Table of contents for July 2015 in Maximum PC

Just like other skirmishes between the two big beasts of the gaming graphics world, streaming finds Nvidia investing in proprietary tech while AMD is plying a more open-source path. For Nvidia, that means making its Shield portable console and Shield tablet the hook on which it hangs game streaming. Add in the GeForce Experience app running on your PC, along with optimizations in Nvidia graphics silicon to improve streaming performance, and you have a total solution known as Nvidia GameStream. It even includes support for remote streaming of your games from your PC over the Internet as well as features like ShadowPlay, the latter involving optimizations for the capture and conversion of games into video streams. Nvidia argues that restricting its streaming tech to a combination of its own graphics…

THE LORD GIVETH. And yet he also taketh. So it is with Intel’s NUC, which gives you a lovely, compromise-free computing experience, but saunters off with most of your money. Fully built, it’s horrendously expensive for what amounts to a low-end laptop in a box. Without a screen. The NUC also leaves the door wide open for an alternative proper-PC proposition that puts Intel’s full-fat Core CPU architecture into a tiny box, without also obliterating your bank account. It’s a door that MSI is all too happy to step through with the Wind Box. What we’re dealing with here is an evidently full-function PC, complete with an Intel Core-architecture CPU, a Windows OS install, system memory, and mass storage. It’s all squeezed into a tiny box. And it’s yours for…

WHAT’S THIS? Some kind of comedy entry? A $40 toy with an ancient ARM processor? This thing can’t even play Flash video, ferchrissake. Surely, then, the Raspberry Pi has no business being considered for any even remotely performance-critical application. Even this second-generation Pi with its comprehensive upgrades. Game streaming, after all, is nothing if not performance sensitive. To be clear, you don’t actually need your streaming box to be a 3D pixel pumper par excellence in its own right. But you definitely do need something that can decode video stream with absolutely minimal latency. What are the odds that the Pi can do that? Those upgrades might help. Roughly three years since the Pi first popped up, this second-gen barebones board has arrived. True to the ethos of the original,…

Galaxy S6 Edge 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: With its glass-and-aluminum construction and curved-edge screen, Samsung looks to have leaped light-years ahead with its newest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S6 Edge. But is it as future-proof as it is futuristic. Only a teardown will tell… MAJOR TECH SPECS: • 5.1-inch Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen (1440x2560, 16M colors) • Samsung Exynos 7 Octa 7420 Processor, integrated Mali-T760 GPU and 3GB memory • 16MP rear camera with HDR, LED Flash, and 4K video recording • Built-in support for Qi and Powermat wireless charging • 32/64/128…

1. OPEN A SHELL AND CHOOSE A RELEASE Open a terminal window by pressing Ctrl–Alt–T. You can see the set of commands by typing “list.” One of the commands is “shell,” which gives you a full Bash shell (patched for Shellshock). Run Crouton with “-t” to see all the available targets. Chromebooks are relatively low-powered, and a lightweight desktop such as LXDE is a good choice. Unity is better suited to running everything full-screen. 2. ENCRYPT YOUR FILES AND INSTALL THE DISTRO Adding “-e” to Crouton’s command line causes your chroot to be stored in an encrypted directory (this isn’t the same as the “e” that follows “sh”). Choose a decent passphrase, but remember most of your data will be saved in the cloud because Chromebooks have very little storage.…

1. ADD NEW ENTRIES The app Win+X Menu Editor makes it easy to add shortcuts to the Power User Menu. Just select a type to get started. 2. VIEW ENTRIES All existing entries are displayed here in groups and shown in the order they appear on the actual menu. 3. MANAGE ENTRIES Right-click an entry to reveal options to remove, rename, and reorder it. You can also move an item between groups. 4. PRESETS Some built-in Windows apps, as well as the Services management console and shutdown options, can be added here. 5. ENABLE CHANGES Click the “Restart Explorer” button to see the effects of your changes. Once Explorer restarts, press Win–X. 6. ADD MORE ITEMS Go to “Control Panel” or “Administrative Tools” to pick new items from a list.…

THE FIRST THING you’ll see is the price. It’s certainly not budget. And then there’s those antennae. There’s so much tech inside this box that it wouldn’t be that much of a leap for it to flip itself over and start scuttling off like a robot crab. There’s a 1GHz dual-core processor on board, plus 128MB of flash memory and 256MB of RAM, with three offload processors powering three separate Wi-Fi networks—one for legacy 2.4GHz devices (up to 600Mb/s theoretical) and two separate 5GHz networks (cited as a massive 1,300Mb/s). Now, that’s a router. It won’t surprise you to learn those speeds are theoretical lab speeds. The fastest we got over the 5GHz network was around 350Mb/s. Still pretty fast. The three networks essentially enable you to spread out the…

WIPE THE SLATE CLEAN. Forget the SATA interface and forget the AHCI protocol. This is high bandwidth NAND Flash-specific storage of the highest order. This is solid state all grown up and forging its own path. Since the first consumer SSDs hit our PCs, they’ve been piggy-backing highlatency mechanical drive tech in terms of their interfaces and protocols. In the beginning of the SSD revolution, running across the 600MB/s limit of the SATA 6Gb/s interface wasn’t much of a problem. But quickly our SSDs became more trustworthy and more capable, and suddenly they were bumping their heads against the limits. Along came PCIe-based drives, but they were mostly still smaller SATA drives connected to a PCIe RAID controller. Then came actual PCIe interfaces specifically designed for SSDs. The new wave…

FOR A FRANCHISE that’s coming up to its 18th birthday, it’s amazing how little Grand Theft Auto has changed. GTA V may have the most fully realized city and well-drawn characters to date, but it’s fundamentally about the gratification of being able to walk down the street and break into any car. This is also the savviest entry in the series—it has been released on two generations of consoles and now on the PC, essentially milking the same content a total of five times. Cha-ching! That’s not to diminish the PC version in any way. Rockstar may have a lackadaisical approach to our beloved platform, but the company has poured its efforts into making the Windows version as seriously bling as possible, hence that 18-month delay between its first console…

USER INTERFACES HAVEN’T CHANGED much since the first home PCs came to market. Indeed, the keyboards and mice that we’re all accustomed to are one of the selling points of PC gaming. For specialized inputs, there are steering wheels, flight sticks and throttles, gamepads, and trackballs. Designers and artists, meanwhile, have drawing tablets for input that resemble putting pen to paper. Intel has been working on developing a 3D camera interface that will attempt to take physical objects out of the picture. They’re calling it RealSense, and it’s already available in a number of laptops and ultrabooks. We managed to get our grubby paws on an Intel RealSense Developer Kit front-facing camera built by Creative, and got to playing with it to see what all the fuss was about. First…

Malware is like the new common cold. As much as you try to avoid it, it’s bound to infect you at one point or another. Instead of affecting your body, however, it—arguably much worse—affects your PC! Whether it comes in the form of changing your search engine or inundating you with annoying pop-up ads, it can make you feel sick to your stomach. Luckily, you don’t have to sell your kidney to fix your computer. In our online guide, we show you how to remove malware for free: how to scrub down your browser, kill the malware with AV software, and more. http://bit.ly/MPC_malware…

IT’S NOT OFTEN that Valve gets booed for its attempts to improve Steam, but the longbeloved game company faced the fury of the Internet after its controversial decision to allow for the monetization of mods. The feature rolled out on April 23, with Bethesda’s popular Skyrim RPG being the first game to take advantage of the system. While giving modders a chance to make money from their mods doesn’t sound too controversial, Valve’s implementation of its system was met with great criticism. One of the biggest issues people had with it was the distribution of funds: Modders would receive 25 percent of the revenue for each mod sold; according to Bethesda, Valve would take its standard 30 percent cut; this left 45 percent going to Bethesda. Many people took issue…

> New Builds > SSD Decisions > Power Woes Windows 10 32-bit? My business requires I use older software that will not run on any 64-bit OS. This program runs very well on Windows 7 when it’s installed as a 32-bit OS. Will Windows 10 be available in 32-bit trim for those of us who helped the PC industry get started? —Dennis Quicker THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: Yes, Dennis. Win10 will be made available as a 32-bit OS. Right now, Microsoft’s saying you need 1GB of RAM to run the 32-bit preview version or 2GB for 64-bit. There’s another option you might consider, particularly if you’re on a machine with lots of memory that isn’t getting used by your 32-bit OS. Install the 64-bit build and virtualize your 32-bit workload with…

Valve’s Steam boxes. Whatever happened to them? A bold vision for the future of PC gaming, the Steam box was supposed to combine a number of new initiatives from Valve, including the Linux-based Steam OS and, indeed, game streaming. But here we are in mid-2015 and the Steam box proper hasn’t really arrived. We’re told they’re still coming. But should you even care? Arguably, the Steam box is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Valve’s Gabe Newell has been quoted bad-mouthing Microsoft, the company he himself used to work for, and its Windows operating system. We’re talking about the whole “Windows 8 is a catastrophe” thing. The temptation is to see the Steam box and Steam OS as something of a personal Newell vendetta against Microsoft. Whether there’s…

IT’S HARD TO KEEP UP with Nvidia at times. On paper, its core proposition is pretty simple—make the best graphics cards on planet Earth. But so relentless is its quest for utter domination that the number of Nvidia’s spin-off technologies is becoming borderline bewildering. It started with SLI multi-GPU tech and expanded to stereoscopic GeForce 3D, then took in the adaptive refresh hotness known as G-Sync, and spanned out to ultramobile with the Tegra chip, while also including things like the auto-optimization software that is GeForce Experience. There’s also the minor matter of two Android-based gaming portables in the form of the slightly whacky Shield console, and latterly the Shield tablet. Phew. As if that wasn’t enough, Nvidia has its own game-streaming tech in cloud form (GRID) and in-home streaming…

ONE DAY, the distinction between mobile and desktop computing won’t have any meaning. The wizards of chip production will have shrunk transistors to such tiny proportions that packing almost any quantity of compute power into almost any device, no matter how small, will be a given. We’re not there yet, of course. Not by a long shot. Indeed, as transistors approach the very size of an atom, it’s looking like we’re getting close to the limits of what current computer chip tech can deliver. If there are doubts over further progress, the obvious question is just how close to full desktop performance the latest ultramobile PC processors have come. Enter the preposterously pocket-sized Pico, this supertest’s representative for the Intel Atom ultramobile processor. In 2008, the end-game for Atom seemed…

Read the tech and games press, and the buzz is all about virtual reality. Valve revealed its long-hidden VR product Vive, built with HTC, in March. Oculus Rift, meanwhile, has been bought for a cool $2 billion by Facebook, with Facebook’s owner Mark Zuckerberg calling it “the dream of science fiction” that will “unlock new worlds for us all.” Yet, quietly, people are whispering that the real story is augmented reality (AR). Influential data firms such as Juniper Research have even put figures on it. Juniper’s "Augmented Reality 2015–2019" report predicts revenues of $4.1 billion for AR apps in 2019, with 1.3 billion apps in use. By contrast, Digi-Capital is advising that AR could be worth $120 billion by 2020, with VR valued at a mere $30 billion. That reflects…

CROUTON The free installer is a gateway to a Linux OS. Download it from http://goo.gl/fd3zc. USB STICK You’ll need to back up your OS to a USB stick or SD card before getting started—2GB should be enough. CHROME OS IS BRILLIANT. For the type of user Chromebooks are generally aimed at, it does exactly what it needs to do. It’s fast and easy to use—what more could you ask for? Well, you may find yourself missing some of the features associated with more traditional operating systems. Don’t worry, help is at hand, in the form of Crouton. Crouton is a set of programs that create a chroot environment within Chrome OS, from which you can run a Linux OS, with Debian and Ubuntu currently supported. A chroot is not the…

SECOND SCREEN Whether it’s a laptop, monitor, or TV, it should be easy to connect with either HDMI or VGA. LIKE IT OR NOT, the most ergonomic way of using a laptop is to sit at a proper desk with a proper monitor, mouse, and keyboard. There are other advantages to this setup, as well; you can use your original laptop display as a second screen. Dual-screen setups are now the norm in many offices, and you can have the same at home as well. It’s useful for copying information between documents, having your email on one screen while you work on the other, editing photos on one screen while you have your photo library on the other, and so on. Here we’ll set up Windows to function with a…

WINDOWS 8.1 File Explorer is a revamped Windows Explorer. It revolutionizes how you manage files and folders. WINDOWS 8.1’S FILE EXPLORER is more than just a rebadged version of Windows Explorer. It’s a revelation. Thanks to a raft of improvements and new features, it makes managing your files easier than ever. There’s the improved file copying tool, which not only speeds up file transfers, but makes them easier to manage, too. The new ribbon-based UI places all the key tools you need within easy reach, and the Navigation pane remains a great way to quickly move to the different parts of your PC. In this tutorial, we’ll reveal File Explorer’s best features, some of which are hidden away from view. We’ll also show you how to make File Explorer even…

A KICKSTARTER IS NOT A GUARANTEE. Many of us learned that the hard way. Looking at the list of games we’ve backed, it ranges from the disappointing (Fist of Awesome), to the misleading (Godus), to the never-appearing (Clang!). And if you backed the Project Eternity Kickstarter, which promised a return to the days of Baldur’s Gate, you did so with the full knowledge that the developer Obsidian had a string of wonderful but mostly buggy projects to its name, so you shouldn’t expect too much. Perhaps the company’s reputation for unfinished games was due to publisher pressure to finish on time. Because here, working at its own pace, Obsidian has excelled. Pillars of Eternity is a perfect recreation of that Baldur’s Gate era. There’s the mysterious plot and the character-soaked…

STREAMING GAMES from your PC to other devices. It’s a crazy idea, right? It is if you really think about the nuts and bolts. Start with a control input from your client streaming device, whatever that may be. A precision flick of the mouse in reaction to gunfire behind you. That kind of thing. The signal has to be processed by the client box and then sent over your network to the host PC. That PC then processes the input and updates the game state by rendering new 3D frames, calculating some AI, number crunching the audio, and everything else that goes into a modern game engine. The result of all that is thrown together, encoded into a video stream, and bounced back over your network. The client box then…

NO-COMPROMISE COMPUTING in a stupidly small, but beautifully engineered, little box. From day zero, that’s been the core proposition from Intel’s NUC, or Next Unit of Computing. As it happens, it’s been a proposition with which we have, broadly speaking, jived. When it comes to PCs, we like pushing the tech envelope for its own sake, so simple smallness is synonymous with coolness in our book. That’s especially true when tiny proportions come with little or no compromise in terms of performance. There’s no denying Intel has engineering clout that goes well beyond most makers of mere barebones PCs, too. Likewise, if anyone knows how to make the most of an Intel Core CPU within the constraints of a very small box, it’s surely Intel. The NUC, however, has always…

STRICTLY SPEAKING, NZXT’s Doko ought to fall at the first hurdle. It’s not actually a computing device in its own right. It’s just a dumb mirroring box. Unshackle it from the host PC, and it effectively drops dead. But hang on. Our numero uno concern is game streaming, and that lifts the Doko from dodo status to something more interesting. Here’s a box that promises to banish compatibility concerns. With the Doko, it doesn’t matter what graphics card you’ve got. It doesn’t matter what game you’re trying to play. If it works on the host PC, it’ll work on the Doko. The end. If that sounds great, it gets better. The Doko is cheap. Not quite crazy cheap like the Raspberry Pi. But surely affordable enough for almost anyone interested…

SUPERTESTS OF THE LATEST GADGETS for your PC are always interesting, even if that just means getting to grips with the latest technologies and releases. But when it comes to game streaming, there’s a whole lot more to learn. Together, the six devices gathered here give you a pretty comprehensive overview of both the different device options and the current state of game-streaming tech on the PC. We’re happy to report the news is mostly good. Currently, the key challenges for game streaming go something like this. First, you want that stream to keep going and not chuck you out the game. Second, you need as little lag as possible. ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT Progress has been made on both counts. Use a wired network, along with hooking into Nvidia’s GameStream…

There are many ways to try augmented reality today. As it’s a more mature technology, there are some basic devices that take advantage of it already, as well as many cell phone applications to try. The Carl Zeiss VR One headset, for example, supports AR features and will work with any iOS or Android headset between 4.7 and 5.2 inches. Google Glass V1.0 may have been canceled, but that’s out there too. There’s a huge array of AR apps for smartphones. One of our favorites is GoSkyWatch Planetarium for iPhone and iPad. This is one of many stargazing apps that use the device’s accelerometer and GPS to orient your device, so wherever you’re pointing, it shows constellations, stars, and nebulae. See also Anatomy 4D, Google Goggles (which can translate text…

WINDOWS TIP OF THE MONTH TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR MEDIA KEYS If you’ve got the Chrome browser installed, your keyboard’s media keys might not work, due to them being hijacked to only work with Google’s Play Music. It’s easy to fix. Open Chrome, click the menu icon in the upper right, choose “More tools,” then “Extensions.” Click “Keyboard shortcuts” and change the Google Play Music settings from “Global” to “In Chrome.” MAKE – USE – CREATE 60 Install Linux on your Chromebook 64 Become a Win8 Power User 68 Build an extra quiet mid-tower rig STAND UP FOR APPLE WATCH Stand up! No, really. Do it. It could save your life. Like most people, you probably thought the new Apple Watch’s much-touted ability to remind you to stand up every…

Comparing a cheap Chromebook to a full laptop may seem unfair, but we’ll do that anyway. Running Ubuntu or Debian on a Chromebook is just like running it on a proper laptop. The only differences are down to the use of a chroot and the scary boot messages you get. This means you have to boot into Chrome OS first and then open a shell to start the chrooted session. But Chromebooks are designed to be suspended rather than shut down, so this isn’t necessary often. It uses the hardware through Chrome OS, so you need to do things like set up your network connection in there, but as you can switch between the OSes at will, this isn’t a problem. It’s not dual boot, it’s running both at once.…

WIN+X MENU EDITOR Manage your shortcuts with the free, third-party tool Win+X Menu Editor. Download it at http://bit.ly/1jvITAU. MICROSOFT CAUSED A REAL UPROAR when it dropped the Start menu from Windows 8. But arguably the biggest mistake it made was failing to advertise that it had provided a replacement. Of sorts. All you needed to do was find it. The Power User Menu may not have the functionality of the original Start menu, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. Indeed, even if you’ve installed a third-party Start menu replacement, such as ClassicShell’s Classic Start Menu, you’ll still find the Power User Menu incredibly handy. As its name implies, the Power User Menu provides convenient shortcuts to key system tools, from the Program and Features Control Panel to the…

1. QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR Add any File Explorer button you like here for quick access. Up to six options are provided by default. 2. NAVIGATION PANE Use the Home tab’s Easy access button to add your most-used folders to the Favorites section for quick access. 3. CONTEXT-SENSITIVE TABS These tabs appear when certain items are present. Click a file or folder to access context-sensitive controls. 4. VIEW TAB Use the View tab to set up how the current folder looks and behaves. Changes will only apply to this folder. 5. SEARCH Type search terms here to look through the current folder. Use the ribbon’s Search tab to fine-tune the results. 6. DETAILS PANE Selecting this and clicking a file or folder reveals its details without having to manually open its…

LAST YEAR, we reviewed Silverstone’s original TD02 closed-loop CPU cooler (CLC). It used a 240mm radiator, which had integrated tubing that fed heat coming from a pump and heatsink combo that sits on top of the CPU. Enthusiasts like CLCs because they can allow higher CPU overclocking than a conventional air cooler. They also take some weight off the mobo, though modern backplate designs tend to make that a non-issue. But the TD02 wasn’t perfect. Its radiator was thick, so it couldn’t fit in some cases. The tubes were also a bit undersized, so it could have trouble getting heat to the rad. We liked the aluminum pump housing of the original, and the white tubing and fan blades. But we were apparently in the minority. When you unbox the…

MORE IS ALWAYS BETTER, RIGHT? The X3 Plus V3 is all about more. More pixels (5.76 million), more VRAM (6GB), more heat, and more fan noise. There’s a bit less of one thing though, the three SSDs we’d assumed the X3 series was named after have been pruned back to two: 256GB mSATA models in a RAID 0 (striped) configuration. Aorus, owned by Gigabyte, has designed a slab of black aluminum with vents on the back that make it look like a stealthy Cobra Mk III from Elite: Dangerous. The keyboard is backlit to look like a birthday cake, but without much in the way of key travel, and marred by a crunchy F8 key. Plus the slippery puddle it calls a trackpad hides an unresponsiveness beneath its good looks.…