Table of contents for December 2015 in Maximum PC

With Windows 10, Microsoft wanted to combine the trustworthiness of Windows 7 with the revolutionary elements of Windows 8. What’s more, users were given the chance to track the development of the OS with regular previews and then pass their feedback on to Microsoft. There are many new features with Windows 10, but we also see the return of some old favorites, including the Start menu and Backup. Look out for tips throughout the next few pages on all of those and more. Elsewhere, Microsoft has stressed it hasn’t given up on the touch interface it introduced in Windows 8. But, thanks to its commitment to the trusty old keyboard and mouse, Windows 10 makes just as much sense on the desktop as it does on touch-based devices. In essence,…

PERFORMANCE GEAR LAID BARE WE ARE PC GAMERS, and PC gamers demand the best that their pay check can muster. Well, no. Sort of. It’s usually whatever money we have left over after our other activities—but you get the point. For the enthusiasts among us, the first step is to get hold of an allin-one cooler. Then maybe some braided cables and LEDs. Then, finally, jump into the murky depths of water cooling. That’s exactly what we did here, and damn, does it look good. We used an Asus X99 Sabertooth, an Intel Core i7-5820K, 64GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RAM, and two EVGA GTX 980 Ti cards to produce one number-crunching, super-benchmarking machine. And boy, does it perform! Fancy 4K gaming at ultra 60fps? No worries. The biggest problem…

About iFixit iFixit is a global community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people fix things through free online repair manuals and teardowns. iFixit believes that everyone has the right to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit www.ifixit.com. BACKGROUND: The a7R II is Sony’s second shot at a professional-grade mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera, but this time, Sony claims it can keep up with any Canikon DSLR. While trial by fire may be the best way to judge a camera, trial by teardown is our specialty. With a $3,199 price tag and no reflex system, we hope this mostly-solid-state camera comes with an equally hefty repairability score. MAJOR TECH SPECS: • 42.4 MP Exmor R CMOS back-illuminated sensor • BIONZ X image processor • 5-axis in-body optical image stabilization…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 Get the latest OS from www.microsoft.com. BEING ABLE TO RECORD your screen can be helpful if you want to demonstrate to someone how a tricky thing is done in Photoshop, or show off your ungodly gaming skills on YouTube. Either way, up until now it’s involved installing a third-party tool and then fiddling with it until it works. With the advent of Windows 10, however, Microsoft has bundled in a screen-recording app as part of its Xbox integration features. It’s clearly meant for use when gaming, but oddly enough, it works with any desktop app—all you have to do is tell Windows that it’s a game. There’s a simple keyboard shortcut to bring up the Xbox app and start recording. Microsoft hasn’t officially announced this…

IN AN ATTEMPT to make gaming more immersive, Nintendo introduced the Rumble Pak for the N64 way back in 1997. Kickstarter-funded company Immerz hopes to up the ante, and the feedback, with its Kor-FX “immersive gaming vest.” Put simply, it converts acoustic signals into haptic feedback. Two vibrating transducers are located in the chest region, spaced roughly ear-distance apart. The theory is that, when you talk, most of the vibration comes from within your chest. Thus, the internal vibrations are what the vest is trying to emulate. The vest itself is relatively comfy, though with any gaming peripheral that you have to wear, it’s a slight hassle to put it on. You’ll also look extremely dorky wearing it. Luckily, it fits a wide variety of body types with its two…

ASUS, REPUBLIC OF GAMERS. It’s a coveted name. A brand that’s shifted from premium products to a more encompassing mobo and graphical solutions line, and now appears to be a convergence of the two. The color red has always followed RoG, so it’s also interesting to note that Asus has moved from its usual design style, in favour of something a little more subtle. The Maximus VIII Hero turns up somewhere in the middle of Asus’s eighth iteration of Maximus motherboards, with the first Hero being introduced way back with Haswell and the Z87 chipset. The launch of the first Hero marked RoG’s entry to the mainstream, a move that pulled most of its high-end expertise into the more consumer-grade marketplace. The Hero became the quintessential mobo of choice, a…

IN THIS BRAVE NEW WORLD of PCI Express storage, M.2 drives, U.2 drives and fancy NVMe protocols, is there any space for ye olde 2.5-inch SATA drive and its piffling 6Gb/s of bandwidth and crusty AHCI interfaces? That this is even in doubt says a lot about how fast storage technology for the PC has changed in recent years. An SSD hooked up via four lanes of PCI Express connectivity has the potential to be as much as five times faster than a SATA drive, in terms of raw throughput. What’s more, that NVMe protocol promises much better random access performance. On the other hand, even a mediocre SATA SSD will annihilate a conventional magnetic hard drive by pretty much any metric. But here’s the real kicker. Unless your PC…

THEME HOSPITAL games have mostly avoided medicine. In fact, let’s face it, games mostly avoid difficult themes—probably because titles like the superbly depressing environmental destruction simulator Fate of the World have a tendency to not sell well. And we suspect the Democracy series only sells because the results of political and economic decisions within it are so apocalyptic. Big Pharma ’s tack is more on the manufacturing side, which makes it closer to logic games such as SpaceChem. Except its focus is the drugs industry. Here, in Big Pharma, you’re a manager of a pharmaceutical firm. You start with a handful of unlocked ingredients, a couple of simple processing machines, and a small amount of floorspace to work in. Then you get to work out what drugs you can make…

WE TACKLE TOUGH READER QUESTIONS ON... > Practical GPU Upgrades > Where’s the Skylake? > Hybrid vs Pure SSDs New GPU for Old CPU I currently have two AMD Radeon HD 4870s running in Crossfire mode. Since AMD will not release drivers for it for Windows 10, I would like to upgrade them to an Nvidia card. I game at 1920x1200 and I just need a single card that will be an upgrade to my current configuration for as cheap as possible. Would a GTX 950 or 960 give me better performance? I’m a little out of the loop when it comes to GPUs. My CPU is a G3258. —Joey McCaleb SENIOR EDITOR JARRED WALTON RESPONDS: True story: I took an HD 4870X2 to the local computer recycling place about…

IT SEEMS AT TIMES that no sooner does Adobe plug a security hole in its Flash Player, than another one is discovered. Like trying to fix a persistently leaky ship, at some point you have to wonder if it’s time to get a new vessel, and that’s the point where the web is now. The anti-Flash sentiment that exists today wasn’t always there. Back when the Internet was in its mainstream infancy, developers used Flash to display animations, make games, and create an interactive experience with video, sound, and other dynamic elements. Flash played an important role in the web’s evolution to what it is today, both good and bad. Unfortunately for Adobe, the bad might be outweighing the good at this point. In a recent threat report, Intel’s McAfee…

The PC gaming community has been waiting with bated breath to see how Valve will handle the transfer of keyboard-dedicated titles to the controller world. We spoke with Chris Sutphen, marketing manager at Alienware parent Dell, about the Steam revolution. MPC: Can you tell us what we’re looking at here? Chris: Yeah, we’re actually looking at the real life, fully functioning, Alienware Steam Machine. We’re giving partners and press a behind the scenes look at a few games, and talking about what this really means for the PC gaming ecosystem. MPC: You have the official Steam controller right? Chris: Yes we do. So we’ve been playing on this for the past few days, we’ve been rocking a couple really fun local co-op games, we’ve been doing some first-person shooters, we’ve…

For much of recent history, water cooling has been shunned. Only a select few could afford to merrily dance with computing death, taking their chances with water-cooling hardware and components that weren’t even designed to work in the silicon environment. They’d graft plumbing fittings onto hardware and hand-mill various water blocks, all in the hope of creating a leakproof, watertight system that could efficiently and effectively transfer heat away from their component parts, to a far greater degree than traditional air coolers ever could. That was back in the times when the average PC enthusiast was less concerned about how a PC looked. More important was how many frames per second they could squeeze from their beige box of dominance in Unreal Tournament. It was a terrifying time. But over…

Plenty of F2P games fall into the camp of huge time sinks, where players can get a second-rate experience very slowly, or pay extra to get a first-rate experience with less time. Time is the killer here, so we’ve selected our favorite F2P games that you’ll never need to pay for. (Unless you want to thank the heroic developers who make these things with no guarantee of any reward.) The games on the next few pages are as good as any paid game, though it’s a lot harder to give them away for Christmas. We’ve tried to pick out a wide selection, so there’s something for everyone—from The Cat and the Coup, for the political amongst you, to Dota 2, for those of who you don’t like to sleep. It’s…

What’s the state of play of F2P? It’s fine. That is a rather broad question. F2P is healthy and growing. It’s still young and, despite the number of entrants to the genre, there is surprisingly little innovation or new thinking, particularly in the West. But make no mistake, the biggest games on the planet are free to play, and due to the importance of network effects in making F2P economies work, are only strengthening their positions over time. Is there a type of game where the paid model still makes sense? This depends very much on how you define “type of game,” but certainly if you have a very clearly defined and enthusiastic user base, who are happy to pay up-front and willing to buy further content inside the game,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI 2 The brilliant mini-computer costs under $45. See www.raspberrypi.org. USB PORTABLE DISK Ideally a self-powered disk that doesn’t draw power from the Raspberry Pi. $ sudo apt-get install owncloud. DO YOU WANT the convenience of an omnipresent Dropbox-like storage service without doling out wads of cash and your data to a third party? OwnCloud is one of the best pieces of opensource software to help you create your own private and protected cloud-sharing service. Using OwnCloud, you can sync and share your private data, and access it from any device connected to the internet. For added security, OwnCloud can also encrypt your files. The software can handle files in a variety of formats and you can extend its usability by adding a number of other…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 INSTALL HDD or SSD with additional unused space. TODAY IS AN INCREDIBLE TIME TO BE ALIVE. Over the last 10 years the world has created a torrent of digital information. In fact, if you ask Cisco, we’ll have passed the threshold of consuming over a zettabyte of information by the end of 2015. That’s a billion terabytes. And with more of us opting to sack the 5.25” bay in favour of USB installs and a cleaner, tidier rig. It’ll only be a matter of time until disks go the way of the dodo. Following floppy disks, LPs and photo albums into early retirement; reserved only for the hipsters and purists amongst us who still value a connectivity free world. But ultimately, in this age of…

TWELVE YEARS ON, The Phantom Pain is series creator Hideo Kojima’s latest (and final) attempt (passing over its excellent single-level demo/prequel, Ground Zeroes) to move Metal Gear to PC. This risks sounding hyperbolic, but we’d assumed that The Witcher 3 was this year’s gaming peak— MGSV might just prove us wrong. It serves the fans who’ve loved the series from its PlayStation days, while demonstrating an unprecedented level of awareness of other games and staying coherent. It’s both an artifact of its vanished world and a huge, very modern device that pulls all the levers and ticks all the boxes. For those who don’t know the story of the franchise… don’t bother. It’s almost incomprehensible. This game, for example, is set smack right in the middle of the series’ plot,…

WHEN IT COMES TO the PC market, analysts tend to err on the side of gloom and doom. We wondered if that would still be the case once Windows 10 released to the public, and though it’s now installed on more than 75 million devices, at least one market research firm is predicting an ongoing decline in PC sales. International Data Corporation (IDC) is forecasting that worldwide PC shipments will slip in the neighborhood of 8.7 percent in 2015, and if true, that would make five consecutive years of declining growth. Why the negative outlook? IDC points out that even though vendors have been preparing for Windows 10 systems in the second half of the year, the shrinkage is related to a “stubbornly large inventory of notebooks from prior quarters…

> PCIe Bandwidth > Non-Gaming Builds > Platform Upgrade IDE To AHCI Greetings Doctor. My PC has a 256GB SSD as its primary drive. Back when I installed it, I neglected to tell the BIOS to boot up in AHCI mode. There aren’t a lot of clear guides on how to properly make this switch without reinstalling Windows, unfortunately. I know it involves a registry tweak and booting into safe mode to get the ACHI drivers loaded. But is this even recommended? Alternatively, when I make the jump to Windows 10, will I be able to finally tell my motherboard to boot in ACHI mode after a fresh installation? –Kevin Bunkley THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: To answer your first question, Kevin, yes, enabling the AHCI driver through your registry is a…

MYTH 1 If I use deionized water in my loop, then leaks won’t matter or cause any damage. Answer Unfortunately, no. As soon as the water is introduced to the system, it will begin making contact with the various metals inside of the water blocks. It will soon be picking up positive ions, meaning it’ll be conductive within a couple of hours, at the very least. MYTH 2 What If I blow it up when I switch it on? What if there’s an instant leak? Answer Honestly, you’re not going to damage anything. The best way to fill and test a loop is to make sure everything’s unpowered by using a PSU bridge. By using this bridge, you can switch on just the pump and that’s it. Leave this on…

WINDOWS TIP OF THE MONTH GET ORGANIZED WITH RENAME MASTER Few things annoy us more than the filenames that cameras give to photos. We get that it doesn’t just know to call it “Jarreds-birthday-surprise-2,” but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. That’s where free utility Rename Master (http://bit.ly/1XarlNF) comes in. It makes it super-easy to rename whole batches of files, whether they are pictures, videos or songs. MAKE – USE – CREATE 60 Set up your own OwnCloud server 64 Record games and apps in Win10 68 What Gloriousness Really Looks Like CONTRIBUTING EDITOR CAN YOU HEAR VOICES? Yes, Windows 10 is all very exciting. But let’s face it, even if the privacy issues don’t leave you squinting all suspiciously at the Redmond outfit, there’s bound to be a…

The real advantage of commercial cloud services such as Dropbox is that you can access data stored within them from any computer connected to the internet. However, by default, a self-hosted OwnCloud installation is only accessible from computers and devices that are within the local network. That’s not to say that you can’t access your private cloud from the internet. The trickier and more expensive solution is to get a static IP address from your ISP and then poke holes in your router’s firewall. Or, you can set up Dynamic DNS in your router or local machine. The smarter way, however, is to use a tunnelling service, such as PageKite. The service uses a pay-what-you-want model. As a non-commercial user, you can use the service for free by filling out…

WE’VE BEEN asked more than a few times why there aren’t any gaming laptops with mechanical keyboards, and up until now our response has always been, “Because that would be stupid.” MSI has thrown convention out of the window by introducing its GT80 Titan, the world’s first gaming laptop with an integrated mechanical keyboard, and slap us on our butts and call us Sally if it doesn’t work in its own little, or shall we say, big, way. Specifically, the GT80 Titan uses a tenkeyless keyboard designed by SteelSeries, outfitted with Cherry MX Brown switches and red LED backlighting. Overall, it looks and feels surprisingly great. The Brown switches offer a nice sense of tactility without being too noisy. MSI has integrated its trackpad on the right-hand side, sort of…

IF THERE’S ONE THING we love more than fast GPUs, it’s affordable fast GPUs. The best-selling graphics cards of all time have generally come from the $150 sweet spot, and users looking to balance price and performance find skipping a couple of generations between upgrades is the way to go. You miss out on some features and performance, but even moderate hardware from a few years back can still run most games at 1080p with settings that look decent. Nvidia is going after these infrequent, mainstream upgraders with its latest Maxwell 2.0 card, the GTX 950. Built on the same GM 206 core as the GTX 960, the 950 disables a couple of functional units and drops clock speeds a bit, all while reducing the price by nearly $50. In…

MECHANICAL KEYBOARDS. Love them or hate them, they’re here to stay. Whether you’re still not convinced it’s worth dropping the extra $60 or $70 on a mechanical key switch or not, it might be worth giving this review a read. Corsair brings to the overcrowded table a slimline version of its popular Vengeance series of boards. It’s a brand synonymous with solid build quality and premium feature sets, and the Strafe doesn’t disappoint. Packing Cherry MX Red key switches, it’s quiet, but still has that mechanical sound and feel associated with Cherry’s carefully crafted clackers. If this is your first time delving into the world of Cherry switches, you’ll find the Red switch is very soft to the touch. It has an incredibly sensitive actuation point, meaning that placing just…

IN THE KINGDOM of Armello, the mad lion is king. That might sound like bad poetry, but Armello is a strange game—hugely familiar, but also extremely unusual. It’s a board game, definitely, but one that’s been developed purely as a computer game, so it can do things board games never could. You take control of one of four characters, leaders of factions in the peaceful kingdom of Armello. Well, it used to be peaceful. The king has been infected by a disease called the Rot. He’s slowly dying and succumbing to madness at the same time, and—just like the Fisher King legends— the realm is also suffering, with dungeons opening up across the land, spitting out winged “banes” that terrorize the towns of the world. The King’s Guard is struggling…

OXIDE RECENTLY gave press pre-beta access to Ashes of the Singularity. If you’ve been hiding under a rock, this game is important as it’s the first “real” DX12 benchmark—all other DX12 tests so far have been synthetic in nature. It’s important to note that Ashes sports an AMD Gaming Evolved logo, so we expect it to perform better on AMD. This is nothing new; the same thing happens on the Nvidia side with “TWIMTBP” titles. Under DX11 there were a lot of things that could be done in the GPU drivers to try to optimize performance. With DX12 being a low-level API, most driver optimizations go away; instead, it’s up to the software developers to write optimized code to extract maximum performance from the GPU. If a developer has the…

PRICES FOR COMPONENTS have risen for nearly everything we used in our last build, so we had to really shop to save some cash. Still, we found that we could create a very nice build that stayed under $850. The first thing that had to go was the case. We went with the Cooler Master Elite 110, which is a nice little mini-ITX cube that’s well priced at $40. We paired it with a slightly bigger PSU, which cost us. However, there’s something to be said for EVGA’s five-year warranty. We also invested in the CPU, bumping up to a Core i5-4590. This cost us an extra $10, but we think that it is a worthwhile upgrade, and going the locked route saves some cash on both the CPU and…