Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2024 i Maximum PC

THE ARRIVAL of Intel’s Arrow Lake CPU is a big deal. We have a new socket, process, tile-based construction, features, core architecture in Lion Cove, AI hardware, and more. Intel plans to release 21 SKUs (Stock Keeping Units). It’s the biggest launch since Alder Lake in 2021. There’s new branding, too—no more ‘i’, as Arrow Lake is to be the Core Ultra 200-series. The Ultra 100-series was the mobile Meteor Lake, a tile-based design that never made it to a desktop. Top dog is expected to be the Core Ultra 9 285K with 24 cores. That’s eight performance and 16 efficiency cores, or ‘8P+16E’ in Intel speak. It has a base clock of 3.6Ghz, and a maximum boost of 5.5GHz. Then there’s Ultra 7 265K, with 8P+12E cores running at a…

WHILE MOST PC COMPONENTS have been getting pricier, many gaming monitors are cheaper. $250 buys you a lot more than it did five years ago, though a new class of OLED panels has made things pricier at the top end. In between, there’s more choice than ever before, including resolutions, aspect ratios, panel types, backlight tech and plenty more. 5 PIXIO PXC277 ADVANCED Don’t know Pixio? Seen the pricing? Don’t panic. Corners haven’t been cut where it counts. It feels a bit cheap, but looks slick enough, and when it comes to image quality and gaming experience, there are no horrors. You get a 1440p VA panel, 1ms response, and 165Hz refresh. It’s not true HDR, topping out at 320 nits and lacking local dimming, but that’s fine. $240, www.pixiogaming.com…

WHEN IT COMES TO the ITX form factor, most will end up in one of two camps. Either you love them because of the minimalist aesthetic, small footprint, and that basic concept of absolute power in a ridiculously small build. Alternatively, you hate them because of the lack of connectivity, limited case choices, and often poor cooling as a result. It’s one of the most controversial form factors out there. With components getting larger, more power hungry, and requiring more cooling to get the most out of them, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find support for it across the board as we move from generation to generation. But what if we were to tell you there was another way? What if we could mix the very best of both worlds?…

THERE YOU HAVE IT, FOLKS: one super pristine, clean, black and white, high-contrast, powerful testbed transplanted into a ridiculously small chassis, complete with all the bells and whistles you can possibly ask for, plus 6TB of delicious PCIe 4.0 and above storage. It’s not pulling any punches, that’s for sure. On the whole, the chassis was a joy to work in. There’s just something about it that’s massively endearing. We’re not sure if that’s because it’s not a massive manufacturer releasing one or two slightly different mass produced cases every year, but it’s got spirit. It’s not perfect, let’s be clear with that. airflow could be better, flexibility on how you build in it (although, of course, that is limited by the lack of internal space), and things like the…

BTF is in a way a very unique form factor. It’s still early days in its lifecycle to truly understand how as a form factor it’s going to develop, however. The one advantage ITX, ATX, and Micro-ATX have had is the fact that there’s flexibility when it comes to the placement of the componentry on the PCB itself. Yes, the socket needs to go in the top-left center of the board, and certain elements have a rough radial area they need to be placed in, but time and time again, we’ve seen EPS power shift from the top-left to the top-right, the 24-pin move up and down to accommodate other elements, and USB headers, SATA headers, and more shuffle about, depending on the size, PCIe slots, and power design requirements of…

IF THE NAME of developers UNIGINE sounds familiar to readers, it’s because they’re the authors of a number of other excellent benchmarking tools, such as Heaven, which displays a jaw-dropping representation of a steampunk village guarded by an ornate dragon statue. On downloading the 1.2GB installer for this benchmarking software from https://benchmark.unigine.com/superposition, setup offers three options. This is where we discovered that the ‘Basic’ version of Superposition supports running ‘Virtual Reality’ benchmarks for Oculus and SteamVR HMDs (Head-Mounted displays). Superposition also displays a helpful bar at the bottom indicating how much VRAM is required for the next round of benchmarks. If you try to exceed the available virtual memory, the program will display a warning and suggest you lower the settings or use another ‘preset’. The default preset is ‘1080p medium’.…

Privacy is such an important aspect of our online lives that it’s often exploited to promote software that’s not private. ‘Keep your privacy under control’, says the download page for Chrome, despite Google being court-ordered to destroy user data it collected through the browser’s Incognito mode (tinyurl.com/ysb8xpcv). ‘Maintain your online privacy’ promises CCleaner, whose privacy policy states that it ‘collects personal data in order to personalize ads for you’ (tinyurl.com/58kskj9f). Popular though these programs are, they undermine your privacy rather than boost it, while some lesser-known tools are more trustworthy. Rather than collect and share information about your web activities, they protect you from companies who engage in intrusive practices by blocking trackers, disguising your identity, and letting you easily delete your private data. In this feature, we reveal the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS LUMINAR NEO Some image files MANY IMAGE EDITING APPS have been jumping on the AI bandwagon, but for Luminar, it was less of a leap. The app, from Ukraine-founded (but now New York-based) Skylum Software, was already heavily algorithmic, notable for its ability to easily replace skies in photos, as well as providing the sharpening and color adjustments you’ll find in many raster image editors. The app has gone through a few name updates since its inception, and now goes by Luminar Neo, but things have moved on since we last touched on it in 2022. It’s available as a standalone app, and as a plugin for Adobe Photoshop (including Elements) and Lightroom. One thing it’s very good at is spreading its processing load across all the cores…

Luminar’s selection of presets are one-shot filters that can be quickly applied to an image. There are plenty included with the app, covering everything from high-contrast monochrome portraits to cinematic film looks, and some appropriate for soft landscapes. Clicking through them takes little time, and they are instantly applied to your image as a preview just from hovering your pointer over them. Each is applied at 100 percent strength, and comes with a slider you can use to back off the intensity. These presets are customizable, and you can create your own from edits you’ve made using the Actions menu at the bottom left of the interface. These can also be shared with other Luminar users, or backed up if you’re changing computers. If you feel that you need more,…

1. OPEN FILES Click here to locate office documents on your system. LibreOffice supports both the OpenDocument Format (ODF) files and Microsoft Office documents. Choose ‘Remote Files’ to open documents stored on servers. 2. FILTER APPLICATIONS If you’re working with a large number of documents, use this drop-down menu to display only files of a specific type, eg. Presentations. This also works when browsing templates. 3. ECENT DOCUMENTS Click here to view all files (both local and remote) that you’ve opened recently in the main pane. You can also click the settings (three bars) at the top right to clear the log of recent documents. 4. TEMPLATES LibreOffice comes with a small number of templates for Writer, Draw, and Impress. If you can’t find what you need, visit https://extensions.libreoffice.org, and…

Solid state laptops Portable PCs with moving parts FIRST, A TERRIBLE confession. My daily driver is not a PC. It’s a Mac. But before you gather the pitchforks, hear me out. For starters, my main fun rig is, of course, a powerful desktop PC. I also use a laptop PC to drive my home cinema. The Mac really only gets used for web browsing and text editing, plus some casual content creation. But the main reason it’s a Mac is because it needs to be portable. I want to be able to pick it off my desk and take it into the office while maintaining its working state. Right now, only Apple offers a truly solid state laptop, or at least one that offers good performance and features as opposed to…

THIS MIGHT be the best-value PCIe 4.0 SSD we’ve found to date. Usually, when we say something like that, there’s a massive trade-off to be had at the same time. Like, “Oh wow, this GPU drives some seriously impressive frames and is super affordable, but by the way, it’s louder than a jet engine”. With the NM790, though, that’s not the case—for a PCIe 4.0 SSD, it’s seriously impressive. Not only are the performance metrics up there with some of the best PCIe 4.0 drives we’ve tested, but it trounces some of our favorite drives from a value perspective, both for gigabytes per $ and sequential read performance per $ as well. Let’s talk numbers and what you get—top-line specs. 2TB of total capacity on the PCIe 4.0 standard, with…

CHERRY’S SWITCHES are dependable, unwavering, and the standard by which many of us judge all other switches. So what happens when Cherry changes them? You get the MX2A Red switches inside the Cherry-made Xtrfy K5V2—a new and improved version of the Cherry MX Reds we’ve come to know and love. The MX2A Reds are an improvement in a number of ways. First and foremost, they’re factory lubed. If you’re a regular reader of our keyboard coverage, you’ll know that lube makes for smoother switches with a satisfying clack. That’s certainly true of the MX2A Reds, too. Each key glides effortlessly with each strike from my fingers. The MX2A switches come with 'pin point ring lubrication' applied to the new ‘socket dome’ in the bottom housing. If that sounds like jargon, it…

JUST WHEN it felt like we were seeing the end of new graphics cards this year, AMD surprised us by importing its RX 7900 ‘Golden Rabbit Edition’ from China for a worldwide audience. True, AMD’s gaming business is struggling in the face of strong competition from Intel and particularly Nvidia (see news on page 9), but that hasn’t stopped Team Red from releasing some stellar products, helping keep the market more competitive in the process. The RX 7900 GRE, then, is the star of this month’s cover build, as masterminded by our resident master builder, Zak Storey. We reviewed the card in our last issue, and gave it a score of 8, leading me to ask Zak to prioritize it for a build. The card sits in between AMD’s RX…

GOOGLE USES ITS annual I/O event to set out its plans, and this year the theme was simple: whatever the product, it was about how AI can improve it. Like it or lump it, you’ll be interacting with Gemini, Google’s brand for its LLM AI engine. There are dozens of interconnected AI initiatives covering images, Gmail, and even Workspace. The most obvious change is to Google search, which is shifting to being a “search generative experience”, dubbed AI Overviews. This replaces hard links with an AI-generated summary. Depending on the query, it can return a completely AI-supplied reply. Not everybody is happy about this. The results are far from infallible, and cite precious few original sources. It isn’t easy to disable, either. However, if you use the Web Search as…

MERE months after the M3 first appeared, there’s already a new Apple M chip—this time in an iPad, the first time new silicon hasn’t debuted in a Mac. The SoC uses a 2nd gen 3nm process courtesy of TSMC, and is the first time Apple has given its M silicon CPU cores a major overhaul. Single-core performance is improved thanks to both improved IPC and higher clock speeds. There’s improved branch prediction, and wider decode and execution engines. You also get two extra efficiency cores—six in all, but the same four performance cores. The GPU sticks to ten cores, albeit tweaked with Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. In the new iPad Pro, the new silicon is partnered with what Apple claims is the world’s most advanced display: the Ultra…

CPU Intel Core i9-14900K $549 www.intel.com Time and time again, we keep coming back to the Intel Core i9-14900K, and with good reason. At its core, this build is the very heart of the Maximum PC testbed. It’s our go-to chip for GPU, RAM, and SSD testing, and delivers incredible performance for the price. It’s effectively the pinnacle of what Intel has managed to achieve with its Rocket Lake architecture. It’s not perfect, and if you’ve kept your ear to the ground on this one, you’ve likely seen news articles regarding motherboards producing pretty aggressive overvolts and clock-speed boosts. However, you can now pick up an Intel default performance profile in most mobo BIOSes, and even with that slight drop in overall potency, the 14900K still delivers supreme CPU performance,…

BUILDING THIS THING was a challenge, with lots of cable management, a ton of chassis disassembly, and more, but what was performance like? First things first, we need to caveat those sequential scores. We’ve already extensively tested the Kingston and Crucial T700 in these hallowed pages, and if you were after the best bang for buck, that 2TB Lexar NM790 is challenging to beat. With that in mind, we decided to test that in our sequentials instead of the two other drives. That said, all in all, performance was pretty consistent across the board. We’ve compared our Model 4 build against the Stealth Hyte Y40 system we built in our March 2024 issue, so we can take a closer look at the GPUs at play here. However, it’s worth mentioning…

IN THEORY, using tools to run ‘synthetic’ benchmarks is a great way to test specific components like GPUs through carefully crafted workloads. A whole industry has sprung up around this. Each developer claims to offer the best kinds of tests. Some, like Geekbench 6 or 3DMark, even have their own scoring system. Still, winning 10,000 points and a gold star from any one benchmark doesn’t necessarily mean your gaming rig will perform optimally with specific applications. This is particularly true for resource-intensive games like Cyberpunk 2077, and precisely what makes titles like these popular with reviewers, who like to subject devices to ‘real world’ benchmarks. In this feature, we’ll explore some of the most popular benchmarking software available, and discuss how to run some ‘real world’ tests of your own.…

LIKE GEEKBENCH, 3DMark is an extremely popular benchmarking platform. Its scoring system is also similar in that higher marks mean better performance. There are ‘Advanced’ and ‘Enterprise’ editions for $34.99 (one-off) and $1,695 (per year), respectively. These contain the most comprehensive sets of tools, as well as features like custom benchmark settings and game performance estimates. 3DMark also offers free demos of three tools. In order to access these, though, you’ll need to have a Steam account to search for and install the ‘3D Mark Demo’ via the Steam Store. Time Spy is used for testing DirectX 12, so will only work with Windows 10 and 11 platforms. The tests are run at 2560 x 1440 resolution. The demo version consists of two graphics tests and one CPU test, which…

POWER UP 1 The upright rectangular design of the Orbi range is a familiar sight in many homes and offices, but the Orbi 970 has had a bit of a facelift. The sheer speed of Wi-Fi 7 requires more power than previous models, so the new Orbi units have a taller, more cylindrical design that stands at 11.5 inches high, and houses no fewer than 12 internal antennae. APP OOPS 2 The Orbi’s hardware features are state of the art, but the app is a mixed bag. The initial setup process is fine. However, the app requires you to provide your email address in order to create an account before you can finish setup, and then hits you with an ad for technical support before you can even look at your new…

TIP OF THE MONTH STARTUP PURGE Want to speed up your login time? Fed up with every app under the sun launching within 2.5 seconds of you signing in? Us too. Fortunately, there’s a super-quick and simple way of stopping apps from opening up in Windows. Head to the Start menu, and type ‘Startup Apps’. Hit Enter, and you’ll get a list of all the programs installed on your machine, with the option to disable them from loading on Windows launch/login. TEST BED TWEAKING It’s been a busy year for me, or at least the last six to eight months. I left a job that wasn’t really working out and pivoted to being a freelance writer. It was terrifying at first—the lack of security, the piecework lifestyle, and pay. But…

Luminar is a non-destructive editor, which means your original file is kept safe, and edits are only applied to a new file that you export at the end of your session. The app makes it easy to export an image, with a button at the top of the interface presenting a pop-up box with plenty of options, allowing you to specify the file format (including PSD and PDF) pixel dimensions and color space (sRGB, Adobe RGB, or ProPhoto RGB) of your final image. There are options in the Crop tool to the correct size for Facebook cover and feed images, but for other social networks, check what the best sizes are before cropping and exporting. Not only can you save to a local folder on your PC; it’s possible to…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A RECENT INSTALL OF LIBREOFFICE 24.2 Java Runtime Environment (For certain Base features) LIBREOFFICE BEGAN its life in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org, which was itself an open-source fork of StarOffice. This productivity suite is developed and maintained by TDF (The Document Foundation), which remains loyal to its open-source roots. This means that unlike Microsoft Office, LibreOffice is cross platform as ports exist for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The suite consists of a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet software (Calc), presentation program (Impress), a vector graphics editor (Draw), an application for editing mathematical formulae (Math), and a database management program (Base). LibreOffice defaults to the OpenDocument Format when saving files, but can also open, edit, and save Microsoft formats like Microsoft Word (.docx). The most recent release…

YOU’LL NEED THIS SPACEDESK Download the PC software from spacedesk.net WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOUR MONITOR feels a bit cramped, but you don’t want to pay for a bigger one? Or need to keep an eye on a website or video stream? Fortunately, if you have a tablet or smartphone going spare, you can expand your desktop space without spending a penny. Spacedesk can turn your unused phone or tablet into an extension of your computer screen. It does this with two programs: one that sends images to your tablet or phone from Windows, and one on your mobile device that makes it behave like a connected monitor. It works by making Windows think the remote device has a physical connection. That way, you can drag program windows on…

WE LIKE OLED monitors, their thinness and brightness appearing contradictory yet strangely alluring. Add the 240Hz refresh rate of this Acer Predator, and you have a winning combination. The resolution of 1440p looks like a wise choice, even though it’s a step down from the old Quantum Dot Predator X27’s 2160p. By showing restraint and dialing it back a bit, Acer is able to increase the chances that today’s GPUs will be able to supply the high frame rates a screen like this deserves. It’ll display them without tearing, too, thanks to Freesync Premium and VRR support, though it drops the G-Sync certification of its predecessor. You also get plenty of ways to feed it those frames. At the back of the X27U, there’s an array of ports that includes…

IF AI IS BASICALLY MATH, then computers are obviously going to be good at it. The basic idea is nothing new, of course, what with a paper published in 1943 that outlined the first model of a neural network. Since then, we’ve been waiting on hardware that can really deliver on that notion. Well, AI is suddenly everywhere, all at once, and every technology company is falling over themselves to incorporate it into every process imaginable. Inevitably, that includes the PC. Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI is at the forefront of the AI industry, and with that comes not only a whole slew of new AI features for Windows, but a whole class of machines—there is now an official Microsoft AI PC. Before we get too excited, there is nothing terribly…

TRIUMPHS NEW STANDARD FOR TRACKERS LAUNCHED Dubbed DULT, it warns if a tracker is following you, so it’s not used to stalk people. TAPE ISN’T DEAD Shipments are up three percent to 152.9 compressed exabytes—that’s a billion gigabytes each. MIND READING Researchers have turned brain activity into words, thanks to electrodes. Well, certain words at a 77 percent accuracy. TRAGEDIES SILENT RUNNING The silence of an electric car isn’t good for pedestrians: a study shows that twice as many people are hit by EVs over ICE. AI’S POWER PROBLEM By 2026, it’s estimated that LLMs will burn through as much power as Japan. GOOGLE’S SEARCH SNAFUS Using AI to search has a few problems. Users have been told that staring into the sun is safe, and to eat a rock…

> VPN vulnerability > Application tabs > Podman acceleration Are VPNs toast? I’ve been reading a news story on the TunnelVision vulnerability for virtual private networks. Apparently, this—excuse the pun—tunnel-sized hole in VPN security has existed since 2002. It says the vulnerability allows attackers to force VPN apps to send and receive at least some of your traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel. The claim is that you’re only safe when the VPN runs on an Android device or Linux PC. Is this true, and if so, does it mean the VPN networks I’ve been using for all these years have been utterly useless in all that time? —Caitlin H Tracey THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: The headline of this vulnerability does make for grim reading. That said, in practical terms, the…

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 hours DIFFICULTY: Hard This is probably one of the hardest builds we’ve had to create here at Maximum PC, and that’s a heavy statement for us to make. After all, we’re veteran builders here, with hundreds of published build logs to our name, and multiple liquid-cooled rigs under our belt, including a few in some seriously space-restricted cases. Yet, throughout this process, working in the Model 4 had to be approached with an open mind. We’ve always been advocates of the notion that your build process should be fluid. Take a look at your chassis before you start installing anything. Try to identify where you might hit a snag or bottleneck. Think about your clearances, and where your hardware will sit. Would it be easier to…

THE BENCHMARKING tools that we’ve reviewed so far are the best ones we found for simulating ‘real world’ performance of devices. For instance, Geekbench 6 actually uses a headless browser to simulate web browsing activities. Additionally, software like 3DMark’s Time Spy carefully measures metrics while rednering footage similar to what you would find in a graphically rich videogame. Still, it only takes a quick search on forums like the/r/overclockers subreddit in order to see that users are often baffled by the results. The chief complaints are that their device will pass popular benchmarks with flying colors, but games will still not perform to a sufficient standard. This is an excellent demonstration of the old English adage, ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ In other words, the quality of…

WE ALL KNOW how priceless our personal data is. You can’t recreate photos and hand-crafted documents from thin air. Another crucial commodity is time: how damaging would it be to spend more than a few hours (never mind 2-3 days) recovering your system to a usable state? Armed with the right backup regimen, you’ll never have to worry about losing more than a few minutes’ work again. Over the next seven pages, we’ll reveal how to protect not just your main Windows PC and everything on it, but your Linux machines, too. For good measure, we’ll help you back up key photos, settings, and apps on your iOS and Android devices, too. Better still, for the most part, we’ll show you how to do all this at no cost to yourself. We’ll…

1. MAIN MENU Kept very small and in the corner, this is where you’ll find File, Edit, and all that sort of thing. 2. LAYERS This is used for putting overlays, such as light leaks and other effects, over your images while maintaining control. 3. MODES This is where you switch between the Presets and the Editing tools, or open the Catalog in order to quickly swap to another file. 4. EXPORT Luminar is non-destructive, so doesn’t overwrite your original file. Export your work as a new file from here. 5. THE TOOLS A list of tools, each with sub-divisions and usually multiple sliders. They can be collapsed to keep things tidy. 6. VIEWS Two buttons to quickly remind yourself of the original image, or to bring up a divider…

At the start of this feature, we downloaded Spacedesk to our primary PC (or ‘server’ in Spacedesk terms). This handles the sharing of the virtual display connection with a secondary device (called the ‘client’). So far, we’ve only used a phone and tablet as the client, but you could use an old laptop. Rather than download another copy of the server software to the laptop, go to the Microsoft Store attinyurl.com/mu7ms2pv and install the client software. Once launched, it should spot your main PC across your wireless network. Click the primary PC’s IP address in the Spacedesk client on your laptop, and the two will connect, with the Windows desktop of your main machine extending into the window now shown on your laptop (1 in our screenshot). Hover over that…

ALL NEW TECHNOLOGIES come with a learning curve. With the cataclysmically desirable Alienware 32 AW3225QF, we’re taking some lessons about OLED as a display solution for PC gaming. Yes, this is another of the brave new 4K monitors running a Samsung QD-OLED panel. We’ve cast our eyes across several of these now, and the wow factor remains. But with familiarity comes a slightly more grounded sense of what these monitors offer gamers. However, let’s kick off with the basic speeds and feeds. Again, we’re talking 32 inches of 4K QD-OLED glory. Response is rated at 0.03 ms, peak HDR brightness at 1,000 nits, full screen brightness at 250 nits, and color coverage comes in at 99 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut. The subpixel structure also remains the same. In…

FOLDABLE SCREENS are everywhere now. We first saw them pop up in the mobile world, then they made their way to monitors with the likes of Corsair’s Xeneon Flex, and now we have them in laptops, too (if this can even be called a laptop). You see, the HP Spectre Foldable is technically a laptop, an all-in-one, and a tablet. Its downfall is that it’s a $5,000 tablet with sub-$1,000 performance. Yeah, that’s kind of the problem with the HP Spectre Foldable. On the surface, it is an incredibly versatile device. You’ve got a crisp, beautiful OLED panel with some solid pixel density, that is entirely foldable, with a detachable, magnetic wireless keyboard and mouse combo. That allows you to do a few things: first, you can just use it…

THE SIGHT OF THE SLEEK, indomitable mothership preparing to jet off into the unknown, accompanied by radio chatter and a moody score, feels like a homecoming. For newbies, it’s a striking scene. For veterans, it calls to mind the original mothership getting ready to leave Kharak and the beginning of one of the best strategy games ever created. Welcome to Homeworld 3. It’s enough to make you tingle. Homeworld 3 wants to remind you of its legacy, a lot. After the events of Homeworld 2, Karan S'jet, the mothership’s navigator, was sent on a mission to deal with a looming crisis, but never returned. 20 years later, her protege, Imogen S'jet, is following in her footsteps, with a new mothership and a new fleet that must strike out on their…

THINGS HAVE BEEN relatively quiet in the world of web browsers for a while, if you overlook Microsoft’s constant pressure on Windows users to switch to Edge. The MS browser has greatly improved since the switch to Google’s rendering engine, Blink, itself a fork of Apple’s older Webkit engine used in Safari. Microsoft also has Trident (Internet Explorer) and EdgeHTML (older versions of Edge), while Firefox runs on Gecko. There are others, too. These engines affect the way websites, which exist as lines of code and image files on a server somewhere, are displayed on your computer. The differences between them mean they don’t always render web content identically, especially in these days of embedded content, multiple coding languages, and plugins that mean a browser may be pulling information from…