Sommaire pour Holiday 2021 de Maximum PC

WELCOME to our final issue of 2021. What a year it’s been, filled with crazy ups-and-downs, and still stuck in the middle of a pandemic that refuses to budge. But before we get on to next year, next issue, and our predictions for what’s going to happen in the world of tech in 2022, we need to wrap up these last 12 months in style. To that end, this edition of the mag is jam-packed with a ton of epic content to really celebrate this orbit around the sun. We have the annual Maximum PC Gear of the Year awards, a guide on how to get into PC modding from our own resident system-building guru Kris, a full explainer on how supercomputers predict the weather and earthquakes from Ian, and…

IF YOU OWN SOMETHING you might imagine you have to right to take it apart, modify, or repair it. You don’t. Often the job is made difficult because you need special tools or software, but the main problem is copyright law, specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has numerous exemptions and allows security measures to prevent you from tinkering. This stops you copying abandoned games or cracking open your smartphone. These exemptions are made by the US Copyright Office, reviewed every three years, and signed off by the Librarian of Congress. The latest changes include recommendations from iFix, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Over the years, there has been a slow swing away from restrictive practices, and the latest batch of changes goes further than usual. It is…

I know, I should stop moaning, storage is cheap and I’m lucky to live at a time when the finest gaming experiences money can buy can be squirted down an internet pipe into my PC. But download sizes are outstripping the ability of our internet connections to deliver them in a timely manner. According to Microsoft, over 20 million Americans live without access to high-speed internet connections. The chances are many of them are quite happy doing so. After all, the connected life is a special kind of punishment, with constant pings and buzzes having to be silenced and filtered out so you can get anything done at all. However, the trajectory is only going in one direction—and that’s toward greater and greater online confluence. The days of going to…

PC MODDING IS at the absolute top of our custom computing hobby. It sits among the giants that make this community so great and continues to push through advancements and product tweaks into the industry itself. Vertical GPU mounts? Modders did that first. ITX liquid-cooled cases? Modders did it. Liquid-cooling in General? Modders did it (with household plumbing parts, would you believe?). But there’s more to it than that. It’s an intricate art form, a way of showing off your personality and building something unique to you. The hardware might be obsolete in a few years from now, but ask any of those modders what build they’re most proud of, and it’ll bring back a flood of memories from yesteryear, now outdated by the superior chips of today. For the…

THE MAMBILA PEOPLE, who live across Cameroon and Nigeria in West Africa, like to watch the movements of crabs and spiders. As part of a practice called Nggam, a stick and a stone representing a binary choice are offered to the multi-legged creatures, along with some cards placed between them. This is all part of a plan to tell the future. The wisdom-seekers leave the cards intact for up to 15 minutes, during which time the crab or spider may have come out of its hole and disturbed the cards, producing a pattern that can be interpreted. If particular cards have been moved toward the stick or the stone, then that choice is bound to become reality. Elsewhere, some people still believe to this day that the position of the stars…

1 10 GBPS This setup comes with a 10Gb/s ethernet port for your WAN connectivity as standard, along with a 2.5Gbps LAN port on each router and satellite (you can use this 2.5Gbps port as a wired backhaul for the satellites too). For everything else, you also get three standard 1Gbps ports per device. 2 WIFI 6E As mentioned, it comes with support for WiFi 6E via a quad-band solution. There are three bands used for your devices across 2.4, 5 and 6GHz, plus an additional “hidden” fourth 5GHz band that is dedicated to providing connectivity between the router and its satellites. 3 IOT NETWORKING A dedicated smart devices network ensures that all of your interconnected thermostats, cameras, and doorbells sit on their own isolated network away from your PCs…

THE TERM ‘FAKE NEWS’ might have been popularized only very recently, but incidences of ‘fake news’ certainly aren’t a new thing. That brings us neatly to Hippolyte Bayard, another pioneer of photography in the 19th century. Bayard believed he was the father of photography, not Niépce, Daguerre, or Talbot. Frustrated by a perceived lack of credit for his work at the forefront of photography, Bayard created what could now be seen as the first example of clickbait—that’s right, way before YouTube was even a thing, people were seeking attention through false claims. Bayard could be considered the first ‘influencer’, also creating one of the earliest ‘selfies’. Driven by the recognition the others had received, Bayard faked a photograph of his own suicide. In a grainy photo from 1840, Bayard photographed…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A COPY OF ZESARUX available from GitHub. https://github.com/chernandezba/zesarux/releases FOR FANS OF BRITISH MICROCOMPUTERS, the Sinclair ZX80 and its successor, the ZX81, were integral to establishing the home computing scene. The brainchild of British inventor, Sir Clive Sinclair, the ZX80 first brought affordable home computers to the masses in 1980. As we began our research for this column, we heard the news that Sir Clive had passed away, aged 81. So it seems an even more appropriate time to pay tribute to a computing legend by covering the machines that kick-started Britain’s coding revolution. 1 DEVELOPMENT Before the ZX80, Sinclair Research was already well established in the electronics world, pioneering devices such as cheap calculators and pocket televisions. It had developed a rudimentary computing kit under the former…

1. ADVANCED This is where all the interesting tools are, though you can find security options in Basic too. 2. GUEST NETWORK Both our Netgear and Asus (running Merlin firmware) routers make it easy to find Guest Network options. 3. EVEN MORE ADVANCED This is the home of the VLAN settings, which you should read up on further before tackling. 4. ASUS GENERAL SETTINGS The Guest Network is high up on Asus’s list, and it offers three to Netgear’s one. 5. WIRELESS SETTINGS Here, you’ll find security, filtering, a block list, and advanced Wi-Fi settings, all in one place. 6. AP ISOLATED This is a useful setting that can cut off one access point from the rest of the network.…

THE PREVIOUS FEW MSI laptops we’ve reviewed have been pretty decent but were generally located around the budget to mid-range sector of the market. However, this offering from MSI is quite the opposite. With the GE76 Raider, everything is on the larger side, including its price tag of over $3000. The 17-inch format doesn’t exactly make for the most nimble of devices either. Though it’s aimed at a fairly specific gamer target market, a laptop of this size loses the benefit of portability. So then, is this machine worth your time and money, and could you use it as a desktop? Compared with the most recent MSI laptops, you get a feel of why this beast is almost double the price of those models. This is a large and solid…

EVEN THE SWITCHES on your keyboard can be a contentious issue. Some people prefer the old-school mechanical clicks that give you a real sense of feedback when typing, while others enjoy the softer, quieter, and more delicate type of keyboard that's often found on a laptop. Razer’s Huntsman V2 analog appears to hit a sweet spot between the two. The Huntsman lineup has always been a popular choice for PC enthusiasts, especially when it comes to gaming. The V2 Analog comes with a few bells and whistles, but are these important additions or simply unnecessary extras? Those familiar with the full-size Huntsman style will notice that the V2 hasn’t changed much in terms of layout from the Huntsman Elite model. In the top right are the media controls; three cylindrical…

FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER A MAN ONCE SPOKE at length a bout the definition of insanity. He defined it as doing the same thing over and over, expecting things to change. This time it’s going to be different. This time it’s going to be different. Welcome to Far Cry 6. You went on to stab Vaas to death in Far Cry 3, but his monologue has continued to resonate. Every Far Cry since Vaas’s has given you a wide-open play area, a madman, a bunch of buddies to help you out, and enough weaponry to outgun a Just Cause game. Every time we expect it to be different. This time, it’s definitely not Cuba. The fictional (and rather large) Caribbean island nation of Yara has a dictator problem, as Anton Castillo (portrayed…

TRIUMPHS FCC EYES SPAM TEXTS The FCC is looking to make mobile carriers block spam texts. A staggering 7.4 billion were delivered in March 2021. BIGGEST BUG BOUNTY YET Immunefi paid a researcher $2 million for discovering a bug on a finance platform that put $850 million of cryptocurrency at risk. STEEL WOOD Scientists have found a way to make wood tough enough to take an edge better than a steel knife. TRAGEDIES AMAZON’S PRACTICES Internal documents prove that Amazon copies popular items then fiddles with search code to promote them over rivals. FACEBOOK UNFOLLOWING A developer who built an extension that enabled you to empty the News Feed has been banned from Facebook. BITCOIN POWER Half of Bitcoin mining is carried out by just 50 miners. The top 10%…

FACEBOOK HAS A NEW corporate name: Meta. There’s a new logo too, a squished blue infinity symbol, or pretzel. Meta means ‘beyond’ in Greek, and according to CEO Mark Zuckerburg, it symbolizes that “there is always a next chapter to the story”. The company’s timing isn’t perfect, embroiled as it is in controversy over its business practices, however, the bad publicity had “nothing to bear on this”, says Zuckerburg. Meta also unveiled its new project: the metaverse, “the future of the internet”. Essentially, it’s an interconnected digital world where your avatar can interact with others, as well as carry out all the usual tasks you can on the internet. The word first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, as a place people could escape a less than perfect…

If the cosmetic changes weren’t enough to make you reconsider upgrading, the TPM requirement and reduced performance might do the trick. Windows 11 comes with VBS—that’s Virtualization Based Security, not Visual Basic Script. It isn’t new, having first been introduced to Windows 10 back in October 2019 with the 1903 9D update, but the chances are you never actually used VBS with Windows 10. In short, VBS creates a secure area in memory for other security features to use. These include TPM (Trusted Platform Modules) and HVCI (Hypervisor Protected Code Integrity). The problem with these security features is that they reduce overall system performance by roughly five percent—the equivalent of one of Intel’s CPU architecture upgrades (with the number of cores and threads static). Gaming is a prime candidate for…

THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES … > Corrupt memory > Win11 on Mac > Backup drive query Random BSODs I’m suffering from a weird problem that I hope you can help me fix. I am getting random blue screen errors when copying or moving files, and once in a while when I open too many browser tabs. I had one when I was syncing my Ancestry.com family tree to Family Tree Maker, when scanning a large downloaded file with McAfee, when trying to create an OS backup with Macrium Reflect Free and even while downloading a Linux ISO to create a live disc to boot from. This problem has existed since I built the PC in October 2020, starting when I copied files from the old computer’s drives to this…

Much of the data for our weather forecasts comes from polar-orbiting satellites, those that orbit the Earth north-to-south and pass roughly over the poles. They are generally at low altitudes between 125 and 600 miles up, though more data comes from geostationary satellites 22,000 miles above the Earth, and yet more from deepspace satellites, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Deep Space Climate Observatory that sits a million miles out. A particular type of polar orbit, known as a sun-synchronous orbit, means the satellite passes points on the Earth’s surface at the same time every day—for example passing over New York at noon each day. By taking pictures and measurements as the satellite passes over the same spot at the same time day after day, patterns of weather…

IN A WORLD where photography is constantly at our fingertips, the thought of life without it seems pretty alien. It’s fair to say that without the camera, history would look completely different and so many memories would have been lost forever. Over the past decade, smartphones have replaced the camera as the most accessible and convenient choice of snapper for many people and while the days of the DSLR aren’t yet numbered, that technology has changed the art of photography beyond recognition. As smartphone cameras have evolved, so has the ability to edit your images. As useful as photo manipulation is, the technology can be used for the wrong reasons—fraud, false advertisement, click-baiting, airbrushing, and the trend for ‘deep fakes’. But it can be beneficial too. Editing is essential to get…

IT’S FAIR TO SAY that the camera has changed the world we live in. With the World Wide Web going live in August of 1991, digital photography and image manipulation boomed alongside the growth of the internet. The introduction of Photoshop made manipulation both more accessible and more convincing too. Everything we take for granted today, including brightening, sharpening, contrast, hue, and saturation levels, we owe to the advancements of digital photography and Photoshop. In the early 2000s, Sharp introduced the camera phone. By today’s standards, they were shocking images, but the idea of being able to carry around a 2-in-1 camera and phone device was a winner. However, due to the poor quality of the camera phone, people still continued to carry a separate digital camera with them. But…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CC 2020 https://www.adobe.com YOU MAY HAVE SEEN THIS LIGHTING EFFECT used in advertising, films, and portrait shots. Bathing the main focal point of your image in some immersive lighting focuses the attention there and is a great way to highlight what really matters in your shot. In this tutorial, we will be using layer masks, blending modes, and gradient maps. It’s also worth checking out our previous tutorial on gradients for illustrators to get a feel for how gradients work. These techniques will combine to give the illusion of two separate light sources hitting the main subject. You can expect a more rewarding outcome if you start with an image that has strong shadows and highlights or a strong contrasting background. You can create this…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT THIS LAST BUILD of mine is a bit of a contrarian thing in itself. On the one hand, this is my personal machine. On the other, everything in it belongs to PRs and their respective companies and as such, by the time you read this issue, it will have returned in its entirety to the Maximum PC offices. In many ways, the concept of this build is a moot point. After all, a typical transplant like this is usually undertaken because you intend to use the new chassis for some time, and are curious as to how it performs day-to-day. That said, as PC enthusiasts, as hobbyists, and as journalists, there’s a natural curiosity inside us that needs to…

ALDER LAKE is I ntel’s first desktop processor to use the Intel 7 process node, which was previously referred to as Intel 10nm SuperFin, and also the first in a long time to not use the 14nm process node. Oh, how times have changed. Intel has finally broken free from the shackles of 14nm and managed to escape the node that was once so congested it caused an embarrassing pile-up for the chipmaker. With Alder Lake, Intel is no longer tied to that node and so it is free to do more in the space it does have. The company says it even expects to shift plenty of Alder Lake chips this side of New Year. So, perhaps this is some silicon you will actually be able to buy at…

FROM THE SUBLIME to the ridiculous, this month’s 1440p gaming monitor pairing has it all—we’re just not sure which is which. Where the Corsair Xeneon 32QHD165 bumps right up against the limits of what seems plausible for a ‘mere’ 1440p panel at this price, the Monoprice Dark Matter 27-inch IGZO 180Hz Gaming Monitor comes at it from the opposite angle. This thing is cheap. For just under $350, Monoprice offers a 27-inch gaming monitor based on a cutting-edge IGZO-type IPS panel, complete with 180Hz refresh, adaptive sync, and HDR 400. You even get USB Type-C connectivity with power delivery for charging a laptop. That’s one heck of a spec list for the money. It really is. Drilling down deeper into the speeds and feeds, the ‘IGZO’ panel tech refers to…

FOR CORSAIR, the M65 has gained a reputation as a legendary mouse. In the world of these perfect pixel pointers, the very name commands the same amount of respect as the Razer Deathadder, the Logitech G series, or SteelSeries’ Sensei lineup. The M65 is the brand’s quintessential mouse, unchanging, unflinching, and in a somewhat significant shake-up compared with the other three we just listed, rather unique in its design approach. The shape of this mouse sets it apart from its competitors. Its wide angle and long, sweeping thumb rest give it a broad presence that you might assume would make it a sure shot for fingertip and claw gamers and yet, it’s as equally at home with a palm-gripper too. It's comfortable and ergonomically impressive, there are no flared buttons…

SMART SPEAKERS, or digital assistants, have been a huge hit. There are over 90 million of them in the US, and by 2025 it is expected that three-quarters of homes will have at least one smart device. And all of them are gathering data. It transpires that Alexa is the most adept at this. A new report from Reviews.org looked at all the major players to see just what you are giving away to their parent companies. The top five all collect the basics: your name, time zone, phone number, location, and IP address. Some dig a little deeper, including your address, payment information, age, and personal interests. The best at this is Alexa, which collects this and more, including your voice characteristics. It also delves into your profile and…

A LITTLE OVER a year ago, A pple’s M1 processors arrived, and from nowhere Apple entered the processor market with a chip that was touted by many as a real rival to x86 silicon. Now it has returned with two new versions: the M1 Pro, and the M1 Max. These two ARM-based SoC designs build on the original but are much bigger beasts. The M1 Pro has eight high-performance cores, double that of the original M1, plus two high-efficiency cores. These are coupled to 14 or 16 GPU cores, again twice the original number. There’s 24MB of L2 cache, a 16 core Neural Engine, and up to 32GB of unified memory. This adds up to a total of 33.7 billion transistors. The M1 Max is the true monster, with 57…

IT FEELS LIKE only yesterday we were gearing up for last year’s Gear of the Year awards. That prestigious moment where we gather our thoughts on the very best hardware that has been launched in the last year (or at least the gear we’ve had the opportunity to test) and give you our picks for where you should invest your money. It has certainly been an interesting year, that’s for sure, and jam-packed with a ton of new releases. Last time around, we were still reeling from the first year of the pandemic, the world of computing had just arrived at a rather abrupt silicon shortage, and Nvidia had just launched its latest and greatest 3000-series GPUs as well. Life was, fair to say, a little odd. And, arguably, it…

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THINK IMAGE MANIPULATION today and Adobe’s Photoshop software may spring to mind. In fact, so embedded in popular culture is this program that ‘photoshopping’ has even entered the lexicon. Image manipulation has been normalized to the extent that photoshop is more of a term to describe this technology than the application itself. But how did we get here? Adobe’s giant plays a massive role in this whole industry, but it wasn’t the start. Before getting familiar with where image manipulation came from, we need to understand what it truly means. In short, image manipulation is the art of transforming an image to get a specific and desired look. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds and there are plenty of implications to it. Since the creation of…

TIP OF THE MONTH START MENU BACK TO THE LEFT If like us, you have been able to update to Windows 11, you may have noticed Microsoft’s big change—the centralized start menu. If you’re not a fan, then fear not, you can easily move this back down to the bottom left corner. Right-click any blank part of the taskbar and click on taskbar settings. Then scroll down to find taskbar behaviors, then taskbar alignment. From here, you can set it back to its natural habitat on the left. CODING MY CAR? Yes, you read that right. Instead of trying my luck with computer coding, I thought I’d go over to the automotive world. I’ve seen OBD scanners online and they have intrigued me for a while. They are little devices…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PC, ROUTER(S), HOME NETWORK, IOT DEVICE(S) Internet connection Wi-Fi THERE’S A STORY THAT GOES around cyber-security events about a casino, somewhere in North America. It had a fish tank, and in that watery fish home was a thermometer. For reasons best known to the casino management, the thermometer was an IoT (internet of things) device and reported the tank’s temperature via Wi-Fi. However, it wasn’t particularly secure, and so hackers used it to gain a foothold in the gambling establishment’s network, eventually escaping with a database containing the details of high-rolling customers. We hope the aquarium housed a marine environment, as it would make comparing the heist to the Oceans 11 movies easier. That might sound pretty amusing when it happens to wealthy people with more money…

YOU’LL NEED THIS SUITABLE LINUX OS SSD/HDD with unused space. MOST BACKUP STRATEGIES lead to a lot of wasted space because you invariably end up making copies of the same data over and over again. In essence, data deduplication is the process of comparing chunks of data that have already been backed up, filtering out duplicated data, and retaining only a single unique copy, thereby saving disk space. When deployed as a data backup strategy, this means that only changes since the last backup are stored. Backup tools for Linux are as prolific as browsers, video players, or even text editors. BorgBackup, or just Borg, is a deduplicating backup utility—released under the BSD license, the project was forked from Attic, a popular backup utility, in 2015. Thanks to the data…

MAN, THIS HAS BEEN a really difficult issue for me to write. On the one hand, and I’m sure my production team will agree, I’ve been insanely efficient for once, meeting every single one of my personal deadlines ahead of schedule, planning, commissioning, and organizing the next two issues on top of that, so my successor doesn’t have such a hard time, and generally just being punctual with backup plans on backup plans. But on the other hand, it’s been difficult because it’s going to be my last issue. I’m finding it challenging at times to write, without getting emotional. It’s in the back of my mind that this is my last build-it, my last review, my last editor’s intro, and that’s quite rough. For me at least. I know…

AMD’S RX 6600 GPU may be the end of the line for desktop RDNA2 graphics cards. AMD also has APUs with RDNA2 graphics in the works, and Samsung’s upcoming Exynos smartphone chip will put RDNA2 into mobile devices. We’d be hard-pressed to name one good reason why a smartphone needs ray tracing hardware, but that’s a topic for another day. Building off the same Navi 23 GPU that powers the RX 6600 XT, the vanilla 6600 comes with 28 of the potential 32 CUs enabled. That’s a relatively small reduction in the number of functional units, but AMD also trims clocks by anywhere from 100–300 MHz, depending on GPU temperatures, power use, and other factors. The GDDR6 memory also gets a speed reduction from 16Gbps down to 14Gbps. Taken as…

AS YOU MAY KNOW, we’re big fans of small cases here at Maximum PC. It’s perhaps a bit of an Achilles heel of ours that we don’t focus on the larger chassis out there. But there’s just something about compact chassis that really hits home. For the vast majority who don’t hoard TBs of data and process vast simulations or render video footage, a compact machine like this is all you really need. On-board audio killed the sound-card, Nvidia killed SLI, Intel killed networking cards, and the M.2 drive has decimated every other storage form. Because of that, for most people, a small case that you can lift off the ground and plonk on your desk is a smart move. Typically that means a small form factor, but ITX cases…