Índex per October 2019 a Maximum PC

a thing or two about a thing or two YOUR FEELINGS on reinstalling Windows will largely be dictated by how long you’ve been using it, and by how the process has worked out for you before. Windows has a sordid history of filling up with dross, eventually slowing down to the point of being unusable, and hiding data and settings in the obscurest of places to make sorting it all out an unappetizing proposition. Reinstalling Windows can be frustrating, time-consuming, and flawed. It can leave you in driver hell, and may not even fix the very thing that forced you to reinstall. Such experiences are rare now, though. Things have changed. A lot. And mostly for the better. Still, if you’ve been using your PC for a long time, there’s…

AMAZON’S RING, its Internet video doorbell, is a simple and useful idea, but keeps running into hot water. The latest chapter has a sinister air. A leaked document has shown that Ring’s “Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal” doesn’t come free. In return for giving the police the ability to request footage from Ring cameras, Amazon asks them to endorse its products and assign officers to Ring-related tasks, including a social media co-ordinator and a press co-ordinator. The police department is also obliged to run “outreach” programs to promote Ring. The agreement is supposed to be confidential, but was released under a public records request. Over 200 law enforcement agencies have joined partnership schemes, earning them free Ring units to hand out, and the ability to earn $10 toward extra units every…

SO, YOU USE WINDOWS. You’re in a slowly shrinking but still three-quarters majority, so it’s not a surprise: Windows users are ubiquitous. Almost as ubiquitous as people complaining about Windows, because that group extends to macOS and Linux users, too. Whatever your gripes, the thought of reinstalling Windows has likely crossed your mind at some point. Perhaps you’ve even gone ahead without thinking of the consequences. You might even have been left with a half-functioning machine that’s missing many of your critical files and programs. Let’s be clear at the start of this feature (one that’s ostensibly about reinstalling Windows): Reinstalling Windows is generally a really dumb thing to do. Hear us out. Windows 10 is a much cleaner and more stable OS than its predecessors. There’s no good reason…

We’re at the point in the PC’s evolution where the overheads of virtualization are proportionately so small, and the technology enabling it so plentiful, that running an everyday OS in a virtual machine is entirely reasonable. You obviously won’t get 100 percent of bare metal performance from a virtualized instance of Windows 10, but it has a host of advantages. When you’ve got a system running just as you like it, you can take a snapshot, then quickly return to it at any point in the future. You can whip up a fresh copy of Windows in minutes, without any risk to your existing install. You can fire up other operating systems, and run them simultaneously on the same machine. If you’re the kind of person who loves to settle…

FACEBOOK’S LIBRA is nearing launch, and if the plans bear fruit, it’s going to be the most disruptive thing to come out of Silicon Valley for years. Let’s start with what Libra isn’t. It’s not a cryptocurrency, you won’t be able to mine coins, and it’s not an opportunity for speculation or investment. It does use similar blockchain tech to drive it (see “The Blockchain” box), but it’s a closed system designed for stability. It’s also designed to be fast, something bitcoin struggles with (it can barely manage seven transactions a second; Libra will start at 1,000). It isn’t a bank account either, something Facebook is keen to stress for legal reasons, so you won’t be earning interest on your account, or get credit. Libra is a stable private blockchain…

A stated early target for users of Libra is the migrant worker who sends money home to support their family. While the individual amounts may not be large, the scale of the whole business is huge. The World Bank estimates that $715 billion is moved around the world annually, supporting over 800 million people, and making major contributions to the economies of many nations. The established wire transfer services, such as Western Union, take a cut of this. The global average for transfer fees is 7 percent, which is quite a hit: Seven bucks for every hundred of hard-earned wages disappear when you simply send money home. There are currently few ways to avoid these fees, and they have a disproportional effect on wealth. UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific,…

examining technology and putting it to use Huawei Mate 20 X 5G BACKGROUND While the US-China trade dispute drags on and we ponder Huawei’s future, the company charges into the 5G arena with its new Mate 20 X 5G. We’re curious to see what this plus-sized phablet conceals, and how independent the hardware might be—even as Huawei faces the possibility of being banned from doing business with US companies. MAJOR TECH SPECS 7.2-inch 1080×2244 OLED multitouch display Octa-core Huawei Kirin 980 chipset, with 8GB RAM 256GB onboard storage Balong 5000 multimode 5G modem 4,200mAh battery with 40W SuperCharge 2.0 support Triple rear cameras: 40MP f/1.8, 20MP f/2.2, and 8MP f/2.4 lens with 5x optical zoom KEY FINDINGS • On the bottom we recognize the usual suspects: a USB-C port, two…

NVIDIA FRAMEVIEW Download it from www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/technologies/frameview/. A COMPATIBLE GRAPHICS API DirectX 9 or later, OpenGL, Vulkan, or Universal Windows Platform. IT’S ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA to keep an eye on how your hardware is performing. Not only will this help you diagnose problems, but it can also indicate when it might be time to upgrade. If you’re getting stuttering and frame drops during gameplay, for example, there’s a good chance your graphics card may be past its prime. There’s a number of tools that you can use to ascertain the performance of your graphics card, from GPU-Z to HWiNFO, but none really provides a one-stop shop to help you measure power consumption, frame rates, performance-per-watt, and more. That’s where Nvidia’s FrameView comes in. FrameView is a simple utility that provides…

OpenMediaVault is very extensible, and a number of plugins are available from “System > Plugins.” The USB backup tool is pretty handy for automatically backing up folders (such as your very important documents or photos) to a USB drive. There are also plugins for the Transmission BitTorrent client or encrypted storage via LUKS. A number of more adventurous thirdparty plugins are available from the OMV-Extras repository. To enable this, go to http://omv-extras.org/joomla/index.php/guides, download the .deb file for OMV 4.x, and follow the rest of the instructions on that page. The list of available plugins multiplies, giving access to (among others) the SnapRAID and MergerFS plugins for more flexible storage—conventional RAID can lead to wasted space on differently sized drives. You’ll find a new “OMV-Extras” menu entry for adding more repositories,…

LET’S JUST GET this out of the way right at the beginning: We think the Super branding could quite possibly be one of the dumbest things we’ve seen in recent years. We’re definitely looking forward to the redundant naming that’s bound to come from EVGA: the GeForce RTX 2060 Super SSC (Super Super Clocked). But complaints about naming aside, we’re looking at modestly improved core counts. The Turing architecture behind the new Super RTX cards is identical to existing RTX cards. That means the hardware includes RT cores for DirectX Raytracing and Vulkan-RT, Tensor cores for DLSS and other machine-learning workloads, variable rate shading, mesh shaders, and concurrent integer and floating-point execution pipelines. The 2060 Super has 8GB of GDDR6, which equates to 33 percent more bandwidth—the same as the…

STEELSERIES’S APEX 7 sits in a difficult position. It’s an Apex Pro in all but its switches—and given that the Apex Pro’s customizable hall-effect switches are (in theory) pretty much the most interesting keyboard controls of a generation, it’s not immediately clear where the Apex 7, a linear-switched board that’s a mere $40 cheaper, stands. Is it good enough, without that gimmick, to sit so high on the price ladder? In its own bubble, at least, it’s certainly a feast for the eyes. The RGB lighting hits you first, and it hits hard—both the key illumination and background coronae are absolutely superb, with a bright glow that seems to have been tuned away from the lurid side of RGB and into a more hip, warm, retro zone. Don’t worry, though—the…

AN M.2 SSD might not be the usual fare for the “Geek Tested” column, but this one’s a bit different. With Gen4 NVMe arriving, Gen3 M.2 drives now taking something of a back seat in this fine publication, but we really wanted to squeeze the Genesis Xtreme in. You probably haven’t heard of Asura before, because it was founded barely a year ago in Chino, California, and the Genesis Xtreme is its very first commercially available product. Focused on bringing high-end hardware to enthusiasts around the world, Asura currently only has the one product, although its upcoming “Steel Series” and “Titanium Series” lines promise more top-quality components. Asura states that its premium parts focus on “quality, performance, and reliability,” and that certainly seems to be the case with the Genesis…

the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small INTEL HAS MOVED to 10th generation chips with the imminent release of 11 Ice Lake CPUs. There are six low-power U-Series, and five even lower power Y-Series, ranging from a Core i7-1068G7 down to a Core i3-1000G1, all aimed at mobile devices. The U-Series have a 28W range-topper, but otherwise burn at a TDP of 15W, while the Y-Series make do with 9W. They carry either two or four cores, and base clocks run from just 0.7GHz to 2.3GHz, with boosts topping out at 4.1GHz. We get a new naming convention, too: The processor numbers all start with a “10” to indicate the generation, and end in a two digit identifier to indicate the on-board graphics used. All are systems…

WE’VE BEEN TOLD for a while that there is an over-production of DRAM, and prices are low. However, it appears there may well be a lot more to come. A report by Gartner (world-class research, advisory company, and developer of the Hype Cycle) claims that prices have a lot further to fall. It gives the figure of a 42.1 percent fall before the end of the year. This is a strangely specific figure, which must have been generated by some statistical method—nobody estimates in tenths of a percent. The report says there is so much excess stock in the supply chain that it will take months to clear, and prices won’t stiffen until the middle of next year. Reasons include a slowing of smartphone sales, a “weaker pricing environment,” and…

Most of the time, your CPU runs at some in between clock speed, usually closer to the boost clock than the base clock. However, with AMD’s Zen 2 and third-gen Ryzen CPUs, things have changed. I noticed this while testing, specifically in single-threaded workloads like Cinebench 1T. With most CPUs, such a test would show individual cores hitting the specified boost clock, and one core would always run at 100 percent utilization and the maximum clock speed. In practice, depending on the motherboard firmware and other factors, this isn’t always the case, but with Ryzen 3000 CPUs, no core hit—let alone sustained—the maximum boost clock. For the Ryzen 9 3900X, Ryzen 7 3700X, and Ryzen 5 3600X, the highest clock speed my tools showed was 50–100MHz lower. Others have noted…

One of the factors that contributes to our pessimism surrounding reinstalling Windows is that we desperately don’t want you to lose anything. We’re kind like that. But there is another, slightly frivolous way to do a reinstallation if you’ve got working hardware to play with: You can turn one Windows installation into two. If you have a second drive that is able to support a Windows 10 installation, or enough access to your current Windows 10 installation (and enough free space) to be able to trim down its drive using Disk Management then create a new clean partition, you can install a second copy of the operating system alongside the first. Simply select a custom install, and then point Windows 10 at that spare disk space—it should do the rest…

IF YOU’RE A REGULAR reader of Maximum PC, you’ll know we have a soft spot for PC Part Picker (http://pcpartpicker.com). It’s a fantastic website that takes the hard work out of putting together prospective PC builds. Not only does it alert you to any incompatibilities, but it shows you the best prices for each component you want to use, plus stats, measurements, and ratings for everything. There are handy build guides for every budget, and community showcases so you can view and rate your fellow enthusiasts’ work. It’s required reading for anyone looking to build a PC today. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only resource at your disposal when it comes to putting together your next build. There are plenty of other places you can go, whether you’re in…

AH, THE LOOT BOX. Truly, the antithesis of genuine fun or any sense of real progression in games. Call them what you like—loot crates, booster packs, lock boxes, whatever—the principle is the same: Crack it open and receive in-game loot of varying rarity, typically falling at the common end of the scale. Most games let you steadily earn loot boxes through normal gameplay, but there’s always that option—come to the market, buy a whole bunch, and open them all at once! You know you want to. Loot boxes tap into what psychologists call a “compulsion loop,” a repeated activity that triggers the release of dopamine in the brain, granting mental satisfaction upon acquiring virtual rewards. Many games, by their very nature, utilize compulsion loops. If you’ve played any MMORPG, you’ll…

Premium currencies, for those not familiar with the term, are a form of in-game money purchasable with real-world money, which can be spent on specific items in the game. While premium currencies have been around in games for a while (and, for a brief horrible period, in virtual stores on some consoles), their relationship with loot boxes has grown more complex of late. Some developers have used premium currencies as a workaround to avoid selling loot boxes directly, by having them available to buy in game using a currency that costs real money. Free-to-play title Warframe was guilty of this, featuring random mod and relic packs that could be purchased with the premium currency Platinum, although the packs were removed following negative responses from players. Premium currencies are often purchased…

What is the blockchain? It is tempting to say it’s a mass of complicated math you don’t need to understand. Essentially, it’s an electronic ledger that tracks the movements of digital tokens between wallets—apps that store the tokens. The tokens can represent anything: ownership of a share or proof of identity, for example. Each transaction is verified and added to the list, or chain. The wallets have two cryptographic keys, one private and one public. A transaction is encrypted using your private key and the recipient’s public key. At the other end, the process is reversed, so it can only be unscrambled by the intended recipient, and they know it’s from you. The scrambling involves that complicated math we mentioned. Each transaction becomes part of the whole, because it’s mathematically…

AMD Ryzen CPUs THE NEW SERIES of Ryzen CPUs has hit the ground running. After a few teething issues with existing systems and programs (looking at you, Destiny 2), these CPUs are ready to roll. Improving on the second generation across the board, the new 3000-series processors come with their own coolers, while maintaining a price point that keeps them competitive with Intel’s offerings. Thanks to PCIe 4.0 support, these CPUs can form the basis for the fastest, smoothest systems around. AMD isn’t leaving those on a tighter budget behind, either. With prices ranging from $100 to $500, there are options for anyone putting together a new build. You might notice that the high-end Ryzen 9 3900X is absent from this lineup—that’s because we’ve already reviewed it, and it was…

RASPBERRY PI You also need the Pi Camera Module. STREAMING VIDEOS on the web is increasingly popular, and YouTube is the chosen platform for many. Almost any device can stream video to YouTube, but what if you want a dedicated streaming solution? The Raspberry Pi is a great choice for this, giving you the option to stream anything you like, just as long as there is an unlimited network connection. You’re limited only by your imagination, with the Raspberry Pi and its Camera Module ideal for everything from a YouTube-based baby monitor to running live presentations (see the boxout on the opposite page for more ideas). With a good network connection, the right Raspberry Pi setup, and a YouTube channel stream URL, you can have your Raspberry Pi YouTube-streaming video…

AMD RYZEN CPU Your system should have a Ryzen CPU, ideally a 2000-series or better. AMD RYZEN MASTER SOFTWARE This can be downloaded from www.amd.com. OVERCLOCKING IS A FINICKY BUSINESS: Adjusting frequencies and voltages to try to eke out a bit of extra performance from your rig—while simultaneously avoiding the terror of the blue screen of death. It’s often a lengthy process, too, demanding repeated trips into your BIOS to make minuscule adjustments. AMD processors are also known to be a little tougher to effectively overclock than Intel’s K-variant chips, which have excellent overclocking headroom. Thankfully, there’s an easier way to manage overclocking on AMD processors. While there is plenty of licensed and unlicensed overclocking software out there, AMD has its own official piece: Ryzen Master, which can adjust both…

SERIF AFFINITY APPS, Buy the full set of apps or download their free trials from http://affinity.serif.com. SERIF’S BATTLE AGAINST ADOBE has seen its third great push forward, with the launch of Affinity Publisher earlier this summer. While it might not be troubling InDesign CC as the page layout tool of choice just yet (although Adobe toppled Quark, so it does happen), it comes with a host of highly attractive features, and doesn’t require a monthly subscription. The Affinity name has puzzled some since the series appeared, with Illustrator rival Affinity Designer on Mac, in 2014. Publisher makes it clear what it means—the three apps (Photoshop-a-like Affinity Photo completes the trinity) come together in the top-left corner of Publisher. Select an image and click the “Photo” button, and you’re able to…

AMD’S THIRD-GENERATION Ryzen CPUs boast higher clock speeds and more cores than the first and second-gen parts. In fact, Zen 2 CPUs are so good that AMD almost doesn’t need the faster offerings—its second-string 3700X is perfectly capable of running the offense, and it isn’t quite as demanding when it comes to signing bonuses and contracts. For those teams (aka PCs) with salary cap concerns that can’t quite justify chasing the 3900X, the 3700X is a versatile QB that can throw a quick short pass, scamper downfield for a modest gain, or even launch the long ball when required. When it comes to playing football—in other words, running PC games—there’s not a huge difference between the 3700X and the 3900X. In fact, there’s hardly any difference at all. Out of…

ADVENTURE GAME GAMING’S DEBT TO Lovecraft keeps getting bigger. The Sinking City takes i ts source material literally as well as seriously, being based on two of HP’s stories: 1920’s “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family,” and the 1931 novella, The Shadow Over Innsmouth. It starts with an arrival. You, Charles Reed, private investigator, are invited to Oakmont, Massachusetts, where there is fog and rain and discontent and plenty of fish. The beginning is reminiscent of last year’s Call of Cthulhu, which used similar sources, but took them on a different path. This slice of mythos certainly begins well, your arrival at the dripping, partially flooded town noted by both the natty dresser who invited you, and the simian Robert Throgmorton, head of one of the city’s…

AMD’S ZEN 2 architecture has reached its server chips with Rome, the second generation of Epyc processors. As well as the expected increase in instructions per cycle, and a hike in clock speeds, it is the core count that has really pushed performance—it has effectively doubled. The top model, the Epyc 7742, packs 64 cores across eight chiplets, and clocks in at 3.4GHz. At its launch, AMD made some bold statements, including claiming 80 world records running industry-standard benchmarking software, and the title of the world’s most powerful x86 chip. Pricing is competitive and impressive. The Epyc 7742 sells for just under $7,000; its rival, the 28-core Xeon Platinum 8280, is $10,000, and nowhere near as fast. The Rome chips undercut the older Naples chips, too: An Epyc 7502 bests…

In a recent post on its website, the open-source Git repository host GitHub said it would be closing its doors to users originating from countries the United States has sanctioned. Specifically, the ban prevents users from North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria, and the Crimea region of Ukraine hosting private repositories with GitHub.com. For most of the Western world, this doesn’t seem to have much impact. After all, keeping North Korea away from code can’t be all bad, can it? While I understand the need for export controls to prevent state enemies acquiring technology, the Internet has made this very difficult to stop. And this isn’t the first instance of US law intervening in open source. In 1991, Phil Zimmermann’s release of his RSA-based Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption program was…

Reinstalling is, or should be, a last resort—and if you ever come to the point where you absolutely have to reinstall Windows and don’t have copies of your files, it might be too late. A hardware failure, a cryptographic malware attack, whatever the case may be, you don’t want to be left stranded. We’ve talked about using Windows’ File History tools elsewhere, which is a good way to keep regular copies of your personal files, but Windows also includes a more thorough backup procedure in the form of Backup and Restore (Windows 7). Now, we can’t be entirely sure how long this is going to last, given its archaic name, but for now, it works, and we’d wager that Microsoft will supply a tool to restore its backups even if…

What if you could put together a PC component list, practice building it, and see it in action, without ever having to leave your desk? That’s what you get with PC Building Simulator. This game enables you to put everything together and see how it all looks, letting you decide whether the final product is something you would be happy with. The game contains fully licensed real-world components from over 30 different brands, including Nvidia, AMD, Corsair, Gigabyte, and MSI, so you know you’re getting accurate representations of the components you’re thinking of buying. Not only that, but it’s a helpful way to learn how to fit the components together into place without risking breaking anything. If something doesn’t fit or could be tricky to mount correctly, you’ll quickly find out by…

Facebook will not run Libra directly, but through its subsidiary Calibra, it will be a partner in the body that does: the Libra Association. This is a non-profit, independent organization dedicated to running, controlling, and promoting Libra, as well as managing the reserve fund. Facebook hasn’t gone alone for a number of reasons, trust being one of them. As the project leader David Marcus admitted, “If we were controlling it, very few people would want to jump on and make it theirs.” The association has 28 founding members, and among them are such big names as PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, eBay, Uber, and Spotify. There are also some names you won’t know, unless you are familiar with blockchain development and venture capital. This is just the initial lineup—it is expected to…

WINDOWS 10 Your device also needs a microphone if you want to speak to Cortana instead of typing commands. FOR SOME USERS, especially those used to versions of Windows previous to 10, Cortana is something of a non-event. Why would you want to use an AI assistant to do something you could very well do yourself? These people have probably never experienced the joy of using an Amazon Echo to switch the lights on and off, and the two things are very similar: Cortana exists to make things easier, to smooth your passage through Windows’ interminable screens and pop-ups, and to put a friendly face on technical settings. We’re using typed commands, but you can also talk to Cortana if your Windows device is equipped with an appropriate microphone. To…

OPENMEDIAVAULT Download the latest ISO from www.openmediavault.org/download.html. IN OUR AUGUST ISSUE, we built a mini NAS box using mostly scavenged parts. We also skimmed over setting up Volker Theile’s OpenMediaVault (OMV), a Debian-based Linux distro that takes the pain out of configuring and maintaining such things. For the “Build It” feature, we didn’t cover this software side of things in much depth, so in these two pages, we’ll try to remedy that. Naturally, we assume you already have suitable hardware—basically any PC, but ideally something with one or more large drives in it. We’ll cover setting up a RAID array, which will cover you in case one (or more if you opt for extra redundancy) of your drives fail. Remember, RAID doesn’t protect against fat-fingered deletions, or even subtle drive…

EXPLORATION GAME THERE’S SOMETHING about Vane that’s so obvious, we need to get it out of the way now, or it’s going to clog up our thoughts, and we may never stop talking about it. Vane is beautiful. It’s breathtaking. It’s the sort of game that makes us wish we published four-page reviews, just so we could fill three of them with images. The game runs at 4K, 60fps, highest settings on our GTX 1070 Ti test bed. You may look at the screenshot above and say it runs so well because there’s nothing there, just empty desert and lowres cliffs, and we’d have to shuffle slightly and concede the point. There is a lot of empty desert and low-res cliffs, but it’s an artistic choice that works, providing a…

Modern computers are built out of a collection of seven primary components: the CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, motherboard, case, and power supply. Each of these—yes, even the case—now contains anywhere from a few microchips to potentially hundreds of chips that handle a wide variety of tasks. Audio, communication, graphics, storage, and, of course, the CPU, aka central processing unit. The primary building block of our modern computers is the silicon microchip, but what exactly is a microchip, and how is it made? It’s a fascinating and incredibly complex topic, so we’re going to give you the ultra-condensed version. Microchips, microprocessors, CPU, GPUs, or whatever you want to call them are fundamentally similar. They’re all made from semiconductors, typically on 300mm silicon wafers, which in turn are cut from a large…