Innehållsförteckning för June 2024 från Maximum PC

WITH AMD’S RDNA 4 GPUs rumored for the end of 2024, there’s little room for AMD’s previous-gen RDNA 2 cards. The series launched in 2020, and the 16GB AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT was considered one of the best graphics cards of its time. Unfortunately, it was almost impossible to purchase at its original retail price. In recent weeks, history seems to be repeating itself. Used RDNA 2 series graphics cards are still available via auction sites, though in some cases for well above the original retail price. Lower-end GPUs like the Radeon RX 6750 XT are also still available for around $330. AMD’s higher-end RX 7000-series, such as the RX 7900 GRE and RX 7900 XT, are also still available at reasonable prices.…

LG DISPLAY has developed the first ever gaming panel with a switchable refresh rate and resolution. This is achieved through the company’s ‘Dynamic Frequency and Resolution (DFR)’ feature. Mass production is already underway. In theory, this will allow users to choose between a high refresh rate (posited by LG as FHD∙480Hz) and a high-resolution mode (UHD∙240Hz). The company says that given a high refresh rate allows the panel to display more images per second, this is most useful for games where speed and screen changes are particularly important. The UHD high-resolution mode is designed for graphically rich content like 4K movies, given the more pixel-perfect video and image quality. At 480Hz, LG claims the panel has the fastest response time (0.03ms) of any panel on the market. LG has also incorporated…

THE LATEST GENERATION of mobile GPUs and CPUs are now well established. That means prices are down from their peak, when all the hardware was new. At the same time, it’ll likely be a year before any significant chip updates arrive. This means that now is a great time to grab a great gaming portable at a sensible price, without having to worry that it will be hopelessly outdated a few months later. 5 ACER PREDATOR HELIOS 16 Considering this laptop is quite a bit cheaper than its RTX 4080 competition, it doesn’t feel that pared back for it. In fact, this laptop has one of the most gorgeous screens we’ve seen on a mobile device yet, powered by mini-LED and running at 240Hz. The overall gaming performance is a…

PC GAMING has come a long way in the last 20-30 years. Let’s be fair—it has never been a cheap hobby. Consoles have and always will be cheaper than any PC you can buy or build, no matter what generation. In fact, over the years we’ve tried numerous times to forge the ultimate budget rig, only for it to still be more expensive than its console counterparts, and lacking performance somewhat as well (although admittedly that’s because PCs have better graphical fidelity as standard). It’s a tale as old as time. But lately, with the cost of hardware climbing upward, it feels like getting your foot in the door for a decent PC gaming experience is starting to become almost impossible. Once upon a time, our budget builds were $400-500.…

media://mpc230.centerfold.planetpc_xr2_mini_desktop-1.jpg/ IF YOU’RE BORED of conventional tower rigs or x86-based mini PCs, then get a load of the new PlanetPC XR2 Mini Desktop. The idea is a zero configuration Linux PC. No more searching for drivers, compiling or configuring obscure parameters; just a usable Linux machine running Ubuntu. Novelties include an integrated color touchscreen with 1,424 by 280 pixel resolution, giving access to soft keys, a system monitor, and controls for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio, and other system functions. Connectivity is another strong point, with two HDMI out ports with support for up to 8K resolutions, an HDMI-in for capturing video up to 4K, dual ethernet, microSD, USB-C, and even a legacy VGA port. Oh, we forgot to mention that this is an Arm-based rig running the intriguing RockChip RK3588 SoC. It…

TIP OF THE MONTH GOOGLE DRIVE DARK MODE Nobody panic—it’s finally happened. Google has implemented a ‘Dark mode’ for its Google Drive suite on web. To activate it, simply click the settings cog on the drive of your choice, scroll down to ‘Appearance’, and change it to what mode you’d like. Bear in mind that this only changes the drive file explorer, not the actual documents themselves. MISSING YESTERYEAR I’ve been in the tech industry for quite some time—coming up to ten years next year. The older I’ve gotten, though, the more I’m starting to miss the past. I’ve always been into PC gaming, and have long built my own machines, since my mom rewarded me with some cash to build a brand-new gaming PC as a reward for getting…

YOU’LL NEED THIS Admin privileges Stable internet connection HAVE YOU NOTICED that no matter how many times you up your browser’s security level, decline cookies, and click ‘Do Not Track’, it feels like websites still know your browsing habits? Browser fingerprinting is a way of identifying you through the information your browser sends when it visits a web page. Some of this information is contained in the ‘User-Agent’ header, which gives the site basic information about your browser version, operating system, language, time zone, and so on. This can be combined with other data to form a unique ‘fingerprint’. This is a very serious risk for your privacy, as unlike your browsing history, fingerprints are stored on remote servers, so can’t be deleted. In this guide, you’ll learn how to…

I LEFT Maximum PC back in November of 2021. Corsair offered me a position as a PR specialist. I took the leap (this was before I realized just how much I’d miss journalism), thinking, given my skillset and ability to moan about products a lot, that maybe I could do some good there. I learnt a lot from my time there, and worked with some incredibly good people. There’s a lot of talented folk in this industry, not just at Corsair, but Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Razer, Logitech, and more. It’s a tight-knit community, and one I’m very fond of. When I left Corsair in 2023, heading back into tech journalism and going freelance, the head of PR at the time and my manager gave me some incredible gifts. One was a…

IS THE AYANEO KUN the king of handheld gaming PCs? That’s what the company is clearly aiming for with a name like that, and it gets so damned close. Yet, there are the little things that get in the way of the full regal verdict. Hold that thought—the Ayaneo Kun is based on the exact same silicon as most other gaming handhelds. Yup, it’s the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U (occasionally known as the Ryzen Z1 Extreme), and it’s the SoC de jour, paired here with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. It’s a huge amount of hardware for a handheld. Ayaneo itself has a host of different devices, from the tiny Air 1S to its Flip in two different designs, and the Slide. The Kun is perhaps the most…

THERE’S SOMETHING TO be said for a chassis design that’s a little different. No matter where you turn these days, pretty much all cases look sort of the same. Let’s be fair, there’s only so much you can do with a metal box that holds your PC parts, but still, the homogenization of the humble chassis is a little disappointing, particularly if you want something a little more unique. The Model 8 from Geometric Future does exactly that. It’s made by a small start-up Chinese company. It’s got a few products out there: the odd power supply, liquid-cooler, fan, you know the drill, but the big product range comes in the form of its chassis. Yep, there are four base versions total, all of them labeled as ‘Models’ going from…

IN THIS ISSUE of Maximum PC, we’ve dared to think the unthinkable in performance PC building. Namely, can we build a gaming PC that doesn’t have a dedicated GPU? Of course, the GPU market has gone bananas over the last few years, and what was not so long ago the price of a top-end graphics card ($500) has now become the entry price for a decent unit. Intel has tried to plug the gap at the entry-level $200-350 price point with its Arc A750 and A770 cards, and while they got off to a shaky start, the former card is now good enough to feature in our budget builds (see page 96). AMD, though, has another idea to appeal to budget gamers—a new CPU boasting enough gaming grunt to play…

SAMSUNG HAS BEGUN mass-producing its 9th-generation triple-level cell (TLC) vertical NAND memory chips for high-performance/high-density solid state drives. They are smaller and have an improved bit-density of 50 percent compared to the Samsung’s 8th-generation V-NAND. They will also have 290 active layers—a 20 percent improvement on previous generations. This should enable Samsung to increase recording density of its 3D NAND devices. According to a report by Hankyung Media, Samsung plans to build on this by introducing a 10th Generation V-NAND chip in 2025 with 430 layers. It also says that Samsung has achieved this through a ‘string stacking production technique’: building a CMOS layer with logic, a 145-layer 3D NAND memory array on top, then successive identical layers on top of that. Other NAND manufacturers have been quick to exploit…

The whole AI industry is, slightly ironically, tricky to compute. What does ‘AI’ actually mean? When do a few clever algorithms and a dash of pattern spotting actually become artificial intelligence in a meaningful sense? Right now, there’s debate over the possibility of sentience of the latest chatbots. Personally, I don’t think text prediction amounts to intelligence, much less sentience. Large language models are meant to do a convincing job of predicting text, and do just that, which is not cause to impute some mysterious higher function emerging out of nothing. That may happen eventually. In the meantime, we have the term ‘AI’ plastered all over everything. Later this year, that will include the PC. Microsoft is obviously one of the most important players in PC tech, so what it…

THE BENEFITS OF VPNs—Virtual Private Networks—are well-known, particularly when it comes to securing your connection to the internet. Nate Drake’s excellent feature in the October 2023 issue explains how that side of VPNs work, but another use for VPNs is to provide you with a secure means of going in the opposite direction. In other words, instead of tunneling your way out into the wider internet, we’re talking about tunneling back into your local network from outside. Why do this? First, it enables you to access your network as if you were sat at home, giving you access to all your local network resources. But another use for VPNs is to provide you with an alternative—and even more secure—means of accessing your home server. Instead of exposing sensitive services like…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PHOTOSHOP CC 25.5 OR LATER Some images An internet connection ADOBE HAS DONE a lot of work to integrate generative AI—a system it calls Firefly—into Photoshop over the past year. The technology has made the jump from the beta version of the app to the mainline release you’ll find on Creative Cloud, as well as the web and iPad versions. The image-editing app’s AI capabilities now cover much more than producing uncanny images of people with six fingers and an uncountable number of teeth, but then, that was never Adobe’s approach to the tech. It has always taken the position of seeing what neural networks can do for Photoshop without allowing them to become Photoshop, and while the current buzz on social media might be about models…

YOU’LL NEED THIS An up-to-date version of VLC Media Player I SINCE 2001, VLC Media Player (Previously ‘VideoLAN Client’) has developed a solid reputation as a lightweight and free media player. It supports a huge number of media types, DVD playback, and even streaming video. VLC uses the open-source libavcodec library, meaning it supports virtually all codecs and file formats well beyond what Windows and most other operating systems can play natively. The program is well known for its icon, which takes the form of an orange traffic cone. What’s less well known is that VLC is much more than just a simple media player—the program can actually convert files from one media format to another. In this guide, you’ll learn how to get set up with VLC and point…

WE ALL KNOW the story of the tortoise and the hare: the rabbit races along for short periods of time and then rests, while the turtle plods along at a steady pace and ultimately wins the race. AMD’s RX 7900 GRE, the ‘Golden Rabbit Edition’ that was only available in China for the past year, flips the story around and claims a late victory by edging past its Nvidia competition in the form of the RTX 4070. The 7900 GRE doesn’t get a clear win in every area, however, and the RTX 4070 has been steadily racking up sales over the past year. It’s the ninth most popular GPU right now, according to Valve’s monthly Steam Hardware Survey. AMD could have launched the 7900 GRE in all markets last year,…

ARE YOU READY for a really bad joke? There’s not a single Cuda core on this thing—not one—and it’s not on fire, either. What the heck, Seagate? You had one job: give your PCIe 5.0 drive a sensible name. Well folks, here we have it: Seagate’s top-tier, flagship PCIe 5.0 drive that you can pick up right now. It’s not quite as blisteringly quick as some of its like-minded competitors, at least not on the sequentials, but it is nippy in other areas. Let’s dive in. The FireCuda 540 is pretty similar to a number of 5.0 drives out there right now. In fact, it’s genuinely quite sad just how similar all these drives are. At its heart, the 540 features a 232-layer TLC NAND developed by Micron, Phison’s E26…

WOW. Look at those swaying aquatic plants as you dive underwater, ready to hide from mechanical foes in the 'stealth kelp'. Look at the neon lights that form the cyber-ghost of Las Vegas above the post apocalyptic dunes, and the lush grass as you stoop down to slowly pick up more sticks. No question, Horizon: Forbidden West is a technical tour de force. But while the graphics have certainly evolved, arguably little else has. The gorgeous visuals at least make this feel at home on PC. With a good enough rig, this port can meet and exceed what is still one of PS5’s most resource-hungry titles. That said, on our mid-level test rig, the game ran very nicely at 1440p with a 144hz refresh, Nvidia’s DLSS making the graphics a…

AH, THESE TWO TITANS. If you’ve spent any amount of time in the world of benchmarking, stress-testing your PC, or even if you’re just curious about how toasty that Ryzen 9 7950X is getting, you’ll have no doubt heard of HWMonitor and HWiNFO. On the surface, they serve a very similar purpose. Their job, as much as it is, is to tie into the mass of sensors that litter your motherboard and supporting components, reporting on all manner of temperatures, voltages, and clock speeds that your OS and system need to know about. At this point, they then relay that information directly back to you in an easily readable format. Now. it goes without saying that here at Maximum PC, we are big fans of both of these pieces of…

THIS YEAR at Intel’s ‘Vision’ event in Phoenix, Arizona, the tech company focused on bringing business and technology leaders together to learn about AI advances. It also announced that the 6th generation Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest processors will be branded ‘Xeon 6’, dispensing with the ‘Fifth-Gen Xeon Scalable’ naming convention. In Intel’s words, the “evolved” Xeon 6 branding will “tell a unified Intel Xeon story,” “facilitate customer navigation”, and “amplify performance signals.” Intel’s product stack consists of 32 models divided into six lanes for cloud, networking, and so on, plus the Bronze, Gold, Silver, and Platinum tiers. At the time of writing, it’s not clear how the introduction of Xeon 6 Sierra Forest processors will clarify the current lineup of CPUs. Intel first unveiled its 288-core Xeon CPU in…

TRIUMPHS TIKTOK BAN PASSED The US government has approved a ban, citing privacy and security concerns. 8K META QUEST YouTube videos via Meta Quest are now better quality, due to the app supporting 8K streaming. BATTERY CHARGES UP European researchers have developed a charging solution to make li-ion batteries last longer by altering how the charger delivers current to electrolytes. TRAGEDIES MESSAGE APPS REMOVED Apple has removed WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Threads in China at the request of the Chinese government. MITRE ATTACKED Hackers have used Ivanti devices to access one of MITRE’s unclassified networks. MAJOR WINDOWS FLAW An attack relies on ‘Magicdot’ paths, where functions convert DOS to NT, allowing hackers access to Windows machines.…

SEGA TOYS released its line of ‘Kimit’ toys in February 2024. The cat robots were supposedly trained on the data of over 100 cats, and can mimic typical feline behavior. This innovation, which cost ¥33,000 (around $215), seems more expensive than adopting a cat, but Sega Toys was aiming at customers who were allergic to the real thing. This is quite a problem: a survey by Tokyo-based LG Electronics Japan in 2023 revealed that 12.5 percent of cat owners have an adverse reaction to their own pets. A series of adverts in Japan showcased the robots’ ability to make their eyes glow as users cuddled and petted them. The ‘ragdoll’ cats were also shown to be warm to the touch, with realistic-looking fur, which is apparently what triggered the recall. According…

The result, according to numerous accounts on forums, has been out of VRAM errors and other instabilities. My particular PC has also experienced problems. While my own CPU issues date back over a year, it seems a number of games are triggering ‘out of VRAM’ error messages, particularly on Nvidia GPUs. But the graphics card has nothing to do with the games crashing to desktop. RAD Tools, which provides software libraries, released a statement about crashing problems: “RAD has become aware of a problem that can cause Oodle Data decompression failures, or crashes in games built with Unreal. We believe that this is a hardware problem which affects primarily Intel 13900K and 14900K processors, less likely 13700, 14700 and other related processors as well. Only a small fraction of those…

> Better NAS mobo? > Explorer crashes > Speed up Handbrake Alternative N100 board In your article on building a NAS system in the April 2024 issue, two possible N100I motherboards were mentioned. In doing research on the components in the system, I came across a third possibility, the IKuai OS N100 ITX motherboard. Looking at the specifications, it seems like a much better fit for your NAS build. Some advantages over your choices are that the IKuaiOS has six SATA ports, four Ethernet ports, and two M.2 ports built into the motherboard. It does lack audio output, but I don’t think this is a problem for a NAS server. Using the iKuai OS board would seem to eliminate the need for the M.2 SATA card, the Ethernet card, and…

The internet has never been more dangerous. In April, a Microsoft Employee stumbled across a cunningly coded Linux backdoor that could have compromised virtually every major website. Generative AI promises to transform users’ desktop experience. But cybercriminals are using LLMs to generate well-written phishing messages, as well as malicious code. Traditional ways to protect your online privacy like VPNs are also being undermined by increasingly sophisticated ‘fingerprinting’ techniques. Protecting your PC is largely a matter of developing good habits such as regular updates and using integrated tools. In this guide, you’ll gain some insight into the state of cybersecurity for 2024, as well as some ways to keep your device safe. SECURE BROWSERS POSITIVES Easier detection of bugs Compatible with privacy plugins Resistant to browser fingerprinting NEGATIVES Can’t protect against…

CYBERATTACKS don’t look like you might expect—and they certainly don’t look like they do in the movies. If your security is compromised, you probably won’t see a big flashing sign saying ‘YOU HAVE BEEN HACKED’, or weird skull-and-crossbones graphics filling your display. On the contrary, modern attackers lay low. The era when hackers just wanted to attract attention and cause chaos has long gone—today, they more likely want to use your computer for mining cryptocurrency, or as a staging point for launching anonymous attacks on remote targets. Or, of course, they may intend to quietly encrypt your personal files, with a view to demanding a ransom for the decryption key. Whatever the goal, it’s in their interest to be as discreet as possible, and not to tip you off that…

YOU’LL NEED THIS AN ACTIVE MICROSOFT ACCOUNT for each family organizer/member WHILE THE INTERNET can be a great tool to help kids learn and socialize with their friends, children sometimes struggle to put down their devices. The more time they spend online, the greater the risk that they’ll be exposed to unsuitable content. There’s no substitute for being there each time young people in your care go online. Still, given the rise of portable devices and how ubiquitous the internet is, parents and guardians can’t always be there. Fortunately, Windows 11 offers some powerful parental controls, which you can use to manage your child’s computer usage free of charge. In this guide, you’ll find out how to set up Microsoft Family Safety and create accounts for you and your kids. You’ll…

FOR WHAT SEEMED like forever, I waited for the first high-refresh 32-inch 4K OLED monitors to arrive. Well, now they have, and I’ve spent quality time with a couple of them, namely the Alienware 32 AW3225QF and Asus ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM. They both use Samsung’s new 32-inch QD-OLED panel, albeit Alienware has gone with the curved option and the Asus is flat. LG’s competing 32-inch 4K OLED tech is also incoming, but monitors using it haven’t gone on sale yet. Anyway, after several weeks with both models, I’ve acquired some learnings, most notably that life is pretty sweet with a high-DPI OLED monitor, but it’s also complicated as well. It’s sweet, because OLED with decent pixel density and good full-screen brightness is what I’ve been waiting for. I particularly…

http://media://MPC230.rev_2.HP_Omen_45L-1.jpg HP’S CURRENT RANGE of Omen desktop cases are imposing black monoliths that genuinely do look like something out of a science fiction movie. We’re referring to the type that’s about unknowable alien technology indistinguishable from magic, rather than the affable uncle who makes an airship out of old gears and his wife’s underwear, but sci-fi nonetheless. That it wears its CPU cooling system, known as a ‘cryo chamber’—but actually just the usual radiator and fans—as a hat only enhances this feeling. Luckily, the innards of the Omen 45L aren’t fictional; they’re functional. And with a 13th-gen i9, an RTX 4090 and 64GB of RAM, this one’s very functional indeed. There may be newer chips emerging onto the market, but the i9-13900K is not to be argued with, and matched…

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, two of the biggest names in the memory market have been Corsair and Crucial (or Micron, really). They’re without a doubt some of the largest manufacturers out there, with some serious market share both on the enterprise level and to us consumers as well. Corsair has perhaps made itself more prominently known on that front, particularly with its Dominator and Vengeance series (although Crucial certainly has tried in the past with its Ballistix line), but all in all, these two juggernauts have been at it for many, many years, battling to and fro over ever-tightening market-share. Why is that relevant? Well, let’s just say that when it comes to performance, these two are the kings, and our memory kit on test today, Crucial’s Pro Overclocking, really…

MECHANICAL KEYBOARDS for the average Joe are a bit unique these days. Because the market and the enthusiast space has advanced so rapidly over the last few years, long gone are the times when manufacturers could forgo sound dampening, and use any old Cherry switch or a discounted alternative on their boards. After all, why buy an off-the shelf product when you can build a board specifically for your needs? Layout size, switch-type, foam dampening, keycaps, cable—all of it can be customized to your liking. That puts the traditional manufacturers in a tricky position when it comes to designing new product lines, and it’s very much a case of 'adapt or die'. Asus, while not new to the peripheral game, is certainly not a brand that immediately springs to mind when…