Table of contents for June 2018 in Maximum PC

ROUND 1 Product Range and Branding For some time, the weakest element of Intel’s operation has involved branding, marketing, and product positioning. The underlying hardware has been fantastic. However, the problem has extended beyond the ridiculous product names. Not even the fact that Intel offers the thick end of 200 desktop and mobile CPUs is the worst aspect of all that, even if that makes it almost impossible for any normal human being to keep track of Intel’s CPUs, and actually understand what they are buying. No, it’s the fact that the marketing guys force infuriating decisions—like preventing most of Intel’s CPU from being overclocked, or switching off HyperThreading—that grates most. Intel’s 8th Gen chips are a case in point. “8th Gen” covers at least three distinct CPU architectures and…

Storage solutions are the next biggy on our list of bottleneck conundrums, and the issue pretty much boils down to the introduction of the latest PCIe SSDs, from the likes of Samsung, causing problems for those interested in setting up multiple drives in RAID 0. Traditionally, when you wanted more speed from your system, the obvious way to do this was to take two hard drives—spinning platters or flash SSD—and set them into a redundant array of independent disks with striping. You’d take two drives, and force the data saved to be split in half and written to both simultaneously. Then you could read the original data from both drives at the same time, effectively doubling performance, in exchange for a little more vulnerability, because if one drive fails, half…

TIP OF THE MONTH THE WINDOWS HANDSHAKE Ever been driven insane by Windows 10’s handshake feature? Shook the mouse too fast and had all your application panes minimize down to the Taskbar, only for you to have to painstakingly reopen them all again? Don’t worry—there’s an easy way out. Do exactly the same mouse shake again, and all those same application panels will open up to exactly the same position. $Free MAKE – USE – CREATE DEPUTY EDITOR IRRELEVANCE OF CLOCK SPEED Last issue, I came across an interesting reader letter discussing processor upgrades. It mostly stemmed around Spectre and Meltdown, but the part that caught my interest was the disappointment our reader had in regard to the lack of a dramatic increase in clock speed between the Core i5-2500K…

YOU’LL NEED THIS INSPECTRE Simple program that toggles Spectre and Meltdown protection on/off. Get it from www.grc.com/inspectre.htm. X264 BENCHMARK V5.0 For stress-testing your CPU via 1080p video encoding. Download it from https://archive.techarp.com/showarticlea96b.html. THEY SOUND LIKE BOND MOVIES—actually, one of them was a Bond movie—but in a computing context, Meltdown and Spectre are nothing like as much fun. The pair of exposed and fearfully publicized CPU vulnerabilities caused much gnashing of teeth earlier in 2018, due to the potential for hackers to target two decades’ worth of processors. Teeth were gnashed even harder when the patches that Intel and AMD rolled out to fix these vulnerabilities were reported to decrease system performance. The extent of that performance hit isn’t certain, though, and varies depending on your CPU model, your OS, your…

If you’re not content with fixing the Windows Taskbar, why not replace it? Docks used to be all the rage when OS X appeared in 2000, but the clamor has died down more recently, replaced by the full-screen touch Launcher, we guess. It’s a shame docks were often just visual fluff, as to truly replace the Taskbar, they need to offer task management, and more. Two well-known docks are Rocket Dock (https://rocketdock.com) and Circle Dock (http://circledock.wikidot.com/start), but both have been put out to pasture for almost a decade, though they still both work. One of the few docks still maintained worth a look is WinStep Nexus (www.winstep.net/nexus.asp), which offers a fully featured free version and a paid-for extended option. It supports Win XP through 10. The paid-for version does enhance…

IT’S FAIR TO SAY that the first generation of Ryzen motherboards had its problems at launch. While most of these have since been ironed out, a second-generation chipset brings with it a certain level of reassurance. You just know that those little nips and tucks will make for a better user experience. Indeed, this is exactly what we found when using this motherboard—everything simply worked first time. There’s more to this new MSI mobo than the fact it works, though. It’s worth noting that there isn’t a lot that’s obviously new with the X470 chipset when compared to the older X370. In fact, looking down the spec sheet, there’s only one standout inclusion, and that’s support for AMD StoreMI storage acceleration—which is essentially a smart caching solution that combines the…

EVER SINCE the first 21:9-aspect monitor rolled out five or so years ago, the super-wide format has been about as polarizing as it gets with flat panels. Some loved it for its cinematic sizzle; others trash-talked the limited vertical resolution and consequent poor productivity proposition. Each successive generation has upped the ante in terms of vertical resolution. ViewSonic’s latest cinematic screen salvo is the VP3881. It’s a 38-inch monster with no fewer than 1,600 vertical pixels. Thanks to that 21:9 aspect, the horizontal pixel count clocks in at 3,840. In other words, this is a 21:9 respin of the 3840x2160 standard, also known as 4K or UHD. However you slice it, the VP3881 packs a reasonable number of vertical pixels and, in turn, productivity chops for viewing docs. With this…

”A FINAL FANTASY for fans and first timers” is the message you’re shown every time you start up the game, and it’s a heartening statement to see when approaching a series that has had a troubled relationship with the PC in the past, with some pretty terrible ports. Crimes have included mobile versions of games uprezzed to 4K, while games made for PS3 that should have run at 1080p were locked at 720p. All that has changed, however, because Square’s never-ending series has finally embraced the PC and everything it can do. It’s a game that can look stunning, and which can bring even the beefiest rig to its knees with a few tweaks to the settings. First of all, though, there’s the small matter of storage. You might need…

> Office Location > VR Movies > Monochrome Desktop Finding Office Hi Doc. I inadvertently deleted Office 2007 Home & Student from my dated PC running Windows 10 Pro. I have the key, but no media. I do have an older backup. However, I’d just as soon use Libre Office instead of going through the hassle of restoring the image and installing all of its updates. Is there anywhere to download Office 2007 so I can get it back on to my computer? –Gord MacDonald THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: As of last year, Office 2007 is no longer supported by Microsoft. The company suggests upgrading to Office 365 or Office Home & Student 2016. Officially, you’re out of luck. While copies of the Office 2007 disc image are floating around online,…

Memory is an integral part of any system, and it interacts with the CPU in a very interesting way. It’s essentially a hyper-fast, volatile storage medium, designed to hold data that needs to be accessed more quickly than that found on non-volatile hard drives, yet using files that are larger than those that can be held locally on the internal CPU cache. When it comes to processors, outside of rendering tasks or simulations that operate off large data sets, it’s difficult for your memory to bottleneck your system. Most everyday tasks don’t process or shift enough data fast enough for the bus between the DDR and the CPU to ever become truly saturated, or for the memory to be under 100 percent load all the time. You can encounter bottlenecks…

CPU There are a few obvious bottlenecks we’re going to ignore, as they’re processor limitations. For instance, video editing benefits from more cores and higher single-core/IPC. But the biggy is in game. Go to www.cpuid.com and download HWMonitor (dodge the Pro version), run that, and minimize everything aside from the “Utilization” section for your processor and graphics card. Here you’ll see all your threads, and their current, minimum, and maximum utilization, along with your GPU utilization. Load up the gaming benchmark of your choice (Unigine’s Superposition is a solid alternative at https://benchmark.unigine.com), then Alt-Tab back to HWMonitor, select the “View” drop-down, hit “Clear Min/Max,” then go back to your benchmark, and hit “Run.” You’re looking for whether your CPU load is at 100 percent across all threads while your GPU…

MrSpeakers Aeon Flow INTENSITY AND PASSION. They’re the two true refining attributes of any masterful craftsman. It doesn’t matter how much you get paid, or what degrees you have, for those who love what they do, the work they produce will always be superior to that of those who don’t. MrSpeakers doesn’t have the manpower of Audio Technica, or the financial grunt of Beyerdynamic. It’s not the juggernaut that is Sennheiser, nor does it have the legacy of the likes of Shure, but don’t count it out. These guys are absolute masters of the audio-decibel spectrum, a collection of truly passionate individuals, with headphones that keep up with and even surpass the big boys. The Aeon Flows encapsulate those qualities down to a tee. They’re earthy and warm in feel,…

There’s a good chance ray tracing will never become a primary tech for game developers—or at least, it won’t be taking over for another decade or two. Doing it in real time demands a vast amount of processing power; consumer cards that can support even this early level of ray tracing will take a long time to hit our machines. In the meantime, rasterization is only going to get better. When the hardware to render everything with ray tracing does land, it probably won’t look that different from the tech it’s meant to emulate, making the overhead that ray tracing adds a pointless computational expense. Sticking with more efficient rasterization eaves room in the GPU for ever more complex physics and material simulation; making things a micron more shiny won’t be…

IFIXIT presents: BACKGROUND With the lightning pace of tech releases, it’s hard to believe nearly two years have passed since our first Vive teardown. Today, HTC brings you the first headset in what’s bound to be VR’s v2.0, and we’re bringing you the pieces. MAJOR TECH SPECS • Two 1440p AMOLED displays for combined res of 2880x1600 • 90Hz refresh rate • Dual front-facing cameras, dual mics, and headphones • Accelerometer, proximity, gyroscope, and IPD sensors • 360-degree headset tracking via up to four Lighthouse 2.0 base station IR emitters • Wireless with the not-yet-released Vive Wireless Adapter KEY FINDINGS • We haven’t even started disassembly, and already we’re seeing some repair-friendly features. Spring contacts and standard Phillips screws connect the modular headphones to the headset, making for easy removal…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI 3 OR 3 B+ With an Internet connection, USB flash drive or hard drive, keyboard, mouse, screen, and 2.5A official power supply, plus a PC running Linux or Windows. 1 GETTING STARTED Soon you’ll see the Raspbian desktop, so now update your Raspberry Pi 3 B+ [Image A]. Open a terminal; the icon is in the top-left of the screen. In the terminal, type the following, line by line, and press Enter at the end of each line: >> To ensure that you can always find the Pi on the network, let’s fix its IP address. Right-click the networking icon, and select “Wireless and Wired Network Settings.” In the “Network Preferences” dialog, configure interface eth0. Select “Automatically configure empty options,” then change the IPv4 address…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE PHOTOSHOP OR LIGHTROOM Subscribe to a suitable package at www.adobe.com. PHOTOGRAPHIC TONING once meant changing the color of a black and white image by replacing the silver used in the development process with a silver compound. This is why old photos have a wonderful sepia tone—it’s down to chemistry, specifically silver sulfide in the case of sepia, and it had the side effect of increasing the lifespan of the resulting print. Of course, this is relatively straightforward to do with digital post processing, and we can take the process a step further by toning the light parts of the image in one color, and the dark parts in another. This is known as split toning, and can be achieved in both Photoshop and Lightroom—the latter even…

AMD’S RYZEN was a very long time coming. So much so, some industry observers worried whether AMD would survive long enough to bring it to market. But AMD did, and here we are just over a year later. In the meantime, the original Ryzen CPU family inserted a flying nocturnal insectivore up the metaphorical nightdress of the PC processor market. And now we have AMD’s second-generation Ryzen processor in hand. AMD is back, and it’s all for the better, even if you don’t buy an AMD CPU. It’s arguably a stretch to characterize the Ryzen 7 2700X chip as truly second gen. Architecturally, the narrative involves Zen+ while previous Ryzens were Zen. But there are no changes to the physical design, no new features, no additional cores, no added PCI…

WHEN INTEL ANNOUNCED its partnership with AMD to produce a single CPU package with integrated Vega graphics in late 2017, hell’s residents must have wondered about the white stuff falling from the sky. But the Hades Canyon NUC is no joke, and packing this much power into such a tiny space is a little like harnessing the power of the atom. Kaby Lake-G is the bombshell of small form factors, thanks mostly to the Radeon Vega M graphics. Vega M GH configuration is five times faster than Intel’s HD Graphics 630, and it’s also more than twice as fast as the Vega 11 graphics in AMD’s Ryzen 5 2400G. Yeah. It can actually deliver 1080p at 60fps in most games, at medium quality. That’s great news for ultra-compact devices like…

HIGH-RESOLUTION AUDIO is PC gaming’s favorite “Next Big Thing” at the moment. Just as HD displays brought our eyes out of the dark ages and into a new era of crystal-clear game worlds, hi-res audio wants to bathe your ears in newfound fidelity, making positional audio cues in games easier to pinpoint, and Metallica’s Master of Puppets sound exactly 3.8 times more badass than the last time you heard it. And it’s this promise that SteelSeries embraces with its newest batch of Arctis headsets. They were already among the best in the market, and now a trio of fresh (and expensive) models aims to stretch out that lead on the competition. There’s always room for a little healthy cynicism when these new tech standards present themselves, of course. But what…

TRIUMPHS ✓ MORE MINI RETRO GEAR Following the huge success of the NES and SNES Classic, Sega is launching a Mega Drive Mini. ✓ YOU CAN OPEN THE CASE The FTC has confirmed that “warranty void if removed” stickers are illegal, and sent out warning notices to companies. ✓ AMAZON PRIME HITS 100M Free delivery and constant nagging pays off. Amazon doesn’t usually give out stats, but couldn’t resist boasting about this. TRAGEDIES ✗ YOUR TV WILL SNOOP TOO The new TV broadcast standard allows smart TVs to track what you watch and help target ads. ✗ TESLA 3 HALTED AGAIN Production targets are way off, with a huge waiting list. The solution? Hire more people to build the cars instead of robots. ✗ SPECTRE/MELTDOWN COST Benchmark figures are emerging…

8 CES Big gadgets, future technology, and next-gen innovation to kick off the year, every January in Las Vegas, NV. www.ces.tech 7 COMPUTEX TAIPEI Running since 1981, Taipei’s Computex inevitably hosts some massive tech reveals from Asia’s top manufacturers. www.computextaipei.com.tw 6 CEBIT® Straight after Computex in June comes its European counterpart—Cebit, in Hanover, is the largest computer show in the world. www.cebit.de 5 PAX Seattle. Boston. Philadelphia. San Antonio. Melbourne, Australia. PAX, running since 2004, is a massive entity with a huge following. www.paxsite.com 4 GAMESCOM Cologne’s Gamescom is a huge celebration of gaming, with an awesome city-wide festival tacked on to the end. www.gamescom-cologne.com 3 PC GAMING SHOW AT E3 LA’s E3 is packed with games of all kinds, but our friends at PC Gamer have made it a…

Memory is also a vital component when it comes to rendering graphics, both with integrated and dedicated GPUs. It all comes down to the notion of a frame buffer. In short, the GPU cores found in both graphics cards and CPUs rely on the frame buffer to store rendered textures, which can be called upon, when required, for quick, smooth, and efficient rendering, and the piecing together of frames in game. For a standalone GPU, the card itself features its own dedicated memory, designed specifically with that one task in mind. These memory chips typically run faster than their DRAM counterparts, and have a wider bus, which allows for a larger amount of data to pass through at any given time. For instance, an Nvidia GTX 1080 has a 256-bit…

THE ANCIENT GAMER INGREDIENTS There are two major problems here, the first of which is the dual GTX 970s running in SLI. This forces the GPUs to operate in PCIe x8 mode, as opposed to a full-fat x16. Couple that with the fact you’ve got just a dual-core processor, and most games are immediately going to throttle even at 1080p. The GPU solution is fine on its own for 1080p, but the problem lies with that processor. It would make sense to upgrade the motherboard and CPU to something with more cores and single-core grunt. The second and possibly more alarming problem is the 550W bronze-rated power supply. By default, you should be drawing around 450W from the wall—even with this dual SLI setup—but only having 100W of headroom doesn’t…

For x86 processors (other processors, such as AR M, have their own technologies), there is a number of different hardware features that have been added over time to help accelerate virtualization of guests. It’s worth covering these, because they offer an insight into the work the virtual host is having to do. Virtualization software largely has two options when it comes to running guest software faster: full virtualization or paravirtualization. The full option, as you might guess, requires the host to recreate every aspect of the virtualized hardware from the full instruction set, I/O operations/devices, interrupts, and memory. For x86 code running on an x86 machine, instructions can largely be run directly, but any instructions or I/O access that violate the virtual machine have to be trapped and translated—this slows everything…

A fantastic use for a virtual machine is running a development system. Snapshots enable you to play with a guest VM, and rewind all your changes. As an example, we’ll explain how to run a Turnkey dedicated WordPress server. This enables you to run your own full-fledged local WordPress server, and do whatever you like to it. Head to www.turnkeylinux.org/wordpress and grab the VM.ova file —it’s a reasonably light 304MB. Use the VirtualBox “File > Import Appliance” menu. Peruse the default settings—they should be fine—and click “Import.” You might want to click “Settings > Network,” and ensure Bridge mode is selected—it should be. Fire up the VM; it asks you to set root, MySQL, and WordPress passwords. As this is just for fun, “Password!” works well. You may want to skip…

WHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN. Ray tracing, that stalwart tech that made the Commodore Amiga look graphically impressive (as long as you left it on for two days, and didn’t want to render more than a sphere and a checkerboard) is making a comeback. The light-following rendering technology is on the way to making the move from multiple days of processing time to 60fps, and this means a massive change for previsualization in movies, the graphical fidelity of games, and possibly the entire future of GPUs. Big names in rendering have jumped on board, such as Epic and its Unreal Engine, Unity 3D, and EA’s Frostbite. Microsoft has pledged its support in a big way, with an entirely new set of rendering instructions integrated into DirectX 12, and Nvidia is working…

Although the tools to get started with real-time ray tracing are pretty much there right now, with DXR support added to Unity 3D, Unreal Engine, and the like, you’re not going to be able to take advantage of them yet. But if you’re interested in seeing how real-time ray tracing works on current hardware, and want an example of how valuable denoising is going to be, you can try some old-school tracing now. Otoy’s Brigade engine (http://otoy.com) is a real-time path tracer that purports to run on current GPUs—and it does, albeit in a very noisy way. You can try an online demo, running through a version of Otoy’s OctaneRender package, at http://render.otoy.com/includes/xio_launch.php to see what the fuss is about and why denoising matters. There are multiple scenes that you can…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI We use a Pi Zero in this tutorial. UPS Buy an Alchemy Power UPS from www.amazon.com. 1 YOUR OWN PI UPS The solution comes from the folk at Alchemy Power, who have developed two UPSes for Pi and Pi Zero users. Its main solution is the Pi-UpTimeUPS, which works with any Pi that has a 40-pin GPIO header, including the Zero. However, its form factor is aimed at the Pi, and it comes with a prohibitive price tag: $50 from Amazon. >> A less powerful option, but one that can still provide over an hour of emergency power, is the PiZ-UpTime. This costs $29 from Amazon, and is the unit we used in this tutorial. Although optimized for the Pi Zero, it works with the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI ZERO The budget board costs just $5. 1 GETTING STARTED Downloading the Raspberry Pi Desktop is easy. Visit www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspberry-pi-desktop and click the “Download” link. This downloads an ISO file—a disk image that we can write to a spare USB flash drive. The best and easiest tool to use to write the image is Etcher (https://etcher.io). >> Download Etcher and extract the file to your desktop. Now go to your desktop and double-click the file to open Etcher. The program asks you to tell it where the file is that you wish to write (ours is the Raspberry Pi Desktop ISO). Insert your USB flash drive—Etcher detects the drive and uses it. The final step is to click “Flash” and supply your password to write the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 And the desire to change its desktop to something better. YOU WIMP! Readers as old as our executive editor, Alan, will know that Windows Icons Menus and mouse Pointer (WIMP) is the ancient acronym that describes the original mouse-driven graphical interfaces that span out of Xerox labs. Despite Windows 8, Microsoft was never able to kill off the classic icon-based desktop that most PC users know and love. We should admit to the truth, though: The classic desktop is terrible; it’s as bad as a real desktop. You’ll leave your garbage scattered all over it—empty coffee mugs, Oreo crumbs, and worse. It is, however, a little draconian to utterly ban the ability to keep recent items left handily on your desktop. Surely there’s a helpful…

SIX-CORE INTEL CPU? Check. Nvidia GTX 1070 graphics? Affirmative. IPS panel with 144Hz refresh and G-Sync support? Sir, yes, sir. On paper, Asus’s latest ROG gaming laptop, the Zephyrus M, has all the makings of a high-frame-rate portable powerhouse. But like any laptop, what matters is the detailed implementation. Much more than desktops, integration and engineering make all the difference if you’re going to squeeze the maximum out of any given component in a laptop. As it happens, attention to those details is precisely what Asus claims the Zephyrus M delivers. As a for instance, Asus says the thermal design of the chassis compared to its Zephyrus progenitor has been carefully tweaked. The overall thickness is maintained at 17.5–19.9mm, but the volumes have been optimized, and the number of thermal…

ANOTHER MONTH, another new SSD from Intel. Over the last year or two, we’ve seen Intel roll out new SSDs built into conventional PCI Express cards and SATA enclosures, released in new formats such as M.2, supporting the latest NVMe control protocol in various guises, and even ditching tried and tested NAND flash memory in favor of the radical new 3D Xpoint tech. That’s just on the consumer side. Intel’s SSDs for servers are even more varied. And yet there’s still more. The “more” in this case is the new Intel SSD DC P4510 Series. It’s available in configurations up to a monster 8TB, but this example rocks in at 2TB. Still a beefy drive by solid-state standards. Indeed, the smallest of the P4510 Series is a full 1TB. In…