Inhoudsopgave van November 2015 - Maximum PC

THERE ARE TWO major components inside a PC that usually garner the most attention when the news hits the wires— the CPU and the GPU—and rightly so. Both components can truly make or break a great PC experience, considering they handle just about every task. Coincidently, both AMD and Intel have new parts on the scene for graphics and general processing, respectively. Consider then, AMD’s new Fury and Fury X, the company’s latest flagship cards, based on the Fiji architecture. Unlike the Fury X, which took most of the headlines, the smaller Fury card is interesting because it contains most of the Fury X, but for $150 less. Between the two, then, Fury would seem to be the card most should go for. But should you? We address that question…

WHILE MOST OF US would be thrilled to have 1Gb/s Internet service, such as what’s offered by Google and AT&T in a handful of territories, Verizon is testing a next-generation fiber-optic technology that’s 10 times faster. The technology is called NG-PON2, or “next-generation passive optical network.” And get this, while the thought of 10Gb/s service certainly gets our attention, Verizon’s already looking ahead—way ahead—with claims that NG-PON2 has the legs to reach 80Gb/s. That’s 80 times faster than Google Fiber, folks! That’s not to say that 80Gb/s, or even 10Gb/s, service is coming to your residential neighborhood anytime soon, but the potential technology for such mind-boggling speeds is there and doesn’t just exist in a lab. Verizon tested the ultra-fast service with a business customer, and also with a residential…

IS OUR UNIVERSE an immense computer simulation? Is everything we perceive an illusion rendered in super-resolution pixels? Are we mere pixels, too? Lately, I’ve seen these questions debated more often in Internet forums, and often by reputable scientists. It’s not just another crackpot conspiracy theory. Usually, I’m far too busy to waste attention on trending Internet debates, which can seem as pointless as medieval arguments over the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin. But the “universe simulation hypothesis” intersects my knowledge of computers. And one thing often missing from the debate is a realistic forecast of future computing power. Many (though not all) simulation proponents assume, essentially, that Moore’s Law is forever. They take for granted that computers will keep getting more powerful on…

ALONG WITH the announcement of the Pascal architecture, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang also introduced the world to NVLink, an interconnect for its GPUs that could potentially offer between five and 12 times the bandwidth of the current PCIe 3.0 connection. Nvidia’s talking about NVLink offering DRAM-class speed and latency, which will allow for the use of Pascal’s unified memory across the entire PC. It will also improve performance between GPUs, so multi-GPU systems could end up getting a far more linear scaling in terms of gaming speed. As well as the NVLink connection on the GPU itself, it will also require dedicated silicon in the CPU if it wants to bypass the PCIe interface completely. From the outset though, that looks likely to be restricted to supercomputer-class highperformance computing (HPC);…

And on the third day, God made the world. And He saw that it was quite crummy. And He then looked at the other worlds that He’d made, and thought, “They suck a bit, too, infallible as I am.” So He pondered for silent indefinites, as the void drifted tetchily on, waiting for time, space, gravity, bicycles, and all the other concomitants of virtue and vice. Eventually, He got a bit frustrated. “Balls to it all,” He thought, blasphemously. “Handcrafting a universe is for losers. I’ll procedurally generate an infinity of them and just choose the best one.” And lo, that was the morning of the third day, and He saw that it was good. So He went and watched fractal zooms on YouTube for the rest of the week.…

Fiction book: Life, A User’s Manual Written by Georges Perec, in line with the Oulipo manifesto, this book isn’t strictly speaking programmatic, but Perec wrote it in line with formulaic constraints that meant he had to write about a certain room, in a certain building, with certain people and objects interacting in every chapter. Perhaps because of that, it comes across as a weird jigsaw puzzle of a book. And somewhat long-winded. Fact book: Philip M. Parker Professor Philip M. Parker has patented a method that automatically produces books from a set template, which is then filled with data from Internet searches. He claims to have produced over 200,000 books, ranging from medical science to dictionaries about just one word, with most of them being print-on-demand only… he’s also started…

An upgrade can give your aging PC a new round of usefulness, even with older architectures LENGTH OF TIME: 1 HOUR LEVEL OF DIFICULTY: EASY THE FLIGHT PLAN HERE AT MAXIMUM PC, we often build new rigs from scratch. We have the option of using just-in, bleeding-edge, nerd-porn-worthy parts, or remixing a fresh build idea from our selection of parts we’ve already built and reviewed. Either way, builds are usually using newer-generation parts. New! Shiny! This isn’t one of those builds. We know that not everyone can or has the desire to go out and build a whole new PC every time. In fact, one of the best parts of building a PC is the fact you can upgrade a system as it begins to show its age. We were…

THIS WHOLE 4K THING i s all a bout compromises right now. Forgetting the fact that running games at the mighty 3840x2160 native resolution of 4K monitors is incredibly demanding on your graphics hardware, just trying to find the right monitor in the first place can be incredibly tough. The first 4K panel we checked out was a frighteningly expensive Asus 32-inch IGZO panel; great-looking but walletdestroying. From there it was either weaker panel tech in TN trim for the larger screen sizes, or too-expensive IPS technology. Or you could compromise and go for a smaller screen space paired with a finer panel. This is the route Viewsonic has taken with its latest 4K monitor. Matching Samsung’s PLS panel technology (IPS by any other name would smell as sweet…) with…

IF YOU’RE NOT READY to drop a couple of Benjamins on a smart watch, and just want a fitness band, Polar hopes to fill that void with its $140 A300 activity tracker. The band looks fairly stylish and is comfortable to wear. The device is also waterproof, so you can track yourself while swimming. In addition to swimming, the A300 also supports a wide variety of workouts that include running, walking, cycling, biking, and weight training. But here’s the rub: It doesn’t use GPS. It just tracks wrist movements, so it’s not terribly accurate. Also, while you can purchase a separate $50 Bluetooth heart-rate sensor for the device, the A300 itself doesn’t track your heart rate. The A300 isn’t a bad fitness tracker, and we love that it can last…

WITH THE EXCEPTION of the Neutron case, prices have dropped pretty much across the board. EVGA’s shorty GTX 960 fell by about $15. Combined with the price drop of $15 on SanDisk’s SSD and $5 on the PSU, we had a little wiggle room. We chose to go with G.Skill’s Ares over the Ripjaws: The timings are identical, the heat spreaders are lower profile, and these models are blue, which match the mobo. Since we're OK with a locked CPU, we dropped the Z-model ASRock mobo in favor of an H-model. It keeps the AC Wi-Fi and most of the other Z97 features, at the cost of OCing options. With the spare cash, we got two more cores by upgrading to a Haswell Core i5. Of course, we save more…

INTEL IS BRINGING its server-focused Xeon processors to notebooks for the first time. These mobile chips will be based on Intel’s sixth-gen “Skylake” architecture. The first in the new mobile family will be the Xeon Processor E3-1500M product series. Note that this is fundamentally different from the use of desktop Xeon processors we’ve previously seen in high-end notebooks. For example, the Clevo P570WM uses LGA2011 processors, and companies have supported up to the Xeon E5-2687 v2 (12-core, 2.7–3.5GHz, 130W) in the likes of the Panther 5. These new parts will be mobile-focused, which, among other things, will mean lower TDPs. In addition to taking advantage of built-in Intel vPro Technology, Xeon mobile workstations will support Thunderbolt 3. Intel will also offer certifications for CAD and engineering apps, as well as…

ONE OF THE BIGGEST PROBLEMS with proprietary software isn’t the “black box” nature of its inner workings, but the nature of the agreements that users give their consent to. When you begin using a new piece of software or an online service, how often have you actually read the terms of use and privacy policy? If you’re like me, you’ve all too often scrolled to the bottom and clicked “I agree,” without giving it a second thought. “Give me my software experience! Here, have my firstborn child; I need to be able to do this one thing!” We’ve all done it, and few of us are proud of it. For all of the outrage surrounding services that have wronged users, most of it was hidden within the dark depths of…

Procedural game design academic Michael Cook said something very interesting. “Depending on how VR designers want to take the tech, procedural generation could be the defining tech of the VR age.” As we’ve explored in recent months, AR and VR are taking lessons from games and growing them into whole new fields. Oculus is even employing ex-Pixar staff to make VR kids' movies. Of course, like AAA games, VR has to be convincing to work, and the hardware can’t do it alone. It needs tons of content—a lot more than any game, because it has to be all around the player and in great detail. Procedural generation might not just be helpful, it seems essential. Valve and HTC’s Vive system adds even more complexity, given that it uses extra cameras…

Sometimes, even though a wireless adapter works fine out of the box on the Raspberry Pi, it might throw errors when it’s asked to serve as an access point. This is especially true of cards that use Realtek chipsets, like the one we’ve used —MicroNext MN-WD152B—which uses the RTL8192CU chipset. While it works right off the bat for browsing the web, it doesn’t work with the hostapd client in Raspbian’s repository. Apparently, Realtek has its own version of hostapd client, which you’ll have to use if you’re in the same predicament as us. To download the file, you’ll need to head to Realtek’s download section (http://bit.ly/RealtekWiFiDrivers) and select your chipset. This takes you to a page that lists the drivers for your chipsets. From this page, grab the driver for…

MINI-ITX MACHINES are the hotness right now, and have been for a while. And why wouldn’t they be? We think that it’s super sexy to be able to stuff loads of power into a small form factor box. Digital Storm, no stranger to SFF builds, is trying to raise the stakes even further with its latest Mini-ITX offering: the Bolt 3. Measuring 18.3x15.1x5.8 inches, the Bolt 3 ups the ante in the size stakes with a new case designed by Lian Li. It’s roughly 25 percent larger than the Falcon Northwest Tiki we reviewed in our September issue (page 78). While the box isn’t huge, and is smaller than mid-tower cases, it does feel a little too beefy to act as a console replacement. Luckily, though, the Bolt 3 is…

YOU’D THINK I’D LEARN MY LESSON, but every time a new platform launches, I get excited about testing all the new hardware. Sometimes, everything goes as planned. But most of the time, brand-new platforms— especially when you’re testing prerelease samples—come with plenty of glitches that need to be ironed out. Broadwell-DT motherboards required firmware updates before they ran properly, and Skylake is clearly no different. Our initial review of Skylake was decidedly more ho-hum in nature, with performance that failed to really put any distance between Devil’s Canyon and the new hotness. No one expected Skylake to be a huge jump in performance—those days are long past— but we were looking for 5–10 percent gains. There were a few of those, but also quite a few cases where performance only…

> SLI 4K Gaming Woes > New Dual-GPU Cards > Skylake Upgrade? It’s Tough to Lead I’m a longtime reader of Maximum PC and I have an issue with a company that is simply ignoring its obligation to its loyal customers. Nvidia has a bug in its video drivers that it has known about as far back as 12/12/14. This bug causes those who have purchased multiple Nvidia graphics cards to experience a rapid, full-screen, green strobe-like effect that makes it impossible to play any games in 4K at 60fps. I have three Titan Xs and can’t play anything over 1440p. This issue has been well documented over at the Nvidia forums. Dozens of people across multiple websites have shared detailed information with Nvidia about this issue. We’ve followed its…

IT WAS RECENTLY discovered by an Ars Technica forum user that some Lenovo laptops are configured to download the firms’s pre-installed software and utilities (read: crapware), even after wiping the storage drive and performing a clean install of Windows. You could even zero-fill the drive before installing Windows from your own disc and you’d still end up with Lenovo’s software. How so? It’s down to a BIOS feature that lets OEMs hide executables in a system’s firmware. Microsoft supports the feature in Windows, which runs the code during booting. While that may seem reckless, it’s intended for OEMs to install anti-theft software that can’t be circumvented by wiping a drive clean and reinstalling Windows. However, Lenovo’s been using the feature to pre-install various other software and utilities on some of…

TRIUMPHS RUN WIN10 ON APPLE PCs Apple updated its dual-booting Boot Camp utility to support Windows 10 64-bit on select MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iMac systems. NEW STORAGE RECORD Using third-gen 3D V-NAND memory, Samsung built a 16TB 2.5-inch SSD, the most capacious drive in the world. MICROSOFT CHANGES RULES Once you activate Windows 10 for the first time, you can clean install on the same machine again and again, without ever having to reactivate. TRAGEDIES LENOVO PREPS PINK SLIPS Slumping sales at the world’s top PC supplier have prompted plans to slash 3,200 jobs. TRIPPING OVER EDGE Mozilla wrote a whiney blog post accusing Microsoft of favoring its Edge browser and “purposely” disregarding user preference. PAY TO PLAY DVDs After burying Windows Media Player, Microsoft released an official…

1 CORTANA She’s your new virtual PA, but without the curves of the Halo version. 2 START MENU It’s back from the grave, packed with both your program links and tile-based apps. 3 XBOX APP This is a social network and a client for Streaming Xbox One to Windows 10. 4 MICROSOFT EDGE Light on looks and fast on browsing, Edge brings fun back to surfing. 5 VIRTUAL DESKTOPS You can now open full-screen programs on more than one desktop. 6 STORE Not only is shopping now better, but purchased apps are windowed on the desktop. 7 SETTINGS APP Most settings are crammed in this, but you can still access the Control Panel.…

There are ways other than procedural generation and handcrafting to generate content. The most spectacular in recent months has been the frankly terrifying and hallucinatory images coming out of the Google Deep Dream project. This project works by starting with a neural network. These are typically piles of 10–30 stacked layers of artificial neurons. The team starts training the neural network, using millions of examples, and then adjusts the network parameters gradually over time so that fidelity isn’t lost, but random noise is. Each layer of the network extracts higher-level features than the previous one, until the final layer decides what the image looks like. So, the first level might detect edges, then intermediate layers might detect recognizable shapes, while the final layers assemble them into complete interpretations. This is…

If you find this tutorial too cumbersome, or want to set up something for a nontechnical friend or relative, there are several ready-made hardware solutions that can anonymize all their web traffic in a similar fashion. There’s the OnionPi Pack from AdaFruit (http://bit.ly/AdaOnionPi), which includes a Raspberry Pi B+ and a compatible USB Wi-Fi adapter, along with a case for the Pi, cables, SD card, and everything else you need to set up your Torrified Wi-Fi hotspot. The bundle costs $70. However, you’ll still have to follow the instructions and set it up yourself. If you’d rather have something more plug and play, there’s the SafePlug from the guys who brought us PogoPlug. It’s a $49 device that plugs into your wireless router. Once activated, it routes all traffic over…

Simply put, it’s allowing one OS to run inside another, in a kind of digital Russian doll arrangement. It’s something that’s long been possible through software emulation, but modern CPUs (Intel since 2005, AMD since 2006) have made the process faster and easier by moving it to hardware. Virtualization is common on servers, as it’s more efficient for a powerful piece of hardware to run multiple instances of server software, all managed by a hypervisor, to do many easy tasks at once. The capability has trickled through to desktop CPUs (though some tech is still held back for server chips, such as Xeons) and allows us to pull clever tricks, such as running multiple OSes at the same time.…

Scott Richardson: Meh... Hossein Mansouri: Dear chipmakers, stop introducing a whole new architecture every six months. The problem is every time someone goes for the upgrade, he sees that something newer is coming in six months, so he waits and after six months the same thing happens. Bill Gilbert: I’m debating whether it’s 6700K or 5820? It’s only $40 more for six cores, but the motherboards are about $80 or so more…. Chris Ditchburn: My first-gen i7 runs all my programs and games, so why upgrade? Ron Carson: Skylake, more like Byelake. Alex Martin: If Intel wants my money, they gotta work harder. Affordable eight-cores. Brendan Patrick Lyon: It’s great if you’re building a new PC, but if you have really any i5 or i7 since Sandy Bridge, there’s no…