Maximum PC March 2023

LIKE MANY OF YOU, I’m a member of quite a few WhatsApp groups across family, friends, and colleagues. One such group of journalists and PRs in tech has been spamming my chat with their attempts to take the latest CPUs and GPUs, and fit them into as small a PC as possible. In the past, that’s been a challenge, but this generation’s chunky RTX 4000-series cards in particular make it more difficult than ever. Undeterred, they’ve been swapping ideas on cases, egging each other on with ridiculous cooling solutions, and posting the results to Reddit where they’ve been lapping up praise. That’s why this issue, we’re doing our own small form factor build. You’ve no doubt looked at (or already bought) the latest gear from Intel, AMD, and Intel—now we…

BEING ABLE to claim you have the world’s fastest processor has an undeniably attractive ring to it. You might not make the most efficient, best value, or any other metric you care to pick, but if you make the fastest chip, you have major bragging rights. Intel has been claiming that crown for years, though it has had to fight increasingly hard for it recently, as AMD’s Zen-powered chips edge ever closer. But it’s not about to lose that crown without a fight. If your rival gets close, there is a simple tactic—take your best chip, then carefully select the best ones you can find, and crank the frequency up as far as you dare. Enter Intel’s Core i9-13900KS, which is an aggressively binned 13900K, and configured to run at…

THE 12GB GEFORCE RTX 4080 was poorly received. As a step down from the 16GB version, but with a premium price, it quickly vanished. Now it’s back, this time called the RTX 4070 Ti, and costs $100 less at $799. It has a claimed performance better than the 3090 Ti. Problem solved? Not quite. It still isn’t pushing pixels fast enough—struggling to match a 3090 Ti in tests that Nvidia hasn’t cherry-picked, it even drops near 3080 territory at times. The price/performance is still out of whack (see review, page 74). Dropping down the running order, Ada Lovelace isn’t panning out too well, casting a shadow over the forthcoming 4070 and 4060 Ti, which will presumably be slower still. The 4070 Ti is in limbo here, neither reasonable value nor…

NOT EVERYBODY has been completely happy with their new Radeon RX 7900 XTX cards. It wasn’t long before reports started appearing of cards overheating, hitting 110°C at the hot spots and triggering thermal throttling. As you’d expect, people were pretty vocal online, though AMD was initially unsympathetic, insisting that things were “within spec”. People got more organized, passing serial numbers to AMD, and things improved. The problems only seemed to affect the AMD reference designs, which points to the cooler. AMD’s investigation found that “a small number” of cards were released without enough water in their vapor chambers. If you have a hot card, the advice is to return it, although replacement stocks are currently in short supply. This is an embarrassing failure from AMD. The reference design is just that—a…

TRIUMPHS ✓ NO MORE DRIFT The Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Con can be fixed using parts from Guliket, which use magnets instead of moving parts. ✓ FIX IT YOURSELF John Deere is to provide the diagnostic tools required to fix your own tractor—a victory for the right-to-repair campaign. ✓ A RARE FIND A deposit of over one million tons of rare earth oxides has been discovered in Sweden. TRAGEDIES ARTIFICIAL IDIOT ✗ An AI system developed by a Pentagon agency to recognize humans was foiled by people wearing cardboard boxes. TESLA FAKES AUTOPILOT ✗ A Tesla engineer has admitted a video showing a self-driving Model X was fake, as drivers had intervened several times. MICROSOFT DITCHES VR ✗ Microsoft has fired 10,000 employees, including most of its VR and HoloLens staff.…

EVERYBODY was impressed by the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, a Zen 3 chip with 96MB of L2 cache that was claimed to be the world’s fastest gaming processor at the time. We’ve been waiting for the Zen 4, and AMD has now confirmed three new versions—the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and 7900X3D, and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The top dog 7950XD has 16 cores and a maximum clock of 5.7GHz. That extra cache pushes the total to 144MB of L2, which is Threadripper territory. The middle chip has 12 cores and a top clock of 5.6GHz, while the Ryzen 7 has eight cores, a clock of up to 5.0GHz, and a TDP of 120W. They aren’t unlocked but settings such as the precision boost overdrive, curve optimizer, and memory can be tweaked.…