Table of contents for Holiday 2024 in Maximum PC

IT MAY BE GREEN on the cover of this issue in honor of the colorful Geometric Future Model 5, but inside these pages, it’s very blue. That’s both a reference to Intel’s corporate color, with the new Core Ultra chips leading our cover build and the reviews section, but also the sense of malaise that’s greeted this new generation of CPUs. Judged in isolation, Intel’s new chips are powerful and very efficient. But when you stack them up against the previous 14th-gen chips, which are more powerful and a lot less expensive than their upgrades, they’re quite difficult to recommend. As Zak says in the conclusion to his build, the construction of these chips is a huge overhaul for Intel—handing manufacturing mostly over to TSMC, moving to a 3nm node,…

IN A POST ON CHINESE SOCIAL MEDIA site Weibo, hardware leaker Golden Pig has claimed that Intel’s new line of ‘Battlemage’ GPUs will be released in December. If true, this means that the GPUs will arrive ahead of Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series. From a marketing perspective, releasing the Battlemage series around the Black Friday sales makes sense. This would also give Intel a clear runway before any new announcements from competitors at the upcoming CES trade show in January 2025. The rumors seem to indicate that Battlemage GPUs will offer comparable performance to mid-range cards like NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4070. Though Golden Pig has made accurate predictions before, a 2024 release of the Battlemage series has been teased for some time. Back in June, Intel even announced that its Xe2…

IN A NOSTALGIC stop-motion video released in late-October, Apple showcased its latest Mac Mini offering, describing it as “five by five inches of pure power and purpose.” This is the first major redesign of the miniature PC since 2010. The latest offering is less than half the size of previous models, with a height of two inches and a weight of 1.5lb. The M4 chip is a 10-core CPU and GPU. The base model starts with 16GB of unified memory, presumably to better handle AI-intensive tasks. The asking price is $599, which also includes a rather miniscule 256GB SSD. The port configuration along the back of the unit is similar to the Mac Mini 2. There are three Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with an HDMI and Gigabit Ethernet port. Unlike…

Allegedly, Nvidia is plotting Arm chips engineered in partnership with MediaTek and fully custom in-house designs. It’s the version aimed at consumer PCs that will supposedly be pure Nvidia, while MediaTek will partner with Nvidia to create another Arm-based SoC for enterprise customers. The enterprise chip probably needs 5G connectivity built in, hence the MediaTek tie-up. MediaTek is one of very few outfits capable of building 5G into an SoC, but the consumer PC chip, probably for laptops, maybe for handhelds or even desktops, doesn’t have that requirement, giving Nvidia a free hand to design it exactly how it wants. Anyway, precisely where in the market Nvidia will pitch its this Arm-based newcomer isn’t clear. But surely it will lean heavily into Nvidia’s utterly dominant graphics technology. After all, if…

You might be wondering, “Maximum PC, why do you always choose two SSDs for your builds? Surely it’s better to get a single drive and partition it?” We’re going to cover this in more detail in the next issue when we take you through our ultimate Windows 11 install guide, but we do this for a few reasons. First, it allows us to simplify our install and file directory processes. The premise is straightforward: install your operating system on your fastest drive. Ideally, you want an SSD with super-quick sequentials and solid random 4K reads and writes, as this is mostly how we’re going to be utilizing files. Our secondary drive is going to be dedicated to games, media, and other programs. In this environment, sequential performance is less important, and…

THIS MIGHT BE—at least right now—the world’s most ridiculous laptop. It is insane—absolutely beyond comprehension. To put it bluntly, it starts at $5,500 just to get your foot in the door. To max out the spec, the price can go as high as $9,500. That’s just insanity in an 18-inch form factor. Why the big cost? Simply put, MSI has crammed every single element it can into this thing. It’s got an Intel Core i9- 14900HX processor—basically the same as the desktop equivalent, minus 200Hz. There’s a full-fat RTX 4090 driving graphics performance, 64GB of DDR5 supporting it (which you can max out 192GB, if you so desire), and 4TB of PCIe 4.0 storage (with capacity for up to 24TB if you go for the ridiculous edition), all backed up by…

YOU’LL NEED THIS INTERNAL WIRELESS CARD ETHERNET CONNECTION WI-FI 6 USB WIRELESS ADAPTER (Optional) BLUETOOTH 5.0 ADAPTER (Optional) IF YOUR WINDOWS 11 device has an existing Wi-Fi, cellular, or Ethernet internet connection, you can share this wirelessly via Windows’ Mobile Hotspot. This is particularly useful if you’re in a situation where the Wi-Fi card antenna in your laptop or PC can connect to the network without issue, but other devices, like cellphones, struggle to maintain a strong signal. In this case, you can generate a mobile hotspot to which other nearby devices can connect and take advantage of your Windows device’s stronger internet connection. If your Windows machine connects directly via Ethernet, but has an internal wireless card, you can use the Mobile Motspot feature to generate a wireless network to…

$1,100 FOR a 1440p panel? Really? Yes, really. May we present the INZONE M10S, Sony’s foray into the 27-inch gaming OLED segment. This monitor adopts stratospheric market positioning courtesy of the same LG-sourced 480Hz WOLED panel as the Asus ROG Swift PG27AQDP. It’s the latest OLED technology from LG with Micro Lens Array enhancement. It’s as bright as they come, with 275 nit full-screen SDR and up to 1,300 nits HDR. Other specifications are as you would expect from a cutting-edge OLED gaming screen. Color coverage comes in at 98.5 percent of DCI-P3, and the pixel response is rated at a ridiculously fleeting 0.03ms. Combined with that turbo-charged 480Hz refresh, you have the makings of a rather nippy gaming display. This is, of course, the point of the Sony INZONE M10S.…

WHAT AN ODD technological world we live in. It’s one of the perks of a new generation of processors that we inevitably get new chipsets as a result. No matter whether those processors are backward compatible or not, the fact is that we’ll almost always get a new range of motherboards to back them up. Seeing how each generation of board evolves and changes, and what connectivity is added or taken away, and of course the massive change in design aesthetics, is fascinating on many levels. For good folk like ourselves who dream of system builds almost nightly, how they look impacts our content plans and aspirations. There’s an excitement around it. Asus has pretty much always been at the top of the pile when it comes to top-quality motherboards.…

WE MAY HAVE SLIGHTLY teased this particular laptop in last month’s issue with our Acer Swift Go 14 review. If you’d glanced down that article’s benchmark sheet, there should have been one big figure that stood out to you perhaps more than most. Yep, we’re talking about the battery life on this little number, because, well, it’s absolutely insane. That’s not a typo; that’s not a benchmark testing error; no, it’s far more than that. It’s a score of over 26 hours in a battery benchmark test. To be more specific, the Swift 14 AI ran a continuous video loop at 50 percent screen brightness for over a day. It was so radically superior to every other test we’ve performed that we actually ran it multiple times, each test coming to…

LOOK, WE GET IT, nutrition and fitness is a bit left field for Maximum PC—it’s not something we often cover. That said, it’s an integral part of all our lives, and the better we look after ourselves, the more time we can spend in good health with our loved ones, doing the things we enjoy (namely, tinkering with PCs). Staying inside of healthy weight ranges is one of the best and most effective ways of reducing the risk of all-cause mortality. It’s almost at the level of being a complete panacea in a lot of measures. The science has come a long way in recent years, so much so that we now have a far better understanding of how human metabolism works, how hormones and genetics affect it, and how…

TRIUMPHS MASS EFFECT TV SHOW IN ‘ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT’ Details are scarce on Amazon’s adaptation, but Fast 9 writer Daniel Casey is on script duties. STEAM INTRODUCES GAME RECORDING FEATURES Background recording, quick replays, and ‘timeline-enhanced’ markers are now present. COPILOT PRO ADDED INTO MICROSOFT 365 Users no longer need to pay $20 for the add-on. TRAGEDIES GTA 6 FOR FALL 2025 Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two confirms only PS5 and Xbox Series S/X versions. MICROSOFT ACCUSED OF SLOWING DOWN CONTROL PANEL FEATURES This raises questions about Microsoft’s past practices. HACKER ALLEGEDLY STEALS FROM NOKIA Despite Nokia’s denials, threat actor ‘IntelBroker’ has offered source code for sale.…

RESEARCHERS AT BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY in the UK have declared the anti-cheat system in FPS Valorant as the most effective in the gaming industry. Codenamed ‘Vanguard’, the system has outperformed competitors like Fortnite and Team Fortress 2. Valorant’s most common cheats center on aimbots to improve firing accuracy. The game also is subject to ‘wallhacks’, whereby unscrupulous players can render surfaces transparent to give themselves an unfair advantage. Vanguard’s success is mostly down to the kernel-level driver, which runs automatically when the system boots. This allows for easier detection of more advanced forms of cheating, such as unauthorized mappings in kernel memory. However, it has raised privacy concerns, given that it can run constantly in the background. This said, if players install the latest Windows 11 security updates, it can be…

From the sidelines, Arrow Lake sounded like the more impressive design. Multi-tile chips leveraging a variety of manufacturing nodes, with a renewed focus on efficiency? Sounds great. Toss in the new Lion Cove performance cores and Skymont efficiency cores, and it felt like Intel’s race to lose. Putting stacked L3 cache on the chips has proven effective in boosting gaming performance, but otherwise, Zen 5 X3D didn’t sound that exciting. How wrong that line of thinking turned out to be. AMD reworked the 3D V-Cache to move the extra die under the main CPU die. This is critical, as the stacked cache acted as a blanket, trapping heat inside the processing cores and limiting top clocks and safe voltage ranges. With the cache under the chips, AMD delivers about a…

> Move to new PC > Temp files stuck > Mask email address Transfer legacy apps What is currently considered the best (and easiest) way to migrate programs, settings, and so on to a new PC? I built my last machine back in 2009. Through the years, it has updated from Windows 7 to Windows 11 (with some effort), but has reached its limits. I have some legacy programs that currently work fine, but trying to re-install may not be possible due to the fact that they were supplied on diskettes. Ideally, I’d like to build a brand new machine and clone my existing unit—is that possible? Happy to pay for software. —David Sollish THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: While it might be technically possible to clone your old hard drive and transfer…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 hours DIFFICULTY: Easy AH, a return to normality—sort of, anyway. This might be a new generation of Intel processors, with odd naming schemes and curious performance, but as far as the build process is concerned, very little has changed. It’s all down to the chassis at hand. That’s the real trick with these builds—no matter how you look at it, throughout custom PC building history (it’s a thing, we promise you), it’s the case that dictates all. It tells you what you can install, in what order, how best to route the cables, how to maximize the cooling potential you have, and what hardware to install without thermally throttling. So much of it is reliant on that big old box. It’s why Geometric’s chassis are so…

IN 1525, THE GERMAN PAINTER and engraver Albrecht Dürer pioneered a new method for creating art. It involved using a grid and a piece of string to accurately trace the movement of light from 3D surfaces onto the 2D plane of a canvas. Dürer correctly recognized that light travels in straight lines, so the string could represent the path of light from the image to the observer’s eye. The artist could then make a series of marks on the picture to represent areas of high and low contrast. This was one of the first documented ‘ray tracing’ techniques, whereby an artist tried to realistically portray how light interacts with objects in different ways to produce an image. Light doesn’t behave this way in the natural world. In reality, photons emanate…

YOU’LL NEED THIS CCLEANER Optional—download it from www.ccleaner.com A STABLE INTERNET CONNECTION MAXIMUM PC READERs will know that nothing quite compares to the glee of firing up a brand new laptop or computer for the first time. Unfortunately, your excitement can easily be dampened by the presence of ‘bloatware’. This is software that usually comes bundled with Windows, and provides no significant value to the user. Common culprits included third-party antivirus and media software. As Windows veterans know, these programs may offer a free trial, and even work unobtrusively for a short period of time. However, at the end of the trial period, users are usually plagued with pop-ups encouraging them to register and/or subscribe. Bloatware, by definition, is software that is unnecessary to the smooth running of the OS.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ANDROID PHONE OR TABLET (sorry, iPhone users) WINDOWS 11 WE’VE ALL GOT A WEBCAM, but most of them are built into the bezel that surrounds a laptop screen, or connected to the back of a desktop PC by a wire. They can be pretty good, but there’s another camera we carry with us everywhere: the one in our cellphones. You can use it as a wireless webcam for your Windows 11 machine—as long as it’s an Android phone (Apple users can do something similar with an iPhone and Mac in the Continuity Camera feature, and Windows has similar third-party apps), and you’ve enrolled it in the Link to Windows program by installing Microsoft’s app. It’ll need Android 9 (Pie) or later, but as that version was released…

THE CORE ULTRA 9 285K, the new flagship CPU showcasing Intel’s latest Arrow Lake architecture, marks the start of a brave new era for Intel. A big slab of silicon, containing all the cores and sundry? Gone. Manufactured on the latest Intel process node? Also gone. Oh, and class-leading gaming performance? Turns out that’s gone, too, even according to Intel’s own numbers, which is arguably the most conspicuous loss. Hold that thought—what you do get is the same use of mostly TSMC-made chiplets that were first introduced with the Meteor Lake mobile chip. So, does that make for a better flagship CPU than something made purely by Intel itself? For gaming, the answer is no. In terms of average frame rates compared to the old Core i9-14900K, the Core Ultra…

I SAY IT EVERY TIME: this range of HP Omen gaming laptops will always have a special place in my heart. My very first rig was an RTX 1050 HP Omen 15, in all its chunky metallic glory. But the 2024 HP Omen 17 is a whole different ball game. Yes, it’s still a hefty, 17-inch device, but gone are the red accents, textured lids, and angular decals. Instead, this slab of black plastic prioritizes performance over flashy external sing-song. Marrying an 8000-Series AMD processor with an Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU, it’s just on the cusp of mid-range, offering big-screen play without the price tag of most 18-inch devices. The affordability is reflected by the all-plastic construction, though considering you can easily spend over $2,000 on a mid-range configuration, a…

> Monitor upgrades > Intel concerns > Physical feedback HDR or bust? After years of reading about the supposed benefits of HDR visuals, I’ve finally decided to see what all the fuss is about. I have a decent gaming rig with a Ryzen 7800X3D and an RTX 4080, but I’ve never really splashed out on a gaming monitor. So, I’m finally going to make the jump from a regular SDR monitor to something with HDR capability. But do I need to fork out for a pricey OLED panel, or can LCD monitors get the job done? Thanks in advance. – J. Cunningham CONTRIBUTOR, JEREMY LAIRD, RESPONDS: Okay Jim, this one is actually pretty straightforward. If you want to experience HDR visuals, there’s only one real option: you need an OLED monitor.…

JARVIS IS THE name given by Iron Man to one of his AI assistants, in honor of the Stark family butler. Google has seemingly decided to continue this tradition with the codename for its latest AI prototype, which was briefly made available via the Chrome web store in November. The prototype offered some insights into its upcoming features. According to The Information, the version of Jarvis on the Chrome store was an internal preview. It also carried the description, ‘a helpful companion that surfs the web with you’. When a reporter installed the extension and asked Jarvis to complete a task, it failed due to access permissions. Still, the nature of the permissions provided some insight into Jarvis’ purpose. Unlike previous assistants, the AI will be able to take full…

RECENTLY, mini PCs have bulked up to become modest yet viable gaming platforms. The latest laptop APUs have decent iGPUs for light gaming, but some mini PCs actually have dedicated GPUs. Of course, if you’re after high frame rates at 1440p and beyond, then you’re better off self-building. But if you’re looking for a tiny, off-the-shelf PC with awesome everyday computing power, you’ve come to the right place. 5 AYANEO RETRO MINI AM02 With its NES-aping design, the Retro Mini AM02 is the cutest mini PC around. Inside lurks the excellent AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS APU, and a level of performance customization that few other machines offer. This gunmetal-gray homage to the original Nintendo Entertainment System also has a front-flap concealing USB and headphone ports, and a touchscreen with system…

INTEL’S IN A BIT of a bind right now, isn’t it? Its 14th and 13th gen chips have been rocked by over-volted BIOS and manufacturing failures, leaving it in a somewhat precarious position. In fact, arguably across the industry, this generation of desktop chips has been somewhat cruddy. AMD’s processors lack the real punch we’d expect from a gen-to-gen update, with token performance increases of just 10 percent, and on pages 74 and 76, you can read how Intel’s Core Ultra series has landed like a lead balloon, with worse single-core performance and paltry power savings, coming complete with hyperthreading removed, and a new nomenclature that makes even the most eager of tech heads scratch their collective craniums. Is it all so terrible, though? What’s it actually like to build with…

THIS BUILD, if we’re honest, is outstanding. It’s been with us now for over two weeks, and it’s just a thing of beauty. We didn’t quite have the time to get Asus’s Armory Crate installed on the day, and as such, couldn’t configure the internal lighting, but with it all set to a lovely shade of green, it just absolutely pops (seriously, we tried to get it done on the day, but it took 45 minutes to install over a hotspot, and still hadn’t finished by the time the shoot wrapped). In short, it looks stellar. Fishbowl cases have become increasingly popular over the last few years, and you can see why; those twin glass panels give you an unprecedented view of the hardware within. If you’ve got the gear…

GAMING LAPTOPS have grown in popularity over the years, but they’re often heavier and noisier than models that use integrated graphics. AMD and Intel have both released new mobile processors in recent months, with beefed-up GPUs that have taken over the budget sector of the graphics market. It’s telling that we haven’t seen much in the way of new budget mobile GPUs in the past few years. Nvidia still offers older Turing and Ampere-derived solutions in the MX550 and MX570, but without any of the RTX features, like DLSS and ray tracing. Those were both launched in March 2022, but if you only need that level of graphics performance, you might find that the latest iGPUs from AMD and Intel are sufficient. We collected three similarly configured laptops and put them…

TIP OF THE MONTH ANTIGRAM - BLOCK INSTAGRAM REELS Fed up of getting stuck watching pointless Instagram reels in your spare time? Want to feel slightly more productive on your PC? Perhaps it’s time to kick those dopamine hits in the backside, and block them entirely. Google Chrome’s Antigram extension does just that. Block the Explore, Stories, and Reels section, and automatically default to a list of posts from the people you follow. It’s like social media from 2011 again. MAKE – USE – CREATE SCREWING UP I was at my second job, opening up the coffee shop with my other boss (sorry Guy), and we got talking about screws. Tom, the head chef/owner, had been taking apart a mountain bike, and struggled to get a screw off because he…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A STABLE INTERNET CONNECTION For downloading Linux and the games you’ll want to play. MANY WINDOWS PCS could become redundant in October 2025 due to Windows 11’s TPM 2.0 requirements. This could result in over 250 million junked devices. This means that there’s never been a better time to switch to Linux. Although it occupies only a small fraction of the desktop market (four percent), the OS offers advantages for PC users. Aside from more forgiving TPM requirements, Linux is free and open-source. This means it doesn’t cost a penny. The development community also often supports drivers for older devices. Linux comes with virtually no bloatware and few background processes. This can free up a lot of system resources for gaming. For instance, the recommended amount of…

SOCIAL MEDIA has warped our perspective. It was when the platforms transitioned away from chronological feeds to curated timelines. From a business perspective, it was a masterstroke: control what your users see, feed them what they ‘like’ so they stay for longer, and show them more ads, which you can force companies to pay for. It doesn’t matter if Aunt Cathy’s had a new baby; check out this Warhammer meme!! As our world became more turbulent, these algorithms had a net negative effect. Entire communities and friendships were almost held up by social media. In any normal society, that would mean communication, debate, and discussion. Conversations on different ideas, perceptions, and thoughts challenged. By its very nature, that leads to growth, understanding, and empathy. What the algorithms took away was…

THE LAUNCH OF ARROW LAKE marks a new chapter in Intel’s history. This is the first desktop processor in its ranks that isn’t made by Team Blue itself. The multi-tile design, first introduced with Meteor Lake in the mobile sector, is predominantly manufactured by TSMC. Only the base tile and packaging are handled by Intel. The Core Ultra 5 245K (and the GPUless 245KF) is currently the baby of the Arrow Lake line-up, and it’s basically a Core Ultra 9 285K with two P-cores and eight E-cores disabled. The clocks are a little lower, too, and there’s less L3 cache, all of which reduces the maximum power limit to 159W. While it’s an obvious successor to the Core i5 14600K, the 245K’s $309 MSRP puts it closer to the Ryzen…

NETGEAR’S RANGE of Wi-Fi routers and mesh systems are always well-designed and offer high-end performance for business and home users who need a fast, reliable Wi-Fi connection. They do tend to be pretty expensive, though, as we saw with the recently-launched Nighthawk RS700 (reviewed in our March issue), which weighed in at a hefty $700. That’s a lot of money for a single, standalone router—especially for home users who probably don’t need the blazing 19Gbps Wi-Fi speed offered by the RS700. The new Nighthawk RS300 is therefore designed to provide a high-speed Wi-Fi 7 upgrade with a more affordable price tag. As you might expect, the RS300 is slower, offering a top speed of 9.3Gbps, but that’s still more than fast enough to handle gaming, streaming 4K video, and other…

THE RAZER KRAKEN V4 Pro doesn’t hide its premium nature. This haptic-focused headset sits behind a massive $399 price tag, putting the $349 SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless and $379 Astro A50 X in the firing line. This is a slimmer design compared to the Razer Kraken V3 Pro. It’s not the obnoxiously wide headset you may have seen in the past, but the Kraken V4 Pro still retains its recognizable form factor. The cup cushioning itself has been elongated to sit around the ears rather than directly on top. That generous padding sits along the headband, too. Of course, let’s not forget that blazing RGB on the side. It’s easily switched off if you’re in a more focused setting, but even switched on, it’s a subtle effect. More significant,…

DRAGON AGE games have long faced the same problem as Dragon Age protagonists: the utter impossibility of pleasing everyone simultaneously. Arriving almost exactly a decade after Inquisition, with hopes and expectations as granular as demands for cameos from minor characters and RPG design preferences that go all the way back to 2009’s Origins, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is indeed trying to please a lot of people. The first 10 hours of The Veilguard are thus disorientating, even for a Thedas lore dork. It opens with the hero, Rook, and series fan-favorite dwarven archer, Varric Tethras, arriving in the city of Minrathous at the end of an apparently lengthy search to track down his Inquisition comrade turned elven god, Solas. We stop Solas’s world-ending ritual to tear down the barrier between…