Inhaltsverzeichnis für November 2022 in Maximum PC

AS I’M SURE YOU’RE AWARE, AMD has just released its “best gaming CPU” ever in the form of the Ryzen 9 7950X (read all about it in our news section on page 8). It’s an exciting debut for the brand new Zen 4 line—the 7950X is around 13 percent faster than its predecessor the Ryzen 9 5950X and, at $699, it’s also $100 cheaper. It’s a bold statement of intent from AMD that once again lays down the gauntlet to Intel. Luckily, no matter who wins this next generation, the real winner will be us consumers. You may ask, then, why we’ve opted for a budget gaming build for this month’s cover feature. Don’t worry, we will be reviewing, comparing, and building the heck out of all of AMD’s (and…

BY NOW, WE WERE hoping to have official news of Nvidia’s next-generation graphics cards, but it seems we’ll have to wait just a little bit longer. The 4000-series will be based around the new Ada Lovelace GPU, which will reportedly bring a massive speed jump. Some reports talk of a doubling in performance, which seems, frankly, wishful. Figures of between 66 and 80 percent sound more achievable, while still being remarkable enough. The freshest rumor is that we’ll only see one card this year, an RTX 4090, which is in production now, according to a leaked production log from a third-party card builder. Apparently, Nvidia has also restarted production of the 12GB RTX 3080 so it can use some of its stock of GA102 GPUs. Much has been made of…

Intel also insists it will regain process node leadership before the end of the decade, which implies at least two or three process shrinks in the next five years. Turning sand into high-performance silicon chips containing billions of individual components is one of the greatest technical achievements in human history. But for a while in the 2010s, it looked like progress was going the same way as supersonic travel. We’d hit a wall. But TSMC upped its game and the rest of the industry is being dragged along with it. In terms of truly mass-produced computer chips for commercial consumption, only TSMC, Intel, and Samsung factor when it comes to operating right at the cutting edge. While only these companies can produce the most advanced chips in retail volumes, several…

JUST SEVEN OR EIGHT YEARS AGO, it was multiple generations behind Intel in chip production technology. 15 years ago, it was a bulk producer of cheap commodity chips with no track record in high-performance silicon, and 30 years ago, it barely existed. So, how has TSMC come to rule the world? Today, TSMC can claim indisputable world leadership in chip manufacturing with at least one generational advantage over Intel, arguably two. It produces roughly half of the global supply of customer-designed chips and over 90 percent of those manufactured on cutting-edge processes. Its chips go into not just PCs and phones, but cars, military equipment, medical hardware, and everything else we depend on these days. TSMC is based in Taiwan, an island territory operating as a de facto independent state…

TIP OF THE MONTH SETTINGS MATTER When you are working or playing games in full-screen mode, getting back to your desktop screen isn’t always the easiest or quickest thing to do. Neither is returning to your settings window, especially if you haven’t already added it to your taskbar. But if you need to interrupt your game for another task or to tweak the settings quickly, an easy way to dive straight into your settings menu is to press the ‘Windows Key’ + ‘I’. MAKE – USE – CREATE 64 Fix common PC problems with Windows 11 68 Locate those hard-to-find drivers and update them. 70 Turn a monitor into a digital dashboard A ROW OF SAINTS Open-world titles have to be my favorite genre of games. The sense of freedom,…

1. FILTER VIEW Event Viewer allows you to examine specific parts of your system by browsing the available list of logs. Alternatively, you can create your own custom views. 2. ERROR FREQUENCY In isolated cases, errors and warnings can be ignored, but if they keep cropping up it’s a good idea to investigate them further. 3. EVENT DETAILS Try to include as much detail as the log gives you in your searches: Event ID, source (or filenames), and any error codes, plus key information from the description. 4. ASK OTHERS If all else fails, right-click the event to copy its details to the clipboard. You can paste this into an email to the Doctor or a web forum post when asking for help. 5. FILTER CURRENT VIEW When viewing specific…

YOU’LL NEED THIS TRY ONE OR BOTH OF THESE DRIVER UPDATERS Snappy Driver Installer (free and open source, www.glenn.delahoy.com/snappy-driver-installer-origin/) and IObit Driver Booster Free (adware, www.iobit.com/en/driver-booster.php) THERE ARE TWO PRINCIPAL REASONS to update your drivers: performance and stability. If you’ve made do with the drivers installed by Windows, then stability is already a given—these have undergone rigorous tests in the Windows Hardware Quality Labs to earn WHQL certification, signed by Microsoft itself. However, if you’re looking for better performance or new features, WHQL-certified drivers aren’t always the best option. But where do you track down these newer drivers, and what can you do if you’ve just installed some new hardware only to discover the supplied drivers don’t work or—worse still—don’t exist at all? That’s where this tutorial comes in. We’ll…

IT TURNS OUT that if you’re lucky enough to sit within the Generation Z age bracket, you want a keyboard with dedicated emoji keys, but you don’t want to forgo a certain level of quality. That was my takeaway from Logitech’s recent Creators Day, where the company showed off its new Pop Keys keyboard, designed to appeal to a younger but still discerning generation. The wireless keyboard has mechanical keys, just like the excellent Logitech MX Mechanical Mini I covered in my Editor’s Pick in the August issue, but unlike that dull office keyboard, the Pop Keys is available in a host of bright colors that Logitech calls ‘Daydream’, ‘Blast’ and ‘Heartbreaker’. The Pop Keys also features a host of customizable and swappable emoji keys to the right of the…

AHOY THERE, mateys! Batten the hatches and prepare to set sail on Intel’s Arc, its first proper graphics card in more than two decades. The maiden voyage got off to a rocky start, storms clouded the journey, and the captain seems to have lost his bearings. But can Arc weather the journey, or will all hands go down with the ship while chasing Moby Dick? Yarrrgh! Enough of the pirate talk. At least the price isn’t terrible. If Intel had launched Arc at the beginning of the year, when GPUs were still nearly impossible to come by, it might have stood a chance. Except, even months after the cards first went on sale in China and half a dozen updates later, there are still plenty of driver kinks and issues.…

NZXT’S LATEST H7 line-up of cases consists of three new models, the H7, the H7 Flow, and the H7 Elite. We’ve already got our hands on the Elite model, which we reviewed in last month’s issue. The Elite was an impressive and handsome chassis and, as the most expensive option, we’d naturally assumed that it would be the best performing choice out of the three. But while the main focus of the Elite model was its good looks, how does its sibling, the Flow, compare? Costing $70 less than the Elite, is it a better option? At this point, it’s worth mentioning that the Flow costs the same as the standard H7 case. Which begs the question, what’s the benefit of the standard H7 over the Flow? Visually, the Flow…

HAVE YOU EVER looked at your keyboard and thought, ‘I really wish it felt a bit more like something out of Dexter’s Laboratory?’ No? Well, you will be after reading this review, because that’s exactly how using the Mountain Everest Max keyboard feels. The Everest Max is the Batman utility belt of keyboards. It comes with a media dock, numpad, and wrist rest, all of which are detachable and (in the case of the former two) can be placed on either side of the keyboard. Every part of it feels like it has its primary use and then some other secret use because its inventors are so darned clever. Even its shipping box has a drawer with cute little compartments for all the pieces. Many keyboards come with media docks…

SOME GAMES are defined by their graphics, some by their plots, and others by their dialog choices. However, there’s also a more nebulous category of games that are defined by their feel, and Rollerdrome is most definitely one of those. How does it feel? Cool. Outrageously so. It involves roller skates, and its main influences seem to be The Running Man (1987) and Rollerball (1975), which are so likely to be lost on anyone under 30 as to perhaps be new and fresh. The plot is that you are the newest recruit to a near-future, arena-based bloodsport by the name of Rollerdrome, in which challengers take on (and shoot) the ‘house players’—all manner of out-of-work professional wrestlers and Mad Max extras armed with spiky clubs, armor, sniper rifles, and rocket…

AND SO it begins. AMD’s Zen 4 has landed and Intel’s 13th generation Raptor Lake chips aren’t far behind. The fight for CPU supremacy is on. First, those new AMD chips. The Zen 4 range starts with four new models. At the top is the Ryzen 9 7950X, with 16 cores and 80MB of L2 and L3 cache. The base clock is 4.5GHz, with a boost to 5.7GHz, and costs $699. Next is the Ryzen 7900X ($549) with 12 cores, a 200MHz faster base clock, and a 100MHz slower boost. Both chips have a TDP of 170W, and a ‘maximum’ power consumption of 230W, so toasty rather than hot. Then there’s a Ryzen 7 7700X with eight cores and a clock of 4.5GHz at $399. Lastly, the Ryzen 5 7600X…

A CURVED MONITOR on a larger screen is a great idea. Your eye is at a similar distance from all parts of the screen, minimizing distortion and reducing eye strain. They also expand your peripheral vision, offering a more immersive world. LG, pioneers of curved screens, has developed a new use for its flexible OLED screen. The first television to use them is the LG Flex TV LX3, a 4K, 16:9, 42-inch screen with motorized controls that adjust the curvature from flat to an impressive 900R (ie. a radius of 900mm). You can set it to 20 curvature levels, and it uses the Alpha 9 Gen 5 image processor, LG’s high-end model. It has a resolution of 3,840x2,160 and a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. There are a host of…

Generational pricing sees some dips and bumps, depending on the model. The top Ryzen 9 7950X will see a $100 drop to $699, while the Ryzen 7 7700X will cost $399, $100 more than the outgoing 5700X. The Ryzen 9 7900X sticks with the $549 price point and the Ryzen 5 7600X lands at the same $299 price as the outgoing models. Of course, street pricing on the 5000 series has changed significantly over time, with the various processors selling anywhere from $100 to $250 below MSRP right now. Performance should be a major improvement over Zen 3, thanks to architectural enhancements that AMD claims deliver a 13 percent higher IPC (instructions per cycle). Tack on boost clocks that are 15-17 percent higher and we’re looking at a potential 30…

> Driver Updater > Plex security breach > Adobe CS3 options Driver Updater query I have a question about driver updaters. AVG charged me for such a program recently. I wondered why I was being charged for this since I had a two-year subscription to its Ultimate package. Turns out AVG has a new software app that updates not only its software drivers but everyone else’s drivers too. Oddly, a company like Microsoft charges third-party companies that use its operating system lots of money to ‘authenticate’ drivers, but suddenly, AVG has 20,000 other manufacturer drivers to update. It's strange that AVG has moved into this area. Could you possibly shed light on what is going on with driver updaters and why software manufacturers aren’t updating their own drivers? Maybe they…

On paper, it seems as though TSMC is miles ahead of Intel. After all, it’s been over two years since the first commercially available devices powered by 5nm TSMC chips hit the market. Meanwhile, as we went to press, TSMC is just weeks away from mass production of 3nm chips. And Intel? Its most advanced node for commercial chips is 10nm. Oh dear! But hold on. Making assumptions based on the nomenclature involved is problematic. Put another way, TSMC’s nanometers are not directly comparable to Intel’s. How can that be possible? The name attached to a given process node has become detached from the physical reality of the chips involved. It used to relate to the smallest feature inside a chip. Now node naming is more branding and marketing than…

It’s all too easy to flippantly characterize the contest between the big players in chip design and production in militaristic terms. But is TSMC now so important that it could spark not just financial fisticuffs between corporate entities, but a real-world hot war between the USA and China? That is a sobering thought and one that has become rather more ominous in the wake of Russia’s recent incursion into Ukraine. After all, there are many parallels between Russia and Ukraine’s relationship and that of China and Taiwan. At their closest point, just 80 miles of water separates Taiwan from the mainland. China, of course, has long maintained that Taiwan remains part of its territory under the One China doctrine. For its part, the US has operated a policy of strategic…

An initiative of the European Space Agency in collaboration with The Raspberry Pi Foundation, Astro Pi is providing teams of young coders with the opportunity to see their applications running aboard the International Space Station, Python, and the Linux Operating system. The Astro Pi platform comprises an RPi 4, a sensor HAT, and an HQ Camera. But, as you can see from the photograph, it doesn’t look like any previous Raspberry Pi-based platform. Stringent testing was required before the Astro Pi was allowed onboard the ISS. First, the machine had to be capable of withstanding the huge vibrations that occur at lift-off. To ensure the safety of the astronauts who will use them, the surface temperature of the case couldn’t exceed 45°C. It also had to have no sharp edges and…

BenQ X3000i ARE YOU LOOKING to create an exciting and fun space in which to sit back and unwind? A place to watch your favorite films and shows after a hard day’s work? Then a cinema room could be the perfect way of doing that. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need the biggest of rooms nor does it need to cost the Earth. Projectors are becoming more affordable, more compact, and more powerful than ever, with a huge range of models to choose from. Projectors haven’t always been the first choice for gamers—one of the drawbacks was their lack of gaming performance. A big input delay and a display that tops out at 60Hz means that while media consumption was great, gaming wasn’t a viable option. For this reason, gamers…

AT FIRST GLANCE, you could easily mistake this piece of sci-fi tech as something from Ridley Scott’s Alien. Looks aside, this all-in-one PC by MSI has plenty of interesting points and has the power below the case to match the crazy chassis. However, with its rather hefty price tag, is this all-in-one worth the extra bucks over a similarly-priced DIY custom machine? The Aegis Ti5 is a statement piece that could pass as an intergalactic battleship or a cyborg helmet. But while this is clearly a product aimed at gamers, the Ti5’s spec sheet is more like that of a productivity PC. So, is MSI limiting its potential market by wrapping a powerful PC up in such an outlandish aesthetic? Sadly, the overall build quality of this machine is lackluster.…

GERMAN CHAIR manufacturer Backforce has made some great gaming chairs for the premium end of the market, such as the $600 Backforce One and the $700 Backforce One Plus. Both chairs were perfect for those all-night gaming sessions, but it was the customization that set them apart, with a wealth of color options, personalized lapels to show off your clan or Gamertag, and adjustable LED lighting on the rear. Not all gamers can afford such luxuries, however, which has inspired Backforce to put its gaming chair know-how into a more budget model, the $400 Backforce V. One of the big changes to this cheaper chair is that it requires some level of construction, but don’t worry, it’s not an Ikea-style mission of Allen keys and missing pieces. Though there is…

ONE MEDIA SERVER to rule over them all. That’s the dream of anyone hosting a huge collection of media they would like easy access to. For years, that media server has been provided by Plex, a beautifully designed, slick, and powerful tool. While its core functionality is free, there is also a paid-for subscription in which you can unlock extra goodness and features. However, over the past few years, a young pretender has emerged. Forked from Plex-rival Emby’s last opensource implementation, Jellyfin’s key commitment is to remain free and opensource for ‘now and always’. As we reach its fourth anniversary, now is the perfect time to see how Jellyfin measures up to Plex and which one offers the better overall experience. When it comes to core functionality, there’s little to…

YOUR EMAILS AREN’T SAFE from prying eyes. Google collects data from Gmail, which is crucial to its core business. It stopped directly scanning emails in 2017, but still collects data on your activities. DuckDuckGo is an advocate of privacy and its search engine won’t track you. It has extended this approach to emails with its Email Protection service. It’s not a traditional account, but a forwarding service. You get a @duck address, and your emails are funneled through this from your original address, with all tracking codes being stripped out of messages. DuckDuckGo claims that, during beta testing, 85 percent of messages contained hidden trackers. The system can create a unique private address, making tracking more difficult. Until data collection is responsibly handled, such services are the only way to…

AT AN INVESTOR meeting in February, Intel promised to ship four million Arc graphics cards this year. We’re still waiting. The only Intel card currently available is the low-end A380 ($139). It proved a disappointment (see page 74 for the review). The midrange A750 and A770 are due to launch by the time you read this. The first samples are being inspected, and the A770 is expected to perform somewhere between a GeForce RTX 3060 and 3060Ti, and a bit faster than the Radeon RT 6600XT. What went wrong with Intel’s much-anticipated entry into the graphics card market? Intel’s Tom Petersen (a graphics guru poached from Nvidia) cited ‘readiness’ as the reason for the delays. There were issues with supply lines, but the big problem is software-related. The lack of…

OK, so times are tough right now and the price of everything seems to be going up by the day, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to put those PC building plans on hold just yet. Stick to a budget of around $1,000 for a new PC and it‘s possible to get a smooth 1080p gaming experience at a reasonable price. So, where do we start? Let’s begin by choosing our sides—are you team Intel or team AMD? In this budget offering, we’ve gone down the Intel route with a 12th generation i5-12400 CPU. Alongside a Zotac RTX 3050, this should provide a decent gaming experience. Working to a budget brings a few constraints, of course. Not only do we have to choose our components carefully, but they also…

If this so far has largely been a tale of glorious success for TSMC, is that a dark cloud we can make out on the horizon? We speak of TSMC’s upcoming 3nm node. It has been widely reported that 3nm has been problematic for TSMC. Blame the pandemic? It could be a factor. Or is it more that TSMC is sticking with existing FinFET or fin field-effect transistor tech while the competition is moving to more advanced GAAFET or gate-all-around field-effect transistors? Either way, there are a few signs that TSMC 3nm isn’t quite on track. For evidence, we refer you to TSMC’s own relentless march of new production nodes. In fall 2018, you could buy an actual consumer product containing a chip produced on TSMC’s 7nm node. By the…

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VIDEO GAME CONVENTIONS have had a strange few years. The Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles went virtual for a couple of years during the pandemic but was canceled this year, before being handed over to new management for the 2023 show. Similarly, Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, has had no in-person show for the last couple of years, which was even more disappointing as it’s also open to the general public. This year, the convention returned to its in-person form, welcoming 265,000 gaming fans into the halls of the city’s convention center to see new games, new hardware, and more than a few cosplayers. Most of the big publishers were present, including Ubisoft, Sega, and 2K Games, in addition to hardware manufacturers such as Xbox, Razer, and Samsung. We fuelled up…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WHOCRASHED HOME EDITION (www.resplendence.com/whocrashed) TWEAKING.COM WINDOWS REPAIR TOOL (www.tweaking.com) GOT A PROBLEM WITH YOUR PC? The answers to your woes lie somewhere buried deep inside Windows itself, you just need to know where to find them. Windows 11 may not introduce any new troubleshooting tools to the mix, but it continues to support tried and tested tools, including Device Manager, Event Viewer, and a host of troubleshooters. We’ll take an in-depth look at these as well as some other useful tools. Reliability Monitor is built into Windows, while the third-party tools we showcase—WhoCrashed and Tweaking.com’s Windows Repair tool—are included because they provide convenient access to system logs and tools such as System File Checker and Windows’ powerful disk-checking tools. If the tools featured can’t provide a solution…

Windows is packed full of tools for testing and repairing different parts of your system but they are a bind to access manually. This is where Tweaking.com Windows Repair Tool Free (www.tweaking.com) comes to the rescue. Once installed or downloaded in portable form to your USB disk, you can run a series of tests and examine its comprehensive set of repair tools that can fix most problems. The tool is best run in Safe mode—open the program and click ‘Reboot to Safe Mode’. Follow the prompts, selecting ‘Safe mode with Networking’. Run through the pre-repair steps and if problems are found and fixed, reboot when prompted. If the problem isn’t resolved, reboot into Safe mode and run Windows Repair again, this time focusing on its Repairs – Main tab. The…

YOU’LL NEED THIS AN OLD OR CHEAP MONITOR A monitor wall mount HDMI and Power Cables Raspberry Pi 4B or old PC DAKboard (www.dakboard.com/site) HAVING ALL THE INFORMATION you need available on one screen can be a great convenience, especially during the work day. Instead of having to pull up separate apps to check the weather, view your calendar, and read the news, you can have everything in one place. Sure, there are lots of gadgets out there that purport to do this, most notably the Amazon Echo Show 15, but at around $250, it’s a lot more expensive than a standard PC monitor, not to mention significantly smaller. But maybe you have an old monitor around that’s not being used, or maybe you’ve been eyeing an upgrade to something…

NZXT IS A BRAND we know and admire, though not necessarily for its gaming monitors. Better known for cases or even fully-built PCs, NZXT’s latest foray into high-performance panels is the Canvas 32Q Curved. With this latest 32-inch, 1440p model, it’s clear the brand is getting pretty serious about displays. Much effort has gone into the design and engineering. The Canvas 32Q Curved has a nicer chassis design and build quality than your average PC monitor and although it is mostly plastic, it looks and feels expensive. The stand adjusts for height, tilt, and swivel but doesn’t rotate into portrait mode, which would be problematic for a curved display. That stand is an optional extra, priced at $429 with and $379 without, the extra $50 investment for a stand seems…

IT’S NOT OFTEN that a product from one of the biggest brands in computing genuinely disappoints. But without giving away too much too soon, there’s no getting around it—the HP Elite Dragonfly G3 is a bit borked. Part of the problem is its pricing. With a base price near $2,000, and our review unit coming in well over that figure, this 13.5-inch premium ultraportable should be just about perfect. That’s especially true when you consider that Dell’s gorgeous XPS 13 Plus starts at $1,299. But even for the same money, there would still be lots to lament about this laptop. We wouldn’t be complaining about the build quality. OK, the chassis design looks dated compared to that uber sleek Dell. But for an ultra-portable measuring just 16mm thick, the aluminum…

WD’S BLACK SN850 was one of our favorite PCIe Gen 4 drives. So, this new SN850X model is certainly intriguing. What it’s not, to be clear, is a fancy new PCIe Gen 5 drive. If that’s disappointing, the reality is that there’s barely any support for PCIe 5 storage right now. Yes, Intel’s Alder Lake CPU family has limited PCIe 5 support, it doesn’t have dedicated lanes for storage, so it all gets a bit complicated. Meanwhile, AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 chips have proper PCIe 5 storage support, but they have only just been announced. With that PCIe 5 digression dealt with, what to make of this SSD, likely one of the last of the high-end PCIe 4 generation? As before, it’s a quad-lane PCIe Gen 4 M.2 drive, this…

> TVs as Monitors > Sound Card Salute > Jarring Jargon The Best Thing On TV I’d like to respond to R. Kleinhaus’s letter in the August 2022 issue (‘Monitor Money’), regarding a new monitor recommendation. The point was made that the writer doesn’t need a monitor that can accommodate competitive gaming. In that case, I would suggest getting an HDMI 2.1 4K TV. I’ve been using a 48-inch LG OLED48CXPUB for about a year and I absolutely love it! There’s no noticeable screen lag, it has frame sync, HDR, 4K resolution, 120Hz, pure blacks… the list goes on. The one thing I didn’t catch when purchasing it is that it can only do 4K at 60Hz, not the full 120Hz. You need to set your output resolution to 2,560x1,440…