PC Pro October 2024의 목차

You may not realise that Charles Dickens wasn’t merely a prolific novelist, journalist and short story writer, but also a keen reader of PC Pro. And a time traveller. When he wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, he was referring to the incredible slew of AI-enabled laptops that would launch in the summer of 2024, knowing the lost weekends and evenings it would cause me in my desperate attempt to review them all. Although I’m still not entirely happy about his depiction of me in A Christmas Carol. This particular issue is a tale of two CPU architectures, with AMD the hero for x86 with its all-new Ryzen AI 300 series. I give my largely positive verdict on this launch from p48, and…

Exclusive investigations into technology practices. Email probe@pcpro.co.uk if you have a story Was the CrowdStrike meltdown the worst IT failure in history? Probably, but nobody really cares about its level of notoriety. What they care about is their flight leaving on time, or their hospital appointment going ahead, or being able to log in to online banking. For a good few hours on 19 July 2024, none of those things was a given for millions of people around the world. The incident reports have been written, the lawsuits filed and in-depth articles about why it happened written (see the columns by Jon Honeyball and Davey Winder this month, p110 and p118). But will the lessons of the CrowdStrike failure be learned to minimise the possibility of a similar incident ever…

Who would have thought that AI could become so boring so quickly? I feel an urgent obligation to devote a column to its fall from grace, but it appears to be happening faster than I can type. Last month, Nvidia’s stock rose faster than a SpaceX test shot before dropping even faster. Now Amazon reports that its Kindle self-publishing platform has been flooded by such a torrent of AI-generated bodice-rippers that it’s imposing an upload limit of only three books a day on its customers. Amazon stops short of banning AI-generated content altogether, however, so ChatGPT remains a cancer on the body of the publishing industry in more ways than just crap e-novels. When I review a book, I often look at other people’s reviews online, not to plagiarise them…

Google-free phones On the podcast of Thursday 15 August, Darien made a comment that there are few who would be happy with an Android phone missing Google services (or words to that effect) outside of China. Well, I’m one of those who is. I have a Galaxy Z Fold5, so Samsung and Google up the yazoo, but I also imported a Moondrop MIAD 01 (which stands for mobile internet audio device) and there are probably few of these outside of China. It’s a truly excellent hi-fi phone (double DACs, 3.5mm and 4.4mm jacks), but it has no Google footprint on it. I’ve sideloaded apps from other app stores and installed various security apps. What’s really noticeable is the amazing battery life (5,000mAh) without all the Google crapware, and how a…

If you thought life wasn’t confusing enough, a number of key features that Microsoft has rolled out as part of Windows 11 24H2 will only be available to Copilot+ PCs. Or at least, that’s what Microsoft is saying now. It has form when it comes to changing its mind about such things, quietly adding features to Windows 10 that were once thought unique to Windows 11. There is some sense to this bifurcation of Windows, however, as all the features below use the neural processing unit (NPU) built into a handful of recent processors. And even if you bought a laptop with Intel’s Core Ultra inside, or AMD chips with first or second generation Ryzen AI inside, you’re out of luck: while those processors include NPUs, they aren’t powerful enough. Microsoft…

In the past few years there’s been a steady stream of new Wi-Fi gear to spend your money on – first came Wi-Fi 6, then 6E, and now we’re seeing Wi-Fi 7 routers and laptops appear. There’s a fair chance that you’ve recently replaced your router, and may still have the old one knocking around somewhere. If so, it doesn’t need to be gathering dust – or at least, it could be doing something useful while it gathers dust. Almost any router can be turned into a Wi-Fi extender, enabling you to get a stronger, faster signal in remote areas of your home. However, the term “Wi-Fi extender” can refer to a few different sorts of setup, each with its own particular strengths and limitations. Here’s what you need to…

SCORE PRICE 2TB/RTX 4070, £2,416 (£2,900 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com While I could sum up this review in six words – like the PX13 opposite, only bigger – that doesn’t do the ProArt P16 justice. Yes, it shares many of the same design hallmarks and specs as its little brother, but this 16in laptop can justly be called a graphics workstation. The bigger chassis means more room for fans and cooling systems than the PX13, and the CPU benefits from a maximum thermal design power (TDP) of 70W rather than 65W. Asus evidently can’t make room for a GeForce RTX 4080 within this still-slender chassis, instead sticking to the RTX 4070 found in the top-end PX13. What you do get, if you select the 2TB model, is 64GB of RAM;…

Recommended This, quite simply, is a product we recommend you buy – if it meets your needs. A-List The best buy in its category right now. The product will also feature on our A-List, starting on p14. It’s updated each month. Labs Winner Each month we run a group test, or Labs. This product has managed to beat all others to top position. Tinyurl.com links Throughout the magazine you’ll see tinyurl.com shortcuts. Enter these into the address bar of your browser and it will take you to a particular page, which will either be too long or awkward for us to publish or will take you to the precise shop from which to buy. If it’s Amazon, note that we may have an affiliate deal in place so we will…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,041 (£1,249 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk While Dell’s Inspiron brand focuses on value, the XPS range is all about luxury. That should be immediately obvious from the photo, with the sleek and chic XPS 13 designed to turn heads. There’s no visible touchpad, the function keys light up, and the edge-to-edge keyboard and superslim bezels add yet more visual flair. It’s also highly configurable. Most Copilot+ PCs come in a handful of configurations, but here you can choose between 16GB, 32GB and 64GB of RAM; 512GB, 1TB or 2TB of storage; and from a trio of screens, two supporting touch (one OLED, one IPS) and one not. You can even choose between graphite and platinum colour finishes. Dell chose to send us the platinum version –…

SCORE PRICE £3,995 (£4,794 inc VAT) from ultima-computers.co.uk You know that AI is everywhere when it sneaks its way into a rugged laptop. With the S510, Getac is jumping ahead of rivals such as Dell and Panasonic by not only offering Intel’s Core Ultra chips but complementing them with optional GeForce GTX 1650 graphics. This five-year-old chip still packs acceleration beyond integrated graphics, but not much beyond: the S510’s 3,394 in 3DMark Time Spy is on a par with laptops using Intel’s Arc graphics. However, any apps that take advantage of Nvidia’s CUDA platform will be significantly faster. The NPU built into the Core Ultra 7 165U vPro is modest, to the point where Intel doesn’t even specify its standalone TOPS rating, merely “up to 34 TOPS” for the processor…

SCORE PRICE $400 from rayneo.com Smart glasses are an idea that keeps coming around: recently we’ve seen the Lenovo Legion Glass (see issue 352, p70), the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses (see issue 352, p71) and the Carrera Smart Glasses with Alexa (see issue 353, p70). However, no-one’s yet managed to drag the idea into the mainstream. Could TCL RayNeo’s new Air 2s AR glasses be the ones that hit the big time? They certainly make a style statement. The shape resembles a pair of classic Ray-Ban Wayfarers, but RayNeo’s design eschews the Wayfarers’ thick rims in favour of a futuristic full-front visor. The silver temples offer three-point tilt adjustment and ultra-flexible hinges, and at only 79g they’re comfortable to wear, even for prolonged periods. The frame does, however, suffer from…

SCORE PRICE £441 (£529 inc VAT) from samsung.com Remember those innocent days before AI when “smart” was the hottest buzzword in tech? Samsung was one of its keenest advocates, applying it to the Smart Monitor M7 (see issue 326, p93) back in 2021, and for good reason. That was a 31.5in 4K monitor with Wi-Fi 5 that included Tizen OS, so you could use it for streaming TV or smart home duties without the need for a PC. Now we have the M8, which is a 31.5in 4K monitor with Wi-Fi 5 that includes Tizen OS. But even though the M8 costs £140 more than the M7, this is a far better offering. The main reason: improved image quality. The M8’s VA panel shares the same technology as its predecessor,…

SCORE PRICE £832 (£999 inc VAT) from xiaomi.com The Xiaomi 14 Ultra isn’t exactly new – it first appeared in the UK back in February. However, the steep £1,299 launch price put it in an exclusive price bracket. Now it’s had a significant drop to £999, making it a rival to the latest iPhone Pro and Pixel Pro handsets, or a cheaper alternative to Samsung’s top-tier Galaxy S24 Ultra (see issue 354, p58). At the new price, it’s a good deal. The phone comes with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, and the camera provision is unrivalled: the rear of the case is dominated by a sizeable circular protrusion that houses four 50MP Leica cameras. The design isn’t wholly ergonomic. The large camera assembly makes it top-heavy, and when…

The PC workstation market never stands still. When your activities need the fastest possible desktop computing you’ll always be looking for the latest technologies, and manufacturers are happy to oblige. For this reason, if you want to see the pinnacle of PC power, a fully stocked workstation will be it. This year, we see new generations of Intel and AMD CPUs compared to last year, the return of the non-Pro AMD Ryzen Threadripper, and new graphics accelerators. But there’s still a huge range of components to choose from, and every single system in this labs test has a different combination. Some trends remain. There are still more AMD processors than Intel, and more Nvidia graphics cards than AMD, but it’s great to see all the main contenders represented in some form, showing…

SCORE PRICE £3,749 (£4,499 inc VAT) from armari.com Armari decided to provide us with something a little different for its £4,500 workstation entry this year. Instead of the classic black box like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Magnetar PrMM16R9 is small – very small. Yet it packs in the same workstation-grade components found in more conventional systems. The Magnetar uses a Phanteks Evolv Shift XT chassis, which is a quarter to a third smaller in every dimension than other cases this month. The physical appearance with angled corners is stylish, but the infinity mirror on the front is mesmeric, looking like a lit passageway extending unfeasibly into the front of the case. This is a chassis you’ll want to display on your desk as a statement rather…

SCORE PRICE £3,750 (£4,500 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews PCSpecialist’s Quantum Goliath R is an outlier in this group test, as one of two systems supplied with consumer-grade rather than professional graphics. But that doesn’t mean it’s just a gaming PC. Certain types of content creators – particularly game developers – prefer this anyway. The GPU in question is an incredibly potent Asus TUF GeForce RTX 4090 OC Edition. This sports 16,384 CUDA cores, which is almost as many as the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation and more than any other Nvidia card here. There’s 24GB of GDDR6X memory with 1,008GB/sec of bandwidth, which is also the highest in the Labs. PCSpecialist has also gone for the best with the CPU, an Intel Core i9-14900KS. That’s one rung up from the…

SCORE PRICE £8,329 (£9,994 inc VAT) from armari.com Armari has been a leader in the UK workstation market for decades and, together with Scan, is often the first to send us the latest technology. The Magnetar M64T7-AW1650G4 isn’t the only system this month to sport one of the recently released non-Pro AMD Ryzen Threadrippers, but it’s the only one to opt for the 64-core iteration. The Threadripper 7980X has a base 3.2GHz clock across its 64 cores (with 128 threads) and a maximum boost of 5.1GHz. The most obvious difference between the two variants of the Threadripper is that the Pro version supports eight-channel memory, and the non-Pro variant has a quad-channel controller, so will have lower RAM bandwidth. However, the Pro also has 128 PCI Express 5 lanes whereas…

This month’s Labs provided our first foray into testing workstation performance for AI inferencing. Right now, this is a tentative workload on local systems, with most generative AI being processed remotely via services such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and DALL-E. But creatives who aren’t already experimenting with using these tools in their work should be – in part out of concern that AI will make their jobs obsolete, but also for positive reasons. By getting on top of the technology, and incorporating it into your own work practices, you might just enhance your workflows and explore new creative areas. Online image generation services such as DALL-E make heavy use of GPUs, and even more will have been employed to create their AI models in the first place. But those GPUs…

SCORE PRICE Standard Cloud/One user, £287 exc VAT per year from islonline.com ISL Online probably has the most flexible licensing schemes of any remote support solution available. SMBs anticipating only occasional use can purchase a £75 pay-per-use contract for 500 minutes of unrestricted support sessions, while those with more ambitious plans can host it on-premises, opt for a privately managed cloud version or pick a Cloud licensing model. The Standard Cloud plan we’ve reviewed here starts at £287 per year for one concurrent user, which allows one active session to be shared across all support staff. You can easily adjust your plan if you need more concurrent sessions and, unlike some competing cloud-hosted solutions, the price includes both on-demand and unattended remote support. The technician’s cloud portal has undergone a…

SCORE PRICE £547 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Netgear has traditionally offered an outstanding range of network switches and wireless access point (APs) for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), but routers have always been conspicuous by their absence. Not any more: the PR60X Pro fills this void in Netgear’s product portfolio by delivering a 10GbE-ready solution offering plenty of routing capabilities, dual WAN failover, support for up to 30 site-to-site IPsec VPNs and an integral firewall. Powered by a 2.2GHz quad-core ARM A73 CPU partnered by 2GB of DDR4 memory, this slimline 1U rack unit offers a 10GbE copper port configurable for LAN or WAN duties, a 2.5GbE WAN port and three 2.5GbE LAN ports, all of which are the multi-gigabit variety. You get a 10GbE SFP+ uplink port for long-distance…

Some decades ago I had a personal involvement in the sort of profiling project that would eventually feed into hyperpersonalisation. My version wasn’t purely commercial, however; it was designed to track down a fraudster. The client was trying to deal with a situation where – thanks to the borderless markets of the EU – an individual might pop up in Paris one week and Stockholm the next, each time trying to sell Madrid airport (yes, really) to a different branch of the same bank. Our challenge was to piece together whatever we could about them. Our database was pretty crude as such things go – fast, pervasive internet and large online repositories of personal data weren’t things we could rely on in 1997. But it was fully distributed, surviving a…

Distributed cloud can protect you from a wide range of risks, but it’s not a magical cure for all digital ills. In recent weeks, many managers will have been searching for measures that might have protected them from the global CrowdStrike meltdown in July – but the truth is, a distributed cloud arrangement probably wouldn’t have helped. That’s because the distributed model relies on many VMs all running the same software in tight synchrony, so if a core component goes bad in one instance, it ought to go bad right across the deployment. This in fact points to a subtle challenge of distributed cloud: while running multiple virtual servers in multiple places can lend you resilience, it also creates opportunities for problems to spread far and wide. The damage from…

I’m speaking at a conference in September on “picking the right lawful basis for your processing activity”. Don’t stop reading! I agree it doesn’t sound that enticing, but I promise there is excitement ahead. Every different use of personal data about someone needs a lawful basis, and you have six options. Your activity must be necessary for a contract with them, a legal obligation, vital interests (life or death), a public task, or legitimate interests. The sixth one is the individual’s consent. The tricky thing about consent is that it must be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous. A tricky part of the others is that word “necessary”. In my preparations, I started rolling out some quick examples for my delegates: “We collect employee PAYE details to send to HMRC”…

In summer 1985, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs rebuffed three offers to become a professor. “I told all of the universities that I thought I would be an awful professor,” he later revealed in an interview with Newsweek. Yet he still wanted to make a big impact in the education sector. Jobs was 30 years old and ready for a new challenge. He’d resigned from Apple following a reorganisation, but not before telling the board what he wanted to do next. Having previously visited Brown University, he’d been told academics sorely wanted a powerful, personal workstation capable of helping them with their research. His aim, he told the Apple board, was to create a computer for the higher education market that best suited them. When he made his announcement, jaws dropped,…

Features AI is coming for your job There’s no question about it any more: AI is coming for your job. We find out how it’s affecting different sectors and how you can use the technology to enhance your working life rather than let it replace you. Features Instant Expert: Clipchamp Can you create professional-quality movies in Microsoft’s free video-editing suite? We think so, and show how to use advanced visual effects, AI-powered editing and more. Features Deep dive: what is an NPU? As more and more personal devices gain AI capabilities, we explore the hardware that makes it possible, and ask: how many TOPS do you really need? Labs Smart speakers With never-ending discounts, it’s tempting to simply buy an Amazon Echo and be done with it. But there are…

PC buyers and vendors alike are troubled after Intel belatedly admitted to problems with its 13th and 14th generation desktop processors. There have long been reports of instability with Intel’s “Raptor Lake” processors, with systems crashing under heavy load, and even dead chips. Intel finally released a microcode patch for the processors in August, throttling back the voltage available to the chips to prevent systems hanging and permanent damage to the processor. That’s far from the end of the matter, though, with unhappy PC buyers worried their processors may already be irreparably damaged and PC vendors bearing the brunt from disgruntled customers. The long road to remediation Reports of problems with the Intel processors have been swirling since late 2022, particularly among the overclocking community, who are most likely to…

CrowdStrike probably had a bigger impact than any IT outage in history, but it’s had strong competition, not least from McAfee almost 15 years ago. McAfee’s 2010 blunder bore a striking resemblance to CrowdStrike. The firm released an antivirus update that inadvertently flagged a critical Windows file (svchost.exe) as a malicious threat. Affected machines entered a reboot cycle, and its effect was felt in government agencies, hospitals and beyond. McAfee issued an emergency fix and instructions on how to manually restore affected systems. There’s another similarity between the two incidents. McAfee’s chief technology officer during the 2010 blunder, George Kurtz, is now the CEO of CrowdStrike. There is, of course, no suggestion that is anything other than a desperately unfortunate coincidence, but if you’re the man involved, well… that’s gotta…

When I was growing up in Canada, tablets and smartphones didn’t exist, so I spent much of the time staring out of the window on our 12-hour drives from Calgary to Vancouver to visit family. To be clear, this isn’t a complaint: the views through the mountains and valleys are tremendous, and I have always been very good alone with my thoughts. Had iPads existed, would my parents have turned to technology to keep my sisters and me entertained? Yes, I imagine so, though annoyingly the cheapos probably would have shared one between the three of us, sparking untold arguments. Last month, with a toddler of our own on an eight-hour flight, we didn’t hesitate: we dug out and charged up our iPad, sought out a few babyfriendly games, and…

The mid-90s was a race to get the world online. Every month, magazines such as PC Pro carried CDs from faceless ISPs desperate to bag sign-ups, but there was one ISP that was radically different from the rest, spearheaded by a man who was used to shifting millions of CDs of his own. David Bowie didn’t just lend his name to an ISP; it wasn’t some half-arsed piece of merchandise. He regularly joined chats with members, and delivered internet innovations that were well ahead of their time, such as the live streaming of concerts and offering 3D environments for fans to mix in. All this long before YouTube or Second Life were even a thing. We’ve spoken first-hand to the people who worked with Bowie to bring “cyberspace” to the…

You have to sympathise with AMD. Thanks to its powerful and power-efficient Zen architecture, it has slowly chipped away at Intel’s laptop dominance for the past five years, to the point where it had doubled its market share. And then party-pooper Qualcomm comes along with its Snapdragon Elite chips, which were the first to meet the criteria for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs. But AMD is battling back thanks to its Ryzen AI 300 series, which also meet Microsoft’s criteria for Copilot+ PCs (although, at the time of writing, they are yet to be certified). In what AMD is calling its third-generation Ryzen AI chip, it has overhauled the architecture to deliver leadership in productivity, content creation and games. Or so it claims; Qualcomm looks at things quite differently. Its undeniable advantage…

SCORE PRICE £1,417 (£1,700 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com While Asus designed the new ProArt laptops (see p50) to extract every last ounce of juice from AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, the Zenbook S 16 takes a different approach. Yes, this super-slim 16in laptop is fast, but with far less room in its 12.9mm-thick chassis for cooling it’s not the best choice for those with demanding workloads. This was made abundantly clear in Cinebench 2024, which lasts at least ten minutes per test. Where the ProArt systems were hitting around 1,200 in the multicore section, the best score I extracted from the Zenbook S 16 was 915. It was a similar story in Geekbench 6’s multicore test, with a 13,239 result paling in comparison to the 15,000+ of its…

SCORE PRICE £624 (£749 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews Dell’s Inspiron 14 Plus (see p59) is currently the cheapest Copilot+ PC around, but if that’s still too much and your heart is set on an AI PC, then the PCSpecialist Lafité AI AMD may be the answer. Rather than featuring one of AMD’s new Ryzen AI 300 series chips (see p48), PCSpecialist saves a chunk of cash by opting for last year’s AI hotshot, the Ryzen 8845HS. Its NPU offers 16 TOPS compared to the 55 TOPS of the Ryzen AI 370 HX in the trio of Asus laptops on review this month, which means no Recall or Cocreator built into Windows, but you can take advantage of third-party software enhanced for NPUs. So far, that mainly means videoand photoediting software…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £874 (£1,049 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Inspiron 14 Plus marks two interrelated firsts: it’s the first Copilot+ PC to include a Snapdragon X Plus chip rather than X Elite, and the first to duck under the £1,000 mark. If Dell had sent us this version of the 14 Plus with a 512GB SSD rather than 1TB then that’s the price you would see above. That’s because it uses the X1P-64-100 chip, with “P” standing for Plus. It has ten cores to the Elite’s 12, slower clock speeds and slower graphics. In single-core tasks, it’s almost identical to the X1E-78-100 in the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x (see p57), but switch to core-intensive applications and the Yoga pulls ahead – particularly in Cinebench 2024, with 1,044 versus…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,986 (£2,383 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Dell has recently updated many of its Latitude business laptops with Intel’s Core Ultra chips, and this is our first chance to look at one in the flesh. If you haven’t checked out Latitudes for a while you might be struck by the dark grey matte chassis, a striking design that’s a welcome move away from the light grey metal finish so common on business laptops. Duck if one is thrown at you, however, as it’s one dense, heavy machine. That’s partly due to the robustness of the aluminium chassis, but also because convertibles are always meatier due to the hinge mechanism and the extra support this requires. While you can customise the CPU (Ultra 5 135U or Ultra 7…

Total value this month £145 Norton Secure VPN 2024 You need to keep your wits about you when using a PC: viruses, scams and worse can put your valuable personal data at risk. However, one of the most common threats – and one that’s easy to overlook – is the danger of insecure wireless networks. Sit down to work in a café, or connect to public Wi-Fi at an airport or library, and you’re putting your personal data in the hands of an unknown network administrator. Worse, on fully open Wi-Fi networks, your communications can be spied on by anyone else using the same hotspot. Come to that, do you know for sure that the network you’re connected to really is the official one, and not a malicious imitator? The…

SCORE PRICE £250 (£300 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Wi-Fi 7 has been slow to catch on, but now that new laptops are regularly arriving with built-in support for the new wireless standard (officially dubbed 802.11be), it might finally be ready to hit the mainstream. If that’s so then the Nighthawk RS300 has arrived at the ideal time. It’s the first Wi-Fi 7 router we’ve seen with a remotely sensible price tag, undercutting Amazon’s Eero Max 7 (see issue 352, p68) by a cool £300 and slashing more than 60% off the cost of Netgear’s own Nighthawk RS700S (see issue 353, p76). Despite the relatively low price, the RS300 offers a decent specification. The legacy 2.4GHz network runs at 700Mbits/sec, while the 5GHz radio is rated at 2.9Gbits/sec and the 6GHz…

SCORE PRICE £208 (£249 inc VAT) from oneplus.com The OnePlus Nord CE 4 Lite grabs attention with an arrestingly low price. At £249 inc VAT it’s hugely affordable, yet it still offers decent performance and battery life, plus bang-up-to-date system software and a generous 256GB of storage. It’s not a phone that’s likely to win any design awards. The casing (in your choice of “Mega Blue” or “Super Silver”) is chunky but clean, with no extraneous buttons or switches – not even the handy alert slider found on some other OnePlus mobiles. The only real design feature to speak of is the camera panel on the rear; a reflective panel around the lenses makes them look bigger than they actually are, but they don’t stick out far and the phone…

Workstations are the most powerful desktop PCs around, but budgetary constraints still apply. You need to choose your components wisely – and that means focusing your money on the workloads you generally perform. The good news: it’s no longer necessary to compromise too much between systems that are biased towards real-time graphics display and those aimed at final output. However, you should still spend the most on the components that will benefit your workload the greatest. 1 Processor Processors have moved on a generation since our last workstation Labs. The AMD Ryzen 9000 series arrived just in time for this test, when last year we had the previous 7000 series. Intel Core CPUs have moved from 13th (Raptor Lake-S) to 14th (Raptor Lake-S Refresh), and Threadripper Pro from 5000 to…

SCORE PRICE £3,642 (£4,370 inc VAT) from ipworkstations.com British workstation specialist InterPro has quietly been delivering excellent systems for over two decades now, and the IPW-RL is another case in point. The system combines a sensible selection of components for general content-creation tasks, and backs it up with a huge amount of memory. The CPU choice is from Intel’s stable, but not the absolute pinnacle of the range. It’s the latest 14th generation, but the Core i9-14900K rather than the slightly faster KS variant. Both CPUs combine eight P performance cores with 16 E efficiency ones, offering base clocks of 3.2GHz and 2.4GHz respectively. However, the K processor has a 5.8GHz P-core maximum Turbo Boost frequency and 6GHz Thermal Velocity Boost, versus 5.9GHz and 6.2GHz respectively for the KS. The…

SCORE PRICE £3,667 (£4,400 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk AMD was just in the process of launching its Ryzen 9000 Series processors as we were putting this Labs test together, and we’ve managed to squeeze our first look into the roundup. It comes from Scan in the form of the 3XS GWP A1-R24. Just as the 14th generation of Intel Core CPUs don’t make any radical changes over the 13th generation, the Ryzen 9000 doesn’t diverge greatly on paper from the 7000 series, with core counts still ranging from six to 16. Even the clock rates haven’t progressed. The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X in the Scan system is a 12-core CPU with a base 4.4GHz clock and 5.6GHz boost. The 7900X it replaces has a 4.7GHz base clock and 5.6GHz boost.…

SCORE PRICE £8,333 (£10,000 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews Zircon is a gemstone not to be confused with the synthetically produced cubic zirconia. Instead, it’s a naturally occurring gold-hewed mineral that comes in a variety of shades. PCSpecialist clearly considers its high-end entry to be a bit of a gem and it’s certainly packed with cutting-edge components. Despite the return of the non-Pro AMD Ryzen Threadripper, PCSpecialist opted not to go with this variant for the Zircon Extreme. Instead, it uses the 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7975X. This offers 64 threads and runs at the same frequencies as the non-Pro version – a base 4GHz with 5.3GHz boost. However, the Pro processor supports eight-channel memory and has 128 PCI Express 5 lanes, so can offer higher memory bandwidth while supporting…

As flexible working becomes the new normal, businesses of all sizes must adapt their IT support services to cope with the challenges they present. These working arrangements bring undeniable benefits in terms of productivity and efficiency, but in order for them to be effective, companies must find new ways to provide essential support regardless of where their staff are located. It’s impractical for technicians to personally visit users every time they have a hardware or software issue and, in many cases, they may also be working remotely. Telephone support is inefficient as it’s often impossible to fix a problem without having access to the user’s system. Remote support software is the answer as it puts technicians in front of the user’s troublesome workstation without having to be physically present in…

SCORE PRICE 1-500 systems, perpetual licence, £10 each exc VAT from netsupportmanager.com SMBs that want to keep all their remote support services on–premises need look no further than NetSupport Manager (NSM), which is one of the best solutions on the market. Cost control is another compelling argument since, unlike cloud-hosted services that incur regular monthly fees, NSM is priced on the number of systems you want to support and its perpetual licensing plans mean you pay only once. Now well into its third decade, NSM benefits from constant development with version 14.1 delivering new features and security enhancements. NSM delivers a wealth of support tools, including remote control, view and screen sharing, file transfer, text or two-way audio chat and recording facilities, remote application launch and Registry-editing tools, plus a…

SCORE PRICE £245 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Zyxel’s Nebula NFWA505 is designed to deliver wire-free internet access. This compact desktop mobile router teams up 5G with Wi-Fi 6 services and targets a wide audience including small businesses, SOHOs, mobile workers, pop-up stores and those that can’t get decent fixed-line broadband speeds. The FWA505 replaces Zyxel’s older NR5101 (see issue 338, p103), but is more competitively priced and sees a design refresh, with all ports arranged vertically at the rear. The status LEDs have been moved from the base to the front of the unit and it also sports a pair of smaller TS-9 connectors at the back for optional external aerials. Two gigabit ports are provided, with the first offering LAN or automatic WAN failover services and the second used…

Whisper it, but we here at PC Pro know quite a lot about our readers. We know why you read the magazine, and we know how it factors into your purchasing decisions. We’re also very aware of – and very grateful for – how long our subscribers stick around. We’re not quite at the point of hyperpersonalising the content of the magazine for each individual reader, but the data helps us make decisions that will, we hope, keep our readers satisfied. If you’ve read the main feature, however, you might not be surprised to learn that we don’t use powerful AI systems to derive this information. It might be more fun if we did – along with a fleet of interactive bots for you all to talk to – but…

What a mess. Everything that could have gone wrong actually did go wrong. And the response from the manufacturer leaves many questions unanswered. I’m not, of course, referring to the disappointing chocolate digestive I’ve just eaten, but to the CrowdStrike calamity. The one that managed to take down whole chunks of the internet services platform on a global scale. As was widely reported, Windows computers received an update to their CrowdStrike Falcon installation, and then blue-screen crashed. Rebooting the computer didn’t help. Recovery has usually involved booting the computer into Safe Mode, deleting some files and rebooting, and thus has required hands-on access (unless you had some sort of remote management out-of-bounds access as often found on rack-mounted servers). To understand what happened, we need to look under the Windows…

As the dust settles over what has been one of the most disruptive IT failures ever, the funky CrowdStrike update that blue-screened more than 8.5 million devices across the planet, it’s a good time to reflect on what actually happened. Yeah, I know, “disruptive” undersells it a tad, but cluster@$!& was deemed editorially unacceptable. Call it what you will – CrowdSpike, ClownStrike or, my personal favourite because I coined it, the IT CrowdStrike – the incident was the single most significant cause of tech disruption since WannaCry back in 2017. It was also, perhaps inevitably, the biggest source of technical misinformation since social media made everyone an expert on everything. I mean, seriously, where did all these so-called endpoint and cloud security experts come from? Days after the incident, days…

Woof, woof. You stare at your dog’s fluffy face and wonder two things: what does she want, and how do I make her stop? AI researchers are working on a way to answer that first question so you can then figure out the second, following a grand tradition of attempting to unpick what our pets are trying to say to us. In 2002, Japanese company Takeda launched the BowLingual dog translator (tinyurl.com/361bowlingual), followed by the Meowlingual version for feline friends. By listening to the sounds your pets were making, this $75 device would supposedly reveal its mood via an onscreen display and a short phrase (think “I’m hungry”). It was awarded that year’s satirical Ig Nobel prize, but animal translation using AI has attracted real academic attention. A project called…

There’s a standoff happening between the American tech giants and governments around the world. Google is under significant pressure in the US, with calls for it to be split up. Apple faces legal challenges from EU regulators, having recently been forced to support other app stores within the EU. Then there’s the EU’s new digital antitrust law, which has Meta, Google and Apple in its sights. There is an emerging view that the historical “do it and sort out the mess later” attitude of these companies is no longer sustainable. Take training of AI engines as one recent example. Is it acceptable to scrape everything out there and stuff it into the gaping maw of an AI training engine? But there is also another battle brewing over who controls the…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in (2023) M3 power from £1,699 from apple.com The M3 chips give the already brilliant MacBook Pro series a boost in games with no sacrifices elsewhere, so power users who are happy with Apple must grapple with the big decisions: which M3 chip, which size of screen, and how much RAM and storage? REVIEW Issue 352, p46 NEW ENTRY Apple Mac Book Air 13in (M3) Both the 13in and 15in MacBook Airs impress for speed, styling and battery life, but the 1.2kg 13in Air wins out of the two for its sheer portability. From £1,299 from apple.com  REVIEW Issue 356, p54 Huawei MateBook X Pro (2024) Despite weighing only 980g, this laptop packs a 14.2in OLED panel, 2TB of storage and an 11-hour battery life,…

Lord Honeyball and I found ourselves in a squabble on Twitter/X recently. I was lamenting the fact that Apple won’t let us run macOS on the iPad; he was lamenting the fact that I was lamenting that fact. Why do I want macOS on an iPad? Partly to offset my guilt. I spent a couple of months’ worth of mortgage payments on an iPad Pro recently, complete with the Magic Keyboard. It’s stupidly powerful, in some ways more so than the M1 MacBook Pro I’m writing this on, but I’m struggling to take advantage of all that horsepower. I went spendy on the iPad because I wanted it to replace the MacBook on the road. The MacBook is great, but it’s heavy, and so is the charger, and it’s more…

It’s that time of year when both the major computer operating systems give us a wealth of new features to play with. For both Windows and Mac this year, there is (to the surprise of absolutely nobody) a focus on AI. However, both will limit the availability of their AI goodies. For Windows, these features are largely limited to the new breed of Copilot+ PCs with built-in NPUs. On Mac, the AI toys are reserved for those with Apple silicon, but even then Apple Intelligence is going to be rolled out gradually and may not arrive in UK English for the launch of macOS Sequoia. Still, even leaving the AI features aside, there’s plenty of new stuff being added to both operating systems. Here’s a rundown of the features you…

If you’ve any interest in graphics, you’ve probably heard of Canva. It’s the fastest-growing visual design tool on the market, expanding from a million users ten years ago to an estimated 170 million at the end of 2023. Much of its appeal is down to its powerful image-editing and generation tools; these have a wide range of applications, but are particularly suited to commercial marketing and merchandising. It also doesn’t hurt that you can use Canva’s core features for free, and run the application entirely in a browser – although there are also native apps for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. There are also some powerful integrations. Since Canva’s launch in 2013, its parent company has absorbed the Pixabay stock photography, footage and music site, and the Pexels stock photography…

SCORE PRICE 2TB/RTX 4070, £2,083 (£2,500 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com Not content with being the first company to announce laptops with AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chips inside, Asus has built a new brand of laptop around them: together with the P16 opposite, these first ProArt laptops are aimed at designers and artists alike. Think Pantone-calibrated screens with excellent colour coverage, discrete GeForce RTX 40 series graphics and all the power that comes with AMD’s latest family of chips. Asus is selling two versions of the 13in PX13: one with RTX 4060 graphics, 24GB of RAM and a 1TB disk, and the other (as tested) with an RTX 4070, 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. Both include AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, with Asus supplying it with up to…

Laptops and PCs We run a selection of benchmarks on all the PCs and laptops we test. Where possible, we use a cross-platform test so we can compare Windows and macOS machines, which is where both Geekbench and Cinebench come into play. Both push the CPU to its limit, exposing how well cooled a system is. We run extra tests for Windows systems. We use PCMark 10 to benchmark systems in office tasks, content creation and basic tasks such as web browsing and video calls. We also run 3DMark Time Spy and Shadow of the Tomb Raider as a minimum. We test laptops and PCs that include discrete graphics with a range of games, such as Metro Exodus Enhanced and Dirt 5. For laptops, we test battery life with Wi-Fi…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,125 (£1,350 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Many Copilot+ PCs feel as if they were built for Intel chips before being retro-fitted with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon technology. Not so the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x. It more than lives up to its name, measuring 12.9mm thick compared to 14.9mm for the Intel-based Yoga Slim 7, and the only surprise is that it weighs 1.3kg. This is reflected in the sturdiness of its aluminium alloy chassis, but if Lenovo had chosen magnesium alloy it would have been lighter – and more expensive. Where the Yoga Slim 7x has followed the same trend as other Copilot+ PCs is that it has already dropped in price. We print the RRP above, but at the time of going to press you could buy…

SCORE PRICE £1,999 (£2,399 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk LG takes a straightforward approach with its gram laptops. Every single one is slim and light, and with each passing year we see upgrades in lock-step with Intel’s offerings. This year, that means Core Ultra chips, and every gram Pro model – the Pro is LG’s most premium version of the gram – will ship with Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H processor. Your big decision is whether to opt for a discrete Nvidia graphics chip rather than relying on Intel’s Arc graphics. The former adds almost 100g, but the chassis is identical. The gram Pro comes with different RAM, storage and screen options (there’s even a 17in version), and our test model sits at the top of the range with a pair…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £641 (£769 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Last year, Intel stopped developing its popular NUC mini PCs, signing an agreement with Asus that it would “manufacture, sell and support the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) 10th to 13th generation systems product line, and to develop future NUC systems designs”. I assumed that meant Asus would have the monopoly on the NUC name, but not so: MSI has entered the fray with its Cubi NUC line, and assures me that more will follow in the coming months. You can buy the Cubi NUC 1M as a barebones system, with the Core 3 100U version costing £349 inc VAT. Core 5 120U and Core 7 150U versions are available for £449 and £519 respectively (prices from scan.co.uk). Or you…

1 Visit pcprodownload.co.uk. First, enter the issue number (361 this month). Next, enter your email address and the coupon code printed on the cover’s spine (or directly on the front cover of digital issues of the magazine). We’ll then send an email to confirm that your code has been registered. Follow the instructions in the email to access the download area. 2 Once you’re in the download area, you can access this month’s bonus software by navigating to the relevant product page and clicking the red Install button. For trial software, freeware and other downloads, click the Install button below the product description, or follow the onscreen instructions (please make sure to read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register button, or follow the instructions on…

WORTH £2,199.99! If you’ve been waiting to upgrade to Wi-Fi 7, we have excellent news: one extremely fortunate PC Pro reader will soon benefit from the stunning Netgear Orbi 970 (see issue 357, p62). It is quite simply the fastest router we’ve tested, delivering blistering download and upload speeds across a wide area. And we tested the two-pack version; this is the three-pack edition, extending coverage to an astonishing 8,200 square feet. You can buy it now at www.netgear.com/uk/home/wifi/mesh/rbe973s or take your chance in this exclusive prize draw. Here are just some of its highlights: 8K streaming, gaming and more From 8K streaming to videoconferencing, from gaming to VR, Orbi ensures your family can accomplish everything at once. Up to 27Gbits/sec speed Unparalleled performance and coverage for your whole home,…

We run our PC Pro real-world benchmarks suite to assess image-processing and video-encoding abilities, then multitasking (see results on p95). Each category’s score indicates relative speed compared to a Core i7-4760K desktop PC with 8GB of RAM. If a machine scores 150 in a test, it’s 50% faster than the reference PC. All these results are then combined into an overall score. Our other tests focus on higher-end workstation tasks. To test 3D modelling, we use SPECviewperf 2020 v3.1, which runs OpenGL and Direct3D viewsets (here, viewsets means a particular set of workloads designed to replicate real-world tasks) based on popular 3D content creation, engineering and medical applications. These include Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, PTC’s Creo, Siemens NX, plus Dassault Systèmes Catia and SolidWorks. Maxon Cinebench 2024 contains a…

SCORE PRICE With RTX A4000 graphics, £2,783 (£3,339 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Lenovo, as the heir to IBM’s PC business, has a long and illustrious history of producing incredible workstation designs. The P3 Tower is the latest in the line of mid-sized tower systems, with a solid construction and labour-saving features. However, the version we were sent came with a 13th generation Intel Core i9 processor, one behind other Intel-based systems this month, even though this system can be specified with the 14th generation. At least it’s a near range-topping 13900K, which has eight performance P-cores with Hyper-Threading and 16 efficiency E-cores without it. The P-cores have a base 3GHz clock and top Thermal Velocity Boost of 5.8GHz. The E-cores have a base 2.2GHz frequency with 4.3GHz boost. There is…

SCORE PRICE £7,917 (£9,500 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Scan is the second manufacturer this month to take advantage of the return of the non-Pro AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPU. However, Scan has opted for a lesser model than Armari, enabling more potent graphics acceleration and a different performance balance as a result. Specifically, Scan chose the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X. This is the 32-core variant, which offers 64 threads and a base clock of 4GHz with a 5.3GHz boost. Of course, with AMD processors that have Precision Boost Overdrive enabled, the actual frequency will depend dynamically on power and temperature. Otherwise, the specifications are the same as the Armari CPU, with quad-channel memory support and 48 PCI Express 5 lanes plus 24 PCI Express 4 lanes. With a cheaper processor than…

SCORE PRICE One agent/25 devices, £44 exc VAT per month billed yearly from goto.com GoTo Resolve has a laser-sharp focus on remote support access security, and it now augments this with endpoint protection services. These include antivirus and patch management, while the Resolve “GoPilot” streamlines support sessions with AI-powered assistance. This cloud-hosted service is available in four plans, with the Remote Access edition providing unattended support and starting at £18 for unlimited users and 25 devices. The Remote Support plan enables attended access for on-demand support and is priced per agent. The Standard plan we review combines unattended and attended access, adds remote execution services and enables endpoint protection, GoPilot and custom script alerts. The Premium edition adds Windows and application update management. The basic plans interact with existing anti-malware…

SCORE PRICE £19 exc VAT billed yearly per technician/month from zoho.com/assist Zoho Assist is a cloud-hosted remote support service that will appeal to companies of all sizes. Small businesses may find the free version sufficient as it supports one technician, unlimited support sessions and five unattended desktops, but if you want more Zoho offers a range of affordable plans that can be upgraded or downgraded as required. We reviewed the Enterprise plan, which enables everything Assist has to offer and costs £19 per technician each month when billed yearly. Bear in mind that the plan enables on-demand remote support sessions onl; if you also require unattended access, you’ll need a separate licence, with the Professional plan starting at £12 per month for 25 computers. The good news is that if…

Move over mail-merge: simple personalisation techniques such as pasting people’s names into emails are old hat. Hyperpersonalisation is about learning as much as you can about a person’s behaviour, interests, activities and so on, and dynamically tailoring your digital offering to give them the perfect experience they didn’t even know they were looking for. Now, since you’re reading PC Pro, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re coming to this topic from an IT perspective. And that’s fine, because hyperpersonalisation is absolutely an IT function, and even brings AI into the equation as we’ll see. However, hyperpersonalisation is primarily to do with marketing and customer relations, and implementing it isn’t solely an IT project. As is often the case with these 21st-century trends, this isn’t a single product you can…

Isn’t this a bit redundant? Surely cloud is by definition distributed? Actually, it’s not. The marketing might make you imagine that cloud deployments always include remote backup, failover, regional scalability, software updates and so forth. In reality, these things are very much in the realm of chargeable extras, or features you need to manage for yourself. In the case of distributed cloud, we’re talking about a powerful set of standards for business continuity that should be compatible with your cloud package, but which are certainly not baked into it. So does it basically mean spreading our VMs across data centres? A distributed cloud will indeed run across multiple geographical locations, using fast long-haul links to provide a functionally locationless global resource. More than that, it can (and should) also extend…

If you read my column in issue 360 then please accept my congratulations on making a wise reading choice for the second successive month. I should warn that what you’re about to read isn’t a reprint. You may recall that I’d received an email enquiring about retrofitting the mighty Kraken Elite RGB cooler (tinyurl.com/361kraken) into a machine and, thanks to my warning about potential leaks, the enquiry went cold. Well, the influential magic of PC Pro works in mysterious ways, and mere moments after the last issue hit the newsstands, I received an email confirming that the machine was being brought in to have a “Krak El 360” fitted. The machine is a custom-built desktop sporting LEDs with the potential to fatally dazzle anyone who approaches without adequate sunglasses. This…

I have recently discovered that I am not a hospital person. Partly this was caused by visiting a sick relative, but mostly it was brought on by a few days being fixed up and then cared for on a ward crammed with patients, nurses, doctors, families and hangers-on, porters, catering staff – the food was pretty good, incidentally – and the occasional scribbler in suffering. Actually, it can’t have been so bad, because I was utterly hypnotised by what the nurses were using as an IT system. Each nurse had a trolley – nothing new there, you might say. Except that these trolleys were topped off by a 24in widescreen monitor and adorned with a massive steel shelf, just at arm height, where the keyboard, mouse and sundry paper printouts…