloaded and used for free; they can be used for commercial and non-commercial purposes; and no permission is needed (though attribution is appreciated). Compared to other image…

Every new system needs the components flushed before use, especially radiators, due to debris left over from the manufacturing process, which can clog up a whole loop, leading to problems down the line. Pressure testing before filling the loop is also a wise idea; unless you are super-confident, but we wouldn’t advise skipping this either, because a leaky system won’t last long. Coolant choice is subjective; however, make sure you pick something that is designed for long-term use. There are some great color options, but beware that some are designed for only short-term use, such as exhibitions—these need flushing to remove all sediment from a system, and may stain reservoirs and blocks, too. Finally, stick a slot in your diary a year from now; an annual system flush, coolant change,…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT THIS IS A strange build for a number of reasons. We decided to do this because the case is really interesting. We were perusing various retailers on the hunt for a decent chassis to build in for this issue, and came across this sweet little ITX number: the Raijintek Pan Slim. It’s an odd case style-wise, reminiscent of the early ’90s PCs on which you’d stack a chunky CRT monitor. So, we set to task requesting one. It took a while because we didn’t have a direct relationship with Raijintek, despite having reviewed a few of its cases in the past (samples from Newegg), but after reaching out to the company, the PR got back to us, and we…

IT’S TIME ONCE more for the mid-cycle upgrades. After last year’s big reveal of the Ampere architecture and its higher performance, Nvidia is back to fill in the gaps. Add some additional cores, bump clock speeds a bit, and toss in some extra memory and the associated memory bandwidth. Et voila, we have the RTX 3080 Ti, filling the small gap between the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080. Nvidia pitches this as the “ultimate Ti” and makes reference to the still excellent GTX 1080 Ti, but it fails to live up to those lofty expectations. On paper, the 3080 Ti looks a lot like the 3090, just with half the VRAM and two fewer SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors). Considering most games don’t need anything like 24GB of memory, which is more…

HOW MUCH ARE you willing to fork out for features like USB-C connectivity, monitor daisy-chaining, Ethernet connectivity, and a webcam with facial recognition? A hundred bucks over an otherwise identical monitor? Two hundred? More? Enter the HP E27D G4, a 27-inch productivity monitor with a 1440p IPS panel. It has all that stuff and plenty more. But it will cost you around $220 extra compared to HP’s entry-level 27-inch IPS 1440p offering, the 27MQ. Ouch. Still, along with the fat feature set, this panel also packs slick industrial design, with crisp styling, slim bezels on three sides, and great build quality. The specifics of the broader feature set are impressive, too. The USB Type-C interface supports 100W of device charging, which is as good as it currently gets, plus daisy-chaining…

WE ALL KNOW HOW important it is to have a webcam, especially in a pandemic. Staying in touch with loved ones, friends, and work colleagues is essential for keeping the world ticking. As crucial as webcams are, though, nobody wants a PlayStation 2 EyeToy-quality conference call, so upgrading our webcam is a choice a lot of us have made. Elgato, however, has provided an alternate method. It clearly looked in its pocket and thought: Hey, phones have pretty good cameras; they’d make pretty good webcams, right? And so we have the Elgato EpocCam app, with an accompanying assortment of mounts to turn your iPhone into a webcam. Sounds like a reasonable alternative and it makes the most out of what you already have. This could be a great use of…

ON A FUNDAMENTAL level, Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software and AMD’s Radeon Software (also known as Adrenalin) are exactly the same. Both offer device driver management and capture utility alongside specialized support for a variety of games. The dividing line, of course, is that Radeon Software is designed for use with AMD GPUs, while GeForce Experience is the app you need if you’re rocking an Nvidia card. It’s not that simple, naturally. GeForce Experience has been around for a wee bit longer than Radeon Software, at least in its current incarnation, and it’s not unfair to say that AMD clearly copied Nvidia’s homework whenever Experience added a new feature. Both consistently recommend that you upgrade to the latest and most expensive GPU, for example…. This sort of software started life as…

WHEN AMD attends an event to show off its new gear, you won’t come away disappointed. At this year’s Computex trade show in Taiwan, AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su, showed us what she called “the next big step forward” in advanced chip packaging. AMD has been working with TSMC and its 3DFabric technology to combine chiplet packaging with die stacking to create a 3D chiplet architecture. The first application of this will be a 3D vertical cache, stacking memory chips directly over the processing units. We were then treated to a glimpse of a prototype chip, a Ryzen 9 5900X with 64MB 7nm SRAM chips stacked on to each core complex, tripling the amount of L3 cache to 192MB. There is over 2TB/s of bandwidth connecting this new cache, faster than…

TRIUMPHS RANSOM RECOVERED The FBI has recovered most of the bitcoin ransom paid after the Colonial Pipeline hack. WORLD’S FASTEST HDD Seagate has unveiled its new dual actuator Mach 2 HDDs; the drives can reach a sequential data transfer rate of 524MB/s. DOOM ON A LIGHT BULB Some bright spark has managed to get Doom running on the Cortex-M33 processor inside a smart LED light bulb. TRAGEDIES ALIENWARE SUED In 2019, Alienware said its new Area-51m was upgradable and a true desktop replacement. It isn’t. Cue a class action lawsuit. BYE, INTERNET EXPLORER Microsoft is to kill IE next June—no more support, it’s Edge all the way now. APPLE’S ILLEGAL SHARE After an iPhone repair, Apple had to pay huge compensation when private images from the phone were shared online.…

> Store Malfunction > Boot Issues > RGB Compatibility No Store Downloads My current problem is with the Microsoft Store. Having read somewhere (I think) that some future Windows 10 updates will be coming through the Store, and having discovered my Calculator app had stopped working some time ago, I thought I’d remove it and reinstall it from the Store. But while it comes up OK, whenever I click the “Get” button, nothing happens. I’ve tried running WSreset. exe, which didn’t fix things, and have tried resetting the Store under “Settings > Apps > Microsoft Store > Advanced Options,” but still no change. I’ve also tried PowerShell commands—which I was able to verify had removed and reinstalled the Store—but that made no difference either. I’ve also tried signing out of…

Folding@home isn’t the only group that’s interested in folding proteins. Google, via its faintly terrifying offshoot DeepMind (which has an AI that can play Starcraft much better than you can), has also been having a go, but its AlphaFold software takes a rather different approach. Essentially, what AlphaFold has been able to do is sidestep the whole inconvenient simulation process, and go straight from looking at the flat chain of amino acids to its final 3D shape by predicting how it will fold, then honing that prediction to a remarkable degree of accuracy. “It’s a game changer,” Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, told Nature. “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change…

With chip shortages, the cryptomining craze, and painful pricing for all kinds of components, we’re hardly operating in normal times when it comes to PC tech. Without mentioning the p-word, let’s just say the world has more to worry about right now than overpriced GPUs. Excuse the pun, but screen tech hasn’t been immune to the madness. Yet progress continues. In fact, after years of headline-grabbing advances in gaming panels, the next 12 months might offer the best chance to upgrade a tired productivity-oriented screen. The introduction of the first mainstream OLED monitors this year is certainly a milestone. Likewise, wider adoption of mini-LED backlighting is a game changer. The mere availability of affordable monitor models that combine a quality 32-inch IPS or VA panel with 4K resolution and 120Hz-plus…

For especially young children, even those for whom using a block-based language might be a step too far, Bee-Bot ($90) or Blue-Bot ($120) might be of interest. Referred to as programmable floor robots, and typically used with mats that the robots can be programmed to navigate, these devices don’t have to be programmed via a language at all. Instead, they can be programmed by pressing buttons on the robot’s body. So, for example, if you press the “Clear” button, followed by “Forward” twice, “Right turn,” “Forward,” and “Go,” the robot moves forward by 300mm (2x 150mm), turns right 90 degrees, and finally moves forward by 150mm, with a short pause between each step. While this isn’t programming as we normally use the word, it is, of course, exactly that, and it…

WATER COOLING A PC can be a daunting task for those new to the scene, and at times, even for some seasoned professionals, but where do you start if you want to take your build to the next level? Running a custom water cooling solution does bring a number of benefits, extending the life of the hardware, being able to have a virtually silent system, allowing for higher overclocks, stable temperatures, and much more. Now, builds usually fall into one of two use cases: those that purely focus on productivity, and enthusiast or gaming setups. Both situations are, of course, first and foremost, dictated by the hardware to be used, and the performance required for each scenario. Productivity builds can obviously take advantage of the benefits that water cooling can…

FANS OF OBSCURE GAMING are in for a treat this month, as we’re going back to the Land of the Rising Sun to explore a different take on the PC, released only in Japan. If you’ve ever wanted to know what the PC would be like in an alternate reality, Fujitsu’s FM Towns is the answer. This “hyper media PC” provides a wealth of new experiences, ranging from desktop multimedia to brilliant arcade ports. So, join us as we explore a brief history of the FM Towns, and show you the easiest way to emulate it. YOU’LL NEED THIS TSUGARU EMULATOR AND BIOS FILES http://ysflight.in.coocan.jp/FM/towns/Tsugaru/e.html 1 BACKGROUND The FM Towns was released as Fujitsu’s response to the increasingly competitive Japanese computer scene, where machines such as the Sharp X68000 and…

I’VE BEEN HAVING fun with ray tracing in World of Warcraft and Cyberpunk 2077. It’s pretty cool, but it’s not perfect—most importantly, in what it tries to mimic: light. A quick tl;dr on ray tracing. Nvidia has dedicated hardware on its current-gen RTX cards that simulates how light works by using “rays” to predict certain variables. It does this by bouncing an individual particle or ray off the geometries and materials in the game scene to try to get a better understanding of how shadows are formed and light reacts with those materials. That gives more realistic shadows, reflections, and refractions. It’s the same technique used in a lot of CGI in Hollywood blockbusters. The difference is that in GPUs we only use a comparably small number of rays per…

CONSIDERING THAT, on paper, it’s a prebuilt gaming powerhouse, the Orion 3000 is surprisingly compact. Its case has a capacity of just 18 liters, and the whole rig weighs under 22 pounds. With a footprint less than 15 x 7 inches, it can squeeze comfortably on or below any desk. It’s a fairly unassuming PC, all things considered. Its relatively small size and gentle RGB front lighting don’t immediately grab your attention the way bigger, badder machines do. The $1,500 price tag isn’t particularly demanding, either, especially as it contains a GeForce RTX 3070, which is extremely hard to find right now. The prospect of scooping up a powerful pre-built system instead of trying to out-bid bots in the GPU scalping war is certainly attractive. If it wasn’t a giveaway,…

COOLER MASTER is no stranger to the case market, offering an extensive line-up to suit every scenario and budget. The Cooler Master MasterBox 540 adds yet another product to the MasterBox series, the company’s website now listing a total of 64—yes, 64—MasterBox options. The MasterBox 540 is marketed as “Gaming in a New Light,” a reference to the aRGB backlit front panel that takes its inspiration from automotive lighting. Given its experience in the case market, Cooler Master seems to have taken something of a gamble here and pinned its hopes on people liking the front panel backlit design. It’s either a really risky or a really clever decision on Cooler Master’s part, and it’s refreshing to see a manufacturer not being scared of trying something new. Overall, the MasterBox…

IT ISN’T ANY SECRET that we really do enjoy using SteelSeries products. Its hardware often checks all the relevant boxes, and it’s very rare that the company launches a complete dud, so when we saw the Rival 5, we had to grab one. The Rival 5 is marketed as being inspired by a chameleon for being able to meet the needs of many, and being versatile as it does so, but how well does it hit the mark? The shape of the mouse is pretty solid—it is similar to the Logitech G900 but with a less bulbous rear, making it fit comfortably in your hand, especially with a palm or claw grip. Eight out of the nine programmable buttons are easily accessible, even with smaller hands; however, the large silver…

> Phone Problems > Ultimate Audio > More Gaming? S21 Ultra Woes? Dear Zak, In your June 2021 issue, vol. 26 no. 6, on page 73 you mention that you got a Samsung S21 Ultra. You gave it a thumbs-up. But when I went to the website for Verizon, it gave it 2.5 stars out of 5. Now the reviews say after the April update most of the phones stopped working properly. And there were a lot of very bad reviews for that phone. So, my questions to you are: Have you had any issues with your phone so far, and how would you rate your phone? I was planning to buy that exact phone until I saw those reviews. So, any info you can give me would be much…

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, Microsoft will have made a major announcement on the next version of Windows; however, we’ve already seen a leaked beta version. There’s an updated UI, complete with the expected updates from the canceled Win 10X. There are centered app icons, like a Mac, although you can change it back. There’s a simplified Start menu, and a lot more rounded corners. Intriguingly, an icon labeled “Widget” appears (it’s back, hurrah). There’s a smart new Snap feature, to quickly resize windows to a set of predefined arrangements. The Xbox app is also now integrated into the OS. Excited? Probably not; from what we’ve seen, it appears to be a visual refresh, with some tweaking around the edges. It’s due to launch later this year. Meanwhile, Windows…

WHETHER YOU’RE a PC-building veteran who has more machines under their belt than Origin PC, an intermediate builder who’s comfortable but has scope for more knowledge, or if you have all the gear but no idea, this guide contains all the tips and tricks to make building a PC an enjoyable experience. If you are reading this, chances are you have a keen interest in PCs, and even if this article isn’t immediately helpful, it will be at some point in the future. Custom PCs are our true love; they aren’t necessarily cheaper, and certainly aren’t easier than a pre-built plug-and-play machine, but the advantages are significant. The sky is your limit (well, that and your wallet), but you get full control over what goes inside and how you want your PC…

If your PC is connected to the Internet, there’s nothing stopping you from beginning to fold immediately. Point your browser at https://foldingathome.org/#downloads and choose your operating system. From there, install the client, and set up an account. Perhaps join a team, which pools the research carried out by multiple donors and turns it into a kind of competition between teams as to who can process the most work units. There’s a Maximum PC team, naturally: number 11108. The minimum specs are very low, in the Pentium 4 and Windows XP range, but the more cores you can give it, the happier it will be, and only a limited number of projects are available for 32-bit systems. Once connected, you’ll find the client lurking in your system tray. There are two…

1 AMOLED DISPLAY With a 1.2-inch display, packing 360x360 pixels, you’ll be surprised to hear this thing packs in a pixel density of 364 ppi. That’s as high as most modern smartphones. Combine that with an impressive brightness and color contrast, thanks to that Super AMOLED display, and it’s beautiful to behold. 2 BATTERY LIFE The big question, right? How long does it last? In the configuration we have, we get through around 50 percent every 10 hours. However, that’s with the display permanently on, the brightness high, and GPS and heart-rate tracking on continually. Some people have recorded up to four days. There are smartwatch hybrids out there that will give you 32 days off a single charge. 3 SENSORS & CONNECTIVITY We’re just going to list all the…

Sonic Pi (https://sonic-pi.net) is described as a code-based music creation and performance tool. The tool runs under Raspberry Pi OS (it was developed in conjunction with the Raspberry Pi Foundation), as well as Windows and macOS. It’s also referred to as a live coding environment. This means that performers write code on the fly to create music as they’re performing. We might think of it as enabling a digital jam session. Where things differ, though, is that it’s common to project the live code on to a screen during performances, so the audience can share in the coding experience. It’s used by professional artists, but it also has educational value, especially for kids. According to its developer, Sam Aaron, writing for MagPi magazine, “Sonic Pi was conceived and built within classrooms…

iMac M1 24” BACKGROUND Is the new M1 iMac just a silly-sized M1 iPad, a detachedkeyboard M1 MacBook, or an M1 Mac Mini stretched out like pizza dough? We’ll only know by getting inside, however tough that might be. It’s time for a teardown of the mid-tier model. MAJOR TECH SPECS • Apple M1 chip with eight-core CPU (four performance cores and four efficiency cores) and 16-core Neural Engine • Apple M1 integrated eight-core GPU • 8GB of unified memory • 23.5-inch (diagonal) True Tone display with 4480×2520 resolution and support for one billion colors (P3 color gamut) • 256GB of SSD storage KEY FINDINGS • Specs aside, at first glance this iMac looks like an iPad on a stand. We’ve been doing iMac teardowns for a long time, so…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CC 2018 ONWARD To view compatibility visit: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/systemrequirements.html. PHOTOSHOP CAN BE very aptly described as a tool for your imagination. If you can visualize something artistic or creative in your brain in the first place, chances are you can transform that concept into a reality using Adobe’s software. So, when you picture all those crazy illustrations in your head, don’t just disregard them in the belief that they would be too difficult to recreate. Give them a chance and take your time; Rome wasn’t built in a day. Don’t quote us on that, though—we aren’t historians. The specific form of surrealist art we are focusing on this issue is spherical art. You may have seen this type of bizarre artwork plastered all over the Internet…

Planning a new build is an exciting time. You know the sort of look you want, but can’t nail it down. Well, whatever case and part combination you have, chances are there is already a system out there with a full custom loop installed. Search the web, find inspiration from a previously completed build, a theme, color combination, sports team, your favorite game. Take pictures of certain aspects you want to incorporate from other builds you have seen, sketch ideas, play with fun reservoir placements—it all leads to something new and different. Maybe take it one step further: Paint the case, etch the glass, add custom cables, a sleeper build, a desk build, the possibilities are only limited by your own creativity. Make the build your own, make it stand…

IT’S ALWAYS EXCITING to get a lot of power in a relatively small form factor, and the laptop we have been blessed with for this review happens to fit into this category, with the much-coveted GeForce RTX 3080 inside. Partnered with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS, it should surely pack a punch; and it does on paper, at least. Asus’s Republic of Gamers division has been releasing impressive gaming tech since 2006, and the hardware on offer is only getting more exciting. So, the Zephyrus G15 has a lot backing it, but does it perform adequately? Well, it’s certainly no underdog. As a 15-inch model, it’s the average laptop size, but that’s the last time we will use “average” in this review. With the lid closed, this machine looks sharp.…

Can Razer enter a new market? IT’S ALWAYS interesting to see a company switch into a new line of products. The transition can be a scary move for a team with a fixed brand identity, but Razer seems to be handling this new expedition into a more lifestyle-oriented sector of the tech world pretty darn well. That’s not to say it has abandoned its gaming ethos by any means, but with more productivity-focused devices coming out, it’s really pushing the brand forward. One of these products is the new Opus headset, a slightly different set of headphones from Razer’s traditional gaming cans. So, how does the Opus perform, and can it stand up to other music/media-focused headphones? As a pair of active noise-canceling (ANC) Bluetooth headphones, they certainly differentiate themselves…

YOU HAVE BEEN LIED TO. In trailers, early showings, and generally all press materials, Resident Evil 8 was shown to be a game about a tall vampire lady who pursued you through a crumbling mansion. And it’s really kinda not. There is a tall vampire lady, of course, and she’s one of the best things about the game, but her presence takes up barely 25 percent of its runtime—she’s effectively the tutorial. The section involving her is also over too early, frontloaded in a plot that also involves her daughters, four other boss characters, werewolves, faked deaths, parasites, bio-organic weapons, Chris Redfield, the kidnapping of a baby, and that strange crossover between religious cults and the biological sciences. A direct sequel of Resident Evil VII, Village does something it thinks…

ANOTHER MONTH, another depressing set of GPU prices a cross all the major online retailers. Even worse, it seems that prices of budget CPUs are rising, too, with AMD’s Athlon 3000G rising by a small amount and Intel’s i3-10100 leaping up by more than a third. It’s dispiriting, but there aren’t many good alternatives; if you’re considering getting an i3 right now, the 10300 is only 30 or so dollars more than the 10100, and offers significantly better performance. There aren’t really any good alternatives to the AMD chip, as we’re seeing low stock on processors such as the Athlon 240GE. Both our budget builds this month have new motherboards: Gigabyte’s wallet-friendly offerings for AMD and Intel respectively, the B450M and B460M DS3H V2. They’re straightforward mATX mobos, devoid of…