Índex per May 2018 a Maximum PC

BACK IN 1996, I picked up a magazine that would forever change my life. It started me on a journey of love—the love for hardware and the PC industry. Many years later, I would write for this magazine, and it would be one of my most memorable experiences. All of that culminated in realizing my dream of being part of the Maximum PC staff. The hardware industry changes regularly, and it changes fast. This is one of the primary reasons why I love it so much. Things keep evolving and moving at such an incredible pace that oftentimes it even becomes difficult to keep up. But that’s the excitement that energizes the industry so profoundly. In the last few years, I’ve had the privilege of being part of a wonderful…

FACEBOOK’S RELAXED attitude to sharing data is coming under increasing pressure from all sides. It is about to lose its chief security officer over a row about how the Cambridge Analytica data breach was handled. Now it looks as though the law is getting increasingly interested. The Senate Commerce Committee and the Judiciary Committee have started sending letters and considering hearings. Meanwhile ex-Facebook employees keep popping up, and describing the company’s data security as “lax.” One high-level insider in charge of policy violations by third parties claims to have warned it of major data breaches back in 2012. A class action has also been launched by a disgruntled shareholder. Mr. Zuckerberg has recently put on a suit and tie, and given interviews where he has been apologetic, admitting the company…

We sat down with Mike Arkin, CEO of Big Boat Interactive and lead developer of the original Battlezone II, to discuss the challenges involved in bringing the FPS/RTS classic into the modern era with the addition of HD graphics and modern-day OS compatibility. Maximum PC: Hi Mike, the question has to be asked: Why now? Where did the desire to remaster this classic come from? Even in its heyday, the original BZ2 was a somewhat niche title, holding a hardcore base of players and fans, but it never came close to the heights of other RTS and FPS titles of the time. Can you tell us what inspired you and your team to take on this challenge? Mike Arkin: Well, if we go way back in time, Battlezone was a…

We’re going to highlight the Google Authenticator as a prime TFA tool. Install it on your phone, then fire up the service you want to protect with TFA. LastPass uses Google Authenticator (among others) to do so. Using that as an example, head to “LastPass Vault > Account Settings > Multifactor options.” Click the “Edit” button and “Enable” it. Use the “Barcode” option to display a QR code. On your phone, open Google Authenticator, tap the “+” and click “Scan barcode,” then point your phone at the on-screen QR code. LastPass has now been added to Google Authenticator. Anytime someone tries to access your LastPass Vault from a new device, they must enter the current code (this updates every 30 seconds) before access is granted. There’s an option to allow…

Ever wanted to revisit classic games from the ’90s? DOSBox enables you to play games written for MS-DOS, and while it’s possible to tie it into PlayOnLinux, it’s far simpler to just install it natively: DOS games reside in their own folder, and you can source a wide variety from www.abandonia.com. Download a game in Zip format to your Downloads folder, then extract its contents into the dos/c folder you created in your Home folder. Now type “dosbox” and hit Enter to launch DOSBox in its own window. Next, enter the following command for it to mount your/dos/c folder as its own C drive: Type “dir” and hit Enter to verify you’re in the correct spot—you’ll see folders for each of the games you want to run. Type “cd dirname”…

If you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, a copy of Premiere Pro, a camera with an interval timer, and a tall building overlooking a busy intersection nearby, you can make a tilt-shift time-lapse movie of the cars passing by. Speeding up the clip slightly adds to the sensation that you’re looking at models, rather than reality, and Premiere supports similar masks and blur effects as Photoshop. You can even use keyframing to animate the blur. Real pros using Adobe After Effects can use Compound Blur and depth maps to do the same thing with more control, and it’s interesting to note how different blur styles alter the final result. We found Lens Blur to be the best in Photoshop, but experiment for yourself with the different blurs…

TEN TIMES THE DATA DENSITY, 1,000 times faster, 1,000 times better endurance. All of this and more Intel claimed three years ago for its revolutionary 3D XPoint non-volatile memory technology, now branded Optane. Those claims, of course, were made in comparison to the incumbent non-volatile memory tech that dominates the storage industry, namely NAND flash memory. Now we have our hands on Intel’s first more-or-less mainstream SSD for PCs based on that 3D XPoint tech, the Intel Optane SSD 800p. But what’s this? Sequential reads of 1,450MB/s? Writes of just 640MB/s? And check out the IOPS, too. Intel rates its new Optane drive at just 250K read IOPS and 140K for writes. Far from being 1,000 times faster than a NAND SSD, all those figures are significantly slower. What’s going…

BUDGET BOOM, LOOK AT THAT: $22 savings off last month. It’s happening people—prices are tumbling, memory prices are sort of coming down slowly, and we’re even scraping savings from the most unlikely of places. We’ve gone for a cheaper PSU this time around, mostly because EVGA’s 450BT is now out of stock. That said, Corsair’s still a solid brand, and this 80 Plus White PSU will be more than enough for our rig, even with a GTX 1060 thrown in for good measure later in the year (or whatever fancy new mid-range GPU Nvidia might be releasing in the next few months). That aside, not a huge amount has changed for our budget build. The case is the same, the processor, the mobo, hard drives, and our chosen OS—all of…

THE CITY OF PLATTSBURGH, NY, sits next to a hydroelectric power station, which means it has—or had—some of the world’s cheapest electricity. The national average is 10 cents per kWh, the city charges 4.5 cents, and to promote business, it offered a commercial rate of 2 cents. This soon attracted cryptocurrency miners in some numbers. The trouble is, the power plant only has so much to give: 104MWh a month, to be exact. Anything over this has to drawn from elsewhere at a cost. The rates have proved so attractive to miners that they’ve exhausted the local supply, and city residents are getting hit by $100 or more extra on their bills. To slow things down, the city council has imposed an 18-month moratorium on new cryptocurrency mining operations. A…

I first stumbled upon Zotero while perusing through the Document Foundation’s list of LibreOffice extensions. While I’d seen it listed on Flathub—a repository for flatpak packages—I hadn’t actually looked up what the program does. Simply put, Zotero is a repository for documents and resources to help people manage their research. Do you remember having to look up how to write an APA or ALA bibliography as a kid? Remember how formatting them in Word was a pain in the backside? I do. Zotero can do all that formatting for you. Created by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University under the GNU Affero General Public License, Zotero is a personal research repository. Unlike Evernote and OneNote, the focus is on maintaining bibliographical information for documents and…

PlayOnLinux isn’t the only way to (try to) run Windows software in Linux. As we’ve seen, POL is basically a user-friendly wrapper for Wine, and while it makes things easier—particularly in the way it supports multiple Wine versions for compatibility purposes—it’s not perfect. As you’ve seen from the main feature, you’ll often be forced to bypass its scripts and attempt to wrestle with its controls—in a more user-friendly interface than offered by Wine itself, though—to try to get your game running. If the idea of Wine appeals, but spending hours trying to get your game working doesn’t, take a look at CrossOver Linux (www.codeweavers.com). Like POL, it’s a wrapper for Wine, but it’s better developed, because while it’s not free, you’re paying to support Wine development, and many improvements in…

This job has a funny way of warping your perspective on the cost of things. We receive an excessive level of components here, and over time, when you’re exposed to that constant barrage of hardware, you begin to lose appreciation for its value. That’s not to say we treat it with disrespect, but because we don’t actually buy it, we’re often disconnected from its cost. It’s one of the reasons why the Blueprints section at the back of the mag is so important. Not only to you, but to us as well. It gives us a good grounding in what the industry is doing, and how it’s affecting consumers. In fact, the big-brass balled executive editor and myself take turns doing it from issue to issue, just to keep us…

WEB BROWSER If installing the Adblock Plus or Ghostery extensions, your browser must meet the minimum requirements (see https://adblockplus.org/requirements and www.ghostery.com/products). THERE ARE CURRENTLY OVER 2 BILLION ACTIVE FACEBOOK USERS. The platform is a great way to stay in touch with friends and family, especially considering it’s free to use. The fact that virtually everyone has an account, however, means it can be difficult to make sure that the status updates, photos, and messages you share stay only within a limited audience of friends. While Facebook has some very powerful privacy features, these are not all enabled by default. For instance, when you create a new account, your public profile is automatically visible to search engines such as Google. This can include information such as your name, birthday, and home…

It’s easy to be critical of Skype, Discord, and the like in this context, because they’re simply not made for podcasts. There is at least one free alternative out there that does a passable job of live recording, because its technology has been built with low latency, high-bandwidth conversations in mind, almost like the dedicated ISDN connections that are, in some parts of the world, still used today to record live radio interviews. The little-known Source-Connect Now is a perfect tool to try if you’re desperate to avoid the editing, and get your podcasts online without too much hassle. The free version, which you can get via http://now.source-elements.com, connects two participants at a perfectly reasonable 128kb/s, and has built-in support for WAV recording—you’ll still need to do a little conversion…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1–2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT THE IDEA BEHIND our budget builds is simple enough—construct the most affordable machine possible for the smallest pile of cash. We’re not utter masochists, though, so while it is possible to build a machine even cheaper than we have here, there are some quality-of-life choices that we see as a bare minimum. We won’t, for instance, touch non-brand hardware, because we’ve been down that road before, and in our experience, such corner-cutting never ends well—especially when it comes to cases and power supplies. But it does mean that even before we start, there are potentially further savings to be made. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here; let’s get back to the concept…. What makes this budget build possible…

BUDGET BUILDERS have never been so spoiled. Not in every component choice—RAM and graphics card prices are still hideous—but definitely when it comes to processors. We’ve never had it so good. After years of marginal performance increases, we find ourselves handling chips that would have been highend a year ago. We’re talking quad-core as standard, at decent stock frequencies, with capable integrated graphics. And in the case of this new $100 chip, that latter point shouldn’t be understated. The Ryzen 3 2200G, like the 2400G that we looked at last issue, uses architecture more readily found on AMD’s discrete graphics cards to power the chip’s 3D graphical grunt. Where the top-end Vega 64 has 64 compute units, and the 2400G has 11, here we’re dealing with just eight. That equates…

BALANCE, AS WE ALL KNOW, is vitally important. Without it, we wouldn’t have Segway polo, giant Jenga, or standing up. Does the world of mousing really need a big emphasis on balance, though? Does it need 256 possible levels of side-to-side balance adjustment? Science has perhaps not advanced far enough to tell, but that’s what SteelSeries is offering with the Rival 600: a series of eight 4g (about 0.15oz) weights, with eight possible positions to place them (or not place them), four on each lateral edge of the mouse. Pull them all out, and the mouse is light and skippy; stuff them all below the detachable side panels, and it’s, predictably, just over an ounce heavier, with a weightier glide. Depending on your particular right-hand stance (the left-mounted thumb buttons…

RAZER MAMBA AND FIREFLY HYPERFLUX I’ve been using Razer’s Mamba Tournament Edition as my daily mouse for a while now, so when Razer sent me the new HyperFlux wireless edition, I had to check it out. A few weeks later, I’m a wireless convert. The Mamba HyperFlux is nearly identical to its wired predecessor in design, the only notable difference being the honeycombed grip has changed into more of a ribbed pattern. The biggest difference, obviously, is the move from wired to wireless. But unlike most wireless mice, the Mamba HyperFlux never needs to have its battery changed. In fact, it doesn’t have a battery at all. Power is provided via the Firefly HyperFlux mouse mat, which wirelessly sends power to the mouse. Without a battery, the Mamba is one…

> Mouse Marvels > Driver Clashes > Budget Builds Upright Mice The “vertical mouse” is an ergonomic innovation that only recently came to my attention. After feeling wrist pain, I’m experimenting with several, and discovering how different they are in terms of angle and grip. The fundamental idea that a “handshake position” is more natural than the standard mousing hand position does make intuitive sense. And you can buy a decent vertical mouse for as little as $10. This all may be worthy of some discussion in your mag. –David Rolfe EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: There are several vertical mouse advocates in our office, and I’ve had the chance to try quite a few different designs over the years. The problem is that despite my best intentions, I’ve never…

ON MARCH 12, a little-known research company called CTS-Labs issued a security warning about AMD Ryzen and EPYC chips. It claimed to have found 13 flaws, which could let attackers install malware into protected parts of the processor, exposing passwords and encryption keys. This was hard on the heels of Meltdown and Spectre, and people were understandably twitchy. It received a good deal of coverage, and sounded scary. Things were odd from the start, though. It is best practice for a security company to give at least 90 days’ notice before going public. This gives enough time for patches and fixes to be put in place before alarming the public. Typically, the vulnerability and the patch become public on the same day. CTS-Labs only gave AMD 24 hours before going…

TRIUMPHS WORLD’S SMALLEST PC IBM has developed a SoC the size of a grain of salt, designed for blockchain and IoT. APPLE DEVELOPING OWN MICRO-LEDS Smaller, brighter, and more efficient, the next screen technology may be out this year on the Apple Watch. HTC VIVE GOES PRO New lighter $799 headset offers 2880x1600 display, noise canceling, and wireless adapter. TRAGEDIES AI CLAIMS FIRST VICTIM? For reasons that are unclear, an autonomous Uber vehicle has killed a pedestrian in Arizona. RIP STEPHEN HAWKING The visionary physicist who popularized something so complicated the population couldn’t understand it. Genius. TITAN V GETS SUM WRONG Nvidia’s Titan V has a hardware glitch that sometimes gives the wrong math answer. OK for games, not scientific uses.…

AMD BUILD Step-by-step guide PG. 64 AMD INGREDIENTS INTEL BUILD Step-by-step guide PG. 68 INTEL INGREDIENTS REMEMBER WHEN BUILDING A PC was an affordable pastime? Remember when graphics cards used to be in stock? Remember when a reasonable upgrade path used to exist? Maximum PC remembers…. All joking and old advertising slogans aside, it wasn’t so long ago that these things were a given. It was that age-old argument we could turn to when confronting people who had bought laptops or consoles: We saved money, and got better performance for it in the long run. Oh, if only that were still the case. Go back to our January 2017 issue, and our budget build—complete with Core i5-6500, 8GB of DDR4, GTX 1060, 256GB SSD, and 1TB HDD—came in at an…

PlayOnLinux’s scripts aren’t always capable of getting the job done, sadly. There’s a particular issue with Steam powered games, where the installer falls over attempting to insert Steam into the virtual drive you’ve created. The solution here is to install Steam directly first, using the POL script—after it’s successfully installed, double-click the icon, and allow it to update itself. If you receive an error saying it’s crashed, but a progress bar is still running, leave it to finish updating, then click “Next” to remove the crash window, and log in to your Steam account. As things stand, Steam works, but is unable to access the store in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. To resolve this, first select its shortcut in the main POL window, and then click “Configure.” Type the following into…

1 Pseudo-G Wired Ethernet has had an overhaul, with performance increases of two to three times that of previous generations. The Raspberry Pi Foundation refers to this as pseudo-G Ethernet, as it’s still bridged over USB 2.0, which means that you’re limited to 250–300Mb/s, but on a physical level it’s Gigabit Ethernet. This also supports Power-over-Ethernet, and there’s a new header for supporting that next to the main GPIO connectors. This will support a new HAT board that will enable you to power your RPi via the Ethernet cable. 2 Wireless Boost The new Raspberry Pi 3 B+ adds support for 5GHz Wi-Fi to the existing 2.4GHz offering, along with Bluetooth 4.2, and Bluetooth LE. There’s a new dual-band Proant antenna squeezed in, drawing on the developments of the RPi…

If you’re planning to use your Pi as a guest network, or if you want to slow down your uploads to stop your download speeds taking a dive, Wondershaper is a great tool. It’s tiny—really, it’s just a 15kb script—but immensely powerful if you’re looking to control the speed that traffic can move through your hardware. Begin by downloading it from the Pi’s standard repositories using sudo apt-get install wondershaper, at which point you can go ahead and run it for the first time with sudo wondershaper eth0 1024 1204. This command restricts the download (first value) and upload (second value) of the Pi’s Ethernet connection to an entirely unreasonable 1,024kb/s. You can check that it’s working with wondershaper eth0, or by running a speed test at, for instance, www.speedtest.net…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1–2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT THESE BUILDS have been an interesting exercise in budgeting, that’s for sure. We usually work at the crazy end of the system-building spectrum here in the labs, and as we’ve mentioned in the past, it’s far easier to get expensive components in than more affordable gear. Which, although truly hysteria-inducing at times, makes working on a project like this far more satisfying. That said, this isn’t the first time we’ve looked at such affordable rigs. Back in March 2017, we were given a $300 budget, and told to tackle a similar challenge, albeit with 8GB of DDR3, a 256GB SSD, and some terrible, terrible, terrible processors. No, seriously, just how far things have come in processing performance in the…

AS A REVIEWER, it’s far too easy to get caught up in the razzmatazz of full-sized premium cases and bespoke custom towers. Those rectangular boxes that pack every innovative feature known to man into their voluptuously carved forms appear before us like sirens, singing over the sea. Their enticing figures draw us closer, before the reality sets in as to who exactly is serving who here. Sure, they have their purpose, and the market is certainly there for those who can afford such luxury in their computing lives. But those triple-digit transactions are often an unnecessary indulgence. Such halo products are designed with no more purpose in mind than to instill desire into the consumer, to reinforce the premium feel of a brand, and to make its more affordable options—the…

IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN, when you can’t swing a VR headset without smacking a stack of new processors. AMD’s second-generation Ryzen and Intel’s second batch of Coffee Lake processors are both preparing for take-off, along with mobile Coffee Lake CPUs for laptops that promise a huge boost in performance for mobile systems. But the processor I’m most excited to poke a stick at is Intel’s Kaby Lake-G, with on-package RX Vega M graphics. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to create Kaby Lake-G. Intel CPU with AMD graphics sounds cool, sure, but the resistance between the two companies must have been tremendous. It’s almost a slap in the face to Intel’s whole graphics team—your stuff isn’t good enough! And then there’s the technical challenge…

WHY ON EARTH do we have this thing in? I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t already own a headphone stand. I have one at home, a cheap $20 aluminum affair, an impulse buy from Amazon to complement the custom desk I built in 2016. I love my audio, and as I’ve got a sweet pair of Beyerdynamic DT 1770 Pros to cushion sound waves around my rather small earlobes, I needed something to store them on. Thus, the stand. There’s a whole plethora of them out there, too: plastic ones, wooden ones, ones you attach to the underside of your desk, even ones baked into screens and cases. If you can think of it, some odd-named third-party company has probably made it. It’s a big market, and…

While you probably don’t need to adjust your PC’s page and swap files, it’s useful to know what they are when troubleshooting, or if you’re trying to free up a little hard drive space. What is a page file? A page file acts like a physical extension of RAM, and is used to offload excess or idle data from the memory to the hard disk. It’s necessary because if the main system RAM is overloaded, and no page space is available, a program could crash and potentially lose data. What is a swap file? The swap file and page file perform the same function. Swap files are also a reserved section of disk space used to offload data from RAM. One of the swap file’s primary functions is to provide…