Table of contents for April 2015 in Maximum PC

SOLID-STATE STORAGE was once the final frontier. It's arrival would banish the last remaining mechanized throwback and deliver us into a brave new age of lagless, lightning-quick computing. Back in 2008, when the first affordable SSD rocked up, initial impressions were revelatory. But it quickly became clear solid-state storage wasn't quite the instant fix—it turned out to be the most complex component of all. Whether it's different data types delivering differing performance, drive survival, or performance longevity, the more we learn, the more we recognize the limitations of earlier drives and realize how much potential there is. Fast forward to 2015 and today's SSDs are out-of-sight better than those laggy, stuttery, early-adopter drives. If you haven't already jumped to SSDs, we guarantee you'll be delighted when you do. It's now…

WITHOUT GIVING AWAY TOO MUCH, too soon, you may have noticed that both of our showcase SSDs this issue hail from the same outfit, namely Samsung. Without doubt, the Korean giant dominates the market for solid-state drives. That applies in terms of sheer number and presence, plus in terms of technical innovation. And it’s the latter that qualifies the 850 Evo for special attention, though that doesn’t mean it’s doing something absolutely new or that it’s necessarily a winner. Still, it’s all a bit galling when you consider Samsung is also dominant in the smart-phone market. And HDTVs. And just about any other area of consumer electronics you care to mention. Resistance, it seems, is futile. Not that it’s terribly surprising to find big players dominating a technology like solid-state…

WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN BIG FANS of Crucial’s MX100. So a similar but upgraded drive from the same brand ought to be a no brainer, right? If only things were so simple. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First let’s take a look at what separates this range-topping M550 from Crucial’s more prosaic MX100. It’s not the controller chipset, as both drives tote the Marvell 88SS9189 chip. Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re getting the same quality of firmware from each drive and we’ve long known that firmware is at least as important and possibly more so than the controller chip. As for flash memory, the MX100 uses 16nm chips to the M550’s 20nm items, suggesting the latter should last longer. That said, Crucial applies the very same 72TB endurance…

THE NEXT 12 MONTHS are going to be big for Intel. There are two huge desktop launches coming this year, one a process shrink down to 14nm with the socketed Broadwell chips and the next a new microarchitecture to take that die-shrink even further with Skylake. Having two new processor generations, the fifth-and sixth-gen core architectures, both arriving in 2015 is a bit odd, and shows how delayed the Broadwell die-shrink has been in the final reckoning. Intel though will tell you it launched Broadwell in 2014, but for us the Core M simply isn’t the Broadwell processor we’ve been waiting for. No, Broadwell proper isn’t due to arrive until “mid-2015” according to a presentation we had around the release of the latest low-power mobile U-series chips. So we’re waiting…

THIS YEAR IS LIKELY to be more of a reactive year for Nvidia in the graphics game. It’s going to be busy enough though with its new mobile processing beast, the 256 CUDA-core’d Tegra X1. But that’s not to say we won’t see movement from the green team on desktop GPUs. We’ve already had the release of the middle order Maxwell GPU, with the GTX 960 rocking a new GM 206 GPU. That gets Nvidia’s current generation to a state where it can wait to see what its rivals do before releasing anything else. And that’s likely to be how the rest of the year goes. Nvidia will be waiting in the wings for AMD to drop its new R9 3xx series of cards, holding fire until it can get…

FROM A MOBILE STANDPOINT, Nvidia’s latest SoC is probably the most exciting. The Tegra X1 is the Maxwell-powered successor to its Kepler-based Tegra K1 chip, and brings a pair of the same SMM modules you’ll find in the GTX 980 into a 20nm SoC. That provides 256 CUDA cores and 16 ROPs in a mobile chip, which will deliver some serious graphics power. The chip has a 1GHz top clock speed, which will allow it to deliver a full 1 TFLOP of graphical processing, though in tablet form factors it’s unlikely to be able to sustain this speed for very long. But because Nvidia had always been looking toward the mobile sector when designing Maxwell, the new TX1 is capable of bringing all that extra performance to bear with lower…

With every year, the PC lineup only gets more crazy. While console firms pay millions for temporary exclusives, the PC has so many exclusive games each year it’s untrue. And many of them are now free, from twine and inform text adventures, to endless Ludum Dare titles such as Titan Souls, to huge AAA games like Path of Exile. No console lets developers just experiment like the PC does. Every developer with any sense will co-develop for PC, as all the console creators have dumped their fancy tech and the machines are now standardized, repackaged PCs, meaning every game that isn’t a platform exclusive tends to end up on PC. What was there that was worth buying a console for in 2014? Destiny, a handful of derivative Mario-and Zelda-related exclusives,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS UBUNTU SERVER We’ll help you transform a basic Ubuntu installation into a web server. ELGG The freely available open source software that powers our social network (www.elgg.org). WHEN J. A. BARNES COINED THE TERM “SOCIAL NETWORK” IN 1954, he had no idea that, with the Internet as catalyst, online social networks would change the dynamics of interaction for individuals around the world. As a means of connecting people, social networks can bring together students and provide them with the tools to collaborate on projects, exchange class notes, and even advertise the availability of dorm rooms. Similarly, a corporation could deploy such a social network on its intranet as a virtual water cooler for its employees, and as a means for them to exchange notes and recommend their…

YOU’LL NEED THIS FAMILY SAFETY The parental controls service is included in Win8/8.1. If you have Win7, you can get some of the features by downloading Windows Live Family Safety, part of Windows Essentials, for free (www.microsoft.com). WINDOWS 8 INCLUDES A USEFUL SET OF PARENTAL CONTROLS to insulate your children from inappropriate content strewn across the web. It also helps ensure they don’t inadvertently compromise the security of your PC by downloading malware and other nasties. You can define when your children can use the PC, which apps they can use, what games they can play, and what kind of websites they can browse. However, before setting it up, you need to make sure you have a password-protected Administrator account so that your children can’t simply log in with unrestricted…

THE FINAL FANTASY XIII TRILOGY is a bizarre series, each game clearly fashioned around the reactions of its fanbase to the one before. FFXIII was a cloyingly linear affair with a brilliant combat system, so it follows that direct sequel FFXIII-2 is so freeform it’s sometimes hard to keep up with what you’re supposed to be doing. While it’s mostly the better game, it comes with a whole host of new problems. It’s set a few years later, and Lightning, moody heroine of the last game, has vanished into Valhalla. It’s up to her sister, Serah, and a displaced Valhalla native called Noel to look for her. An initially confusing time travel concept shapes the structure. Using a menu screen-cumtimeline stupidly named the Historia Crux, you can jump between different…

you write, we respond > New Intel Chips > Mobile GPUs > Touchscreen Monitors Broadwell Broadcast I’ve been a loyal reader since the boot days. I’m wondering why the magazine hasn’t covered Broadwell or Skylake very much. I’m impatiently waiting to upgrade my six-year-old i7-920 to the new 14nm technology. It would be nice if you guys covered the debate of whether to buy Skylake or Broadwell, and give us your best estimate of when the chips will be released. —John Neggia TECHNICAL EDITOR TOM MCNAMARA RESPONDS: Hi John, we haven’t talked about Broadwell or Skylake too much because information has been thin on the ground and mostly rumor. But, good news, that’s about to change! Make sure you pick up next month’s Maximum PC for a full report on…

AFTER ABUNDANT churning of the rumor mill, Microsoft held its Windows 10 press event last month and confirmed its upcoming operating system would be free to Windows 8, 7, and Windows Phone users— for the first year at least. The Redmond company views it as an incentive for users to quickly jump on board the Windows 10 platform, and believes this will solve one of the biggest OS issues for developers—OS fragmentation. Microsoft is keeping quiet, however, about how Windows 10 will be priced beyond the intial year. Another rumor Microsoft confirmed was that Windows 10 will support Cortana, which the company is pitching as the OS’s personal digital assistant. In short, Cortana is based on the AI character from the Halo games, and is Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s Siri.…

Oculus Rift has had a busy life since its inception just over two years ago, but with big money and plenty of expectations floating around, many questions remain about both the Rift technology and the future of virtual reality in general. MPC’s Jimmy Thang caught up with Oculus VR’s Nate Mitchell at CES 2015 to give him a hard time, so you don’t have to. Maximum PC: For those readers that might have been people living under a rock for the past two years or so, can you tell us a little bit about Oculus VR? Nate Mitchell: Oculus is a company dedicated to bringing great consumer virtual reality to life. We’re focused on two products right now. Firstly Gear VR on the mobile side, which is a product we’ve…

YOU'VE HEARD OF 3D GRAPHICS. But 3D SSDs? Oh, yes, they're a thing and they're coming. Actually, they're already here. Both Samsung's 850 Pro and 850 Evo drives use 3D NAND memory. But what does it mean? It means building chips in layers or 3D stacks of transistors rather than just a 2D plane, so you end up with loads more transistors per square millimeter. And that means greater memory density. That's handy given chip makers are finding it ever harder to reduce the size of individual transistors, which is the traditional route to greater density and lower costs. The upshot is that Samsung is using some pretty old-school 40nm production technology for its 3D memory where 2D chips need to be sub-20nm for remotely comparable density. What's more, there…

TO EARLY ADOPT OR NOT? That is the question. At least, it’s the question you’d better have in mind when considering the new Plextor M6e. Because it most definitely ain’t the finished M.2 article. All this M.2 and PCI Express stuff is still quite new and certainly a little confusing, so let’s recap. M.2 is the new PCI Express-based storage interface that’s taking over planet Earth. Well, it’s taking over the little bit of planet Earth that is PC data storage. In the process it’s replacing the venerable SATA interconnect. That’s overdue for several reasons. Firstly, SATA development has crept along at what you might call a rather stately pace, requiring a new standard for each and every speed boost. Meanwhile, the underlying performance of solid-state drives has grown fast…

KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID. Even if that means making everything, well, stupid. That’s pretty much how the mass marketing of most consumer goods works. It explains why the processor industry disappeared down the rabbit hole chasing megahertz in the late 1990s. More megahertz must be better. It’s a simple and effective sales pitch. Likewise, the burgeoning CPU core counts in smart-phones. Never mind that most software and apps on mobile devices aren’t multithreaded, that phone has eight cores. It must be totally awesome. Apply that same logic to everything from megapixels in cameras to milliseconds in LCD panels and you’ve got the sales pitch all sown up. In that context, we fear for SanDisk’s Extreme Pro. It may not be cynical enough. SanDisk seems to have concentrated on producing a…

The most important thing to nail down when it comes to testing SSDs is to ensure you’re testing from a level playing field. Box-fresh drives often perform better than drives which have already seen a fair bit of use. To make sure all our drives are tested in a more real-world state, we ran each drive through PCMark8’s extended storage consistency test. This hammers each drive with a huge amount of data, at once putting them in a reliable state for benchmarking and delivering a snapshot of how they perform under duress. We then ran our real-world and synthetic benchmarks and the 4K random test to emulate the small file transfers that make up general OS use.…

CABLES, HUH? Connections. Mmmm, fascinating… But seriously, fascinating! This year is going to see a bit of a cable renaissance as the increased amount of power and data we’re looking to shift between systems and devices is moving upwards at a pace the current connections simply can’t keep up with. First off we’ve got the update to USB coming in 2015, moving us to USB 3.1 and doubling theoretical transfer rates up to 10Gb/s, putting it on a par with the first iteration of Thunderbolt. At CES in January, MSI was demonstrating an X99 motherboard, shipping in Q1 2015, with a pair of USB 3.1 ports. It had a pair of Intel SSDs in RAID 0 to raise the bandwidth roof, hitting a full 695MB/s writes. We also saw some…

ONE OF THE BIGGEST CHANGES in tech is that virtual reality has become an actual category of product rather than just a singular entity. Of course the Oculus Rift is still going strong in the vanguard of the latest VR revolution, but a number of other manufacturers have now thrown their helmets into the ring. Several industry players have formed the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) ecosystem, including Sixense, Razer, and Leap Motion. Razer is going to be offering its OSVR Hacker Dev Kit in June. At $200, it has everything you need to get started, with a headtracker, display, and optics all included. But with the onus being on open source-ness, you can already download the prototype’s schematics and components list if you wanted to build your own device…

About iFixit iFixit is a global community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people fix things through free online repair manuals and teardowns. iFixit believes that everyone has the right to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit www.ifixit.com. BACKGROUND: The iMac may be the antithesis of what a computer is about for the vast majority of Maximum PC readers (and indeed staff), but there’s something cathartic about stripping down Apple’s latest offering to the simple components. Essentially this iMac is identical to the previous 27-inch offering, but with that Retina 5K squeezed in to offer up to four times as many pixels. Once you’ve torn it apart, what you’re left with isn’t quite so magical. In fact, it’s all very straightforward. MAJOR TECH SPECS: • 27-inch 5120x2880…

The latest version of Elgg (v.1.10.0) requires MySQL v5 or greater, PHP v5.3.3 or greater, and the Apache web server with support for URL rewriting. To install these components, fire up a terminal and enter the “sudo apt-get install apache2” command to install the Apache web server. Once that’s done, enter “sudo apt-get install mysqlserver” to install the MySQL database server. While setting it up, Ubuntu will ask you to specify a password for MySQL’s root user. Finally, install PHP and hook it up with MySQL and Apache with “sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql.” Also, remember to enable Apache’s rewrite module with “sudo a2enmod rewrite.” Next, turn on the AllowOverride directive, which tells Apache to follow the directives in the .htaccess file instead of the preset ones. Point your…

YOU’LL NEED THIS AUSLOGICS REGISTRY CLEANER Download the lightweight cleaning tool from www.softpedia.com. LET’S BE HONEST. We’re not big fans of Registry cleaning tools. Through the pages of Support Squad we’ve seen first-hand the damage they can do to perfectly functioning Windows systems. They’re often billed as a magic cure for problems, or promise performance improvements, but if you scan blindly and let a Registry cleaning tool simply delete everything it finds, you’ll eventually run into trouble—and you won’t notice any speed boost either. Despite all this, Registry cleaning tools can help fix problems by tracking down rogue entries and deleting them. The trick is knowing how to use them carefully. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to selectively search for, analyze, and remove the right entries. Just as…

ONE OF THE NICE THINGS about PCs is that your budget has a wide range of entry points. If you don’t need the heavy lifting of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 or an AMD Radeon R9 290X, you don’t have to cough up hundreds of dollars for one. Both companies offer a variety of GPUs to fit your budget. Historically, Nvidia’s cards ending in “60”—like the 560, 660, and 760— have offered performance in between the premium cards and the more economical choices, putting them in a “Goldilocks zone” of balanced price and performance. Nvidia’s latest, the GTX 960, is no exception. With a 128-bit memory bus, a little over a thousand shader cores, and 2GB of VRAM, it’s not designed to be a giant leap over the GTX 660.…

STORAGE ISN’T SEXY. For all the advances of the last few years, mostly in terms of solid-state drives, it’s still difficult to talk about PC storage in any way other than terms of functionality. We all want our PCs to boot from SSDs because of their in-OS speed, but they’re not really going to make our games perform better or look more awesome. We’re still always going to prioritize a quality graphics card. But that’s not to say things aren’t interesting in the world of the SSD. It’s one of the youngest, most vibrant areas of computing and has seen constant improvements as new tech, new controllers, and new memory have arrived, boosting performance and reliability, though that’s mostly been restricted to internal 2.5-inch drives. Our first experiences with solid-state…

TO PARAPHRASE DR. EVIL, is it too much to ask for an M.2 drive with frickin’ laser beams, sorry NVMe support, attached to its head? No idea what we’re talking about? Let’s start at the beginning. Solid-state drives were the final piece of the PC performance puzzle. Before they arrived, everything else was achieved with solid-state circuits. Central processing, system memory, graphics, the whole nine yards. But not mass storage of data. No, that was still done using arcane magnetic platters rotating about a spindle and interrogated by read heads floating precariously above the platter surfaces. That made for slow going during certain tasks, most obviously collecting random bits of data from distant sections of the platters. It also makes conventional hard drives prone to failure due to the delicate…

ONE DAY THE CRUCIAL MX100 will hang up its spurs. It’ll retire from the solid-state storage game and get some well deserved rest. But that day hasn’t quite come. Incredibly for a drive that has never really been a world beater by any single metric, it remains relevant. Just. A lot of that is down to cost. For an SSD from one of the really big noises in solid-state storage, this thing is filthy cheap. It’s probably not the cheapest drive you can get in the 500GB segment. But it’s very appealing given Crucial’s reputation for producing decently reliable drives. It’s also worth noting that at this capacity, the MX100’s Marvell controller actually comes good. The 256GB and smaller variants of the MX100 drop off when it comes to sequential…

Have you seen the price of crystal balls recently? They’re super-expensive. Obviously fortune tellers have vast sums of money from their numerous lottery wins to call on, but us tech journalists don’t have such resources to fall back on. No, we need to do research, ask questions, and investigate, all in order to figure out what’s going to happen over the next 12 months. Not like those feckless fairground rich-kid psychics… On the surface of it though, predicting what’s coming up for the rabid technorati in 2015 should be pretty simple. There’ll be new, quicker processors, faster graphics cards, laptops with longer-lasting batteries, and screens with more pixels than stars in the night sky. Digging into the specifics though is a little trickier, and more difficult still is to figure…

IF 2015 IS LOOKING LIGHT on the processor front for us desktop PC folk, it should be a more exciting 12 months for the graphics half of AMD. Its strategy looks like a two-pronged attack on Nvidia. The first will be a refresh of its top-end Hawaii-based graphics cards, while the second will see the launch of its new Caribbean Island range. The Hawaii refresh is likely to produce a small performance boost over the existing R9 290X, but will essentially be a mildly tweaked Hawaii core taking advantage of the matured manufacturing process allowing for more reliable, higher clock speeds, and potentially less heat. We were expecting this refresh at the tail end of 2014 in order for AMD to introduce some competition for the new Maxwell cards, but…

WINDOWS TIP OF THE MONTH USE MACRIUM REFLECT TO CREATE A BOOTABLE BACKUP IMAGE Sure, Win7 and Win8 both come with disk cloning tool System Image Backup, to prepare you for when disaster strikes, but its interface isn’t the best. Instead download Macrium Reflect at http://bit.ly/1gGwIiJ. It’s free for home use, is simple to use, and does everything you need. MAKE – USE – CREATE 60 Set up your own social network 66 Produce your own stop-motion movie 68 Build the perfect LAN party PC CONTRIBUTING EDITOR MACS AND PCs CHEW THE EXFAT As someone who remembers when 50GB seemed like more storage space than you’d ever need, the ridiculousness of reaching for a 2TB hard drive to store my home videos on never escapes me. And yet, 2TB portable…

YOU’LL NEED THIS MOVIE MAKER The editing software is part of Windows Essentials 2012. Get it at http://bit.ly/1BwQJmg. CAMERA AND TRIPOD Steady, consistent snapping will create the best results. SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER, Jason and the Argonauts, Robocop, The Evil Dead—all these movies had something in common: stop-motion, a type of animation technique that originated as early as the late nineteenth century. As the name implies, it’s literally a case of stopping motion by breaking it down into a series of discrete steps. By making small incremental movements to an object and taking a picture from the same position each time, you create frames which can later be stitched together in movie-making software. Once you’ve joined the frames, it’ll look like the object is moving—the more frames…

LET’S FACE IT, consoles have the PC beat in the living room. Alienware and the Steam Machines were supposed to change that, but we all know the saga of the Valve delay, while Alienware has decided to release its box early as a small Windows 8.1 PC, dubbed the Alpha. It does an admirable job of attacking the PC’s problem areas in the living room, but unfortunately (as the name implies), it’s still got some way to go. Black and small, measuring 2.1 x 7.8 x 7.8 inches, the Alpha is closest in size to Nintendo’s Wii U, and we had an easy time lugging it around with four controllers inside a backpack. Speaking of controllers, it comes with a black wireless Xbox 360 controller. Inside the box, the Alpha…

WHAT IS THE COMPUTER mouse missing? It already has buttons, wheels, lasers, optics, weights, pulleys, secret chambers for hiding priests, and fluffy patches you can stroke to reduce blood pressure. The bespectacled, white-coated boffins at Corsair, however, think they’ve struck upon the answer. What the computer mouse needs now, more than anything, is color! That’s right, the thing hidden beneath your hand needs to be more colorful, to be a resplendent peacock advertising its virility in the hope other mice from across the district will come and mate with it. The M65 RGB claims to be able to display 16.8 million colors, which is presumably a rounded-up figure representing the 16,777,216 colors of the 24-bit RGB color spectrum. The human eye, in comparison, can distinguish around 10 million colors. You…

WE’RE USED TO FEELING like the center of attention in games, like the whole world revolves around us. But Resident Evil’s zombie-plagued mansion doesn’t care about you. It’s a place where death lurks around every pre-rendered corridor, and if you stumble into one of its sadistic traps or undead denizens, bad luck. It’s back to the main menu with you, and you better hope you saved. Resident Evil doesn’t hold your hand: it rips it off and eats it. This is a remastered version of a remake of the original 1996 game, which was released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2002. It retains the fixed cameras, rendered backgrounds, and tank controls of Mikami’s pioneering survival horror, but mixes a few things up. If you know the Spencer mansion from the…

WE’VE BEEN ASKED MANY TIMES why there aren’t any gaming laptops out there with mechanical keyboards, and we’ve always given the quickfire response that “it would make the laptop too big.” Well, the mad team at MSI has decided to totally ignore that notion and work with SteelSeries to incorporate a mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches into its GT80 Titan notebook. While this does add to the bulk of an already large 18-inch laptop, beefing the weight up to a hefty 10 pounds, it is being designed from the ground up as a desktop replacement. If you look above the keyboard, it seems there’s a bunch of negative space, but this is actually where all of the components lie. Inside the laptop are two GeForce GTX 980M GPUs…