Table of contents for March 2020 in Maximum PC

AMONG INTEL’S OFFERINGS at CES was our first look at its jump into the discrete graphics card market. Intel is being cagey about the technical specs, but the first hardware, the Xe DG1, isn’t built to show off Xe’s eventual power. There are no power connectors for a start; it looks as if it can make do with the 75W the PCIe slot provides. Early testers confirm that the card boots, runs, and has passed initial testing in-house; it has now to moved to distribution, along with a developer’s kit, to third parties. An early Linux driver had it listed as “UHD Graphics Gen12 LP DG1,” the same naming convention as the integrated graphics on the upcoming Tiger Lake CPUs, which would mean we’re starting with a basic card with…

8 SAMSUNG Q950TS Samsung’s new 8K TV has an invisible bezel that makes the display appear edgeless. 7 LENOVO YOGA 5G Lenovo’s big reveal at CES 2020 was the world’s first 5G laptop, inventively called the Yoga 5G. It’s a super-modern two-in-one laptop with a reported 24-hour battery life. 6 ASUS ROG SWIFT 360 Asus and Nvidia’s new monitor touts G-Sync along with a blistering 360Hz refresh rate—the first of its kind. 5 ACER TRAVELMATE P6 Acer’s latest addition to Intel’s “Project Athena” laptop run, the TravelMate P6, is superdurable yet super-light, with a 10th-gen Intel CPU and 23 hours of battery life. 4 HP ELITE DRAGONFLY G2 A slick new laptop from HP, the Dragonfly G2 comes with a built-in tracker for Tile, the app that tracks the location of…

It’s possible to encrypt an existing data drive without wiping it in VeraCrypt using “Encrypt in place.” But there are drawbacks. Unlike encrypting your Windows installation, the drive won’t be available while it’s being encrypted. Also, when done, you’re prompted to assign it a different drive letter—this isn’t necessary as we’ll explain shortly. Choose “Encrypt in place,” click “Next,” read the warning, and click “Yes.” You’re prompted to set encryption and authentication options, then asked to move your mouse randomly to strengthen the encryption keys, before ending up at the “Wipe Screen.” This allows you to shred unencrypted files after the drive has been encrypted to prevent them from being recovered by undelete tools later. Only the most paranoid should consider anything other than “None (fastest)” or “1-pass (random data).”…

TIP OF THE MONTH KNOW YOUR TEMPERATURES Any seasoned system-builder should know that keeping an eye on your hardware’s temperatures using HWMonitor or Real Temp is a must. But it’s important to take things one step beyond: Do your research, and find out the actual ideal operating temperature ranges for your CPU, GPU, memory, and storage. Make sure your components are running within those ranges, and they’ll last longer and prevent throttling. MAKE – USE – CREATE 56 Edit video like a professional with OpenShot 60 Stop all browser snooping by using Tor 70 We give a gaming PC a workstation makeover ↘ submit your How To project idea to: comments@maximumpc.com…

YOU’LL NEED THIS OPENSHOT VIDEO EDITOR Download this free app from www.openshot.org. BLENDER This open-source 3D tool is available from www.blender.org. INKSCAPE Use this free app from https://inkscape.org to create titles. JUST HOW MANY PHOTOS AND VIDEO CLIPS have you accumulated over the years? Whether you’ve got dedicated equipment or just love snapping and videoing on your phone, now is the time to do something creative with them. OpenShot is a brilliant video-editing tool that’s relatively simple to learn, yet packed with features that enable you to turn last holiday’s rough video footage into a polished movie you’ll be happy to show to friends and family. In this tutorial, we run through the program’s main features to help you bring your footage together, edit it, add special effects and titles,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS THE TOR BROWSER Download it from www.torproject.org. THEY’RE WATCHING YOU. They’re watching everything you do online. You’d think we were being paranoid, but it’s part of their mission statement; the US government is part of the international Five Eyes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes) group of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States, which have worked together since World War II to collate and share intelligence, and that includes the Internet use of citizens. In the digital age, that means intercepting, storing, and analyzing all Internet traffic. Don’t be fooled into thinking that local laws can stop a nation state from spying on its own citizens. If you’re one of the Five Eyes, just get your buddy overseas to do the spying, then report back. Tempora (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora), a UK…

YOU’LL NEED THIS AFFINITY PUBLISHER See https://affinity.serif.com to find out more. LAST MONTH WE CREATED a single-page document in Affinity Publisher, but Serif’s app is capable of so much more. The creation of entire magazines, catalogs, and books in a single document is not outside of its capabilities. This time we’re looking at master pages, which enable you to replicate elements on every new page you create; text frame linking, which allows text to flow between pages; baseline grids, which enable you to lock your text in place and keep it lined up; as well as use of the Assets panel, which stores content you need frequently, but not regularly enough to place on a master page. There’s a lot of depth to Publisher—we’re not even touching on switching between…

LOOK, WE WERE REALLY excited about this one. The Surface Pro series has long offered some of the best tablets in the biz, their detachable keyboards providing a sleeker experience than most two-in-one convertible laptops. While the Surface Pro 7 delivered high-quality performance across all areas, thanks to its 10th-gen Intel Core CPU, its chassis was familiar, all hard silver edges and chunky bezels. The Pro X looked like the breath of fresh air that the Surface really needed: a total redesign of the exterior and peripherals, coupled with a custom-built processor using a hybrid of Microsoft and Qualcomm’s technology. It should have been awesome. Yes, we knew the ultrathin new design was going to cause a hit to computing performance, and the lack of Intel’s Iris Plus integrated graphics…

LIKE MOORE’S LAW, all good things must come to an end. I came to Maximum PC nearly five years ago, when most desktops were still limited to four-core/eight-thread processors, and the top enthusiast chip was the eight-core/16-thread Core i7-5960X. I arrived just in time for the GTX 980 Ti launch—my first GPU review for the magazine. It’s been a wild ride, testing the latest and greatest hardware, and it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come. 2015 was the year we got Intel’s late-to-the-party Broadwell desktop CPUs, which became effectively obsolete just two months later with the arrival of Skylake. Dream Machine took us to the moon with four Titan X (Maxwell) GPUs, the i7-5960X, 64GB RAM, and a RAID 0 set of Samsung 850 Pro 1TB SSDs. That would…

WIRELESS EARBUDS are a curious proposition for a gaming brand. For starters, they’re wireless, which puts some gamers off due to the potential for audio latency. And they’re earbuds. Razer is a gaming brand; over-ear headphones are usually the way to go. So the Hammerhead earbuds are a strange option, supposedly more for gaming purposes than the comparable AirPods. But it doesn’t matter how strange it is, because these earbuds are seriously good. The custom-tuned 13mm dynamic drivers push incredible sound quality directly to your ear holes, with crystal-clear high notes and thumping bass that we’d have thought impossible in such tiny earphones. They’re controlled by tiny touchpads that take the appearance of the iconic green Razer logo, with small taps and holds for commands such as pausing music and…

Six hundred and eighty bucks!? It’s almost ridiculous how good value this model of Nvidia’s excellent RTX 2080 Super is. This is the card that makes 4K gaming more viable; or 1440p ultra, with ray tracing on. Don’t get us wrong, it’s still a lot of money for a GPU, but right now it’s hard to recommend anything else for powerful gaming systems. With 8GB of VRAM at 15.5Gb/s and a tasty 1,830MHz boost clock, this is a powerhouse card that is edging closer and closer to half the price of its big brother, the still-ludicrously-expensive RTX 2080 Ti. It’s great, and it’s never been better value.…

AMD HAS ANNOUNCED the arrival of the “world’s highest performance desktop and ultra-thin laptop processors.” Big talk. First to the desktop: The new Threadripper 3990X is a beast, with 64 cores and 128 threads. It has a base clock of 2.9GHz, with a maximum boost rate of 3.4GHz. It shares the same basic design as the Epyc 7702P server chip, but with fewer memory channels and bumped speeds. It will drop into existing sTRX40 motherboards, with a quick BIOS update to optimize performance. Feeding it data means it needs 1GB per core as a minimum for complex tasks; 2GB is better, so you’ll want 128GB of main memory to give it room to breathe. The TDP is still quoted at 280W, the same as all Threadrippers over 24 cores, but…

Perhaps not surprisingly, Nvidia and its display partners fall into this latter category. This year, Asus and Acer will release 360Hz 1080p gaming displays targeted at esports professionals, using Nvidia G-Sync tech. But Nvidia isn’t just pushing ever-faster refresh rates without some scientific backing, and at CES, I was able to go hands-on with these ultra-fast displays. Let me just say that any so-called expert who suggests lower refresh rates and frame rates don’t matter for games has never actually played games. There is a huge difference between 30Hz and 60Hz. More importantly, there’s a noticeable difference between 60Hz, 144Hz, 240Hz, and even 360Hz—in the right scenarios. If you think the 50 percent increase from 240 to 360 won’t matter much, I was right there with you. And seeing them…

Oculus Rift S vs. HTC Vive Cosmos vs. Valve Index ROUND 1 Value Despite its ludicrous $999 price, the Index sold out incredibly fast. Valve restocked, of course, but with Half-Life: Alyx looming on the horizon, it sold out again. The price has dropped somewhat since then, though, bringing it more in line with the $699 Vive Cosmos. The Rift S, though, clocks in at $399, feeling almost ridiculously cheap in comparison. That significantly lower price doesn’t come with any huge drawbacks either. Yes, the Rift S is the oldest of these three headsets, and it has a slightly lower resolution, but it still performs perfectly well when paired with a good VR-ready PC. The Rift S also has the lowest refresh rate of the trio, but only by a…

WORRIED ABOUT THE SECURITY and visibility of your data? Do you have sensitive files you want to keep away from potentially prying eyes? Worried that your cloud backup isn’t as secure as it might be? Concerned that the data on your laptop might be vulnerable to theft? Want to dispose of files—or an entire PC—without compromising the data (including previously deleted files) on it? You’ve come to the right place. In this feature, we explore numerous options for protecting your data, both data stored on your PC and that backed up elsewhere, whether on local storage or in the cloud. We also reveal how to ensure all data you delete is shredded beyond recovery, too, enabling you to pass on a PC or drive to a new home without having…

When you delete a file, it’s not physically removed from your PC; instead, the first few bytes of the file are overwritten with a tag that tells Windows that the file is deleted and the space it currently resides in is available when writing other files to disk. It speeds things up, but it’s not good for security. Until the file is physically overwritten by another file, its contents are still retrievable. What’s more, even if the file is overwritten, it might be possible to retrieve part or all of it using sophisticated file recovery techniques. So, how do you protect yourself against that kind of technology? Thankfully, there are tools that can securely wipe data from your drive. One that’s free and open source is Eraser (grab the latest…

SCREENS TODAY OFFER more innovation, wider choice, and better value than ever. But, by some metrics, PC displays are disappointing. By other measures, though, marketing madness is starting to take hold. How so? On the one hand, you can now choose from a huge array of form factors, sizes, and aspect ratios, many of which are more affordable than ever. Innovations such as high refresh rates and adaptive sync have entered the mainstream. Support for HDR or high dynamic range content is becoming widespread, too. Connectivity solutions such as USB Type-C make it simpler than ever to hook up displays to PCs of all kinds. And panel tech is improving, with better contrast, lower response times, and technologies such as local dimming contributing to dramatic improvements in image quality. On…

When it comes to HDR PC monitors, not all implementations are equal. But it’s not all bad news. Even mediocre HDR brings improved color performance. Strictly speaking, high dynamic range doesn’t automatically imply greater color fidelity. Instead, it’s about the contrast between the brightest and darkest elements of an image. However, in practice, HDR standards typically make requirements of a display in terms of color space coverage and color fidelity. Take VESA’s DisplayHDR standard. Even lowly DisplayHDR 400 demands 95 percent coverage of the Rec.709 color space (the standard used for HDTVs), 10-bit per channel signal processing, and native 8-bit color rendering. Step up to DisplayHDR 600, and 99 percent of Rec.709 is required, plus 90 percent of the more demanding DCI-P3 color space, the standard for professional digital cinema. DisplayHDR…

Tensions were high in the office this month, as we attempted to upgrade our esteemed editor’s PC, while also building the high-end gaming system featured on the magazine cover. Ultimately, we were successful, but upgrading an entire system is never as simple as you’d think; it’s often easier to make those upgrades piece by piece, over a longer period. Compatibility between CPU and motherboard is a frequent sticking point—just because a mobo can be compatible with a certain processor, it doesn’t guarantee that it will be. The board may require a BIOS update (or a reset) first, but a different, actually compatible CPU is needed to do so. This can trip up inexperienced builders as it’s rarely highlighted by manufacturers. Another issue is CPU cooler clearance. Always check that your…

No video is complete without a nifty title sequence, and OpenShot has a dedicated tool for creating both static and animated titles. You need Blender for animated ones, and Inkscape for static titles—portable or installed. Once in place, choose “Edit > Preferences > General,” and click “Browse” to locate and select the relevant program file. Once done, select your chosen tool from the “Title” menu. Select a template, then use the controls in the right-hand pane to enter your text and tweak options. Static titles can change font, text color, and background color, while animated titles offer more options, depending on the effect. Be sure to give your title a suitable filename to identify it—after clicking “Save” or “Render,” it appears in the Project Files pane, ready for dragging and…

Take a look at how much privacy protection Tor and HTTPS offer when used. Without either Tor or HTTPS at every step in the process, anybody with access to your connection can potentially snoop on all your activity, including the destination site, your username and password, your user data, and your location. Using HTTPS helps to protect your user data, and your username and password at all stages. Using Tor masks your destination site, username and password, data, and, to a certain degree, your location. Adding a VPN would further protect your location details, but we should point out that there could be government bodies directly accessing ISP data or the site.com services via unknown snooping programs.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS DISK DRILL 2 Sign up at http://win.cleverfiles.com. IT’S SOMETHING THAT HAS HAPPENED to all of us at some point—the horrible realization that a file you need has vanished, maybe deleted, and the Recycle Bin emptied. With Disk Drill 2, you can get your data back. Maximum PC readers can download a full copy of this advanced file recovery tool and use it for 18 months completely free of charge—check out the tutorial below to find out how. If you are impressed by what Disk Drill 2 is capable of, we’ve teamed up with CleverFiles to bring you the latest version, Disk Drill 4, with even more advanced features, at a 30 percent discount. To take advantage of this offer, download the trial version of Disk Drill 4…

Your Assets panel is saved on your PC and appears at the side of any document you open in Publisher, useful for transferring frames, but less so if you move computers—use “Embed In Current Document” from the Assets panel’s drop-down menu if you want to take it with you. To export your assets to send to someone else, gather them all together under a single “Category” heading. Drop down the panel’s menu, and choose “Export.” Give the file a name, and save it on a removable drive, ready to move to another PC. The assets file can get quite large if it has a lot of embedded images in it. To import on a different PC, open Publisher, open the Assets panel, drop down the menu, choose “Import Assets,” navigate…

WITH SO MANY BRANDS, such as Asus and MSI, dominating the gaming laptop landscape, it’s exciting when an unfamiliar name comes along. Granted, Maingear isn’t a no-name company—the boutique system builder has been around since 2002—but it’s entering the notebook arena for the first time with its Element and Vector laptops. The model tested here is the retail version of the Element, which is slim, sleek, and weighs barely over four pounds, with a bezel of just 0.25 inches. The tenkeyless keyboard also helps give the Element its slim dimensions. The keys themselves are very square and packed tight, leaving more room at the bottom for a larger than average touchpad—but they also respond quickly, thanks to the lightweight, optical silent switches. For “silent” switches, though, they are surprisingly loud…

THE RAZER BLADE LAPTOPS are all pretty darn sweet-looking machines. Sleek black laptops with perfectly designed keyboards and tiny screen bezels, and powerful internal hardware to boot. The Blade 15’s new Studio Edition is no exception: a ninth-gen Intel Core i7 processor along with a Quadro RTX 5000 GPU, crammed into an impressively slender chassis, carved from a single block of aluminum. This laptop ditches the usual black-and-green aesthetics of the Blade series, though, instead opting for a more professional silver finish. This Blade feels like a staging ground for turning a great gaming laptop into a great content-creation laptop. A high-end graphics card and fully addressable RGB-lit keyboard can still scratch the gamer itch, while plenty of RAM and a large 4K touch display mean that this laptop is…

OH, TO BE A FLY ON THE WALL in the meeting room where this mouse was first pitched. What does a mouse do—some disruptive but well-liked marketing wunderkind asks—if not just point and click? What if we just focused really hard on that part? What if—at this point, the marketing guy sweeps his hands around dramatically—we created the perfect click? This scenario is, of course, fantastical. But the Roccat website claims that the Kain did take two years of brainstorming, redesigns, and rigorous testing, and then goes on to refer to it as “our masterpiece.” Well, Roccat, we’ll be the judge of that. The Kain 202 AIMO, itself a minor evolution of the Kain 200, is the physical embodiment of this reviewer’s favorite Ron Swanson quote: “Never half-ass two things.…

WE HAD TO CHECK, but it has indeed been 20 years since the last mainline MechWarrior game. MechWarrior 4: Vengeance (which, confusingly, had a standalone expansion called Mercenaries) was a first-person mech sim based on BattleTech in which you shot the limbs off enemy mechs to reach mission objectives and pick up the parts as scrap with which to augment your own stompy killing machine. Little has changed in MechWarrior 5, apart from the fact the game now runs happily in 4K, supports ray tracing and DLSS, and you have the choice of a third-person view. You’re a rookie pilot getting trained up when some bad guys attack, knock your father’s mech off a cliff, and damage his mercenary outfit in search of something you know nothing about. It’s a…

WINDOWS 7 has now entered the twilight world of “legacy” computing. Support from Microsoft officially ended on January 14. It is still possible to get security updates, if you’re a business and prepared to pay. Initially, ESU, Extended Security Updates, were only to be available for Professional and Enterprise versions, but Microsoft has backtracked, and now promises to support “all business customers,” as long as they have an Office 365 Business subscription. It’s a yearly fee, and is planned to last three years. It costs $25 or $50 for the first year, depending on your business subscription. This doubles per year, so could be as much as $350 per machine for the full deal. After the third year, you really are on your own. One organization that wasn’t ready was…

TRIUMPHS ✓ 2019: GOOD YEAR FOR PCs Sales were up 2.7 percent, according to analysts IDC, ending seven years of contraction. ✓ UNIVERSAL MEMORY Scientists have theoretically found a way to build non-volatile memory that’s as fast as DRAM. ✓ DISNEY+ TOPS CHART The Disney+ streaming app was the most downloaded app of Q4 last year. It also made $50 million in the first month—more than HBO has made any month. TRAGEDIES ✗ MICROSOFT FORCES BING A new Chrome extension from Microsoft will force Office 365 ProPlus users to have Bing as the default search engine. ✗ TESLA GOES TOO FAST After 127 cases of “unintended acceleration,” the NHTSA is considering an investigation. ✗ MUSK VS. ASTRONOMERS SpaceX’s plans for a global network of satellites means bright streaks appearing across…

> Fan Controllers > Kick-Ass PC Tweaks > Browser Backups Faulty Fan Controllers In May 2018, I built a new PC and put it in a Rosewill Thor V2 case. This is a great case, but the documentation is sorely lacking, as it makes no mention of how to hook up the fan speed controllers—in fact, neither they nor the two Molex plugs are mentioned at all. I was never able to determine if the speed controls were working, but the fans were on, so let it go for 18 months. Over Thanksgiving, I opened the case to install a second SSD. I then took the entire case apart to address other problems and ended up disconnecting all the fans and going online for advice. I found a post advising…

If you’re using a higher-end version of Windows—Professional, Education, or Enterprise—and you’re looking to encrypt an entire drive, you might like to use the built-in BitLocker tool. It can be used to encrypt fixed and removable drives, as well as your Windows boot drive, making it possible to protect the contents of your laptop should it be stolen. Type “bitlocker” into the Search box and click “Manage BitLocker.” You’ll see a list of all available drives in the main window. Expand one and click “Turn BitLocker on.” If you’re looking to encrypt the main system drive, you may see an error about your PC not having a compatible Trusted Protection Module. Check your motherboard specifications—you may be lucky and simply need to enable TPM support in the BIOS (look in…

You’ve encrypted the files on your hard drive, but what about your backups? By default, backup tools store your files unencrypted on a local or network drive, which is fine if the drives have been encrypted with VeraCrypt or BitLocker, but what if you just want the backups to be encrypted; perhaps you’d like to store them securely in the cloud? The answer lies with the free and open-source backup tool Duplicati, currently in beta (www.duplicati.com). This has been engineered like Cryptomator for the cloud, but specializes in file-based backups. After downloading and installing, let Duplicati launch—configuration is done through a browser window. Click “Add backup” to work your way through the backup wizard. You’re prompted to set your encryption level (the default AES-256 is more than adequate) and passphrase…

HDR, or high dynamic range, has always been a tricky concept, but in the recent context of PC displays, it’s been more problematic than ever. What with numerous competing standards and no unifying definition of what it takes to be an HDR display, it’s a minefield for buyers. Arguably, the problem is even more fundamental than that. The ability to support or decode HDR content is one thing, the ability to render an HDR image is another. To the discredit of many monitor companies, they’ve conflated the two. But not all manufacturers are guilty. By way of example, in our review of the new BenQ DesignVue PD3220U, we noted that BenQ says the display “supports HDR10 content.” Arguably, BenQ could be even more explicit, but it’s welcome that the company…

Alienware Aurora R9 DELL’S ALIENWARE BRAND has improved incrementally from its early days as super-expensive gaming hardware bedecked with RGB lighting. The Alienware Aurora desktops have been successful for Dell, and the newest—the R9, with a ninth-gen Intel CPU—is the greatest yet. The R9 was designed with esports in mind, utilizing a smart design for maximum cooling. Air is drawn in at the front and ejected from the rear, side, and top, with a PSU swing-arm mount that allows for both a relatively compact chassis and improved airflow for the GPU (or GPUs, as the R9 supports the installation of a second card). The Aurora is prepped for maximum connectivity, with three USB 3.1 ports, a USB Type-C port, plus audio input and output all on the front I/O. Most…

Drag a photo on to the timeline and it appears in your movie for 10 seconds by default; choose “Edit > Preferences > General tab” to edit this via the “Image Length (seconds)” setting. We recommend overlapping images to produce a more seamless switch between them using the Fade effect. Image-based slideshows can appear rather static, even with the transition effects in place. One way to inject some more pizzazz is to make use of OpenShot’s various Animate effects. Right-click the photo to reveal a pop-up menu of options. Use the “Rotate” menu to correct the orientation of portrait photos, then examine the options under “Animate.” One potential issue with rotated photos is that the top and bottom get chopped off. One solution is to use “Animate > Start of…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS OR LINUX PC These emulators run on any modern PC, but Linux users need a stable version of Wine. JOYSTICK A USB joystick makes life easier in some games. YOU MAY NEVER HAVE HEARD of the BBC Micro, but in ’80s Britain, this beige box with its cool red function keys would find its way into almost every school in the nation. For many Brits, the BBC Micro would be their first experience using a computer, inspiring new coders across the country. With a production run reaching into the mid-’90s, it was a national institution. Indeed, it was the BBC Micro that inspired both the Raspberry Pi and its Model A and B naming scheme. Although the BBC Micro was too expensive to be a popular…

AMD’S RETAIL Radeon RX 5500 XT series of graphics cards is here, bringing additional options to the budget and mid-range market. AMD’s Navi architecture hasn’t changed, although Navi 14 does cut the potential number of compute units from a maximum of 40 down to a maximum of 24—with the 5500 XT enabling 22 of those CUs. There are two versions of the 5500XT; the only difference is the VRAM and a $30 increase in price. The 5500 XT 4GB card matches up against the GTX 1650 Super, and the two are effectively tied in performance. The 8GB card, meanwhile, has to take on the GTX 1660, and Nvidia’s card has the same number of GPU cores: 1,408. The problem for AMD is that Nvidia’s GPU cores tend to perform a…

SHOP CAREFULLY and you can pick up a 4K monitor for under $200; $300 will bag you a 32-inch 4K monitor with a decent VA panel. Which begs the question: Why would you unload nearly $1,200 on this? It has a 31.5-inch (read 32-inch) panel, 4K resolution, and tops out at 60Hz. So far, so samey compared to that $300 option. However, the DesignVue PD3220U ups the ante with IPS rather than VA panel tech. That implies better color accuracy, viewing angles, and response, but inferior contrast compared to a VA panel. Problem is, $600 will buy you a 4K 32-incher with an IPS panel. As it happens, BenQ itself will sell you such a screen. So, what justifies the 100 percent price premium? It’s not high refresh, that’s for…

DAMN, this keyboard is terrible. The feet fold out sideways. That’s vaguely neat from an aesthetic point of view, but the slightest lateral movement causes it to crumple to the deck with a whimper. Don’t use the feet. They’re really bad, and Corsair’s engineers should flagellate themselves for designing them. Whether they choose to break out the birch twigs before or after they receive the plaudits for the rest of this keyboard is up to them. Damn, this keyboard is great. The K95 Platinum XT is an obvious evolution of Corsair’s tried-and-true overall design, which sees a cleverly folded aluminum base frame forming a neat dished base for the keyboard, with a distinct forehead and tiny, functional chin. Everything that isn’t core keyboard (and there’s a lot of that) has…

COME INTO PHOENIX POINT unprepared, and you may accuse its devs of playing a lot of XCOM. This is almost certainly true, but beside the point. Snapshot Games has played a lot of X-COM, too, having been co-founded by Julian Gollop, one of the designers of the original X-COM: UFO Defense from 1994. As a result, XCOM veterans will find Phoenix Point familiar to the point of feeling like an expansion pack, but different enough to be thrilling. Anyone new to the series will find it a convenient place to get on, even if it doesn’t quite hit the heights XCOM 2 did. This time, rather than arriving in flying saucers, the threat comes from the sea. Mutated creatures mixing human, seafood, and unknown DNA are wreaking havoc on the…