Table of contents for May 2016 in Maximum PC

Getting Into Safe Mode Hello Doc, in a fairly recent issue, you described how to access the Windows 10 boot menu for entering Safe Mode. Would it be possible for you to send me the directions? I know it had something to do with pressing the Shift or Alt key before or during the reboot process, but I can’t remember the exact instructions, nor can I find that issue. Please assist with this one! –Carl Smith THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: There are a few ways to get into Safe Mode. The one you’re probably referring to involves opening the “Start” menu, clicking “Power,” and then selecting “Restart” with the Shift key held down. Your PC should then reboot to a screen that asks you to choose an option: “Continue,” “Troubleshoot,” or…

WE DON’T UNDERSTAND ASRock’s naming scheme. Fatal one ty? What’s that? Well, it’s a brand that’s proudly paraded as the gamer’s motherboard of choice from this particular company. But how does it compare with the world of Skylake, particularly with the B150 chipset? You’ll notice that this model is backward compatible with the aging yet dependable DDR3 standard. Of course, if you choose that path, you’ll lose out on the additional bandwidth, lower voltages, and higher capacities of DDR4. That choice aside, this motherboard’s a little too thin on features. There’s a total of six SATA 6Gb/s ports, support for DDR3 at 1,866MT/s, Killer LAN, and a fancy audio solution, but that’s about it. In fact, the PCB appears to be a stripped-down version of the B150’s more sophisticated Z170…

2016 IS THE YEAR of the ITX chassis. Just take this motherboard—there’s no reason why you couldn’t throw in a Core i7 clocked at 5GHz, 32GB of 3,000MT/s DDR4, AMD’s R9 Fury X, a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB, and a separate RAID 0 array. Enough said. So, what does this 6.7-inch square provide? You’ve got the standard 8-pin and 24-pin power, a solid overclocking VRM solution, support for DDR4 at 4,000MT/s, four SATA 6Gb/s ports, one SATA Express port, dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1, and a full complement of premium audio capacitors, DAC, and headphone amplifier. The most interesting part of this tiny mobo, however, is the M.2 slot. Space is always going to be a precious commodity for an ITX system, and ultimately something has to give—usually, it’s M.2.…

LOOK AT THAT WHITE REAR I/O cover. Go on, take a peek. It’s stunning. We mentioned earlier how Gigabyte is breaking the mold with its new board designs, and nowhere is this more apparent than with the Gaming 7. The white rear I/O cover draws your attention faster than Kanye West can make a fool out of himself. And wow—does it look good. What else is interesting about the GA-Z170X-Gaming 7? Beside the dual PCIe x4 M.2 slots, Thunderbolt 3 support, upgradeable OP-AMPs, noise-canceling power design, integrated HDMI 2.0—that spec AMD doesn’t yet support on its current GPUs—dual networking solutions, and the elegant RGB lighting embedded into the rear I/O cover? Well, it does support DDR4—that’s pretty cool, right? The number of features here is nigh-on incredible. As usual, our…

THE MAXIMUS EXTREME lineup has always revolved around one particular pastime: overclocking. If you look at the number of records broken by that fabled name, you’ll realize there’s more to these boards than mere marketing propaganda. The Maximus VIII Extreme has already broken six world records in overclocking competitions. This is a motherboard designed to push Skylake to the limit. We’re talking overclocks well above the 6GHz mark. But not everyone has a processor (or a cooling solution) capable of such high frequencies. So does that make this board useless for anyone else? Not entirely. For the money, you get eight SATA 6Gb/s ports, two SATA Express ports, one M.2 slot, one of Intel’s prestigious U.2 ports, support for DDR4 up to 3,866MT/s, and no fewer than four PCIe 3.0…

1 BYPASS MICROSOFT UPDATE Microsoft Update may contain plenty of drivers, but they tend to be conservative in nature. You’ll want to download graphics and chipset drivers direct from your manufacturer if any are provided, or you could take the lazy option and use a tool such as IObit Driver Booster Free (www.iobit.com) to automate the process for you, plus uncover updates for more obscure drivers. Just make sure you deselect the relevant option during setup to avoid installing the full Advanced SystemCare suite. 2 FIND OLDER DRIVERS If you’ve got older hardware, you may find Windows 10 doesn’t provide driver support. Don’t panic, though—if you upgraded from an older version of Windows, your old drivers should work fine. If you’ve installed from scratch, you should get away with Windows…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY Pi 2 The brilliant mini-computer costs under $45. See www.raspberrypi.org. DO YOU USE YOUR RASPBERRY PI for a headless project, such as a media player, NAS server, seed box, or security camera? If you do, then your Raspberry Pi is probably tucked out of the way somewhere that’s not particularly easy to access. You can always log in to it remotely but how do you monitor it in real time? How do you know whether it’s overheating? Or running out of disk space? In this project, we’re going to play God and make your Raspberry Pi self-aware, and give it the ability to communicate with you. 1 REGISTER AN XMPP ACCOUNT We need to install the sendxmpp tool on the Raspberry Pi [Image A], which allows…

ONE DAY in the distant future (well, about five years from now), we’ll look back at LCD monitors with both wonder and horror. Just as it now seems odd to think passenger jets were once full of people puffing away on cigarettes, soon the notion of shining light though millions of tiny shutters will be ridiculous. What were they thinking? But that day will also give us the perspective to identify the pinnacle of LCD technology. Peak LCD, you could call it. And the Asus ROG Swift PG348Q might be it. The point is that LCD is a dumb idea for a full-color digital display. Remember, it’s a grid of microscopic shutters that attempts, imperfectly, to control the transmission of light from a rear-firing backlight. There is always some leakage.…

UBISOFT HAS MADE its game again. Publishers, and possibly players, love a franchise, and this installment of the openworld slaughter-’em-up takes us back 9,000 years before the invention of gunpowder, and 6,500 years before the wheel, for a Stone Age Far Cry without guns or vehicles. When Blood Dragon followed Far Cry 3, it retailed for a budget price; this is a full release not tied to Far Cry 4, yet it shares a great deal with that game, showing that any time period can be stretched across its framework like skins at a tannery, only without the smell of urine—although you might catch your pet wolf disrespectfully relieving itself on the corpse of an enemy. Animal taming is the big feature of Primal. Protagonist Takkar is trying to rebuild…

SSD Form Factors Triple-Screen Gaming Internet Saves Pump Up My Storage! Is there any way we can get drive manufacturers to think outside the (2.5-inch) box? Twenty years ago, HDDs came in two flavors: 3.5-inch for desktops and 2.5-inch for laptops. Five years ago, when SSDs started to become popular, it was still pretty much 3.5-inch for desktops and 2.5-inch for laptops. Even laptop HDDs barely hit 1TB, but a desktop was 2TB going on 3. My desktop case has two 2.5-inch slots and six 3.5-inch, so to install more than two SSDs, I must use an adapter. Why can’t the drive manufacturers make an SSD in the 3.5-inch form factor? It would fit three or even four times the memory. Instead of shrinking components to fit more inside a…

“Apple sees the creation of a back door, or master key of sorts, as a slippery slope. THE BIGGEST tech story of the year is likely to be Apple’s hardline opposition to a court order that it assist the FBI with hacking an iPhone. Not just any iPhone, mind you, but the one that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters in a massacre that left 14 people dead and several others injured. The FBI used a statute that’s over two centuries old, called the All Writs Act, to compel a federal court to force Apple to provide “reasonable technical assistance” to bypass certain security measures. Specifically, the FBI wants Apple to update the killer’s iPhone with a stripped version of iOS that would allow the agency to guess…

MOTHERBOARDS ON TEST The motherboard may not be the sexiest of components, but it's the part of your PC that you build your system around. It dictates more about the rest of your rig than anything else, so making the right decision about your motherboard is arguably the most important choice you make when building or upgrading. With Intel's latest 6th Generation Core processors, code-named Skylake, we’ve shifted from the 9-series motherboards of Haswell and Broadwell, to the new 100-series. And that’s partly because we’re also talking about a whole new socket design—a move from the previous LGA 1150 socket to the new LGA 1151 design. Yeah, a whole extra pin. But the new 100-series boards offer more than a subtle new socket design; there are important new features across…

THIS IS HOW B150 should be put together. A clean, slick, black-and-red gaming motherboard, with just enough bells and whistles to keep you happy. No doubt you’re still going to lose out compared to the likes of the Tomahawk and its Z170 chipset, but if you’re putting together an entry-level gaming PC, this may well be your best bet. For $110, you get two PCIe 3.0 16x slots, support for up to 64GB of DDR4 at a maximum of 2,800MT/s, six SATA 6Gb/s, one SATA Express port, and one M.2 slot, although not of the PCIe x4 variety, so no super-fast speeds for you. On top of that, you get a separate PCB for audio, Killer Gigabit LAN, plenty of USB 3.0 ports, and the heady software package that comes…

AT $220, WE START to enter territory inhabited by additional features and aesthetic choices that really do make you go, “Ooooh!” The M7 is a prime example. One of the first MSI boards to feature a full rear I/O cover, it is a stunning example of black and red done right. The metallic finish across the heatsinks gives the board just enough pop to stand out. But that’s not all this beastie can muster. You have access to six SATA 6Gb/s ports, two SATA Express, two M.2 slots (but no RAID 0), three PCIe 16x slots, protected by the ever-popular steel reinforced brackets, and full support for DDR4 up to 3,600MT/s, if extra-voltage DDR4 is your thing. Fortunately, there’s no garish RGB lighting, and the audio solution is quite the…

AS YOU CAN PROBABLY TELL by our extensive benchmarks table, the variance in performance between these mighty mobos was almost non-existent. Don’t get us wrong—it’s still there, and you can notice it in places, but at most it only ever amounted to 3 or 4 percent. In reality, you’re just not going to notice a difference that small outside of benchmarking or particularly lengthy simulations, at which point, these kinds of motherboards just wouldn’t even be considered. So what are the criteria that really differentiate a winner from the rest here? Well, it’s all down to feature set, ease of use, and style, with feature set being the more important of the three. After all, what use is a Z170 motherboard if you can’t take advantage of all that the…

12 MAKE SETTINGS MORE ACCESSIBLE Got a favorite tweak you frequently find yourself burrowing into Settings to find? You can create a one-click shortcut to it a number of different ways. First, you can pin it as a tile to the Start menu simply by locating it in Settings, then right-clicking its entry in the left-hand pane, and choosing “Pin to Start.” >> It’s also possible to launch individual settings directly from the “Start > Run” box, or create shortcuts to them on the desktop (right-click the desktop and choose “New > Shortcut”). The format is pretty consistent—for example, “mssettings: display” opens the Display settings, while “ms-settings:network-wifi” goes straight to the Wi-Fi section of “Network & Internet.” You’ll find a full list at https://msdn.microsoft.com/mt228342.aspx. 13 PIN SAVED SEARCHES TO START…

DEALING WITH APPLE’S STORAGE FORMATS You’ve thrown some files on to a memory stick to transfer to a Mac, you insert the stick, try to copy and paste the file across, and… it doesn’t work. Say hello to the plague of exFAT. Apple hasn’t accepted that there might be more than one file format worth recognizing, and if you’re rocking NTFS, you’re out of luck. So throw your USB stick back into Windows, open “My Computer,” right-click the device, select “Format,” choose “exFAT” from the “File System” menu, and click “Quick format.” A LITTLE ITX INTELLIGENCE I’ll be the first to admit, I love trying out different form factors. Over the last five years, I’ve owned, built, and worked on systems ranging from ITX gaming PCs all the way up…

YOU’LL NEED THIS KEEPASSX Store your passwords securely on your machine with this free tool from www.keepassx.org. Wherever you go these days, you need passwords. The number of websites that expect you to provide a username and password to access all their content is even greater than the number of sites providing helpful advice on good and bad practice for passwords. So what are we to do? You should already be using a secure operating system, but any system is only as secure as its users. Passwords are less effective once they are written on pieces of paper stuck to the sides of monitors, or saved in text files. The three questions we will try to answer here are: How should I choose my passwords, how can I check that…

IN ORDER TO GET a respectable amount of power from a gaming laptop, it has to be big and bulky. That’s been accepted as gospel for some time, but now we have notebooks like Digital Storm’s Equinox. Armed with a Core i7-6700HQ and a 970M, the laptop is thin and deftly defies many preconceived notions about gaming notebooks. Weighing just four and a half pounds and measuring 0.78 inches thick, it’s so thin and light that we thought the box was empty when we opened it. To be fair, the box that it shipped in is a little weird, and had some folders and other stuff covering the laptop, but still, that’s pretty crazy. Aesthetically, we like the look of the notebook; it’s simple and clean, and predominately black. It’s…

WIRELESS HEADSETS are both loved and loathed by the PC enthusiast community. Losing the cable is great—it gives you the freedom to move around, and not get tangled up as your sudden bouts of rage take hold while wiping on that particularly annoying raid boss for the 18th time. On the other hand, they’re battery-dependent, the quality and comfort can be lackluster, and eventually they’re going to go flat. They’re still an incredibly popular headset choice, and one Corsair is attempting to reinvigorate with its brand-new lineup of VOID RGB wireless gaming headsets. Out of the box, our VOID was lightweight and comfortable. The circumaural ear cups fitted well enough to begin with, although they did feel a little loose around the lugs; there just wasn’t enough tension on the…

FOR ANYONE WHO thinks they’re good at XCOM, Firaxis has a massive plasma cannon ready to blow your confidence apart. Just as glorified expansion pack Terror From the Deep was more difficult than the original XCOM: UFO Defense in the mid-nineties, so XCOM 2 ups the challenge after 2012’s Enemy Unknown. It’s harder for a different reason, though. This is the XCOM formula deconstructed and reassembled around the solid core laid down in the first game. No matter what happened in Enemy Unknown, this game assumes you lost. Twenty years after the events of the first game, Earth has been taken over by a collaborationist regime known as ADVENT, whose semi-human troops are infused with alien DNA. Citizens live in gleaming cities and drive futuristic cars, apparently unaware of the…

IT’S BEEN JUST over a year since Sony spun off its Vaio PC brand to a Japanese investment firm, so that it could focus on its mobile business—that seems to be where all the cool kids want to hang out these days. At the time, it wasn’t clear what the future would look like for Vaio, though as it turns out, it could be a key part of a three-way deal to create a very large Japanese PC company. According to Bloomberg, Vaio is close to inking a deal that would bring together the PC divisions of rivals Toshiba and Fujitsu. Vaio would own the biggest stake in the new venture, the result of which would be a rather large PC outfit that would be in position to be the…

TRIUMPHS GONE IN A FLASH The web can’t be rid of Flash content fast enough. Google is helping by banning Flash-based ads by 2017. KEEP IT QUIET While we wait for new CPUs, AMD redesigned the stock coolers that ship with some of its own. They’re quieter and dissipate more heat. GAINING GROUND For the first time, Windows 10 jumped past Windows XP, an OS that refuses to go away, to take the third spot in OS usage. TRAGEDIES WRONG REMEDY Remedy initially recommended a pricey GeForce 980 Ti to play Quantum Break but later clarified that it was only needed for Ultra settings—phew! FBI FAIL A hacker used social engineering to hack the FBI, making off with details of 29,000 government employees. CASUALTY OF WAR A Google engineer who’d…

1 CLOUDLANDS It really feels as though you’re playing mini golf within the confines of your home. 2 HOVER JUNKERS A Mad Max-inspired multiplayer shooter set in a futuristic desert. 3 THE GALLERY: CALL OF THE STARSEED Adventure inspired by ’80s fantasy and sci-fi movies. 4 JOB SIMULATOR: THE 2050 ARCHIVES Re-enact mundane jobs in the not-so-dystopian future. 5 ARIZONA SUNSHINE Dual-wield pistols against hordes of zombies out in the Wild West. 6 FINAL APPROACH A unique simulation game that’s one part helicopter sim and one part The Sims. 7 AUDIOSHIELDAudiosurf plus Ikaruga meets virtual reality…. 8 FANTASTIC CONTRAPTIONS Like Poly Bridge had a baby with Rube Goldberg, then took steroids.…

If you thought Broadwell’s pair of mostly ignored desktop chips were the last gasp for that gen, you’ve forgotten that Intel’s high-end desktop parts are always a generation behind. So next we have Broadwell-E, scheduled for the second quarter of this year. As you might expect, Broadwell-E is the 14nm die shrink of the Haswell-E processors, cribbed from the highend Xeon server parts of the range. As such, it’s all about multi-core performance, and this is where Intel has continued its core push, leaving the standard desktop chips to stagnate at four cores. Haswell-E brought the first straight eightcore consumer CPU from Intel, and Broadwell-E is set to deliver us a 10-core/20-thread monster in the Core i7-6950X—reportedly for a monstrous, Titan-shaming price, too. But that also means that at the…

MSI HAS PROVIDED MILITARY CLASS motherboards for as long as we can remember but this is possibly the first time we’ve ever seen carbon fiber on a motherboard. Or rather, carbon-fiber styling. The Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon is similar in a lot of ways to Asus’s Maximus VIII Formula. It’s a sophisticated development in the line of Z170 chipsets. Interestingly, MSI only ever released one RGB-lit Z170 motherboard—the Carbon’s older brother, the Gaming Pro—but it was criticized for color clashing. So now we have the Gaming Pro Carbon, a black and gray variant of this entry level gaming motherboard. So what do 170 bucks buy you? Other than those flashy lights, you get a PCIe x4 M.2 port, six SATA 6Gb/s ports, one SATA Express port, a plethora of USB…

SKYLAKE INTRODUCED one of the most controversial features ever to grace the world of motherboards: RGB lighting. At first, ill-advisedly, manufacturers simply threw those little LEDs into their boards without much consideration for the potential color clash. Fortunately, the Formula avoided such a fate. Thanks to a later release cycle, Asus took the opportunity to strip the motherboard of its color, leaving a very sharp, blackand-gray base for those LEDs to complement. Benchmarking was, as ever, a smooth process. We achieved our maximum overclock of 4.9GHz with relative ease, and all our other benchmarks were in line with what we expected. Leaving us in no doubt that, beyond included features and software suites, there’s not enough on the board at this point to make a considerable difference. That aside, the…

XIFIXIT PRESENTS: THIS MONTH WE DISSECT... 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: Anyone else sick of apples? Time to take a bite out of a juicy Microsoft offering, the Surface Pro 4, to see what it’s made of. We’re hoping Microsoft has opted for a more fixable laplet (laptop+tablet, eh?) this time. There’s only one way to find out... OK, two ways—we have X-ray vision. It’s teardown time! MAJOR TECH SPECS: • 12.3-inch PixelSense 2736x1824 (267ppi) IPS LCD display • Intel Skylake Core m3 (4M Cache, 2.2GHz) up to Core i7 (8M Cache, 3.8GHz)…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE PHOTOSHOP Subscribe to various Adobe packages at www.abobe.com. PHOTOS To import and edit. BACK WHEN CAMERAS USED FILM, clever or accident-prone photographers could make a second exposure by not winding an exposed frame on, burning two images into the emulsion, and ending up with something dark and inexplicable. The really creative ones, however, could produce multiple exposure images of ethereal grace and sublime surrealism. If you’re a fan of underwater photography, it’s likely you’ve seen double exposures at work. Because of the lack of light under the ocean, a flash picture is sometimes taken of fish that leaves the background dark. A second, longer exposure is then taken, often in lighter, shallower water, that adds the background back in, putting a natural blue color or a…

WHEN IT COMES TO LAPTOPS, 15-inch models are in that awkward space between supersexy 13-inch Ultrabooks and 17-inch bigscreen behemoths. Dell is trying to grab the best assets from both with its 2016 XPS 15, and it largely succeeds. Dell calls its new XPS 15 “the smallest 15-inch laptop on the planet,” but what makes it arguably sexier is that the company was able to squeeze a discrete Nvidia GPU into its 4.5-pound build. And this isn’t some bottom-of-the-barrel mobile graphics card, either. The XPS 15 comes with a very capable GTX 960M, which, it turns out, makes this bad boy a competent gaming machine. At least at 1080p. It might not look like a gaming notebook, but that’s OK by us. Its aesthetics run along the lines of a…

REMEMBER WHEN we thought Steam Machines were a pretty neat idea? Remember when Valve was going to save us from the PC gaming hegemony—nay, dictatorship—of the evil Microsoft? Yeah! Things haven’t really worked out that way, have they? In fact, the more time we spend with Steam Machines, and their Linux-lite OS, the more glorious the homecoming when switching back to Windows. It’s the same situation with Zotac’s latest Steam Machine, the bizarrely titled NEN, which is a damned shame, because Zotac has created one of the most impressive mini-rigs we’ve ever tested, cramming full-size gaming hardware into an almost pint-sized package. For a start, the black and white, Stormtrooper-inspired design is seriously pleasing. But it’s what’s inside that counts. Within that diminutive exterior is a Skylake quad-core CPU, the…

YOU KNOW WHAT WE LOVE? Manufacturers who listen. And that’s exactly what Logitech has done. If you’ve been following Maximum PC for some time, you’ll know that we reviewed the G810’s older brother a few issues back. The G910 was Logitech’s first entry into the world of custom mechanical switches—in the form of the Romer-G—and it came with all the bells and whistles you’d expect from the maker of the legendary G15 gaming keyboard. But the G910 wasn’t perfect. It catered to one demographic only: gamers. The key caps were indented, the macro keys abundant, and the stylization audacious and pointy. Couple that with fixed Logitech LED logos and media keys, and it almost felt like a wasted experience using that RGB lighting. It was a solid keyboard, but its…

THE GREAT OUTDOORS can be a creepy place. Firewatch is a small game set in a big forest in the 1980s; a place where it’s almost always sunset, and where sad, bearded Henry—that’s you—has come to man a fire lookout tower, and find the solitude he craves. He ends up having an adventure, in first-person, while wearing shorts. Things start to get complicated, as is often the case, when other people intrude upon his loneliness. First up is Delilah, Henry’s boss, and a warm, friendly, curious, perhaps even flirtatious, voice on the other end of a radio link. She gives Henry things to do that involve him hiking to a point in the forest, guiding himself using his map and, later, your memory of the trails. Something he finds along…