Sommaire pour October 2022 de Maximum PC

I’M SURE IT hasn’t escaped your attention, but the cost of living is going up. Gas prices are higher than ever, inflation is running away from pay rises, and many expect us to be in a recession by… well, by the time you’ve finished reading this sentence. However, in the computing world at least, prices in some areas are coming down, such as graphics cards, SSDs, and DDR 5 RAM. But then again, prices were so artificially high during the pandemic that it’s less of a discount and more of a return to where they should have been in the first place. With that in mind, in this month’s cover feature we look at how to put together a solid mid-range PC and wring every last bit of performance out…

WI-FI IS BASED on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards and major updates are marketed as versions of Wi-Fi. Intel has revealed that it will be ready to launch IEEE 802.11be in 2024, known as Wi-Fi 7. Wi-Fi’s protocols are in the care of the Wi-Fi Alliance, a non-profit organization that makes sure everything works together. All kit labeled as Wi-Fi needs to complete interoperability testing and Intel is currently working to get its new version certified. Intel developed the current standard, 802.11ax and this new version has more bandwidth (320MHz vs. 160MHz) and packs more data. It employs 4096 QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation), alongside other trickery such as Multi-RU Puncturing, Enhanced QoS, and more. The result is a theoretical maximum data transfer rate of 46.1Gbps. The practical speed jumps…

GRAPHICS CARD prices are not only back to sensible levels, but some have dipped below MSRP, with bargains to be had. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 Ti was originally $1,999, but versions are now selling for as little as $1,150. In the spring of 2021, when prices peaked, the RTX 3090 was an average of over $3,500, if you could find one. It’s a similar story with AMD’s kit, although with less dramatic swings. The Radeon 6950 RX is selling at just under MSRP, as is most of the Radeon range. Alongside retailers’ discounts, we have some lowering of MSRPs, or as Nvidia says “promotional pricing”. It knocked $500 off the 3090 Ti and $200 off the regular 3090. The 3080 Ti gets a $100 shave and the 12GB 3080 gets…

FULL DISCLOSURE: Previously on this very page, I have detailed several of Intel’s recent missteps, including the car crash that is Arc graphics and the built-in platform disadvantages versus AMD that will take several years to solve. But people, please, there is no need to panic. Despite the building narrative of multi-modal catastrophe at Intel and a stock price that’s tanked by about 35 percent in the last few months, the reality is that not much has changed. Most of Intel’s current problems were baked in years ago. At the risk of sounding smug, four months ago, I called it regarding Intel’s Arc graphics woes. So, let’s just say recent rumors that Intel is seriously evaluating whether it should nuke the whole sorry saga aren’t exactly surprising. But here’s the…

CPU COOLER NZXT Kraken X73 RGB AIO Price: $225 To handle our zippy CPU, we need an effective CPU AIO cooler to keep things under control. NZXT’s Kraken lineup has plenty of powerful options to choose from, so we’re picking the largest X73 RGB to fill the space in our machine. This features a 360mm radiator and three of NZXT’s 120mm Aer RGB fans. This can be controlled via the NZXT CAM software, we will touch on this later. The CPU header features a fun infinity mirror display with 12 rotational angles of adjustment, so you can make sure the logo is aligned with the rest of the build. This mirrored design ofeers a clean yet artistic look to the build, especially when the RGB elements of the CPU header…

AS YOU CAN SEE, running at 1440p, our machine performed strongly. Sure, we knew this machine was more powerful than the one we were testing but to see some FPS gains of around 50 percent and more was pretty impressive. We also decided to run some additional games to see how well a range of slightly older titles performed on this PC. It’s safe to say that our machine gave some strong results again for these titles on ultra settings. These will also be compared later to the overclocked results. So, now that we have set a new set of additional benchmarks, let’s turn things up a notch, crank up the settings, and see what free performance upgrades we can get out of this machine. PRE-OVERCLOCKED GAMING BENCHMARKS Our 1440p…

1 CLICK OVERCLOCKING TO OVERCLOCK YOUR CPU quickly, we can use Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility. Head over to the official Intel site to download this application if you are using a 12th gen Intel CPU. Then once you’ve installed it, go to the speed optimizer panel on the left and click the big blue ‘optimize now’ button. It’s as simple as that. This takes our old all-core frequency from 4.90GHz to 5.10GHz—not a bad improvement for just clicking a few buttons. There’s even an XTU2 benchmark built in. Before optimizing we got a score of 8914 marks and after we got a score of 9570 marks. That’s one easy upgrade. 2 RAM OVERCLOCKING SIMILAR TO THE ONE-CLICK overclocking for the CPU, we can tune the RAM in the BIOS with…

VIDEO UPSCALING is hardly a new technology. From the time the first DVDs started shipping, companies have worked to create higher-quality renditions of low-resolution videos. First, it was VHS to DVD quality, then we got 720p TVs and Blu-ray drives that would turn DVD quality into Full HD quality, and now there are TVs and other devices that will upscale 1080p content to 4K, or even 8K if you have the requisite display and hardware. But upscaling video content is different from upscaling games, in a variety of ways. For one, games have a lot more data available behind the scenes. They also run at much higher frame rates and are highly susceptible to latency issues. While the underlying concepts of upscaling may be similar, the hardware and technologies behind…

2 EASY WAYS TO ORDER FOR FASTEST SERVICE CALL 1-844-779-2822 & mention code B2JXIN Complete all information below & return with payment to: Maximum PC, PO Box 2029, Langhorne, PA 19047-9957 *Offer only valid on one-year print subscription. Pricing valid on US shipping addresses only. Savings based off US newsstand cover price of $9.99 per issue for 13 issues, plus the retail price of Ultimate Retro PC Gamer Collection digital edition of $23.99. Ultimate Retro will be emailed 3-5 days after payment is processed. Check payment made payable to Maximum PC Magazine. Visit us at magazinesdirect.com or call 1-844-779-2822 for other subscription options. Your first issue will arrive 4-6 weeks after payment is processed. Offer valid until December 31, 2022…

Storage devices that do their own computation—now there’s an interesting idea. Not only could you reduce the overall load on the CPU, freeing up resources for other tasks. The flow of data back and forth between storage and the CPU could also be minimized. If nothing else, data transfers use up a lot of energy. ARM estimates that over 60 percent of the energy consumed in computing gets hoovered up just moving data in and out of storage. And energy consumption is becoming an ever more sensitive issue for a whole range of reasons. So, what if you did the computation on the drive itself and didn’t have to move the data over to the CPU at all? Not only would you save power, but as you add drives, you…

TIP OF THE MONTH HANDY SHORTCUTS Navigating around your PC using your mouse can be a little cumbersome, especially if you don’t have an excessive amount of desktop space—plus it’s so last millennium. To make life a little easier for yourself, you can use these nifty shortcuts to navigate around your PC faster. Press the ‘Windows key + S’ to quickly jump into your PC’s search bar. To pop open file explorer, press the ‘Windows key + E’. MAKE – USE – CREATE 62 Reboot Windows 11 File Explorer with our tips and tricks 66 Use Docker containers to run apps and services. 70 Our Machine of the Month, the TRS-80 from 1977. IN LIMBO MODE In the previous issue, I mentioned that I should have been in a new…

1. TABS File Explorer’s big new feature is tabbed browsing. Simply drag files and folders onto a tab to copy or move them to that location. 2. NAVIGATION PANE The pane is now split into three sections and redesigned. Home is a new one-stop shop for favorite files and folders, including Quick Access, which now sits beneath it in the second section. 3. FILTER VIEW When browsing the Recent list of files in the Home folder, you can now filter this view to show specific file types (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, videos, or PDF) using this button. 4. MANAGE TAB BAR Tabs work in a similar way to the Edge browser—drag and drop to rearrange them, and right-click on the tab for further options. 5. HOME FOLDER The Home folder…

1. RUN INFORMATION The ‘-d’ tag instructs Docker to run the container ‘detached’, so it doesn’t tie up the Terminal. The ‘--name’ tag can be anything you like—it merely helps you identify the container. 2. ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES The ‘-e’ tags allow you to specify settings tailored to the container you’re running. All Linuxserver.io containers include PID and GID variables for running containers more securely. 3. PORT MAPPING The ‘-p’ tags tell you which ports the container is listening on. If there’s a potential clash with other services, choose a different port to listen on—eg. ‘-p 8080:80’ redirects port 8080 to port 80 inside the container. 4. VOLUME MOUNTS Allows you to map folders on your hard drive to the container, ensuring you can preserve configuration and data files when the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A COPY OF TRS80GP Windows, Linux, and Mac OS are supported System ROMs and boot software are supplied. http://48k.ca/trs80gp.html IN THE FINAL INSTALLMENT of this series, we are covering the third machine in the ‘Holy Trinity’ of microcomputers launched in 1977. Tandy/Radio Shack’s TRS-80 was the plucky underdog of the trio but played a big part in helping to establish home computing. Pitched against rivals from Commodore and Apple, the TRS-80 was the cheapest option of the three, bringing computing to the masses long before Commodore would seize the lower market. For those willing to dive in, the TRS-80 has a large gaming library with plenty of classic titles. However, emulating the platform can be tricky, so, after a brief history lesson on the machine, let us…

SK HYNIX isn’t one of the big boys when it comes to consumer SSD branding. But it is one of the heavyweights in NAND flash chips. In fact, SK Hynix is about to have even more weight to throw around thanks to buying Intel’s SSD and flash memory business lock, stock, but minus the Optane barrel, the latter not available on account of being closed down entirely. Anyway, the company’s relative anonymity as a consumer SSD brand is about to change. The new SK Hynix Platinum P41 is a bit of a beast, a serious attempt at a high-performance M.2 drive. For starters, where the previous generation SK Hynix Gold P31 made do with a PCIe 3.0 interface and a controller chip with just four memory channels, the new P41…

THE MOVE AWAY from easy-to-upgrade gadgets to devices that are impenetrable has to be one of the worst tech trends over the last 15 years. It’s one of the reasons we’ve paused our repair guides in partnership with iFixIt—your laptop and phone have become unfixable to the average user. Sure, you can upgrade the RAM and SSD on most consumer laptops, and the Wi-Fi card if you’re feeling adventurous, but if you want to upgrade anything else, you’re basically looking at buying a whole new machine. California-based Framework, founded just under three years ago, is attempting to do something about this problem and the e-waste it creates. Its Laptop is highly upgradeable, from an entirely replaceable mainboard inside, to the I/O ports on the outside, meaning you can in theory…

WORD ON THE STREET is that we could see Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace GPUs launch in the next few months. Nvidia isn’t saying much, but the number of leaks is a sign the hardware is nearing completion and may be getting into the hands of early testers and add-in card partners. The latest rumors, if true, indicate the ultimate Ada graphics card will be an absolute monster. Many of the core specs haven’t changed much since the Nvidia hack earlier this year. We’re expecting a GPU built on TSMC’s 4N (“4nm Nvidia”) custom process node, similar to that already being used for Hopper H100. Like the H100, the AD102 chip will have eight Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), with 18 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) per GPC, and 128 FP32 CUDA cores per SM.…

> What’s Wireguard? > Missing case features > USB operating system VPN confusion I found your article on securing your VPN (May 2022 issue) interesting, but I’m slightly confused about WireGuard VPN. Do I have to install this software on my network server, or can I run it just on a desktop or laptop? WireGuard’s website is confusing too. On the subject of browser fingerprinting, couldn’t I just use my DuckDuckGo browser? I would greatly appreciate any information. —Ariana Arsenault THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: Jonni Bidwell’s guide to building your own VPN connection should be required reading for anyone wanting to know what a VPN does, what protection it offers, and importantly, what it doesn’t offer. The key thing about VPNs is that there are two basic types: client-based, where you…

OUR FIRST IMPRESSION is that we prefer the white variant of the Corsair 7000D Airflow, although the black case’s interior hides messy cables better. Talking of cables, we wish we’d chosen neater braided ones, especially the PCIe cable that connects to our GPU, which sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s a shame as the GPU with its subtle RGB branding and mount sits proudly in this behemoth of a case. The case has multiple routes for cable management making this build easy to piece together in the final stages. Due to its large size, you will have to plan out the cable routes in case they are too short—it seems like the size of this case is both a plus and a negative. You won’t struggle for space when…

IT’S SAFE to say that if you spend your time learning your PC’s limits with overclocking then you can see performance upgrades without necessarily taking your system to within an inch of its life. Across the board, we saw improvements in our CPU, RAM, and GPU performance and general gains of around 3-10 percent. With our results already performing so highly, we were glad we could squeeze this extra power out of our system. Put it this way, if it’s there to be harnessed, why not do it? Spending that extra half an hour to an hour going back and forth overclocking and benchmarking can make a difference. It could also be the vital difference between using all of the available Hz on your display or not. OVERCLOCKED BENCHMARKS Our…

Our primary focus has been on real-time upscaling used in video games, but upscaling has other applications too. From Star Trek and MacGyver to James Bond and CSI, computer image enhancement has long been a way of pulling incredible detail out of blurry images. See that 5x3 block of pixels? Enhance! And like magic, a blocky image resolves into a clearly legible face, reflection, license plate, or whatever. We’re not there yet. In fact, we may never see an algorithm that can take a single low-resolution photo and ‘enhance’ it into a clear high-resolution photo showing a reflection of a tattoo. However, taking a modest resolution image and upscaling it to a higher resolution without adding a bunch of pixelation has become commonplace, and video sources could also be used…

WHEN THE FIRST SOLID-STATE DRIVES (SSDs) for consumers appeared in 2008, it seemed like the problem of PC storage had been cracked for good. Finally, a fully solid-state PC was possible. On paper, even those early SSDs obliterated conventional hard drives with spinning magnetic platters when it came to most measures of performance. But almost immediately it also became clear that the SSD was a work in progress. With a bit of use, early drives quickly became stuttering, laggy, useless bricks. More gradually, we PC enthusiasts became familiar with the inherent shortcomings of the predominant memory technology used for SSDs, namely NAND flash. Since then, flash-based SSDs have improved beyond all recognition in terms of performance. At the same time, prices have fallen dramatically to the point where it’s now…

Remember the good old days of ribbon-like IDE cables, jumpers, and maximum bandwidth measuring 100MB/s? Back then, the introduction of SATA in 2003 was pretty dramatic stuff. It nearly doubled bandwidth, debuted a slick new physical connector, and even supported hot swapping. Pretty quickly, the theoretical peak bandwidth of SATA quadrupled to 750MB/s and storage performance was really up and running. Ever since then, that relentless progress has kept on coming. Today, the latest M.2 SSDs connect via a PCI Express 4.0 quad-lane interface supporting up to 8GB/s of bandwidth—more than RAM or system memory offered back when those IDE drives were being replaced by the first SATA HDDs. Anyway, PCIe Gen 5 drives are already supported on Intel’s latest 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs, albeit with some limitations, and…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 11 FILE EXPLORER plus some optional free apps to give you additional or improved functionality: WizFile, TeraCopy, ViVeTool, Win Subst, and TreeSize Free THERE’S NO GETTING AWAY FROM IT: a core part of Windows 11 is File Explorer, the tool used to navigate and manipulate the files and folders on your PC. But for all the time you’re using it, are you maximizing your use of File Explorer? It has come on leaps and bounds in the last few iterations of Windows, and there may be some hidden features you aren’t aware of that could revolutionize the way you interact with your PC’s drives. That’s where this latest collection of tips and tricks comes in. We’ll start by highlighting some of the lesser-known tools within File…

While File Explorer’s ‘This PC’ view can give you a basic overview of how much space each drive has free, it can’t help you locate which specific files or folders are taking up the most space. You can do this manually, but there are lots of free tools out there that can do the hard work for you. One such tool is TreeSize Free (www.jam-software.com/treesize_free), which quickly scans entire drives or selected directories to provide a visual map of what’s taking up all that space. After launching, click the Select Directory button in the ribbon to select a drive or folder to scan. You’ll be prompted to restart as an administrator, which is only required if the directory required contains restricted files (if you do so, TreeSize Free will pick…

THIS MONTH, I headed to London, England, donned my combat pants, and tried out the new Tomb Raider Live Experience. Based on the video game series, TRLE is a 90-minute adventure set in the Tomb Raider universe that’s best imagined as a mix of escape rooms, immersive theater, and Krypton Factor-style physical trials. It’s a fun idea from a company that also recreates the Crystal Maze TV show, catering to corporate team-bonding days and bachelor/bachelorette parties. You are one of Lara Croft’s team on an adventure, traveling the globe to solve puzzles, collect artifacts and discover treasure. While you don’t interact with Lara, Alicia Vikander from the 2018 Tomb Raider film does turn up in voice form, while you meet characters from the game, such as recent villain Aiden. It’s…

LAST MONTH, we looked at the rather disappointing Radeon RX 6400. This month, Nvidia’s GTX 1630 gives us one reason to reconsider AMD’s budget offering. Based on the four-year-old Turing architecture, but without raytracing hardware, the GTX 1630 feels like a GPU that’s horribly late to the party. It might have made sense if it had launched alongside the GTX 1650 back in 2019, at a price south of $100. But today, with cards selling for $199? It’s everything bad from 2021’s GPU shortages, at a time when no one is interested in paying that much money for an underperforming card. And underperform it does. Compared with the RX 6400, the GTX 1630 ends up being 36 percent slower at our mostly playable 1080p medium settings. It’s also 32 percent…

A COUPLE OF MONTHS a go, we took our first look at AMD’s new RX 6750 XT GPU, courtesy of Asus’s ROG Strix model. At the time, pricing was higher than we’d have liked, but things have already moved in the right direction. ASRock’s Phantom Gaming D has a lot in common with the Strix card, including the triple fans and large cooler, but prices have dropped by $50—and if you’re willing to skip the RGB lighting, ASRock’s Challenger D knocks another $100 off the price, making the RX 6750 XT a far more attractive proposition. Other things have happened in the past couple of months that we wanted to investigate. Specifically, AMD released a DirectX 11 optimized driver after our review, which can improve performance in some cases. Unfortunately,…

WE’VE PLAYED as some strange things in our time. A bipedal cow, the manifestation of a sun goddess as a wolf, any number of angry bald white men. But a simple cat? That’s a new one. Although, haven’t we been playing as cats in games all along, scrambling over platforms, and swatting things out of our way? This cat does all that and has a cute ‘miaow on request’ button. A slim and gingery (there’s no character customization, which surely must lose the game a point or two) member of a colony, or family, of kitties living in industrial ruins long since returned to nature. While huge rusted pipes and slabs of concrete are the order of the day, they’re covered in moss, creepers, and all the usual signs of…

WE’RE EAGERLY WAITING the next generation of cards from Nvidia with the new Ada Lovelace GPUs, especially the halo model: the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti. This will sport a GPU near the top of the Lovelace tree, an AD102-400-A1, or AD102-450-A1, using close to the full die. There will be a lot of cores: 18,176 or more CUDA cores, 142 or 144 RT cores, and 576-odd Tensor cores. The RTX 4090 Ti will couple this to a whopping 48GB of GDDR6X sitting on a 384-bit bus capable of shifting 1,152GB/s. There is no statistic about this triple-width card that isn’t jaw-dropping, including expected power consumption, which has a rumored TDP of 800W, requiring a 1,200W PSU as a minimum and two 16-pin power connectors. Early leaks put this monster at…

TWO YEARS AGO, GPUs were in short supply and prices were ridiculous. Intel entered the market promising competitive and available hardware—we were promised four million GPUs in 2022, remember? However, the Arc project has hit a few problems, not least with drivers. Intel thought it could “leverage the integrated graphics software stack”, according to CEO Pat Gelsinger, but that simply didn’t work. Nvidia and AMD have years of hard work behind their drivers, Intel hasn’t. Performance with DirectX 11 is particularly bad with some titles seeing performance differentials of 50 percent between DX11 and 12. The Arc driver also has features that don’t work, such as Smooth Sync. In the meantime, another problem is who will sell the cards? It seems Intel’s retailer packages, including the RMA (Return to Manufacturer)…

AFTER A COUPLE OF YEARS of patiently waiting on the sidelines, DDR5 RAM is about to enter the limelight. It’s already supported by Intel’s 12th generation chips (although they also work with DDR4), but AMD’s incoming Socket AM5 platform is going to require the newer memory. At the same time, prices have steadily been coming down, meaning you don’t have to worry about remortgaging your house to get on board. So, if you’re destined for DDR5, these are the sticks to go for 5 KINGSTON FURY BEAST 32GB DDR5-6000 C40 Kingston’s kit may feature the words ‘Beast’ and ‘Fury’ in the title, but it’s actually rather subdued and stealth-like. Those words apply to the performance, particularly the high-frequency 6000MHz speed, while the timings are also good. The real draw of…

BEFORE we get into the nitty gritty of overclocking, we need to check out how well our PC runs before we tinker with it. On paper, considering the components we have, this mighty machine should be more than capable of putting on a show when it comes to gaming. Pairing together the latest and greatest i9-12900K with a GPU as powerful as the Radeon RX 6900XT will make an exciting duo. We will be initially testing against our 1440p benchmarking build to see how this machine runs unmodified. Then afterward, we will be overclocking and testing against our original scores to see how much of an improvement we can potentially gain for free. And who doesn’t like free upgrades? PRE-OVERCLOCKED BENCHMARKS Our 1440p zero-point consists of an Intel Core i7-12700K,…

IF YOU ARE relatively new to the PC building scene, the word overclocking may send shivers down your spine. But fear not, the reality is not that scary. We aren’t aiming to turn your CPU temps up so high that you could huddle around your PC in the middle of a snow storm just to gain a few extra FPS. We will be using simple methods and a variety of tips and tricks to squeeze some extra power from your new build. If you’ve made the bold choice to buy and build your new PC, then why not aim to get the most out of it? Overclocking may at first seem like a process only achievable by the most experienced underground hackers on the deep underbelly of the dark web,…

FROM OUR ADDITIONAL BENCHMARK on our older favored titles, we also see improvements across the board. Our largest is an 11 percent increase with the new overclocking settings on Dirt Rally. This game is seven years old, but with the sliders cranked to the right and played on a high hertz 2K monitor, it still rocks! To make sure your benchmarking is accurate, with each tweak you make overclocking, run three benchmarks at those settings and take an average result. So, are we happy with our results? The bottom line is yes. Older titles almost feel like they need to be played on the highest settings so they don’t appear too outdated, so overclocking on older games is a must to get the best experience possible. OVERCLOCKED GAMING BENCHMARKS Our…

Many examples of upscaling like to start with showing the worst option, nearest neighbor—which hasn’t been commonly used as the preferred solution for decent quality upscaling in a couple of decades. Sometimes nearest neighbor might be used for aesthetic purposes, but ever since the 3dfx Voodoo first came to market back in 1996, bilinear filtering has been the baseline for upsampling textures. Adobe’s Photoshop photo-editing program has supported various upscaling algorithms for as long as we care to remember. Some work better than others, and the latest release now has an AI-derived mode called Preserve Details 2.0 that generally works better than previous upscaling options, and it only takes a few seconds. What if you took a similar approach, but instead of running on a local PC, you train and…

FSR and DLSS are not ‘universal’ upscaling solutions that will simply work with whatever game or application you want. They require game developers to put in the effort to make the tools work. However, if you want upscaling with a game that doesn’t support FSR or DLSS, there are alternatives from both companies—spatial upscaling options, naturally. AMD’s Radeon Image Scaling (RSR) uses the same core FSR algorithm but applies it to everything at a driver level. That means you can use it with pretty much any game or application. Upscaling artifacts might be more apparent when going down this route, but if you have a game that doesn’t reach acceptable performance levels, it’s worth a shot. Nvidia Image Scaling (NIS) is the same driver-based solution, although the upscaling algorithms are different—though…

It was once the future of computer memory. A technology that promised to be as fast as RAM and more durable than flash memory. Now it’s all but dead, so whatever happened to Intel Optane? Based on a new nonvolatile memory technology known as 3D XPoint, Optane-branded drives could maintain data storage without power. But like RAM, 3D XPoint memory was addressable at the bit level. That gave it much higher IOPS performance than any flash-based technology and much lower latency. 3D Xpoint also offers spectacular endurance. For example, the 1.6TB version of the Intel Optane SSD DC P5800X delivers a ridiculous 292PB (yes, petabytes!) of write endurance. Put simply, you won’t ever wear that out. It’s all the more remarkable, then, how quickly the whole project failed. 3D XPoint…

WE ALL KNOW the kind of ‘boring but useful’ tasks we should carry out regularly on our computers: backing up, syncing, eradicating junk, and so on. Just as in life, there are lots of things we should do, but don’t—but one of the reasons we put off such PC tasks is not knowing the best program to use. That’s a problem we aim to fix in this feature. We’ve highlighted 16 tasks you may have attempted in the past, perhaps with mixed results. We start with tools that help you manage your files: removing, renaming, searching for, and converting them. Once that’s done, we move on to security—more specifically, encryption. You’ll learn how to hide files behind passwords, and even inside other files. Backing up and syncing are covered, followed…

Mapping network folders to drive letters is a great way to simplify access to remote shares, but what about being able to map deeply buried folders on your local hard drive too? This functionality doesn’t exist within Windows but can be added with a smart portable tool called Win Subst (www.no-nonsens.nl/win-subst/). Once downloaded (note it’s 64-bit only) launch Win Subst and click … next to Source path to define your first folder. Pick a drive letter, add a description, and click Connect Virtual Drive to create a link. One drawback is that it shares the same drive label as its parent drive in File Explorer. By default, any mapped drives will vanish as soon as you close the program or reboot your PC. You’ll find two options under Settings to…

YOU’LL NEED THIS DOCKER ENGINE, PLUS YOUR CHOICE OF CONTAINERS available for Linux, Windows, Mac, QNAP, and Synology IF YOU FOLLOWED LAST ISSUE’S NAS SERVER BUILD, you’ll have been left hanging with the tantalizing prospect of using Docker to run many, if not all, of your key services. Docker provides a clever way to run a wide range of applications and network services (from VPN and self-hosted cloud-style backup to media streaming) on any supported hardware. Docker containers make it easy to run services in isolated bubbles, complete with their own dependencies and with tailored access to the outside world. At first glance, it can appear an impenetrable subject but in this tutorial, we’ll show you how to install it on your system, set things up, get a firm understanding…

From the Terminal, browse to /home/dockeruser/containers/swag/ngnix/. Here, you’ll find two folders: siteconfs contains a single file called ‘default’ and proxy-confs contains a host of files covering most of LinuxServer.io’s docker images. You can view these in your browser to get a feel for what’s available and how they work at https://github.com/linuxserver/reverse-proxy-confs—there are both subfolder and subdomain conf files available, the latter is your focus if you’re using subdomains. Open one of the files in proxy-confs using nano, where you’ll see several variables that may need amending to suit your specific container settings. For example, server_ name points to your subdomain, while $upstream_app references the name of your container as defined by the --name tag when you set it up. If your container is supplied by Linuxserver, that should be all…

I AM A PRETTY heavy laptop user these days. I have a desktop test rig that doubles as an occasional gaming platform, but day-today, I use portables. I even use them for reviewing screens, as it makes the logistics and setup so much easier. I have a high-end laptop with a 3080 Ti GPU, so I can do a proper job of reviewing gaming panels up to and including 1440p models. 4K is theoretically doable, but I’m not convinced that mobile GPUs can crank out sufficient frame rates to do high-refresh 4K monitors justice. Anyway, the point is that I do most stuff with laptops, even performance-intensive work. It says a lot about how far the PC platform, including x86 CPUs, has come. There’s not much in it regarding CPU…

THE H7 SERIES is a newly revised lineup of mid-tower cases from NZXT, with the H7 Elite at the top of the tree. Below it sits the H7 flow and the standard H7, both coming in at just below $130. It’s no great shock that NZXT knows how to make a good-looking PC chassis, and these three cases don’t buck the trend. NZXT claims the series has been created with the aim of being easy to build in, with plenty of interior space and versatility. However, the H7 Elite model we have on test is the one with all the bells and whistles. So, is it worth splashing out an extra $70 for the Elite over the Flow, or indeed the Standard version? All three cases have a similar design,…

THERE CAN BE MANY factors to consider when choosing a display, depending on whether you’re using your PC for work and whether that work relies on a color-accurate screen. If you’re looking at a gaming monitor, then chances are it’ll prioritize a high refresh rate over color accuracy. Not so with BenQ with the Mobiuz EX3210U, which offers a monitor with 4K resolution, a gamer-friendly 144Hz refresh rate, and a wide color range. So does that make the EX3210U the ultimate all-in-one monitor? 32-inch monitors are often considered right on the cusp of being too large for a desk setup, but they deserve a look if you can mount one properly. Depending on your layout, this could double up as an internet TV, or a gaming monitor, or just a…

IN THE (CHERRY MX) red corner, weighing in at just 1.42lbs, we have the latest contender from Corsair’s K70 keyboard range. As a 60 percent keyboard, does it pack a mighty punch or will it throw in the towel? Judging by the price tag alone, we're unsure how this fight will go—it costs more than the full-sized K70 RGB Pro we reviewed recently, which arguably has more versatility. On the other hand, the 60 percent wireless form factor is a big favorite in the gaming scene. So, is less actually more? Straight out of the box, the design of the K70 Pro Mini Wireless feels sturdy, giving you the feeling of a good quality product. It is evenly weighted and features a rubber bar underneath and rubber around the feet…