Table of contents for August 2020 in Maximum PC

MAXIMUM PC to me has always been more than just another tech publication. It’s got a history and a reputation behind it. From its earliest days as Boot magazine, to the heady heights of Gordon Mah Ung’s run as editor, to the closure of its website back in 2017, and my own coronavirus-stressed tenure, it’s had its fair share of ups and downs But honestly, my biggest takeaway from it—and perhaps the biggest reason why I came back to it—is the community. All of you who still subscribe, support us, and write in—whether that’s with suggestions, or anger and complaints, or just questions and praise—you continue to make Maximum PC better than it was the day before. It’s a key part of why I believe it’s still so successful. We…

IN A BLOG POST AMD pitched a 4GB Radeon RX 5500XT against an 8GB version, and has concluded that the 4GB card is increasingly obsolete for top-flight gaming. The average performance gap at 1440p is under 10 percent. However, for newer, heavy-hitting games the gap is more pronounced. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is 22% faster, and Wolfenstein II: New Colossus is 24% faster. That’s a fairly significant margin. That gap will only get wider too: The next generation of consoles will both have 16GB. Running a PC version without all that VRAM means a compromise. A company recommending that you buy a more expensive product is hardly surprising, but AMD does have a point, especially for AAA titles. You’ll still need a GPU that can fill that VRAM with…

RECENTLY, AMD X570 MOTHERBOARD makers came under scrutiny for potentially running the latest Zen 2 CPUs out of spec. This is nothing new, though the methods behind the Zen 2 “cheats” are slightly different. There are various opinions, which distill down to two basic philosophies. One is that enthusiasts want their PCs to run as fast as possible, and any tuning that a motherboard manufacturer might do in a BIOS is fair game. The other take is that any auto-over-clocking or beyond spec tuning should be disclosed in the settings, and by default a board should run at stock. With AMD’s AM4 X570 boards—and let’s be clear, this isn’t the first time this has happened, not even for socket AM4—the problem is that some motherboards are reporting an incorrect current…

> Random Freezes > Compatible Batteries > COD: Warzone Crash Random Freezes I have a slim form factor build: AMD Ryzen 2700, 8GB Team T-Force Delta RGB 3,000MHz RAM, a single PNY factory overclocked XLR8 RTX 2060, 250GB Samsung 860 EVO SSD, and 2TB Hitachi hard drive. They’re connected to an ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F motherboard, which is stuffed in a Thermaltake Core G3 and connected to a Dell P1914S. Recently my PC started acting up. Sometimes if I leave it on, the entire thing freezes—mouse, keyboard, and even the power switch become nonresponsive. The only solution is to switch the power supply off and on, then reboot. It may be the drivers, but I have an issue installing them—what do I do with the compressed folder that was downloaded?…

WHAT, EXACTLY, has happened to Intel? The once unassailable leader in both PC processors and chip manufacturing generally now looks second best by almost every conceivable technological metric. AMD’s CPUs appear cleverer. TSMC’s manufacturing technology seems more advanced. Intel, it seems, has completely lost its way. Even in the mobile PC space, which Intel has absolutely owned for decades, AMD’s new Renoir APU has the edge. Likewise, how is it that AMD has offered PCI Express 4.0 on desktop PCs for a year, but Intel hasn’t even announced future support for what is a crucial highspeed interconnect? Things are so bad that Apple is said to be planning to ditch Intel in favor of its own ARM-based processors. Worse, Intel itself is rumored to be considering TSMC as a manufacturing…

EK Fluid Gaming 275-AG Vanquish WHEN IT COMES TO liquid cooling, EK is the genuine article. Cooling kits and water blocks are the first thing this Slovenian brand offers, but today we’re going a step further, taking a look at one of EK’s fully liquid-cooled gaming systems. This is the 275-AG Vanquish, an absolute powerhouse for gaming, fitted with an EVGA RTX 2080 Super and AMD Ryzen 7 3800X, along with 32GB of high-speed RAM. Sit down for this: It costs $2,700. Yes, that’s a lot of money to drop on a gaming rig, but consider that the CPU and GPU cost $1,200 to buy separately. The Vanquish is expensive, but you get plenty of bang for your buck. Of course, the main draw here isn’t just the incredibly high-end…

presents: About iFixit iFixit is a global community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people fix things through free online repair manuals and tear downs. iFixit believes that everyone has the right to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit www.ifixit.com. BACKGROUND Second Edition? Smallish Edition? We’re not sure what “SE” stands for, but it wouldn’t be an iPhone teardown without a little mystery. And this 2020 iPhone SE is $400 worth of smartphone conundrum—old-school on the outside and purportedly pretty modern on the inside. Let’s tear down… MAJOR TECH SPECS A13 Bionic SoC with a third-generation Neural Engine 4.7” Retina HD display with 1334 × 750 resolution (326 ppi), True Tone, and wide color gamut (P3) support 12MP wide-angle rear camera at f/1.8, and a 7MP f/2.2…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RAINMETER www.rainmeter.net WINDOWS 7 OR LATER Preferably use Windows 10 as it’s still supported by Microsoft. THE DEFAULT WINDOWS DESKTOP customization experience is fine, but not much more. You can change your wallpaper, adjust window accent colors, and switch up your lock screen—and that’s about it. If you want more power to change up your computer’s style, you will likely be disappointed with the results. That all changes with Rainmeter. This lets you install various “skins” on Windows, all of which can add new flavors of visual flair to your desktop. These range from small widgets showing the time and weather to full-blown overhaul suites with moveable items, redesigned taskbars, and custom shortcut icons. You can even build your own skins if you have a bit of…

THE NITRO 7 isn’t immediately exciting. It looks exactly how we imagine a “gaming laptop” should look: Sturdy, with a big screen, and red keys against an all-black chassis. It’s relatively well-made, but it doesn’t jump out at us like some new laptops do. That’s not to say we don’t like it; despite its metal exterior and large screen, the Nitro 7 barely weighs five pounds, and is easy enough to slip into a shoulder bag when you’re on the move. Let’s talk about that screen first. It’s a standard 15.6-inch 1080p panel, with a crisp 144Hz refresh rate, ideal for twitchy shooters. The brightness and color density are good, although we wish the chunky upper and lower bezels were a bit smaller—a change that could potentially shrink the laptop’s…

APPLE IS TO USE its own designs of ARM processors in all its Macs. Rumors of this move have been floating around for years—actually a decade—but now it’s a reality: Apple is dropping the x86 processor, and taking the job in-house. There are, reportedly, three different system-on-a-chip designs in development: “Project Kalamata” as it is called within Apple. The first design is based on the iPhone A14 chip (due to appear in the iPhone 12 shortly). Apple’s custom A-series chips are already the best in the business, surpassing ARM’s own designs. The chips are to be made by TSMC—Apple has no manufacturing capacity for this—and will use the same 5nm process as the A14. The first design is expected to have 12 cores: eight high performance “Firestorm” cores, and four…

HOW MANY BOOT DISKS do you have lying around your desk? Maybe you have a whole drawer stuffed with burned optical discs or USB flash drives, struggling to remember what bootable medium is on what, or you’ve tried to make do with two or three drives, swapping ISO images in and out. Whatever your method, it’s a pain keeping tabs on them all. Optical discs are—by their nature—slow to boot and obsolete the moment a newer version of the bootable media in question is released. As flash drive capacities grow ever larger, it seems wasteful storing a single 512MB bootable rescue disk on a 16GB drive. Wouldn’t it be great if you could house all your boot disks on a single USB flash drive, then switch between them as required?…

COMET LAKE hath cometh, and with it Intel has brought a bevy of new features into the headlines of its latest processors. That means a new socket, a new chipset, more cores (more heat), and of course, more performance. But is it quite enough to compete with the juggernaut that AMD has become? We already know that 3rdgen Ryzen represents incredible multi-threaded power at a comfortable price. But the one area those zenified processors don’t quite match up is typically in the gaming department. On the whole AMD’s IPC (instructions per clock cycle), although much improved on Ryzen’s debut, still aren’t up to Intel’s level. The big question, then, is whether Intel’s IPC advantages in its flagship 10-core processor give it the edge over the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X in…

YOU’LL NEED THIS YOUR PC Compressed air, thermal paste, and patience. CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF, you don’t actually need to spend a whole wallet full of cash to make your PC run silently with liquid cooling and big radiators—which is great, because with the human malware that is Covid-19 going around, chances are your local PC shop won’t accept cash, and you’ll also prefer to save it for a rainy day. But now we’ve come to a non-metaphorical rainy day, and you’ve decided it’s time to do something about that loud PC of yours. So here’s how you can silence your PC for under $20 (your results may vary). A wonderful thing is that almost every PC—laptops not included—comes with cooling gear that is, at least moderately, over-dimensioned for the…

LET’S JUST PREFACE this by saying, yes, this is a $400 motherboard. However, we’ve already featured the Gigabyte Z490 Aorus Pro AX in our build this issue, and the motherboard Intel sent us with its media package is the insanely expensive Asus ROG Maximus XII Extreme, which currently clocks in at no less than $750. So weirdly this is currently our only “mid-range” motherboard, so far as it’s the middle one in our office right now. How odd. That’s not to say there aren’t budget options out there—there’s a bevy of boards below the $150 mark still harboring the Z490 chipset spec, and on top of that manufacturers have launched H470 chipset motherboards too, which are even cheaper than that. So what makes the MSI MEG Z490 Ace so special?…

BEFORE WE TALK about anything else, we want to give a bit of attention to the Aukey KM-G6’s box. It is, quite frankly, beautiful: A beige rectangle of recycled cardboard with simple black text stamped on the top, along with a monochromatic illustration of the keyboard itself. It looks like it arrived by falling through a time portal in the 90s, and we love it. The keyboard inside that box looks like it sits very firmly in this century, though. Colored LEDs under each molded plastic keycap, and media controls integrated with the function keys make this a competent keyboard for modern-day use, even if it is slender on the feature side. There’s no extra macro keys or volume wheels, only a standard 104-key layout with a compact plastic base.…

START OUT IN A GAME like XCOM, and you feel fragile: You don’t have the advanced plasma weapons of the invaders; you don’t have proper armor; your troops are a raggedy bunch of freedom fighters who were lucky enough to still be alive. Start out in Gears Tactics, for all it may look like XCOM to the casual observer, and you immediately feel powerful: You’ve got the series’ trademark weapons; you’ve got the cover system; you’re a side of beef crowbarred into a gridiron uniform. This is just as well, as Tactics is prepared to stack the odds against you. Things move along in standard tactics game manner, with each soldier having a small number of Action Points with which to do stuff like move, fire, and reload. Run out…

> Control Panel > Encrypted HTTP > DIY Laptops Tutorial Errors Love Maximum PC. Been reading it for years. In the June 2020 issue "Breaking Back into Control Panel" I had forgotten about “GodMode.” Well, I’m 75+, but it would have been handy last week. Thanks for your fine article. Just a heads up—you forgot a hyphen in the folder name: “God Mode. {ED7BA470-8E54- 465E-825C-99712043E01C}” –Robert M & Steve Cook EDITOR ZAK STOREY RESPONDS: I’ll apologize in advance to you both Robert and Steve, I know we’ve bundled two of your letters together here, but we’re just trying to save a bit of space. Thanks for pointing this out, sometimes these things do slip past us during the design and proofreading stage of issue development. I did check these links…

INTEL HAS LOST its leading chip a rchitect, Jim Keller, after barely two years at the company. Keller will work as a consultant for six months to help in the transition as Intel shuffles around the heads of it engineering groups. Keller has resigned for undisclosed personal reasons, although it seems amicable enough, with Intel praising his work in an internal memo. Keller has an impressive work history, including being a big hand in the Zen microarchitecture, Tesla’s Autopilot, and Apple’s A4 and A5 chips. His loss couldn’t come at a worse time for Intel: Just a couple of months ago he was the subject of an article in Fortune magazine that said Intel was “betting its chips” on the “mastermind” Keller, who was to be given room to make…

THE CONSUMER TECHNOLOGY field is, without a doubt, an absolute hotbed of technological innovation. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen computing make incredible strides in processing power, graphical capability, and data storage. There have been inspired new moves, like the introduction of simultaneous multi-threading and hyperthreading to double the available threads of CPUs, as well as improvements to software, hardware, and network infrastructure that have made things like 4K video streaming a reality. It wouldn’t be an overly bold claim to say that the PC hardware industry and community are in the best place they’ve ever been (any global pandemics notwithstanding, of course). However, it hasn’t always been happy faces and full coffers in the computing industry. There have been mistakes, bad judgements, humiliating missteps: Some tragic, some hilarious.…

TIP OF THE MONTH REPLACE YOUR FANS! If you’ve got a system that you regularly use (or an always-on machine), consider how long you’ve had it for. A good-quality drive or processor can last for ages, but case and radiator fans are rarely rated for more than five years of operation, and less for systems that are constantly running. New case fans aren’t too expensive and are a worthwhile investment to keep older systems running cool. MAKE – USE – CREATE 52 How to silence your PC for less than $20 54 Start and secure your own WordPress blog 60 Build a silent audio-recording PC for a home studio STAFF WRITER LIQUID DIET The EK Liquid Gaming PC we’ve featured in Tech Porn this issue is a beaut, even if…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WORDPRESS SERVER Any reputable web host will do, or you can host it yourself on your own server. ONE OF THE SIMPLEST WAYS to get yourself a website is through WordPress. This free and open-source platform is the world’s most popular, and it’s easy to see why. Although it started out as a blogging tool, it has since expanded to become capable of handling everything from personal websites to online shops. In the first of this new series on building a WordPress site, we’re going to start at the beginning by getting your site installed, set-up, secured, and ready for action. While the simplest way to set up WordPress is through signing up for a free account at www.wordpress.com, we’re focusing on self-hosted solutions, whether through a…

UNDOUBTEDLY the i5s of this world are the most popular of Intel’s CPUs, the most sought after. These mid-range chips have often provided an astonishingly goodvalue proposition for those not looking to render everything at lightning speed. They have been and still are by far the go-to chip of choice for the gamer. Why’s that? Well it all comes down to impressive single-core performance, balanced perfectly with power draw, thermals, and cost. Get all the gaming prowess of a Core i7 or an i9, but with 50 percent off the latter’s retail price tag. For the longest time, in Intel’s world of quad-core dominance, the main difference between the Core i5 and the i7 product lines was one simple addition: Hyper-Threading. The logic at the time as far as recommendations…

THIS MIGHT BE ONE of the best portable gaming headsets we’ve ever seen. Coming with a sleek hardshell carry case, detachable mic, and 3.5mm cable, along with wireless connectivity via a small USB-C dongle, the ROG Strix Go 2.4 can connect to just about any modern device, be it a PC, smartphone, tablet, or console. Apple fans may be left out in the cold, but hey, this isn’t Maximum iMac. The Go uses a 2.4GHz wireless connection with twin antennas that results in virtually zero audio latency or interference. We found the sound quality to be crisp, clear, and lag-free, no matter what device we connected it to. The little black dongle is emblazoned with the Republic of Gamers logo, and comes with a USB-A adapter for use with consoles…

READERS OF A NERVOUS disposition may want to look over the page at the game in which you chainsaw bad guys, because despite its nonviolent nature, city and planet-builder Before We Leave hides a dark secret: It calls its population “peeps.” Players who can get past the twee, however, will discover a 4X game without the extermination—a 3X if you like—in which your citizens emerge from an underground bunker to revel in the sunlight of a rejuvenated world. What the disaster was that forced them down into the darkness we’re not told, but judging from the artifacts left on the surface, the peeps’ ancestors were once an advanced spacefaring civilization. You start out on an island with limited resources and an old boat. Fixing this up to explore strange new…