Índex per December 2016 a Maximum PC

Using the Right BIOS Hey Doc! I have a PC I bought from Staples back in 2012 (I know, that might look a bit weird, seeing as this is an enthusiast’s magazine). It is an Acer Aspire M3420-ES348, with 8GB of DDR3-800 RAM, an AMD A10-5700 APU, and Radeon HD 7350 graphics, all installed on an Acer AAHD3-VC motherboard. My question involves updating its BIOS, as I think that’s related to my performance issues (though I do realize the hardware is also very old). The current firmware version is P11-A4. I downloaded P12-B0, but I keep getting an error that says the ROMID is not compatible with my current ROMID, or something along those lines. Looking at the build, I think the B in the version is related to the…

The theory is all very well. In theory, AMD’s Bulldozer was going to be a killer multithreading machine. It didn’t quite work out that way. So, despite AMD’s extremely plausible sales pitch for the new Zen architecture, the proof will be in the real-world performance. Inevitably, we won’t have the full picture until next year at the earliest, when the first Zen CPUs are released, and we can verify all the impressive claims first-hand. But AMD has provided a glimpse of what we can expect beyond that headline claim of 40 percent improved performance per clock, compared to its existing CPUs in singlethreaded software. At the traditional sideshow event it holds in parallel to the main event at Intel’s IDF tech fest in San Francisco every year, AMD demonstrated Zen…

1 GTX 965M GPU Yeah, we know: 4K screen, GTX 965M—why would you do that? Just think of the pixel density here: 4K on a 15-inch panel is 293 ppi. That’s twice as compact as a 28-inch equivalent. The theory is that you game at 2560x1440 and below, and enjoy the desktop experience at 4K. 2 4K IPS PANEL Is there anything prettier than an IPS panel when it comes to accurate color reproduction, short of OLED? Probably not. This is positively the best you’re going to get when it comes to working on a notebook. 3 CARBON FINISH OK, yes—this is the gamer aspect we commented on earlier. Fortunately, it’s not garish, but a clean, matte, subtle finish. Props to HP for really nailing the aesthetics on this. We…

THIS MONTH WE DISSECT... About iFixit iFixit is a global community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people fix things through free online repair manuals and teardowns. iFixit believes that everyone has the right to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit www.ifixit.com. BACKGROUND Today, a new Xbox lands in our inbox, and that’s a rare thing— though not as rare as it used to be. What makes the new Xbox One S a worthy mid-cycle update to Microsoft’s console? Let’s tear down this surprisingly slimmer, possibly speedier, appreciably sassier Xbox One, and find out. Game on! MAJOR TECH SPECS • Spec-bumped GPU supporting HDR10, along with the same AMD Jaguar eight-core SoC found in the original Xbox One. • 2TB of storage (500GB and 1TB configurations are…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PHOTOSHOP Subscribe at www.adobe.com. A SUITABLE IMAGE Choose something with strong colors and good contrast. FILTERING APP PRISMA has become very popular among smartphone warriors. This Russianmade app—which, until a recent update moved some computing to your phone’s processor, would shunt your photo to its servers for a thorough going-over by a neural network, and even an AI— recreates photos with a textured oil-painting look, among other tricks. It’s still filtering, though, so the result is out of your control, other than fading it out if it’s been applied so strongly you can’t recognize the original subject. With a PC, we are in control, and can apply it to selected areas, and make artworks that aren’t square—a major drawback of the app. We’re going to use Photoshop’s…

THERE’S MOBILE GRAPHICS. And then there’s proper gaming graphics. For a taste of the latter in a portable package, look no further than MSI’s new GT73VR Titan Pro. It’s a beefy 17-inch portable with Nvidia’s stupid-quick GeForce GTX 1080 graphics. The point is that it really is a GTX 1080 chip. Over the years, both Nvidia and its main rival, AMD, haven’t always played it straight with their laptop graphics chips. All too often, the mobile version of a given GPU wasn’t quite what it seemed. But not this time. This is no GTX 1060 with a lick of paint. It’s the real 2,560-CUDA-core deal. That GeForce GTX 1080 GPU is just the beginning of what is an epic feature set. There’s a quad-core Intel Core-i7 6820HK CPU, which clocks…

AMD’S HAD AN INCREDIBLE RUN since the launch of Polaris. Indeed, the RX 480 has scooped up a number of awards. The GTX 1080 may be the king of the frame rates, but it’s the dollars per fps that cinch the deal for us. So, how far can you push the value bracket before things go asunder? AMD’s Radeon RX 460 is a $130 low-end budget card. Aimed at esports gaming, particularly League of Legends and DOTA II, it’s not a great pixel-destroyer, nor is it capable of channeling AAA titles at acceptable frame rates. That said, that’s how we do most of our testing, so to ignore it would be ludicrous, regardless of how much AMD moans at us about it. So, for a meager $130, you can grab…

A QUESTION THAT’S BEEN ASKED since the release of No Man’s Sky has been: “Is this the game we saw in the trailers?” The simple answer is no, it’s not. When the definitive history of videogames is written, an entire chapter will be dedicated to studios massively over-promising in their trailers, and No Man’s Sky isn’t even the worst offender. Irritating bug-hunt Aliens: Colonial Marines looked amazing in video form, while the reality of BioShock Infinite, although a good game, was different from that portrayed during development, with many abilities and locations removed. If, by any chance, you’re still holding off buying No Man’s Sky thanks to the Internet’s downcast reaction to its launch, then know that it’s definitely worth playing—there just might be fewer herds of sauropod-like creatures being…

Approximate Price: $811 PRICES, ESPECIALLY FOR GRAPHICS CARDS, are fluctuating like crazy. Couple that with the numerous offers on 2.5-inch SSDs, and now is definitely the right time to treat yourself to a budget build. We say “budget,” but this thing is a monster—that new mini GTX 1060 sitting inside will happily munch up AAA titles for breakfast, even this 3GB version. Unfortunately, we lost a few good products this issue: The EVGA G2 550W PSU has made its way out in favor of the SuperNOVA 550 GS, and the 240GB SanDisk Ultra II gave way to the X400 in its stead. After much debate (literally seconds), we also dropped the AC variant of ASRock’s H170M-ITX, as it adds little to gaming potential. That aside, the biggest upgrade you could…

“Even with these upgrades, consoles are still being trounced by high-end PCs. NEXT MONTH, Sony takes its PS4 into 4K gaming with the release of the PS4 Pro. This is a departure from the usual route taken by consoles, because it’s a significant hardware upgrade without being a next-generation machine, or requiring a new library of games. The PS4 Pro runs all PS4 games, and there are no exclusives. It will set you back $399—a hundred bucks over the standard PS4, which will be sold alongside as the new PS4 Slim. The PS4 Pro has more powerful silicon: the AMD Jaguar CPU runs at 2.1GHz rather than 1.6GHz, and there are 36 rather than 18 compute units to the AMD RX 480 GPU. It has roughly twice the graphical grunt…

So, you’ve got a broad picture of what AMD’s new 14nm Zen architecture looks like. What will the detailed specifications of the first chips be? Unfortunately, AMD isn’t going into any great detail at this stage. But there is enough information out there for us to take a stab at the likely configuration of the first retail Zen chips. In terms of core count, the 8 cores and 16 threads of the processor that AMD demonstrated beating Intel’s Broadwell-E, a chip that’s currently codenamed Summit Ridge, probably represent the initial high-end target for AMD. It’s not that Zen is necessarily limited to eight cores by some technological limitation. Indeed, AMD has released details of a massive 32-core Zen chip called Naples. But that’s designed for high-end servers. Moreover, the Zen…

Every universe has its own basic set of rules. Middle-earth has magic, Star Wars has midichlorians (AKA magic). Ours has things like gravity, the Planck constant, and so on. The outgrowth of these simple rules creates complexity—rainbows, computers, seacows…. Game universes have their own rulesets, too. The existence of magic, the presence of gods, or perhaps faster-than-light travel. However, these aren’t the basic rules of the universe, but glosses on it. The basic rules of a game universe are dictated by the underlying engine, and those basic rules can be a lot more simple than a real-world universe (so far, anyway). They can range from how many dimensions the universe has (GameMaker is 2D, the CryEngine is 3D) to the look of the worlds in it (RPG Maker is low-res,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI See www.raspberrypi.org. MICROPHONE A USB model or a webcam with built-in mic. IN STAR TREK IV: The Voyage Home, Scotty and Dr McCoy are offered the opportunity to use a computer, and are somewhat bemused when it fails to respond to voice commands. The film was made 30 years ago, and voice recognition has taken huge leaps forward since then. The Raspberry Pi has not been left out, and with the help of an inexpensive USB microphone [Image A] and some suitable software, you too can have your Pi search YouTube, open web pages, launch applications, and even respond to questions, simply by speaking. The Pi has no built-in soundcard or audio jack, so you need a USB microphone or a webcam with built-in mic…

YOU’LL NEED THIS CHROMIUM OS From http://arnoldthebat.co.uk. LAPTOP Any spare laptop should do. THE FIRST QUESTION in your head is probably, “Why would I want to install Chrome OS, even on my old laptop, when there are perfectly adequate full-fat Linux distros to choose from?” Good question, and the answer is that not everyone wants a full-fat distro, nor can everyone use a full-fat distro. Part of the success of Chromebooks—and they are successful, with Chromebooks outselling Apple Macs in the United States in the first quarter of 2016—is their cut-down, lightweight Gentoo-based operating system. If you want to give someone easy, no-fuss access to Google services, it should be a tempting choice. 1 CHROMIUM VS. CHROME The good news is it’s easy to install Chromium OS [Image A], the…

WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR in a motherboard? Clean style? Endurance? Good power draw? Never-ending connectivity? There’s a lot to think about when choosing the perfect motherboard. Much like a processor, you need one that’s appropriate for your build; suitable for what you want to do. In a lot of ways, it’s a contradictory component; by its very nature, it’s oxymoronic—without it, your system cannot run, but in terms of computational performance, it adds very little. Just take a look at our benchmarks, and you’ll see that the differences between these boards are slim at best. Games, in particular, do not benefit in any perceivable way, performing exactly the same on a $200 board as they would on one that costs three times as much. In fact, what we look…

SO GOOD IT HERTZ. That’s the thinking behind the new 180Hz-capable Asus ROG Swift PG248Q. To put it another way, more hertz in the form of a higher refresh rate is necessarily a good thing. Up to a point, we agree. The step up from a standard 60Hz LCD monitor to something capable of 100Hz and beyond is pretty sweet. Nearly everything is smoother and slicker. Obviously, games benefit more than just about any other application from a higher refresh. But even bumping application windows around the desktop is more pleasant. Once you’ve tried high refresh, you won’t want to go back. But it doesn’t automatically follow that chucking ever higher refresh rates at the problem of gaming smoothness makes sense. Eventually, you get to a point where human perception…

LOGITECH IS ON A ROLL at the moment, a slew of new products butting their way into existing niches, and carving out new ones with little mouse-sized hammers and chisels. Top of the fashion pile in mouse marketing meetings is to pretend your product is somehow tied to the professional gaming scene. These esports mice are all very well, but when will somebody design a mouse for people who sit around all day surfing Reddit? Logitech—whose approach to branding is to write “PRO” in huge letters on the box, but not say pro what, and put out press releases featuring pictures of pro-gaming stars, cropped so you can’t see what mouse they’re using—does seem to have taken the approach rather to heart. And it doesn’t really need to. Logitech products…

THE DEUS EX SERIES is in a strange place. By choosing to make the later games prequels, Eidos Montreal was presented with the paradox of making them closer to our time, but necessarily more primitive than the original game. Yet, given the rate of technological advance, the first game already looks like an artefact from another timeline. When it was created, back in 2000, a cutting-edge cell phone looked like the Nokia 3310. In Mankind Divided’s time, a cell phone is built into the protagonist. In the previous game, Human Revolution, cyborg Adam Jensen discovered a plot to take control of augmented humans through their implants. While foiling it, a signal was sent that drove all augmented humans into a killing frenzy. In Mankind Divided, it’s several years since the…

Nvidia’s success with Pascal stems from its ability to push the limits of the upper echelons of PC gaming. The GTX 1080 currently decimates the field in terms of frame rate performance. So, we sat down to chat with Justin Walker, senior product manager at Nvidia, to get the low-down on just what makes the Pascal architecture so special. Maximum PC: Pascal seems to have been quite a revolutionary step for Nvidia. How do you go about developing an architecture like that? Justin Walker: That’s kind of a big question, but Pascal was probably one of the biggest—if not the biggest—undertakings this company has ever done. We invested billions of dollars into it, it was a pretty ambitious project, and it’s a little hard to sum up the scope and…

AMD’s Bulldozer processors take a pounding for their poor performance. But, let’s be honest, AMD’s chipsets have hardly covered themselves in glory of late. Even the ostensibly high-end 990FX is absolutely ancient beneath a layer of badge engineering that is fooling nobody these days. How could it, when it conspicuously lacks so many features, including DDR4 memory support, PCI Express 3.0, USB 3.1, and the NVMe protocol for solidstate drives? The good news is that all of that is coming with AMD’s new chipsets for Zen. Beyond that, we can’t tell you much about the detailed specifications. However, the other good tidbit of news is that AMD is also consolidating its CPU socket strategy. Currently, it’s a bit of a mess, with FX processors requiring Socket AM3+ motherboards, while its…

HIDE YOUR RECYCLE BIN After an icon-free desktop? Try a nifty piece of software called MiniBin, developed by e-sushi. You end up with a lovely little icon in your hidden icons bar that hotlinks out to your Recycle Bin. Just hide the desktop icon (type it into the Start menu), and you’re all wrapped up. Point of advice: Once installed, right-click the icon, hit “Configure,” and check the double-click action is set to “Open.” Otherwise it empties on double-click. MAKE – USE – CREATE 58 Control your Raspberry Pi with your voice 62 Increase your YouTube views the professional way 68 Build your own version of a Chromebook COMBATING ANTIALIASING I’ve wanted to talk about this for a while. I game at 4K, with a Fury X, at 60fps in…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A GOOGLE ACCOUNT Creating a YouTube channel is straightforward and free, as long as you’re logged in to Google. EDITING TOOLS Video and image editors are essential —don’t rely on YouTube’s gimmicks YOUTUBE IS A TRICKSY BEAST, as much a video-hosting website as it is a mysterious, unfathomable, and ever-changing algorithm. Getting your content seen initially is a massive crapshoot. There’s a vague chance that you’ll roll a seven, and pick up a huge amount of traffic, but those dice are weighted heavily toward snake eyes. The best you can hope for in real terms is to make your videos as interactive and fully-featured as possible. Here we’ll lead you through using YouTube’s own back-end tools to add links, references to your other content, and quality enhancements…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 Cortana is built in to Microsoft’s latest OS. FIRST INTRODUCED ON HANDSETS running Windows Phone, Microsoft’s virtual personal assistant, Cortana, arrived on the desktop with the launch of Windows 10. Named after the artificial intelligence from science-fiction game series Halo, Cortana is much more than just a search tool— it also manages your calendar, tracks packages, and will even tells jokes. Cortana packs in more features than Apple’s assistant Siri, or Google Now, and you can make it even more personal by customizing your settings to reflect your interests, activities, and preferences. It works together with Microsoft’s wealth of programs and tools, to help you get even more from your PC. So, let’s get started! 1 MEET CORTANA Cortana is accessed by clicking the “Search”…

THE BACK AND FORTH struggle between the two titanic graphics manufacturers is what the GPU race is all about. Don’t be mistaken: this is an arms race. A race to find the best value card. For Nvidia, it’s all about retaining its horrendously progressive market share, while AMD is chinking away at Nvidia’s armor, outmaneuvering it to sink its own teeth back into the juicy flesh of mainstream superiority. From month to month, prices change and margins shift, as each side competes for your hard-earned cash. What does that mean? In short, it means better value for us, the consumer. It’s pretty hard to argue that this isn’t a good thing. Competition is always going to be good for the majority. With the launch of Polaris 10 and 11, AMD…

GOOD THINGS COME to those who wait, they say. If that's true, Crucial’s new MX300 SSD must be smoking hot. It’s Crucial’s first SSD to offer 3D NAND memory technology, but it’s fully two years later to market than Samsung’s first SSD with 3D NAND. When it comes to memory density and capacity, however, it looks like the MX300 has been worth the wait. Samsung’s 3D NAND chips topped out at 128Gb per die at launch, and even its second-generation triple-level cell 3D NAND dies only max out at 256Gb. We say “only” because Crucial, along with production partner Intel, has come up with some beefy 384Gb TLC NAND chips right from the get go. The large capacity of the NAND chips explains why the MX300 line comes in oddball…

Sleep Safely The article “Supercharge Windows 10” incorrectly states that the hibernation file is not used by Sleep mode. Windows uses a hybrid sleep mode that relies on the hibernation file in the event the PC loses power. But I bet almost everyone at the magazine knew that…. Great magazine by the way. –Robert Tortorelli CONTRIBUTING WRITER NICK PEERS RESPONDS: Technically, you’re correct, in that Windows offers a hybrid sleep mode that uses the hiberfil.sys file to store the contents of RAM during sleep as well as hibernation, so if there’s a power failure, you don’t lose any work. But, you don’t need it. If you’re low on disk space and happy to forego this additional protection, you can still put your PC to sleep. I know this because I…