Table of contents for Holiday 2020 in Maximum PC

WINDOWS 10 is in the midst of its annual fall update, 20H2 in the company’s new naming system. As ever the update will initially receive a limited distribution. At the time of writing it is still an optional update, so you need to manually check for updates to trigger the installation. Over the next few weeks it’ll be rolled out to more systems, until your automatic update will insist on it. The biggest new feature is that 20H2 will include the Chrome-based Edge browser for the first time. This now includes a price-comparison tool, so when you search for a product it’ll bring up the best prices available. You can also navigate within Edge using Alt-Tab to cycle through tabs. The Focus Assist feature receives a welcome tweak too. It…

AMD’S BIG NAVI, the RDNA 2 architecture, is finally here, and for the fist time in about a decade AMD is gunning to be the fastest card. There are three initial models: The RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT. All carry 16GB of GDDR6 RAM, and 128MB of Infinity Cache. AMD set itself some big goals for its RDNA 2 architecture, employing what it had learned from Ryzen. A lot of work was done optimizing the cache system, and performance per watt, which is said to be 50 percent better than RDNA. It has also included hardware ray-tracing for the first time, with one RT accelerator per CU. The results, even if we have to rely on AMD’s claims and bar charts for now, are impressive. The RX 6800…

> Alienware 240Hz > Move Program Folders > RAM Upgrade Broken Alienware? Hi Doc, my monitor is an Alienware 25 and it says it will display 240Hz, but if I go to my settings to change it to 240Hz the screen goes black and then nothing happens until it reverts automatically to 60Hz. Do I need to have an Nvidia graphics card, or can I use it with an AMD graphics card? –Gregory Muenzer THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: There are two versions of the Alienware 25 monitor, and which model you have will determine which card you’ll need. The G-Sync version (model number AW2518H) requires a G-Sync compatible card, which basically means GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost or higher. If you have an AMD card—any Radeon RX model—you’ll need the FreeSync…

Remote access allows you to stream from your Jellyfin server over the internet. Unlike Plex or Emby, which use their cloud-based authentication systems to simplify the connection, you’ll need to set this up manually. It’s a good idea for security purposes to ensure all remote connections are secure (HTTPS rather than HTTP), and the easiest way to do this is through an existing reverse proxy. If you followed our tutorial in February 2020’s issue to set up a Docker container with ngnix and LetsEncrypt, start by setting up a new subdomain (jellyfin.domain.com) with a domain you own. Now delete and recreate the container, adding your subdomain to the “SUBDOMAINS =” environment setting. Once the certificate has been generated, shut down the container. Now copy and paste the code underneath “Nginx” from…

One of lockdown’s few pleasures is watching movies together with far-flung family via Zoom. Thanks to Jellyfin’s new SyncPlay feature, it’s easier than ever to watch the same movie without fiddling about trying to sync up everyone’s playback. The prerequisites are simple: Everyone needs access to your server plus the media library that’s serving up the content. Once done, start playback on your main device and look for the “SyncPlay” button (next to “Cast”). Click this and choose “New group.” When your family launch their own instance of Jellyfin and click the “SyncPlay” button, they’ll see your movie/episode title appear as a group that they can join. Clicking this should see them join your stream at the same point you’re already at. Click play to continue watching. The sync may not be perfect—we…

YOU’LL NEED THIS NON CONDUCTIVE THERMAL PASTE Recommended, Noctua NT-H1. EVERYTHING IN COMPUTING IS POLARIZED. Nvidia or AMD? Apple or Windows? PC gaming or console? There’s a whole plethora of argument-inducing debates to be had and statements and brands to align yourself with. And that is very frustrating, because a lot of the time it genuinely gets in the way of real progress and learning. Nowhere is this more evident in computing than with the “debate” surrounding the application of thermal paste. When you take a step back and think about it, it sounds insane. How can arguments descend out of this madness? Surely the way someone applies thermal paste isn’t worth having a fight over? This journalist has to admit he didn’t always think like that. There was one…

FOR YEARS, the Titans have reigned as the kings of the graphics world—mighty GPUs that are more of a show of force than anything regular mortals should purchase. The first of the Titans rose from the primordial dust so long ago that most of us can barely remember it. 2013 seems but a fond memory now. After seven descendants, however, the Titans have finally been dethroned. RTX 3090 has kicked their collective butts into Tartarus and staked a claim as the ultimate gaming GPU for the rising generation. It’s generally much faster than the Titan RTX and costs $1,000 less. What’s not to love? In hand, one thing that’s impossible to overstate is the massive heft of the RTX 3090 Founders Edition. We’ve looked at a lot of large graphics…

WHEN YOU THINK of Razer, the first thing that comes to mind is its peripherals: The DeathAdders, the BlackWidows, the Nagas, the Krakens. And then you have the Blade laptops, and the mouse mats, and that weird toaster thing it teased that one time (seriously). As a brand, it’s established some impressively svelte products. But we never thought Razer would dabble in cases. It’s a difficult field to crack, and often requires knowledge and experience to really become a truly top-tier chassis manufacturer. That said, if you think about it from a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense. Razer’s fanbase is one of the most dedicated, and that tri-headed snake commands a lot of respect. So why not dive into the realm of mid-range chassis, and produce something…

RAZER HAS TEAMED UP with ergonomic experts Humanscale to create a mouse that is both beautiful and comfortable. With no RGB in sight, it’s certainly a far cry from the usual Razer offerings, yet it’s perfect to go along with its other professional keyboard and mousepad, the Pro Type and Pro Glide. The Pro Type didn’t impress us fully in our recent testing, but the Click might just be the saving grace. The white and gray styling completed with silver highlights makes the device look phenomenal. It is certainly one of the best-looking mice we have had on our table for some time. Even if after testing it this thing was a dud, we’d still use it as a beautiful paper weight, it just looks great. Unfortunately it’s only suited…

RELEASING BALDUR’S GATE III into Early Access might be a masterstroke. It’s going to be there for about a year, and while it gets the 25-hour first act into players’ hands in a playable state, it also lets developer Larian off the hook for any glitches—like the fact we couldn’t get the game to run under its default Vulkan renderer, backing off to DirectX 11 instead. There’s a disclaimer up front and a darn great watermark on all screenshots to the effect that, yes, this is still an early build. Look at it, then, as a valuable opportunity to watch a master at work. Or wait a year before buying. What you get now is a remarkable opening sequence involving a flying mollusc-ship and dragons right out of Westeros. Some…

BY THE TIME you read this AMD will have officially launched its Zen 3 processors. It’s been less then four years since it launched the first Zen-powered chips, and the rate at which they have been improving has been startling. Zen 3 will offer about a 19 percent improvement in IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) on Zen 2. This means AMD has managed to scale the design faster than any other processor in the last 20 years. Zen 3 is a ground-up redesign that AMD says will finally beat Intel at single-threaded gaming, the one area where the Blue Team always won. There are four initial chips, spread neatly across the market. Top of the pile is the $799 Ryzen 9 5950X with 16 cores, a base clock of 3.4GHZ, and…

2020 certainly has been an intriguing year. Whether that’s the global climate, the COVID pandemic, or computing, as ever nothing stays the same. The only thing that’s seemingly permanent is impermanence. There’s nowhere else that this premise can be better observed than in the realm of processing power. From the advent of Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series, to AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics cards launching, this year has seen some revolutionary leaps in performance. But that’s not what we’re talking about here today. It’s all about the processors, and namely AMD’s latest Zen 3 or 5000 series chips. Take a moment just think back 10 years—how far we’ve come in this last decade has been remarkable. The potency of the humble desktop has increased exponentially. Moore’s law may be coming to an…

ANYONE WHO LOVES to stream media from their own personal library will have heard of Plex or Emby. Both offer an amazing user experience and powerful features, but they also come with one major pitfall: The need to pay a subscription to access their best features, such as live TV and DVR support, as well as hardware-accelerated transcoding. Those subscription costs can soon mount, but the good news is that there’s a completely free and open-source pretender to their crown coming up fast in the rear-view mirror. The usurper in question is Jellyfin. Although it only came into existence a mere two years ago—forked from the last open-source release of Emby—it’s developed swiftly into a genuine rival to its established peers, boasting all their best features, including those hidden behind…

Your media server uses the filenames of your media to help identify and tag them correctly. Jellyfin follows the same naming conventions as Plex and Emby, so if you’re migrating from these you should have little trouble with most of your content. The only exceptions are likely to be TV series that share the same name as an earlier show, and any movie extras you have into the same folder as your original movie following Plex’s naming conventions (see https://support.plex.tv/articles/local-files-for-trailers-and-extras/). Regarding the latter, Jellyfin follows Emby’s convention: Here, you simply create a subfolder called “Extras” inside the main movie folder, then move all your extras into there. You’ll also need to rename the file— for example, “Avatar-deleted. mp4” should be renamed “Avatar Deleted Scenes.mp4” or even just “Deleted Scenes. mp4,” as its…

YOU’LL NEED THIS CABLE SLEEVING TUTORIAL PART 1 Maximum PC Vol 25 No 12. Patience. LAST ISSUE we went through the main tools that you’re going to need to start creating your very own custom power-supply cabling. Custom cables are by far and away one of the best ways you can make your system shine. You can of course opt to buy those from a 3rd party, such as CableMod, and even some of the PSU manufacturers offer their own sets of custom-sleeved cables, but to really make a build pop, there’s nothing quite like making your own. If you do, you can control every single aspect of that process, from the sleeving colors used, to the length, to whether or not to integrate your own combs—practically everything. Now that…

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: FRUSTRATING THE CONCEPT IF YOU HAVEN’T read our review of the Tomahawk ITX chassis just yet, you’re in for one hell of a treat. This thing is a seriously slick box. For its first consumer case (or one of two, I should say), Razer has really managed to hit the nail on the head. The design elements are there, the lighting is sophisticated and sleek, and the quality-of-life stuff is included too. For an ITX case (which have always been a notorious pain in the butt to deal with) it’s pretty damn good. It’s not flawless—there’s some minor missteps here and there that need addressing in iteration 2.0—but they’re just small frustrations rather than larger oversights, and things that you can work…

HP’S POWERFUL notebook computers have been kicking around for a while, but the arrival of Ryzen 4000 has meant that new models needed to hit the home offices. We’ve got our hands on the EliteBook 845 G7, which packs a fierce octa-core Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U processor. Pricing varies significantly with this laptop, as there are numerous SKUs. That’s the most powerful chip AMD has to offer in the professional Ryzen range, promising up to 21 percent better average performance compared to the non-pro 4700U you’ll see in more conventional laptops. Performance against Intel chips is a bit less clear, although AMD insists that the 4750U should comfortably beat the similarly powerful i7-10710U in both multi-threaded and graphical tests. Speaking of graphics, this EliteBook uses Radeon Vega integrated graphics that…

SAMSUNG’S SSDs have been the standard by which consumer solid-state storage has been judged for several years now. So the arrival of a new "PRO" model from Samsung is quite the event. Hail the conquering hero, and all that jazz. The new Samsung 980 PRO is particularly intriguing because this, ladies and gentlemen, is Samsung’s first consumer M.2 NVMe SSD with PCI Express Gen4 support. The benefits of Gen4 are simple enough, namely a doubling of raw bandwidth. A wider interface doesn’t automatically translate into more performance, of course. But on paper, the 980 PRO certainly claims to be making the most of the bandwidth bump. Samsung reckons it’s good for fully 7,000MB/s of sequential reads and 5,000MB/s of writes, both of which are far beyond PCIe Gen3’s circa 4,000MB/s…

RAZER IS OFTEN either loved or hated. It can either do no wrong or it can’t get anything right. It has a strange status within the tech industry that we don’t really understand—we’ve seen great products from Razer and some less so, just like every brand. Recently Razer has decided to target the prosumer market with the Pro Type keyboard, Pro Click mouse, and Pro Glide mouse pad. While many people are currently working from home it’s definitely a great time to target those who want to have beautiful peripherals at work. The Pro Type keyboard is a stunning bit of kit, and aesthetically you could quite easily mistake it for an Apple product. The silver top plate and white keys really do make it a very sleek product, and…

FROM ITS LAUNCH in 2003, Valve’s Steam digital game store has had things pretty much its own way. In 2013 it held 75 percent of the market, and in 2017 represented 18 percent of global PC game sales. In 2019 it had 95 million active monthly users. It has branched out into game controllers, gaming boxes and even an operating system. If there was ever any doubt that PC gaming is huge, then Steam is all the evidence you need. There have been competitors, of course. Who remembers Games For Windows Live? They have tended to be single-publisher stores, however, such as Ubisoft’s Uplay and EA’s Origin. It wasn’t until 2012 that it got competition, when GOG—a previously retro-only store operated by Witcher developer CD Projekt—began selling more recent titles.…

THIS SUMMER FACEBOOK MADE a Facebook account mandatory for users of Oculus VR sets. Now it transpires that if you delete your Facebook account, your Oculus games are gone forever, and your VR headset is an expensive conversation piece. Your social media account and your VR game accounts are irrevocably fused together—you can’t walkaway from either without losing both. Meanwhile there have been reports of a good number of Oculus Quest 2 owners having their Facebook accounts disabled when trying to create or link to them, leaving bricked headsets. An automated message claims that the accounts didn’t meet Facebook’s Community Standards. Facebook’s handling of Oculus has not won it many friends. Oculus’s founder, Palmer Luckey, has offered a cash reward to anybody that can “jailbreak” the Oculus Quest 2 from…

THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Google, the largest case since Microsoft found itself in hot water over 20 years ago. The accusation is that Google’s search and advertising “empire” is against federal anti-trust laws. Google has nearly 90 percent of the search market. This market dominance was achieved, according to the DoJ, by “problematic” business practices. These include simply paying companies large amounts to be the default search engine. Google’s reach has enabled the company to enrich itself through advertising, strengthening its grip on the market, making it tough for competitors, stifling innovation, and reducing consumer choice. This isn’t the first time Google has been in the DoJ’s firing line. A case in 2012 was called off. This time, we assume, the DoJ is better…

Any media server will live or die on how easy it is to access your content from a variety of platforms and devices. Over the past year, Jellyfin has worked hard to cut the gap between it and its longer established rivals, so that most major platforms are now supported—for free. To see what platforms currently support Jellyfin, visit https://jellyfin.org/clients/ —you’ll find a range of releases (although beware, the Jellyfin for Desktop client currently has no official releases; try Jellyfin MPV Shim instead). Both Android and iOS are covered, along with a growing range of smart TV platforms: Boxes like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV have native apps, while Apple TV owners can access Jellyfin content through the Infuse app. Also supported are Chromecast and AirPlay. Dedicated apps for…

Like Emby, Jellyfin supports a wide range of plugins that provide access to all kinds of extra features and functions. Navigate to the Dashboard and click “Plugins” under “Advanced” to review them. You’ll see that four metadata providers come pre-installed covering your music, movie, and TV libraries. Any with a vertical ellipsis button next to its name contain settings you can tweak by clicking the button and choosing “Settings.” Switch to the “Catalog” tab to see what additional plugins are currently available through the official Jellyfin repo. You’ll see they’re split into six categories: “Authentication,” “Channels,” “General,” “LiveTV,” “Metadata,” and “Notifications.” Click one for a description and options to install it. You’ll find plenty of potential interest: If you have a USB TV tuner then you’ll find plugins supporting popular backends…

THESE DAYS it’s one of the less-crazy conspiracy theories that the world isn’t real and that all of this—peers around the decaying Maximum PC office—is an elaborate virtualized simulation run by some bored alien teen on their Apple IIq quantum computer. Brushing aside simpler questions such as, “Why?” and, “Could they bump up my pay check please?” it shouldn’t mask that the modern world is in fact now largely run in a virtual world. This text is being run as part of a Java Virtual Machine inside a browser. It’s stored in the “cloud” as a managed virtual storage pool that’ll be maintained as part of a Kubernetes orchestrated virtual containerized system. The webpages we’ve read to research this will have been served off high-availability load-balanced virtual server clusters, and the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A RASPBERRY PI & A COMPATIBLE IR CAMERA Some wood and a few screws. Friendly local bird life. HELLO, AND WELCOME TO MAXIMUM CARPENTRY MAGAZINE, where “Minimum BS” stands for “Bowed Softwoods.” This month, we’ll be knocking up a bird-nesting box in about five minutes, then showing you how you can outfit it with clever camera trickery to watch the nestlings inside. Oh, who are we kidding? We’re better at routing cables than routing cabinets. However, we like birds, so we’re going to take our mediocre woodworking skills and build that birdbox, then use a Raspberry Pi and an IR camera to outfit it with a night-vision surveillance system that can wirelessly (apart from power) send pictures directly to the internet for us to watch or share…

BACK IN THE OLD DAYS of Intel’s Netburst architecture, CPUs were all about operating frequency. MHz marketing descended into mania, and eventually Intel and the rest of the industry had a total rethink in favor of multiples cores and more work done per clock cycle. Are gaming monitors going the same way with an over-emphasis on high refresh rates? 360Hz monitors are now a thing… However, the new AOC C27G2 is a 1080p panel that tops out at 165Hz, so it’s firmly in the zone where there’s an unambiguous benefit in terms of fluidity and input response compared to a 60Hz screen. The C27G2’s job isn’t to push the upper limits of high refresh gaming, it’s to bring that buttery smooth 120Hz-plus experience to a wider audience. Pegged around $260,…

ASUS GENERALLY knocks it out of the park with its gaming keyboards, and the original Strix Scope from the Republic of Gamers brand was a typically solid outing. There weren’t any unnecessary "unique" features, just a dependable all-round gaming board focused on nailing the simple stuff: Great build quality, responsive keys, and a sane price point. The new ROG Strix Scope RX isn’t trying to mess with that winning formula. In fact, it’s visually almost indistinguishable from its predecessor, sporting the same clean design and sturdy construction materials: An alloy top plate and grippy PCB keycaps, with IP56-rated dust and water resistance for improved longevity. An RRP of $140 puts it comfortably in the premium range, but it’s certainly not outrageous. What it does do to set itself apart from…

THERE HAS BEEN an absolute mob of different key-switch types launched since mechanical keyboards first made their mainstream appearance in 2013. It seems almost endless, and Cherry, although a bit more reserved on this front, has been no different. The company has launched two switches since 2013—the MX Silver or Speed, and its Low Profile variant, which was effectively just a redesign of its MX Red. For those that don’t know, back when the furore around mechanical boards kicked off properly and the market boomed in 2015, Cherry began to struggle to keep up with the demand for its switches. Corsair, seeing this problem, stepped in and offered to buy Cherry an entire factory line for free to help soothe some of its demand woes, in exchange for priority on…

> Coolant Investigations > Alternative Picks > Death of the Disc Drive? Strange Buildup in Tubes To Whom It May Concern: As with a letter from a reader in your previous issue, I am also incarcerated in MDOC. Though, I'm not sure if we are in the same "M" state. I'm having a third party email this to you for me instead of writing a letter, and appreciate any feedback you can provide. A couple of years before my arrest in 2014, I built a liquid-cooled PC. I was one of the first people to get a new coolant to test from Mike at Mayhems. It was their new Pastel UV Lime Yellow coolant. And while I loved the color with and without my UV lights on, I kept having…