Maximum PC February 2023

SINCE THE Nvidia RTX 4090 arrived to a ‘9 Kick-Ass’ award in our December 2022 issue, we’ve been fixated on the card. I admit to being personally impressed when I did the cover build for the following issue, and after some frustrating boot problems, I was able to see all my favorite games in a new light by playing them at 4K with maxed-out settings. Sam followed that up with a much cheaper 4090 build in the Jan 2023 issue, showing that while the 4090 itself is expensive, it didn’t need the latest and greatest CPU, RAM, or motherboard to get the most out of it. This time it’s the turn of the RTX 4080, the much-maligned little sibling of the flagship, which has been somewhat overlooked since its launch at…

NVIDIA’S GeForce RTX 4090 is a power-hungry giant of a card that sets new performance standards. It’s also a buck shy of $1,600 at retail and requires a monster of a rig to give it room to work. The RTX 4080 isn’t any smaller, but can’t reach the same performance highs, yet still costs $1,199. What many are waiting for are the more affordable mainstream Ada Lovelace-based cards. These are due to appear this year—the RTX 4060, 4060 Ti, 4070, and the RTX 4070 Ti. The specifications for these have appeared across several sources, although they do not all concur, and none have been confirmed by Nvidia yet, bar the 4070 Ti. The RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti are based around the AD106 GPU with either 3,840 or 4,352 CUDA cores coupled…

INTEL’S ARC GRAPHICS card hasn’t made much of a splash, with AMD and Nvidia owning top-level gaming. However, mid-range cards are where the majority of sales are made and, here, Arc Alchemy cards are making an appearance. Most cards we’ve seen are Intel-branded, but Gigabyte has now joined the party, selling low-end branded Arc cards in selected markets, with presumably the A750 and A770 cards to follow. One weakness of the Alchemist cards has been the underdeveloped and buggy driver, but the latest version addresses the terrible performance under DirectX 9. The driver now has native DirectX 9 support, although only for selected games (currently 13 titles). It can give a dramatic boost too, with a frame rate that doubles in some cases. Arc has been slow to market, but…

THE LAUNCH of AMD’s Zen 4 Ryzens had one thing missing: there were no 3D V-Cache chips with that wad of L3 cache laid over the cores. The previous generation’s eight-core Ryzen 7 5800X3D had 96MB of L3, making it a gaming demon. AMD said it would return to the formula, but now rumor has it that we’ll see three new V-Cache Zen 4 chips this year, with either 16, 12, or 8-cores. The larger two chips have 192MB of L3, while the smallest has 96MB. Eight cores are ample for gaming, which is one reason AMD stuck to that on its original V-Cache chip. Content creation is another matter, though. The Zen 3 V-Cache chip was not overclockable, and ran slower (200MHz) than the stock Ryzen 7 5800X, mainly…

TRIUMPHS ✓ CHIP IN YOUR HEAD? Neuralink is months away from human trials of an implanted brain-computer interface. ✓ APPLE OPENS-UP SHOP It saw off Fortnite, but now Apple is preparing to allow third-party apps on iOS, breaking the monopoly of its own App Store. ✓ BIG NEW FAB TSMC is to build a $40 billion second fab at its Arizona site. It will produce 3nm chips and be operational from 2026. TRAGEDIES ✘ HACKER BEACHES FBI After discovering a loophole in an FBI database, someone put details of 87,000 ‘high-profile’ people for sale on the dark web. ✘ KILLER ROBOTS San Francisco authorities have approved deployment of police robots capable of lethal force. ✘ UNSAFE PASSWORDS The password manager LastPass has been compromised again, the seventh such scare since 2011.…

INTEL’S development is running at some pace, although Meteor Lake appears to have hit a snag, so Raptor Lake will be refreshed this year instead. New slides leaked from Intel show this is scheduled for this fall, almost exactly a year after the launch. Originally, the LGA 1700 socket was designed to run two iterations of processor but now gets a third. The range is to get a rework, but it’s not clear whether we’ll get more than fiddling with clock rates and boost configurations. They will use the same motherboard chipset—no news on a 34-core Raptor Lake glimpsed at Intel Innovation last year, however. We will also be treated to non-K versions of Raptor Lake, the mainstream 65W parts without the high boost clocks. These replace the 12th-gen Alder…