Indice dei contenuti per March 2019 in Maximum PC

WE LOVE PERFORMANCE on Maximum PC. It would be our middle name, if we had one. Whether we’re looking at high-end hardware or the latest budget offerings, we want the best performance possible from the components used, often pushing things even harder with a little judicious overclocking to eke out those last few percentage points. There’s something plenty of us fall on down, though, and that’s on the software front. Specifically, the OS. If performance is important to you—and given you’re reading Maximum PC, it probably is—a clean install of Windows is what you really want. Whether you’ve just installed a new component, or have been rocking the same hardware for a while, cutting out all the detritus and bloat of a well-used operating system can give any machine a…

GOOGLE HAS PROPOSED a change to Chrome that will stop adblockers working. As made public in its Chrome Extensions Manifest v3, it is planning on limiting the webRequest API, and adding a new one that will require that any extension declares to the browser what it can do, and how. It also has a limited number of items that can be filtered. It’s all ostensibly in the name of security. If the proposal goes through, your adblocking apps on Chrome will stop blocking, and you’ll see the Internet in all its ad-infested glory. Adblocking has grown rapidly of late. In the US, about 40 percent of laptops and 33 percent of desktops used adblockers in 2017; 2018’s figures are expected to be higher. Ads are money, and collecting and selling…

Another Windows Update is due shortly, offering mostly bug fixes and minor interface updates. There is really only one new feature worth mentioning, called Sandbox. This is a secure virtual environment to run questionable apps. It opens a isolated desktop, and anything run within it has no access to your system proper, and is deleted when you close Sandbox. It’s an excellent idea. Another thing: You lose 7GB from your boot drive. Windows Update has never been able to accurately check how much space you have free. Nobody wants to risk having their system fall over halfway through an update, so it ropes off 7GB to ensure it has room to maneuver. Why can’t it just ascertain the free disk space? This is, it seems, beyond the capabilities of Microsoft,…

THE RING SECURITY CAMERA is a great idea, and popular. Amazon bought the company last year for $1 billion, and sales have been buoyant. Unfortunately, Ring gave an external research and development team access to the cloud servers holding every video created by Ring devices from everywhere in the world. The R&D team also had a database that gave the customer’s physical address. It was at least all in the name of development; the team was working on Ring’s facial recognition algorithms. It has a feature called Neighbors, billed as a kind of digital Neighborhood Watch. Only it didn’t work very well, and Ring decided to give engineers all their customers’ videos to teach the AI systems. Ring also gave US executives and engineers access to live feeds from any…

8 PHISON M.2 PCIE 4.0 X4 SSD Phison showed off a PCIe 4.0 SSD, clocking in at over 4GB/s sequential reads and writes, hopefully on next-gen AMD motherboards. 7 RAZER TOMAHAWK ELITE CASE Razer enters the chassis market with this fantastic gullwing-door case. Practical? Hell, no. Do we want it? You bet! 6 ASROCK A300-STX MOTHERBOARD ASRock’s Ryzen-powered A300-STX motherboard comes in at just 5 x 5 inches, and supports integrated GPUs only. 5 HYPERX CLOUD ORBIT S HEADSET The first planar magnetic gaming headphones in existence, the Cloud Orbit headset demands your money and your ears. 4 INTEL OPTANE H10 M.2 PCIE SSD Combining a 32GB Optane cache with 1TB of QLC, could this be the year Intel’s Optane M.2 drives finally make sense? 3 ALIENWARE 4K 55-INCH OLED…

YOUR PC IS A TRAVESTY. It’s a mess, and you know it. Files everywhere. Stray registry keys cluttering things up like dust bunnies in the corner of your garage. Unused programs filling your virtual shelves. Hidden auto-running programs under your Desktop’s rug. And that’s normal, because you’re a PC user. That means you use your PC. In the process, you install things, you juggle files, you toss stuff on the desktop. Sometimes you need to move quickly and messily, sometimes you just can’t be bothered. Rest assured, you are doing the right thing. If you spent minutes in meticulous thought every time you had to decide where to save an image or install a piece of software, you’d get nothing done. So, when it’s time to clean up, we suggest…

WE’VE BEEN BRINGING YOU the skinny on all things PC, and now we want to see if you’ve been paying attention. What better way than some friendly questioning to see what stuck inside that noodle. And so we present another in our irregular series of Geek Quizzes, formulated to stretch your head with all things tech-related. We’ve seven magical sections of seven questions, covering all things PC, some more general tech, and Internet stuff. It’s the kind of thing you should know if you’ve been following Maximum PC and have any aspirations of geekdom. There are questions your pet can probably answer, some that are much more fiendish, plus the odd trick one. We recommend you try this well away from the temptation of the Internet. Yes, you can sit…

The most frustrating part of using ALVR is nothing to do with streaming, visuals, headtracking, or VR, but the controls. You can understand how the situation has arisen: The Oculus Rift, Vive, Oculus Go, and SteamVR games have all been developed with specific controls in mind. Straight SteamVR games gave the fewest issues—Alien Isolation needed a little mapping to get turning on the Steam Controller—because they largely default to supporting normal gamepads. It felt like games or systems made for the HTC Vive would also largely work with the Oculus Go controller, but it lacks some of the side buttons, which will cause issues. Oculus Rift games are a headache because they expect the dual Rift Touch controllers, while we also ran into issues with Oculus Rift games not recognizing…

HAS YOUR RASPBERRY PI SLOWED DOWN? It’s a common problem—it doesn’t matter which version of the Pi you’re using, performance always suffers if the operating system isn’t correctly configured. Using a lightweight operating system such as Raspbian Lite, DietPi, or piCore can help, but there’s much more you can do. Performance boosts can be gained from overclocking, changing how RAM is used, and ditching bloatware, among other things 1 POWER RANGERS The wrong power supply can wreak havoc with the performance of your Raspberry Pi [Image A]. With insufficient power to deal with processing requirements, bottlenecks can occur, slowing the computer right down. Low power can also result in read/write issues, which in turn can damage the microSD card (more on that later). Then there’s the usual end result of…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT A BUDDY of ours approached us at the end of last year with a question. His rig was getting dated, his Core i5-4690K quadcore processor wasn’t as punchy as he’d like, and although he had a fairly solid GPU (a GTX 1070), he wanted to know what we’d recommend he do with a $1,500 budget. Cue a quick trip to PCPartPicker, and a few select questions. The first thing we always ask people who throw that particular query at us is: “What are you interested in doing with your rig?” It’s a very open-ended question, but it makes a lot of sense to ask, because there’s no perfect solution that’ll answer every problem in the world of computing. Sure,…

THE $200+ CASE MARKET right now is a pretty tough old girl to get your claws into as a manufacturer. It’s littered with award-winning hyper-towers from the likes of Phanteks, Cooler Master, NZXT, and more, and as reputations go, they’ve earned theirs through blood, sweat, and a ton of development. So, when we say that Thermaltake might be on to something with the A500 TG, you can guess how this is going to go. It’s a dangerous part of the market, for sure, but nonetheless, Thermaltake has attacked it with vigor. The A500 TG is a mixing pot of slick brushed aluminum, pressed steel, and tempered glass panels. It features the type of intuitive design choices, quality materials, and impressive engineering that we’ve not seen from the brand for some…

THE NVIDIA RTX 2080 TI was officially released on September 20, 2018, but at the time of writing, here we are, four months later, still waiting for a reason to drop money on one. So far, there’s been one game released that makes use of the new technology, and Battlefield V is hardly the sort of game where you can really appreciate what the new technology is capable of. In our experience, the franchise benefits more from silky smooth frame rates than beautifully rendered puddles. What we do have is a new benchmark to get our collective heads around: 3DMark’s Port Royal test. This synthetic, non-interactive benchmark does a good job of showing off some of the things that real-time ray tracing is capable of, with the spaceship’s mirrored hull…

THE NIGHTHAWK M1 is a Gigabit LTE mobile router, capable of connecting up to 20 devices to afford Internet access where you wouldn’t normally get it. It’s a great little unit if you’re on the road. It can tell you how many devices are connected, as well as how much of your data allowance you’ve used. In theory, it supports up to 1Gb/s downloads and 150Mb/s uploads, although your own experiences will depend on the network you’re using, and where you’re using it. If you’re off the beaten track, you may not get much in the way of a network at all, while those in metropolitan areas can find themselves fighting for bandwidth along with everyone else. Setup is easy: Pop the base off, slide your SIM into place, and…

AFTER MONTHS of focus on Nvidia and its groundbreaking RTX cards, we have a solid response from AMD in the form of the Radeon VII. Unlike the RTX cards, we don’t have a fancy new GPU architecture or extra features, but we do get the first consumer outing for the 7nm Vega 20 GPU, which first appeared in November in the Instinct enterprise cards. While the GPU is small, it’s on a hefty double-width, full-length card, with triple fans. The Vega 20 in the Radeon VII has 3,840 stream processors—256 fewer than the Vega 10-powered Vega 64. It carries 60 compute units (four fewer than the enterprise incarnation, and four fewer than the Vega 64). Clock speeds have jumped significantly; the base clock is now 1,400MHz, with a peak boost…

FACEBOOK HAS PLANS FOR YOUR DATA: It is to merge Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger behind the scenes so they can share data. They’ll still appear to be separate apps, but under the skin there will be one big integrated Facebook social media platform. You’ll be able to send messages from one app to another without switching. It will also enable end-to-end encryption on all three. It’s all part of a plan instigated by Mr. Zuckerberg to enable each element of Facebook’s social media empire to communicate. The idea has not been without opponents; this project is reportedly why the company lost the founders of WhatsApp and Instagram last year. Some have complained that the integration will mean the more widespread sharing of personal data. WhatsApp, for example, doesn’t require…

These are professional products built for machine learning and other computational workloads, but would we see anything for gamers built off the chip? It turns out the answer is yes. And soon. AMD revealed the Radeon VII at CES, with the cards going on sale February 7 at $699. There are multiple tie-ins to the name, it seems: “VII” for “Vega 2” is one, and the Roman numeral for seven hints at the 7nm lithography. It’s probably also why AMD selected February 7 for its launch. The Radeon VII is destined to go up against Nvidia’s RTX 2080, and AMD claims it will offer comparable performance. That would require a decent boost compared to the existing Vega 64, as my benchmarks have the RTX 2080 leading by 45 percent on…

There’s a big list of games you can choose from these days, with a reasonable number of decent VR experiences. Many of the best are VR spins of existing games. The main issues you’ll run into are controller-based ones; either the game is hardcoded to use a specific controller you don’t have, or another selection type issue will raise its annoying head. Another issue is that a game simply won’t work—Fallout 4 VR is a prime annoyance here. The good news is that most SteamVR games do work well, ideally with the Steam Controller. This should mean you have ample opportunity to try out a good VR experience, and perhaps commit to dedicated VR hardware down the line. A small number of games require mods to work. Take Alien Isolation…

If you’re dedicating a Raspberry Pi entirely to running Steam Link, and you’re mostly aiming for couch gaming, it might make sense to remove the need to manually launch the program when the Pi powers on—that way, you can do away with the mouse and keyboard entirely. Raspbian Stretch has a number of methods to run apps automatically, but editing “/etc/rc.local” is the simplest way to do it. Open up a terminal, and run sudo nano /etc/rc.local to begin tweaking, then make a new line just above exit 0. Add the text sudo -u pi /usr/bin/steamlink &—the ampersand is important, because without it, the Pi’s boot process won’t properly complete—then save the file by hitting Ctrl-X followed by Y. Reboot your Pi, and it should jump straight into Steam Link.…

As versatile as the Raspberry Pi is, it’s a good idea to be certain that it’s the right device for the project you have in mind. You might just be using the Raspberry Pi for retro gaming or Kodi. It might be acting as a desktop replacement, or as the main component of an IoT project. If your Raspberry Pi is up to the task, it should work fine. The problem is when you choose a task that the Pi simply can’t do, even when the hardware appears to be a good fit. Conversely, the Raspberry Pi might be far too advanced for the task you have in mind, such as flashing an LED over the web, or something equally low-spec. Perhaps there isn’t quite enough RAM; or maybe the…

YOU MIGHT HAVE noticed that we didn’t have a Dream Machine in 2018. The realities of that monstrosity of work are harsh, and trying to get new parts that clearly outperformed 2017’s model wasn’t going to happen. As an alternative, allow us to present Falcon Northwest’s Mach V. If we were to spec out a Dream Machine for 2019 right now, the components would look uncannily similar to this. Let’s start at the top, with the pair of Nvidia’s beastly Titan RTX cards, running in tandem with an NVLink bridge. Each has a whopping 24GB of GDDR5, and together it’s one-third of the price, if you’re keeping score. Outside of professional GPUs like the Quadro, there’s nothing faster. The same goes for Intel’s Core i9-9980XE, which Falcon overclocked to 4.2–4.9GHz,…

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR, you just might get it. That’s essentially how it’s shaken out with the new generation of QLC solid-state drives. QLC, of course, refers to the quad-level cells in the latest NAND flash memory, translating into four bits of data stored per cell, and thereby increasing storage density over existing TLC or triple-level cell NAND by a hefty and instant 33 percent. What’s not to like? With the Crucial BX500 and Adata SU630, quite a lot. The downsides to QLC memory are the same in character as every other increase in NAND memory cell data density to date. The problem is scope. When the original single-level memory cell was usurped by MLC cells, which store two bits per cell, both performance and endurance suffered. That…

GRIP IS DEADLY important, particularly when applying the iron claw, once pro wrestling’s most deadly submission hold. If you’ve not seen it, basically it involves contorting one’s hand into a tense shape as if you’re holding an invisible basketball while pretending to be a swamp monster, then placing that hand tenderly on to the bit of your opponent you’ve been attacking for the last 20 minutes. Perhaps you’ll gingerly touch their abs, maybe their skull. Whatever the target, wrestling’s iron claw elicits screams of pain. Thankfully (and tenuously), Corsair hasn’t taken even an ounce of inspiration from this mouse’s namesake, beyond trying to make it a match winner. But we do need to question that name. If you’re going to add “claw” to the title of your mouse, we’d have…

AROZZI VERONA JUNIOR GAMING CHAIR Between various jobs, reviewing games, and writing my own stories, I’d already spent a lot of time sitting in front of a computer long before joining Maximum PC. Years of having bad posture at the keyboard caught up to me. I started getting muscle spasms in my shoulder blades. All the muscles in my lower back felt like worn-out rubber bands. So, I started sitting up pin-straight in my chair. It’s difficult to maintain that kind of posture for over eight hours a day, if not impossible. I didn’t hurt as much, but I realized that the other issue was my chair. Sure, it was some expensive, ergonomic chair that could adjust in more directions than a Wonkavator, but it was too big. Few gaming…

Sponsored by BUDGET INGREDIENTS Approximate Price: $632 THAT’S DARN IMPRESSIVE: We managed to shave a total of $3 off the final cost of this build, and swapped out three major components at the same time. That’s surprising, because given Nvidia’s latest release, we expected the GTX 1060 to either hit EOL stock limits, and in turn shoot up, or the prices to shift regardless—but, nope, it actually reduced, and you get a Fortnite bundle, too, whatever that is. So, swapsies? Well, we’ve gone for a better spec motherboard this time around, ditching the no-longer-available AB320 ASRock mobo for an AB350M instead. It’s a slightly higher specced chipset, with slightly better connectivity, and it only cost us $5 extra, so no hardships there, then. We saved $10 on the GPU, which…

AMD’S PROCESSOR development schedule continues to run apace. Last spring we saw the arrival of the Zen+ core; this year we’ll get the Zen 2 core, and the accompanying 3000 series chips. At CES, we saw our first silicon. The Zen 2 design uses chiplets, in this case an eight-core 7nm processor chiplet, and a 14nm I/O processor on the same substrate. Tellingly, there was room on the chip for another eight-core chiplet. You can even see the traces laid out for it. AMD is being tight on details, but it did boast that its pre-production chip could run Cinebench with a score of 2,057, which compares well with a Core i9-9900K at 2,042. It did this while drawing 130W, against the Intel’s 180W. There are lots of leaks about…

TRIUMPHS ✓ LARGER HADRON COLLIDER CERN looks set to build a new LHC four times the size of the original, with a 62-mile track. ✓ FLYING TAXI Forget self-driving cars, Boeing has just tested its first autonomous flying craft, the PAV (Passenger Air Vehicle). ✓ MACHINES PLAY BETTER Google’s DeepMind AI machine has played the world’s best StarCraft players, and beaten them ten games to one. TRAGEDIES ✕ APPLE’S BLACK SCREENS The MacBook Pro has a habit of breaking the ribbon cable connecting the screen to the controller; it costs $600 to fix. ✕ FAKE 5G AT&T has been berated by rivals for its 5G service, because it isn’t actually 5G. ✕ DRAGONFLY ON HOLD Google’s controversial censored search engine project for China has been stopped after China pulls data…

You may have noticed that SSDs are still getting cheaper, after they halved last year. Predictions for 2019 are that they will get cheaper still. Production of 3D NAND chips is outstripping demand; 64-layer chips are in large-scale production; and the shift to 96-layer is expected to be in full swing by summer. The big fabs are due to be churning out 50,000–100,000 chips a month, with the major players reaching 150,000. This is too much for the market to bear. The result is bigger drives, and cheaper drives. For example, Western Digital has just launched its new SN750 range of M.2 cards, still running 64-layer chips. There’s nothing much new about them, except that the 2TB model is now just $50 more than last year’s 1TB one—that’s about 25…

As Windows progresses, older versions fall by the wayside. The latest victim of time’s relentless march is Windows 7, which will see the end of extended support on January 14, 2020. This presents three sensible possibilities for a Win 7 machine: retirement and replacement, upgrade to Windows 10, or install and run Linux. As long as I’ve been a Linux user, it’s been hard to convince people to try—let alone switch to—Linux on a brand-new PC. To be fair, there’s good reason not to: Each new Windows version has flashy new features and interfaces. And, usually, everything works as intended out of the box. Historically, it was rarely smooth sailing for a new Linux install, especially on newer hardware. Some things were quirky or didn’t work at all, with wireless…

You know the most annoying area of clutter on most PCs? The taskbar. More specifically, the notification area. There’s a lot in there that tries to hide itself, but clicking the up arrow icon will likely reveal a bunch of software that’s running without doing anything useful. We’re not suggesting you dump your antivirus (though Windows Defender is now very good indeed, so consider whether you need to give up the resources to anything else), and we’ll give a pass to certain hardware drivers that make our keyboards do cool things. The rest, though, can probably go. The quickest and easiest way to kill programs that start automatically—and this isn’t limited to notification area apps—is to open Task Manager with Ctrl-Shift-Esc, and head to the “Startup” tab. The list here gives…

BUILDING A GAMING PC yourself means being able to customize it specifically for the games you want to play, whether you’re a casual player or a full-time streamer. But if you can’t build your own, where do you turn to get something completely custom? Origin’s all-new customizable Neuron is yet another option for gamers and streamers who don’t want to fuss with the consuming aspects of piecing a rig together. The Neuron comes in many different configurations, including a CPU up to either an Intel Core i9-9900K or an AMD Ryzen 16-core Threadripper, and a GPU up to an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti. The unit we were sent is a little different from the one in the photos; it’s red, and sans RGB lighting, but it’s got a great list…

LET’S CONTINUE with that subheader for a moment. $420 on Newegg; $423 on eBay. Anywhere else? Nope. At least, not that we can find at the time of writing. That’s one painful price point. It’s just $30 off the price of a Maximus XI Formula. You know, that motherboard with the super-advanced stat reading, OLED display, and integrated liquid-cooling VRM blocks. Knock $130 off that budget, and you could still get a Maximus XI Hero. Ouch! We love the microATX form factor. It’s the perfect compromise between the unreasonable physicality of ITX and the connectivity-laden chalice of ATX and above. It’s the most blissful pairing, more often than not found in budget systems. We once mused about how few of these boards were out there, because the market is so…