Table of contents for November 2016 in Maximum PC

THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES... Waiting for Polaris Dear Doctor, after reading Maximum PC’s May 2016 review of Skylake-compatible motherboards, I decided to build a gaming machine in a Mini-ITX form factor. The plan was to purchase Asus’s Z170I Pro Gaming, which you reviewed. But, after looking at all of that company’s products, I went with the Maximus VIII Impact instead. At this point, I have all of the parts to go with it, except for a graphics card. My son recommended that I wait for AMD’s Radeon RX 480 8GB, so I put off finishing the machine for now. Unfortunately, they’re all sold out! Now I need your advice: Should I keep waiting until availability improves, or go with another card? The games I am playing include Civilization V…

TECHNOLOGY HAS ADVANCED more over the last 30 years than during the rest of human history. Think back to Pong, the Commodore 64, the Atari 2600, the Sega Saturn. Think back to the games we used to play. Look back at the earliest PlayStations and personal computers, at Half-Life, Medal of Honor, Tomb Raider, and Freelancer. Look back to Crysis, to Far Cry, to Call of Duty, and take a moment to appreciate just how far we’ve come in such a short space of time. As long as there’s been silicon in processors, graphical fidelity has led the way in driving the consumer market forward, pushing manufacturers to test the limits of what they can achieve with each of those minuscule chips. The Titan X is the epitome of this…

THIS MONTH WE DISSECT... BACKGROUND Apple’s first update to the 12-inch MacBook with Retina Display is a baby update, so we’re matching it with a baby teardown. Beside a faster processor and zippier flash memory, what’s changed? There’s only one way to find out: crack it open. MAJOR TECH SPECS • 12-inch 2304x1440 (226ppi) IPS Retina Display • 1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core m3 processor (configurable up to 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core m7) • 8GB of 1,866MHz LPDDR3 RAM • 256GB or 512GB PCIe-based flash storage • Intel HD Graphics 515 • 1802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fiwireless networking and Bluetooth 4.0 • Single USB-C port and 3.5mm headphone jack KEY FINDINGS • If it weren’t for the rose gold finish, we’d be hard-pressed to distinguish this year’s Retina MacBook from yesteryear’s. The exteriors look…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE LIGHTROOM Subscribe at www.adobe.com. VIDEO FILES Most common file formats are compatible with Lightroom. LIGHTROOM IS FOR RAW IMAGE WORKFLOW, non-destructive image-editing, and searching, tagging, and organizing. It does those things very well, but there are also some lesser-known tricks up its sleeve, including the ability to deal with video files. DSLRs have been able to shoot HD video for some time now, and 4K is beginning to make its way into manufacturers’ top-level offerings. Lightroom is capable of working with most common video file formats, though, so whether you’re using a GoPro, an iPhone, or a Canon EOS 1-DX Mark II, it’ll be able to handle the files. You can import video at the same time as still images, process it in the same app,…

THE X99 PLATFORM is incredibly attractive. Six cores or more, quad-channel memory, plenty of PCIe lanes, expanded storage options, the list goes on. But for those looking to move to a smaller form factor in the process, options are limited. MicroATX and smaller X99 boards are few and far between. There’s a grand total of one ITX X99 board, and four microATX ones—slim pickings indeed. And when you’re looking for the perfect motherboard to round out a slick new themed build, well… let’s just say it’s a little challenging. EVGA’s X99 Micro 2 mobo, then, provides a good base for any builder looking to put a well-rounded build together. Aesthetically, it’s gorgeous. With a lightweight metallic rear I/O cover, black heatsinks, and a stunning mix of black PCB and limited…

AT MAXIMUM PC, we tend to look at the extreme. Thanks to your support, we’re in a very privileged position, being able to pick and choose some of the best products to review. Nowhere is this more obvious than with audio systems—DACs and headphones in particular. Anything with a signature acoustic resonance. However, these products, from the likes of Devialet, Beyerdynamic, and more, owe a massive debt to their precursors. In particular, we’re talking about the 2.1 speaker systems of yesteryear. Speaker systems that were developed and created solely to make the most of the limited space provided by a desktop environment. Alas, 2.1 speaker systems have almost hit an impasse. Finding a decent set of premium 2.1s today is hard work. The big brands—such as Logitech, Antec, Corsair, even…

WE TACKLE TOUGH READER QUESTIONS ON... Useful shortcuts For Windows XP and Windows 7 users looking for their old troubleshooting commands in Windows 8 and 10, simply use Windows-X. Windows-I can be handy as well. –Mark Seest EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: We like readers bearing gifts. Rightclicking the Start button produces the same result, but keyboard shortcuts are definitely quicker. So well done, Mark. Dream builds Another great August issue! I read the comments section in the last issue about doing a microATX build, and I thought that would be great. Then I thought, you know what would be better? A water-cooled build. Then I thought, even better would be a Dream Machine in a CaseLabs Mercury S5. Epic, I say, very epic indeed. Just one more suggestion, I…

“Microsoft has millions of systems, and a single key now unlocks them all. TWO “RESEARCHERS” going by the monikers “MY123” and “slipstream” have revealed on their blog a fairly monumental hole in the Windows Secure Boot process—a so-called golden key. This “key” has the potential to be able to unlock every Secure Boot Windows device to allow the installation of other operating systems. During booting, Windows uses Secure Boot to check that the operating system has a Microsoft certificate and the right policies. The Secure Boot Policy is normally only accessible by Boot Manager. During the development of Windows 10, a new policy was added, to ease testing and debugging, which has its settings merged in, depending on conditions. This policy was shipped with retail Windows versions—accidentally, we assume—sitting dormant…

JUST WHEN WE THOUGHT MOORE’S LAW was history, that gaming graphics was grinding to a halt, it’s happened. Finally, belatedly, both AMD and Nvidia are rolling out a hot new generation of die-shrunk graphics chips. Cue a collective sigh on behalf of PC gamers across the globe. Among the new chips are the bases of indisputably the fastest and most powerful graphics cards we’ve ever seen. Some of the numbers involved are spectacular, going on preposterous. Billions of transistors per chip, trillions of floating point operations per second, countless pixels pumped—it’s all very exciting. But along with a new performance paradigm has come a new pricing paradigm, from Nvidia at least. The Mean Green Graphics Machine has set a distinctly unwelcome standard in that regard with the $1,200 Titan X.…

BUYING AN EARLY ACCESS GAME on Steam seems like a gamble. You want us to pay money for something that’s not finished, and will be full of bugs and empty of content? Yet, when you consider the popularity of Kickstarter, where people put down money on the basis of an idea alone, Valve’s system starts to look less problematic. You get the game, in whatever state it’s in, you get the chance to play it early, and feed back information about bugs and problems to the developer, and you get to keep it when it’s finished. A lot of these aren’t expensive games, and many have simple graphics and low system requirements, but Early Access is the home of the sort of title that might not get made any…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI AND SD CARD/USB DISK See www.raspberrypi.org. OWNCLOUD Download it from www.owncloud.org. THERE ARE PLENTY OF CLOUD file storage and sharing services, so why would you want the hassle of setting up your own? There are many reasons, beyond the perfectly acceptable “because you can.” Commercial services have limits on the amount of data you can store. They may or may not encrypt your data, but it is their encryption—you can’t be sure that they can’t read it. If you’re sharing between computers on the same network, your data still has to go to their server, over a relatively slow upstream link, before it can be downloaded to another computer in the next room. On the other hand, commercial providers have large data farms, with plenty…

“TWO MOTHERBOARDS in one issue and it isn’t a group test? Are you crazy, Maximum PC? Why do you keep tormenting yourselves like this?” Good question. This month has been particularly interesting for us; we finally garnered a press contact at EVGA for some much-desired review samples, and then, MSI sent us, absolutely totally on purpose, this exceptionally stunning, ballsto-the-wall, silver MSI Z170A MPower Gaming Titanium ATX motherboard. Try saying that five times fast, while drunk. Poorly angled imagery aside (curse you crazy photographers), this motherboard is beautiful, and that’s down to a couple of nifty additions, most prominent of which is that suitably succulent shiny silver PCB. Until now, we’ve never seen a PCB in silver. Yes, Asus introduced an all-white PCB in the form of the Sabertooth…

WHAT DO WE LOOK FOR when evaluating whether or not a pair of headphones is any good? There’s plenty of criteria, both quantitative and subjective. Frequency response, impedance, comfort, sound signature, connection standard, you name it—the list is almost endless. There are ways we can guess ahead of time, however; things we look for when seeking a pair of acoustic drivers capable of satisfying our highly demanding criteria. More often than not, it comes down to two specifications: impedance and frequency response. Although not the be-all and end-all of headphone design, a good frequency response indicates a potential soundscape untethered by the limits of the driver itself. Coupled with a high impedance cutting out any residual background noise, and you’re usually on to a winner. BEST HEADPHONES EVER? With that…

READING THAT A GAME is made for VR may give you the same sinking feeling as when a movie is made for 3D. Great—there will be lots of unconvincing CG, and loads of bits where something big and pointy is pushed toward the audience. So, in a medium that’s entirely CG, what can a game built for VR offer that one for flat screens can’t? One thing is the control scheme. Among the limitations of the current generation of VR hardware is the unpleasant nauseous sensation some people get when moving. Developer nDreams clearly knows this, as The Assembly has one of the best VR control setups we’ve seen. Holding the left trigger pops up a ghost of your character, which can be moved using a combination of sticks and…

TRIUMPHS WORLD’S BIGGEST SSD DRIVE Seagate has built a monstrous 60TB SSD drive, four times bigger than the previous record holder, from Samsung. A commercial version is due next year. ATOMIC-SCALE HDD Researchers have found a way to write data with single chlorine atoms on copper, increasing data density by 500 times. But it does require-321 C. STREAMING PLAYSTATION You’ll soon be able to play PlayStation 3 games on PC via PlayStation Now, although Europeans will get first go. TRAGEDIES HACK CAN OPEN VWS A security company has revealed a hack that can open 100 million VW cars using $30-worth of hardware to intercept the key fob signal. CHROME TO LOSE FLASH Chrome is to drop all Flash support by the end of the year. Ten sites will be spared—all…

This year has seen some of the craziest advancements in graphics performance since both manufacturers jumped down from 40nm to 28nm. We sat down with Jason Megit, AMD’s Technical Marketing Manager, to get some insight into why Polaris and its new 14nm architecture is such a revolutionary step for the company. Maximum PC: Can you tell us a little bit about Polaris’ design process? Where do you start? How does an architecture develop over time? Jason Megit: The design process for Polaris began over three years ago, at which point we spent a great deal of time looking at our current product specifications and trying to project forward into the future and understand the types of use-cases and resulting performance requirements that would be asked of our product in two…

Ever felt you’re losing control of your PC? If you share it with other users—family members or friends, for example—it can be a frustrating experience. First, there’s the need to keep your own data private from other people, then there’s the worry about what they might be doing behind your back. Windows has tools for managing children’s use, but what happens to a PC that’s shared between a group of consenting adults— even those who should know better? In this feature, we’re going to examine two principal ways in which you can regain control of your PC. The first is through user accounts. We’ll reveal a technique whereby everyone—including yourself —gets their level of access reduced on a day-to-day level, tightening security, and preventing the haphazard installation of software and…

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDES TO IMPROVING YOUR PC TAKE CONTROL OF TWITTER Are you an avid Twitter user? Tweetdeck is both a standalone website and Chrome extension developed by Twitter, which enables power users to take full control of their newsfeeds and lists. Intuitive and easy to use, you can choose what lists and feeds to show, whether to see retweets, and even enable a dark mode, making it far easier to manage and catch up on the news. A great tool for journalists and hardware fans alike. OVERCLOCKED GPUS Oh god, here he goes again, talking about overclocking. Sorry, but we get asked a lot about graphics cards, and the overriding question is, “Is GPU overclocking worth it?” And the answer will vary, unsurprisingly. As an example, take the reference Nvidia…

YOU’LL NEED THIS TRENCHBROOM Download the editor from http://kristianduske.com/trenchbroom. A MODERN QUAKEWORLD CLIENT nQuake is our current favorite: http://nquake.com. Quake’s pure brown deathmatch violence is, despite its age, eternal. Even when the FPS genre came of age, and became a hyper-realistic orgy of shiny blood and countless polygons, Quake’s fast, raw blasting (bar a few resolution, networking, and interface upgrades) stayed static. Not so for its map editors. Where once you were forced to wrap your head around constructing maps using 2D views covering three axes, now, with 3D editor TrenchBroom (plus a bunch of handy textures and some modernized compilation tools), you can do it in a manner much closer to playing the game itself. It’s even (whisper it) quite easy. So, let’s make ourselves a kickass deathmatch map,…

THE NUC (Next Unit of Computing) felt like it was on the cusp of greatness when it was first introduced in 2013. Three and a bit years on, and that feeling still prevails, even though this version looks like a completely different beast from what has come before. For some, this is going to be the perfect tiny PC. Unfortunately, that niche is very tightly defined, and it’s still not the mass-market machine many of us were hoping for. So let’s get that spoiler out of the way— this isn’t a Kick Ass device. It almost could be, but there’s a couple of things holding it back. But before we get to what they are exactly, it’s worth covering what you’ll find inside Intel’s latest barebones system, how Intel is…

KEYBOARDS AIMED AT gamers are so common at the moment, you’d be forgiven for being completely confused by them. A popular conceit is to brand them as some sort of esports tool, making you better at MOBAs in the same way that a Longhorns jersey makes you better at baseball. This sort of thing has worked in the world of meatspace sports for so long, it’s no surprise it’s crossed over. The M500 is a budget model, merely “designed with the world’s best esports teams,” without mentioning who they actually are—a solid slab of matt black plastic, with enough metal in its base to give it a decent weight and purchase on your desktop. Each key sits atop the dependable favorite Cherry MX Red switch, giving it the easy up…

THE SECOND OF THIS MONTH’S non-combat games is more abstract, created by a team led by Matt Nava, the art director for PS3 waft-’em-ups Flower and Journey. Both games were critically applauded, so it’s not much of a shock to see Giant Squid deviate little from the template here, taking things underwater in a move we should have deduced from the studio’s name. Abzû’s protagonist is a diver, feline in appearance, apparently unencumbered by the need to breathe, and possessed of a wonderful grace in motion. She swims through a world inhabited purely by underwater creatures, sometimes accompanied by the drones she digs up from the sea bed, sometimes hanging on to some of the larger swimming creatures. Her intention seems solely to explore, appearing to take information about what…