Tabla de contenidos para April 2024 en Maximum PC

SHOP THE FULL RANGE WWW.MAGAZINESDIRECT.COM/SUBSCRIBE Offer open to new subscribers only. Please allow up to six weeks for delivery of your first subscription issue. Payment is non-refundable after the 14 day cancellation period unless exceptional circumstances apply. For full terms and conditions, visit www.magazinesdirect.com/terms. For enquiries please call: +44 (0) 330 333 1113. Lines are open weekdays between 9am-Spm UK Time or e-mail: help@magazinesdirect.com. Calls to 0330 numbers will be charged at no more than a national landline call, and may be included in your phone provider's call bundle.…

FIGURE AI is a start-up robotics company that has attracted investments of $675 million from such players as Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, OpenAI, and Jeff Bezos himself. The robot, Figure 01, is billed as an autonomous AI-powered multi-purpose humanoid robot suitable for dangerous and undesirable tasks. As soon as you see one, you think of the Terminator. At least it doesn’t have a skull for a face, although Figure AI’s website does have a section called ‘master plan’, along with a lot of jargon, mission statements, and ‘visions’. The ominous appearance is somewhat undercut when you see it move, as it shuffles about like an octogenarian. Tesla is working on a similar machine, Optimus Gen-1, so it looks as if something along these lines will come to market in the near…

AMD’S RDNA 3 family of graphics cards still isn’t complete, as we have another midrange(ish) offering: the RTX 7900 GRE. It’s been available in China since last July—what AMD has done is give the rest of the world a chance to play with one. It’ll cost $50 more than the recently released 7800 XT at $549, and aims to offer solid 1440p and reasonable 4K gaming. At its heart is a cut-down Navi31 GPU with 80 compute units. This places it neatly between the 7800 XT, which has 60, and the 7900 XT, which has 84. We get a healthy 16GB of memory on a 256-bit bus, mirroring the 7900 XT. The clock sits at 1,880Mhz with a top boost to 2,245MHz. What does GRE stand for? Golden Rabbit Edition.…

OVER THE LAST FEW ISSUES, we’ve built a cornucopia of different styles of PC. Whether that’s high-end glamorous RGB monsters with enough displays and gifs to make your eyes melt, cooling-challenged ITX towers, or super stealth blacked-out builds featuring the best-value componentry around, all of them have pushed a particular theme in one way or another. They each present their own unique challenge—a way of testing hardware, sure, but equally a way of testing the journalist tasked with building them. That’s a big part of what we do, and a key ingredient of learning. This time around, we decided to do something a little bit different; a little bit more refined. This, dear reader, is our attempt at building a relatively affordable, suave, and sophisticated 4K gaming machine—one that combines the…

WE LOVE a confusing set of numbers here at Maximum PC, and oh boy, do we have some below. Performance across the board for our build was generally pretty good—the main highlights were Total War: Three Kingdoms finally reaching above that 60 fps mark, and Metro Exodus rolling across the finish line with a smooth average frame rate of 54 fps. Jump over to the synthetic CPU-oriented benchmarks, however, and they tell a very different story. That single core performance in particular is quite the shocker, at 1,801. We did a few extra runs to be sure, and even double-checked everything, from the CPU cooler to memory settings being enabled correctly, and nope, that’s the best out of all four runs we committed to. Why so low then, compared to…

ONE SERVER to rule them all. That’s our dream—a single, centralized PC designed for always-on action, but which won’t run up huge electricity bills. It needs to be able to run multiple services simultaneously, from media streaming to cloud sync and backup. It needs to be configured as headless machine, accessible from other devices on your network, and handle more than one connection, so friends and family can benefit from your NAS server. For the past few years, we’ve been living the dream with the subject of our September 2022 build. It’s as capable now as it was then, but we set ourselves the task of improving it in every way: a more powerful mobo that consumes even fewer watts? Check. Plenty of drive bays to allow us to easily…

The last thing you want is for a power outage to disrupt all your running services and potentially corrupt your entire Debian installation. To protect your server 24-7, therefore, you need to plug it into a UPS so it survives brownouts or simple trips in your home’s electricity supply. While most UPS’s like CyberPower’s 450VA backup ($58, www.bestbuy.com/site/6239405.p) provide simple battery backup, giving you time to either restore the electricity or manually shut down your server gracefully, what happens if the outage occurs when you’re away from home? The solution lies with a smart UPS system—one that connects by USB to your server and which can shut it down automatically after a set period or when the battery drops to a certain level. There’s not much of a premium to…

For desktop integrated graphics, there’s really no competition between AMD and Intel. Intel’s graphics solutions in 12th through 14th Gen Core processors use the same Xe-LP architecture as the 11th Gen Tiger Lake laptop processors that launched in 2020, except where the mobile chips included Xe Graphics with up to 96 graphics Execution Units (768 shader ALUs), the desktop processors top out at just 32 EUs (256 shaders). That makes for a huge gap in potential performance. Where the older mobile GPUs could deliver up to 2.1 teraflops of compute, even the fastest desktop iGPUs from Intel still fail to break the 1 teraflop barrier: the Core i9-14900K with UHD Graphics 770 offers a theoretical 845 gigaflops of graphics compute. They’re sufficient for basic office and desktop use, with decent video…

TIP OF THE MONTH DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE START MENU Less of a tip and more general advice: how many of us have sat there with a blank or default start menu in Windows 11? Take advantage of it. Right-click and remove the default junk programs Microsoft loads on there by default, and pin genuinely useful—but less used—apps that you need on a weekly basis. It’ll keep your desktop tidy, and your taskbar shiny. TIME AND TIME AGAIN Life is busy at the moment. The freelance life is fun, but I’ve paired it with working full-time as a barista in a local independent coffee shop, as I love coffee and needed a bit of social interaction after leaving my last working-from-home job. I’m actually a director of a limited company with…

Standalone password managers would seem to be a moot point when every modern browser can save your credentials for you. Why, then, would you want to install a separate product? The answer here lies in the question: browsers are not specifically designed as password managers, so operate in a different way. Some users of Chromium-based browsers like Chrome and Edge have discovered this the hard way after their devices were infected by Redline Stealer. This malware targets the ‘Login Data’ file, an SQLite database created by browsers to store login credentials. If it runs on the same user account, Redline can decrypt ‘Login Data’ and access your passwords. Admittedly, in a scenario where your device is infected with malware, there’s always a chance that your credentials will be harvested. Still,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS NVIDIA GRAPHICS CARD Some games ACOLYTES OF TEAM GREEN have had an array of GPU-focused software to contend with since GeForce Experience arrived in 2013. It’s the app you’d open to update drivers or optimize the graphics settings of a particular game, but if you wanted to set up G-sync, change digital audio settings, or view the HDCP status of your display, you’d need to open the Nvidia Control Panel. You’d also need to log in with an Nvidia account just to update your drivers, something that added an extra level of aggravation nobody wanted. Thanks to the new Nvidia app that’s now gone, though there’s now a rewards scheme that requires a login (this can be skipped). The Nvidia app is more than a reskin of…

I’M NOT A huge fan of traditional gaming laptops. I want them to be good to the extent that I’ve run about 10 of them long-term, but they’ve all disappointed. However, the last few months have given me a new perspective. It turns out I was using the wrong kind. I covered the excellent Asus ROG Flow X13 a couple of issues back. Now, I’ve had a brief spin with the HP Omen Transcend 14, and I find myself lusting after gaming laptops again. Both systems share a thin-and-light philosophy. They don’t aim to achieve desktop-like performance. Instead, they look for gaming chops. Those aren’t genuine laptops in my view; they’re portable PCs. Instead, both the Asus ROG Flow X13 and HP Omen Transcend 14 are lovely devices just as…

THIS IS NOT a great card to be writing about, unfortunately. AMD’s low-end budget model is something of an oddity. It comes with a rather lackluster launch all things considered—on its own, solo, in Q1. Where Nvidia is launching multiple Supers, and redefining its entire GPU range, AMD has launched this. Admittedly, Team Red did provide us with the more impressive 7800 XT and 7700 XT late last year, but those had a bit more gumption than this thing does. Let’s take top-line stats first. The RX 7600 XT is based off of the RDNA 3 architecture, manufactured by TSMC on its slightly older N6 manufacturing process, and features a 7nm transistor size. By default, it clocks in with 2,048 stream processors and touts a maximum clock speed on paper…

LET’S FACE IT, if there’s one thing Corsair should be good at, it’s memory. The company built itself off the back of the great memory race of the '90s and early '00s, and has since held a dominant position in the industry. Look at any industrial sector that’s reliant on memory chips, and Corsair probably supplies the majority of the DRAM for it. It's a similar story in the PC gaming sector, with the company having some serious flagships. Back in early 2012, when Linus Tech Tips was just two dudes filming hardware unboxings, the company launched perhaps its most ambitious memory kit to date in the form of its DDR3 Dominator Platinum line. PC gaming had been well cemented for some time now, but it was just starting to…

LENOVO has proved rumors true and built a laptop with a transparent screen. The augmented reality machine is just a concept for now, but has an undeniable cool factor. The screen is 55 percent transparent when the pixels are off—switched on, they become increasingly opaque, but never completely. It has a modest 720p resolution, and the keyboard is a flat piece of glass with a projected layout. This looks good, but isn’t easy to type on. As for what can you use it for, Lenovo starts to run out of ideas, even suggesting that artists can place items behind it for reference. What’s needed is software that can make use of the interaction between screen and reality, something Apple managed on its Vision Pro headset. We don’t expect commercial hardware…

INTEL’S CEO PAT GELSINGER had a big plan in 2021—that the company would produce five process nodes in four years, giving it process leadership. That time is nearly up, with Intel 7 appearing in Alder Lake and then Raptor Lake, and Intel 4 appearing at the end of last year in the processor tiles on the Meteor Lake. Intel 20A has yet to appear, but is due to debut with Arrow Lake later this year. That leaves the final piece, Intel 18A, due next year. It was an ambitious and risky plan, so risky that Gelsinger has admitted that “this is the biggest bet we have ever made as a company, because it also puts incredible stress on the financials of the company.” Yikes, sounds serious, although it seems unlikely.…

The difficulty of getting graphics drivers right and more generally optimizing GPU performance is known. At the same time, it’s hard not to be a little exasperated with Intel and its Arc graphics cards. Intel surely knew how tough it was going to be. It’s hardly a newbie in the tech space, so surely it put in all the work to do the job before it launched those first Arc graphics cards in 2022? As it turned out, Arc GPUs launched with frame rates all over the place. It did nothing for Arc’s reputation, and Intel has been catching up ever since. The good news is that lots of progress has since been made—performance in any given game is likely to be well optimized. A revisit of Arc performance by…

CPU AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is an incredibly interesting processor. At its heart, think of it as a slightly lower-clocked Ryzen 7 7700X. Indeed, it features the same eight cores, the same 16 threads, and the overall chiplet composition is similar, too, with a single core complex providing all of the performance. However, unlike the Ryzen 7 7700X, its maximum clock speed sits at 5 GHz, rather than 5.4 GHz. The reason for this is that AMD has placed a stack of 3D V-Cache on top of the core complex itself. This extra cache gives the 7800X3D access to more super-fast memory for games that prefer it, allowing it to boost frame rates as a result, particularly at lower resolutions. This comes at the cost of…

CABLES—LOVE THEM or hate them, they’ve been a critical part of PC building since, well, we were building PCs. Over the years, these pesky connectors have developed considerably. From the humble days of the MOLEX and IDE connectors, to modern-day SATA, M.2, and 12VHPWR, as our PCs have got faster and more power hungry, so too have cables become streamlined and more efficient, catering to the whims of the PC builder. Cases have developed special channels, rubber grommets, and cable tie-off points. No longer do we have great gobbets of them hanging loose across systems. Of course, we couldn’t talk about cables without mentioning such things as braided and sleeved custom cables, hidden away in paracord, or the likes of Lian Li and its Strimmer RGB illuminated variants, too. Corsair…

Another upgrade is the addition of a second Ethernet port. Thanks to Linux’s support for ‘bonding’, you can combine two separate Ethernet interfaces. It doesn’t double transfer speeds, but it does double throughput. It also provides a measure of redundancy—if one port fails, the other will continue to work. Support for ‘bonding’ is built into Cockpit. Navigate to Networking, where you’ll see both interfaces listed—so long as both are connected to your network via Ethernet cables, they should have independent IP addresses and traffic. To combine the two, click ‘Add bond’. Leave the name as bond0, then check both interfaces. Set the Mode to ‘Round robin’, leave the other options as they are, and click Add. You’ll see the Interfaces replaced by a single ‘bond0’ entry, and after a short…

LONG AGO, before the reign of the Supers, there was a graphics card. It was bold, gauche, and built with the blood of a Titan, with gaming in mind. Its heart was near identical to the goliath it was born from, yet it lacked the memory, spirit, absolute architectural majesty, and subsequent price tag of its Titanic kin. Instead, this humble card was known simply as a Ti—Titanium, often with the number 80 before it. It was the ultimate gaming workhorse. It lacked the Tensor majesty and professional level technicality of its full-fledged, four-digit priced sibling, and instead gave us, the PC gamers, access to performance hitherto unseen before for a fraction of the price. These two cards here, ladies and gentlemen, with their RTX 4080 Super beating hearts, are…

We normally test using native resolution benchmarks, but for integrated graphics solutions, it can be beneficial to look at other tweaks that can boost performance. AMD HYPR-RX provides a quick way to boost performance across virtually every game, albeit with some quirks. HYPR-RX enables four AMD features: Radeon Super Resolution (RSR), AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), Radeon Boost, and Radeon Anti-Lag. Anti-Lag is the only feature that shouldn’t reduce image quality, as it reduces the latency between when a frame finishes rendering and when it shows up on the monitor. The other three are a different matter. RSR uses driver-level spatial upscaling. It’s basically FSR 1.0 (FidelityFX Super Resolution), except it doesn’t require game developers to integrate support. RSR can cause some noticeable artifacts, particularly at lower resolutions, but rendering…

1. MULTIPLE VAULTS Your password manager should allow you to create multiple independent databases, each secured with their own master key. For instance, you can have one for your web logins and another for sensitive financial information. 2. CREDENTIAL CATEGORIES If you have a lot of credentials, make sure your password manager supports grouping into specific categories. Bonus points if you can also add a colorful icon to help distinguish between them. 3. PASSWORD GENERATOR The ideal password generator suggests unique, strong passphrases each time you create a new account. It should also alert you if any existing passwords have been exposed in a data breach. 4. MOBILE VERSION Juggling two password managers is bad for your self-organization and a nightmare for security. Make sure your password manager offers compatible…

YOU’LL NEED THIS SHORTWAVE A Google/Google Workspace account SHORTWAVE IS THE CREATION of a number of ex-Google developers, who seem to be reaching for the holy grail of helping users organize their email inbox once and for all. The good news is that if you’re on PC, there’s no downloadable client to install; you only need to sign in via your Google account. Shortwave makes use of ‘bundles’ and ‘labels’ to categorize messages into rows. You can also schedule delivery of messages so that your device isn’t pinging every few seconds. The recent inclusion of an AI assistant allows for quick summaries of message lists, scheduling reminders and even drafting suitable replies, automating the headache of navigating through dozens of messages at a time. In this guide, you’ll discover how…

A 27-INCH 1440p panel has been the sweet spot for gamers for as long as I can remember. Arguably, that hasn’t changed. Okay, I’d favor a 34-inch ultrawide version of the 1440p thing. But at the very least, a high-refresh 27 incher remains one of the most popular and relevant monitor form factors. Panels in this category that hit the basic spec points of minimum 144Hz refresh and an IPS panel can now be had for under $200. But if you add a couple of provisos, let’s say minimum 400 nits brightness and basic HDR support from a brand you’ve heard of rather than some random panel with no provenance, you’re looking at around $230 to $250 minimum. The Gigabyte G27Q can be had at the lower end of that…

PROJECTION is often overlooked as a format for a good gaming display, and with good reason. Over the years, they’ve been held back by a multitude of factors: poor brightness, space requirements, lens burn-in from static imagery (OLED says hello), low resolution, price, and of course, refresh rate. There’s a lot to put off any would-be buyer, particularly when looking at their next big-screen purchase. Times have changed, however, and projectors have come a long way since those days of yore. Yes, they’re still remarkably expensive pieces of equipment, but the tech you get with them these days very much justifies the cost. Well, almost. Take this Benq X3100i 4K gaming projector. It’s robust and chunky, complete with a 3,300 lumens brightness, 3,840x2,160 resolution, 600,000:1 contrast ratio, 1.07-billion color support,…

WHATSAPP AND SIGNAL have a lot in common: they’re both messaging apps that support text, voice, and video. They can also make use of group chats, status updates, and share much of the same codebase for encrypting communications. Still, WhatsApp’s the pick for billions of people, while Signal is in the low tens of millions. This said, due to Signal’s focus on privacy, there’s often a spike in downloads in the wake of privacy scandals, such as the security bug discovered by Twitter engineer Foad Dabiri in 2023, where WhatsApp secretly activated the microphone on his Pixel phone. WHATSAPP At the time of writing, WhatsApp has over 2.8 billion active users, and is expected to pass 3 billion in 2024, making it by far the world’s most popular messaging application.…

INTEL’S 14th generation is to be joined by the Intel Core i9-14900KS Special Edition, which buzzes along at a maximum boost speed of 6.2GHz, breaking the 6GHz barrier and becoming the world’s fastest processor. The base clock is a more pedestrian 3.2GHz. Otherwise, it’s the same chip as the 6.0GHz i9-14900K, so we have 24 cores, with eight performance and 16 efficiency cores, for a grand total of 32 threads. It draws more power at 300W-400W, compared to the K chip’s maximum Turbo Power draw of 253W. This is a lot of power, with liquid cooling advised, if not required. Samples have appeared online, including running all its performance cores at 5.9GHz. It had an average temperature of 96 C, with a peak of 101 C, and managed an average…

IF YOU’VE EVER WONDERED whether what was missing from your first-person shooters was the smell of gunfire, then GameScent is here to fix that. As you play, it puffs out an odor. It’s basically a fancy essential oil diffuser. The hexagonal box holds six cartridges, five scents, plus what it calls ‘clean air’, which acts as palate cleanser between smells, of which you have explosion, gunfire, forest, racing cars, and storm. Coming soon will be grass, blood, ocean, and sport arena. So how does it know what scent to use? Customization for every game would be quite a task, so it’s AI to the rescue, analyzing the game (via Wi-Fi) to supply the appropriate scent by tapping the audio feed. It will work on a variety of devices, including consoles,…

SSD 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade M.2 PCIe 4.0 Another Kingston pick, our SSD for this build is none other than the Fury Renegade PCIe 4.0 SSD. This is by far one of the most impressive PCIe 4.0 drives we’ve tested, even beating the Crucial T500 in a number of our real-world tests (in fact, it actually beats some PCIe 5.0 drives we’ve used, too, but more on that another time). Initially designed for use in the PlayStation 5 as expandable storage, the Fury Renegade absolutely dominates in both sequential and real-world performance. It utilizes a curious mix of 176-layer TLC from Micron, alongside a Phison E18 controller, but the more impressive addition is a full-sized DDR4 chip acting as a cache, which really helps accelerate speeds. $200, www.kingston.com GPU MSI…

If all is well, you shouldn’t run into any problems with your build. But if you do experience issues, then the PRIME N100 board supports troubleshooting via the N2 case’s power light to potentially guide you to a solution. For a guide to how it works, visit www.asus.com/support/faq/1046157. If the build progresses smoothly at first, but then falls over when you introduce some of the later components (such as the network card), you may find yourself falling back on the old ‘wipe the CMOS and start again’ method. In many cases this should settle things down enough for you to strip back to the basic build, then reintroduce each new component without further problems. However, if you find yourself stuck even at this point with the PC stubbornly hanging at…

The PC has gone through a lot of changes, branching out in myriad ways and names. But whatever they’re called, every computing device needs certain features: CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, the mainboard, and power. Take any one of those away, and the functionality plummets or fails. How much capability you need from each component varies by the intended use case. Our focus for this state of the PC investigation will be on the GPU, specifically integrated graphics solutions. The GPU replaced the lesser video controllers of early PCs, which in turn replaced the punch cards of a bygone era. Whatever the name or complexity, the purpose is to output something useful. Watches, phones, TVs, tablets, laptops, and desktops all have some form of display these days, with plenty of differentiation.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A COMPATIBLE WEB BROWSER Administrative rights to set up the password manager IN LATE 2023, cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs reported on the November 2022 breach of LastPass’ database, wherein the password vaults of 25 million users were stolen. Citing a recent spate of cryptocurrency thefts to the value of $35 million from security-conscious people in the tech industry, Krebs speculated that at least some of LastPass’ vaults were cracked. It’s hard to tell if this is true, as like many password management platforms, LastPass isn’t fully open-source. Proprietary software can’t be subjected to public scrutiny, so it’s difficult to verify claims like ‘zero knowledge encryption' server-side. Open-source software is built on the philosophy that ‘many eyes make bugs shallow’, making it the gold standard for privacy. In…

Using a reliable password manager means you’re protecting all your credentials using ‘zero knowledge’ via your master passphrase. Our first advice is to make sure this isn’t the only way you secure your password database—all the software in this guide supports login via 2FA, and in most cases you can use hardware keys like YubiKey or ‘keyfiles’ to add a further layer of protection. Beyond this, it stands to reason that your master password should have sufficient entropy. In other words, it shouldn’t be easily guessable or able to be cracked using ‘brute force’ techniques. You also need to be sure that you can recall the password easily. The best method to create secure passwords you can remember is to use Diceware (https://diceware.dmuth.org). This involves using dice (or an RNG)…

YOU’LL NEED THIS VIVETOOL AND WINDOWS 10 OR 11 github.com/PeterStrick/ViVeTool-GUI WINDOWS IS BEING CONSTANTLY DEVELOPED, and Microsoft makes new beta features available on a rolling basis. However, many are available only to Windows Insiders signed up to preview versions. The good news is that you can often enable these features yourself. One of the easiest ways to do this is with ViVeTool. Here, we’ll show you how to download pre-release versions of Windows and use ViVeTool to enable features. Before starting, make a backup of your system. The features that ViVeTool can activate are experimental, so proceed with caution. 1 SIGN UP FOR WINDOWS INSIDER First, you need to turn on optional diagnostic data in Windows. Press Windows key+I to open Settings, then in Windows 10, click Privacy (or ‘Privacy…

IT GENUINELY FEELS like we’re turning a corner in the world of PC gaming. Finally, we’re leaving the shackles of 1080p behind, and heading to the clear, glossy-coated clarity of 1440p and beyond. The likes of the RTX 4070 Super and 4070 Ti Super really do cement that notion. In fact, the entire Super range with either identical pricing and increased hardware, or similar hardware and significantly reduced pricing, is definitely a good thing. So then, what card do we have on the chopping block this time? Well, this, as you’ve probably already spotted, is the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super 16G Ventus 3X (seriously MSI, we need shorter names, come on now). Unfortunately, the 4070 Ti Super doesn’t quite have the same glamor as the other GPUs in…

FORMERLY KNOWN as Eve, Dough has had a shaky start. The internet is littered with tales of product non-delivery and delayed refunds, but it’s hanging in there with this revision of its 27-inch 4K gaming panel. It started off as a fairly conventional 4K monitor with a matte anti-glare coating, then it went glossy. Now, we’ve got a further iteration, using Corning’s Gorilla Glass with DXC. The glossy version was a game changer; it made a huge difference to the contrast levels, so it’s exciting to see what the new Corning Gorilla Glass version—the first gaming monitor to offer it—can deliver. The pitch is that it will handle reflections better and offer more robust anti-abrasion protection, while maintaining the contrast advantages of a more conventional glossy panel. The anti-abrasion bit…

THIS MIGHT JUST BE the best-value M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD we’ve found—one that not only delivers big on the storage per $ front, but doesn’t sacrifice performance while it does it. Yep, we’re talking about the Crucial T500. We might not have been quite as impressed with the T700 Pro, but the T500 hits all the right marks. At its heart, it’s a super-speedy PCIe 4.0 drive, with sequentials listed at 7,400 and 7,000 MB/s and random read/write IOPS at 1,180K / 1,440K respectively. You can pick one up in two variants, either with or without a heatsink, and it features an impeccable 1200 TBW endurance rating and a five-year warranty. The NAND flash at its core is the real showpiece, however. It’s powered by Micron’s 232-layer NAND Flash tech—according…

PICTURE THE SCENE: four soldiers make a desperate scramble for their dropship on an alien planet, pursued by enormous, dagger-clawed bugs. Machine gun fire rattles, green goo erupts, the landing pad teems with beasts as the quartet piles through the boarding hatch, and their ride blasts off at the last available second. It could be a Hollywood action sequence, but in Helldivers 2, it's merely the end of another mission. Indeed, it's amazing just how often a Helldivers 2 sortie climaxes in screaming, skin-of-the-teeth heroics. It remains exciting time after time because that Hollywood ending is never guaranteed. Maybe you get tagged yards from completing your great escape, or maybe by a spray of bullets from a wheeling teammate. Speaking of teammates, this is a four-player squad shooter (solo play…

> All-AMD Build > Windows Where? > UK Pricing Woes AMD on a budget I was wondering if there was any reason why you haven’t done a $1,300 AMD build for a while, and if there was any likelihood you’ll be doing one in the near future? That would be very much appreciated. I have the budget, and think it’s time for me to pull the trigger! – Andrew S. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, GUY COCKER, RESPONDS: Thanks for the request and the build challenge—we always love to receive them! We haven’t done an AMD build at that budget for a while, you’re right, but with AMD’s new Ryzen 7 7800G chip (reviewed on page 78), or even the $549 Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card released this month (read more on page 11),…