Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i Maximum PC

CPU $320 Intel Core i5-14600K The Intel Core i5-14600K is the little brother in Team Blue’s 14th gen product stack (we’re yet to see a Core i3 make it to market just yet). That said, it still packs some serious punch on the performance side of things. By default, it comes with a total of 14 cores. Six of those are Intel’s Performance-cores, complete with hyper-threading, the remaining eight are the ‘Efficient-cores’ designed for desktop applications. It clocks in at a max turbo frequency of 5.3 GHz, but other than the 200 MHz bump to clock speed, is identical to the Core i5-13600K. It doesn’t even get access to APO. That said, it’s still a potent chip, and comes with all the other bells and whistles you’d expect from a…

WHETHER YOU store them in your browser, on post-it notes, or in your head, passwords are a necessary evil for protecting your online accounts. The trouble is that they don’t perform that job very well, and can prove to be more frustrating than reassuring. We’ve all received alarming emails urging us to change our passwords immediately after they’ve been compromised in a data breach, locked out of accounts when we couldn’t remember the password, or had to conjure up convoluted logins containing upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and special characters. The introduction of two-factor authentication (2FA) gave our accounts a second layer of security, but because 2FA methods are used in addition to passwords, and usually involve waiting for verification codes to arrive, they make signing into websites even more tiresome.…

Linux was once the standard—but never entirely helpful—answer when asked what to do with an old computer. For many, it was something you tinkered with when you’d moved to a new machine and could afford to corrupt your old workhorse. There was no guarantee that a Linux machine would play nicely with your existing data, sharing files with friends could be difficult, and the overall process could often have often been a lot more user friendly. None of that is true today. A FAMILIAR ENVIRONMENT Let’s be blunt: there’s no reason why Linux shouldn’t be your primary operating system. Most of your data is platform agnostic, many apps run in the browser, and Linux is as easy to use as Windows. Ubuntu might be the best-known distribution, but Linux Mint…

Windows 10 is not yet an ex-Windows. It is not preaching to the choir eternal, and it has not ceased to be. Yet, it will soon become as dead as the parrot in that famous Monty Python sketch. So what will this mean in terms of the security of your data? Dates and details are important. Windows 10 Home and Professional 21H2 won’t get any more security updates, having hit end of support on June 13 2023. Organizations running Education and Enterprise versions have until June 11 2024. If you’ve updated to version 22H2 then security updates will continue until October 14 2025. Note that this applies to all versions, including Education and Enterprise. RUNNING WINDOWS 10 AFTER OCTOBER 14 2025 The security implications of continuing to use a legacy…

WHEN TWITCH FIRST BLOSSOMED onto the world stage, gaming PCs were in a very different place. Screen recording required some serious hardware to pull off, and programs like Fraps ate up frame rates and system resources incredibly quickly. In fact, it was very common for dedicated Twitch streamers to run not one, but two separate systems: one for the heavy-lifting video encoding and uploading (acting primarily as a passthrough system), and the other for the actual game they wanted to, you know, play. Crazy, right? For many, the barriers to entry were just too great. Fortunately, a lot has changed since those early days, and with GPUs and CPUs now coming with dedicated streaming and video encoding componentry embedded directly, the actual system requirements to get going are starting to…

TIP OF THE MONTH CLEAN DESKTOPS One simple trick can help tidy up your desktop and change how you use your Windows PC forever: Search. The quickest way to find a program you need is the Search menu. Click the Start menu and start typing what program, setting, or file structure you want. Windows will list a number of items you might need. Click it, and you’re done. It’s time to get rid of all those desktop icons, and only use it for what you need. INTEL’S GEN 14 DEPRESSES ME Hello there! For those of you who are new to the mag, I used to be Maximum PC’s editor-in-chief. I could talk for days on what I did in the interim, but there’s something more pressing: the 14th gen…

YOU’LL NEED THIS GOOGLE CHROME https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/chrome CHROME IS THE MOST POPULAR web browser in the world, and there are good reasons for that: it’s not only underpinned by one of the biggest names on the net, it’s supported by an active community of extension developers. A huge library of extensions massively increases the range of tasks that Chrome can accomplish, making it as much a productivity platform as it is a window on the web. Here’s our pick of eight essential extensions that can save you time and enhance your web experience, whether you’re a casual browser, a power user, or an online professional. You don’t even have to be using Chrome to make use of them—you can also install Chrome extensions in Microsoft Edge to get the exact same…

WITH BOTH INTEL and Nvidia’s latest mobile chips, plus a price tag of $2,549, Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 generates very high levels of expectation. That doesn’t just apply to gaming performance, but to the general user experience. It’s all very well stuffing in an RTX 4080 and Core i9 13980HX, but how well engineered and optimized is this thing? Before we get into the numbers, the Scar 16 is off to a good start with its aesthetic. There’s an industrial flair to the design without being edgy or over styled. It’s reminiscent of the resurgent retro console trend, with a subtle translucent plastic RGB strip around the chassis edge and front. The Scar 16 is a thick old thing, raising hopes of a mechanical keyboard under the lid. No…

THE NACON REVOLUTION 5 Pro gaming controller takes a lot of cues from the Microsoft Elite Series 2, both aesthetically and in terms of its key features. But among the two main console combatants, it’s important to consider Nacon’s alignment with PlayStation, as opposed to Xbox, what with its Sony-exclusive features. We use the word 'combatants' unironically, since Nacon specifically designed it with fighting games in mind. That doesn't stop it acing all kinds of games, though there are a few things that stand in the way of a deadly combo for the Nacon R5P. The fact the Nacon is fighting Sony’s corner is made clear with the central PlayStation logo on the home button, as well as the signature face buttons and touchpad. On the back, alongside more switches than…

WHEN IT COMES to browsing the web, more than six in ten of us use Google’s Chrome browser. Its dominance has slipped slightly in recent years, but that only tells part of the story. Beneath Chrome’s hood is Google’s open-source Chromium browser and Blink web engine, which renders web pages and performs other core tasks, including navigation, running scripts, and security. Virtually all other web browsers—including Microsoft Edge—now use Blink rather than develop their own proprietary engines. While Apple continues to plow its own furrow with WebKit, the only other standout is Mozilla’s Gecko engine, used to power its Firefox browser. Unlike virtually any other browser comparison, then, we’re not simply splitting hairs between two browsers who share large portions of code from the open-source Chromium browser project; we’re genuinely…

WE’VE BEEN waiting for this one. AMD is finally getting the Zen 4 core architecture into desktop APUs. Previously, the only chips with integrated graphics and Zen 4 cores were built strictly for mobiles. These Phoenix chips are being made available for desktop duty in AM5 sockets, dubbed the 8000G series. As well as Zen 4, we get updated on-board graphics thanks to RDNA 3 GPUs. We’re still running on leaks and rumors (expect more at CES in January), but we don’t expect any real surprises when they officially drop. There will be a mix of Phoenix and Phoenix 2 versions. The former is a high-performance traditional design, while the latter is a hybrid design using a mix of Zen 4 and Zen 4c cores aimed more towards efficiency. This will…

AMD’S ZEN 4 THREADRIPPER 7000-SERIES launched recently. There are two basic versions: the WX series, aimed at professional applications, and the X series for workstations and HEDTs. It was predicted to smash overclocking records. AMD’s overclocking team got to work on the halo chip, the 96-core Threadripper Pro 7995WX. Liquid cooling pushed it to 5.0GHz, close to the boost speed of an unadulterated chip. This brought a few overclocking records, including on Cinebench R23 and 2024. Then they brought out the overclocker’s favorite weapon: liquid nitrogen. This reached 6.0GHz on all cores, while consuming 1,000W. It could now produce a Cinebench R23 score of 201,501. Others followed, topping that. The benchmark world records on HWBot that can usefully scale across multiple cores are dominated by the new Threadrippers. That Cinebench…

The latest export restrictions on AI hardware define the limit as anything with a Total Processing Power (TPP) of 4,800 or higher. There’s a secondary factor of Processing Density (PD—TPP divided by die size in square-mm) that seeks to limit data center parts so that supercomputers can’t use lots of lower performance parts to make up the difference. Various GPUs, including the Nvidia H100, H800, A100, A800, L40, L4, and RTX 4090, can no longer be exported to China without a license—with a presumption of denial for license exceptions. TPP is calculated by the highest teraflops or teraOPS throughput multiplied by the number of bits (eg. 16 for FP16 operations). The RTX 4090 has peak performance of 330 teraflops of FP16 compute using its tensor cores, giving a TPP of…

> Raw file recovery > Sub-100W GPUs > AI graphics upscale Data recovery question A friend recently switched from Mac to PC, and made the mistake of somehow wiping his drive because it wasn’t visible in Windows (as it had been formatted in Apple’s own APFS format). He compounded the error by creating a new Apple APFS volume over the top of the original partition in a misguided effort to undo his original mistake. I’ve run several drive-recovery tools, but while they’re able to see the drive’s previous content, none of the files appear to be recoverable, even though no new files have been written to the drive. Why is this so, and is all his data lost? —Eric L Dumont THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: This comes down to the fact that…

Difficulty MEDIUM Time 1 - 2 HOURS THIS BUILD IS a bit of a unique endeavor. The key question is fairly straightforward: is the Intel Core i5-14600K still a good CPU if all you care about is gaming? That’s a bit of an oversimplification of things, of course. After all, there’s more to it than that. In a world of expectations and assumptions, your average tech journalist or PC enthusiast would pair an Intel Core i5 with something like an RTX 4060 Ti, or an AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT, or similar. But does pairing it with something like an RTX 4080 or 7800 XT dramatically alter the performance of those parts as well? That’s what we’re looking to answer here. It’s an odd pairing, we admit, but its that very…

AT LAST, we’re at the extended benchmarks we alluded to earlier. So, isolating purely the CPU side of things, does the old adage still hold true? If gaming is your sole and only interest, is a Core i5, ‘enough’ at 4K? The answer is yes. We swapped out the Core i5-14600K in our build for the 14900K and run both through an extended suite of gaming benchmarks to see what difference it made at 4K, if any. The answer was, perhaps unsurprisingly minimal. Most of the time, almost every game was +/-1-percentage point within one another. Some titles, such as Total War: Warhammer III, seemed to prefer the Core i5-14600K’s more stable single-core performance (as it didn’t come close to its TJMax temp as often as the 14900K), while others with…

Don’t panic THOSE WERE THE WORDS so famously written across the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in Douglas Adams’ eponymous book, and they apply equally well here. Windows 10 has already stopped getting new features, and security updates will come to a halt in October 2025. The clock is ticking. While you shouldn’t panic, you should think about what happens next before your hand is forced. Follow Microsoft’s advice to the letter, and that perfectly functional PC or laptop will be consigned to landfill as security updates end. Lee, opposite, is not happy about that. Perhaps you want to wait it out. Maybe Microsoft will bow to the pressure and keep releasing security updates? Or you could simply ignore Davey Winder’s advice on p47 and keep running Windows 10 anyway. We…

Tiny11 is a stripped-down version of Windows 11. Where the full-fat OS requires 4GB of RAM and 64GB of drive space, Tiny11 can manage with 2GB and 8GB respectively. It looks like the perfect solution for older machines that fall short of Windows 11’s specs as, in the developer’s words, it will run on “basically any computer that also ran Windows 10”. That might leave you wondering why Microsoft, with all of its resources, didn’t manage the same. The answer is most likely that Microsoft didn’t want to: its goal was to ship a feature-rich operating system that was a genuine step up from Windows 10, rather than a minimized working environment. Tiny11 developer NTDev hasn’t stripped out everything. Accessibility features and smaller apps such as the Calculator and Notepad,…

TOM CLANCY’S FAVORITE PC CASE… PROBABLY. Cases have been, for the longest time, pretty dull. They house your components, and that’s about it. Some come with the odd flicker of RGB, or some nice cable management touches, but usually that’s it. There’s no flair, flamboyance, or excitement. Hyte’s Y70 Touch, though? This is different. The company took the world by storm with the launch of its Y60, throwing the rulebook into the scrap heap and building something entirely different. It not only looked incredible; it didn’t cut any corners when it came to both build quality and feature set. From intelligent cable management and small, subtle features you didn’t know you needed, to PCIe 4 risers and more, it subverts expectations, and then some. But how do you improve on perfection?…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 11 23H2 An internet connection COPILOT IS A NEW CHATBOT in Windows 11 that can do more than just search or crack jokes. It can launch apps, change settings, generate images, and talk to you in natural language. You can type or speak to it, and it will respond to your commands and queries. It is optional, and can be ignored like Cortana before it, but offers a new way to interact with your PC without using the mouse. You can find it on your Taskbar if you have the latest version of Windows 11. Copilot is a version of the Bing chatbot, incorporating DALL-E 3 and based on ChatGPT, that lives on your Windows desktop. You can ask it to change settings on your PC,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 OR 11 www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download KEEPING YOUR SOFTWARE UPDATED is important. If you let things slip out of date, you risk becoming vulnerable to hackers and malware. You might also be missing out on useful new features in your favorite programs. Thankfully, keeping up is far easier today than it was a few years ago, thanks to automatic updates in Windows and Office and programs that check for new releases every time they start [Image A]. That said, anything that can simplify the process further is a bonus—which brings us to the concept of package managers. These tools help handle the job of installing and updating software. Package managers download bundles of code and descriptive data (or archives) from servers known as ‘package registries’. The archives are…

THE ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4090 OC Edition is a stripped-down version of the flagship ROG Strix RTX 4090. That means the same Ada Lovelace streaming multiprocessors, the same 4th Gen Tensor Cores, the same 3rd Gen RT Cores—you get the idea. You also get a trio of familiar but redesigned Axial-tech fans, though this board lacks some of the extra flashy stylings from the flagship card. Still, with so-called military-grade capacitors rated for 20,000 hours at 105 degrees Celsius, the TUF Gaming RTX 4090 OC is designed to perform under load and last for years of gaming, which is handy given the current price of RTX 4090s. The design of the Asus TUF Gaming RTX 4090 OC GPU is understated, but fitting for most gaming PC builds. The metal…

THE US GOVERNMENT has been restricting China’s access to certain US-based technology. China is notorious for ignoring intellectual property rights, and it came as something of a shock to regulators when China’s SMIC began mass production of 7nm ARM processors, with 5nm ones rumored to be not far behind. The focus of the ban is high-end AI processors, including GPUs. Last year’s ban on high-end enterprise hardware such as Nvidia’s A100 and H100 chips has been extended, with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 included. Nvidia was hit on sales, and prepared cards to avoid the sanctions. It built new A800 and H800 AI cards, fitting the same hardware as the banned cards, but with the NVLink interconnect turned down from 600GB/s to 400GB/s, giving them about 70 percent of the original’s…

NOT ALL GAMING KEYBOARDS are created equal. What type of keycaps do you prefer? There’s also the question of those all-important switches—do you like clicky or quiet, cushy or crisp? What about size, form factor, and extras like media controls and volume wheels? Do you want all the number keys, or as compact a keyboard as humanly possible? Don’t forget about the wired versus wireless conundrum. Yep, there’s plenty to consider when choosing your next input slab. Here are five of the very best… 5 WOOTING TWO HE Look at the black faceplate and keycaps of the Wooting Two HE, and you might wonder what the fuss is about. It looks decent, but doesn’t appear too different from most mechanical gaming keyboards. But it is, and then some, because it…

THERE’S ALWAYS a better option than automatically shoving an old PC into landfill. First, let’s look at the machine. A ten-year-old desktop PC may include a 4th gen Core i7, with 16GB of RAM and decent graphics. Even today, something like that will perform for everyday needs. It may need a cheap SSD upgrade to give it some pep, but that goes for 99 percent of machines with spinny drives. If the machine is a decade-old Athlon 2, then running Windows 10 is probably hard work. However, adding copious amounts of RAM to an old machine is incredibly cheap, and switching from 4GB to 16GB will help even the slowest CPUs. Fundamentally, this is a software issue. Windows 10 is much more sluggish than previous versions of the OS, so ditching…

UNLESS YOU’VE BEEN HIDING under a rock for the last decade, you’ll be aware of Twitch. Complete with an arsenal of influencers, journalists, athletes, astronauts, and more, all of them vying for your time, money, and interactions, and hopefully entertaining you in the process. It’s an incredibly dynamic platform, radically different from any other form of entertainment, and has some of the most passionate communities out there, all centered around personalities and talent from all walks of life. Into World of Warcraft? Watch the race to World First. Big into Counter-Strike 2? Watch the best players across the planet duke it out. Looking for a Dark Souls challenge run guy? You can see that too. Want to watch a native Kiwi Maori carve up some beautiful pieces of wood? They’ve got…

YOU’LL NEED THIS Twitch Account Create one at twitch.tv OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) Download at obsproject.com/download OWN3DPRO Overlay / Elgato Marketplace Overlay Download at own3d.pro/ or marketplace.elgato.com/ SO, we’ve got the hardware side covered, and you’re all ready. You’ve got your idea of what you want to stream, and how often you’re going to dabble with it. Now, let’s get the boring technical software stuff out the way, shall we? 1 TWITCH ACCOUNT SETUP The first thing you’re going to want to do is create an account on Twitch to get your channel set up and your live streaming underway. Head to www.twitch.tv and click the Sign-Up button. Enter a username (Twitch will let you know if it’s taken, or compatible with their ToS, so no cussin’), and a password. Insert…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PI-HOLE (https://pi-hole.net), which requires Linux or Windows (through Docker or WSL) EVERY TIME A DEVICE on your network connects to the internet—in particular the web portion of it—there’s a load of junk downloaded alongside the legitimate content you want to access. Pop-up ads, trackers, and unsavory subjects are just part of it—there’s the real danger of stumbling upon malware, too. By now, you’ve probably already made use of an ad blocker to protect your main PC, and your mobile browser may feature some limited ad-blocking tools, too. But imagine if you could protect your network—including your smart devices—from this unwanted junk, all from one location. The good news is that Pi-hole is designed to do just that. Configure it as your DNS server—the tool used to resolve…

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT the GPU market had returned to normal, the US government creates another GPU shortage. Restrictions have been placed on Nvidia’s RTX 4090, notionally preventing export to China on the basis that the GPU is so powerful, it may be useful for AI research and development. That had the impact of seeing more RTX 4090s flooding into China before the ban. Even with the ban live, there are reports of RTX 4090s being stockpiled in countries bordering China. All of that underlines that the move is more about politics and optics. If the RTX 4090 is freely available across most of the world, China finds the RTX 4090 useful in its AI quest, and is suitably motivated, the idea that the export ban is going to have…

THE GAMING LAPTOP space is complex. It’s full of different specs, price points, and brand names, so it can be tough to see where a new machine fits. But Lenovo’s LOQ family notionally offers a pretty clear proposition. Where the company’s Legion machines are all solid chassis, high-level pricing, and spec sheets, the Lenovo LOQ range would be cheaper, less premium, and come with a lower level of hardware for a bargain price. But the Lenovo LOQ 15-inch range, championed here by a system comprising an AMD CPU and Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU, doesn’t actually make a lot of sense at full retail rice—not in a world where you can often bag the Lenovo Legion Slim 5, with the same CPU and GPU combination, for around $100 more. And yet…

THIS LATEST Z790 refresh board is part of ASRock’s Phantom Gaming lineup. At £250, it’s an affordable option that comes with out-of-the-box support for Intel’s 14th Gen processors, though it supports 12th and 13th Gen processors as well. You could argue that these new Z790 motherboards are the same as their predecessors with barely a lick of paint. But if you’re upgrading from a system that’s a few years old, then Z790 refresh motherboards have a lot of appeal. They include the latest connectivity features, electrical refinements, and support for fast memory. And although many models have taken yet another step up in price, that doesn’t apply here. The ASRock Z790 Riptide still offers a lot for your money. It includes WiFi 7, support for DDR5-8000+ memory —something the existing…

THIS IS GOING TO BE a touch different to some of our usual reviews, as we’re actually going to be evaluating a number of products from Corsair, all under one review. Yep, we’re talking about Corsair’s iCUE LINK PC building ecosystem. You can see our full build process involving the hardware on page 16, but that said, how does this kit fair in isolation? iCUE LINK is a complex daisy-chaining solution designed to simplify the build process, while providing a ton of customization and top-tier build features across Corsair’s new product stacks. It’s early days, but the company has launched a number of products, including a range of AIOs, both with and without screens, in a multitude of different sizes, fans of course (in black and white at 140mm and…

OPEN WORLD ACTION-ADVENTURE GAME FULL-ON SYSTEM CRASHES, poor performance, and bizarre progress erasing interface bugs involving a perpetually grayed-out 'continue' button that only works when the game is deleted and subsequently reinstalled. It’s been an inauspicious start for Frontiers of Pandora, but we kept hammering away, and it turns out that it was worth it. This could be the best Far Cry game Ubisoft has ever published. Much like Far Cry itself, resource gathering is the primary means by which you source special ammunition and craft materials for new gear, but Frontiers of Pandora puts an environmentally conscious twist on what would otherwise be a purely extractive (colonial, even) approach to harvesting. Killing a deer quickly or gently removing the fruit from a tree will yield higher-quality resources, which can be…