Inhoudsopgave van December 2018 - Maximum PC

MICROSOFT HASN’T ALWAYS had success with hardware, but its Surface range broke the trend. The touchscreen hybrid devices are innovative and stylish, and Microsoft has announced an update to the range, bringing more power to the party. Surface Pro 6, a two-in-one device with detachable keyboard, has new processors. It starts at $899 for a system sporting a Core i5-8250U, 128GB of storage, and 8GB of RAM. This jumps to $2,299 if you want a Core i7-8650U. Still no USB-C port, though. Surface Laptop 2, a touchscreen notebook, receives a similar bump in power. The $999 base version has 8GB of memory—double the previous version—and a Core i5 Kaby Lake dual-core processor. Still no USB-C, either. Both the Pro 6 and Laptop 2 come in a new color option: matte…

The Windows 10 October 2018 Update—because Microsoft loves simple names—is due soon, and may already be downloading by the time you read this. It’s the sixth major release for Windows 10 since it first hit in July 2015, and it arrives through Windows Update. It’s not necessarily a bad thing—although it might be nice if Microsoft let us just get on with using our PCs—but this release seems a bit light on actual new features. We spent some time with the Insider Preview to see what’s actually new. 1 Start Menu and Searching You can now name tile folders on the Start menu, and hide the scrollbars using an option in Ease of Access, but the biggest change is in searching. It’s got a wider interface, and if you search…

YOU EXPECT a press release to make ambitious claims, but the one from Nvidia for its Turing GPU architecture is particularly striking. The headline tells us that it will “fundamentally change computer graphics,” and the company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, says that it is “Nvidia’s most important innovation in computer graphics in more than a decade.” Bold talk, but there’s substance behind it. Turing is more than a generational step: It brings genuinely fresh technology to the graphics card, with real-time ray tracing as star billing. Turing follows on from Pascal, which has powered everything from the top-tier GTX 1080 Ti down to entry-level GTX 1050s. Nvidia also has its Volta architecture, released last year, with its machine-learning cores, but this has been kept to specialist markets, apart from the eye-watering…

Battlefield V This is said to be one of the best places to start to showcase Turing’s abilities. Ray tracing is used to make lighting effects bounce around the environment. Muzzle flashes and explosions really pop, and there are some lovely reflections, as you can see in the supreme example above. It’s due by late November. Shadow of the Tomb Raider This uses a more subtle approach, with the emphasis on generating softer and more natural shadows. Available now. Assetto Corsa Competizione Some impressive ray-traced reflections, shadows and ambient inclusions. It’s on Steam’s Early Access now. Metro Exodus This boasts of ray-traced global lighting and ambient occlusion for pixel-perfect shadows. Unfortunately, it’s not due until next February, though. Enlisted WWII-themed MMO due to launch next year with global illumination. It’s…

Let’s change tack and talk about open-source software and Linux—stop groaning at the back! You won’t be running desktop Linux, and that’s fine, we’re not here to convince you to, but the majority of the world’s servers and virtual machines do run Linux. Why? This sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not because the software is free (technically, yes it is, but it costs to deploy and support it); it’s because the software has been freed under the GNU GPL (General Public License). Back in the day, Microsoft required a Windows license for every physical processor in a system. Think about that for a moment. For your desktop, who cares? But even modest workstations have dual CPUs. And what about enterprises that run warehouse-sized server installations? Even worse, what do you…

MEASURING TEMPERATURE There’s a whole plethora of ways of measuring the temperature of your processor and parts, but our favorite tool by far is HWMonitor. Simple, free to download, and developed by the same guys and gals who work on CPU-Z, it can provide you with all the sensor information you could possibly need, from current to temperatures, load, and more. $Free https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html THERMAL PASTE SAGES I was watching an interesting video from the guys at Gamers Nexus with regard to thermal paste. Notably, what effect your application method has on temperature with a mainstream processor. And it confirmed a lot of what we thought to be true. What were the results? Well, they discovered that the application method and amount of paste used made little to no difference on…

Every filter except Liquify and Vanishing Point can be applied as a Smart Filter. To edit their settings, double-click their entry in the Layers palette, and the original filter window appears. Once you’ve finished the composition, editing the Gaussian Blur effect we added in step three can have an interesting result—increasing the Radius to 9 brings in what’s almost a depth of field effect, adding a slight 3D feel to the portrait that wasn’t there before. Increasing it further destroys the solid figure that was the basis of the composition, and lighter areas begin to dissolve away. Smart Filters can also be blended, just like a layer. Double click the parallel-lines-with-two-triangles icon to the right of the Filter Gallery entries in the Layers palette, and you’ll get a Blending Options…

THE MARCH OF PROGRESS usually has a stately pace, but sometimes you need to throw caution to the wind, stomp on the accelerator, and see just how fast you can go. That seems to be what Nvidia is doing with its Turing architecture, and it’s what it hopes gamers will do with their wallets. The RTX 2080 Ti gets you the full kitchen-sink experience. It boasts 21 percent more CUDA cores than the 1080 Ti, and with RT cores and Tensor cores to help accelerate ray tracing and deep-learning calculations, Turing is built for the future. Nvidia is hyping up the raytracing angle, but the deep-learning elements may prove more useful in the long run. The great thing is that you get both. Unlike the RTX 2080, the 2080 Ti…

STRUGGLING TO KEEP UP with the latest must-have features for gaming monitors, such as 144Hz refresh rates, adaptive sync, curved panels, and low input lag modes? Then prepare to be even more baffled. HDR, or High Dynamic Range, visuals have arrived, and represent perhaps the most complex and confusing technology to yet hit the monitor market. BenQ’s new gaming monitor combines all of the above, and more. In fact, it throws USB-C into the mix, along with a 32-inch diagonal LCD panel, and a gamingfriendly quad-HD 2560x1440 native resolution. On paper, the EX3203R is killer. In practice? It’s more complicated. For starters, not all HDR displays are equal. In fact, good luck finding two that are entirely comparable. Not only are there multiple bodies setting standards, but even within a…

THE FACT THAT the British Empire hosted an international team of paranormal troubleshooters—emphasis on shooters—is unrecorded in the history books. Thanks to Rebellion, then, a developer whose commitment to historical accuracy cannot be questioned, especially after the testical-shooting gratification of Sniper Elite, for bringing it to light. Strange Brigade is a co-op shooter pitting you against swarms of Egyptian-themed zombies, and as such loses something if played solo. It’s also aggressively British, with three of the initial four characters coming from the heart of the Empire, while the fourth, a bit of a stereotype, is from a colonized country. A pre-order exclusive extra character adds diversity, while the first DLC character—an all-American rodeo rider—has already been announced. The game seems designed to drain your wallet, as the trickle of free…

DVI is pretty much dead. VGA ports are but a distant memory. Welcome to 2018, and the age of the modern digital video connection, where HDMI and DisplayPort rule, the latter in the form of both dedicated DisplayPort sockets and courtesy of an alternate mode via the neat little USB-C connector. But how do these cutting-edge video interfaces compare? Does it matter whether you’re gaming or hammering through spreadsheets? Let battle commence. ROUND 1 Bandwidth In this age of ever higher resolutions, color depths, dynamic ranges, and refresh rates, the most important metric for any digital display interface is bandwidth. Intriguingly, it’s a moving target. Today, 2K displays with 144Hz refresh are becoming more popular. Tomorrow, it will be 4K, then in a few years, 8K and plenty of Hz.…

Microsoft’s campaign to get millions of Chrome and Firefox users to switch to Edge continues, but there aren’t many new features—things like the redesign of the three-dot menu that now groups icons, and a new look for its settings page. There are controls for autoplaying media, including blocking them, but you can also manage them on a per-site basis, and you can turn off Flash content. Edge tabs now appear in the Alt-Tab task switcher, and your most commonly visited sites appear in a Jump List when you right-click the Edge icon on the Taskbar. There’s now dictionary lookup if you highlight a word in the PDF viewer or in Reading View, and there are new page color themes for the latter, while the former gets an “Add Notes” option…

IT’S NO SECRET THAT PHANTEKS has produced some of our absolute favorite cases of all time. Its attention to detail, use of high-quality materials, and innovative design philosophy has forged some true gems when it comes to those rectangular boxes our systems call home. As for the Evolv X? Well, it’s an evolutionary step up from Phanteks’s original Evolv. This mid-tower monster takes all the features of the original Evolv, and improves upon them. From enhanced airflow to better spacing, superior tempered glass panels, now fixable in place, and those intuitive rear hard drive caddies, it’s a case to be admired. Of course, there’s also the added inclusion of some smooth-flowing RGB, all digitally controllable and ready to go, and superb cooling support. Oh boy, it’s a liquid-cooler’s dream, that’s…

There are certainly precedents for open hardware being successful, even if that comes with a few hiccups along the way. One of the better-known projects is Arduino, an Italian-designed microcontroller range that has its software and hardware designs licensed under Creative Commons. The schematics and designs for the boards have open licenses, even though the Arduino name itself is trademarked. In fact, there was a legal spat between the founders over the trademark, but thankfully that was resolved in 2017. Arduino’s open nature has enabled it to flourish as a core component in the more niche maker area, because it enables smaller specialist hobbyist companies to manufacture Arduino-compatible boards. Certainly, part of the RISC-V initiative is to deliver an open ecosystem in line with Arduino, alongside the open-source software. An additional…

BACKGROUND Last year’s iPhone X had a weird name and the most advanced internals we’d ever seen. Now Apple turns it up to 11 with the iPhone XS and XS Max. We’re taking apart the XS, so grab hold of your Roman numerals, and let’s get started. MAJOR TECH SPECS Hexa-core A12 Bionic SoC with a “next-gen” Neural Engine 5.8-inch (2436×1125) 458 ppi Super Retina OLED display with True Tone, wide color gamut, and 3D Touch 12MP rear cameras (wide-angle and telephoto) with f/1.8 and f/2.4 apertures and OIS, and 7MP selfie cam paired with TrueDepth Face ID hardware 64GB of onboard storage (256 and 512GB optional configs) Gigabit-class LTE (not 5G), as well as 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, with MIMO, Bluetooth 5.0, and NFC Improved dust and water resistance with an…

MANY OF US HAVE GOOGLE CHROME running on our PCs. While Microsoft Edge is a very good web browser, Chrome is the best option if you regularly use Google websites and services. But did you know that Chrome can also scan your PC for malware? While malware can infect your PC more widely, it often causes problems with your browser, such as changing your homepage or search engine without your permission, or perhaps you keep being redirected to sites you don’t want to visit. That’s where Chrome’s built-in malware scanner comes in, and we’ll show you how to use it right here. It’s actually a fairly new tool, and Google worked with security firm ESET to develop the technology. A word of warning: It isn’t designed to be a complete…

IT’S A JUNGLE OUT THERE. When we go online, we have to battle the various villains that roam the Internet: malicious software, people trying to access our online accounts, fake “phishing” links, and other unpleasantness. The good news is that Windows comes with a great range of tools to help keep you safe, and they’re not difficult to use or complicated to set up. In this tutorial, you’ll discover the key Windows features that help keep your PC protected, and how you can make sure they’re working properly. Our screenshots are of Windows 10, the safest version of Windows yet, but the tools and features we talk about work just fine in older versions, too. For those Windows versions, we recommend using a third-party antivirus program, but other than that,…

CAST YOUR MIND back to late 2006. That’s when Intel introduced its first desktop quad-core CPU. Fast-forward nearly 11 years later to summer 2017, and what had changed? In terms of core counts, not much. Intel’s mainstream desktop socket was still limited to just four cores. OK, you could buy so-called desktop chips with more than four cores, but they were part of what was and remains today a series of rebadged server platforms, complete with costly multichannel memory controllers, and other features that up the price but do little to enhance the desktop computing experience. Yet here we are in late 2018, reviewing a mainstream eight-core CPU from Intel, just a year after it unveiled its first six-core mainstream chips. What, exactly, is going on? The answer is Ryzen.…

PORTABILITY AND PLENTY of screen real estate don’t normally see eye to eye. However, a recent development is enabling those two ancient foes to become a little more pally. We speak, of course, of USB-C, in all its single-port, multi-function glory. It’s an enabler thanks to three key properties. First is loads of bandwidth, which is essential for driving high-resolution displays. Second is support for DisplayPort alternate mode, and thus the ability to function as a video port without the need for special drivers. Third is the ability to supply much higher power output. USB-C maxes out at 5A and 20V, and thus fully 100 watts. Not every USB-C port will necessarily deliver the full 100 watts, but broadly speaking, if your PC or laptop has a USB-C port, it…

HAIR HAS COME A LONG WAY in videogames since the blue-topped goons of Wing Commander II. While it still clings in shrub-like patches, it moves and reacts with a degree of naturalism—even if it now protrudes over Lara Croft’s forehead like the rearward part of a duck. Lara’s appearance has been tinkered with again. She remains a reasonably naturalistic early-20s woman, as seen previously in the trilogy, but distinct from her appearance in the recent movie. Her body count is mind-boggling, and she must surely be on some sort of most-wanted list for the number of antiquities she’s stolen, but her slight figure, noticeably shorter than the heavily armed men who hunt her down, is an effective device for gaining the player’s sympathy. But it’s not enough. Shadow has done…

> Version Control > Secure Systems > Upgrading Graphics File Versioning In the August 2018 issue, your response to Mr. Monarrez on a Time Machine alternative caught my interest. I lost a version of a file because I modified it twice between backups. I don’t use File History because it only looks in certain folders, but I have a financial program called Quicken with a neat option that lets you add a date stamp to the file name every time it’s backed up. The other programs you mentioned seemed to be backup-oriented. However, I’m looking for a utility that sits in the background and only backs up the files I select whenever they’re saved to disk (preferably with a date stamp). I know there are programs like this in the…

What would life be without a little challenge along the way, eh? Whatever your passion or your hobby, finding new ways of testing yourself, and pushing the limits of what you can do, is key to achieving fulfillment for us human beings. Whether that’s in sport, in gaming, with PCs, or in your work, there’s no arguing that it’s part of the human condition, and something we’re all secretly obsessed with. The reality is, we’re masochists. All torturing ourselves to become better at what we do, constantly striving for more. At least, we are here in the office. Not literal masochists, of course, although that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with that. Far be it from little ol’ Maximum PC to tell you how to conduct your love life. It’s…

3Dfx Voodoo Launched way back in 1996, the Voodoo started life in arcade machines, and jumped to the PC when RAM prices fell far enough. It brought decent accelerated 3D graphics to home machines, and was, at the time, simply awesome. It was also expensive, and required a companion card to do all the 2D work. The proprietary API from its arcade machine roots didn’t help, either. Technically inferior, but significantly cheaper, and better supported cards won out in the end. But, for a while, it was king, especially when playing Quake. No card of merit since could go without accelerated 3D. Thank you Voodoo. GeForce 256 Nvidia’s first true star dates from 1999. The company even coined the term “GPU” to describe its silicon heart. It was the first to…

MONOPOLIES AREN’T BAD. At least, they don’t have to be. But with a single corporation owning the rights to the x86 instruction set, the consumer processor market is hardly abuzz with competition. It’s true enough that AMD’s star is currently on the ascent, but that’s been helped by a decade of stagnation by Intel, ever since the heights of the original Core 2 releases. The situation is an indication, though, of what would happen if x86’s only competitor dropped out of the processor market—Intel could stop all development, and you would still have no option but to buy its processors. It isn’t healthy to over-specialize. “But there’s ARM!” you rightly cry. ARM is a peddler of intellectual property, though. The company licenses its design, and manufactures nothing itself. It’s a…

We can’t emphasize enough that benchmarks are largely irrelevant at this point, as RISC-V implementations are going to be targeting embedded, low-power, controller and enthusiast boards. No one is going to be releasing a consumer-level laptop or desktop at this early stage. There is a question, though, of how efficient the ISA is versus other commercial implementations. A thorough micro-op analysis of, say, x86-64 versus RISC-V compiled binaries is the sort of thing good PhD theses are made from. In fact, that was exactly what was done back in 2016; you can see an outline of the report on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii_pEXKKYUg), which shows RISC-V binaries are competitive in micro-op density, and can outperform x86 and ARMv8 code, with a number of potential compiler optimizations being highlighted from the study. For a…

EARLY WARNING SYSTEMS provide alerts to pending issues, so immediate action can be taken to prevent or reduce further damage. “Honeypot” is a term assigned to a computer system designed to detect unauthorized access to the resources it makes available. Honeypots are configured to look like legitimate computer resources on a network; the computer can be posed to look like a fileserver containing data that would appeal to an attacker. A honeypot webserver, a honeypot database, or a honeypot application server would have resources staged as bait to attract the adversary. When the attacker tries to gain access to a specific resource, it is blocked, because the resource is fake. However, the attempt triggers an alert, and can be logged for analysis. If an attacker has entered your network, depending…

CARING ABOUT YOUR ONLINE PRIVACY and actually following best practices to protect it are two different things. As a Maximum PC reader, it’s likely that you know the principles of what you should do to avoid the great data collectors and geo-locators in the sky, but maintaining constant vigilance is an effort that soon gets tiresome, if not downright impossible. For example, you know that you should be using a VPN to avoid any ISP-level filters. Setting up and using a log-free VPN service from your desktop is straightforward enough, but what about all the other devices you have in your home? For example, if you use a games console to watch Netflix or YouTube on your TV, how do you route traffic from there effectively? No consoles have built-in…

POP ART WAS A CREATIVE MOVEMENT that began in the late 1950s and flourished in the United States. It saw the artistic space that had been previously inhabited by refined painting and sculpture invaded by common objects, particularly comic-book panels and mundane images, such as Andy Warhol’s soup cans. There was more to pop art than a few stacked tins, however—it also saw the removal of subjects from their contexts, and a return to hard-edged composition in contrast to the softness of earlier portraiture. It could be surreal, minimal, colorful, repetitive, and even created mechanically. Here, we’re going to look at a pop-art portrait, creating it using Photoshop’s layers as well as its clever Smart Objects and Smart Filters, which retain the information you used to create them, and allow…

THIS IS GOING to be a tricky review. We looked at the Founders Edition last issue, and found it wanting, so far as generational upgrades are concerned. It’s an odd proposition, and not something we can wholeheartedly recommend; its main selling points—ray tracing and DLSS antialiasing—are unknown quantities at the time of writing, and even once the features are supported by Microsoft, we’ll probably still be waiting some time for more titles to enable them. What you’re left with is a card that performs the same as a GTX 1080 Ti, but for $140 more. It’s a tough one to swallow. That’s not to say DLSS and ray tracing aren’t interesting concepts, though. Designing dedicated hardware on to which to offload antialiasing is a genius idea, and arguably the future…

IT’S NOT OFTEN that a keyboard strikes us as special. Many great keyboards cross our desks, many innovative devices, many bells, many whistles. But special keyboards? Not so much. So, does the Wooting One really land in that bucket, or is it merely sloshing around in the pool of very good keyboards that we keep in the corner? We’ll tell you: This is special. Very special. It’s a combination of supreme style, superior sound, fantastic feel, and tantalizingly innovative technology that sets itself far apart from everything it’s even tangentially competing with. We’re keeping it. Forget prying it out of our cold, dead hands; we’re curling up around it, and developing rigor mortis. We should probably break down the Wooting One’s key gimmick before we go any further. It’s an…

> Monitor Options > Noise Reduction > Laptop Reviews Value Screening Your article on “The Ultimate Build Guide,” October 2018, could not have been more timely for me. It’s been 15-plus years since I built my own PC, and I am looking to get back into it with a cheap, but powerful, build. The only thing lacking for me in the guide would be an affordable monitor to go with the new rig. Do you have any recommendations for monitors under the same theme as “most bang for your buck”? Thank you. –Jeremy Knox DEPUTY EDITOR, ZAK STOREY, RESPONDS: There are plenty of excellent monitors out there right now, and you should be able to find a great value screen whatever size you’re looking for. For those wanting a specific…