Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2021 i Maximum PC

INTEL’S ASSAULT on the GPU market took another step with the release of discrete GPUs for system builders. At the bottom of the stack is the Xe-LP, branded Intel Iris Xe Max. This is essentially what we’ve seen coupled to a CPU on the Tiger Lake chips. It delivers moderate gaming performance, but it’s not being marketed as a gaming chip—Intel pushes “content creation.” It runs with a peak clock of 1,650MHz, and has 96 EUs (Execution Units). The Xe-HP is aimed at data centers, and is currently with developers, notably the Argonne National Laboratory. Meanwhile, the design for Xe-HPC (the supercomputers version) has been finalized. The first discrete graphics card, DG1, is a low-end affair, due shortly. We’ll have to wait for DG2, the Xe-HPG card, for a real…

> CPU Temps > Is Free Software Safe? > Choose Headphones CPU Temperature Fluctuation I’ve been using Open Hardware Monitor to control my CPU fan. This was the only app I could find that controlled it. I have an Asus ROG Strix B450-F motherboard, AMD Ryzen 5 3600 overclocked to 4,150 MHz, and the stock AMD CPU cooler. I tried to control the fan from the motherboard, but it didn’t work. I also have two NVMe SSDs, two SATA SSDs, ODD, three 140mm case fans, and a 120mm case fan, all fans blowing inward, all housed in a Corsair 110R case. My question is why does the temperature in the processor vary over a six-hour period when the voltage, fan speed, and room temp don’t change? Do I need a…

BEFORE YOU CAN DO ANYTHING you’ll want to start the ISO downloading for the Arch Linux install image. Head to www.archlinux.org/download and grabone of the torrents, or else scroll down to one of the localized mirrors. Best practice is to run an integrity check on the download file—this ensures that it’s downloaded correctly but also that no one has interfered with the stored file. Technically the ISO file and checksum hash should be stored on different systems, so it’s harder to compromise both. The easiest way is to use a hasher, such as IgorWare Hasher (www.igorware.com/hasher) for Windows types, load the ISO file and click “Calculate.” The generated SHA-1 and MD5 hash should match that on the Arch Linux download page. You can copy and paste it to save you…

IN THE LAST TWO ISSUES we have been showing you the tools of the sleeving trade, and how you can sleeve your own custom power-supply cables. And with this new-found knowledge you should be able to create a set of cables or extensions, as long as they don’t have any “Y” cables involved in them at all. Y cables are most commonly found on the 24-pin ATX motherboard power cable, and can be a little bit trickier, but once you know how to do them, you can have that perfectly sleeved PSU that you absolutely deserve. This is gluttony when it comes to building your own system, and it can take time and patience to get the job done right, but once it’s done, you’ll truly have a bespoke system…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT OH BOY this is a big one. It’s one of those builds that you sort of plan out at first, thinking, “Ah this will be easy, and affordable, and realistic,” and then you get to the end of requesting in all those parts and what you’re left with is a massive price tag. It happens more often than you’d think. Yep, if you take a quick glance over to that ingredients list to the right, you’ll see that our secondary storage of choice takes up a whopping 67 percent of our total budget. That’s nuts. However, it does bring to light one perhaps obvious fatal flaw when it comes to a system build quite like this. As you can…

LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE: The performance of the Ryzen 9 5900X and AMD’s latest Zen 3 architecture is good. It’s really good. It pretty much delivers on the promise that AMD laid out at the chip reveal on October 8, and if nothing else that should make for very worrying reading for Intel. For us gamers that is nothing but good news, because there is now real choice when it comes to the best CPU for gaming for our next build. Intel has managed to stay competitive through AMD’s successive performance improvements to Zen thanks to its dominance in gaming. While AMD was making everything else to do with computing a miserable story for Intel, it still had that one flag to cling to. That has now gone. While…

ALL-IN-ONE PCS can be a tricksy business. Towers with discrete monitors are generally considered the norm, and any AIO computer draws obvious comparisons to both Apple’s successful iMac range and desktop-replacement Windows laptops. They also have inherent limitations imposed on them by their small, screen-sized form factor; integrated graphics are usually the only option, and physical connectivity frequently takes a hit. HP’s new AIO, the EliteOne 800 G5, is all business. Costing $1,400 (for our review SKU specifically), this is a professional machine, well-suited to a home office environment. The brushed silver finish is unobtrusive, and the 23.8-inch monitor has a pleasingly small bezel. Being an AIO system, it has a small footprint, with just a weighted metal rectangle as its base, upon which the rotating monitor arm and the…

HYPERX’S HEADSETS are frequently a good bet, and the new Stinger S addition to its Cloud line is no exception. The Stinger S goes in the opposite direction to the Stinger Core, which was a cheaper alternative to the original Stinger. At $60, the Stinger S is more expensive, edging its way into premium headset territory, but it has a lot to offer for the price. Let’s start with the audio quality. Unlike the 40mm neodymium drivers found in the Core models, this headset has the original Stinger’s high-quality 50mm drivers, bringing a broader frequency response that delivers clear, crisp highs and bassy lows. It’s a remarkably balanced sound profile, and while it won’t blow away any serious audiophile, it’s certainly sufficient for both gaming and music or podcasts. The…

RASPBERRY PI OS is fine, generally. I t’s a 32-bit OS though, and the 64-bit version is a work in progress, with features that don’t work. If you’ve got the 8GB version of the Pi 4, you might be frustrated at only being able to use 4GB of that lovely RAM, but Ubuntu has come to the rescue with a Pi port of 20.10 Groovy Gorilla that’s fully 64-bit, and a great desktop experience. Does this make the Pi 4 (or the new 400 model) a proper desktop computer now, or do we have to wait for the inevitable port of Windows for that? Apple’s M1 processor shows what’s possible with ARM chips when you know what you’re doing with them, so perhaps we are looking at the future. Windows…

> Gaming Server Case > Sleeper Build > Back to Tech Server Rack System? Hey Zak! Glad to see Maximum PC is back to full length, and I hope you're staying safe and healthy. I had a quick question about a rack-mounted chassis. The parts I'm using are essentially a gaming PC build, but I can't recall Maximum PC ever covering this type of funky build. I'm looking at cases, but there's a lot to cover in terms of what size (2U, 4U—how much clearance will I need and what should I prepare for?); I'm not even sure if I can mount an AIO in a rackmount. I'd love a recommendation (or even a full-length article with the amount of confusing options out there) if you know of any? I…

APPLE’S MOVE away from x 86 architecture has begun in earnest with the release of the first batch of machines sporting the Apple-designed M1 processor. This isn’t the first time Apple has jumped horses—it started out using Motorola chips in 1983, and stuck with these until 1995 when it switched to PowerPC chips, then in 2006 it moved to Intel x86 silicon. Following the success of the ARM chips in its iPhones and iPads, it has gone and launched new MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac minis all sporting the new M1 chip, and all considerably faster than their predecessors. Dubbed “the first chip designed specifically for the Mac,” the M1 is a SoC built using a 5nm process. It has four performance cores (Firestorm), and four high-efficiency cores (Icestorm),…

MOORE’S LAW MIGHT BE DEAD, or at least seriously slowing down, but progress hasn’t stopped. 2019 saw AMD launch Ryzen 3000 CPUs and Radeon RX 5000 GPUs on TSMC’s then cutting-edge N7 process, and 2020 brought us the Ryzen 5000 and Radeon RX 6000 chips on the same node. Nvidia opted for Samsung 8N for its RTX 30-series GPUs (and N7 for the datacenter GA100), while Intel still tries to get a handle on 10nm. The question now: Which company will be the first to release 5nm hardware? If you want to count Apple, it already launched the first consumer 5nm chips built on TSMC’s EUV-enhanced N5 node in October 2020. OK, maybe the A14 silicon doesn’t count since it’s not going into anything remotely PC. If that’s your mindset,…

IT FEELS LIKE an old and tired mantra at this point, but it’s fair to say that 2020 was an awful and very challenging year. It’s shown us just how dependent we are on that humble transistor. Life has changed, for better or worse, and the world we once knew likely won’t exist in the same way it did when this pandemic ends. If the science comes true, and as population sizes swell, diseases like this will likely become far more commonplace. And with it there’ll no doubt be an even greater shift in how we work, how we enjoy our spare time, and how we connect with our loved ones. We’re seeing this change happen already: More of us now than ever work from home, and the majority are…

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED what makes a PC start and run, I mean really run? Not just hand-waving “the processor boots the operating system” dismissive nonsense, which isn’t any more enlightening than saying that stuff is made of atoms. The nuts and bolts when you press the power button and the PSU fires up its 12, 5, and 3-volt lines to the motherboard—how does the processor even know what to start running, and how is that even loaded into memory when there’s nothing to run to do that? We are talking (semi) software level here. If you want to know how individual hardware components work then that’s another world of glorious pain to explore—gawping at the level of insanity of the Intel 8088 architecture that leaves you asking “Why would…

Haha, fit a graphical OS on a floppy disk, crazy talk, right? It is until you go and look at http://menuetos.net which is a graphical OS that fits on a floppy disk. Like many of these alternative tiny operating systems, it’s entirely written in assembly and yet supports 64-bit CPUs, 32GB of RAM, USB 2.0 devices, a full TCP/IP stack, full GUI toolkit and 1080p in 24-bit color. But can it play Crysis? No, no it can’t. There is a small but active world of alternative operating systems. Some like AROS.org are education-based projects spun out of an older operating system, an API-compatible implementation of AmigaOS but entirely open source and for modern hardware. Others like MikeOS (http://mikeos.sourceforge.net) are created by highly intelligent people that fancy the challenge of creating…

GIVE A PERSON A CAMERA, and they’ll find a way to point it at other people. Most of the single-board computers that are popular at the moment have camera attachments, or can use a webcam through a USB port. MotionEyeOS is an operating system that does nothing but operate cameras, and it can be installed on a great many of these boards—we’re using a Raspberry Pi Zero W, but Banana Pi, NanoPi, ODROID, and Pine boards are all compatible. MotionEyeOS is a lightweight way to run motionEye, the web interface that gathers together the feeds from connected cameras and displays them, running motion-detection routines and triggering recordings or stills when motion is detected. It can take feeds from connected cameras or network cameras, and multiple boards can work together as…

LOOK, I get it, historical accuracy and video games isn’t really a thing. So when Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla was first announced, I knew, given my obsession with Nordic culture I was going to be playing a lot of it, most likely frustrated. Now, there are two major symbols repeated throughout the game, the most common being the Ægishjálmur, and the other being the Vegvísir. The Ægishjálmur in particular is meant to be eight Algiz runes bound in a circle. The Algiz rune symbolizes protection (apparently). Yet the Ægis symbol is nothing to do with the Viking era at all. In fact the name itself originates from a passage in The Saga of the Volsungs, which as far as we can tell originated around the 13th century CE (200 years after),…

IT SEEMS LIKE every new generation of GPU from AMD is supposed to be the chosen one. Navi, Vega, Polaris, Fiji, Hawaii, Tahiti, Cayman—if those names don’t mean anything to you, they’re the codenames for everything from HD 6000 up through to RX 5000. Many were good, but few were unequivocally great. But this time is going to be different, or so the story goes. Could RDNA 2 and Big Navi finally put AMD ahead of Nvidia at the top of the GPU stack? After seeing the RTX 30-series Ampere GPUs launch over the past few months, we were skeptical. Nvidia doubled down on FP32, Tensor core, and ray-tracing performance. Leaked AMD specs for Navi 21 looked decent, but nowhere near enough to take down Ampere. Then AMD started talking…

IF YOU’RE IN THE MARKET for a monitor, it’s hard to avoid all the hype. Dubious claims of HDR capabilities, ridiculously high refresh rates—it all seems rather tangential to, you know, getting something worthwhile done on your PC. We love PC gaming, but too much of what dominates the current monitor mindspace is gaming-centric, which is where the new Philips 279C9 comes in. It doesn’t really care about gaming. That isn’t to say the 279C9 is a total dud when it comes to leisure—far from it. But it does offer what you might call a finely-tuned precision-productivity package. The core highlights involve a quality 27-inch IPS panel with native 4K 3,840 x 2,160 resolution, plus USB-C connectivity with support for device charging. Strictly speaking, the 279C9 is HDR certified. However,…

STEELSERIES is no stranger to the gaming peripheral scene, but this is its first foray into the ultra-light mouse sector. Ultralight mice have increased in popularity in recent years, and love them or hate them, they don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. The Aerox 3 we have here is a wired mouse, but the rather nice, silky smooth USB Type C cable can be removed, presumably so that SteelSeries can use the same shell for both the wired and wireless version. The mouse is somewhat on the smaller side, and large-handed folks might struggle, especially with a palm grip—fingertip or claw grips are preferred and recommended. The shape is nice and familiar, and the six programmable buttons are easily accessible. All of the buttons and the scroll wheel…

UBISOFT’S OPEN-WORLD London is quite an achievement, even if its inhabitants frequently speak in a way that would make even Guy Ritchie think the dialog coaches had gone a bit far. It’s a shame, then, that such a fine representation of a near-future capital city has been tethered to such an unrelentingly grim game. There’s no main character this time around, a very good thing when you remember the sullen Aiden Pearce from the first entry in the series. While you create a custom character at the beginning of the game, you can play as anyone you meet as you rebuild the DedSec white-hat hacking crew from scratch after a false-flag terrorist attack wipes them (almost) out. Starting as your custom character, you’re sent out onto the streets of London…

SILK ROAD WAS A HIGHLY CONTENTIOUS dark-web marketplace launched in 2011, and shut down by the FBI in 2013. Payments for its dubious offerings were made in Bitcoin. Its creator, Ross Ulbricht, was hit by hackers, and had over 70,400 Bitcoins stolen. Apparently the coins had been stolen in increments while Silk Road was operational, and have been sitting in an account ever since. Recovering lost Bitcoin is difficult, and as Silk Road acted as a “tumbler” to hide the transactions, following the blockchain wouldn’t work. After much data analysis, law enforcement agents have caught up with the stolen coins, and the unnamed hacker who originally purloined them has signed a forfeiture agreement and handed the coins over to the government. At the time the coins were originally stolen they…

GOOGLE IS to start charging for Google Photos from May 31 if you want to store more than the free 15GB that comes with every Google account (which is shared by Google Drive, Gmail, and Photos). Currently images uploaded at high compression don’t count towards the total. Only Google Pixel owners will be excluded from the new deal. Why the change? Because free unlimited storage is an open invitation for people to fill countless rack-mounted hard drives with pictures of their cat. Google claims that 28 billion images and videos are uploaded every week, and that the total number of photos has topped 4,000,000,000,000. One piece of good news is that anything added before the new policy kicks in won’t count, so if you do have a huge library of…

8 LOGITECH G15 2006 Blue backlighting and a built-in LCD panel with macro support? The G15 was ahead of its time, but it does look truly dated. 7 CORSAIR VOID PRO 2017 Our resident staff writer was actually present at the Gamescom launch of this headset, and it has since proved to be an invaluable companion for daily online games. 6 STEELSERIES H5V3 2013 SteelSeries has always produced solid peripherals, and the H5v3 was no exception. Leather padding, a double-braided cable, and great portability set this headset apart from the crowd. 5 LOGITECH G502 LIGHTSPEED 2019 It might be expensive, and more recent than other entries on this list, but the G502 Lightspeed is a simply sublime mouse that will take some beating. 4 MICROSOFT SIDEWINDER X5 2008 Remember when Microsoft made gaming mice?…

IT’S HARD TO KNOW just how much we’re handled with kid gloves these days as computer users—and this journalist says that from a Linux user’s perspective. It’s likely that many Maximum PC readers will remember children’s electronic kits from the 1970s, like Radio Shack’s Science Fair Microcomputer Trainer. You had to handwire components to create a suitable circuit, then program the CPU by inputting single commands and variables in hexadecimal. Horrifying, but fun! It’s the sort of barebones introduction to computing electronics that will suitably traumatize a young child into wanting to learn to program. It’s also about as far away from how current children are introduced to the subject via sanitized iPads and touchscreen devices. Where’s all the fun if there’s no screaming “What do you mean I have…

If all of this sounds super-crazy, back in 1983 Richard Stallman created the GNU Project (GNU is Not Unix), and the first items to be developed were the GNU C compiler GCC (it remains one of the leading compilers today), the EMACS text editor, the GNU Coreutils (file manipulation), the GNU Bash shell, and the GNU C library glibc, which provides the basic function calls to enable C to work on a system. All of these tools developed 35 years ago are still used within most open-source operating systems to one degree or another today. So while this might seem just a bit of silly fun, it does genuinely outline the basic building blocks and steps required to boot a computer. And absolutely with older BIOS systems this is the…

NEXTCLOUD JUST GETS BETTER—the latest edition of the self-hosted storage and sharing platform sees it transformed into a complete collaboration hub. If you already have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or equivalent stack set up on a home server or VPS, you can easily add a Nextcloud instance to it, either by extracting an archive to your web server’s root directory, or by copying the Web Installer PHP file there and running it directly. Setting up a LAMP stack (or indeed a LEMP stack with Nginx and MariaDB) is easy enough (although it’s a bit of a faff having to create databases by hand) in Ubuntu or Debian—there are countless guides a mere search away. This time around we’re going to install Nextcloud via Docker. In theory this will…

About iFixit iFixit is a global community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people fix things through free online repair manuals and teardowns. iFixit believes that everyone has the right to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit www.ifixit.com. BACKGROUND Buried in a blizzard of buzzwords like “teraflops,” “true 4K,” and “ray tracing” is a new device—Microsoft’s statement on gaming for the next several years. It’s teardown time. MAJOR TECH SPECS AMD custom 8-core 3.8 GHz (3.66 GHz with SMT) Zen 2 CPU AMD custom RDNA 2 GPU (1,825 MHz with 52 Compute Units) 16GB GDDR6 RAM 1TB SSD storage (with an optional 1TB Expansion Card) HDMI 2.1 connectivity with support for 8K video at 60 Hz, or 4K 120 Hz 4K UHD Blu-ray drive KEY FINDINGS This…

THIS MONTH WE EXPLORE the brainchild of Apple’s other Steve, the genius that is Steve Wozniak. The Apple II (stylized as the Apple][) was one of the original mass-market home computers, but would become synonymous with color computing, distinguishing itself from rivals made by Commodore and Tandy. Unhappy with the state of personal computing, Wozniak wanted to create something “small, reliable, convenient to use, and inexpensive.” Following the stylistically crude but technologically promising Apple 1, Wozniak wanted to create a machine that was faster and more practical, with color graphics. While Steve Jobs concerned himself with selling the machine and making it pretty, Wozniak would create a piece of engineering beauty still admired today. Widely regarded as a primary influence on the IBM PC, the Apple II created the first…

THE GEFORCE RTX 3070 is round three of Nvidia’s Ampere architecture. All of the core features are present, and yet Nvidia dials things back quite a bit from the earlier outings. We weren’t expecting RTX 3090 levels of performance for $500. Still, having seen what the RTX 3080 and 3090 bring to the table, this is definitely a big step down. In a vacuum, the 3070 basically delivers RTX 2080 Ti performance at half the price, which sounds like a bargain. But the 3080 has 70 percent more memory bandwidth and 45 percent more theoretical computational power, and ends up beating the 3070 by about 35 percent overall. It also costs 40 percent more, but nearly linear scaling of performance with price is far better than the usual diminishing returns…

LOOK AT THAT CASE THERE, crisp, standing pristine in the light, the soft-lit gradient running down the front panel, glinting off the top left of that tempered glass. It’s modest, refined, and simple, at least at first glance. Our photographer’s skill is nothing to be sniffed at, and yet even with his brilliance, the Silent Base 802 still gives nothing away. It’s clearly just another black box from be quiet! complete with a tempered-glass side panel, and a few other basic features chucked in for good measure, right? Not worth the time of day to review, surely? Well that’s the brilliance of this case. It is almost akin to a sleeper chassis: It’s so good, and yet from first appearances, there’s absolutely nothing really that gives that brilliance away. The…

HAPPY HACKING Keyboards (HHKBs) are often seen as the holy grail of keyboards for developers, coders, and sys admins, but you'd be right to be hesitant on dropping that kind of cash on what seems like such a basic board. What can possibly make it cost so much? First and foremost, Topre switches. These are electrocapacitive switches that are a dream to type on. They’re like typing on clouds. If you've never used Topre switches, it's worth trying them just to feel how soft switches should be done. Topre switches are made by a single company in Japan, and the price of them is eye-watering. Topre switches have a conical spring underneath a rubber dome. The plunger compresses the dome and spring until it makes it actuate. This kind of…

Who browses the browsers? FOR THE LONGEST TIME everyone used Microsoft Internet Explorer, and then one day, around 2013, the world woke up and everyone was using Chrome. How did that happen, and should we care? Google launched Chrome in late 2008, when Firefox from the non-profit Mozilla was pootling along at 30 percent market share and IE at a seemingly insurmountable 70 percent share. Jump forward four years and Chrome had half the market—and increasing—with IE and Firefox fighting for second and third place. Chrome’s unstoppable success seems like a combination of agile development—quickly embracing the latest open-source technologies and standards—Google’s dominant search position, its growing online tool suite, and its mobile success with Android. Google is everywhere, bringing Chrome with it. Firefox is the sweetheart of the opensource…