Table of contents for February 2015 in Maximum PC

To celebrate, commemorate, maybe even commiserate the departure of long-term Maximum PC staffer, all-time hardware expert, and part-time muckraker Gordon Mah Ung, here are some highlights from his very last podcast. Gordon’s rants, preachings, and polemics have been a highlight for Maximum PC parishioners for over a decade and a half. And this final podcast is no exception. His soaring oratory and low expletives lay waste to mainstream media assumptions, Han Solo’s hero status, poor old console graphics, and, yes, Apple’s bent iPhones. Adieu, Gordo. Adieu. MPC: Tell us about the huge changes to the PC you saw over your 16 years on Maximum PC. Gordon: There’s an old YouTube clip from 2001 from a TV show PC Chronicles. I was on it though I can’t even remember being there.…

For a long time, many PC gamers scoffed at the idea of gaming laptops. After all, how could you fit all that power in such a small form factor? And even if you could somehow squeeze it in, it’s got to be deafeningly loud or incredibly heavy, right? Well, the gaming notebook sector is advancing, and it’s doing so by leaps and bounds. So much so that big gray box companies are taking notice. HP, for instance, is jumping back in with its Omen gaming notebook. Gone are the days when a modestly powerful gaming laptop had to be a back-breaker. Many aren’t much thicker than some of the sleek Ultrabooks out there now. But what of performance? The gap between desktop and mobile GPU performance is narrowing faster than…

If you can remember our August 2014 issue, we weren’t too impressed with Nvidia’s Battery Boost when it came out. For the uninitiated, the feature throttles gaming performance to optimize battery life, but we saw little-to-no gains. Nvidia acknowledged an issue and has been trying to rectify that with its mobile Maxwell GPUs. We tested it with our Asus ROG G751, with its Nvidia GTX 980M, and saw a small gain this time. For our benchmark, we did A/B testing by looping the Tomb Raider graphics benchmark until our G751 died. With Battery Boost disabled, the laptop ran around 50fps average and lasted 70 minutes. With Battery Boost enabled, we got 80 minutes. Ten minutes extra may not sound much, but a 15 percent bonus is nothing to sneeze at.…

The hardware requirements aren’t steep. Just like running a game, the more processing power behind the host machine, the less taxing streaming will be on the system. But assuming you’ve got the hardware to accelerate the video encoding process (and almost every system sold in the last few years should), an adequate amount of memory, and decent broadband, then a fairly modest system will work just fine. Both Nvidia’s GameStream and Steam’s In-House Streaming recommend using a quad-core Intel CPU (or six-core AMD processor). We’d also suggest having at least 8GB in the system. As always, more memory is better. The client systems have more modest requirements, however. They should have a GPU with built-in hardware accelerated H.264 decoding, but just about any modern computer or device should have that.…

MPC: What have been the biggest changes in the games industry over the last few years? BG: Digital has been changing the industry for a while and it’s not done yet. Whether you’re looking at how games are delivered, the renaissance of the indie developer, the immediacy of social, or the draw of live video streams, all have been fuelled in some way by improving connectivity, and it’s only going to get better. We’re also seeing consumer expectations changing. People want to access their chosen entertainment quicker, on the device of their choice, wherever they are. MPC: How does it work in terms of licences? BG: OnLive has two offerings. PlayPack is very much like the Spotify or Netflix models where you have a constantly growing library of games that…

THIS MONTH WE DISSECT… 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: A commodity-spec Android tablet for the mouth-breathing masses? Yuck. But wait. It packs one of Nvidia’s smart-ass new Tegra K1 chips, the version with Nvidia’s special-sauce Denver cores. Intriguingly, the Denver variant has just two cores compared to the quad-core version that’s based on ARM A15 CPU cores. So that’s two K1s with different core counts and architectures. Baffling and fascinating? You betcha. MAJOR TECH SPECS: KEY FINDINGS:…

NVIDIA’S NEW MAXWELL GENERATION of video cards breaks down into two categories: the GTX 970 and GTX 980. As its numbering implies, the 970 is the less-expensive and not-as-fast option, coming in at around $330 for the basic model. As you can see from the photo, Zotac’s Amp Extreme Edition is anything but basic, with an appropriately higher street price of about $400. What does that extra cheddar get you? Aside from performance that can pretty much guarantee 60fps at 1080p, the Amp Extreme (one tier above Zotac’s “Omega”) gets you some massive cooling. Since the GTX 970 is only rated to need 145 watts before overclocking, it’s not putting out a lot of heat, by video card standards. With this jumbo-sized heatsink helping things along, the trio of fans…

SPECIFICATIONS THERE ARE FEW PARTS of the industry as volatile as the SSD world. Most other PC components are mature enough that the smaller players have faded away to leave only a few of the biggest still operating. In graphics there are three players, and in processor terms only two. With SSDs we're starting to see Crucial and Samsung pull away, but the market is still young enough to mean many hopefuls remain. OCZ was among that following crowd. But since being bought by Toshiba, it's discovered a brighter future. After all, a big reason Crucial and Samsung have developed a lead is because they both have direct access to the pricey part of SSDs—the NAND flash. Crucial’s parent company, Micron, is one of the biggest NAND producers around, while…

MICROSOFT HAS LONG BEEN CRITICIZED for using an “embrace, extend—and extinguish” strategy across its business. You know, embrace a standard, extend it by adding new proprietary standards, and then extinguish the competition that can’t use the proprietary standards. Well, we’re truly through the looking glass with Microsoft’s new Universal Mobile Keyboard, folks. This mobile Bluetooth keyboard is what you’d expect: rechargeable through micro-USB with a decent action but a little too compressed. There’s also a very clever cover that does double duty as a stand for your tablet, with two different viewing angles supported. The keyboard has the typical volume controls, multimedia buttons, and a compressed cursor layout as other mobile keyboards do. So far it’s a snore, right? What’s so unusual? Well, it’s clear that someone at Microsoft wearing…

WELCOME TO A FIRST-PERSON shooting gallery smattered with nearly-on-rails vehicle segments, quicktime events, and slightly interactive storytelling. Yes, Advanced Warfare is like most other Call of Duty games. It sure is a lot better than Ghosts, though, and it introduces some neat gadgets. The most interesting are the Exo suits, which imbue their wearers with double-jumps, strafe dashes, and other special abilities. Guns are littered everywhere and they’re fun. Big, powerful, and varied, with some punching single shots through armor and others spraying corridors with death. The ballistics aren’t very interesting (put mouse over head, tap left mouse button to make dead) but the animations, sounds, and dramatic death animations are addictive feedback. There’s even a beam weapon—like a Ghostbusters proton pack, only it extracts ghosts from the living—and heaving…

IS 2015 THE YEAR OF 3D SSDs? It will certainly see the SSD war hotting up, as Intel and Micron have teamed up against Samsung in the battle of 3D NAND memory and mighty tech empires. The most immediate impact of 3D memory will be a dramatic increase in drive capacities and in turn a major tumble in the bucks-per-gigabyte metric. Solid-state drives should get both bigger and cheaper. Great. Much like the stacked RAM coming to graphics memory, slabs of the NAND silicon that goes into SSDs is being built up in layers and linked with billions of pillars or connections. Samsung was first to the punch in late 2014 with its Samsung 850 Pro and 850 EVO, which are just hitting store shelves as we go to press.…

GPU Let’s face facts. As powerful as gaming laptop GPUs have become, they will always be slower than their desktop counterparts. You can always cram more power into larger components; it’s simple physics. But gaming laptop GPUs are narrowing the divide, and this has been the case with every passing generation of mobile GPUs. According to Nvidia, its Fermi-based 480M GPU only offered 40 percent of the performance of its 480 desktop equivalent back in 2010. Nvidia claims the gap narrowed to 60 percent with the Kepler-based 680M. Now Nvidia says the 980M is roughly 70–80 percent as fast as its current flagship GTX 980. From our internal testing (which you’ll read more about on page 33), our numbers don’t support those figures across the board, but they aren’t terribly…

There’s a lot of complex engineering involved in getting game streaming “right.” At its core, however, the concept is fairly straightforward. When you break things down, every game is essentially a collection of frames displayed on-screen that are affected by the gamer’s input. Multiple things must happen to run and interact with that game, but the on-screen imagery, audio, and interaction are what are ultimately conveyed to the gamer through the monitor, speakers, and input devices. It works by taking some of the game’s frames, converting them into a video stream on the fly, and transmitting the video out to a remote device. The game’s control interface and audio is also sent to the remote device, whether it be another PC, a smartphone, or a tablet. On some levels, streaming…

As a Maximum PC reader looking to experiment with game streaming, odds are you’ll already have access to Steam, or Nvidia or AMD GPUs. With that in mind, we thought we’d explain how to utilize Steam’s In-Home Streaming, Nvidia’s GameStream, and AMD’s Gaming Evolved utility to stream games between PCs, between a PC and mobile device, and from a PC to Twitch. Although they have some features in common, there are fundamental differences between Valve’s, Nvidia’s, and AMD’s current solutions. Steam, for example, can stream games between systems on a local network that are capable of running the Steam client (currently available for Windows, Linux, and OSX). Nvidia’s GameStream technology can stream games from a PC to an Nvidia Shield device on a local network or across the web, provided…

MPC: The online games marketplace has changed a huge amount since Green Man Gaming started. What have you done to keep ahead? DC: We’ve kept ahead by going beyond a sale! On top of having an extensive catalogue of nearly 6,000 titles, we offer customers the chance to earn GMG Credit for positive activity such as joining the service, writing reviews on the site, signing up to newsletters, or most importantly, playing games. With Playfire Rewards, we attach credit to a selection of titles. This credit is then earned as gamers play through and gain achievements. These games don’t have to have been bought from us—gamers simply need to link their Steam account and sign up to the Rewards BETA to start earning. MPC: You’ve recently branched out into console…

WINDOWS TIP OF THE MONTH SUPERCHARGE “SEND TO” You’ve probably noticed the handy “Send to” option in the File Explorer’s right-click context menu, which lets you move a file directly to a number of common directories. But did you know you can supersize the list of possible destinations? Just hold Shift while right-clicking, and you’ll see a much larger list of send to locations. MAKE – USE – CREATE DON’T OVERLOOK AMAZON WEB SERVICES Generally, there’s a pretty big gulf between business-oriented software and services, and those marketed to consumers. The former tends to cost a lot more, and to be impractical for small-scale usage. But recently I’ve used Amazon Web Services for a few online projects, and I’ve noticed it bucks this trend. It’s marketed mostly to web developers,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS FLAWLESS WIDESCREEN Pick up the program at www.flawlesswidescreen.org. WHEN THE FIRST 29-inch ultra-widescreen monitors arrived, we loved their potential but decried their use on the standard Windows desktop due to the lack of vertical height. But LG and AOC have launched 34-inch monitors with 3440x1440 native resolutions, so we’re back on board. They’re still niche displays though, and many games don’t support them out of the box. You either get black bars down the sides or stretched images. Luckily, a programmer created Flawless Widescreen—it’s very easy to use, and can source game locations from both Steam and Origin. –DAVE JAMES 1 DRIVER TIME Before you get started, ensure your graphics drivers are up to date. Go to your card manufacturer’s website and download the current version. Now…

AJAY GHALE TRAVELS TO KYRAT, a fictional region of the Himalayas, to scatter his mother’s ashes. But by a quirk of fate he finds himself in the service of the Golden Path, an army of freedom fighters founded by his late father. They’re locked in a brutal civil war with Pagan Min, the despotic ruler of Kyrat, and it’s up to you—the prodigal son—to free it from his tyranny. It’s a neat twist on the classic Far Cry setup. You are, as in earlier games, a tourist stranded in an exotic, dangerous place, but this time you have a more personal reason for being there. Ajay feels more like an empty vessel for the player than the last game’s frat boy Jason Brody, but you still care about his story,…

WE TACKLE TOUGH READER QUESTIONS ON… Power Connections LGA2011-v3 Motherboards Gaming Upgrades Hooking Up I’m building the Turbo PC from the December issue. I am at a loss how to connect the Kraken X61 power connector. Should it be to the Gigabyte GA-X99-UD4 mobo? If so, how? Also, how did you get the X61 with the GA-X99-UD4 to fit inside the NZXT Phantom 530? —Pat TECHNICAL EDITOR TOM MCNAMARA RESPONDS: Hi, Pat. The power connector plugs into one of your power supply’s SATA cables. NZXT has a series of animated diagrams (http://bit.ly/11YxZxU) that walks you through it. For the Phantom 530, you need to remove the plastic top of the case to reveal the metal frame. Mount the fans on the top of this frame, then put the radiator inside…

SOLID-STATE STORAGE drives (SSD) are relative newcomers to the storage scene compared to media like mechanical hard disk drives, so understanding of their long-term reliability is still developing. In the absence of a DeLorean equipped to race back and forth in time, the next best way to test SSDs for longevity is to bombard them 24/7 with reads and writes. It turns out that such a test is taking place with two SSDs having survived 2 petabytes of write tests so far. The curious folk at TechReport started testing a batch of SSDs a year ago. They kicked off with the Corsair Neutron Series GTX, Intel 335 Series, Kingston HyperX 3K, and Samsung 840 Series. The two left standing are the Kingston and Samsung drives, both of which surpassed 2…

8 CPU-Z: Get a read out of your CPU’s clock speed, multiplier, and BUS speed. 7 GPU-Z: Provides detailed specs of your GPU’s clock speeds and memory size. 6 FURMARK: This program will indicate if your GPU overclocks are running too hot. 5 FRAPS: Provides a real-time frame counter and frame rate log during gameplay sessions. 4 PRIME 95: A stress test for your CPU. You can use this to see if your CPU clocks are stable. 3 3DMARK: See how your graphics stack up against others with a 3DMark score. 2 AMD CATALYST CONTROL CENTER: Monitor and change AMD cards’ core and memory clock speeds. 1 EVGA PRECISION X: Monitor and overclock your Nvidia GPU clock speeds.…

>VGA Cooling >GPU Upgrades > Sluggish PCs Busted Frozr Doc, I’ve got an aging Nvidia GTX 570 card from MSI that came with a Twin Frozr II cooler. While considering the possibility of either an upgrade or SLI configuration, I noticed the temperatures on my GPU were getting very high according to the monitoring software I use, especially under load. After investigating, I discovered one of the fans on my card had completely seized up while the other stuttered and barely ran at all. I’ve since removed and cleaned the card, disassembled the Twin Frozr II assembly to gain access to the fans’ rear area in an attempt to perform a lube, and reinstalled everything. After all that I discovered I’d completely failed to coax either fan back to life.…

When we reviewed our original Asus ROG G750 back in the June 2014 issue, we liked it. We liked it a lot. We ended up awarding it a “9 Kick Ass!” With its then top-of-the-line GeForce GTX 880M GPU, it killed it in gaming performance. It was also eerily quiet under load. Asus is hoping to recapture lightning in a bottle with its new G751, which is equipped with Nvidia’s latest mobile darling, the Ge-Force GTX 980M. It’s certainly the most powerful mobile GPU we’ve ever tested in our Lab, but the laptop, unfortunately, isn’t without its blemishes. The chassis remains largely the same, with a body measuring 16.4 x 12.5 x 0.9-inches. It’s also still very heavy, even by 17-inch gaming laptop standards, weighing in at 9 pounds, 3…

On 26 April 2014, a team of documentary makers turned up part of an unlikely story in the arid expanse of the New Mexico desert: a trove of some 700,000 buried Atari cartridges. The discovery of this 8-bit burial ground, assumed for many years to be little more than an urban legend, was a reminder of the near-destruction of the videogame industry in the early 1980s. A number of factors led to the spectacular crash. The industry was flooded with poor quality consoles, and the home computer was emerging in the form of the Apple II, the IBM 5150, and the Commodore 64. Consumers were becoming interested in a piece of hardware they could upgrade, rather than one with features rigidly set in stone by its manufacturer. There were also…

MPC: The UK introduced tax relief for developers last year. Has it had an effect on the games industry yet? JT: The tax breaks scheme officially came in on 1 April 2014, and we’ve been touring with our tax breaks roadshow since then to make sure all developers know about how to make their claim. The initial response has been incredibly positive. We encourage as many businesses as possible who think they might be eligible to take a look at the Cultural Test to see if they might qualify for any development costs from 1 April this year. MPC: Does piracy still have an effect on the way the games industry works financially? JT: The games industry has always been very good at dealing with this issue in different ways…

YOU’LL NEED THIS CLASSIC SHELL Head to www.classicshell.net for a new custom Start menu. STARTISBACK+ Does what you’d expect. Get it from http://bit.ly/1eDnJ2h. To run it, you’ll need Chocolatey. Find it at http://bit.ly/qbvEmi. POKKI Also restores the Start menu (http://bit.ly/1f9GKIO). THE WINDOWS 8.1 INTERFACE is the latest iteration of the Windows desktop, but you don’t have to stick with the default look. The Modern UI was a radical change, and many people still expect the Windows Start button to bring up a classic Start menu rather than the new Start Screen (and get frustrated when it doesn’t). But with a few tweaks, that core interface element can be returned. We’ll look at three different versions you can install for free. Plus, there are more ways to improve the OS. For…

SPECIFICATIONS WHEN NVIDIA PULLED THE WRA PS OFF its Ge-Force GTX 980M mobile graphics chip, the Internets burst alive with much rejoicing. At last, here was a laptop GPU that could give the best desktop graphics cards a run for their money. Well, kinda. Make no mistake, the 980 looks mega on paper. With 1,536 Maxwell-style shaders and a base clock north of 1GHz, the 980M is one hell of a GPU by any metric, including the desktop. It’s so good, we built our cover feature around the notion that it made laptops truly competitive with desktops. What it’s not, however, is unique in history. To reach what’s arguably the golden age of laptop gaming you have to wind the clock right back to 2005 and the GeForce Go 7800…

SPECIFICATIONS HIGH-PERFORMANCE MEMORY is by far and away, without a shadow of a doubt, the most pointless PC component you can buy. Hyperbolic but basically true? It’s certainly the sentiment that any premium memory kit has to battle these days. The reason performance memory has become less relevant, of course, has been the demise of bus-based overclocking. With Intel’s CPUs you either can’t overclock, or it’s done via the CPU multiplier, leaving the memory subsystem untouched. Making matters worse, what we’re dealing with here is a quad-channel kit for Intel’s latest Haswell-E chips on the newly revised LGA2011 socket—and that’s a platform with epic memory bandwidth overkill on the desktop to start with. It’s really designed for multi-CPU servers. But in single-socket desktop trim with four channels, it’s an embarrassment…

PARIS IN 1798. What a time to be alive. The streets are filthy with mud, blood, and gunpowder smoke. Starving citizens bully perceived enemies to guillotine stands. Guards grapple with anarchists. Above burn spiked heads. Below, French Tricolor flags lie stamped into the dirt. Assassin’s Creed Unity recreates all of this with astonishing clarity and sets it within the most detailed city we’ve ever seen in a game. If Unity was about absorbing the ambience of a period of history, we could stamp a big “YES” on it. The full story is more complicated. Unity is about exploring the city, jumping, and stabbing. The professional killer of this adventure is young rogue Arno Dorian. Born of wealth, he’s driven into the Assassin order by tragedy and there uses his skills…