Maximum PC September 2022

WHILE A QUICK GLANCE over past Maximum PC covers dispels this myth, desktop PCs still have a reputation for being a little, well, boring. Sure, they come in different sizes, colors, and RGB-lit flavors, but most of the time they’re still black (or sometimes white!) monolithic rectangles. Not so this month’s cover build, which is based around Teenage Engineering’s computer-1 case. It’s orange, as I’m sure you noticed already, with a lovely RAL 2004 powder-coated finish. It also boasts a small footprint and chunky handles to make it easier to carry it from the office to the living room. But its construction is the most interesting element of the design, with 1mm aluminum panels that bend into shape around the internal components in a way I’ve never seen before. If the computer-1…

Red vs. Blue Two new chip families get ready to go head-to-head THIS FALL we have the pleasure of two new processor architectures landing pretty much simultaneously. First up, Red team. AMD is preparing its 7000-series Raphael chips using the new Zen 4 core architecture and a 5nm process. This is a whole new chip, motherboard, socket, and GPU. We get integrated RDNA 2 graphics, DDR5 memory (no DDR4 support), PCIe 5.0, and a new AM5 socket. There’s even a new 6nm I/O chip, replacing the older 12nm example with enhanced low power modes, which is responsible for most of the improved energy efficiency. AI is improved by support for AVX-5112 instructions. AMD says it will “try to make a big splash with overclocking” too. Those Zen 4 cores bring an IPC bump…

WHILE A QUICK GLANCE over past Maximum PC covers dispels this myth, desktop PCs still have a reputation for being a little, well, boring. Sure, they come in different sizes, colors, and RGB-lit flavors, but most of the time they’re still black (or sometimes white!) monolithic rectangles. Not so this month’s cover build, which is based around Teenage Engineering’s computer-1 case. It’s orange, as I’m sure you noticed already, with a lovely RAL 2004 powder-coated finish. It also boasts a small footprint and chunky handles to make it easier to carry it from the office to the living room. But its construction is the most interesting element of the design, with 1mm aluminum panels that bend into shape around the internal components in a way I’ve never seen before. If the…

IS YOUR RIG RUNNING PCIE 5.0? Then it’s tasty stuff, as version 5.0 is only just about to become properly mainstream. Version 6.0 only recently reached its final specifications, and you won’t find hardware around yet. The PCI-SIG (the Special Interest Group that manages the format’s standards) has announced that it is “on track” to finalize PCIe 7.0 by 2025. The gap between this and the first hardware being available is just over a year. Each iteration of PCIe doubles the data rate of the previous generation. PCIe 5.0 offers 128GB/s bidirectional transfers on a x16 link, so PCIe 7.0 will take us to 512GB/s. PCIe’s impressive bandwidth, right from the original specifications, has given us more than we could ever easily flood with data, which is not something you…

Red vs. Blue Two new chip families get ready to go head-to-head THIS FALL we have the pleasure of two new processor architectures landing pretty much simultaneously. First up, Red team. AMD is preparing its 7000-series Raphael chips using the new Zen 4 core architecture and a 5nm process. This is a whole new chip, motherboard, socket, and GPU. We get integrated RDNA 2 graphics, DDR5 memory (no DDR4 support), PCIe 5.0, and a new AM5 socket. There’s even a new 6nm I/O chip, replacing the older 12nm example with enhanced low power modes, which is responsible for most of the improved energy efficiency. AI is improved by support for AVX-5112 instructions. AMD says it will “try to make a big splash with overclocking” too. Those Zen 4 cores bring an…

Team Blue’s ambitious plans ahead of schedule YOU HAVE TO BE impressed with Intel’s ambition. It plans to put itself at the top of CPU development by 2025 by producing five nodes in four years. Given the company dropped the ball so often trying to move away from 10nm, we may scoff. But it appears the first step, the Intel 4 process, is now on track for production this year. The Intel 4 process is analogous to 7nm elsewhere and will debut on Meteor Lake chips, which will be 14thgeneration CPUs. These are Intel’s first tile-based designs and include diestacking to boot. That’s a lot of juicy new Intel technologies in one generation. Reportedly, Intel was to be ready for volume production of the mobile versions before the year’s end, but…