Table of contents for April 2018 in Maximum PC

I THINK I’M CURSED. For the life of me, I can never seem to build a PC that works the first time around. You might be thinking, “How’s that even possible?” But the truth is, it’s happened every time I’ve built a machine, whether it’s for myself or someone else. Things always go wrong. Even when I’m upgrading, things go wrong. Once I bought a blazingly fast 52x CD-ROM drive to upgrade my aging unit. It didn’t work. I had to exchange it for another. It’s so bad that my uncle once asked me to help him build a PC, but instructed me not to touch anything, only sit there and tell him where to put things. Like I said: cursed. To make sure you won’t have the same horrific…

MICROSOFT IS ADDING the ability to purchase its games directly though Mixer. Streamers can elect to promote downloadable content from the Microsoft Store on their feeds; a link next to the channel name will activate a pop-up window to the promoted DLC. When you buy anything, it is added to your Xbox or Windows library—no need to stop watching or redeem codes. In return, the channel owner gets a 5 percent slice of any sale. Initially, the option will only be available to Mixer Partners, but is expected to be available to all in due course. Twitch added a similar system last year. The ability for streamers to make money is important to attract and keep the top players, as YouTube Gaming, Twitch, and Mixer fight for market share. Each…

The big problem with most integrated graphics solutions is that the CPU and GPU portions of the processor must share limited system memory bandwidth. Even with a dual-channel 64-bit DDR4-3200 interface, that’s only 64GB/s. If that sounds like it should be more than sufficient, consider that even Nvidia’s budget GTX 1050 delivers almost twice that much, thanks to a 128-bit GDDR5 interface—and all 112GB/s on a GTX 1050 gets devoted to GPU duties. In the computing playground, GPUs are the big, greedy bullies that don’t like to share with other children. That doesn’t make AMD’s Ryzen APUs bad—on the contrary, I like what they bring to the table. But as a gaming solution, they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. In benchmarks, the faster Ryzen 5 2400G with Vega 11…

TIP 1 RESEARCH A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE can go a long way when it comes to building your perfect PC. And the best place to start is reviews. You can look at all the build guides in the world, but if you don’t know what gear is right for you, you’re going to end up sorely out of pocket, and with a system not fit for purpose. Reviews are a huge source of information. Whether they’re online, on YouTube, or in good old Maximum PC, you can learn how something works, how to install it, and how it performs when push comes to shove. Second to reviews are manufacturers’ websites. Reading PDFs and install manuals ahead of time will make the build process far easier, and help you set everything up…

1 GET OPEN MEDIA VAULT We’re assuming you’re installing this on a blank system—we’re not attempting to run anything alongside OMV, dual boot, or so on. So, we can safely wipe the entire boot system drive. You could run it off a USB stick, but an old sub-64GB SSD would be ideal. We’ll add data drives later. Head to www.openmediavault.org/download.html and download the latest ISO file. Currently, that’s v4.014 amd64 (64-bit). See the box, above-right, on how to get this on to a DVD or USB drive, and boot from it. 2 START THE INSTALL If the target NAS PC has booted from your OMV media correctly, you should see an OpenMediaVault boot menu. Ensure “Install” is selected, and press Return. “Advanced options” has a hardware detection tool, handy for…

It runs contrary to the spirit of this guide to say so, but there is such a thing as too much antialiasing. And it’s not just defined by the point when your frame rate renders the game unplayable. Over-aggressive AA can blur out images, make entire textures disappear, and give an uncanny valley effect to old games. Doom was never intended for smooth edges and high-res textures, so when modern AA techniques are applied, the result is only a passing resemblance to the game you remember. Similarly, in 2D games that feature line drawings heavily in their art style, the once-crisp lines get extra pixels, intended to smooth them out, but which make it look as though someone’s spilled a bottle of water all over your game. So, use AA…

LIVING ON the bleeding edge of performance is undoubtedly a blast. But what, in reality, do most of us really want? Good performance, solid reliability, and no obvious holes in the feature set. That’s what. Handily, that’s exactly what Intel’s latest SSD offers. In theory, at least. As a PCI Express drive in the M.2 form factor, with NVMe control protocol support, it checks all the boxes we like to see from a contemporary SSD. It’s also competitively priced for a drive with such a complete feature set. Thus, the Intel 760P SSD represents one of a new generation of what you might call mainstream NVMe drives. It’s taken a little while for NVMe to attain that mainstream status, admittedly, but drives such as the 760P, Intel’s best value NVMe…

SPELLFORCE’S CLASH of initialisms flings RTS together with RPG, and contains the resulting fusion in a series of narrative arcs within a generic fantasy world. As a result, what looks like a standard isometric RPG in the Baldur’s Gate mold sees you building bases, raising an army, and taking the fight to the bad guys as a mass of troops, rather than a small party of heroes. Although there is a small party of heroes, too, who have all the special powers and upgradable skill trees you could want. The RTS interludes help avoid the RPG sections feeling hackneyed. There are dwarfs, orcs, and elves, magic users both good and bad, a religion that persecutes those magic users, a dungeon escape, whirling rumors of a chosen one, a long-dead civilization…

DESPITE HAVING the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela is in a financial mess. To help earn hard currency, the government has launched its own cryptocurrency, the Petro, backed by those oil and mineral reserves. What’s more, the government has decreed that government industries use it, and that citizens can use it to pay taxes and buy other services. It’s a slightly odd development, because a keystone of cryptocurrencies is that they are independent of state control, and have no collateral. No longer, it seems. The initial offering went well, if President Nicolas Maduro is to be believed. He claims it raised $735 million, although it’s not clear who the largest investors were. He also plans to launch a second currency, Petro Gold, backed by the state’s gold reserves. Iran is…

By using package managers, users can quickly update their systems with a few keystrokes. The problem with this model is that unlike Windows, Meltdown and Spectre are both hardware vulnerabilities. Until Intel and AMD correct the vulnerabilities in hardware, users will have to rely on software fixes. Unfortunately, the mitigation strategies employed by the kernel developers result in the slower execution of code. That means slower desktop applications for the end user. It really sucks, but it’s the cost of security. What this means to the end user is that code will run a bit slower on Linux until better fixes or architectures have been developed. But for now, the big task at hand is to make sure you update your kernel. As of this writing, kernel 4.15 has been…

MAGNETIC BOWL You can pick up this handy Park Tool magnetic bowl for a little under $10 from Amazon. Amazingly useful for storing all your bolts and screws, you can attach it to anything metallic, at any angle, without the worry of losing any of the stuff inside. Plus, rub your screwdriver up against the bowl, and voila—magnetic screwdriver. That’s science, folks. THERMAL PASTE We stick with one brand: Noctua’s NT-H1 Thermal Compound. It’s a nonconductive thermal paste, with a satisfying consistency, which doesn’t spill out all over the place. You’re not going to see revolutionary changes in temp with a higher quality paste, but you will see some. Just make sure you don’t use conductive paste, but if you do, be careful when applying it to your CPU. CABLE…

TIP 1 AMD CPU INSTALLATION OUTSIDE OF THREADRIPPER, AMD has stayed with the PGA (or pin-grid array) setup—the interconnect pins between the motherboard and CPU lie on the processor, as opposed to the mobo’s socket, meaning fewer broken boards. To install your AM4 processor, match the golden corner on the chip with the corner on the socket. Lift the retention arm on the socket, carefully slot the processor into place, push it down firmly in the middle until it’s secure, then bring down the retention arm to lock it into place. TIP 2 INTEL CPU INSTALLATION TO INSTALL ANY LGA processor, lift the retention arm out and up, then lift up the bracket, leaving the protective plastic covering inside. Line up the processor’s golden triangle with the etched triangle on…

TIP 1 UPDATE THE BIOS BIOS UPDATES used to be a daunting experience, leading to bricked mobos and dead CPUs. Now, it’s really beneficial, and we recommend you update your BIOS whenever a new one launches. Go to your mobo manufacturer’s website, find the page for your model, and head to the support section. Go to driver downloads, and search for the BIOS subsection. Download the latest version. Extract this file on to a 4GB USB stick that’s been formatted to the FAT32 filesystem, then plug it into the back of your motherboard, head into the BIOS, and find the update BIOS tool in the advanced menus. Select the USB stick, find the file, and load it—your motherboard takes care of the rest. TIP 2 FAN CURVES WHILE YOU’RE IN…

Hi. If you’re reading this, then you’ve never installed an OS before. Don’t worry—there’s nothing to be embarrassed or nervous about, we were all OS install virgins once. Installing an OS seems like something of a dying art; millennials and their damn embedded “smart” devices—tsk. An OS is software like anything else, it just happens that part of its job is to load the OS kernel and generally boot the system to a usable state, the clever scamp, which means that installing it requires you to boot the system off an install media—a DVD or USB drive, in other words. At the start of the walkthrough below, we direct you to download an ISO file of OMV. An ISO file is a standard file format maintained as ISO9660; shout out…

Work on my custom desk is under way. The bespoke steel legs finally turned up, the integrated wireless Qi charging pad has been ordered, and the overall design has been finalized. All that’s left is to build the thing. But that got me thinking. I’m trying to go with a super-clean aesthetic. Ergotron’s kindly provided a dual-screen monitor arm for my two ViewSonic VP3268-4K panels, to keep the huge displays off my desk. And I have some smart ideas to keep the rear I/O cables from my new rig hidden out the way as well. The biggy is peripherals—without drilling holes in the middle of my desk, it will be damn near impossible to hide those pesky USB cables from view. There’s an obvious answer: to go fully wireless. But…

Like any good music player, Volumio supports playlists, but unfortunately it’s not the most intuitive of tools. Switch to the “Browse” tab, then browse your music library by either artist or album. You’ll see the ≡ “hamburger” menu button next to artists, albums, and individual tracks—click this, and you’ll see an option to add the selected item to a playlist. Either type the name of a new playlist and hit “New,” or click an existing playlist to add the items to it. You can access your playlists from the “Browse” tab. From here, you can open the playlist to remove individual items via the ≡ button, but one crucial missing feature is the fact that you’re unable to rearrange the running order. No problem: A more elegant—and, indeed, quicker—method to…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ELECTRUM You can get hold of the free software from https://electrum.org/#download. BITCOIN HAS GONE FROM BEING the province of a few bored programers to a major investment tool. While a single Bitcoin was worth around $1,000 in January last year, today it’s worth well over 10 times that amount. The prevalence of online exchanges such as CoinBase and Bitstamp have also made it easy for even non IT-literate people to cash in on the crypto-craze. As a virtual currency, Bitcoin is vulnerable to hackers, which is why anyone interested in investing must have a secure software “wallet” to keep their funds safe. Electrum, which has been around since 2011, is a remarkably powerful and free client for Bitcoin. Not only is the software extremely easy to set…

When you draw a vector shape in Photoshop, what you’re creating is a fill layer linked to a vector mask—this is why a shape seems to float freely from other layers, because it’s a layer in its own right. When you’ve created a shape, it remains editable as long as you don’t choose to rasterize it. You can use the Direct Selection tool to modify it, clicking and dragging on the square points that mark its corners and the halfway points of its vertices. You can apply a Layer Style to a shape, just as we did with the frame for our pop-up photo, and you can fill it with a pattern or gradient using “Gradient Overlay” in the “Layer Styles” window. The Custom Shape tool, which folds out from…

WHAT HAPPENS when you put the equivalent of a complete desktop into a notebook chassis? How about if you include a bit of the desk? MSI’s GT75VR 7RF Titan Pro answers that question with an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink attitude. For starters, it’s gigantic, even by desktop-replacement standards. We’ve tested some large laptops over the years, but at more than 2.2 inches thick, the Titan Pro is absolutely massive. A good portion of that is due to the cooling solution, with more than 10 heat pipes, dual exhausts, and twin super-large, 29-blade fans (more on those later). Adding to the heft is the SteelSeries mechanical keyboard, and while its removable keycaps are still chiclet in style, they have a satisfying click that feels great to type and game on. The Titan’s insides are…

THERE WERE LOTS OF REASONS to get excited about Intel’s eighth-generation (Coffee Lake) Core processors, but for this reviewer, it was the promise of this particular chip that produced the excitement. The reason is straightforward enough—it potentially offers the best bang for your buck of any of the new chips. The good news (if slightly premature in terms of this review), is that it delivers on that potential and, in fact, for many system builders, now becomes the go-to chip for most budgets, and even mainstream plans. We’ll get to the reason for this glowing preamble shortly, but before we do, it’s worth going over what your $120 gets you. The Core i3-8100 lacks HyperThreading and a Turbo boost, but it does pack four cores into its LGA 1151 package,…

GEEK TESTED & APPROVED I REMEMBER THE EMAIL: “Zak, you can review keycaps, right?” Apprehensively, I said yes, but I’ve held on to them for a long while before even testing them, much to Corsair’s disdain. So what’s the point of these, and why should you invest 50 bucks in them? That’s a lot of beer (64.93 bottles—I did the math*). If you’ve already invested in a mechanical keyboard, the likelihood is you’ve put a good $120 into it, so why drop more cash? Well, most keycaps are molded out of a single piece of plastic, and the character is laser-etched into it. The Double-Shots, on the other hand, are formed from two separately molded pieces of plastic: one translucent to allow your RGB light of choice to pass through,…

Tesla is the latest victim of what’s known as cryptojacking, which is when a company is hacked and its resources used to mine cryptocurrency. In this case, hackers were able to break into Tesla’s Amazon cloud account. Cybersecurity startup RedLock Cloud Security Intelligence (yes, that would be CSI) discovered the intrusion last month. Or, more accurately, it stumbled upon the intrusion while investigating Kubernetes administration consoles being accessible over the Internet due to a lack of password protection. These consoles are designed to help IT admins manage virtual machines. “A couple of the instances belonged to Aviva, a British multinational insurance company, and Gemalto, the world’s largest manufacturer of SIM cards. Within these consoles, access credentials to these organizations’ Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure environments were exposed. Upon…

8 GOOGLE EARTH Go from gigantic towering god to tiny street-level ant with this unique view of the world. 7 KEEP TALKING AND NOBODY EXPLODES You can see the bomb; friends have defusal instructions. 6 FANTASYNTH A seven-minute acid trip through the craziest music visualizer ever—live version coming soon. 5 GORN Comical violence, buckets of syrupy blood, and ridiculous weaponry in a dumb-fun gladiatorial “sim.” 4 AFTER SOLITARY Step into the cell of former inmate Kenny Moore to experience life behind bars. 3 COCO VR Disney-Pixar’s Oculus-exclusive trip into the afterlife is a cute, touching, fun experience like no other. 2 THEBLU Hurt your GPU with a stunning trip to the bottom of the ocean, where the scale of VR comes to life. 1 TILT BRUSH Wave your arms to…

SYSTEM BUILDING is one of the central tenets of the PC enthusiast community. It’s something we should all aspire to. Here at Maximum PC, we’ve built rigs and taught others how to craft their own, both in person and across these pages, countless times. And with one very good reason: You get a real sense of pride from constructing your own machine, and an even greater one from teaching others how to do it. And with the added benefits of knowing every part that goes into your build, saving some cash, and understanding how to troubleshoot your system if it goes wrong, it’s hard to ignore the advantages that system building brings. A lot revolves around system building across the industry. From hardware development, to the custom modding scene, to…

TIP 1 CASE STRIPDOWN THE FIRST THING to do (other than lay out all your hardware, and take a shot for Instagram, obviously), is strip your case down to its frame. Carefully unscrew, pop off, and remove every panel you can find. You can also remove the dust filters, and any hard drive cages you don’t need. Doing this improves airflow, makes your build infinitely easier to manage in the early stages, and stops you manhandling and potentially damaging some of the more aesthetically pleasing panels (damn you, brushed aluminum). TIP 2 PANEL STORAGE IT’S SMART to keep your part boxes, at least for a year or so, until the warranties run out. That said, there’s an immediate use you can make of the box your chassis came in. The…

TIP 1 LIQUID PLANNING A FULLY CUSTOM LOOP is something most PC builders aspire to at some stage. Whether you’re keen to try it or not, knowing how to build one successfully is a key piece of knowledge to have. As with most builds, it all starts with a good plan, some acquired knowledge, and a touch of research. There are two basic principles to remember when liquid-cooling. Firstly, your pump must almost always be gravity fed by a reservoir, and secondly, each component you wish to cool must have at least 120mm of radiator to support it—more for overclocking. Once you’ve got that pinned down, it’s on to the planning stage. Similar to our first plan we did back on page 28, it’s a good idea to use a…

If you’ve followed the walkthrough, you’re at a point where the NAS can be let loose on your network for people to access. The final step is providing shared folders for Windows users to access. This uses the SMB/CIFS, aka Samba, system. Find this under “Services > SMB/CIFS.” You largely just need to hit “Enable,” click “Save,” then click the “Shares” tab, and add any folders you’ve created. Click “+Add,” click “Enable,” select the “Shared” folder (we create a public one in step 14), and if it should be available to everyone, enable the “Public > Guest allowed” pull-down menu. You’ll likely need to click “System Apply” once you’ve saved the new share’s settings. If you jump on a Windows machine and peruse the network, you’ll now see a new…

YOU CAN ACCUSE THE GAMES INDUSTRY of many things—and people do, just look on the Internet—but never of staying the same. It’s an entertainment medium in constant flux, at once refining popular ideas and embracing bleeding-edge technology that might facilitate new ones. You wouldn’t always know it by the ultra-safe parade of triple-A games that flaunt their stuff at the big shows every year, focus-grouped to within an inch of their lives, but it’s true nonetheless. Last year’s biggest game was a mod based on a mod, which turned into an Early Access phenomenon. PUBG was as non-traditional a path to stardom as it gets, and 2018 promises more surprise hits, more genre-changers coming in from the left field, and even some brave and ambitious titles from the big triple-A studios.…

If you’re concerned about the safety of your Bitcoins, consider setting up a watching wallet. When run in this mode, Electrum displays your current balance and allows you to receive payments, but you can’t spend your coins. This is perfect for installing Electrum on a machine you don’t own, such as one in your college or workplace. Begin by clicking on the “Wallet” menu option, then “Information.” Follow the instructions in step 1 to install Electrum on a new machine. When you come to the “Keystore” screen, choose “Use public or private keys.” Paste the master public key you copied earlier into the box, and click “Next.” Electrum alerts you that this is a watching only wallet, which cannot send payments by itself. Electrum also supports “cold storage” mode. This…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM THE CONCEPT LONG BEFORE this journalist started working for Maximum PC, he was but a meager enthusiast, a humble bumbling varsity student, fawning over expensive hardware, and meticulously planning hypothetical builds at all sorts of budgets and specifications. Outside of the aesthetically pleasing BitFenix Prodigy and Corsair’s Obsidian lineup of cases, the chassis that attracted the most attention originated from the legendary manufacturer Cooler Master, with its Cosmos II being first and foremost in the list of “awesome stuff I’d like to build in.” Tech journalists around the globe waxed lyrical about its brilliance, with its sturdy frame and intuitive design helping retain its glory since conception. When we first witnessed the beauty of the Cosmos II’s new sibling, the C700P,…

LOOKING AT THE CALENDAR on the wall, we realize that Nvidia’s Pascal debuted about two years ago now. It used to be that we could expect some massive changes in that time, but today’s Titan Xp is built off that same original GP100 that first appeared way back in the Tesla P100. That was an insane part, built for machine learning, and the GP100 never showed up in a consumer product (unless you count the $7,499 Quattro GP100). Nvidia has decided to try a new approach with its GV100 core—which sits at the heart of the Tesla V100 and goes after a similar market as the P100—and has released the prosumer and machine learning focused Titan V. Nvidia’s Titan series of graphics cards has always been more about status than…

THESE DAYS, STORAGE is all about solid state. SSDs provide not only by far the fastest performance, they also offer the largest capacities—for a price. Samsung will do you a 30TB 2.5-inch SSD, for instance. Just don’t ask how much it costs. You might prefer to spend the money on a new car. Despite that, there is one application that remains dominated by old-school magnetic hard drives: storage bang for buck. If you want maximum storage density for the minimum possible price, you’ll need some spinning magnetic platters. With that in mind, it’s no surprise to find that conventional hard drive technology marches on despite its relegation to a relatively small niche. A little over a year ago, the biggest mainstream hard drives weighed in at 10TB. Now we’re reviewing…

DATAVAC ED-500 ELECTRIC DUSTER If you haven’t cleaned out your PC’s internals lately—in the past six months at least—stop reading. It’s time for some spring cleaning, so grab your screwdriver, crack open your case, and take it outside for a good internal dusting—and don’t forget your keyboard. But wait, are you using canned air? Not only can that stuff be bad for the environment, but it’s completely unnecessary. There are far better alternatives. I’ve used a small Shop-Vac in the past, but it’s big, noisy, lacks small nozzle attachments, and isn’t nearly as convenient as the DataVac ED-500. Don’t let the diminutive size fool you, as it really blows—it has a 500W motor for just that purpose. Whether it’s blasting dust from your case or removing crumbs and other tasty…

> Color Confusion > Exhausting Issues > System Specifics Living Color I’ve kept all of my Maximum PC magazines since you started publication. When I received my March 2018 edition, however, I noticed something peculiar. Because I stack all my magazines with the spine facing outward, I saw that the March 2018 issue had the same color scheme as the February 2018 one, with just the subtle change of the front cover. Is this the Illuminati confirmed, or did the color picker person lose their creativity? –Kolby Aggramar ART EDITOR (AND CHIEF COLOR PICKER) FRASER MCDE RMOTT RESPONDS: Just like everyone else in the office, I have my issues lined up with their spines showing as well—it’s a timeless system that’s been used for storing magazines and books since… well,…

Sponsored by BUDGET INGREDIENTS YEAH, SCREW YOU, GRAPHICS CARDS, we don’t need you anymore, you’re crappy. Well, not really, but honestly, we’re really fed up with having to deal with the perpetual price increases. Seriously, 2017 saw three million GPUs bought up by those pesky cryptocurrency miners, and as much as we like to get behind new and intuitive ways of making money with technology, GPU scalping simply seems too far below the belt for us to vouch for. All hail our new AMD overlords, then, and in particular the Ryzen 5 2400G. Those Vega cores beating away at the heart of this APU are plenty powerful enough to enjoy a mid-range gaming experience at 1080p. And it’s for that exact reason that we’ve chosen the 2400G as our budget…