Table of contents for January 2018 in Maximum PC

a thing or two about a thing or two I AM A SELF-ADMITTED hardware addict. I love hardware. I obsess over hardware, and I’m always chasing the cutting edge. I’m also an early adopter, and that can be a problem at times. Some things just don’t work the way they’re supposed to when they’re new. For the most part, I haven’t had too many issues with being on the edge. There have been times when I’ve tried to convince myself to slow down. “There’s no need to keep upgrading,” I told myself. The self-hypnosis doesn’t seem very effective. What we’ve done this issue is put together a list of the very best gear of the year. Only products we think are badass make it on to this coveted list—the kind…

FACEBOOK HAS PUBLICLY denied that it is spying on us by secretly listening through our cell phone’s microphone in order to better target advertisements. This follows months of rumors that this is exactly what it’s doing. The rumor is born out of Facebook’s almost uncannily accurate targeting. This was helped along by some seemingly convincing viral videos of people testing the theory out by talking about a previously untouched subject, only to see ads pop up for it later. Spooky stuff. Official denials on shady behavior from large corporations are never very convincing. The fact that they have to be made at all is worrying. However, it may be worth mentioning the frequency illusion at this point: The ads were there all the time, but you just didn’t notice them…

The i7-5820K dropped the entry price for six-core, 12-thread chips to $389 in 2014—basically the same as today’s i7-8700K. The problem is that Intel’s mainstream platform, LGA115x, has stuck at fourcore, eight-thread since 2009’s first-gen Core i7s. That’s eight years of stagnation, largely because AMD never had a superior product. Ryzen changed that, and while it doesn’t win every benchmark, the availability of competitive 8C16T chips at prices that undercut Intel’s 4C8T CPUs looks bad, and the 6C12T Ryzen 5 parts cost less than most of Intel’s 4C4T Core i5 parts. If you’re running workloads that can benefit from more cores/threads, Ryzen has been an easy recommendation since launch. After coasting on the mainstream platform for eight years, Intel has been able to rapidly release more cores and higher performance.…

It’s a subjective tussle as old as time (OK, not quite that old). What should you be running? What will make your computing life easy, and what will make it a living hell of crashes and bugs? We’ve pulled in the three big operating systems: Windows, macOS, and (presented in catch-all broad strokes) the entire Linux ecosystem. We have repeatedly banged our heads against all three over the past couple of decades, not just as desktop operating systems, but as servers, single-task machines, and so on. So, we’ve chosen to pitch them in battle over five categories that really make a difference. Let’s fight! ROUND 1 Hardware Compatibility Windows’ advantage as the largest operating system means the vast majority of devices offer 100 percent compatibility with it, generally straight out…

With a new generation of Intel processors usually comes a new platform. Intel’s 8th Gen Core chips are no different, even if it’s too early to assume which members of the 8th Gen family the new motherboard chipset will align with. For now, it’s the six new desktop processors that are the first to be based on the Coffee Lake architecture. The new chipset they’re getting is the Z370. Indeed, the Z370 is more a requirement than a gift. Officially, the new Coffee Lake CPUs will not run in older motherboards. In some ways, that’s frustrating. In most regards, the new Z370 is identical to the old Z270. It has the same broad connectivity, so we’re talking up to 24 PCIe 3.0 lanes, six SATA 6Gb/s ports, with support for…

IT’S TAKEN the better part of a decade, but Intel has finally upped the core count of its mainstream PC processors. Give it up for the new Coffee Lake chips! As we’ve explained elsewhere, the big news with the Coffee Lake generation is the jump from two cores and four cores to four cores and six cores. In other words, where once you got two cores, now you have four. And where you had four, you now get six. This new Core i5-8400 replaces the quadcore Core i5-7400. So, it’s a six-core beast. Like previous Core i5 models, it doesn’t support HyperThreading, so that’s six cores and just six threads. Also somewhat similar to before is the price. Intel lists the Core i5-8400 at $182; however, they’re currently retailing for…

EUROCOM IS KNOWN for its customizable portable workstations, but every system we’ve tested so far has been, well, let’s just say bulky, and leave it at that. Things are different this time, as we’ve got Eurocom’s Q5 in for testing—another svelte laptop built on the foundation of Nvidia’s Max-Q philosophy. Spec for spec, the Q5 is very similar to MSI’s GS63VR Stealth Pro that we tested last month, so our big question this time around is how much bearing does different manufacturers’ interpretation of the Max-Q philosophy have on performance, power, and design. In other words, who did it better? That’s a tough question to answer. The Q5 starts at a lower price point—only $1,599 for a stripped-down system of Core i7-7700HQ, 8GB RAM, GTX 1070 Max-Q— but quickly balloons…

THERE’S AN EXPECTATION when shopping for a case on a budget that you’re going to end up with a bum deal. If you’re looking around the $60 mark, the likelihood of finding one with anything resembling modern-day features is slim. Cable management and modern design come at a premium. Want a PSU cover, extensive radiator support, fan mounts, cable management, and tempered glass for less than $90? Get outta here! The notion has always been that, cases being the least important part of any budget build, you should forsake the fancy features, and just get whatever’s available with the funds you have left after buying everything else. After all, cases are all pretty much the same at this price point. That’s why Phanteks’s Eclipse P300 is one of the most…

I FIND IT HARD to get excited about controllers. The use cases are slim, but a good controller is an essential part of any gaming enthusiast’s PC toolkit. After all, you can’t play every game with a mouse and keyboard. Well, you can, but lots of titles simply aren’t as enjoyable without a game controller. Platformers, racing sims, and fighting games all feel much better on a controller than with a precision pointer and clacky keys. I’ve tried a few aftermarket ones in the past, so when Razer offered me the opportunity to try out its latest Wolverine controller, I jumped at the chance to give the big ugly mammal a run for its money. So, it’s $160. It’s challenging to justify spending that much on a controller, especially when…

the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small “A successful attack would enable decryption of all data you send over a connection. WI-FI PROTECTED Access 2 (WPA2), the encryption protocol used on the majority of Wi-Fi connections, has a major problem: Researchers from the University of Leuven in Belgium have published details on the so-called Key Reinstallation Attack—or Krack, for short— which breaks the encryption wide open. The problem is fundamental to the protocol, rather than any implementation of it, so everything using WPA2 is at risk, which is millions upon millions of devices WPA2 uses a nonce, an arbitrary number made for the process, during the initial handshake between devices, during which the encryption key is generated for all subsequent traffic. Frequent reconnections are anticipated with Wi-Fi,…

WHEN APPLE DECIDED that the 3.5mm headphone jack just wasn’t cool enough, and dropped it, there was some consternation. Apparently, even at that size, it took up too much room, and wasn’t suitable for super-skinny hardware. Other makers soon followed, and it looked as though it was going to be “legacy” time. Now it appears the old dog may have a savior. Microsoft has been granted a patent on new forms of the socket, which can be used in devices thinner than the plug itself. There are three designs; all use a variation on an expanding socket, so part of the jack can project beyond the device. Simple and easy enough to engineer. Microsoft itself probably won’t be making use of the idea, though, as it has killed off the…

“Pure OS will be a full-fledged Linux OS, and won’t require the user to set up an account with Google or Apple. Our world is ruled by cell phones. The numbers of mobile devices in the world swamp those of PCs. But with this many devices, one would hope to see more operating system choices. One such choice is on the horizon: Purism’s mobile Pure OS. Purism is a boutique PC maker that focuses on building privacy-respecting Linux PCs. The Librem 15, for example, allows for replacement of Wi-Fi card, storage, and RAM with minimal effort. Purism’s Pure OS, like System76’s Pop! OS, is a custom Linux flavor based on Debian. (Pop! OS is based on Ubuntu.) Like Pop! OS, desktop Pure OS is little more than a custom collection…

SLI Done Right Dear Doctor, I finally joined the SLI club with a pair of EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Elite Gaming 11GB GDDR5X cards. I also have a trio of Asus monitors that I hook up via DisplayPort. What is the protocol for connecting my monitors and retaining SLI support? Each cards has three DP outputs, totaling six DP connectors. –Jerry Franco, Jr THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: According to Nvidia’s Surround Configuration Tool, there are seven viable options for enabling SLI across as many as five displays. You need to use one DisplayPort connector on each card, then a third DisplayPort output on either the left or right card. This narrows the original seven possibilities down to three. Just make sure your center (primary) display is connected to the…

It’s probably no surprise to learn that I’m the youngest Maximum PC team member. I recently dinged to level 26, and had quite the moment of realization when looking back at my two decades of system tinkering. In my youth, I gamed a lot—some might say excessively—but as I’ve matured, I’ve found it more and more difficult to find AAA titles that hold my attention. Although it’s still easy for me to drop into games and become more than proficient, my patience and free time is far more limited. I tend to find myself browsing the web, working, consuming media, and planning my next big adventure far more than investing in a new RPG or RTS. Back in March, I fell in love with Samsung’s CF791 super-wide screen. Its dramatic…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1–2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT WE HAVE a bad habit of focusing too much on the high end, and not enough on what really matters. Say what you like, but the halo products aren’t what make or break a company. And although manufacturers make their biggest margins on the most expensive components, it’s the mid-range and budget sections of the spectrum that secure the most market share. Which is why, more often than not, they’re the more interesting products. Ask any of our team which processor interested them the most over the last two years, and the answer almost always falls down to either the Pentium G4560 or the Ryzen 3 1200. Anyone can spec out a high-end, pixelcrushing, calculation-solving monster. But it takes…

YOU CAN GIVE A CAR fancy European styling, but what’s the point if it’s plain old Detroit iron underneath, and a pushrod motor under the hood? That’s the kind of conundrum posed by ADATA’s newest SSD. Well, kinda. ADATA has dressed up its latest PCI Express SSD in enthusiastfriendly threads. It’s given it “gamer” branding, yet this is not a high-end drive. It’s an entry-level SSD in the M.2 category. We give you the new ADATA XPG Gammix S10, test-driven here in 512GB spec. For the record, the Gammix has the same components and specs as ADATA’s own bare-bones drive, the SX7000. Only the snazzy heat spreader separates the two. Either way, you get 512GB of Micron 32-layer 3D TLC NAND memory arranged in 384Gb chips, marshaled by a Silicon…

FOR AS LONG as humankind has been able to pass an electrical current through a circuit board, we’ve been singing the praises of Kingston’s HyperX Cloud headset in its various forms. It began with QPad’s QH-90 in 2013, taking its cues from aviation headset design, and setting a new high bar for closed-cup gaming sound. Kingston bought the rights to that design and iterated on it with the Cloud and Cloud II, which didn’t reinvent the wheel but did find sonic improvements, and introduced new features. What can the Cloud Alpha do to make good on its prestigious name, then? Even better sound. Duh. What’s more interesting than that non-revelation is how the Alpha does it: using separate chambers within each earcup for bass, mid, and high frequencies, giving each…

2017 HAS BEEN A GREAT YEAR for technology, with more major CPU launches in a single year than I can recall ever seeing. We’ve also had a lot of excitement in the GPU arena, with the GTX 1080 Ti, Titan Xp, Volta GV100 for deep learning, and AMD’s RX Vega. The last was disappointing, because on paper Vega looked like it might be a contender. Instead, we got a power-hungry GPU that couldn’t even claim a decisive win over Nvidia’s parts that launched a full year earlier. But competition in the graphics card market can be brutal. The 1070 trails Vega 56 by as much as 10–15 percent in individual games, and overall it’s a few percent slower. Never mind the supply problems AMD continues to experience several months after…

Stingy Storage SSD prices are stuck at a stubbornly high level, typically four to five times that of a traditional hard drive of the same capacity. Why is it taking so long for prices to come down? And when do you see prices becoming more competitive with HDDs? –Steve Hartjes EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: SSDs have actually dropped in price significantly since they first hit our machines, sliding from around $3 per GB in 2010 to just less than $0.5 per GB today. We are not saying they’re cheap, but they’re much cheaper than they were. Unfortunately, hard drives have also dropped in price, and continue to do so—for comparison, you’re looking at less than $0.04 per GB now. Very roughly speaking, $50 will get you a 128GB SSD…

a part-by-part guide to building a better pc GUYS, GUYS! That’s a $3 price drop on memory. Stop the press! OK, joking aside, we’re finally getting confirmation that DRAM production is being upped at the start of next year, with Samsung committing one of its production facilities and an additional floor elsewhere to manufacturing memory. On top of that, SK Hynix and Toshiba are also upping their production lines at the end of 2018, so perhaps, at last, we’ll see those prices drop. Anyhow, that aside, we’ve finally jumped the gun, and swapped across to Ryzen 3 for our budget build. The Ryzen 3 1200 is a perfect little quad-core, ready for any gaming or general-use task you can throw at it. Couple it with some good memory, a decent…

1 TECH TENT Interviews and investigation of the top stories of the week from the BBC World Service’s tech team. (Weekly) www.bbc.com 2 NOTE TO SELF A short, easily digestible, yet deeply existential, look at the effect our digital habits have on our lives and minds. (Weekly) http://wnyc.org 3 THIS WEEK IN TECH Leo Laporte’s insightful news show records live on Sunday nights ready for the Monday commute. (Weekly) http://twit.tv 4 CLOCKWISE Four hot topical tech topics torn apart by four hosts within a strict 30-minute time limit. (Weekly) http://relay.fm/clockwise 5 FUTURE A Microsoftcommissioned look at the ways in which tech might influence the future. (Weekly, series-based) http://microsoft.com/podcast 6 REPLY ALL Biting, humorous investigative journalism on the Internet and its weirdest facets. (Every two weeks) http://gimletmedia.com 7 TEDTALKS TECHNOLOGY Every…

THE PC INDUSTRY rarely sits twiddling its thumbs, but 2017 was an incredible period by any standard. We’ve seen impressive new processor releases that we may not feel the full effect of for some years (competition is great for pushing things forward), cryptocurrencies reinventing graphics card pricing, more RGB LEDs than you could shake a cracked kyber crystal at, and a general focus on the whole PC ecosystem to make it more powerful and more customizable. The timing of these advances is no accident, with the way we’re using PCs continuing to develop in new directions, while reinvigorating older ones. The consoles that have diverted resources away from PCs for so long have had a faltering start with their nextgeneration platforms, so the PC has returned to the fore as the…

Intel’s new 8th Gen family of CPUs is already pretty complicated, what with Kaby Lake refresh chips going into laptops, and the new Coffee Lake architecture for the desktop. But it’s only going to get busier. So far, all the new 8th Generation processors are manufactured using Intel’s new 14nm++ silicon production process. It’s basically a refined version of the 14nm process that first appeared in 2014 with the Broadwell architecture. However, next year will see the arrival of Intel’s first 10nm processors, known as Cannon Lake. These, too, are expected to be marketed as 8th Generation CPUs. Strictly speaking, Intel says it will be shipping the very first Cannon Lake CPUs by the end of 2017. But we doubt you’ll be able to buy PCs or the bare CPUs…

ONE ARGUMENT that can be drawn out of Hanson’s work is whether these brain emulations would be conscious. After all, if the Ems do all the work, and humans retire and live on the profits, isn’t there a word for that? As in Star Wars, where an army of apparently sentient droids obeys and are the property of the biological creatures, would we be condemning them to a nightmare of our own making? The question of whether computers will be conscious may never be answered. Hanson asserts there’s no way to tell: “If we mean it in the informal descriptive sense, of having some sense of self like humans do, that you can ask questions like ‘what did you do yesterday?’ or ‘how did you feel about that?’ then most…

WHEN COFFEE LAKE first launched, it’s fair to say we were fairly apprehensive of the azure juggernaut’s response to Ryzen. After all, it came out of the blue. Kaby Lake officially launched in January 2017, and a meager nine months later, we gained its hex-cored successor. And there was a big problem: thermals. At first glance, Coffee Lake’s six-core flagship seemed nothing more than a hot-headed retort, an attempt to regain the lost ground Ryzen had claimed. Although impressive, with both price and performance being perfectly on point, skyrocketing past its predecessors, its thermal dynamics really put us off. Our launch sample came with an Asus Maximus X Hero motherboard, almost identical to the one we received with the Ryzen launch. No cause for concern there. However, temps were through…

WHEN CHOOSING which GPUs to review, there’s a simple process of elimination we go through. Typically, we review a reference card on launch, then, if it’s interesting enough, one aftermarket variant, and generally that’s it. To cover more than that, it has to be exceptional in one way or another. MSI’s Trio is one such card. Admittedly, this isn’t the first tri-cooler we’ve seen from MSI, although that threefan design has usually been reserved for the two-and-a-half-slot, high-end, Lightning overclocking variants, which aren’t readily available, and often come at such a high price point it’s enough to make even the mighty Titan Xp sweat. So, what’s so interesting? Think of this as MSI’s equivalent to Asus’s DCIII. Or a Tri Frozr cooling solution, instead of its usual Twin Frozr. Now,…

YOU’RE A LOGICAL READER. You’ve seen the headline up there, you’re asking one-word questions such as “what” and “why,” and frankly you are completely justified. On the face of it, Logitech has gone absolutely mad with power. The company’s engineers (who have, it must be said, been on fire recently) realized that they could create a 4K webcam without stopping to think if they should. Then its marketers slapped the word “stream” on it, despite the fact that rendering and uploading a stable 4K stream is beyond most PCs, Internet connections, and streaming hosts. And then its power-crazed number-crunchers decided $199 was a perfectly reasonable price for such a thing. All this, when Logitech already has a 1080p webcam on its roster in the shape of the C922. But looking…

SEAGATE IRONWOLF PRO 12TB I’m a sucker for storage, ludicrous amounts of storage. This is why I’ve decided that the batch of 12 5TB hard drives in one of my NAS units isn’t worthy of my decadent hardware obsession any longer. I’m going to upgrade them to Seagate’s new IronWolf Pro 12TB drives—all 12 drives. That’s 144TB of storage in one NAS. Seagate’s IronWolf line is designed for the demanding 24-hour operation that’s required of a NAS-focused hard drive. There’s no rebooting or shutting down, and up time is everything. What’s more, the IronWolf Pro series is designed to go even further, which makes its five-year warranty worth the price premium. The hardware on the IronWolf Pro is also made to both last and endure punishing workloads. Seagate rates the drive…

Microsoft's latest console makes for a much better HDR Bluray player than your PC. What else is there to like about it? The Xbox One X is the closest any console’s come to the power and functionality of a gaming PC. It runs on a custom version of Windows, and has components that roughly compare to a $500 gaming PC, with enough GPU power and memory to run games at 4K, but a relatively weak CPU compared to a Core i5 or i7. We’ve been using the Xbox One X in the living room as an alternative to Steam's Big Picture mode, trying to get a feel for how this console compares to Microsoft's first stab at the Xbox One, which was big, ugly, and had a borderline-unusable OS. The…