Table of contents for May 2020 in Maximum PC

THIS IS THE SECOND TIME I’ve written this intro. In fact, I’d drafted my first version two days before I even started my job. I was, and still am, unbelievably excited to take on this role. Becoming editor of Maximum PC is a dream come true. This is home to me. I owe everything to this magazine and its community. To all of you. When I heard that Alan Dexter, my predecessor and all-time favorite boss, was leaving the publication, I knew I had to throw my hat in the ring. After all, having the chance to lead this brand into the next decade is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s funny how much the world can change in just 14 days. Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the biggest catastrophes…

IT IS NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT to get an accurate figure on how many people are using what OS, but Microsoft thinks that after five years, Win 10 is now running on one billion machines. Quite an achievement, but not what Microsoft had originally planned. It wanted to reach that target in 2017, but the free upgrade from Win 7 wasn’t as popular as the company imagined. Win 10 was called the last version of Windows by Microsoft back in 2015, it has also been called the “forever version.” Instead of new releases, we just have a continually updated version, including UI changes to keep things fresh. However, there is still a lot of work to do yet. Despite the withdrawal of official support, Win 7 stubbornly refuses to fade away. There…

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, AMD’s CPU team has been firing on all cylinders. Or cores…. It has pushed Intel in ways that were almost forgotten. And AMD is not letting up on the pressure, either. In its recent Financial Analyst Day briefings, AMD went into detail about its plans for the next several years of CPU and GPU advancements. The most important bits: Yes, Zen 3 and fourth-gen Ryzen CPUs are coming and should launch before the end of the year. Plus, RDNA 2 and Navi 2x GPUs with ray-tracing capabilities will also arrive before 2021. I’m going to leave the GPU discussion for another day and focus on the Zen 3 CPUs. First, Zen 3 will continue to use TSMC’s 7nm FinFET manufacturing process. There were earlier rumors…

ROUND 1 Value Straight out of the gate, optical keyboards stumble. Using a combo of sturdy mechanical keys and lightbeam-based switches results in a costly manufacturing process, and optical keyboards tend to be expensive. Membrane keyboards are almost unilaterally the cheapest option. Many business environments have made the shift to membrane keyboards, usually due to price and quietness. Generally, a multipurpose membrane keyboard is cheaper than a mechanical model with the same features, primarily due to the lower cost of the materials. Membrane key tech has effectively reached its apex, too, so industry efforts can be focused on making the production process more affordable. Mechanical models sit somewhere in the middle. While the base technology behind mechanical key switches has been around for years, modern mechanical keyboards use delicate, expensive…

If you’re struggling with some of the tubing runs in your build, it might be time for you to opt for a different strategy. Although hard tubing allows you to achieve far tighter bend radii than with soft tubing, there is a limit to how tight a bend you can create. Combine that with it becoming infinitely more difficult to secure a length of bent tubing the smaller it gets on either end, and sometimes it’s not worth using tubing at all. As tubing bends, it also widens at the point where you apply the pressure to form it. No matter how tight a fit that silicon insert is, you’ll inevitably have a slightly flatter tube at the point of the bend than you did before the bending process. This…

TIP OF THE MONTH CHECK OUT YOUR SYSTEM WITH WINSAT Windows has had a neat little system-testing tool built in ever since Vista, and it’s called WinSat. Run the Command Prompt as an administrator, then punch in “winsat formal” to run a standard system test. Different commands enable you to check live stats, such as memory performance using “winsat mem”; type “winsat -help” for a detailed breakdown of the options available, such as specific CPU tests. ↘ submit your How To project idea to: comments@maximumpc.com…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ELEMENTARY OS Get this Ubuntu-based version of Linux from https://elementary.io. HARDWARE SETUP Enough hard drive space for a shared data partition and a minimum of 50GB for Elementary. IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A REASON to switch to Linux, Elementary OS is a compelling distro to try. It’ll appeal to both Mac and Windows switchers looking for a slick, intuitive desktop. It’s built on rock-solid foundations, forked from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, so you can leverage your existing Linux expertise and embrace it in the knowledge that anything that works with Ubuntu should also work with Elementary. The latest version of Elementary—version 5.1, codenamed Hera—is the best yet. In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to install it alongside your existing OS—whether Windows or macOS. You’ll set…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A FREESYNC COMPATIBLE MONITOR Stating the obvious, but this doesn’t work with just any panel; you need FreeSync on your screen’s specs. GRAPHICS CARD An Nvidia RTX 20-series or GTX 10-series GPU. THE PROBLEM IS CLEAR AND SIMPLE: Sometimes games produce screen tearing and stuttering. They don’t mean to, it’s just a function of the way your graphics card and monitor interact—GPU spews out frames as quickly as it can, monitor uses those frames at a set refresh rate, gamer looks on at torn images in frustration. This being the wonderfully infuriating world of personal computers, it’s the solution that proves far more complex. V-Sync is the simplest band-aid over frame pacing issues, telling your GPU at the software level to only provide as many frames per…

THE LATEST ZenBook Flip is strange. It has a 10th-gen Intel CPU, but still uses the compact Max-Q version of Nvidia’s GTX 1050, a two-year-old graphics card. It’s got a 360-degree hinge, but it’s thicker than any convertible we’ve seen recently. The trackpad doubles as a tiny screen with numeric keypad functionality, but Asus still saw fit to squeeze a physical numpad on the keyboard. It’s an odd, anachronistic product, as full of older hardware as it is brimming with innovation. The chassis is fairly bulky, with a 15.6-inch screen making the overall build a lot larger than sleek convertibles such as the HP Spectre x360 and the Dell XPS 2-in-1. It’s not heavy, mostly due to the plastic chassis, but it does feel chunky and outdated. That 360-degree hinge…

SITTING ON its charging stand like the sought-after artifact on a pedestal in an Indiana Jones movie, this Basilisk Ultimate certainly has the looks. This is a wireless gaming pointer with no expense spared, from the 20,000dpi sensor and 100-hour battery life to the RGB dock, the luxurious materials forming the body around it, and a host of subtle design touches that all combine to make life a little easier. It’s a gorgeous mouse. While the standard Basilisk model is bogged down in unsightly grooves along its inner side panel, this features a textured, rubberized finish at either side, which functionally improves grip and aesthetically preserves a clean, professional look. Only the asymmetrical ergonomic shape jumps out as an obvious through-line between Basilisk models, in fact. It’s a body best…

LET’S HIT YOU with the first thing that hit us: The top plate of the HVER Pro X is pretty outrageous. It’s a screwed-down aluminum slab that spills off all sides of the keyboard, as though it’s desperate to escape. We’ll say it: Those edges are really, desperately ugly, stamped and bent with xtreeem gamerz cuts and slashes that do more to take away from the look of the HVER Pro X than add to it. Aesthetics aside, they are at least practical—you can balance a pen on the rear lip, and the curves on the bottom and side edges make this more comfortable on the palms than some. The top panel also aids in the Pro X’s spill-proof design. We won’t claim that the half can of Monster Energy…

SWEDISH DEVELOPER The Bearded Ladies made a game a little while ago that was a mix of real-time stealth and turn-based tactics, in which you were heavily outnumbered by the enemy, and had to tune your approach to combat situations effectively. There was a duck in a top hat, a pig with a blunderbuss, and a sniper fox. You know the one. With Corruption 2029, just over a year later, the same devs have released the same game, but without talking animals. It’s an unexpected and slightly bizarre release, which might perhaps make sense if it were framed as a prequel. In fact, you’re given very little information about what’s going on. The opening cinematics tell you more about your troops than the geopolitics, introducing them as drones stripped of…

MICROSOFT AND SONY have been tantalizing us with snippets about their new consoles for months, and now we have the rough technical specs. Microsoft’s Xbox Series X has custom AMD silicon comprising of an eight-core Zen 2 processor running at 3.8GHz; it has multithreading, but enabling this will drop the clock to 3.6GHz. Graphics are supplied by an RDNA 2 chip with 52 compute units (3,328 cores), running at 1,825MHz, complete with hardware ray tracing. Microsoft boasts of 12 teraflops of graphical processing power on tap. In theory, the new Xbox has about four times the muscle of an Xbox One S. You also get 16GB of GDDR6, 10GB of which is reserved for the GPU, and 2.5GB for the OS. Storage is a custom 1TB SSD. The target is…

HIGH-END VR requires high-end hardware. Or it did. Cloud gaming company Shadow is running a streaming VR system called the VR Exploration Program, which we assume is a beta test. The initial test will only work using an Oculus Quest headset and a pretty zippy connection: 15ms response, 100Mb/s download, and 20Mb/s upload. The game streaming services run from $11.99 to $39.99 a month. Shadow’s approach is different from Stadia—you can play your PC games on a multitude of devices, including smartphones, Macs, and any old PC. Your games actually run on a beefy Win 10 box in Shadow’s data centers. Log on and add any games you own to your cloud box. Shadow doesn’t sell you games; what you get is remote access to a high-end rig. VR is…

WITH THE SPREADING pandemic of coronavirus, or COVID-19, many companies are asking employees to work from home. For bigger businesses, enterprise solution offerings from Google or Microsoft might be the default, but some companies may not want to have to rely on Big Tech to get work done. Luckily, there are open-source alternatives. A lot of workers will be working from home in the coming weeks. As a result, they will rely on communication and collaboration tools as stand-ins for being at their desks or in meeting rooms. There are offerings from the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Zoho, but there are lots of great open-source offerings, too. I wrote recently about Keybase (https://keybase.io) and its collaboration tools. While Keybase’s first goal is to facilitate easy encryption tools, it offers…

VPNVarieties WeirdWake-Up MouseMystery Which VPN Option? I’m considering ditching my monthly-fee VPN service for my own home-brewed VPN. While I have no doubt there are Internet how-to guides and MPC tutorials, what is the short answer? I have a TP-Link Safestream VPN router collecting dust, or my current router supports easy setup using OpenVPN, so are these two relatively easy viable alternatives? Does a secure VPN require serious hardware, or is there a poor man’s alternative to pay services? – Ryan Pitts THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: Your question has given the Max PC team an idea, and we’ll be revisiting this subject in greater detail in a future issue. For now, remember that third-party VPN providers offer a different service from a VPN server sitting at home. A home-brewed VPN server…

WE KNOW WHAT you’re thinking: Nobody actually wants a PC full to the brim with software. A guide to free software is one of those PC magazine tropes, and here’s Maximum PC reaching into the well again. But wait, reader. Cool your jets and think about it. If you’re looking at this guide and presuming that we’re saying you have to install every little thing we’ve mentioned, you’re doing it wrong. This isn’t about what you should have, it’s about what you could have—software that could change the way you create, the way you work, and the way you manage your PC. It’s about doing things better without breaking the bank. It’s about software that actually deserves a place on your SSD, stuff that’s so useful and well constructed that…

1. LAUNCHER Click here to access a complete list of installed applications. Once you’ve installed a few, use the category view to filter the list by type, or type into the search box to find the app you’re looking for. 2. SYSTEM SETTINGS In keeping with its slick, minimalist approach, Elementary’s System Settings tool is sparsely populated. The “Mouse” section shown here does at least offer plenty of options. 3. DOCK The Dock is the equivalent of the Windows taskbar, providing access to both open windows and favorite shortcuts. Right-click an item for more options. 4. CALENDAR As with Windows (and macOS), the date at the top of the desktop provides a convenient shortcut to both a monthly calendar and a list of events. Double-click to open the main Calendar…

YOU’LL NEED THIS LASTPASS ACCOUNT Sign up for free at http://lastpass.com. WE ALL KNOW WE NEED to use stronger passwords—“password123” is not a good choice and never has been—but doing so can seem like a daunting task. How do you know what constitutes strong passwords? Where should you store them all? And won’t it be a hassle to go through all your accounts and give them strong security? Fear not, because you can take the pain out of the situation by using LastPass. It’s a password manager that handles everything for you, from suggesting strong passwords to filling them out for you and storing your other important info, including addresses and credit card details. It can even automatically scan your accounts, find weak passwords, and, where possible, change them for…

FIFTY BUCKS for an unlocked Zen-architecture processor with integrated graphics? Fifty bucks?! We wondered if AMD was joking when it announced the Athlon 3000G, but no; here it is, in all its super-affordable glory. Releasing a dual-core processor in the year 2020 feels like an odd move, but when it’s cheap as all heck, it’s certainly hard to argue with AMD’s logic. Team Red has long been the king of budget APUs, with the excellent 3400G and 3200G launching in its Ryzen line last year to some success. The Athlon 3000G isn’t so much a step forward as it is a nimble leap sideways, filling a space in the market with a budget APU that sits alongside the likes of the Athlon 200GE. It’s cheaper than the GE-series Athlon CPUs…

BEN AND DAN, dual protagonists of Clockwork God, have been through two games before, classic point-and-clickers in the LucasArts mold. This time around, though, while Ben sticks to following the pointer and combining objects with words, Dan has decided to reinvent himself as a character from a platform game. Ben and Dan are also the names of the writers and developers of the game, and if you’re a fan of fourth-wall-breaking, raised eyebrows, and ironic self-insertion, there’s a lot of that here to please you, especially if you played a game in the ’90s. Appropriately, despite its modern trappings, the game Lair most closely resembles is The Lost Vikings from 1993, in the way you switch between characters with differing abilities to solve puzzles. Unlike other dual-protagonist games, such as…

ARE YOU A STREAMER? Perhaps you are, perhaps you’re not, but you need a new lamp, and want to convince your house guests that you’re the kind of person who knows what “Twitch partnership” means. If that sounds like you, beware: Elgato is coming for your wallet. Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of the Elgato Key Light Air, a little background for those unfamiliar with the filming process. LED ring lights for webcams and conventional softbox lighting are both used by online video performers, but they have drawbacks. For streamers and YouTubers, buying a setup of two or three standing softbox lights isn’t necessarily expensive, but they guzzle electricity, take up a lot of space, and cause noticeable temperature build-up, particularly if you’re committing to extended livestreams lasting hours.…

AMD’S MOBILE CHIPS have generally taken second place to its desktop versions. No longer: AMD claims to have been working on “Renoir” since 2017, optimizing it for mobile work. The result is a carefully packaged chiplet design with up to eight 7nm Zen 2 cores and Vega-based graphics. Finally, AMD’s mobile chips have the latest silicon, with the attendant jump in IPC. A significant improvement over the 3000-series, which is hardly sparkling. There’s the usual split: the U range for low-power work, with a TDP of 15W, and the beefier H and HS series, with a TDP of 35 or 45W. The initial range of nine starts with the Ryzen 3 4300U, with four cores and four threads, running at a base of 2.7GHz. Then there are three six-core Ryzen…

8 HYPERX ALLOY CORE RGB HyperX clearly decided to flex with the Alloy Core RGB, delivering an effective membrane keyboard that looks great for under 50 bucks. 7 LOGITECH G PRO X The G Pro X might appear at first glance to be feature-light, but the inclusion of easily swappable key switches for physical customization is brilliant. 6 CORSAIR K63 WIRELESS Corsair’s high build quality and style make for an excellent wireless keyboard, complete with Cherry MX Red switches and a soft rubber wrist rest. 5 DAS KEYBOARD 4 PROFESSIONAL Functionality over frills. No key backlighting or dinky touchscreens here, just a solidly designed keyboard, perfect for typists who prefer mechanical keys. 4 STEELSERIES APEX PRO A sleek deck with RGB lighting, a tiny OLED display, and incredible customization, thanks…

Mac users need to install the rEFInd boot manager to install Elementary OS alongside macOS. First, disable System Integrity Protection—reboot your Mac, holding Cmd-R until the Apple logo appears. When the recovery environment starts, choose “Utilities → Terminal.” Type “csrutil disable” and hit Enter, then restart. Next, download rEFInd from www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html—click “A binary zip file” and save it to your “Downloads” folder. Double-click the downloaded zip file to extract its contents, then open the extracted folder (“refind-bin-0.12.0” or similar). Next, open Terminal via “Applications → Utilities,” and drag the “refind-install” script file from the Finder window into Terminal. Press Enter and provide your account password to allow rEFInd to install. It should end with an “Installation has completed successfully” message, so restart your Mac, and the rEFInd boot menu should…

YOU’LL NEED THIS 32-BIT X86 CPU WITH MMX, WINDOWS 2000, OR LATER Or you can use a solid version of Wine under Linux. XM6 PRO-68K Download it from https://bit.ly/2TjiAF4. THE ATARI AND AMIGA may have had their adherents, but when it comes to gaming, the Sharp X68000 is in a league of its own. Dubbed “The God Computer” by the Japanese, the X68000 (or X68k for short) is perhaps the ultimate in 16-bit gaming. While console makers such as Sega and Nintendo often boasted “arcade-like” graphics, the X68k was the first home machine to provide genuine arcade graphics. The X68000 might not be famous in the West (it was only sold in Japan), but those in the know can expect near-perfect arcade ports. However, X68k ownership is an eye-wateringly expensive…

ANY MINI-ITX FORM FACTOR could be hiding an RTX 2080 beneath its slim case, and the Asus Huracan G21 is no exception. Its recent refresh puts it in a dead heat with other PCs of the same caliber; it can be configured with up to an Intel Core i9-9900K CPU and GeForce RTX 2080 GPU, which is the model we have here. If you’re looking for a small PC that can handle the most demanding games, the Huracan G21 stands tall with the competition. The all-black design gives this tiny tower of terror a minimalist look—but with a multifunctional twist. A flap on the right side panel folds up to expose the hardware inside, but it’s not just there for show; the space within the geometrical design is empty, to…

THE EASY CHOICE for blowing a big monitor budget? Bag a 4K model. It’s also the unimaginative option. Enter the HP Z38C, an intriguing alternative to the 4K norm, with its 21:9 aspect ratio and generous 38-inch diagonal. What it’s not, however, is necessarily superior to a conventional 4K monitor, nor is it the first of its kind. It was early 2017 when LG rolled out the first 21:9 aspect 38-inch monitor, the 38UC99, and set the precedent for the HP’s 3840x1600 resolution. As it happens, HP’s IPS panel is almost certainly produced by LG. More importantly, it offers fewer overall pixels than a standard 4K monitor. Full 4K works out to nearly 8.3 million pixels. The HP’s cut-down vertical resolution compared to 4K results in just over 6.1 million.…

THE FIRST ROG PUGIO was a pretty standard affair, a wired gaming mouse with a 7,200dpi optical sensor, RGB lighting, and an ambidextrous design that allowed both left and right-handed users to enjoy an ergonomic mouse experience. It was a decent mouse, although it didn’t set the world on fire. Now, Asus is back with a new Republic of Gamers mouse, the ROG Pugio II, a wireless sequel to the original Pugio. Now, calling this a wireless mouse is doing it something of a disservice. The Pugio II uses tri-mode connectivity, consisting of a 2.4GHz wireless USB dongle, Bluetooth 5.0, and wired connections using the included USB cable. The 2.4GHz connection means ultrafast wireless, with zero noticeable input latency in our tests. The dongle in question can be concealed inside…

The concept of working from home and remote workforces has been around and in practice for a while now, but recent global events have changed the game entirely, with many governments urging citizens to dramatically increase social distancing measures. Indeed, COVID-19 has driven entire offices to close and whole companies to work from home, resulting in an unprecedented shift in the working landscape. Organizations are having to rapidly adapt, and a vital consideration is security, particularly given cyber attackers’ propensity for opportunism in times of crisis. Unfortunately, distressed global climates and times of uncertainty are prime times for hackers to launch attacks and we can already see targeted Coronavirus-themed phishing attacks in circulation. Therefore, it’s imperative for organizations to implement business contingency plans that prioritize protecting remote workforces from attacks.…