Maximum PC May 2023

AS YOU MAY HAVE GUESSED by the fact that you’re not holding a physical copy of Maximum PC this month, we’re becoming a digital-only publication from this issue forward. Sadly, the rising costs of printing and distributing the physical edition of Maximum PC were no longer viable, and while I know that will be a disappointment to many of you, we made the decision to pivot to digital now so that we’re able to continue to bring you the title you love. And that’s exactly what we’re doing: the same magazine, the same number of pages, and the same features as before, just in a new digital format that you can access anywhere you have a device. We’re also taking this opportunity to add more content to the magazine in…

AFTER QUIETLY working in the background of many applications and services for years, AI has hit the headlines. ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing consumer application ever, surpassing 100 million users, doing in four months what took Twitter five years. ChatGPT is just the vanguard of a major shift in how computers are going to be used: an explosion of AI, and not everybody is waving flags of support. An open letter has been published, signed by some of the world’s most influential technology experts, asking for a pause and some reflection. It warns that AI could prove hugely disruptive, alter the future of life on Earth, and that the rapid development means even AI creators can’t control, predict, or even fully understand what their systems are doing. It calls for a…

A KEY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AMD AND INTEL is that the latter’s processors have gone hybrid, with big and little cores sharing the work. AMD, on the other hand, has stuck with multiples of one core design. Both approaches have their strengths, but hybrid designs have some telling ones. AMD has a new APU chip code-named Phoenix 2 in development, which is expected to introduce us to AMD’s version of the hybrid design with performance Zen 4 cores, and energy-efficient Zen 4c cores, each with hyper-threading. The chip reportedly has two big cores with 2MB of L2 apiece, and four little cores alongside an RDNA 3 integrated GPU. Rather than two architectures, the chip uses the same Zen 4 design for both jobs, adjusting clocks to suit the application: running at…

GIVE A HIGH-END PC user a fast chip and all they’re going to want to do is try to make it go faster. AMD’s V-Cache chips are a tempting target. However, there’s a bug in some motherboard software (including from MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, and ASRock) that enables free control over voltages, and multipliers if you click through to ‘Customize’. All safeguards are bypassed, and it is easy to fry the chip. High voltages produce too much heat, hence AMD’s reduction of the maximum from 1.5v to 1.35v. You can also set the multiplier to 80. Theoretically: 8GHz. Reality: a fried chip. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D has been subject to some tweaking too, including a successful effort to 5.9GHz, thanks to AMD’s PBO Curve Optimizer. Another effort was less successful,…

TRIUMPHS ✓ CAR REPOSSESS ITSELF Ford has been granted a patent for a system that would let a car react to repossession: disabling features, and even driving away. ✓ INTEL SHRINKS DRIVERS The launch driver for Arc graphics cards was 1.2GB. The new version has got it to 604MB. ✓ ANCIENT MEATBALL Australian start-up Vow has mixed woolly mammoth DNA with stem cells to create a lab-cultivated prehistoric meatball. TRAGEDIES ✖ GAME KILLS CARDS Reports are emerging of RTX 3080 Ti cards getting trashed by Diablo IV. Advice so far is to cap the frame rate. ✖ CHIP SMUGGLING FAIL A man was caught trying to get 239 Intel Core i5-13400F processors into China. ✖ NVIDIA SLAMS CRYPTO The CTO at Nvidia has claimed that crypto adds nothing to society—apart from lots of…

WE’VE BEEN WAITING for Nvidia’s to flesh out its 4000-series cards for a while, but details are starting to land. The first to arrive is the GeForce RTX 4070, which according to a leak is April 13 (this should be confirmed by the time you read this). It uses the same AD104 silicon as the 4070 Ti, but cut down to 5,888 CUDA cores running at up to 2.475GHz. It carries 12GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus offering a maximum data transfer of 504GB/s. All this will cost $599. The premium factory versions will be 225W cards, and use either the new 16-pin power connector, or two 8-pin ones. The standard cards will run at 200W, and stick to 8-pin connectors. Next down the tree is the RTX 4060…