Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i APC

Book some annual leave and exploit your accumulated sick days – it’s time to play the best games you’ll probably see all year. While Christmas is the traditional time for publishers to release the blockbusters, Q3 this year is an incredibly rich mother lode of games you really don’t want to miss. Right now the team is heavily addicted to Baldur’s Gate 3 – at least, those of us that still haven’t had their fill of Diablo IV. This RPG is so good it’s being used as a poster child to guilt the rest of the gaming industry into doing better. Which is of course terribly unfair. BG3 has been in development for six years, and in early access for an astonishing three years. All plenty of time to make…

Tech companies like to talk about how they’re going to play an integral role in shaping a better future, but for an industry at the forefront of industrial capabilities, there really hasn’t been much development in environmentally friendly products… at least not in terms of obvious company wide shifts. I was recently at HP’s Future Ready Conference in Tokyo where the company was keen to highlight its sustainability goals, giving us an insight into what environmentally-conscious tech looks like. As someone with a Masters degree in Environmental Management, this is a topic close to my heart and, while it’s encouraging to hear that more and more tech companies are trying to go green, a lot of it ends up seeming like marketing material rather than meaningful progress. So what exactly…

Tales of inflationary woe continue, but if anything, many PC component prices have been falling. Indeed, Amazon’s recent Prime Day fire sale was packed with low-priced PC parts, with one predictable exception. "Perhaps the most conspicuous bargain involves storage. SSDs are pretty much being given away, with decent 512GB drives at under $50." Perhaps the most conspicuous bargain involves storage. SSDs are pretty much being given away, with decent 512GB drives at under $50, a high-performance 1TB model like the WD SN850X for $120, and quality 2TB options for under $200. I even saw a 4TB that was going for just over $289. Okay, it was an older Gen 3.0 model from TeamGroup that tops out at about 3GB/s. But outside of a few edge-case workflows, you’re never going to…

1 NAD C 3050 STEREOPHONIC AMPLIFIER $2,299 | nadelectronics.com When it comes to high-end audio, the NAD Electronics C 3050 is a serious contender. Designed to celebrate 50 years of hi-fi mastery, the NAD C 3050 amp marries 70s retro styling (walnut-finished vinyl-clad cabinet, push buttons and Dual VU meters) with the very latest sound tech. This includes a HybridDigital UcD output stage and a Texas Instruments PCM5242 differential digital-to-analogue converter (DAC), which combine to deliver what NAD describes as ”immersive three-dimensionality and thrilling dynamics’. The C 3050 also features NAD’s future-proofing Modular Design Construction, with the option to include a module in the rear MDC2 expansion slot that enables BluOS high-res, multi-room streaming and Dirac Live room correction. Cool. 2 FIIO FT3 $499 | fiio.com FiiO’s latest…

■ $2,799 | mwave.com.au If you like the flexibility of a self-built PC, but you’re not confident (or just can’t be bothered) to piece one together yourself, then it’s really not a bad option to look at a third party prebuilt system. Take the Arctic Flow Gaming PC from Mwave, for example, its components have a market value of around $2,785, but it was on sale at the time of writing for just $2,799. That means you get the benefit of a professional assembling all components for you, configuring BIOS and installing OS software, troubleshooting issues, testing that everything runs well and then offering you a two year warranty for the sum total of $14. Sure, the full retail price is $100 more than that and there’s a good chance…

■ $1,448 | dell.com "This revised and cheaper Alienware monitor is an easy win over the original G-Sync model. Even for the same money, we’d take it for its glossy panel coating. In a more general sense, it’s one of, if not the best, gaming monitors around." Not only is Alienware’s alternative OLED monitor, the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF, better than the existing AW3423DW; it’s cheaper. How does that work, exactly? For the most part this is the same monitor, so it’s a 34-inch ultrawide model sporting Samsung’s QD-OLED technology. It’s not just the same technology; it’s the same panel, with one alteration, more on which momentarily. Once again, the resolution is 3440 by 1440, the peak brightness remains at 1,000 nits, the claimed pixel response of 0.1ms is carried over,…

■ 256GB, US$1,799 (~AUD$2,750) | store.google.com It’s about flippin’ time. At last, another mainstream foldable phone is here to compete with Samsung’s Galaxy Fold handsets. And this is no me-too device: the Pixel Fold makes its own mark with a wide front display that’s easy to use, the thinnest design we’ve seen on a foldable and top-grade cameras. First things first, though. At the time of writing the Pixel Fold Australian release date hasn’t been announced. It may not even make it to our shores, but with the staggered territorial roll outs we’ve seen in the past from Google, the chances are extremely high it will have an Australian release, and soon. Design and displays The Pixel Fold is available in two colours: Porcelain and Obsidian. I personally prefer the…

WINAERO TWEAKER 1.55 System information tool Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 | winaerotweaker.com We’re always pleased when a new version of Winaero Tweaker is released, because it gives us even more ways to make Windows less annoying and intrusive. Since we last looked at this app it’s been updated three times, as it strives to keep up with the latest unwelcome changes made by Microsoft. For example, the revamped File Explorer in Windows 11 removes options that many users found useful, so Winaero Tweaker lets you restore them without editing the registry. Scroll down to the File Explorer section in the left-hand panel, click Classic Folder Options and select ‘Make the checkboxes removed in Windows 11 visible’. These options include ‘Show drive letters’, ‘Hide protected system files’ and ‘Use…

◾ $59 | PC, PS4/5, XB1/S/X | focus-entmt.com Many games have tried to replicate the slow burning tension and chaotic action of Aliens, but Dark Descent is the first game since Monolith’s AvP 2 to really nail it. Developer Tindalos Interactive has thought intensely about how to get the best out of James Cameron’s film in a virtual context, and their solution is a scintillating real-time tactics game that blends stealth, strategy, and nail-biting gunfights. Dark Descent plays its weakest card first. The game takes place on Lethe, a xenomorph-infested moon owned by Weyland Yutani, and where the Marine frigate USS Otago has the misfortune to crash-land. The cause of the crash is detailed in a story-driven tutorial prologue, but the script is a mess of forced conflicts and awkward…

Computers cannot survive and thrive in isolation. They need software and lots of it to make them practical and useful. History is littered with machines that appeared to be promising on the face of it yet were let down by a lack of support from software developers. With too few apps, consumers would shy away from making a purchase and, with too few consumers, developers would decide their efforts would be better rewarded elsewhere. When three former Texas Instrument (TI) workers decided to set up their own business and manufacture a computer, they were acutely aware of the problems that such a vicious circle posed. It was the early 1980s and there was no computing standard. Developers needed to tweak their software to work on various machines and they would…

Is LK-99 is a black swan? A worldwide race to validate whether the material is a room temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor is still ongoing. Beyond the initial coverage rush, well over a dozen research teams are working at breakneck speed to validate the original South Korean claims around the copper-lead-apatite compound. According to a real-time Wikipedia live-tracker, a total of 16 separate teams are currently working on the replication efforts as we speak – 16 that we know of, anyway. Considering the claims that LK-99 has already been synthesised over a Russian kitchen sink, you can bet that a number of efforts all across the world are underway to crack LK-99. From government agencies to corporations and even individuals, the race is on. "There’s no consensus at present as to whether…

With all the fanfare of a beginning band student, Nvidia ‘launched’ the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB on July 18. Except, much like with a few other less desirable GPUs in previous years, Nvidia opted not to sample media and press with review hardware. Even worse, while listings showed up as planned, everything showed “auto-notify” or “back ordered” for at least the next week. Cards are finally starting to be available, but reviews are few and far between. You might think it’s no big deal, but Nvidia’s RTX 40-series graphics cards have received a lot of negative press over the past few months. The consensus tends to be that while the RTX 4090 is an excellent halo product, everything else has been cut back too far, with prices that are out…

Microsoft’s announcement that it is rolling out its Copilot AI and large language model (LLM) technology into Office 365 is both thrilling and terrifying. It doesn’t come cheap, of course. At US$30 (~AUD$45) per user per month, this is a significant uplift on the cost of an Office 365 E3 licence. From a business point of view, the price is almost an irrelevance. I don’t say that flippantly. I simply mean that it’s easy to justify $30 of increased spend if more than this is returned to the company in terms of direct benefits in productivity, along with more indirect outcomes such as improved data mining, insight and time planning. The one feature that causes me to pause, however, is the ability for Copilot to look at Excel data, and…

■ $3,399 | asus.com/au Asus has a huge range of devices, so you’d be forgiven for not having come across the Vivobook Pro 16X OLED range before. For the uninitiated it’s a 16-inch creative workstation that prioritises power over an ultra-portable thin and light form factor. Don’t get us wrong, the Vivobook weighs a very manageable 1.9kg, but at 2.2cm thick it’s half a centimetre thicker than devices like the MacBook Pro 16 and this combines with a lightweight plastic keyboard surround to give it a gaming laptop look. The powerful components on offer here may be more than capable of smoothly firing up your favourite games after work, but the Vivobook Pro 16X OLED is designed for work – a fact highlighted by the Windows 11 Pro bundling and…

■ $1,899 | corsair.com "The per-pixel lighting, the effectively perfect contrast, the bright highlights perfectly rendered next to deep, inky black tones – it’s pretty incredible." You can buy OLED PC monitors from a growing list of brands. Ultimately, however, the actual OLED panels that go into those screens are sourced from just two companies: LG and Samsung. It’s the former that provides the 27-inch OLED panel in the new Corsair Xeneon 27QHD240. Unfortunately, that’s an issue. Hold that thought while we cover speeds and feeds. This 27 incher runs the same 1440p native resolution as similar OLEDs from Asus and LG. They use the same LG WOLED technology and offer similar specifications. Corsair rates the panel at 0.03ms for pixel response, with peak brightness at 1,000 nits. Again, that’s…

■ $589 | seagate.com PCIe 5.0 SSDs have been teased for what seems like an eternity. In spite of all the chat, relatively few drives are available, even less so from the big name SSD makers. Seagate belongs in that category, and its FireCuda 540 leads the Seagate charge into the brave new world of PCIe 5.0 SSDs. For now, that new world is a very expensive one to buy into. All PCIe 5.0 SSDs carry a massive price premium over PCIe 4.0 drives. There are many high performance 2TB PCIe 4.0 drives at well under half the price of the 2TB FireCuda 540, and straight away that makes it difficult to recommend. Seagate is positioning the FireCuda 540 as an all-round option. There are obvious gaming benefits, including support…

■ 16GB/256GB, $1,069 | asus.com Asus’ Zenfone handsets have always delivered plenty of power at a convenient size, and the new Zenfone 10 doesn’t mess with the formula. At $1,069 with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage it makes a compact alternative to the Samsung Galaxy S23. You can pick up a Zenphone 10 from the likes of Dick Smith or Becex Tech in Australia, even though Asus hasn’t officially launched it here yet. This is a phone with a character of its own. The 5.9in format is smaller than most Android phones these days, and the handset weighs just 172g. That’s partly down to a bio-polycarbonate back. Despite the plastic build the Zenfone 10 doesn’t feel cheap: indeed, its nice grippy texture is ideal for one-handed operation. It’s also good…

Powerful text expander that speeds up repetitive documents. ■ $52 | ergonis.com | macOS 10.15 or later We all know how tedious and time-consuming it can be when you repeatedly have to type certain pieces of text several times every day, such as your address or information about a new product. The macOS does have an option in the Keyboard settings panel that can help here, by allowing you to create text ‘replacements’. These are short snippets of text that are automatically replaced by a longer piece of text when you’re typing – such as typing ‘myweb’ and instantly expanding that to show your company’s full web address. That’s a handy time saver, but this option in macOS is quite limited, and is really only suitable for simple, short pieces…

TOP TIPS TO TACKLE TECH TROUBLES Safe mode networking I want to perform a full security scan in Safe mode to be sure that there isn’t something nasty buried in my system (nothing shows up in normal mode, but I’m not convinced). I want to boot into Safe mode with networking so I can update all my scanners, but while I did this with no problems a few years ago, I’m now unable to access the internet after rebooting into Safe mode via msconfig using the ‘Safe boot’ check box with Network selected. I checked my network adapter (Realtek PCIe GbE Family Controller) in Device Manager, and it has thrown up the following error: “The driver was not loaded because the system is booting into Safe mode.” I’ve never seen…

Release: August 23, 2011 Developer: Eidos Montreal Publisher: Square Enix Link: eidosmontreal.com There have been times in my life I’ve tried to convince myself I didn’t like something because it wasn’t ‘hardcore’ or PC enough. For almost a year in high school, I pretended to not like BioWare games – to no one else in particular, just in my own mind palace – because I watched a loud man on YouTube say they were quite bad indeed. So too, more recently, with the Deus Ex series. I played the hell out of Human Revolution, Eidos Montreal’s 2011 prequel/reboot, in high school. I must have rolled credits on it at least twice before ever making it past the halfway point in the OG classic, and yet for a long time I…

CHIP CHAT JOEL BURGESS REPORTS ON THE UNUSUAL SIDE OF TECH NEWS The Mason City School District, Iowa, has used AI to identify curriculum books that contain “a description or depiction of a sex act” in order to enact a new Republican-backed education law that was introduced in May, 2023. The school district removed 19 books from its catalogue using ChatGPT, according to an interview by Popular Science with Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction, Bridgette Exman. ““Frankly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books,” said Exman, noting that the district also had a duty to comply with all local laws. GOOGLE USES AI TO TLDR THE ENTIRE INTERNET SEARCH LABS IS USING BARD…

"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 Baldur’s Gate 3 too good? That was a matter sincerely debated in August when, to the surprise of everyone except CRPG enthusiasts, Larian’s new fantasy game hit the big time with critics and mainstream audiences alike. The discussion was triggered by game developer and writer Xalavier Nelson Jr., who correctly pointed out in a tweet that the scale and technical ambition of Baldur’s Gate 3 is not likely to become a new “baseline” for what players can expect from RPGs. It’s really more of an anomaly: Larian is an independent studio that has iterated both its artistic and technological skills over nearly 30 years and on the back of some recent successes in the genre. The studio is both independent and wealthy, thanks to the success of its Divinity…

In this issue, I review a Seagate FireCuda 540 PCIe 5.0 SSD (page 40). Actually, I quite like it. It’s faster than the best PCIe 4.0 drives but sadly, it’s a lot more expensive. At the time of writing, the 2TB 540 was priced at a whopping $589, which is in line with similar drives. But compare that to the best PCIe 4.0 drives at over $200 less, with many cheaper than that, and PCIe 5.0 SSD are clearly a very tough sell. I said exactly the same thing when PCIe 4.0 drives launched. They were simply too expensive to recommend over good quality PCIe 3.0 drives. It’s a case of history repeating. We’ll all be saying the same thing in a couple of years when PCIe 6.0 drives arrive.…

WE EXPLORE THE TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE SET TO SHAPE THE FUTURE Someone to make a cup of tea for you, fix dinner while you’re at work and then do the dishes while you catch up on your favourite shows. This is no backwards dream of a stereotypical 1950s housewife, but the much-promised future of robot butlers. Such robobutlers don’t yet exist. But plenty of startups, researchers and billionaires are trying to make the dream a reality – for those with large bank accounts, at least. Prosper Robotics, founded by former OpenAI staffer Shariq Hashme, has built Alfie to do chores while you’re out. Tesla is working on the humanoid Optimus to help around the house (and in Tesla factories). And humanoid robots are in the works for a…

■ $2,999 | gigabyte.com It’s been a while since we last covered an Aero from Gigabyte, and it seems the range that was once defined by its pops of orange and green on the cover has matured into a sleek silver workhorse that won’t rock the boat in an office setting. It’s nice to see that the company is still forging its own path in laptop design with unique little details like an HDMI port at the rear of the device that looks like the exhaust of a sportscar and fast looking set of thermal vents. But while the design of this device is nice, it’s hardly the reason you’ll be looking to drop the $3k asking price on it. But don’t be worried, there’s plenty of reasons that the…

■ $1,499 | www.philips.com.au In the last issue we covered a 34-inch ultra-wide 1440p monitor with a 165Hz refresh rate from Asrock that retails for just $619, so it might be a little confusing that a seemingly comparable, 34-inch ultra-wide display from Philips costs almost three times as much. The most fundamental answer is that the Asrock monitor opts for a VA display, while the Evnia 34” UWQHD QD-OLED here combines a notoriously expensive OLED panel with novel Quantum Dot lighting technology. We first saw the combination of these two technologies in the 2022 Alienware AW3423DW, which was our favourite monitor of last year, and it’s actually the exact same Samsung panel as the one used here by Philips. "Despite its professional capabilities, there’s no doubt this is a gaming…

■ $729 | asrock.com The concept behind the Asrock Z790 Taichi Lite is simple. It retains all of the features of its non-Lite counterpart, but drops the premium aesthetic, knocking over $150 off the price in the process. Looks aside, the Z790 Taichi Lite retains all of the premium features of the Z790 Taichi. Its long feature list includes dual Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, high-end audio and VRM solutions, lots of storage capacity and dual LAN. There’s no other motherboard in the Z790 Taichi Lite’s price range that ticks all of those boxes. The Z790 Taichi Lite still has some RGB lighting. The white printed cogs and wheels combined with a primarily black design is not ugly, but it does give it a mid-tier, almost utilitarian appearance. The Z790 Taichi…

■ $1,499 | motorola.com.au Alongside a growing number of foldable phones, we’re starting to see more “flippable” vertical designs. Last year’s Motorola Razr was a credible competitor to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4, now the Razr 40 Ultra is a bigger, more substantial offering, with a larger external display and a stylish look that will definitely turn heads. Is this the phone to bring the flip concept into the mainstream? As you’d expect, the phone is terrifically pocketable when it’s folded up. A pleasingly solid hinge mechanism allows the Razr 40 Ultra to close up completely with no gap, then sit flush when it’s opened up. While there is a small crease running along the inside display, I barely noticed this when using the phone. "In either configuration the…

■ Licence GPL2 | fedoraproject.org Apart from being the chosen hat of everyone’s favourite adventurer, Indiana Jones, Fedora is the upstream source of the Red Hat Linux Project. This puts it on the bleeding edge of innovation when it comes to software packages, so we were eager to see if Fedora 38 lived up to its predecessors. This latest version was announced on the Fedora blog a week early, which came as rather a surprise to the Linux community, which is used to a more sedentary development cycle. If you’ve already decided on the Workstation (desktop) version of Fedora, you’re still spoiled for choice when it comes to desktop environments. Apart from the default Gnome (pictured), there’s now an official spin of the Budgie, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, MATE and Cinnamon…

ENSURE YOUR PC REMAINS IN TIP-TOP SHAPE AND FIGHTING CONDITION WITH THE HELP OF NICK PEERS. All mechanical products require maintenance to keep them running. You get your truck or car serviced at regular intervals to ensure that failing parts are spotted and replaced, while tuning the engine to improve performance and efficiency, so why not your PC too? In this feature, we’ve developed a simple program to help you ensure that your PC’s hardware is running as well as it possibly can. We’ll start by showing you how to audit your system so you can identify everything that’s in it, from the stuff you should already know about (like your graphics card model or CPU), to more obscure components (what USB controllers is your motherboard using, for instance?). From…

Ever since the first Apple silicon Macs arrived in 2020, they’ve offered an additional benefit – the ability to run iPhone and iPad apps too with no messy conversion required. That’s because devices like your iPhone, iPad, and M1 and M2 Macs effectively run on identical architecture – the major difference being that while Mac apps are designed to be used with a mouse or trackpad and a keyboard, iPhone and iPad apps use touch-based taps, swipes and other gestures. To get around that, macOS has a feature called Touch Alternatives that ‘remaps’ iPhone and iPad apps so they can be used with your Mac’s input devices. This should work with the overwhelming majority of iPhone and iPad apps, but there are exceptions. Developers can, if they wish, explicitly prevent…