Índex per January 2019 a Maximum PC

HUMANS LIKE to know what’s coming. Look back through history, and it’s littered with future-gazers, augurs, oracles, and prophets trying to guess what’s going to happen next. We like to think we’ve come a long way from casting bones and imbibing noxious substances in order to foresee what the gods have in store for us, but realistically, a lot of our divinations have just gone a bit more high tech. Supercomputers may be the stuff of tech dreams, but much of the time, they’re trying to predict the future. From analyzing weather data to ascertain which way a storm is going, to trying to spot trends in the shares market, our greatest technological wonders are dedicated to trying to guess what’s going to happen next. We have whole industries built…

INTEL HAS A NEW FLAGSHIP CPU: the Core i9-9980XE, a 14nm process Skylake-X that boasts 18 cores. There’s an obvious rival in view, too: AMD’s 32-core Threadripper. The Core i9-9980XE has a base clock of 3.0GHz, with a Turbo of 4.5GHz, and a useful all-core Turbo of 3.8GHz. Adding two cores over the i9-9960X has cost 100MHz on the base clock, but it receives a bump in L3 cache, now 24.75MB. Performance is mixed. For straight single-core jobs, it loses to its sister chips, who can pump the clock better, especially the 5GHz available to the i9-9900K. In multicore jobs, it struggles to keep pace with Threadripper’s finest. It’s very quick everywhere, nicely balanced overall, but it’s not often the absolute fastest anywhere. Being Intel’s king of the hill, you…

A RESEARCH TEAM from Michigan and New York Universities has devised a method to break into fingerprint recognition systems. The remarkable, and alarming, thing is that the feat has been achieved without access to the original fingerprint or any hacking of code or hardware. It just uses a fake fingerprint that grants access. These “DeepMasterPrints” are created using machine learning. An AI system was trained on thousands of prints until it could create realistic human fingerprints from scratch. These combine the most common traits of a fingerprint, producing a generic archetype, like a skeleton key. Biometric security is convenient, and we’ve been told that our fingerprints and eyes are unique. However, the systems only work on a subset of the possible data; you don’t need a full and perfect fingerprint…

Consider first the timeline being discussed here. In the technology and software world, 10 years is an entire lifetime. Facebook got rolling in 2005, only 13 years ago. Instagram is only eight years old. Canonical itself has only been around since 2004. A 10-year support horizon seems ambitious. But in a world where Canonical and Red Hat make their money catering to cloud customers, actions may seem puzzling to the desktop user. After all, Ubuntu has iterated through Linux kernels and provided new features via new version releases. Does that mean Ubuntu 18.04 will become stale? To users of Ubuntu Server, a long-term support horizon of 10 years means more predictability. Applications will have a known stable platform to target. And applications for the server increasingly mean those that run…

To program yourself requires the standard called OpenQASM. This is the basis for all development kits. Many groups have developed toolkits using this standard. The best-known ones are from IBM, D-Wave, and Microsoft. IBM decided to use Python to create Qiskit, and you can download this kit from Github. It also has many sources and demonstration collections available. You can learn all about the current development state from there. In both Eclipse and Netbeans, all you need to do is import the code into a project and explore. Don’t forget to install Python 3.5 or higher before you try to compile. IBM’s QE has these examples in its Python toolkit. When you have the sources installed, you can only run simulations on your own computer. If you want to run on a…

When it comes to M.2 NVMe SSDs based on flash memory, we’re not going to pull any big surprises. Samsung’s 970 Pro, available in 512GB and 1TB formats for $190 and $380 respectively, is our pick of the premium M.2 drives. Its advantage over the competition isn’t enormous, but it’s still the daddy—just by a smaller margin. Its core specifications are the chief reason why the 970 Pro is so good. For starters, it uses Samsung’s hottest 64-layer 3D MLC NAND memory, where the 970 Evo uses cheaper but ultimately slower 3D TLC NAND. Then it packs at least 512MB of LPDDR4 DRAM cache. Finally, there’s Samsung’s very latest and greatest controller chip and firmware combo, known as Phoenix. The net result? Sequential read speeds of 3.5GB/s that pretty much…

YOU KNOW WHAT we don’t like doing? We don’t like reviewing the same product over and over and over again. The RX 480 was a fantastic breath of fresh air from AMD when it arrived. It showed promise. A mid-range GPU with enough clout to take on the 1080p battleground, no sweat, and at an affordable price, too. OK, it may have drawn perhaps a touch too much power from the PCIe bus at first, but that had little effect on premium motherboards anyway. It was an exceptionally strong GPU. Fast-forward a year, and we saw AMD’s first ever like-for-like rebadge, the RX 580. With Vega not having dropped yet either, the future didn’t look good. And, lo and behold, it wasn’t. Usually, a brand new top-tier architecture, like Vega,…

THIS ASUS ROG Strix GL12CX combines the dynamism of the RTX 2080 and the Intel i9-9900K. What’s special about this power couple is that the CPU comes factory overclocked up to 4.9GHz under a dead silent, liquid-cooled system, which seems like a good investment if you’re the kind of person who is into high-end tech. Turned off, the solid black chassis captures the silent ninja look Asus was presumably going for. Turned on, small strips of color glow brightly from between the cracks. This special Black Ops 4 edition also comes with a clear side panel to show off the components. Aura Sync lighting adds a specific color pattern to your keyboard as soon as you start Black Ops 4, then highlights specific key-bindings once in game. It’s pretty, but…

THERE ARE FUNCTIONAL headphones, and then there are experience headphones. Let’s not skirt around the subject for any longer than necessary: With the ATHM50xBT, Audio-Technica delivers exactly the kind of sound stage you’d expect a company like that to deliver, and it does it hard. This is a set of brash closed-back cans that well and truly thumps through music, seemingly throwing impact straight down through your spine when you push the decibels up, literally throbbing along with the bass end. But where some bass-heavy cans allow that ketchupy low end to smother the high-end fries, A-T knows there’s a balance to be found, and the company has dipped the M50 drivers in just the right amount of sauce. Highs fizz, and mids stand out if you go looking for…

We’re seriously impressed by AMD’s Threadripper lineup, having just about wrapped up our second-generation TR testing. All in all, it’s a sound investment for anyone looking to get into video editing, or any similar professional pursuit. The 2920X, in particular, has caught our attention, not only for its price point, but also because of its versatility. Plus, when you look at how far AMD has come in such a short space of time with memory improvements and the plug-and-play nature of its Threadripper lineup, it’s hard not to feel admiration. If we were looking to invest in a new rig, the TR 2920X would be our first port of call. With its multicore performance, competitive in-game prowess, incredible temps, and reasonable price, it’s an awesome chip. And when paired with…

RECENT TESTERS of pilot versions of Windows 10 were surprised to find something extra in their inbox: ads. It didn’t last long, the “feature” quickly disappeared. Microsoft has claimed it was an A/B test that was never meant to be seen by Windows Insiders. The company’s head of communication, Frank X. Shaw, said it was “an experimental feature that was never intended to be tested broadly, and is being turned off.” If so, why was such a detailed FAQ prepared for users? An FAQ that clearly states that the company is running a pilot of the system in four countries to “get user feedback on ads in Outlook.” The ads appear in non-work accounts, including Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. Their targeted nature can be turned off, via privacy settings,…

Meltdown and Spectre have cast a long shadow, not least on Linux. It has been a long, difficult process to secure the OS, and November’s kernel 4.20 release returned to the issue, but this time the performance drag on Intel systems hit hard. Sorting out the Spectre variant 2 chip flaw means putting heavy restrictions on Hyper-Threading. Previous fixes knocked off a few performance percentage points; this new fix provides the security, but tests show a performance hit of 30–50 percent on many tasks. The effect has been particularly hard on Linux servers. The cure is close to being worse than the disease. Linus Torvald has even suggested turning off Hyper-Threading.…

That’s the good news. The bad news: It’s really demanding. We shouldn’t be surprised, and it’s not as bad as some suspected after the initial demos in August. There were rumors flying about that the game only ran at 30fps at 1080p with ray tracing, and that was on an RTX 2080 Ti. Reality is much better, with 60fps or more, even at 1440p on an RTX 2080—at least in some areas. More complex scenes can drop quite a bit from that mark. As an example, an RTX 2080 Ti runs the snowy Nordlys single-player campaign at 92/70/41fps at 1080p/1440p/4K using the Ultra preset. Turn DXR off, and performance improves to 144/128/78fps. The RTX 2080 goes from 139/105/61 without DXR to 78/58/29fps with ray tracing, and the RTX 2070 drops…

ROUND 1 Productivity This won’t come as a surprise, but it’s very hard to work efficiently on a smartphone. Even the largest phablets have a screen that’s just too small to contain any significant portion of a document and an on-screen keyboard, and while the apps are there—analogs of the Microsoft Office suite, Google’s collection, and everything in between—actually using them is another matter. The same can be said of tablets; if you really want to get something done on a keyboard-free device, you’re going to have to juggle with Bluetooth peripherals and squint really hard. That said, there’s slightly more screen real estate to work with on bigger devices, and certain examples (the iPad Pro, in particular) are uniquely suited to artistic pursuits in a way that no other…

THIS TIME LAST YEAR, we predicted the future of non-volatile memory, and therefore SSDs, would be all about Intel’s 3D Xpoint and Samsung’s Z-NAND technologies. Fast-forward 12 months, and not much has changed, including the fact that we’re still largely talking about the future. Neither 3D Xpoint nor Z-NAND have yet made much impact in consumer-level PCs. That said, Intel’s 3D Xpoint tech has become more widely available. Multiple generations and formats of drives based on 3D Xpoint and sold under the Optane brand have been released. We’ve had first-gen PCIe boards and M.2 cache cards replaced by second-gen products, while larger M.2 SSDs with just about enough capacity to run as primary drives have also been released. You could even argue that the mighty Intel 905p PCIe board is…

DDR5 might not be on the cards until 2020, so is there anything we could see in the meantime to bolster memory performance? The most obvious solution would be an increase in the number of memory channels accessible by high-end desktop users, as that’s typically where memory matters most. Mainstream platforms can get away with dual-channel and DDR4 for some time, but for the high-end, any increase in memory bandwidth bolsters performance in ray tracing, video rendering, CAD CAM, you name it. AMD is likely to be unwilling to introduce more channels on its high-end motherboards just yet, because apart from including support in its latest Threadripper processor designs, it would also need to redesign its LGA socket on motherboards, so the newer chips would cease to be backward compatible…

One big question is whether encryption systems are at risk with quantum computers. The major concern is the RSA encryption scheme. The scheme is secure because it relies on the condition that factoring a large number into its primes is too time-consuming. When trying to find the prime numbers, there are many strategies, so the simplest one is to guess and try. A trial and error approach isn’t practical, though, since a 2,048-bit number has millions of solutions. Some strategies can reduce the number of possible solutions, but even the most powerful methods will take years or millions of years. With the right algorithms, a quantum computer could reduce that time to a practical level. Efforts are underway to create other algorithms that are not breakable this way. While this is prudent,…

DEPUTY EDITOR THE BEST AD-BLOCKER: UBLOCK ORIGIN Shh, don’t tell anyone, but we don’t like those pesky ads either. Let’s face it, relevant ads are good, but ones that take over an entire page or drag you elsewhere aren’t good. uBlock Origin is an open-source, low-resource-impacting ad-blocker, which is frequently updated—and we’re big fans. Add filters for your favorite content producers, and enjoy super-snappy load times on everything else. http://bit.ly/UBlockOrigin $free OH, MSI, WHY? There are two types of people: the organized, who have everything clean, spick and span, and in the right place; and the chaos curators, who have everything in a mess, but kinda know where it’s all located. The latter, at least for now, is my life. As I’m finally moving into my first home, the word…

Before you start setting all this up on your home system, and if you want to play with small snippets of code, try online solutions, such as Codepen and Jsfiddle. Codepen has a pleasing design and it’s easy to move around the desktop. For completeness, you have a window for HTML, one for CSS, and finally one for JavaScript. Each window also has options to analyze your code in different ways. The features are Tidy, Analyze, and Show Compiled. These are useful if you have a bad habit of indenting poorly, or just can’t figure out what you’ve done wrong. You can choose where you want your code to show. The three windows with code can be on the right, left, or bottom. When you want to start your own…

In this project, we used the Keyboard Python library to emulate a real keyboard using just the push buttons that controlled playing, pausing, and stopping video playback. The Keyboard library can be used to press any keys, so we can automate multiple key presses all from one push button. The library can also be used to write text to the screen. However, the most dangerous function of this library is that it can be used to record every single key press on the target machine. These key presses can be recorded to a list, then saved to a file, and used for nefarious purposes. Of course, recording the key presses of a user, without their consent, is illegal, and can land you in a lot of trouble—so don’t do it!…

INSTANT POT ULTRA 8-QUART Little known fact: I’m a family man, and I can cook. (Don’t tell my wife.) I’ve made plenty of meals in crock pots over the years, but there’s one small problem: time. If I remember to get things ready in advance, letting things simmer on low all day is great. Often I forget until a few hours before it’s time to eat. Did anyone want pizza for dinner instead? But the Instant Pot brings pressure cooking to the mainstream, and in doing so, cuts cooking times way down. Take one of my favorites: roast beef with pepperoncini and some seasonings. With a slow cooker, I’d cook it on low for 10–12 hours, or in a pinch I could try to get it ready to eat in…

FACEBOOK HAS LURCHED from one public relations mess to another for a couple of years now. The latest and biggest problem stems from the poor way it managed news output during the 2016 elections. The story has now taken a bizarre twist. It is being sued by an app developer called Six4Three, whose owner, Ted Kramer, has called Facebook “the biggest violator of data misuse in the history of the software industry.” Six4Three had an app that searched for pictures of people in bikinis on Facebook (not exactly a noble quest). Facebook shut it out and killed its business. As part of the case, Six4Three obtained private internal documents that revealed how much Facebook, and Zuckerberg in person, knew about the problems with privacy, and the abuse of it by…

TRIUMPHS ✓ LIFE IN MAGNETIC MEDIA Seagate plans to push the HDD to 100TB by 2025, using new heat-assisted magnetic recording technology. ✓ DDR5 ARRIVES Hynix has produced the first JEDEC-compliant DDR5 memory modules, capable of 5,200Mb/s, 60 percent faster than DDR4. ✓ MORE FLEXIBLE FUN Samsung finally showed off its foldable phone at its Developer Conference. It launches in 2019. TRAGEDIES ✗ RIP STEAM LINK After the current stocks are sold, that’s it for Steam’s Link; there wasn’t any profit in the sales it generated. ✗ THE COST OF MINING A new report claims that mining cryptocurrencies uses more power than mining metal. ✗ REPAIRS THAT BRICK Apple has confirmed that its T2 security chip may kill your device unless you use authorized dealers for repairs.…

Last month, we saw an alarming number of reports of Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition cards failing. Nvidia has admitted that the “limited test escapes from early boards caused the issues.” A test escape denotes a defect that has evaded all testing, a generous term to use—the early cards detonated soon after arrival, so clearly weren’t thoroughly soak tested. There are no firm figures, but anecdotal evidence points to a failure rate of about half of the first batch. The standard RTX 2080 Ti has fared much better at about 2 percent. Still no word on what is failing, and why. Suspicion still centers on the memory, although a problem with the GPU itself hasn’t been ruled out.…

8 STITCHER Why download podcasts? Listen online, and sync your listening with your phone. Magic! 7 BANDLAB A free DAW that’s actually functional, with the addition of integrated collaboration tools. 6 OFFICE ONLINE Better than full-fat Microsoft Office? Debatable. Significantly more free? Absolutely. 5 PLEX Media Player? Pah. VLC? Forget it. Plex plays any content in any format, through a web interface. 4 HOOTSUITE Support for Facebook and LinkedIn streams (plus Twitter) makes it better than Tweetdeck. 3 FOTOR Adobe Lightroom, get to stepping. This vast range of sexy filters can gussy up even the worst photo. 2 PASTEBIN Why use Notepad when you could share your notes, or even set them to self destruct? 1 PHOTOPEA A Photoshop-alike that can open and edit more file types; there’s even a…

This could be the year we see the first DDR5 memory kits make it to market. We saw Micron and Cadence demo working DDR5 memory in late 2018, and even with JEDEC not finalizing the spec just yet, manufacturers are expecting to begin production in the latter half of 2019. When it comes to DDR5, although it looks to be more of the same, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Expect MT/s (MHz for the marketing gurus out there) to start at speeds of 4,266MT/s and reach 6,400MT/s, followed by a drop in voltage from 1.2V down to 1.1V, and a doubling in maximum capacity per chip, as usual. According to Cadence and Micron, however, all that is just icing on the cake. The big changes will be at…

This will likely come as no surprise, but 2019 should see the advent of a lot more USB C-compatible devices, from monitors to GPUs, mass storage solutions, and eventually even peripherals. USB Type C will be the dominating form factor going forward, mostly due to its spec and form factor. Reversible by design, and secure-fitting, USB C cables are much easier to use than their USB Type A counterparts. Couple that with it supporting MHL, Thunderbolt 3, HDMI 1.4b, and DisplayPort 1.4 standards as well, and it starts to look like a winner. The biggy, however, is going to come with the introduction of the USB 3.2 specification. Ratified in early 2017, and still retaining its backward compatibility, USB 3.2 should see a doubling in total bandwidth, from around 10Gbps to 20Gbps…

To help understand how quantum computers work, there are several simulators. There’s no way that you can simulate one efficiently, but if you want to understand the underlying principles, many of these are excellent. The first one worth exploring is a Bloch sphere simulator. Without having at least a rudimentary understanding of the Bloch sphere, you’ll have trouble understanding what the gates do. Learn more about it at http://eecs.ceas.uc.edu/~cahaymm/blochsphere. There are many more simulators—the majority are the results of PhD thesis work. For that reason, most of them are not active, only good starts. The few mentioned here are useful for self-education. The JQuantum simulator looks and behaves like a quantum score. Using it is a little cumbersome, but if you’re practicing this while reading a textbook, then it becomes usable…

When it comes to value SSDs, there’s such a thing as false economy. A cheap drive from an unknown brand looks great on paper, with plenty of capacity and appealing performance numbers. But therein lies danger. Engineering a flash-based SSD that delivers good long-term performance and reliability is no simple task. It requires deft integration of multiple components and quality coding of the drive’s firmware. Specifically, one of the major challenges includes effective garbage collection that mitigates the inherent loss of performance over time as NAND blocks fill with data. For that you need a quality controller chip and good firmware algorithms. Bigger brands can invest in such technologies and share the cost over a wide range of products. Another problem for cheap drives involves the related issues of overprovisioning…

React is developed to handle user interfaces, so you should think of it as a part of your toolset, not the entire solution. To use React, you may want to consider what logic you need to combine with it. Combining React with a CMS is one way to go, and there’s even a webpage (https://reactfordrupal.com) for this purpose. Drupal is not the only choice, though. WordPress has an API that makes developing the interface straightforward. When you have npm installed, you can look for packages using the built-in search. The result is a long list of packages, so be sure to choose “reactdom” for webpages; “react-native” is for native environments. Packages that use React make an even longer list. In fact, the length alone should encourage you to learn React…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1–3 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT WE’LL BE HONEST, even if AMD hadn’t sent us two cards to test “by accident,” we would have probably still had a crack at stacking an RX 590 into our monthly “Build It.” It’s an interesting release, at least on paper, if only because it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. We gave the RX 580 a lot of flak when it first launched, due to the fact that, spec for spec, it was identical to the RX 480, albeit with a little extra clock speed. Fast-forward another year, and bam! We’re witness to a card with the same internal hardware specifications (although, apparently, it’s a 12nm card now), and a slightly higher clock speed. Yay! Just kidding—it…

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM says that AMD is the budget darling, while Intel has you covered at the high end. Conventional wisdom is out of step with reality. Because, right now, if you want serious performance, AMD’s Threadripper should be at the top of your list, while anyone on a super-tight budget is better served by Intel’s Pentium chips and the likes of the Core i3-8100. AMD doesn’t want to leave any market segment to Intel, though, so has revived the Athlon brand for this, its most affordable Zen chip to date. Before we delve into the details, it’s worth mentioning the price. In theory, this is a $55 CPU, but in truth, you’ll do well to actually find it for that, because it’s one of those chips that tends to sell…

SSDs ARE A PAIN in the ass. At least, they are from a lab-testing perspective. Of all the major components, they’re the tricksiest to test. For instance, it’s simply not viable to assess long-term performance of an SSD when you might only be loaned the darned thing for a few days. Likewise, the metrics by which SSDs are measured have shifted dramatically over time. At first, it was all about raw bandwidth. Then it became apparent that drive performance could degrade over time. The latter issue has been largely resolved, with well-engineered drives at any rate. More recently, it’s become clear that what really matters for desktop PCs is 4K random access at low queue depths. You can read more about that in our feature on page 36, but suffice…

WHEN IT COMES to smartphones, I swear by the wireless Qi connection standard. Having been introduced to it with the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, and continuing to use it with the S9 Plus, without a shadow of a doubt, I couldn’t live without it now. I litter a plethora of these bad boys all over the house and office. I have a flat one on my desk at home, an angled one at work, another angled one by my bedside table, and even one downstairs next to the TV for when I’m binging on TV series with my future wife. The thing is, they’re so ridiculously convenient—there’s no chance of damaging the port, a reduced chance of damaging the cable, and keeping my phone charged, quickly and easily, is an…

> Smooth Rewind > Dual Keyboards > Screen Deep Dive Visible Search I’ve read lots of discussions and reviews of various streaming devices and the apps in TVs and DVD/Bluray players, and they never seem to discuss a few very basic but, to me, extremely important usability issues, such as visible search, frame-stepping, and other related “transport” issues. I’ve always been horrified whenever I’ve tried to watch streamed content—how can anyone search without being able to see if the video you’re fast-forwarding or rewinding through is OK? I have a new Sony UltraHD Blu-ray and tried the Amazon Prime app, and no surprise—no visible search. If I try to replay the last few seconds because I missed a word or just want to watch a cool bit over and over,…

Sponsored by BUDGET INGREDIENTS IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME since we’ve changed anything dramatic in our budget build, and for good reason: There’s nothing right now that would shake up its performance. Everything seems to be situated at the high end. Even Nvidia’s RTX 2060 is still waiting in the docks for some meaningful competition, trying to eke out that last cent for folks committed to buying the latest-gen GPUs. That said, we’ve had a bit of a shuffle around, saved some cash, and managed to splurge on a slightly better GPU: the GTX 1050 Ti. It’s not frame-breaker, but it’s a darn sight better than the 1050. We’re talking a 20 percent improvement on the base hardware alone. Unfortunately, it’s not the 80 percent you’d get for going to…