Table of contents for March 2017 in Maximum PC

THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES... > Sneaky Software > Microsoft Bugs > Random Shutdowns Sneaky Software Hi Doctor. I downloaded and installed Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, and was shocked to see two other applications, McAfee Security Scan Plus and True Key by Intel Security, being installed at the same time, with no option to cancel. As I recall, there was no checkbox dialog asking if I wanted those apps prior to loading Adobe’s software on to my PC. Do you have any idea what might have prompted this uninvited intrusion? Are other program downloads using the same forced install for software we didn’t ask for? I was able to uninstall True Key and disable McAfee in “Task Manager > Startup,” however, I would have preferred Adobe not to push them…

Asus PA329Q Monitor In search of incredible—that’s Asus’s MO, a subtle nod to a lifetime dedicated to the pursuit of mastering everything hardware-related. From graphics cards to motherboards, and gaming peripherals to high-end workstation products, the Taiwanese company has certainly made an impact on the tech world, garnering huge sales figures across the globe. But don’t be fooled—this isn’t an organization hell-bent on being a jack of all trades and master of none. Asus’s products are renowned for their premium feel and exceptional quality, and that’s particularly true of its range of monitors. Whether that’s introducing one of the first high refresh rate gaming monitors, or pushing IPS panels into the mainstream, Asus has championed the humble pixel’s potential to achieve the pinnacle of success in today’s graphical world. The…

Microsoft Surface Studio Two PCs in one? Almost. About iFixit iFixit is a g lobal community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people f ix things through free online repair manuals and teardowns. iFixit believes that everyone has the r ight to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit www.ifixit.com. BACKGROUND Good news, everyone! Microsoft has made its first desktop ever. The Surface Studio is big, expensive, powerful, and most importantly, it’s on our teardown table. Is this a machine for creative pros, or a me-too entry in the modern wave of fashionably disposable hardware? If it survives this teardown, we’ll have our answer. MAJOR TECH SPECS • 28-inch adjustable PixelSense display, with 4500x3000 resolution (192 dpi), supporting sRGB, DCI-P3, and Vivid color profiles, plus 10-point multitouch. •…

WE ONCE HEARD the original Xbox described as “Batman’s briefcase crossed with a supercomputer.” Apologies to Microsoft, but Eurocom’s Sky X9E2 now deserves that mantle. This beast of a gaming machine is one of the most powerful portable systems we’ve ever tested. Of course, “portable” is something of a relative term. The Sky X9 itself weighs in at (only) 12 pounds—not bad, considering the hardware inside—but it requires two massive 330W power bricks to run at full juice, and those weigh nearly three pounds each. Of course, all that weight is well spent. Packed inside the Sky X9’s minimalist black case is more power than most high-end gaming desktops. An Intel Core i7-6700K clocked at 4GHz serves as the brains of the operation, with a turbo up to 4.2GHz supported.…

KABY LAKE has launched, and we’re on our way to being buried by the latest and greatest from the big three motherboard manufacturers. Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte are churning out new iterations faster than we can say “Conway Twitty,” and that’s no bad thing. These boards have been in development for some time, and with the first murmurs heard back at CES 2016, it’s easy to understand why manufacturers are so eager to get their foot in the door, and your money in their pockets. Here we have the kingpin of Asus’s motherboard arsenal, and a follow-up to one of its best-selling mobos of all time. The Maximus IX Hero is a beauty. Asus has done away with the black and red of its eighth-generation ROG predecessor, opting for a…

NOT A SELF-AWARE calculator from Cyberdyne Systems, but the latest in a familiar line from Razer. The Elite marks the DeathAdder’s tenth anniversary in style, by adding a couple of extra buttons, for a total of seven. That’s a little unfair. There’s a new optical sensor, too, squeezing an extra 6,000 dots into every inch when compared to the DeathAdder Chroma, and new Razer-made switches under the buttons, now rated for 50 million clicks. The DeathAdder has always been Razer’s Jack-of-all-trades gaming mouse, aimed at those who don’t like to specialize in one kind of title, but let their fingers wander all over the Steam store. Despite this, Razer has chosen to plaster the promotional material with its eSports branding. For once, however, it makes a bit of sense—the DeathAdder…

A game in which y ou s pend 3 0 h ours conspiring to bring about a giant DDoS attack by getting people who like you to backdoor their own PCs and phones may seem like it’s casting you as the bad guy, as would the beatings you hand out to security guards. But as you’re sticking it to a large corporation that keeps records of people’s private lives, you get some rebellious cool points that elevate you to hero status. Watch Dogs 2 takes a trip through the headlines of today’s and tomorrow’s news sites, having you hack emails and take on corporate interests for the presumed benefit of San Francisco’s grateful citizens. It’s presented as an open-world stealth game, as you use your hacking powers to move unseen…

Ryzen: The First AMD Zen Chip Is AMD finally going to get its competitive edge back? This is an important release for AMD. Yes, every processor launch is important, but AMD’s Ryzen chip is the first to feature its Zen core architecture. This is AMD’s first serious assault on the high-end and enthusiast market for five years, and there is an awful lot riding on its success. Ryzen is an eightcore barnstormer, built using a 14nm production process. Intel chips have been top dog in serious machines for a while now—AMD fanboys will tell you how AMD chips can run faster, but it always seems to require a specific set of circumstances to achieve the trick. Ryzen looks to have the raw power to tackle Intel’s finest across the board.…

1 STEELS ERIES RIVAL 700 ($100) Ergonomically perfect, together with haptic feedback, an OLED screen, and all the RGB lighting you could want, the Rival 700 decimates this list. 2 LOGITECH PROTEUS SPECTRUM ($80) An outlandish design combined with an unlockable scroll wheel, weight adjustment, and even more lights means the Proteus Spectrum is one appealing finger-pointer. 3 CORSAIR M65 PRO ($60) The combination of a soft-touch finish, sand-blasted plastic and aluminum chassis, and dependable lighting makes the M65 Proone of the most enjoyable mice to use. 4 LOGITECH G900 CHAOS SPECTRUM ($123) Combine the brilliance of the Proteus with wireless tech and a new ambidextrous design, and you’re left with the Chaos Spectrum. If only it weren’t so pricey.… 5 MIONIX NAOS QG ($130) With clever sensors that can tell you if you’re dying…

EVERY ISSUE, we’re set new challenges. Whether it’s via our executive editor, our editor-in-chief, or the management bods who want those big headlines on the front cover, we’re thrown into the belly of the beast with a new conundrum to tackle. And each issue, those challenges get more extreme. This t ime, we were sat down and told: “$300— that’s your budget. We want a 250GB SSD, and 8GB of memory. Do it!” And so here we are. Maximum performance at the absolute minimum budget. A base system that can operate efficiently and quickly, yet is f ully c apable o f being upgraded to compete with some of the most prestigious mid-range gaming or office PCs out there. But who are we if not suckers for punishment? Instead of…

It’s a great time to be a PC gamer. The console battles for audience (and the fact that they’re cheap PCs inside anyway), along with the utter saturation of the phone game market, mean that publishing on PC is the safest, easiest bet developers can make. For the consumer, that means anything and everything you want to play is on PC—except if some lunatic at a console company has dropped a million or two on buying a temporary exclusive. Indeed, the number of games released on Steam every year has grown so much that it always exceeds the total number of games from previous years—and that’s happened for three years running. We’ve drawn up a list of the games we think are going to be the best over the coming year.…

THE DREAM OF POWER and portability is often pondered on these pages. We see plenty of powerful desktop replacements, and a fair selection of svelte ultrabooks, too, but very few systems have managed to successfully combine both disciplines. The latest system attempting to tackle this tricky marriage is the HP Spectre—a super-thin machine that appears to pack a list of impressive hardware into its diminutive form. First, a quick word on looks—this machine isn’t going to excite everyone. The faux bronze rear bar and hinge are a touch too kitsch for some, and the large bezel around the screen annoyed a couple on our team as well. So, even if you like it, don’t expect everyone to swoon in a similar way. The materials do feel a little plasticky compared…

SAMSUNG’S PREMIUM “PRO” DRIVES are pretty much the go-to SSDs for enthusiasts seeking the best in solid-state storage performance. The latest 960 Pro is a barnstormer of an SSD. But it ain’t cheap. In 512GB M.2 configuration, the smallest option, it rocks in at a recommended retail of $329. That’s pretty fancy for the 500GB segment, which is where the 960 Evo steps in, again in M.2 format. Like previous “Evo” models, it gives you much of that Samsung SSD goodness, just in a more affordable package. That’s the theory, at least. The core specs certainly look promising. For starters, you can have it in 250GB format, as tested here, which brings the price down dramatically. It’s well under half the price of the smallest 960 Pro. But like the…

SUNNY SKIES h ave b een m issing f rom videogames for much of this century, so any opportunity to escape the grimdark worlds of COD or Gears of War is welcome. This month’s other game review, Watch Dogs 2, presents players with a suitably sweltering San Francisco, but no game can match Planet Coaster for sheer summer fun. Another thing we haven’t seen much of, unless you’re into soccer or farming, is management games. 2013’s SimCity wasn’t a huge success, and now Frontier is resurrecting theme park management. And what a resurrection. Planet Coaster is sunshine collected and condensed into something endlessly entertaining, a game dedicated to making people happy, rather than making them dead. Frontier’s experience with Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and Thrillville shows through, and across the Career,…

Ever wondered what goes on under the hood of Windows? If your PC is running smoothly, doing its job, then probably not. It’s when things start to go wrong—your PC slows to a crawl, or non-responsive application errors keep popping up—that you suddenly take a keen interest. There are plenty of tools out there that promise to speed up your computer, fix errors, and make things as good as new again (whatever that means), but there’s always an element of risk involved in trusting your PC to a program that doesn’t really explain what it’s doing, failing to point out that cleaning out the Registry doesn’t—on its own, at any rate —speed things up, and, more often than not, introduces problems you later can’t unpick to resolve without a refresh…

examining technology and putting it to use TIP OF THE MONTH SKYPE RECORDING Use Skype a lot? If you like to keep a backup of your calls, a nifty piece of freeware called MP3 Skype Recorder is exceptionally handy. It monitors your Skype account, looking for audio activity, and as soon as a call starts, it begins recording the session for you to play back later. There’s also an ad-free Pro version for business use, with extra features, that costs less than two cups of coffee. https://mp3skyperecorder.com MAKE – USE – CREATE 58 Connect to the Internet securely with OpenVPN 62 Create professional streams with Gameshow 68 Follow the build process behind our brand new test bench BOOT TIMES It only seems like yesterday that I would hit the switch…

PULL UP A SEAT, and get comfortable. The following is gonna get philosophical, maybe even a little epistemological. The new Intel Core i5-7600K is very cool, you see. But it’s also kinda crappy. Hold that thought while we square away the speeds and feeds. The 7600K is, of course, part of Intel’s new Kaby Lake family. That makes it a Tock in Intel’s nowdefunct “Tick Tock” cadence of processor development, where a Tock represents an architectural revision, rather than a new production process. Actually, it’s the second such Tock on Intel’s prevailing 14nm process, which reflects the fact that Tick Tock is dead, and now we have “Process, Architecture, Optimization.” In simple terms, Intel can’t keep up with its self-imposed strategy of introducing a new production process and then chip…

STEELSERIES HAS LADLED on the gimmicks with its sport-inspired Arctis series, and while the model 3 lacks the USB connectivity and RGB lighting of the Arctis 5 ($20 more), and the wireless convenience of the Arctis 7 ($70 more), it’s still toting the lion’s share of the family’s genius touches. So, let’s dissect, starting with that funky ski-goggle headband, a feature most commonly seen on concept VR headsets. It makes the Arctis 3 infinitely adjustable and, once you’ve got it set just right, monumentally comfortable. It does take a little getting used to, since—despite claims that it eliminates pressure points— it seems to exert more direct pressure across your dome than a traditional padded band would. We’d like to blame at least one early headache on wearing it before it…

The name Serif has long been associated with budget design apps, usually ending with “Plus.” There was DrawPlus, PhotoPlus, and even PagePlus, and while they were cheap, they were outclassed by other software packages, often costing a great deal more, and which ran on Macs. While the products improved over time, Serif decided to break with the Plus range when it launched Affinity Designer, a vector graphics app that was initially released only on Apple computers, followed by Affinity Photo, a raster-editing app. Both then made their way to Windows after beta periods (in the case of Affinity Photo, a very short one, as anyone trying to follow last issue’s tutorial may already have found out). The Affinity products are pro-grade, Adobe-troubling apps sold at a reasonable price, with no…

> Overclocking Dual Cards > Cleaning Out PCs > Budget Builds Overclocking SLI I love your magazine. As a constantly deployed US Navy sailor, it is always great to see when it comes into my ship. Your article on overclocking was great in December 2016. Very clear and precise, and better than scouring forums. On to my questions: I have two Nvidia GTX 980 SCs in SLI. Do I need to overclock them both individually using the steps you provided? Or can I just do one, and then apply the same settings to the other card? Can I use MSI Afterburner as you guys suggested, or do I have to use EVGA’s software? MSI’s looks more user-friendly than the EVGA software I have (and kind of hate). Nikolai “MUFFS” L.…