Table of contents for January 2022 in Maximum PC

INTEL IS BACK. Of that, there can be no question. This month, we get our paws on the 12600K, the gamer’s choice among Intel’s new 12th-generation Alder Lake chips. If we had doubts last month about the range-topping Core i9-12900K SKU, thanks to some scary power consumption figures, that’s largely mitigated by the new Core i5 model. The 12600K reduces 12900K’s 240W power guzzling problem down to a much more manageable 150W or less. More to the point, the 12600K is now the weapon of choice for gamers. Job done for Intel? For now, perhaps, but Intel still has plenty to prove. Alder Lake is built on the so-called Intel 7 node, otherwise known as 10nm and still years behind schedule. As you’ll discover in our Tech Preview feature, AMD…

A PREVIEW BUILD of Win11 has pulled a sneaky trick by stopping a popular ‘helper’ app called EdgeDeflector from working. This could detect the hard-coded links to Edge that Win11 likes to scatter across the OS, then redirect them to your preferred browser. The planned update kills it dead, ensuring that Microsoft’s browser pops up instead. Trying to set a rival as your default isn’t easy either. When you install a new browser and open a link, you have to select “always use this app” to make your choice the default. But you only get one chance, if you miss it you’ll have to set it as the default for all files or link formats individually. Only Firefox manages to successfully navigate the pitfalls to install itself as the default.…

That smartphone experience generates a sense of cognitive dissonance. Any handset launching with less than 300dpi would get laughed off the internet these days. But most PC users are lucky if their monitor manages 120dpi. Of course, smartphone screens are normally held closer than the typical viewing distance for a PC monitor, but not so as to make up for the chasm between the pixel densities. Many smartphones have pixel densities of 400dpi or more, with some high-end models reaching 500dpi. Meanwhile, a typical 1440p 27-inch PC monitor manages just 109dpi. Even a 27-inch 4K monitor is only 163dpi. So why does this matter? It’s not about content, at least not in the sense of video or gaming. Virtually no content exists that fully leverages the capability of a high-DPI…

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GETTING AN ACTUAL Linux desktop running on WSL 2.0 on Windows 11 proved a little tricky. In fairness, WSL was built to run applications, not to act like a conventional virtual machine. It’s not really surprising that Gnome and KDE won’t work. They rely on all sorts of daemons and services running in the background holding all the components together. Brave souls have managed to get the Xfce desktop working nicely on Windows 10 with Ubuntu 18.04, but this didn’t work for us on Windows 11 with Ubuntu 20.04. If you’re running Windows 10, then you’d be well advised to try out running Xfce via the X410 server. It should just be a matter of adding: $ sudo apt install xfce4 Then setting the DISPLAY environment variable correctly. A major change…

If your router is showing signs of its age, but you don’t want to upgrade, then visit the DD-WRT webpage https://dd-wrt.com/support/routerdatabase/ and see if your router model is listed as being compatible with the free DD-WRT alternative firmware. If not, consider an affordable upgrade, such as the Archer C7 ($44 for the AC1750 model) that can be flashed with DD-WRT. DD-WRT adds useful functionality to consumer-grade routers, including additional security tools, such as a firewall, VLAN support, and a VPN server. It’s also frequently updated, so your router stays up to date. Not all features are available on each device, so after confirming compatibility try Googling your model number and ‘dd-wrt’ to see how others have fared. Although the main DD-WRT interface is straightforward to navigate, some features require a degree…

examining technology and putting it to use TIP OF THE MONTH ACTIVATING THE GOD MENU If you like to keep things all in one place, the ‘secret’ God Mode menu is a great place to organize important settings and tweaks in one folder. Simply head over to your desktop, right-click and create a new folder. Rename this GodMode. {ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and the quickaccess control panel folder will give you over 300 options to play around with, which should save you some time. MAKE – USE – CREATE 54 Design textures and patterns in Adobe Illustrator 60 Build a better file server with the Raspberry Pi 62 Optimize your Steam and Proton gaming on Linux A LUCKY PURCHASE In the last issue, I dived into the world of car coding by picking…

Now that you have completed this first part of this tutorial, you can experiment with ways of taking the concept further. One possibility could be to take one of the plants from the artwork we have made and apply a grid repeat effect so that you end up with a patterned wallpaper look. First, we need to copy one whole plant by highlighting the necessary shapes—as an aside here, if you ever highlight too much of the board or too many individual shapes, simply hold the shift button and click on the parts that you don’t want to highlight, and this will deselect them. Once you have the desired items selected, make sure all the shapes that make up that item are grouped together, by pressing CTRL + G. Then,…

Steam can run games remotely between two Steam-equipped setups. The way it works is that the remote computer runs the game and compresses the video and audio. It then streams this video and audio to the other computer while the client sends back mouse, keyboard, and controller input. The two computers you use don’t even have to be of the same architecture, and there’s an Android app too. We tested it out between a Windows computer with a GNU/Linux one over a home network and found that it worked well. The performance-limiting factors are the speed of the host that’s running the game and the latency and bandwidth of the network, rather than the power of the client computer. So you could have a tricked-out gaming computer with a decent…

INTEL’S CORE I7 and i9 chips are allround performance leaders, at least within Intel’s own range of CPUs. But for gamers, it’s actually the Core i5 that rules. Cheaper than an i7 or i9, i5 chips usually give up significant multi-threaded throughput but more or less match their more expensive siblings when it comes to in-game frame rates. With the Core i5-12600K, the first Core i5 of the Alder Lake generation, that usual refrain may actually understate its abilities. That’s because the 12600K is something even more impressive entirely. In many ways, it matches Intel’s previous-gen top chip, even in multi-threading, but in a package that’s almost half the price. That’s Core i9 performance for Core i5 money. The 12600K is a six-plus-four design. It has six Performance Cores (P-Cores)…

THIS IS FAR from the first 38-inch nearly-4K ultrawide monitor on the market. But the Eizo FlexScan EV3895 is unusual in that it is aimed squarely at the professional productivity market, if not actually at content creation pros. In fact, there are a few good reasons why we haven’t seen a 38-inch, 21:9 curved productivity panel before. The curvature isn’t necessarily a benefit when it comes to getting stuff done as opposed to, say, gaming immersion. Likewise, the 3,840 by 1,600 native resolution is a bit betwixt and between, falling short of full 4K and so limiting native workflows to 1080p, or at a pinch, 1440p. The large panel size also translates into a relatively low pixel density, which isn’t optimal for font rendering, general image sharpness, and detail. A ‘conventional’…

ANY COLOR so long as it’s black. So it goes for MSI’s mid-range MEG boards and the new MSI MEG Z690 Unify is no exception. While the look is familiar, the specifications have had a major overhaul to support Intel’s new Alder Lake CPUs, not to mention no fewer than five M.2 sockets, dual 2.5 GbE LAN, Wi-Fi 6E, plus DDR5 and PCIe 5.0. It’s quite a package. If that’s true of the feature set, it also applies to the board’s physical bearing. The heatsinks have a lot of mass, as the structure reaches out over the IO area. The sheer scale of the cooling and the surface area connected via a heatpipe bode well for keeping the high-end MOSFETs running well within their specified range. Speaking of cooling, for…

WHEN GETTING A NEW system or finishing a new PC build, one of the first tasks is usually to change the default web browser. Yes, Microsoft provides you with its Edge browser. But for most people, it simply doesn’t cut it. Beyond the simple task of downloading Google Chrome, that tends to be pretty much it for Edge. In the majority of cases, you will probably find yourself switching to the Google Chrome browser. While there are many alternatives out there, including Firefox, Opera, and Safari (for those using macOS), Chrome remains the most popular browser. Google Chrome is built on the same Chromium open-source browser used by many other browsers, including Microsoft Edge. This means some of the features that make Chrome so popular can also be seen on…

INTEL HAS released the best of its new Alder Lake chips first, the headline-grabbing performance models. But what about the more affordable CPUs, the chips we stand a better chance of buying? Thanks to a slip up at Dell, among others, details of further Alder Lake SKUs went online well before the official launch. As expected, we have Core i7-12700, i5-12600, 12500, and 12400, and at the bottom the Core i3-12100. Curiously, the low-end chips don’t appear to have any efficiency cores. An early benchmark of the i5-12400, with six performance cores using Adobe Premiere Pro, shows it stands toe-to-toe with a Ryzen 9 5600X. Alder Lake is proving to be a match for Zen 3 across the range. What’s next? Alder Lake mobile comes first, which has entered production,…

TRIUMPHS GAMING FREEDOM Windows allows you to choose where to install games from Windows Store or Xbox Game Pass: no more locked folders. THROWN INTO SPACE SpinLaunch plans to ‘throw’ satellites into space using a huge centrifuge operating at high-speed in a vacuum. A small test version works, at least. THE ORIGINAL APPLE An Apple-1 sold at auction for $500K complete with cassette adapter, and koa wood case: one of 200 hand-made machines. TRAGEDIES STOLEN RTXs A truckload of GeForce RTX 30-series cards, including 3090s, was hijacked en route to a warehouse in California. RECORD WITHDRAWN A world-beating 8GHz Alder Lake overclock by Gigabyte was rejected due to a bug in CPU-Z that can give the wrong clock speed with Alder Lake chips. LOCKED FRAMES Nvidia’s cloud gaming service locks…

NO NEW CARDS, BUT we’ve had a few software updates from Nvidia. Most interesting is that the new version of Nvidia Image Scaling (NIS) is going open source. Nvidia Image Scaling does the same job as DLSS without the AI, which means you don’t need a fancy latest-gen Nvidia card. This version uses a six-tap filter with four-directional scaling and adaptive sharpening, it doesn’t include any anti-aliasing, that’s down to the game. As with DLSS, NIS squeezes extra frames out of higher resolutions, so you can set a game to 1440p, and let NIS crank it up to match your 4K monitor, and it should get close to the same frame rates as running in 1440p flat. Going open-source effectively means letting it run on AMD and Intel graphics. That…

To date, all implementations of multi-GPU rendering have had drawbacks that prevented ideal scaling. The biggest hurdle is figuring out how best to break up the task. GPUs already split workloads up into thousands of queues of instructions running in parallel, but splitting that across multiple GPUs separated by a relatively slow interface limits scaling. Consider the RTX 3090, it has an internal memory bandwidth of 936GB/s. The current NVLink connector only provides up to 112GB/s—about one-eighth the bandwidth. Games generally opt to use alternate frame rendering (AFR) for multi-GPU modes as every other frame is rendered by the second GPU. But AFR can introduce latency and create a higher CPU load, which limits scaling. Nvidia has abandoned support for 3-way and 4-way SLI for this reason. But what if…

> Monitor misery > Start-up sound > HDR headache DVI to USB-C Long-time subscriber for more than 20 years here: I have an LG 29-inch 2K monitor, model number LG 29UM59-A. This monitor has one HDMI and one USB-C port. I have been trying to connect a second computer to the USB-C port without any success. The motherboard with the USB-C port is an MSI X370 Gaming Pro (with AMD Ryzen 1700X CPU and 32GB RAM), with an MSI GeForce GTX 750TI video card with 2GB of memory. I'm hoping to upgrade to an RTX 3070 or RTX 3080 when prices come back down to normal. I’ve tried both USB-Cto-VGA and USB-C-to-DVI adapters and neither works. I’ve not tried a direct USB-C cable yet as I do not have one.…

ARE YOU PART OF the slightly sinister-sounding Windows Insiders Program? Have you installed an even more sinister-sounding Preview Build of Windows 10 (at least build 20262)? Then it’s easy to run Linux as part of WSL 2.0: just open an administrator-privilege Windows command prompt and run wsl --install. This also works on Preview Builds of Windows 11. A few clicks and pops and a restart later and you’ll be in business. Actually, the GUI App Support download is pretty large, so now might be a good time to make a cup of tea. On your return, WSL, Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Platform, their custom Linux Kernel and Ubuntu should all have been downloaded. Other distros are available and you can specify, for example, wsl --install -d Fedora to install Fedora instead, or…

WSL supports running with a virtual GPU so that Linux programs can take advantage of high-powered graphics cards and run compute jobs (not games at this stage) at near-native speeds. There’s also a DirectML backend for TensorFlow (see https://github.com/microsoft/DirectML), enabling speedy machine learning experiments on Direct3D 12-supported hardware. Further to this, in spring 2021 the d3d12 driver became an official part of the open-source Mesa 21.0 stack. To make use of this, and speed up your Blender renders or whatever, you might need to update your Windows GPU driver to one supporting WDDM 3.0. Nvidia’s WSL CUDA drivers are considered public preview and should be delivered to Windows Insiders through the normal Windows Update channel. Otherwise, they are available from https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda/wsl. Owners of AMD graphics hardware can get the preview drivers…

JUST HOW SECURE is your home network? These days, it’s a crucial part of our everyday lives, connecting all our home devices to each other and the wider internet. But it’s also a target for hackers and other nefarious folk. By default, the router or modem router you’re using will be set up with convenience rather than security in mind, which puts you at risk of being attacked. Your network is primarily vulnerable to attack from two vectors: first, by a physical incursion from someone within the range of your Wi-Fi network. You’d be surprised at its range—try wandering out front or back to see how easy it is for your network to reach into a neighbor’s yard or basement, or the sidewalk. If your network isn’t protected by strong…

Have you ever been on the road and needed to access your home network in some way, such as copying files to or from a shared folder, or sending something to your home printer for when you return? If you use a VPN server, you can add this functionality securely without leaving your network open to attack. VPN servers require existing hardware set up inside your home network. This might be on your SOHO router (VPN Plus is part of Synology’s SRM software), or you could add it to your server: PiVPN (https://pivpn.io/) works with a spare Raspberry Pi, for example, or you’ll find support in higher-end NAS drives from the likes of QNAP and Synology. You can even create a VPN server on your Windows PC, although you’d need…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A RASPBERRY PI 3 OR 4 An internet connection Spare SD card A NEW VERSION of the Raspberry Pi OS was released not too long ago, and while this may elicit the same groans as Windows 11 did, there’s actually a good reason to upgrade—if you have the right chipset. Not all Raspberry Pi 4 boards, it seems, are created equal. We already knew they differ in terms of the amount of RAM that’s attached, but it seems that if your Pi 4 has the newer BCM2711 SoC with a C0T model number—the chipset introduced with the Pi 400—then you get a 300MHz speed boost from 1.5GHz to 1.8. You may well have already overclocked your Pi, but it’s welcome nonetheless. The new OS is based on…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A COPY OF GSPLUS IIGS system ROM Bootable hard drive image https://apple2.gs/plus/ THIS MONTH WE LOOK AT what was arguably one of Apple’s best and most underrated products: the Apple IIGS. Designed for superior graphics and sound (hence the “GS” moniker), the IIGS brought the old Apple II line into the next era of computing and was the first Apple computer to feature a color desktop. Despite its impressive 16-bit capabilities, the IIGS would play second fiddle to the likes of the Commodore Amiga or Atari ST. This makes it a gold mine for retro computing enthusiasts, with cult games, applications, and a phenomenal sound chip waiting to be discovered. 1 DEVELOPMENT Steve Wozniak rejoined Apple and set his sights on making a substantial upgrade to the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS STEAM Linux Proton Internet connection IF YOU’RE AT ALL INTERESTED in gaming on PCs, you have probably already come across Steam, Valve’s platform for distributing, updating and running games. Steam makes it possible to purchase a game, install it over the internet and then run it from the Steam interface. That brings us back to the age-old gaming conundrum of support if you happen to be a Linux user, as not every PC game is designed to run on anything other than Microsoft Windows. That said, there are plenty of Steam games that will run on Linux, and quite often, a Windows Steam game can be convinced to run on Linux, even though some ‘fettling’ by the user may be required. This approach is officially supported by…

Steam can offer a gaming experience that is ergonomically closer to console gaming through what it calls Big Picture Mode. This pushes Steam into a full-screen mode with controller support. We have tried it out and we liked what it had to offer. Big Picture Mode is invoked by clicking on a small icon at the top of the screen, and the first thing you’ll notice is that every element of the user interface is jumbo-sized for better legibility on typical TV setups. You navigate around this interface using the mouse or a controller – all from the comfort of the sofa. However, we found that the hardware support wasn’t quite as slick as the interface undoubtedly is. For example, there is no clear way of specifying which screen should…

THE RADEON RX 6900 XT currently reigns as AMD’s most powerful GPU. ASRock takes that chip, slaps on a massive tripleslot, triple-fan cooler, and cranks the clocks to levels normally only seen on the smaller Navi 22 and Navi 23 chips. It’s less about an elegant design and more of a brute force approach, but we appreciate the end result nonetheless. If it’s not immediately obvious, this card caters to extreme desktops with plenty of room. Perhaps there are some mini-ITX cases that could accommodate the card’s girth, but we’d be concerned about limiting airflow. Also, finding a mini-ITX power supply with the required triple 8-pin connectors and probably 850W of output will prove almost impossible. You could probably run the card off a 750W PSU, especially if it’s a…

THE NEW XPG Xenia 15 KC gaming laptop packs some serious punch for a slim portable PC. But wait! Isn’t XPG the performance brand of memory specialist Adata? Yes, it is—and the Xenia 15 KC is based on a 15-inch laptop chassis engineered by none other than Intel. Flip the Xenia upside down and you’ll find an Intel Corp sticker and product code, which is no bad thing. Intel not only has the resources to engineer a laptop right in a general sense, but it also has access to more information than anyone else when it comes to optimizing a chassis design to suit its mobile CPUs. The chassis in question has been around in some form since 2019. It’s mildly revised here and remains pretty sweet. Built largely from…

WE RECENTLY REVIEWED AVerMedia’s PW315 webcam and were pretty impressed with the features and performance we got for a relatively affordable price tag. The Taiwanese company specializes in webcams and the AVerMedia PW513 is a more premium version of the model we've already seen. Quality is key to good video communication. After all, there’s nothing worse than your video call looking like a game of Minecraft. Though we all experience dodgy internet connections from time to time, one way of improving the quality is to upgrade your outdated webcam. So, having given the PW315 the thumbs-up, we have high hopes that the PW513 can improve on it. One thing that the PW315 suffered from was its build quality but, here, AVerMedia has stepped up its game. Instantly, you get a sense…

REMEMBER MATROX? How about S3 or even 3dfx? Back in the 1990s, there were dozens of graphics card designers and builders. But since then, they have either run themselves into the ground, retreated into niche markets, or been bought out. For years, there has effectively been a duopoly; Nvidia and AMD control roughly 80 and 20 percent of the market respectively. Recent times have been harsh for the industry, losing cards to cryptocurrency miners and a chip shortage that squeezed supplies and raised prices. However, the growth of cloud services, AI, and other intensive HPC applications has fueled a resurgence in GPU development. In 2019, there were 11 developers, this year it has grown to 19. Most of this development won’t find its way out of the server racks, but the…

6 PLAYSTATION VR $299.99, www. playstation.com This PlayStation 4 headset brought VR to a wider audience and, though a little outdated, still offers an experience that’s easier to manage than a typical PC rig. It is also compatible with the PS5 through a camera adapter. Sony is working on a new version of PlayStation VR for its latest console, which should address the outdated feel of this device. 5 HTC VIVE PRO 2 $1,399.00, www. vive.com. The most premium VR headset experience on PC comes with a hefty price tag. It has a 5K display paired with a 120Hz refresh rate and the outcome is gorgeous. It is supremely comfortable and the sense of immersion is peerless. Sure, we’d love it to be tetherless, but we can’t have everything. Unfortunately, the controllers…

PANDEMIC ASIDE, 2021 has been one heck of a year. Our world of technology is still forever advancing, regardless of the silicon shortages. We’ve seen new graphics cards, processors, screens, peripherals, cases, cooling solutions, and ever crazier announcements and launches over the past 12 months. The tech landscape has really changed quite dramatically, companies have thrived, died, and survived as various economic impacts of the silicon shortage have finally hit home. And yet, the long advancing march of technology still trundles on ever forwards. So, 2022 is set up to be quite the year. Hopefully, its arrival will signal not only the end of the pandemic and its many impacts but also the end of the chip shortages too. With a host of new fabs and technologies opening up across…

WHEN WINDOWS 8 was announced, there was a concern that Microsoft would use Secure Boot, an optional feature of the then-new UEFI (Universal Extensible Firmware Interface), to restrict the installation of other operating systems. Secure Boot only allows booting EFI images that have been signed by a key enrolled in the UEFI. Since almost all hardware ships with a public signing key from Microsoft, it’s easy to see where this concern came from. However, to help Linux distros (or any software that needed its own bootloader) deal with Secure Boot, Microsoft used its magic key to sign a small program (they probably wouldn’t sign something big and complicated) called Shim. Shim is a first-stage bootloader used by many distros (including Debian and Ubuntu) to launch their own (second stage) bootloaders.…

OWNERS OF A MODERN UEFI system should be able to revert any unwanted changes caused by installing a new operating system, as long as you can get into the UEFI settings. The UEFI boots an image from the EFI partition or live media, and userspace tools (both on Windows and through efimgr on Linux) can change the boot order and, in some cases, break things. It’s generally expected, but not necessarily desired, that a newly installed OS will put itself at the top of the boot ordering. Often this results in Windows booting immediately and the only way to get to the UEFI settings to revert this is to hold the Shift key while shutting down from the start menu. An option to reboot to settings should appear. Our experience…

If you’ve determined your router needs upgrading, now is the perfect time to put security at the heart of your purchasing decision. And that means looking beyond consumer routers for something more suited to a SOHO environment. These types of routers receive frequent firmware updates (as opposed to none in many cases) to close security loopholes and occasionally add new features, plus they feature useful extras such as built-in VPN servers, more granular parental controls, and firewalls. While SOHO routers carry a premium, they don’t have to cost the earth. Synology’s RT2600ac (above) costs around $200 from newegg.com, and while it’s not the quickest, it’s certainly a lot more secure than any consumer router and is one of the most affordable routers we’ve seen supporting WPA3 encryption. Like most SOHO routers,…

Securing your router protects the gateway to your network, but it doesn’t mean you can ignore the security of each computer or device you’ve connected to it. After all, your network is only as secure as its weakest element. Your Windows PC should be protected by the built-in Windows Security, but what about your mobiles, tablets, and other connected devices? While iOS devices don’t technically require security apps, make sure you’re running the latest version of iOS and if you have installed third-party protection on your PC, look for a mobile app such as Bitdefender Mobile Security that can highlight potential vulnerabilities and provide some email and web protection. Android devices require antivirus just like your PC, and it’s good practice to protect Macs too. Perhaps now is the time…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR CC 2020 https://www.adobe.com WE HAVE ALREADY CREATED some interesting shapes, designs, and flat artwork previously in these tutorials, but there are always more steps you can take. As long as your creativity is infinite, you can add more to your design work and take it to the next level. Patterns and textures are a great route to advance your artwork. Sure, the less-is-more technique is also another strong approach, however, we are going all out for this tutorial. Adding a texture can make certain elements in your work pop, giving them stronger contrast and a 3D look. When used in the right places, it gives more depth and detail that should help to grab the audience’s attention. With flat artwork, a texture can give a grainy…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI 3 OR 4 NextCloudPi USB 3.0 HDD Internet connection RUNNING YOUR OWN CLOUD STORAGE SERVER saves money, allows you to expand storage as necessary, and can be done with a device as small as a Raspberry Pi. In our previous guides on the Raspberry Pi, we have covered everything you need to know about installing and setting up NextCloudPi and the Nextcloud Ubuntu Appliance, as well as the manual installation of Nextcloud on Raspberry Pi OS. But even when the software is installed and connected to your network, the job is still only half-finished. You will need to configure it for your specific use-case, enable external storage to reduce wear and tear on the Pi’s SD card and make the Nextcloud server accessible from beyond…

1. MAIN MENU Easily overlooked, this is the menu bar. It’s mostly concerned with options to configure Steam itself. 2. STEAM SECTIONS These tabs take you to different parts of Steam. Each entry is also a pulldown menu if you hover over it. 3. GAME LIBRARY CONTROLS Three filter icons to chose from; installed games, owned games and native Linux games. 4. SEARCH The search box. If you need this, you probably have too many games! 5. GAME LIBRARY The list of games in your library. Left-click to be taken to the game’s page. Right-click for the properties menu. 6. RUN A GAME A button that changes between play, install, and stream functions. 7. GUILT-O-METER Total playing time. Keep this covered when your boss, partner, or parents are present.…

Running hot and heavy Does power consumption matter? tested. reviewed. verdictized. INTEL’S NEW Alder Lake chips are undoubtedly a big step forward. But do they have a fatal flaw? I speak, inevitably, of power consumption. Not in a global quasi-environmental sense, that’s not my remit. What I’m talking about is the extent to which power consumption is a problem from a performance and usability perspective. Last issue, we had the 12900K in the labs and, boy, does it like a drink. It’s a 240W-plus chip. This month, the compact 12600K is in the house and, at first glance, it’s a more efficient chip, topping out at around 150W in heavy multi-threaded workloads. Depending on how you look at that, the 12600K seems to solve Alder Lake’s power problem. After all, 150W…

AT THE MORE extreme end of the monitor market, things don’t just get a bit pricey. You can also find yourself with a display that’s fine-tuned for some tasks, but not so good for others. Enter the new Dell S3222DGM. At just over $300, it’s an affordable 32-inch monitor and a decent proposition for everything from gaming to web browsing. It’s a true all-rounder. The S3222DGM is a 1440p model, which means 2,560 x 1,440 pixels. That’s adequate in terms of desktop real estate, but also a good compromise between detail and performance. 4K is sweet, but it seriously hammers your GPU. Given the cost of graphics upgrades right now, that’s a problem. The issue with that 32-inch 1440p combo involves general productivity duties. The consequent 93dpi pixel density doesn’t…

GIVE IT UP FOR that rarest of things in these unusual times, a gaming peripheral that won’t break the bank. We present the AOC 24G2, a 24-inch gaming monitor available for around $180, though day-today pricing is pretty volatile right now For that, you get all your basic gaming needs covered. And then some. High refresh, IPS image quality, adaptive sync, even slim-bezel styling, it’s all here. At this price point, of course, something has to give. Along with the modest 24-inch proportions, you’ll also have to make do with a mere 1080p resolution. But then that’s a good fit with both the performance of most budget-orientated gaming PCs and the average gamer’s actual budget too. More pixels make for a heavier GPU load, which is a real problem given…

STEELSERIES’ APEX 3 TKL is a smaller take on the brand’s most budget-friendly keyboard. As it’s a TKL format, it takes the 10-key numeric pad away from the standard Apex 3 board, making it a favorite amongst esports competitors. With less room taken up on your desk, there’s more room to swipe that mouse around. So, is this membrane keyboard a great pick-up for a price tag of under $50? This board also has a pretty nifty feature that may separate it from its main competitors. Although this is a TKL model, the Apex 3 TKL still offers you a taller format than normal. There is plenty of room on this board and it doesn’t feel as cramped as others. From the few first clicks after setting this keyboard up,…

REAL-TIME STRATEGY SO MUCH TIME has passed since the last Age of Empires release, one that wasn't a remake or a definitive edition, the chances are that anyone reading this hasn’t played a game in the series, or at least hasn’t thought about it for a long time. Things have changed a lot over the past 16 years. Series originator Ensemble Studios is no more, replaced by Relic Entertainment (Homeworld, Company of Heroes) and World’s Edge, an internal Microsoft studio set up to look after Age of Empires. Things have also changed outside of the development studio, especially in the world of Total War. The two series overlap in more than just timeframe, with Creative Assembly’s behemoth pushing the boundaries in terms of units on-screen and, more recently, fire and magical…