APC December 2022

BEN MANSILL Is very excited about the PC right now. Let’s just take a moment, breathe in, try to relax, and look around at what’s happening in the world of the PC right now… AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs. AMD’s AM5 motherboard platform. Intel 13th Gen (Alder Lake) CPUs. Nvidia 4000 series graphics cards. AMD RDNA 3 graphics cards. Intel Arc graphics cards. And, PCIe 5 storage, OLED screens, ATX 3.0 PSUs. And DDR 5. And a few other things. ALL AT ONCE. It’s completely mental. Well, the big stuff isn't all dropping at exactly the same time, but over a period of no more than two months. Which still qualifies as ridiculous. It’s sent tech journos around the world into an almost unfathomable amount of benchtesting. Editors into defcon 1 states of extreme planning to…

1 ASHAMPOO PHOTO COMMANDER 16 View, edit and organise your photos. Ashampoo Photo Commander 16 is a powerful all-in-one solution to view, edit and organise your photos. Features include automatic image optimisation plus manual effects and various tools to recover faded images, remove scratches, fix red eyes and eliminate digital noise. The integrated batch processing is ideal for large numbers of images and supports conversion as well as image manipulation features. Download link: www.apcmag.com/exclusives 2 ABELSSOFT GCLEAN Denies Google’s data collection! Google provides users innumerable popular and useful services. But users pay an invisible price for this convenience, as Google uses its online services to mine your personal data. GClean, from Abelssoft, pulls the plug on this underhanded operation. The new version has been designed for the latest internet browsers, sports a lot of optimisations and…

"Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage." APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms. We know…

"Intel claims the 13th-Gen Raptor Lake processors deliver up to 15 percent higher single-threaded performance and 41 percent more multithreaded performance than their Alder Lake predecessors. " Intel has announced specs, pricing, benchmarks, and architectural details for its 13th-Gen Raptor Lake lineup, touting its flagship Core i9-13900K as the ‘world’s fastest desktop processor.’ The lineup includes three new processors with frequencies that jump up to 5.8GHz, a new record for the mainstream desktop, and more e-cores, giving Intel the core count lead on the mainstream desktop for the first time since AMD’s Ryzen arrived back in 2017. Intel also announced that the 6GHz version of the Raptor Lake is a limited edition model that will come to market later this year. This will be the first 6GHz desktop PC chip. Paired with…

Jarrod Walton Jarrod can barely contain his excitement with all these big launches. During the GTC 2022 keynote, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed the specifications for the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, along with details of the Ada Lovelace architecture. Most of the most recent leaks appear to have been reasonably accurate. The RTX 4090 will have 128 SMs with a 2,520 MHz boost clock, coupled with 24GB of GDDR6X memory running at 21 Gbps with a 384-bit interface. The memory configuration basically looks unchanged from the RTX 3090 Ti, which on the surface is basically correct. However, much like AMD did with RDNA 2’s Infinity Cache, Nvidia will apparently be packing 96MB of L2 cache in AD102, compared to just 6MB of L2 cache in GA102 – that’s not yet officially…

Shaun is an Australian editor for PC Gamer, GamesRadar and PLAY, and writes for APC, TechRadar and more. In the lead up to the November 2019 launch of Google Stadia, the internet was awash in op eds declaring the arrival of the game streaming era. Traditional consoles – the ones with powerful hardware under their hood, all the better to locally run games – were, for the umpteenth time, ‘dead’. But rarely has a narrative backflipped so quickly, because the Stadia launched with a big ol’ thud. Few people liked it; even fewer people presumably bought it. It’s immaterial in some respects, because Stadia – unlike Microsoft Cloud Gaming, or Nvidia GeForce Now – never launched in Australia. So when Google announced in late September that it was killing off Stadia (or…