APC February 2022

What’s been your stand-out tech of the year? Here at APC we’re thinking about that right now, and a few particularly nice things linger in our memory. As always, as we get into 2022 in earnest, the team will be putting together our annual Australian PC Awards, but until we actually formalise that and homogenise the many differing opinions of the editorial team, it’s fun to look at what shone in 2021 less formally. I was really impressed with the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 this year. By gosh is it nice. Microsoft don’t get enough credit for the design, manufacturing, and materials used in all of its hardware. I feel they’re taken for granted in some ways. The bar was set long ago with the first Microsoft Intellimouse and the…

ASHAMPOO UNINSTALLER 9 The complete uninstaller for risk-free PC usage. Ashampoo UnInstaller 9 is your safety net to try and completely uninstall programs without any leftovers. You decide what goes and stays on your PC. The program carefully monitors each installation in depth to completely remove it should the need arise. Even unmonitored installations are reversible thanks to in-depth cleaning technology. With UnInstaller 9, unwanted programs, browser extensions and toolbars disappear from your system at the click of a button! And thanks to innovative snapshot technology, you can track any modifications to to your system instantly and intuitively. Download link: www.apcmag.com/exclusives AUDIALS RADIO 2022 SPECIAL EDITION 100,000 radios legally conjures up a lot of free MP3s. There are over 100,000 international, national and even regional internet radios from 120 music…

“Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage.” APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms.…

AMD’s Zen architecture propelled it to the top of the desktop PC market, but Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs now offer a compelling alternative. Not to be outgunned, at CES 2022 AMD teased renders of the coming 5nm Zen 4 chips that will come with Ryzen 7000 branding and a radical new design that will drop into the new AM5 LGA socket. In addition, AMD demoed a Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ chip running Halo Infinite with all cores surpassing 5.0GHz during the benchmark. AMD says the Ryzen 7000 processors will arrive in the second half of the year. In the interim, AMD will fire back at Alder Lake this autumn with its Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor. This new chip features AMD’s new 3D V-Cache tech that packs a whopping 96MB of L3…

Nvidia has finally announced a “budget” RTX card with the GeForce RTX 3050. It also revealed details on the already leaked RTX 3090 Ti, and announced RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPUs. The RTX 3050 desktop card will use the same trimmed down GA107 GPU found in the mobile 3050/3050 Ti. That’s not great news, since GA107 only has a 128-bit memory interface and up to 2560 CUDA cores. The desktop 3050 will use the maximum 20 SMs (streaming multiprocessors), giving it 2,560 GPU cores, and of course the RTX 3050 also features RT cores for ray tracing and tensor cores for DLSS and other applications. Next up, the RTX 3090 Ti will basically give a minor bump in GPU core counts. It will utilise a fully-enabled…

Intel’s CES 2022 keynote found the company introducing the remaining 22 Alder Lake-S chips that will round out its lineup for desktop PCs. The company also announced that the more affordable H670, B660 and H610 chipsets would come to market soon, helping to address the high platform pricing associated with the pricier Z690 motherboards. Intel also shared details about its new Laminar lineup of stock coolers that come bundled with its non-K SKUs. These new coolers appear to add plenty of new cooling capabilities in tandem with some RGB bling, both of which are sorely needed to compete with AMD’s historically excellent Ryzen stock coolers. These 22 new 65W and 35W chips complement the three Alder Lake models (Core i9-12900K, Core i7-12700K, and Core i5-12600K) already on the market. As…