Table of contents for July 2018 in Computer Shopper

AS I SIT and write this at the end of April, I’m remembering that glimpse of summer we had earlier in the month, with those gorgeous sunny days and a chance to get outside in the garden or the park. It was over all too soon, leaving us to wonder if that was the British summer 2018. Still, our reviews team are happy with the change in weather. Rather than being able to enjoy the warm weather, they’ve been locked away in the basement labs for the past month, testing and comparing a whopping 31 components to help you build your perfect PC. Go into any shop or restaurant, and you can’t help but notice that prices have gone up compared to a couple of years ago. Our guide (p76)…

Tech pioneer and all-round good egg letters@computershopper.co.uk MEL BROOKS IS a very funny man, and at the age of 91 it seems only natural for him to be laughing in the face of his own impending death. And what’s really funny is that he’s determined to make money out of it. A couple of years back he did a mouth-crinkler of a comedy sketch that features his own tombstone. In it, unsuspecting folk wander around a sunlit graveyard, and as they come into range they trigger an embedded video screen in the stone marker of his final resting place. From inside the screen, Mel knocks on the glass and beckons them over. Then he starts cracking jokes from beyond the grave, and puts on a great show. But he stops…

MIT creates a headset that reads your mind… MIND-READING GADGETS could soon be a reality as scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a headset that’s been designed to read inner thoughts. MIT’s AlterEgo headset is a rather ungainly wearable device that relies on subvocalisation – the silent speech that occupies our grey matter, when reading, for example – to essentially ‘hear’ a wearer’s thoughts. Looking like a futuristic version of orthodontic headgear, the headset uses integrated electrodes and bone-conduction headphones to measure the neuromuscular signals omitted when a wearer subvocalises. These signals are then transferred to a machine-learning computer interface, which uses a neural network to discern individual words. While it’s not difficult to imagine more sinister applications, AlterEgo has so far been used for harmless, if geeky,…

£2,749 • From www.microsoft.com VERDICT The Surface Book 2 grows up with a bigger screen and upgraded GPU, but these changes come at a huge price THE SURFACE BOOK, Microsoft’s hybrid laptop, finally resurfaced (ahem) in 2017 after a two-year hiatus. Yes, it might have taken a while owing to Microsoft’s do-it-all hardware arm focusing on the Surface Laptop, but what an upgrade the Surface Book 2 (Shopper 361) turned out to be: expensive, but delivering on the promise of desktop-grade power squeezed into a package you could comfortably carry around every day. All it was missing was a big-screen version, originally sticking solely to a 13.5 in display size. Now, however, Microsoft has finally released a 15in version. Before you get too excited, it should be noted that on…

£430 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT This budget Windows hybrid has some good qualities but fails to excite ACER’S DETACHABLE LAPTOPS have traditionally always positioned themselves as cheaper alternatives to Microsoft’s Surface Pro range, while still providing a similar 2-in-1 experience. With last year’s Switch 5, however, a combination of small issues meant that it was ultimately wiser to just spend a little extra for the Microsoft alternative. Much like its more expensive sibling, the Switch 3 is aimed at those who need the flexibility of a tablet mixed with the functionality of a laptop, only this time a few of the more fancy features, such as liquid cooling, have been stripped out in favour of a more attractive price. Provided the Switch 3 is able to replicate some of the…

£130 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Reasonable performance, AMD FreeSync support and a low price make this gaming monitor a bargain AT A REFRESHINGLY low £130, the 24in G2460VQ6 is one of AOC’s cheapest monitors; in fact, it’s the cheapest monitor to grace these pages since the Asus VC239H (Shopper 349) all the way back in 2016. Despite its price, the G2460VQ6 still has gaming monitor ambitions and, perhaps more importantly, a solid and sturdy body. Its circular stand has a smart, brushed metal effect, and the area beneath the screen is decorated with a curved red band that houses the OSD buttons. It also has a back panel that’s pleasingly resistant to bending, as well as a base that doesn’t wobble as much other monitors in the same price range,…

£30 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The Muvo 2c is affordable, weatherproof and compact, and sounds better than you’d think CHEAP, PORTABLE BLUETOOTH speakers usually suffer from one or more of the following: weak sound, poor build quality or a dearth of features. It would be understandable, then, to approach Creative’s Muvo 2c with a degree of trepidation. At £30, it’s certainly cheap, and measuring 93x38x67mm, it’s not like there’s much room to fill with top-quality speakers. However, it quickly becomes apparent that the Muvo 2c isn’t just bargain-bin rubbish. It’s rated at the IP66 standard for dust- and water-resistance, and has a fair few connection ports, including a 3.5mm auxiliary input, a Micro USB port for both charging and data, and a microSD slot, which works hand-in-hand with the integrated…

£599 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT With its 1in sensor, this tiny video camera aims to do things differently, but its hardware limits as often as it excels WE WERE EXCITED by the DSC-RX0 when we first saw it at IFA in October 2017. Here was a tiny, 4K-capable action camera with a sensor around four times the size of the one in GoPro’s Hero 6 Black (Shopper 362), along with a host of professional-level features. It looked as if Sony was on to a winner. For various reasons, the tiny DSC-RX0 sadly falls short. We’ll get to those reasons later on, but essentially, this camera is hard to recommend because it’s too niche, more difficult to use and generally less flexible than its GoPro rivals. In some ways, it’s not…

£200 • From www.fitbit.com/uk VERDICT A versatile smartwatch with four-day battery life and a compact design, all backed up by the Fitbit community THE VERSA HAS a lot of hopes and expectations riding on it, even if most of them are Fitbit’s own. It’s the firm’s second attempt to break into smatchwatches, following the Fitbit Ionic (Shopper 360), and strips away many of the non-essentials from this precursor to create a smaller and more affordable wearable. Fitbit is hoping this will, in turn, broaden the Versa’s appeal beyond the usual male-dominated smartwatch crowd. SHRINKING RESPONSIBILITIES The obvious benefit is the size of the watch on the wrist. If you’re used to wearing something bulky such as a Garmin Fenix, the Versa will feel ridiculously compact and lightweight in comparison. It’s…

01 A smartphone’s operating system (OS) dictates its basic features and which third-party software you can install. There are three main contenders: Apple’s iOS, which is found on the iPhone, Google’s Android, which is used by various handset manufacturers, and Windows Phone, which has few options. Apple iOS and Google Android have the most apps available but Windows Phone is slowly catching up. 02 All smartphones have colour screens, but their resolutions vary. Basic models have 800x480 pixels, but text can be indistinct. Look for a display that has at least 1,280x720 pixels so it’s easy to browse web pages. Don’t worry too much about built-in media players or Office document editors; you can always install apps to replace these with better versions later. The image quality of smartphone cameras…

01 A basic 24in LCD monitor costs around £100. It will be fine for typical Windows work but is likely to have poor viewing angles, so you’ll need to sit straight on for the best picture quality. Its colour accuracy may not be very good, either. 02 A VGA input lets you use the monitor with any PC, but the quality may not be as good as it is over DVI or HDMI. Both are digital connections and require a compatible graphics card but they avoid the need for digital-to-analogue or analogue-todigital conversions, which can reduce image quality. A digital connection achieves the best picture automatically, so you won’t have to adjust clock or phase settings as you do with analogue connections. Many DVI and all HDMI connections support HDCP,…

01 Action cameras are typically much smaller than a regular camcorder, as they are designed to be mounted to a bike, board or car, or worn on your person. As the name suggests, they are designed primarily for shooting action footage, but because of their small size they are ideal for strapping on to your pet’s collar or your children’s toys for a different perspective. 02 Almost all action cameras will shoot Full HD video, and some will even shoot 4K, but frame rate is arguably more important than resolution when it comes to action video. Higher frame rates will mean smoother clips, and super-high frame rate videos can be played in slow motion to emphasise exciting shots. Keep an eye out for 4k/30, 1080p/60 and 720p/120 models for the…

01 You should be able to buy a decent inkjet printer for less than £40. High-quality printing is possible on such a printer, but it will be slow. The actual print speed of an inkjet can be half the quoted (maximum) speed for text documents, and even slower when printing graphics. Budget inkjet printers such as these are designed only for light use and can be expensive to run. 02 For £60 you can buy a much more capable printer that’s either faster and better built or better at reproducing photos. If documents are your priority, you’ll want a high minimum speed and low print costs. Look for inkjets that can handle all your office media, such as envelopes and labels. 03 If photos are your priority, speed is less…

01 You really don’t have to spend much to buy a decent graphics card that can drive multiple monitors. The AMD Radeon R7 250 costs less than £60, for example, and while it isn’t suited to playing the latest games in Full HD, it is perfect for watching videos, browsing the web and playing basic games. 02 You’ll need to spend more money if you want to play the latest games. A good mid-range gaming graphics card is the Nvidia GTX 1050, which is powerful enough to play any of the latest games. High-powered cards tend to be more expensive, so expect to pay over £300 if you want to play games in Ultra HD at the highest quality settings. 03 Check that your chosen card has the graphics outputs…

Chat and Communication UPDATED Evernote 6.11.2.7027 Store your notes, ideas and plans in the cloud, and synchronise them between computers. UPDATED Mailbird 2.5.4 A free desktop email client for Windows. UPDATED Miranda IM 0.10.78 Chat with friends across multiple messaging platforms, including AIM, Facebook, IRC and MSN, all from one simple interface. UPDATED Skype for Windows 8.19.0.1 Make internet voice and video calls for free, and buy credit to make calls to mobiles and landlines. UPDATED Telegram 1.2.17 This free IM app synchronises your conversations across multiple devices, and can spruce up chats with stickers and GIFs. UPDATED WhatsApp Desktop 0.2.8691 A free PC and Mac version of the popular messaging app, letting you chat from your desktop. Customisation iolo System Mechanic Free 17.0.1 Speed up your system with iolo’s…

If the CPU and (possibly) graphics card’s jobs are to get your PC up to a certain level of performance, it’s the RAM’s responsibility to keep it there. Having too little memory will mean that trying to run multiple tasks, or even just a single particularly demanding one, will cause your PC to slow down. Despite this essential role, there are generally no meaningful differences between how different memory kits (of the same size) perform, at least in our benchmark tests. You can get sticks running at different speeds, although this field has narrowed as well, thanks to DDR4 memory becoming the industry standard for motherboards instead of a premium feature. Previously, you could opt for a dirt-cheap set of 1,866MHz DDR3 as readily as a 3,200MHz set of DDR4,…

EXTRA FANS We recommend doing this anyway if the case doesn’t include a front intake fan out of the box, but you don’t have to stop at one. Adding two at the front will maximise the amount of fresh, cooling air that gets dragged across the hot graphics card and motherboard, and possibly some storage drives as well. If your case has room at the top, you can add fans here, too: because the processor is located near the top of the motherboard, this can help the main CPU cooler by either cooling it with an extra intake of air or venting out the hot air it produces. LED LIGHTING The inclusion of purely decorative LEDs can be a delicate balancing act, and the tendency of certain component and peripheral…

£189 • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT With Wi-Fi, quadruple GPU support and easy overclocking, this is a good board for a luxury build – without the luxury price THE TAICHI SERIES of ASRock motherboards occupies the space between the mainstream and the high end, and that can be see quite clearly on the Z370 Taichi: a Coffee Lake motherboard that sneaks in a few premium features while keeping the price below £200. For instance, on the back panel sits a pair of dual Ethernet ports, rather than the usual one. This has a range of uses, such as daisy-chaining networks, hooking up to a NAS array or just providing a degree of redundancy in case one port develops problems. There’s also a dinky little wireless module that provides both 802.11ac Wi-Fi…

£170 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT It looks the part, has 802.11ac Wi-Fi and is loaded with a fantastic BIOS – this is the Intel ATX board to beat THE Z370 GAMING Pro Carbon AC is one of those rarest of things: a motherboard that looks rather excellent. All black and grey with some touches of carbon fibre texture on the rear port cover and PCH heatsink, it’s a beautifully designed piece of kit, and that’s even before getting to the gleaming metal around the RAM and topmost PCI-E x16 slots. The primary purpose of this is to reinforce the underlying plastic, so it’s practical as well as good-looking. It’s still somewhat pricey, so MSI will have needed to match these looks with some appropriate features. All is well on the…

£146 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT A great overclocking platform that’s teeming with ports, and has a rare focus on audio fidelity THE AX370-GAMING 5 comes from the old guard of AM4 motherboards: it was there when AMD first released its Ryzen chips, and it’s still part of the Aorus line-up today. The only thing that’s changed is the price, having dropped from £200 to £143, undercutting the ROG Crosshair VI Hero, the other do-everything ATX board we’ve featured. This is a quintessential X370 board. It takes advantage of the chipset’s extra PCI-E lanes to support CrossFire and SLI, and is awash with SATA ports, USB3.1 connectivity, and both fan and cooling pump headers. It’s kitted out with three reinforced PCI-E x16 slots, the top two of which can support dual…

clive@computershopper.co.uk Make an AirPlay speaker For under £100 you can make a wireless speaker that supports Apple’s exclusive AirPlay standard, as well as Wi-Fi streaming. Clive Webster shows you how AIRPLAY IS A more advanced method of streaming music and video over Wi-Fi, which tends to be more robust (these days, at least) than Bluetooth streaming. AirPlay usually requires at least one Apple device or iTunes, but our DIY speaker will work with Android devices and most other sources, too. Apple has just launched its first AirPlay-compatible speaker, the £319 HomePod. Meanwhile, the cheapest (and only) certified AirPlay speaker on the Apple Store is Naim’s Mu-so at a cool £995. We can build an AirPlay speaker for well under a ton. AS WITH ANY DIY project, the first step when…

letters@computershopper.co.uk Like for Lake? It used to be that so long as the number of pins aligned, you could stick any CPU into any motherboard. Now, with all the Lake series of Intel processors, even when the pin numbers are the same, say 1,151, there is talk claiming the type of Lake must be the same when it comes to CPUs and motherboards. What is the truth in all this? Can a Skylake processor go into a Coffee Lake mobo, or vice versa, or in a Kaby Lake? And so on. The pin numbers are the same, so… Also, can you tell me if Sky Lake/Skylake is one word or two? Chris Sadly, Coffee Lake chips currently only work with motherboards using the Z370 chipset, which Intel says is because…

THE WORLD IS getting less trustworthy. Among reports of Russian interference in elections and warnings of what could happen to critical infrastructure should hackers attack comes a new threat. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has written to telecoms companies warning them against buying kit from Chinese manufacturer ZTE. Dr Ian Levy, technical director of the NCSC, said: “It is entirely appropriate and part of NCSC’s duty to highlight potential risks to the UK’s national security and provide advice based on our technical expertise. “NCSC assess that the national security risks arising from the use of ZTE equipment or services within the context of existing UK telecommunications infrastructure can’t be mitigated.” Dr Levy later wrote to UK telecoms companies, warning them against using ZTE products. According to the Financial Times,…

For the den Hailing from Germany with a vexingly pronounceable name and a range of high-end TVs, Loewe has a decent chance of stealing some of the home cinema market from Samsung and Panasonic. That’s if the Loewe bild 3.55 is any indication: it’s an impeccably designed OLED TV with some of the best built-in speakers we’ve heard. Admittedly, the panel used isn’t quite as pixel-perfect as those of its more established competitors, but it still looks very pretty indeed. HDR10, Dolby Vision and Hybrid Log Gamma are all supported as well, making sure that the bild 3.55 has the premium specs to match its styling. (Page 43) For the wallet We rarely bother to review dirt-cheap Bluetooth speakers because, with a few exceptions, they have a tendency to be…

Slick simulation PC Building Simulator has launched on Steam, letting wannabe PC builders create the machine of their dreams without the risk of electrical disaster Superpowered academia The universities of Edinburgh, Bristol and Leicester are to get supercomputers courtesy of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, giving their number-crunching tasks a massive boost DIY AI Google has added the Raspberry Pi Zero WH into its ‘Artificial Intelligence Yourself’ Vision and Voice DIY kits, to better help people curious about smart tech get started with AI development Console comeback The classic Sega Mega Drive is making an official comeback with a reboot called the Mega Drive Mini, which shrinks the console and will work with modern TVs…

USA City held to ransom Atlanta’s municipal government was hit by a ransomware attack that locked 8,000 workers out of their computers. A hacking group called SamSam was thought to be behind the attack, demanding $51,000 in bitcoin to unlock the city government’s scrambled files. While major systems such as the city’s 911 service weren’t affected, the municipal government had to work hard to restore the system without paying the ransom. The attack represents an escalation of ransomware attacks against major US cities. China Motors to go Vending machines tend to contain snacks or drinks, but a partnership between Ford and Chinese online retail giant Alibaba saw the creation of a vending machine for cars. The Super Test-Drive Centre in Guangzhou allowed people to select the latest Ford cars and…

“It was not working, so we got rid of that whole thing” Tesla founder Elon Musk plans to replace robots with human workers on the Model 3 production line “It is mathematical, it is pure, it can’t be altered” Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak has faith in bitcoin despite ditching his own cryptocurrency holdings “An ethical approach ensures the public trusts this technology and sees the benefits of using it” House of Lords Select Committee chairman Lord Clement-Jones wants ethics to enshrine AI development “What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms” Father of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee is concerned too much online power lies with a few big tech firms “Senator, we run…

£600 •From www.overclockers.co.uk VERDICT There are better budget PCs, but the Kinetic Z3 offers good performance in an elegant package HOT ON THE heels of last issue’s £600 PC group test (Shopper 364) comes Overclockers’ Kinetic Z3, another desktop that promises affordable but high-quality 1080p gaming in a time of outrageously high GPU prices. Not that you’d guess this was a budget PC by looking at it. The Kolink Stronghold case is a perfect combination of understated and stylish, with a reasonably convincing brushed aluminium effect on the plastic front panel and a full-sized, tempered glass side window. This gives full view of the ATX motherboard – no cost-cutting microATX model here – which itself uses the premium Intel Z370 chipset. As a finishing touch, the main internal chamber is…

£120 • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT It’s fast and durable, but there are few reasons to buy this SSD over the cheaper 860 Evo IN KEEPING WITH the Samsung tradition of launching two similar yet distinct SSDs at once, the outstanding 860 Evo (Shopper 364) is accompanied by this, the 860 Pro. Costing a little more but promising faster read and write speeds of 560MB/s and 530MB/s respectively, the 860 Pro clearly wants to position itself as the premier SATA SSD: sure, you could save some cash on the 860 Evo, but why not stretch a bit further to have the best in its class? In reality, things haven’t turned out that way. The 860 Pro is a very quick SSD, make no mistake, but as far as we can tell…

£747 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Even though it’s not picture-perfect, this iMac-aping 5K monitor is a stunner THROUGHOUT ITS MANY incarnations, the iMac has always been a technology style icon. Design-wise, the Iiyama ProLite XB2779QQS monitor borrows a lot from the latest, most aspirational iMac, including the glorious 5K resolution. At £747, it’s also competitively priced – but is it any good? To be sure, it couldn’t be called cheap, but it does comfortably undercut its 5K competitors. The LG UltraFine 5K Display, for instance, comes in at a steep £1,179, and while the Philips 275P4VYKEB originally launched at £860 last year, the price has since rocketed up to £1,245. By these standards, the XB2779QQS looks a veritable bargain. IMITATION GAME Clearly, the design of the XB2779QQS is inspired by…

£150 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT These cylindrical desktop speakers have customisable RGB lighting, but don’t sound great for the money RAZER IS BEST known for its PC peripherals and gaming headsets, but the company has been branching out with laptops and even smartphones. More recently Razer has tackled speakers with the Leviathan soundbar (Shopper 329) and the Bluetooth-powered Leviathan Mini. The Nommo PC speaker range now targets the desktop: it includes the £500 subwoofer-equipped Nommo Pro set and the cheaper Nommo Chroma set, which we tested. The speakers are certainly striking. They have a cylindrical plastic enclosure that measures 170mm in length and 107mm in diameter, so they point outwards straight towards you when you’re sat at a desk. The drivers are held up by a plastic support that raises…

£100 • From www.johnlewis.com VERDICT Nokia’s budget handset has a great screen and battery life, but fails to deliver elsewhere THERE’S NEVER BEEN so much choice in the budget smartphone market, and while a lot of it is, to put it charitably, of the quality you might expect for less than £100, there are some genuinely good handsets, too, such as the Vodafone Smart N8 (Shopper 356). The Nokia 2 is the latest phone to try to grab a slice of the budget pie. Unfortunately, it gets off to a bad start: the plastic body is unattractive and, well, plasticky, with build quality more in line with sub-£50 handsets. The Vodafone Smart N8 is more elegant and has a textured rear cover that makes it easier to grip with sweaty…

01 A basic PC costing around £350 will be able to run everyday office, multimedia and education software and will easily cope with surfing the internet. It might even be able to run some modern games. Many PCs can be sold either with or without a monitor. If you don’t like the display that the manufacturer is offering, you can always use your current one, or buy another one separately. 02 If you want to play games, you’ll have to upgrade the graphics card. Budget cards such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 will cope well with many 3D games, but to play the latest 3D games smoothly (and enjoy the best-quality graphics) it’s worth upgrading to a more powerful card such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. 03 All…

01 All tablets rely on an operating system (OS) to run apps. You have three main choices: Apple’s iOS, which runs on the iPad, Android, which Google licenses to various manufacturers, and Windows 10, which is slowly becoming more common in hybrid tablets and convertibles. If you own an Apple or Google smartphone, you can download your apps, music and so on to a tablet that runs the same OS, so it makes sense to stick with a compatible device. 02 It’s important to pick a tablet that has a good-quality high-resolution screen. Many budget tablets have 1,280x800-resolution displays, but better tablets have Full HD 1,920x1,080 panels, and we’re starting to see tablets that have even higher screen resolutions. Some are as high as 2,560x1,600 or even 4K. Entry-level tablets…

01 A 32in Full HD TV costs around £200 and will suit smaller living rooms. TVs look much smaller in the shop than in your home, so measure the space available before you buy. Curved TVs are becoming increasingly more common, but bear in mind that these typically take up more floor space than a traditional flat set. 02 A 1,920x1,080-resolution TV can display a 1080p image. You can still buy TVs with a 720p (1,366x768) resolution, but they’re no cheaper and the image won’t be as sharp. 3,840x2,560 Ultra HD resolution, or 4K, TVs are finally available at reasonable prices, although you’ll still pay a premium for one over a 1080p model. 03 Consider the number of inputs you’ll need to connect the rest of your equipment. Two HDMI…

01 Wearable tech can include anything from chest-strap heart-rate monitors to augmented reality glasses, but the two most common types are smartwatches and fitness trackers. Both are designed to sit unassumingly on your wrist, and are almost always meant to be used in tandem with a paired smartphone. 02 Smartwatches are typically more complex and expensive, though more closely resemble a traditional wristwatch. You can use them to receive and reply to text messages and emails, quickly check maps and even play games – like a smartphone, most smartwatches allow you to install your own choice of apps. 03 Fitness trackers are much more dedicated to healthy pursuits. Step counters, heart-rate monitors and even sleep tracking are all common, and the data collected is fed back to you so you…

01 Wireless routers each use a number of Wi-Fi standards, so you shouldn’t have any trouble connecting your computer or phone wirelessly if you get an 802.11n or 802.11ac router. Nearly all routers support 802.11n, so even a cheap model should provide decent performance. You can expect a transfer speed of around 40Mbit/s at a distance of 10m from any modern 802.11n router. The very latest routers use the 802.11ac standard, which provides tremendously fast transfer speeds. Some devices still don’t support the 802.11ac standard, so check the specifications before you buy. 02 If you subscribe to an ADSL broadband service, you should buy a wireless router that has a built-in ADSL modem. This will cost more than the equivalent cable router, but it allows you to connect your router…

• Anti-aliasing: When games use square pixels to draw diagonal lines, the results can look jagged; this is called aliasing. Anti-aliasing simply refers to the methods used in smoothing them out, making everything look slicker. There are a few different types of anti-aliasing. Fast Approximate AA (FXAA), for instance, uses a post-processing effect to slightly blur the edges, minimising the impact on your GPU but perhaps not giving that razor-sharpness that a more advanced technique might provide. Case in point, Super Sampling AA (SSAA) is a big drain on GPU power, but effectively eliminates jagged edges by rendering a scene at a higher resolution, then downscaling the image to match your display resolution. • Texture filtering: This helps prevent in-game textures looking blurry when viewed from oblique angles. Bilinear filtering…

£230 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT This Coffee Lake motherboard rewards your investment with impressive overclocking and watercooling capabilities WE’VE ALWAYS PREFERRED Asus’s Prime series motherboards to its ROG Maximus range, largely because the latter are invariably much more expensive. With the release of Intel’s Coffee Lake CPUs and accompanying Z370 chipset, it looks as if that won’t be changing any time soon: the ROG Maximus X Hero starts at £230, about £80 more than the Prime Z370-A we’ve seen in a few pre-built PCs. It’s also a fair bit pricier than other ATX-size Z370 motherboards in contention, such as the ASRock Z370 Taichi and MSI’s Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC. To be fair, ROG Maximus motherboards have always offered more than a scarier-sounding name, and the ROG Maximus X Hero…

£102 • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT Don’t be put off by this motherboard’s proportions; ASRock has made very efficient use of the space ONE OF THE many, many, many PC hardware products to bear the handle of competitive Quake player-turned-entrepreneur Johnathan ‘Fatal1ty’ Wendel, the AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac might seem an odd mishmash of ideas. Mini-ITX motherboards are, after all, rarely the best fit for powerful gaming systems. Nonetheless, this is a much more sensible motherboard than its branding suggests. ASRock has squeezed a genuinely impressive assortment of ports, slots and features into a tiny piece of equipment, and it’s all paired with a BIOS that makes it particularly easy for newcomers to learn about overclocking and other forms of hardware tweaking. THINK SMALL Before all that, there are some limitations that –…

£73 • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT Superb hardware and performance makes this microATX board useful for a variety of Ryzen builds WE’VE ALREADY SEEN, via the Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac, that you don’t need the best chipset to get high overclocking potential out of your motherboard – nor that only full-size ATX models will suffice for good features. Really, when it comes to AMD, the only things that definitely benefit from the X370 chipset are high-end watercooling support and almighty multi-GPU configurations. This can be seen quite clearly on the B350M Mortar. It has two PCI-E x16 slots, which is one more than we’d usually see on a microATX board, and it supports AMD CrossFire for doubling up graphics cards (Nvidia’s equivalent, SLI, is limited to X370). However, the bottom slot merely…

Send your problems to businesshelp@computershopper.co.uk Change the sheets I want to link the rows on separate sheets in Excel so that I can see the same row on different sheets as I move between them. For example, if I’ve scrolled on sheet 1 so that the top row below the headings is row 95, what I want to see when I move to sheet 2 is row 95 at the top. I thought there was a way to do this, but I can’t seem to find it. Frank Baxter There is a way of comparing two worksheets side by side using the Synchronous Scrolling method, but I’m not sure it gives you quite what you want. However, it’s worth trying as it’s relatively simple. To use Synchronous Scrolling, you first…

Green gauge In the article ‘Eco-Friendly Tech’ (Shopper 364), it was found that the latest products could use more energy than they save. Not so with eco-friendly technology from the 1970s and 1980s. When Economy 7 was brought into use by Harold Wilson in 1974, the effect was to cut the number of power stations needed by four. If compulsory installation had been carried out, the invention could have cut the number of power stations by nearly half. The introduction of Economy 7 has helped several countries shut down their dirty, dangerous and expensive nuclear power stations. Another invention from the 1970s was Starlite, which if coated on the walls and ceilings of the office and home, could cut heating and cooling bills to near-zero; automatic windows could control most…

Madeline Bennett RAVES I MIGHT BE a bit late to the party, but I’ve finally got round to watching Hidden Figures, the 2016 film about the role of three African-American women in the 1960s US vs Russia space race. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson were vital in one of the biggest events in space history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit and his safe recovery, which paved the way for putting a man on the moon. I’d never heard of the women before the film came out, but was vaguely aware of the remarkable nature of their story from seeing the reviews and trailer. Not only did it seem improbable to me that three African-Americans would be working at NASA in the segregation-era United States, but…

AMD’S NEXT WAVE of Ryzen processors are once again bringing the fight to Intel, with Ryzen 2 chips sporting up to eight cores and clock speeds that top out at 4.3GHz. Last year’s initial Ryzen release prompted Intel to come out with its Coffee Lake architecture. That brought a hike in performance over older Kaby Lake processors. But now AMD’s Ryzen 2 range looks to be in a position to keep Intel on its toes again. Leading the Ryzen 2 charge is the Ryzen 7 2700X, an eight-core, 16-thread processor with a base clock speed of 3.7GHz and a boost clock of 4.3GHz. With a thermal design power (TDP) of 105W, the chip looks set to compete with Intel’s Core i7 processors in both power and efficiency, and at £300…

Warranty stickers Stickers on tech that declare ‘Warranty void if removed’ are complete nonsense, according to the US Federal Trade Commission, which argued such labels break consumer rights laws Homeless HomePod Despite touting excellent sound quality and a pleasing design, Apple has struggled to sell its HomePod, flogging fewer than 10 a day in some stores PC sales Shipments of desktops and laptops have slumped for the 14th quarter in a row, although the likes of HP, Lenovo and Dell are still flogging plenty of machines, meaning the PC is still a long way from kicking the bucket Russian snoopers Russia blocked access to secure messaging app Telegram after the firm refused to provide message decryption keys to Russia’s FSB security service, thwarting Moscow’s desire to monitor electronic communications…

£1,599 •From www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk VERDICT The Infinity X88 GTX isn’t just one of the most powerful gaming systems we’ve tested, it’s one of the best value DON’T LOOK TOO closely for similarities between this new high-end gaming PC and the existing Infinity X88 Elite. Other than sharing a processor – the hexa-core Intel Core i7-8700K – there’s little reason to compare that £1,099 system with the far more luxurious Infinity X88 GTX. The most significant departure, especially performance-wise, is the inclusion of MSI’s custom GeForce GTX 1080 Aero OC graphics card. This 8GB beast of a GPU has had its base clock speed increased from 1,607MHz to 1,632MHz, as well as its maximum boost speed upped from 1,733MHz to 1,771MHz – and this overclocking sets the tone for the rest of…

£329 • From nest.com/uk VERDICT A super-smart, well-designed outdoor camera with excellent image quality – but it’s expensive THE NEST CAM IQ (Shopper 363), with its fancy 4K sensor and facial recognition, proved to be the best-quality and smartest security camera we’ve tested. Now, the company is back with the same tricks, this time in an outdoor model. Nest first joined the outdoor security market with the neat Nest Cam Outdoor (Shopper 363), which was the easiest external camera we’ve ever installed. Thanks to its magnetic mount and use of an outdoor power socket, the Cam Outdoor could be installed in a matter of minutes; unfortunately, this also made it easier to tamper with or steal. With the Cam IQ Outdoor, Nest has made the camera harder for thieves to…

£285 • From store.canon.co.uk VERDICT The Pixma G4510 is a good-value MFP with refillable ink tanks – just make sure you’re not in a hurry INK CARTRIDGES ARE expensive, but until now the only alternative has been risking third-party refills, or buying one of Epson’s EcoTank range. Step up Canon’s Pixma G4510, one of a small range of refillable ink tank multifunction peripherals (MFPs) now launched in the UK. Like Epson’s EcoTank ET-4750 (Shopper 361), the G4510 competes with home office MFPs around the £80-100 mark. It costs significantly more up-front, but cheaper ink means it will cost less in the long run – if you use it enough. The G4510 looks to have most office tasks covered. You can connect it to a wireless network, make unattended copies with…

£2,199 • From www.cramptonandmoore.co.uk VERDICT It doesn’t come cheap, but this 55in TV delivers premium styling, great sound and gorgeous OLED images OUTSIDE OF GERMANY, Loewe is not a well-known TV brand. And even those that have heard of the company probably aren’t aware that it has the biggest range of OLED TVs save for LG: there’s the bild 9 designer TV, the bild 7 with a motorised stand, the bild 5, the bild 4, and the bild 3.55, the 55in model of which we’re reviewing here. While it sits at the bottom of Loewe family, the bild 3.55 touts all the headline features you’d expect at the rather considerable price. It has a UHD resolution, HDR support for the open-standard HDR10, broadcast HLG (Hybrid Log-Gamma) and Dolby Vision formats,…

£550 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The P20 is attractive and generally competent, but its much-vaunted camera is a big letdown RELAX, HUAWEI FANS, you haven’t just slept through a decade. Rather than following up the rather excellent Huawei P10 (Shopper 354) with the P11 through P19, the Chinese giant has instead opted to cut to the chase and just bring out the P20 and P20 Pro. We’ll cover the P20 Pro in a future issue, but for now let’s look at the standard P20: specifically, its iPhone X-style screen notch at the top of the display. It’s as wide as its Apple equivalent, occupying about a fifth of the screen’s width, but it’s there and noticeable. If you don’t like it, there’s a switch in the settings you can press…

01 A basic laptop costing around £300 will run everyday office, multimedia and education software, but it won’t be suitable for 3D gaming or processor-intensive tasks such as video editing. Many laptops at this price have a 15.4in screen and weigh around 2.4kg, so they’re best used around the house and for occasional journeys. 02 If you want to play modern games, you’ll need a laptop with a dedicated graphics chip such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060M. Good gaming laptops tend to have large 17in screens and weigh around 3kg, so they’re best suited to use at home. 03 If you want a laptop that you can take everywhere, look for a model that weighs less than 2kg. For the best portability, buy one that has an 11in or…

01 If you’re ready to step beyond the basic controls of a compact camera, or you want greater flexibility than an ultra-zoom can offer, a compact system camera (CSC) is the next logical upgrade. With interchangeable lenses, manual controls and stellar image quality, these cameras give proper digital SLRs a run for their money. 02 There are three competing types of CSC mount, and the one you buy determines the number of compatible lenses and accessories you have available. Samsung’s NX-mount is arguably the most limited in terms of lens selection, and the company has confirmed that it’s shutting down its European camera business, so it’s best to avoid these altogether if possible. Sony’s E-Mount has a slightly wider range, but Micro Four Thirds offers the widest variety. Both Panasonic…

01 Bluetooth speakers come in all shapes and sizes, so you’ll need to decide what you want to do with the speaker before you buy. If you don’t plan to take your music outdoors or around the house, look for a wired speaker. These are typically cheaper than speakers with built-in batteries. If you do want a portable speaker, however, pay particular attention to how much it weighs. Ruggedised models should be able to survive accidental drops, water spills and unexpected rain showers. 02 Many of the cheapest Bluetooth speakers use the lossy A2DP Bluetooth protocol, which is prone to compressing your music and discarding detail compared with the original recording. It’s hard to tell the difference when listening to pocket-sized speakers, but if you’re looking for a speaker to…

01 A smart thermostat can save you a lot of money by intelligently controlling your heating. Most smart heating devices are designed to be used with hot water central heating systems, with the boiler directly controlled by the system. These typically require a relay to be wired into your boiler, with a wireless thermostat giving you direct control. Smartphone apps then tie into the system to give you remote control. While it’s possible to fit controls yourself, you may want to pay an experienced plumber to do the job: expect to pay around £150 for a typical installation. If you have electric heating, there are very few choices, and the big names (Nest, Honeywell and so on) do not directly support these systems. 02 Want smart hot water control? If…

01 A basic 1TB internal hard disk should cost around £40. This will be fast enough for general use and will provide enough storage for most users. Make sure the hard disk you choose has the appropriate interface type for your PC. Some mechanical hard disks still come with SATA2 interfaces, but newer models and most solid-state drives (SSDs) have faster SATA3 interfaces. You’ll need a motherboard with a SATA3 port if you want to benefit from SATA3’s faster speeds; SATA3 disks will work with SATA2 ports but can only transfer files at SATA2 speeds. 02 SSDs can make the most of SATA3’s extra bandwidth for fast file transfers. They use flash memory similar to that found in USB flash drives, and although they tend to provide less capacity than…

INTEL Z370 This is the ‘premium’ chipset for Intel’s 8th-gen Coffee Lake processors. Its main benefit is that it supports overclocking for both compatible processors and for DDR4 memory. On that quality alone, it’s the one to aim for if you get an overclockable K-series chip such as the Core i7-8700K. It also provides more PCI-E lanes, which basically means you can have more slots on the motherboard to run additional graphics cards, Wi-Fi cards and sound cards. INTEL B360 B360 motherboards are compatible with the same chips as Z370 boards, but they don’t support CPU and RAM overclocking, have half the chipset-provided PCI-E lanes and don’t allow for storage drives to be configured in RAID. Why choose a B360 motherboard, then? Well, for starters, they’re cheaper, and since not…

£116 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT Don’t care for overclocking? This B360 board will do almost anything else you could ask for WHILE THIS MOTHERBOARD uses the B360 chipset, Intel’s cheaper but not quite entry-level alternative to Z370, it’s not what you’d call a budget product, especially when other B360 models can be found for up to £40 less. Nevertheless, the ROG Strix B360-F Gaming brings with it a fair few goodies of the kind that could make it worth stretching a bit further for. It’s a full-size ATX board, and Asus hasn’t let any of that extra space go to waste. In addition to two PCI-E x16 slots (which support two-way AMD CrossFire, but not Nvidia SLI), you get a healthy four PCI-E x1 slots, not to mention a full…

£207 • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT It’s not the overclocking champion we hoped for, but few motherboards can top the ROG Crosshair VI Hero’s features and connectivity LIKE AN AMD equivalent of ASRock’s Z370 Taichi, the ROG Crosshair VI Hero occupies the space between mid-range affordability and high-end flexibility. Like most Asus ROG hardware, this leans towards the luxury side of things, but in this case that means more connectivity and more PC upgrade potential. Take, for example, the cooling support. A healthy total of seven 4-pin headers are included, including separate CPU cooler and all-in-one watercooling pump connectors. For cases with plenty of space for adding 120mm and 140mm fans, this motherboard will serve well even without the use of splitter cables. At the very high end, one advantage of…

Send your problems to help@computershopper.co.uk No syncing feeling I use Chrome across several devices: a Windows 10 PC, my Android phone and a Chromebook I use when travelling. Everything is set to synchronise, and my bookmarks do just that, but from any one device I can see only some recently closed tabs from my other devices, not their full browsing history. Right now I’m in a hotel and I need to find a couple of pages I was viewing on my PC one day last week, but they don’t appear in my History on the Chromebook. Why isn’t my full browsing history synchronising across all three devices? Emily Nelson There are a couple of possible reasons for this. We’ve heard of cases where Chrome spontaneously stops synchronising successfully between devices,…

ben@computershopper.co.uk HOME VIDEO PRODUCTION used to be a niche interest, usually conducted by gadget enthusiasts, and watched by friends and family with an air of long-suffering patience. The problem was that, unlike a set of photos, videos play at a fixed speed, and most home videos were too long to hold the viewer’s interest. Computers provided a breakthrough, making it easy to pick only the best clips and put them together into an edited video. Video-sharing sites such as YouTube meant that the creator could send a link via email, and recipients could happily watch the whole thing, give up halfway through or skip to the end without fear of upsetting anyone. The rise of social media and the ubiquity of smartphone cameras have moved the concept of home videos…