Indice dei contenuti per August 2022 in Maximum PC

BEING A PC USER IS GREAT, but it can make you a bit of a solitary animal. I tend to work all day on my laptop with my intimidating-looking gaming headset on, and then when I get home, unwind until the early hours by playing games on my ultra-wide monitor. That’s one of the great things about PCs—you can use them anywhere and stay out of everyone else’s way. But recently, I’ve been missing the days when I used to share an apartment and spend Friday nights playing sports games with my housemates accompanied by beers and pizzas. This nostalgia led me to this month’s cover feature, a couch gaming special for those who want to enjoy their PC gaming in a more relaxed setting. Unbelievably, it’s been nearly two…

ONE ASPECT of Win11 that didn’t go down well at launch was its hardware requirements, specifically for the processor. Needing a chip with TPM 2.0 support (Trusted Platform Module), which for Intel meant 8th generation silicon or better, left some capable processors out of luck. Of course, Win11 could run on ‘older’ machines, Microsoft just didn’t want you to do it. But Microsoft has accidentally released a preview build of the 22H2 update, which has been offered as an upgrade to some people with Win10 rigs not signed up for the Insider program. Win10 Skylake and Kaby Lake systems have reportedly been upgraded to Win11 without issues. But, according to a Microsoft post, it was a bug—the hardware requirements have not changed and support won’t be forthcoming. That’s a pity,…

INTEL’S PROBLEMS with its processor nodes have been notorious. It was slow to reach 10nm and got stuck there. But it got a new CEO, Patrick Gelsinger, and an ambitious plan to reclaim the leadership in CPU technology by 2025. To do that, it made a bold promise to make five new nodes in four years. The second step in that journey, Intel 4, or I4 (although comparable to TSMC’s 7nm) is due to arrive in the shape of the Meteor Lake processor next year. We’ve seen actual silicon in the form of a die at this year’s VLSI Symposium, which has been running since 1981 as a venue for engineers to show off technical stuff. The I4 process is Intel’s first to exclusively use EUV, Extreme Ultraviolet, lithography. According…

The hard data here comes courtesy of Nvidia. Of course, Nvidia isn’t going to publicly say that graphics card prices are going to be slashed, and nor is that likely to happen. But there were some telling tidbits in Nvidia’s latest quarterly investors conference call that suggest the recent trend of falling prices is only going to continue. Firstly, attached to the call was an official Nvidia statement that said, among other things, “the reduced pace of increase in Ethereum network hash rate likely reflects lower mining activity on GPUs”. Which was Nvidia’s roundabout way of conceding that the whole crypto mining thing on GPUs has gone quiet. Nvidia has form when it comes to referring euphemistically to its mining-related GPU sales. In May this year, Nvidia paid $5.5 million…

We’ve talked about the slowing down of Moore’s Law many times in the pages of Maximum PC, and one of the key areas of impact is power requirements. Even though Zen 4 will move to a 5nm process, gains in clock speed and performance mean that it will potentially use more power than AMD’s existing solutions. Socket AM4 had a TDP (thermal design power) rating of 105W, with a Package Power Tracking (PPT) limit of 142W—1.35x the TDP. With socket AM5, AMD has increased the TDP to 170W, with a 230W PPT. PPT is effectively peak power, the maximum the CPU can draw under short-term boost conditions. The situation is similar with Intel’s more recent processors, where the Core i9-12900K has a base power of 125W but a maximum turbo…

After pushing AVX-512 as a useful new instruction set for workloads with its Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, and Rocket Lake families of processors—as well as the HEDT Skylake-X and derivatives, not to mention the Cannon Lake SKU—Intel decided to disable AVX-512 support in Alder Lake. The performance cores (P-cores) contain the necessary transistors and functionality, but the smaller efficiency cores (E-cores) do not, and Intel decided it was better to disable the instruction set rather than trying to have two CPU architectures active with different instruction sets. AMD has no such issue, as all the Zen 4 cores in its upcoming CPUs are the same, and it has added AVX-512 support in the new architecture. This represents a reversal from Zen 3 and Rocket Lake, as AMD previously only supported AVX-256.…

LIBREELEC was forked from OpenELEC, which began life in 2009 as a minimal Linux flavor for running XBMC. This also found its way to the Pi shortly after the latter’s inception. In 2017, the project was abandoned and most of the developers joined the LibreELEC project. LibreELEC describes itself as Just Enough OS (JEOS) to run Kodi and strategically times its releases to coincide with those of the latter. Kodi 19, codenamed Matrix, was a big release and in August 2021 this was incorporated into LibreELEC 10.0.0. Since then, there have been a few point revisions of both. The current version is 10.0.2 with Kodi 19.4, but it’s possible newer editions will be available by the time you read this. Breaking changes Only recently has support for the older Pis,…

Playdate Netflix meets handheld retro gaming? NETFLIX AND RETRO GAMING? It’s an intriguing-sounding combination—and it’s not too far from the truth. Meet the Playdate, a fun and modern take on the retro handheld games console. It’s pretty clear that this latest addition to the handheld gaming scene has taken its design cues from the Nintendo Gameboy, but it also looks like a squashed and more pocketable version of the Analog Pocket. However, the Playdate offers something different from those two consoles in that you won’t be able to natively play your favorite retro game titles on it. The games available on this console will be new and limited to the Playdate. As minimal as the design looks, this little handheld has some fairly modern features—though before you get too excited, that…

DOES ANYBODY do laptop innovation like Asus? We sure can’t think of another brand that will sell you a laptop with two screens, one of which is a 120Hz OLED panel, all crammed into a relatively compact 14-inch footprint. Welcome, then, to Asus’s latest masterwork, the Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED. And what a machine it is. That OLED panel? It only covers fully 100 percent of the demanding DCI-P3 digital cinema color space. That’s better than most pro-grade content creation monitors can muster. Both panels are also stylus and inking compatible, the connectivity is outstanding, there’s some proper audio and a half-decent GPU, not to mention one of Intel’s finest mobile CPUs. Oh yeah. This thing is loaded. The main 14.5-inch OLED panel rocks 2,880 by 1,800 pixels in…

A SINGLE DEVICE for all your computing and media consumption needs? That could be the Samsung M8 Smart Monitor. It not only integrates Samsung’s full SmartTV platform, it even supports basic web browsing without the need to hook up a PC. More realistically, most users will be plugging a laptop in via the M8’s slick, single-cable USB-C interface to get any serious computing done. But the M8’s SmartTV functionality and funky design, available in either white or a choice of pink, blue, or green-tinted pastel shades, certainly add a whole new dimension. Hold that thought while we give the specs a quick scan. This is a 32-inch monitor with a VA rather than an IPS panel. That’s not a huge surprise, given VA is Samsung’s go-to panel tech. It helps…

CORSAIR ISN’T EXACTLY unfamiliar with keyboards. The company has an impressive arsenal and a presence in most types of keyboard markets. The K70 RGB Pro follows on from the K70 RGB MK.2 with a refreshed sleek design and some performance upgrades. At just under $160 with Cherry MX Brown switches, it’s pricey, but is it worth splashing out to add this to your desk? First of all, the K70 RGB Pro feels solid to the touch. Made of an aluminum frame with a durable plastic housing and weighing around 2.5lbs, this keyboard feels premium for the most part, but that impression is let down by a few sharp edges. The full-sized model on review here looks more professional and sleeker than before. The minimalistic design is a step in the right…

IN JANUARY last year, Qualcomm spent $1.4 billion on buying Nuvia—that’s a lot for a company barely two years old with few tangible assets. What Nuvia had was expertise in processor design, particularly ARM-based chips, and also several ex-Apple engineers in its ranks. Qualcomm is a huge, but fabless, manufacturer of processors and other silicon. Its chips power about 30 percent of the world’s smartphones and high-end Snapdragon SoCs are found in tablets and laptops. Apple’s M1 chip has shown what could be done with a good ARM design. Qualcomm aims to build PC-level processors and take a bite out of the x86 market, starting with performance laptops but also becoming a proper desktop contender. Originally Qualcomm hoped to have a processor to rival Apple’s M1 by the end of 2023.…

AMD’S ANNUAL FINANCE DAY may sound irredeemably dull, but it’s an opportunity to show something interesting, and AMD generally has something to crow about. This year, it was an architectural and process node roadmap, going all the way to Zen 5 in 2024, complete with a ground-up new architecture. However, of more immediate interest is Zen 4. We’re used to AMD’s Zen generations taking decent steps, but the jump from Zen 3 to Zen 4 is shaping up to be a good one. AMD is expecting an Instructions Per Cycle (IPC) bump of eight to ten percent but has now said it expects an increase of over 15 percent on single-threaded performance, as well as a 25 percent boost in performance per watt. We’ll also see ‘significant’ increases in clock frequencies…

FSR was a good first effort but it relied on spatial upscaling using only the data present within a single frame as input. It applied an upscaling and customized Lanczos sharpening filter, a relatively low overhead way of doing upscaling. However, artifacts were visible at higher upscaling factors and it did nothing to combat aliasing. DLSS uses temporal upscaling, with data from multiple frames combined with motion vectors and the depth buffer and feeding that into an AI enhancement algorithm. DLSS 2.x looked better than FSR but was restricted to Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards. Enter FSR 2.0, an overhaul of the algorithm that has more in common with DLSS than it does with FSR 1.0. It also uses temporal upscaling and applies anti-aliasing to the resulting output, like DLSS but…

> Partitioning problem > Slow flash drive > Firefox annoyance Save old PC! I have a PC that I love very much (my first build), but it’s not compatible with Windows 11, so after 2025, this machine will die. Can you suggest what to do with it? I don’t want to sell it, so maybe start with Linux? NAS? Any ideas? The spec is: Intel i5-6500 3.20GHz, MSI B150 GAMING M3, 16GB DDR-4 RAM, 520 GB SDD, 1TB Seagate, Radeon R9 390. Thanks in advance. —Cesar Rosadio THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: That’s a decent spec that should last well beyond 2025, Cesar. The Doc would shy away from using your PC as a NAS, as it’s not optimized for 24/7 use—and consider the cost of running such a power-hungry machine around the…

FROM THE VERY DAWN of computer graphics, there has been one overarching goal. An end game for PC gaming, a final destination. We’re talking of course about real-time photorealism. In experiential terms, graphics rendered in real-time that are indistinguishable from reality, at least as shown on a 2D screen. Achieve this goal and the observer will not be able to pick rendered computer graphics from real-life motion video. Of course, deciding when any given example of computer-generated graphics has achieved photorealism is always going to be a subjective call. We can all surely agree that the best CGI in movies and TV achieves that at least some of the time. But has any PC or console game yet achieved even fleeting photorealism? That’s debatable. Just occasionally, you get a snippet of…

If Zen 4 sounds great, you’ll be shocked to hear that AMD is already working on… [drumroll]… Zen 5! We do have to give credit to AMD for keeping things simple on the architecture naming, though of course, that doesn’t account for the numerous codenames—Raphael, Granite Ridge, Phoenix Point, Strix Point, and plenty of other names are floating around. Slated for a 2024 release, Zen 5 will look to carry forward the Zen legacy. At this stage, AMD isn’t providing much information on performance or new capabilities that it’s planning for Zen 5, but it has shared a few other details. For example, there will be V-Cache versions, such as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and the Milan-X server CPUs, of Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors. AMD hasn’t committed to any…

1 CONTROL There are many ways to control the Ray, including touch-sensitive buttons on the top, voice control if you have a smart speaker or phone, the Sonos app, or by using Spotify or TIDAL Connect. You can also program most infrared television remotes if it’s in the living room. 2 DESIGN The Sonos Ray is available in both black and white colorways. The 22-inch width is compact for a Sonos soundbar and the tapered design gives it a unique flourish. A light at the front confirms your button presses, so you can see when the volume is being changed. 3 CONNECTIVITY Sonos makes its products simple to use, meaning inputs on Ray are limited to optical, ethernet, and power. There’s not much else you need, although you are losing…

TIP OF THE MONTH RESIZE YOUR WINDOWS Instead of moving your mouse to the edge of an open window and dragging it to size, there’s a slightly quicker action that should help you organize your desk space more efficiently. Holding down the Windows key and simultaneously pressing an arrow key will move your active window around according to which arrow key you use. Pretty nifty, right? MAKE – USE – CREATE PLANE PAIN After only running the latest Lego Star Wars title on our new liquid-cooled PC build, I thought it’d be criminal to not push this mighty machine further. I haven’t played Elden Ring yet—I’m currently moving house, so I need to settle in first before I can commit to it. In the meantime, I’ve been playing Forza Horizon…

YOU’LL NEED THIS GIMP 2.1 OS: Windows 7 or newer WHEN USING A PHOTO MANIPULATION application such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, there are many more possibilities than you may initially realize. Plenty of these programs can be used in various ways to create unique pieces of artwork. In this tutorial, we will create isometric 3D art using GIMP. This technique can be transferred onto all sorts of different media and can be used to emphasize a particular place or subject. Learning as many skills as possible can enable you to broaden your creativity by applying them to new forms. We will be using an image from Unsplash, which is of a skewed piece of land, taken from an angle and not a birdseye view. This will help later on in…

THERE’S A quiet revolution happening in the productivity space. Well, I say quiet—it’s actually the click-clack of mechanical keyboards making their way back into the offices that they left 30-or-so years ago. At least that’s the plan according to Razer and now Logitech, who have both recently released work-based takes on the mechanical keyboard. Both keyboards are available in either Linear or Silent switch types, although Logitech does also sell the noisier clicky variety (confession: I’m the annoying guy in the office who prefers the louder switches). I received the ‘Tactile Quiet’ variant of the MX Mechanical Mini, meaning Cherry MX Brown equivalent switches on a compact frame that loses the numkeys and rearranges the navigation keys vertically on the right to save even more space. At $149 for this Mini…

A LAPTOP WITH a 4K 144Hz display? That’s impressive. But does it actually make sense? Before we get to the answer, let’s cover off the new Blade 15’s speeds and feeds. The 4K screen is a 15.6 incher, an IPS panel described as the ‘Creator’ option—you can also opt for 360Hz 1080p and 240Hz 1440p alternatives—and backed up with impressive 100 percent coverage of the demanding DCI-P3 digital cinema color gamut. To that, you can add the cream of the available crop of performance laptop components. That’s Intel’s mighty Core i9-12900H CPU with six high-performance cores and eight efficiency cores, plus 32GB of the latest 4,800MHz DDR5 memory. On graphics duty is the finest mobile GPU known to man, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with 16GB of VRAM. And…

MICROSOFT HAS A PATCHY RECORD with hardware, but its Surface laptops have been a success. It has just launched the Surface Laptop Go 2, an update on its most budget-friendly member of the Surface squad. The $599 laptop is in the competitive Chromebook territory. The changes are mainly on the inside of the aluminum/polycarbonate case with a Core i5-1135G7 processor, a four-core Tiger Lake chip with a base clock of 2.4GHz, and a maximum boost of 4.2GHz, with integrated Iris Xe graphics (that’s $309 retail already). This is coupled with either 128GB or 256GB of solid-state storage, and 4GB or 8GB of RAM. The screen remains the same 12.4-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 1,536x1,024. Key travel is now 30 percent greater than a MacBook Air and we also get…

WHEN APPLE RELEASED its M1 chip, the ARM-based design not only gave Apple independence but kept it dangerously competitive. Apple is now ready with round two. The M1 was a 5nm chip and TSMC isn’t ready with 3nm yet, so the M2 is a tweak of the 5nm design with a similar transistor density. The M2 has 20 billion transistors, so it’s physically bigger, but the basic pattern is the same: four performance cores, 16MB rather than 12MB of L2 cache, and four efficiency cores. The M1 was blessed with 68GB/s of memory bandwidth but the M2 pushes that to 100GB/s. There’s more actual memory too, with up to 24GB of LPDDR5 of Apple’s Unified Memory Architecture. The GPU has been upgraded to ten from eight cores, pushing graphical performance up…

WHILE NVIDIA AND AMD’S increasingly sophisticated capture software can do a fantastic job of livestreaming or recording your gameplay prowess for the world to see, if you’re taking things seriously, you’ll probably still need a capture card. That’s because you’ll either want to have a dedicated computer to take care of the recording and mixing for a professional look, or you might just want to play a console game now and again. This varied list of cards, covering a range of prices, resolutions, and card type, allow you to do just that. 1 AVERMEDIA LIVE GAMER 4K If you’re a desktop user with a spare PCIe slot, this 4K capture card from AVerMedia is worth looking at, thanks to its raw power, RGB lighting, and competitive price tag. The Live Gamer…

THERE ARE BENEFITS to gaming in the office or study. You’re less likely to disturb anyone, your RGB-enabled full-size case can be tucked under a desk, and you have a flat surface for keyboard and mouse-based games. But as console gamers will attest, the couch is better for playing with friends, immersing yourself in God of War, or getting comfortable for a weekend of laid-back gaming. That’s why we wanted to create the perfect couch-based PC gaming experience and help mere mortals become living room legends. The challenges are multiple—it needs to be compact enough to fit under the TV or in an AV cabinet and quiet enough not to distract from the gaming. Of the few cases built for this purpose, nearly all use the most compact motherboard size,…

WE’VE BEEN eager to build inside the NZXT H1 v2 for quite some time now, and we weren’t disappointed with the end result here. It’s a stylish computer case that, while clearly inspired by the Xbox Series X, allows you to get the best of the PC into a living room-friendly box. It’s a tight build for sure and there are times when it’s useful to have another pair of hands available, but the short cable lengths and smart cable routing made things easier than we had initially feared. In terms of the finished build, a number of things stand out. This is a computer that’s easy enough to move from room to room, so it could be used as both an office and living room PC. One note of…

AMD has had an on off relationship with integrated graphics in the Ryzen era. The first-generation Ryzen processors were CPU-only, but then AMD created the 2400G and 2200G that ditched half of the CPU cores in favor of integrated Vega graphics. The other Ryzen 2000-series processors using the Zen+ architecture lacked integrated graphics, but the 3400G and 3200G added them in again. That pattern continued up to the current Ryzen 5700G and 5600G that feature updated Vega 8 graphics. Ryzen 6000-series CPUs also have integrated graphics, but they’re only for laptops. While CPU only solutions are sensible for enthusiasts who plan on installing a dedicated graphics card, business PCs and laptops use chips that offer integrated graphics—even if the PC has a dedicated GPU. They are slow graphics solutions, but for…

One of the headline items for both Intel’s Alder Lake and AMD’s upcoming Zen 4 is support for PCI Express 5.0. Doubling the potential throughput for the various connected devices sounds like a good thing, but the need for PCIe 5.0 is a bit nebulous. There’s a lack of consumer devices that support the standard, so it’s more a case of ‘build it and they will come’. PCIe 5.0 requires tighter tolerances and shorter traces on motherboards to keep the signal clean. That means motherboards with multiple PCIe slots will need to add PCIe redrivers (or a second chipset) for the distant slots. Power requirements are another concern, and one of the reasons many laptops still opt to use PCIe 3.0 connectivity. Still, for the desktop and server markets, having the…

EVER SINCE the dawn of Raspberry Pi computers, people have been making media centers out of them. Even the original Pi, thanks to its VideoCore SoC, was able to play 1080p content smoothly, 256MB of RAM notwithstanding. Media center distributions quickly sprang up to exploit this and using your Pi as a media center was quickly seen as an easy way to get into the world of micro PCs. The first media player software to make it onto the Pi has its roots in the original Xbox console from the early 2000s. Apart from being a platform for playing Bungie’s Halo, this console was popular with homebrew enthusiasts, since, thanks to easily exploited buffer overflows in popular titles, they could be made to run unofficial titles. One such title was…

SINCE THE RASPBERRY PI 4 has significantly more graphical horsepower than its predecessors, it’s capable of playing ‘movie’ 4K resolution (i.e. 4096 x 2160 as opposed to ‘TV’ 4K which is 3840 x 2160) and 10-bit (HEVC) content. It might not yet be capable of driving two 4K displays at 60Hz, but it can certainly drive one. You need to enable that feature by hand, as it will make the SoC run a little warmer than usual. You’ll need to enable SSH access and log in to your Kodi box to do this, remembering that Kodi has only one account, namely root. So the incantation will look like ssh root@192.168.x.x. Remember you can always find Kodi’s IP address from the status panel. Once you’re in, you’d usually run raspi-config to…

YOU’LL NEED THIS YOU WILL NEED SOME OR ALL OF THE FOLLOWING TOOLS: Bulk Crap Uninstaller, CCleaner, TreeSize Free, Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder, SteamMover (all free) THE EMERGENCE OF SMALLER, faster boot drives has resurrected an age-old problem: how to stop your hard drives from filling to capacity. What wasn’t such an issue with a 2TB drive is now a hot topic as you struggle to maintain Windows 11 and your apps on a super-speedy 256GB NVMe boot drive. In this tutorial, we’ll reveal a range of tips, techniques, and tools to help you bring back some semblance of order to your drive’s contents while ensuring you have plenty of room to allow your personal files to sit side-by-side with Windows, your games, and other apps. We’ll start with a quick tour…

AMD’S TRIFECTA of refreshed RDNA 2 GPUs continues with the Radeon RX 6750 XT, a minor update to the existing RX 6700 XT initially launched in March last year. Over a year later, the main update to AMD’s Navi 22 offering consists of slightly boosted GPU clocks and power limits, coupled with 18Gbps GDDR6 memory. That all sounds fine, but what’s not quite so welcome is the $70 jump in MSRP. Asus has also seen the ante and raised it another $100 for its ROG Strix model, which tacks on another 30W of power and a 43MHz overclock. In terms of the numbers, relative to the reference 6700 XT, that means you get a 0.7 percent increase in GPU clocks, with 12.5 percent more memory bandwidth, 8.7 percent more power,…

GAMING PROJECTORS are a niche market right now, with many projectors focusing on standard media playing rather than games. Some manufacturers have stepped up, such as BenQ with its chunky X1300i gaming projector last year. The latest brand to take a shot at this market is Acer, with the Predator GD711. If the reflective Acer Predator logo on the top doesn’t give it away, the sharp lines and triangular patterning on the sides of the unit make it clear this is a gaming product. But it’s unassuming for a piece of gaming kit, free of RGB lighting, and should look at home in any room. The first thing we noticed upon firing up the GD711 was the lack of a zoom feature, an egregious exclusion in any projector. A rolling…

TURN-BASED STRATEGY THOUGH TECHNICALLY A SEQUEL to Chaos Gate from 1998, Daemonhunters has little to do with the older title, apart from being a turn-based strategy, its Warhammer 40,000 setting, and the choice of the hordes of Chaos as the enemy. While the earlier game used the Soldiers at War engine to power its grimdark mass murder, Daemonhunters is in thrall to a completely different title: XCOM. And this is a good thing. XCOM 2 is one of the few games from the past five years to get the coveted Maximum PC ‘Kick-Ass!’ award. There are far worse things to be inspired by. And by dressing up XCOM’s turn-based tactics in mutated green Nurgle pants and Terminator armor, you’re basically guaranteed a good time. Daemonhunters swaps Chaos Gate’s Ultramarines, the…