Maximum PC April 2020

THE PC INDUSTRY as a whole is in a constant state of flux, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the staff at your favorite magazine (that’ll be the one you’re holding right now) changes regularly, too. Hopefully, it won’t come as too much of a shock when I reveal that this is my final issue as editor. I’ve loved working on this magazine, but as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. There have been some pivotal releases during my tenure, and I’ve mentioned some of those in my “Lab Note” at the back of the magazine, but the real highlight has to be the people I’ve worked alongside—both the staff who work hard to put each magazine together, and the army of…

JUST WHEN YOU thought Intel couldn’t push its aging 14nm Skylake microarchitecture any further, it does it again. AMD’s speedy Zen chips have left Intel little choice but to respond. The slow development of its 10nm Sunny Cove parts means, once again, it’s down to old faithful to fill the gap, now on its fourth refinement. Luckily, Skylake has proved its worth, and Intel is getting good at squeezing every drop out of it. Not that there is much juice left. Each iteration gains over the last by a lesser degree. Comet Lake first appeared last year, disappointing us by only being low-power U series chips. Now we get the full-on S desktop and H laptop versions. Exact specs haven’t been officially announced, but there are engineering and qualifying samples about,…

IF YOU HAVE a Flywheel exercise bike, you’ll have noticed it has stopped doing all the fancy Internet functions—no more live streaming classes at home. Flywheel launched its Peloton rival in 2017, and has an avid following. However, it has lost a case of patent infringement with Peloton, which claimed that Flywheel had copied its Leaderboard, where users are ranked against—which it had. After that, the service was no more. Peloton is offering some comfort: It’s offered to swap your Flywheel bike for a refurbished Peloton one. You’re out of luck if you bought your bike with finance, though, in which case you now own a rather expensive ordinary exercise bike. Flywheel still runs studio sessions, but the at-home service is dead. This isn’t an isolated event. Earlier in the year,…

AMD’S CEO CONFIRMED THAT AMD is bringing out its “Big Navi” card this year, based, we assume, on the second-gen Radeon DNA, which is also appearing in the new Xbox and PS consoles. With no firm announcements, we have to turn to rumor and leaks. One such (convincing) leak has an as-yet unannounced Radeon RX 5950 XT having 5,210 shading units, 80 compute units, 320 texture mapping units, 96 render output units, and 24GB of memory on a 4,096-bit bus. Compare this to the current heavyweight, the Radeon RX 5700 XT, where you can halve those numbers. Apparently, it has just passed RRA certification, which points to an early release. There will be lesser kin, too: the Radeon 5950, 5900, and 5800 XT. What the new card won’t be is affordable.…

MOZILLA’S FIREFOX BROWSER is to be the first to enable encrypted DNS over HTTPS (DoH). The roll-out should be nearly done now. Mozilla claims “unencrypted DNS is not only vulnerable to spying but is being exploited.” Chrome is scheduled to make a similar move. DoH disguises DNS enquiries as regular traffic, sending them to “resolver” servers, which unscramble and return the encrypted result. It’s claimed to help stop ISPs tracking you, and be a way to bypass censorship. “Security experts” claim DoH can’t properly prevent tracking; there are dozens of other data points for this, not least the IP address. It’s also going to be a pain for IT departments, where it bypasses DNS filtering systems, making spotting DNS hijacking next to impossible. Last summer, the first malware to exploit DoH…

TRIUMPHS ✓ WOW WOWS World of Warcraft Classic has lead to a doubling of paid WoW subscribers since launch. Not bad for a 15 year-old game. ✓ GTA IV BACK ON STEAM A notable absence from Steam, GTA IV is finally on board as a new Complete Edition, but with no multiplayer or leaderboards. ✓ WIN 10 GETS 3D ICONS Win 10X is first to get the new Fluent Design icons. The rest of us will be updated soon. TRAGEDIES ✖ SMART PET FEEDER FAIL A system outage at Petnet left its Gen2 SmartFeeders unresponsive to the app, leading to some grumpy cats. ✖ MICROSOFT BACKS DOWN After threatening Office users with having to use Bing, Microsoft listened to protests and offered it as an opt-in. ✖ RADEONS GO BLACK AMD has problems with its latest driver, leaving some people looking at nothingness.…