Innehållsförteckning för PC PowerPlay: 2019 Technical Handbook special från PC Powerplay

Take your mind back a moment. It’s November 1996, Bill Clinton has just beaten Bob Dole to the presidency, “Macarena” is topping the charts, and Star Trek: First Contact is about to make waves at the box office. In the world of tech, however, something more wonderful is about to happen. Andrew Grove, Intel’s CEO of the day, is about to drop one of his truth bombs, and that truth? Well, it’s that by 2011, thanks to a combination of Moore’s Law and genius architectural advancements, Intel CPUs will be operating at the 10GHz mark and beyond. Although that prediction may have fallen a bit flat over the years, it’s not to say we haven’t advanced since then, technologically at least. The world of the transistor stops for no nerd,…

We’re in an odd place with pricing, and that old adage, “It’s always cheaper to build your own rig,” doesn’t hold true right now, at least, not until Samsung and co. get their extra memory plants up and running. The memory shortage and cryptocurrency mining have ruined it for everyone. So how can system integrators still offer us cheap pre-built machines? It’s down to pre-emptive bulk buying. Most companies that offer pre-built systems buy all the hardware they need in bulk, well ahead of time, so for the time being at least, they’re still running off older prices, and can drastically undercut the current market. Usually, the longer a memory standard has had to mature, the cheaper it becomes to produce, so the market stays ahead of the system integrators.…

Nothing says “problematic” quite like an auto-overclocking motherboard. We’ve seen it across multiple generations now, as manufacturers try to differentiate their motherboards from each other. It’s pretty prolific with Coffee Lake, as Asus pumps up the default VCore in its motherboards to boost processor performance in benchmarks (in short, enabling more stable turbos at higher frequencies at stock). This is great, up until you start noticing temperature spikes of 20 degrees or more compared to the competition. We’ve seen this with memory profiles, too. Early on with AMD memory, frequency support was haphazard across a swathe of motherboards, with 2,400, 2,800, and 3,000MT/s causing boot loops and more. Threadripper still can’t support 128GB of DDR4 at 3,200MT/s. So, what’s the solution? BIOS tweaking. If you’re having thermal issues, check that…

You’ve made it. You’ve got a brand new rig, and you’re ready to kick some serious ass in those 1080p games. But how do you get there? How do you install an operating system on your new machine? You haven’t installed an optical disc drive in your chassis, and you don’t seem to have one laying around either, so where do you go from here? No need to worry—we’ve got your back. The last time we used one of those DVD readers was way back in 2016, and even then that was only to see whether the coverdisc of our friends over on the Linux titles would read properly. Spoiler: It did, then they trashed our DVD drive. Typical, right? But enough waffle. You’re here to install your OS of…

PlayOnLinux’s scripts aren’t always capable of getting the job done, sadly. There’s a particular issue with Steam-powered games, where the installer falls over attempting to insert Steam into the virtual drive you’ve created. The solution here is to install Steam directly first, using the POL script—after it’s successfully installed, double-click the icon, and allow it to update itself. If you receive an error saying it’s crashed, but a progress bar is still running, leave it to finish updating, then click “Next” to remove the crash window, and log in to your Steam account. As things stand, Steam works, but is unable to access the store in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. To resolve this, first select its shortcut in the main POL window, and then click “Configure.” Type the following into the…

When it comes to outright speed, your PC never seems to have enough. Or to put it another way, it doesn’t matter how smoothly it’s running, your PC could always do with being that bit faster. Armed with the right know-how, you can fine-tune your PC to squeeze more performance from it, but the effort involved can be more than it’s worth. Which is where we come in. In this feature, we’ve dug out the finest free tools we know of that can help speed up your machine. We kick things off by revealing our favorite tools for fine-tuning your system. Your hardware could use some optimization, too, so we’ve collected the best overclocking and tuning apps for pushing it beyond its limits. And finally, when you next bite the…

Reinstalling Windows from scratch is a one-way process. Once you’ve formatted the drive and reinstalled Windows, everything you once had is gone. What happens if you forget a key file or setting, or the reinstall process goes wrong, and you want to roll things back? Don’t worry—Macrium Reflect Free (www.macrium.com/reflectfree. aspx) is just the tool for you. Here’s how you can use it to protect yourself and your files. 1 SORT RESCUE MEDIA Launch Macrium Reflect Free and choose “Other Tasks > Create Rescue Media” to create a bootable DVD or USB flash drive you can use to recover your Windows installation if something goes catastrophically wrong with your PC. 2 BACK UP PARTITIONS Once you’ve created your rescue media, click “Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup…

With all of this coming from the mainstream manufacturers, you might be forgiven for thinking that’s it for the world of the humble processor. Well, there’s one outlier you might not expect to be making waves, but there are more than just ripples coming from our long-misjudged technical brothers across the battle-ravaged OS ocean. Apple is seemingly picking up the pace when it comes to processor design and overall performance. Take a look at the ARM-based Bionic A12 X processor found in its latest tablets, and even in the iPhone XS, and you’ll see performance numbers equal to a mid-clocked Sky Lake Core i5-6400 or so. That might seem like small fry when you look at the current state of desktop processors, but given the fact that the company has…

For the experienced, building a PC is an easy, often therapeutic experience. Each part fits into its designated slot, each cable is carefully woven around the frame, and each power-on is successful. However, for a vast swath of folk, it’s nothing of the sort. PC building can be a daunting task, especially if it’s your first time. After all, you’re messing around with delicate parts that can cost upward of half a month’s paycheck. One little slip, one jolt of static, one cable in the wrong place, and boom—you’re out of pocket and out of luck. So, why bother? You can pick up a pre-built PC for a similar amount of cash as building your own—and let someone else worry about everything. It’s convenient, easy, and saves a whole ton…

A sus is a world leader when it comes to PC parts, designing some of the best, most powerful components in the business. Whether you’re looking to put together a new PC, upgrade an existing one, or even invest in a new mouse and keyboard, Asus’ unbeatable range is well worth investigating. But once you’ve got that perfect machine, if you’re a true PC fan-someone who gets a thrill out of putting their machine together with the perfect components – or a hardcore gamer, you’ll want to know the best ways to test the limits of what their new beast can do. Asus knows how important it is to real enthusiasts that they can tweak settings, overclock performance, and customise their experiences. Here are some tricks and tips for how…

Having read the above, you should now have some understanding of just how important it is to buy the right GPU for the resolution you want to take advantage of, and the games you want to play. Memory and GPU cores are typically well paired. A GTX 1060, for example, combined with 3GB of VRAM, is more than enough for 80 percent of most modern AAA 1080p titles, with 6GB of VRAM being enough to future-proof you for years, or just enough to scrape by on for 1440p. The big problem, however, lies with the folk who drop the cash on a GTX 1080 Ti, only to then game at 1080p. Unless you’re absolutely obsessed with playing first-person shooters at 200Hz and above, with super-low latencies, such a purchase makes…

Ever wanted to revisit classic games from the ’90s? DOSBox enables you to play games written for MS-DOS, and while it’s possible to tie it into PlayOnLinux, it’s far simpler to just install it natively: $ sudo apt-get install dosbox$ mkdir-p ~/dos/c DOS games reside in their own folder, and you can source a wide variety from www.abandonia.com. Download a game in Zip format to your Downloads folder, then extract its contents into the dos/c folder you created in your Home folder. Now type “dosbox” and hit Enter to launch DOSBox in its own window. Next, enter the following command for it to mount your/dos/c folder as its own C drive: $ mount c/home/username/dos/c$ c: Type “dir” and hit Enter to verify you’re in the correct spot—you’ll see folders for…

BootRacer (www.greatis.com/bootracer) has become our go-to app for managing startup. Not only does it enable you to see which programs are launching with Windows, but it times everything, too, enabling you to keep an eye on the boot process, and giving you a heads-up should some resource-sapping program suddenly insert itself into the startup process. Here’s a quick rundown of its key features. 1 TIME YOUR START The first thing BootRacer does is measure your start time, from the moment your PC is switched on until your startup apps finish loading. This helps you identify bottlenecks at different points of the process, so you can target your troubleshooting. 2 DELAYED START BootRacer also inserts a delay of 10 seconds to the startup process, to give Windows a chance to finishing…

Once Windows has been reinstalled, open Windows Update to bring your fresh operating system fully up to date—don’t be surprised if there are hundreds of updates still to apply in the case of Windows 7 and 8.1. Once it’s completely updated, consider reinstalling Macrium Reflect Free (see page 32), and taking your first drive image—a vanilla backup you can restore in future if needed, instead of reinstalling Windows itself. If you followed the advice on page 33, you should be able to reinstall your core apps using CloneApp from your PC’s data drive. If you click “Restore,” every program setting you backed up is restored—if there are any you don’t want to restore, select “Options” to locate the backup folder, then open it, and move any program folders you want…

BATTLEFIELD 5 MAY NOT GET RENTAL SERVERS Electronic Arts hasn’t decided yet whether it will offer a rental server program for the newest Battlefield. Battlefield’s server rental program gives players the ability to operate their own game servers, with map rotations, game modes, and gameplay settings customisable as the renter sees fit. Third-party companies operated the servers for earlier Battlefield games, but EA assumed exclusive control with Battlefield 1. It said during a September livestream that rental servers would not be available at launch, which caused some concern, but the general assumption seemed to be that they’d come along sooner or later, since previous Battlefield games also launched before rental servers were ready. But a message posted on Reddit by Battlefield global community manager Dan Mitre suggests that it might…

Computers are funny things: a complicated collection of components, each working in conjunction with the rest to produce on-demand output. But as with any team effort, there is always a weak link in the chain. As more and more people join the PC enthusiast community, it’s easy to get swept up in the hype, and upgrade a very basic system with high-end componentry. And while that’s not always a bad thing, it can lead to those weak links being stretched to breaking point, as top-end hardware makes its way into a system that wasn’t designed to host it. This can lead to bottlenecking, when one piece of hardware doesn’t perform as well as it should, due to another component in the system being ill-equipped to handle the potential performance levels.…

Free software drives the PC industry. Paid-for packages might seem to be the better option in general (and if you’re in industry, you’ll need the professional support options that come from paying up), but it’s the no-bucks-down applications that make life as an everyday PC user worth living. We have three things to thank for the delicious software cornucopia that we’ve spread on the table today. First, the dedication and skill of the open-source community, predominantly those propping up the Linux world. These guys see a problem, they find something they want to do, and just go ahead and make it, offering up the software—and the building blocks that put it together—to the world when they’re done. Thanks, folks. You rock, and you make the next generation of software better.…

PlayOnLinux isn’t the only way to (try to) run Windows software in Linux. As we’ve seen, POL is basically a user-friendly wrapper for Wine, and while it makes things easier—particularly in the way it supports multiple Wine versions for compatibility purposes—it’s not perfect. As you’ve seen from the main feature, you’ll often be forced to bypass its scripts and attempt to wrestle with its controls—in a more user-friendly interface than offered by Wine itself, though—to try to get your game running. If the idea of Wine appeals, but spending hours trying to get your game working doesn’t, take a look at CrossOver Linux (www.codeweavers.com). Like POL, it’s a wrapper for Wine, but it’s better developed, because while it’s not free, you’re paying to support Wine development, and many improvements in…

One way you can speed things up is by overclocking your processor, so both it and your RAM run faster than they were designed to. There are dangers with this approach—overheating can shorten your components’ lives—but official tools help to minimise the danger. AMD users should install AMD Overdrive (www.amd.com/overdrive); Intel users should download and install the Extreme Tuning Utility (https://intel.ly/2y3DBw6). 1 EASY OVERCLOCKING Your overclocking options with Intel’s utility vary according to the particular processor you have—some are incredibly limited, while others offer more scope. If supported, the utility can also enable you to overclock the onboard graphics. 2 TEST YOUR OVERCLOCK After tweaking your settings (visit http://bit.ly/pcgoclock for a detailed guide to what to do), select “Stress Test” to perform a five-minute stress test across processor, memory, and/or…

If you lived through the ’90s, you probably have fond memories of gaming classics such as Red Alert, Doom, and Starcraft. Despite the clunky graphics and witless AI, it’s hard to recapture the sense of excitement that came from giving Stalin a bad day, or battling against the forces of hell on the moons of Mars. Sadly, most of these vintage gaming classics don’t work natively on modern PCs. This dilemma is the focus of the DOSBox project, an emulator designed to mimic Intel x86. The emulator’s primary focus is to play games that were released prior to Windows XP (2001), but in practice, you can actually run a number of DOS/Windows programs. The DOSBox website maintains a database of all supported software (www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?letter=a). You’ll notice that DOSBox bears an…

Sequels and remakes, sequels and remakes. It’s been a criticism of the games industry for some time that it’s averse to taking a risk on something new, more content to rake over the past, and present the familiar and “safe.” This has been particularly true ever since the idea of the “HD remaster” came into being, with old games being polished up for modern graphical standards—to varying degrees of success—before being set before consumers as something new. There is innovation—if you know where to look. The coming year sees a raft of Japanese games arrive on PC, the sort of thing that once would have stayed on PlayStation, while the unstoppable march of Warhammer 40K continues, and Tom Clancy is still putting his name on games despite being dead for…