Table of contents for June 2017 in Maximum PC

Choosing a panel type used to be simple. You chose TN if you were cheap or wanted to game, or IPS for almost everything else. Now, it’s not so easy. The best TN tech has improved dramatically, though the benefits have only touched a minority of monitors. Meanwhile, IPS panels have become far cheaper, and VA tech keeps throwing in that high-contrast curve ball, thus offering a flawed but compelling alternative. Meanwhile, the PC is now so capable that the range of uses and applications, not to mention screen sizes and resolutions, are so varied that the pros and cons of the three main panel techs are more nuanced than ever. ROUND 1 Gaming If there’s a single application type you can rely on to hammer your PC into whimpering…

THE CHIPSETS Ryzen has a total of five chipsets, each aimed at a different audience. There’s the top-end X370 chipset, featuring highend support for storage, NVMe devices, and overclocking by default. The B350 is a slightly slimmed down variant of X370, with SLI/Xfire disabled by default, but still coming overclocked. Then there’s the more budget-oriented A320, with even less USB support, and overclocking disabled. Finally, there are two unreleased chipsets we haven’t seen yet, designed to deal with small form factor devices: X300 and A300. Although we haven’t seen any X300 or A300 motherboards, their position is actually the most interesting question. Reason being, we’ve already seen Biostar produce an X370 ITX motherboard— arguably one of the smallest mainstream form factors currently available to the computing ecosphere. So, we simply…

Asus is a behemoth of a company, split into different divisions dealing with graphics, peripherals, monitors, mobile devices, and everything else, with divisions upon divisions upon divisions, each with the aim of producing and maintaining products aimed at its own target audience. Take the motherboard division, for example. Inside this monumental substructure, you’ll find Republic of Gamers, TUF, WorkStation, and the Pro series of mobo teams. Each team working independently of one another, both in motherboard d esign a nd B IOS/ UEFI development. Why do we bring this up? Well, it’s to do with motherboard choice. Not all Asus motherboards are born equal. This Crosshair VI, plied with the latest BIOS update, is a phenomenal piece of gear, more than capable of hitting higher than 3,000MT/s memory overclocks, and…

Giga byte’s Gaming 5 series has generally always been the value king, but it might need to rethink its game plan with the likes of MSI dropping this sweet little number on to the AMD playing field. It may not have as clean a look as Gigabyte’s mighty Aorus lineup, but it’s hard to deny that the connectivity is there. Sort of. Well, OK, so you lose out on a few banks of SATA 3, there’s no U.2, and it’s still prone to MSI’s haphazard butchery of the rear I/O, but all in all, it’s a well specced board for anyone looking to build a fairly entry-level Ryzen rig, even featuring DVI-I for those future APUs that might come out soon (seriously, we don’t know). All joking aside, couple this…

What a roller coaster this has been. At the start, we knew it wasn’t going to be easy— and we were right. Three motherboards, one chip, and this reviewer’s soul have been claimed by the beast of bedlam that is Ryzen’s monstrous new AM4 platform. On paper, Ryzen and its new chipsets are sound. Logical even. After all, the vast majority of I/O included on modern mobos goes untouched by mainstream users. And despite Ryzen’s seemingly high-end, professional heritage, its price point puts it in the realm of the average joe. The rumored X399 platform, hopefully coming soon, should be a re-envisioned HEDT variant of Ryzen, with a far more expansive chipset (hopefully mostly on the processor), but for now, this is what we have to play with. AM4 is…

Game Mode is perhaps the feature that generated the most amount of buzz ahead of the launch of the Creators Update. So much so, that Microsoft actually had to downplay expectations, worried that people were getting their hopes up too high. So, what is Game Mode? It can be toggled from the Game Bar (Windows-G on your keyboard brings this up), and it tells your system to reallocate CPU and GPU hardware resources to prioritize the game at hand when it’s the active, full-screen application. The results, as Microsoft claims, are steadier frame rates than before, notably with games that particularly tax a given system’s resources. The idea is that if you’re playing a game and recording it in the background—or you have another intensive task running while you play—Game…

Ever wanted to dip your toe into Linux, but felt put off by the user experience? It’s time to confront your fear. Linux isn’t as impenetrable as it looks, with Ubuntu providing a very userfriendly approach to getting started. Ubuntu is a great flavor of Linux, but one of its biggest achievements has been to pioneer a host of off-shoot distros that focus on providing a more welcoming environment for those wishing to switch from other OSes. One obvious example is Linux Mint, an Ubuntu-derivative that uses the Cinnamon desktop to provide a Windows 7-like experience for switchers. Another—as you’re about to discover—is Elementary OS. Elementary is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and is perfect for those who like their OSes to look sleek and modern. It’s particularly attractive to…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A RASPBERRY PI This is processor-intensive, so a model 3 is ideal. CHAR-RNN Head to https://github.com/ karpathy/char-rnn to get it. AT LEAST UNTIL they power the inevitable robot uprising that will one day enslave the citizens of Earth, recurrent neural networks are great fun to play with. They generally consist of deceptively simple code—in this case, a package called Char-rnn, supplied by Stanford Computer Science PhD student and neural network expert Andrej Karpathy, which is a slightly expanded version of his 100- line original, coded in Lua for the Torch deep learning framework. In base terms, you feed Char-rnn a source document containing the sort of thing you’d like it to learn to create—we’ll show you a couple of examples of this—and set it to grind away.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS GIMP Grab the app from www.gimp.org/downloads. A PHOTOSHOP PLUGIN FILE In 8BF, 8BA, 8BI, or 8LY format. A PHOTO You need to choose a suitable pic to edit. ADOBE PHOTOSHOP IS THE WORLD’S INDUSTRY STANDARD PHOTO EDITOR. It’s hugely powerful, and is expandable through third-party plugins that add even more features to its already impressive toolkit. It’s not cheap, though, with an annual subscription costing $120. Justifiable for professionals, but perhaps not so much for hobbyists. That’s where the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) comes in. This open-source photo editor has been in development since 1995, and over the years it has grown into the closest free alternative to Adobe’s premium software. It includes manual and automatic tools for refining color, saturation, and contrast; one-click smart filters…

WHEN AMD PULLED the wraps off its radical new Ryzen CPU, it was all about those eight awesome cores. Count ’em, Intel. The first Ryzen 7 chips blew the market for $300- plus CPUs wide open. But not everybody can unload that kind of money on a processor, especially a brand new design that also requires a motherboard upgrade. Enter the Ryzen 5 1600X. On paper, it might just be the ultimate balancing act between performance bang and efficient deployment of your hard-earned buck. Try this for a compelling proposition. The 1600X packs six cores, and supports 12 software threads, while a similarlypriced Intel processor, the Core i5-7600K, has four cores and just four threads. And as a consequence of being the top sixcore model, it also clocks in at…

WINDOWS’ BUILT-IN FILE HISTORY is fine, but what PCs need, and it pains us to say this, is something like Apple’s Time Machine. An app that grinds away in the background, incrementally backing up your files, and which can be accessed to drop a particular version of a particular file on to your desktop, should you need to recover it. In these days of cloud storage, you may question the value of a backup app. With all your documents mirrored on Google or Dropbox’s servers, why bother backing up to a local disk? Anyone who’s had to use System Restore to recover from a ransomware attack, or struggled to find a file that someone else has deleted from a shared folder, will appreciate an easily accessed local repository of your…

At last, we’ve witnessed AMD’s second chipset, the B350—team red’s answer to Intel’s H270. But is it strong enough to withstand the full brunt of Ryzen’s notorious bugs, while not being at the top of AMD’s pile of enthusiast boards? Gigabyte’s AB350-Gaming 3 is the first board we’ve tested under this new chipset, it was certainly an adventure. By default, the AB350 should be overclockable, but in our tests, we just couldn’t get that spark to ignite, no matter what settings we tinkered with in the rather limited OC BIOS. Memory support was also lacking. Even with the latest BIOS, our Corsair Vengeance kit was limited to 2,133MT/s. Of course, we could put this down to BIOS bugs, but we’re now two months into the Ryzen release, with Ryzen 5…

It’s hard to ignore the rivalries that exist in computing. Dogmatic factions stand resolute against logic, faithfully defending their torchlit companies online. Flailing argument after argument attempts in vain to derail some well-conceived post. It’s an age-old fight. Red versus blue, Intel versus AMD, Microsoft versus Apple. And no more does it exist than between Asus and MSI. More blood has been shed between these two companies than most people realize. They’re the industry titans, continually goading one another to even headier heights than the last, and nowhere is this more apparent than with MSI’s X370 XPower Gaming Titanium, the pinnacle of what MSI has to muster on AMD’s new platform. The crisp silver board is a far cry from yesteryear’s budget offerings we used to recommend with AMD-specced systems.…

When Windows 10 launched in July 2015, it was met with acclaim—and also a fair amount of relief—because it was a marked improvement over its predecessor, Windows 8. However, it still wasn’t a perfect operating system, and Microsoft appears to have acknowledged this by releasing two major updates for it: The first, the Anniversary Update, hit our PCs last year, and now the Creators Update is currently rolling out to PCs around the world as you read this. Windows updates are rarely worth getting excited about, but the number of tweaks, fixes, and new features that Microsoft has promised with this release makes it worth downloading. As the name suggests, Microsoft has focused on bolstering the creative aspects of Windows 10. However, if you have less creative juice flowing through…

Elementary’s gorgeous visuals belie the fact that—underneath it all—you’re running an offshoot of Ubuntu Linux. Linux is a powerful operating system, and to really get to grips with it, you need to start familiarizing yourself with the Terminal, which gives you direct access to Linux’s underlying shell. You can open it via the “Applications” menu, or simply press Win-T to bring it up. Here’s your first useful set of commands—we find the App Center can sometimes hang, but you can update Elementary and all your installed apps directly using the following commands: $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get upgrade The next set of commands install the Grub Customizer tool, which enables you to tweak the GRUB boot loader (for example, to change the default operating system back to Windows…

examining technology and putting it to use TIP OF THE MONTH CHECK YOUR SCREEN One of our dedicated panel reviewers picked up some handy tools recently over on the nifty www.testufo.com website. The site offers a whole plethora of different web-based tests to see just how your monitor is performing, including one designed to examine how bad your panel’s ghosting situation is. On top of that, there’s also a neat 15, 30, and 60fps side-by-side comparison to show all your console-loving buddies. MAKE – USE – CREATE 60 Run a neural network on your Raspberry Pi 64 Become a metadata master with Mp3tag, and manage music 72 Follow our guide to building a gorgeous gaming rig REVIEWS EDITOR WINDOWS ACTIVATION Oh, Windows 10, you’re good. You may be helping yourself…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PHOTOSHOP Available from www.adobe.com. A SUITABLE PHOTO Choose an image with a strong, isolated color in it. THERE’S A PHOTOGRAPHIC EFFECT you may have seen if you’re friends with any parents on Facebook. An image is drained of color, apart from specific hues, which are injected back into the otherwise monochrome image. It’s a bit overused—and, if we’re being honest, groan-inducing, especially when applied to photos of newborn babies—but by recreating it, we can gain some insights into how Photoshop works, because it’s possible to do it in a couple different ways, depending on whether you choose to work on the colors involved specifically, by selecting them directly, or just the area you want to work on more generally, by selecting the pixels in a certain area,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS REMOTR SERVER From http://remotrapp.com. SMARTPHONE Running iOS 8 or later, or Android 4.1 or later. CLIENT APPS Download from your app store. WE’RE NOT SHORT OF OPTIONS when it comes to streaming games. We’ve talked plenty in these pages about the immensely useful Steam In-Home Streaming, we’ve covered the likes of GameShow and XSplit, which send your games up to Twitch and other online streaming services, and we’ve even looked at ways you can beam console games through your network and play them on your PC. Well, add Remotr to the list. It’s immensely flexible, offering up client apps for smartphones, tablets, and other Windows PCs, happily streaming over cell phone networks if you have the data allocation for it, and it’s incredibly simple to set up…

WE COULD HAVE GIVEN this build a funky Warhammer 40K name, such as the Emperor’s Chosen, or Gabriel Ti-gelous. But that’s not our style, and the Classy Conqueror fits the bill a hell of a lot better. After all, this is a system that any PC enthusiast could be proud of. Building a rig at such short notice threw up a lot of challenges. Usually, we spend an hour or two planning each build, requesting the parts, then piecing it together however we see fit. Having to improvise and make decisions on the fly, however, turned out to be far more satisfying than we thought. The Kraken X42 forced us to rethink our cooling strategy: Instead of having two intakes in the front, two exhausts in the roof, and leaving…

FINDING A 240MM dual rad at this price is fairly impressive. There are a few alternatives from the likes of Cooler Master and Thermaltake, both with their own flaws, but the biggest challenge comes from Corsair’s Hydro H105 240mm AIO. Coming in at $104, it’s only $4 more than the Frostflow 240L, and that’s a problem for the plucky underdog. Whether it’s the mounting system, the materials, the finish, you name it—the Frostflow falls short in almost every way. But that’s to be expected. Corsair is a well-known brand, one that almost singlehandedly pioneered AIO liquid-cooling. The mounting system isn’t awful—the fact you can mount it in stages, without needing to balance the two parts together, makes it fairly effective. The problem? The backplate. It’s steel, and is padded with…

FACIAL ANIMATION GLITCHES are undeniably funny. Also funny is the moment your character suddenly levitates in a tram car while talking to his crewmates, or when an enemy freezes, inviting an assault rifle to the face. Mass Effect Andromeda proves to be more than the sum of its bugs, however. If you’ve played the other ME games, you know what to expect: an RPG you play like a shooter, or maybe the other way round, in space, with mutually pleasurable interspecies mating-port-stimulation a distinct possibility. There’s a character creator in which you can make any number of grotesques, and a car in which you can roar around on planetary surfaces, causing trouble. This familiarity isn’t necessarily a criticism, though, as it enables you to settle more quickly into a new…

you write, we respond > Overclocking Mastery > Router Recommendations > Ergonomic Keyboards Master Overclocking I recently built a new gaming PC. It’s been 15 years or so since I last built one, and I’d say I did quite well. I’ve been running “custom specced” gaming laptops for several years due to their portability and ease of use. My new build is an Intel Core i7- 7700k, Asus TUF Z270 Mark 1, G.Skill Trident Z 3600 32GB, Samsung 850 Evo 1TB SSD, Seagate Barracuda 4TB SATA 6GB, EVGA FTW 1080 GTX, Corsair H100vi, EVGA Supernova 1,200W P2 PSU, and Acer xb1 27hu. This was my dream machine, and I finally saved enough money to build it. It has been up and running for a month or two, and I have…

Self-driving cars are big. From Google to Uber, Tesla, and beyond, the tech is exploding. Apple has been toying with the idea for some time, under the name Project Titan. It went quiet for a while, and Apple claimed to be only interested in the incar technology and software. However, it has been busy hiring automotive experts, moving executives about, and has just been granted a permit to test self-drive cars in California. Whether or not we see a fully Apple-branded car is another matter, although the success of Tesla must make it tempting. Despite modest sales, Tesla’s share price makes it the world’s most valuable car company, bigger than Ford or General Motors. This wealth isn’t built on hard profits—the company doesn’t make any—but it shows confidence from the…

1 IDF 2017 The Intel Developer Forum was a great showcase for the company’s products, and for getting the low-down on the latest tech. To be replaced with smaller events, apparently. 2 ATOM “BROXTON” SYSTEM-ON-CHIP The Atom brand has taken many low-power forms, but the “Broxton” SoC was aimed squarely at the tablet and smartphone markets, only it was a little too late, so got the chop. 3 LARRABEE Intel’s attempt at serious desktop graphics underperformed as it was nearing release, and so was dropped. Intel’s integrated graphics continue to improve, though, so not all was lost. 4 “TEJAS” The original followup to Pentium 4 was canceled due to its high heat output (150W at 2.8GHz). This death did help push the Core 2 architecture forward, though. 5 TICK-TOCK CYCL…

So, here we are: the dreaded annual motherboard supertest. A new architecture and a new platform, filled with uncertainties, early BIOS versions, and all sorts of bugs, errors, and crashes to contend with. An absolute swamp of autoasphyxiated hell for any hardware reviewer. Indeed, many across the industry have dreaded this day, because it means the suspension of sanity for at least two weeks. Why do we put ourselves through this? We do it for you, our readers, and, of course, because we’re fired by the rampant curiosity that drives each and every human being. It’s rather like asking, “What is the meaning of life?” or “What did 1998’s McDonald’s Szechuan sauce actually taste like?” We simply have to know which motherboard is best, and— more importantly—which board is right…

THE GOOD From the get-go, it would seem that AMD is already on the back foot when it comes to chipset connectivity. Lacking PCIe 3.0 lanes on the chipset, and with limited SATA and USB support (regardless of its USB 3.1 additions), it doesn’t look particularly fabulous for team red. But then you have to ask, when has anyone ever used the full complement of motherboard connectivity? When you break it down, those looking to take advantage of 10 or more SATA hard drives, multiple M.2 PCIe SSDs, and so on are already looking at the higher-end platforms in the form of the X99 series and server-grade solutions. For the vast majority of consumers and anyone on a budget, a single M.2 PCIe SSD and four SATA 6Gb/s ports are…

Giga byte is the king o f v alue w hen i t comes to motherboards. Its crisp, sharp PCBs provide almost everything you could want, at a price that makes its competitors weep. It won our Z170 mobo roundup with its Gaming 5, and would have undoubtedly grabbed a victory among Z270 boards, too, if we’d delved into that minor update. Can the same be said for AMD’s latest platform? Well, it’s off to a good start. The design is undeniably clean: The satin white finish on the heatsinks and rear I/O shield, coupled with the brushed aluminum and black PCB certainly make it look the part. The LED lighting is a little less subtle than we’d like, dotted around the VRMs near the socket, the onboard audio, PCIe…

We knew this supertest w as g oing t o b e a turbulent one, because of how brand new architectures tend to operate, so we cast our net wide from the start, but that didn’t prevent a few headaches along the way. Taking a cross section from MSI, Asus, and Gigabyte, we originally chose nine motherboards, both X370 and B350, before whittling the list down to five. Four boards didn’t make it through—three due to testing failures, and one simply didn’t arrive in time. Notable mentions: the Asus Prime X370- Pro and the MSI B350 Tomahawk. We spoke briefly earlier about how each section of Asus’s massive structure is broken down into individual teams, with each part working autonomously— unfortunately, not all parts are equal. ROG vastly outshines the…

Video game streaming is incredibly popular, with Twitch gaining 100 million monthly unique users watching over 2 million monthly streamers since it launched in 2011, with around 241 billion minutes of content being broadcast, so it’s little wonder that Microsoft is so keen to get involved. It has done this by acquiring the Beam service last year, and integrating it into Windows 10’s Creators Update and the Xbox One. Classic Microsoft. Of course, with the success of Twitch and other established services, Microsoft has an uphill struggle to convince people to move from their preferred service to Beam. However, it has a few tricks up its sleeve. For a start, it has a focus on super low latency, something Microsoft is describing as the “Beam Faster than Light SDK,” which…

1 REAR I/O Why no one has ever thought of this before is beyond us: a pre-installed rear I/O shield. It’s simple. Just position the empty bracket prior to installation, and there’s no messing around trying to line both up. Couple that with dual Ethernet ports, dual USB 3.1 Type C, USB 3.1 Type A, four USB 3.0 ports, and two additional USB ports for both KEYBOT and USB BIOS flashback, and this rear I/O is as premium as you can possibly get on the X99 platform. 2 MEMORY SUPPORT DDR4 support up to 128GB of 3,333MT/s on the Rampage V makes this one mean motherboard. Together with quad-channel memory for all the bandwidth, and this board—even compared to its Ryzen competition— thrashes high-end computational tasks. 3 PCIE POW ERHOUSE…

GRUB is a perfectly acceptable boot manager for most people, but if you’re looking for something more visually appealing (or you’ve installed Elementary on a Mac), then you should look to replace it with the rEFInd Boot Manager. Note that rEFInd only works on computers that use a UEFI rather than a BIOS—this should cover most modern PCs (and Macs from 2006 onward). Once Elementary has been installed, open the Terminal, and enter the following commands to install rEFInd (you should skip the first command if you’ve previously installed software-properties-common): $ sudo apt-get install softwareproperties- common && sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:rodsmith/refind $ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install refind Once installed, answer “Yes” at the screen that appears, then wait for rEFInd to finish installing itself.…

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 Apple has announced a trio of new laptops, and today we’re looking at the top of the line, with its new Touch Bar, which attempts to replace our tried-and-true function keys. It’s time to tear down the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar! MAJOR TECH SPECS • 15.4-inch LED-backlit Retina Display with 2880x1800 resolution (220dpi), P3 color gamut • 2.6GHz Skylake quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.5GHz), with integrated Radeon Pro 450 with 2GB of GDDR5 • 16GB of 2,133MHz LPDDR3 onboard memory • 256GB…

YOU’LL NEED THIS MUSIC A collection of untagged or incorrectly tagged music or music video files. MP3TAG Download the software from www.mp3tag.de/en. MUSIC FILES NEED TO BE TAGGED—without the correct metadata in place, how do you know the track you’ve selected is the right one? If you use Windows Media Player to rip your CDs, you’ll find its relatively small database often produces incorrect matches (and beyond that, no matches at all). You could spend hours manually entering this information in Windows Media Player’s arcane interface, or you could employ the services of a tool that makes managing music (and music video) files much simpler. The tool in question is Mp3tag, which can be installed as a regular application or run as a portable tool. Point it toward a directory…

YOU’LL NEED THIS LINUX PC The system you want to secure must be running Ubuntu Linux. ANDROID PHONE Your smartphone needs to have the Google Authenticator app. IN THIS AGE OF MULTI-CORE PROCESSORS and easy-to-use password-cracking tools, locking access to your computer (and all the data it holds) with a password alone simply doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. If you’re really concerned about unauthorized access to your computer, you should definitely add an additional layer of authentication. One of the easiest mechanisms with which to implement such a two-step verification is the Google Authenticator service, which issues a time-based authentication token to supplement the existing password challenge. Once you’ve integrated the service with your Ubuntu login, in addition to your user password, you’ll be prompted for one of the quickly…

SINCE THEY EMERGED from the damp, beige, angular swamp of the early ’90s, mice have—at least in comparison to the rest of the PC peripheral market—been objects of scant innovation. Mainly because, really, where is there to go? A thing that fits your hand, some buttons, a wheel, and a sensor that determines how you’re moving the thing. Those components are frequently refined, but where’s the next big change? What can make the mouse new again? Well, if you’re Asus, you’ll find at least some of that innovation inspiration both in the current trend of adding RGB LED lighting to absolutely everything, and beneath the chassis of the most pimped-out rides. So, let’s begin with the Gladius II’s big shiny selling point, that RGB illumination, an upgrade from the primo…

DEAD RISING GAMES have never been subtle, and DR4 is a riot of button-mashing combat, bizarre weapons, and more targets than you could ever take down. Pushing a large number of character models on screen at once, previous games have brought frame rates crashing down. No such problems with Dead Rising 4— we raised the game’s initially conservative graphics settings for our GTX 970 to Very High without dropping much below 60fps. But it’s not the most refined-looking game out there, with very boxy environmental details, and a restrained color palette. It’s not refined in play, either, as photojournalist Frank West, returning from the first game, mulches his way through the undead. Also returning is the shopping mall setting, used in Dawn of the Dead as a sharp satire on…