APC July 2021

We’ve just finished filming the first ever all-video Australian PC Awards, and you can watch it all over three parts on June 23rd, 24th and 25th at www.australianpcawards.com.au. Hopefully it all holds up well and our noobishness at presenting in a video format is mostly acceptable. I thought it would be a good time now to more properly introduce the team you’ll see. These are the guys primarily behind all the awards voting too, with the addition of two of our freelance writers covering their specialties Nick Ross (networking and storage) and Mark Williams (components and resellers), who weren’t on camera that day. Long-time APC readers will know former editor Dan Gardiner. Dan’s still part of the APC team in the sense that here at Future Publishing we all row the boat…

ASCOMP Photo Anonymizer Anonymise your image files by completely removing metadata and GPS information. Often photos taken with a smartphone or digital camera contain personal information that not only disclose on the location and time of the recording, but can also hold other sensitive information. In so-called meta-tags, in addition to the GPS location, information about the recording device and even the photographer can be stored. Photo Anonymizer helps you maintain your anonymity: Remove unclaimed metadata from your image files with just a few clicks! The free Windows software supports all common metadata standards, such as EXIF, DICOM, IPTC and XMP. Did you know that Internet browsers often store the source of an image download in the respective file and thus can be traced for years to come, from which Internet address an image…

APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms. We know most people aren’t wed to a single brand’s products and use a variety of devices. And, like you, APC’s journalists want to…

Several marketplaces had removed its products. Gigabyte has apologised for a comment it made about Chinese manufacturing that prompted social media outrage, led several marketplaces to remove its products from their platforms, and caused a $710 million drop in its market value. According to Bloomberg, the company published a blog post slamming its competitors for outsourcing production to Chinese manufacturers that make products in a “low-cost, low quality way.” The blog post has since been deleted. That comment was seen as an indictment of Chinese manufacturing writ large instead of a targeted criticism of Gigabyte’s rivals – which is what prompted the removal of its products from the JD.com and Suning.com e-commerce platforms. All of which led Gigabyte to publish an apology for that blog post.…

Performance, specs, availability, and more. Nvidia’s still eager to pump out GPUs that most gamers will have a hard time getting hold of, as is the case with its latest mobile GPU, the RTX 3050 Ti. Its debut officially puts the nail in the coffin of the GTX 1650, Nvidia’s previous mainstay budget GPU for low-end gaming laptops. Nvidia gives a few examples of how the RTX 3050 Ti and GTX 1650 will differ. In Call of Duty: Warzone, the 1650 can manage 55-ish FPS at medium settings at 1080p with an Intel Core i7 processor. With the same config, a 3050 Ti can output FPS counts in the low 80s, escalating to just under 100 if DLSS is enabled. Basically, under the right circumstances, performance is almost doubled when going from…

Intel introduced its long-awaited eight-core Tiger Lake-H chips for laptops, marking Intel’s first shipping eight-core 10nm chips for the consumer market. These new 11th-generation chips, which Intel touts as the ‘World’s best gaming laptop processors,’ come as the company faces unprecedented challenges in the laptop market – not only is it contending with AMD’s increasingly popular 7nm Ryzen “Renoir” chips, but perhaps more importantly, Intel is also now playing defence against Apple’s innovative new Arm-based M1 that powers its new MacBooks. The halo eight-core 16-thread Core i9-11980HK peaks at 5.0GHz on two cores, fully supports overclocking, and despite its official 65W TDP, can consume up to 107W in base mode and 135W under heavy load in high performance mode. Additionally, Intel has also added limited overclocking support in the form of…