Maximum PC May 2020

THIS IS THE SECOND TIME I’ve written this intro. In fact, I’d drafted my first version two days before I even started my job. I was, and still am, unbelievably excited to take on this role. Becoming editor of Maximum PC is a dream come true. This is home to me. I owe everything to this magazine and its community. To all of you. When I heard that Alan Dexter, my predecessor and all-time favorite boss, was leaving the publication, I knew I had to throw my hat in the ring. After all, having the chance to lead this brand into the next decade is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s funny how much the world can change in just 14 days. Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the biggest catastrophes we…

MICROSOFT AND SONY have been tantalizing us with snippets about their new consoles for months, and now we have the rough technical specs. Microsoft’s Xbox Series X has custom AMD silicon comprising of an eight-core Zen 2 processor running at 3.8GHz; it has multithreading, but enabling this will drop the clock to 3.6GHz. Graphics are supplied by an RDNA 2 chip with 52 compute units (3,328 cores), running at 1,825MHz, complete with hardware ray tracing. Microsoft boasts of 12 teraflops of graphical processing power on tap. In theory, the new Xbox has about four times the muscle of an Xbox One S. You also get 16GB of GDDR6, 10GB of which is reserved for the GPU, and 2.5GB for the OS. Storage is a custom 1TB SSD. The target is…

AMD’S MOBILE CHIPS have generally taken second place to its desktop versions. No longer: AMD claims to have been working on “Renoir” since 2017, optimizing it for mobile work. The result is a carefully packaged chiplet design with up to eight 7nm Zen 2 cores and Vega-based graphics. Finally, AMD’s mobile chips have the latest silicon, with the attendant jump in IPC. A significant improvement over the 3000-series, which is hardly sparkling. There’s the usual split: the U range for low-power work, with a TDP of 15W, and the beefier H and HS series, with a TDP of 35 or 45W. The initial range of nine starts with the Ryzen 3 4300U, with four cores and four threads, running at a base of 2.7GHz. Then there are three six-core Ryzen 5s:…

THIS IS THE SECOND TIME I’ve written this intro. In fact, I’d drafted my first version two days before I even started my job. I was, and still am, unbelievably excited to take on this role. Becoming editor of Maximum PC is a dream come true. This is home to me. I owe everything to this magazine and its community. To all of you. When I heard that Alan Dexter, my predecessor and all-time favorite boss, was leaving the publication, I knew I had to throw my hat in the ring. After all, having the chance to lead this brand into the next decade is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s funny how much the world can change in just 14 days. Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the biggest catastrophes…

IT IS NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT to get an accurate figure on how many people are using what OS, but Microsoft thinks that after five years, Win 10 is now running on one billion machines. Quite an achievement, but not what Microsoft had originally planned. It wanted to reach that target in 2017, but the free upgrade from Win 7 wasn’t as popular as the company imagined. Win 10 was called the last version of Windows by Microsoft back in 2015, it has also been called the “forever version.” Instead of new releases, we just have a continually updated version, including UI changes to keep things fresh. However, there is still a lot of work to do yet. Despite the withdrawal of official support, Win 7 stubbornly refuses to fade away. There are…

MICROSOFT AND SONY have been tantalizing us with snippets about their new consoles for months, and now we have the rough technical specs. Microsoft’s Xbox Series X has custom AMD silicon comprising of an eight-core Zen 2 processor running at 3.8GHz; it has multithreading, but enabling this will drop the clock to 3.6GHz. Graphics are supplied by an RDNA 2 chip with 52 compute units (3,328 cores), running at 1,825MHz, complete with hardware ray tracing. Microsoft boasts of 12 teraflops of graphical processing power on tap. In theory, the new Xbox has about four times the muscle of an Xbox One S. You also get 16GB of GDDR6, 10GB of which is reserved for the GPU, and 2.5GB for the OS. Storage is a custom 1TB SSD. The target is…