Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i Maximum PC

I’VE GOT THAT ITCH a gain for a new system. Honestly, it’s the biggest curse of this job. Once you’re in, and you’re tinkering and playing with hardware, and writing about it and building systems all the time, you sit down, and you’re like “This is enough, I’m happy, Core i5-10600K, RTX 2080 Super, it’s all good.” Then things start launching; AMD releases new processors, Nvidia announces new GPUs, performance increases over here, new awesome software and tech out over there, then a few cool-looking cases pop up. All of a sudden your mind is back on the idea of liquid-cooling the proverbial out of some poor chassis that’s likely going to have its front I/O cut out because it looks “aesthetically displeasing” to you. That is my life, and…

A NEW CARD from Nvidia, the GeForce RTX 3060 sits in the middle of the current Nvidia range, aimed at 1440p gaming. The engine is an Ampere GA106 GPU, which has 3,584 CUDA cores and 112 TMUs, and is coupled to 12GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit interface. The base clock is 1.32GHz, with a maximum boost of 1.78GHz, so it clocks slightly faster than the RTX 3060 Ti. As an Ampere-powered RTX card we get all the fancy ray tracing and DLSS. Performance figures from Nvidia have it comfortably beating the GTX 1060 (and so it should), and manages (roughly) an extra 10fps over the RTX 2060. Nvidia is calling it “the Ampere for every gamer,” which means it is actually affordable. Cards are available now (if you…

ARE YOU TIRED of the continual console wars between Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation? Well that’s what the makers of the Atari VCS hope. It looks as if it belongs in some sort of digital museum. It is meant to be an homage to the original Atari 2600, complete with optional fake wood effect. The development has been slightly tortuous, and required crowdfunding to reach the market. Orders were initially taken in May 2018, and deliveries have just started. No it’s not really an Atari—the company died long ago—and the name has been passed around, before being owned by Infogrames (Remember them anybody?), which renamed itself Atari SA. Inside we find a compact PC running Linux (or Win10 if you must). It’s a flexible thing, you could run standard office…

GOOGLE IS THREATENING to pull its search engine from Australia. It’s a heavy-handed response to a proposed new Australian law, which makes the company responsible for paying royalties to other media companies for the news content it distributes. The proposed law is called the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, and has been put together by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The law has been introduced in the Australian parliament, with the support of the country’s prime minister, who said that legislators would not yield to “threats.” This has ramifications across the world, as legislators everywhere will see how far the Australians can get. There are a number of court cases pending here, and the lawyers will be monitoring this one closely. The proposed law has been…

AND THERE you have it, one ship-shape 4K gaming PC powered entirely by AMD. We’ve been wanting to do one of these builds for a while now, just to see what the added benefits are in the real world when it comes to AMD’s Smart Access Memory tech. For those that don’t know, when using AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs (and now 3000-series processors), with a Radeon 6000-series card and appropriate motherboard BIOS (X570 chipset), you can enable Smart Access Memory. This basically gives the processor complete access to the GPU’s VRAM. Traditionally your processor can only ever access up to 256MB of that VRAM at any one time, regardless of how much VRAM the card actually has. The CPU then uses that VRAM as a frame buffer to store information…

IN THE PAST we’d have directed you to hack by setting up the Metasploitable virtual machine and attacking it. We’d encourage you to do that too, (you’ll find all the information you need at https://github.com/rapid7/metasploitable3). But this time around we’re going to do something different. The Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) is exactly what you might expect: it’s a PHP application riddled with security holes. It requires a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack to run, and it’s certainly not the sort of thing you want to deploy on an internet-facing server. So rather than set all that up from scratch, we’ll cheat and use the Docker image. Just follow the simple three-step guide (below). We can’t get enough of Portainer, so if you’re similarly enamoured with this container management…

BAITING ATTACKERS TOWARDS your own hardware might not seem a particularly good idea, but if that hardware has nothing of value on it, and is suitably isolated from your other machines, then you can more or less lure them in with impunity. The goal of setting up a honeypot is not to revenge-hack attackers, but rather to detect attacks, and distract those responsible from more valuable targets. Opening your home network up to the internet isn’t something that should be done lightly, though. If the honeypot machine was to be compromised, then it could be used as a staging post for attacking any services running on your network, including your home router. If you were foolish enough to run a honeypot on your desktop PC, then it’s possible that an…

Choosing the correct switch is very important when you are customizing your board, as there are multiple options. You have two main types of mount—PCB mount, or plate mount. PCB mount has two extra prongs that go into the PCB, while plate mount doesn’t have these. We usually buy PCB mount, as you can cut the prongs off to make them plate mount. There are also different pinouts and shapes too—for example, Alp switches will not fit a keyboard that is made for Cherry MX-style switches. There are also different housings for switches. As you can see in the image, (below), the LED in the middle will fit the slot on the top two switches, but it won’t fit the slot for the two switches at the bottom, as they…

As good as Microsoft Paint is when it comes to free pre-installed software, is there a real comparison between it and Adobe’s titan, Photoshop? They are both editing software, but Photoshop easily trumps Paint. In Photoshop your creativity is only capped by your imagination. In Paint, your creativity is capped by the limitations of the software itself. Photoshop can be seen by many as overkill. To newbies, it may seem overly complex. If you’re just going to be cropping and resizing images then maybe you should stick with Paint. What you want to get out of the software should be the guide to choosing between the two. If you’re sitting at a basic level, then Paint is great for having some fun. Use it to test how much you can…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 7 + Realtek Audio Console AUDIO LISTENING IS A HUGE PART of day to day life for most people. Whether it is simply for personal use, or part of your professional role, it is important that what you are listening to is of a high quality. If you’ve got your headphones plugged in for long durations every day, of course you are going to want to get the most out of them. Having higher quality audio can get you more involved in what you are listening to, and immerse you in the experience—your music will reveal more layers to you, it will heighten your awareness while gaming, and hopefully, it will make any form of listening more of a pleasure. How do you listen to audio?…

MSI’S VISION is that of a world leader in gaming solutions, and the company is unwaveringly committed to cutting-edge innovation and aesthetic design. The Bravo 15 sits in the middle of MSI’s budget gaming laptops. It follows on from the previous Alpha 15, with an AMD CPU and GPU. MSI boasts that it’s combined the most advanced 7nm AMD Ryzen processor and Radeon RX graphics. This, along with FreeSync Premium, aims to provide stunning performance and a smooth gaming display for the price. On paper, it’s pretty impressive. This can also be a negative, however. The problems start when you consider the price range and where it sits in MSI’s lineup. Compromises are to be expected when you’re just over the $1,000 mark. It’s not the ugliest laptop by any…

WITH A RATHER sleek wrist rest and a really nice gun-metal gray aluminum top plate, this board certainly looks the part. A closer inspection then uncovers a scroll wheel and a little button beneath it that can act as volume and media keys, as well as menu navigation for the OLED screen. We have seen OLED screens on SteelSeries products before, and although we know that they are gimmicks, we still like to play with them from time to time and see if there is actually anything useful we can do with them. We played with multiple apps that work with the OLED screen—some official ones and some third-party. The Discord app is particularly useful, as is the System Monitor, and you can of course put your own animated GIFs…

PASSWORD MANAGERS are, we think, generally a good thing. Remembering adsofpjdp is one thing, but also committing 4256p4m2glm! and paLsdKfnk26& to memory is quite another. Keeping your passwords strong and changing them regularly is important these days, when you can check on a website whether or not you’ve been “pwned,” and Chrome harasses you with your unfeasibly large number of compromised passwords. Web browsers, the front line in the war between password and jailbird, have been able to remember your passwords for a while now, and can generate strong passwords that you’ll never be expected to remember. This is fine until you try to log in on a different system, or using your cell phone, and have to dig in the browser settings to view the password that it recorded…

THE MODERN world runs on silicon—even if a product doesn’t have chips in it, the machines that make it, deliver it, or supply the raw materials will. Manufacturing chips is expensive; the machines that make the wafers cost $100 million a pop. Such expensive machines are kept running continuously, and production runs are planned months in advance. Spare capacity is lost money, so the total capacity is close to total demand. If a manufacturer orders too few chips it can take a while until there’s a production slot available to build more. The pandemic has thrown a spanner into the works, and the industry is struggling to adapt. The result is a chip famine. This isn’t unique—it happens regularly as part of the supply and demand cycle. But circumstances have…

It all started with COVID-19. While the impact on graphics cards might seem like a relatively small item in the grand scheme of things, the manufacturing plants that produce graphics cards—from the GPUs themselves to the memory chips, VRMs, capacitors, PCBs, and other components—were all affected to varying degrees. The problem is that our manufacturing supply chain doesn’t deal well with delays, and it can take days if not weeks when restarting production lines to get everything running smoothly again. Compound all of that with shipping delays. Across the globe, a large chunk of the shipping industry has been diverted to help with routing medical supplies, and now vaccines. So an industry already starved of supplies also now faces restricted shipping. Finally, we have the unprecedented demand for PC upgrades.…

There was no human sacrifice. Dogs and cats did not live together. The only mass hysteria was in the media. And unlike Ghostbusters, the Millennium Bug, also known as the Y2K problem, was very real. It was only through a lot of hard work on the part of programmers and IT contractors across the world that bad things didn’t happen. And it’s not as if we weren’t warned about it years in advance. For those under the age of 40, here’s the condensed version: as the year 2000 approached, warnings increased in the press that, at one second past midnight on January 1, all computers would experience an integer overflow; planes would fall out of the sky, and nuclear reactors explode as a result of catastrophic computer failures linked to…

THE TOOLS WE’RE GOING TO SHOW you can be installed on pretty much any Linux distro, but we’re going to use Kali Linux. This is primarily because it has all these tools installed already, and there’s excellent documentation if you want some more information about it. Kali is probably not something you’d want to use as a daily driver, although if you look online you’ll see a lot of posts by budding haxors that do just this. Up until the end of last year Kali used the root account by default, since many tricks such as handcrafting network packets require this. It would be a terrible idea if you were running, say, your mail client as root and you clicked a dodgy link. Using the root account was sound practice…

1. RUN THE IMAGE Use the official instructions to get Docker installed. Then run the image with: the image with: $ docker run –rm -it -p 8080:80 vulnerables/web-dvwa In a moment you should find the server running on port 8080 of the host machine. Click the “Create/Reset Database” button to begin the fun. 2. BEGIN SLEUTHING Log in with the super-secure combination admin:password and go to the SQL Injection page from the menu on the right. This appears to be some kind of user query utility. Try entering “1” into the form. You should see some information about the admin user. See what else you can find out from here. 3. STEAL A COOKIE We’re going to attack this web app using SQL later on in the tutorial, but to…

Most of what we’ve covered here will be more of interest to those wanting to defend their services than to home users. It’s hard to give general advice for protecting your home network. We’ve always told users to keep their software updated and to be wary of emails from princes needing somewhere to stash their fortunes. And in general that advice goes a long way—those princes aren’t real, and popular applications are patched quickly. The Linux kernel has second-to-none security processes, even in the face of Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities that will be here for a long time. We put a lot of trust in our home routers, though, and perhaps that’s misplaced. Imagine if all the machines on your network were subject to the same probing and bothering that our honeypot…

Changing switches doesn’t have to be a time-consuming money pit. You can buy hot-swappable boards, and even hot-swappable sockets that can be inserted into standard PCBs. These used to be quite hard to get hold of, but brands are slowly starting to see the benefits. The Drop CTRL and ALT are fantastic examples of hot-swappable boards, but they are not really mainstream in terms of brand. You may have heard of Glorious, the makers of the insanely popular Model O and D mouse. Well, the company also has the GMMK that we reviewed in November 2020 (vol. 25, no.11), which is great and—you guessed it—features hot-swappable switches. Even Logitech, one of the biggest players in the peripheral game, has a board with hot-swappable switches, the G Pro X. These boards…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CC 2018 ONWARDS Windows 10 (64-bit) version 1809 or later. To view compatibility visit: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/system-requirements.html PHOTOSHOP: YOU’VE ALL SEEN IT, you’ve all heard of it, but there is a lot more to know about it than you first realize. In this series, we’ll break down different ways you can take advantage of Photoshop, to squeeze every cent’s worth from the high monthly cost of the Adobe CC suite. So, what exactly is this software? In simple terms, it’s the world’s leading photo-editing application. It’s a tool used by millions of graphic designers, artists, photographers, and people who just want to goof around putting their buddy’s face onto anything their heart desires. Use your imagination there. American brothers Thomas and John Knoll developed Photoshop in 1987.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS SOUNDSWITCH https://soundswitch.aaflalo.me/ THE BACK OF YOUR PC probably has both analog and digital audio outputs. Then there are Bluetooth headphones, USB headsets, the speakers on your monitor connected over HDMI, even external sound-processing boxes. For something that can’t generate more than a harsh beeping noise unaided, your PC can actually find many ways to make a noise. Windows doesn’t always make it easy to switch between them, though, and is always liable to blast audio through your speakers when you don’t want it to, or to remain stubbornly silent when you try to connect something to its digital optical output. SoundSwitch is an open-source utility that sets your PC’s audio output, and lets you choose a hotkey so you can swap the noise from speakers to headphones…

To make sure the settings you have changed are working, you can check on them through the main Windows OS settings. Go to “Settings > Sound,” then under the related Settings tab to the right of your screen, you should see the Sound Control Panel section. The Sound Control Panel section will display a list of the output and input devices you have under the Playback list. Click on the device you want to check, which will open up a new Properties window. In the General tab, you can rename your device and change the devices icon—handy for a little bit of personalization. You can check the drivers for the device when clicking the Properties button. The next tab along is Levels, which quite simply is the volume and microphone…

AS A LOVER of keyboards that are generally 65 percent or smaller, I sacrifice a lot of functionality that you get on full-size keyboards. Many of these functions can be added to second or even third layers, but when you just want to hit “next song” or turn up the volume, switching layers, remembering the hot key, then switching back just isn’t ideal. Also, if there is an embarrassing song playing when a colleague visits, I want to be able to mute it straight away. No one needs to know about my secret love for Shawn Wasabi, and the alternative takes far too long. Macropads are invaluable to bring back these options, and the Pikatea Macropad is my latest. It also does the trick without taking up desk space—perfect! A…

DO YOU DEMAND the absolute fastest M.2 SSD, hands down? Samsung’s 980 PRO is an object lesson in solid-state speed. In our hands, the 1TB version of Samsung’s NVMe finest knocked out over 7GB/s of read and 5GB/s of write performance. That’s as good as we’ve seen from an M.2 NVMe drive. Actually, it’s redolent of RAM speeds from not entirely distant memory. But it’s not enough to beat Sabrent’s new beast—not on paper, at least. So here we have the new Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. Like the Samsung 980 PRO, it’s an M.2 drive with a quad-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface running TLC NAND flash memory. However, in the Rocket 4 Plus, Sabrent has created what it claims is the fastest NVMe SSD on the planet. The cold, hard…

AMD HAS LAUNCHED THE RYZEN 5000-SERIES mobile chips, and what a tasty bunch they are. In the performance group we have the 45W H series, the 35W HS chips with slighter slower clocks, and the new HX chips, which can be overclocked and are rated at “45W+”. All have eight cores, bar two base versions with six cores. Top dog is the Ryzen 9 5980HX with a base clock of 3.3GHz, and a boost of 4.8GHz. All this silicon has Zen 3 cores. There’s also a 15W U range running up to the eight-core Ryzen 7 5800U, with a base clock of 1.9GHz, and a boost of 4.4GHz. At the bottom sits the Ryzen 3 5300U with just four cores. This group includes re-branded 4000-series chips with Zen 2 cores.…

> Sound Driver Lag > Power Problem > Driver Updates Update Windows Media In the Holiday issue on virtual machines, it mentioned that we can get images for old Windows boot disks at www.allbootdisks.com—do these images contain the original Windows version, or do they include all the updates to these older versions that were supplied before MSFT support ended? It wasn’t clear in the article. – Phil West THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: These boot disk images aren’t suitable for installing Windows—they basically provide boot and repair functions only. If you read the article again, you’ll see that Neil has directed you to the website to obtain a boot floppy disk image for Windows 95, because the Windows 95 CD-ROM itself wasn’t bootable, and requires this to run. When it comes to…

PEOPLE HAVE DONE BAD THINGS with computers for decades. Even before personal computers, people (“phreakers”) used to abuse telephone systems. The hacking journal 2600 takes its name from the 2600Hz tone required to trick AT&T phone lines into giving free calls in the 1960s. This was possible because the same line carried both voice and connection-management signals. Such in-band signalling was done away with in the 70s when a new signalling system was introduced. This enabled different networks to send this data out of band. This system, known as SS7, is still in use today, and is vulnerable to a manin-the-middle attack. This has been exploited to allow second-factor SMS codes to be intercepted, and accounts to be compromised. The Morris Worm is widely regarded as the first self-replicating worm…

By far the most common attacks involve exploiting human weakness. This might be through a carefully crafted phishing scam, or having a covert agent on the target premises. The compromise of several high-profile Twitter profiles in July was the result of a spear-phishing campaign, where several individuals in the company were targeted until one gave up credentials to account support tools. It wasn’t an elegant scheme, but within a few hours followers of the 130 compromised accounts had donated some $117,000 worth of Bitcoin to the scammers. However, they left plenty of tracks and so won’t be able to enjoy any of their ill-gotten gains. The mastermind (a teenager from Florida) pleaded guilty to 30 charges in August. Twitter now requires that all employees use physical two-factor authentication (2FA) to access…

This issue, we’ve taken a look at the S teelSeries Apex 7 TKL keyboard (page 87). It is actually one of the best off-the-shelf keyboards we’ve reviewed in a long time. It scored a 9 and earned our Kick-Ass award. That is realistically the highest score any product will get at Maximum PC, as nothing is ever perfect: even if it ticked every single one of our boxes, it’s just not going to be the right fit for everyone—therefore, it can’t ever be a 10. There’s always something that can be improved upon. The Apex 7 we received for review had Cherry MX Brown switches. These switches are a favorite for a lot of folk, but as professional writers working in tech, we often like heavier, tactile switches, and the Browns…

TIP OF THE MONTH TUNE MY MUSIC Thinking of switching music-streaming services, but the huge headache of transferring your beloved playlists is clouding your vision? Well put your worries aside for one moment while we show you this little gem. TuneMyMusic is a website that lets you put your feet up and relax as it does all the hard work for you. It’s simple, effective, and straight to the point. www.tunemymusic.com MAKE – USE – CREATE 62 How to use Photoshop part one: an introduction 67 Switch audio output with SoundSwitch 68 Take a look back at Microsoft MSX architecture PLAYER 2 HAS ENTERED Well hello! I’m Sam, a fresh tech-head looking to delve deeper into this ever-advancing industry. You’ll be seeing my face a little bit more often around…

YOU’LL NEED THIS OPENMSX For this tutorial, grab openMSX, which is available on Windows and Linux in both 32 and 64-bit versions: https://openmsx.org/ For advanced users who want BASIC or disk usage, try fMSX: https://fms.komkon.org/fMSX/ THIS MONTH’S COMPUTER is a little different. Rather than being a single system, MSX was actually a Microsoft specification for eight-bit microcomputers. Countless brands produced their own MSX machines, which dominated Eastern markets. The MSX era is a fascinating period of computing history often neglected in the West, which showcases an unusual stage of gaming evolution. Japan in the early 1980s was flooded with home computers. Despite most machines sharing Microsoft BASIC, these computers were usually incompatible with each other. In June 1983, Microsoft announced the MSX specification: an attempt to standardize eight-bit microcomputers into…

RECENTLY I’ve been delving into the world of painting Warhammer miniatures. It’s something I like to do to pass the time, and it’s quite therapeutic. I’m lucky because I’ve got a fairly large home office, and a massive desk. At one end is my PC, and the other end is, well, empty—an ideal space for a painting station. Now, anyone who’s painted minis knows that you end up with a lot of paints. Citadel ones, the ones I use, are tiny, and a pain to store. So I did some research online and found a company selling an accessory that you can attach to an Ikea Skadis pegboard (I have three already), and holds Citadel paints. What’s the problem? Each one only holds five paints, and they’re shipped from Germany,…

NO LESS than 49 inches of premium ultrawide panel tech; high refresh; HDR support; 5,120 x 1,440 pixels—if that sounds like a recipe for a pretty niche, premium product, it hasn’t prevented Samsung from cooking up at least three different monitor models that tick all those boxes. It may actually be more than three—it’s hard to keep track of Samsung’s sprawling product range. The most famous of what we’ll now call the “known trio” of 49-inch Samsung ultrawides is the epic G9. That one wowed many a YouTuber and reviewer with its crazy-tight 1,000R curvature, 240Hz refresh, and its DisplayHDR 1000 certification. But we’ve got the CRG9, sometimes also known as the C49RG90, which scales that back to 120Hz and 1,800R, while retaining the same resolution and DisplayHDR 1000 certification.…

RASPBERRY PI has a history of disrupting the status quo. In 2012, the first $35 Raspberry Pi emerged as a low-cost option in the single-board computer market that was dominated by boards in excess of $100. The Raspberry Pi Pico, the latest in the range, disrupts a different part of the market, taking on microcontroller boards like Arduino. Available for an MSRP of just $4, the Pico is powered by Raspberry Pi’s own custom silicon, the RP2040 SoC, which features an ARM Cortex M0+ processor running at up to 133MHz, with 264KB of SRAM and 2MB of on-board storage. A great choice for robots, weather stations, or other electronics projects, the board doesn’t run a full operating system, but instead launches programs that you write in either MicroPython or C…

WE SHOULD HAVE expected a wild ride. Eight years in development, a team of up to 500 people, Keanu Reeves. You’ll have read about the rest: the delays, the crunch, the controversies over representation, the game-breaking bugs, Sony pulling it from the PlayStation Store because of its PS4 performance, the lawsuits. Could it ever live up to the hype on PC? Kinda. Maybe. Let’s go through our first steps with the game by way of an example to support that nebulous summing-up. We start the game a few days after its launch expecting a crash to desktop at any moment, because that’s what we’ve read will happen. It doesn’t. We didn’t get an early review code, so it’s had one patch already by this point, and another comes in halfway…