Innehållsförteckning för November 2020 från Maximum PC

WE KNOW WHAT you’re thinking: “This is odd.” And you’re right—it’s not something we’d usually cover here at Maximum PC. It’s not a gaming rig specced out to some arbitrary number set by the management bods, nor is it a deep-dive into the latest technological architecture from the likes of Nvidia (next issue—don’t worry!). No, this is something we’ve never done before: A case study and the chance to test something that very few people can get their hands on. So, what are we talking about? Well, we’re heading back into the world of tubing and water blocks to take a look at one of the most radical types of coolant being developed and grown today: Mayhems’ 6nm XTR. Yep, you read that right—this coolant is synthetically grown in a…

THE PROBLEM WITH this type of build is that reseating the CPU to troubleshoot a problem involves draining the rig entirely of—in this case, particularly expensive 6nm—coolant, cleaning out as much as you can, getting enough microfiber cloths and paper towels together, then disassembling the entire top half of the loop just to get to the processor. Then you have to reassemble it all, refill it, and see if it works. If this is your only system, it’s an absolute nightmare. The reality is, although it was an interesting challenge to convert this build, it’s not a very practical system. Swapping out blocks and coolant at the same time led to problems. What we should have done was swap the blocks earlier on, tested it again, long before the photography…

UBUNTU DERIVATIVES ARE A DIME A DOZEN. Some you could probably recreate yourself by installing a desktop and changing some default applications. But some are simply outstanding, taking the rock-solid Ubuntu base and adding unique and powerful features on top. One example is Elementary OS which, through its own Pantheon desktop, brings a sleekness and simplicity that rivals Mac OS. Instead of forcing users to read manuals (which in many cases just raises more questions), one of Elementary OS’s aims is to have minimal documentation. It aims to be sufficiently intuitive that users should be able to figure things out for themselves. Another of its design aims is “concision,” keeping things simple and avoiding bloat. Finally, it strives for “accessible configuration”—not bombarding the user with options, or asking for information…

Arch users may be shocked to find their distro of choice not mentioned in this page on new technology, and perhaps they have a point. But then so too might Gentoo or Linux from Scratch users, who also have access to the latest versions of everything, and can also compile it with whatever optimizations suit their CPU. We’ve focused instead on what distros offer out of the box, and with Arch, and more so with Gentoo, well, you barely get a box. Manjaro has gone and done the unthinkable and made Arch Linux easy to use, and continues to be one of the most popular desktop distros around. Manjaro doesn’t (directly) use the same repositories as its progenitor, since things move quickly on Arch, and Manjaro has a release cadence…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI 4 OR 3B+ RASPBERRY PI CAMERA Preferably the High Quality camera. RASPBIAN The Pi’s Debian-based operating system. WALLACE AND GROMIT, THE EVIL SKELETONS created by Ray Harryhausen… these are all famous examples of an animation technique called stop-motion, which uses individual images posed by an animator so that, when run as a sequence, the subject appears to move. Traditionally this takes many hours or days of painstaking work. But using the power of the Raspberry Pi and its camera, we can make our own movie studio. In this tutorial we will make a short animation using a LEGO model, all filmed using Python and the Raspberry Pi. The button that triggers our camera is a push button inserted into a breadboard. This is then connected…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A WEB BROWSER Some deal-listing sites, and your favorite etailers. CAN NOVEMBER really be rolling round again? Yup, and that can only mean one thing. No, not the election, but Black Friday, none other than the best day of the year to get great deals on PC kit. But how, exactly, do you get the best deals, and how does it all work? The easy answer is to log on to the websites of MPC’s sister titles, including www.techradar.com, www.tomshardware.com and www.pcgamer.com and allow them to do the heavy lifting for you, all neatly categorized and simple to select. But that leaves the question of how those websites themselves go about selecting the best deals. You’re in luck, for your erstwhile correspondent has been a member of…

THE AMD RYZEN 9 3900X was released exactly a year ago today, and we loved it. Loads of cores and decent gaming performance made it one of our favorite processors. On paper, this brand new Ryzen 9 3900XT takes that impressive chip and squeezes just a little more power out of it. The base clocks are unchanged at 3.8GHz, but the boost goes from 4.6GHz to 4.7GHz. Yup, a whole 100MHz. You may be wondering how AMD has managed to squeeze an extra 100MHz out of this chip, even if it is only at boost, and apparently it’s down to a better understanding of the 7nm production process. There are no other changes, though. The core and thread counts are the same, the cache levels are unchanged, and there are…

ADVENTURE HERE’S A LOVELY THING: An adventure game based on Scandinavian folklore, Röki casts you as Tove, capable elder sister of little Lars, who won’t go to bed without his stuffed toy and a story. The story she chooses is one of four guardians, and it feels heavy with foreshadowing. Lars is a playful boy, and sees trolls and monsters everywhere he roams, even if that’s just to the bathroom at night. The siblings have a father, who does little but sit in his chair and eat pickled herrings, and the family is still hurting from the loss of their mother. Early comments from Tove about her father not keeping her mother’s possessions show that this rankles just as much as having to cook eggs once again for dinner. It’s…

> $,1000 Hydra > Data Clusters > Refrigerated Computing Where’s Windows? I would like to bring your attention to the fact that not every subscriber is a PC builder. I’m not. I’ve been reading your magazine for several years, because of its Windows articles. In the latest editions, there is no mention of Windows. Your attention to this matter will be appreciated. –Carlos H. EDITOR, ZAK STOREY, RESPONDS: That’s a very good point, and I’ll be honest with you: We haven’t had the budget. Because Windows 10 has been around for so long, it’s been difficult to justify the spend on it right now. I do perhaps have a bit too much of a hardware focus personally, but this is definitely something we should readdress. I mentioned in my “Editor’s…

IT’S BEEN a while since I ntel had something properly new and shiny to boast about. Now it does: Tiger Lake has finally arrived. It’s a family of 11th-gen mobile processors using the Willow Cove microarchitecture coupled to the new Xe graphics engine. It replaces Ice Lake, which used Sunny Cove cores (the first proper new microarchitecture design from Intel since 2015’s Skylake). Before we get too excited, Intel has started at the bottom—the first wave of Tiger Lake processors is all the U series, aimed at low-power mobile devices of upto 28W. T iger Lake uses a 10nm SuperFin process, essentially a new name for the 10nm+ process. Let’s hope Intel continues to stop adding “+” to the end of things for good: 14nm++++ just looks ridiculous. The basic…

NO MATTER HOW you look at computing performance, it always boils down to electricity, tolerances, and heat. Those three factors have stymied unlimited power over the years. Diminishing returns are rife within this enthusiast hobby of ours. As transistor count goes up, gate width decreases, more voltage is applied, and heat increases, the need to cool components becomes more important to ensure they remain within their operating temperatures. To draw heat away from the processor and into something that can dissipate it into the open air has been of prime importance since the personal computer became a thing—in fact, even before that, with supercomputers. The basic principle behind cooling any PC component is that you need a form of heat exchange to take heat from the system and dump it…

TAKE A MOMENT to cast your mind back 15 years to that pre-credit crunch optimism of the mid-2000s. Windows users were appalled by Windows Vista, and a new Ubuntu operating system was claiming that it could displace Windows—despite being based on the fiendishly inaccessible Linux, and thinking that orangey-brown was a good desktop color. Well, Windows may not have been wiped out by Ubuntu, but Linux has developed in leaps and bounds since then. It’s more usable than ever before, and key industry players take it much more seriously now. Thanks to Valve and Vulkan, we can play thousands of Windows-only titles on our Linux boxes. More companies than ever are shipping Linux on consumer hardware, too—your wireless hardware probably works with it. Best of all, there’s a fine range…

It would be remiss of us not to mention, in a spread about beautiful distros, Pop!_OS. We were thoroughly impressed by the 20.04 release back in April. Pop!_OS (we like most everything about it, bar the awkward punctuation) is made by Colorado-based Linux system manufacturer System76. Being an OEM, the team wanted to be able to ship an OS that was guaranteed to work with their hardware. But also, just like the other distros named in these pages, an OS that makes it easy for users to do whatever they want to do. Pop’s desktop is much closer to Gnome 3 than what Mint, elementary OS and Solus offer, but don’t be afraid. Likewise, don’t be afraid that the latest release gives you the option to experience—in a very gentle…

KEYBOARDS ARE THE TRUE KINGS of input devices. They predate mice by almost 15 years, and thanks to companies like IBM—who set the standard in terms of the shape we know today—they have become perhaps the most easily recognizable and usable devices out there. In fact that tell-tale shape ensures that we can jump onto any PC we see and immediately know how to interact with it. If you think of a keyboard, you usually end up with an image of that standard 104/105-key ANSI layout imprinted into your mind. Membrane, dome, capacitive, and scissor-switch keyboards still make up the majority of the keyboards that are out there in the wild today, mostly due to office and industry use. But before we go any further on this, what we will…

TIP OF THE MONTH CHECK OUT MODES IN RYZEN MASTER If you’re running an AMD processor (specifically a Ryzen or Threadripper, not Athlon), you should be using Ryzen Master. It’s a powerful tool for automatic overclocking, making the process of squeezing extra performance out of your CPU easier and gentler on the silicon. Even better, it comes equipped with Game Mode and Creator Mode. Depending on your usage, this is the simplest, quickest way to boost your PC’s performance. CHRISTIAN GUYTON STAFF WRITER MOVE ON UP This month, I’m moving house. Well, to be more accurate, I’m trying to move into a house, and out of a tiny apartment. Working from home is all well and good, but when you don’t have a home office (or a workbench, or good…

The new Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera is fantastic. It may cost much more than the standard camera, but it uses interchangeable lenses (bought separately). We can also use old C and CS-mount lenses, or other lenses via adaptors. A proper aluminum screw mount provides a solid fitting to secure our camera to a tripod. The new camera connects to all models of Pi with a camera connector, including later models of the Pi Zero via an adapter cable. It can be controlled using Python, as we did in this tutorial, and can be used directly via the raspistill and raspivid commands in the Terminal. But what makes the latest camera so different to those before it is that there’s so much manual control. We can alter the focus and…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WORDPRESS SERVER Any reputable web host will do, or you can host it yourself on your own server. YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE is up, running, secure, backed up and looking e xactly as you wanted. But you’ve barely scratched the surface of what you can do with a WordPress site. To finish off this four-part series we’ll look at several ways in which you can make better use of it, from setting up contributors to help you fashion content, to finding ways to tweak your site’s settings to maximize performance and make things better for your site’s visitors. There’s also time to explore how to set up a commenting system, plus benchmark—and improve—the visibility of your website with search engines, helping you drive more traffic to your pages.…

LET’S NOT BEAT about the bush here: for us, MSI’s laptops are sometimes hit and miss. Performance is always solid, with all the latest tech crammed inside the chassis, but the chassis is often the problem; chunky, ugly plastic casings and poor display choices mar what would otherwise have been excellent laptops. The Raider GE66 is the successor to the GE65, a laptop that essentially reviewed everywhere as “really good, but looks a bit terrible.” The GE66 doesn’t do much to differentiate itself from its predecessors in that arena, but it does make several key improvements elsewhere. The big pull here is a shiny new 10thgeneration Intel processor, specifically the i9-10980HK in our review model (other configurations are available). That’s bringing eight high-speed cores to the party, which combined with…

COMPARED TO MANY peripheral companies, Glorious PC Gaming Race is the new kid on the block. It has been around for about six years now, and in that time it has made a huge impact on the peripheral scene. The Model O mouse is one of the best-selling mice of recent years, and the GMMK fullsize and TKL are both highly respected, claiming to be the first hot-swappable modular mechanical gaming keyboard. Today we have the GMMK Compact Barebones. This is a 60 percent keyboard for those who appreciate the smaller things in life, without a numpad, arrow keys, and F-row. To access these you use FN + I,J,K,L for your arrow keys, and FN + numbers for your F keys. The "Barebones" part of the name is the most…

> Onboard Sound > Sleep Resume Issues > Transfer Setup Move Windows 10 License I have three licenses attached to three computers. One is an OEM laptop. The other two are Pro licenses I purchased. It’s time to upgrade one of the Pro machines, which will be a full rebuild, making the jump from an Intel 6700K to AMD. How do I transfer the license? Thanks. –Painflame THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: The key is to link your Pro license to your Microsoft account as a digital license. Open “Settings > Update & Security > Activation” on the PC you’re replacing and check the activation status—if it simply says “Windows is activated with a digital license” you should see a prompt for “Add an account”—click this and follow the prompts to link…

LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS have come a long ways ince the good old days. In the beginning, of course, there were no distros (actually in the beginning there was no Linux, and no space-time, then there was a big bang—but you get the point). You’d start with the kernel, somehow bootstrap a barebones system, fetch some GNU tools, mess with the make files, compile those packages, install them, realize you’d got your Make file wrong, tidy up the mess. Rinse, lather, repeat. It was great fun. More often than not you had to get these things on CD or even floppy disk in the post, unless you had access to the internet (or a friend in a computer science department). Then in 1992 came SLS, which inspired Slackware and later frustrated Ian…

Flatpaks, Snaps, AppImages: They all seek to make it easier for developers to ship software in a distribution-agnostic manner. Whereas Snaps rely on a central app store, anyone can set up their own Flatpak remote. The Flathub repo (https://flathub.org) is a good place to find popular apps. Flatpaks are OSTree images too, which is why the two integrate so nicely in Endless OS. When you download your first (nontrivial) application on Endless OS (or your first Flatpak on another OS), you’ll find that the download is very large. This is because it depends on a large runtime (e.g. Gnome) Flatpak. Once you have this you won’t need to download it again for Flatpaks, which depend on it. These runtime Flatpaks are updated incrementally, so subsequent large downloads should be a…

1 TOWER POWER The LT100 “starter kit” that we’ve got here consists of two towers, each with 46 addressable LEDs. The light-diffusing plastic cover on the front of each tower ensures a soft glow, unlike the harsh brightness of some other RGB accessories. They also include a clip-on bracket that can transform one tower into a headset stand. 2 KEEPING TRACK The Nexus can be used for a wide variety of shortcuts and information readouts, but our favorite is probably the system-monitoring function. With this, the slender display can show component temperatures, fan speeds, and resource allocation in real time—perfect for keeping an eye on your system while overclocking or benchmarking. 3 LOW PROFILE The Corsair K70 RGB MK2 Low Profile we’re using here to demonstrate the Nexus is a…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PC OR LAPTOP (Or custom game server) running on the same network as the Raspberry Pi. GAME CONTROLLER Or two. DESPITE ITS SIZE AND LOW POWER, the Raspberry Pi has proven to be a useful addition to any game-streaming setup. While it won’t run modern games, it can stream them from a PC with Steam or Parsec. All you need is the PC or laptop (or custom game server) running on the same network as the Raspberry Pi, and a game controller or two connected to it. The same is true with Google Stadia. You might have heard about Google’s game-streaming platform, which pre-launched in November 2019 ahead of full launch in 2020. It enables the streaming of AAA games to your desktop PC computer, potentially with…

AS CHASSIS DESIGN goes, this is the most extreme example of minimalism we’ve ever seen. There’s no frills here, no excess garnish or gaming flair, there’s no support for crazy, over-the-top liquidcooling, and you can’t make it into a glorified NAS with hundreds of TBs of storage. The reality is that the Hydra Mini is a true manifestation of pure, clean, functional style, merged with exceptional craftsmanship and an attention to detail that makes it perhaps one of the most interesting cases we’ve ever had the pleasure of reviewing. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its flaws, and we’ll cover those in due course, but despite that we can’t help but admire this thing. So what exactly is the Hydra Mini? Well, it’s a tiny ITX SFX chassis that…

ACTION ROLE PLAYING MANY OF THE GAMES that come to Maximum PC have issues, and we’re usually fairly kind about them, as we are often told there will be a day-one patch to fix the problems. So what’s Horizon Zero Dawn’s excuse? It’s a three-yearold game originally made for the AMDpowered PS4, and didn’t have a holiday or multi-system release window to hit. How was it released in this state when Death Stranding, which runs on the same engine, was such a strong port? You see, it’s a bit crashy. The PC port of HZD has many things to recommend it, but stability isn’t one of them, returning us to the desktop about 50 percent of the time with no noticeable trigger event. And despite the wealth of graphics options,…

OFFICE SUITES are a hard thing to get excited about. They represent actual work, which nobody likes, rather than messing around or playing games, and they’re also nothing special to look at. There’s not even an exciting war going on, such as that which once took place between Microsoft and Lotus/IBM over spreadsheets. No, the office front is a very quiet one. These comparisons, between Google’s cloud-based suite and The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice, are of features in free software. If you need Microsoft Office, ensuring 100-percent compatibility with Office users and the other premium features you can only get with a 365 subscription, then you need it, and no alternative suite is quite going to be right for you. This is going to affect mainly professionals and those who need…