PCWorld July 2016

Tech and trends that will affect you today and beyond. THERE WAS ONE issue that went unspoken in Microsoft’s recent announcement that the free Windows 10 upgrade offer would end (go.pcworld.com/win10offer) on July 29. What would the company do about all those annoying, almost malware-like (go.pcworld.com/win 10prompt), pop-up notifications to upgrade to Windows 10 that appear on the PCs of Windows 7 and 8.1 users? The answer is that they will disappear. “Details are still being finalized, but on July 29th the Get Windows 10 app…will be disabled and eventually removed from PCs worldwide,” Microsoft told WinBeta (go.pcworld.com/getwin10app) in a written statement. The company warned that it may take some time to disable the upgrade pop-ups on computers worldwide. Many people disliked the company’s approach, but it appears Microsoft’s upgrade push (go.pcworld.com/win10push) has been…

GAME OVER, MAN. Game over! Another E3’s done and gone, and E3 2016 was one of the most exciting conferences for PC gamers in a long, long time. Now that the new consoles pack PC guts, the number of new PC games revealed at the show far exceeded E3 2015’s lineup. And that was just the tip of the iceberg! Don’t kick yourself if you missed any of PCWorld’s E3 coverage (pcworld.com/category/e3). Catch up on all the new games, graphics cards, PC gaming hardware, and more—right here, right now. Games! Let’s get the most important part of E3 out of the way first. You know, the games. A veritable deluge of new games hit E3 2016, from AAA blockbusters like Titanfall 2 and the glorious return of Quake, to more PC-focused titles like Dawn…

CES MAY BE the show that gives you a glimpse of the future of computing, but Computex is where the gloves come off (go.pcworld.com/computexmatters), year in and year out. The PC industry emerges in full force for the annual Taipei trade show, lugging all the nifty new goodies it hopes to sell during the crucial back-to-school and holiday seasons. This year’s Computex was nothing short of glorious (go.pcworld.com/computex2016). From the first-ever 10-core enthusiast CPU to the launch of the next generation of graphics cards to the rise of all sorts of wild, imaginative PCs built around that hot new technology, the world of computing’s firing on all cylinders and looking more exciting than it has in years. Buckle up! This is going to be a great ride. Intel Broadwell-E Extreme Edition The rumors were…

THE NEXT-GENERATION GRAPHICS card war is officially on—though it’s already shaping up very differently than previous versions. While Nvidia kicked things off with the overwhelming firepower of the enthusiast-only $600 GeForce GTX 1080 and $380 GTX 1070, AMD’s attacking the mainstream instead. In a livestream from Computex in Taipei, AMD announced that the Radeon RX 480 will be the first graphics card based on its forthcoming Polaris graphics processors. And get this: The Radeon RX 480 stands ready to deliver performance equivalent to what today’s $500 graphics cards offer, as first reported in the Wall Street Journal. That’s roughly in line with the Radeon R9 390X, GeForce GTX 980, or air-cooled Radeon Fury. But here’s the real bombshell: The Radeon RX 480 costs only $200 (it should be available for sale by…

AS THE NOTEBOOK PC becomes ever more important to the company’s future, AMD debuted its Bristol Ridge and Stoney Ridge integrated graphics APUs for laptops as the Computex show in Taipei kicked off. Combined, AMD’s new 7th-generation APUs represent a total of nine new products intended for low-end, budget notebooks on up to premium devices. Bristol Ridge and Stony Ridge represent AMD’s first APU refresh in a year, since the company debuted the Carrizo chips last year. AMD’s traditional argument for its APUs has been that they offer more graphics horsepower for a lower price. This time around, both the Bristol Ridge and Stoney Ridge APUs pack AMD’s Excavator core, which will be paired with AMD’s Radeon R7 graphics cores on the FX and A12 lines; AMD’s R5 graphics on the A10…

DONALD TRUMP CAN BUY himself many things, but he will never be able to officially build a 10,000-block-high statue of himself in Minecraft. Your dreams of exploring a mammoth Taco Bell Chalupa? Dead. And no, don’t expect to mine Moria as part of a Lord of the Rings server. Microsoft and its Mojang subsidiary said recently that they will begin blocking corporations and politicians from using Minecraft to promote their own agendas, including the sale of products, movies, or political views. “We want to empower our community to make money from their creativity, but we’re not happy when the selling of an unrelated product becomes the purpose of a Minecraft mod or server,” Mojang wrote in a blog post. The new additions are now part of Mojang’s Commercial Usage Guidelines (go.pcworld.com/minecraftcug). Why this…