Table of contents for April 2022 in Maximum PC

WHEN I JOINED Maximum PC last month, my immediate concerns were meeting the team, getting stuck in to our publishing systems, and, of course, getting a magazine out four weeks later (quite important, that last one). By virtue of the fact that my face still appears above, I can confidently say: Mission Accomplished. However, little did I know that I was being eased in gently for a much bigger task this month: tackling the mountain of equipment that had built up at Maximum PC towers. No one had warned me that we were on the verge of a PC peripheral-based avalanche so big, it would only be matched by the ensuing mountain of HR paperwork if it ever fell on anyone. Ever the resourceful editor though, I thought about how I could…

INSTALLING A FRESH copy of Windows 11 Home requires a Microsoft account, and always has done. There is a fiddly and undocumented way to avoid this, but it’s not something your average user is likely to know about. It hasn’t been a popular move and makes Windows the only major OS that requires an online account to use. That isn’t always practical or desired as it makes it a pain to pass on a rig or for third parties to repair it, as you often need to know the account details. Microsoft has decided to add this restriction to Windows 11 Pro, too. Currently, it’s only part of an insider build but it’s planned to go live soon. This hasn’t gone down well with the typical ‘Pro’ user, who expects…

At least, that was the usual refrain. Not only did it never happen, but if anything the PC is in ruder health than it’s ever been. What’s more, the next 18 months or so are set to be even more special. A rapid-fire product assault is coming from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, the likes of which we’ve never seen. Arguably it all started in 2014 when Lisa Su took over AMD and set about knocking PC hardware’s perennial underperformer into shape. AMD’s renaissance has forced Intel and Nvidia to up their game and PC enthusiasts are set to benefit. On the PC processor side, Intel will follow up the impressive Alder Lake architecture with Raptor Lake later this year. There’s a chance it might arrive less than a year after…

IF YOU’RE reading this magazine, there’s a good chance the Lenovo 500e isn’t really for you. If you’ve got kids in your life though, keep reading, because this Chromebook encapsulates the focus on education Google had when creating ChromeOS. Plenty of Chromebooks are aimed at schoolchildren, so it would have been remiss of us not to include one in our breakdown. The 500e (2nd generation) is, if we’re being honest, a bit ugly. The exterior is rubberized plastic with a grippy textured finish, which looks bad but is ultimately designed for small hands and a laissez-faire attitude to hardware safety. It feels durable; you could throw this Chromebook into a locker or backpack without having to worry about protection. The 360-degree hinge feels similarly robust. Unlike every other device featured…

THE ACER SWIFT series of notebooks has been around for a while, but the Swift X is a step forward for the manufacturer. While previous Swift models ran the gamut of budget to premium, the Swift X is looking to be all things to all people—discrete graphics for gaming and creative tasks, a powerful Ryzen 5000 CPU, all-day battery life, and a sleek, lightweight form factor. In terms of physical design, at least, it holds up to this ethos well. It’s certainly not the thinnest nor lightest ultrabook on the market, but it’s perfectly portable at 3.33lbs and keeps its screen bezel small despite a decently sized 14-inch display. This LCD IPS panel isn’t a touch screen, unlike the other laptops it’s up against, but it’s a nice screen nonetheless;…

There were plenty of Chromebooks we would have loved to feature in this article but couldn’t due to time constraints or hardware availability. The big one was Google’s own Pixelbook Go, a premium Chromebook that offers the best of what the platform can do. The Go features a sturdy but thin design, stellar battery life, and one of the best keyboards found on any notebook laptop. Higher-spec models also offer a 1080p webcam and even a 4K touch display. We’d also point the ChromeOS curious towards Lenovo’s IdeaPad Duet, a Chromebook with a detachable keyboard for a true tablet experience. The Duet’s hardware specs are modest (4GB of RAM and a MediaTek ARM processor) but given its sub-$300 price tag, we can’t be too critical. HP’s Chromebook x2 11 also uses…

YOU’LL NEED THIS FL STUDIO 20 www.image-line.com LAST ISSUE, we focused on one of the most important parts of creating an audio production—the drumbeat. The beat is the foundation to any song, and while you don’t have to use drums as any instrument can make a beat, drums are as good a place as an to start on FL Studio. If you haven’t done so already, check out our previous tutorial before you try this one out. This month, we’ll be turning our attention to creating some notes in a track using the piano roll. Before you start panicking, you don’t need to be familiar with all of Mozart’s work in order to achieve this. Even the folks here at Maximum PC can put something together with rhythm and we…

YOU’LL NEED THIS LUMINAR NEO (OUT LATE 2022) https://skylum.com/ Images to edit LUMINAR IS AN IMAGE EDITING APP that we’ve covered before through a couple of previous incarnations and now the time has come for another new version. Luminar Neo is the latest edition, due for release later in 2022, but Maximum PC has managed to get hold of a special pre-release version to show you the kinds of things its AI-powered tools are capable of. Neo brings together features from the previous Luminar 4 and Luminar AI releases and adds some new stuff of its own. Since its launch in 2016 as a Mac-only app, Luminar has gained features and Windows compatibility, concentrating on effects that can be achieved with sliders and automatic selections rather than requiring a great deal…

SUSTAINABILITY is an undeniably tricky issue for the PC hardware industry. Mining the resources needed to manufacture computer components has a significant environmental impact, and those components are shipped around the globe in pollution-spewing cargo ships and heavy goods vehicles. Then there’s the energy usage; powerful PCs glug down electricity and spew out heat, with crypto mining proving to be a significant contributor to global CO2 emissions. One eco-friendly laptop isn’t going to fix everything, but that doesn’t mean it can’t try. Acer has pulled out all the stops to produce its first super-green computer, the Aspire Vero. Every aspect of the Vero’s design has sustainability in mind—the outer casing is made of post-consumer-recycled (PCR) plastics and the keycaps are 50 percent PCR. The chassis is paint-free to reduce manufacturing…

AS A SETTING, ancient Rome has much to recommend it. There’s the strong military culture, the mad gods, the orgies, the wine, gladiators, philosophers in togas (or was that Greece?), and a general lack of medical care. Expeditions: Rome takes that military culture and spins it into a turn-based RPG in which you, as the scion of a famous leader, take command of armies and do an awful lot of talking. It starts off small, as you lead a disparate group you’ve met on a boat to Lesbos to kill guards and blow up ships with Greek fire, but scales into the command of whole legions, besieged cities, and doing more and more of the aforementioned conversing. Standing between you and all this is the character creator, which allows you…

> More Letters, Less iFixit! > Get Good at GIMP > Sub-par $2K laptops iDontFixIt I’m a long-time subscriber to Maximum PC, and I just wanted to say congratulations to Guy on being named the new Editor-in-Chief. Now, may I make a couple of suggestions? In general, I really enjoy the magazine. Probably some of the most informative items are ‘Doctor’ and ‘Letters’, so it would be terrific if those could be expanded. You probably have a page limit and so to do that, some things would have to go. I’d lose the iFixit and the PC Centerfold instead—iFixit is online and anyone can access it, while Centerfold could be one of the reviews in the back. Just some ideas for consideration. –N. Weinshenker EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, GUY COCKER, RESPONDS: First of…

EVERY YEAR, the big-wigs at Intel have a meeting with major investors to keep them up to date. There’s often plenty of stuff to interest consumers, but this year’s Investor Day proved to be particularly tasty. For starters, Raptor Lake, Intel’s 13th generation processor, had its first public demonstration and we also got some solid specs to chew over. Raptor Lake follows the same hybrid design as Alder Lake, but with up to 24 cores in all—eight performance and 16 efficiency cores, for a total of 32 threads. It will be socket-compatible with Alder Lake, so we won’t all have to invest in DDR5 memory at once. Intel claims Raptor Lake will offer a “double-digit” performance boost for single-thread operations, and more for multi-threaded applications. The top clock rate is expected…

WHEN A COMPANY FEELS the need to say a project is “doing great”, chances are all is not well, and that seems to be the case for Microsoft’s HoloLens project. The company came early to the world of mixed reality in 2016, and while the resulting HoloLens won acclaim, sales have been slow. Microsoft recently partnered with Samsung over future headsets, which has reportedly led to much internal strife, with allegations of in-fighting and staff leaving to join rivals. Officially, though, HoloLens is “doing great”, with Microsoft saying: “don’t believe what you read on the internet”. There has been one decent sale; last year, the US military signed a $22 billion deal for 120,000 customized HoloLens headsets. Even this is starting to look shaky, with rumored issues about the “quality”…

To recap, Bitcoin peaked at over $19,000 in late 2017, then dropped to around $4,000 by the end of 2018. Bitcoin prices fluctuated in the $4,000–$12,000 range until the latest surge in prices in 2020. Bitcoin passed the $20,000 mark in December 2020 and hasn’t looked back, with prices ranging from a low of $33,000 to a high of $65,000—though by the time you read this, it might have exceeded either of those boundaries. That volatility perhaps kept Intel from seriously pursuing mining at the time, but now it’s ready to dip its toe into the waters. The initial BMZ1 foray into cryptocurrency mining took a similar approach to other Bitcoin ASICs, packing about 137 GH/s of SHA-256 hashing power into a chip that measured just 14.2mm2. That tiny die…

> Dead PC? > Win11 update error > TPM 2.0 upgrade PC won’t post to BIOS I’ve had my computer since 2013: Intel i5-4670K, Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UDH3, 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz RAM (two 8GB sticks), housed in a Thermaltake case and powered by a CX Series 80 Plus Bronze CPU. When I try to boot, the PC turns on for about two seconds, then turns off and tries to reboot without success. I can’t even get into the BIOS. I’ve switched out the power supply, tried only one stick of memory, and switched out the CPU cooler to no avail. I suspect the motherboard is at fault, but nothing obvious shows on the board. Your advice would be appreciated. —Paul LoGrasso THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: Assuming you’ve already stripped the machine back…

CHROMEBOOKS—plucky little brother to the Windows laptop, typically trading performance for portability and ease of use. An affordable option for performing basic tasks such as word processing and web browsing. While Chromebooks may be disparaged by tech-heads, they’ve come a long way since their introduction in 2011. Google describes today’s ChromeOS laptops as ‘speedy, simple and secure’, with virus protection built-in and effective cloud-based storage for files and user data. So, how do modern Chromebooks compare to their Windows counterparts? We break down some of the best ChromeOS systems on the market right now—it’s about more than just performance, of course; value, ease of use, portability, and general hardware quality will all be factors. Will Chromebooks emerge victorious or should we stick to what we know best?…

THOUGH THE Acer Spin 513 sticks to the Chromebook script, with its touchscreen, hybrid tablet design, and underpowered speakers all par for the course, where the Spin 513 differs is its processor; rather than an Intel chip, this Chromebook uses a Qualcomm CPU. The Spin 513 is powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 7c processor, an octa-core CPU that promises to deliver industry-standard performance with Adreno integrated graphics while improving battery life and reducing heat generation. It’s an ARM-based chip, and ChromeOS is well-optimized for ARM, as are the Android apps available through the Play Store on every Chromebook. However, users who want greater flexibility to run virtual Linux environments are likely to run into compatibility troubles with some Linux apps. In terms of overall specs, the Spin 513 isn’t immediately…

AT $1,200, this is the most expensive product on this list. It’s still decidedly mid-range as laptops go, although you’ll struggle to spend that much money on a Chromebook. The Summit E13 Flip Evo works hard to justify its pricing, with some dedication on MSI’s part to make it feel like a premium ultrabook with a hybrid tablet design aimed at fast-movers. MSI is better known for its PC gaming rigs and components in the US, but it has cornered a decent share of the laptop market in Asia and every so often one of its best products makes the leap over. The Flip Evo is an eye-catching product, with a golden trim surrounding the edges of its black, machine-milled metal exterior. It’s thin and compact, reminiscent of pricier convertibles…

“DARPA was created when Sputnik went up,” says Crocker. “The US government got caught flat-footed in its space program and the agency was created to prevent technological surprises. The first thing it did was to gather the pieces of the space program together and then NASA was spun out of that.” It was an exciting start for the agency responsible for developing emerging technologies for use by the military, and its $520 million budget in 1958 ($3.427 billion in 2019) reflects this. Essentially, it takes new ideas, shakes them, sees what military applications drop out, then invests in making these happen. As a side-effect, interesting civilian and medical applications of technology tend to get discovered too. Take GPS and weather satellites. Both developed with DARPA investment to make it easier…

In the battle of voice assistants, the obvious winner is Apple’s Siri, right? After all, voice control is most commonly used on mobile devices and last year Microsoft actually ditched its Cortana app for Apple iOS and Google Android devices. Cortana was also nixed on the Xbox console back in 2019. Around the same time, Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, made it clear that Cortana was no longer going to compete directly with Siri or, indeed, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa in the AI assistant market. Instead, Nadella saw Cortana becoming a more specialized service that integrated with other voice assistants. In fact, while Cortana is part of Microsoft’s latest client OS, Windows 11, it has been demoted in terms of its prominence. It’s no longer part of the first-time boot ‘experience’…

TIP OF THE MONTH ACCOUNT KILLER Social media getting you down? Feel like chucking in the towel? Sometimes simply logging out of an account isn’t enough and the time has come to completely part ways. If you want to delete an account for good, go to www.accountkiller.com and type into the search bar the website where you have an account. Scroll down, follow all the steps and you should be able to fully kill it once and for all. Take that, Facebook! ↘ submit your How To project idea to: editor@maximumpc.com…

If you want to add some more sounds to Fruity Loops, a great place to start is the official website [www.image-line.com]. This store has plenty of loops and sample packs to check out. Implementing these into your tracks not only allows you to make many different songs, but can also add depth to your beats. The majority are paid for, but they start at relatively small amounts but go up to large packs with lots of sounds. You can also preview these sample packs and loops on the website to get a feel for which ones best suit your style, or simply to get some inspiration. Along the top, you can choose a genre, select whether you’d like to find loops or samples, search, and also sort the page. The…

1 MENUS Here’s the dropdown menu that replaces the usual menus at the top of the interface. 2 CATALOG Click here to find all the folders and individual images you’ve added to Luminar, ready to edit 3 EDIT The editing interface is where you will spend most of your time. 4 TOOLS A list of tools. Click on each to expand the sliders and add the effect to your image. Advanced options can be uncovered too. 5 EDITS A list of edits you’ve applied to the image. You can go back and further alter them, or remove them altogether. 6 ZOOM AND UNDO No Ctrl+Z here, so use the Eye to view the image, the zoom menu to change magnification, and Actions to undo.…

IN AN AGE where webcams have become a necessity, it can be a bit of a mission to actually find the right one. Whether you're using a webcam to catch up with family and friends, or you rely on video conferencing in your professional life, you need to choose one that can deliver reliable and clear images and sound. Typically, many people would turn to a brand such as Logitech, which has been in the webcam game since what feels like the dawn of the internet age. However, one alternative is a relative newcomer called Ausdom. Founded in 2014, it specializes in audio and conferencing peripherals and is becoming more prominent on the webcam front. So should you look past the old trusty favorites and instead turn to one of the…

THE MECHANICAL keyboard market is nothing if not saturated at this point. Gamers and typists alike are spoilt for choice, with a vast range of sizes, styles, and switches available. RGB lighting has become ubiquitous. Unique proprietary switches are becoming incredibly common, a marked shift from the days when the only widely available options were red/blue/brown Cherry and Gateron switches. Vissles is a newcomer to the market, founded in 2018 and launching its flagship mechanical keyboard, the V84, in 2021. In addition to its odd name, Vissles also has a weird slogan plastered all over its website and on the V84’s box: ‘Poppin Your Life With Ease’. The ‘About Us’ page isn’t forthcoming with an explanation. Perhaps it refers to how the original V84 (and the model we’re reviewing here, the…

GRAB THEM IF YOU CAN, because Crucial Ballistix memory modules have reached the end of the line. Ballistix has long been a favorite of modders, overclockers, and builders of awesome gaming rigs, but now the entire range has been axed, explaining why we’ve seen no announcements on DDR5 kit to date. Crucial is a consumer brand of Micron Technology, one of the big three with Samsung and Hynix. Why Micron pulled the plug isn’t clear, although its statement could give us a clue: “JEDEC standard DDR5 memory provides mainstream gamers with DDR5-enabled computers with better high-speed performance, data transfers, and bandwidth than previously available with Crucial Ballistix memory”. It seems that with modern manufacturing methods, pretty much every chip is a good one, and enthusiast memory modules aren’t a big…

A SHARP BUMP in the price of SSD kit will soon make its way down the supply chain thanks to a major ‘incident’. Western Digital revealed that, due to an unspecified contamination in the manufacturing process, it has scrapped up to 6.5 exabytes of 3D NAND chips. One exabyte is a billion gigabytes, so that’s a lot of lost silicon. The issue came to light after an inspection of production lines at the two fabrication plants at Yokkaichi and Kitakami in Japan, which are joint ventures between Western Digital and Kioxia. As yet, we don’t know officially if Kioxia, which used to be part of Toshiba and is credited with inventing flash memory, has anything significant to add to the losses. It released a statement saying it assumed there were issues…

With respect to all the accountants and spreadsheet wizards out there who couldn’t live without their numerical keypads, most gamers find them an unwelcome distraction between the main keys and the mouse. That’s why tenkeyless (also known as TKL) keyboards have become so popular recently, especially for those with limited desk space. So, this issue’s list focuses on five of our favorite TKL keyboards, aimed at gamers looking for the perfect compact setup. 5 STEELSERIES APEX 3 TKL The only non-mechanical keyboard on this list, the SteelSeries is still a fantastic board with lots of features. We love SteelSeries’ “Whisper-Quiet” switches that feel great to type on, the dedicated media controls, and PrismSync lighting control, but we don’t love the non-removable USB cable. SteelSeries also claims the Apex 3 TKL is…

DESPITE BEING A relatively high-end model, the Asus Chromebook Flip CX5’s $700 price tag puts it closer to the budget space, adrift in a market dominated by slick MacBooks and $1,000+ gaming laptops. The Flip CX5 needs to justify its price tag since it occupies that space between more powerful Windows laptops and more affordable Chromebooks. Out of the box, it’s off to a strong start. While Chromebooks have been price-sensitive machines, a design ethos that all too frequently extends to the build quality of the external casing, the Flip CX5 feels premium. It’s the heaviest of the three Chromebooks on test here and the largest too. The blue-tinted exterior looks great, with shiny metal hinges that feel remarkably sturdy. That’s a good thing given that this is a 2-in-1,…

HP’S PAVILION 15 range is broad, with prices ranging from this sensible $500 model to more powerful iterations with dedicated GPUs that run for around $1000. This version is a reserved affair, with a Ryzen 3 4300U processor, 8GB of DDR4 memory, and 256GB of speedy NVMe storage. The Pavilion 15’s defining feature is right there in the name: a lovely 15.6-inch touch panel, offering excellent brightness and plenty of screen real estate for productivity-focused users. The large display means a bigger overall size, so we’ve got a full-sized keyboard complete with numpad crammed in here too, as well as a nice wide trackpad that handled better than we’d expect for a $500 laptop. Despite the size, this is by far the cheapest of the Windows laptops on test here.…

WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM ALL THIS? Well, we won’t be making the switch to Chromebooks anytime soon, but then again we aren’t the target audience. When you spend your work hours drooling over high-performance hardware, Google’s sensibly-priced, security-focused laptops aren’t exactly a turn-on. But Chromebook design has come a long way from its origins (check out that Acer AC700, for instance!). Modern Chromebooks can match mid-range laptops for aesthetics; the Asus Chromebook Flip CX5 is the perfect example, combining thin-and-light design requirements with a clean, refined look. While older Chromebooks looked most at home in the IT rooms of elementary schools, cash-strapped university students no longer need to feel ashamed by their hardware if they opt for Chrome. If you’re on a tight budget or looking for ‘Baby’s First…

THE IDEA OF A NETWORK which spans the entire world is not a new one by any means. As far back as 1900, Nikola Tesla was dreaming of wireless power and message transmission, though sadly despite his claims, the chances are the wireless power part of the system would never have worked. Thinkers and theorists kicked the idea around for much of the early 20th century, coming up with ways that information could be stored and accessed long before the technology to build them was actually available. MIT computer scientist and later ARPA office head, JCR Licklider, put forward the somewhat optimistic idea of an ‘intergalactic computer network’ in the early 1960s, but his work did a lot to ground the idea in reality instead of science-fiction. His ideas about…

THE STEAM DECK IS HERE! Well, it might be, if you were quick off the mark with your pre-order. Yes, rather than a big launch, it seems as though Steam Decks are going to be drip-fed into the market for the rest of the year. Thankfully, we were able to get our paws on the finished hardware this month, so we wasted no time getting it into the studio. First of all, this is technically a portable console, but at 1.47lbs and nearly 12-inches across, it’s not going to slip into your pocket unless your jeans are very baggy indeed. Other than the limited portability, though, we’re impressed—the interface feels fairly comfortable, the screen is substantial and the AMD Zen 2 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU are impressively specced for…

This month, I decided to try out Xbox PC Game Pass—it’s essentially the Netflix formula for games—and have been downloading games left, right, and center. The only downside is that my SSD is getting close to its capacity. I’d already purchased Forza Horizon 5, which is available on Game Pass, so I could have saved a few bucks there, but with access to tons of other games, it’s easily worth $10 a month. Looking back, it’s strange that I hadn’t tried it out before, as I spend that much on games anyway, and this way, I get to try titles I wouldn’t necessarily have bought. On another note, I’ve ordered an Amazon Echo Auto for my partner’s car. She recently changed motors and the infotainment on the new one isn’t…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A COPY OF SIMCOUPE Windows and Linux are both supported. Extra BIOS files aren’t needed. http://www.simcoupe.org IF YOU’RE A FAN of obscure computing gems, you’re in for a treat this month. With sales figures only numbering in the thousands, the SAM Coupé is a true rarity and any working collection will cost a king’s ransom. However, this hasn’t stopped it from becoming a darling of the cult computing scene. The SAM Coupé sits in a strange gap between the 8-bit and 16-bit worlds, and uses some unusual hardware. The odd experience it provides has earned it many modern fans, and enthusiastic hobbyists are still developing new software and expansions for the machine. 1 DEVELOPMENT AND LAUNCH The Coupé was developed by Miles Gordon Technology (MGT), a Welsh…

This version of Luminar seems to have removed the useful ‘before and after’ view that allowed you to split an image with a movable boundary. Not only was it perfect for seeing precisely what had changed in your image, but for journalists preparing tutorials it allowed an effect to be shown in a single screenshot. So the pictures in this boxout are the original ones we used for two of the Luminar effects on these pages, for comparison with the finished articles above. We hope the split view returns for the full retail version, as it was one of the things that set Luminar apart from its competition. However, the ability to flip back to the original image by holding down the eye icon at the bottom of the interface…

LET ME JUST SAY this from the outset: Jeremy Laird is a fantastic editor who did a phenomenal job managing this esteemed publication before my arrival. But, having read his column “Gaming Laptops Suck” in the February edition, I felt I had to stick up for these little portable powerhouses. You see, gaming laptops are what got me through the pandemic. Sure, I’ve enjoyed gaming desktops and their ridiculous power for years, but during lockdowns, I didn’t want to game in my home office, as it’s where I’d been cooped up all day. So I decided to invest in a gaming laptop so I could work from the living room, the kitchen and (hopefully, my new boss isn’t reading this) sometimes even my bed. This newfound freedom meant I could…

COMPARED TO the relative travesty of the RX 6500 XT launch (see review on page 80), the RTX 3050 feels like another great option from Team Green. Nvidia’s RTX cards previously bottomed out at $300 with the later RTX 2060 models and the minimum price for the entry-level 3000-series has now dropped to just $250—in theory. The problem is that the base MSRP only applies to GPUs using Nvidia’s reference clocks. If a graphics card manufacturer provides even a tiny one or two percent factory overclock, MSRPs skyrocket to $330 or more—and even then, most RTX 3050 cards are selling for more than their MSRPs. It’s the same problem with virtually every other graphics card during the last 18 months, and while we can hope the situation will improve, that…

GPU RELEASES tend to follow a pattern. First, come the ‘halo’ cards that pull out all the stops. Then, come the slightly lower spec, but still fast high-end cards, followed by mainstream GPUs, and eventually the budget options. The RX 6500 XT aims for the latter, trimming down pretty much every conceivable spec in pursuit of a lower cost but still an acceptable design. Unfortunately, AMD has gone too far in its pursuit this time, cutting away too much of the juicy meat and leaving meager scraps behind. In the past, budget GPUs such as AMD’s Navi 14 (RX 5500 XT) and Nvidia’s TU116 (GTX 1650 Super) have stopped cutting features at a 128-bit memory interface. Thanks to Infinity Cache, AMD could get away with a mere 64-bit interface, which…