Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i APC

We have a nice little head to head this month. In it, we wonder in an abstract semi-science way, whether a smartphone is better than a tablet, or can a Chromebook insert itself in to the equation and topple both? The conclusion, unsurprisingly, is that each is fit for a purpose, and while there’s some crossover we’re all better off having simply the right tool for the job, whatever yours may be. Part of the mission for us with that little comparison was to take a fresh look at Chromebooks and have another stab at figuring out where they belong in the world. And as always the answer is easy. If you don’t use Office, or apps that are exclusive to Windows or Mac, or play PC games, then a…

$8.2 MILLION AMOUNT OF MONEY FACEBOOK HAS PLEDGED TO HELP TRAIN JOURNALISTS IN THE UK. – and so help combat the spread of “fake news”. The Community News Project money will be distributed by the National Council for the Training of Journalists. 7% CHANCE THAT SPACEX FOUNDER AND TESLA BOSS, ELON MUSK, WILL MOVE TO MARS. He’s made the claim several times before, but never attached a figure of probability to it. He’d better hurry up – SpaceX’s first Mars mission is currently scheduled for 2022.…

TICWATCH C2 This 2nd gen’ TicWatch ticks a lot of boxes. $300 | WWW.MOBVOI.COM The original Ticwatch range got a lot of attention for offering the features of a premium smartwatch at a much lower price. The TicWatch C2 has the same elevator pitch, but it’s just much, much better it. A lot of this is due to Google’s updated, and much better, Wear OS, but the C2 is also significantly more responsive, a little slimmer and has a sleek new minimalist design. While it doesn’t quite have the 5ATM waterproofing of the TicWatch E2 and S2 that were announced at CES, it is IP68 water resistant. With access to Wear OS’s broad range of apps and smartwatch faces, the C2 is almost on par with Apple or…

It’s time once again to present that most tricky proposition: the gaming ultrabook. Here’s an ultra-thin, seriously designed piece of gear that looks as capable of passing itself off in a boring meeting as it is at offering up a slice of gaming gateau. But can you really squeeze everything you need for gaming into a chassis that’s less than 15mm thick? Let’s find out. This is actually an updated version of the GX501, with an eighth-gen 2.2GHz Core i7-8750H at its heart, and a 144Hz panel. This panel may lack the G-Sync cleverness of the original model, but as it has a lower-powered GeForce GTX 1060 pumping out the pixels, this is less of an issue, as you’ll be hard pushed to hit the frame rates needed to make…

For years we’ve been talking about how SSDs are encroaching upon the mechanical hard drive market. While we’re a long way from calling the death of the HDD, the advent of 4-bit per cell NAND is a big step towards addressing the advantages held by hard drives: price and capacity. QLC (Quad Level Cell) NAND has been seen in a couple of NVMe drives, but the Samsung 860 QVO 2TB we have on hand for review is the first QLC SATA SSD. It’s priced very aggressively and looks to be a solid choice for users looking for a good value and/or high capacity SSD. QLC NAND is inherently slower and has lower endurance than TLC NAND found in the majority of consumer SSD’s. It offsets this with increased data density…

Finally we have a somewhat affordable RTX card! RTX generation Founders Edition cards are a big step forward compared to their blower cooler equipped ancestors. The card is surrounded by an aluminium shroud including a solid backplate that looks great, helps with cooling, and adds rigidity to the card. The RTX 2060 Founders Edition has an excellent array of display outputs, with two DP 1.4 connectors, a single HDMI 2.0b, USB Type-C and a DVI-DL port. The premium MSI can’t match that. The Founders Edition doesn’t have the cooling surface area of the MSI, so it can’t match its boost clocks or the essentially silent noise levels. That’s to be expected though given its lower spec. What really matters is not forward-looking ray tracing support, but how it performs in…

AMD’s Threadripper CPUs are undoubtedly high end. Thus, accompanying X399 motherboards are generally pricey compared to the mainstream AMD and Intel platforms because they are complex. All those PCIe lanes, quad channel memory, huge socket and expansive connectivity means X399 motherboards will never be cheap. Or will they? ASRock has gone and done it. The Phantom Gaming 6 is a high end motherboard that comes in at just $285. Straight up – that’s dirt cheap. ASRock has always had a reputation for producing well-featured motherboards without exorbitant price tags, and at a glance the Phantom Gaming 6 follows this trend. Gone is the Fatal1ty branding. The Phantom Gaming brand now covers ASRock’s gaming motherboard and AMD GPU product lines. It’s important to note that the board only supports 180W Threadripper…

$9.99 | GOODTASKAPP.COM This app combines Apple’s Calendar and Reminders and syncs with iCloud. It’s more than that, though: it adds several features of its own to do much more than Apple’s apps. With tags assigned, you can view or exclude tasks based on those tags. You can filter notes that include certain text strings; filtering is done using Smart Lists and you can create lists showing overdue items, items in a specific location, or those created recently. Quick Actions allow you to choose from a number of presets, such as alert times or adding tags. You can edit these or add your own, either when you create a task or by selecting one. You can select multiple tasks and add Quick Actions in bulk. It takes a…

FREE | WWW.BITDEFENDER.COM.AU While ploughing through all the usual suspects to find the best free anti-malware package, we came to several disturbing (and yet liberating) conclusions. The first was that literally all of the feature-packed free versions are annoying at best and dishonest at worst. Some flash up ads, others install affiliate shopping links (that they call ‘safe shopping’), many offer performance scans for free but are rendered utterly pointless as the fix requires payment. Others offer VPN features with so little free data that they’re borderline useless without subscribing to a premium version. “Bitdefender’s Free Edition offers all of its group-test winning core security features for free and nothing else.” In practically every case, you can find much better, third-party applications without going through this rigmarole that…

$95 FOR FIVE DEVICES FOR ONE YEAR | HTTPS://AU.NORTON.COM We suspect there are still a few people who wince at the thought of Norton. Some 15 years ago it was an ununinstallable nightmare that could arguably be best described as malware. To its credit, the company realised this, rebuilt it from the ground up and integrated backup technology from what was Norton Ghost to make one of the most efficient pieces of security software around. It’s fair to say that the competition has since caught up, but Norton still offers a slick, set-and-forget experience that can’t be beat. If you’re not interested in bells and whistles and just want your family’s devices protected knowing that the software won’t badger them about anything, this is the product to buy.…

As it turns out, the video card wars are going to charge into 2019 quite a bit hotter than any of us were expecting. As part of AMD’s CES 2019 keynote, CEO Dr. Lisa Su announced that AMD will be releasing a new high-end, high-performance Radeon graphics card. Dubbed the Radeon VII (Seven), AMD has its eyes set on countering Nvidia’s previously untouchable GeForce RTX 2080. This announcement was interesting in that it’s just as much about technology as it is the 3D chess that is the market positioning fights between AMD and Nvidia. Technically AMD isn’t announcing any new GPUs here, but the situation in the high-end market has played out such that there’s now a window for AMD to bring its cutting-edge Vega 20 GPU to the consumer…

While CES 2019 was a flurry of excitement with 7nm and 10nm silicon, what interested us most were all the new computer monitors we feasted our eyes on. From gargantuan 65-inch displays to RGB lit spectacles, we’ve never seen this many monitors introduced at CES and there were also a fair share of newcomers to the scene as well. HP OMEN X EMPERIUM 65 As its name suggest it’s a massive 65-inch monitor and while it might not have a tuner like your 4K TV, it’ll deliver impeccable image quality with its 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) resolution, 1,000-nit peak brightness, HDR colors, and a high refresh rate of 144Hz. What’s more, this screen features a built-in sound bar and a built-in Nvidia Shield, so it could easily be the…

As has been the case every year for the past twenty years straight, the technology world gathers in Las Vegas to see what the biggest and best technology companies in the world have come up with at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show). The show, as the name suggests is consumer oriented, as opposed to a trade show like Taiwan’s Computex, so you see a wide gamut of things, which this year ranged from laundry folding machines to RoboSharks, right through to the stuff we’re more interested in: new PC tech. There were of course the big players in PC chip making there, spruiking their latest wares. AMD was offering up everything from (essentially) a faster Vega 64 in the form of the Radeon VII (“Radeon Seven”) to the new mobile…

We’ve taken a significant hit on the budget build this issue, but not without gain. We’ve managed to switch out that aged GTX 1050 Ti for our favorite GPU of the last two years, the GTX 1060 3GB — it’s a budget 1080p killing machine. Yes, perhaps the 3GB of VRAM isn’t as future-proof as we’d like, especially in the bigger AAA memory-hogging titles, but it’s difficult to argue with how much better value this thing is over its 1050 Ti sibling. For $100 more, you get 50 percent more CUDA cores than the Ti, plus significantly higher boost clocks and memory clocks. We’ve also plumped up some more cash to upgrade the Ryzen 3 1200 to the Ryzen 5 2600, a six-core 3.9GHz processor. This effectively gives us an…

STORAGE MOVE OFFICE TO A NEW HARD DRIVE My Samsung R850 hard drive appears to have crashed, Windows 10 going into automatic recover mode and telling me to replace the drive whenever I try to boot from it. This means a new hard drive and new Windows 10 OS as my install discs are in another country for the next four months. Can I move Office 2010 from my Samsung N150 to the new drive? It’s too slow for anything but photos. Bob McKnight First things first, there should be no need to buy a new copy of Windows 10, Bob. So long as it’s a straight hard drive swap, then your Windows 10 license should be tied to your old PC – all you need to do is use…

The Alt key – or, in proper Mac parlance, Option, though it isn’t labelled as such on all Mac keyboards worldwide – is literally your key to a world of shortcuts and alternative behaviours. You might have a sense of this already from our Genius Tips troubleshooting advice; the first step in solving some software problems is to hold the key to reveal a link to your user account’s Library folder (where you can carry out certain maintenance tasks) in Finder’s Go menu. Similarly, you may have encountered the key’s powers elsewhere, by accident, when idly tapping it and other modifier keys while you explore the contents of menus. Here you’ll discover some of the Alt key’s uses in macOS and a few of the apps that come with it.…

First-person shooter Metro Exodus launched exclusively for the Epic Games Store in February, after its publisher Deep Silver opted to remove it from Steam in favour of the newer platform. The move wasn’t without its complications: pre-orders already placed on Steam will still be honoured, meaning the game will exist in a diminished fashion on Valve’s service until February next year – when Epic’s timed-exclusive period ends. The move must have rattled Valve, because the traditionally quiet company was compelled to address the matter in a statement. “We think the decision to remove the game is unfair to Steam customers,” the company wrote, “especially after a long pre-sale period.” The statement goes on to add that Valve was “only recently informed of the decision and given limited time to let…

TPG was keen on becoming Australia’s fourth largest mobile career, sinking $1.9 billion on setting up its own 4G network. The service was switched on in 2018, and was supposed to cover 80% of the country’s population. But with only a few metro areas in Sydney currently covered, the rest of the build has been abandoned, with TPG citing the August 2018 ban on Huawei as the main reason. Huawei has been TPG’s sole provider of small cell boxes needed for mobile services. The Federal Government’s ban on the Chinese manufacturer’s equipment, however, has thrown a spanner in the works, with TPG claiming it “does not make commercial sense” to carry on pouring money into building the network. “A key reason for the selection of the vendor and the design…

Apple’s once-neglected Mac mini is coming in hot with a brand-new, cutting-edge, long-awaited… processor upgrade? And a couple more ports? There must be more, and we know how to find it – with a teardown! MAJOR TECH SPECS ■ 3.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i3 with 6MB shared L3 cache ■ 8GB of 2,666MT/s DDR4 SO-DIMM memory ■ 128GB SSD ■ Intel UHD Graphics 630 ■ 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 ■ macOS Mojave KEY FINDINGS ■ Our first look at the 2018 mini’s exterior gives us the warm and fuzzies – it’s the same friendly form factor we remember. Despite controversial departures from a few common ports, Apple has included plenty of them here. We spot two USB-A ports, four USB-C ports, a headphone jack, an Ethernet port, and an…

There’s a big shift in overall design of the 2018 Alienware m15 from last year’s Alienware 15. Cuts to the m15’s footprint have eliminated the former’s unique rear vent design, which jutted out well past the screen hinge, transforming the new model into a far more predictable gaming laptop shape. The 36.3 x 27.5 x 2.1cm, 2.2kg chassis of the m15 is also 1.3kg lighter, 2.6cm narrower, 3cm shallower and 4mm thinner than its predecessor. We actually prefer the overall look of the original and while you could argue that a more compact design can hinder thermal efficiency, the Alienware 15 had surprisingly bad thermals, with the Core i9 CPU regularly spiking to 100-degrees C, so there’s not much point. Generally Alienware offers a range of CPUs on its gaming…

A portable display is a rather niche proposition, but if you are one of the few that needs a multi-screen setup that can go anywhere, or a big screen to display your smartphone, then Asus’s ZenScreen Go should be in your shortlist. The ZenScreen Go has the same honed metal chassis as its ultrabook brethren and is one of the only portable displays to really minimise the bezels. Combine this with a sleek magnetic folio case and smartphone sized charging cable and you have one of the best looking portable displays available. The 15.6-inch Full HD display features a 7800mAh Li-Po battery which will last four hours on peak brightness settings. This will stretch to almost a full working day if you can lower the brightness or live with the…

MSI’s RTX 2060 Gaming Z is the first custom RTX card we’ve had in our labs, and like MSI’s Gaming cards usually are, it’s an improvement over the Founders Edition in almost every way. The MSI Gaming Z is solidly built yet remains quite compact compared to the very large Trio Gaming cards. There’s a solidly machined backplate and no high end GPU in 2019 would be complete without an attractive dose of RGB lighting. The MSI features three DP 1.4 ports along with a single HDMI 2.0b port though curiously no Type-C port. The card requires just the solitary eight pin power connector. Particularly impressive is the boost clock of the MSI which increases to 1830MHz, a nice bump over the 1680MHz of the Founders Edition card. MSI’s Twin…

Google, Amazon and (to a lesser extent) Apple are all vying to take control of the next big thing in tech – the smart home and the associated products and services that come with it, with the second-generation Amazon Echo Show and the new Google Home Hub being just two of the latest devices to tempt you into joining their particular ecosystems. The similarities between the Amazon Echo Show and the Google Home Hub are certainly uncanny, from form factor to features – even some commands sound the same once you change the word “Alexa” for “Hey, Google”. The result is a device you feel like you’ve used before, yet Google’s version has some distinguishing features, like the auto-updating Google Photos gallery and a Home View that shows your smart…

Let’s begin by tightening the security of the computers in your home. First, take a look at your security software. If you’re currently using Windows Defender, we recommend that you switch to something stronger. If you’re happy to rely on free protection, then Panda Free AntiVirus (www.pandasecurity.com) is an excellent choice. It’s light on its feet, easy to use and gives you protection that matches many commercial products. It includes built-in protection against Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) and an optional browser plug-in, which offers safe web searches and protection against dodgy websites. Panda is also less intrusive when it comes to pop-up upgrade offers – you can switch off these completely by opening its Settings. Paid-for protection from the likes of Kaspersky and Norton goes even further, and you can…

Even if you’ve yet to embrace the concept of the smart home, the chances are you will still have a number of devices, as well as your PC, competing for bandwidth on your home network. Read on to discover how to reduce its vulnerability with a home network security audit. LOCK YOUR ROUTER Let’s start with the gateway between your home and the Internet. If you have never carried out admin on your router before, then you will definitely find ways in which to strengthen its security. You can usually manage your router through your web browser by entering its four-digit IP address into the Address Bar. To do that, first open Settings > Network and Internet, and click ‘View your network properties’, then make a note of your router’s…

Now let’s make your Internet connection more secure. Let’s start with your DNS server. This is used to translate web addresses into their actual physical IP addresses. Normally, your DNS server is provided by your ISP, but it’s not the best choice for performance and security reasons. Alternatives such as OpenDNS are faster, more reliable and, crucially, apply more security checks to validate web addresses. With OpenDNS, you can even sign up at its website (www.opendns.com) for things like parental controls and identity theft protection. Alternatively, log in to your router, locate where its DNS settings are stored, and then change them to the following addresses: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. The effect will be immediate. If you lose your connection, check that you’ve added them correctly. If you have any devices…

Do you rely on a limited number of passwords to secure accounts both online and off? You’re not alone. The sad truth is, though, that this represents an opportunity for hackers and identity thieves who, once they crack one of your passwords, can often crack them all. The way to solve this problem is to create unique, complex passwords for each account that you use, using a mix of upper and lowercase characters, numbers and even symbols. The trick then is remembering them all. The solution lies in employing the services of a password manager. A good password management tool will generate strong random passwords, make them easy to access and protect them all behind a single, strong master password you can remember. You log into the password manager with…

Intel’s Senior Vice President of the Client Computing Group Gregory Bryant defined what Intel calls the “new era of computing” during Intel’s CES keynote. This includes several technologies, like cloud-based solutions, desktop PCs, 5G networking, AI, and data centre products, among others. Intel is launching six new 9th-Generation processors for the desktop PC that range from Core i3 up to Core i9, and says the first new 9th-Gen processors will come to market this month, with more rolling out through the second quarter of this year. Bryant then displayed a 10nm Ice Lake processor that comes with Gen11 graphics, native Thunderbolt 3, WiFi-6, and artificial intelligence (boosted by DL Boost) into a single SoC. Intel demonstrated the Ice Lake chip offering a 2x performance boost to processing images. The company…

Quantum computing has caught the attention of large companies, academics, and hobbyists. We’re going to cover the history, the different ways to make a quantum computer, and the logic behind programming. You’ll also learn about some programming toolkits that you can use to get started. To run a quantum computer, the physics has to be understood, so programmers can manipulate and measure the final results. Scientists have observed quantum effects in photons, electrons, and isotopes of many materials. This means engineers use superconducting materials, such as niobium and aluminum, to construct workable quantum computing systems. The logic gates are made of silicon wafers, and are controlled using microwave emitters. These solutions may not be the best in the long run, but they’re the ones that are running now. To use…

1TB Samsung 860 Evo $235, WWW.SAMSUNG.COM Nothing says enjoyment quite like instantaneous load times. Samsung’s 860 Evo is exceptionally good value for money now. You can currently get the 1TB variant for a little under $240, which is just awesome. A year or two back, this thing would have set you back near enough $400. The margin between hard drives and flash seems to be shrinking, something we thought would never happen, but given the way things are developing, old-school hard drives may very well be on the way out. There are a few other options out there for solid-state storage at this capacity and this price point, but with a five-year warranty and some impressive performance, there’s very little reason not to go with Samsung right now.…

Just as with previous versions of Windows, the look of Windows 10 can be customised using themes. These are collections of desktop wallpapers, menu colours and sounds that overhaul the look and feel of Windows. While Windows 10 comes with a few themes pre-installed, you can also browse and download from a huge variety of ready-made themes that have been picked by Microsoft. These are easy to download and apply to Windows 10, enabling you to give your PC that personal touch. Best of all, you can tweak these themes to better suit your tastes, or create your own themes and save them so that they can be easily applied in the future. Windows 10 themes can also be removed or swapped if you want to change the look in…

When you’re managing your HomeKit accessories, it’s natural to head for Apple’s own Home app. That’s logical, and it’ll get the job done, but it’s not necessarily the best choice. Home’s design pushes certain aspects of accessory control into the background – try tweaking the colour of your lights, for instance, and you’ll need to navigate through at least two screens before you’re given the option. “You can see the exact status of all your accessories and access their basic controls from a single page.” Even if you don’t own a single Eve accessory, the Eve for HomeKit app is one you owe it to yourself to try. It’s compatible with everything HomeKit, and in many cases it makes it much quicker and easier to get things done. You can…

We always say it, but if you want to know what’s coming inside your next-generation phone, look at new-generation CPU tech. While there’s plenty of hype (and, for big phone makers, hope) surrounding the arrival of 5G, the new mobile CPU technology launching this year will have far greater reach than just your mobile phone. In fact, the CPU tech about to power your new phone soon could be running your laptop, driving your car and flying your plane. PEAK SMARTPHONE? Have we reached ‘peak smartphone’? That’s the question now being asked by some pundits after news of Apple’s slowing iPhone sales sent shockwaves around investment circles in late-2018. It also coincided with market research from Gartner that if it wasn’t for Chinese brands Huawei and Xiaomi, third-quarter 2018 global…

$89.96 | PC, PS4, XO | WWW.JUSTCAUSE.SQUARE-ENIX-GAMES.COM The Just Cause series has a knack for holding your attention in short bursts. It can cause you to grit your teeth as you wingsuit so close to mountains that you can taste the snow spray, and grapple-hook up to helicopters to escape the mushrooming flames of exploding bases. It also gives you the freedom to tether a goat to a balloon, hook yourself onto it and float off into the stratosphere. This time the protagonist, Rico, is helping liberate the South American island of Solis, a vast paradise of several beautiful biomes whose people are oppressed. It’s on you to wrest back control of the island. Where in previous games you did this simply by causing enough destruction in a…

Account takeover-based (ATO) attacks now comprise 20 percent of all advanced email attacks according to new research from the email security and protection company Agari. This rise in popularity is largely due to them being more difficult to detect than traditional attacks and their ability to bypass email filters since they are sent from a real sender’s email account. Senior Director of Threat Research at Agari, Crane Hassold provided further insight on the threat posed by ATO attacks, saying: “Credential phishing was already a huge risk for organisations because of the potential for data breach, but now there is a new wave of account takeover attacks leveraging compromised accounts to commit additional fraud.” According to Agari’s Cyber Intelligence Division, brand impersonation remains the most common attack vector and this technique…

5G comes with the promise of faster internet speeds and more reliable connections on smartphones and other devices. It uses cutting-edge network technology to offer download speeds of up to 20Gbps, and users should see an average speed of 1Gbps at the very least. These kinds of speeds are typically seen on fixed-line networks, meaning 5G could well be nicknamed ‘fibre to the smartphone’. 5G will also help power the next generation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, providing the infrastructure to transfer huge amounts of data within split seconds, allowing manufacturers to produce smarter gadgets to connect the world. Development and testing is already underway, and is backwards-compatible with the existing 4G network to provide speedier connections to let you stay online no matter where you are. Australian telcos…

Here’s a compelling theory: according to former prime minister Kevin Rudd, the national embarrassment that is the NBN can at least partially be blamed on Foxtel. That is, Rudd claims to have evidence that News Corp mogul Rupert Murdoch worked to undermine the then-incumbent Labor Party’s plans for the infrastructure, which would bolster the burgeoning reach of Netflix and, it was thought, diminish the competitiveness of Foxtel. During a reddit AMA (‘Ask Me Anything’) in January to promote his book, Rudd didn’t pull punches. He alludes to compulsory News Corp stock exchange filings in 2013, which heavily reference the threat that more robust internet infrastructure could have on its services. “It was no coincidence that when the Liberals came up with an NBN that was only Fibre optic to the…

If you loved MSI’s 2018 GS65, but don’t quite think you could get away with its gold grills in the office, you’ll be jonesing for MSI’s Prestige series P6 58RE. It’s clear from the vent design and identical physical specifications that MSI has used the same chassis of the GS65 to build the new P65. This is not a bad thing. We do prefer the black, red and gold colouring of the GS65 to the plain silver P65, but the fresh all-white Limited Edition P65 might just be our favourite of the three. Up front the MSI P65 has an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU and 16GB of R AM. The P65 comes in two variations locally: the silver P65 Creator 8RE, with a GTX 1060 (Max-Q), 60Hz FHD IPS display…

We never expected to see a new NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) from Samsung this soon – especially with the 970 Evo and 970 Pro launching just last April – but here we are looking at the new Samsung 970 Evo Plus. While it might seem like a minor upgrade unworthy of a fully numbered sequel, the Samsung 970 Evo Plus is a worthy successor, with the fastest speeds and some of the lowest prices seen on its NVMe SSD products. The entire NVMe SSD world is engaged in something of a race to the bottom to offer the cheapest and fastest storage, and it seems Samsung has had to bend to market dynamics. Samsung has brought its prices down across the board. Undoubtedly, these new price cuts are a result…

PC gaming enthusiasts with deep pockets have had access to Nvidia’s Turing RTX graphics cards for several months now. They’re good cards, though their steep price tags keep them well outside the reach of the majority of PC gamers. Most of us just aren’t interested in dropping $800+ on the (until now) most affordable RTX card – the RTX 2070. Widespread ray tracing adoption will never happen at those prices. The RTX 2060 is now the cheapest RTX series card, though calling a $600+ card cheap is a misnomer for sure. The RTX 2060 is the successor to the GTX 1060 in pretty much name only. The number of Cuda cores has increased from 1280 to 1920, memory bandwidth increased from 192GB/s to 336GB/s and of course the price has…

We’ve spoken a lot about manufacturers turning away from gaming motifs, jazzy lights, and pointy angles in favor of sleeker designs, a more premium feel, and a better quality of product. MSI’s MEG Z390 Godlike didn’t seem to catch that memo. The layer of over-the-top glam adorning this bulky E-ATX beast was enough to make even our experienced selves take a step back, aghast. From the LED-dotted infinity mirror on the rear I/O cover to the vertically aligned OLED display showcasing the MSI dragon fighting some ninjas on startup, to the huge drake motif on the bottom chipset perpetually glowing with rainbow lighting, everything about this screams gauche. There’s no subtlety at all. That touch of class we find from the likes of Asus is absent. It’s as if MSI…

The first two Huawei Watch products were a big part of the initial success of the Android Wear operating system, so it came as a surprise when the company backed away from Google’s wearable platform for the Huawei Watch GT. Instead the company decided to use its own software for its latest smartwatch. The Watch GT has pared back software to increase battery life, and the good news is that this has worked – although at the cost of compromises elsewhere. This is a thin and light smartwatch with a full-colour display, and we found it comfortable to wear throughout our time using it; we also had compliments on how the watch looked on our wrist. The design is similar to that of the Huawei Watch 2, although it is…

But some older devices and apps – including emails apps Thunderbird and Outlook – don’t work nicely with it. The good news is you don’t need to source a separate app or compromise your security – most services that offer two-factor authentication offer what’s known as one-time passwords. These are passwords you can use in place of a regular password to log into an application or device. If an app refuses to work properly even after entering the correct password, try one of these instead. If you’re a Google user, for example, go to accounts.google.com and sign in. Choose your username, then My Account. Click ‘Sign-in & security’, scroll down and click ‘App passwords’ beneath ‘2-step Verification’. Choose ‘Select app’ to give your app a name, and a device, then…

$70 FOR FIVE DEVICES FOR ONE YEAR | WWW.BITDEFENDER.COM.AU Regular readers won’t be surprised: the Bitdefender juggernaut keeps on rolling. This monster with ballerina’s feet doesn’t just offer a complement of features that’s unrivalled in the market, it does so while maintaining best-in-class protection and minimal system impact. As if that’s not enough, it’s also one of the best-looking packages with slick design and intuitive access to all of those features. That it’s available in a multitude of versions, all of which are great value, is almost a footnote. It achieved a perfect score in AV-Test with almost no false positives – there was a single instance where it blocked the installation of a file where that it thought was suspicious. While all security software slows down the…

AMD AMD Ryzen 3rd gen ‘Matisse’ coming mid-2019 EIGHT CORE ZEN 2 WITH PCIE 4 ON THE DESKTOP-MEMORY. AMD’s keynote address this year was a whirlwind of primetime announcements for the company. The message is clear: AMD is committing itself to 7nm as the future process node that will drive the company’s innovations starting in 2019. The first consumer products on 7nm will be the Ryzen 3rd Generation Desktop processors, using Zen 2 cores, offering more than competitive performance against Intel’s best hardware. Also on the docket is a return to high-end graphics performance, with AMD set to release a 7nm graphics card that can spar blow-for-blow with the competition. First up, CPUs. AMD presented its next generation 7nm desktop CPU, which is the 3rd Generation Ryzen. The new parts,…

“RTX is coming to laptops: 40 machines will launch early in 2019, with 17 using Max-Q designs.” Nvidia head Jensen Huang took the stage at a packed CES keynote briefing dedicated specifically to the company’s gaming technology. He introduced the RTX 2060, the company’s latest GPU and one capable of ray-tracing. It will debut with 52 trillion tensor FLOPs, 6 GB of G6 memory and 5 gigarays per second of performance. He additionally announced G-Sync Ultimate, a new driver that will make adaptive sync monitors work like those that already have Nvidia’s proprietary technology, as well as RTX cards for laptops. He showed it off with a demo of Battlefield V, with RTX on at 1440p. We saw a mission in the Battle of Rotterdam, and were pointed to how…

Sequels and remakes, sequels and remakes. It’s been a criticism of the games industry for some time that it’s averse to taking a risk on something new, more content to rake over the past, and present the familiar and “safe.” This has been particularly true ever since the idea of the “HD remaster” came into being, with old games being polished up for modern graphical standards – to varying degrees of success – before being set before consumers as something new. There is innovation – if you know where to look. The coming year sees a raft of Japanese games arrive on PC, the sort of thing that once would have stayed on PlayStation, while the unstoppable march of Warhammer 40K continues, and Tom Clancy is still producing games despite…

I didn’t need a new PC, but I wanted one. My old gaming/ image-editing build was constructed in 2012, and had grown organically over time. It was based around a Core i7-3770K, and had 32GB of DDR3 – absolute overkill, but I didn’t foresee the effect cheaper SSDs would have, expecting huge amounts of RAM to become more common instead. Originally, it booted into Windows 8 from a Samsung 840 128GB SSD, with a 500GB WD Velociraptor for storage, plus a DVD drive, and a GeForce GTX 680 to push the pixels. All in a Cooler Master Silencio 450 case, with a Corsair 750W power supply. “It was based around a Core i7-3770K, and had 32GB of DDR3 – absolute overkill, but I didn’t foresee the effect cheaper SSDs would…

1 VIEW CURRENT THEME Right-click any free space on the Windows 10 desktop and select Personalise. In the window that opens, select Themes from the left-hand pane. You’ll see the current theme that Windows 10 is using. A picture at the top shows you the background image and what the Start menu looks like. You’ll also see the name of the image, the colours, mouse cursor and system sounds. 2 BROWSE AND APPLY INSTALLED THEMES You’ll also see pre-installed themes that come with Windows 10 (or ones that your PC manufacturer has created). These are listed under the ‘Apply a theme’ section. Each theme has a name, and will show one of the theme’s desktop wallpapers and beneath the image will be a colour, which is the colour certain elements…

Once you get used to Emacs, you won’t want to leave. Well, at least that’s what uber-geeks think. The thought isn’t totally nonsensical, though, because most people use a range of applications. Whatever you’re writing, be it code or documents, Emacs can be used as a way to reduce distractions while you tackle the task at hand. From experience, if you start switching to work in other applications, your attention may start to wander. Why not consider using Emacs for your email, at least when you’re in the middle of something? Another advantage with this approach is that you can send what you’re already writing directly from inside Emacs. Cut and paste will be less hassle. As you’ll see, you’re also able to format your emails. There are a few…

Has your Raspberry Pi slowed down? It’s a common problem – it doesn’t matter which version of the Pi you’re using, performance always suffers if the operating system isn’t correctly configured. Using a lightweight operating system such as Raspbian Lite, DietPi, or piCore can help, but there’s much more you can do. Performance boosts can be gained from overclocking, changing how RAM is used, and ditching bloatware, among other things. POWER RANGERS The wrong power supply can wreak havoc with your Raspberry Pi’s performance. With insufficient power to deal with processing requirements, bottlenecks can occur, slowing the computer right down. Low power can also result in read/write issues, which in turn can damage the microSD card (more on that later). Then there’s the usual end result of a frozen Raspberry…

$49.95 | PC, PS4, XBOX ONE | WWW.MUTANTYEARZERO.COM Here’s the basic idea: the world is divided into lots of discrete but connected areas as you set out to find a member of your settlement, The Ark, who’s gone missing. You’ll encounter enemy encampments, weapon chests, scrap caches and weapon parts, which act as currency to buy gear and upgrade weapons back at the Ark, to which you can fast travel. This setup gives the world a coherence that’s lacking in most turn-based strategies, but it also means that between fights you must ponderously run through undergrowth in search of the scrap you’ll need to afford vital medkits and grenades. The environmental detail often repays the time spent exploring, but I wish movement was faster so I could get…