Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2023 i APC

"Launched as an enterprise form-factor, people quickly realised that for home computer users they offered all the power they needed, in a tiny box that can be tucked away – or even mounted to the VESA plate on the back of your monitor." Mini PCs are enjoying a strong resurgence, and these most interesting little PCs can deliver capability that defy their small size. Originally launched as an enterprise form-factor, people quickly realised that for home computer users they offered all the power they needed, in a tiny box that can be tucked away – or even mounted to the VESA plate on the back of your monitor. They really exploded in the early noughties when home media centre PCs boomed (anyone remember Microsoft’s Windows Media Center special edition of…

Anyone who has worried about some of the nuances of George Orwell’s prophetic Nineteen Eighty-Four novel ever coming true you can now rest easy knowing it’s only a matter of time until we have a fully functioning thought police regime. Researchers from the University of Texas, Austin, published a study in Nature Neuroscience detailing a piece of AI-powered software that can decode brain patterns into language, using non-invasive functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). This research is the first instance of neural activity being transformed into continuous understandable language without the need for surgically implanted probes. Jerry Tang, the lead researcher on the paper, said in a press briefing that; “Eventually, we hope that this technology can help people who have lost the ability to speak due to injuries like strokes,…

As APC’s resident PC component writer, I handle a lot of different PC parts. But there’s one in particular that manages to irk me every time I use one. I’m referring to M.2 SSDs. In fact, I hate them. They have so many unnecessary drawbacks. They’re well suited to laptops, but for a DIY PC? Nope. What’s really frustrating is that there’s a ready-made alternative with all of M.2’s advantages, and essentially none of its drawbacks. It’s called U.2. Sadly, despite fleeting inclusions on some high-end motherboards a couple of generations ago, U.2 never caught on in the consumer space. And I want it back. When the first SSDs launched, it became apparent that the aging SATA and mSATA interfaces were insufficient to handle the increasing speeds of these swishy…

■ $3,899 | asus.com/au The Zenbook Pro 16X OLED is Asus’s flagship creative workstation, blending an impressive screen with a unique raised keyboard, discrete GPU and generous battery for something that is really well suited to creative professionals. The screen is undoubtedly the main drawcard here featuring a generous 16-inch 3840 x 2400 OLED display with an impressive 550nit peak brightness and full DCI-P3 gamut coverage for professional colour and cinematic work. This creator geared screen is supported by either an Intel Core i7-12700H CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD; or an i9-13900H CPU, RTX 4070 GPU; 64GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. The latter here is really only for those needing a special kind of creative workstation for demanding cinematic or creative work…

$1,999 | rog.asus.com The 27-inch monitor is still probably one of the most purchased screen sizes available: It’s a little bigger than competitive tournament standards, but not large enough to mean that you’re paying more for an obscure form factor. You’re also dealing with enough screen real estate to mean resolutions higher than 1080p will look great, but not so much that you pay a premium. So it makes a lot of sense for Asus to be throwing a bunch of new technologies at its ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM monitor. The PG27AQDM combines a 1440p OLED panel with a 240Hz refresh rate to offer one of the most vibrant high-refresh gaming monitors around. This super fast refresh rate is backed up by a 0.3ms response time and both Nvidia G-Sync…

■ $1,169 | msi.com Isn’t it great to see capable graphics cards available at prices that won’t make you keel over in shock? Ok, that’s not exactly true, but given the bonkers GPU market of a couple of years back, GeForce RTX 4070s starting from $999 are a dead set bargain. While you can’t call a $1,000+ GPU an affordable one, it’s good to see the latest generation cards hitting price points that are more attractive than we’ve seen in a long time. Here for review I have MSI’s RTX 4070 flavour, specifically the GeForce RTX 4070 Gaming X Trio. The Gaming X series often impresses me, usually delivering a near perfect balance of temperatures and low noise levels that allow the card to hold high boost clocks without too…

■ $419 | rog.asus.com The third generation of Asus’s Ryuo AIO CPU cooler is the top tier in the company’s cooling range, as the price might have made apparent. It’s a standard configuration, with three 120mm RGB fans and a display. Unlike almost every other AIO you can buy today, though, the display uses an LED matrix instead of the more common LCD or OLED, or just basic RGB. It’s impressive from the get-go. The packaging is excellent, with the radiator was very well protected by stiff plastic. Out of the box, our test unit had not a single deformation on any radiator fin. The braided tubes appear to be high quality, and their 400mm length allows installation just about anywhere you like in your case without adding any stress…

■ $399 | rog.asus.com The Asus ROG Azoth could make you reconsider some of your biases surrounding keyboards. It certainly did that for me, as before I used the Asus ROG Azoth, I dismissed compact gaming keyboards for feeling too cramped and not offering enough additional features I’ve come to love about the full-size keyboards I usually use to type and play games on. As a 75% keyboard, it keeps its size down by jettisoning certain keys. You don’t get the numpad, and the keys that remain are cleverly moved to minimise space. Most importantly of all (for me at least), the four arrow keys are maintained. I use these a lot not just in games, but when typing, as it’s a quick way to jump around a document. The…

Licence GNU GPL, various | www.suse.com "SUSE’s installer is based on YaST, a long-running setup utility that has finally been updated from text mode to a full graphical installation." As an experienced distributor, German company SUSE has been around for many years and is very popular in European markets. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly due to the large amount of software found on its CDs. It has also recently converted its distribution to run on the Alpha processor, and it has put money into several of the key areas of Linux development. SUSE’s installer is based on YaST, a long-running setup utility that has finally been updated from text mode to a full graphical installation. Sadly, when we started our installation, it told us our 2GB partition…

It was the launch of a product the likes of which the world had never seen. Compact and lightweight, its selling point was a computer that fits into your pocket. It amazed all who saw it and launched a whole new class of portable computing. Of course, we’re referring to the Tandy Electronics TRS-80 Pocket Computer and the year is 1980. Back then, computers still filled rooms and few of us had one at home. The idea that you could now run a computer on a couple of coin-batteries and slot it into your pocket was science-fiction becoming science-fact (which is, no doubt, why Tandy Electronics signed up famed author Isaac Asimov to spruik the Pocket Computer in its ads). The launch of the Apple iPhone some 27 years later…

Be careful what you ask for – you might just get it. So it goes with screen technology of late. We’ve been clamouring for something better than an LCD panel with a big, dumb backlight for years. Now we’ve got it, and it turns out – in some ways, at least – that conventional LCD monitors aren’t so bad after all. The new entrants on the display scene are, of course, mini-LED and OLED. Mini-LED screens are actually a subset of LCD displays, not a new category of panel tech. But they do represent a significant step change. OLED, meanwhile, has taken its time transitioning from the TV market to PC monitors. But it is a radical new technology and has finally arrived in desktop monitors. On paper, both offer…

■ $74.99 | PC, PS4/5, XB1/S/X, Mac | everspace.game Everspace 2 is not Freelancer, though it resembles this classic. If anything, it’s better. It’s the same sort of third-person open worldish interplanetary adventure, Diablo in space, an RPG in which you play a conglomeration of engines and lasers as much as its pilot, and a sequel to 2017’s Everspace. It’s different from its predecessor in one crucial way: the roguelike elements are gone. In Everspace, death was inevitable, baked into the game so that credits earned during a run could be used to buy perks and improve your character for the next one. Not so in Everspace 2, where death merely brings up the reload checkpoint screen and a chance to try again. Following a Kickstarter campaign and a period…

CHIP CHAT JOEL BURGESS REPORTS ON THE UNUSUAL SIDE OF TECH NEWS Researchers from multiple Swedish institutions have created the world’s first transistor out of wood. The team removed the lignin from balsa wood and replaced it with a conductive solution that allows the wood to transmit and modulate electric current. These wooden transistors come in at a width of 3cm and run at a max of 1Hz, instead of the 3nm 5GHz-plus we see on today’s top silicone transistors, but the researchers note; “Yes, the wood transistor is slow and bulky, but it does work, and has huge development potential.” If nothing else wooden processors would be even better at running halt and catch fire commands. GOVERNMENT BANS TIKTOK ON EMPLOYEE DEVICES Commonwealth employees will have to get their…

Last month, I quipped that we’re not yet at the point where you can run your own ChatGPT instance. While technically true, the amount of progress we’ve seen with different models and algorithms proves how shortsighted that statement was. Much like Stable Diffusion last year, research in large language models (LLMs) means that you can now run your very own chatbot on your local PC. (tinyurl.com/local-chatbot) Caveats apply. This isn’t ChatGPT. You’ll also want a GPU with as much VRAM as possible, and plenty of system memory – 32GB is a realistic minimum. Nvidia GPUs are vastly preferable as well, which seems to be what 99 percent of AI researchers are using. Finally, given how much has changed in just a few weeks, don’t be surprised if the gap between…

FUTURES WE EXPLORE THE TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE SET TO SHAPE THE FUTURE The backlash didn’t take long. OpenAI released the latest version of its ChatGPT in the autumn of 2022, and within weeks startups were taking advantage of the generative AI tool and the large language model that powers it. In 2022 alone, $1.4 billion was reportedly invested in generative AI companies in 78 deals (futurism.com/deep-learning-expertgpt-startups-rude-awakening). But warnings about the technology arose just as quickly. First, people didn’t understand the text was grammatically correct but not necessarily factual; that’s not a flaw but how these systems inherently work, although that was apparently news to many (indeed, ChatGPT itself warns that it “may occasionally generate incorrect information”, can be biased and has limited knowledge after 2021). Critics also raised…

■ $5,599 | rog.asus.com The Strix Scar 17 has long been the flagship of Asus’s gaming portfolio, and while this year we also get an even bigger 18-inch Scar in 2023 (we’ll cover it next issue) that doesn’t mean this device doesn’t offer the unbelievable power and gaming performance we’ve come to expect from the 17-inch gaming powerhouse. This year’s ROG Strix Scar 17 can be configured with an AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU for performance we’ve never come across on a laptop before. The most dramatic feature of these two powerful components is the power draw. The 7945HX CPU has been configured to pull up to 65 Watts while the 4090 is capable of drawing an impressive 175W. This massive amount of…

$999 | Samsung.com "At first glance it has a veritable wishlist of features for gaming fans, including 4K, 144Hz, 1ms response time, IPS panel, and G-Sync support." When we’ve covered Samsung Odyssey monitors of late, they’ve tended to be on the pricier side. This Odyssey G70B isn’t going to feature on any budget buy lists, but at $999, it’s more affordable than some other premium Samsung screens. At first glance it has a veritable wishlist of features for gaming fans, including 4K, 144Hz, 1ms response time, IPS panel, and G-Sync support. Add smart features for streaming, and you have a very appealing proposition. AI frame generation and upscaling tech has come a long way, but 4K displays are still the domain of high-end GPU owners. If you are in a…

■ $599 | teamgroupinc.com All in one cooling tends to get a bit samey. One model might have an LCD screen or an RGB variation, but at the end of the day they’re fundamentally similar. Not so the Teamgroup Siren Duo360. Yes, it’s a 360mm CPU cooler, but it’s also an SSD cooler. That’s right! It includes a second waterblock to cool an M.2 SSD. PCIe 5.0 SSDs in particular can get very hot, particularly if they are uncooled or sitting adjacent to a hot running graphics card. Motherboard manufacturers are aware of this. Many of the latest motherboards come with chunky heatsinks. But while it’s important to keep an SSD cool, it’s important to dissipate that heat effectively, and that’s what elevates the Duo360 to a new level. The…

■ $389 | www.corsair.com Innovation is an unfamiliar friend in the world of power supplies. Right now we’re enjoying a rare phase of fresh features thanks to the new PCIe 5.0 standard, and that’s the first bit of ‘excitement’ in years. PCIe 5.0 primarily brings the new the 12VHPWR connector the 40 series Nvidia cards demand, and it’s able to deliver a stable 600W, compared to the older 8-pin connectors, each of which could handle up to 150W. The Corsair RM 1200x Shift 80 Plus is PCIe5.0 & ATX 3.0 compatible, and it’s a top of the line PSU in all other respects. This 1300W box of power is rated at 80+ Gold, which is essential when you’re dealing with power output so high – you want all the efficiency…

■ $159 | msi.com MSI’s new Clutch GM51 Lightweight Wireless gaming mouse weighs 85g, which is kind of heavy by lightweight mouse standards. It features an ergonomic design, grippy sides with RGB-infused “diamond lightgrips,” and it sports an excellent PAW-3395 sensor that puts the mouse in league with the best gaming mice on the market today. The mouse also boasts an impressive 140-hour battery life (with the lighting turned off, of course), and it includes a wireless charging dock (which doubles as a USB extender). A wired version is also available for $129. The surface is allegedly anti-smudge, but I started seeing oil from my fingertips after just an hour or two of use. Its sides are what MSI calls “diamond lightgrips,” which are lightly-textured, soft, grippy-feeling thermoplastic elastomer. While…

Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 | www.snipca.com/45222 Solid-state drives (SSDs) are much faster than traditional hard drives, but they can suffer performance problems when they’re not configured correctly. SSD Fresh offers a simple way to analyse and optimise your drive, and potentially extend its life. This new version has a redesigned interface that makes the program even easier to use, and provides additional data about your SSD. When you run SSD Fresh, it tells you your SSD’s current ‘health status’ and temperature, and lets you perform an analysis to find out which processes are writing data to the drive. You can also see how much free space is available and your system’s level of optimisation. "SSD Fresh offers a simple way to analyse and optimise your drive, and potentially…

Windows 10 or 11 | $34.99 Free trial: 30 days www.stardock.com/products/fences SHOULD I PAY FOR…? Choose the right version of software Other than changing the size of icons and aligning them in a grid, Windows doesn’t offer many ways to organise your desktop. This can lead to it becoming cluttered with shortcuts, files and folders. Stardock Fences offers a simple but effective way to clean up your desktop and keep it tidy, so you can quickly find items when you need them. It works by arranging your desktop icons into themed groups called ‘fences’. The default options are Programs, Folders and ‘Files & Documents’, but you can rename these if you want and easily create your own fences by drawing rectangles on your desktop. The program lets you customise your…

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have revolutionised our computers over the past decade, making them faster, quieter and much more reliable. If you’ve bought a new laptop or desktop PC in the last few years, it almost certainly includes an SSD, either as its sole boot and storage drive, or coupled with a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) to give you extra space. The quality and popularity of SSDs means that HDDs are being phased out. Microsoft has asked PC manufacturers to prioritise SSDs over hard drives, despite the latter being cheaper to make and buy. But although the latest SSDs are up to a hundred times faster than HDDs, they’re not immune to performance problems, whether the drive is built into your PC or you’ve installed it yourself. There are many…

Most distros nowadays feature a desktop search tool out of the box to help you quickly find the files you’re looking for. This is incredibly useful with vast disk space and an ever-increasing number of stored files and directories. But for CLI users, there have always been a few trusted tools to quickly fetch files. Chief among them is Find. As the name implies, the Find utility strives to help you find files. What sets it apart? The ability to identify files based on more than just filenames. When looking up files, you can use a variety of parameters, such as name, approximate name, permissions, last modified, file type and so on, to quickly narrow down the file you’re looking for. You can also restrict results to directories, and even…

■ PC, PS4/5, XB1/S/X, Switch | dredge.game Life in Dredge is Lovecraftian as hell, wonderfully ominous and effortlessly moreish all at once. Things start off simple enough: my poor fisherman has wrecked his vessel near the small island town of Greater Marrow. After being offered a replacement and a small debt for the pleasure, I’m on my way to start fishing. Getting a target to align with green zones dotted along various shapes reels fish in. Some have my target spinning around a circle, while others have it swinging between two curved bars. The real challenge comes from what to do once I’ve landed my catch. Fish come in all shapes and sizes, which I have to fit, Tetris-style into my vessel’s tiled inventory. "Fish come in all shapes and…

"Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage." APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for over forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of…

Is it still possible to make a stable, enjoyable, original, and critically acclaimed blockbuster videogame? To resort to a cliche, if you were to awaken from a 20 year deep sleep into the first half of 2023, the evidence would suggest that the task is near insurmountable. The big name publishers pushing out the biggest name products with the biggest budgets are the loudest marketing, are just not having a great time at the moment. Square Enix’s Forspoken? Plagued with graphical issues, with a Metascore of 64 on PS5. Destiny 2: Lightfall? A 66 Metascore. Minecraft Legends? Arkane’s Redfall? Both also critical flops, the latter plagued with egregious technical issues. Exceptions include Dead Space, which is a remake, and Resident Evil 4, which is also a remake. Games that have…

A disclosure. I don’t just enjoy the tech rumour mill, I’m involved in it. It’s fun to track upcoming chips from Nvidia and Intel as they progress from mere whisper to retail reality. But as a journalist, you’re only as good as your next rumour, which is why things can get a bit silly sometimes. That’s exactly what’s happened with the rumours revolving around Intel’s upcoming desktop Meteor Lake CPUs. But actually, it’s simple. Meteor was probably never meant to be a desktop processor. That Intel’s Meteor Lake processors exist is far from a secret. It is mentioned by senior Intel suits every time the company updates the markets on its progress. Meteor Lake, we are assured, remains on track for production later this year. Meteor Lake will be its…

■ $959 | playstation.com Sony’s new headset is the most powerful virtual reality system around. It brings together an impressive set of immersive technologies, and is driven by the mighty PlayStation 5 console. The catch, of course, is that the PS5 and headset together come to just over $1,600. That’s a big ask when the Meta Quest 2 can be had for around $740 all in. The design is an evolution of the first-generation PSVR headset. It retains the plastic headband, but now integrates the headband release button and the tightening wheel into one on the back of the band. At the rear is a socket for plugging in the bundled wired earbuds, and a thin captive cable that connects the PSVR 2 to the PS5. Inside the headband, there’s…

$1,799 | msi.com The MEG 342C QD-OLED is MSI’s riff on the panel that made last year’s Alienware AW3423DW our favourite monitor in 2022. It’s obviously not the first unit we’ve seen to utilise this Samsung QD-OLED ultra-wide panel, but it does still offer the same awesome balance of visual technologies for gamers. If you’re not familiar with the panel; Samsung’s Quantum Dot technology combines with an OLED self-emitting panel to offer brighter, more efficient and more colourful visuals than your average OLED screen. With a peak brightness of 1,000 nits this unit is capable of getting a VESA HDR True Black 400 certification, which means it’s displaying vivid HDR colour at up to 400 nits in real world usage. This is more than a lot of standard monitors and…

$1,299 | rog.asus.com/au For a long time, Asus’ ZenWiFi mesh routers were our favourite. The two-node systems used a backhaul channel that delivered on the promise of ‘performance at distance’ in a way that regular Wi-Fi mesh systems had failed to achieve. Now, here’s the gaming version of the ZenWiFi. If it performs as good as it looks, we’re in for a treat. The GT6 nodes embrace ROG’s latest ‘Matrix’ design ethos in the form of an Asus-Aura-compatible, zoned-RGB, backlit ROG logo. Even if you don’t like the nodes’ other ‘gamer’ flourishes, which includes calls to action like, “Join the Republic” and “For those who dare,” the potentially mesmerising lights will still likely leave you loving the looks. Set-up is simple and involves scanning a QR code on the base,…

■ $209 | crucial.com DDR5 memory has come a long way since its inglorious launch. Component shortages meant DDR5 was scarce and resulting high pricing hampered adoption. In the 18 months or so since then, kits have drastically dropped in price, speeds have gone up, relative latencies have come down and the competition is fiercer than ever. Ideally, I wish I was here talking about one of Crucial’s historically well regarded Ballistix kits, but sadly, the Ballistix brand is no more. Instead I have a 2x16GB set of Crucial DDR5-5600. It’s made up of a pair of basic bland green PCB single sided sticks. That’s it. It’s the very definition of a generic kit. You won’t find fancy heatspreaders, RGB lighting or loads of hidden overclocking potential. Firstly, a look…

■ $609 | www.msi.com MSI has a solid collection of power supplies for all sorts of PC builds. Whether you require something affordable that doesn’t have the best efficiency rating or power output, or you have the available budget to go all-out for a PSU that can handle some serious overclocking. MSI likely has a unit that suits your needs. MSI tells us that this is the first ATX 3.0 Ready PSU on the market – and although that may be true by some small margin, it does not really say anything about the product itself. The specifications of the MEG Ai1300P PSU that we are reviewing today are extremely impressive, as expected from the flagship product of a premium brand. The MEG Ai1300P is a fully modular power supply…

Use random hardware addresses to stop Wi-Fi tracking When your laptop isn’t using Wi-Fi it looks for networks nearby to connect to. It does this by sending a signal that contains its MAC address. Because this address is unique to your device, some public areas like shopping centres could use it to track your movement. You can block this by getting Windows to generate random MAC addresses, concealing your real one. There are two ways of doing this – either across all Wi-Fi networks (for maximum security), or on specific networks. To do the former in Windows 10, open Settings (press Windows key-I), then click ‘Network & Internet’ followed by Wi-Fi on the left ( 1 in our screenshot below). Now click the ‘Use random hardware addresses’ slider so it…

New PC prices are still historically quite high. After the crypto boom caused graphics card prices to go stratospheric, and the COVID pandemic simultaneously causing supply constraints and high demand for computer parts, we’re still feeling the after effects of it all, while rising inflation and increasing costs of the latest manufacturing nodes isn’t helping. As a result, a new PC with the latest parts now costs much more than what they traditionally have. While GPU prices have come down substantially from the peak, they’ve settled down at a comparatively elevated level relative to pre-2020 prices. Effectively pushing each GPU up a tier in pricing. To combat this, a new trend of continuing to offer previous-generation parts – or even two generation old parts in “new” systems – has gained…

TOP TIPS TO TACKLE TECH TROUBLES Video RAM question Back in the early days of the RTX 3060, I remember a question about the amount of video RAM available and I believe you stated that 2GB would be plenty. Now, these cards are available with 12GB of video RAM! Why is this necessary and what has changed? Serpent Lord APC responds: It’s a good question, particularly given the huge amounts of system RAM available in today’s PCs. But the answer is straightforward and based on the simple fact that VRAM is optimised for the demands of graphics. The type of RAM – GDDR SDRAM – is optimised for high-bandwidth usage, and along with its placement on the GPU, means it processes graphics far quicker than using system RAM. As you’d…

IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes YOU WILL LEARN ou will learn what Mastodon is and how to use it YOU’LL NEED A browser, and a bit of patience Mastodon has been a big beneficiary of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover; with Twitter in apparent chaos and lots of previously banned users being allowed back on, many people have been looking for a more pleasant alternative. For many, Mastodon is that alternative. It has very strong anti-abuse rules, and with a bit of effort you can make it just as easy to use as Twitter. Mastodon works a bit like email; in much the same way you can have yourname@iCloud.com or yourname@gmail.com, there are different Mastodon servers for different people. Mastodon calls them ‘instances’, and there are instances for journalists, drummers, environmentalists……