Table of contents for May 2022 in Maximum PC

I STARTED my journalism career on a home theater publication, where I cut my teeth reviewing televisions, speakers, and amplifiers. So, when our writer Sam pitched the idea of building a living room PC for this issue, naturally, I said yes. The resulting build is stylish and compact but highly customizable, thanks to Intel’s NUC 12 Extreme barebones PC. Sam built a machine that games, streams, and even works like a champ, while being easy to tuck away behind a TV or in an AV cabinet. You can follow his guide on page 16. Sam’s build highlights what a successful return to the living room the PC has made in the last couple of years. More televisions support Variable Refresh Rate standards from AMD and Nvidia, while GPUs and laptops…

IT’S FAIR TO SAY Google’s Stadia hasn’t been a roaring success. Game streaming is a sound idea, but Stadia has struggled to deliver the performance the top titles need. It’s still alive, but the push into the consumer market looks half-hearted at best. At the Game Developers’ Conference, Google renamed the white label version of Stadia to “Immersive Stream for Games”. This is open to third parties who can use all that development to provide their own streaming games without any Google branding. The first to benefit was AT&T, which is offering Batman: Arkham Knight to its customers. Google has a habit of dropping projects if they don’t work immediately. It killed its own Stadia game studio before that could produce an original game and the new free Stadia account,…

TOP-FLIGHT GRAPHICS cards are notoriously power-hungry. The next generation of Nvidia RTX 4000 cards will continue this trend, and rumor has it that the AD102 GPU will debut with 450W and 600W versions, but talk of an 850W version is wild (think of the cooling that would need). AMD’s next generation of cards, due later this year, is based on RDNA 3 silicon. Power requirements are expected to be less dramatic, but at 450-480W, not exactly parsimonious either. To feed these cards, Intel has its new ATX 3.0 power supply specification, which was finalized in February. It’s the first big change to the ATX standard since version 2.3 in 2007, which removed the 20A limit on the 12V rails. Expect it to be adopted quickly, cards have already outgrown the…

Actually, GPUs will probably be cheaper still by the time you read these words. Reports of graphics card prices falling off a cliff are coming in from across the globe. In Australia, the Asus GeForce RTX 3080 TUF Gaming OC plummeted from AU$2,299 to AU$1,499 overnight, an incredible drop of 35 percent from one day to the next. That’s still around 50 percent above the AU$999 MSRP for a reference Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, but it’s a huge step in the right direction. Similarly, in Europe, RTX 3090s have dipped below 2,000 for the first time since March 2021. Back in the US, RTX 3080 pricing now starts a little over $1,000. Likewise, that’s well above the 3080’s rather notional $699 MSRP, which now seems like an incredible deal. But…

AS MUCH as we all enjoy the journey, the end product is where we can start to get properly excited and dig deep into the build. Granted, this was a slightly different approach to our typical builds as we were taking a look at Intel’s new NUC 12 Extreme kit, codenamed the ‘Dragon Canyon’. Usually, when working on smaller builds this means an abundance of head-scratching, tight spaces, and not a lot of clearance. Although the latter point is valid in this build, and we did have a bit of head-scratching when it came to opening up the case, the rest of the build went pretty smoothly. The Intel NUC’s interior space has been designed incredibly efficiently to house a range of high-performance components in such a small form factor,…

AS A MEASURE of just how successful the Phison E18 PCIe Gen 4 controller chip for SSDs has become, consider that the Kingston Fury Renegade 2TB isn’t even alone among Kingston’s M.2 drives in using it. The Kingston KC3000 also packs the E18 controller. Among the SSDs tested this issue, you can also add the PNY XLR8 CS3140 and Seagate Firecuda 530 to the list of E18 groupies. All of which begs the question why? What is it that makes the E18 so popular? The Phison PS5018-E18, to use its full nomenclature, is an eightchannel controller produced on TSMC’s 12nm process. It comes configured with five CPU cores in total, three of which use ARM’s Cortex R5 IP with the remaining two designed by Phison itself. All told, Phison reckons…

FOR AN AWFULLY long time, Samsung was the gold standard when it came to SSDs. Year after year, when Samsung released its latest premium SSD, it went straight to the top of the performance tables. It was a textbook example of how the sheer engineering might of one of the world’s biggest tech companies made for a competitive advantage. Funnily enough, that was still pretty much the case when Samsung wheeled out the standard 980 Pro. And this 980 Pro Heatsink 1TB is largely the same drive. So, that makes it a nailed-on certainty for the win, right? Actually, no. The problem is that the 980 Pro was launched way back in the Fall of 2020. The market has since moved on and the 980 Pro has been marginally overtaken.…

With any group test, there’s always one that got away. That was particularly likely with this gathering of high-performance PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSDs. After all, the market is positively heaving with options, all of them seriously speedy. The most conspicuous absence, however, has to be the WD Black SN850. The 2TB version can be had for around $265, which puts it right in the XPG Gammix S70 2TB’s wheelhouse. But the SN850 has some conspicuous performance advantages. As you’d expect, it puts out really big sequential numbers. But so do all the other drives. Instead, it’s the trickier—and arguably more critical for that sense of day-to-day response and performance—4K random performance where the WD Black SN850 makes its mark. In our previous testing, it cranks out a whisker over 90MB/s…

WHEN THE FINE FOLKS at Backforce offered us our own Maximum PC gaming chair, we jumped at the chance, if only to stop the guys and girls at PC Gamer from stealing our seat. The “Max PC” customization is subtle rather than a full-on bespoke affair, but it highlights how Backforce can add this kind of neat personal touch to its chairs. Tell them the words and colors you’d like emblazoned on the velcro shoulder strips, and they’ll make it happen for just $13. There’s a lot more to be excited about than lapels on the Backforce One, though, including customizable lighting, folding armrests, and a tailored color scheme that can be matched to your personal tastes or eSports team of choice. In the flesh (well, polyurethane leather), the chair…

As we were writing this feature, a company-wide email appeared with a familiar beginning: “The IT department is investigating an outage”. This time it was the corporate VPN that was out and, since most staff were working from home, they were unable to access corporate services. For us, that meant no fonts, no Creative Cloud license validations, and we couldn’t even log into the IT Helpdesk to make them aware of our disgruntlement. But what we should say is that corporate VPNs are (when they work) a good thing. This, despite using some of the same technologies (for example, OpenVPN) they are used for entirely opposite purposes to the shady VPNs we’re on about. Businesses use their VPNs to restrict access to resources and use hardware appliances to achieve this.…

The other popular way to roll your own open-source VPN is with the OpenVPN protocol. This is a much more complicated beast than WireGuard, but it’s still easy enough to get started with a simple setup. This all relies on you having access to a remote server (if you want to use a VPN in the conventional way), and on you being confident that said server won’t be compromised. Because if it was there’s not much point in running a VPN on it. We’re not going to recommend any commercial service over any other, but we’d consider Mozilla a force for good in a world full of Metas and Alphabets and Yahoo! And it so happens you can support them by subscribing to their VPN service. It uses WireGuard (without…

TIP OF THE MONTH XBOX APP FIX If the Xbox app isn’t loading, or you are unable to download your selected titles, there are several things you can do. First, head to the date & time settings and sync your time. Then, head to the apps & features menu, find the Xbox app, click on the three dots. Select advanced options, then scroll down and click on repair. If this doesn’t fix the problem, hit reset and this should resolve these issues. MAKE – USE – CREATE 60 Hints and tips to keep Windows 11 running smoothly. 64 The Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer, an American classic. 66 Colorize vintage pics using GIMP editing software. HANDS-FREE ENTERTAINMENT The Amazon Echo Auto has helped me and my girlfriend out by modernizing her…

1. PROCESSES This tab offers a handy view of everything—from Store apps and desktop programs to background services—running on your PC. Items are split into three sections: Apps, Background processes, and Windows Processes. 2. PERFORMANCE From here, you can monitor the performance of key hardware. A chart provides historic data for the past 60 seconds, while you also get to see real-time stats and key info about each component. 3. APP HISTORY/STARTUP While the former provides a means of monitoring the resource usage of any running apps you’ve installed through the Microsoft Store, the latter offers a comprehensive list of programs and apps set to start with Windows, complete with a rough estimate of their impact on start-up times. 4. USERS If multiple users are logged on to your PC,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A COPY OF VCC Downloads are provided on the project’s GitHub page. Extra system ROMs not required. https://github.com/VCCE/VCC/releases THIS MONTH we explore a true American classic: the TRS-80 Color Computer, otherwise known as “CoCo” for short. Not to be confused with the original TRS-80 manufactured in the late 1970s, the CoCo was to be a new system for the 1980s, designed to take on Apple and Commodore with something more affordable, and in color no less. The CoCo provides a sizeable library for any 8-bit enthusiasts. Unfortunately, running this software can be a tricky process, so we will guide you through the steps needed to emulate this groundbreaking machine. 1 DEVELOPMENT AND RELEASE The CoCo began life as a VideoTex terminal designed to provide farmers with access…

YOU’LL NEED THIS JOPLIN (https://joplinapp.org) Plus supported cloud service for syncing your notes. WE SPENT MANY A YEAR EXPERIMENTING with note-taking tools, looking for the perfect cross-platform service. And then we stumbled on Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/). It’s completely free to use, open-source, and works across all major desktop and mobile platforms, so you can easily access and update your notes from anywhere. Joplin is perfect whether you’re looking to record basic text-only notes or emulate the rich text features found in paid-for products, such as Evernote—from markdown-styled text to support for embedding images and even file attachments. You can type directly into the app or capture notes from the web using the free Joplin add-in for your web browser—available for Firefox and any browser with access to the Chrome web store.…

FOR AN ANSWER to the question posed above, you’ll have to wait for the next issue and our full review of the new Alienware AW3423DW QD-OLED panel, the first true OLED monitor for gamers. But what I can say right now, however, is that Alienware has got me thinking. As I soaked up the incredible contrast, colors, and speed, the question was whether it made every gaming monitor that came before it redundant. Is it really that good? In some ways it is. But by other measures, it doesn’t get off the starting line. In size and resolution terms, it’s an ordinary 34-inch monitor with a 3,440x 1,440 resolution. For pixel density, it is blown out of the water by any 4K gaming panel. Then there’s sheer scale, which is…

THE FIRST THING you should know about Valve’s Steam Deck is that despite its looks, this isn’t a Nintendo Switch alternative. It’s so much more than that. Sure, it looks like a handheld console, but Valve has made an impressively open and powerful device that’s actually more like a gaming laptop alternative. In that respect alone, it’s a triumph. For PC gamers with a Steam library, the Steam Deck gives you a ready-made collection of games—open up the Steam Deck, log in, and all your games will be waiting. Not every game is compatible with the Steam Deck, mainly because it runs Steam OS 3.0, a Linux-based distro, and relies on Proton, a software compatibility layer that allows Windows games to play on Linux. When it works, it works incredibly…

BARELY A MONTH goes by without AMD or Intel releasing something juicy. This month, it’s AMD’s turn with the launch of the first chip to use its innovative 3D V-Cache technology. The new Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a regular Ryzen with a slab of extra cache stuck on top using a direct copper bond (technically, it’s Through Silicon Vias (TSVs)—basically holes through the dies). The 5800X3D is an eight-core Zen 3 chip with a base clock of 3.4GHz and a maximum boost of 4.5GHz. It has 96MB of L3 cache, 64MB more than a ‘regular’ Ryzen 7 5800X. One side-effect is that the 5800X3D is AMD’s first Ryzen that you can’t overclock. The core voltage is locked at 1.35V, and there’s no wriggle room to push it further. At $449,…

A NEW FEATURE HAS POPPED UP in a Dev Channel Windows build that has proved most unwelcome—advertisements. These pop up in File Explorer, promoting just Microsoft Editor so far. The online response was rapid and vociferous, as you might expect. Microsoft said that the feature was “not intended to be published externally”, and has turned the ads off. The last time Microsoft tried to place ads in Windows, inserting them into a 2018 beta build of Windows Mail, it backtracked then, calling it an “experimental feature that was never intended to be tested broadly”. Though Microsoft experiments with new features in its development builds, its response isn’t particularly comforting, as it’s clearly still developing systems to include adverts in Windows. The company makes little profit from Windows sales, licenses for…

Built with 80 billion transistors on a custom TSMC 4N process (4nm Nvidia, not to be confused with the generic N4 that TSMC also offers), Hopper ups the ante in many ways. It supports a PCIe 5.0 interface, the first GPU to do so, as well as 4th generation NVLink, which can deliver up to 900GB/s of bandwidth, while PCIe 5.0 tops out at 128GB/s, 1.5x and double the bandwidth of the A100, respectively. H100 will have 80GB of HBM3 memory with 3TB/s of bandwidth, x1.5 faster than the A100’s HBM2E. The H100 can also deliver up to 2,000 TFLOPS of FP16 and 1,000 TFLOPS of TF32 compute—triple the performance of the A100. FP64 Hopper also adds improved FP8 support with up to 4,000 TFLOPS of compute, six times faster…

> All-in-one laptop > SSD Win11 bug > Transfer Windows 10 PC TV? I have a TV hanging on the wall of my kitchen. It’s nice, but it’s not a computer. How can I get a microcomputer glued to its back panel with Bluetooth connections to a keyboard and mouse? I was thinking about stripping down an old laptop, attaching its working parts to the back of the TV, and using a wireless mouse and keyboard with it. It would need Wi-Fi, as well as Windows. —Gary Dent THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: The problem with stripping down a laptop is that its parts have been custom designed for that specific model and manufacturer, and the case designed around it. While some laptops are easier to disassemble than others—Google your manufacturer and…

IT TOOK ITS MERRY TIME. But with the latest 12th Gen Alder Lake CPU family, Intel can finally support PCIe Express Gen 4 on the desktop. Better 18 months later than AMD and its PCIe 4.0-capable Ryzen 3000 CPUs than never, huh? Whatever. You now have free reign to build a PC based on a platform from either of the core hardware vendors without worrying about interconnect spec. As for why PCIe 4.0 matters, as ever, it comes down to speed. If you want the fastest connection speed for peripherals, you need PCIe Gen 4. And if there’s a single component that benefits most from more PCIe bandwidth, it’s storage. Gen 4 doubles theoretical bandwidth over Gen 3 to fully 8GB/s in both directions. Thanks to AMD’s early move in…

GIVE IT UP FOR our second Phison E18-based drive, the PNY XLR8 CS3140. Handily, we have the PNY in 1TB format, allowing a look at both 1TB and 2TB drives with the controller du jour for drive integrators who don’t have the desire or means to do one in-house. PNY is pretty punchy about the performance of this drive, claiming an eye-popping 7,500MB/s per second for sequential read performance, which is as fast as we can recall for a single consumer NAND-based SSD. For what it’s worth, that figure is also higher than the supposed maximum speed Phison claims for the E18 controller used by the CS3140. Make of that what you will. Inevitably, writes are a little tardier at 5,650MB/s, which is actually in excess of 1GB/s slower than…

JUST WHEN you were beginning to think that Phison had a complete stranglehold on the third-party SSD controller market, here comes the XPG Gammix S70 to blow that notion away. Lift this M.2 drive’s beefy alloy lid and you’ll find none other than an InnoGrit IG5236 chip, which is somewhat intriguing. So, what can we tell you about the InnoGrit IG5236? It’s a multi-core controller with NVMe 1.4 support, eight memory channels, and a quad-lane PCIe 4.0 interface. Like the Phison E18, it’s built on TSMC’s 12nm FinFET process, which bodes well for things like clockspeeds, thermals, and efficiency. Of course, merely being novel isn’t going to cut it. Nor is multiple gigabytes of bandwidth in each direction. The SSD market is thick with PCIe Gen 4 drives that can…

THANKS TO THE WONDERS of open source, it is possible to run your own VPN. Depending on your purposes (i.e. if you want to break rules), this might not be for you. But if you want a secure tunnel to your home connection or a VPS (virtual private server) when you’re away, then we’ll show you how. Before that though, let’s look at a lesser-known feature of another jewel of FLOSS, OpenSSH. As it happens it’s full of hidden gems. For example, during an SSH session, if you type Enter then ~ then C, you can access a super-secret command shell, from which you can add any port forwarding options. Very handy if you forgot to add them when you initiated the session. See the box (below) for how to…

YOU’LL NEED THIS GIMP 2.1 OS: Windows 7 or newer OVER THE PAST YEAR OR SO, we’ve featured a variety of image manipulation tutorials that have covered a range of tasks. These programs are often powerful tools, but they also tend to cost a fair amount. Our go-to photo-editing program is usually Adobe Photoshop, but this can be a pricey tool, particularly if it comes as part of a subscription to the Adobe suite. However, there are plenty of alternatives, such as GIMP, that offer a similar outcome for free. Although it doesn’t have the most instantly appealing name, GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Granted, this application doesn’t have the finesse and the overall shine that Photoshop does, but it’s still a useful program, particularly for…

WITH GRAPHICS CARD shortages still plaguing the world, the fine folks at Nvidia thought what we needed was another extreme GPU priced over $1,000. Shakespeare might opine that a GPU rose by any other name would perform just as fast—or, alternatively, a 3080 Ti by a different name would cost as much. You can easily imagine the wheels churning behind the scenes. When every GPU produced gets sold immediately, typically at massively inflated prices, why bother with lower-priced models? The RTX 3080 10GB that launched in September 2020 supposedly starts at $700, though it still routinely sells for $1,300 or more. Meanwhile, the RTX 3080 Ti starts at $1,200, but online goes for closer to $1,700. If Nvidia is getting a fair number of GA102 chips that have all 12…

MAYBE WE NEED to get out more, but there was genuine excitement when the new Dell Ultrasharp U3223QE, a sober-suited 32-inch monitor designed primarily for productivity, landed at Maximum PC. The U3223QE has limited HDR support, no local dimming, runs at a mere 60Hz, doesn’t have quantum dots or lots of tiny LED backlights. It isn’t even curved. So what’s the big deal? Dell claims it is the first use of ‘IPS Black’ technology from LG, the first company to mass-produce IPS panels. IPS Black improves the contrast performance of IPS panels to fully 2,000:1. That’s a big boost over the best existing IPS screens, which are good for 1,300:1 and have been stuck at that level for nearly a decade. Many current IPS screens only manage 1,000:1. Of course,…

IF YOU’RE THINKING ABOUT switching up your living room rig or want to move away from a traditional display, choosing a projector is certainly one way to do it. It isn’t the easiest transition to make—projectors don’t generally offer the same high-quality image that you’d expect from a 4K monitor or TV set but, slowly and surely, the quality is improving. Of course, the projector has a few other factors to contend with, such as the need to block out sunlight and the practicality of mounting a projector to a ceiling, but a range of powerful and altogether more portable devices have entered the market that could make owning a projector a viable option. One such device is the XGIMI Halo+. Does it achieve its goal, or is this projection…

HOWEVER IMPRESSIVE your setup may be, it can easily be hindered by your choice of peripherals. Whether that's a controller or a mouse and keyboard combo, to get the most seamless gaming experience from your rig you need accessories to match. If you're considering going down the controller route, you'll probably have come across SCUF and the Instinct Pro, its latest controller for the PC and Xbox. The Instinct Pro sits at the top of its lineup alongside its PlayStation counterparts, so is it worth upgrading to a pro controller from the standard Xbox model, and how does it fare against the Xbox Elite Series 2? At a glance, it looks like a typical Xbox controller, though our review sample features a rather neat custom dragon faceplate or, as SCUF…

LET’S GET THE elephant in the room out of the way first. Elden Ring is a Souls game. From Software’s string of action RPGs have a reputation for being brutally hard and unforgiving. From the original Demon’s Souls in 2 09, via the main Dark Souls trilogy and Eldritchs pinoff Bloodborne, players have thrown themselves against the twin terrors of a game world designed to make them suffer, and gigantic bosses with matching health bars built to hammer home the point. Sometimes literally. However, Elden Ring sees the Souls game, previously a Metroidvania-like dungeon-crawl that offered little sympathy to the underpowered character (or even those who found the controller a bit awkward to use) take a new approach. There’s nothing as scandalous as an Easy mode, but the open-world setting…

AMD HAS A PAIR OF DRIVER UPDATES for its Radeon cards. First is RSR (Radeon Super Resolution), which is available now (driver version 22.3.1). It enables a wider range of games to use upscaling with FSR (Fidelity FX Super Resolution) and is supported on all Radeon RX 5000 series cards (it needs an RDNA-based GPU). You won’t get the full FSR effect but you do get a healthy jump in speed. AMD claims RSR will give between two to three times the frame rate when you upscale 1080p to 4K. However, the results are better if you step up from 1440p or more. This summer, we’ll also get FSR 2.0. The original FSR uses spacial upscaling (each frame is re-rendered in one pass), whereas version 2.0 introduces a temporal element…

THE PANDEMIC made a complete mess of chip supplies and graphics card prices went through the roof, though now the end of this situation is in sight. Before we get too excited, we are still paying over the odds, but that’s improving rapidly. There are many factors at play, including the volatile cryptocurrency market, which has affected prices under restricted supplies. February saw a decent reduction in graphics card prices, and the latest figures put March’s drop at about 12 percent. We’ve even heard of basic cards selling at near the recommended retail price, but generally, the premium ranges from 20 to 60 percent depending on the card. A survey by online retailer Newegg put a GeForce RTX 3070 at a premium of 70 percent, while an RTX 3080 Ti…

GENERALLY SPEAKING, desktop PCs are our forte, but we don’t want to shy away from the obscurities out there. Mini form factor machines have always caught our eye, though their inherent restrictions and performance limitations can often dampen our initial interest. However, Intel’s latest NUC 12 Extreme ‘Dragon Canyon’ kits have well and truly sparked that fire in our bellies and we are looking forward to getting right into this rig. We’ll be tweaking this system to create a small, minimalistic home media and couch gaming system. To spice things up, we’ll be pairing it with XGIMI’s Halo Plus projector. This little companion will sit alongside the NUC 12 on a shelf to provide a discreet setup. There’s something exciting about playing games on the big screen and you can’t…

JUST NINE DOLLARS. That’s how much extra you currently have to pay for the Crucial P5 Plus 1TB with PCIe Gen 4 capability over the older Crucial P5 Gen 3 drive. The plain old P5, should we need to remind you, returns barely more than half the performance by several measures. Even if you don’t have a Gen 4 capable rig right now, it surely makes sense to go with the Gen 4 drive and future-proof your storage for any possible CPU and motherboard upgrade. With that in mind, it’s not a huge surprise to find the Crucial P5 Plus is the cheapest drive on test. Less than $130 for 1TB’s worth of Gen 4 goodness in an M.2 package? Sign us up! It’s not as if this drive cuts…

FUNNY OLD THING, the storage market. You might have expected the traditional magnetic drive outfits to pile heavily into solid-state storage. After all, the writing isn’t just on the wall for those magnetic platters, it’s burned right into their spinning surfaces. It’s not that the future is solid-state, the shift has already happened. Until now, the exception has been WD, with the SN850 Black being a particular success and one of the best of the current generation of PCIe Gen 4 drives (read about the SN850 at the end of the group test). But Seagate? While it has been active in the SSD market, it hasn’t exactly made headlines. That deserves to change with the new Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB. It’s a very good drive. Surprisingly, given Seagate’s status as…

SIX SPEEDY M.2 SSDS. A zillion benchmarks. And a whole hill of specs. But what have we learned? Firstly, the quality of current SSDs is very high. There absolutely isn’t a dud here. Every single drive would be an electrifying upgrade for a system based on something like an old SATA SSD. Indeed, it’s remarkable to think 7GB-plus per second of bandwidth is rapidly becoming the norm. You don’t have to be as old as Ulysses S. Grant to remember when that kind of bandwidth was decent for a CPU, let alone storage. If there is a disappointment it involves 4K random access performance. It’s those tiny little data requests and writes that can make the difference to how snappy your PC feels in regular use. While random access throughput…

NAILING DOWN the games of 2022—what’s left of it, at least—proved to be trickier than in previous years. There is a distinct lack of concrete release dates out there, with developers preferring to take an ‘it’ll be done when it’s done’ approach instead of killing themselves with 80-hour weeks as they crunch toward an unwise deadline. And that’s just fine. After all, the more game developers who are left alive, the more games we get to play. There’s also a dearth of big names. There’s no Call of Duty coming out this year. No new GTA, unless you count another re-release of V. No Assassin’s Creed nor Far Cry. No Halo, no Doom, no Civ… the list of absences goes on. This leaves room for the other players, at least.…

We’ve seen that there are other ways users can be identified besides their IP address. One we haven’t yet discussed in detail is browser fingerprinting. Even without recourse to the User Agent string, which can easily be falsified, everyone’s browser, it turns out, behaves a little bit uniquely. Specifically, different fonts (or JavaScript-constructed canvas elements) will render slightly differently on different systems with different resolutions. Likewise, everyone has their own WebGL attributes and their own set of headers that any old web page can happily request. All of these variables can be measured, and there’s sufficient variety that by studying a handful of metrics, website operators can uniquely fingerprint your browser. The Tor Browser takes steps to block browser fingerprinting, with the goal that all Tor Browser users appear more…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ANY WINDOWS PC Process Explorer (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer) IN THIS FIRST TUTORIAL in a new series showcasing how to get more from your Windows 11 setup, we’re starting with a detailed look at what’s going on under the hood of your machine. You may not currently care that, behind the scenes, your Windows installation is performing a complicated juggling routine involving a tangled web of applications, services, processes, threads, and handles, but we suspect that outlook will change the moment your system starts to slow down, become non-responsive, or prone to crashing. Knowledge is power, and there are two primary tools that can help you peer behind the scenes to determine what’s going on, identify areas of concern, and even in some cases, restore non-responsive applications to life without…

If you’re unfamiliar with GIMP, the best place to head to first is the official website. Here, you can download the latest version (2.10.30) and learn about this open-source program. For beginners, it makes sense to use this application to see whether photo manipulation is something you can do and that you enjoy before you spend a dime. You can also head to the tutorials section if you’re just starting from scratch. These are simple, yet informative lessons that give you a full rundown on the application and how to get to grips with it. Like most things, it can be quite daunting to use a new program, but the more and more you use it, the easier it gets to work your way around it. Switching to GIMP from…

AWAY FROM THE WORLD of performance PCs, this month I played with two brand new powerhouse phones—the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and the Redmagic 7 Pro. In the blue corner, Samsung brings a raft of premium features, including top-of-the-line cameras, the brightest phone screen ever, and the much-loved S Pen stylus. In the red corner, Redmagic offers gaming-optimized shoulder triggers, fast 960Hz touch sampling, and 18GB of RAM (that’s more than in my gaming laptop, and that runs God of War at max settings). While these two phones serve different audiences in the real world, I found that using them side-by-side played to my two conflicting interests in an almost Jekyll & Hyde manner. During the day, I love having the Samsung and its pen for making notes, a brilliant…

THE ONLY ANDROID tablet to really take on Apple’s iPad Pro at the premium end of the market so far is the $850 Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+, released back in August 2020. It turns out that wasn’t premium enough for the Korean manufacturer, so now we have the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra. The “U-word” has been rolled out for the first time to denote, as on the Galaxy phone line, that this is the very best in the range. So what makes this $1,099 tablet so Ultra, given that the S8+ also still exists for $899? It’s all about the screen—a ridiculous 14.6-inch OLED 120Hz display that’s nearly as big as most 15-inch laptop panels. The Ultra model also boasts the thinnest body ever on a Samsung tablet at just…

WHEN THE FIRST NETGEAR Orbi arrived in 2016, mesh Wi-Fi systems were largely the domain of offices managed by IT professionals. But as homes started to absorb more smart devices and faster internet, they began to be released in kits sold by the likes of Amazon. Six years on, gigabit internet-enabled homes and WiFi 6 devices are becoming the norm. Netgear has responded with the Orbi AXE11000, which is on the cutting-edge of networking standards. Top of the spec sheet is WiFi 6E support for devices with a theoretical maximum 4800Mbps throughput. Wired networking is equally fancy, each node boasting a 2.5G ethernet port, with a 10G internet port on the router. The catch is the $1,499 price tag. If you have lots of WiFi 6E devices, a computer or…

HAVING BEEN AROUND since 2017, Elgato’s quirky little macro switches have made a name for themselves in the creative, live streaming, and gaming circles. If you like keeping your desktop setup neat and tidy, the idea of adding another peripheral may not be appealing. However, this one is designed primarily to streamline your work and to make your PC experience as efficient as possible. So, should you add a Stream Deck to your desk or stick to the old school mouse and keyboard method? There are several variants in Elgato's Stream Deck lineup. There is the original model, the XL version, the Mini, the mobile app, and the pedal accessory. The one we have on test here, the MK.2, is a revamp of the original version. It now features 15…

WE TAKE THE WORSHIP of the dark gods seriously here at Maximum PC. When it’s not the simple brute-force power exemplified by Khorne we’re getting excited about, it’s the serpentiform Slaaneshi curves of a liquid cooling system, or whatever Tzeentchian sorcery makes PCs work in the first place. Sorry, Nurgle, we haven’t worked out a tortured metaphor for you, yet. The injection of Warhammer’s chaos gods into Total War for its third installment based on the tabletop war game is just the shake-up that the game we aren’t supposed to call 'Total Warhammer' needs. While the second installment arrived bearing new races, the third wasn’t going to get away so easily. A heavy dose of sorcery to join the swords makes the game feel fresh again. So what’s new? The…