Table of contents for September 2017 in Maximum PC

Mini-ITX vs. ATX One of the attractions of PCs is that they come in all shapes and sizes, and you can build whatever system you want. Some love a full ATX system, while others only ever consider a compact Mini-ITX build. While there have been plenty of form factors over the years, there are four common ones these days: ATX, Mini-ITX, microATX, and Extended ATX (something of a niche). Of these, the battle generally comes down to a choice between ATX and Mini-ITX, but what are their benefits? Which should you use for your next build? Allow us to help. ROUND 1 Performance The general perception for a long time was that if you wanted serious performance, you needed a full-sized motherboard and a sizeable full-tower case to put it…

We all want our PCs to run faster, but that doesn’t simply involve fitting a new processor, doubling the amount of RAM, or tweaking system settings in an effort to boost Windows’ raw speed. It also involves reappraising the way you use your PC, finding new shortcuts, and basically forcing yourself to work in a more efficient way. There are dozens of hidden tips and shortcuts that can revolutionize the way you interact with both Windows and your favorite programs, saving you a huge amount of time in a relatively short period. How much time can you save? Taken in isolation, each tip we reveal will probably shave a few seconds off here and there, but when you start using them regularly, things soon start to add up. Imagine: One…

TIP OF THE MONTH FLAWLESS WIDESCREEN Running 21:9 or multiple monitors? Fed up with games not supporting the glory of 2560x1080 or 3440x1440? Tired of going into game config files to set the resolution to your new super-monitor? Then Flawless Widescreen is your jam. With a ton of plugins to automatically fix any resolution woes, this app makes using the niche aspect ratio a dream. It’s freeware, so feel free to try it and donate at www.flawlesswidescreen.org. MAKE – USE – CREATE 60 Set up the perfect OwnCloud server for backup or sync 66 Use MediaWiki to create your own Raspberry Pi wiki 72 Discover how we built this year’s Dream Machine ZAK STOREY REVIEWS EDITOR MIGHTY MONITOR ARM I love my man corner, but it could do with a…

There are mobile apps for iOS (99 cents), Blackberry (free), and Android (99 cents). Again, connect using your server address, username, and password. The app makes it easy to access your files on the go—you can view photos, stream video, and download files to your mobile storage. Go into Settings, and you can also automatically upload photos and video to your OwnCloud storage, too, plus set a PIN passcode to further protect your data. You can also upload other files to OwnCloud from other mobile apps by looking for the option to send or share the file via another app—select “OwnCloud” from the list (if it’s not present, scroll right, and tap “More,” then flick the slider next to “OwnCloud” to “On”). From here, tap “Location” at the bottom of…

No, we’re not joking. Having too many frames per second is admittedly extremely rare when you’re relying on an integrated graphics solution to do all the heavy lifting in your games, but there are cases when setting a limiter makes sense. Laptop battery life can be extended massively, for example, by capping the frame rate. If you’re getting performance in the mid-40s anyway, a 30fps cap doesn’t adversely affect your experience, but does gain you lots more unplugged time. The bad news: It’s harder to find a program to limit frames on Intel graphics. Turning vsync on in the Graphics Control Panel is the simplest solution, but for more control, your unlikely salvation comes from Bandicam’s screen capture software. Most capture apps h ave a frame cap while recording, but…

YOU’LL NEED THIS Photoshop Subscribe to a package at www.adobe.com/photoshop. Perspective Warp was one of the new features in Photoshop CC that passed many people by. It seems complicated, brings back memories of the terrifying 3D interface, and requires a bit of preparation work before you see results. In reality, it’s a much easier process than using Photoshop’s 3D tools, and as long as you follow the setup procedure, it’s quite simple to get something that looks good. Perspective is the relationship between objects in an image, and can usually only be changed by moving the camera and taking another picture. Even changing the lens you’re using doesn’t affect it, although focal length may alter the perceived distance between objects as they recede into the background, with a telephoto lens…

When is a laptop not a laptop? When it’s a convertible. It’s not a great joke, and it isn’t much of a differentiator in real terms either, but it’s enough for HP to take on the road. While you can achieve some cleverness thanks to the extra flexibility of the screen hinge, you’ll either use it as a laptop or as a tablet (on steroids). HP claims it actually has five modes, with “presentation,” “media,” and “conference” rounding things out, but you’ll rarely (i.e. never) use these, even in an office environment. Don’t completely dismiss its overly athletic flexibility, though, because there’s a lot to love in this svelte and versatile system. Just to return to the convertible concept a second, they’re pretty hard to sell, so we’ll forgive HP…

WE HAVE SPAT so much bile about the trend for adulterating mundane hardware with extra buttons, switches, lights, and other pointless frippery in these pages that you might presume there’s a Maximum PCwide stance on such things. There is not. The team is torn. Some love a pretty thing; others would rather functionality took precedence. The Pulsefire FPS seems determined to either further divide or finally unite our two camps—HyperX’s scientists must have toiled hard in the hardware labs to find a formula for the most middle-ground mouse possible. First of all, purists rejoice: It’s visually subtle, neither overdoing the pizzazz nor shaped like an art project that’s been left too close to a space heater. Yet even the grumpiest among us must admit there’s a certain sexy charm to…

The tree loves us, we’re fairly certain. Its messages about trade agreements and our role in maintaining cosmic harmony certainly look affectionate. We don’t think a race of sentient plants could be warlike liars, but there’s a small chance they just see us as a future source of compost. The affable arboreal astronauts are just one of Endless Space 2’s races, along with entrail-obsessed cyborgs, perky Grays, and humans. We’re deep in 4X territory here, pushing the boundaries of the genre set up by Civilization, and discovering light years of room for expansion beyond them. Pushing your boundaries is what the game’s all about, be they the literal borders of your empire, or the scientific limits that will allow you to explore new areas of the map, exploit resources, and…

Have you tried buying a h ighend graphics card recently? Almost everything above budget is in short supply. Manufacturing hasn’t been interrupted, but there has been a massive spike in sales, and the culprits are cryptocurrency miners. It is economically viable to use consumer hardware to mine coins again, and speculators have snapped up stocks of the best cards to do it. Mining cryptocurrencies involves a huge amount of convoluted math, and GPUs are well suited to the task, the Radeon Polaris GPU in particular. Supplies of these were soon exhausted, so the miners turned to Nvidia Pascalbased cards—not as effective, but efficient enough. Some high-end Pascal cards aren’t compatible with the mining software and are still to be had, but otherwise you’re out of luck. Meanwhile, there’s been a…

> Processor Pairs > 4K Foray > Ryzen Hopes Doubling Up Hi Doc, I recently found out that you can have two CPUs instead of one. However, I don’t really understand why you’d need a pair of processors. Is it for Bitcoin mining? Gaming? Can you please explain what a dual- CPU configuration would be good for? –Nikita Plutenko THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: Today’s desktop CPUs include anything from two to 10 cores. Technologies such as Hyper- Threading double the number of processes that each of those cores can schedule, allowing a lot of computation to happen in parallel. Adding cores/threads helps maintain a smooth experience when you have many programs running concurrently—otherwise known as multitasking. Or, it improves performance in individual applications optimized to exploit host processing resources. processing resources.…

Extend your application Jump Lists with Jumplist Extender (https://code.google.com/archive/p/jumpl ist-extender)— despite its age, this open-source tool works perfectly with Windows 10. Simply select your program, then create app-related tasks you can add to the list of options that appear in the program’s Jump List. The best news? Jumplist Extender edits the Registry to create and edit your Jump Lists, so it doesn’t need to be running for them to work. For example, launch the program, and choose “Start a new jump list.” Type “snipping” into the “Search Programs” bar, and select the Snipping Tool. Click “Open” followed by “Run Snipping Tool” to launch the program. When it loads, click the Snipping Tool window to select it, then click “OK” in the Jumplist Extender window. Type “Rectangular snip’” into the “Name”…

A new generation, a new socket—that inevitably means new motherboards. And this generation is no different. Each time we get a new architecture, a new chipset, we see refined iterations of the brands and models we love. Whether it’s Asus’s prestigious ROG Hero and TUF Sabertooth motherboards, or MSI’s ACK and EVGA’s Classified series, there’s always some new feature ready to be baked into a fresh design. It’s arguably one of the best parts of the modern tech industry. Not great for those looking for a cheap and easy upgrade, but for anyone building a fresh system, it ensures you’re getting the very latest and greatest tech possible. X299 has been one of the more controversial releases from Intel, but the boards that have come along with it have been…

BACKGROUND: Teardown is the word of the day, and we’re diving into Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop right now. Will this carpeted Alcantara-clad laptop excel in our teardown room? The power is in our hands. MAJOR TECH SPECS: • 13.5-inch IPS PixelSense display, 2256×1504 resolution (201 ppi) • Intel Kaby Lake Core i5 (3M Cache, up to 3.1GHz), or Core i7 (4M Cache, 4.0GHz) CPU • 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB RAM • 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB PCIe SSD storage • 720p front-facing camera with Windows Hello sign-in • USB 3.0, Mini DisplayPort, and SurfaceConnect charging port • 802.11ac Wi-Fi, IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n compatible, Bluetooth 4.0 KEY FINDINGS: • We take a peek under the suspicious rubber footpads on the bottom of the laptop, but find metal feet instead of the screws…

We strongly recommend you force OwnCloud to use a secure SSL-encrypted connection to improve privacy, even when transmitting over your own network. To do this, you need to add an SSL certificate to your NAS or server—a guide to doing this manually can be found at https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/certificates-and-security.html. Any decent NAS should offer a simpler option, though— for example, QNAP users who set up DDNS through myQNAPcloud should open the app and select the “SSL Certificate” tab. From here, you can either purchase an SSL certificate from QNAP (www.myqnapcloud.com—$45 for three years), or choose the free option from Let’s Encrypt. QNAP users using their own DDNS address should instead open the Control Panel and navigate to “Security > Certificate & Private Key,” where you can create and use a free certificate…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A RASPBERRY Pi Any model of Pi should work, from the first edition up. RASPBIAN Find everything you need at www.raspberrypi.org/ downloads/raspbian/. The Raspberr y Pi is perfect for a vast number of single-serving uses, and it’s cheap enough and light enough on power usage that you can reasonably keep one running at all times. What we’re doing here is more of a secondary purpose; it doesn’t matter what you’ve got your Pi doing day-today, because having it host a web page or two, or serve as a base for your HTML experiments, barely taxes the little board at all. Our aim is actually twofold: to install a LAMP bundle—Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP—to give us everything we need to run and serve web applications, and then to…

Bleeding-edge GPUs have been coming thick and fast from Nvidia of late. This new Titan Xp board, for instance, finds itself among a family of at least three other seriously high performance graphics cards based on Nvidia’s smash hit Pascal family of GPUs. We’ve had the GeForce GTX 1080 and its GTX 1080 Ti sibling, as well as the Titan X. Admittedly, only two of those are based on the bad boy GP102 graphics chip that sits supreme in the Pascal GPU lineup. But the point is that Nvidia has been cranking out big-money boards at a frightening rate over the last year or so. That’s not going to change any time soon, what with Nvidia recently giving a sneak peak of an early board based on its upcoming Volta…

YOU’LL EITHER LOVE the mesh design o f Logitech’s new surround sound cans, or you won’t. They’re certainly a striking pair of closed-cup headphones in any of the four available colors. Our test sample came in “triple black,” and while it’s true that Logitech’s sports mesh design does help to keep the weight down to just 9.14oz, we didn’t notice that they were especially breathable. More noticeable is the G433’s tendency to collect and display dust in all those hard-to-reach dimples. Also included are a color-matched carry case and an alternative set of ear pads with a tighter weave, but they, too, have an unorthodox finish. Think faux chamois. They’re slightly more comfortable against the ears, and a bit easier to keep clean. But this isn’t Good Housekeeping magazine, and…

In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity. In the convoluted world of transistors and nanometers, battles are being fought, as Intel and AMD vie for your hard-earned cash. The core count is rising, and we’re currently seeing the landscape change at an incomprehensible rate. Soon, 16- and 18-core parts will become the weapons of choice for anyone looking to build such a ludicrously bank-breaking system as this. For now, though, the heady heights of 32 threads are nothing more than a fevered dream, hidden from consumers until their grand masters see fit to release them upon the computational world. But Dream Machine doth wait for no man. It’s the culmination of a year’s worth of technological development, and the machine we build now, one of the most powerful…

The old “Start > Run” dialog may not be shown by default on the Start menu anymore, but it’s still there (press Win-R), and it’s as useful as ever. The more you use it, the better it becomes, because autocomplete kicks in, while typing paths is also quick, because all available sub-folders pop up as you type, helping you to locate and travel through your filesystem that little bit quicker. Let’s start with a Windows 10-only tip. The new Settings menu can be labyrinthine to navigate, but the Run dialog gives you access to any section with the following syntax: “ms-settings:shortcut” You need to replace “shortcut” with your choice of location, such as “mssettings: windowsupdate,” “ms settings: lockscreen,” or “mssettings: display.” The Run dialog also speeds up access to the…

We’ve relied on end-to-end streaming for longer than we’ve relied on computers. Where would society be without the influence of radio or cable TV? Would we be quite the same if Major General George O Squier hadn’t developed Muzak’s earliest tech, a 1930s system of sending inoffensive music along electrical wires directly to elevators and stores? Well, probably. We might even be slightly more sane. But that’s not the point: Streaming has long been hugely important, and the Internet has completely democratized it. You’re now free to send whatever you want wherever you want. You can push data, making it available to anyone who wants it, or pull streams, just for you, from a private source. You can work with audio, video, live cameras, or any other data that suits. You…

You’ll need this Com patible NAS with OwnCloud server For example, Western Digital Live, Synology, or QNAP. Li nux-based server Plus, OwnCloud desktop and mobile clients. CLOUD BACKUP AND SYNC is a brilliant way to ensure your data is both protected and available on all your devices. But you may have good reason not to want a third-party provider to look after your data—perhaps the cost is too great, you don’t trust their encryption methods, or you’d rather restrict synchronization to your own network. The solution to having your cloud-based cake and eating it is OwnCloud. OwnCloud works in exactly the same way as most cloud sync providers, but your data is stored locally, so the only limit is the size of your server’s hard drive. It’s also restricted to…

YOU’LL NEED THIS NVIDIA INSPECTOR Tweaking suite from http://download. orbmu2k.de/download.php?id=51. RADEON SOFTWARE AMD’s own driver/utility suite. MSI AFTERBURNER Download the best frame counter in the business from www.msi.com/page/afterburner. Counterintuitive as it may seem to the PC enthusiast, sometimes your frame rate is too high. It might be that your fondly remembered classic game is running like a VHS tape stuck on fast forward, because it was never designed to run on those four GTX 1080s you plumped for. It may be that you’re getting a variable frame rate in a game that doesn’t offer its own limiter or vsync option, and you’re sick of the stutter, even above 60fps. Or, after several alarmingly high electricity bills and considerable hearing loss from listening to your red-hot GPU whine and blow a…

Editing a wiki is simplicity itself, using a very straightforward markup language. Log in to your wiki with the credentials we set in step five, then click the “Edit” link, and type away, using the string of buttons at the top of the editing box to format text appropriately, or add links to images or files—upload these using the link in the left column. If you want to create a new wiki page, make a link to it by surrounding some text with [[double square brackets]], save your edit, and click the new red link to start editing it. There are, of course, a bunch of slightly more complex ways to organize your pages, and the default main page includes a link to MediaWiki’s own site, explaining many of these.…

For the past six months, we’ve spent time with more than a dozen machines— benchmarking, playing games, and generally working—to determine the best gaming laptop. What stuck out more than anything is that gaming laptops are thinner and lighter than ever. Thanks in a large part to Nvidia’s Pascal architecture (the GTX 10-series GPUs), which offers excellent performance at lower temperatures than generations past, the latest crop of gaming laptops offer superb power in a shell that’s thin and light, free from huge, bulky fans. At Computex this year, Nvidia revealed its new “Max-Q” design philosophy. In short, Max-Q is centered around finding the right balance between power and efficiency, in order to put high-performance graphics cards into the thinnest notebooks possible. Asus’s ROG Zephyrus is the first Max-Q laptop…

>Ryzen vs. Intel >Home Networking >Creators Update Comparing Cars I know this is Maximum PC, but why use a Core i7-6950x processor costing $1,600 when an i7-7700k at $300 would be a much fairer comparison with Ryzen in both performance and cost. I’m a long-time subscriber, but this build-off makes Ryzen seem like it is the affordable performance option, when it is not. The i7- 7700k is as fast at stock, and can comfortably overclock to 5GHz. Most comparison sites have the i7-7700k 9 percent faster than Ryzen, so it doesn’t seem like there’s a reason to compare a Ferrari with a Mustang, when a Camaro would be fairer. I think a rematch is in order: Ryzen versus Intel i7-7700k, and let the readers decide which makes more cents (pun…