Table of contents for June 2016 in Maximum PC

There’s nothing like building your own perfect system, and at the highest peaks of this passion lie some very select hobbies: extreme overclocking and water-cooling. We spoke to world-renowned overclocker and liquid-cooler Ian Parry about what drove him to start overclocking, and why you should consider moving across to custom water-cooled loops. Maximum PC: Hello Ian. Can you give us the low-down? What was it that interested you about overclocking? Ian Parry: I first got into overclocking when I started gaming. I downloaded some benchmarks and ran the test on my rig, then when I compared the results to those that others were achieving with similar systems, I wasn’t pleased. I needed to understand why mine weren’t as good. I found that the other guys were overclocking, so my competitive…

A LARGE MOUSE with a calculator strapped to its side, Corsair’s Scimitar is a member of that strangest of tribes—the MMO mouse. It’s easy to see where the design came from—the demands of MMO games that spells and attacks be assigned to numerical keys for easy access—but the Scimitar suffers from the same problem we have with all MMO mice: using the damned thing. The buttons come in alternating lines of rough and smooth textures, but it’s not enough—we found it hard to tell where our thumb was on the array without looking, and reaching all the way back to 10, 11, and 12 meant a complete repositioning of the hand on the mouse body. You can still click the primary buttons with your finger about halfway down them, but…

ONE OF THE FORGOTTEN KINGS of the gaming mouse world, the Diamondback has won an armful of awards, and claims to have had the first “optical gaming sensor”— although what marks out a sensor as being for gaming we’re not sure. It’s also always lit up, so perhaps it’s to blame for the rash of LEDs. The Diamondback brand dropped off the radar in 2007, eclipsed by larger, more modern designs, but has now returned. The slim, tapering shape is unusual; your right thumb tucks right into the side but your fingers are left without enough to get a proper hold. It can sit forward in your grip, teased in your fingertips as if you’re making delicate adjustments to a dial or a lover. It’s not uncomfortable, even if it’s…

THE KIRO IS A MOUSE you can use with either hand. We already have a perfectly good word for such a thing, but Roccat has decided to invent its own: “superdextrous.” Super, of course, comes from the Latin word “supra,” meaning “above” or “beyond”—so we quite expect to be able to operate this mouse with our feet. We can’t, of course—the webbing between our toes gets in the way—but the Kiro is cleverly designed to be reconfigured for right-and left-handers. You get four “sides” in the box, two with buttons and two without, enabling you to place additional switches (all Omrons) where you need them the most. They’re attached by magnets, and snap into place. Claw grippers will be able to use all four extra buttons, while palmists will probably…

There’s a battle coming. An important one. It’s for the future of graphics cards. It started when AMD threw the first metaphorical stone, in the form of Mantle, a couple of years ago. Mantle forced Microsoft’s hand when it came to DirectX 12, but it’s the absorption of the Mantle philosophy into Vulkan that could really bring about change. But what is Vulkan? Why is it so important? And can anything really take on Microsoft and win? This modern retelling of David and Goliath could be lining us up for a new king of graphics APIs, so it’s a battle that’s worth fighting, with glorious rewards for the victor. Let us explain. Graphics are changing. We’re not talking about new GPUs, better CPU graphics, or anything like that—we’re talking about…

DirectX was born with Windows 95 as a set of standard multimedia APIs. Its aim was to get games to run under Windows, and not drop to DOS and use old-school direct drivers. On the development of Microsoft’s first console, the term “DirectX” was coined for all these APIs. The one that interests us is Direct3D. DirectX has had its ups and downs; version 4.0 was never even released. Newer versions sometimes struggled to be as fast as older ones, even on freshly developed games. We’ve reached version 12, released with Windows 10, which is the only place you’ll find it outside of an Xbox One. This uses many of the lowlevel hardware abstraction techniques that Vulkan does. Most notably, it passes data across to the GPU in batches, rather…

Backups may not be the sexiest of subjects, but you’ll want to take yours for a candlelit dinner the day it turns a data recovery disaster into a minor annoyance. Think for a moment: how much is your data worth? Some files are more valuable than others: for some, it’s the time taken to recreate a document, while others—such as photos and videos—can never be brought back. Most people know the importance of backing up, but can you be sure your backup plan is up to scratch? Many people keep one backup copy of their files, but what happens if it is destroyed along with the original? Seeing as most people keep their backup drive in the same location as their PC, that’s not a fanciful notion. We’re going to…

One of the fringe benefits of following our backup plan is that many of the tools on offer record multiple versions of your files, enabling you to undo changes to files as well as restore lost, deleted, or corrupt data. Both Windows backup tools support this, although File History’s default settings of updating your files every hour (rather than weekly, as with the Backup and Restore tool) means you have greater flexibility. If you back up files to OneDrive, Dropbox, or your own OwnCloud server, access your account through your web browser, then locate the file in question. OwnCloud users should click the “Versions” option next to the filename; otherwise, right-click the file and choose the option to restore a previous version, to see what’s available based on time and…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY Pi 2 The brilliant mini-computer costs under $45. See www.raspberrypi.org. DESPITE ITS ITSY-BITSY FORM FACTOR, and notwithstanding its fairly low CPU power, the Raspberry Pi [Image A] is blessed with some workman-like graphics hardware. Specifically, the Broadcom VideoCore IV is a dual-core affair, supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 and hardware decoding of 1080p 30fps h.264 video. All well and good, but what is OpenGL ES, and how can we use it to make pretty graphics? Good questions, and it just so happens that this article is devoted to their answers. OpenGL has bindings available for many languages, but using these directly is not for the faint of heart—programming in OpenGL is not really anything like programming in Python. Fortunately for the Pythonistas, there are a few options…

LENOVO MAY BE the largest PC seller in the world, but it isn’t a household name as far as PC gaming is concerned. The Chinese company wants to change that, especially as it pertains to the desktop space. Enter the Ideacentre Y900. The mid-tier desktop line features an edgy and aggressive design, but doesn’t look too gaudy. A good Ideacentre or just a bad idea? Read on…. The Ideacentre Y900 uses a mid-tower chassis, and has some sharp edges, fancy red lighting, and a carbon fiber aesthetic, which gives the package some pizazz. The side doors open up unconventionally, and took us a second to figure out. Not only is there a latch on the back that you have to release, but there’s an unlock button on top for the…

YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE how many laptops we get offered to review. If the beginning of this year has marked anything, it’s the launch of Core i7-6700HQ and GTX 970M compatible laptops. Throw that together with a PCIe SSD and an IPS 1080p panel, and you’re generally on to a winner. From that point, it’s just a case of finding the right price, I/O, and any other features you want. Or is it? Well, we can scrap that bit about panel type. Gigabyte has thrown in a full 2560x1440 IPS panel, and it looks gorgeous. The extra clarity provided by those 1,612,800 additional pixels is enough to make you cry out in joy. Having the extra screen real estate here is fantastic. PIXEL DENSITY DETAILS “But, but, but,” we hear you…

“UWP lacks support for several popular features, including user mods. MICROSOFT hasn’t had an easy time getting industry bigwigs to see its vision or to share its excitement over what the future might hold. When Windows 8 came out, Valve’s Gabe Newell called it a “catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.” Part of his concern, as shared by several developers, was that Microsoft was creating a walled garden whereby it would have full control over apps running on its platform. Fast-forward to today, and there’s again concern about Microsoft exerting too much power, only this time it’s Epic Games’s Tim Sweeney who’s holding Microsoft’s feet to the fire. His beef isn’t so much with Windows 10, but Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative. The abridged version is that Microsoft…

THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES... Pick the Right GPU Hi Doc, I just built a new PC for gaming (I play Fallout 4, Witcher 3, XCOM 2, and Skyrim) and web browsing (YouTube, Kodi, and so on). It’s based on an Asus Sabertooth Z170 Mark 1, Intel’s Core i7-6700K at 4GHz, 16GB of Corsair DDR4 memory, a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB boot drive, a Seagate 1TB SSHD for loading games on, and an EVGA SuperNOVA 850 P2 PSU. The Intel HD Graphics 530 engine in the Core i7 scores 7.1 in the Windows Experience Index, which is 0.4 points higher than the Radeon R9 290 2GB in my A10-based machine, even though it wouldn’t run Fallout 4. The CPU scores 7.8 and the memory/boot drive both score 7.9. I’d like…

A SPECIALIZED MOUSE for the claw gripper, the Xornet II may feel a little unusual to someone who’s not prepared to extend their fingers in just the right way. It’s been redesigned from its previous incarnation, and now sports a new sensor, altered button shapes, a light-up scroll wheel, and a more firmly attached cable. Unfortunately, if you’re not fond of the claw, this might not be the mouse for you. A ledge on the right is easy to mistake for the right button, and it’s simply uncomfortable if you try to palm it, seeming to twist off to the left under your hand. At 0.3 lb, it’s relatively light, and there is no way to alter that weight. The matte black finish is classy, with the kind of microtextured…

PARDON US FOR BEING subjective, but this could be the best mouse we’ve ever used. And we’ve used a few, from $5 barely functional lumps of plastic to Apple’s appalling G3 hockey puck to the RAT. This model replaces the Proteus Core, which we liked a lot the last time we looked at mice. The new G502 is tall and solid, making its presence known in your palm, yet still being light enough to push around easily. Should it be too light, there are five 0.13 oz weights, shaped like some sort of horrible futuristic boomerang bullets, that fit in the base, enabling you to move the center of mass. With a body that looks like something Adam Jensen would use, even down to the triangular motif etched into the…

THERE ARE TWO VERSIONS of this mouse. The Luxury Edition doubles the price and adds optional wirelessness, customizable click force through a couple of hex nuts on its base, and comes with a recharging stand that lights up. Nnnnngh. There’s not a lot else about it that deserves the “Luxury” label, however. The Tournament Edition is the basic model, and probably the more successful of the two. It’s a large mouse that fits well in the hand, with a humped back to increase comfort. Like every other mouse in this test, it’s permanently wired to your PC. As with its stablemate, the Diamondback, there’s a lighting strip that, by default, slowly cycles through its colors. It doesn’t run all the way around the body, as it does on its smaller…

SOMETIMES THE SIMPLE THINGS in life are among the best. This is a good basic mouse, with only two additional buttons, and a sensitivity switch on top. With a smooth matte plain black finish, the Rival 100 fits well in our palm—although claw grippers will get on well with it too—and the programmable lighting is kept to just the wheel and the logo on the rear. There’s a lot to like about this budget offering—remember, it’s only $40—but it doesn’t feel like it’s built to a budget. There’s a good rubbery grip at the side, bobbled for extra pleasure, and it’s light, too, although there’s no option to increase the weight. The shape is ambidextrous, but there are only buttons on the left-hand side, catering to the right-handed population. The…

BUILDING YOUR OWN CUSTOM PC tends to be a labor of love. It has a lot in common with, say, restoring an old Ford F-150 pickup truck. You can spend hours pouring over parts lists, planning your internal layout, and choosing what chassis you want to build in, before you even start on the practical side of piecing a silicon powerhouse together. Yet it’s never without problems. You’re almost always bound to run into a snag, but overcoming those obstacles is exactly what’s so satisfying about building your own rig. Your machine. Your baby. And the pinnacle of PC building stems from one liquifying portent: watercooling. It’s an expensive addition to any rig, but what it can add to a build, well, let’s just say it’s undeniably beautiful. Silence-optimized machines,…

When it comes to choosing where to back up your files to, you’re spoiled for choice. But it’s not a case of either this backup device or that one— ideally, you should invest in at least two separate devices. Here’s what to look for. Secondary hard drive: this can be internal or external (USB). Use it for your primary file and drive image backups, using Windows’ own tools and Macrium Reflect Free. Network hard drive: a good secondary solution that can be kept elsewhere in your home for added security. Perfect for any of the backup methods we discuss here—you can even use it as the basis for your own personal cloud storage system using OwnCloud. Other computer: if you own another PC (or Mac), keep your key files in…

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDES TO IMPROVING YOUR PC FIND THE PERFECT WALLPAPER Hunting for the perfect desktop background is a pain. Trying to trawl through Google’s image search is a nightmare, and places such as DeviantArt, although housing some fine masterpieces, are generally filled with a lot of poorly drawn cartoons. Ladies and gents, we give you www.wallhaven.cc. You can search by resolution, color, aspect ratio, you name it. Then it’s just a case of left-clicking the image you want, rightclicking it in the new window, and then saving to desktop. WATERCOOLING WOES Liquid cooling. It’s by far the most prestigious part of building a custom PC. To do it properly, it’s often ludicrously expensive, quite troublesome (certainly for the average techie), and requires yearly maintenance to ensure your coolant doesn’t turn…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE PHOTOSHOP Subscribe to various Adobe packages at www.adobe.com. DIGITAL CAMERA With a long exposure facility, and clear skies. AS THE EARTH SPINS, the stars appear to move. They take a graceful arc across the night sky, rising and setting much like the sun and moon. If you want to capture this motion, you need a camera that can keep its shutter open for long exposures—15 or 30 seconds—without an undue amount of noise. You also need a reasonably “fast”—or wide aperture—wide-angle lens. It’s the length of exposure that captures the movement of the stars, but a wider aperture lens lets in more light, for a stronger effect, and the ability to use a lower ISO sensitivity setting to reduce electronic noise. The lens needs to be…

HAVING CHOICE can be a great thing. Much like the world of automobiles, laptops come in all shapes and sizes. Do you want a gasguzzling truck for off-roading, an exotic sports car, a family vehicle like a minivan, or something with great gas mileage? All of these can be had, but in every case there’s a trade-off being made. For laptops—and gaming laptops in particular—the biggest decisions you’ll face are in the areas of graphics performance, screen size, and battery life. MSI’s GE62 aims to be an everyman gaming notebook. It’s not too big to carry around, but it’s still big enough that you won’t end up squinting at the screen when using the native 1080p resolution. Performance is good, with a GTX 970M being a nice fit for 1080p…

HINDSIGHT BEING WHAT IT IS, the decision to move IO Interactive’s choke-’em-up series to an episodic release model may prove to be a masterstroke. It’s impossible to tell right now, of course, with only the tutorial and first level in our hands, but one thing is clear: By limiting your progression, the game forces you to play it “right.” The idea that there are right and wrong ways to play a game is one that’s frequently kicked up and down the debating halls of the Internet. If we send XCOM 2 into a loop of waiting until the Avatar Project is nearly complete before finishing a story mission and setting the clock back—putting off triggering the final missions that end the game—are we doing it wrong? Is it enough simply…

TRIUMPHS VALVE TURNS TO MODDERS Think you can build a better Steam Controller? Now’s your chance to prove it—Valve has made the controller’s CAD geometry available. BREAKING THE SPEED LIMIT Seagate announced plans to launch the fastest SSD ever seen. How fast? Up to 10 gigabytes per second! A SHARPENED BLADE Razer recently upgraded its 14-inch Blade laptop for gamers with faster hardware while making it lighter and cheaper. That’s a winning trifecta. TRAGEDIES HUMAN CORRUPTION In under 24 hours, Twitter users turned Microsoft’s teen girl AI chatbot into a racist, hate-spewing troll. SIGNING OFF Email inventor Raymond Tomlinson sadly passed away at age 74. We thank him for giving us the future of communication. UPGRADE SHENANIGANS A mob of angry users raged against Microsoft online, claiming the Redmond outfit…

1 THE LAB Valve’s The Lab is a compilation of fun, polished VR mini games set in the Portal universe. 2 EAGLE FLIGHT A kooky first-person game from Ubisoft, where you control an eagle in abandoned Paris. 3 VR SPORTS CHALLENGE Play football, hockey, basketball, and baseball with Oculus Touch controllers. 4 THE GALLERY: CALL OF THE STARSEED The narrative VR experience you’ve been waiting for. 5 I EXPECT YOU TO DIE An escape-the-room puzzle VR game that kills you if you fail. 6 THE CLIMB Scale virtual mountains in Crytek’s breathtaking climbing game. 7 RAW DATA Fend off waves of robots with a buddy in co-op using swords, bows, and guns. 8 TRIALS ON TATOOINE Meet Han Solo and R2-D2 on Tatooine and wield a lightsaber against Stormtroopers.…

IN THIS FINE COUNTRY of ours, the right to excess is absolute. Sure, you can play games with a lump of plastic that has two buttons and a wheel, plus some sort of movement sensor. Maybe even with a trackpad. Coupled with a keyboard, you can beat anything from an RTS to an FPS to a point-’n’-click adventure. So why do better? Why do you need 12 programmable buttons, a sensor with an ungodly resolution, and a whisk attachment for omelets? It’s down to two things: control and options. The first can be control of movement or control of interaction, and comes down to how fast you need to react. Playing something like XCOM 2 doesn’t require the same sort of reactions as Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, and the dedicated…

THE FIRST CORSAIR model in this test is a stripped-back, basic model that retails for a reasonable price. Corsair is known for color schemes that mix jet-black plastic with a garish highlight color, and the Sabre is no exception. You can, of course, change this highlight color, as it’s supplied by LEDs. The Sabre is very lightweight, moving easily across any surface, and changing direction with minimum effort. It’s fairly low and wide, designed for claw grippers, but is more forgiving to the palmer than the Xornet II. There are eight programmable buttons, including the wheel, with Omron switches rated for 20 million clicks, and a very nicely braided cable that stretches 5.9 feet toward your USB port of choice. The optical sensor resolution tops out at 6,400 dpi, and…

WHAT AT FIRST LOOKS LIKE it’s going to be an ambidextrous mouse turns out to be nothing of the sort. This is a right-handed-only zone, with its ergonomics subtly tuned to support only the ruling class in our unequal society. The Castor wants to position itself as a premium product, and almost manages it. The sensor is a 10,000 dpi PMW-3310 optical unit that boasts a complete lack of hardware acceleration. There are six fully programmable buttons, the shape supports all types of grips—although is better taken fully in the palm—and gamers baffled by the current trend toward bigger and bigger mice will be pleased to see that it’s one of the smaller models we’ve tested. Matte black mice always look good, and the Castor is no exception. Its four-layer…

WITH A LASER SENSOR and 19 programmable buttons, the Naga Chroma is trying very hard to get some attention, and it will probably succeed at this task by dint of big numbers alone. As an MMO mouse, the Naga falls into the same traps as the Corsair Scimitar, although it makes its buttons easier to locate by providing them with a concave top surface, so there’s less chance of pressing two at once. If you have to look at it, Razer has chosen to rotate the numbers printed on the array through 90 degrees, presumably to make them easier to read, although we’re not sure about that, having tried it. The wheel is a tilting model that moves very positively, its rubber tire nicely studded with a pattern of dots…

“Logitech made its name making mice, and its engineers know how to build a premium product. THIS YEAR’S GENERATION of gaming mice is extremely similar to the previous one. Apart from a few cosmetic changes here and there, there’s no great technological breakthrough that makes any of them a must-buy. Some of them are even identical to their previous iterations. Far be it from us to advise not spending your money (that’s not why you buy this magazine, after all) but if you’ve purchased a new mouse in the last year or so, the best advice is probably to hold off shelling out for another one. If you are in the market for a new rodent, however, the smart money would go on one from Logitech, Razer, or SteelSeries. Those…

There is little hard evidence of Vulkan’s capabilities. So far we have one game running on Vulkan—Croteam’s The Talos Principle—using beta drivers from AMD and Nvidia. Performance is only average as the code is far from optimized. Using the integrated benchmark, Vulkan is behind DirectX 11, but faster than OpenGL. But the numbers aren’t comparable, as the code paths are different and the end results can look different, too. What’s more important is where it’s going. When first released, Talos ran faster under DirectX 9 than it did under DirectX 11. After proper optimization, it managed a 20–30 percent hike in frame rates. The developers predict a much better path under Vulkan. In fact, they’ve been more than impressed, stating that “Vulkan has huge potential—we’ve only scratched the surface of…

Let me start by nailing my allegiances to the flagpole. I use standing desks on a daily basis. My first standing desk was homemade. Five years ago, my doctor said that my long-term back problems were a result of the amount of time I spent sitting down, and I had to reduce it. I said I simply couldn’t stop sitting down, because I’m a writer. He said that I had to stop, if I wanted my back to ever get better. So I rebuilt my cheap desk using spare planks and boxes, until I had something fairly stable that was standing-only. Two years later, I moved house and dismantled it. Now, standing desks are a standard part of many offices. It’s not unusual for larger offices to offer them as…

Nothing lasts forever—and the same is true of backups. Optical discs don’t last a lifetime, as we once thought, while hard drives physically wear out, and cloud storage can disappear without warning. That’s why backing up to multiple locations is essential, but it doesn’t stop there. You should take additional steps to protect your data from physical degradation. Check with the maker of your drive for a monitoring tool, such as Seagate’s SeaTools (www.seagate.com/seatools), to keep an eye on your drives’ health, giving you time to replace failing drives before they disappear with your data. If you want a network drive, choose a twobay model, such as Synology’s DiskStation 216+, and fill it with two identical drives in a RAID 1 setup. Data is mirrored on both drives, so if…

THIS MONTH WE DISSECT... XIFIXIT presents: 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: Behold! We hold the World of Warcraft in our hands! OK, fine. Maybe just a part of it. Or a part of a part of it. And it doesn’t really fit in our hands. When Blizzard decided to upgrade its servers, it sold off the old equipment as collector’s pieces. Prepare to be WoWed as we take a look inside the insides of the World of Warcraft. MAJOR TECH SPECS: • 2x dual-core AMD Opteron 275 processors @ 2.2GHz • 6GB (2x…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A CASE AND FANS All respectable cases have support for fan mounts internally. INTERNAL AIRFLOW; let’s cut the crap—it’s one of the biggest dividers of opinion there is, second only to cake or pie. So, why is it so complex? What’s a positive or negative pressure system? Static pressure? CFM? What’s that? Well, that’s what we’re here to answer. Whether your woes lie with choosing which fans to use to cool your mighty AIO, or with the age-old argument between static pressure and high airflow fans, don’t you worry—we’ve got your back! Is internal airflow really that important? In a lot of ways, it’s more vital than people realize; the more air you circulate, the better temperatures you’ll have internally, and the more comfortable your overclocks will…

TOM CLANCY MAY BE DEAD, but his worldvision marches on. The Division is a multiplayer shooter based in his alternate version of New York, where virus-laden dollar bills are distributed on Black Friday and decimate the population. You take the role of a member of The Division—a supersecret set of sleeper agents scattered throughout the population, ready for an emergency. Like most of Clancy’s games and novels, the hero’s talents lie solely in violence. Players roam an open-world New York, battling anyone wearing a hoodie, righting wrongs, and trying to get the infrastructure back online, so the government can lift the quarantine on the city. You can either solo your way through it, team up with friends, or just matchmake with other random players to complete the missions. You can…