Maximum PC May 2022

I STARTED my journalism career on a home theater publication, where I cut my teeth reviewing televisions, speakers, and amplifiers. So, when our writer Sam pitched the idea of building a living room PC for this issue, naturally, I said yes. The resulting build is stylish and compact but highly customizable, thanks to Intel’s NUC 12 Extreme barebones PC. Sam built a machine that games, streams, and even works like a champ, while being easy to tuck away behind a TV or in an AV cabinet. You can follow his guide on page 16. Sam’s build highlights what a successful return to the living room the PC has made in the last couple of years. More televisions support Variable Refresh Rate standards from AMD and Nvidia, while GPUs and laptops are…

BARELY A MONTH goes by without AMD or Intel releasing something juicy. This month, it’s AMD’s turn with the launch of the first chip to use its innovative 3D V-Cache technology. The new Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a regular Ryzen with a slab of extra cache stuck on top using a direct copper bond (technically, it’s Through Silicon Vias (TSVs)—basically holes through the dies). The 5800X3D is an eight-core Zen 3 chip with a base clock of 3.4GHz and a maximum boost of 4.5GHz. It has 96MB of L3 cache, 64MB more than a ‘regular’ Ryzen 7 5800X. One side-effect is that the 5800X3D is AMD’s first Ryzen that you can’t overclock. The core voltage is locked at 1.35V, and there’s no wriggle room to push it further. At $449, the…

AMD HAS A PAIR OF DRIVER UPDATES for its Radeon cards. First is RSR (Radeon Super Resolution), which is available now (driver version 22.3.1). It enables a wider range of games to use upscaling with FSR (Fidelity FX Super Resolution) and is supported on all Radeon RX 5000 series cards (it needs an RDNA-based GPU). You won’t get the full FSR effect but you do get a healthy jump in speed. AMD claims RSR will give between two to three times the frame rate when you upscale 1080p to 4K. However, the results are better if you step up from 1440p or more. This summer, we’ll also get FSR 2.0. The original FSR uses spacial upscaling (each frame is re-rendered in one pass), whereas version 2.0 introduces a temporal element…

IT’S FAIR TO SAY Google’s Stadia hasn’t been a roaring success. Game streaming is a sound idea, but Stadia has struggled to deliver the performance the top titles need. It’s still alive, but the push into the consumer market looks half-hearted at best. At the Game Developers’ Conference, Google renamed the white label version of Stadia to “Immersive Stream for Games”. This is open to third parties who can use all that development to provide their own streaming games without any Google branding. The first to benefit was AT&T, which is offering Batman: Arkham Knight to its customers. Google has a habit of dropping projects if they don’t work immediately. It killed its own Stadia game studio before that could produce an original game and the new free Stadia account,…

TRIUMPHS ✓ LONGER BATTERY LIFE Japan has developed a new material that reduces capacity loss from battery recharging. ✓ WORLD’S BIGGEST BORE Quaise Energy group is digging the world’s deepest holes (over 12 miles) to tap geothermal heat as a renewable energy source. ✓ WINDOWS DIRECTSTORAGE DirectStorage, a form of SSD acceleration, is finally here for Windows, though games will need support added to use it. TRAGEDIES ✖ APPLE OVERPRICING Apple’s 1.8m Thunderbolt 4 cable costs $129, yet branded rivals are half the price and a generic version sells for $30. ✖ HOLOLENS DISAPPOINTS Troops questioned the reliability and performance of Microsoft’s mixed reality US Army headsets. ✖ TESLA CANS CRITIC An engineer on Tesla’s self-driving project was fired for posting a YouTube video showing one failing.…

THE PANDEMIC made a complete mess of chip supplies and graphics card prices went through the roof, though now the end of this situation is in sight. Before we get too excited, we are still paying over the odds, but that’s improving rapidly. There are many factors at play, including the volatile cryptocurrency market, which has affected prices under restricted supplies. February saw a decent reduction in graphics card prices, and the latest figures put March’s drop at about 12 percent. We’ve even heard of basic cards selling at near the recommended retail price, but generally, the premium ranges from 20 to 60 percent depending on the card. A survey by online retailer Newegg put a GeForce RTX 3070 at a premium of 70 percent, while an RTX 3080 Ti was a…