Table of contents for March 2022 in Maximum PC

a thing or two about a thing or two Guy Cocker AS PC ENTHUSIASTS, we’ve never had it so good. I know, that’s a bold statement for a new editor to make after two years of component shortages, inflated graphics card prices, and general stagnation in CPUs. “The new guy is crazy! Burn the heretic!” I hear you cry. But allow me to explain… First of all, there’s finally some genuine competition in the CPU space. Intel’s 12th generation chips, particularly the i5-12400, offer incredible price-to-performance and bring real competition to AMD’s dominance in the low-to-mid-range. Look out for our next issue when we’ll be building an amazing system around this chip, redefining the mid-range gaming desktop in the process. Not to be outdone, AMD looks set to build on…

Printers identify official cartridges as frauds ONE CASUALTY of the chip shortage is the little DRM chips used in Canon’s official printer cartridges. Normally, if you use a non-Canon cartridge, your printer pops up warning screens to complain. It also tells you the cartridge may be faulty and refuses to reveal how much ink or toner you have left. Obviously, the people who make your printer want you to buy their highlyprofitable cartridges, especially as they can hard-code page limits into them. Canon has now run out of these chips in some markets, meaning genuine Canon cartridges cannot be recognized and may malfunction. The company has issued instructions on how to go through the multiple warning screens: by just closing and ignoring them. This exposes them for what they are:…

Cut-down card cut down AMD HAS RELEASED the first of its budgetorientated graphics cards sporting RDNA2 silicon, the RX 6500 XT, which was quickly followed by the RX 6400. Both use the new Navi 24, which was designed with laptops in mind. This helps explain some of the missing features, including media coding and decoding, and only two display controllers. The RX 6500 XT sports 4GB of GDDR6 RAM, and costs $199. The GPU packs 16 Compute Units, 1,024 Stream processors, 16MB of AMD’s Infinity cache, and a ‘game’ clock of 2,610MHz. That’s half of what you get on an RX 6600 XT, and the quoted fill rates and FLOPS numbers neatly match that. There are only four PCIe lanes, as the rest aren’t wired-up. That wouldn’t be too bad…

Jeremy Laird Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of Nvidia’s corporate culture, in general. It has long been the prickliest, most thin-skinned of the major tech players, getting into more pointless spats and having a greater propensity to do things like blacklisting members of the media for perceived transgressions than its rivals, Intel and AMD. I understand the particular derision reserved for the RTX 3080 12GB. For starters, it’s a reminder that the 3080 should have had 12GB from the get-go. At the same time, it’s another expensive new GPU that barely moves the needle for performance, just like the RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3080 Ti, and RTX 3090 Ti. Put another way, the 3080 12GB changes nothing apart from Nvidia’s margins. It’s another GPU that shifts the average…

PROCESSOR Intel Core i5-10400 $149 We’re going back two generations with this sub-$150 Comet Lake CPU, which is a pretty good bet if you’re building on a tight budget. With integrated Intel UHD 630 graphics and a cooler, it’s a wellrounded product for a relatively small outlay. This six-core, 12-thread CPU should handle things pretty well, with up to 4.3GHz clock speed from Intel’s Turbo Boost technology 2.0. For our build, it should be able to play games at a midrange level at 1080p and it should also suit the rest of the rig nicely. intel.com STORAGE PNY CS900 480GB 2.5” SSD $44 One of the most popular SSDs from PNY, the CS900 is an ideal price for our budget build. With capacity options ranging from 120GB to a whopping…

BY SOME ESTIMATES, over half of the world’s economic growth over the last 50 years has depended on Moore’s Law. What was once an esoteric observation involving transistor density in semiconductors is arguably now the most important economic driving force on the planet. It’s the technological gift that keeps on giving. More transistors. More computing performance. For less money. Year after year. The net result has been unprecedented global economic growth lasting decades. In other words, Moore’s Law isn’t just about faster CPUs and GPUs every year or the inevitability that the PC you buy today will be hopelessly outclassed tomorrow. It’s about the huge impact that exponential increases in computing power have had on the way we all live. At least, that was true for about 40 years following…

There’s a sudden realization that comes when you misplace a vital file or accidentally delete it—never mind the shock of discovering an entire partition or drive has gone missing. Speaking from personal experience, data loss is an ordeal, whether it’s a single file or the entire contents of a drive. Anyone who’s had to reconstruct a hard drive file-byfile because they were too zealous with fdisk will know the importance of backups. We learned the hard way in 1999, but you don’t have to—dig out issue 194 of Maximum PC and follow our ultimate backup guide. The quickest way to resolve data loss is using your backups, which is where we’ll begin this guide to the tools, techniques, and tips you need to maximize your chances of recovering lost files. What if…

Have you been targeted by ransomware? Most forms target your data rather than locking you out of your PC. Typically, you’ll need to use a rescue disc or boot into Safe mode with networking to remove the underlying infection before you can look at recovering your files. If the files have just been encrypted, you should be able to restore them from a recent backup. If your files are stored in OneDrive and you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, you should receive a warning that files have been changed or deleted and given the chance to roll back to earlier, pre-infection versions. If the feature doesn’t appear automatically, click the OneDrive settings button and choose Options, then select ‘Restore your OneDrive’. After verifying your identity, you’ll be able to quickly roll…

THE MOVIE THEATER is dead, long live the movie theater! Cultural shifts usually happen pretty slowly, but recent concern about being in enclosed spaces during a pandemic has certainly accelerated the shift towards home streaming. Home theater installations have always been something enthusiastic PC users would try to tackle—expensive kit, miles of cables, drilling holes through drywall—these are all activities we imagine tick the average reader’s boxes. A home theater project is about bringing together a host of disparate parts and technologies to offer that special movie experience. Of course, you could stream the same content to your cell phone, but where’s the fun in that? No, this project will be about recreating the comfort, the lighting, the big-screen, and big surround-sound experience of the movie theater. Part of that…

The main issues encountered with projector installations are the additional cabling and accommodating the screen. With many 75-inch TV models now costing less than an entry-level 4K projector, it might make sense to opt for a decent big-screen TV. This is a great time to consider a gaming TV. The default high-end 4K capabilities of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X mean manufacturers have invested in developing PC-style modes as selling points rather than an afterthought. We’d recommend the LG C1 range, which starts at 48-inch and goes up to 83-inch screens. This OLED panel supports HDMI 2.1 with a 4K 120Hz refresh plus the HDMI 2.1 Auto Low Latency Mode and Variable Refresh Rate that works with both G-Sync and Freesync, offering a low 13ms input lag. Starting…

A PC RUNNING WINDOWS OR LINUX Internet connection. THESE DAYS, IT SEEMS we’re never far from cybercrime headlines. In the last few years, we’ve seen large-scale attacks against Ukraine’s power grid, Sony Pictures, the Colonial Pipeline, JBL-SA (the world’s largest meat supplier), and South African shipping firm Transnet. Such attacks often aim to cause damage and disruption, though the aim can sometimes be political. The Sony Pictures hack is widely believed to have originated from North Korea, with hackers demanding that the Kim Jong Un-themed comedy The Interview be withdrawn. Latterly though, hackers are financially motivated—they want their targets to pay a ransom (usually in cryptocurrency), either to restore access to their systems or avoid sensitive information being publicized. These are known as ransomware attacks. Ransom demands can be high too,…

SO, YOU’VE DECIDED to take the plunge and get into music production? Whether you’re going down the professional route or just wanting to have a bit of fun, the likelihood is that you’ll be using a digital workstation to piece together your music. Unless you’re physically creating and recording your own music, you’ll probably need to add external sounds, drumbeats, or sound effects to your production. Created by other artists, these are known as samples. Sampling is a term that describes taking a portion of an existing song, whether it’s a drumbeat, a line of vocal, or a few notes from an instrument, and adding it into a new song. Perhaps the most famous example is Vanilla Ice’s hit Ice Ice Baby, which sampled the bassline from Under Pressure by…

TRIUMPHS PC SALES STILL BOOMING The PC boom continued in 2021, with sales up by between 9.9 to 14.8 percent over 2020. WASHERS ARE COOLER Alder Lake’s design can cause warped heat spreaders, but using four 1mm washers to raise the ILM can cool the chip by 5°C. UNIFIED MEMORY, AGAIN A new experimental UltraRAM is claimed to be good for 10 million write/erase cycles. It uses resonant tunneling to store data. TRAGEDIES R.I.P. BLACKBERRY Once ubiquitous, the Blackberry phone service has now been switched off for good. CRASH FOR VIEWS? A YouTuber is being investigated by the FAA after bailing out of his plane and leaving it to crash. All caught on camera, of course. THE STATE IS WATCHING Surveillance is so prevalent in China that US athletes have…

INTEL HAS ANNOUNCED that it’s opening a huge new chip fabrication plant in Ohio. Construction on the 1,000-acre site is due to start this year, and the first phase will see an investment of $20 billion into two fabs. It will then be expanded into a ‘mega’ site with up to eights fabs and a total investment of around $100 billion. Once complete, it will be one of the world’s biggest semiconductor manufacturing plants, and though it’s not yet clear which process nodes each fab will build, we expect Intel’s 20A and 18A process (yes, we have reached angstrom measurements). Intel’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, said it will “help build a more resilient supply chain”. Fabs aren’t simple to build though and we won’t see any silicon from the site for…

Jarred Walton Now, with AMD’s upcoming Rembrandt Ryzen 6000-series processors, consoles might get some competition. Make no mistake, consoles are still a big step up in overall performance, but compared with the previous generation Renoir (Ryzen 4000G) and Cezanne (Ryzen 5000G) processors, Rembrandt will double the level of performance we’ve come to expect from integrated graphics. The Ryzen 7 5700G still posts some respectable performance in games. It’s not sufficient for 1080p medium at 60fps, but it could handle 720p gaming. It was also about 50–100 percent faster than Intel’s Xe-LP found in the Tiger Lake laptops (which is about twice as fast as desktop UHD 770 Graphics). But with Rembrandt, we’re at the point where integrated graphics won’t completely suck. First, AMD has boosted the maximum number of compute…

> Win11 Firewall flop > Router add-ons > Chuck Start menu Windows 11 Firewall failure I am a long-time subscriber to Maximum PC and have a self-built desktop running a Ryzen 5 3400G CPU with an M.2 970 EVO 500GB as system drive, with additional SSDs and a spinning disk drive on an Asus X570-Plus (Wi-Fi). I tried a Windows 11 upgrade, both as an Insider and via a USB created using the Media Creation Tool. Windows 10 is running fine, including Windows Defender Firewall and Bitdefender antivirus, and no other firewall is installed. Immediately after either update or setup, everything looks good and the Defender Firewall is running but, after any reboot, the Firewall will not run. The Windows Defender Firewall Service is continually toggling between ‘Running’ and ‘Starting’…

Data loss isn’t always restricted to accidentally deleted files or completely lost or corrupt partitions. Sometimes it can manifest in an individual file not saving correctly or corrupting when opened by its parent application. First, check to see if the program itself offers repair tools. For example, if you have a corrupt Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file, then in the latest version of Office, click Browse to open the main file selection dialog. Locate the file in question, then click the down arrow next to the Open button and you’ll reveal an ‘Open and Repair…’ option that may enable you to recover some or all the document. If it’s unable to help, check your data recovery tool. While free tools are limited, paid-for apps, such as EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard…

Data recovery isn’t an exact science, and it’s not always that intuitive either. Data recovery specialists offer additional, if expensive, services to help you get critical files back should you need them. Some data recovery tools allow you to make use of remote assistance specialists to help guide you through the process of data recovery. The second, most expensive form of data recovery is getting data off physically damaged drives. If your drive isn’t being detected or making clicking or grinding noises, it’s likely this is down to the heads crashing or motor failure. Recovery from these drives is only possible using specialist labs known as cleanrooms, where the drive can be physically opened and the platters upon which your data is stored can be connected to equipment from which your…

examining technology and putting it to use SHOW FILE EXTENSION TYPES File types are hidden by default in Windows, which can be annoying when you’re searching for a particular document, photograph, or application. To turn these on, go to the search icon and look for ‘File Explorer Options’. In these settings, go to the view tab and uncheck the box named ‘Hide extensions for known file types’. Now, the next time you head back to your file explorer, you will be able to see all the file extensions. SAM LEWIS STAFF WRITER WORTH THE WAIT? There have been a few disappointing game releases of late, with titles from teams who should be hitting the mark every time falling some way short. While glitches are inevitable, GTA: The Trilogy Definitive Edition…

PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS 2022 http://www.adobe.com/photoshop-elements Some photos Imagination ADOBE UPDATES PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS, its beginner-friendly image-editing app, every year, but we’re starting to wish it didn’t. The problem is not that it’s an excellent program, but the urge to upgrade to the latest version is strong and the new features rarely justify the price. It’s fine if you only upgrade every time you buy a new PC, but annually? Elements isn’t priced as a subscription, unlike its big brother Photoshop CC, which gets a constant flow of patches and upgrades. Instead, you pay once and use the software for as long as your PC supports it. The 2022 version of the app piles on the automation, with clever transformations powered by Adobe’s Sensei cloud tech. There’s a thrust in the direction of…

tested. reviewed. verdictized. PC gamer goes Analogue A blast from the past and lots of nostalgia EVEN BEFORE JOINING this esteemed publication, I considered myself a hardcore PC gamer. I waited patiently for God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn to make their way to the PC so I could unleash my RTX 3090 on them for true 4K resolution and unlocked frame rates. Suck it up, PlayStation 5. I started out as a console gamer though, in particular, on a handheld from the 1990s called the Game Gear. So when I heard friends in my Discord group talking about the Analogue Pocket, which recreates handheld consoles of this era from the likes of Sega and Nintendo, my ears pricked up. I convinced one of them to let me come over…

OCCASIONALLY, a new product pops up that appears to have skipped the past five years completely. We give you the ‘new’ BenQ EW3880R. That’s not to say this epic 38-inch monitor is rubbish, as there’s lots to like. But the EW3880R is a pricey screen that feels decidedly dated. First, let’s cover the basic proposition. This is 38 inches of gently curved (2300R, to be specific) IPS panel. The native resolution clocks in at 3,840x1,600, so it’s 4K in the horizontal, but not in the vertical, and the aspect ratio is 21:9 ultrawide. By some measures, this is a pretty epic panel. The sheer scale of the screen combined with the ultrawide aspect ensures that. But it’s far from novel. In fact, back in 2016, LG announced the 38UC99, a…

KEYBOARDS ON MSI’s laptops have tended to be somewhat hit and miss over recent years, but it’s difficult to get everything right when creating a budget laptop. Inevitably, compromises have to be made and those looking for for value may consider that their money is better spent on the performance of the device. However, with the latest addition to MSI’s range of peripherals, this VIGOR GK50 low profile TKL keyboard, all the attention is focused on performance. This keyboard is a fresh take on the VIGOR GK50 low profile board that has been around for a couple of years. The idea behind a low-profile keyboard is that it is both sleeker and more minimalist than a traditional keyboard, so it would appear to make perfect sense to merge the low-profile…

IF YOU’RE FORTUNATE enough to own HyperX’s excellent Cloud Revolver S headset, there’s not much to get excited about on the Revolver 7.1. It’s a hardware refresh in the minimalist sense, with only one significant change; the Revolver S used Dolby tech to produce virtual surround sound, while the Revolver 7.1 uses HyperX’s proprietary surround sound hardware for genuine 7.1. The design is similar to the original Revolver, with large earcups and a sturdy steel frame that supports a selfadjusting headband. The combination of metal and matte plastic gives a premium feel to the headset, with memory foam wrapped in a soft leatherette on the earcups and headband. It’s a far more refined product than HyperX’s cheaper offerings such as the Cloud Stinger and Cloud Core headsets, with a hefty…

BIGGEST EVER ACQUISITION FOR THE GAMES SECTOR CANDY CRUSH is now owned by Microsoft, along with partner gaming brands including Call of Duty and Warcraft. In a huge deal, MS spent $68.7 billion to buy Activation Blizzard. This is good news if you held Activision stock, as Microsoft paid a healthy premium for the privilege. The deal makes Microsoft the third largest gaming company in the world, with many new titles to add to Game Pass’ 25 million subscribers. It has also left gamers wondering what will happen to their favorite titles. Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, said it will “honor all existing agreements”, adding a non-committal “desire” to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. Microsoft has history here. After it bought ZeniMax for $7.5 billion, multi-platform games, such…

6 ALIENWARE CONCEPT NYX A powerhouse PC purpose-built for cloud-based gaming, Dell’s newest concept product is the Nyx. Dell claims it can enable high-end gaming sessions on any screen in your home by acting as a central server from which up to four games can be streamed at once. 5 ASUS ZENBOOK 17 FOLD Foldable phones are so last year—2022 is the year of the foldable laptop. The Zenbook 17 Fold can be configured for either a 17.3-inch or 12.5-inch display and comes with a slick, detachable keyboard. No, we don’t know how expensive it’s going to be, nor how breakable. 4 TP-LINK ARCHER AXE200 OMNI ‘Mecha-powered WiFi’ is the future, apparently. TP-Link’s latest is a tri-band router with four antennas that use tiny motors to rotate and angle themselves towards…

BUILDING A MONSTER PC and blowing the budget sure is fun, but for most of us, the more realistic challenge right now is constructing something to a lower price. Whether that’s because you’ve got other purchases to worry about, or you can’t source all of the components right now, you might be holding off building something for work, school or pleasure when you really don’t need to. So we decided to set ourselves a challenge: could we build something we’d be proud to have on our desk to a $600 budget? Something that would not only offer bang-for-buck performance, but also use quality components that will stand the test of time? Something that can handle everyday tasks, while also looking sleek doing it? In starting our build, we first looked…

WE’VE MADE IT TO the finish line of this budget-end rig. Right from the offset, we knew this was going to be a good-looking machine, even though we’d set ourselves a strict price bracket within which to work. Much of that is down to the NZXT H510 Flow case that houses our machine. With its sharp lines and better airflow from a revised front panel, it’s great value for money and a big improvement from the previous H510 case. For under $100, it’s a great case that brings the looks of your build bang up to date. Our chip is a promising component—a mid-range Intel Core i5 CPU for under $150 is still a good and solid brain with plenty of potential performance, despite dating back to the Comet Lake…

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Hard drives aren’t the only storage devices that corrupt. Flash drives, multimedia cards, and good old optical discs are also susceptible to data loss. The data recovery tools we cover in the main portion of this feature claim to work with flash media as well as regular hard drives. Optical discs are a different matter. Errors can be caused by physical damage as well as discs that have been subject to program or user error, for example, disc sessions on writable or re-writable discs not having been closed properly. This kind of recovery requires specialist tools, and two stand out from the crowd. The first is Recovery Toolbox for CD Free (https://recoverytoolbox.com/cd.html), which works across CD, DVD, and Blu-ray. After installation, insert your corrupted disc and launch the program. You’ll…

AH, RETRO HANDHELD GAMING. It’s a medium many have fond memories of, including the Maximum PC team. Back in the 1990s, long before we had smartphones capable of streaming games direct from our home rigs, portable gaming was the domain of companies such as Nintendo and Sega, with the vastly successful Game Boy being the handheld console of choice for many gamers. Naturally, those consoles had a vast selection of games, with everything from classics like Pokemon to cult hits like Golden Sun. Of course, playing these games today isn’t easy. Functioning handhelds from over two decades ago are a rare find and ROM emulation is an option but means a shift to ill-suited hardware. Luckily, the good folks over at Seattle-based retro game hardware company Analogue Inc have a finely designed solution. The Analogue Pocket…

ALMOST ANY PC Windows or Linux Emulator comes pre-loaded with a BIOS. VICE: https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/ THIS MONTH, WE COVER a Commodore titan that was a huge success in the 1980s, though it was eventually overshadowed by the more successful Commodore 64. Launched in 1980, three years after Commodore’s first personal computer, the PET, the VIC-20 was a sales phenomenon, becoming the first computer to sell over a million units. Aimed at the general consumer, rather than enthusiasts, the VIC-20 (also known as the VC-20 in Germany and the VIC-1001 in Japan) was labeled the ‘computer of the future’ and served as a personal computer for tech giants such as Elon Musk, Linus Torvalds, and id Software’s John Carmack. 1 DEVELOPMENT The VIC-20 was the culmination of multiple projects within the Commodore Business…

YOU MAY HAVE HEARD of the phrase ‘a bad workman blames his tools’, and we all know the struggles of using an inefficient laptop to complete intensive tasks. Essentially the modern technological equivalent of a tool, a solid productivity laptop can certainly make life a lot easier. Asus already has a decent lineup of productivity laptops but its latest addition, the ProArt Studiobook Pro 16, has some neat creativity-based features that make it stand out from its rivals. The first of these is the display on the ProArt Studiobook Pro 16, which the company claims is aimed at creative professionals. As soon as you boot up for the first time, you can tell this is a crisp, 16-inch OLED HDR panel with a 4K UHD resolution of 3840x2400. It’s an…

FIRST- PERSON SHOOTER HALO’S RELATIONSHIP with the PC has always been rocky. We had to wait for 2019’s Master Chief Collection to finally bring the Xbox games (which began life on the Mac) to Windows, but even then they were slowly drip-fed to PC users over the course of a year. It’s a lot to expect Halo Infinite to make up for these 18 years waiting for a proper Halo PC launch, but this is a darned good attempt. The Halo story has become convoluted across the last six or so games, but the basics are that a war between the religious collective known as the Covenant and humanity ended up including mysterious ringworlds that were built as a doomsday weapon system to wipe out a voracious species known as…

Sponsored by CORSAIR’S WONDERFUL 4000D AIRFLOW CASE is up $8 this month, sound the alarms! It’s still a solid choice of case at that price but, hopefully, we can make some small savings elsewhere. For the AMD build, we’ve got a new power supply: the TUF Gaming 550W from Asus, which is cheaper than Corsair’s CV550 and brings to the table all the usual trimmings for a cheap but reliable PSU. We’re talking dual-ball fan bearings for improved lifespan, 0dB technology for quiet operation, and an 80+ Bronze efficiency rating. The budget AMD system is treated to a new motherboard this month, courtesy of a sale on MSI’s MPG B550 Gaming Plus. This won’t net a massive performance boost, but it’s a steal at $87 and comes equipped with RGB lighting…