Table of contents for September 2015 in Maximum PC

When Min-Liang Tan started in eSports, it was a tiny field. In 2015, it’s huge and only getting bigger. When he started making luxury peripherals, he was a pioneer. In 2015, every hardware firm does it. Min’s an important man to talk to, not merely because he makes incredible computer mice, but because he’s always cared about staying on the cutting edge—and Razer’s recent billion-dollar valuation from Forbes reflects that. Maximum PC: You’re from Singapore. How did growing up there change your life and help set you on this path? Min-Liang Tan: Gaming was pretty much frowned upon. The focus over there is all about academia, doing well. Gaming is more like a waste of time. But I’ve always been passionate about gaming, right from the get-go. It was close…

ASUS IS WELL KNOWN for its high-end componentry. Yes, it can come at a premium, but it’s often money well spent if you’re looking for feature-rich, reliable products. So, does this X99 board, in Asus's TUF series, hit that mark? Oh yes. Since launch, the TUF brand has focused on two things: reliability and consistency. And, although the ROG and Workstation series still exhibit these traits, it’s hard to argue with TUF’s reputation for being the workhorse of the breed. Certainly, over the three years since its first Z77 chipset and its first thermally armored boards, these have been values that Asus has aggressively expanded upon. This board looks spectacular, hiding the vast majority of the all-black PCB under the thermal armor, giving the Sabertooth an incredibly clean look. Whether…

WHAT CAN WE SAY about Biostar? As a company, some of us weren't even aware it existed until a month ago. That was until it debuted a new range of rather interesting consumer Z170 boards at Computex, boards with a strange ability to swap between using two sticks of DDR3 or two sticks of DDR4, depending on your budget. The Taiwanese manufacturer, of course, has actually been around for decades, but has traditionally leaned more toward business-to-business sales, as opposed to the enthusiast end of the market. So, what can be said for its Z97 gaming motherboard? It’s certainly a blast from the past. The general look and layout of the board is very reminiscent of the Sabertooth, but only to a small degree. The plastic covers feel anything but…

THERE’S NO SHADOW of a doubt that if you’re looking for a motherboard that hits all the marks, Asus’s Sabertooth X99 is a solid board. Not only is it a mean-looking workaholic, it's also packed with more features and cooling support than you could shake a braided cable at. Asus’s TUF ICe fortifier is a great piece of componentry in itself, improving cooling performance and fan curves to a degree that’s comparable to most aftermarket fan controllers. Granted, it’s quite the pricey mobo, but the fact Asus has managed to get so much onto a single motherboard, and still keep it looking so clean, is not something to be shunned. ACROSS THE BOARD The ASRock X99 ITX is a remarkable feat of engineering by the Taiwanese company. Unfortunately, so much…

With DirectX 11, at least, OCing the GPU is the area of most benefit to gamers. But it’s also where overclocking has most dramatically changed. That’s because, with Nvidia’s GPU Boost and AMD’s Power Tune, it’s no longer possible to simply up the voltage and in turn increase cards’ core clock speeds. It’s now often better to ignore the voltage and let the proprietary software do its own thing. This way, you can avoid reaching the artificial power limits set by our GPU overlords—cores won’t throttle themselves in an attempt to control imaginary temperatures, that may or may not be present, even if they’re running on an aftermarket cooler, or water. Sounds ridiculous, right? You’re not wrong. Still, we’ll show you how far you can go with these cards. 1…

Component lifespans are usually pretty easy to track. Processors get higher clock speeds, more cores, and smaller silicon; graphics cards get better clocks, more transistors, and bigger heatsinks; and storage gets bigger and cheaper. Memory is another component that’s constantly evolving: faster speeds, bigger quantities, more channels. Conventional wisdom suggests that adding faster and larger amounts of memory will allow games and applications to run faster, but that’s not always the case, which is why we’ve examined this murky situation. THE MEMORY LANDSCAPE Computer memory is divided into two main types: DDR3 and DDR4. The former is older, having debuted back in 2007, while the latter only hit the mainstream recently, with Intel’s X99 platform in 2014. They both work using the same principle: Flash chips store data that the…

WINDOWS TIP OF THE MONTH POWER-UP YOUR USB SOCKETS Frustrated with your devices charging slowly via your PC’s USB socket? The Asus Ai Charger can speed up the process. This free Windows utility ups the ampage of USB ports, so batteries should recharge as quickly as they would via the mains. Asus says it only works with Apple iPhones, iPads, and iPods, but reports suggest some success with Android devices. Find it at http://bit.ly/1g6LIGD. THE WAIT FOR WINDOWS 10 NEARS END Patience may be a virtue, but like most tech-heads, I don’t possess it. I want the latest gadgets, and I want them yesterday. Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t wait for the official release of Windows 10. I grabbed the Insider Preview and put the new OS through its paces early. And…

1. CHECK DRIVE You can quickly see if your PC’s drive is in good working order before backing it up. Click “Actions” under the drive and choose “Analyze file system.” 2. FORENSIC IMAGES Pick the “Forensic” option to take an exact copy of the entire drive for advanced data recovery purposes. Note, however, that standard images are smaller and quicker to create. 3. NAME YOUR IMAGE The entire contents of your recovered drive are stored in one file, called a drive image. Untick this box to give it a more easily identifiable name. 4. REDUCE IMAGE SIZE After clicking “Next” to view the summary screen, click the “Advanced Options” button for more options. Start by reviewing the compression options —if space is tight, set this to “High.” 5. SELECT YOUR…

To better monitor your house, you can add a floor plan to iSpy. Once you’ve added all of your cameras, you can then place them on top of the floor plan to get a better hang of the activities transpiring in your home. Make sure you’ve added all of your cameras first, then head to “Add > Floor Plan,” and click the “Image” button to point it to the image file of your floor plan. Once you’ve added a floor plan, drag and drop the added cameras from the list below the image on to the floor plan. Hold down Shift while dragging the mouse pointer to rotate the camera and point it to another part of the room. To change its angle of view, hold down Alt. The cameras…

A NAME LIKE V17 Nitro Black Edition inspires images of fast cars and powerful engines. Acer, not normally a company associated with high-performance systems, might be trying to change its image, it seems. And indeed, on the surface, the V17 packs some decent hardware, such as a gimmicky 3D RealSense camera. But while some parts are good choices, others leave us wanting. The V Nitro series is available in two sizes, the 15.6-inch V15 and the 17.3-inch V17 we’re reviewing. And that’s where we first encounter some anomalies. Despite having a larger chassis, the V17 is only available with a 1080p display, where the smaller V15 is available with 1080p or 4K IPS displays. The battery is also a fairly small three-cell 52Wh capacity, which impacts battery life in a…

LET’S START BY SAYING this is not just another multiplayer online battle arena. It’s a comment on the MOBA itself, by the company whose games inspired the genre. With it, publisher Blizzard steps into a territory it will find both deeply familiar and alien—a world of chunky characters and competitive strategy it embraces, alongside a fathomless homebrew complexity that it doesn’t. This is a studio that’s always valued accessibility, a belief strengthened of late by the success of Hearthstone. As such, Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA for people who don’t play MOBAs. Perhaps even a MOBA for people who don’t like MOBAs. It’ll be divisive, that’s for sure. In designing Heroes, Blizzard has stripped away many of the ideas that previously defined the genre. Individual leveling is gone,…

the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small HAVE YOU CHECKED the prices of solid-state drives lately? For just over $300, you can own a high-performance 1TB SSD. It’s become a surprisingly crowded field of relatively affordable options, considering that not so long ago there weren’t that many SSD models boasting 1TB of storage. What’s more, the ones that existed were too damned expensive to take seriously. Now, there’s talk of 10TB capacity SSDs and beyond—huzzah! Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look at how the market’s evolved over the past several years. In 2011, OCZ launched the Colossus, a 3.5-inch SSD with 1TB of capacity. It offered up to 260MB/s of sequential read and write performance, which was fast for its time, and commanded an obscene…

> GPU Backplates > Excessive Power? > Multiple Monitors Updating Storage Doc, I own a Samsung EVO 250GB SSD, which Maximum PC recently identified as having new firmware to alleviate memory/performance loss. After upgrading my Samsung Magician suite, the software detected the update, but failed to install it. After a little research, it appears the AMD chipset (990FX) on my Asus motherboard and the Samsung firmware utility are at odds. Supposedly, there is a newer AMD SATA controller driver, but I’m unable to locate it. It isn’t on Asus’s website or AMD’s. I’m at a loss. I wrote to Asus and its customer service told me to flash my motherboard’s firmware to version 2501, which I already have. –Steve M THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: It sounds like you’ve done a fair…

INSANITY, thy name is ASRock. We don’t think there have been many companies out there who have thought to themselves: “You know what we need to do? A 2011 socket, ITX form-factor, go!” The ASRock X99 E-ITX is nothing short of an engineering miracle—fitting an extreme edition processor into the ITX form factor represents a huge challenge. Considering the socket alone takes up 25 percent of the entire PCB, ASRock has been left with littleto-no room to maneuver. So, has it delivered on the promise of an insanity-packed Mini-ITX powerhouse? Sort of…. The board follows the traditional blue design SKU of the latest ASRock boards. Granted, you won’t see much of it once you’ve slammed in a graphics card and two sticks of DDR4, but for what’s it worth, it’s…

MSI GAMING, albeit a new line in MSI’s arsenal of products, has had a tangible effect on the marketplace. And you can tell. With so many manufacturers creating their own "gaming" series in response to MSI’s fiery dragon, it has quite the reputation to live up to. So, is MSI’s Z97 Gaming 6 motherboard worthy of wearing the prestigious red garb displayed by so many of its brothers? Well, for starters, it's worth noting that this board wears a cheaper price tag than some of the mobos in this supertest, even for this socket. As such, it's understandable that it's not overflowing with quite so many flair touches as some of its competitors. This means smaller heatsinks, less glamorous cooling solutions, and generally not a lot of color beyond that.…

Overclocking. It’s long been a part of a PC enthusiast’s toolkit when it comes to wringing every last ounce of power from our beloved machines. Whether you’ve opted to run AMD or Intel, overclocking has been a staple food group of the techie’s diet for as long as there have been chips in PCs. The basic principle is very simple: Add more voltage to the component part, provide it with sufficient cooling, either through water or air (or Ln2 for the more adventurous among us), and increase the Hz output of the hardware you’re trying to improve. But this doesn’t come without risk. While we’ve come a long way in the world of overclocking, it is still possible to fry your CPU, GPU, RAM, or motherboard to the point where…

Welcome to the world of overclocking, a place where dreams are realized, and where having just enough of those overclocking chops may mean the difference between a world record–breaking benchmark and a night of crying into a pile of burned-out chips and GPUs. As mentioned at the beginning of this guide, OCing isn’t for the faint-hearted. You can do a considerable amount of damage to your CPU and other component parts, so it’s not something to be taken lightly. What’s more, in some cases, the performance gains are negligible. But, if you’re interested in eking every last ounce of power from your machine, this is definitely the hobby for you. It’s something the vast majority of PC users will shy away from, and it’s understandable why—the thought of placing extra…

Memory manufacturers try to sell expensive kits on the basis of their size or speed, but that’s not the only advantage that comes from spending big on a high-end set of DIMMs—many of them are also designed to look better than their cheaper, plainlooking alternatives. Corsair’s Dominator Platinum range sits at the top of the firm’s product stack, and some of its key benefits are about the visuals. Corsair boasts of its industrial design and LED lighting —the top metal bar can be upgraded with different attachments, the LEDs can be changed, and the box has a good-looking fan kit that can sit on top of the sticks to provide extra cooling. Expensive memory kits like this don’t just have aesthetic advantages —Corsair’s Dominator Platinum chips are hand-sorted, have improved…

LG G4 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: LG wasn’t known for its super high-end Android flagships until it launched its widely-lauded G3 smartphone. Its successor, the G4, now looks to improve and expand upon a lot of that signature phone’s features. But the big question is, how easy is it to take apart and repair? MAJOR TECH SPECS: • 5.5-inch IPS WQHD display (2560x1440 at 538dpi) • 6-core, 1.8GHz, 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor • 3GB RAM; 32GB on-board storage, expandable to 2TB via microSD card • 16MP rear camera and 8MP front…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 The new Microsoft OS is officially released on 29 July. Get your free upgrade from www.microsoft.com. WITH WINDOWS 10 ARRIVING THE DAY AFTER THIS ISSUE GOES ON SALE, you might be wondering what exciting changes will be in store, and if they’ll be easy to get your head around. Well, in short, we can guarantee that you’ll be up and running with your new operating system in next to no time. Of course, there’s plenty that’s different. But that’s no bad thing. Fear not, Windows 10 is designed to make your computing life more streamlined than ever before. In this tutorial we’ll look at the Start menu, and see what’s changed with the launch of Windows 10. So, let’s get started! 1 PIN AN APP…

WE ALL KNOW THE TYPE: the ultra-cool guy with the best hair, the right clothes, and the hottest car. The problem is that trying to make friends with such a person can be difficult… and will cost you. But did you know the coolest guy in town has a little brother who’s much more down to Earth? Oh, he still dresses right and drives a nice car, but he’s not quite so ostentatious. The little brother is named GeForce GTX 980 Ti, son of Nvidia and sibling to the Titan X. The 980 Ti hardly comes as a surprise. Nvidia uses the fully enabled GM200 GPU in the Titan X, so a version with some functional units disabled was inevitable. The same thing happened with the original Titan and the…

THIS IS NONSENSE. This, we’d argue, would be any sensible person’s default initial reaction to the new Samsung 34-inch übertron with a curved LCD panel. Like stereoscopic 3D displays or 200Hz TV sets, the technology of curved LCD screens is real enough. But surely it only exists as a marketing tool, not because it enhances the viewing experience? Curved screens certainly qualify for gimmick status in the HDTV market. After all, the only way a curved screen can possibly work is when you‘re positioned in the perfect place. In other words, you need to be sitting exactly in the sweet spot of the circle of which the screen curve forms a segment, and that is rarely the case with a TV. You’re probably too far away and sitting at least…

IN THE FUTURE, motherboards will be all about bandwidth. Actually, they already are. That’s because the big news for the PC is a whole bunch of new interconnects. And they’re all about boosting bandwidth. They’re also borderline baffling. Firstly, there’s the crazy nomenclature. Whoever thought that "SFF-8639" was a keeper needs to be strung up with SATA cables. More on that later. The confusing naming, that is, not death by middling-bandwith cable connects. Then there’s the fusing of multiple standards into one, plus the replacement of others with multiple options. Nightmare. Maybe it was always this way. Perhaps our spectacles are growing ever more rose-tinted. Until recently, it was just PCI Express for graphics, SATA for hard drives, and USB for the rest. Wasn’t it? OK, we had to keep…

WE’VE HAD A BIT of a good run with ASRock in the Maximum PC Lab recently. Our “Overclocking Masterclass” (see page 42) is demonstrated using the Extreme4 edition motherboard, the little brother to this mobo here. We’ve also managed to achieve some insane overclocks on other ASRock boards, notably 5GHz on its Z77 ITX motherboard, with a tiny little Corsair Hydro H60. As a result, we’re expecting big things from this one. Anyway, we digress. This board is the Extreme6, the more feature-rich edition of ASRock’s professional line. ASRock has gone with a blue design style with the latest Z97 and X99 chipset that we all love here. It’s nice to see someone else take it on after MSI and Asus seemingly dropped it in the dust following the release…

ONE SIMPLE QUESTION always hounds those who are about to embark on the creation of a new PC: Do you go Intel or do you go AMD? Usually, those who are new to the world of PC gaming tend to opt for Intel. That’s at least partly down to how easy it is to identify what is new and what isn’t with Intel, a route that AMD hasn’t chosen to follow. Each time AMD releases a new CPU, instead of forcing a new chipset, it makes sure it’s backward compatible so its customers don’t have to change out their motherboards. Decidedly then, this can make it quite challenging to find out which AMD boards are new and which are old. And so to the matter at hand. MSI has brought…

Before crossing the start line, there are a few basic principles to get your head around. The first one is heat. Inevitably, the more voltage you add to your components, the more heat that component is going to output. Second, the higher the clock speed you’re trying to achieve, the more voltage you will need to power that attempt. And third, there’s only so much voltage your PC part can take before you start to see detrimental effects. These could be a drop in frame rates for GPUs, corrupting processes on the CPU, or even a failure to boot at all. These, essentially, are the basic limits of overclocking. All chips are born equal, but some are more equal than others. You’ll often hear overclockers talk of "The Silicon Lottery."…

Yes. It’s true. Overclocking doesn’t just mean tinkering with your CPU. Other avenues exist if you’re keen to shove the boat out a little bit more. RAM speeds over the course of the last few years have almost tripled in frequency, meaning performance can be improved quite dramatically in certain computational programs. It’s important to bear in mind, however, that the higher you push your RAM frequency, the more your CPU will suffer. In other words, it might mean an overall lower final overclock for your little powerhouse. On the other hand, AMD’s APUs, despite being a lower-end graphics solution, will benefit hugely from an increase in those same frequencies. So, what does all this come down to? 1 WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY? Identifying the frequency of your RAM on purchase…

SINCE THE RELEASE of the Titan X, many of us have wondered whether Nvidia would even bother releasing the 980 Ti. But low and behold, Nvidia has launched possibly one of the best bang-for-your-buck GPUs ever. A card that, although inheriting only a portion of the Titan X’s processing power and half of its memory, performs only slightly below the $1,000 beast. Throw an overclock on that and you’ve a hugely competitive card. So, what did Zotac do with Nvidia’s new graphics card? Simple, strap a water-cooling block to it, add an additional triple-fan heatsink, and overclock the balls out of it. This card is beyond insanity. It weighs a ton, but that’s mostly down to the fully copper waterblock tucked away inside. It’s so heavy, in fact, that Zotac…

YOU’LL NEED THIS MACRIUM REFLECT Get the free recovery software from http://bit.ly/1gGwIiJ. EXTERNAL DRIVE Ideally, an external USB 3.0 hard drive with enough space to hold the contents of your entire PC. WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU CAN’T BOOT INTO WINDOWS? If, as in most cases, the hard drive itself hasn’t physically died, then your data is tantalizingly close, but just out of reach. Attempting repairs could make things worse, but if you follow this tutorial, you’ll be able to back up all of the data on your drive using a free program called Macrium Reflect Free, before you try to fix the problem. This tutorial assumes you’re unable to boot into Windows, in which case you’ll need access to another Windows PC. You’ll also need an external USB hard drive…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 Microsoft’s latest operating system is available as a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 users. WINDOWS 10 BRINGS A LOT OF NEW FEATURES to the table. It also reworks a lot of the old ones to the state that they should’ve been in at the launch of Windows 8. Old favorites such as AeroSnapping have been expanded, allowing you to organize your workspace a little easier, and finally we have the fabled “Task View” button, allowing us to see all open applications at once—something that Apple users have enjoyed for years. There’s also command prompt now having copy and paste, and, of course, the hallowed DirectX 12 making its debut. But what other interesting tidbits has Microsoft given us to make our lives…

IF THE MSI WIND BOX was really just a tub of hot air, then the Cubi is a hurricane. A very good-looking hurricane. Sleek and small, with a clean design, our review sample is a treasure trove of golden hardware. It’s everything the Wind Box should’ve been. Around 1mm taller than Intel’s latest NUC, the Cubi’s slightly sloped, edgy physique gives it a much more arresting and elegant look than its rival. It’s almost a shame that it’s VESA-mountable, meaning most will be slapped to the back of a TV, as the pristine, glossy-white chassis really does look quite at home on our desk. Clearly, because of the size of this thing, it’s not a powerhouse when it comes to performance. With a Cinebench score of 199 (almost double what…

REVIEWING PC GAMES is sometimes tough. We’re the ones who’re supposed to shut up and like what we’re given. “Oh, you’re lucky the game was released at the same time as the super-special (resolution-degraded) console version,” says Mr. Anonymous Publisher. “Hell, you’re lucky you nerdy, copyright-thieving PC folk are even getting a version of our game at all.” So no, we don’t get review versions. We rarely get early code any more at all. But even rarer still is that no-one in PC gaming gets review code for a Triple A title like a new Batman game from Rocksteady. Such was the case with Arkham Knight. And, from the subsequent fallout from the launch of this latest foray into the Dark Knight’s tormented psyche, it could hardly be seen as…