Maximum PC February 2019

PC BUILDING is a personal endeavor. Ask each member of the Maximum PC team to build a system for a given task or to a certain budget, and you’d get completely different systems from each one, as personalities and experiences come into play. One may focus on storage throughput, another on processing power, graphics performance, or connectivity. That’s before we even consider personal touches, such as case, lighting preferences, and so on. Despite these variations, there are general trends, and there are two broad camps when it comes to PC building: One revels in putting the latest technologies to task, while the other is focused on how the machine is going to be used. Both methodologies have advantages and disadvantages (not least of which is cost), but for most practical cases,…

NVIDIA’S INNOVATIVE raytracing RTX series has grown, with a new entry-level RTX 2060, and a top-end Titan RTX. It has also launched new GTX cards that use the new Turing silicon. It has effectively made two brands: the RTX series with ray tracing enabled, and the GTX series without. The RTX 2060 is the card many have been waiting for. Nvidia’s 60-series cards usually provide the best bang for your buck, useful given RTX pricing. The 2060 has 1,920 CUDA cores, 240 AI Tensor cores, and 30 ray-tracing cores. All down on figures for the RTX 2070, which has 36 ray-tracing cores. It’ll have 6GB of GDDR6, a base clock of 1,365MHZ, and you’ll need a spare eight-pin power plug. First reports say that if you run Battlefield V with ray tracing…

INTEL MIGHT APPEAR to be having a tough time, with AMD’s Ryzen taking big bites out of the PC market, but the tech giant has big plans for 2019. Of most interest is that we will finally get to see its new 10nm chip using the Sunny Cove architecture, Intel’s first all-new design since Skylake in 2015. We don’t have many details, just a few slides shown at its Architecture Day event. It will have 50 percent more L1 cache, and “significantly” larger key structures, buffers, and so forth. It has a wider front end—that is, more paths—and can run two stores per cycle. It also gets an extra Address Generation Unit, a second Load Effective Address unit, 10 ports instead of eight, and a second shuffle unit, all adding up…

A RANSOMWARE ATTACK hit the Los Angeles Times and other Tribune Publishing papers just before the new year. Only 15 percent of subscribers received their newspapers on time, and many editions were slimmer. It also disrupted west coast distribution of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, among others. According to the group, it was “the biggest publishing disruption in decades.” The culprit is a piece of malware known as Ryuk, named after a Japanese manga character. It encrypts files, and demands payment in bitcoin for their release. Ryuk first appeared last summer, and was used in a well-planned series of attacks that netted a reported $640,000. This new attack originated outside the US; the Department of Homeland Security and FBI are investigating. Sophos Labs estimates that by the end…

NEW YORK STATE and Charter Communication (which also does business as TWC and Spectrum) have reached a lawsuit settlement that will cost the ISP $174.2 million. Charter was accused of fraudulent, misleading, and consumer-hostile actions. At one point, it was even given 60 days to stop operating in the state. It is the biggest ever payout to consumers by an ISP. Charter was said to have “denied the customers reliable and fast Internet services it had promised.” Advertised speeds were only reached 60 to 70 percent of the time. The hardware the company distributed was deficient, and network capacity not maintained. Charter also used hardball tactics with Netflix, and other streaming services, leading to frozen screens, extended buffering, and degraded video quality. $62.5 million of the fine will be used…

TRIUMPHS ✓ 3NM CHIPS PLANNED TSMC is to build the world’s first 3nm foundry for $19.5 billion—we can expect to see the results in 2022. ✓ FORTNITE FORTUNE Gamer Tyler Blevins earned nearly $10 million last year through Twitch and YouTube. ✓ ULTRA SHORT THROW PROJECTORS LG’s new CineBeam Laser 4K can give a 90-inch image at just two inches from your wall. TRAGEDIES ✗ DRM DOES HIT GAME PERFORMANCE Proof emerges that Denuvo does impact games—frame rates and load times are slower. ✗ CLASSIC FLOP Sony’s retro PlayStation Classic isn’t selling well; blame falls on the poor games bundle. ✗ RIP DR. LARRY ROBERTS A founding father of the Internet, he laid out the original network, and introduced packet switching.…