Maximum PC August 2022

BEING A PC USER IS GREAT, but it can make you a bit of a solitary animal. I tend to work all day on my laptop with my intimidating-looking gaming headset on, and then when I get home, unwind until the early hours by playing games on my ultra-wide monitor. That’s one of the great things about PCs—you can use them anywhere and stay out of everyone else’s way. But recently, I’ve been missing the days when I used to share an apartment and spend Friday nights playing sports games with my housemates accompanied by beers and pizzas. This nostalgia led me to this month’s cover feature, a couch gaming special for those who want to enjoy their PC gaming in a more relaxed setting. Unbelievably, it’s been nearly two years since…

IN JANUARY last year, Qualcomm spent $1.4 billion on buying Nuvia—that’s a lot for a company barely two years old with few tangible assets. What Nuvia had was expertise in processor design, particularly ARM-based chips, and also several ex-Apple engineers in its ranks. Qualcomm is a huge, but fabless, manufacturer of processors and other silicon. Its chips power about 30 percent of the world’s smartphones and high-end Snapdragon SoCs are found in tablets and laptops. Apple’s M1 chip has shown what could be done with a good ARM design. Qualcomm aims to build PC-level processors and take a bite out of the x86 market, starting with performance laptops but also becoming a proper desktop contender. Originally Qualcomm hoped to have a processor to rival Apple’s M1 by the end of 2023. That…

BEING A PC USER IS GREAT, but it can make you a bit of a solitary animal. I tend to work all day on my laptop with my intimidating-looking gaming headset on, and then when I get home, unwind until the early hours by playing games on my ultra-wide monitor. That’s one of the great things about PCs—you can use them anywhere and stay out of everyone else’s way. But recently, I’ve been missing the days when I used to share an apartment and spend Friday nights playing sports games with my housemates accompanied by beers and pizzas. This nostalgia led me to this month’s cover feature, a couch gaming special for those who want to enjoy their PC gaming in a more relaxed setting. Unbelievably, it’s been nearly two…

MICROSOFT HAS A PATCHY RECORD with hardware, but its Surface laptops have been a success. It has just launched the Surface Laptop Go 2, an update on its most budget-friendly member of the Surface squad. The $599 laptop is in the competitive Chromebook territory. The changes are mainly on the inside of the aluminum/polycarbonate case with a Core i5-1135G7 processor, a four-core Tiger Lake chip with a base clock of 2.4GHz, and a maximum boost of 4.2GHz, with integrated Iris Xe graphics (that’s $309 retail already). This is coupled with either 128GB or 256GB of solid-state storage, and 4GB or 8GB of RAM. The screen remains the same 12.4-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 1,536x1,024. Key travel is now 30 percent greater than a MacBook Air and we also get…

IN JANUARY last year, Qualcomm spent $1.4 billion on buying Nuvia—that’s a lot for a company barely two years old with few tangible assets. What Nuvia had was expertise in processor design, particularly ARM-based chips, and also several ex-Apple engineers in its ranks. Qualcomm is a huge, but fabless, manufacturer of processors and other silicon. Its chips power about 30 percent of the world’s smartphones and high-end Snapdragon SoCs are found in tablets and laptops. Apple’s M1 chip has shown what could be done with a good ARM design. Qualcomm aims to build PC-level processors and take a bite out of the x86 market, starting with performance laptops but also becoming a proper desktop contender. Originally Qualcomm hoped to have a processor to rival Apple’s M1 by the end of 2023.…

ONE ASPECT of Win11 that didn’t go down well at launch was its hardware requirements, specifically for the processor. Needing a chip with TPM 2.0 support (Trusted Platform Module), which for Intel meant 8th generation silicon or better, left some capable processors out of luck. Of course, Win11 could run on ‘older’ machines, Microsoft just didn’t want you to do it. But Microsoft has accidentally released a preview build of the 22H2 update, which has been offered as an upgrade to some people with Win10 rigs not signed up for the Insider program. Win10 Skylake and Kaby Lake systems have reportedly been upgraded to Win11 without issues. But, according to a Microsoft post, it was a bug—the hardware requirements have not changed and support won’t be forthcoming. That’s a pity,…