Table of contents for May 2024 in Maximum PC

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THE EUROPEAN UNION has a piece of legislation called the Digital Markets Act, aiming to address the practices of large online companies, the so-called ‘gatekeepers’. If you qualify as one, you must comply with a set of rules and obligations. You can guess who qualifies: Alphabet, Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, and ByteDance, the Chinese firm behind TikTok. Five instances of non-compliance form the opening salvo. Apple and Alphabet are claimed to not allow apps to freely communicate, steering people away from alternatives. Apple isn’t giving enough choice of apps, specifically a browser choice. Meta is making people pay to avoid ads, and Google is pushing its own goods and services over rivals. The punishment for non-compliance is a fine of up to ten per cent of the company’s turnover—this can…

WIRELESS GAMING KEYBOARDS offer a degree of flexibility and freedom that you just don’t get with a regular wired keyboard. Freeing your keyboard from the chains of its cable means that you’ll have the option to use it wherever you like, from your lap to the sofa and beyond—within range, at least. There’s plenty to consider, from that very range and battery life to weight, build quality, programmability, and keystroke feel. Here are our five favorites. 5 STEELSERIES APEX PRO TKL WIRELESS We recommend this for its compact frame and competitive gaming edge. That’s because this SteelSeries board comes with magnetic OmniPoint 2.0 switches, which allow the user to set the actuation point of each switch anywhere between 0.2–3.8mm via the SteelSeries software. If you have your keys set to…

ALRIGHT, you can probably tell by this point that we’re in love with this build. In fact, what you can achieve with this chassis is nothing short of epic. From a building standpoint, although it does lack the cable-management finesse we’re perhaps more used to in the modern era, that rotated motherboard design and thermal channel, mixed with the absolutely insane amount of fans that we managed to install into it, made it a joy to work in. Combine that with the insane level of internal space to play with, and the surprisingly small footprint it takes up on a desk, and it’s a remarkable piece of tech. We did have issues, of course. That front panel and those pins were certainly among them, and the cable management quandaries with…

Quantum tunneling has been a headache for Moore’s Law enthusiasts for some time now, particularly in regard to processors and transistor size. In a very simplified explanation, how a transistor works (effectively flipping from 0 to 1) is that a current passes through a gate (an insulating material, or semiconducting material, in our case, silicon) that is heated up via a secondary current. As it heats up, the resistance decreases and the primary current can pass through switching that transistor from 0 (no current passing through) to 1 (current passing through). The problem, however, is that once you get to such small transistor sizes, electrons can effectively jump through the semiconducting gate, without that gate being opened by any secondary current. That’s called quantum tunneling, and as you can imagine, creates…

We can’t talk about liquid cooling without mentioning the Danish company Asetek, either. Founded in 1997 by André Eriksen, the company specializes in a mix of data-center and desktop-cooling solutions. It famously patented the first OEM AIO pump design back in 2003, effectively meaning any manufacturer that attached a pump or impeller to a CPU block would have to pay royalties or find a different solution under EP 771 (European) or US patent 517924 P (with several others). Asetek has sued multiple manufacturers over the years for infringement of that patent, most famously losing to Cooler Master in 2017 in the Netherlands, and CoolIT in 2022. Interestingly, the patent looks to be expiring in 2025, meaning we may very well see a spate of new pump designs in the years to…

WE COULD spend another six pages explaining the finer details on how to build the perfect liquid-cooled PC from start to finish, but as we’re saving that for a future Dream Machine in an upcoming issue, we’re going to give you the best crash-course advice we can on how to get yourself going on your own liquid-cooled adventure. Let’s face it: there are a fair few more considerations that need to be made before committing to the fully custom liquid-cooled build. These include what you’re cooling, how you’re cooling it, what components and case you’re using, and even styling choices need to be planned well in advance—not to mention what your budget is. At first glance, It can be quite daunting, so let’s break this down into steps to make…

CHATGPT, CHATGPT PLUS, CHATGPT TEAM PRICE ChatGPT, free; ChatGPT Plus, $20 per month; ChatGPT Team, $30 per month from chat.openai.com Plain old ChatGPT is starting to look both old and plain, relying as it does on GPT-3.5 and—unless you download the iOS and Android apps—the stark web interface. Nor does it offer any way to create images. Where it wins compared to the free version of Copilot is that you get to keep your history, while there’s no limit on queries or interactions. Things get more interesting with ChatGPT Plus. The interface is the same, but you can create GPTs and connect with third-party services. That means it can do things such as plan holidays and make restaurant bookings. It’s also brilliant at analyzing data, making sense of complicated spreadsheets,…

EVERY MODERN GAMER knows that it’s hard to replicate the excitement we all felt as kids when we started playing videogames. True, many of these had rudimentary graphics and may have even had no network play, but who can forget the peculiar feeling of satisfaction that came with facing down the alien menace in Half-Life, armed only with a crowbar? What modern game can even come close to the joy of ‘insult sword fighting’ in The Secret of Monkey Island? As modern hardware evolves and 64-bit systems become more commonplace, it’s actually getting harder to run titles like these out of the box. Modern hardware often lacks optical disk drives, and original game cartridges for older consoles like the NES and SNES are selling for ridiculous amounts. In this guide, we’ll…

1. RETROARCH LAUNCHER RetroArch serves as a frontend to multiple emulators. While running, you can download multiple ‘cores’ to run titles from various systems. These will then be accessible via the main menu. 2. GAME WINDOW When ‘content’, i.e. a game, is loaded, it will play automatically in the main window. There are also various hotkeys, such as F2 and F4, to save and load game states. 3. FILE MENU RetroArch users can access new cores and content from the main menu. Once these are installed, however, the ‘File’ menu can be used to load a new ‘core’ (system) or ‘content’ (game). 4. COMMAND MENU This menu contains basic options such as pausing and restarting the game. From here, users can also configure audio and disk options, as well as…

If you’re running Windows 11, depending on your hardware, you can enhance gaming performance through Auto HDR (Auto High Dynamic Range). In theory, this can improve the image and video quality of SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) in games to HDR. To get started, type ‘HDR’ into the Windows search bar, and choose ‘Use HDR settings’. Here, you can discover if your hardware supports HDR. If so, you can activate various options by selecting the corresponding rocker switch, such as ‘HDR Video Streaming’. You can play the sample clip in the top left of the window to view how video will look with your chosen settings. It can also be accessed via the Gaming Bar. Hold Windows + G to launch, then click the settings icon in the top right. Choose…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PODMAN You can install this natively in Linux or through WSL in Windows. For a beginner’s guide to Podman, see the February 2024 issue. A COUPLE OF ISSUES AGO, we introduced you to a new, more secure way of running containerized apps on your PC: Podman. However, while Podman is designed to work with Docker containers, the way it functions means they’re not 100 percent compatible—at least in their native form. That’s down to two primary reasons: the first is that Podman runs under your own user account to provide containers with ‘rootless’ access to your system, and the second is that containers are set up to run independently instead of through an additional Docker daemon process. Rootless access prevents containers from being given the keys to…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 11 An up to date installation. (Optional) 8GB USB stick for clean install THERE’S NOTHING QUITE as annoying as booting up your brand new Windows 11 PC for the first time, only to find that it’s crawling to a snail’s pace due to the presence of bloatware. Common culprits include ‘registration’ programs from your machine manufacturer, as well as trial versions of antivirus and backup programs. Your OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) may want you to use their proprietary apps or ones that they’ve been paid to preinstall, but this isn’t necessarily best for your machine. Bloatware consumes system resources, and can even pose a security risk due to undisclosed bugs. In this guide, you’ll learn how to go through your Windows 11 device and list apps,…

AMD’S UPSCALING TECH, FidelityFX Super Resolution, has reached version 3.1, and is now in the hands of the developers. First to use it is Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, with an update in July. The big change is the decoupling of FSR from FMF (Fluid Motion Frames). You can play without upscaling and keep frame generation, or use Nvidia or Intel’s upscaling tech with FMF, even on non-AMD cards. We’re also promised less shimmer around objects, reduced ghosting, and better detail preservation. The next step for FSR is rumored to be switching to an AI-powered system. AMD is alone in not using AI hardware here. This means that FSR works on older cards, but leaves a lot of power on the table with newer silicon. AMD’s chief technical officer said…

APPLE IS WORTH $2.5 trillion, and has weathered many challenges, but the latest legal assault looks to have weight behind it. The Department of Justice, working with 16 state and district attorney generals, has filed an anti-trust case that claims it uses its dominance of the smartphone market to control it. The case cites section two of the Sherman anti-trust act, the federal law that limits the power of monopolies. Among the areas of (alleged) abuse are using the app review process to stifle potential rivals, making it difficult to connect non-Apple smart watches to an iPhone, blocking access to Apple Pay, blocking ‘super apps’, and using green bubbles to stigmatize messages that aren’t from another iPhone. Essentially, it calls out the ways Apple keeps others out of the lucrative…

CPU INTEL CORE i9-14900K Intel’s Core i9-14900K might be one of the hottest chips around (seriously, we’ve not actually seen this thing not run at 100C under full load), but it’s one of the fastest. With eight performance cores, 16 threads, 16 efficient cores, and 36MB of smart-cache, this insane little number will quite happily crank itself up to 6 GHz, depending on workloads, and rip-roar through any task you throw at it. It unequivocally dominates the gaming scene right now, and although it isn’t exactly the best value option out there, if you’re after the ultimate performance on a mainstream platform, then the 14900K is the chip to beat. $540, www.intel.com Motherboard NZXT N7 Z790X It might be on the ‘cheaper’ end of the Z790 spectrum, but this motherboard hits the…

NOW WE GET to the pain. The frustration of finding out only after the fact that your motherboard doesn’t actually support M.2 PCIe 5.0 is frustrating. Always read the fine print. It makes it doubly worse, as we’re using two PCIe 5.0 drives, not just a singular drive in this build. That said, it’s not all doom and gloom, as those sequential numbers are still remarkably high. Additionally, the big advantage we have is that this build is predominantly designed with gaming in mind. The reason we picked those drives was because the Random 4K performance, particularly on single-thread, is considerably higher than that of the competition available for PCIe 4.0, and lo and behold, under scrutiny these things absolutely rip through our random 4K results. Although we can’t include…

WE OFTEN DESCRIBE PC building as Lego for adults. For the most part, modern systems are incredibly easy to construct. There are, of course, certain pitfalls that you can encounter, but most of it comes down to cable management, clearances, and hardware compatibility. Graphics cards, CPUs, DDR memory, M.2 SSDs, and even the very connectors that power them, are designed to make the build process as simple as possible. Even modern cases encourage users to build their rigs in a certain way to avoid the pitfalls and errors that used to be commonplace. On the one hand, this makes our hobby incredibly accessible. There’s room for refinement, of course—cabletidying tricks, design choices, hardware combos—but at its core, it’s an enjoyable recreational pastime that with enough knowledge is fairly easy to…

As for coolant, the development in this field has been a mix of two different angles. It’s well known that one of the most efficient coolants out there, particularly for DIY customers, has been deionized or distilled water. Certain refrigerants are available, but these are typically reserved for top-tier enterprise-grade machines that require significantly greater thermal capacity than with the likes of any consumer PC. Because de-ionized water is so readily available and affordable with such high thermal conductivity, the need for any advanced coolant, at least in the DIY PC space, has been fairly minimal. For the longest time, Mayhems, a British company, set up by a slightly eccentric ex-army officer called Michael Wood, was the go-to brand for any would-be liquid cooler. The company famously developed its Aurora…

Depending on your loop configuration, you can configure it so two tubes will run coolant to and from your components. For instance, you could run a pump reservoir to your GPU, up into your CPU, back down into your GPU, and into the radiator. This is what’s known as a parallel setup. It’s less efficient at cooling your CPU, but typically only if your coolant isn’t moving fast enough around your loop as that heat builds up around your CPU. Due to the fact that the loop itself is pressurized, and as long as the speeds the coolant is flowing at are fairly high, temperature in the coolant should remain fairly consistent. Still, if you don’t want to run your pump at high speeds, we highly recommend running a serial…

When Microsoft announced the general availability of Copilot for Microsoft 365 in January, it also removed all limitations on rollout sizes. Up until that point, you needed to commit to 300 seats for a minimum of a year. At $30 exc VAT per user per month—on top of the cost of Office 365 itself, which is a minimum of $23 exc VAT per user per month for the E3 version—that added up to a $108,000 investment over the course of a year. Minimum. The sweetener to that deal is that companies received direct support from Microsoft via its FastTrack experts. Now, that offer extends to companies with 150 paid-for Office 365 (or Microsoft 365) licences—if, that is, you fulfil four other criteria. The first is easy: you must already use…

TIP OF THE MONTH DESKTOP ICONS Ever needed to get rid of your fixed desktop icons, or add them back in? Did you download Minibin because you just hate that Recycling Bin icon on your desktop? Click the Start menu, type ‘Themes and Related Settings’, then click ‘Desktop icon settings’. From there, you can enable or disable whichever desktop icons you want. KEEPING PACE Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we use our hardware, and how certain categories of components are becoming almost superfluous in their performance improvements. Even if you 3D render, edit videos, or do anything related to data analysis, the majority of your time is still going to be spent not doing those heavy-load things. For the bulk of our operations, the current speed and performance we…

1. CPU This element determines the CPU usage of the game in question. By default, the Xbox Game Bar also displays this in a line graph to the right. 2. GPU AND VRAM The GPU metric naturally measures how much video processing power it is using (if any). VRAM simply represents how much video memory the graphics card itself is currently consuming. 3. FPS The higher the FPS (fames per second), the smoother a game will look. The display graph can be configured to show average FPS over the past 60 seconds—helpful for checking optimizations. 4. SETTINGS Use the XBox Game Bar settings to change configurations. Once opened, click into ‘Gaming Features’ to enable both ‘Use HDR’ and ‘Use Auto HDR with supported games’. 5. CAPTURE The Xbox Game bar…

1. FILTER CONTAINERS Cockpit’s podman plugin displays all running containers regardless of which account launched them by default. Use the drop-down menu and keyword filter to create customized views. 2. IMAGES Click ‘Show images’ to view all downloaded images—including those not currently being used. Click ‘Create container’ next to one to set up a container from it. 3. CONTAINER DETAILS Click > next to a container to reveal more information, plus gain access to both system logs (for troubleshooting) and a console for directly interacting with the container. 4. SYSTEM RESOURCES Each container reveals which user account is running it, as well as its CPU and RAM usage. This updates in real time to help you identify resource hogs. 5. CONTAINER ACTIONS Click the tricolon to reveal a menu from…

YOU’LL NEED THIS NVIDIA RTX 3060TI GRAPHICS CARD or better RTX Remix software Retro game library A lot of patience WE’VE SEEN PLENTY of remastered or modded games recently that have updated the textures and even patched ray tracing into older titles. The RTX versions of Quake II and Portal are some of the best examples, as they were created by professional studios that know what they’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, or just want to have a go because taking games apart to see how they work is interesting, Nvidia has released a beta version of RTX Remix that can do just that. It’s time-consuming, fiddly, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually get results. However, in so many ways, it’s the perfect pastime for PC…

SSDS ARE, on the surface, quite boring. They don’t have the graphical fidelity of a GPU, they can’t render 4K video files, or act as the beating heart of your machine like a CPU, and they aren’t as critical to your system’s operations as RAM. In fact, you can get away without using one of them at all. A simple HDD will allow you to run a machine and do all of those things you know and love, just more slowly. So why have we’ve got so excited over this drive? Surely, at its heart it’s just another boring SSD with slightly better sequentials, right? Well, yes, but also no. Kingston has produced some fantastic drives, but in the world of cutting edge PCIe 5.0 storage and other marketing buzzwords,…

VALVE HAS COMBINED its Steam Family View and Family Sharing features into Steam Families. It lets you add up to five others to your Steam Family who have access to ‘shareable’ titles in your game library, and you to theirs. Each member gets their own saved games and set of Steam achievements, though not all games can be shared due to ‘technical or other reasons’. The biggest issue with the previous system has been fixed—if somebody was playing a game from your library, nothing else could be played from it. Now, all members can play games from any member’s library at once. There is also a new set of parental controls, including limiting playtime. To prevent hopping between multiple families, there is a one-year wait before you can join another…

The mid-cycle refresh H200 has just started shipping. This means it’s time for Nvidia to reveal its post-Hopper data center GPU plans. Meet Blackwell. As we mentioned on page 8, the work of its namesake, David Blackwell, has had an impact on the research and development of artificial intelligence. That’s fitting, considering the new GB200 GPU is set to power the next generation of massive AI supercomputers. Nvidia hasn’t spilled all the beans, so we don’t know the die size or number of processing units. However, we know that Blackwell has 208 billion transistors, and will be built on TSMC’s N4P 4nm node. We say ‘combined’, because the Maxwell GPU is composed of two die, linked together via a new Nvidia High Bandwidth Interface (NV-HBI). The maximum die size of…

> StopCrypt fears > Tiny server build > Backup bandwidth Keep ransomware at bay I’ve just read up on a new piece of ransomware that can evade detection and is aimed at consumer users. How can we protect ourselves from it? —Samuel B Marshall THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: The ransomware you talk of is actually a variant of an existing form: StopCrypt. It has cleverly evolved to take a softly, softly approach to bypassing security measures, employing multiple delayed stages of execution to sneak on to a system before infecting it. StopCrypt doesn’t generate the same level of media attention (surprise, surprise) because it doesn’t involve huge sums of money being extorted from businesses. Instead, it focuses on us mere mortals, looking to extort hundreds of dollars in return for providing…

WELL, that wraps up our in-depth look at Nvidia’s Super series cards: three builds, each with a unique GPU at their heart, and each GPU in turn unique in its strategic approach. Without a doubt, these three cards are exactly that—unique in how they’ve been applied. Given its market-share dominance currently (Nvidia GPUs account for 76.92 percent of all GPUs, according to Steam), Team Green has had the opportunity to try out new strategies and techniques like this to see what boosts sales, and what doesn’t. Each card went about its debut in a very different way, despite launching at similar times. The RTX 4070 Super, on the one hand, had a huge internal hardware bump, bringing it far closer in performance to the older 4070 Ti, but at the…

FOR AS LONG AS there have been computers, cooling has been a problem, particularly as CPUs have continually increased their transistor density, clock speed, and power draw. In the early 1950s, machines like the UNIVAC1 and IBM’s System 360 famously utilized liquid cooling to alleviate the excess heat build-up in their machines. In fact, IBM saw that this problem was only going to get worse all the way back in 1965, and invested heavily in researching solutions for the issue, developing its own ‘Thermal Conduction Module’, which acted as a rudimentary water block, built with thermal pins surrounded by helium gas to accelerate heat transference into the block and away from their machines. Most famously, the Cray-1 was also one of the first to use a liquid-cooling-esque style solution, utilizing…

AH, MICROSOFT. How we love your ability to create world-dominating software with one hand and sow world-beating confusion with the other. In January, finally, it announced that Copilot for Office was available for all. Except, this being Microsoft, calling it Copilot for Office would be too simple. Instead, we now have the free Copilot, Copilot Pro, and Copilot for Microsoft 365 (and Windows Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and a trio of Sales, Service, and Security Copilots, but let’s ignore these distractions). Now, vanilla Copilot has nothing to do with Office. It’s the successor to Bing Chat and, unless you choose to download the Copilot apps for iOS and Android, you’ll access it via the web. As it’s based on GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo, though, it remains a powerful tool, especially considering…

YOU’LL NEED THIS Stable internet connection (Optional) gaming mouse THERE’S NO BETTER WAY to experience gaming than on a dedicated PC with a high-end graphics card, liquid cooling system and RAM to spare. Still, even the very best hardware can have issues running the latest games. You may find that textures don’t live up to the promise of those 4K YouTube previews. Gameplay itself sometimes can be glitchy or the controls don’t respond in the way you want them to. Such bugs can often be patched simply by updating the game itself. Even when a game seems to be operating at peak performance, though, you want to know that it and your operating system are making the very best use of the hardware available. In this guide, you’ll discover how…

The Xbox Game Bar can be a useful overlay for gamers, allowing you to view performance metrics and tweak settings like Auto HDR support. If you’re as trigger happy as we are at Maximum PC, however, there’s always a danger that you’ll accidentally activate the Game Bar at an inconvenient time. To remove the Xbox Game Bar altogether, type ‘Terminal’ into the Windows search bar and click on ‘Windows Terminal’. From here, enter the command: Get-AppxPackage Microsoft. XboxGamingOverlay | Remove-AppxPackage If you’re looking for an alternative overlay, there are a number of options, including Razer Cortex (pictured), which contains a number of enhancements for game performance. These include disabling CPU ‘Sleep Mode’, clearing the RAM of non-essential programs besides the game itself, and pausing programs and services. If you want…

YOU’VE HEARD IT all before about Arm assimilating the PC at the expense of traditional x86 CPUs, but this time it might actually be happening. We’re just months away from the first laptop PCs with the new Snapdragon X Elite chip, and Qualcomm is ramping up its marketing efforts. Qualcomm reckons the chip has the measure of the best Intel and AMD CPUs for thin and light notebooks when it comes to both performance and efficiency. Even by Qualcomm’s own numbers, Apple’s latest M3 chip probably has the edge, but the performance and efficiency proposition looks promising. The catch will be software support. Here, Qualcomm is again making big claims about the near-native performance of legacy x86 software running in emulation on Windows for Arm and the new Snapdragon X…

A DO-EVERYTHING keyboard for a price you can afford—that’s the idea behind the new NZXT Function 2. For starters, it features dual-actuation, and a choice between a light and responsive 1.0mm key actuation or a solid and full 1.5mm. This may not sound too extravagant, nor is it the first gaming keyboard to offer this, but it can entirely change the sound and feel of the board, which is handy when switching between work and play. Next up, there’s the 8,000Hz polling rate—something rarely seen on a gaming keyboard, especially one selling under $150. That’s the kind of number you might expect from a high-end mouse, but not a keyboard, where 1,000Hz is more typical. What’s more, included in the box is not only a keycap removal tool, but also…

I FINISHED Dragon’s Dogma 2 at 7am after an all-nighter. I should have gone to bed. I could barely keep my eyes open. But I did not go to bed. Instead, I immediately started a new game, resetting the story, but keeping most of my items and all of my levels. I then proceeded to play for five more hours before I literally passed out. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is glorious, thrilling, accidentally hilarious, frustrating, and maddening—literally all the adjectives. It’s one of the very best RPGs, as well as being a huge pain in the behind, and then some. You are the Arisen, a soldier killed by a dragon, returned to life despite the absence of a heart. Whenever the dragon appears, a new Arisen also shows up, their fates intertwined.…

ADOBE Photoshop and GIMP have some very similar features: they’re both raster image editors. Both programs also support virtually every image editing feature you’re ever likely to need, including selection editing, layers, alpha channels, scripting, retouching, resizing, HDR, noise removal, and much more. Photoshop is now a proprietary paid SaaS (software as a service) product. It’s used by millions of professional graphic designers every day. In fact, the software has become so ubiquitous that the verb ‘to photoshop’ was even added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2008, though the first use of the term was in a Usenet group in 1992, two years after the software was first released. GIMP’s initial public release was in 1996. Although the name was originally an acronym for ‘General Image Manipulation Program’, after meeting…