Indice dei contenuti per January 2020 in Maximum PC

VIRTUAL REALITY has been the Next Big Thing for so long it’s gone beyond a joke. We look at the state of play in the VR market on page 46, and one conclusion is that VR still needs a game that makes you want to jump on board just to play it—the killer app. Valve may be about to provide such an incentive: a AAA VR exclusive, Half-Life: Alyx. It’s set between the first and second main Half-Life games, follows the adventures of Alyx Vance, the secondary character from Half-Life 2, and promises to be the same mix of tense combat, puzzles, and strong story line. You interact with the world via a pair of disembodied hands, which looks a little strange at first. The Gravity Gun makes an appearance,…

APPLE HAS LAUNCHED the most powerful notebook it has ever made, the MacBook Pro 16, and it’s pretty tasty. The 3072x1920 16-inch Retina display is the largest yet, although it’s actually only 0.4 inches larger than the Pro 15. The graphics are handled by an AMD Radeon Pro 5000M chipset, and the numbers crunched by an Intel Core i9 or i7 processor. Good modern silicon; Apple has previously been a little behind the curve here. Inside, there’s a six-speaker sound system, including two bass units that cancel out each other’s vibrations. It’s one of the best sound systems you’ll find in any laptop. All this is powered by a 100Wh battery (up from 83Wh in the Pro 15), enough for up to 11 hours of video playback or web browsing.…

POKEMON There are emulators, but an official PC game would be amazing. Imagine the VR possibilities! CRACKDOWN 2 This Xbox 360 classic is still a really enjoyable urban sandbox to fling cars around in. FABLE II Other Fable games have made it to PC, but the superb second iteration is stuck on Xbox 360. BREATH OF THE WILD This Switch launch title might be the definitive Zelda experience—beautiful. MARVEL’S SPIDER-MAN Sony has been killing it with PlayStation exclusives, and this is no different. SUPER MARIO GALAXY The best 3D Mario game ever. We’ll accept no criticism on this view. BLOODBORNE Dark Souls fans are irate that From Software’s faster, bloodier title is a PS4 exclusive. HORIZON: ZERO DAWN A PlayStation title with a gorgeous open world and likeable characters.…

OVER THE NEXT 10 PAGES, you’ll find the best gear to have been released this year. The hardware, systems, and components that stand out as the best options around. If you’re looking to treat yourself, this makes for a great wishlist of where to drop your cash. Or, if you’ve already bought something that we’ve covered, congratulations—you have great taste. The big news of 2019 was the release of AMD’s Zen 2 architecture, as found in the Ryzen 3000 series of CPUs, and with it came support for PCIe 4.0, which saw impressive bandwidths in SSDs in particular. There’s been plenty of great motherboards for these new chips, too, making it a great time for anyone looking to upgrade their system with a whole new powerful base with lots of…

The Raspberry Pi 4 is unusual in its company, because it’s a warm little thing. We’ve seen users out there experiencing recorded temperatures of around 82 C sitting idle, which is (as you might imagine) not the finest thing to happen to your hardware. Like most chips these days, the key components of the Pi 4 will thermal throttle when they get too hot: The CPU is set to throttle at 80 C, while the GPU joins it should the temperature make it to 85 C. If either of these things happens, you’ll see a thermometer pop up on your desktop, half full to represent the former situation, and full red when everything’s going into slow-down mode. This mainly happens because these chips are being pushed. ARMv8 runs much harder and…

While we’ve mostly covered the Raspberry Pi here in its role as a computer, there’s a duality to it: It’s as much a hobbyist hardware platform as it is mini PC. Thankfully, the Pi 4’s hardware shift has not affected its GPIO pins, which are laid out in the same way as the whole range, from Pi Zero up, so the entire world of Pi HATs is available to those open to experimentation. Whether you want to add a dedicated LCD, e-ink, or TFT display, add arcade control to your emulation box, upgrade its audio output with a dedicated DAC, or give yourself a convenient platform for electronics tinkering, there’s something for you. We wouldn’t call any HAT absolutely essential, but something that adds an actual hardware power switch to the…

VIRTUAL REALITY keeps coming back, like a bad smell. Or a nice smell; a pleasing scent of sandalwood for the proponents of VR, as they insist that it’s “the future of gaming” or “the next level of immersion.” Some of us at Maximum PC are skeptics, while others think VR just hasn’t quite hit its stride yet. There are applications beyond gaming, too, with virtual reality headsets now being used in medical and architectural fields. The problem is that there have already been a few “futures of gaming.” First it was webcam body-tracking, then it was motion controls, then it was touchscreens, then it was motion controls again, then it was, uh, figurines with NFC chips in them? Yeah, we don’t know what Nintendo was smoking when it dreamed up…

VR isn’t just for gaming, of course. Indeed, Oculus creator Palmer Luckey parted ways with videogames to found a new company specializing in defense technology, putting that VR know-how to work on drones, sensors, and software for the US military. Virtual reality has been examined by numerous militaries worldwide for training purposes, particularly for fighter pilots, where it enables them to experience combat situations without any exposure to real danger. Virtual reality has also been used for medical purposes. Trainee surgeons can practice complex operations in VR, or rewatch 360-degree videos of more experienced surgeons at work. VR headsets have even been used for experimental therapy purposes, such as a program that simulates the effects of dementia on a person’s vision and hearing. Applications such as this can allow family…

OVER THE PAST FEW ISSUES, we’ve shown you how to build a few practical self-hosted servers: NextCloud for cloud storage, Bitwarden for password management, and Booksonic for audiobook collections, to name but three. While it’s possible to configure all three for remote access over the Internet, it’s an awkward process ensuring each individual server has access to a secure, encrypted Internet connection. One of the many uses for a reverse proxy is to act as an intermediary between the Internet and any self-hosted servers you want to access remotely. Simply configure your router to forward all relevant ports to your reverse proxy, and it does the rest. Why do this? Because your reverse proxy secures all incoming and outgoing connections, making it easy to obtain and manage a free SSL…

1. ENTER LISTENING PORT This section defines which port your reverse proxy is listening on—plus what protocols it’s listening for: typically SSL and HTTP2. 2. DEFINE TRUSTED SERVER Enter your domain name next to the “server_name” component. If you planned to use multiple subdomains (such as nextcloud.domain.com, bitwarden.domain.com, and so on), you could use this to redirect each one to the correct server. 3. HARDEN SECURITY The “ssl_protocols” flag enables you to ensure only specific cryptographic protocols can access your servers. Add TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1 only if your server doesn’t support the minimum recommended version (TLSv1.2). 4. OPTIONAL ADD-ONS Not all server commands are security-related. These two commands help ensure your reverse proxy communicates correctly with the NextCloud server in step 8, below. 5. SSL CERTIFICATE This section is crucial—it…

WHETHER A SIMPLE SHOPPING LIST or the complex steps for a project you are working on, just about everyone can make use of a to-do app. Being able to make a list and check things off as you go is an effective way to keep track of what you’re doing, so you can better manage your time. Microsoft has its own to-do app, appropriately named Microsoft To Do. It is free for Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS, as well as online. You can create checklists, so you can check things off as you do them, and cross-platform synchronization means you can access your lists from different devices—such as your computer and your phone. Microsoft To Do is about more than just simple lists, however. You can also use the app…

IS VIRTUAL REALITY A FAD? The debate rages within our own team, with the pro-VR camp still holding out for a killer app, while the detractors insist that it’s doomed to pass by as another feeble attempt at gaming immersion. We’re going to try to remain as impartial as possible for this review, looking at Facebook-owned Oculus’s latest foray into virtual reality: the Oculus Quest. One of VR’s early stumbling blocks was the lack of portability and flexibility. Not only did earlier headsets require a wired connection, but they also needed a machine capable of powering VR games. Oculus’s own first attempt at PC-less VR, the Oculus Go, wasn’t powerful enough to be a real competitor to PC-tethered models. Other attempts involved glueing smartphones to your face, but if there’s…

ALIENWARE’S BEEN AROUND for a while, cranking out premium gaming hardware for almost as long as this reviewer has been alive. The M17 series of gaming laptops has been available ever since the company was purchased by Dell in 2009—high-end systems with 17-inch displays, and the latest in internal hardware. This new model of the M17 doesn’t buck the trend: a recognizable design, top-notch components, and Alienware’s signature branding plastered all over it. As gaming laptops go, we have to admit that we like the design of this M17. The screen bezel is thin and black, and beneath it the speakers and fans sit below a hexagonal honeycomb mesh. It’s surprisingly lightweight, too, and has quite a small profile when closed, as the screen hinge is mounted an inch or…

A TOP-DOWN RPG/adventure game! In 2019! Well, sort of. Disco Elysium might be viewed from above, and its police detective plot might sound like something Sierra On-Line could have produced, but this is a postmodern game for postmodern times, and it isn’t afraid to let things get weird. Your tie is talking to you, for one thing. Waking, naked apart from your socks, on the floor of a squalid hotel room in some ghastly 1970s alternate reality, the world’s worst hangover has pummeled your memory into a blank slate, perfect for character creation. There’s a murder to solve—somebody, probably you, has allowed the corpse of a hanged man to remain in a tree at the back of the hotel for several days; it stinks, and you feel so tender you…

GAME STREAMING is going to be big. Google’s Stadia has been launched with its Founder’s Edition for early adopters (read guinea pigs). For your $129, you get a Stadia controller, a Chromecast Ultra, and a three-month subscription to Stadia Pro, after which it will cost $9.99 a month. Initially destined to have just 12 “carefully selected” games, Google added another 10 just before launch. There are some decent titles, including Destiny 2, Mortal Kombat 11, and Red Dead Redemption 2. A reasonable start, but Google needs to add more games quickly. Stadia will come in two levels, a subscription-free base level, and Stadia Pro, which unlocks 4K, free games, discounts, and more. There have been a few teething troubles. Many didn’t get access codes they needed, cue much grumbling. More…

AMD HAS A NEW WORKSTATION graphics card based around its 7nm Navi GPU: the Radeon Pro W5700. It’s a workstation version of the consumer RX 5700, and uses the same Navi 10 GPU. AMD has changed its card naming convention, shortening the WX prefix to a plain W, and bringing the numbers into line between the two ranges. The W5700 has 36 compute units, 8GB of GDDR6, and runs at a maximum clock of 1,930MHz. This is faster then the RX 5700, and pushes the 32-bit floating point performance above the RX 5700 XT. It’s for graphics work, not AI; AMD is still behind Nvidia here. The W5700 is touted as a replacement for both the Vega-based WX 8200 and Polaris-based WX 7100; it isn’t as fast on paper as…

To be clear, anyone claiming to have specifications for the RTX 3080 right now is making stuff up. But even if we don’t know the exact specs, looking at the underlying tech—TSMC’s and Samsung’s 7nm process technologies—can provide a good sense of what Nvidia is likely to do. Nvidia GPUs build on each preceding generation, adding features and improvements. Turing is like Pascal, with new ray-tracing and Tensor hardware, concurrent FP and INT execution, an improved NVENC block for video encoding, and some other tweaks. Pascal is like Maxwell, with tweaks to the architecture and some new features; Pascal also marked a transition from 28nm lithography to 16nm FinFET. Maxwell built on two generations of Kepler GPUs, with better memory compression and some VR-specific features that didn’t catch on. This…

The Raspberry Pi 4, the latest iteration of the world’s most popular single-board computer, has dropped with a big impact, sporting a huge uptick in specifications that doesn’t affect its credit-card-sized footprint. But once you’ve invested your $35, what are you going to do with that cut-price, cut-sized hardware? How do you exploit its abilities? We have a few ideas that use those new features—the gigabit Ethernet, upgraded CPU and GPU, 4K-capable dual HDMI ports—and make the Pi 4 shine. It actually arrived a few months ago, but we’ve held off on taking a dive into the Pi 4’s potential abilities because it hasn’t been ready—the hardware leap from the previous generation hasn’t been easy for software creators to catch up with, and its firmware has lagged behind a little.…

If you’d like slightly more complexity to your NAS than a simple Samba share, look in the direction of OpenMediaVault, and cross your fingers that it gets updated to the Pi 4 soon. It’s a much more complex and fully-featured NAS solution, with a web interface that lets you do the dirty work of setting it up and allows you to access files on your server from outside your local network, if you set it up correctly. It also offers access to services like SSH and FTP, allows you to run torrents on your NAS box, and much more. While there’s no official build for the Pi 4 yet, you can download an entire single-purpose OMV distro for its elder siblings at https://sourceforge.net/projects/openmediavault, which you just need to write to…

The Raspberry Pi is all about experimentation—so why not put together your own project? Here are some things we’d love to see; let us know if you’ve built a distro, come up with a combination of packages, or spotted something we’ve missed that can give the Raspberry Pi these capabilities. ›› A MUSIC MAKER How about wiring up a series of arcade buttons to the Pi—à la the Midi Fighter, or the MPC—and using them to trigger samples? We’d need superlow latency to use it as a live instrument, knobs to tweak things as we play, and an easy way to add samples—maybe pulling them from whatever USB stick is plugged in. ›› A CHROMECAST CLIENT Yes, you could just buy a Chromecast for less, but that’s not the point;…

VR has been kicking about for a while in various forms. Perhaps the most memorable precursor to modern VR was Nintendo’s oft-maligned Virtual Boy, a table-mounted headset that demanded you press your eye holes into it to experience wonky stereoscopic 3D games in all their red-tinted 32-bit glory. It was frankly horrible, and a huge commercial failure for Nintendo. The Virtual Boy (pictured above) might be a familiar industry touchstone, but it wasn’t a true VR headset; the focus was on headache-inducing parallax 3D. Sony’s Glasstron visor was a true predecessor of VR as we know it today; a proper head-mounted display that enabled gamers to take a seat in the cockpit of a war machine in MechWarrior 2. Sony released five models of the Glasstron across three years in…

TIP OF THE MONTH ADJUST YOUR COMMAND PROMPT WINDOW You can customize the look of your Command Prompt window by opening it up (search for it in the “Start” menu, if you don’t know how), right-clicking the top bar, then selecting “Properties.” This enables you to alter all sorts of elements, from font and text size to colors and command history. Most helpfully, you can adjust the opacity, enabling you to view other windows while you bash away. STAFF WRITER EXPLORING VR I’ve been spearheading our investigations into the state of the VR market, and it’s been fascinating to re-acquaint myself with virtual reality. I used to think of it as a fun side project for the games industry, something most people couldn’t afford to get into, but a platform…

There are several ways to set up a reverse proxy in Windows. In most cases, however, your Windows PC is your primary machine, and there are many good reasons not to be using that; it’s best to keep the reverse proxy isolated, which is why you should consider running a virtual instance of Debian or Ubuntu. VirtualBox is perfect for the task—just remember to set up bridged networking to ensure the VM receives a proper IP address, so it’s seen on your network. If you’re determined to run nginx in Windows, there is a Windows client, but as you’ll see from http://nginx.org/en/docs/windows.html, it’s not as fully featured as the Linux version. It’s also not easy to link with a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. Thankfully, you can follow the tutorial using…

WHEN YOU FIRST CREATE AN ACCOUNT ON WINDOWS 10, Microsoft would prefer you to use an online Microsoft account that you can use to access all its other services, such as Mixer, Outlook, Skype, and more. But there may be times when you don’t want to use this account and would prefer to keep everything on your computer. In times like that, you need to use a local account instead. This has a couple of benefits. For one thing, it means you can still get going even if you don’t already have a Microsoft account—particularly useful if you’re setting the account up for someone else and don’t know their Microsoft account details. As well as that, there’s also the privacy side, because a local account won’t sync anything to Microsoft’s servers,…

The obvious place to find games is via general ROM sites, but they are fraught with legal issues. These sites can also be a great source for system ROMs (TOS images in the ST’s case), and switching between system ROMs can help get pesky programs running, but copyright issues still apply. For visual demos and non-gaming apps, you usually need to look elsewhere. Archive.org has a few gems you can play with, and you don’t have to sort through legally suspect ROM sites. However, the easiest way to find legal software of any sort is through magazine coverdisk archives, which usually mix gaming and utilities. We had most luck with Exxos’s archive (www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari), which has a collection of disks from ST Format (a Future Publishing magazine that ran from 1989…

FOR ANYONE WHO SPOTTED THE CREATIVE CLOUD APP chugging and downloading recently, well, it was Photoshop getting a big update. Adobe seems to have dropped the CC moniker, although Creative Cloud is very much still with us. Version 2020 (or 21) of the venerable image-editing app brings a swathe of improvements across the whole face of the app, but stops short of fundamentally changing the look and feel, which has been set since the dark gray background made its appearance several years ago. Some of the changes are to tools that have been the same since forever—the Brush tool, for instance, can now be rotated with the arrow keys while you’re painting, and hitting tilde (~) flips it into an eraser. The Properties panel, much unloved, has been revitalized with…

BACK IN JULY, AMD launched a massive 7nm offensive in the CPU world. What can it do for an encore? More cores, more threads, and potentially higher clock speeds. The Ryzen 9 3950X really impresses in some areas, though it’s not quite as awesome in other respects. Let’s start with the best use case, which is anything in the content-creation realm. With 33 percent more cores than the 3900X, and similar clock speeds, it’s usually 25–30 percent faster. If you do video editing, 3D rendering, or any other task that can benefit from a 32-thread processor, you’ll love the 3950X. For tasks that don’t scale well to 16 cores, though, you’re better off with a less expensive part. Even though the 3950X is nominally a consumer CPU, it costs a…

WE KNOW WHAT you’re thinking. Will you just look at those bezels? And that price. What the heck is HP doing with the ZBook X2, a $5,000 tablet that looks a decade old? But bear with us, because while this is a flawed device, it’s also pretty special. HP says the ZBook X2 is the world’s most powerful detachable PC. A punchy claim at first glance, the detachable PC segment is in reality distinctly niche. In other words, the competition is fairly limited. Devices like the latest Microsoft Surface Pro 6 spring to mind, but despite being available with precisely the same Intel Core i7-8650U quad-core CPU as the ZBook, it isn’t actually that comparable. That’s because of the ZBook’s overall feature set and functionality, which is remarkable, if not…

YOU KNOW WHAT you’re getting when Call of Duty goes back to its “roots” in the fourth game. You get three years of Infinity Ward’s full attention, with additional help from High Moon, Beenox, Raven, and Sledgehammer. It had better be good—and luckily it is. While we get yet another plot about American intervention in a Russian invasion of a fictional country somewhere in that space where Turkey meets Iraq, it’s also a game of beautifully recreated moonlit alleyways, night-time walks in the forest, abandoned motorbikes, and a battered PC case with the single best rendering of a Molex power connector we’ve yet seen. Its use of darkness is sublime, enabling you to be the terror in the night before deftly turning the tables. It sees the return of Captain…

Red Dead Redemption 2 is finally here on PC, and it has a ton of graphics settings to play with. It also has stability issues and requires a fast CPU (or a workaround to help eliminate stuttering)—it’s been a rough launch on PC for many players. Your PC might be in need of an upgrade to run it well. There’s also the important choice between DX12 and Vulkan graphics APIs, not to mention performance across popular CPUs and GPUs. It’s a lot to cover, so let’s get to it. Looking at the PC features, the list of graphics settings is good, if perhaps a bit overkill. Resolution support is good—we were able to select widescreen, ultrawide, and doublewide resolutions, as well as old-school 4:3 stuff, such as 1024x768. Except RDR2…

THE WORLD OF CONSUMER GPUS has been a contest between AMD and Nvidia for so long, it’s hard to remember that the market used to be crowded with contenders. That will change—Intel has been working on its own discrete graphics card tech, the Xe Graphics Architecture, for some time. Its first iteration, code-named Ponte Vecchio, is a 7nm chip (Intel’s first). It uses a high-speed Compute Express Link (CXL) and Intel’s 3D Foveros system, which enables chips to be built in layers. It has also announced its first card featuring Ponte Vecchio, which Intel claims is an exascale GPU (capable of a billion, billion FLOPs). Before we get carried away, Intel is aiming its initial efforts at the very top of the market; this is a server card for heavy…

For as long as I’ve been writing about tech, I’ve preferred services and software that help protect privacy. I switched to using Signal as my default mobile messaging app years ago. Since then, Signal has gotten features such as Giphy integration and video calls. But one thing has always irked me: The use of a phone number as a user ID. For all its accolades, Signal has been criticized for tying a user to a phone number. For users who might want a new number (to avoid calls from a persistent ex, for example), keeping in touch with Signal contacts meant setting up new conversations, security numbers, and a lot of headache. More importantly, talking to someone over Signal required giving out your phone number. For friends and family, this…

> OpenVPN Confusion > Poor Performance > AMD Mobo Woes Best Drive Layout In the early days of computing, it was often recommended that the OS live on a separate disk, or at least a separate partition. In this new age of solid-state disks, what do you recommend? Cost and space for multiple disks isn’t an issue. –Daniel Swanson THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: Keeping the OS (and apps) separate from your data is pretty much a matter of personal convenience—the key thing is that you don’t get lulled into a false sense of security and forget to keep everything backed up separately. The Doc has long split his data from the OS and apps—originally through partitioning, but now on separate drives. That’s largely down to the smaller size of SSDs compared…

Come, fill your tiny $35-$55 desktop PC with the kind of apps a PC of that value could never have dreamed of in days gone by. Show it who’s boss. You’re boss, in case you hadn’t realized. In Raspbian, you’ll want to click the raspberry icon, then head to “Preferences > Add/Remove Software” to find the packages. ›› OFFICE: LIBREOFFICE No sense in deviating from the open-source standard here, because the LibreOffice suite runs remarkably well on the Pi 4, particularly once you’ve made the transition to booting from an SSD. You’ll find it preinstalled with most distros, including Raspbian. ›› IMAGE EDITING: GIMP Another staple: The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a fantastic and extremely capable Photoshop-esque photo editor and graphics mangler that runs perfectly adequately on high-RAM editions…

You could, if you were particularly masochistic, attempt to install Steam and find ARM-compatible games on the platform to play on the Pi. Our brief experiments show that would not work well. Or you could do the sensible thing and use it as a Steam Link, streaming games from your main PC to your living room TV. This function has been disappointing on previous models, but it works tremendously well on the newest Raspberry Pi. A Pi running the Steam Link app is functionally equivalent to Valve’s outdated Steam Link hardware, only dialed up to 10: The Pi is a much more powerful device. The app has been updated for the fourth-generation Pi—just run sudo apt install steamlink to install it—but we’d say it still has a little way to…

For every good game playable in VR, there are about 7,000 bad ones, based on our expert (not exactly accurate) calculations. Those good games do exist, though. Right off the bat, we’ve got to recommend Beat Saber, a high-octane, neon-tinted rush of adrenaline—Guitar Hero by way of Star Wars. Your two controllers become lightsabers as colored blocks race toward you, demanding that you destroy them in time to the music. Similarly fast-paced is bonkers extreme sports game Sprint Vector, which sees up to eight players race through all manner of futuristic locales at blistering speeds. Those interested in a more cerebral experience might enjoy Budget Cuts, a tongue-in-cheek stealth title that puts you in the shoes of a human employee in a workplace full of robots. Armed with a portal…

Microsoft Surface Pro X BACKGROUND Less than a month after dropping the Surface Pro 7, Microsoft is back with the Surface Pro X—a fresh design with hints of improved repairability. Since ripping into the Surface Laptop 3, we’re cautiously optimistic. Bring on the era of repairable tablets, Microsoft—we’re ready. MAJOR TECH SPECS 13-inch PixelSense 2880x1920 display (267ppi) Microsoft SQ1 3.0GHz ARM CPU (based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx), with a Microsoft SQ1 Adreno 685 GPU 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM (16GB optional) Removable 128GB SSD (256GB or 512GB optional) 5MP and Windows Hello front-facing cameras, and 10MP rear-facing camera 2x USB-C ports and one Surface Connect port Wi-Fi 5 802.11ac, Bluetooth 5.0, Gigabit LTE KEY FINDINGS Unlike the Surface Pro 7, the Pro X is a complete redesign. Compared to the Pro…

When opening your network to the wider Internet, remember to stay secure. We’ve tightened security to some degree on the reverse proxy itself—by forcing use of TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3—and you can make things even more secure by following guides like that at Raymii.org (https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Strong_SSL_Security_On_nginx.html). That’s the beauty of reverse proxies—rather than having to strengthen each individual server, you can add an extra layer of protection for them all. Apply these tweaks to all your server blocks, including the one set to listen to port 443 by default. Visit www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ to see how secure your reverse proxy really is. You should strengthen the security of each service you open for Internet access. Avoid non-secure (HTTP) connections, and ensure your accounts are protected by strong passwords. Look for options to…

To be fair to Microsoft, using a Microsoft account does come with some benefits. These days, Microsoft runs a whole host of services, and all of these can be accessed using your Microsoft account. For example, you could use your account to log in to Skype, Mixer, Xbox, and more on any device, and your settings will be the same. It also helps improve Cortana, and gives you access to Windows Store apps. You can also sync things such as your Windows settings, OneDrive files, and photos from your phone between devices, so that when you log in to your Windows tablet, for example, all these files are easily accessible. But as we outlined in the introduction, there are plenty of reasons why you might not want to use a…

DROPBOX IS AN APP THAT, at its heart, synchronizes a folder on your PC with other computers—the same files are available everywhere. You can also access them via the web on any device, although the files aren’t actually stored on your device, unless you choose to download them. In many ways, it works very similarly to Microsoft’s OneDrive. Dropbox isn’t really meant as a cold storage system—its plans for lots of storage are rather expensive, and it’s recently been targeting business users over consumers—but for managing the stuff you’re working on right now, it’s unparalleled. We often work across multiple devices and use it as the main place to store our files, instead of our “Documents” folder. What’s more, you can share files with other people, and easily find things,…

THIS A MILESTONE for Intel and CPUs, with the Core i9-9900KS officially being the first CPU that can do 5GHz on all eight of its cores, all the time. The Core i9-9900KS takes everything good about Intel’s existing ninth-gen refresh, then cranks the dial up to 11, using binning to select the best chips and reach the lofty goal of 5GHz. Is it enough to maintain Intel’s claim to the gaming throne? Yes, absolutely. The Core i9-9900K was already the fastest CPU in games, so tacking on 300MHz is only going to help. At the same time, 300MHz more isn’t going to come close to closing the gap between Intel and AMD’s 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X in multithreaded workloads, never mind the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X and third-gen Threadripper. Fifty…

TOO MANY tech companies are slaves to fashion. HP certainly isn’t guilty of that crime with its DreamColor Z31x Studio Display, a glorious 31-inch panel, with what HP describes as full “cinema style” 4K resolution. To say that the Z31x defenestrates the vogue for slim screen bezels would be the understatement of the eon. This thing is fat. It is also, however, designed for serious professional productivity and content-creation work. So, quality, accuracy, and functionality are what matter, rather than superficial aesthetics. The Z31x has all of that in spades. For starters, those bezels are a function of its ability to fully calibrate itself. Top and center, HP has located a sensor that swings down on a motorized arm, allowing for full calibration. What’s more, the calibration tool can be…

I THINK VR is a lot of fun. I’ve fooled around with most of the big-name headsets (I’ll get my hands on a Valve Index eventually), and most games I’ve played have been genuine fun. Some games just work in VR; the moment I first dived into space combat sim EVE: Valkyrie was a revelation. I can’t properly describe the mix of emotions I felt upon looking down and seeing my own newly space-suited body gripping the controls of my ship, lasers glinting off the cockpit glass, while missiles subtly followed the movement of my head. And yet, when I look at the industry, I can’t help but feel disappointed. Half-Life: Alyx is a single pinprick of light, a hopeful glimpse into a world of glorious, immersive, big-budget VR games,…

ARE YOU THE OUTDOORSY TYPE? Western Digital’s subsidiary G-Technology has you covered. The ArmorATD is an external hard drive designed to survive the harsh conditions of even the most desolate wilderness, perfect for hikers, photographers, and extreme sports enthusiasts. If you need durable tech that can survive the elements, there aren’t many rugged HDD manufacturers, and Western Digital’s name carries a promise of quality. The ArmorATD has all the features you’d expect from a super-rugged HDD, and more. The exterior is solid aluminum, with internal shock mounts and a rubber sleeve that ensure protection against drops and whacks. It’s also crush-resistant up to 1,000lb, according to G-Technology, so it could likely even survive a landslide. They’re so confident about the ArmorATD that they offer a three-year warranty, too. The rubber…