Table of contents for December 2019 in Maximum PC

FOCUS IS IMPORTANT. When it comes to building PCs, it enables you to spend your cash where it will have the most impact. Pump the lion’s share of your budget at the processor if you’re going to be doing a lot of number crunching, at the graphics card if you’re a gamer, or at the storage if you’ve got a lot of data to plow through or you’re building some kind of NAS. But what do you focus on when you’re building a more general-purpose system? Where should your hard-earned cash go? This issue, we show you how to build such a system, with the added benefit that the resultant machine won’t break the bank. It absolutely works as a fully functioning PC, and thanks to shifts in processor capabilities,…

IT IS NO SECRET that Microsoft wants you to have a Microsoft account. It has become increasingly difficult to avoid one when setting up Win 10. Recent reports stated that the option for an local account has disappeared altogether. It hasn’t, but Microsoft has hidden it. The trick? To create an offline account on Win 10 Pro, you have to select “Domain join instead.” Pretty sneaky, hiding the option behind something else. The situation on Win 10 Home is worse. There is no offline account option since the May 2019 Update. Microsoft’s advice is to create a Microsoft account, complete the installation, then go back into Settings, and delete it. If you are more determined, you can disconnect from the Internet, skip through the “something went wrong” error message, then…

8 ASUS PROART STUDIOBOOK Asus had a strong showing at IFA, revealing its new ProArt laptop, which comes with a 4K screen and an Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000—making it a graphical powerhouse. 7 SONOS MOVE Audio giant Sonos premiered its excellent new speaker at IFA: the Sonos Move, the company’s first portable smart speaker, with the glorious sound quality we’ve come to expect. 6 HUAWEI KIRIN 990 For those who follow mobile hardware, Huawei announced its new flagship chipset, Kirin 990, which will be powering upcoming smartphones from the Chinese firm. 5 PROJECT ATHENA Intel was keen to promote Project Athena, its new program for creating laptops with better performance, connectivity, and battery life. Confirmed partners are Dell, HP, and Lenovo. 4 HISENSE 85U9E TV Hisense’s first foray into 8K…

THE PC. The personal computer. The IBM-compatible. Whatever you want to call it, somehow this machine has maintained a dominant presence for nearly four decades. If you try to launch a program from the ’80s to the 2000s, you have a good chance of getting it to launch—your PC has backward compatibility going right back to the ’70s, enabling you to run pieces of history as though they were from yesterday. In fact, your computer is brimming with heritage, from the way your motherboard is laid out to the size of your drive bays to the layout of your keyboard. Despite the weight of all of this lineage, we have an extraordinary range of devices that somehow get lumped under the category “PC.” Go back to the early ’80s, and…

Be Inc. (founded by ex-Apple executive Frenchman Jean-Louis Gassée) launched the BeBox in October 1995, running its own operating system, BeOS. Optimized around multimedia performance for the masses, BeOS was intended to compete with both Mac OS and Windows. Lightning fast and free of the legacies of old 16-bit hardware, BeOS had features such as symmetric multiprocessing for multi-CPU machines, pre-emptive multitasking, and the 64-bit journaled file system BFS. Although the BeBox itself was unsuccessful, BeOS was ported to the Macintosh in 1996, and almost became the new system to replace Mac OS. Gassée’s $300 million asking price was too steep, however, and Apple went with Steve Jobs’s NeXTSTEP OS instead. BeOS was then ported to the PC in 1998, along with a free stripped-down BeOS 5.0 Personal Edition, but…

Where transcoding is unavoidable, you’ll need to either limit the number of transcoded streams to prevent your CPU being overwhelmed, or find ways of offloading all that work from software-based to hardware-based encoding. Hardware encoding is restricted to Intel CPUs that support Intel Quick Sync video, which covers most bases since 2011 (confirm your processor is supported by searching for it at https://ark.intel.com/#@Processors). Using hardware to transcode streams means the effect on your CPU is almost as negligible as direct streaming or direct play, but before jumping for joy, be aware it may not be the magic bullet you hope it is. Hardware encoding almost always results in lower-quality streams, but how noticeable this is comes down to several factors. First is the quality of the source material—ironically, low bitrate,…

If you want to get finer control over your Fire TV Stick, ADB, or Android Developer Bridge, is the way to go. As its name suggests, it’s a protocol that forms a bridge between your PC and an Android device, enabling you to send files between them and pull up a shell, exposing Android’s Linux origins. Actually getting it set up can be a little finicky; begin by switching on ADB debugging in the “My Fire TV” menu, then head over to the “About” section in the same menu to discover your IP address. Back on your PC, we recommend walking through Amazon’s guide at http://developer. amazon.com/docs/fire-tv/connecting-adb-to-device.html to make sure you’ve set up everything properly. When you have a connection established, head out and download some APK files on your…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 You might also need to resort to using your Win 10 installation disc. IF YOU’RE LUCKY, you will have a trouble-free experience with Windows 10, but—realistically—it’s quite likely that something will go wrong at some point. You may be experiencing a lot of crashes or error messages, or you might even find that Windows won’t boot at all. If you can’t even start your computer, how are you supposed to fix things? Thankfully, there’s a number of recovery methods built into Windows 10 that should help you get back up and running with the minimum of fuss. While it’s natural to panic a little when Windows goes awry, the various recovery tools and options that exist should mean that you can fix the problem without…

THE ACER PRODESIGNER BM320 ain’t exactly cutting edge. There’s a reason for that though—it was originally released at the end of 2017. So, there’s no HDR and it’s limited to a 60Hz refresh rate. But that isn’t necessarily all bad. For starters, the price is only going in one direction. More on that later; first, let’s size this generously proportioned monitor up. The key metrics are the 32 inches of screen diagonal and full UHD or 4K resolution, the latter translating into a fulsome 3840x2160 pixels. Moreover, as the “mere” 60Hz refresh implies, it’s not aimed at gamers, which is actually a relief, such is the preponderance of both gaming screens and gaming-focused technology in the monitor market of late. Instead, the Acer ProDesigner BM320 has pros in general and…

ELGATO GAMING—acquired by hardware giant Corsair in June 2018—has a few capture cards on the market, and if you’re into streaming, there’s a reasonable chance you already own one. The 4K60 Pro is its latest and greatest, compatible with both PCs and 4K consoles (that’s the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, for those not in the know). As you might have guessed from the name, it’s capable of capturing 4K footage at 60fps, and the prerequisites for using it are fairly demanding—in addition to a 4K display to capture the footage, you also need a high-end machine to do the actual video capture. The minimum requirements for this card are a sixth-gen Intel or Ryzen 7 CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1000-series or newer GPU, or Radeon RX Vega,…

> Uninstall Preference > Virtual Reality Updates > PowerShell Tweaks Virtual Column As a suggestion, could you start a new section in Maximum PC that’s dedicated to VR gaming? It is hard to keep track of what is going on in this area. This review does not have to be long, maybe a little column with the latest updates on games, headsets, from HTC, Oculus, and so on. Also, I have a few more suggestions: 1. When you print a screenshot of a PC monitor or a laptop screen, could you specify what game or location is represented? I am sure that many readers would appreciate this info. 2. When you review a game, can you specify if this particular game is playable from a first-person perspective? Personally, I can’t…

After years of amazing us with videos of robots, Boston Dynamics has put a model on sale, or rather lease. A four-legged robot called Spot is available to selected “early adopters.” More general sales are expected to follow if all goes well. The 2.75ft-tall robot can walk at 3mph, carry a 30lb payload, cross rough terrain, and even work in the rain. The swappable batteries last 90 minutes. Spot is programmable, and comes with a range of accessories. Expected tasks include construction, delivery, security, and home assistance. How practical Spot will be is debatable, but it is hypnotizing to watch it walk about; it looks uncannily biological while clearly being a machine. No exact price has been revealed, but Boston Dynamics says it will cost the equivalent of a luxury…

Despite those legitimate complaints, Nvidia and AMD have repeatedly put out reference designs that used blowers with radial fans instead of axial fans and open-air coolers. There are pros and cons to both types of cooling solutions, of course. Why were blowers desirable? All the information I’ve seen and personal experience confirm that a radial fan is almost always louder than an axial fan that moves a similar amount of air. Axial fans move a large volume of air at low pressure, while radial fans are much higher pressure for the same net airflow. Jet engines use radial fans—why would anyone want a jet engine in a GPU cooler? There are two major benefits with blowers. The first is obvious: The cooler can serve as an additional exhaust fan for…

Contrary to popular belief, the IBM PC was not the first personal computer, nor was it the first desktop computer by IBM. Microcomputers existed long before “the PC,” and as for IBM itself, desktop computers had already been developed, though in very different forms to the PC we know now. In 1973, IBM developed a prototype computer called SCAMP, which emulated an IBM 1130 minicomputer in a “portable” (we use the term loosely) boxed form factor, with a small monitor and keyboard built in. Perhaps of most interest in relation to the 5150 Personal Computer is 1975’s IBM PC 5100. Before you start jumping up and down, here the “PC” actually stands for “Portable Computer.” This was similar to the SCAMP, but designed for mass manufacture, using an IBM PALM…

In February 2012, the successful Raspberry Pi was released, taking the industry by storm with a new form factor, often referred to as a single board computer (SBC). Made in Britain from a combination of cell phone and desktop parts, the Pi is barely larger than a credit card, for $35. The Pi was intended to get kids programming after the Raspberry Pi Foundation recognized a national decrease in programming skills, but it became more popular with hobby builders and the embedded computing industry. Unfortunately for PC giants, the Pi ran Linux on an ARM CPU instead of Windows on x86. Due to its popularity, Microsoft ported Windows to the system a few years later, and manufacturers started producing rival machines. For the ARM crowd, there are products like the Asus Tinker…

EVERYONE NEEDS a password manager. You simply can’t get by online these days relying on a handful of easily guessable passwords—just take a trip to https://haveibeenpwned.com to confirm your trusted passwords of yesteryear have almost certainly been exposed by now. The value of a password manager can’t be overstated, whether it’s generating unique, random, lengthy passwords that are almost uncrackable, or storing them securely in a vault protected by strong encryption and—if you’re diligent—extra layers of security. But it’s not necessarily all good news. Where is your password vault stored, and who can access it? Services like LastPass and 1Password that make it easy to sync and access passwords between mobile, desktop, and browser store your encrypted vault on their own online servers. They argue their “zero knowledge” model, where…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PLEX MEDIA SERVER Get this from www.plex.tv if you’re building your first media server. HANDBRAKE Head to https://handbrake.fr to download your copy. THE BANE OF ANY MEDIA server’s life is the need to transcode. Imagine this: You’ve converted your movies to one format already, only for your media server to waste precious CPU cycles converting it to a format that can be played back on your target device. Sometimes this process is inevitable—you want to watch a 1080p HD movie on an older 720p screen, for example—but in most cases, you should be looking to minimize the need to transcode. You’ll not only reduce the load on your server (allowing it to serve multiple streams simultaneously without breaking a sweat), but often you’ll make things easier for…

1. VIEW ACTIVITY Open the web interface (or the Plex app on your PC or Mac), and click the “Activity” button, choosing “Dashboard” from the drop-down menu. 2. START PLAYBACK Start playing media on a target device and then check the “Now Playing” section. Click the “Show Details” button to see which videos are direct-playing and which ones aren’t. 3. TRANSCODING If the original stream isn’t compatible, your server must produce a working version on the fly, putting pressure on its CPU. 4. DIRECT STREAMING This occurs when the stream is compatible, but either the file container isn’t supported, or the other stream requires transcoding-. It has little impact on your server’s CPU. 5. DIRECT PLAY The Holy Grail of streaming—your client can play the file in its original form,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 And a keyboard with a Windows key. USING A MOUSE IS SO 2018. These days, anyone who’s anyone is using keyboard shortcuts to get things done. Not only are they so much quicker than using the mouse, but they let you impress your friends at cool bars and parties. Probably. Anyway, most us know the standard Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V shortcuts, but Windows has a whole lot more up its sleeve when it comes to clever shortcuts. Make use of a couple of modifier keys and your keyboard suddenly becomes the launchpad of your desires (or of Windows Explorer, whichever you prefer). For instance, the Windows key is best known for snapping you out of full-screen programs when you accidentally tap it, but did you know…

YOU’LL NEED THIS AFFINITY PHOTO Grab a free trial from http://bit.ly/AfPhotoTrial. SERIF’S AFFINITY SUITE of creativity apps, recently completed with the release of Publisher, has a quirk not found elsewhere. Each app is divided into sections, known as Personas, which are tailored toward a specific task, and which change the layout of the controls when you enter them. Affinity Photo, for example, has the Photo Persona, for carrying out most image editing; the Liquify Persona, for pixel-bending effects; the Develop Persona, for processing raw image files; the Tone Mapping Persona, for creating HDR images; and the Export Persona, for busting down file sizes and fine-tuning compression ratios. Vector graphics app Designer has something similar, while Publisher acts as a keystone, tying the others together, integrating them into its Personas, so…

THERE’S SOMETHING rather enticing about the Zenbook Flip 13, but we can’t quite put our finger on it. Convertible laptops can be hit and miss, but the latest in Asus’s Zenbook line feels as though it might have struck gold. Lightweight but not flimsy, silent but not underpowered, this is the ideal on-the-go tablet or at-home work laptop. We’d love one of these for the long treks to distant press conferences and media events, but at just under $1,000, it’s not exactly the most affordable notebook in the business. You get a lot for your money, though. Despite weighing less than a bag of apples, it packs plenty of hardware. Our model comes with an Intel Core i5-8265U—a more powerful i7 version is also available—along with 8GB of RAM, a…

THE NEXT STEP for mesh routers appears to be integrating voice assistants into their repertoire. With the release of the Lyra Voice, Asus joins the likes of the Netgear Orbi Voice by releasing a router that also takes a turn as a gateway to the wonderful world of Amazon Alexa. In terms of headline figures, this is very much a router in the same guise as the original Lyra, offering AC2200 connectivity: 400Mb/s at 2.4GHz, and dual 867Mb/s connections at 5GHz. Before we go any further, it’s worth considering how this will fit in your home, because if the Internet connection enters your house in a foyer, under a staircase, or somewhere out of the way, this limits the usefulness of the main selling point of the Lyra Voice as…

AMD’S IMPRESSIVE 7nm GPU has reached the mainstream with the release of the RX 5500 and the RX 5500M (M for mobile), based around a new Navi 14 chip. These are aimed squarely at 1080p gaming. The RX 5500 has 22 compute units and 1,408 stream units—about two thirds of an RX 5700. The desktop version has a game frequency of 1,670MHz; the mobile version is clocked at 1,448MHz. Both have 4GB of GDDR6 main memory, with 8GB as an option for the desktop. The memory interface has been dropped from 256-bit to 128-bit; AMD says the RX 5500 has been “tuned” for 1080p. To be fair, the effective memory speed hasn’t suffered—it’s 14Gb/s, the same as the RX 5700. The RX 5500 has all the fancy features of its…

Samsung’s Galaxy Fold is back, after its debut was cut short by multiple screen failures. It has been redesigned to be more durable. Samsung claims the Fold is now good for 200,000 folds. The first thing many testers decided to do is try to break it. In one test, it reached 119,380 folds. Not bad. iFixit, whose breakdown of the original caused such a fuss, has taken this new version apart, too. The verdict is that it’s better, but the changes are largely superficial—it’s still alarmingly fragile. The list of warnings it comes with paints quite a picture. You must keep it away from objects such as coins, credit cards, dust, and fluff. You must only touch the screen lightly, and never fold it back on itself, or twist it.…

One of the biggest criticisms of technology as an industry is the proliferation of misogynistic and toxic behavior among its ranks. It may be easy to point fingers at Big Tech, but there are bad elements in open source as well. One of the biggest names, Richard Stallman, resigned from his position at the Free Software Foundation and his post at MIT after statements he made defending Jeffrey Epstein from accusations of rape and sex trafficking. As someone who always thought of Stallman as a prophet of free software, I was surprised to learn about his statements. What disturbed me more was that he has a long history of defending pedophilia and child pornography. Reading some of his old blog posts, it doesn’t get better. While Stallman is an extreme…

> Simple Speed Boost > Smooth Windows > Intel Security Fuss-Free Overclock I just purchased an EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER XC Gaming and need your help auto-overclocking it, as I’m a newb. Is EVGA Precision X1 or MSI Afterburner better to use? What, if any, settings should I apply to either program before running it for the auto-overclock? -Keith Brooks THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: We’ll skip the usual disclaimers about overclocking, as we’re sure you know what the dangers versus benefits are. Ensure your PC—including your GPU drivers—is up to date, then download MSI’s Afterburner tool (www.msi.com/page/afterburner), which has the required OC Scanner for automatically determining a stable overclock for your RTX 20-series card, wrapped up in a user-friendly front end that makes it easy to compare your GPU’s performance…

Without the Apple II, it’s possible the PC would never have existed. Although a subject of debate, it’s generally agreed that the Apple II was a primary influence on the PC. Many IBM engineers owned one—as did many customers, who found that they could easily do jobs, such as working on spreadsheets, that were nearly impossible on a giant mainframe. Sporting an 8-bit MOS 6502 processor, with between 4KB and 64KB of RAM, it debuted in June 1977 for a base price of $1,298. It had an incredible production run, selling from 1977 to 1993. Developed by Steve Wozniak, the Apple II stands in stark contrast to products developed by Apple’s lesser Steve (Mr. Jobs). Chiefly, the Apple II is designed around an open architecture, with a removable lid allowing…

When Microsoft released its proprietary Windows Store, Valve’s Gabe Newell described it as a “catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.” Valve felt that the Windows Store threatened Steam’s existence, and decided to branch out with its own platform, using Linux as a base. First, Valve released the full Steam gaming client for Linux in February 2013, followed by its own platform, SteamOS, based on Debian Linux in December 2013. (Linux and SteamOS applications are generally cross-compatible.) However, SteamOS failed to gain much traction, and most of the user base would come from the regular Linux client. Perhaps following the advice of id Software’s John Carmack, Valve re-focused its attention from encouraging native SteamOS/Linux ports to perfecting Wine, the Windows compatibility layer for Linux. In August 2018, Valve released Proton,…

TIP OF THE MONTH CLEAR GOOGLE ASSISTANT RECORDINGS Google is listening in, and employees are paid to listen through the recordings. So, let’s clear that data out. Head to http://myactivity.google.com in your browser, and deselect all products under “Filter by date and products.” Then select “Voice and audio,” and set a date range to delete. You can also delete other recorded data by clicking “Delete activity by,” or set it to delete automatically. Privacy improved! MAKE – USE – CREATE STAFF WRITER RIPPING THE THREADS Information is still thin on the ground regarding the upcoming Threadripper 3000 series of CPUs, but we know AMD is ready to go big: The high-end 3970WX and 3990WX chips rock an almighty 64 cores and 128 threads. Plus, a recent leak mentioned “dual socket…

YOU’LL NEED THIS AN AMAZON FIRE TV DEVICE Any will do, from the original to the 4K. THIS WILL COME as no surprise: Amazon’s hardware line, ostensibly running its own OS, borrows heavily from Android. As in, it’s basically a reskinned Android, with the Google apps trashed in favor of ones that support Amazon’s ecosystem. This is true of the company’s Fire tablets, it was true of its disastrous phone, and it’s also true of the Fire TV range—it’s all Android underneath. This means it has, at least to some extent, the same extendable structure as Android. We can take a Fire TV Stick or TV Cube beyond its standard lineup of channels and apps—we’re not stuck with what Amazon offers on its tightly controlled store. Things like Plex are…

The Develop Persona can be used on an individual layer if you find it a good way to edit. While we recommend shooting raw images in your camera and treating Affinity (or Lightroom/Adobe Camera Raw) as a digital darkroom, Develop can do a lot with processed data. Split your image into layers, using something like the “Flood Select” tool to perhaps carve the sky from the landscape, then make sure that, while both are visible, only one is selected in the “Layers” palette on the right of the Photo Persona. Click the button at the top-left that takes you to Develop, and Affinity remembers where the dividing line is. Any adjustments you make in Develop only apply to the layer you had selected.…

ENDGAME GEAR’S focus is perhaps the most singular we have ever seen of a niche peripheral manufacturer, and that’s saying something, given the company we often keep. The XM1 is, says EG, nothing more than the world’s fastest mouse. Partial credit for that really must be given to your wrist. It’s certainly not very fast without it. But let's move past the terrible dad jokes: How exactly do you go about making the fastest mouse in the world? Part the first, you use Pixart’s class-leading PMW3389 sensor, which eyes up your surface at a maximum of 16,000 cpi. That in itself should be enough, because using the XM1 at full resolution (and indeed any mouse that also carries said sensor, such as the Razer Deathadder Elite) results in an unusably…

THE FEDERAL BUREAU of Control sounds like something a certain type of Facebook group might rebrand the FBI as, but in this mind-bending, space-twisting third-person-sorta-shooter, it’s a real thing. Well, mostly real. It resides in a building called the Oldest House that only appears to those who need it, or by accident. Its brutalist exterior houses an interior that’s either infinite and unshackled from our hum-drum trio of dimensions, or taking up a great deal of expensive New York real estate. Our money is on the former. Influenced by Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the neverending corridors and offices of the Oldest House could be seen as a satire on modern working conditions, but this is something far greater. The FBC is charged with investigating paranormal incidents, and its…

USB DRIVES! They’re not—let’s be honest here—very exciting. If, like us, you work in the tech field, you’ve probably seen a million and one of them. And yet, this diminutive fella had us smiling with almost child-like glee. It’s so tiny, packing 32GB of storage into a sliver of metal and plastic barely an inch long. It’s Gen 3.1, so it’s offering speedy USB transfers (at least, until USB 4.0 rears its beautiful head). But best of all, it’s got a little slider on one side, enabling you to swap between a Type-C USB interface on one end and a Type-A connector on the other. That Type-C connector proves its worth swiftly; while many people are still rocking cases or motherboards without USB-C support, there’s a pretty good chance that…