Table of contents for Holiday 2016 in Maximum PC

Where do you start with the Dream Machine? It’s a concept. A way of pushing limits. And, for as long as we remember, money hasn’t been an issue when building a Dream Machine. Its legacy has, for the most part, been untarnished by cries of “It costs too much!” That said, this has been a traumatic year in the deepest, darkest circles of technology. And with Nvidia still unchallenged in the world of graphical dominance, the Titan’s reign as the fastest GPU comes with an unfeasible price tag. We couldn’t bring ourselves to be so bold as to invest in two Titans, when we could pick up four GTX 1080s for about the same price—not that Nvidia enables SLI beyond two…. So, is it still a Dream Machine? You tell…

SYNERGY IS THE CREATION of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s the defining principle behind all things computational: bringing different pieces of hardware together to create a force of synthetic reckoning. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Dream Machine, a system without limits. Does the 2016 Dream Machine deliver? We think so. The Intel Core i7-6950X is no slouch, and it drives this monstrosity forward on a wave of its own perpetual motion, drawing scores of well over 2,000 in Cinebench. Yes, the single-core performance doesn’t compete with the more consumer-friendly Skylake, but it’s designed for heavy workloads and multithreaded tasks, rather than gaming— not that lacks capability in that regard…. Coupled with two massively overclocked GTX 1080s, that’s a point proven…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI See www.raspberrypi.org. MESSAGING CLIENT We’re using Pidgin, available from www.pidgin.im. With Facebook Chat, Google Hangouts, Yahoo Messenger, and ICQ, to name but a few, there’s certainly no shortage of chat services available nowadays. The downside of all these offerings is that they’re closed-source, meaning the code used to design them is not released to the public. This makes it harder to detect security vulnerabilities—plus, you have to trust that big corporates are keeping your private conversations safe. Federation is also definitely not supported by most proprietary chat software—for instance, someone using the official Google Hangouts app has no way of speaking directly to someone using AOL Messenger. So, how can you get around all these problems? Read on…. 1 XMPP TO THE RESCUE The solution…

1. INSTALL PROSODY Open Terminal on your Raspberry Pi, or connect via SSH, and run the command sudo apt-get install prosody , then press Y to confirm you want to install the software on your device. In the next step, you’ll need to change your configuration, so run sudo nano/etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua . 2. MODIFY CONFIG FILE Scroll to the section labeled “Virtual Hosts” and change example.com to your domain—for example, 192.168.1.2 . Scroll up to the section named “Server Wide Settings” and, under“Admins,” change, to admins = {“admin@yourip”} — for example, admins = {“admin@192.168.1.2”} . Next, search for the words “allow_registration” and change to true . Press Ctrl-X, Y, then Return to save and exit. 3. RESTART AND ADD AN ADMI NISTRATOR Run the command sudo /etc/init.d/prosody restart to restart Prosody.…

1. NOTES Click or tap here to bring up a list of all your notebooks, and add new ones. You’ll find app settings and printing options here, too. 2. HOME This is where you add individual pages to your notebooks, and make notes using text options in the Ribbon. You can add pictures and video, too. 3. INSERT This option gives you the ability to add anything else to your notes —tables, relevant documents, and pictures, as well as weblinks. 4. DRAW Need to annotate your notes? The Draw tab includes a range of basic drawing tools to help you—there’s even a highlighter pen. 5. VIEW This gives you the ability to change the look of your notes, from adding a variety of rule lines, to zooming in and out…

Conventional wisdom dictates that laptops are about portability. If that’s true, it’s safe to assume that Asus regards conventional wisdom as something akin to an inebriated hobo with dubious standards of personal hygiene. Because with the ROG GX800VH, Asus is positively spurning portability. This is possibly the least portable laptop ever. It’s a monumental 18-inch beast. In fact, even the 18-inch metric doesn’t do it justice. Thanks to generous bezels around the screen, it could easily accommodate a 19-inch panel. But that’s just the beginning. Not only does it come with two enormous 330W power bricks, both of which must be used to achieve full performance, but there’s also a meaty docking station, which houses liquid cooling for the two Nvidia graphics chips inside the laptop itself. An 18-inch LCD…

It’s all happening in the PC monitor market. The last year or two have seen a constant flow of innovation. High refresh rates, frame synching, tumbling response times—it just keeps coming. In the near future, HDR or high dynamic range displays are also expected to make the jump from the HDTV market to the PC. It’s into that acutely demanding context that AOC’s U3277PWQU steps. At $1,212, it ain’t cheap. Which demands the question of how it stacks up from a raw specification perspective, and what future-proofing it provides in this fast-changing market. The headline numbers, thankfully, are impressive. The U3277PWQU combines a 32-inch diagonal with a full 4K pixel grid. That’s 3840x2160 pixels. Enough desktop elbow room to be getting on with. In fact, for gaming, it’s probably too…

WHAT WITH ALL THE lightning-fast PCI Express, M.2, and U.2 SSDs available to tease performance junkies with bandwidth measured in GB/s, it’s hard to get excited by a conventional SSD that chats casually to your motherboard over a SATA connection. Even the fastest SATA drives are limited to about 550MB/s. But here’s the thing: If your motherboard only has SATA ports, and lacks support for features such as the SSD-friendly NVMe protocol, even with an add-in PCI Express card, achieving the full next-gen benefit of the latest and greatest SSDs makes for an expensive endeavor, one that includes at least a new mobo and probably a new CPU. Ouch. Whisper this, but a decent SATA SSD actually gets the job done when it comes to day-to-day responsiveness from your PC.…

YOU MIGHT THINK, on starting up Virginia and immediately graduating from the FBI academy, that you’re playing a first-person investigation game. But you’re not, and this becomes increasingly clear over the game’s two-hour running time. We’ve mentioned the length early on because it crams a lot into that short span. Every scene is crafted, with little filler apart from a few short corridor walks— and even these can serve to inform you of a character’s status or mental state. More interactive movie than walking simulator or traditional police game, Virginia i s s ilent a part f rom a w onderful score and some sound effects. Meaning is conveyed through body language and faces, something the stylized, perhaps primitive, graphics are well chosen to express. The game is as linear…

You may have been using Windows for years, or you may be a newcomer to the PC, but, either way, there’s always something new to learn, and for more seasoned users, there are plenty of hidden tricks that will make your dayto-day computing life that bit easier. Whichever camp you fall into, we’ve unearthed 100 great ways of improving Windows—they’re written for Windows 10, but many work with earlier versions of Windows, too. There are many impressive tools and options built into Windows. Some of these are obvious and easy to discover, but there are numerous other secrets that you can reveal just by scratching beneath the surface of your Windows OS. Over the coming pages, we’ll share some of the best Windows advice. Our top 100 tips include basic…

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDES TO IMPROVING YOUR PC WINDOWS TIP OF THE MONTH A CLEAN CHROME We love keeping things neat, so Google Chrome’s default new tab page leaves much to be desired. If you want to tidy Chrome up, Speed Dial 2 may be just the extension for you. Head to https://speeddial2.com to install it, then once plugged in, you can add quick links, change the background picture, use custom images, change layouts, monitor usage, even copy entire layouts across multiple systems. Best of all, it’s free. FAN SPEED AND THE AIO I’m a massive fan of a silent system. Indeed, recently swapping out from a fully liquid-cooled build at home to a single AIO and aftermarket fan has left me with a particularly noisy rig. The noise is generated by…

By default, your chat server will run on your home network only. If you want to communicate with people within your own home or workplace, there’s no need to open your Pi to the world. If you think it would be useful to be able to access the chat server from outside your home or office, first set a static IP address for your Pi, if you haven’t already, by following the guide at http://bit.ly/2cCHl8F. Next, you need to obtain a fixed IP address for your router. Your ISP may be able to do this for you for a fee. Alternatively, you can create a hostname that points to your home router through a service such as www.noip.com free of charge. The next step is to open ports 5222 and…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PHOTOSHOP Subscribe at www.adobe.com. TEXT ISN’T ALWAYS SOMETHING YOU’D THINK OF when using Photoshop, with many designers preferring to set it in InDesign or Illustrator instead, for more control over tracking, leading, and the arcane secrets of the typographer’s art. For eye-catching words or single lines, however, Photoshop does a perfectly acceptable job, with the advantage that you can use it to create colorful effects that make it leap off the page, or sink into a block of metal, as we’ll recreate here. The Type tool is the T-shaped icon in the toolbar, which folds out to reveal four options. There’s the basic Horizontal Type tool, which we’ll be using here, and a Vertical Type tool, which does what you’d expect, plus horizontal and vertical versions of…

YOU’LL NEED THIS USB STICK We recommend using a USB stick about 1GB in size. VIRUSES, MALWARE, ACCIDENTAL DELETION, or corrupted data can all put your valuable files at risk. The best insurance is to make regular backups, but what if you run into trouble in between backups, or you let your routine slide, or a friend has a crisis with their PC? That’s where an emergency USB toolkit of portable apps comes in, giving you everything you need to fix the damage, and save the day. When you install a program, not only are the files it needs to run saved on your hard drive, but it also makes its own changes to the rest of your system, such as adding entries to the Registry. Portable apps don’t do…

It’s a widely held opinion among tech journalists that if you’re after the best wireless headset money can buy, the SteelSeries H Wireless is your best bet. With outstanding audio quality, a retractable mic, an intuitively designed wireless dock, and a subtle sleek design, it solved all the problems that are associated with wireless headsets. Indeed, few manufacturers have even come close to matching the H Wireless’s perfection. So, with the launch of the Siberia 840, an updated variant of the H Wireless, we had to get our hands on it to see exactly what had changed with this legendary design. Where do we begin? Well, let’s start with what’s the same. The overall design aesthetic and comfort is identical to the H Wireless. The soft foam padding at the…

MICE DESIGNED around specific game genres and titles have always confused us here at Maximum PC. After all, everybody's different, and we all use our PCs in a wide variety of ways. Whether it’s for gaming, working, browsing the web, listening to music, or all of the above, it’s easy to see why the PC as a platform is so attractive to any and everyone. And that’s the ethos that has, for as long as we remember, been adhered to when it comes to the overarching design of most peripherals. It’s about versatility, not niche usage. So, to buy a mouse dedicated to one particular game genre seems a little odd to us. Generally speaking, previous MMO and MOBA mice have always come across as a little uncomfortable, packed with…

SPEED: THE SENSATION, the rush, the feeling as your body is held captive by the forces acting upon it—it’s addictive; it’s pure adrenaline. The invention of the car stimulated this human desire, making it accessible to all, and video games have always sought to emulate that experience, to put you in the driving seat, to immerse you in the world, but within a far safer environment. One without risk. Forza Horizon 3 is the third in Microsoft’s Horizon series, designed as an open-world, arcade-like driving game experience. However, it’s best to understand ahead of time that this is as much a simulator as James Corden is a basketball player. It has sim elements littered here and there, yet it falls short of the likes of Project Cars, or even Gran…

8 UTILITIES TO INSTALL ON WINDOWS 10 8 VLC The movie and audio player that deserves to be on every machine. It just does it all. www.videolan.org 7 NINITE Install all your favorite apps and utilities on a fresh install of Windows at the click of a button. https://ninite.com 6 MALWAREBYTES ANTI-MALWARE FREE Whatever antivirus you use, it’s worth having this to hand as well. You know, just in case. www.malwarebytes.com 5 TREESIZE FREE Find out which programs are eating up your storage with this great tool. www.jam-software.com 4 PAINT.NET Forget MS Paint— if you’re looking to do anything with images, you should install this instead. www.getpaint.net 3 NOTEPAD++ All the convenience and versatility of Notepad, but with more features for tinkerers and programmers. https://notepadplus-plus.org 2 7-ZIP When Windows falters,…

THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES... Smashing Bottlenecks Hey Doc, I’m currently running an extremely low-end setup and would love to upgrade. I have an Acer motherboard, an AMD A10-5500 processor, a Radeon HD 7350 graphics card, and two mechanical hard drives. I have my sights set on an AMD A10-7850K and a Radeon RX 480. But where is my bottleneck? I am only going to upgrade one component at a time. Thanks for any advice. –Trevor Giampieri THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: The Doc assumes that you have an A8-5500 (the entry-level A10 model is a -5700). Either way, your Trinity-based APU uses AMD’s Socket FM2 interface. Upgrading to an A10-7850K first requires buying a new motherboard with Socket FM2+. Your older CPU would still work in the new board, but you…

PROCESSOR INTEL CORE I7-6950X Sometimes you need to bring out the big guns, and for Dream Machine, we want the biggest guns possible. Intel’s Broadwell-E parts were the natural choice, with the i7-6950X more than doubling the core count of the i7-6700K, with 40 PCIe lanes as an added bonus. And we put it all to good use. Yes, the i7-6700K can hit slightly higher stable overclocks (4.8~5.0GHz), but with 2.5 times as many cores, the i7-6950X is more than able to make up for the clock speed deficit. We could still push it to a stable 4.2GHz. At stock, the 6950X has a 140W TDP, but it has to drop clocks to 3.0GHz at times to stay within that limit. Running at 4.4GHz, it guzzles juice, dissipating over 250W.…

Asus ROG GX800 This is probably the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever seen, right? If the answer is “no,” well, er, you’d better stop reading now. This is Asus’s latest and greatest ROG GX800. In a word, it’s astronomical. It is without doubt the absolute pinnacle of computational hardware we’ve ever seen in a notebook to date. If you can call it a notebook. It comes packed with an Intel Core i7-6820HK, 32GB of DDR4, two 256GB Samsung PCIe SSDs in RAID 0, and not one but two Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080s running in SLI. All of which is then water-cooled by this luxurious aluminum-clad dock, ready to pump out the absolute maximum in performance whenever you need it. No expense has been spared in the creation of this silicon…

THIS MONTH WE DISSECT... BACKGROUND The VR world is packed with serious contenders. The newest hardware and software solution comes from a dynamic duo: Razer, gaming peripherals giant, and Sensics, virtual reality maven. Their offering: the OSVR HDK 2. Can it hang with the platform heavyweights? We’ll find out soon enough! MAJOR TECH SPECS • Head-mounted display (HMD) with dual OLED displays, 2160x1200 combined resolution (441 ppi), 90Hz refresh rate • IR camera with 360-degree tracking, operating at 100Hz • Belt box with surround-sound audio codec, along with “signal boosters” KEY FINDINGS • Time to hunt for those hidden IR LEDs. Because the HDK 2 is built to be accessible to developers, we aren’t surprised to learn the headset’s gatekeepers are friendly Phillips screws. But with the screws removed, the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ONENOTE Grab the app for free from www.onenote.com. WHEN IT COMES TO TAKING NOTES on your PC, smartphone, and tablet, nothing beats Microsoft OneNote. It’s powerful, flexible, and free, with updates synched across all your devices. It’s a great way to keep on top of what’s going on in your world—and then share it with anyone. OneNote lets you create and capture almost anything: a list of things to buy on your next shopping trip; vacation ideas, with pictures, notes, annotations, maps, and weblinks; lecture and meeting notes, with information and documents right there where you need them. You can even use it to work on projects with family, friends, and co-workers—it’s the perfect collaborative tool. The more you use OneNote, the more things you’ll discover it…

IN THIS BRAVE NEW solid-state era, i t’s easy to forget that magnetic drives still do the heavy lifting when it comes to mass storage. SSD prices may have tumbled, but multiple terabytes of solid-state storage remain super-expensive. It’s also easy to overlook the remarkable technical innovation that underpins the relentless increase in data density offered by the latest magnetic drives. To get an idea of the progress that’s been achieved over recent decades, here’s a nice analogy we shamelessly stole off the Internet. If cars had improved their cabin space since the early 1980s at the same rate that hard drives have increased data capacity, you’d be able to cram the entire population of China into a small family car. Crazy. For more tangible proof of that progress, look…

LET’S GET DOWN TO IT: t his i s C orsair venturing into madness. Into the RGB frenzy that is currently gripping manufacturers across the globe, as they strive to jam their latest and greatest peripherals with lights that are more colorful than one of Bob Ross’s masterpieces. With the sheer volume of 16.8-million-color RGB products hitting the market, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to do the same with a mouse pad. Unfortunately for Corsair, it wasn’t the first company to land such a bonkers product. Razer beat Corsair to it—by a good eight months, in fact. And despite some very mixed reviews, it does seem to be making enough financial sense for other manufacturers to take the concept, improve upon it, and provide their…

BUDGET NOW THAT THIS GENERATION OF GPUS has been released in its entirety, prices are settling down on the graphics card front, which means there are no big changes for the core components this month. We’re still very happy with the 3GB spin of the GTX 1060, so that stays, alongside the Core i5-6500, to form the core of this machine. There have been pricing shifts on the memory and storage fronts, though. Our previous memory of choice, the G. Skill Aegis DDR4-2133, saw a notable price hike, so we grabbed a pair of 4GB HyperX Fury DDR4-2400 sticks instead, which cost $2 more than the G.Skill kit, but are faster, so a reasonable upgrade. Our previous boot SSD, the SanDisk X400, also saw a price increase, so we’ve used…