APC February 2023

“Don’t get me started on the wonders of the form factor. That little sliver of storage that hides away in your case without a single cable necessary. Just so nice. Apart from M.2 screws, which are now the most annoying little bastards of any new PC build.” Remember when SSDs were sexy? That moment your very first SATA SSD loaded up Windows in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Your videos for viewing or editing hitting the screen mere moments after you clicked the mouse button. Game levels loading quicker than your mates so you get get in there first. What a blissful time. And don’t get me started on the wonders of the form factor. That little sliver of storage that hides away in your case without…

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"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 over 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…

Intel announced 16 new Raptor Lake CPUs spanning its 65W mainstream PC chips and 35W “T-Series” categories. The new chips extend from the Core i3 to high-end Core i9 families and come with more cores and higher frequencies along with higher gen-on-gen pricing, mirroring the price increases we noticed with Intel’s 12th-gen chips. They also have significantly increased peak power consumption compared to their predecessors. Most of Intel’s new 13th-gen processors announced today come with the same Raptor Cove architecture as the flagship models that launched last year, but some of the Core i5 and the lone Core i3 model reportedly come with the same die and architecture used for the 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs, albeit bulked up with more generous core counts and/or higher clock rates to enable higher…

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) took place in Las Vegas right after New Year’s, and is where all the big companies announced breakthrough products. While TVs, cars, and smaller gadgets get a lot of attention, it’s also where HP, Dell, Lenovo, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and even Microsoft reveal what is hitting store shelves later this year. New PCs, new form factors, updated processors, some whacky concept devices (usually from Razer), and more can be expected. Here are some of the highlights that have us excited. Asus glasses-free 3D OLED display Thought 3D was dead? Think again. Asus has debuted its most impressive new tech of CES 2023 in the form of the first glasses-free 3D panel found on a laptop. The all-new ProArt StudioBook 16 and VivoBook Pro 16X have…

Intel released nine research papers at IEDM 2022 that lay the groundwork for future chip designs, as the company looks to deliver on its promise of developing processors with over a trillion transistors by 2030. The research includes new 2D materials for transistors, new 3D packaging technology that narrows the performance and power gap between chiplet and single-die processors to a nearly-imperceptible range, transistors that ‘don’t forget’ when power is removed, and embedded memories that can be stacked directly on top of transistors and store more than one bit per cell, among other innovations. Intel’s Components Research (CR) Group lays the initial groundwork for the company’s future technologies, but not all of these initiatives will result in products that ship to market. Those that do come to market would typically…