PCWorld May 2017

MORE THAN FIVE months after its grand unveiling last October, the Windows 10 Creators Update is finally here—and the wait was worth it. Following in the footsteps of last August’s sweeping Windows 10 Anniversary Update, the Creators Update tweaks and tunes the core Windows 10 experience while heaping on a pile of handy all-new features. While PCWorld’s comprehensive Windows 10 Creators Update review (go.pcworld.com/w10updrev) contains detailed impressions of Microsoft’s refreshed operating system, here’s a higher-level look at what you need to know about the Creators Update. How do I get it? Just sit tight! The Windows 10 Creators Update started rolling out to the general public on April 11 via the standard Windows Update process, just like every other Windows 10 update. There’s no way for home users to opt out of the…

AFTER A DECADE of fielding ho-hum FX-series processors, AMD’s finally released its highly disruptive Ryzen chips, throwing down the gauntlet and challenging Intel’s supremacy in high-end computing. AMD’s new Ryzen chips include several CPUs (and CPU families) of various levels of potency. What’s more, Ryzen introduces a completely new motherboard platform, and the processors require different memory and coolers than their predecessors. There’s a lot to sift through—so let’s sift! Here’s everything you need to know about AMD’s Ryzen. Meet AMD’s Ryzen CPUs Let’s begin with the stars of the show: the Ryzen chips themselves. AMD’s Ryzen chips will be split across three families. The top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 processors launched first, with 8 cores, 16 threads, and price points that undercut the comparable 8-core Intel Extreme Edition by a whopping $500. Sweet holy moly.…

SAMSUNG IS BACK. After the Note7 recall stripped us of our end-of-year Galaxy fix, Samsung has officially unveiled its flagship S8 and S8+ phones, and they should be enough to make you forget all about the phablet fiasco. Packed with a slew of high-end features and wrapped in a stunning, near-bezel-less enclosure, the Galaxy S8 and S8+ are sure to turn heads, dispensing of the home button and the somewhat stale S7 form factor, and putting Apple and its rumored iPhone 8 on notice. With the S8, Samsung has returned to the flagship market in a big way, and assuming it doesn’t have any recall-level issues, it should rocket the company back to the head of the class. Pricing varies by carrier: Verizon is selling the S8/S8+ for $30/$35 a month for…

ONE OF THE marquee features of the Galaxy S8 is Bixby, Samsung’s response to the Siris, Google Assistants, and Cortanas of the world. Billed as “a new way to interact with your phone,” Samsung has gone so far as to add a dedicated button on the side of the phone to summon its new assistant, and has integrated it deeply into the S8’s interface. There’s just one problem: You won’t be able to talk to Bixby at launch. In a statement released about a week before the April 21 launch of the S8, Samsung confirmed that its new AI assistant would be missing a key component. While it supported Vision, Home, and Reminder at launch, Bixby Voice won’t be included on U.S. models. Samsung says the feature will arrive “later this…

IT LOOKS LIKE we can’t jokingly call the Pascal GPU-based Titan X the “Titan XP” anymore, because Nvidia just rolled out a new version of its flagship graphics card that’s officially dubbed “Titan Xp.” And this thing is a monster. The original $1,200 Pascal-based Titan X shattered performance records, but the recently released GeForce GTX 1080 Ti rendered it obsolete, offering slightly faster performance for just $700 as Nvidia prepares for Radeon Vega’s imminent release. The Titan Xp (go.pcworld.com/titanxpprod) restores natural balance to Nvidia’s lineup by upping CUDA cores and clock speeds. Whereas the original Titan X Pascal (and the GTX 1080 Ti) packed 3,584 CUDA cores, the new version upgrades to a full-fat version of Nvidia’s GP102 graphics processor, with 3,840 cores. Those cores are faster, too, with a boost clock…

INTEL’S OPTANE MEMORY could be the most revolutionary letdown in storage history. Announced in late March, these first consumer Optane-based devices should be available in late April in two M.2 trims: A 16GB model for $44 and a 32GB Optane Memory device for $77. Both are rated for crazy-fast read speeds of 1.2GBps and writes of 280MBps. If you’re wondering how you can install Windows 10 on one of these, you can’t. The first two Optane Memory devices instead are meant to be used primarily as cache drives for a traditional hard drive, using a technique similar to the Smart Response Technology (go.pcworld.com/intelsrt) Intel introduced in 2011. Why this matters: Optane Memory is a far cry from what we expected after Intel and Micron announced 3D XPoint (go.pcworld.com/micron3dxpt) in 2015. The non-volatile…