Inhoudsopgave van December 2023 - Maximum PC

THIS ISSUE, I got back into PC building, as you can see from the RGB-laden machine adorning this month’s cover. It has somehow been nearly a year since my last cover build, with our first Nvidia RTX 4090-powered machine. It seems only right that my follow-up be with AMD’s highest-end card, the RX 7900 XTX. While that’s also nearly a year old at time of writing, it had been an ongoing discussion between Maximum PC staff members that we’d somehow managed to avoid the top-end AMD card in any of our builds—it’s just been a busy year for CPU and GPU releases. Thankfully, we were still impressed with what AMD has to offer, particularly with the card commonly now available with a 10 percent price cut since launch, now around…

GOOGLE CALLS its AI search feature SGE (Search Generative Experience). The latest update includes the ability to generate images from text prompts, the trick that made DALL·E so famous. Your prompt will generate four images. It’s also set to be part of the image search function, enabling you to create an image. There will be a filtering process—a ‘strict’ one, according to Google. It will also block photo-realistic faces and prompts that name notable people. The AI images will include embedded metadata that identifies their AI origins, and an invisible watermark. This won’t stop the feature being misused—the ‘guardrails’ that AI systems have are proving ineffective. A group from Princeton University have discovered that safety systems can be side-stepped by fine-tuning the model or text strings. Human nature has a…

Constantly catching up. That’s what it must feel like for AMD when it comes to PC graphics. Wind back the clock to 2004, and Nvidia rolled out SLI (Scalable Link Interface). It was a tool for connecting multiple graphics cards. I never liked it—AMD (or ATI, before it was acquired by AMD) felt obliged to copy SLI with Crossfire. Then came Nvidia’s G-Sync in 2013. As a technology that had more merits than SLI, even if Nvidia’s proprietary implementation undermined its appeal, AMD copied it with FreeSync. Next came the GeForce RTX 20 Series in 2018, and the introduction of hardware ray tracing, something AMD wouldn’t match for two years. Another major milestone was Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technology in 2019, albeit it arguably didn’t truly arrive as a worthwhile technology…

How do you make F1 more exciting? British media personality Danny Baker had the brilliant idea of making drivers do the first lap on foot, but that’s unlikely to go down well with Lewis Hamilton and co. Instead, ahead of the 2022 season, the F1 authorities decided to use the power of cloud computing to make races more competitive. Nobody wants to spend two hours of their Sunday afternoon watching cars file round a track in a procession—least of all the millions of fans drawn in by the deftly edited highlights shown in Netflix’s Drive to Survive. With this in mind, Formula One decided to change the rules to enforce modifications to the design of the cars that would make it easier to overtake, inducing more of those moments that…

If you fired up Google Chrome today alongside the version that launched in 2008, you’d struggle to tell them apart. The address bar runs along the top, there’s a row of bookmarks, a few buttons to the left, tabs at the top, and that’s it. Has the way we use the web really not changed in 15 years? There are alternative browser makers who would disagree. Google pioneered the fuss-free, feature-stripped browser in 2008, and the rest of its mainstream rivals followed. But there’s a new undercurrent of “power browsers” designed to satisfy users who want more from their web browser: browsers with built-in email clients and feed readers; browsers that separate home and work life; browsers that don’t endlessly distract you from the task at hand with notifications and…

With a full-blown email client, calendar with offline access, RSS reader, task manager, notes app, and lots more available through extensions, it’s tempting to ask whether Vivaldi is more of an operating system than a web browser. The company isn’t blind to the complexity of its offering. When you first install Vivaldi, you’re given three layout options: Essentials, Classic, and Fully Loaded. Essentials hides pretty much everything bar the basic browsing tools; Classic adds a few more advanced features, such as Web Panels (see opposite), and the browser’s fast-forward and rewind buttons; Fully Loaded gives you the lot. But if you’re looking for an apology from Vivaldi CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, for packing the browser with features, you’d best bring a book; you’ll be waiting a long time. He launched…

IT’S HAPPENING… Last time, I mentioned DLSS 3.5, an AI powerhouse from Nvidia that was bound to take over my life and keep me glued to my PC. Well, here we are—it didn’t take long for it to wow me. I’ve become the office gremlin that I once feared. Okay, it’s not that bad—I don’t have piles of food wrappers on my desk, and I have been outside, so it’s fine, alright? Not only do we have access to Nvidia DLSS 3.5, but one of my favorite titles to take advantage of this AI feature, Cyberpunk 2077, has an expansion, which I’m excited is already using DLSS 3.5. So how do I balance this with life? I’m sure most of you know the struggle of being hooked on a new…

1. QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR As with all good applications, Sigil places some of its most popular tools on this toolbar—roll your mouse over one for a pop-up description. 2. BOOK BROWSER The contents of your EPUB file, including text, images, CSS stylesheets, and other files (including fonts) are listed here. 3. ACCESS EPUB ELEMENTS Double-click an item in the Book Browser to open it in the middle pane, or right-click to reveal more context-sensitive items depending on the item type. 4. CODE EDITOR You can view the underlying XHTML or CSS that makes up your pages and stylesheets in this page, plus edit directly from here if you’re comfortable with coding. 5. OPEN PAGE EDIT Click this button to open your choice of third-party XHTML editor—in this tutorial we chose…

YOU’VE ALMOST CERTAINLY come across an ISO file before. They’re typically used to bundle huge amounts of data, such as in Windows installers, in a widely compatible format. With the format being so predictable, it’s not surprising that new uses for it have since been found. One is to create virtual optical discs, which exist purely as bundles of data, and have no physical presence at all. The data in the bundle complies with the ISO standards, so it can be opened reliably and repeatedly across multiple operating systems, which makes it a safe format for producing manual backups. Because reading them doesn’t rely on a specific piece of software, you should be able to open an ISO file for years to come. 1 ISO AS PART OF YOUR BACKUP STRATEGY…

FOR THE AYANEO AIR 1S, the default comparison is obviously the Steam Deck, right? Size-wise, the Ayaneo Air 1S is actually more like a Nintendo Switch. In fact, it’s a touch smaller than the Switch, or slightly bigger than a medium-large banana. It really is incredibly compact, this handheld wonder. But here’s the thing: it comes with the same incredible AMD Ryzen 7 7840U chip found in the AOKZOE A1 Pro or Asus ROG Ally. That’s a full eight-core, 16-thread Zen 4 processor and Radeon 780M iGPU powered by 12 RDNA 3 CUs—four more CUs than the Steam Deck’s RDNA 2 chip. Then there’s the Ayaneo’s memory and SSD configuration. Our review model comes with 32GB of LPDDR5X memory and a 2TB 2280 NVMe SSD. Yeah, a full-length 2280 drive.…

THIS VERSION OF ASUS’S ROG Zephyrus M16 isn’t about affordability; it’s all about maximum performance in a modest chassis. Yes, we’re looking at the daddy, the RTX 4090 version, though not to the extreme 175W level that the likes of Razer have allowed this GPU to achieve in their systems. Instead, you get the slightly more parsimonious 150W RTX 4090 spec, which is still technically at the top of its potential TGP rating, but without the extra 25W leeway manufacturers are allowed to add on top. Of course, this isn’t the same as the desktop version of the RTX 4090. It’s actually using a completely different GPU, the AD103 chip as seen in the desktop RTX 4080, right down to the core, cache, and memory configuration. Is it still a…

AT LAST, Corsair has brought Hall-effect magnetic key switches to its famed K70 keyboard design. Every switch in the K70 Max is fitted with one of Corsair’s new MGX switches, hoping to tap into that magnetic-mechanical magic that has become a bit of a trend lately in the world of enthusiast gaming keyboards. Magnetic key switches have a few major benefits over standard mechanical switches. Chief among them are adjustable actuation points, making for a customizable typing experience that caters to both gamers and typists, depending on how you set them up. The Corsair’s MGX switches offer actuation between 0.4mm and 3.6mm. That makes them snappier than MX Speed switches on the one hand, which actuate at 1.2mm, and seriously tough to mistype on the other. For most gamers, it’s…

THERE WAS a frisson of excitement when Intel started making discrete graphics cards. At last, there would be a third player, and the possibility of a market shake-up. Maybe it would even help keep the price of high-end cards down. Intel, however, had other ideas. It started slowly, at the bottom of the market. The drivers proved under-developed, and the range started well away from the big players, whose monster cards have remained expensive. But, slowly and steadily, Intel has been building on its start. First, we got the Arc Alchemist A770, A750, and A380. Its latest offering is the Arc Alchemist A580, the first ‘5’ series card, which has been delayed after being announced over a year ago. The first thing to know is that it costs $179. It has…

EARLY IN THE NEW YEAR, we’re expecting Nvidia to release the GeForce RTX 4080 Ti. The regular RTX 4080, while awesome, was deemed too expensive, with a launch price of $1,199. It was expected to follow the established pricing pattern for GeForce cards, and significantly undercut the top-dog RTX 4090 (which launched at $1,599). The previous generation’s RTX 3080 started at $699, so even allowing for inflation, it was an unexpected move. It also generated an uncomfortable gap in performance, with the RTX 4080 having 9,728 shaders, while its big brother 4090 had a 16,384 count for not much more money. This made the the 4080 look particularly poor value, and left a huge performance gap in the 4000-series range. Adding an RTX 4080 Ti gives room to drop the…

This raises the question of why it would choose two less than ideal examples as a launch showcase for the tech: Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum. Forspoken gets a strike against it thanks to its 120 fps framerate cap (240 fps with Frame Generation enabled). We’ve had 144 Hz and 240 Hz monitors for many years, with 480 Hz and even 540 Hz displays now available. There’s no way to take advantage of such hardware with Forspoken. Immortals of Aveum doesn’t have an artificial framerate cap, but there are other issues with FSR3 frame generation. In testing, it often felt jittery and choppy, but then we get to the strange requirements. FSR3 frame generation has known problems with variable refresh rate technologies, and AMD recommends turning on vsync. These apparently…

BEFORE WE TALK about performance, here are some notes on the build. We like Phanteks’ NV7 case from a design and ease-of-build perspective—everything feels well-made and nice to look at. This is the sort of over-the-top PC that builders tend to love, and it attracted plenty of “oohs” and “ahhs” when we were shooting it in our studio. Equally insane is the weight. Sure, we could do with spending more time at the gym, but we struggled to lift this without help. This isn’t a PC to build if you’re attending lots of LAN parties. When benchmarking, we compared it to our February 2023 “RTX 4080 Gaming Machine”. We were tempted to pit it against the cheaper 7900 XT build from our April 2023 issue, but we think the 4080…

When Formula 1 comes to town, a whole industry travels with it. Huge trucks arrive at each location, turning Transformers-style into temporary HQs. This is the paddock, where celebrities hang out and television hosts attempt to grab the gossip. Tucked behind the paddock is F1’s Event Technical Centre (ETC). In terms of data, this is ground zero of each race. Every single conversation between the drivers and their engineers, every byte of information tracked by the dozens of sensors on each car, each of the multiple 4K video streams that eventually appear on our screens. While what you see on TV is topped and tailed by the hundreds of broadcasters around the world, they rely on a single source: F1. It has total control of the broadcasts, as if it…

Arc is the fashionable browser of the moment, the one that kids wielding MacBooks in Manhattan juice bars are using. I say MacBooks, because the browser is Mac only, although there are plans to release a Windows version. Arc isn’t just the browser to be seen with, however. It brings fresh ideas to the table, including power features that readers may well appreciate. Arc is created by The Browser Company, a startup co-founded by Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal, both former Facebook employees. However, it’s another tech giant the pair have got in their sights. Visit the Arc homepage, and front and center is a pull quote from The Verge’s review of the browser, proclaiming: “Arc is the Chrome replacement I’ve been waiting for.” The company’s mission statement on LinkedIn…

ONE OF THE BEST USES for a smart speaker is as an on-demand jukebox. Amazon’s Echo devices integrate directly with both Spotify and Amazon’s own online music service, each of which offers a library of more than 100 million tracks, so you should be able to find almost everything you want. There are downsides, however. One is that you need to pay a subscription fee to get the best from these music services. On both Spotify and Amazon Music, free users can only request playlists, rather than specific songs; Amazon Prime subscribers can stream individual tracks from Amazon Music, but the service limits how often you can skip, and insists on shuffling albums and playlists. For full control you need to pay $10.99 a month for a full Spotify account,…

I most often encounter ISO files when I download new software or operating systems from the web. Windows arrives this way, but fortunately I rarely have to reinstall it from scratch. Mostly, I use ISO files for operating systems on single-board computers like Raspberry Pi, which I use for a range of home monitoring, weather, and information tasks. That said, writing this has prompted me to use ISO files to back up large blocks of work, including novels and non-fiction books.…

WITH THE RELEASE of the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT, AMD’s RX 7000-series is apparently complete. These cards fill the gaping hole AMD had in its line-up following the release of the high-end RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX in late 2022 and the mainstream RX 7600 in May. Specifically, we’re dealing with the Sapphire Pulse RX 7700 XT. All 7700 XTs are AIB cards, as there is no AMD reference card. This is the base model of the three cards Sapphire offers. It’s joined by the mid-range Pure and high-end Nitro+. The Pulse is priced at the 7700 XT’s $449 MSPR, and honestly, spending more on premium models is foolish. Anyway, the 7700 XT looks good compared to its 6700 XT predecessor. It has got more…

MAKE NO MISTAKE: the MSI Prestige 13 Evo is a premium laptop. This almost feels like the blueprint for the perfect ultrabook, a supremely lightweight but still powerful laptop with a whole host of features and a sleek, minimalist aesthetic. Coming in either white or gunmetal gray, the Prestige 13 Evo is equipped with almost everything you could want from an ultrabook, including a wide variety of physical ports, a large, responsive trackpad, and a selection of useful security features. Weighing in at just 0.99kg (2.18lbs), this laptop sits in the same weight class as the popular LG Gram, and it’s even lighter than the eminently portable M2 MacBook Air. With a 13.3-inch display and a thickness of just 1.7cm, it’s phenomenally easy to pick up the Prestige 13 Evo…

CREATIVE ASSEMBLY’S chosen setting for Total War: Pharaoh sits right upon the precipice of military history. The Battle of Kadesh, which took place about 100 years before Total War: Pharaoh begins, is the earliest pitched battle for which we have records of tactics and formations. Playing as an Egyptian, Canaanite, or Hittite general, your goal is to conquer enough of the land around the eastern Mediterranean that your name is forever carved into the stele of history. In this, becoming Pharoah is merely the start of your aspirations. Around turn 12 of the campaign, you unlock a system known as “Power of the Crown”. This lets you choose to follow the path of becoming either the Egyptian Pharaoh or the Great King of Hatti. These positions come with slightly different benefits,…

FIRSTLY, this is a rumor—one that comes with a set of decidedly official-looking AMD slides apparently snapped from a monitor, and from a reliable source. This isn’t gospel, but it shouldn’t be far from what’s coming either, and is good news. Zen 5 will be a complete architectural overhaul, although the chip structure remains the same. The branch prediction has been redesigned, and gets zero bubble conditional branches (a system that handles a branch without delaying subsequent instructions). There’s more L1 cache, 50 percent bigger at 48KB. The throughput has been worked over, as has the scheduler and prefetch. All this rejigging is said to result in an IPC improvement of 10 to 15 percent. AMD has traditionally been conservative with its IPC predictions. Zen 4 was supposed to give…

LIKE A LOT OF PC COMPONENTS, graphics cards are cyclical. We’re now in the calm between the storms of new GPU generation launches. Both Nvidia’s RTX 40 Series and AMD’s RX 7000 GPUs have been fully fleshed out. Likewise, it’ll be a while before any properly new graphics cards are launched, so it’s the perfect time to take stock and consider where the value propositions lie. In other words, what are the best picks of this generation? And might there be one or two old timers from the previous gen of GPUs that still make sense? 5 AMD RADEON RX 7600 There’s nothing we’d enthusiastically recommend at the budget end, but the best of a bad bunch is the AMD Radeon RX 7600, especially now it’s $239. Like all AMD…

WE KNOW, WE KNOW—for the last few issues now, we’ve been infatuated with all things AMD. Part of it is down to the lack of new Intel hardware coming through (which won’t be a problem next issue, as we already have Raptor Lake in-hand), and part of it is just the pure excitement of what AMD’s been doing of late in bringing the fight to Nvidia in the graphics card space. But somehow, despite all of this AMD love, we’ve still managed to avoid doing a build with the company’s top-end offering, the RX 7900 XTX. Well, we’re very pleased to address that oversight here. While the RX 7900 XTX is nearly one year old at time of writing, there’s no heir apparent that we’re aware of in the works from…

We’re hearing more and more about quantum computing, and you might wonder what value it could have for your business. The answer is far from clear, because good, practical information about this new frontier is hard to come by. I have to admit that I enjoy a nice information gap. Computing in general is stuffed full of such things, especially when new, specialist technologies collide with a less cautious and more gung-ho marketplace. The general understanding of quantum computing (QC) doesn’t go much further than the social media-driven perception that it represents the end of conventional computational barriers, and that leaps in performance are just around the corner for everything from tablets to data centers. Of course, the more ambitious the perception, generally the less likely it is to represent…

EVER FANCIED YOURSELF AS AN AUTHOR? These days, you don’t need a publishing deal to distribute your magnum opus, and you don’t even need to commit to the upfront cost of printing copies without any guaranteed sales in place. Thanks to the rise of eReaders like the Kobo and Kindle, you can publish digitally for zero cost and then look to promote your work online. The hardest part of the job is taking your finished draft—typically in a Microsoft Word document—and converting it into a format that opens on an eReader flows properly on any screen and is easy to read. The solution lies in an open-source program called Sigil, which takes your text (and any images you may have) and transforms it into a standard ePub file, which can…

CSS is used to style ePub documents beyond the basics—CSS allows you to define everything from the typeface used along with its style, size, color, and background, to the layout of individual elements on the page. These can be universal settings or limited to both existing styles and brand new ones created from scratch. It requires learning how CSS works and what you can do with it—see www.w3schools.com/css for an excellent introduction to the subject. Sigil supports multiple CSS files (one’s created for your table of contents, for example), so to create a CSS file for the rest of your document, right-click the Styles folder and choose ‘Add Blank Stylesheet’. Next, select all the XHTML files under Text that you want the stylesheet to apply to, before right-clicking and choosing…

HOW MUCH OF A THING is OLED burn in? That’s hard to answer in normal testing. We typically get a few weeks at best to review something like a gaming monitor. That’s plenty for assessing most aspects of a display. You can get a good feel for the image quality, build, features, and so on. But burn in? That’s much harder to judge. Of course, long-term durability is always difficult to measure. I remember when the first consumer SSDs came out to fairly universal rave reviews. Then it turned out the drives wore out pretty quickly. While SSD durability remains difficult to gauge, the technology has improved. But what about OLED panels in PC monitors? If you look at the latest long-term OLED test results from Rtings, just about the…

IS THERE SUCH thing as too much screen? Obviously, yes. Try putting a 65-inch HDTV on your desktop, and the limitations of size are clear. But the new Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC Dual UHD is no thinly disguised TV; it’s a PC-optimized panel. Yet, this still has us wondering if you can have too much of a good thing. What you’re looking at, in effect, is a pair of 32-inch 240Hz 4K gaming monitors fused into a single 57-inch ultra-curved panel. That’s no fewer than 7,680 by 2,160 pixels, or just over 16.5 million. Ouch. Dual 4K running at such a high refresh rate is unprecedented. Indeed, it’s so novel that only AMD’s latest RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7000 Series GPU can hit the full 240Hz, courtesy of their…

A RELIABLE LAPTOP under $1,000 that doesn’t sacrifice build, performance, or features? Tricky. But the Asus Vivobook S 15 OLED squeezes into that happy medium of offering efficient performance in a premium-looking chassis, all for well under $1,000. Packing a 12th Gen Intel processor, a commendable 15.6-inch OLED display, and ample battery life, Asus did a fine job with this year’s Vivobook line-up—or should I say, a clean job. Asus also brings its special “Antibacterial Guard” that claims to inhibit the growth of bacteria by more than 99 percent. For the record, this is what Asus says about the feature: “The Asus Antibacterial Guard treatment consists of positively charged silver ions, and is durable enough for at least three years of normal usage. Household cleaning products and agents such as…

NOT EVERYONE NEEDS a full-blown virtual machine to run certain types of software—Docker is a lightweight alternative that uses containers to wrap up Linux applications and dependencies in a minimal environment. Readers of this magazine will have seen our many tutorials for Docker over the past few years and got a good idea of how it works. But Docker isn’t perfect—it was originally designed for development rather than production-ready use, which has led to question marks over security and stability. Luckily, in 2015, Docker created the Open Containers Initiative (OCI), which has seen several alternatives emerge that can run the same containers. These include Podman, aimed more at production environments (and perfect for home users). Developed by Red Hat, it strives to remain broadly compatible with Docker while employing a different…

> Print natives > Laptops or claptrap? > OLED, where art thou? No love for digital I've been a subscriber to the magazine for over 20 years, and would read almost every issue of Maximum PC cover to cover within a week of receiving it. Since you went to a digital format, I struggled to get through the first issue. It took me almost two months to find the time to finish it. Since then, I haven’t read another issue. I realize that I’m a dinosaur, as I had my computer science degree before most of your readers were born, but I still build at least one PC per year, and like to keep my knowledge fresh, so I consider my expertise to be far above that of the average…