Table of contents for October 2017 in Maximum PC

a thing or two about a thing or two THIS IS AN IMPORTANT ISSUE for me. But I reckon it’s important for the whole PC community. I feel as though this is one of those times when you get to hold a company’s future in your hands, literally. I am, of course, referring to our review of AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper. I treat Threadripper as AMD’s first halo product in years. Many of the company’s recent releases have been iterations on existing products, and while that’s great, Threadripper stands on its own as being ballsy. Here’s the thing about halo products: Not many can afford them, and many more people don’t need them. I always refer to Audi when talking about halo products, because ever since the release of its R8…

In 2003, the National Institute of Standards and Technology said passwords should contain upper and lower case letters, a number, a special character, and should be changed frequently. Many services insist you follow this format, leading to passwords that are difficult to rEm3mB%r. Bill Burr, the man behind the rules, has confirmed what many argue is correct: it’s about password length. Four random words are more difficult to crack, and easier to recall. NIST has issued new guidelines, which also suggest not changing passwords unless a security breach is suspected. The old system created passwords that were cryptographically weak, but hard to use. “Much of what I did I now regret,” said Bill. To be fair, it was also our fault; we used common number substitutions, and simple base words.…

If Nvidia performs a bit faster, while using less power, this is a clear win for the green team. On paper, there’s a lot of good stuff inside Vega. New features include the High-Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC), reworked shader pipelines, new instructions, far more VRAM than the previous high-end Fiji design, and a Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer (DSBR). These are designed to allow Vega to outperform all other AMD GPUs, and the result is clock speeds up to 1,677MHz on the liquid-cooled RX Vega64, or 1,546MHz on the air-cooled variant. Combined with 4,096 shader cores, that gives Vega 13.7/12.7 Tflops of raw FP32 compute performance. Nvidia’s GTX 1080 Ti delivers up to 11.8 Tflops, and the Titan Xp up to 12.2 Tflops. That means RX Vega is going to outperform…

ROUND 1 Image Manipulation They’re all really, really good for this. Seriously. It’s what they’re made to do. We couldn’t get an M2 SSD between them, so tightly are they clustered around the “really good” end of the scale. If pressed, we’d say we like the Adobe way of working, especially the behavior of the Crop tool, over Serif’s. But that could be 20 years of professional use talking. So, let’s talk about pricing. Photoshop CC is part of Adobe’s notorious subscription pricing model, which puts some people off. However, the Photographer’s Bundle nets you Photoshop and the raw image development/organization app Lightroom, for $20 a month—looked at like that, maybe it’s not so expensive. Elements and Affinity are buy-once apps, and while Elements gets annual upgrades, which may extract…

Every liquid-cooled build falls into one of two camps, based around the tubing used. There are two types that the enthusiast community takes advantage of right now: hard tubing and soft. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Soft tubing, the most common type, is usually a form of flexible PVC, capable of being cut to length with relative ease. Available in many colors, it’s commonly found with an outer diameter of 13, 16, or 19mm, and can be used with a barb, or specially designed compression fittings, which are a combination of a barb, with an o-ring and compression cap on top. Its successor—which is arguably more difficult to work with—is hard tubing, also known as hardline, an umbrella term for everything from acrylic, to copper, even glass tubes.…

If you’re investing in one of EK’s DIY kits, deciding what to cool is quite easy: Do you buy a CPU kit, or a CPU and GPU kit? If you’re speccing up your own loop from scratch, however, the decision is more complex, but we reckon you may as well cool the GPU and CPU on your first pass. You can cool memory as well, and the VRMs on motherboards, but at additional cost and risk—particularly for DDR4, as you have to remove the stock heatsinks to mount the liquid-cooled waterblocks. In most scenarios, liquid cooling memory is more for aesthetics than performance. VRMs, on the other hand, may provide significant benefits for overclocking. For that, you need to buy a motherboard with integrated liquid cooling support, or invest in…

USB is simple and flexible. It scales nicely, capable of running very basic devices, such as a keyboard, right up to demanding mass storage devices. It is all based around a single controller on the host machine. All communications are initiated by the host—devices cannot communicate directly with each other. Each device is assigned an address. The host controller sends packets of data, one bit at a time. Every connected device receives the data, but only the specified device responds, and only one device at a time can reply. Despite the huge number of devices you can connect at once, it essentially only talks to one at a time. USB has four data transfer types, which help make it so flexible. Control transfer does the initial housekeeping and setup. Bulk transfer…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI Any 40-pin model of Pi, with Raspbian Pixel. EXPLORER HAT PRO Plus 1x LED, 1x 220 Ohm resistor, 1x push button switch, a DC motor, 6x male-to-male jumper wires, and a 10k potentiometer. WE’VE GATHERED TOGETHER a quartet of 10-minute hacks that you can build using the Explorer HAT Pro for the Raspberry Pi. These four projects can be mixed together, and we’ll be using the analog inputs with potentiometers, digital input/outputs with LEDs and buttons, and the H Bridge controller for operating DC motors with the board. Before we power on the Raspberry Pi, we need to attach the Explorer HAT Pro to all 40 of the GPIO pins. The board should sit atop the Raspberry Pi, and match the outline of the Pi.…

Open Terminal on your Raspberry Pi, and begin by installing some tools: Next, we need to enable an experimental graphics driver. Run and scroll down to “Advanced Options.” Press Return. Choose “AB – GL Driver” and enable it. Now download the official Minecraft client with the following: Launch it by running: Now you need to log in with your username and password. Next, click the “Profile Editor” tab, then click the box that’s underneath “Version” to open up a new window. Find the drop-down menu named “Use Version,” and choose “1.8.9.” Next, click “Save Profile.” Click the “Play” button at the bottom to begin downloading the files. When the downloads are finished, you need to close the launcher and re-open Terminal. Run the following commands: Next, we need to make…

A Linked Smart Object is a layer that contains image data from an external source, such as another Photoshop or Illustrator file. When the source file is updated, the Linked Smart Object is updated, too, saving you the trouble of changing your T-shirt graphics every time the bored designer tweaks his logos. You can also perform transforms on these layers, skewing, growing, and shrinking them, without worrying about losing quality, because the original data is always accessible in the linked file, rather than being thrown away when you commit to a transform. Linked vector files also remain vector files, rather than being rasterized on import, so can be manipulated without fear of pixellation.…

SEASONIC PRIME TITANIUM 650W Shoot me down, but I won’t fall, I am titanium! Fitting lyrics for what is currently the best of breed in the PSU world. Seasonic has been making PSUs for decades, and its Prime Titanium line tops the charts. It’s not just about 80 Plus Titanium certification either— the 650W model also has ETA A (a far more demanding assessment of PSU quality) and Lambda A++ (less than 20dB noise) ratings. That’s all well and good, but here’s what you really need to know: The 650W Prime Titanium is awesome! Thanks to the exceptional efficiency, it barely gets warm under moderate loads, and even at max it’s very quiet. Ripple, voltage regulation, and power factor are all excellent as well. The 650W model is one of…

The massive demand for Tesla’s new $35,000 Model 3 shows that we are ready for the mainstream electric car—the company had over half a million reservations on its books at one point. This makes it the most anticipated car ever. To fund manufacturing, Tesla has been forced to sell $1.5 billion in bonds, and the money men look happy enough to buy them. Over the first quarter of 2017, it built 25,000 cars, a new record for Tesla, but a long way from its plan for 500,000 a year—even at this level, it is under a tenth of Ford’s annual production. Tesla has a lot riding on the Model 3; despite catching the zeitgeist beautifully, the company still made a loss of over $330 million last year. The list of…

Linux is the number-one kernel on the planet. It runs on everything from IoT devices and cell phones to high-end supercomputers. Yet life with Linux on a laptop has often been full of compromise. Nvidia drivers still don’t play nice with Wayland. ACPI power management can be hit or miss. And Wi-Fi can still cause headaches sometimes. Even so, Linux is far better on laptops today than it was five years ago. Historically, hardware woes could be avoided by looking for hardware that was compatible with Linux before buying. Since manufacturers didn’t exactly advertise Linux compatibility, it was up to the user to figure out the make, model, and revision of the key pieces of hardware in a laptop. But this can be tricky, because manufacturers rarely list the hardware…

Speed Boosts Upgrade Quandaries Perished PSU Mobile Speed Hi, Doc. I have a Core i5- 2540M, with 6GB of LPDDR3, and a GeForce GT 520M graphics adapter. They’re so slow, though! I use Gigabyte’s OC Guru and MSI’s Afterburner software, so can I crank that hardware up to run even faster? –Computer Bro THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: At the end of the day, you’re working with a more than six-year-old mainstream CPU and a GPU with just 48 CUDA cores. No matter how aggressively either is tuned, the absolute impact in today’s games will be minimal. Moreover, there’s a good chance that the chassis designed to handle such a combination wouldn’t be forgiving of increased heat output. And because mobile CPU and GPU coolers are often linked, adjusting one component may…

If you’ve decided to give liquid cooling a go, you’re going to want to do some benchmarking, to see how much of an effect it has had on your build. We recommend you download CPUID’s HWMonitor. It’s a neat piece of freeware that pumps out all sorts of system info, including temperatures of a whole variety of system components, including your CPU and GPU. Next on our list is Prime95. Designed to search for Mersenne prime numbers, it’s one of the most aggressive torture tests out there for stressing your processor. Finally, for your GPU, grab FurMark—or, if you fancy dropping the cash, 3DMark’s Fire Strike. First up, reboot your system, open up HWMonitor, and take note of the idle temperatures of your processor (you’ll want the “package” temperature) and…

We decided to stick with temperatures and system power draw for this feature. If you’re looking for performance figures, head over to “Build It” on page 70 to get the lowdown. All temperatures are the highest recorded over the duration of the benchmark. Prime95 was run for five minutes, Cinebench R15 was run three consecutive times, with all other benchmarks running for a single instance. Each GPU test was a single instance, with both games being run at 1440p, on the highest graphical preset. “Power Draw Load” was one standard instance of Prime95’s burn test, over five minutes. For our final figure, we measured the temperature of our processor at idle, ran an instance of Prime95 with Small FFTs until the processor temperature wouldn’t increase any more. Then we canceled…

USB’s main rival in the early years was FireWire. In 1987, Apple, IBM, and others started working together on a new high-speed interface. By 1995, it was ready, and it was technically something of a triumph. FireWire—or IEEE 1394, as it is more properly known— could manage 400Mb/s in both directions simultaneously, supply up to 1.5A at 30V, and daisy-chain up to 63 hot-swappable devices. Apple added it to its Macs. Sony used it on its first generation of semi-professional digital video cameras. Microsoft and Intel took an interest. It looked as though it was going to be a thing. On the cusp of success, the wheels started to fall off. The collaborative effort had also produced 261 patents across 10 companies. Apple decided it wanted $1 per port royalty payment.…

In this tutorial, we’re focusing on the Explorer HAT Pro, which is the top-of-the-line board. It comes with eight capacitive touch pads, four analog inputs, four digital inputs, and four outputs. We have a DRV8833 motor controller, and pins for I2C/SPI and serial connections. And we get a breadboard to prototype with. The capacitive inputs 1–4 are best used with your hands, but if you wish to test the conductivity of a banana, for instance, or use either aluminum foil or copper tape to create larger circuits, then you can use inputs 5–8 with crocodile clips, and transform anything you like into a fun form of input. This is in much the same manner as the Makey Makey, a device that emulates a keyboard/mouse, and can turn conductive objects into…

This tutorial explains how to set up Minecraft on your local network, meaning anyone who wants to play needs to be connected to it. However, you may wish to allow others to join your server over the Internet. First, you need to assign your Pi a permanent IP address on your network by editing Next, use a feature known as port forwarding on your router to forward incoming traffic from the outside Internet to the Pi itself. Because each router is different, it’s best to check the specific steps to do this with your router manufacturer, or enlist a more technically able friend. In either case, say that you need to open port 25565 for both TCP and UDP. You also need your router’s external IP address, which you can…

LENGTH OF TIME: 5–6 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM THE CONCEPT WELL, THIS WAS FUN. As we explained in our liquid cooling feature (pg. 36), EKWB sent us one of its latest Fluid Gaming Kits. In fact, it sent us two: a standard 240mm CPUonly loop, and one with an additional GPU block. Naturally, we gravitated to the latter, not because it’s pricier than its $160 kin, but because it’s the more intriguing solution. We’re used to cooling processors off a single 240mm radiator, but adding a GPU to the loop (literally), a part that can pack some serious heat, just seemed ludicrous. We made the decision to go with Ryzen at the very last minute. We’ve been wanting to revisit the platform for some time now. As both BIOS…

IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I’ve seen an impressive piece of portable tech. And where was it likely to have come from other than the behemoth that is Samsung? Finally, we’re witness to the latest generation of T-series portable SSDs. The T5 is the first USB 3.1 drive we’ve seen in the office, and it’s a belter. Taking advantage of that USB 3.1 standard, coming with both a USB Type-C to Type-C cable, and a Type-C to Type-A cable, it packs speeds upward of 470MB/s for both read and writes in CrystalDiskMark, and the random 4Ks aren’t resting on their laurels either, with 30MB/s read and 70MB/s write. It’s the form factor that blew us away most, though. As ever with the T5 series, it’s gorgeous. With a soft-touch metallic…

a part-by-part guide to building a better pc BUDGET Approximate Price: $646 WE TRIED AND WE TRIED, but scrimping this budget build down any further wasn’t possible without aggressively damaging the spec. We believe a 120GB SSD is the minimum nowadays. Although, admittedly, you can boot Linux off a USB stick, that 120GB gives you plenty of space for expansion, and ensures that if you do plan on jumping ship to Windows 10 or another OS, you’ll have plenty of space for chunkier operating systems. Hypothetically, if you wanted to really skimp, you could ditch the SSD, and run the OS off a thumb drive, or a partition on the hard drive, but we think that any modern rig ought to run some form of flash storage. That aside, we…

Bitcoin has now become bitcoin and bitcoin cash (name could have been less confusing, guys), wallets being populated with an equal number of the new version, creating $4 billion of cryptocurrency overnight. The blockchain has been cloned, known as a hard fork. The nature of the math behind bitcoin means that transactions, and hence new coins, become increasingly more convoluted to make. The original specs have slowed this to a crawl. Bitcoin cash uses the same basic blockchain system as bitcoin, but with much bigger blocks, up from 1MB to 8MB. The bitcoin miners now have something potentially profitable to chew on again. The arrival of bitcoin cash caused a spike in bitcoin’s value, to near $3,500. But, given the volatility of bitcoin, printed valuations are ephemeral. The split mirrors…

TRIUMPHS QUANTUM TELEPORTATION IN SPACE Chinese scientists have sent a photon 300 miles up to a space station. Unhackable instant Internet still a way off, though. HYPERLOOP AT 192MPH Elon Musk’s magnetic-levitation pod in a tunnel is due for fullscale test in South Korea. DISNEY GOES STREAMING Next year, Mickey and chums will have their own streaming service, including original content. TRAGEDIES SURFACE WOES Consumer Report has stopped recommending the Microsoft Surface after breakage rates reach 25 percent after two years. DOTA FANS UNHAPPY Valve’s new digital trading card game based on Dota hasn’t gone down well with fans—cue an online hissy fit. MORE UBER CHAOS One of the company’s investors, Benchmark Capital, is suing CEO Travis Kalanick for fraud.…

8 RADEON RX VEGA At last, AMD removed the wraps from its Vega GPU— three flavors, 13.7 teraflops, and a whole lot of pixels. 7 RADEON WX SSG Not as muscular as the gamer Vega, but an integrated 2TB SSD makes 8K video editing realistic at last. 6 NVIDIA EGPU It’s official: Nvidia and partners will produce a Thunderbolt 3 external GPU solution for Titan and Quadro cards. 5 NVIDIA ISAAC Nvidia stepped beyond GPUs with its AI-controlled robot, which can play dominos or be a VR telepresence avatar. 4 CINEMA 4D R19 Maxon’s renderer update introduces GL-bolstered realtime previews, a spherical VR camera, and stacks more. 3 HP Z VR BACKPACK HP’s pro take on its Omen backpacks, aimed at theme parks and “experiences,” squeezes immense power into a…

BUILD IT Step-by-step guide PG. 70 Ah, liquid cooling, the high-tech love child of a mad plumber and a computer enthusiast. Once upon a time, we lived in a world where the very thought of mixing water and computing hardware was seen as blasphemous. Fast-forward to 2017, however, and it’s now commonplace. AIOs litter the landscape of build guides, highend systems, and even home theater PCs. There have even been attempts to liquidcool entire server rooms in the pursuit of more efficient thermal voiding. Alas, building your own loop still bears the scars of the stigma that plagued the community all those years ago. And despite being easier and safer now than it ever has been, the comments remain the same: It’s not safe, it costs too much, I don’t…

Although plans often have to be adapted to suit your case, the environment, and the parts you have, planning in advance is crucial to building an effective loop. And even with liquid cooling, you still need sufficient internal airflow, so removing all internal fans is a no-no. There are a few things to consider when building a liquid-cooled loop. First and foremost, your pump should always be gravity fed by a reservoir. Think of a pump as a fan—the bearing at its center needs to be well lubricated to function. In a liquid cooling scenario, the coolant acts as lubricant. If you don’t have lubricant in the pump, you risk damaging the bearing and killing your pump. You should also note which ports on your devices are inlets and outlets.…

In 2005, we were promised wireless USB. The idea seemed sound enough at the time. The USB Implementers Forum still has a page trumpeting the project. It points out that there are (or rather were—it is an old page) two billion wired USB devices. Wireless USB would bring the speed and security of a wired connection together with the ease of use of wireless. It would use Ultra Wide Band radio to establish a short range connection between host and device. At around 10 feet, it would offer USB 2.0 speeds. Performance dropped off with distance, down to a quarter of that at 30 feet or more. Unfortunately, this proved a troublesome project. The regulations surrounding UWB are different all around the world, and there was considerable paperwork and negotiation to…

BACKGROUND Is there an echo in here? Seems like Alexa’s talking to us from a lot of devices now. The new Echo Show adds a screen to bring even more Alexa, so she can watch you while she listens. Creepy? Maybe. Endearing? OK, yeah, a little. Hey, Alexa, let’s “Drop In” on another teardown! MAJOR TECH SPECS • 7-inch touchscreen display with 1024x600 resolution • Dual 2-inch stereo speakers • Intel Atom x5-Z8350 (2M cache, up to 1.92GHz) processor • 5MP front-facing camera • Eight-microphone array KEY FINDINGS • Like most Echo devices, we start from the bottom. After peeling up the taped-in rubber foot, we spy a handful of T5 Torx screws. But with all screws dispatched, there are no seams—we seem to be screwed, for now. We hunt…

1 Here are those CableMod LED strips in action yet again. One single 30cm strip placed along the top of the chassis really helps make the hardware pop. 2 The PSU here is a something of an old office beastie. Running for over two years now, the BitFenix Alchemy 750W is still available today, and comes with black braided cables. 3 If you want to have some overclocking fun with liquid cooling, grab a Ryzen 7 1700 instead of the 1800X, drop the memory to 16GB, and you should see similar performance for a lot less cash. 4 By default, EK provides you with clear coolant in the A240G kit, so we picked up some purple dye from Mayhems for $9, and added a couple of drops to the reservoir…

SO, IT’S COME TO THIS: Asus is trying to sell you Optimus Prime’s beard trimmer. Like streamers didn’t already have enough to answer for, the ROG Strix Magnus is the latest manifestation of their influence, a USB-powered, desktop mic, designed for in-game chat and broadcasting. As such, it comes with all the features you’d expect from a product that carries the word “gaming,” but doesn’t strictly have much to do with gaming: customizable RGB lighting, accompanying software, and a braided cable. But let’s give the Magnus a fair chance— there’s a definite gap in the market for a product like this. Streamers have migrated away from the scratchy world of headset microphones in favor of quasi-studio mics, such as Rode’s NT-USB and Audio- Technica’s AT2020USB+, both priced slightly below this…

IN LATE 2014, the Japan Audio Society (JAS) and the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) agreed on a specification that products would have to meet in order to be allowed to wear the hi-res audio certification badge. Defining hiresolution audio as “lossless audio that is capable of reproducing the full range of sound from recordings that have been mastered from better than CD quality music sources,” the JAS and CTA require hardware to have a 20 Hz–40 kHz frequency response range in order to accurately reproduce that lossless sound. Although even the sharpest human ears can’t hear anything above 20 kHz, all that extra headroom above it in the hi-res audio tech standard allows the full harmonic range of each sound to be voiced, which means a fuller sound in your…

WORLD OF WARCRAFT has long been a major part of my life. For 13 years, I’ve played the MMORPG avidly. I’ve gamed with some of the best players in the world, designed award-winning user interfaces, and even lead teams of up to 25 people for months on end, to take out some of the toughest challenges that this pixel-packed epic can throw at us. It brought me into the heady world of Photoshop, introduced me to Lua scripting, and was a big part of what set me off tinkering with PCs. It’s a beautiful game, and it has changed radically since I first started playing it back in 2004. Not all for the better—however, rose-tinted goggles aside, it’s infinitely more impressive than when it first debuted. Recently, though, I’ve fallen…

And there you have it, folks. Threadripper hath cometh to the people. And with it, an almighty number of cores has made its way down from the heady heights of server processing to affordable consumership levels. It really is a credit to AMD just how well its Ryzen architecture scales. Although the first Ryzen parts didn’t impress us when it came to overclocking, the fact that you can take all 12, nay, all 16 cores and push them right up to 4.0GHz with little to no worry is just staggering. If Intel’s Core series can’t compete, both on price and performance, it may be some time before we see this part fall from the grace of our most prestigious Turbo build. $800, www.amd.com…