Maximum PCの April 2021 の目次

I DO LOVE a good challenge, and nothing is more difficult in this industry than building the ultimate budget PC. Bizarrely, the value of the dollar actually shifts depending on how much you have to spend. The less budget you have, the more important it is to allocate it correctly into the components that will give you the most performance. Things like flashy motherboards, cases, and memory just aren’t important. On top of that there’s an industry side-challenge to this as well. Namely, most manufacturers just don’t want to showcase their more budget-oriented parts. That’s what makes it so interesting from a journalistic perspective, because these are components that we don’t see a lot of, and it’s fascinating to analyze just how that performance from the flagship halo products filters…

SECURITY RESEARCHERS at Red Canary have uncovered a piece of malware, dubbed “Silver Sparrow,” that has managed to sneak itself onto over 30,000 M1-powered Macs, and even some older Intel-powered ones. What the malware is designed to do remains a mystery, as the payload remains unidentified. It is not following the pattern of the usual adware infection. Silver Sparrow runs natively on M1 Macs, and uses JavaScript for execution. Once an hour it calls a server, presumably for further instructions. It hasn’t, as yet, done anything malicious apart from bury itself into the macOS. However, it has managed to spread itself across 150 countries, and it’s not clear yet how it managed this. Armed with a more directly destructive intent, this could have turned nasty. Apple has revoked the developer…

AT FIRST GLANCE, you might not get the sense that these headphones contain some serious power under the hood, as this power is hidden under an elegant and sleek body. Its smooth matte mono-colored finish pushes the idea that Sony wanted sophistication with substance. Comfort is great with the WH-1000XM4. Slightly more padding on the headband and cups may be helpful, but using these headphones all day feels almost effortless. The memory foam soft-touch leather creates a perfect cushion for your ears. The headphones are seriously feature-packed. Active noise-cancellation plays a huge part in the immersive experience. Without playing music, they cut pretty much all background noise out. They are great for VOIP, while using the ambient mode is great for communicating without interrupting your musical listening experience. All these…

SITTING AT the budget end of the headsets we have in this battle is MSI with its Immerse GH50 cans. They are a decent-looking pair, with a gunmetal-gray finish and an RGB MSI emblem sitting proudly on each cup. The RGB is quite subtle, at least. The design relies on a simplistic approach, with no physical buttons on the headphones, instead opting for an in-line remote. This houses the volume control wheel, mute button, 7.1 virtual surround sound button, and vibration activation control. The materials on the cups and the headband are comfortable, but thanks to the tight tension of the headband they are not the comfiest pair, fitting a little too snugly on your skull. Bearing in mind the price, this headset produces a powerful sound, with bass at…

IF WHITE CAMO is your thing, or you can overlook the fact that this is white camo, then the HS60 is a good contender for this battle. Looks aren’t everything, remember. The HS60 Haptic is competitively priced at around $120. Haptic bass has been a subjective technology in headphones for a while now, but it’s not often included on more premium products. A lot of the time it’s seen as gimmicky, but the HS60 tackles this well. On the right cup, you have a toggle wheel that controls the amount of haptic feedback you want. Instead of being either on full whack or off—leaving the audio a little flat at times—you can adjust it to your liking. On the right cup is where the volume rocker, mute button, fixed USB-C…

IT SAYS A LOT that when we first priced this system up a month ago, it was about $295—four weeks later, and the thing sits at $387. Honestly, we feel like a broken record at this point, but the market is absolutely volatile right now, as unscrupulous folk and miners snap up every piece of hardware they can find. Even the budget end is suffering, sadly. We’re finally starting to see some companies take action against this (namely Nvidia with its RTX 3060 plans), but it might just be too little, too late. Our opinion? It’s not likely to stabilize for another year, if that. Similar to the memory-shortage crisis three years back (when a set of 32GB memory would cost you nearly $500), there’s just not enough fab time…

We’re sticklers for backing up on Maximum PC, so we’re not going to let you off the hook. Every now and then you might want to try something on your server that either fails to work or breaks something else in the process. Thanks to timeshift you can roll things back, just like Windows’ System Restore: Type “timeshift” after installing to get a rundown of all available commands, but the following will perform your first backup, which will be stored your boot partition: Scheduling backups from the command line is tricky—you’ll need some working knowledge of crontab—but it’s easy enough to run manually on demand, such as before major updates or installations. Then, should you ever need to restore a backup, simply issue the following command: You’ll be prompted to…

ACCORDING to recent research by networking specialist Cisco, nearly two-thirds of the global population will have internet access by 2023. That’s around 5.3 billion souls, a huge leap from the 3.9 billion that had access in 2018. But here’s the kicker. Wireless network growth is expected to be even more explosive. Cisco reckons that there were 169 million wireless hotspots globally in 2018, but the number is set to quadruple to 628 million by 2023. That’s a whole lot of new Wi-Fi. Of course, it’s not just humans that are bandwidth hungry. In 2018 there were around 5 billion connected devices that fell into the M2M, or machine-to-machine, connectivity category. In other words, machines talking to each other with no humans involved. In 2023, the number of connected M2M devices…

According to some quarters, Wi-Fi 6 and by extension its Wi-Fi 6E cousin will be replaced by 5G cellular technology before they’ve had a chance to take off. And there’s at least some substance behind that narrative. Historically, cellular networks have been wide-area solutions working at long distance both indoors and out. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi is a short-range technology primarily used indoors. However, with 5G comes a greater use of so-called small-cell access nodes designed to operate over shorter ranges and support fewer devices. That sounds a lot like Wi-Fi. What’s more, mid-band 5G networks also operate on similar 2.5GHz and 3.5GHz frequencies to Wi-Fi. But realistically, you can’t put a SIM in every device. 5G networks are also typically installed by telco firms, use specific licensed spectrum, and require fees for…

For this tutorial, we are working mainly with the right-hand panel of tools. At the bottom, you can see buttons for FX, used for glows, overlays, and blending options, then the Mask layer icon is next to that. This is heavily used in this tutorial to add and subtract elements of an image. To understand the Mask layer easier, replace the word “mask” with “transparency.” There is already a Transparency/Opacity slider, but what that does is apply the opacity to the whole layer. A Mask layer enables you to choose exactly what part you want to be seen or not. Next along is the Adjustment layer. It adds a layer to the top, which gives you multiple options. These include: Hue/Saturation (used in this tutorial); Invert color, Levels, Black and…

Editor It’s nice sometimes to just be surprised and proven wrong. I love it. It’s why I like to be corrected, and why I like to be wrong as well. Making mistakes is the best way to learn something. And nowhere is this more true than preconceived opinions in tech. In my case, I’ve had the luxury of using an AMD Radeon 6800 XT now for about two weeks or so. I’m holding onto that 4K gaming PC from last issue for as long as I can (sorry AMD, you can’t have your card back yet). I’m just blown away, not only by the performance, which is what you’d expect from the latest generation of cards (outside of ray-tracing, which I use in all of one game), but also by…

WHEN YOU THINK about it, how much of your day is spent sitting on a chair? We aren’t ones to judge, but if you are an office worker/working from home that’s at least seven hours a day. Also, a lot of us like to kick back at our desks to procrastinate and game after work, enjoying that tiny bit of escapism till the early hours. So if you do the rough math, that’s a heck of a lot of time spent in one position. The comfier you are, the longer you will be able to work/game. So why would you not treat your body to the ergonomic tech it needs? Noblechairs is a premium company when it comes to gaming chairs, stating that, “inspired by the most exclusive cars in…

BUDGET WE’RE STARTING tod read putting these build lists together, especially when it comes to the GPU situation. So let’s address that first and foremost. We wrote this piece over a period of 24 hours. Two working days. In that time, the GPU we picked for the AMD build went out of stock overnight, and the GPU we had from last issue for the Intel build skyrocketed in price to a staggering $600. The closest available graphics card, the four-and-a-half-year-old GTX 1050 Ti that’s actually in stock, is now $500, and of course only available on Amazon via certain resellers. We don’t know what to tell you. Right now, if you’re building these systems, you just have to be on your toes and hope you can pick up a GPU…

TRIUMPHS ✔ PS5 TO GET PSVR2 Next year Sony will release an improved VR system, tuned for the PS5. ✔ SAMSUNG LONGEVITY Keeping Android phones current can be tough. Samsung has promised four years of security update support on 100 devices. ✔ A CLASSIC RETURNS Iconic RPG Diablo II is to be remastered for consoles and the PC, now in 3D, and able to run 21:9 and in 4K. TRAGEDIES ✗ PORTLAND’S SMART-CITY PROJECT CANNED Disputes over privacy and data-sharing have scotched plans to turn Portland “smart.” ✗ AMD’S USB PROBLEM Some people are having problems with 500-series AMD motherboards triggered by high USB 4.0 usage, particularly VR. ✗ RANSOMWARE ATTACK More troubles for CDPR as Cyberpunk 2077’s source code was swiped in a cyber attack.…

SAMSUNG HAS DESIGNED a new iteration of Aquabolt (its high-end second-generation HBM2 modules). This one has a neat trick to it: integrated into the wafer is a processor to handle data transfers, which would otherwise be run by attached processors. The HBM-PIM (High Band Memory Processing In Memory) module uses some layers from its 3D stack to carry a dinky 300MHz programmable computing unit, or AI engine. The host (the processor) controls this using standard memory commands. The 16-bit PCU can perform FP16 ADD, MUL, MAC, and MAD calculations within the memory. Samsung says it “exploits bank-level parallelism to provide four times the processing bandwidth than an off-chip solution.” Total processing power is quoted as 1.2TFLOPS Samsung has some bold claims: a doubling of system performance, and a 70 percent…

GRAPHICS CARDS LIKE lots of memory bandwidth. Nvidia’s RTX 20-series was the first to utilize GDDR6 memory, clocked at 14Gbps—a 40 percent increase over the GDDR5X in the GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti. With the RTX 3080 and 3090, Nvidia delivered the first GDDR6X solutions, clocked at 19Gbps and 19.5Gbps, respectively. What’s interesting is that, while the 3080 features chips rated for 19Gbps operation (Micron D8BGW), the 3090 chips are rated for 21Gbps (Micron D8BGX), yet they’re clocked at 19.5Gbps. It turns out that even the 19Gbps chips can get quite toasty under certain workloads, like cryptocurrency mining. At launch, there wasn’t a good way to check GDDR6X temperatures on the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, but HWiNFO64 has added a new Memory Junction Temperature as of version 6.42 that…

YOU ALL KNOW of Sennheiser, as an audio powerhouse at the forefront of sound. The HD450BT is a very well-rounded pair of headphones, sitting in the company’s low to mid-range price bracket at $200. For this price, you get premium features expected in more expensive headphones, such as active noise-canceling, dedicated app support, and a variety of onboard controls, which are found on the right cup. You get buttons for volume, dedicated voice assistant, noise-canceling, and power. A slider controls the playback features to skip songs, and you can press it to play or pause. Alongside that, there is the 3.5mm jack and a USB-C charging port. When charged to full capacity, you can get around 30 hours of playback out of these cans, and that’s with active noise-canceling in…

A LOT OF HEADSETS seem to have at least one or two things that hold them back from being great, either to reduce the cost, or to help one aspect of the headset exceed at the expense of another. The Arctis 9, on the other hand, does everything that is thrown at it very well indeed. First off, the comfort levels are amazing. When initially looking at the headband, the lack of padding was a little off-putting, but its elastic suspension alternative works exceptionally well. It takes all the weight off the headband and evens it out. Along with the breathable fabric cups, it makes for effortless comfort. It is very well-built, although some more premium materials would be welcome considering the price range. The left cup features a pull-out-style…

SO THE CONCEPT around this is pretty simple—we just love the idea behind the Core i3-10100. When this editor first joined the tech industry, the crème de la crème of desktop processors was whatever quadcore, Hyper-Threaded chip Intel had to offer at the time. That was the end goal. Ryzen wasn’t yet a thing, and anything more than four cores was relegated to the world of HEDT, which was a bit more inaccessible. Motherboards were more expensive, and memory costs immediately shot up whenever you mentioned the phrase “quad-channel.” Fast forward to 2020, and with the launch of Intel’s latest chips, this little beauty fell into our lap. Well, it was a special request we put in with Intel really, because bizarrely most agencies, PRs, publications, and tech journo outlets…

When Cockpit was first developed, it had plug-in support for administering your Docker containers remotely via its user-friendly web interface. But then Red Hat OS became a major backer of Cockpit, and when Red Hat developed its own alternative to Docker—Podman—the developers were quick to drop official support for Docker in favor of Podman. Podman and Docker both support the same container types, and Podman uses the same command structure as Docker—indeed, Red Hat recommends the “alias docker=podman” command to minimize disruption when switching from Docker to Podman. Podman has two key advantages: each container runs within its own self-contained process; and it supports “rootless” containers, namely containers that can be run using non-root user accounts for greater security. Given this, you’d expect us to embrace Podman fully in this…

Global momentum behind Wi-Fi 6E is building fast. A number of countries and territories have released or are preparing to release the 6GHz spectrum. The UK, Chile, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates are on the list of early adopters who have already freed up airspace. Meanwhile, the likes of Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Taiwan, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, and Jordan have begun the process of allocating spectrum. However, not all Wi-Fi 6E implementations will be equal. For instance, the UK’s regulatory body Ofcom has only unlocked 500MHz of new spectrum, specifically 5,925MHz to 6,425MHz. By most measures, that’s a large swathe of new airspace. The new spectrum is enough for three new 160MHz Wi-Fi channels, or as many as 24 new 20MHz Wi-Fi channels. But it’s a far cry from the…

Remember the good old days of wireless g, n, and ac? Well, they’re gone, replaced by Wi-Fi 4, 5, 6, and now 6E. Of course, much of this is mere rebranding. Under the new nomenclature, what was once rather clumsily known as 802.11g wireless networking is now known simply as Wi-Fi 3. Similarly, 802.11n becomes Wi-Fi 4, 802.11ac is renamed Wi-Fi 5, and 802.11ax is the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard. But what of Wi-Fi 6E? In simple terms, it’s any Wi-Fi 6 device capable of operating in the 6GHz spectrum. In other words, 6E is simply 6 “extended” into the 6GHz spectrum. That definition was made official in January this year when Wi-Fi 6E was certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry standards body that oversees interoperability and backwards compatibility, and also…

presents: Apple AirPods Max BACKGROUND With a name like AirPods, we had to know: will the AirPods Max be serviceable to any degree? Or did Apple spend a good chunk of the $550 price on over-engineering them into knots? MAJOR TECH SPECS • Two 40 mm Apple-designed dynamic drivers• Two color-matched magnetic ear cushions• Two Apple H1 chips• Eight microphones for active noise cancellation• Bluetooth 5.0 with support for the Apple-friendly AAC codec KEY FINDINGS • Along the bottom edge you’ll find a few holes, but none are the round 3.5mm kind. Instead, wired listening is handled by the Lightning port, pulling double duty for listening and charging.• The first step in disassembly is removing the magnetic ear cushions. Underneath the ear cushions: holes! And are those screws? We’re not…

Every single Photoshop project should take composition into consideration. In fact, it is one of the main priorities of your frame when taking a photo or producing some artwork. In Photoshop, it is talked about in relation to how the subject of the image sits in the frame, and how it blends with the background. In short, it is how the image is arranged and organized, and there are a few factors that are required in order to make this work. It is how you choose to arrange the elements that can make or break a shot, design, or edit. Some factors that heavily influence the composition of an image are perspectives and angles. If you are bringing an image into another image, then it is something that is going…

AUDIO DEVICES are something that I have always been excited about. Any chance I have to myself, I find I’m listening to music, whether that is through a pair of headphones or a speaker. Due to old age, I presume, it’s sad to say that my beloved Bose SoundLink Mini Bluetooth speaker is on its way out. I got six years out of it, and a tear was shed when I knew I had to change. Unfortunately, I’m not at a place where I can have my dream home speaker setup right now, so to bide my time I thought I’d see if I can find an equally good speaker for cheaper—for me, the Bose speaker suited my needs of sound quality and portability perfectly. That’s when I found this…

NVIDIA’S PLANS to spend $40 billion buying ARM has caused waves in the x86 industry. If you want an x86 processor you go to Intel or AMD, or you use a company that employs an ARM design. These include Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei, and other big players. Many more have ARM architectural licenses, or intellectual property licenses, including AMD and Intel, while others have huge racks of ARM servers, notably Amazon. ARM-based designs have been used in more devices than any other company—over 160 billion so far. Owning ARM would give Nvidia some serious leverage across the tech world. The obvious concern is that Nvidia will start saving the best ARM technology for itself, and start squeezing other users, many of which have no ready alternative. Previously ARM has been…

WhatsApp presented its users with a new set of terms and conditions in January, which drew such a backlash that it gave people an extra three months to accept them. The issue is that the new T&Cs are viewed as giving permission to siphon off more personal data to feed the Facebook data pile. WhatsApp says that people’s personal data is still sacrosanct, but business accounts are not. Apparently it is all about data required for making payments. WhatsApp claims it still offers full end-to-end encryption. However, it isn’t backing down—if you don’t accept the new T&Cs your account will be listed as inactive, and ultimately deleted. WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion. It has a huge worldwide following with 2 billion registered users. The clumsy…

AS A LIFELONG CONSOLE and PC gamer, I have nearly 25 years of experience with both landscapes. I cut my teeth on Duck Hunt, but I also breezed through Duke Nukem 3D and Doom. Both ecosystems have their own unique merits. For that reason, I’ll never be able to proclaim a clear-cut winner in the never-ending console versus PC debate. Still, I’m often asked if PC gaming is truly “worth it.” With next-gen graphics card shortages, supply issues, and consoles that mimic PC performance, is the frustration worth the payoff? My response is an enthusiastic “Yes.” Not only is PC gaming still worth it, but it’s something everyone should experience. It’s a fact: PC performance will always be superior to what consoles can offer thanks to cutting-edge hardware and customization,…

X BY KYGO is a fairly new brand imagined by Norwegian DJ Kygo himself. This pair, the A11/800, fit towards the higher end of the lineup, with a simple yet effective mono-colored look. As far as build quality goes, these headphones aren’t up there with the likes of Bose. These are lightweight, mainly plastic cans—though that’s not a bad thing, as wearing these for a long time is no problem at all. However, they are prone to creaking, which is its downfall when it comes to quality. Cup size is not as large as others, favoring the smaller eared out there, and they are a snug fit, with padding being more of a springy sponge. They aren’t uncomfortable, but a softer foam would probably improve these cans. The A11/800 offers…

AUDEZE has used its phenomenal audio knowledge to create a very solid gaming headset. The company is more traditionally known for high-end planar magnetic headphones but has dipped into the world of gaming with the Penrose. The headset has some good weight to it and a real sense of rigidity. The cups are large and deep (probably due to those huge 100mm drivers), offering comfort for listeners. The super-soft earcup pads also help deliver good comfort levels. Looks are subjective, and this pair comes in black and blue, or black and green, which may not appeal to everyone, and might not be a pair you want to commute around with too much. This headset has all the connectivity requirements you could ask for; wireless 2.4GHz via USB dongle, Bluetooth, and…

LOGITECH and peripherals go hand in hand. The Pro X wireless is Logitech’s range-topping gaming headset, and you get a sense of this straight out of the box with the build quality, design, and sturdiness of the Pro X wireless. It’s another headset that’s aviation-themed, but Logitech takes it that one step further by using more premium materials. The exposed headband forks are thick metal, making the earcups feel very rigid. The logo sits on a shiny, grooved-metal ring plate that stands out from the black headset, but in a way that’s not obnoxious. It is one of the heaviest headsets we have on test, but with its thick headband and thick, soft cups, comfort issues aren’t apparent for several hours of use. The Pro X wireless is connected via…

SO, how did we get here? In our little head to head, we ended up having a lot of similar scores through one reason or another. When it came to value for money, the Razer Blackshark V2 took the crown. For build quality, the Logitech Pro X wireless boasted the most premium materials and a solid feel. To come to our decision, then, it came to the overall package and what the most important factor of a set of headphones actually is—sound quality. For us, the Sony just had that wow factor. Throw anything at these headphones and the response back is bliss. The WH-1000XM4 is just superb, to put it mildly. It is feature-packed with class-leading active noise-canceling, has seamless proximity sensors for zero interruption, and effortless touch controls.…

AND THERE you have it, our attempt at building the best-value super-budget PC possible today. And hopefully by the time you read this, it hasn’t skyrocketed in price to $1,800 or something ridiculous. Nonetheless, we’re quite proud of this build—it looks exceptionally clean from a custom PC perspective, even though we’re using very budget-oriented parts, and managing to keep the cables tidy and out of the way has been a relatively painless process. Mounting the SSD in reverse so that it’s facing toward the window looks pretty snazzy, and getting the CPU power cable behind the motherboard looks epic. Even though the board itself is only a Micro-ATX affair, all in all the system doesn’t look empty—in fact it’s nice to see Corsair include cable cutouts specifically for those using…

Traditionally, software is installed on Ubuntu via package archives known as repositories, and these remain a vital tool for getting software onto your server. Ubuntu provides three official repos by default for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS: focal, focal, focal-updates, and focal-backports. You can browse their contents at https://packages.ubuntu.com, and these can all be installed from the command line as soon as you log into Ubuntu Server for the first time. The biggest issue with Ubuntu’s package archives is that many applications found here are frozen at the point of Ubuntu 20.04’s release, so any subsequent developer updates are ignored until your next major upgrade (22.04 isn’t due until May 2022). One prime example of this is Cockpit, which is ‘stuck’ at version 215 in Ubuntu 20.04 (27 updates have been released…