Maximum PC March 2019

WE LOVE PERFORMANCE on Maximum PC. It would be our middle name, if we had one. Whether we’re looking at high-end hardware or the latest budget offerings, we want the best performance possible from the components used, often pushing things even harder with a little judicious overclocking to eke out those last few percentage points. There’s something plenty of us fall on down, though, and that’s on the software front. Specifically, the OS. If performance is important to you—and given you’re reading Maximum PC, it probably is—a clean install of Windows is what you really want. Whether you’ve just installed a new component, or have been rocking the same hardware for a while, cutting out all the detritus and bloat of a well-used operating system can give any machine a new…

AFTER MONTHS of focus on Nvidia and its groundbreaking RTX cards, we have a solid response from AMD in the form of the Radeon VII. Unlike the RTX cards, we don’t have a fancy new GPU architecture or extra features, but we do get the first consumer outing for the 7nm Vega 20 GPU, which first appeared in November in the Instinct enterprise cards. While the GPU is small, it’s on a hefty double-width, full-length card, with triple fans. The Vega 20 in the Radeon VII has 3,840 stream processors—256 fewer than the Vega 10-powered Vega 64. It carries 60 compute units (four fewer than the enterprise incarnation, and four fewer than the Vega 64). Clock speeds have jumped significantly; the base clock is now 1,400MHz, with a peak boost of 1,750MHz.…

AMD’S PROCESSOR development schedule continues to run apace. Last spring we saw the arrival of the Zen+ core; this year we’ll get the Zen 2 core, and the accompanying 3000 series chips. At CES, we saw our first silicon. The Zen 2 design uses chiplets, in this case an eight-core 7nm processor chiplet, and a 14nm I/O processor on the same substrate. Tellingly, there was room on the chip for another eight-core chiplet. You can even see the traces laid out for it. AMD is being tight on details, but it did boast that its pre-production chip could run Cinebench with a score of 2,057, which compares well with a Core i9-9900K at 2,042. It did this while drawing 130W, against the Intel’s 180W. There are lots of leaks about Ryzen 3…

GOOGLE HAS PROPOSED a change to Chrome that will stop adblockers working. As made public in its Chrome Extensions Manifest v3, it is planning on limiting the webRequest API, and adding a new one that will require that any extension declares to the browser what it can do, and how. It also has a limited number of items that can be filtered. It’s all ostensibly in the name of security. If the proposal goes through, your adblocking apps on Chrome will stop blocking, and you’ll see the Internet in all its ad-infested glory. Adblocking has grown rapidly of late. In the US, about 40 percent of laptops and 33 percent of desktops used adblockers in 2017; 2018’s figures are expected to be higher. Ads are money, and collecting and selling your…

FACEBOOK HAS PLANS FOR YOUR DATA: It is to merge Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger behind the scenes so they can share data. They’ll still appear to be separate apps, but under the skin there will be one big integrated Facebook social media platform. You’ll be able to send messages from one app to another without switching. It will also enable end-to-end encryption on all three. It’s all part of a plan instigated by Mr. Zuckerberg to enable each element of Facebook’s social media empire to communicate. The idea has not been without opponents; this project is reportedly why the company lost the founders of WhatsApp and Instagram last year. Some have complained that the integration will mean the more widespread sharing of personal data. WhatsApp, for example, doesn’t require the…

TRIUMPHS ✓ LARGER HADRON COLLIDER CERN looks set to build a new LHC four times the size of the original, with a 62-mile track. ✓ FLYING TAXI Forget self-driving cars, Boeing has just tested its first autonomous flying craft, the PAV (Passenger Air Vehicle). ✓ MACHINES PLAY BETTER Google’s DeepMind AI machine has played the world’s best StarCraft players, and beaten them ten games to one. TRAGEDIES ✕ APPLE’S BLACK SCREENS The MacBook Pro has a habit of breaking the ribbon cable connecting the screen to the controller; it costs $600 to fix. ✕ FAKE 5G AT&T has been berated by rivals for its 5G service, because it isn’t actually 5G. ✕ DRAGONFLY ON HOLD Google’s controversial censored search engine project for China has been stopped after China pulls data support.…