Table of contents for December 2017 in Maximum PC

I’LL NEVER FORGET the joy I felt on the day I opened my first multimedia upgrade kit. In it was a soundcard, CD-ROM drive, and a pair of speakers. I was so excited— mainly with the prospect of not having to continue listening to the clicks and beeps from my “PC speaker.” It was my first step into upgrading. That was back in the early ’90s. These days, we have so much more to play with: SSDs, graphics cards, CPUs, RAM, keyboards…. If you’re just getting into the components game now, the list of things you can upgrade is endless. But what about stuff outside of the PC? Sure, you can keep throwing things inside the box to make it more powerful, but things outside can enhance your overall experience,…

WE KNEW THAT the security breach at Yahoo in 2013 was massive—it was reported that it had lost details on one billion accounts. However, in June, the struggling Yahoo was acquired by Verizon for $4.5 billion, and a new investigation, with the help of outside forensic experts, has shown that Yahoo lost details on all three billion of its accounts. Yahoo claims that stolen data did not include passwords in plain text (encrypted passwords were stolen then?), payment card, or bank account details. Cold comfort perhaps. What was taken included birth dates, email addresses, telephone numbers, and more. A treasure trove for identity theft. It was the worst cybersecurity failure in history by some margin, and it has taken four years to learn the full extent. The company is sending…

AT THE BEATING HEART of your PC sits the CPU, crunching tasty bits of 0s and 1s in byte-sized chunks. It does so at an extremely fast rate— around four billion cycles per second—but each core can do up to six instructions per cycle, with Skylake-X CPUs containing up to 18 cores. That’s 100 billion operations per second (give or take). It’s enough to make a math teacher weep with joy. Modern CPUs are complex, and the task of routing data between various parts—cache, cores, memory, and I/O controllers—is a critical element of the CPU architecture. For several generations, Intel’s HEDT CPUs have used a ring bus architecture. Think of it as mass transit for data, running in a loop, with stations where data can get on or off. As…

ROUND 1 Quality Your stream quality is going to depend hugely upon the stability and capacity of your broadband connection. Even faster pipes are often weighted heavily toward downloading rather than upload speed, so the broadcast quality you get out of any of these services is rather subjective. Streaming hosts generally ask you not to compensate for lagging with a variable bitrate stream, because this causes massive problems for some viewers, and higher bitrates mean that most viewers are forced to switch to a lower-quality transcoded stream. If you happen to be able to fling packets at the Internet with limitless abandon, your selection of streaming service will, as ours does, come down to the maximum bitrate supported. Twitch offers a soft limit, so you can send whatever bitrate you…

Best scores are in bold. Our test bed consists of an Asus X299 Prime-A, an Asus Crosshair VI Hero, 32GB (4x 8GB) of Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, and a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo. All games were tested at 1440p on the highest graphical profile. SO IT IS WITH Intel’s new Core i9 megachips. For years, we’ve been begging Intel to cut the crap and launch some really exciting CPUs that properly push the boundaries of performance. After all, Intel’s Xeon server chips have offered huge core counts well beyond its desktop lines for years. Then Intel suddenly revealed plans for chips with up to 18 cores and, somehow, there was skepticism. It seemed like a cynical ploy to undermine the impact of AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper…

OF ALL THE LAPTOPS we’ve tested, MSI’s GS63VR Stealth Pro is one of our favorites. We’ve long been searching for a gaming laptop that offers solid 1080p performance in a frame that’s not just portable, but is actually light and thin enough to toss in a regular backpack for gaming on the go. The kind of machine that a college student could take to class, or a young professional into a meeting—and not have to worry about loud whirring fans disturbing their colleagues. In short, a MacBook Pro that can play games. The GS63VR comes pretty close to fulfilling that dream. With an Intel Core i7- 7700HQ CPU, 16GB DDR4-2400 RAM, and a 256GB SSD, the GS63VR is nearly identical to (if not a small step up from) the 15-…

RAZER BASILISK There’s hasn’t been much in the way of mouse tech that’s gotten me excited in a while. Sure, DPI sensor numbers are hitting astrological levels, but for FPS precision, I tend to keep everything more reasonable. Luckily, sensors aren’t the only place mice can improve themselves. Lately, I’ve been playing with Razer’s new Basilisk gaming mouse. It has all the high-performance sensors and such you’d expect, but also comes with some nice bells and whistles specifically for FPS players. The marquee features include a scroll wheel with adjustable resistance and a DPI clutch that lets you swap to a second DPI setting on the fly—then go right back to your primary number. The clutch is a removable magnetic paddle, meaning you can swap it out for whatever size…

Sponsored by a part-by-part guide to building a better pc BUDGET Approximate Price: $634 THERE ISN’T MUCH IN THE WAY OF CHANGES this month, as our budget system sees a couple of price hikes, but little in the way of options to see us switching out for cheaper components. The one area where we did see a better deal is on the graphics card front, where our previous selection of the Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti saw a $10 price increase, prompting us to move over to MSI for the same GPU. We also saw a price increase on the Enthoo Evolv ITX, but we’re so sold on this case at the moment, that we just absorbed the $5 hike. The story of DDR4 pricing continues to frustrate, with the Patriot…

SECURITY OUTFIT McAfee has released a study that examines the most dangerous search terms—those most likely to lead you to malicious sites that aim to steal personal data, install malware, or just bombard you with spurious pop-ups. The average risk rate is 1.7 percent (2 in 125 results are potentially risky), but it can reach over 25 percent if you search for particular things. Some terms are pretty obvious targets: “free music downloads,” “make money,” and “game cheats,” for example, or anything with the words “free” or “lyrics” in them bring out the hackers. Other dangerous terms are a little harder to fathom: “myspace” and “solitaire.” The worst search string? At a risk of 16.1 percent, it is “word unscrambler.” Are puzzlers more trusting than most? Diving deeper into the…

There is a legitimate fear that a botnet of smart LED light bulbs could bring down critical infrastructure. WE (SHOULD) ALL KNOW BY NOW that system updates are important. If you don’t keep your system updated, your data could be compromised. And that sucks for you. When an enterprise doesn’t run a system update, it can compromise millions of people’s data. That sucks for everybody. It happened again: There’s been another breach of security that leaves the personal information and Social Security numbers of US citizens exposed. I’ve seen this once before with the Office of Personnel Management hack a couple years ago. This time, however, the scale of the breach dwarfs all others. I also noticed that the affected organization was using open-source software. What? One thing open-source and…

presents: IFIXIT Apple’s iPhone 8 BACKGROUND Apple’s skipped its iPhone “S” update, so we skipped ahead a couple timezones. We went to Circuitwise headquarters, in Sydney, Australia, for our iPhone 8 teardown. Time to find out whether Apple’s merely playing numerical catch-up to Samsung’s Galaxy S8 line, or if glass backing and wireless charging warrant skipping ahead a grade. MAJOR TECH SPECS • A11 Bionic chip, with embedded M11 motion coprocessor • 64GB or 256GB onboard storage capacity • 4.7-inch IPS multitouch 1334x750 (326 ppi) Retina HD display • 12MP camera with f/1.8 aperture, optical image stabilization, and 5x digital zoom • 7MP FaceTime HD camera with f/2.2 aperture and 1080p HD recording capability • Support for fast-charge and Qi wireless charging • 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, MIMO, Bluetooth 5.0, and NFC…

IT’S BEEN ONE HELL OF A YEAR for processor launches: Kaby Lake, Ryzen, Threadripper, Skylake-X, Kaby Lake-X, and now Coffee Lake as well. That’s six different SKUs in less time than it takes to spit, each housing a plethora of fantastic advances for the computing enthusiast. It’s hard to deny just how much of an effect AMD’s Ryzen has had on the industry. Intel, in particular, has upped its game in response to the multithreaded prowess of the red core. And that response has come in two forms: Skylake-X to combat Threadripper at the high end, and Coffee Lake to take the fight back to the mid-range. So, then, what’s so different? To be honest, not a lot. Coffee Lake’s architecture isn’t very different from its Kaby Lake predecessor—it’s more…

LAPTOP ENGINEERING is often a difficult thing to fathom. In this case, we’ve bent our brains trying to work out exactly how Lenovo’s engineers have distorted space and time in order to crush everything they have into this tiny machine. If we drop it on the wrong corner, will we rip open a portal to another dimension? Existential worries aside, the list is mighty impressive. There’s a cool, hyper-fast Kaby Lake i5 in the CPU slot, a proper SSD looking after storage, a wholly reasonable 8GB of DDR4 RAM flinging the quick bits about, and discrete graphics, too, in the form of a GeForce 940X mobile chipset. All this in a 0.8-inch thick shell. Plus, presumably, those dangerous boffins have inserted a miraculously miniaturized portable wind tunnel in there—this thing…

TRIUMPHS NINTENDO SWITCH A HIT Sales of two million a month mean the company is struggling to keep up with demand, and it has yet to launch in China. BLACKBERRY RETURNS It isn’t dead yet—a new keyboardless Android smartphone is being prepped for launch. EMOJIS GO GENDERLESS Along with iOS 11.1, Apple has introduced new emojis, which now include genderless characters. TRAGEDIES ANDROID WEAR MIA Google Store received a refresh, and all the Android Wear gear vanished; development has apparently stalled. GOODBYE AOL INSTANT MESSENGER The first mass market IM service is terminated; no development and rivals kill the trailblazer. WINDOWS PHONE IS DEAD It’ll only receive bug fixes and security updates from now on— lack of apps is blamed.…

WINDSCRIBE 10GB of free traffic per month is nothing to sniff at, and it runs as a browser plugin, too. TUNNELBEAR A big name with a big ad budget, but only 500MB free per month (without a promo code). PRIVATETUNNEL 200MB of free traffic; cheap data bundles (or a $30 subscription) cover the rest. HOTSPOT SHIELD Ad-supported way to get 750MB per day anonymized, though locales beyond US cost you. SPEEDIFY Cleverly combine, say, LTE and Wi-Fi for a faster connection, with encrypted logless traffic, too. FREELAN A DIY solution for client/server, peer-topeer, or even hybrid VPNs between your own machines. OPENVPN Support packages cost you—and it can be outrageously complex—but OpenVPN is used by the pros. PROTONVPN A free VPN with unlimited bandwidth. Hooray! But it’s slowed down on…

UPGRADING IS FUNDAMENTAL to the PC. It’s one of the cornerstones of our platform of choice, and it’s why the PC has survived while other systems have failed. It’s also the reason why you can focus on the hardware that matters the most, and spend your money appropriately. You can upgrade in stages—if you want to focus on a performance CPU first, with a mind to upgrading your graphics card or storage later, you can. As long as you know what’s happening in the tech world, you’re in good shape. On that note, we’ve just had an incredible year for processors. AMD has come out swinging with its Ryzen line, with increased core counts and strong raw performance. And Intel has just responded with its eighthgeneration CPU line—we’ve managed to…

Coffee Flavored Processing LENGTH OF TIME: 1–2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT AS CONSUMERS, it’s our responsibility to give the industry crap if it’s failing us. It’s the very notion of a capitalist democracy: If you don’t like something, change it; if you can’t change it, make your voice heard. People were fed up with four cores being the mainstream norm, so AMD responded with its Ryzen lineup. Eight months on, we’re witness to Intel’s response: Coffee Lake. With its confusing architectural lineup, an increase in core count finally makes it to the company’s mainstream processors. Although lacking some of the wow factor associated with a new architecture, at the top end Coffee Lake provides six of Intel’s highly refined Kaby Lake cores, with slight tweaks to power…

KEEP THOSE EXPECTATIONS in check. That’s not the most enthralling way to approach a new SSD, but it’s very much the attitude to have when considering a standard SATA drive, such as the Crucial BX300. For starters, it’s a SATA drive in an age when SSDs hooked up via the far faster PCI Express interface are becoming ever more mainstream. Not only is SATA limited to a real-world maximum throughput of about 550MB/s, but its control protocols were never intended to jive with solidstate memory. That means random access performance is compromised, compared with the full potential of the latest SSD controllers and flash memory. What’s more, the BX300 isn’t merely a SATA drive. It’s an aggressively priced SATA drive, sold as a value offering, rather than a premium performance…

“WELCOME TO THE CULT OF RAZER,” says an embossed line of text inside the Tiamat’s immaculately presented box, bringing to mind a certain other tech company with a knack for presentation. As with its stablemates in the current Razer lineup, every effort is made to make this headset feel luxurious, starting with the spot UV printed packaging, and going right through to the generous memory foam earpads. On those grounds, it can’t be faulted. An aluminum headband over a memory foam contact pad gives the cans a comfortable fit, without the need for squeaky retractable parts. Indeed, there’s very little noise from this model when you adjust it in any direction—moving the mic to purpose, rotating the earcups, and shifting the fit while on your head are all silent operations.…

2017 IS THE YEAR OF THE CPU—I can’t recall a year when new product launches were so frequent. And these aren’t meaningless 100MHz bumps in performance either, as both AMD and Intel have been on a roll. To recap, Intel kicked off 2017 with the initial Kaby Lake desktop launch in January. AMD followed with its first major architectural overhaul in more than five years, with a staggered rollout of its Ryzen 7, 5, and 3 processors, and finally the beastly Threadripper. Intel also released its Skylake-X 6–10-core models and Kaby Lake-X processors, and later the 12–18-core parts, topping out with the Core i9-7980XE. And wrapping things up, Intel’s Coffee Lake brings 6 cores/12 threads to its mainstream platform with new 300-series chipsets. That’s at least five major launches, complete…

I’VE WANTED TO TALK ABOUT this little gadget of mine for two whole years (our executive editor wouldn’t let me, because he thinks it’s ridiculous). It is, by far, the most useful thing I’ve ever purchased when it comes to my work for Maximum PC. So, what is it? Something typically associated with other more arduous mechanical pursuits and hobbies than PC building—it is, in short, a magnetic bowl. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “What the hell?” But just hear me out. When it comes to building, upgrading, or tweaking systems, it’s generally advisable to use some sort of container to store all the nuts, bolts, and screws you’re using for the job, so you don’t lose them, rather than just littering them all over your workbench. A magnetic…

you write, we respond > Full Drive Image > Version Check > Bottleneck Advice Windows Backup There was much good advice in your “Reinstalling Windows” feature, but I differ on the idea of doing a disk image. When I upgrade or reinstall, I take the occasion to replace the hard drive/SSD with a newer or bigger model. The old drive becomes my safety net. If the reinstall or upgrade goes awry, I simply put the old drive back and can get work done. It’s also there in case I missed transferring a file I need later. Alternatively, I can reformat the old drive and use it for data backup once I'm sure the new install works. –Rick Thompson EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: I do the same, which explains why…