Maximum PC June 2022

BRUCE LEE PROBABLY wasn’t referring to liquid cooling when he made his famous water quote above, but this issue of Maximum PC makes a strong case for water’s merits in PC cooling. I have to admit, water cooling was a bit of a blind spot for me personally, having only ventured into AIO CPU coolers rather than creating any custom loops. So when Zak Storey, previously of this parish (and now of Corsair), offered the Maximum PC team a water cooling hands-on tutorial using the company’s XH303i kit, I jumped at the chance. Thanks to Zak’s excellent tuition, I soon realized there was nothing to be afraid of. While I may not yet be the most accurate at tube bending, I was rigging up reservoirs to radiators and flushing water around…

THE CROWN for making the world’s fastest gaming chip may ultimately be a hollow one, but Intel and AMD take it seriously. AMD’s Zen architecture may give Intel a hard time in many areas, but that final accolade never quite falls into its grasp—and Intel is keen to make sure it doesn’t. When AMD’s cacheheavy Ryzen 7 5800X3D was announced, you knew Intel would answer back. It has, with the Special Edition Core i9-12900KS: a chip that only really exists to break records. It’s a classic Intel response that we’ve seen before: take an existing chip, carefully ‘bin’ it (essentially use quality control testing to pick only the most robust silicon), and you have a new halo processor, without producing any new silicon. The Core i9-12900KS is a faster i9-12900K, up from…

MICROSOFT has a new security system dubbed Smart App Control, which aims to make Windows as secure as possible for ‘hybrid’ working from home. The new system uses cloud servers to monitor an application’s behavior, employing AI to spot anything potentially malicious. Sounds good, but the problem is that it won’t work on any application you’ve already installed, so you’ll need to wipe and start again. Ouch! Having to reinstall Windows and all your applications is a big price to pay for that extra layer of security. There are other issues too, because it doesn’t like unsigned or unrecognized applications. Meaning your obscure utility or elderly application will set alarms off. Until Microsoft figures out how to enable Smart App Control without a clean system and adds more control, this new…

BRUCE LEE PROBABLY wasn’t referring to liquid cooling when he made his famous water quote above, but this issue of Maximum PC makes a strong case for water’s merits in PC cooling. I have to admit, water cooling was a bit of a blind spot for me personally, having only ventured into AIO CPU coolers rather than creating any custom loops. So when Zak Storey, previously of this parish (and now of Corsair), offered the Maximum PC team a water cooling hands-on tutorial using the company’s XH303i kit, I jumped at the chance. Thanks to Zak’s excellent tuition, I soon realized there was nothing to be afraid of. While I may not yet be the most accurate at tube bending, I was rigging up reservoirs to radiators and flushing water…

THE GREAT GRAPHICS card drought is nearly over and to highlight this, Nvidia’s marketing campaign, dubbed restocked and reloaded, is spreading the word that its GeForce RTX 30 Series cards should be in stock. In theory, you have a chance of getting cards at list price, though some opportunistic scalpers are still at large, especially for the ‘hot’ cards. A quick survey of resellers shows a trend of increased availability and falling prices. The Radeon RX 6500XT and 6900 XT are now selling at just shy of list price though, on average, you can still expect to pay an extra $200. Nvidia’s 40 Series cards and AMD’s RDNA 3, are due at the end of the year. Both companies will want to shift the previous generation before they are rendered less…

THE CROWN for making the world’s fastest gaming chip may ultimately be a hollow one, but Intel and AMD take it seriously. AMD’s Zen architecture may give Intel a hard time in many areas, but that final accolade never quite falls into its grasp—and Intel is keen to make sure it doesn’t. When AMD’s cacheheavy Ryzen 7 5800X3D was announced, you knew Intel would answer back. It has, with the Special Edition Core i9-12900KS: a chip that only really exists to break records. It’s a classic Intel response that we’ve seen before: take an existing chip, carefully ‘bin’ it (essentially use quality control testing to pick only the most robust silicon), and you have a new halo processor, without producing any new silicon. The Core i9-12900KS is a faster i9-12900K,…