Indice dei contenuti per January 2023 in Maximum PC

AMD’S SECRET weapon for the Zen 3 range was its V-cache version, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. It stacked high-speed memory on top of eight cores and tripled the L3 cache, making for the world’s fastest gaming chip on launch. Although Intel responded with the Core i9-12900KS to steal some of that thunder, Intel’s chip was faster in some games, albeit more expensive. AMD had no trouble selling its V-cache chips, and even now they’re still hard to find. The same V-cache editions will be released for the Zen 4 Ryzens and should be due in the first half of 2023. The hope was that the cache trick would be applied to a higher-end version with more cores, but rumor has it that AMD will start small, with a six-core Ryzen…

THE NEWS for Meta’s Metaverse goes from bad to worse. Now, Mark Zuckerberg has laid-off 11,000 employees, including many working in his Reality Labs division—a cut of around 13 percent. The global pandemic led to a spike in revenue as people went shopping and looking for entertainment online. Much of that extra revenue was invested in new staff. Things temporarily went back to normal, but then sharply became worse in 2022, which has proved to be a problem. Zuckerberg has admitted over-estimating how long the pandemic boom would last, saying it wasn’t “the wisest decision he could have made”. Meanwhile, at Twitter, Elon Musk fired around 3,700 people, or half the workforce, including many contractors monitoring the platform’s content. Amazon has also recently announced plans to lay 10,000 people off,…

In case you’ve been living under a rock, that’s the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 16GB, and the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX. The GeForce card is priced at $1,200, while the AMD boards are $899 and $999 respectively. Of course, those are MSRPs, rather than real-world street prices. Recent history has seen prices of pretty much all GPUs outstrip any MSRP. Indeed, I recently saw an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 from the previous generation priced at $699 for the first time. So, it’s taken two years from launch to see the inflated price of the RTX 3080 fall back to MSRP. Incredible. With that in mind, the crazy high prices of those new GPUs makes superficial sense. Over the last couple of years, gamers have been willing…

SO, YOU’VE JUST BUILT YOUR NEW PC, you have a catalog of games that are sitting waiting in the download queue ready to be installed, and life is looking pretty good. But games aren’t the only thing you should be using your PC for. There’ll be plenty of times when you’ll need a productivity suite for work, a personal project, or just to have some fun. And what’s better than productivity applications, we hear you ask? Free ones, of course! Here are some of our favorites to add to your newly-constructed machine. GIMP IT’S NOT THE GREATEST name for a piece of software, but GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, which explains exactly what this piece of software does. GNU means free software (‘free’ referring to freedom within the application…

Like Intel and Nvidia, AMD will add hardware AV1 encoding and decoding support to RDNA 3 GPUs. Also like Intel and Nvidia, AMD will have dual media engines to improve the performance and flexibility with video encoding and transcoding. We’ve done some previous testing with the various GPUs to check quality and performance, and AMD’s hardware consistently came in well behind Nvidia and Intel, but AMD claims RDNA 3 GPUs will offer significant quality improvements as well—including some AI enhancements on the decoding side. RDNA 3 will also bring a new Radiance Display Engine into play. This includes full coverage of the REC2020 color space and 12-bit HDR color with up to 68 billion colors. Perhaps more importantly, AMD will offer full support for DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR (Ultra-High Bitrate) 13.5…

THESE DAYS your privacy and security have never been under greater threat, particularly when venturing online. Whether you’re worried about malicious individuals, gangs of hackers, or even your own government, there’s never been a better time to take the steps necessary to lock down your data and modify your online behavior to protect yourself and your loved ones from the less salubrious side of the internet. We won’t go over old ground in this feature, we hope you’ve taken our previous advice and have strong security software in place on your computer, and are already protecting your online accounts with strong, randomly generated passwords. What we will do is help you take the next steps to tighten things further. You’ll gain practical advice on strengthening network security and employing VPNs to…

If you’re struggling to source a Pi, or don’t want to do retro gaming on one, you’ll be pleased to hear that all of the emulators and platforms we mention here are available for your PC, too. Emulating newer platforms, such as high-end Amigas and PlayStation, will perform better there too. If you have an old PC lying around, then you might want to skip the emulation part and run some DOS classics natively. You don’t even need a dubiously obtained copy of MS-DOS: the open-source FreeDOS project (https://freedos.org) saw a new release in February 2022. That might seem like a while ago, but it’s been feature complete for many years and doesn’t have the security (or breakage) concerns of modern software. Alternatively, you can run them on modern Linux via…

OUR FAVORITE HOME computer was the Commodore Amiga, in particular the A500, which launched in 1987. As the successor to the immensely popular C64, the machine had big shoes to fill. And fill them it did—right up until questionable management effectively killed it off. That said, Hyperion Entertainment produced a version of AmigaOS (www.amigaos.net) for PowerPC-based machines. A-EON technology, in collaboration with Hyperion, led to the AmigaOne X5000, the latest in a series of machines capable of running AmigaOS. These can emulate the Motorola 68000 at the heart of the first Amigas without batting an eyelid, though, at $2,500, you might say the X5000 is eye-wateringly expensive. RetroPie 4.8 (the latest version at the time of writing) was released in March 2022, so some of its components, in particular some…

If you want more control over startup, including viewing hidden parts of the start-up process, download Autoruns from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ You’ll find it under Process Utilities. Unzip its contents and then right-click either Autoruns.exe (32-bit) or Autoruns64. exe (64-bit) and choose ‘Run as administrator’ to launch it. You’ll see a huge list of items appear under an all-encompassing Everything tab. The trick is to quickly navigate away from this tab to focus on specific start-up types. The Logon tab closely approximates what’s shown by BootRacer but may well include additional entries. You’ll also see that those items you have disabled or removed in BootRacer are shown as being enabled here—that’s because BootRacer suppresses this list in favor of its own settings (uninstall BootRacer, and they will all flood back). Some tabs…

For the most cutting-edge version of Photoshop, you need to get hold of the beta. Luckily, this is easily available through Creative Cloud, with a Beta versions section on the left-hand side of the central hub app. Once you’ve found it, installation follows the same process as any other Creative Cloud app—you won’t be able to install beta versions of applications you aren’t already subscribed to. They’re essentially pre-release versions of the app suite, used to preview new features and for Adobe to gather feedback on its ideas before setting them loose on the public. Neural filters were once part of the beta program, but have now moved over to the stable release version of the app, even though some of the filters themselves are still in beta. The beta…

WE WERE INCREDIBLY impressed with Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture and the first graphics card to use it, the RTX 4090 (see December 2022, page 74). The 4090 offered massive generational performance gains with only a slight price increase relative to its 3090 predecessor. For the second outing, the RTX 4080 delivers a sizeable increase in performance over the old RTX 3080, but it inherits the substantially higher price point of the RTX 3080 Ti. It’s not that the 4080 is a bad card, but previous generations have kept the 80-class models in the $500–$800 price bracket. The 3080 Ti got away with its high price because it launched during the worst graphics card shortage we’ve ever witnessed thanks to chip shortages and cryptocurrency mining. After the painful availability and value…

LAST MONTH, we reviewed the Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero ($630), a top-of-the-line board for the latest generation of Intel CPUs. It had loads of features including support for PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs, DDR5 RAM, and a shedload of the latest I/O ports. However, in our cover build, we pitted it against this Asus ROG Strix Z790-A Gaming WiFi D4 ($380) and found that, for gamers at least, there was no performance difference between the two boards. With the RTX 4090 ($1,600) set to drain the budget of many a PC gamer, could this Strix model be a potent pairing for the cheaper Intel Core i5-13600K? This is a striking-looking mobo with lots of white and silver detailing on the various heatsinks. Design aside though, this board has all the…

WHEN WE SEE A MOUSE costing $140, it can be difficult not to have incredibly high expectations. It doesn’t help when that mouse comes from a reputable company such as SteelSeries, which already has an arsenal of great peripherals under its belt. So will the SteelSeries Aerox 5 Wireless prove itself worthy or fail to live up to its lofty asking price? The first thing we note is the consistently impressive unboxing experience SteelSeries offers. We are greeted by a lightweight braided USB Type-A to USB Type-C cable, a USB Type-C dongle, and a USB Type-C extension adapter, meaning we have plenty of great connectivity options. Of course, the most popular choice with this mouse should be its wireless dongle, but it’s great to have Bluetooth and detachable cable options just…

YOU CAN TELL a lot about a game by the things it makes you sit through before you actually get to play it. Launch the 2022 iteration of Modern Warfare II for the first time, and you have to scroll through endless license agreements and privacy policies, remember your account password to log in, then wait for the game to restart if you choose to play the campaign rather than the multiplayer. There are even multiple developer and middleware logos to enjoy—it’s an Infinity Ward game, but the studio had help—and you are left looking at a desert cliff while the shaders pre-compile on the first run. Birds circle, but you’re there long enough to notice they’re on a loop, fading out of existence before appearing again in the sky.…

AMD’S NEW GPU series, known as RDNA3, has landed in the form of the 24GB Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the 20GB 7900 XT. AMD claims the cards have the most advanced technology and ‘breakthrough’ levels of performance. Both cards use the 5nm Navi 31 die, the biggest the company has, with the 7900 XT being a slightly cut-down version with 84 compute units against its bigger sibling’s 96. It’s a chiplet design, with the main 5nm GPU surrounded by six 6nm memory chips with attendant controllers. The game clocks are 2.5GHz and 2.3GHz respectively. Much to everybody’s relief, they use two 8-pin power connectors. For a more in-depth look at the technology inside the new RDNA 3 cards, see page 32. First impressions are that it looks as if AMD…

TRIUMPHS SUPER-EFFICIENT The Flatiron Institute’s Herni system returns 65.091GFLOP/Watt, making it the world’s most power-efficient supercomputer. MUSHROOM ELECTRONICS The skin of the Ganoderma Lucidum fungus can be dried and used to make PCB boards. 8K GAMING MONITOR Samsung’s new Odyssey Neo G9 is a 49-inch, 7,680 by 2,160 pixel, curved monitor with a refresh rate of 165Hz. TRAGEDIES SLOW YEAR FOR WIN 11 Figures from Startcounter put Windows 11’s share of the PC market at just 15 percent, one year after its release. NO MORE HANGING OUT Launched in 2013, Hangouts, Google’s try at a messaging service, is now officially dead. GAME DISC WITH NO GAME Buy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on disc and you’ll find just 72MB of data—there’s a huge download instead.…

I mean that literally in this case. Power increases directly in proportion with frequency and with the square of the voltage. That’s why higher clock speeds require more power, but if you also need more voltage to stabilize those higher clocks, you get a double whammy. The reverse is also true, naturally—drop the voltage and/or frequency and you can reduce power requirements. The RTX 4090 is the first of Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace GPUs, and there’s been a lot of noise about the maximum 450W power rating of the reference design, with custom cards potentially drawing 500W or more. Meanwhile, the RTX 4080 curtails power use (see review on page 74), with a limit of 320W by default. But while both cards hit their power limits in some games, there are…

> Free data recovery > SATA controller > New Win11 features Drive stopped working I have a 3.5-inch hard drive that has been attached to my PC via an external SATA adapter for over a year now. Recently, I booted into Windows only for the computer to hang. I eventually traced the problem to this drive—powering it off ‘fixed’ the problem but introduced a new one. Now, when I power the drive back on, its drive letter appears in File Explorer but shows no drive space information. If I double-click the drive to try and open it, I eventually get a ‘Location not available: The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable’ message. If I open Disk Management, the drive shows up as healthy, but as a RAW partition. Does…

Get ready for our third and final round of graphics architectural deep dives. Two months ago, we spilled the beans on Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture. Last month, we did the same for Intel’s Arc Alchemist. Last to the party, but perhaps the most interesting in its approach in the realm of GPU design is AMD’s RDNA 3, premiering with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon 7900 XT. Thanks to its use of chiplets, the RDNA 3 architecture fundamentally changes several of the key design elements. AMD pioneered chiplets in the consumer realm with its Zen 2 (Ryzen 3000) CPUs. That has enabled AMD to deliver more cores and better performance, giving Intel some much-needed competition. Now it’s looking to do the same with GPUs and graphics cards. It’s not…

Talking about all the architectural advances of RDNA 3 is fine, but how do the new graphics cards perform in the real world? We don’t have hardware for testing just yet, but AMD provided some benchmarks showing generational improvements when compared with the RX 6950 XT. Comparing the upcoming 7900 XTX to the current fastest 6950 XT, performance has improved by anywhere from 44 percent (Resident Evil Village with ray tracing) to 100 percent (Dying Light 2 with ray tracing). Across the eight benchmarks, AMD provided, the XTX part is 60 percent faster on average, while the 7900 XT is 37 percent faster. That’s a healthy bump in performance but it doesn’t provide any context for how AMD might stack up against Nvidia’s hardware. We can help with that. Based…

AMD has been working with OEMs for a couple of years now to promote AMD Advantage laptops. The idea is simple enough: any laptop that uses a Ryzen CPU and a Radeon graphics card can potentially become an AMD Advantage system. AMD will now be extending the program to include desktops with Zen 4 Ryzen 9 CPUs and RDNA 3 Radeon 7900-series graphics cards. While any enthusiast can put together a PC that uses AMD hardware, the Advantage program specifically focuses on system integrators. Certified desktops will also need an AM5 X670E motherboard, a premium case with tool-less entry, liquid cooling on the CPU, at least 32GB of DDR memory with AMD EXPO memory profile support, and a 2TB or larger NVMe SSD. In short, you’ll get a high-end PC…

THERE’S BEEN A RESURGENCE in retro gaming lately. The C64 and NES (launched in 1982 and 1983, respectively) both saw mini editions launched back in 2018 and both enjoyed plentiful sales. A SNES edition appeared last year too, priced rather steeply at $265 (that’s relatively more than the original’s RRP). This was followed by the Amiga A500 Mini at the start of 2022 (RRP $130). All of the above are just open-source emulators running on commodity hardware in a designer shell, so you might think the prices are a little overboard. What you’re paying for though, mostly, is the license to run these retro ROMs and disk images legally. Nintendo, in particular, will strike down with great vengeance if it catches you distributing any of its intellectual property. Just ask RomUniverse…

Thanks to cheap hardware and people’s unabashed inventiveness some really amazing peripherals are now available if you still have any working (or almost working) hardware laying around. First of all, there’s PiStorm. This fantastic (and open hardware) board, the work of Claude Schwarz, sits in between the 68000 slot on the Amiga mainboard and a Raspberry Pi. So instead of chugging along at 7MHz, your Amiga will be running an emulated 68EC030 running at around 70-80MHz. Furthermore, the Pi can share up to 128MB of its memory, which the Amiga sees as “Fast RAM”, as opposed to the Slow RAM expansions we all had to save up $50 for in the 1990s. You can track down PiStorms on eBay for around $50. Another fantastic device is the Pi1541. C64 fans might…

BOOTRACER AND AUTORUNS Wise Game Booster (for on-the-fly optimization) Process Lasso (to rein in resource hogs) DOES YOUR PC take longer to boot than it used to? In most cases, you can trace this to the growing number of apps on your system, thanks to their tendency to insert themselves into the start-up process even when they’re not essential. What about other parts of your system? Does your PC suddenly struggle to play certain games, or have you started to notice things grinding to a temporary halt every now and then for no obvious reason? If the answer to any of these frustrations is yes, it sounds as though Windows needs streamlining to eliminate the resource hogs and divert precious system resources to where they’re most needed. In this issue,…

THIS MONTH, WE RECEIVED a letter from a reader, BJ Koho (see page 94), who didn’t understand the fuss we’ve made over Nvidia’s RTX 4000-series. He says that although the new cards are fast, that’s the least we should be expecting—his issue is that this speed comes with such hefty financial, thermal, and power demands, that he doesn’t understand the point of them in the current economic climate. True, we were impressed with the RTX 4090 in our review in the December 2022 issue, and I was blown away by DLSS 3 4K gaming in my build in the Holiday 2022 issue, I immediately went out and bought a card for myself. A luxury, for sure, but how else is a PC gaming nerd meant to keep himself warm this…

WE REVIEWED a Velocity Micro PC in our June 2022 issue–the Raptor Z55, which at the time was a performance powerhouse with a Core i9-12900K CPU and RTX 3080Ti GPU. Six months later, the cutting edge has advanced, thanks to the arrival of Intel’s Raptor Lake processors and Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace graphics cards. Velocity Micro has issued a new Raptor, and the Z95 is the first pre-built system we’ve reviewed using this latest generation of components. The eagle-eyed among you will spot it has a similar spec to the machine we built last month (Holiday 2022 issue), incorporating an Intel Core i9-13900K, RTX 4090, and 32GB DDR5 RAM. Given that was a machine we loved for 4K gaming and creativity, is this pre-built the way to go for those who…

IF YOU’VE STRUGGLED to extend your Wi-Fi signal to all corners of your home, you may have seen the appeal of a mesh network. This tech combines two or more devices to improve Wi-Fi coverage. Traditionally, however, there’s a trade-off between price and functionality. Choose an entry-level system like Google Wifi or Amazon eero, and you’re restricted to managing your network via an app while giving up advanced tools like VPN or server capabilities. At the other end of the scale are mesh systems with all the bells and whistles but huge price tags, such as Netgear’s Orbi AXE11000 system that we reviewed in May 2022. Asus’s ZenWiFi XT9 places itself in the middle, with this two-pack setup costing under $500. The sacrifice in topline speed comes from opting for…

LOGGING IN to a service can be a real pain these days, in between being asked to change your password every six months, having to remember which street you grew up on as a child, or requiring you to check your phone for a text message code before you can gain access. So a request to set up two-factor authentication (also known as 2FA) might seem like yet another annoying layer between you and whatever account you’re trying to access. But it is really important to enable 2FA on any services that offer it, because it means that, even if your password is compromised, any malicious users won’t be able to log in to your account without that code, which only you should have access to. This is especially important…

INTEL’S 13TH-GENERATION Raptor Lake processors are impressive beasts. After struggling against AMD’s Zen-based Ryzen chips in the past few years, the blue team now has a winner. We have solid proof of how robust the flagship i9-13900K model is, thanks to a world overclocking record of 8.81285GHz, achieved with the help of liquid nitrogen cooling, a core voltage of 1.325V, a multiplier of 88, and a tweaked bus of 100.15MHz. Raptor Lake was always going to be a contender—before it was released, engineering samples were reported to reach 8GHz. The eight-year-old record was held by AMD’s FX-8370, a 32nm eight-core chip based around the Piledriver architecture, which managed 8.72278GHz. So, Intel took the record with an improvement of 90MHz, just one percent. Meanwhile, there are rumors of a refresh for Raptor…

WITH THE LAUNCH of the RTX 4090 and 4080, (see page 74) we’re now able to run games at 4K Ultra settings at 60 frames per second. While that’s great if you have a 4K monitor, they’re often expensive and you need a larger display (and therefore a big desk) to really make the most of that resolution. It might be more justifiable to spend that money on a 4K TV, which will be great for not just gaming but also sports, reality TV, movie nights… the list goes on. These are the best. 5 TCL 55R617 ROKU TV www.tcl.com, $530 This is very much in the budget camp, but it’s a world away from earlier cheap TVs from TCL. It includes Roku TV for all of your Smart TV…

MORE OFTEN than not, we try to use our head, rather than following our heart. Last issue, we blew the budget on an RTX 4090 build, but this issue, we’re keeping that GPU and pairing it with much better value components. That includes an Intel i5-13600K CPU, a much cheaper CPU than its top-end i9-13900K cousin, but not one we’re expecting to hobble the Nvidia GPU in any games. We’ve also tried to keep costs down in other areas—the idea being you can get up and running with the best GPU currently available, and still be able to upgrade your rig down the line. Using the NZXT H7 case and without RGB (except a little splash on the GPU), this system is a minimalist approach to an RTX 4090 build—certainly…

THE AIM OF THIS BUILD was to piece together a machine that includes Nvidia’s latest and greatest graphics processor, but keep the costs down by cutting corners elsewhere. In this instance, that was on a more modest Intel 13th-gen chip and a motherboard that, while not cutting edge, is still equipped for the future. Likewise for the rest of the build, we chose components that we didn’t think would have a major impact on performance but would crucially save us some money. Instead of spending at least $150 on an AIO, we opted to dig around in our stock room and reuse some spare fans from unused NZXT cases. These come in at around $18 each, so for a total of under $60, this is a good solution to pair…

One of Nvidia’s continued advantages over AMD comes in the realm of AI-assisted upscaling technologies. DLSS got off to a slow start in 2018, as the original implementation proved cumbersome, but DLSS 2 greatly improved the overall quality, performance benefits, and ease of implementation. Now Nvidia has DLSS 3 with the RTX 40-series, potentially offering greater performance gains. AMD has countered with FSR, which has also gone through some updates. FSR 1.0 was easy to integrate and can also be leveraged via Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) in the drivers for a quick performance boost. But the spatial upscaling of the original algorithm, while easy to implement with games or drivers, is lacking in overall quality. FSR 2 greatly improved the quality by switching to a temporal upscaling algorithm, which also…

$136.86* $31.95 GREAT REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE Save money • Never miss an issue • Get every issue delivered to your door To order go to www.magazinesdirect.com/mpc/B2IMAG or call 1-844-779-2822 and mention code B2IMAG TERMS AND CONDITIONS Savings based off the US newsstand cover price of $9.99 per issue for 13 issues, and the retail price of Book of Amazing Technology digital edition of $6.99. Offer only valid on one-or two-year print, or print + digital subscriptions. Book of Amazing Technology will be emailed three to five days after payment is processed. Visit us at http://magazinesdirect.com or call 1-844-779-2822 for other subscription options. Your first issue will arrive four to six weeks after your payment is processed—please allow additional time for overseas deliveries. Offer valid until February 28th 2023.…

RETRO GAMING has long been a popular activity on Raspberry Pi. Soon after its 2012 release, coders worked to get the popular MAME running and other emulators followed suit. The Fuse emulator for the ZX Spectrum series was another early arrival, and Fuse development is alive and well today. Anyone wanting to recreate the BBC Micro experience, which was particularly popular in the UK in the 1980s, should look at BeebEm (http://beebem-unix.bbcmicro.com). It’s one of the oldest emulators, having been around since 1994, and will have you reliving your galactic trading days in Elite in no time. You can even run it from a web browser at https://beeb.webassembly.link. C64 ON A Pi One of the best-selling home computers of all time was the Commodore 64, which sold somewhere between 10…

1. DOWNLOAD PI IMAGER We usually recommend Balena Etcher for these tasks (and it’s a reasonable choice here too), but this time we’ll use the official Raspberry Pi Imager. You’ll find it in the Ubuntu Software Centre (or repos under rpi-imager), Flathub, or straight from the Pi Foundation website at www.raspberrypi.com/software. 2. DOWNLOAD RETROPIE Open the Imager program and select Choose OS. You’ll find RetroPie in the Emulation and game OS category. If you’re using a different imaging program you can download the image directly from https://retropie.org.uk/download. You may need to gunzip it, depending on said imaging program. 3. BOOT THE SD CARD Wait patiently for the image to be written and close whatever you used to write the media. The newly minted SD card will probably show up in…

Some of the machines we’ve emulated here did a lot with not many pixels. There’s a certain charm to playing games at their original resolution, but on a powerful system, it’s possible to do high-quality image resampling and upscaling. Summon the in-game RetroPie menu and scroll down you’ll find a submenu entitled Shaders. Select Load and you’ll see a list of all kinds of graphical customizations (implemented as OpenGL Shaders) that can be applied. Try selecting the 2xScaleHQ preset. Now return to the quick menu (no need to restart the game) and select Resume. Those jagged edges are a lot less jagged, and the fonts are nicer too. There are all kinds of filters available, and they’re not all about improving the look. Some of them are quite demanding, especially on…

TIP OF THE MONTH PINNED ITEMS If you have lots of pinned applications in your taskbar, there’s a simple way of getting to them that doesn’t involve reaching for your mouse, meaning you can easily cycle through your taskbar apps with this tip. Whilst holding down the Windows key, press a number to open one of your pinned apps. The number corresponds to its location on your taskbar. Easy, right? You don’t even need to touch your mouse! MAKE – USE – CREATE 62 Tear down Xbox’s adaptive controller with iFixit. 64 Streamline and speed up your startup process. 68 Colorize black-and-white images in Photoshop. ABOUT TIME! I’ve been trying to move house for a while, but the time has finally come—it’s been so long that a new generation of…

1. SYSTEM RESOURCE USAGE This graph tracks your processor’s CPU use and responsiveness, plus memory load. When a process threatens to reduce overall responsiveness, Process Lasso steps in. 2. PROCESS INFORMATION Monitor how individual processes are performing. To focus on running apps, switch to the Active Processes tab to filter system processes. 3. ACTIONS LOG This enables you to track how Process Lasso monitors—and manages—your processes. Look for references to ProBalance being enforced on resource-heavy apps. 4. MANUAL SETTINGS In most cases, Process Lasso knows what it’s doing, but if you need to override it for any reason, right-clicking the process allows you to do so. 5. CPU LIMITER This setting allows you to restrict the number of processor cores available to the selected process when the system needs additional…

PHOTOSHOP CC & A CREATIVE CLOUD SUBSCRIPTION A suitable image to edit. Multicore 64bit processor, 2GHz or faster Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909) or later 8GB RAM (16GB recommended) DirectX 12-compatible GPU less than seven years old (4GB RAM recommended) ONE OF THE BENEFITS of a Creative Cloud subscription is that you get almost constant updates to Adobe’s creative apps. You can also access beta versions of parts of the software, which is exactly what we’re doing here with Photoshop. The famous photo-editing app has had neural filters, which use machine learning networks to achieve their aims, for a while now, but they’re an incomplete set and some are still in beta. They’re all interesting to some extent, but one in particular jumps out—the ability to restore and colorize old black-and-white…

SIX MONTHS ago in this very section of the magazine, I reported that I was finally ready for miniLED to take my money. At last, I’d seen a great display with miniLED tech. The catch was that it was a laptop screen, not a desktop panel, specifically the Asus ROG Flow X16. I’ve recently tested a few more cutting-edge miniLED desktop monitors and they are all, without exception, a bit rubbish. One of them will be getting the full review treatment next issue, so I won’t spoil the anticipation even if I’m sure the Maximum PC readership will spot it instantly. Instead, I give you the AOC Agon Pro AG344UXM, a 34-inch ultrawide gaming panel with some spectacular specs. This 21:9-aspect panel packs a serious punch. It’s DisplayHDR 1000 certified,…

AMD ORIGINALLY launched its Navi 22 GPU with the RX 6700 XT in March 2021. We expected there would be an RX 6700 non-XT arriving shortly after, using harvested chips that couldn’t meet the requirements of the higher tier part. Then months passed with no such part in sight, and AMD went so far as to refresh its desktop parts with a higher binned and higher priced RX 6750 XT (see review, August 2022 issue). Now that GPU cryptocurrency mining is dead and graphics cards aren’t immediately selling out, AMD and its partners are finally ready to release the long-awaited 6700 10GB. Why didn’t we get this GPU last year? Probably because AMD was using the same GPU in the mobile RX 6700M. That’s too bad, though it might not…

IF THERE’S A COST of living crisis going on, Samsung and Nvidia haven’t gotten the memo. This 4K Odyssey Ark costs $3,500, and the RTX 4080 or 4090 realistically needed to drive it are over $1,200. But if you want to experience the best of PC gaming, they’re perfect bedfellows. The Ark is packed with features, it transforms from landscape to portrait, displays three different sources at once, and boasts TV-like smart apps. But none of those features is a reason to buy it—the reason is that it’s just a great gaming monitor. The Odyssey Ark is a colossal 55-inch display, with a 4K panel and 1000R curvature—a pretty deep bend on a monitor this size. It takes at least two people to unbox it, screw it into the stand…

HYPERX HAS made a name for itself making really good products that sell for reasonable prices, and even though ownership of the brand has moved from Kingston to HP recently, nothing much seems to have changed. The standard Pulsefire Haste (wired) mouse was released to appeal to the eSports crowd who wanted a fast and accurate mouse that was comfortable for long play sessions. Of course, a wire-free version of that mouse would seem to be an oxymoron, what with wireless introducing lag, dropout, and recharging concerns, but there are undoubtedly plenty of Fortnite and Apex Legends players out there who value the convenience of wireless over the small performance advantage offered by wired. The Pulsefire Haste Wireless is distinguished by its honeycomb design, which allows air to flow through…

> AIO Assistance > Nvidia Hype Train > 2 GPUs, 1 PC PST Disorder I’ve been a long-time fan of your excellent magazine, and I wanted to let you know I very much appreciated your Gmail vs. Outlook article (December 2022 issue). It reminded me that there’s one problem with Outlook that nobody really addresses, though—its infamous PST data files. What’s particularly annoying is the fact that it doesn’t matter how many emails you delete from how many folders, even permanently (meaning deleting emails from the deleted folder). Even if you make an effort to list and delete emails that have a big attachment file, the PST file size doesn’t get smaller. I’ve used the Compact Now feature in the Outlook Data Files Account Settings and it doesn’t do anything.…