Table of contents for December 2020 in Maximum PC

8 LOGITECH G203 LIGHTSYNC $40 A compact and affordable gaming mouse with an 8,000 DPI sensor and three-zone RGB lighting, it’s a straightforward upgrade from the previous G203 Prodigy. 7 E-ELEMENT Z-88 RGB 60% $48 With a wide selection of Outemu switches, the Z-88 is a slick 60% keyboard that is surprisingly durable thanks to its aluminum top plate. 6 STEELSERIES SENSEI 310 $46 Not only is it affordable, but the Sensei 310 is also one of the best ambidextrous mice on the market right now. A 12,000 DPI esports sensor sweetens the deal. 5 JLAB AUDIO TALK GO $49 Compact but effective, the Audio Talk GO has a solid tripod and dual polar patterns, making it a versatile choice for streamers. 4 HYPERX CLOUD STINGER CORE WIRED $40 With…

Blu-ray Ripping I am building a new PC to be used to rip a large collection of DVDs and Blu-ray discs, and I would like your thoughts as to which hardware would make the task faster. I use a software package called Pavtube to do the conversion. The software has an option to speed up the process by enabling Nvidia's CUDA cores on the graphics card. I see when I look at the specs of various Nvidia graphics cards listed on Pavtube’s website that there are different numbers of CUDA cores depending on the card—from 1,536 cores (GeForce GTX 1660 TI) all the way up to 4,992 (Tesla K80). Is this important? Would an even newer card—the RTX 2070 Super or RTX 2080 Super—be a better choice? Finally, would you…

THIS BUILD PROVED slightly more complex to assemble than we’d hoped, but that may have come down to our ham-handedness while trying to plug in tiny I/O cables inside this cramped case. The finished product looks good and runs great, though, with satisfyingly low temperatures and noise across the board. In fact, our PSU and GPU fans spend a great deal of time not spinning at all, thanks to the low power draw and heat generation. The processor doesn’t blow us away in terms of performance, and our rather basic cooling solution means that throwing any CPU-heavy loads at this system isn’t going to work well, but it handles games reasonably well without getting too hot. Post-testing, we installed Ryzen Master and activated its auto-overclocking functions, which eked around five…

IT’S BEEN TWO YEARS since Nvidia unveiled the Turing architecture, ushering in the new era of ray-traced graphics for games. OK, let’s be frank: Raytracing adoption in games has been sluggish and often underwhelming. More accurate reflections, slightly improved shadows? Yawn. We want it all: Reflections, refractions, shadows, global illumination, caustics, ambient occlusion! The problem is that each of those effects increases the burden placed on the ray-tracing hardware and your GPU, so developers often picked one or a few effects at most. But that all changes with Nvidia’s Ampere architecture. Take everything that was great about Turing and basically double down, and you get an idea of what Nvidia has planned for Ampere. We have a full review of the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition [See page 68], the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A WEB BROWSER https://pcpartpicker.com WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE, we’ve all sat down and thought to ourselves: “Huh, what parts should I pick for my next PC?” It’s never an easy question to answer, and is undoubtedly why here at Maximum PC we get a lot of requests from readers, family, and friends on what we’d recommend they pick up for their next build. As much as putting together a PC is akin to adult Lego, when it comes to picking the parts for that build, wading waist-deep through all those choices and deciding how exactly to allocate your budget isn’t quite as simple. Especially for those who aren’t as deep into the industry as we are. So we’re going to teach you the not-so-mystical ways on how…

CORSAIR’S ONE of the few brands out there that really catapulted the mechanical keyboard into the mainstream world of PC gaming. With the launch of its original K70 Vengeance back in 2013, with Cherry MX switches, it was a revolutionary moment. But the K70 wasn’t the only board in Corsair’s arsenal. Designed for those who wanted a no-nonsense board with a clean, crisp aluminum design, Cherry MX Red switches, and some kick-ass media controls, including the now-infamous volume scroll wheel, it was in fact a midrange proposition when it first launched, sitting merrily in the middle of Corsair’s stack, between the TKL K60 and the flagship K90. The K90 was a beast of a full-size board, and came with all of the same compliment as the original K70, albeit with…

WE NEVER THOUGHT we’d say it, but for once we’re thankful for the massive, intrusive, just plain long tutorial that comes with a game. After years of not playing them, of diving into the first mission and decrying it as the game’s fault if we couldn’t work out what the controls did, both of this month’s games have stopped us in our tracks. What Crusader Kings III and Flight Simulator have in common it that they’re not pick-up-and-play experiences. Flight Simulator is an unforgiving simulation of when a large piece of metal intersects with many natural systems. Crusader Kings is an unforgiving simulation of a natural system—your family—intersecting with more natural systems and, quite often, multiple large pieces of sharp metal. Played in the abstract, it's a scrolling map overlaid…

I COME FROM A GASOLINE-guzzling family. Mom’s side is obsessed with classic American cars and V8s, and Pop’s was always tinkering around with old-school Volkswagens. Growing up, I was surrounded by engines and noise. Because of that and my love of technology, my taste in cars is somewhat eclectic. At the moment I have two. My main daily driver is an 07 Audi TT Coupe with a 3.2L V6 engine, and I also have a little 2010 Fiat 500 1.2L 4-cylinder, which the other half drives to work. Both amazing cars, but both somewhat technologically agnostic. I had a Golf Mk7 GTI before this with all the bells and whistles, but I needed to sell it to split it into two vehicles. This month we’ve been involved in two road…

16TB WD My Cloud Home Duo NAS IN OUR GRAND BELOVED PASTIME, the genius of human brilliance has perpetually brought us up above and beyond anything we could’ve possibly imagined. We can process unfathomable calculations almost as fast as the speed of light, render entire worlds and digital realms in fractions of a second, and blaze through masses of stored data in the time it takes to blink. And yet, for all our advancements and perpetual brilliance in pushing the boundaries of that humble transistor, it has come at a price. This eternal pursuit to improve what our machines are capable of, no matter the cost, has mired this technological landscape, and marked it with one fatal flaw, in perhaps a way that we’ve yet to truly fully appreciate. The…

YOU’LL NEED THIS TOOLS Sleeving, wire, heatshrink, patience, and tough fingers. CABLES IN PCS ARE OFTEN AN UNRULY MESS. We’re not just talking about bad cable management either—the physical look of them can ruin the prettiest PC. Thankfully, it isn’t often that we see the old-style “ketchup and mustard” cables anymore, and nowadays higher end PSU manufacturers are even doing pre-sleeved cables with their products, but still they’re often the incorrect color or just look wrong. You are also at the manufacturers’ mercy as to how long they are. Today we’ll show you what you will need to tame these snake-like beasts and get those PCs looking as good as you do. We will do this in multiple parts, as cable sleeving takes some explaining, and it does have an element…

THE GEFORCE RTX 3080 finally kicks off the new season of GPUs, sporting Nvidia’s new Ampere architecture (see: Ampere deep-dive, page 38). Forget the star players of the past couple of years; the hot young talent is ready to kick some serious ass. Even better: Nvidia isn’t asking for a massive signing bonus this round. The RTX 3080 takes over the outgoing RTX 2080 Super’s $699 price point, which means gaming enthusiasts can actually afford one (almost). Just about everything has changed with the 3080 Founders Edition. It looks nothing like previous Nvidia GPUs, and frankly looks nothing like any other GPU we’ve seen. It has dual fans, but in a novel approach to cooling, the axial fan that’s closer to the video ports serves as something of a blower,…

WE HAVE REVIEWED hundreds of peripherals over the years, and we have become rather blasé when we receive them. They are usually so similar it is rare that something really manages to excite us. However, when we received the Pwnage package, we were like kids in a candy shop. Pwnage has been around for some time. It started with an energy drink, then moved to a rather uninspiring mouse, but now it has burst into the market with something remarkably interesting indeed: The Pwnage Ultra Custom Wireless. As the name suggests, customization is the name of the game for this mouse. You can choose between wireless, wired, battery or no battery, solid or honeycomb plates, and you have a huge number of colors to play with. The base mouse color…

ELEVEN GAMES into a series that began in 1982 (and has its roots in 1976), and Microsoft has struck absolute gold. More of a hobby in itself than a game, Flight Simulator scratches the dream of flight that’s itched at the back of your skull since you first saw a huge passenger jet lumber into the air from the freeway near LAX. All this comes with a price, however. Firstly there’s the financial one—the game is available on Game Pass, but if you want the version with the most planes out of the box rather than as add-on DLC you’re looking at over $100. Then there’s hardware, with it shredding all currently available CPU/GPU combos at the time of writing, especially when over large cities or landing at international airports.…

OH HERE HE GOES AGAIN, talking about languages, when will it end? I know, I know, I’ve spoken so much about this over the last few issues, I promise this is the last time I do it. Maybe… Problem is, it’s such a big thing for me right now, and it’s a huge motivator. It keeps me busy, distracted, and well, if I’m honest, fairly sane. There’s only so much Cobra Kai you can watch without a karate school nearby (Miyagi-Do forever!). And let’s face it, I’m being productive despite being stuck indoors, so that’s a plus. The thing is, I now spend so much of my time pouring over Norwegian, aiming towards that end goal of becoming fluent in another language that it’s starting to leak into other areas…

WhereDoThe Builds Go? CarSeatPC Cooling MediaServers What Happens To The Builds? Hi there, what happens to all of these builds you do after they’ve been featured in the magazine? – Various EDITOR ZAK STOREY RESPONDS: This is actually a fairly complicated question that we get quite a lot, so I wanted to take the time to respond to all of you who have asked about it. Here at Maximum PC, we don’t necessarily operate in the same way as, say, a bigger YouTube channel would, or a website. Because we have a more specialist, print-oriented audience, some companies don’t deal with us in the same way as they would with an online brand (which sucks). What that means is a lot of the bigger online publications hold on to all…

WE NOW HAVE THE PRICES for the next generation of consoles. The good news is that they start from $299 for the Xbox Series S. This diminutive, budget version of the Xbox lacks a drive and is less powerful than its big brother, aimed at 1440p gaming and only running 4K using upscaling. It also has more limited backwards compatability. For full 4K gaming and a disk drive, the Xbox Series X will set you back $499, exactly as expected. Sony has also confirmed its pricing: The PlayStation 5 will also cost $499. The PlayStation 5 Digital Edition will be $399, however. You get exactly the same 4K game machine inside—all you lose is that Blu-ray drive. Microsoft’s cheaper digital version is a shrewd move. The console market is a…

IN THE BLUE CORNER we have Rocket Lake. Intel at last moves away from the venerable Skylake-derived microarchitecture and “backports” its newer Willow Cove design (or Cypress Cove if rumors prove true). This will give a useful bump in instructions per cycle of up to 25 percent, although losses in the backporting process may eat into that. This wasn’t the original plan, but setbacks in the manufacturing of 10nm chips have left Intel no choice but to stick with 14nm. Speeds should reach 5.3GHz, and there’ll be PCIe 4.0 support. It’ll also carry the new Xe graphics engine, finally giving Intel something that can make a decent stab at running games. One disappointment is the core count: Rocket Lake looks likely to top out at eight cores, as excessive heat…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1–2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY 1 STRIP TEASE AS USUAL, start the build process with a stripdown of the case. The Raijintek Ophion Evo makes this nice and simple; the only things that really need removing at this stage are the two glass side panels, each of which is secured by four thumbscrews with rubber washers. These side panels are a bit delicate and prone to scratches and fingerprints, so place them back into the case box and leave them until the build is complete. If your Ophion Evo is new, you’ll need to extract a few extra bits and pieces, like the accessories bag and plastic cover on the PCIe riser cable. Leave the blue plastic cover on the PCIe connector until you’re ready to…

NATURALLY, everything under the Ubuntu hood has been refreshed. The 5.4 kernel brings support for new hardware and fixes for old. What most home users will be interested in is the desktop, and you’ll find that Gnome 3.36 looks and behaves better than ever. It seems like there’s been a two-year game of bug whack-a-mole, both within Gnome and Ubuntu’s take on it, to address annoying performance and memory issues. But with this release, it’s as smooth as the inferior type of peanut butter. “The darkening” has come finally to Ubuntu. Like so many desktops and programs it now offers a dark mode, which some people find easier on the eyes. Light or dark, we think you’ll love the new bold icons and Yaru theme. Gnome’s application folders feature—in which…

WE GET IT. A new Ubuntu release, even an LTS, isn’t the cause célèbre it once was. But we’ve always said that this lack of ground-breaking change is a good thing. It shows that Ubuntu has reached such a level of maturity that refinement, and not radical rewriting of the rules, is the optimal path. We also understand that there are plenty of other distros suitable for beginners (and let’s stress here that Ubuntu is popular with professionals too), and maybe some of those don’t get the attention that Ubuntu does. All that aside, Ubuntu remains one of the most popular distros among Linux users in general. In this new outing you’ll find support for AMD’s Navi 12 and 14 GPUs as well as its new APUs, and the open-source…

TIP OF THE MONTH TRY OUT A FAN HUB PC a bit noisy? Fans not ramping up enough to keep it cool? Then you may want to invest in a fan controller to mount inside your case. Plenty of manufacturers (such as Phanteks, NZXT, or Deepcool) offer these, enabling you to take more direct control over your PC’s fans—whether that’s through dedicated software, or a physical controller for those of you who prefer more tactile controls. submit your How To project idea to: comments@maximumpc.com…

YOU’LL NEED THIS INTERNET BROWSER www.falstad.com/circuit LOGISIM www.church.com/logisim MOST LIKELY, the processor in your PC has upwards of a billion transistors. Trying to get your head around the workings of such a complicated electronic circuit might, therefore, seems a daunting task. Yet helping you to understand what goes on inside a CPU is the task we’ve set ourselves here. The latest chips are complicated by many bells and whistles doing way more than straight “processing”, so we should think of a very basic chip and take it on trust that the principles here can indeed be scaled up. In 1971, the very first microprocessor—the 4-bit Intel 4004—still had 2,250 transistors on board. While that might be a whole lot more manageable than a couple of billion, it might still seem…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT COME ON NOW, you knew it was coming. You can’t launch a major new GPU architecture and a swathe of graphics cards and expect us here at Maximum PC to not go out and put together a ridiculously over-the-top, super-powerful, super-expensive machine. It’s in our nature. So that is exactly what we’re doing here today. However, if I’m honest, it being this colorful is a happy accident—depending on your point of view anyway. It’s certainly not something we set out to achieve, but it’s part and parcel of working with the brands we do—more on that later. So what’s the ambition? Well simply put, to see how well MSI’s GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio can perform in an…

PODCASTS, EH? We’ve heard of them. If you’re going to start recording your thoughts for posterity and the amusement of your friends, then you’re going to need a couple of things. First is a decent microphone or two, of which there are many out there from brands such as RØDE, Blue, Shure, and Audio-technica. Then you are going to need software to record your podcast and edit it into shape. There are as many applications made to help with podcasts as there are microphones and subjects to discuss. We’re going to look at two of them here: Audacity, which is a free app created by a team of volunteers and released under the GNU General Public License; and Audition, which is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud and therefore comes with…