Innehållsförteckning för December 2022 från Maximum PC

WHAT A ROLLERCOASTER ride 2022 has been. Obviously, I mean in general, but this being Maximum PC, I refer specifically to the last 12 months in tech. The story of the year has to be graphics cards—in January the only way to get a decent GPU was by paying double the RRP for some dodgy-looking deal on eBay. That thankfully came to an end a few months ago as supply normalized and Crypto miners quickly exited the market thanks to rising energy costs and Ethereum’s move to Proof of Stake. Now, those same cards are about to become even cheaper, thanks to the release of Nvidia’s newest RTX 4000-series GPUs, which Nvidia claims offer a performance boost of between two and four times over their predecessors! In our labs, we…

GOOGLE’S CLOUD game system Stadia was launched in 2019, promising top-tier 4K games on minimal hardware. The idea was sound but the implementation wasn’t as solid as hoped. While Stadia was excellent from a technical perspective, with 4K resolution, surround sound, and smooth gameplay, Google didn’t support it with original content and closed the doors of its in-house developers last year, losing a great deal of talent in the process. The writing has been on the wall for Stadia ever since. The game library remained too small and was mainly made up of older titles, meaning it didn’t attract customers across from other platforms. It also didn’t have a clear market position and compared unfavorably next to the breadth and quality of the Xbox Game Pass. Stadia is now closed…

Nvidia’s new RTX 4090 board is a beaut. So is the AD102 GPU at its heart. Nvidia has not lost its technical touch, the 4090 is a major leap forward. The problem lies with the pair of so-called RTX 4080 boards. They are, in my opinion, trash. To understand why, let’s go back to the launch of the Ampere RTX 30 Series two years ago. Then, Nvidia rolled out the impressive RTX 3080. It was a cutdown version of the RTX 3090 and used the same high-end GA102 chip with a few circuits fused off. The 3080 had roughly 80 percent of the functional units of the RTX 3090 for a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, the RTX 3070 got the then second-tier GA104 GPU and served up around 55…

IN A TEASER leading up to the Ada Lovelace and RTX 40-series announcement, Nvidia had a phone number asking, “Tell us, how fast do you want to go?” Perhaps KITT—that’s the ‘Knight Industries Two Thousand’, if you weren’t around in the 1980s—has finally arrived in the real world, except now he’s a GPU instead of a souped-up Pontiac Trans Am. If you want to take Nvidia at its word, the apparent answer is two to four times faster than the RTX 3090 Ti. However, there are a lot of caveats with those claims. In some scenarios, like with the new DLSS 3 algorithm and running extreme levels of ray tracing, that four-times difference in performance between the current generation RTX 3090 Ti and the RTX 4090 might materialize. In more…

A big talking point from Nvidia since the first RTX cards back in 2018, DLSS is perhaps the biggest potential change with Ada Lovelace. Using deep learning and artificial intelligence networks, DLSS attempts to intelligently upscale a lower-resolution source frame into a higher-resolution result. While the basic idea sounds relatively straightforward, in practice there has been a lot of trial and error. DLSS 1 used spatial upscaling, required per-game training, and only worked with certain upscaling factors depending on your GPU. Worse yet, it didn’t even look that great. Nvidia has been beating the ‘better than native’ drum since the beginning, but back in 2018, that was a laughable claim. DLSS 2 fundamentally changed the approach, shifting to a universal network (no per-game training) combined with temporal upscaling using multiple…

One of Intel’s claims to fame with the Arc GPUs is that they support AV1 encoding, something none of the other graphics cards have supported. With Ada Lovelace, one of Intel’s few selling points gets some competition, though, of course, the current entry price for the RTX 40-series remains substantially higher than Arc A380. Nvidia isn’t just adding AV1 support, however. The RTX 4080 12GB and above—perhaps even a future RTX 4070—will all have two NVENC blocks. These can either work on separate streams or combine to double encoding rates. Nvidia has been working with Black Magic on DaVinci Resolve, the Voukoder plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro, and Jianying (the top Chinese video editing app) to include support for the updated NVENC unit. AV1 allows for a 40 percent reduction in…

REMARKABLE 2 Anyone who loves writing on paper but with the safety of cloud backup will love the reMarkable 2. It’s designed to replicate the feeling of real paper, thanks to its unique design with a tactile, scratchy feel. You can write on PDFs, make notes that are automatically transcribed into documents, and draw doodles that are backed up to the cloud. You can then access them on any device you like, plus share or edit them. $279, www.remarkable.com SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB S8 ULTRA While the Apple iPad Pro is also a good choice, Samsung’s Android equivalent is a better option for designers and other creators. Unlike the iPad, it has a higher quality OLED display, features a huge 14.6-inch screen, and comes with a brilliant stylus that’s ideal for…

LOGITECH G CLOUD GAMING HANDHELD Logitech’s portable gaming system allows you to stream games from cloud services, such as Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia GeForce Now, plus Xbox Remote Play and Steam Link. Using a hotel Wi-Fi connection, you can then play your games library with proper gaming controls and haptic feedback. Games look great on the 7-inch 1080p 60Hz display, it weighs just over 1lb and has a long 12-hour battery life. $300, www.logitech.com QGEEM USB C TO HDMI 4K ADAPTER If you know a frequent traveler, this gift will make those nights away more enjoyable. It connects to any modern laptop, Android device, or newer Apple iPad Air/Pro and allows you to output videos, games, or even work on the hotel room television using an HDMI cable. You…

YOU’LL NEED THIS HWiNFO (www.hwinfo.com) WI-FI ANALYZER (https://matthafner.com/wifi-analyzer) KEEPING TABS ON THE VARIOUS COMPONENTS and peripherals that makeup your PC’s hardware can be a time-consuming task, but Windows 11 has you covered. The operating system has long offered a myriad of tools for managing and tweaking your hardware but has traditionally struggled to make them easily accessible and sensibly organized. Microsoft has pulled more options into the Settings app, so most of what you need is under a single section (Bluetooth & Devices), with shortcuts to other key areas (such as your display and network settings) clearly labeled. It’s not all good news—some key settings remain in their previous locations, but Microsoft has removed easy shortcuts. In this tutorial, we’ll take you on a tour of the Windows 11 Settings…

1. FIND A TV SHOW Type all or part of a show’s name and click Search. A list of matching entries from the TVDB website will be displayed. 2. SHOW SUMMARY Scroll through the list and select the show you’re looking for. Verify it’s correct using the summary shown here. Click ‘Open TVDB Page’ beneath the summary to go straight to the website. 3. SELECT EPISODES A list of episodes, including specials, recorded at TVDB will be displayed. Plex prefers an ‘aired’ order, so ensure this is selected. Hold Ctrl and click the episodes you wish to highlight. 4. TRANSFER AND SET NAMING CONVENTION Click ‘Add Episode(s)’ to transfer the selection here. If you don’t like the naming convention (Title – S00E00 – Episode Name) click Settings to change it.…

A SINGLE LAPTOP for almost every occasion? That might just be the new HP Spectre x360 16 2-in-1. This 16-inch laptop is pretty loaded. How so? It starts with a 16-inch OLED screen with a beyond-4K native resolution. There’s a 12th-gen Intel processor, two-in-one tablet functionality, and 1TB of SSD storage. And did we mention Intel’s controversial new Arc graphics chip? But that’s just the obvious stuff. The finer details include an HP input pen, speakers by Bang & Olufsen, a fingerprint reader, a digital creativity software bundle, a 5MP webcam, and a hefty battery with a claimed life of up to 15 hours. It’s all wrapped up in a sleek, slim, and moderately portable all-alloy chassis and offered at a remarkably reasonable price. It’s a decent proposition on paper…

NVIDIA’S NEW GPU has landed in the form of three new 4000-series graphics cards, and they are beasts. The $1,599 RTX 4090 24GB is a triple-slot 450W monster with 16,384 CUDA cores—50 percent more than the RTX 3090. Next is the $1,199 RTX 4080 16GB with 9,728 CUDA cores, and finally, the RTX 4080 12GB at $899 with 7,680 cores. All three use different versions of the new Ada Lovelace GPU coupled to GDDR6X memory. These have fourth-generation Tensor cores, third-generation ray tracing cores, shader execution reordering, DLSS 3, and clocks over 2.5GHz. These updated technologies, along with bigger core counts and faster clocks, add up to a big performance increase over the Ampere-powered cards. Every metric has been bumped: doubled or more in many cases. Nvidia’s claims include the…

THE HANDHELD GAMING MARKET has another contender, Logitech’s G Cloud Gaming Handheld. It’s a little over 10-inches across and 1.3-inches thick, has a 7-inch 16:9 touchscreen running at 1080p, with a brightness of 450 nits and a refresh rate of 60Hz. On the outside, there are all the gaming buttons you need, while inside there’s a SnapDragon 720G processor, an 8-core chip running at up to 2.3Ghz with 64GB of memory. The 6,000mAh battery is good for over 12 hours of gaming, an improvement over rivals such as the Steam Deck, which offers two hours. All this runs on a customized version of Android. First impressions of the G Cloud hardware is that it’s large enough for a good gaming experience, while being lightweight at just over 1lb. G Cloud…

Let that sink in. EVGA, the biggest vendor of Nvidia graphics cards in the US—accounting for roughly 40 percent of the market—called it quits one day after mining ended. The two might be unrelated. Nvidia’s CEO stated that EVGA’s founder Andrew Han had been “thinking about moving on for several years”. The time has apparently arrived and Han says he has no plans to sell the company or make cards for other companies. On the other, we can’t help but think cryptocurrency played a role. This boom-and-bust cycle was the fourth since Bitcoin’s inception and, in many ways, the most impactful on the world markets. Cryptocurrencies reached a peak market cap of nearly $3 trillion in November 2021, but their total worth currently sits at less than $1 trillion. Numerous…

> Synology Mesh > Ubuntu shares > Laptop drive failure Synology Mesh setup I’m a long-time user of a Synology RT2600ac router, and my biggest frustration has always been extending my Wi-Fi network to cover the whole house. I've experimented with extenders and a Powerline network with Wi-Fi, but having to prompt my devices to move from one network to another feels like a compromise. Mesh networks would fix this problem, so you can imagine how excited I was to discover my RT2600ac could combine with other Synology routers to deliver such a solution. What do I need for such a setup—can I keep the cost to under $150, for example? And how do I go about configuring a Synology mesh network? —Kevin Tuma THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: You can create…

Looking at the announced graphics cards, there are plenty of holes to plug. For instance, there’s a rather huge gap between the RTX 4090 and the RTX 4080 16GB, which could easily be filled with an RTX 4080 Ti when it’s time for the inevitable refresh. Obviously, we’re missing anything below the RTX 4080 12GB for now, and we expect Nvidia will launch plenty of other 40-series cards over the coming year. But there’s also room for something faster at the top of the pecking order. RTX 4090 only has 89 percent of AD102’s GPU, Tensor, and RT cores enabled. It’s also missing out on 24MB of the maximum 96MB of L2 cache, and one of the GPC clusters is disabled, taking one of the ROPs clusters with it. This…

With all the things that Ada Lovelace does include, it’s also important to point out some of the items that didn’t make the cut. Most of these were left out either because Nvidia didn’t feel they were necessary, or because the potential gains weren’t worth the additional die space. First, the interface on Ada remains PCIe 4.0, not 5.0. Hopper supports PCIe 5.0, but Nvidia claims that there’s little need for a faster, more complex, and more power-hungry PCIe interface on its consumer GPUs. Next, in a rather surprising move, Ada won’t support DisplayPort 2.0. The standard has been ratified for use since 2019, so we were somewhat surprised it wasn’t in Ampere, but three years later and still no DisplayPort 2.0? That’s shocking, as even Intel Arc supports the…

CASTLE WOLFENSTEIN APPLE II • 1981 Silas Warner’s game is set inside a castle during World War II. Its combination of tense moments, strategy, and arcade smarts won fans over. PRINCE OF PERSIA APPLE II • 1989 Find your way out of dungeons to save a princess in Jordan Mechner’s Prince Of Persia. Realistic animation cemented the game’s classic status. ANGRY BIRDS iOS • 2009 Inspired by online flash game Crush The Castle and in-house Rovio designer Jaakko Iisalo’s designs of limbless avians, Angry Birds exploded on to the iPhone. Its bite-sized slingshot gameplay was perfect for touchscreen control, catapulting the game toward iconic status. ULTIMA APPLE II • 1981 Richard Garriott used his Apple II to make Ultima. One of the first open-world RPGs, it has influenced countless games…

ELGATO STREAM DECK MINI The Elgato Stream Deck Mini not only gives livestreams the controllability of a TV studio setup, but it’s also an excellent productivity tool. You can customize buttons to switch between a game and a webcam in a livestream, control your smart home, or switch between email client and web browser in Windows. Once you get used to this nifty device, it’s difficult to live without it. $80, www.elgato.com LOGITECH LITRA BEAM Logitech’s new lighting system is interesting. The Litra Beam is lightweight, versatile, and powered using a USB-C cable, either from your computer or a wall adapter. It offers five shades of lighting from warm to cool and you can combine multiple beams to add more depth to yourself and your background with Rembrandt lighting. The…

TIP OF THE MONTH SECRET START MENU Everyone knows how to access the Start menu, right? (Click on the Windows icon at the bottom left of your screen or on your keyboard, just in case). But are you aware that there is a lesser-known menu from which you can access the command prompt, task manager, and control panel? Right-click on the Start menu or press ‘Windows key + X’ to open this secret menu and reveal these important Windows tools. SAME OLD ‘BEEP’ Am I growing out of video games? Or are my expectations too high? I ask myself these two questions every time I get excited about a new title only to be, somewhat inevitably, let down. The latest Saints Row certainly hasn’t lived up to its predecessors. So,…

1. PRINTERS & SCANNERS Click here to not just view installed printers (and install new ones), but access various printer options and change Windows’ default setting of choosing your default printer for you. 2. PHONE LINK Use this to connect your Android phone to your PC so you can instantly access media, send and receive texts, and more. You’ll be redirected to the Store to download an app on first use. 3. CAMERAS View connected cameras (including video cameras) and add new network ones. You can tweak your camera’s video and audio from here and, from Windows 11 22H2, apply cinematic effects. 4. MOUSE Core mouse features are now housed here, such as the primary mouse button and pointer speed. Click ‘Additional mouse settings’ to access more options via the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS Two tools feature in this tutorial RENAME MY TV SERIES 2 free (www.tweaking4all.com/home-theatre/rename-my-tv-series-v2/) METAX FOR WINDOWS $9.95 (www.danhinsley.com) THE SECRET TO A PERFECT media server isn’t just the creation of files that play nicely with all your streaming devices. All good media servers, including Plex and Jellyfin, perform what’s known as ‘media scraping’ of online databases such as TheTVDB to furnish you with all the metadata you need—title, episode, synopsis, cast, rating, and so on. In most cases, this process can be done automatically—all you need to do is correctly name files and place them within the specific folder hierarchy. In this tutorial, then, we’ll first look at how to both quickly and easily rename and organize your files to make them identifiable to your media server.…

While Jellyfin handles multiple movie versions and editions using the same suffix filename style (see step five), Plex is less flexible with this approach. Plex prefers you to use suffixes for multiple versions of the same file only. This means your client either picks the best option based on available bandwidth or lets you choose from a list that only displays each version’s resolution and bandwidth. If you’d like to offer multiple editions of a film, you’re advised to try a different naming convention. Although Plex recommends separate directories for each edition, you can store them all in the same directory: Avatar (2009) Avatar (2009) {edition-Collector’s Extended Cut}.mp4 Avatar (2009) {edition-Special Edition Re-Release}.mp4 If you then want to store multiple versions of each edition, you’ll need to adapt the naming…

AS IMPRESSIVE AS Nvidia’s RTX 4 090 is when it comes to raw performance, the Intel Arc A770 may even be more surprising in many ways. After the disappointing A380 (see November issue), its bigger sibling the A770 delivers a compelling set of performance and features at an aggressive price. There are some growing pains with Intel’s graphics ambitions, such as the drivers that may not always work correctly and will likely leave some untapped performance on the table. But Arc is here and it’s mostly good. Intel took a long, hard look at Nvidia and appears to have told its engineers to match or exceed the RTX cards on every major feature. Along with the expected GPU cores, the Alchemist architecture packs XMX cores (the equivalent of Nvidia’s Tensor…

WHEN AMD’S NEW ZEN 4 PROCESSORS launched, they reached benchmarks that put AMD back on top of the leaderboards in multithreaded performance. The top dog, the Ryzen 9 7950X ($699, see review page 76) broke benchmarking world records. It has a peak clock rate of 5.7GHz on two cores but, with some cooling, can be pushed to 5.8GHz on all cores. AMD’s own overclocking team, using a Corsair AIO cooler, managed a 5.4GHz all-core boost, and claimed a world record for a 16-core Cinebench R23 benchmark at 40,498. The chips have drawn attention for their heat too, a properly toasty 95°C. Consuming over 200W doesn’t help but neither, apparently, does a thick integrated heat-spreader added to ensure compatibility with older AM4 coolers. Sadly for AMD, a reckoning with Intel’s 13th…

WITH THE LAUNCH of the RTX 4090 (reviewed page 74), Nvidia has maintained its position as the manufacturer of the world’s fastest consumer graphics card. But it’s been a long road, one that has taken it from starting out in the highly competitive 90s era of 3D specialists to acquiring one-time rival 3dfx, working on the first Xbox, and now supplying the graphics tech for the Nintendo Switch. But the real story has always been its fight with AMD/ATI. Here are the GPUs that fought on the front lines. 5 NVIDIA GEFORCE 256 Release date: 1999 The card that put Nvidia on the map is notable for two things—it took 3D rendering tasks away from the CPU and directly onto the graphics card, causing Nvidia to coin the term ‘GPU’ or…

Nvidia isn’t the only GPU game in town. AMD is hard at work on its Radeon RX 7000-series cards and RDNA 3 GPUs. We should have more details next month, but we already know what to expect. Current indications are that AMD will be providing a similarly huge jump in GPU core counts compared to RDNA 2, just like AD102 over GA102. The current Navi 21 GPU tops out at 80 Compute Units (CUs), 128MB of Infinity Cache, and a 256-bit memory interface paired with vanilla GDDR6 memory. Navi 31 will reportedly have 96 CUs, but each CU will have twice as many shader units as RDNA 2. That means a maximum of 12,288 GPU cores. While that’s less than AD102’s potential 18,432, keep in mind that the RX 6950…

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FLEXISPOT E7 STANDING DESK The best standing desk you can buy, according to our sister publication Creative Bloq, the E7 has an LED display with four height presets, dual-powered motors, and an alarm to remind you to take a break. It will also support up to 100kg, which is enough for your PC, multiple monitors, and any books you like to keep on your desk. It’s also great for tall people, as it extends up to 50-inches. $580, www.flexispot.com SAMSUNG ODYSSEY NEO G9 If you’re running multiple programs at once, an ultrawide setup can boost productivity. The Odyssey Neo G9 takes this to extremes with its 5120x1440 resolution screen, the equivalent of two large monitors. Its Quantum Mini-LED panel is extraordinary, as is the 240Hz refresh rate. $1,675, www.samsung.com BELKIN…

While Windows Settings provides some troubleshooting tools to deal with network problems, one area it can’t help you with is the performance of your Wi-Fi network. If you aren’t getting the expected transfer speeds or are experiencing frequent dropouts, use the free Wi-Fi Analyzer tool (https://matthafner.com/wifi-analyzer). Once installed, the app will display a summary of your current connection, including signal strength. A Networks tab provides a list of networks within range (or just outside range), providing you with an idea of how many networks are in your neighborhood and whether they’re causing interference. To confirm this, switch to the Analyze tab to view a chart that displays networks according to the channel they’re transmitting on. If Wi-Fi Analyzer detects you could improve your signal by switching to a different channel,…

IN A MOVE THAT was inevitable but still shocking, Google announced it will close its game streaming service Stadia in January 2023, three years after it launched. The writing was on the wall when the company shut its internal game development studios in early 2021, indicating a lack of interest in creating unique experiences for the system. Google’s mistake was that it only released five exclusives for the platform. As Nintendo and Sony know, such platforms need a stream of unique, compelling content to succeed—something even Amazon appreciates with its own well-funded if floundering games studios. The timing was ironic for me. The day before Google’s announcement, my LG TV’s app store threw up a promo for three months of free Stadia Pro, which I promptly took up. The trial…

EVERY COUPLE OF years, the planets align in such a way that allows for the birth of a new generation of graphics cards. Right on schedule, Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace has arrived, and with it the new RTX 4090 Founders Edition. It isn’t the biggest 4090 graphics card, that’s Gigabyte’s 4090 Aorus Master. The RTX 3090 Ti paved the way earlier this year, with a 450W TBP (total board power) and support for the new 12VHPWR 16-pin power connector. The RTX 4090 doesn’t increase the power requirements, but performance sees a major jump, potentially the biggest generational boost we’ve seen for GPUs. The RTX 4090 has more GPU cores and higher clocks than the outgoing 3090 Ti—we saw clocks of 2.7GHz or more while gaming. It’s a theoretical 106 percent improvement…

SPOILER ALERT! The ending of 1991’s Monkey Island 2 was somewhat controversial, as we’re sure you recall. Protagonist Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate and master of insult sword fighting, and his nemesis the ghost pirate LeChuck were revealed to be brothers playing in the maintenance area of an amusement park, told to clear out by a workman and running out to meet their parents. The whale thing had been in their imagination all along. This reveal didn’t stop the Monkey Island series from expanding to five games, though creator Ron Gilbert ceased being involved after the first two, but did leave a convenient jumping-off point for another sequel. Return to Monkey Island is that game and Gilbert is back at the helm. It begins with young Guybrush and Chuckie exploring the…

ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO, a previous employer of mine decided to move its email provider from Microsoft to Google. I was overjoyed. At the time, Outlook was tired, clunky, and ugly, while Gmail had a beautiful interface, a proper mobile app, and the ability to enable add-ons. This included one that could delay sending your email so you could go back and edit it or, for an ill-advised 11pm rant to the boss, delete it completely in the morning. While Gmail is still the better-looking of the two, much has changed in the intervening years. Microsoft has improved its mobile apps, Microsoft 365 has become an integral part of the Windows 10 and Windows 11 experience, and new features such as the ability to see all your attachments in one…