Innehållsförteckning för August 2024 från Maximum PC

THIS ISSUE of Maximum PC is filled with glimpses into the future—nextgeneration Zen 5 chips from AMD (page 8), the future of gaming keyboards with 8,000Hz polling rates (page 49), as well as the first ARM-based Snapdragon X laptops and their amazing battery life (page 72). But as any bargain hunter will know, the release of the next big thing often results in great discounts on last season’s model. And we really are seeing some excellent bargains at the moment, particularly on items like graphics cards, RAM, and SSDs. This is why we’ve chosen to build a $999 gaming PC this issue to take advantage of all the great value PC tech that’s out there. The last time we attempted such a budget build was in May 2023, when it…

THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION has its eyes on Adobe for breaches of ROSCA (the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act). This was enacted in 2010 to protect consumers from online fees that weren’t made clear beforehand. Adobe has been pushing people toward an annual subscription billed monthly, at $59.99 a month for the Creative Cloud All Apps package. What isn’t clear is what happens if you cancel the account, because that information is buried in tiny text that mentions a “early termination fee”. You only get full details when you try to cancel, and that fee is half of any remaining months. Also, the FTC alleges that Adobe makes subscription cancellation difficult, incorporating “resistance and delay” tactics. Some customers are left thinking they’ve canceled their package, only to be billed. This…

THE LIST of most valuable companies has been topped by big tech for years. Apple has generally been in prime place, with Microsoft and Alphabet occasionally usurping it. Now, we have a new winner: Nvidia. In mid-June, it became the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization at $3.34 trillion. No prizes for guessing why. The growth of AI has led to every other big tech company beating a path to buy its high-end accelerators. Last year, Nvidia sold 3.76 million data center GPUs—98 percent of the market. On March 18, Nvidia announced its Blackwell family, which it promised would power “a new era of computing”. The 208 billion transistor B200 chips are built into GB200 systems that are 30 times faster and use less power than the previous generation. A…

THE DUST has settled on the orgy of silicon, sweat-shop capitalism, and silly AI marketing straplines that was the 2024 Computex show in Taiwan. All that’s left bar the cocktail of air-travel contracted pathogens currently laying waste to the post-Computex attendees is to decide which was the best new laptop chip announced at the show. AMD’s or Intel’s? I know what you’re thinking. What about Qualcomm’s new Arm chip, the Snapdragon X? It may well be a turning point for Arm on the PC, but there’s a long way to go, and much to prove, not least the efficacy of its x86 emulation. In reality, the vast majority of laptops are still going to use AMD and Intel x86 chips for several years to come. In some ways, Intel’s Lunar Lake…

WE ALWAYS KNEW a $1,000 build was going to be a little rough around the edges, so let’s preface this benchmark chat with a little caveat. We are very much comparing this build to a system that costs $589 more on the core componentry alone. That doesn’t sound like much, but if you took this build and poured all that extra cash into the GPU, you’d end up with a rig with an RTX 4070 Ti Super in it or better, and we’re comparing it to an RTX 4070 Super at that. Additionally, all of our testing, for better or worse, is performed at 4K to really test the limits of our GPU in question, so when you see 3 fps in Cyberpunk with ray tracing enabled, that’s definitely not…

For gaming purposes, the difference between the fastest and slowest motherboard for a platform can be quite large. We wouldn’t expect an $80 board with an H610 chipset to match a $400 board with a Z790 chipset on features or performance, and the same goes for a socket AM5 board using the A620 chipset compared to the X670E chipset. Memory support, power delivery, and other aspects can and will differ. We’ve done our best to level the playing field as much as possible by selecting some of the best components for each platform. Some elements are even the same across all four systems, like the Crucial T700 4TB PCIe 5.0 SSD for storage and be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600W power supply. The SSD won’t run at PCIe 5.0 speeds…

When is the fastest processor not the fastest? When drivers, platforms, and architectures come into play. AMD’s stacked 3D V-cache used in its Ryzen 5000 and 7000 series X3D chips can dramatically boost gaming performance, though it varies by game and other factors. That’s actually not something we expected to see. We started our testing of these processors with the RTX 4080, and everything lined up pretty much as expected. As we worked our way down to the RTX 3080, 2080, and eventually 3050, however, we started to see some curious results. The 7800X3D clearly wins at 1080p with the 4080, while the 1440p and 4K are basically GPU limited. Based on that, we expected to see very little difference between the 2080 and 3050, since those GPUs are substantially slower.…

So where do we go from here? The world of gaming keyboards has never been more competitive. As the competition heats up, we’re seeing advances in fields across the board. One field in particular is in connectivity. There has been a big push recently in the world of wireless keyboards, particularly those looking to be competitive with them. Over the years, wireless keyboards (and mice, for that matter) have had a reputation as being pretty awful when it comes to latency. Couple that with a low battery life, and usually a lackluster featureset compared to the likes of their wired brethren, and they’re often disregarded. At this year’s Computex, a number of manufacturers debuted boards that re-envision that belief. Asus in particular showcased its latest Azoth Extreme keyboard, featuring an…

You can download a standalone version of Ventoy in zip format from https://ventoy.net/en/download. html, or add it to an existing PortableApps.com toolkit (choose ‘Apps > Get More Apps > By Category’—it’s under Utilities). Once installed or extracted, connect your flash drive and open Ventoy, clicking Yes when prompted to give it administrator access. When the main screen appears, verify that your USB flash drive is selected under ‘Device’, then check the ‘Ventoy in Package’ settings, which lists the drive type (exFAT, which is fine) and partition table (MBR). Press Win + R, type msinfo32 and press Enter, then verify BIOS Mode from the System Summary screen—in most cases, this will be set to UEFI, in which case select ‘Option > Partition Style > GPT’ to change the partition table to…

TIP OF THE MONTH WINDOWS STICKY NOTE Are you an organizational mess, like this editor? Got too many things to keep track of, and not enough time in the day? Do you constantly stare at your PC monitor thinking, “I know I need to do something right now”? Why not try Sticky Notes? Hit the Start menu, type ‘sticky notes’, and open it up. You can create a complete to-do list or sticky notes, and slap them over your desktop, so you don’t forget that important deadline. SPINNING PLATES Recently, I got massively distracted by Baldur’s Gate 3. I tried it on PS5 first, and found it a bit tedious. However, a buddy came over, moaned at me for not playing it on PC where it belongs, and $70 and…

In November 2022, the open-source website FOSSPost ran an article with the damning headline ‘Audacity is Now a Possible Spyware, Remove it ASAP’. The controversy touched on Audacity’s acquisition by The Muse Group. The new owners made changes to the privacy policy that seemingly gave them the right to transfer European users’ data to Russia. It also reported on users’ IP addresses being logged for 24 hours on Audacity’s servers before being hashed and saved for a year. As Audacity had no cloud-saving features, there was no need for it to connect to the internet. As open-source software, Audacity is also licensed under the GPL (GNU Public License), which allows users to freely distribute and use it. This seemed to be at odds with the new privacy policy, which banned…

While Wintoys provides a convenient one-stop shop for many system tools and tweaks, it’s more of an everyman utility than best-in-class. If you find that its tools fall short of what you need, consider augmenting it with the following free apps, all focused on excellence in one specific area. When it comes to uninstalling software from your PC, consider Bulk Crap Uninstaller (pictured above) (www.bcuninstaller.com) should you want to remove applications thoroughly from your system—including leftover files and Registry entries. Looking to see what impact start-up items have your PC before deciding if to remove them or not? Try the free version of Bootracer (https://greatis.com/bootracer/index.html">index.html)—check out the January 2023 issue for our guide. Also consider Autoruns (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns) for a more comprehensive start-up manager in general. Wintoys’ cleanup tools will free…

In the first step, we discussed creating an image of all drives before recovering your data. This involves using Windows’ own tools via the Control Panel.Obviously, this won’t work if the Windows system won’t boot. Fortunately, TestDisk supports creating a disk drive image. To get started, you’ll need to use another device to create a bootable USB of a Linux OS that comes with TestDisk pre-installed, such as GParted. Once you’ve done this, open Terminal and run ‘sudo testdisk’. From here, you can select your system partition and partition table using the arrow and enter keys. Next, choose ‘Advanced’ in the ‘Filesystem Utils’ section. From here, use the arrow keys to select ‘Image Creation’. TestDisk will ask you to confirm the location where to store the image. In Gparted, this…

49 INCHES? Check. QD-OLED panel? Present. 240Hz? Affirmative. We’ve seen this before, surely? Certainly, the new Philips Evnia 49M2C8900 is not a new concept. There have been several gaming monitors using the 49-inch 32:9 aspect QD-OLED panel, not least panel manufacturer Samsung. The question is how well Philips has implemented this panel and where it fits in the price hierarchy. Features-wise, it’s at the better-specified end. Connectivity is comprehensive thanks to dual HDMI 2.1 ports, Displayport 1.4, USB-C with 90W power delivery, a USB hub, and audio out. You also get a KVM switch, which combined with that USB-C interface, makes this perfect for sharing between a laptop and gaming desktop. Further niceties include Phlilips’ Ambiglow RGB lighting on the rear and a stand with height, tilt, and swivel adjustment. You…

BUYING A 2-IN-1 laptop often incurs an additional expense—a stylus—so it’s good to see that HP has included one in the box with this 2024 edition of the Spectre X360. It’s an up-to-date package all round, with the Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake) CPU powering it along. From a gaming point of view, the integrated Arc graphics are sub-optimal, but this is still a very attractive package if you only want to do the occasional bit of alien blasting. The OLED touchscreen is the Spectre’s window on the world, and it’s a lovely place to do things. No only do you get those marvellous OLED colors and blacks, but with an 1800p resolution and 120Hz max refresh rate, it was clear and bright before HP covered it in Gorilla…

OUTRAGEOUS SPEED in a featherweight chassis. That’s what Glorious is bringing to the table with the Model D 2 Pro 4KHz/8KHz Edition. This gaming mouse delivers a painfully quick 8,000Hz polling rate over a wired connection, and maintains half of that even over wireless. In other words, it’s communicating its position with your PC eight times faster than most gaming mice. Superficially, the 4K/8KHz Edition appears to be your run-of-the-mill black plastic mouse, and hardly screams quality from the outset, though this is the trade-off you have to make to shed weight. It has to be pretty simple to keep weight down, which is paramount to competitive gaming aspirations, and comes in at just 62 grams. Don't confuse the 4K/8KHz Edition with the 1KHz version, either. The latter is $30 cheaper…

> Back to the future > Thermal issues > AI, AI, oh Benefit of hindsight I recently re-read Jeremy Laird’s Trade Chat column from the February 2023 edition on page 13 titled: 'This cannot go on. It will not go on'. He wrote about $700 GPUs becoming the new price for a mid-market model: “It’s an incredibly short-sighted way to go about things…[AMD and Nvidia] are not just ripping off gamers, they’re hurting their own businesses. The longer they stick at this nonsense, the smaller the remaining market of PC gamers is going to be when they come back to their senses.” I don’t believe that much has changed, and Jeremy’s conclusion may not be accurate. AMD and particularly Nvidia make vast amounts of money from enterprise/AI supercomputer-market GPUs. The…

TRIUMPHS CLOTHES THAT DISSOLVE Researchers have found a way to spin gelatin into clothes fibers that can be dissolved in water. MASSIVE CPU BOOST Flow Computing has plans for a Parallel Processing Unit (PPU) that accelerates CPU speeds by doing simple jobs in parallel. SMALLER AND SMALLER After its first High-Numerical Aperture EUV lithography machine for Intel, ASML is making an even more advanced Hyper-NA system. TRAGEDIES AI OVERVIEWS BROKEN Google’s attempt to fix its AI search hasn’t worked, delivering mistakes and wrong answers. MINECRAFT ACCOUNTS Players that didn’t migrate their Mojang account to Microsoft have had them deleted, and have to buy a new license. MICROSOFT MANDATORY Win11 setup will no longer accept a fake email. Microsoft increasingly sees Windows as a data-gathering and sales tool.…

PART OF MICROSOFT’S PLANS for the AI PC, or ‘Copilot+’, was Recall. This AIpowered system takes snapshots of your screen and uses OCR to produce a searchable database of text. Sounds useful, but not everybody was happy. The system is unselective, so bank details, private correspondence, and more is logged, creating a treasure trove of data for hackers and the curious. Anybody using your account has full access, itself something of a concern, but it was discovered that physical access to your system wasn’t even required. Those text files can be accessed by anyone with a Windows profile on that system, a process that can be actioned remotely. As pressure grew, Microsoft made a few tweaks, making it an optin feature, and adding some encryption. Then it limited it to its…

INTEL WAS THE LEADER in microprocessor manufacturing technology for decades, but the soon to be released Lunar Lake processors will primarily be produced using technology from TSMC. It’s not the first time Intel has used another company’s process technology, but it’s the latest CPU cores being produced elsewhere. And that’s only the start of the changes. The simple explanation for the use of TSMC’s N3B node for the main compute tile is it was better than what Intel had in the design phase of Lunar Lake. Intel stalled on 14nm process technology for what seemed like ages—it was first used in the 4th Gen Haswell chips in 2014, and extended to the 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs in 2021. TSMC passed Intel, and is now considered the leading foundry for semiconductor…

THIS MONTH’S BUILD has arguably been all about upgrade paths, and saving cash wherever possible to drop that overall price below $1,000. The thing with our builds is that we often look at them as a one-off. The reality, however, is vastly different. Even our very own systems here at the Maximum PC labs go through iteration after iteration and change after change as hardware becomes available or budgets accessible, and it’s no different out there in the real world. Our $1,000 rig is a fantastic starting point, and if you’re heading into a new semester, or looking for a clean complete rebuild after six or seven years, it’s a solid choice. But later down the line, when more funds become available, what’s the best way to upgrade this rig? There…

There’s no single game or game engine that will universally represent every game. This is one of the drawbacks of tools like 3DMark, because while it does illustrate some aspects of GPU performance and matches up well with certain games, it’s designed to focus on graphics performance. Some games end up being more dependent on the CPU, so we’ve tried to include a mix of engines and game types. We don’t have room on the pages of our magazine to show every score from every game for each GPU, unfortunately—you can see additional testing results at Tom’s Hardware if you’re interested (bit.ly/cpu-vs-gpu). For the performance tables here, we’re using the geometric mean of the average fps across all 19 games, which gives equal weighting to each result. We used more demanding…

Zak Storey takes a deep dive into the world of our favorite peripheral… …looking at where they’ve been, where we’re at, and where it’s all heading KEYBOARDS are one of the few devices that we often overlook as PC enthusiasts. Whenever we price up systems and specs, peripherals are mostly ignored outside of the occasional consideration to screen resolution. Yet the reality is that monitors, keyboards, and mice are all integral elements of any good build. So why are keyboards so overlooked? For the majority, a keyboard is the primary method of interacting with the PC. Yet, the world of keyboards has changed dramatically since the PC scene first exploded. To get a good idea of where we’ve been, and where we’re heading, we’re going to jump into the noisy…

ONE OF THE BIGGEST developments we’ve seen over the last few years is the rise of custom keyboards among the PC enthusiast community. With a number of manufacturers out there from all over the globe specializing in the field, it’s now possible to build your own keyboard from the ground up. We’ve written extensively in the past about building your own DIY keyboard, but the basic premise hasn’t particularly changed. At its core, you need a case to house all your components, a PCB that’s going to handle all of your inputs and switches (you can now get these in optical or mechanical configs, with different pin/contact types), a plate, allowing you to mount your switches to the board for added rigidity, stabilizers for your switches, switches, and finally, key-caps. There…

1 DREAM STREAMER The headphones support spatial audio with dynamic head tracking. Dolby Atmos and 360 Reality Audio tracks in Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, and Deezer are supported, so you can get your spatial audio kicks. 2 GET CONNECTED These are equipped with Bluetooth 5.4, and can play lossless audio thanks to Snapdragon Sound’s aptX Lossless support. It doesn’t support next-gen codecs such as Auracast and LE Audio, though Sonos says it is tracking how these codecs are developing and will adapt accordingly. 3 SLEEK DESIGN We particularly like how the hinges and joints are concealed in the body. It offers an elevated look, and ensures that those with long hair won’t get it caught when moving them. As is the trend, the earcups swivel flat, but don’t fold…

Lazesoft’s Recovery Suite is just one tool you can add to your Ventoy flash drive as an ISO file. If you’d rather run dedicated tools than rely on a single recovery environment, you’ll find plenty online. If they can be downloaded in ISO format, they can be added to your recovery media. One major category is bootable security tools, which specialize in scanning hard drives for threats. They include Norton Bootable Recovery Tool (https://support.norton.com/sp/static/external/tools/nbrt.html), Kaspersky (www.kaspersky.com/downloads/free-rescue-disk), and Panda Cloud Cleaner (www.pandasecurity.com/en/support/card?id=1681). Choose the DVD or ISO version rather than the USB. If you use Hasleo Backup Suite (www.hasleo.com) or Macrium Reflect (www.macrium.com) to take drive images of your system, make sure you create recovery media in these, too—again, choose the ISO file, and copy it to your Ventoy rescue disc. Another…

YOU’LL NEED THIS AUDACITY 3.5X www.audacityteam.org/download 80 MB disk space FFMPEG LIBRARY (Optional) 27.5 MB disk space FOR ALMOST 24 YEARS, Audacity has been one of the most popular open-source audio recording and editing apps. This is partly down to its extremely simple interface, which allows beginners to easily begin adding and mixing their own tracks. In April 2024, the developers released Audacity 3.5 with some innovative new features. Chief among these was the ability to save projects to the cloud with an audio.com account. Users can even upload sound files to share with others. (Exporting files locally is still supported). Audacity can also now automatically detect and adjust the tempo of imported clips, as well as non-destructively change their pitch. The software’s functionality can be expanded through downloading plugins…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINTOYS (free from the Microsoft Store), Windows 10 or 11 IF YOU’RE LOOKING TO KEEP YOUR PC PURRING, then Wintoys is worth taking for a spin. It’s a beautifully designed tool that provides a host of tuning, tweaking, and managing options, from cleaning and optimization to maintenance and repairs. The app echoes other parts of Windows, in particular its Settings app, and you’ll find plenty of options that already exist there. But what sets Wintoys apart is that it attempts to make these options more visible and easier to access. In this guide, we’re going to give you the complete tour—you’ll discover how to use it to manage your app installs, Services, and startup items, plus clear out redundant files. You’ll also find out how it brings…

1. ULTIMATE PERFORMANCE POWER PLAN Provides a way to enable the ‘high performance’ power plan hidden under Power Options. Click the settings to jump to the Power Options control panel. 2. HAGS (HARDWARE-ACCELERATED GPU SCHEDULING) Another shortcut to a feature in Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Default graphics settings. Click the link to learn about how it reduces latency to improve performance. 3. STARTUP APPS Click here in order to expand the section and see how long your last boot time took, plus view and manage all of the startup entries. 4. BACKGROUND APPS Windows 11 removed the universal setting that disabled all of the background apps. Wintoys restores this setting, enabling you to free up system resources and RAM, in addition to extending battery life with…

1. SELECT MEDIA DEVICE Use this drop-down menu to select the drive with the files you want to recover. This can be the system drive, external drive, or a disk image. 2. DRIVE PARTITIONS QPhotoRec can search an entire drive, but searches are faster if you target specific partitions. If your partition isn’t listed, you may be able to restore it using TestDisk. 3. FILE SYSTEM TYPE The utility will automatically try to detect the file system type on your chosen partition. If you’re uncertain, leave the default option checked. Most Windows drives use FAT or NTFS. 4. FILE EXTRACTION METHOD By default, QPhotoRec extracts files from unallocated space. This is the most common scenario where files have been deleted. The utility also supports extracting files from whole partitions, but…

SAMSUNG IS a tricky company to gauge. On the one hand, it’s a tech colossus, striding from advanced chip manufacturing to OLED panels, laptops, cell phones, and more. On the other, it is capable of some remarkable slip-ups and oversights. So where does the new Samsung Odyssey G8 OLED G80SD fit into the triumph-or-tragedy spectrum? Frankly, it’s too close to the wrong end for comfort. That’s a surprise, because in many ways, this monitor is a known quantity. It’s a 4K OLED panel with up to a 240Hz refresh rate. Several monitors matching that specification have been announced this year, and of the ones you can actually buy, they all have essentially the same QD-OLED panel used here. By the time you read these words, it’s possible that a few…

LOQ IS LENOVO’S new budget gaming brand, and it takes a lot of design cues from the older IdeaPad 3 Gaming machines, though gains an extra cooling vent on the side. It’s well-priced, though definitely worth paying the extra few hundred bucks for the uprated model we’re reviewing here. With an RTX 4060 and 13th-gen Core i7 CPU, it’s still not going to be competing for a place at the top of the pile when it comes to gaming framerates, but it does a good enough job considering the price point. As a fairly standard 15-inch laptop, there’s one thing that stands out about the LOQ 15, and that’s the keyboard. Seriously. It’s extremely comfortable to type on, and Lenovo has resisted the urge to do anything silly like replace…

A CONTROLLER built for PC gaming? Imagine that—a whole controller just for us. We've become so accustomed to borrowing pads from the best consoles that it actually seems like a novel idea. The thing is, Microsoft and Sony spend big money on designing their controllers, so what can Corsair-owned Scuf bring to the table? For starters, a software package exclusive to Windows. The Envision Pro relies heavily on the Corsair iCUE application to deliver a range of functionality. Most notable are the five programmable macro G-keys running beneath the twin sticks and configurable via the application. With iCUE, they can be programmed for pretty much any function. There are also a few additional buttons, too. Each shoulder has programmable buttons, known as SAX buttons, which you activate with the lower half…

VISION PRO is an undoubtedly impressive piece of VR kit, with a equally impressive price: it starts at $3,499. Apple has reportedly hit pause on the development of the Vision Pro 2 in order to concentrate on a ‘budget’ version. Staff have been reassigned to the project, codename N109, which was started in 2022. Apparently, the idea is to price it next to premium iPhones at around $1,600. The new version was originally slated for this year, but is now expected late next year. Going for a cheaper model first over another high-end one is probably a good call. The Vision Pro was expected to sell over 700,000 units, but it’ll be lucky to shift much over 400,000 this year. The expense is a big factor, although it isn’t without…

THE THEME of this year’s Computex was AI, two letters that are already getting tired pretty quickly. This year saw 1,500 companies with over 4,500 booths, and alongside the usual array of new monitors, laptops, and other kit, it also attracted myriad oddities, innovations, and more. MSI’s MEG Vision X AI drew the attention of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who signed it and added ‘awesome’. The front of the case is a 1080 by 1920 touchscreen. You can run MSI’s system software-monitoring temperatures, frequencies, lighting effects, and so forth, or use it as a second Windows screen. It’s an experimental model so far. Ducky, the mechanical keyboard people, had their new One X, the first to use Cherry’s innovative MX Multipoint system to adjust the actuation points, which is cheaper, and…

THE STEAM DECK AND ITS SHINY NEW OLED VARIANT are our favorite additions to PC gaming in years. They’re perfect for those who don’t want to play PC games in bed or on the sofa, and with Verified Playable support for more than 10,000 games now, there are almost too many options to choose from. More games are getting verified for the Steam Deck every day, but here’s our pick of the best. DAVE THE DIVER Charming, deep, and constantly surprising, Dave the Diver is packed with activities. An adventure RPG featuring deep-sea exploration and fishing during the day and sushi restaurant management at night, it sounds pretty pedestrian—until you clock the stunning pixel art and characters. Even the credits sequence gives you a new game to learn and play. $19.99,…

LET’S FACE IT, PCs are too expensive. Over the last ten years, graphics card prices have soared ever upward. Regardless of whether you support team green or team red, the trend has been the same. CPUs likewise have ballooned in price, and building an entry-level gaming PC for sub-$400 is a thing of the past. That’s a sad fact, but it’s true. At launch, the humble Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 cost just $600. 10 years later, the RTX 4080 is now double that to $1,200. No matter how you split it, that cost increase tumbles down the range as well. Heck, even the 16GB 4060 Ti landed at $499. That’s half the price of our entire build here for what should be a mid-range card. After much discussion in the Maximum…

IF YOU’VE BEEN a PC enthusiast for long enough, you’ll know the feeling: your once-proud system has started to feel a little long in the tooth. Back in the heyday of Moore’s Law, that might only take a year or two, but things have slowed down quite a bit these days. Every generation of new hardware outperforms the previous generation, but sometimes the gap can be quite narrow. Most of us don’t have unlimited funds, and the question inevitably becomes one of stretching your existing hardware as far as possible and choosing the most beneficial upgrades. That’s especially true with gaming PCs, where the usual advice tends to focus on replacing the GPU. It’s the pixel-pumping heart of any gaming rig, after all—why bother with upgrading any other components? It helps…

We wanted to minimize variables and keep settings consistent for our testing, so we only used Nvidia RTX cards. AMD has competing GPUs for every generation, though it only has ray tracing hardware in the RX 6000- and 7000-series. We’d expect to see similar scaling overall if we were to test AMD Radeon GPUs, though some of the individual game results would vary quite a lot from the RTX hardware. Generally speaking, AMD GPUs of the past several generations have performed slightly better than similarly priced Nvidia GPUs in games that use traditional rasterization rendering. Some AMD promoted games, like Borderlands 3, have favored Radeon cards quite heavily, and similarly, there are Nvidia-promoted games, like Cyberpunk 2077, that favor GeForce cards. Games with ray tracing also tend to favor Nvidia…

FOR ANY LONG-TIME PC veteran, the mechanical keyswitch might seem like a bit of an oddity, arriving back into the PC market after so many years, and with good reason. The first keyboards produced by IBM back in the early ’80s were actually based on a similar mechanical design. In fact, if you took the stats and specs of a Model F, and placed them side by side with a similar mechanical keyboard today, you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart, at least outside of the realm of RGB. The Model F launched with a ‘buckling spring’ style of keyswitch. Effectively, a long spring situated under the keycap would push down and bend when pressed, pushing force onto a metal plate that would make contact with the PCB below, completing…

You’ve likely heard of Glorious. Founded in 2014, it started due to a frustration with gaming mouse mats being limited in size and scope, and set out to manufacturer its own larger solutions instead, building the first XXL mousepad. In 2016, it launched its first hot swappable keyboard, allowing you to change out switches on the fly. At the time, mechanical keyboards were still making their way into the marketplace proper, so it mostly flew under the radar. Today, you can build your own custom board on its site, choosing everything from keyswitches and lubrication options to keycaps. Alternatively, you can buy a barebones kit and go elsewhere to get your keyswitches, too. We reviewed another custom kit, the Ducky ProjectD Outlaw 65, in our March 2024 issue.…

When it comes to configuring WinBuilder to craft the perfect recovery environment, start by examining the lefthand pane to see what will make up your Windows PE environment. Leave ‘Basic Build’ unchecked, and expand ‘Apps’, followed by the categories to see what extra tools can be included. Click one for a description. You’ll find plenty of familiar names, and it’s worth exploring, as there are a choice of tools for some categories, such as two partition managers in HD Tasks. We also recommend adding some others to improve your recovery environment’s capabilities: HD Tune and WizTree (HW Info), VLC Media Player (MultiMedia), Avira PC Cleaner and McAfee Stinger (Security), and NSudo—Run As Trusted Installer (System Tools). Don’t forget to leave out any tools mentioned in the main text—these led to…

1.AUDIO SETUP Before starting any project, click here to ensure that you have the correct audio input and output devices selected. From here, you can also switch between mono and stereo channels. 2. SHARE AUDIO Audacity now comes with options to save and share files via the cloud with an audio.com account. This allows others to view your project and download in MP3/WAV format. 3. EFFECTS This menu allows you to apply a number of audio effects to tracks and clips. If you download others, then you can also manage these via the dedicated plugin manager. 4. TRACK CONFIGURATION Choose ‘Select’ to make changes to individual tracks. From here, you can alter amplification and panning, as well as mute the track, set a track name, and change the waveform color.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE To store disk image/Windows backup USB STICK For bootable OS (System drives only) WITH THE RISE OF ONLINE APP suites and cloud storage, horrific data loss scenarios are becoming rarer. Still, as anyone who’s worked in IT knows, people don’t always engage in best practices when it comes to data storage. The subreddit ‘Tales from Tech Support’ even contains a number of stories of customers storing important documents in their Recycle Bin! In this scenario, if files are accidentally deleted from Trash, there’s no automatic way to retrieve them. Even expert PC users can fall victim to this if a failed update or malware corrupts a drive, or if they accidentally delete the wrong partition. There are many data recovery programs, but TestDisk and…

AMD’s 9000 is coming Yes, AI was on the agenda COMPUTEX 2024 has happened, and we’ve had a few announcements, first and foremost being AMD’s 9000 Ryzen series presentation. The top-line facts are straightforward: spec generally stays the same across the majority. However, it’s moving to TSMC’s N4 4nm (maybe 5nm) process, and combining that with lowering latency, TDP, and increasing the bandwidth between the L1 and L2 memory cache, the CCD, and other pipelines. That’s impressive, as it’s given AMD a 16 percent IPC performance boost, without increasing voltages or CCDs. Interestingly, that means we haven’t seen an expanded core count on the mainstream chips this generation, either, making this the fourth one in a row where core count has been somewhat stagnant. No doubt this is to retain Threadripper’s…

NETGEAR WAS QUICK off the mark with its RS700S, one of the first routers we’ve seen supporting the new Wi-Fi 7 standard. This Orbi 970 mesh system was announced around the same time, and promised to be one of the best mesh Wi-Fi systems on the market, but faced delays, and has only just become available here. However, the Orbi 970 goes even further and faster than the standalone RS700, offering a three-piece ‘whole home’ mesh system with a top speed of 27Gbps and is capable of covering areas of up to 10,000 square feet. It’s also phenomenally expensive, with the threepiece system here costing $2,299, and that’s before you add the cost of the extra subscription services that Netgear tries really hard to sell you. Ouch. On cost, the…

TALKING ABOUT a case like this is simultaneously incredibly nice and exceptionally frustrating. It’s so good that conversely, there’s not a lot to complain about. The XT View is nothing if not spectacular. Not only does it provide some exceptional features, aesthetics, and build convenience, it manages to do that all while keeping the price below $80. You get a full fish-bowl case, complete with tempered glass, three RGB fans, and an RGB light strip, plus an RGB controller built in to the front I/O, with room for expansion as well. On top of that, there’s support for all manner of cooling solutions, all of which are wellventilated, in a relatively small compact ATX tower. There’s no corners cut here at all, which for the price, is honestly insane. We’ve had…

ACTION ROLE-PLAYING GAME ELDEN RING: Shadow of the Erdtree is a staggering expansion, not only for its massive size—it’s about as big as half of the original map—but for the ways it challenges the assumptions we had about the nature of its world, coming from the main campaign, and the limits of an open-world narrative. SotE rivals Dark Souls with a corkscrew world design layered with wondrous and horrific secrets to discover. From Software has perfected its command over creating a dark fantasy world layered with history and details that cement Elden Ring as one of the most creative and satisfying action RPGs ever made. Old enemies return in new contexts, weapons, and spell types stretch your approach to combat with acrobatic animations and potent synergies with existing items, and…

WE SPEND A LOT of our time benchmarking. It’s a core part of the job. In fact, no matter where you work as a tech journalist, it’s fair to say that your career very much hinges on your ability to benchmark. And not only being able to benchmark successfully (which can be as complex or as simple as you’d like to make it), but also in being able to analyze the data that those tests spit out. In a similar vein, picking the right benchmarks for your own test set is of pivotal importance. Finding ones that stress whatever it is you’re testing to the max, or providing unique workloads that are relevant both to your audience and to the product itself, is incredibly important. To that end, this month,…