Table of contents for Holiday 2015 in Maximum PC

1 AGP 256MB SAPPHIRE RADEON X800 PRO TOXIC (2004) Complete with obnoxious orange air cooling. 2 AGP 256MB PNY GEFORCE FX 5900 ULTRA (2003) Check this out—is that a Molex connector? 3 AGP 8MB ATI 3D RAGE PRO 2X (1997) Features removable memory and a coaxial connector. Sweet 4 128MB HERCULES ATI 3D PROPHET 9700 PRO (2002) This devilish card came complete with overclocking software. 5 MATROX 576-04 REV.A PCI VIDEO CARD (1995) A classic. Comprising a whopping 4MB of memory and the IS-Storm R2 graphics processor. 6 NVIDIA GEFORCE2 GTS ES AGP (2000) This natty Nvidia card sports 64MB of memory over the initially-shipped 32MB. 7 3DFX VOODOO3 2000 (1999) Boasting a whole 16MB of onboard memory, this trusty PCI version could power Quake III Arena.…

Storage isn’t the sexiest topic, we admit, but that doesn’t stop it being important. After all, you need somewhere to put all those lovely programs you use on a daily basis. You need space for all those videos, photos, games, and documents you’ve spent so long working on. So while graphics cards and processors get most of the tech love, there’s something fundamental about storage that ensures it’s a major part of our computing lives, even if it doesn’t tend to set the heart aflutter. Of course, storage solutions have changed quite a bit recently, thanks to the emergence of the SSD. Storage is no longer something that is measured purely in capacity. Performance is now also a factor. On the flip side, reliability has reared its head as well—early…

THERE ARE MOMENTS in a gamer’s life when time itself freezes. Moments when the world stands still as awe-inspiring graphical fiction parades across our screens. When the game world truly comes to life, in ways we could only ever imagine. All it takes is a stunning title and a potent rig. And, thankfully, Origin PC has provided one hell of a solution to bring that concept to life. Welcome, the Millennium. It’s bold, it’s beautiful, and it’s brave. Featuring Intel’s Core i7-6700K Skylake CPU, clocked at a phenomenal 4.8GHz, 16GB of DDR4, and not one but two overclocked Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Tis, it has more than enough processing power for any of today’s most immersive titles. The future of gaming hinges on the success of VR and 4K, and…

WINDOWS TIP OF THE MONTH FIND THE BEST WIRELESS CHANNEL FOR YOU There’s nothing more annoying than getting home, throwing your laptop on to your 75Mbps Wi-Fi, and achieving a connection comparable to dial-up. A quick way to alleviate this is to move your router across to another wireless channel. To get a glimpse of which channels are busiest, go to http://bit.ly/WiFiAn, and download Acrylic’s WiFi analyzer. This will reveal which channel is least occupied—move across accordingly. ZAK STOREY STAFF WRITER WIN 10 STILL CLUNKY? Do you remember Windows 7? How nice it was booting up for the first time and having that slimline interface? No awful tiles, or confusingly located power options? Those were the days. Although Windows 10 has taken the best of that world and merged it…

1. ARC WELDER This Chrome extension allows Android apps to run in the browser window, but don’t expect to head over to the Play Store and start loading up on games. It’s aimed at those who develop their own apps, and have them available as an APK or ZIP file. It only supports one app at a time, and is a tiny bit buggy too. 2. BLUESTACKS Very similar to AMIDuOS, Bluestacks comes with more apps installed by default but is slightly more annoying to run, as it constantly bugs you for $2 a month, or to install apps promoted by its partners. The focus is on running Android games, and the program acts more like a simple app launcher than a full-fledged operating system. 3. VISUAL STUDIO EMULATOR FOR…

NEVER MIND THE SMALL SIZE; M.2 drives have the potential to deliver a ton of performance in a compact form factor. This makes them ideal for Ultrabooks and thin and light laptops, and desktop motherboards are getting in on the action as well. With SATA topping out at a theoretical 6Gbps, PCIe is the way forward, and M.2 leverages the PCIe bus to deliver up to 32Gbps. Add in support for NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express), an optimized protocol designed to let SSDs reach their full potential, and this looks like the way of the future. So what’s the problem? Until now, finding retail M.2 NVMe drives has been difficult and expensive. Samsung was the first to offer an M.2 PCIe SSD with its XP941, and it followed that with the…

MSI’S Z170A GAMING series has impressed us. It’s a solid lineup, boasting a variety of feature-rich gaming motherboards at a fairly sensible range of prices. The M9 ACK sits at the top end of this spectrum, but can it possibly warrant such a high price tag? Well, that’s what we’re here to find out. Let’s start with the M9’s biggest selling point, namely its audio. Undeniably stunning, the M9 ACK features multiple headphone amplifiers, a high quality audio processor, and insane audio capacitors, all rounded off with a nice chunk of highspec EMI shielding. The sound quality is beautiful. If you’ve ever thought your headphones are too quiet, this board will quickly jump to the rescue. On top of that, MSI has collaborated with Nahimic to provide an audio enhancing…

WHEN IT COMES to mobile, Microsoft is a little like Rocky Balboa. The company has taken some hearty blows from heavyweight contenders such as Android and iOS, and even BlackBerry, a former champ that now finds itself on the ropes. But given Microsoft’s size and persistence, it’s proven a tough opponent to actually knock out. Even now, against all odds and swinging a meager 3 percent share of the smartphone market, Microsoft is back on its feet and looking as though it could be a contender again. Maybe not for the title, but at least for a bigger purse. That’s really the goal at this point. By the time you read this, Microsoft will have launched (or soon will) its new flagship Lumia devices, the 950 and 950 XL, both…

We’ve all heard the rumors of gaming directly from the cloud, and with the advantages that cloud storage and processing have brought recently, Nvidia believes it’s about time that those whispers became a reality. We spoke with Sridhar Ramaswamy, Nvidia’s director of Technical Product Marketing, to see what makes the Shield so special. Maximum PC: Can you tell us exactly what we’re looking at here with the Nvidia Shield? Sridhar Ramaswamy: Sure, Shield is the most powerful streaming box in the marketplace. Powered by our Tegra X1 processor, which brings really high-end graphics processing capabilities to the streaming box market, we really designed Shield so that you can enjoy an interesting pool of apps all at 4K 60fps—it brings amazing gaming experiences to the living room. You don’t just play…

Once upon a time, there was just one simple solution when it came to computer storage. The everreliable, infallible spinning hard drive. That signature sound of those platters whirring into life undoubtedly roused the spirit of many a gamer, knowing that within mere tens of minutes they would be sitting comfortably, ready to load their favorite 32-bit game. It was a technology that, although archaic by today’s standards, developed exponentially for its time. First there was IDE, then there was SATA, then the second generation of SATA, and finally SATA revision 3.0, the pinnacle of SATA technology. An interconnect designed and developed to help support and provide compatibility for all future storage devices and drivers, for the next generation of HDD devices. But something happened, an event that would shape…

No one expected that the dominant game of the early 21st century would be a retro exploration game from a shy, obscure Swedish developer. But then, Minecraft surprises everyone who plays it. You start in on it, and it seems a bucolic little world you’ve dropped into. It’s a joy to run around punching animals and trees for a couple of hours, and marveling at all the stuff you’re collecting. Then the sun starts to set. And it seems very, very dark without it. If you’re a big wuss, you’ll crank up the gamma on your screen, but that doesn’t help much when the daytime farmyard noises give way to creepier sounds. Distant hisses and groans can be heard all around you. You can see things moving between the trees,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS MINECRAFT ACCOUNT You need a legitimate account— version 1.7.10. WINDOWS OS Whatever version of Windows you’re running, it needs to be on a powerful gaming PC. POSSIBLY ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR GAMES of all time, Minecraft has provided a platform to make all sorts of weird and wonderful constructions. However, in comparison to some games power users play today, it seriously lacks graphical fidelity. Vanilla Minecraft, even with the most high of high-resolution texture packs, is hardly comparable to any modern graphical wonder. Until now. You’ve probably seen shader and light packs in Skyrim, Witcher, even GTA, but have you seen them in Minecraft? It’s a game that can benefit the most from an increase in graphical fidelity. After all, when your entire game consists of…

FOR THE PAST YEAR, the fastest notebook GPU has been the GTX 980M. With AMD and Nvidia both stuck on the 28nm process node for 2015, most didn’t expect to see any significant changes until 2016. Shoehorning a mobile version of GM200 into a notebook seemed unlikely, as the 980M isn’t even using a fully enabled GM204, and yet it still runs into the 100W TDP limit of mobile GPUs. Faced with such an obstacle, Nvidia decided to change the game and release a notebook version of the desktop GTX 980, using a fully enabled GM204 chip. How has this been accomplished? Simple: The TDP for the notebook GTX 980 is quite a bit higher than the previous 100W target. Nvidia won’t disclose precisely how much higher, but we estimate…

IF YOU’VE SPENT any amount of time around the depths of the custom water-cooling world, you’ll have come across one name in particular—EK Water Blocks. Along with Bitspower, EK is one of the most popular water-cooling componentry firms globally. And for good reason. Providing top-notch cooling capacity and an aesthetic design style so clean you could eat your dinner off of it, it’s easy to stick with EKWB throughout any of your water-cooling projects. That being said, not everyone is into water-cooling an entire system. Despite that, however, offloading our woes into an all- in-one closed-loop cooler has become undeniably popular. So let’s leave the worry and the warranty to companies such as Corsair, NZXT and Thermaltake, all of which provide some very impressive and easy-to-install cooling solutions. Indeed, it’s…

IF YOU WERE TO ASK us about gaming headsets, we wouldn’t be able to give you a definitive answer as to what they really are. Essentially, they’re just headphones with a mic attached, and usually, it’s a pretty bad mic at that. Instead, what we tend to do is focus on getting a really good set of headphones. When it comes down to it, the auditory part of a game is just as crucial as what you see on the screen. In some cases, it could be even more important. Gaming aside, we want headphones to perform exceptionally well with a variety of other content, too, such as music and movies. For these purposes, we’ve yet to find any gaming headsets that are fully up to the task. Which is…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI 2 The brilliant mini-computer costs under $45. See www.raspberrypi.org. USB PORTABLE DISK Ideally a self-powered disk that doesn’t draw power from the Raspberry Pi. MANY OF THOSE SET-TOP BOXES hidden under televisions are already running Linux. And despite their lack of CPU power, they’re all more than capable of recording and playing several channels at the same time, as well as streaming the data across your local network. The Raspberry Pi is perfectly suited to this, too, and with the appropriate hardware it can be turned into a powerful low-cost digital video recorder, complete with media streaming, scheduling and time shift. The appropriate hardware is the key phrase in the previous paragraph, because a painless installation is mostly dependent on your television-grabbing hardware ‘just working’.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 7 OR NEWER HDD or SSD with additional unused space, AMIDuOS, and Google account. THERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH A PC that may not serve a great deal of practical use, but are just satisfying to do. Guest operating systems and virtual machines come under this header for most people—although there are serious applications of the technology for those developing phone or tablet apps and looking for a safe environment to test them in. AMIDuOS is one such thing. It’s a paid-for app ($10) that comes with a 30-day free trial, and it simply runs an Android session as a desktop app on your PC. You interact with the app just as you would with your phone, tapping and sliding your way across…

IF THERE WAS EVER a switch that’s made us go “holy macaroni!,” it’s this one. Razer has deviated from its traditional choice of Cherry key switches and instead gone with its own custom-designed mechanical switch—a switch that you’ll currently find in all the mechanical keyboards in its range. It provides a highly responsive, soft, tactile typing experience that’s ideal for gamers and typists alike. Admittedly, this isn’t the quietest key on the market, as it still retains the signature click of a mechanical switch. But, honestly, the pleasure your fingers are going to feel from these little things is second to none. It has a higher actuation point when compared to Cherry’s world famous red switch, yet it’s still more responsive than the blue while retaining that tactile click. This…

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, a new dawn is upon us. G-SYNC laptops are coming thick and fast, so it’s with great pleasure that we introduce the Aorus X7-Pro Sync. Unearthed from the heart of Gigabyte’s notorious Aorus factories, comes this marvelous wonder of a tiny gaming powerhouse. Arguably the noisiest dual-GPU laptop ever witnessed, the X7 packs two Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M processors alongside an Intel Core i7-5850HQ, 16GB of DDR3L RAM, and a RAID 0 setup. This is the kind of laptop dreams are made of. Let’s start with the good. The design of the Aorus is stunning. It’s clean, it’s sharp, and it’s low. All traits we normally see from the Ultrabook side of the divide, as opposed to the pro-gamer. That being said, the Aorus is a total…

LET’S GET ONE THING out of the way first: this is not Fury Road: The Game. And that’s a shame, because if there’s one thing this desert wasteland needs, it’s lunatics with guitars strapped to the front of lorries, or convoys of motivated female characters. What you do get is movie bad guy Immortan Joe’s son, Scabrous Scrotus, who wasn’t hugged enough when he was younger, and a whole lot of War Boys looking like Moby wearing Marcus Fenix’s pants. Taking a little of Assassin’s Creed, a chunk of Shadow of Mordor, and a sprinkling of Arkham City, Mad Max sets you loose in an open desert world on a quest to get your car back. Because if one thing can be guaranteed to survive the end of the world,…

WE TACKLE TOUGH READER QUESTIONS ON... > First Build > Drivers For Windows 10 > Media Center PCs First Timer I thought I might try to build my own computer. I’m reasonably competent, with programming skills, tools, and boxes of spare parts. My only hesitancy is what to do if it doesn’t work after I put all the parts together. Who do people call when the computer has been put together from off-theshelf parts with no one responsible for the whole? —Bob Tamarin SENIOR EDITOR JARRED WALTON RESPONDS: Hi, Bob. Many people are hesitant for the same reason, but there’s no way to get over it other than to dive right in. Should you find problems, the standard troubleshooting steps consist of checking all connections, reseating the memory and add-in…