Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2024 i APC

OPINION | TECH TALK Nvidia’s RTX 40-series Ada Lovelace GPUs have had a rocky reception, mostly on account of their significantly higher generational prices, reduced memory interface widths, and reliance on DLSS 3 frame generation to make performance look better. It’s all reminiscent of the RTX 20-series, which had similar complaints. Just like the 20-series, Nvidia will trot out a mid-cycle refresh in the form of new Super models. “We’ve already seen several of Nvidia’s RTX 40-series drop below their official RRPs, and the new Super variants may push prices lower.” The RTX 4070 Super has specs that put it close to the existing RTX 4070 Ti. It features 56 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) and 7,168 CUDA cores – just seven percent below the 4070 Ti and 22 percent above the…

OPINION | ONE MORE THING For my recent trip to CES in Las Vegas, I decided to fly to Los Angeles, pick up and rental car and drive over. I have had too many bad experiences at LAX to trust it with a connecting flight, and it’s simply quicker to drive. Looking at Hertz’s rental options, there was one obvious choice: the Tesla Model Y. This was a prime opportunity for me to try the platform. I had never driven a Tesla but several of my friends swear by them, and I’m very aware of the almost religious love that they have amongst their fanbase. I arrived at LAX after a pleasant flight and took the bus to the rental lot. Within minutes I was sitting in the car. And…

PRICE $8,499 WEB hp.com/au-en We’ve had foldable screen technology on phones for a couple of years now, but the flexible tech has now arrived on laptops and while it’s still absurdly expensive, it’s interesting enough to at least be aware of. $8,499 just isn’t a price point that many people are going to be able to justify for a 2-in-1 laptop with a 12th Gen lightweight Intel U processor, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB PCIe SSD. Even if this pricey device does have a 17-inch screen in a laptop that can fold into a laptop with the same footprint as something with a 12-inch form factor, there’s arguably not enough on offer to warrant that daunting price. If we consider the display in isolation it’s pretty impressive. There’s 500…

PRICE $379 WEB www.amd.com If you care little for 4K with ray tracing and just like to enjoy a bit of gaming in your spare time or online with friends, the Ryzen 5 8600G could be exactly what you’re looking for. The 8600G is an affordable six-core variant of AMD’s exciting Phoenix range of desktop APUs. It’s based on the Zen 4 architecture, with a monolithic 4nm die. It comes with a base clock of 4.3GHz, a boost clock of 5.0GHz and a 65W TDP. Apart from having half the L3 cache, it’s not dissimilar to the Ryzen 5 7600 and in fact its base clock is a surprising 500MHz higher, though the 7600 has a 100MHz higher boost clock. The key feature of the 8600G is its graphics capabilities.…

PRICE $360 (2-pack) WEB www.dlink.com.au We won’t lie, we twitched a bit when D-Link’s Aquila Pro AI AX3000 Wi-Fi 6 Smart Mesh System turned up: it gave us flashback’s to 2022’s hateful D-Link EaglePro AI Smart Router which was one of the most infuriating, not-fit-for-purpose, half-baked, technological turds any company had dumped on the market in years. The good news is, that it didn’t take long to establish that the new Aquila system was a very different beast. First off, the two nodes look genuinely stylish. Whether you think they look like spaceships, Pokémon, or some modern objets d’art, we can all agree that they’re better than the spiky mecha-spiders that ordinarily infest the router industry. They’re even made from eco-friendly, post-consumer recycled plastic. Secondly, setting everything up with D-Link’s…

LABS PRICE $999 (8TB) WEB samsung.com With rated read and write speeds of only 460MB/sec, the Samsung Portable SSD T5 Evo was never aiming for speed awards. Instead, it’s about capacity: with 2TB, 4TB and 8TB versions, it’s even roomier than most portable hard drives. It has the advantage of being more durable and drop-resistant than such drives, too. Samsung adds some reassuring toughness to the T5, even if it steers away from calling it a rugged SSD. There’s no official rating, but Samsung claims the rubberised outer shell gives “extra protection against external shocks”, while a thick metal band on one end means you can clip it to a carabiner. Samsung ships the T5 Evo with a long, removable USB-C to USB-C cable measuring about 40cm. No USB-C ports?…

LABS PRICE $1,499 WEB www.msi.com The RTX 4070 Ti Super is the second of Nvidia’s RTX 40-series Super refresh cards. While all three deliver healthy spec and performance upgrades, interestingly, the RTX 4070 Ti Super is the only one of the three that makes use of a higher tier GPU. The 4070 Ti Super includes the AD103 GPU, that’s the same as that found in the current RTX 4080 and soon the RTX 4080 Super. Though it doesn’t receive an increase in shader count as large as the RTX 4070 Super did, the use of the AD103 GPU means it gets a welcome memory subsystem upgrade. Thankfully, its TDP remains unchanged at 285W, while it’s priced at $1,499, the original price of its non-Super sibling. That means you get more…

WEB www.irfanview.com/ NEEDS Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 This excellent free image viewer is frequently updated with new features, yet remains easy to use and less than 5MB in size. IrfanView 4.65 introduces a long-awaited dark mode, which you can activate by clicking Properties/Settings in the Options menu and selecting Viewing, then ‘Enable Dark mode’ (see screenshot). An interesting addition to the Edit menu lets you apply effects to the parts of an image outside of a selected area, rather than within it. This is useful for adjusting backgrounds without affecting the subject – choose ‘Use inverted selection’ to enable the option. IrfanView has also improved the ‘Custom/fine rotation’ tool in its Image menu. Previously, to rotate an image to the desired angle, you needed to experiment with different…

ChatGPT is a splendid time sink, letting you plot out horror movies starring Michael Stipe and Kylie Minogue, or practically anything else you can dream up. But it’s a lot more than a plaything to pass a tea break with. OpenAI’s chatbot has a series of formidable features, most of them hidden from those who don’t subscribe to ChatGPT Plus. It’s worth doing, even if only for a month, so you can evaluate the sheer power that lurks here and work out if it could make a difference to your life. ChatGPT Plus can perform hugely sophisticated data analysis, saving you from having to spend time learning how to do it yourself in applications such as Excel. It can tidy up your computer code, your emails or your PowerPoint presentations.…

IT WAREHOUSE SNOW WHITE TI $2,549 tinyurl.com/APC530itw This all-white system has some solid underpinnings that are unfortunately becoming a little dated. The Ryzen 5 5600X is no slouch and is perfectly serviceable for most games and tasks, but it sits in the outgoing (though aging well) AM4 socket. This means only last-gen CPU upgrades are available and DDR4. This should all keep the price down but relative to the PLE system, this isn’t looking so hot. It matches it for a roomy amount of RAM capacity, 240mm AIO and even has a beefier PSU, but the weaker CPU paired with a weaker GPU means this isn’t very good value. Look around first before considering or wait for a discount. CPU AMD Ryzen 5 5600X; COOLER Thermaltake TH240 ARGB Sync Snow…

GAMES PRICE $36.95 PLATFORM PC, PS4/5, XB1/S/X, Switch WEB cocoongame.com As a puzzle adventure, the joy of Cocoon is in figuring out how to overcome obstacles and progress, but it’s also in the execution. After a short stint wandering the orange canyons of Cocoon’s opening area, you come across a curved groove in the ground. At one edge sits a large metallic ball, which you grab and yank until it reluctantly leaves its rectangular base, yet remains connected by a chewing gum string. Once the gum’s elasticity approaches its limit, the base starts to move too, gliding across the mouth as if you’re opening a zip. It’s all so very tactile. In this way, Cocoon makes incredible meals of its puzzles within vibrant worlds that could have adorned prog rock…

RELEASE September 30, 2014 DEVELOPER Monolith Productions PUBLISHER Warner Bros LINK warnerbrosgames.com There are few gaming accomplishments more satisfying than the thrill of pulling off kills in stealth action games. The sweetest of feats can be achievements or timed runs or trick shots but there’s something extra special about a grudge kill. Shadow of Mordor, the Warner Bros. action game of 2014, was a factory for satisfying kills with its nemesis system that became the centre of any conversation about the game. After recently working my way through other stealth romps like Styx: Master of Shadows and Hitman 3, I got the itch to return to one of the previous decade’s golden children to see if it’s everything thought. The way I remember Shadow of Mordor was as an understudy to…

Download these APC exclusives free from: www.apcmag.com/exclusives ASCOMP GUARDIAN OF DATA 3.0 ENCRYPTION OF SENSITIVE FILES WITH AES. Security doesn’t always have to be complicated: thanks to Guardian Of Data, you can encrypt your documents directly from the context menu of Windows Explorer! To make encrypted documents available to your colleagues, business partners or other recipients without them having to install Guardian Of Data first, the software offers the creation of self-extracting files. This allows you to send multiple files as an encrypted archive even over insecure channels, without worrying that the data could fall into the wrong hands! ASHAMPOO BURNING STUDIO 2024 POWERFUL BURNING SOFTWARE TO BURN FILES, MUSIC AND MOVIES. Ashampoo Burning Studio 2024 is a powerful disc burning software for CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. The software…

OPINION | END USER Last month Disney purchased a US$1.5 billion stake in Epic Games – the company responsible for Fortnite and Unreal Engine 5 – and thanks to the former it’s nowadays extremely wealthy: Epic Games is worth US$32 billion (Disney is worth US$178 billion). Fortnite has become a global phenomenon in gaming. More importantly, it’s an amazingly pliant marketing tool whose use value lies entirely in its receptiveness to no holds barred cross-promotion. Crossovers abound, ranging from previous Disney brand collaborations, chiefly Marvel and Star Wars, through to pop icons like Ariana Grande and Blackpink. To call it an interactive ad is both truer than calling it a “game” and also oversimplifying what Fortnite is. It’s nowadays a platform or, in the parlance of tech doyen-speak, a metaverse…

OPINION | TWO BITS For many years, modders have helped to reinvigorate older titles with things as diverse as graphical improvements, expanded content and things like new weapons or physics improvements. At the best of times, modding is a challenging and time-consuming task even if you have access to the game’s source code. It’s made more difficult if you need to access and work with locked files, old APIs, and restrictive 32-bit code. To make this process easier, Nvidia has been working on its free RTX Remix modding platform. It allows modders to give older games complete makeovers with modern rendering techniques, including ray tracing and DLSS, with the help of AI. The toolkit was initially announced back in September of 2022. It was used to create Portal with RTX.…

Find the best deals on new gear at getprice.com/au Premium laptops Apple MacBook Pro 16in (M3) STUNNING CREATIVE POWER A reasonable processor upgrade to device with an impressive screen and unparalleled battery life. The new M3 3nm processors is more efficient, so you’ll be able to run the same tasks as the M1 using half the power draw, which helps battery life. From $4,299, apple.com/au THE ALTERNATIVES ASUS VIVOBOOK PRO 16X OLED This 2023 update has some impressive features for the price and is a surprisingly powerful creative workstation with a stunning screen. $3,199, asus.com APPLE MACBOOK AIR The MacBook Air M2 looks like a standout to us. A powerful and quiet ultraportable with an unbeatable battery life and a great pro display. From $1,799 apple.com/au MICROSOFT SURFACE PRO 9…

PRICE 12GB/256GB, $2,199 WEB samsung.com Samsung is marketing the Galaxy S24 Ultra as the AI phone to beat in 2024. From the Circle to Search feature to discovering what plant is growing in your garden to Chat Assist translating messages in other languages, the Galaxy AI features all aim to simplify your life. But: the Galaxy S24 Ultra costs $250 more than the S23 Ultra, while replacing that phone’s 10x optical camera with a less powerful but sharper 50MP 5x telephoto lens. So is this a mis-step or AI-assisted brilliance? Galaxy of AI features First, let’s consider Circle to Search. This is a Google initiative that will be rolled out to other phones, and it aims to make search easier if you see something in a photo. A long press…

WEB tinyurl.com/APC530dup NEEDS Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 AllDup is one of the best free programs for removing duplicate files from your PC. The latest version adds useful options to its Search Results tab to make it easier to manage the duplicates it finds. The Select menu now lets you choose ‘Select all corrupted image files’ (see screenshot) to select damaged copies of images that are cluttering your hard drive. Another new option lets you select only files of a certain age, so you don’t accidentally delete recent items – or old but important ones. Click the Select menu, then ‘Select by date’ and choose either ‘older than’ or ‘newer than’. Specify the number of days and whether to judge a file’s age by the date it was created or…

When it comes to future technology, no show does it quite like CES. It’s the A-Z of everything electrical, with companies from Acer to Zyxel displaying their new products for 2024. But it’s not just about big companies: over 1,400 startups were at Eureka Park in the hope of coverage or a distribution deal. As you can imagine, CES is enormous. It not only consumes the halls of the gigantic Las Vegas Convention Center, it spreads out to a second convention centre – called the Venetian Expo – with three more huge halls to fill. As if that weren’t enough, the show’s tendrils spread into hotels across the city. There’s no hope for one person to cover this event, and APC still relied on 30 colleagues at Future Publishing –…

Budget. A perfect balance between price and performance. This issue’s been an interesting one for Blueprints. What we’re seeing across the industry is a slow but steady increase in SSD prices across the board. Almost every single SSD pick we had from last issue has increased by $20-30. This is likely down to those bumper New Year and Black Friday deals finally subsiding. However, we’re mildly concerned that this may be a continuing trend across the industry, depending on how NAND pricing continues moving forward. It’s one to watch, for sure. Our budget builds for this issue have remained reasonable, all things considered. Changes were minimal – we’ve swapped a few components out across the two builds, both of those cases being the memory across the systems and the primary…

LIBREOFFICE WRITER & MICROSOFT WORD Add a ‘next style’ When writing in LibreOffice, you can choose from a variety of preset styles – with different fonts, sizes, and paragraph spacing. LibreOffice also lets you choose a ‘next style’, which means you can swap from one style to another when you tap Enter. This is useful for changing from a style you’d use to write your headers, to one you’d use to write most of your text. Click the Styles tab on the right-hand side bar ( 1 in our screenshot below), right-click the style you want to edit, then click ‘Edit Style…’ to open the Paragraph Style box. We picked Heading 2. In the Organiser tab, we clicked the dropdown arrow beside ‘Next style:’ 2 and chose Text. This means…

Shell history is one of the most useful and powerful tools at your disposal if you spend a lot of time working with the CLI. While you can easily tweak the settings on your preferred shell to store 500, 2,000, or even more commands, Atuin offers something far superior. It replaces the traditional shell history with a SQLite database, but more importantly, it gives you the ability to sync your CLI history across different machines. Once installed, Atuin rebinds the Ctrl+r and the up arrow key, used to reverse look up previously executed commands and access the history respectively, with a full-screen history search interface. You can also get stats on the most executed commands, or look up commands based on exit codes and more. Best of all, Atuin doesn’t…

YOU’LL NEED • Pi Pico or Pico W • A buzzer • 15x M2M jumper wires • 7x push buttons • Large breadboard • Blu Tack, modelling clay, double-sided tape • Code: tinyurl.com/ APC530piano As I write this, Christmas is happening and it’s got me thinking of my childhood. My mother bought me a small piezo-speaker piano in the hope that I would learn to play. That never happened, but I did learn to take it apart and see how it worked, and now we can do that using the Raspberry Pi Pico. In this tutorial, we are going to use a Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico W running MicroPython to create a Pi-ano. We’ll use the Solfège syllables, a music education method used in schools to teach pitch and…

PRICE Free PLATFORM Browser WEB bit.ly/Roottrees The Roottrees are Dead stands on the shoulders of Tim Sheinman’s Family, a similarly browser-based detective game that had you investigating a music scene and filling in a family tree of linked musicians. In Jeremy Johnston’s Roottrees, it’s a literal family tree, as you’ve been hired by a mysterious client to decipher the complicated genealogy of the Roottree family, and determine who will inherit the family fortune, after a terrible plane crash. You spend the whole game looking at their family tree, but also at your (essential) in-game notebook, collected documents and the ’90s internet. If 90% of detective work is sitting in front of a computer, then this is one of the more authentic detective games. You’ll type search terms into a (deliberately…

OPINION | RANDOM ACCESS This will be my last Random Access column and issue of APC. I’m moving into a role in environmental policy to help keep the planet from being iceless in the next hundred years. I’ve been writing with Future Australia since 2014, and while nine years really isn’t that long in the scheme of things; a decade in technology throws up a lot of change. When I started (around issue 411 of APC) Netflix was yet to hit Australian shores, something that will seem hard to believe these days where you can barely find a free to air TV station amongst all the content providers on your television. This lack of available dramatic content meant that movie piracy was in its heyday and there was a range…

OPINION | TRADE CHAT By the time you read this, Intel will have rolled out a whole new roadmap, the next waypoint on its journey to renewed technological dominance. Except I can’t help but notice that the company hasn’t come close to delivering on its existing roadmap. You know, the one that has Intel delivering five new chip production nodes in four years? It was February 2021 that Pat Gelsinger returned triumphantly to the helm of Intel. It was a winning narrative. Intel had lost its way after years of marketing-biased leadership. At last, an engineer was returning to the top job – and not just any engineer, but a former Intel devotee who’d joined the company aged just 18 in 1979 and worked his way up through the firm…

What exactly do you want from a webcam? How about something that makes you look your best, no matter how dimly lit your bedroom or home office? Just be aware that there are webcam horses for specific streaming courses. The best webcam for live streaming isn’t necessarily the same as the best option for remote working. Many of these webcams support HD and 4K up to 60fps, for instance, but the latter in particular adds to the price tag, and might be overkill for daily office duties. 5 DELL ULTRASHARP WB7022 This is one of the best 4K webcams you can buy. On top of offering 4K at 30fps, you’ve got HDR support and even AI-powered auto framing. As expected, UltraSharp’s support for 4K recording delivers impressive detail over your…

PRICE $539 WEB www.amd.com The 8700G is outwardly similar to its Ryzen 7000-series siblings. It’s built around the Zen 4 architecture, but it is a different beast. Most especially, it uses a monolithic die as opposed to the chiplet design of regular 7000-series CPUs. It also incorporates a dedicated XDNA AI engine, but the major selling point of 8000-series APUs are their integrated graphics. The Radeon 780M graphics of the 8700G is powerful enough to play pretty much any current game at 1080p, especially if you enable AMD’s upscaling technologies. The 8700G is the top chip in the range. It’s built with TSMC’s 4nm node. Its eight cores and 16 threads should deliver a capable level of single and multithreaded performance. It includes 16MB of L3 cache, a boost clock…

LABS PRICE $999 WEB www.tp-link.com/au “The first thing you notice is that the BE800 looks like a small-footprint Dell Office PC from 10 years ago... only bigger.” We were seriously impressed with our first Wi-Fi 7 kit – TP-Link’s recent BE22000 mesh – even though it was eye-wateringly expensive. It redefined wireless speed to the point where we were getting faster transfers than a 2.5Gbps wired Ethernet connection... and that was using a Wi-Fi 6E laptop, meaning there’s headroom for more! Now, here’s TP-Link’s SOHO-oriented, Wi-Fi 7 BE800 Archer router, can it surprise us again? The first thing you notice is that the BE800 looks like a small-footprint Dell Office PC from 10 years ago... only bigger. At the front there’s a large, matrix LED display which displays customisable emojis,…

LABS PRICE $30 WEB www.tp-link.com/au TP-Link’s Tapo Mini Smart Wi-Fi Plug is a diminutive device that, unlike many other smart plugs, isn’t a nuisance to its plug-socket neighbours – it’s not thick, just a little long at the top. It’s also not prone to half-hanging out of a wall when supporting a heavy secondary plug. Set-up is simple via TP-Link’s Tapo app and a QR code (if you can’t reach the QR code when plugged in, there’s a spare sticker in the box). Things can be complicated by its ‘Matter’ smart home compatibility triggering other network hardware and apps into recognising a new smart device and offering multiple ways to manage it. To this end, Google Home’s immediate insistence on managing it was a simple task but it still took…

CES has wrapped up for another year, and once again we’re treated to a plethora of new technologies, concepts and soon to come products. Display technologies were one of the largest categories on show with: LG and Samsung showing off flashy transparent OLED and MicroLED TVs, respectively. There’s 240Hz and 480Hz OLED gaming monitors (as Andre from JW Computers explains), MSI’s AI powered gaming monitor (as Emille from Aftershock PC explains), LED crystal films to stick on your case windows from MSI to show low resolution videos and images, further pimping your rig in a way never before seen. And then there was Sharp, which behind closed doors was demonstrating its new secret QDEL technology prototypes, the holy grail of monitor technology which they’ve apparently succeeded in developing. Quantum Dot…

Which N100 board? I’m looking to upgrade my J4125-ITX NAS server, and have settled on Intel’s newest chip – the N100 processor, which benchmarks tell me represents a huge leap forward over the previous board, even though the J4125 chip has served me well. I see that in addition to Asrock’s N100-based board (the N100DC-ITX), Asus has released its own board, the Prime N100I-D D4. I can see two obvious differences between the boards: the N100DC-ITX has two onboard SATA connectors to the N100I-D D4’s one, but the Asus board works with a standard power supply like the one currently in my J4125-ITX build, while Asrock’s board has its own built-in power supply with 19V jack, into which I would need to plug in a compatible laptop adapter. Which would…

ANDROID Install hundreds of add-ons in Firefox The Android version of Firefox (tinyurl.com/APC530aff) is one of the only mobile browsers that lets you install extensions, but until now you were limited to just 21 of them. Although these included useful tools such as uBlock Origin, Bitwarden and Tampermonkey, the selection paled in comparison with the thousands available for the desktop browser. In December, Mozilla expanded the choice of add-ons available for Firefox for Android to more than 500, which means you can now use many of your favourite tools from the PC browser on your phone or tablet. The additions include extensions for blocking ads and annoyances on YouTube; customising websites such as Reddit, Wikipedia and Google; improving your searches and downloads; and boosting your online privacy and security. To…

GAMES PRICE Free PLATFORM PC WEB bit.ly/TommyGunWitches Here we have witches that dress like Payday robbers, hiding the green skin of the witch from The Wizard of Oz. And they use Tommy guns because, well, I suspect because it makes for a catchy title. The urban fantasy of The Dresden Files has been mashed down into one half-hour game: a gorgeous, first-person adventure game where you interview suspects and solve simple puzzles across a modern city. You play as a sentinel, investigating the murder of a man in a hotel room. Which witch did the deed, and why did she leave her sacred mask and Tommy gun behind? The pixel art is sumptuous and suggestive of a whole city, while the dialogue plays it straight and manages to find the…

GAMES PRICE Free PLATFORM PC WEB bit.ly/RiversHypothesis The Two Rivers Hypothesis is pure aesthetic and atmosphere, with little beneath that – but what aesthetic and atmosphere. It’s a game where you pilot a submersible around a dark and flooded facility, exploring tunnels until you discover the ending. Controlling the craft is an exercise in mild frustration, then, that feels appropriate for the bulky thing you’re steering. It should feel cumbersome to explore this place, inciting fear as you blindly turn a corner and drive it down another pitch-black corridor. As you find your bearings, you’re assailed by emails that tell of the facility crew and their ultimate fates. Are you one of them? Are you trying to escape? Two Rivers is reluctant to reveal too many details. But the atmosphere…

CENTRE CAM 2.0 SITS IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR SCREEN WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE FOR ONLINE EYE CONTACT? We’ve all been annoyed by the placement of a webcam since it never sits exactly where you’re looking, but it’s definitely not as annoying as having something hanging in front of your screen. The makers of Centre Cam V2.0 disagree however, launching an Indiegogo campaign for a webcam that’ll partially block whatever you’re looking at in order to make you appear as though you’re staring directly into the eyes of whoever you’re meeting over a web conference. At the time of writing there were at least 962 other screen-haters happy to trade a clear view for a centred webcam. LG WASHING MACHINE SENDS 3.7GB OF DATA PER DAY THAT’S PRETTY GRANULAR CLEANING…