Table of contents for September 2016 in Maximum PC

BUILDING A PC is much like assembling parts for a high-performance sports car. You’ve got all the bits and pieces, but there’s one critical part that makes everything work together: the ECU, or in the case of our PC, the operating system. And like the ECU in a race car, Windows 10 can be tweaked and locked down to perform better and be more secure. Ever since Microsoft pushed out Windows 10, there has been a flurry of conflicting opinions about whether or not it is a worthy successor to Windows 7. Yeah, I said 7—we all know how Win 8 performed. But I can tell you definitively that, with the right tweaks, Windows 10 isn’t just a worthy replacement, it’s better in every essential way. On my Windows system…

VR IS ON A ROLL. Sony’s $399 PlayStation 4 VR headset is due mid-October. It will work with all PlayStation 4s, and 50 games will offer support by the end of 2016. It runs at 120fps and 120Hz. More importantly, Sony has the VR-friendly high-res PlayStation Neo in the pipeline. It was expected to announce its launch at E3, but it looks like we’ll have to wait a little longer. Not far away either is Microsoft’s Project Scorpion: a 4K VR Xbox due next year. Razer has also launched a new $399 VR headset, the HDK2, Hacker Development Kit, for its opensource VR platform. The pricing is the vital element here, undercutting both the Rift and the Vive, while offering the same core specifications. We now have a generation of…

“No cheap processors paired with fully-featured motherboards; it’s AMD’s way or the highway. One of the reasons I’m excited by the prospect of AMD’s new socket and Zen microarchitecture is because it has the feel of classic AMD stuff. I’m not talking about the Bulldozer et al days of overpromising on barely-iterative new technologies—I’m talking about taking risks and having interesting new takes on where it can take processing technology. The new AM4 socket is the base for its upcoming Zen architecture, with the potentially powerful eight-core, 16-thread Summit Ridge in the vanguard of its high-performance new desktop range. It’s also the base for its new Bristol Ridge APUs. Historically, AMD and Intel have segregated their motherboards between high-end desktop (HEDT) chips and CPUs with integrated graphics. Not so with…

WHEN WE FIRST TALKED to Digital Storm about its new Aventum 3 desktop, we were excited to see what sort of performance the company’s flagship PC could offer. Unfortunately, we were forced to wait. The original spec called for GTX Titan X video cards, but Digital Storm held off to put a pair of the new GeForce GTX 1080 cards in place of the Titans. We have to say, it was worth the wait. The Aventum 3 is a massive machine. It’s big enough that the term “desktop” is something of a misnomer. This PC will most likely make its home on your floor, unless you have a very sturdy, large desk, and a friend with a strong back to help you lift it. And there’s a reason it’s heavy:…

HERE WE GO AGAIN: another month, another wireless headset, another offering to the gaming gods of wireless peripheral fury. The Razer ManO’War is nothing short of awe-inspiring to look at it. Its clean lines, simple black design, and elegant feel will appeal to those looking for a more premium headset. It’s a step away from the more outlandish offerings Corsair recently brought to the table, and far bulkier and classier than Turtle Beach’s wireless headsets, as well. But, alas, looks are only one part of the story, and there’s more to tell when it comes to the ManO’War. It’s safe to say we’ve not always been fans of Razer’s more recent cans here at Maximum PC. The Kraken Pros, for instance, lacked the higher reaching treble found within the likes…

YOU MAY RECALL a couple of issues back that we did an extensive Build-It and feature on hardline liquid cooling. It was my baby—14 pages of water-cooling goodness and a system build, crammed into 5,500 words. Alas, the story never quite ends when it comes to liquid-cooling. In fact, that was only the beginning. But after three months, the conundrums that bugged me with the first “final” build have now been resolved. These conundrums mostly came about because of human error on my part. During my wanton abandon, I idiotically ignored the instructions on including the correct extender fitting on the inlets of my reservoir, so I suffered a tiny leak and the death of two pumps (yep!)—a harsh learning curve for myself. After some discussion with my water-cooling contacts…

INSIDE ALMOST EVERY decent smartphone is an ARM processor; it has an enviable grip on the market. ARM doesn’t produce any silicon itself, but licenses its designs to plenty of big players. The company has just announced a major upgrade, too, with the release of the Cortex A72. According to helpful ARM bar graphs, it promises to be up to 3.5 times faster than the A57. The base architecture is the same as the A57, but it has been shrunk, streamlined, and optimized, with notably better branch predication, lower latency execution units, and faster L2 cache. The key in this sector is power consumption, and here the 16nm A72 addresses the weakness of its predecessor, claiming to be up to 75 percent more efficient. The interesting result of all this…

Imagine this nightmare scenario: You’re a grad student working on your master’s thesis at a hip cafe downtown. It’s getting a bit crowded, but you realize that third cup of tea has made you need to pee. You get up in a hurry, and rush to the bathroom, nearly flattening a toddler, and smashing into a another patron who is miraculously wearing earbuds, holding two coffees, chewing gum, and texting all at once. After you come out of the bathroom, relieved, you find your laptop is gone. You begin to think about having to re-write those four pages of your thesis that hadn’t been synched, while you simultaneously fantasize about finding the rat bastard who stole your PC. That rage turns to panic, as you realize that your tax returns,…

Protecting Power Win 7 and Skylake Battlefield Plans THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES... Protect Your Power Hey Doc! Finally, after saving for six months, I built my first PC with a Core i5-6600K CPU, Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 motherboard, Radeon R9 390 graphics card, 600W 80 PLUS Bronze-rated power supply, and 16GB of DDR4 memory. I live in an old house, though, and I worry that the number of blackouts we experience will damage my new hardware. Do you have any suggestions? –Ben Danielson THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: Unstable power can be hard on your PSU and the equipment attached to it, so you’re right to be concerned. Power is lost completely during a blackout, and although blackouts can last days, all it takes is milliseconds for whatever you’re working on to…

To us, using it today, virtual reality seems a unified idea, a combination of aural, visual, and vestibular (balance) stimuli, which gives a convincing sensation of being in a false location. By contrast, the very first thing that looks like VR was the Brewster Stereoscope, based on Charles Wheatstone’s Stereoscope. Wheatstone was one of those 19th century inventors who seems to have been involved in every invention of his era—electronics, cryptography, telegraphy, spectroscopy, acoustics, and so on. To make the Stereoscope, he had to explain binocular vision first, and how it gives the impression of solidity to the world (crucial in VR). Wheatstone’s Stereoscope was less impressive, but established the basic principles of virtual reality. It used different images for each eye, reflected by an individual mirror. However, this happened…

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY THE CONCEPT WHAT GOT YOU into PCs in the first place? Can you remember? For many of us here at Maximum PC, it was gaming. As much as we are all professionals here in the office, utilizing a wideranging cornucopia of software in our lives, ultimately it was controlling a plethora of pixelated characters over the years that drew us into a world of higher frame rates, customization, and the best experience possible on a desktop. And that’s exactly what this build is all about. Getting back to our roots, piecing together a rig that is centered around a respectable GPU and a gaming workhorse of a CPU. For the previous three generations of Nvidia GPUs, the premium best-value option from…

MOBILE GAMING h as a lways h ad a c ertain stigma. It’s more expensive than a console, yet insurmountably inferior to the towering powerhouse of a desktop PC. Take the GTX 970M as an example. It comes with 1,280 CUDA cores, 384 fewer than its desktop sibling, a lower base clock, 192-bit memory bus as opposed to 256-bit, and half the memory bandwidth of its counterpart. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t stop at GPUs, either, because even though Intel continues to push the boundary in terms of performance per watt and economic power savings, its mobile processors suffer the same setbacks. So, why on earth would you buy one? Usually, there’s just one reason: Convenience. Perhaps you travel a lot, don’t have the space for a full-sized desktop, or are…

LIKE IT OR NOT, i t’s n ot a lways p ossible to have your PC audio piped out from your glorious 5.1 surround sound setup. However awesome your taste in music, your room-mate or significant other may have different (obviously worse) tastes, and might also not appreciate the sounds of your current fantasy realm/postapocalyptic nightmare of choice booming out at all hours of the day and night. What are you to do? Get yourself a serious set of headphones in order to jealously guard your spectacular audio taste, and keep it from the ears of others. They simply don’t deserve it. While a great many PC headsets are aimed at gamers, there is a rising tide of users eschewing gaming headsets’ overblown bass tones in favor of the more…

UBUNTU 16.04 LIVE USB There are a few things I like to keep around as a PC enthusiast. A screwdriver is obvious, as is the occasional can of compressed air. But one thing I’ve found a ton of use for is a USB thumb drive loaded with a copy of Ubuntu. If you boot to the USB drive, you can start using Ubuntu right away, without any need to install it as your main or secondary OS. This is great if you’re just Linux-curious, or want your own OS that you can fit on a keychain and take anywhere. When running Ubuntu from a USB stick, the OS is normally nonpersistent (when you reboot, everything you’ve done is gone). However, you can set up a persistent installation if you use…

IN A DEAL that has surprised many, Microsoft has bought LinkedIn for the princely sum of $26.2 billion, which equates to $196 a share, a full 50 percent premium on the share price at the time of the announcement. LinkedIn is hugely popular, but not profitable, reporting an annual loss of $166 million in 2015. The deal has left many a little puzzled. LinkedIn makes the bulk of its money by selling its recruiting service to corporations that are looking to hire. It has singularly struggled to earn much from paid subscribers or advertising. How Microsoft can earn back its investment looks unclear— it has paid a hefty $60 for every LinkedIn user. The deal does bring the company a lot of data to mine, and some opportunities for integration,…

8 DEATH STRANDING We have little more than an eerie trailer for Hideo Kojima’s latest, but we’re smitten. 7 CALL OF DUTY: INFINITE WARFARE Space isn’t an obvious fit for CoD, but it’s shaping up well. 6 STEEP Ubisoft’s open-world racer pits you against a mountain using skis, snowboards, wingsuits, and more. 5 FORZA HORIZON 3 Every first-party Microsoft game will hit Win 10, including Gears of War 4 and Halo 6. 4 RESIDENT EVIL 7 Jump scares aplenty in the demo that sees the series return to its scary roots. 3 GHOST RECON: WILDLANDS Cause mayhem with up to three friends in this open-world sandbox. 2 BATTLEFIELD 1 Back to WWI for 64-player battles. A Zeppelin going up in flames has us all kinds of stoked. 1 DISHONORED 2…

There’s no getting away from it: Windows needs almost constant attention. Take your eye off the ball, and it’s suddenly clogged up with unwanted files and struggling to keep up, thanks to a pile of software you thought was interesting at the time, but have long since abandoned. Obviously, keeping your PC in good shape is a key part of making it perform well, but while Windows 10 is streets ahead of its predecessors in terms of keeping its demands on your processor, RAM, and other components quite low, there’s still lots you can do to fine-tune it, discovering tweaks and settings that ensure it’s running at optimum efficiency and speed. In this feature, we reveal plenty of tips and tricks for making the most of Win 10. We start…

“There’s a one in billions chance we’re in base reality,” said Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor behind the Tesla car and SpaceX rockets, and founder of PayPal. Talking at the Recode Code conference, he said he thinks we’re almost certainly computergenerated creations of a more advanced civilization’s simulation—a video game. Musk pointed to the advances in video games technology over 40 years, from Pong to “photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously… virtual reality, augmented reality.” He pointed out that we’re “on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box, or on a PC, or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or settop boxes, so it would seem to follow that the…

IF BROADWELL-E HAS shown us anything, it’s that Intel is really starting to champion HEDT as being an accessible platform for gamers. And it’s with good reason. For the longest time, the mainstream Intel Core i5s and i7s were the epitome of what we’d consider a good gaming processor. At least, until the launch of Haswell-E. It was a slow transition, but with the introduction of the Intel Core i7-5820K, we began to see an affordable high-end six-core processor available to the masses. And as the gap continued to close between the highest of high-end Skylake processors and the lowest-end X99 chip, it was only a matter of time before the Core i7-6800K was finally placed right in the sights of those looking for a more powerful gaming processor. This…

WE WERE SO IMPRESSED by the MunroSonic Egg100 monitoring system, we just had to take a look at its larger sibling, the Egg150. Designed and built in Britain by legendary sound man Andy Munro, the Eggs are a stunning example of modern acoustic engineering. In a move away from the industry standard for studio monitors—a pair of rectangular boxes with the amps inside— the Egg150 system comes with an external amplifier, custom-tuned to power two ovoid speakers, each housing a 25mm high-frequency driver and a 165mm woofer. As well as looking awesome, the egg-shaped design allows for a totally resonant-free sound, giving as flat a response as possible. The Eggs are mounted on moulded rubber nests, which enable you to make minute adjustments to both the vertical and horizontal positioning…

PHANTEKS HAS BECOME legendary for its innovative case designs. By no means has the Dutch company created revolutionary changes, more evolutionary advances. Advances that have been picked up by many a case manufacturer looking to improve its lineup. So, what are we talking about? Rear SSD mounts on the back of the motherboard tray and on the front of the chassis, simple yet effective integrated PWM fan hubs, a slide-out fan/radiator mount in the top of the chassis, improved airflow, thanks to cleverly designed perforated front panels, ITX form factor towers capable of housing even the most boisterous GPUs, and some curious rear I/O 5.25-inch drive bay mounting solutions. So, to the case in question. The Evolv ATX Glass is Phanteks' fourth iteration of its Evolv range. The original Evolv…

A TECH JOURNALIST n eeds a s olid a nd dependable camera. Photography and video are a central part of our job, and although you can get away with a good smartphone, nothing compares to a true APS-C sensor. For me, that sensor comes in the form of Fujifilm’s X70. It’s a fixed-lens, lightweight, small form factor street camera I can just pop in my pocket. Its 18.5mm wide-angled lens, coupled with the 16.3MP APS-C sensor, is more than enough to satisfy my needs. Video-wise, the X70 supports 1080p at up to 60fps, for a grand total of 14 minutes in a single shot—enough for all my vlogging aspirations. But what blows me away is the screen. Capable of pivoting up to 180 degrees, it enables you to line up…

Approximate Price: $812 NOT MUCH HAS CHANGED in this build, as at the time of writing, we’re still waiting on AMD’s RX 480 to hit retail. That means the R9 380 stays on, though we changed it up for Sapphire’s factory overclocked model. Changing up the video card presented problems in the little Cougar QBX. As much as we love the case, it can be cramped, and puts restraints on the size and type of GPU and PSU you can use. We decided to change it to allow a little more flexibility. Thermaltake’s Core V1 is a great inexpensive mini-ITX case. All four of its side panels are removable and interchangeable—great for customizing cooling or viewing arrangements. One thing we really like is that the case features a cutout in…